ILB Gripped the Steps and Other Stories. What Are You Reading Now, Spring 2017

^^^

cyril connolly: the rock pool

such an odd book

i love honelandsexuals and always wondered about balloon pop outlaw black, love the title for sure

the chapter with the Italian seminarian cracked me up

I started Tree of Smoke. Five hundred pages to go!

I always liked that you could read most of Denis Johnson's novels in a day

never got along with Tree of Smoke

Sorta abusing this thread for a non-what am I reading now post but I love Queirós a lot and am happy to see this NYRB article. The Proust comparsion there almost purely for alliteration tho, he was a 19th century Flaubert/Balzac type realist.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/05/31/the-proust-of-portugal-eca-de-queiros/

Thanks for posting that! Now reading In Search, where every now and then somebody requests the juicy gossip but assured the consultant that it's only needed for "Balzacian reasons". also the swells tend to drop B.'s name occasionally, maybe just in case you need a reminder that they know some books as well as authors(he is one who can be mentioned without considerations of fashion or table manners, so far, though may yet turn up in Lord De Douchefoucalron's family chronicles, blah-blah-blah).

Really got my fill of most of these titled creeps in The Guermantes Way, though of course Swann and omg Charlus keep shaking things up a bit, but after many a summer Swann, my favorite, is dying---oh well still got Charlus, and the prose-poem revelations will also show up again---the convincing ones, that is, after the narrator very eventually sweats them out (back in Balbec for what he tells us is the second and last time, so that should work out okay, eventually).

I'm nearing the end of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur and still on the first trip to Balbec. Marcel has just a meltdown over the "petite bande".

I finished "Ressentiment" by Max Scheler. Basically it's a book length defense of Christianity against Nietzsche's slur of calling it "slave morality". Scheler thinks that Nietzsche should have rightly applied that tag to bourgeois liberal humanitarianism, which is a perversion of the rightly much less egalitarian teachings of Christianity as properly understood (by Scheler and others he cites approvingly).

Brecht's Life of Galileo. Really enjoyed it. Opening scene of friendly, argumentative, chaotic household of Galileo, housekeeper, hk's son, Andrea, and passers by and guests sets tone.

Main theme is obv truth v power, and the role pragmatism has as it shuttles unequally between the two. Also "truth" is variously constructed as knowledge, as philosophical concept, as a practical value (ie. being able to use the stars more accurately to navigate by).

There's also a lot - perhaps unsurprisingly it's the other main theme - about the worth of truth to the labouring classes. G's friend Sagredo warns him against too much candour:

Galileo, I see you embarking on a frightful road. It is a disastrous night when mankind sees the truth. And a delusive hour when it believes in human reason

But Galileo commends the shrewdness of the peasant laying in hay for their horse before a long journey, or the farm boy who puts on a hat because he knows it's going to rain. He believes this means they are open to reason. A scientific monk warns against taking spiritual value away from the poor - G claims they will be liberated. And his daughter's landowning betrothed says that it will cause revolt and destroy obedience.

Ultimately Brecht's G, after his recantation, says that science must always consider how it may assist humankind or the "gap between you and it may one day become so wide that your cry of triumph at some new achievement will be echoed by a universal cry of horror". Towards the end of the play Andrea, who deserted G after he recanted, receives his final great work the Discourses on Two New Sciences, says that it is better for hands to be stained than to be empty, and Galileo agrees.

G treats and is seen to treat his daughter badly, carelessly, with the irony that she later becomes effectively his prison warden.

Pretty much the best bits of this edition though are Brecht talking about his work with Charles Laughton to translate and stage the first English-language LoG:

We usually met in L.'s big house above the Pacific, as the dictionaries of synonyms were too big to lug about... he used to .. fish out the most aired literary texts in order to examine this or that gest, or some particular mode of speech. In my house he gave readings of Shakespeare's works to which he would devote perhaps a fortnight's preparation... If he had to give a reading on the radio he would get me to hammer out the syncopated rhythms of Whitman's poems on a table with my fists, and once he hired a studio where we recorded half a dozen ways of telling the story of the creation, in which he was an African planter telling Negroes how he had created the world, or an English butler ascribing it to his Lordship... The awkward circumstance that one translator knew no German and the other scarcely any English compelled us, as can be seen, from the outset to use acting as our means of translation.

Charles Laughton was also concerned that for the Beverly Hills performance, in a small theatre, that it would be "too hot for the audience to think" so he ordered trucks full of ice to be parked against the walls and fans to circulate the chilled air.

oh and subsequently reread Stephen Jay Gould's essay The Sharp-Eyed Lynx, Outfoxed by Nature in part about Galileo's struggles to perceive the true nature of Saturn - he, unable to conceptualise or properly see its rings, thought it was a "three-part planet". And quite a lot of the play is about G's insistence on the power of observation to prove and so convince of the truth. SJG's point being that this belief, along with a belief in the excellence of your measuring instruments - here obv the telescope - can lead to certainties of truth that will turn out to be incorrect. That there is an element of contingency on our social and intellectual context.

The narrator's Mama now sitting on the beach, dressed in black and reading her own mother's favorite book, Mme de Sévigné's letters to daughter Mme de Grignan. Translator John Sturrock notes that S. was "thought by many to be the greatest of all French letter writers, and admired particularly by Proust for the quick, spirited impressionism of her style." What's a good collection in English? Doesn't have to be just the letters to her daughter.

(just posted this by mistake on purchased lately thread)

Hi Fizzles, really want to read that, and reminds me that my Mom's got Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter, collecting and providing context for letters to her father (his replies have been lost, maybe burned by abbess of daughter's convent, being too hot to handle re his branding as heretic, though some of what he said might be inferred from her side of the conversation). Chapter One here, with link to the NYT review:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sobel-daughter.html

Got my Carrington collection - only read a few but they're beautifully-formed surreal vignettes.

has anyone read riddley walker?

they have

(however i have not: i own martin skidmore's copy and will one day -- perhaps soon! -- embark on it, as i know several ppl who love it)

i read about it in an article about "threads" and feel similar trepidation about it.

perhaps perversely, i personally still prefer the russell hoban of the mouse and his chuld and the frances books to the adult author, tho i am in no doubt i read kleinzeit, pilgermann and turtle diary too young (i was a teenager trying to transition to grown-up books) and shd revisit them and this judgment

https://mutteringretreat.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/frances-cover.jpg

^^excellent work (all his adult work is written after he and his wife -- and illustrator -- lillian split up, apparently a very hard break-up) (i saw him give a very entertaining talk at the royal geographical society of all unlikely places a few years back, i think with geeta dayal) (i mean i was with geeta, RH was with other ppl i don't remember or recall)

(i shd write one day abt my failure as a teenager to transition to adult books -- basically i went from puffin books to my dad's science fiction books to the nme and rockwriting, with a brief failed attempt at adult novels somewhere in there: they were dull, my landing was bumpy, it took me years to renegotiate this and stop being an i-only-read-nonfiction twerp

Just finished Live & Let Die. As racist art goes, it's a much better book than Tintin in the Congo. I'm re-reading the whole series slightly out of order and loving them - Casino, From Russia & Moonraker being the highlights so far. I'm glad I didn't read them as a kid - he's such a beautiful writer (really!) in a way I never would've understood as a teenager.

I wanted to read something less blokey next, but ended up starting Elmore Leonard's Swag as the opening pages were just *too* good. Next time.

man you Denis Johnson fans: how the fuck did you finish Tree of Smoke? At pg. 400 this thing is a monument to voluminous dialogue.

RIDDLEY WALKER IS GREAT READ RIDDLEY WALKER

Maybe we should form a book club? Oh wait

read & much enjoyed the selected stories of julian maclaren-ross. his memoirs now definitely on my radar!

started in on a selection of edward dahlberg's fiction, poetry, criticism, memoirs, letters & whatever classification the sorrows of priapus might fall under.

late response to mark s: russell hoban's frances books are all really delightful -- well paced and gentle and funny, some of my favorite kids' books. (i dearly wish there were a frances stuffed animal, i have a friend it would make the perfect gift for.) i read the mouse and his child a few years ago and i don't know if i'd even count it as a children's novel, it's quite intense and frightening in ways that i think would have traumatized me as a kid.

Maclaren-Ross: his memoirs are great. Do not bother with his letters, though. Just lots of begging for money and asking for deadline extensions, basically.

I think I'm going to ditch Henderson the Rain King - unless anyone can convince me to stay? I'm about 100 pages in, and I'm finding it a bit all over the place. The heart of darkness narrative is hackneyed, the centre of consciousness is the least convincing Bellow stand-in I've come across (6ft 4, wrestler, testosterone mountain - aye, right. I mean, there's worse reasons to write, but do all his leading men have to be irresistible/repulsive?) and even his sentences, usually his greatest ally, don't zing to the same degree. Maybe I'm dead inside.

No, I think that's warranted: there's something interesting about the way Bellow steers directly into the pitfalls of white writers inventing a private Africa as an exotic backdrop for the white hero's inner struggle, but that doesn't mean it works as fiction or as a critique of that colonialist impulse.

I've started reading Amulet, one of Roberto Bolano's novels. It is written entirely as a first person narration by a woman character. I will report my impressions later.

Maclaren-Ross: his memoirs are great. Do not bother with his letters, though. Just lots of begging for money and asking for deadline extensions, basically.

yep, and obviously from love and hunger if for any reason you haven't read it. some of his essays and fragments are good too - or are those collected with the short stories?

I think I'm going to ditch Henderson the Rain King - unless anyone can convince me to stay

I ditched twice, resumed it two summers ago, endured a desultory read. Not worth it.

Really feel like almost every long novel after Augie March is a disappointment. Some shorter stuff here and there is good though.

Haha I've been approaching and backing off from Henderson for years now, the fact of its existence is fascinating but I'm afraid to finally pick it up. I'm like could this even be good if it were

"What Kind of Day Did You Have?" is the best thing he wrote after the seventies. If you want a rant, check out The Dean's December.

I did enjoy Ravelstein, though it has receded enough that I do only have vague sense impressions of it.

I've been reading Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book: Shonagon's historical moment (around 1000 CE) is distant enough that, as with Proust's characters, her fascination with rank and her thorough contempt for servants, commoners, and less skillful courtiers are more ridiculous than wholly repellent (although her snobbery sometimes takes on bizarre forms, as when she writes a poem to mock an unsophisticated man for losing his home in a fire, or when she states that ugly people should never let themselves be seen napping). That aside, Shonagon is witty and vividly observant, and I appreciate how open her writing is to reverie and digression.

Just finished Kenner, The Pound Era

I've been trawling thru Diana Athill's Make Believe, a memoir of her dealings with Hakim Jamal, a former Black Panther and distant relative of Malcolm X - who also had affairs with Jean Seberg and Gale Benson, a socialite and daughter of a Tory MP. All feature in some way, its pure late-60s/early 70s and has a similarly energy to some of Doris Lessing's fictional work - a very similar intersect of class, race, unbound sexuality. A play between freedom and catastrophe as sides of the same coin. Allen Ginsberg's poetry (discussed this a bit on the book biuying thread) and have just started on Elizabeth Hardwick's study/biography of Herman Melville (as part of the Penguing Lives series) and I like her prose v much - and I see NYRB will be issuing a book of her essays, which is clearly happening, although its slightly disappointing that Confidence Man only gets literally a couple of pages of crit, touching on its modernity then leaving it at that(!)

a play between freedom and catastrophe as sides of the same coin--often the cliche take on the 60s, and not without plenty of justification, but also I've known people running classes, bands, free clinics, voter registration drives, and more questionable endeavors, starting in the 60s/early 70s, and though probably all of them have had experience with catastrophe, they're still at it, for better and worse.

Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to in Search of Lost Time by Eric Karpeles: appealing description here, any of y'all familiar with it?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0500238545/ref=pe_848010_240916020_em_1p_2_ti

dow yes, plenty of positives, certainly not trying to deny - however it was mostly the worse for almost all concerned as portrayed in this book.

I've dipped into the Karpeles book: it's not hugely revelatory, but it's pleasant to look at, and beats interrupting your reading to do image searches.

xpost oh no doubt mostly the worse, from what I've read about some of that, especially Seberg's last years.

I might try the Karpeles book, since Proust is often at his most enjoyable when relating to painting and paintings.

When at his most painterly too, unlike a number of other authors.

Really feel like almost every long novel after Augie March is a disappointment.

Disagree w/ this - Herzog could hardly be termed a disappointment, and Humboldt's Gift might be the best thing he ever wrote.

searching for a bday present for dr vick i broke my resolve and bought a second copy of "the ipcress file" to read instead of the one i've misplaced in my flat: glanced at the opening pages -- never read this stuff before! so maybe i *haven't* misplaced a copy of "the ipcress file" somewhere in my flat and was thinking of "funeral in berlin" all along (GiS-ed for the cover i thought this missing copy had, and no sign of it, which doubly puzzles me: clearly my brane less than billion-dollar these days)

nearly finished "only when i larf"and nicola barker's "darkmans"

also bought (for me) jean rhys: "wide sargasso sea "(bookshop lady v enthusiastic) and "good morning, midnight"

plus vick's bday present to me included the original 1731 poem THE SOT-WEED FACTOR, or A VOYAGE TO MARYLAND by Eben.Cooke, gent., which i started reading on the bus home last night (additional prsent from vick: the revisionist harper lee, which i'm a bit wary of, AT SWIM TWO BIRDS, which for some reason i've never read, despite loving FoB to bits, and THE SURGEON OF CROWTHORNE, which i know nothing abt whatever but starts well)

I am reading "A Posthumous Confession" by Marcellus Emants, which is a nineteenth century slow sickly slick of self-loathing if ever I read one, just my cup of (gone-cold) tea.

Recently read and enjoyed The Surgeon of Crowthorne myself - it's a bit like a less erudite version of Richard Holmes' Dr Johnson and Mr Savage, and includes one of the most squirm-inducing incidents I've ever read about.

That Emants was translated by JM Coetzee, who is a neighbour of mine. I raved about it to him at a bbq and he looked very embarrassed and barely said anything. We also offered him some of our vegetarian bringings, but he couldn't eat them because he's allergic to coconut. I really am not sure what my point is here, other than deeply unimpressive showing off.