Heavens! Look at the Time: What Are You Reading During This Summer of 2017?

the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility and other writings on media benjamin

I'm reading Paul McGrath's autobio

Holiday reading:

Moriarty, Kim Newman. Revisionist take on Holmes from the baddie's pov but also League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen-like mash-up of all sorts of 19th century genre and literary fiction characters, mostly handled quite reverentially. Lots of silly winks in the chapter titles ("The Hound Of The D'Ubervilles"). I can imagine some people really hating this but I found it clever and funny.
An aborted stab at Léo Henry, Le Diable Est Au Piano", about Corto Maltese meeting Blaise Cendrars in Brazil. Couldn't get with it - maybe 2edgy4me and possibly somewhat racially suspect in its glee for the squalor of the favela, but it's just as likely my beach-addled head wasn't in for something quite this demanding and not in my native tongue, so I went for...
O Espelho Que Foge, Giovanni Papini. Originally picked this up as part of a beautiful Portuguese re-edition of Borge's Library Of Babel project (it has an intro by the man); short stories by a 19th century Italian decadentist, highly influenced by Poe and itself anticipating magical realism and Weird fiction in many ways. Got a bit samey reading one story after the other on a flight, but I do highly recommend this guy - melancholic, poetic, world weary in a way that's evocative of half-abandoned villages in the middle of Summer. Quite spooky, too.

Now I'm reading At The Existencialist Cafe, Sarah Bakewell. She does an extremley good job making some of the more difficult philosophers accessible - which immediatley makes me suspicious, both out of fear that she's being reductionist/dumbing stuff down and (perhaps sadly moreso) because of Tall Poppy Syndrome making me feel that what I SHOULD do is struggle with the original texts and learn to understand them instead. But what the hell, the chances that I'll ever decide to tackle Heidegger are pretty slim at this point and it's dumb to be angry at someone for giving me knowledge.

Oh, also Julian Barnes - The Sense Of An Ending, which started out strong but had a crazy melodramatic conclusion that made it difficult for me to take it seriously.

The film is quite good, btw.

Finished Chehkov's Letters and a collection of Olav Hauge's poetry.

I haven't updated this lately, have I? Good things I've read off the top of my proverbial include a couple of Par Lagerqvists ("Herod and Mariamne" and "Barrabas"), "White Tears" by Hari Kunzru, "All My Puny Sorrows" by Miriam Toews and Damon Krukowski's "The New Analog" about what's changed in moving to a digital world, especially in respect of music and communication. I read "Attrib." by Eley Williams again and I will never stop recommending it.

Art and Illusion, by E. H. Gombrich, from 1960. It looks at visual depiction and the history of artistic styles via early cognitive science. It's very fun.

I've been reading Hugo Ball's diaries, Flight Out of Time, which I had only really known through excerpts in Lipstick Traces and the like; the sections dealing with Zurich Dada and with Emmy Hennings are fascinating, but I wasn't really prepared for how brief they are in relation to Ball's musings on German identity and the harmful consequences of the Protestant Reformation. I also recently read Taylor Mac's anarchic satire Hir: I think it's flatter on the page than it's likely to be in performance, but I can appreciate how it both hollows out and repurposes the tropes of the collapsing nuclear family drama, and how determinedly it resists resolving any of its tensions. I'm also starting Samuel Delany's collection of novellas, Atlantis: Three Tales: its prose is unsurprisingly richly textured so far, but I'm not really far enough into it to comment otherwise.

*(supposedly harmful, obvi)

Chekhov's letters are very entertaining

I read a good review of the slate of recent Henry Green re-prints that have recently come out through NYRB publishing which sparked my interest. I recall there being some messages on the Spring thread about him/them. If anyone has a recommendation on which is a good starting point (he was prolific), I'd be happy to hear!

My wife is reading Delaney's Dhalgren (and also picked up The Jewels of Aptor the other day). Although I've never been as into scifi, he seems super fascinating and someone I'd very much like to read.

Also, re: Damon K - he recently started a podcast, Ways of Hearing, which is very related (I'm guessing he adapted passages from the book for it?) and has been very enjoyable!
https://www.radiotopia.fm/podcasts/showcase

re: Henry Green - Party Going is the starting point imo

re: Chehkov - those are lovely and build an interesting picture. Its well worth reading them alongside Janet Malcolm's book on him as they contain thoughtful (as always) commentary. There are strong moral positions - the case for a principled literature (Zola defending Dreyfus, Tolstoy) that provides a kind of guiding light. The letter to his elder brother on what it is to be cultured (after seeing his behaviour) is also terrific and sets the tone. On a lesser note women are there to look good, there are a few times where he remarks that there are no beautiful women to look at and that's kind of it. I think sometimes he wrote more passionately about Tolstoy than to his wife (although that - as Janet Malcolm and the commentary notes show - its perhaps a marriage that should not have been).

Oops, meant to write *spate not slate up there. I see Penguin published an omnibus ed with Loving/Living/Party Going, which I'll try and keep an eye out for (thanks for the Party Going rec - looking it up, I came across this ed.).

Still trying to squeeze in a few more shorter books before re-reading Swann's Way and having a go at the rest of A la Recherche. I'm hoping to read Watt by Beckett, Love's Work by Gillian Rose, and perhaps one of these Green ones.

W/ Henry Green you shld start by Concluding

ketchup on list from previous thread:

• very close now to finishing nicola barker's DARKMANS (in my defence it is quite long)
• found the misplaced copy i did after all have of THE IPCRESS FILE (i now have two, and had not misremembered that i owned only, only that i had started reading it) -- will write up a note or two on the four deightons i read when i have a moment -- ditto the barker when i eventually get there
• finished THE SURGEON OF CROWTHORNE and recommend it, squirmy moment and all: tho i felt it was under-edited (several anecdotes seemed to appear in fragmentary form more than once, in a way that didn't strike me as stylistic) and now and then he reached for a word or an idea i wished he'd been persuaded to drop -- but the basic idea is good and the all-round tale fascinating (i shd add that i embarked on it assuming it was fiction and it took me more pages than it probably should have done to realise that it isn't)
• started and finished eric ambler's THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS (which i thought i'd read before but certainly hadn't)

THE SOT-WEED FACTOR (the original poem) is a weird mix of fascinating (for its uncalculating portrait of pre-revolutionary america) and terrible (as poetry) (the rhyme scheme is like being slapped with a fish)

re: Henry Green - Party Going is the starting point imo

Not my favourite.

*reads further down*

W/ Henry Green you shld start by Concluding

This is my favourite

I just read a book about the Paris Commune called "Massacre" which depressed me so thoroughly I decided to read Strindberg to lift my spirits but haven't even finished the introduction yet, it's longer than some novels.

I don't think I have read Concluding (one of 2/3 I haven't) so will give that one a go too.

All the Green theefers I know or know of are on this page---wherever you dive in, if you like him at all, you're likely to get hooked: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nothing-Doting-Blindness-Vintage-Classics/dp/0099481480/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_1/257-1520979-5155141?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=HJ31ZK7JCJ8BZ2RBK0AS

"threefers", I meant.

my Elena Ferrante Summer concluded, just finished the Neapolitan Quartet. two quotes from The Story of The Lost Child

In what disorder we lived, how many fragments were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.

I realized in a flash that memory was already literature...my book...really was bad, and this was because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn't been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things.

Inhaled Dawn Powell's Angels on Toast, next up her Turn, Magic Wheel. currently reading John Williams' Stoner and enduring my son's smirking jokes abt the title

adding to my list above

Cosey Fanni Tutti's ART SEX MAGIC: not very far in, but so far GPO is way more of an arsehole than you maybe imagined (or at least than *i* imagined, having met him a handful of times, when he was charm itself -- i always tended to think he was more sinned against than sinning; now i am a LOT less certain)
Michael Ende's JIM BUTTON AND LUKE THE ENGINE DRIVER -- children's classic from the late 50s (translated from german, where i believe ende is p well known?); rereading to see how it stands up… it's a sweetnatured attempt at a kind of multicultural fable, jim is a black orphan (who i think in later stories goes looking for his parents); he and luke travel to china to help rescue the emperor's daughter from dragons; the china in question is um let's say an ahistorical and fantastical orientalist invention (transparent trees made of glass, food a wild absurdist caricature, ditto its folkways). it's kinda racist, in fact, though there's no malice in it whatever (the general tenor is that people are nice everywhere and shd get along, even if they're from very different backgrounds). easily the best scene is a hermit who lives alone in the desert bcz -- unlike the rest of us, who look smaller the further away they're viewed from, he looks bigger, so is always encountered as a vast giant

Cosey Fanni Tutti's ART SEX MAGIC: not very far in, but so far GPO is way more of an arsehole than you maybe imagined (or at least than *i* imagined, having met him a handful of times, when he was charm itself -- i always tended to think he was more sinned against than sinning; now i am a LOT less certain)

I talked about it here, Cosey Fanni Tutti: Classic or Dud?

(translated from german, where i believe ende is p well known?)

Yeah, remember enjoying these stories as a very small child, despite my parent's aversion to them, which was indeed based on their racial politics (though I'd imagine as much about the book covers, where Jim Knopf had some distinctly gollywog-like features).

jim is handled perfectly acceptably in the illustrations in the edition i have, but the various chinese characters tend to the cartoonish and hence often the problematic

the illustrator, maurice s. dodd, is better known for his strip the perishers

https://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/britishcomics/images/4/44/Perishers1.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20120212112641

haha oh well

Didn't know Dodd had done illustration work outside of The Perishers. He was chiefly the writer on The Perishers, and only took over the artwork too when the (much, much better) artist Dennis Collins retired.

Yeah, in the classic German edition I had the art was....not great. https://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9783551313065-us-300.jpg

There's been modernized editions with new art though. Researching this I also found out the original book uses the German n word, once, though apparently not with malicious intent (frankly Germany was pretty late in getting rid of it in the public sphere, there was still a popular kind of dessert with the name around when I was a kid).

re dodd: there doesn't seem to be much outside the perishers! the only other books i can find he worked on are jim phelan's waggon-wheels and tony elphick's billykin's first voyage

(neither of which i'd heard of till i started googling)

> there was still a popular kind of dessert

what did this entail?

(that said, we had (have?) golliwogs on our jam for ever)

Kinda similar to tea cakes, but people called them "n word kisses". :/

These days I think they just go by the name of the company that makes them, which gloriously enough is called Dickmann's. You can spend a good time on YouTube giggling at the commercials, I know I did:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLmr_qlVTDM

U.R. Anantha Murthy - Samskara

Really good but finding everything slow-going. You can see why the BJP celebrated his deat. He has no respect with the theocracy they are trying to implement. Although it seems to be working as a book I think it has the makings of a terrific film too (and a film of this was made in the 70s, which I'll try and source)

I finished Seven Viking Romances. There was some small overlap with the more fantastical Arthurian romances, in that a dwarf might appear from time to time or the occasional magic castle, but there is no denying that a Viking's idea of a romantic tale is mainly built around swords hacking at human limbs, ships, plundering, and heavy drinking.

I'm now 2/3rds of the way through Concluding by Henry Green. It has rather a unique flavor to it that is hard to describe briefly. At times it puts me in mind of Cold Comfort Farm, but where CCF is broad and hammers away cheerfully at its targets, Green confines himself to the merest glances and gestures at his characters' absurdity. Everything and everyone is very English, and their mild absurdity contains a lurking tragic note that you can't wholly ignore. I can't offhand think of another book like it.

You're in for a treat if you've never read Green. Most of his major novels have been republished in sparkling NYROB editions.

I recently read a biography of Evelyn Waugh, who was a friend of Green, and I learned that like Waugh, he was a raging Tory. It's funny how quite a few of the modernist-leaning writers of the age were on the Right.

Still reading the tome-like "Transformation of the World" by Osterhammel. Thought-provoking and informative, though it does contain a lot of sentences like: "Here two things must be distinguished." (actual sentence)

The only other Green I've read was his very first novel, Blindness about a year ago. A bit odd that my next one is his very last novel, but that is how it fell out. There are ample clues to his Tory leanings sprinkled through Concluding, where mentions of The State are invariably biting or bitter.

I recently read a biography of Evelyn Waugh, who was a friend of Green, and I learned that like Waugh, he was a raging Tory. It's funny how quite a few of the modernist-leaning writers of the age were on the Right.

― Zelda Zonk, Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Amis too. All my favorite terse British novelists (I've no idea about Scottish-born Spark).

I recently read a biography of Evelyn Waugh, who was a friend of Green, and I learned that like Waugh, he was a raging Tory. It's funny how quite a few of the modernist-leaning writers of the age were on the Right.

No great surprise that Green was a Tory if you read his post war books, "Concluding", "Nothing", "Doting". There's a generation gap thing going on where the younger people (including women!) are often working for state institutions while middle aged men are slogging away in the City to pay socialist state taxes, school fees etc.

Also, while I'm here, "Caught" is amazing too, especially the bit where the leading character goes to the toy shop with his son.

Green was an Etonian contemporary of Anthony Powell's, another 'raging Tory' (not so sure you cld describe the author of a twelve volume sequence as 'terse', tho.) But Unlike Powell, Green has great imaginative sympathy for his working class characters (I'm guessing partly because, as a factory owner, he actually had frequent contact with non-posh ppl, and paid closer attention to the way those outside of his own class spoke and behaved.)

Before the holidays (yeech, nearly gone!) we were having various discussions at school about 'right-leaning' literature, and what we could possibly teach to counter claims of stuff like An Inspector Calls being lefty propaganda. I'd thought of Waugh (not that you'd particularly want to teach him?) but not considered that clutch of inter and post-war writers as having a commonality about them. I wondered about some post-war Sci-Fi writers, but it feels like we missed something obvious. Any ideas?

I finished Concluding. It was first rate, but despite the title, curiously inconclusive. I am now reading A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by de la Casas.

Got about 100 pages to go to finish the first volume of Miklós Bánffy's Transylvania Trilogy(They Were Counted in the English edition; Writing In Flames according to the German edition I'm reading); it's a great big fin de siécle epic, with lots of descriptions of long banquets, balls, gambling and a looming dread as WWI approaches. Really lovely, melancholy stuff. Tiyl: Proust, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Tomasi di Lampedusa.

^^^ great ,lovely book

At the other end of the scale, am thoroughly loving new Tove Jansson translation: Letters from Klara

In the midst of Tana French, "Faithful Place" (Dublin Murder Squad #3), I love these so much

Oooh new Jansson!

James, did you read the entire trilogy?

I'm digging this so far

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51evtck75zL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg