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

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

p sure I've seen twitter backlash against that book from someone or other

p sure I've read people saying it was too short and too rushed on this board somewhere

definitely remember a review saying she was far too uncritical about the right's take on gamergate, sjws, etc.

Gunter Grasse The Tin Drum
story of little Oskar and his toy Tin drum. Oskar refused to grow in size above the age of 3 and likes to shatter glass with ihis voice.
He relates teh story many years later from an insane asylum.
Been meaning to read thsi for years, started iit in '85 then lost the copy of it I had tehn. Found it in a charity shop a couple of months back and am now finally getting to read it.
d/lded the film too

Jeanette Leech Fearless.
Story of post-rock that I find interesting but keep finding doesn't agree with background i knew about at the time or leaves great big bits out.
I don't think she's ever going to be on eof my favourite writers but I think I'll keep going with this.
Might also mean I pick up a few recordings that I've had on the back burner for years.

definitely remember a review saying she was far too uncritical about the right's take on gamergate, sjws, etc.

― angelo irishagreementi (ledge), Monday, 28 August 2017 18:06 (yesterday) Permalink

One of the more least surprising criticisms tbf

finally finished nicola barker's darkmans -- and i think my first reaction is, "i have to read this again before i can write properly about it"

i found it very engaging: a brief passage in the unremarkable lives of fairly weird people (or vice versa) except for one quasi-supernatural event, which maybe isn't supernatural (tho if it isn't i don't really know what it is). barker's characters are all very vivid, and i liked the slightly mazy sense of "nothing actually ever happens here" interspersed w/a fvckton of driving around that is actual life in the country (it's set a little distance inland from winchelsea)

i've read a couple of hers before -- wide open and one of the very early collections -- but besides remembering i quite liked them (and a cut-in-half wasp in the opening scenes of wide open) i don;t really remember anything about them“ so i think i might go on a binge before i reread this (quite long) book

I finished the de Las Casas. It was unavoidably repetitive, given the subject matter, but it was brutal in its descriptions and he could not find terms strong enough to denounce the atrocities, although he used the strongest ones he knew, consigning the conquistadores and the provincial governors to eternal hellfire dozens of times over. No genocide of the twentieth century surpasses the genocide he describes, even though he inflates his numbers by about an order of magnitude.

After such a heavy dose of Vikings and conquistadores, I think I'll try for something a bit more sedate for my next book.

Anybody read this book? Looks promising, and "the spoof of Eliot in his most vatic mode" is a hoot:
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2017/07/at-club-of-bad-books-dylan-thomas-john.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Wormwoodiana+%28Wormwoodiana%29

Oooh new Jansson!

James, did you read the entire trilogy?

Yes, though it was a while ago: I'd like to reread them soon, I think. It stays very good throughout.

Am now reading Lydia Chukovskaya's 'Sofia Petrovna', slim novel written during Stalin's 1937 Purges about a naive woman whose loyal Communist Party son gets caught up in the mass trials and exiled

Finished The Bell by Iris Murdoch (surprisingly 'modern' treatment of homosexuality; at its best when edging into the gothic, tho' I was surprised at how frequently the novel flirts with farce; Murdoch, like Thomas Hardy, not afraid of grand and improbable narrative coincidence).

Now reading The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene.

Power & The Glory is my shit; as always with Greene, his faith is not solace, it is a further complication. At one point

(SPOILER)

...the main character is in jail and discovers the one person he can feel the least sympathy for is the only other Christian in the room.

^^^^^^

Finished The Bell by Iris Murdoch (surprisingly 'modern' treatment of homosexuality; at its best when edging into the gothic, tho' I was surprised at how frequently the novel flirts with farce; Murdoch, like Thomas Hardy, not afraid of grand and improbable narrative coincidence).

I'm fond of The Good Apprentice and Bruno's Dream but otherwise stare at those dusty hardcovers in their library wondering if anyone cares about her anymroe.

Yes, as I sat with The Bell on my journey into work, I wondered if I was the only person reading it in Britain at that particular moment (my paperback edition was a tie-in with a BBC TV adaptation, which also felt like a signifier of a vanished world). I guess she will survive as someone with a sad and interesting 'back story' who was once played by Kate Winslet; the social relations in her novel (lol the middle classes), and the way that philosophical questions are posed and ruminated on, already seem very dated, tho' for historians of a very narrow sliver of British society in the 20th century she will undoubtedly remain a useful resource.

I stayed in a Oxfordshire B&B with a copy of The Bell last week. The first few pages were a lot of fun - I've never read any Murdoch but I never imagined her as "fun". I was tempted to read the rest but had a feeling like "Muriel Spark does this, but with a much shorter pagecount". That's probably unfair.

It felt like a very weary book for a 39-year-old to have written, though

lol otm

Spark = certainty
Murdoch = doubt

(In truth, they don't really have a lot in common but I can see why the opening pages of The Bell might lead you to think that they do. And yes, Iris could usefully have learnt from Muriel's concision - but then, what author couldn't?)

Murdoch popped up a lot in At The Existentialist Café as the person who brought the philosophy to the UK.

Though I guess those guys are all heading towards "not read anymore" territory too.

There is an obtrusive moral (as well as a vividly mad collie dog): we are but shadows, and our desires for particularised individuals are both illusory and predatory. In a sentence that might be labelled in the margin with ‘WAKE UP AND LISTEN’, Charles asks the rhetorical question ‘Can we not love each other at last in freedom, without awful possessiveness and violence and fear?’ The answer to that question for Murdoch was a resounding ‘no’. The reason for that answer does not lie in the nature of human beings or of the universe. It lies in her strange mixture of beliefs. She combined an implausibly unconstrained conception of human freedom ultimately drawn from Sartre with an implausibly depersonalising view of love drawn from Plato. Fusing those two things with the conventions of the realist novel was a profoundly interesting thing to have done, and for having attempted that fusion she certainly will always be thought to deserve a major part in the history of 20th-century fiction in Britain. But it made for plots in which people try to be free and find they are trapped in master-slave relationships, and in which being in love means being cruelly disloyal to more or less any particular person. Behind that recurrent dynamic in her fiction is a deep kind of sadness: she never quite recognised that it might be possible and even pleasurable just messily to get on with loving one person.

Q: what if she hadn't had John Bayley there at the end?

just started

Lee Server "Robert Mitchum: "Baby, I Don't Care"
Lavie Tidhar, "Central Station"