2018 Summer: A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine, and What Are You Reading?

Impressive reading and observation from Fizzles!

thanks pinefox. as always it feels more like imperfect grappling. have just finished the PD James and feel in balance it was better than i was allowing it to be. christian morals, nuclear power, science and nature have an interesting relationship during the post war nuclear period. nigel kneale and also penda’s fen come to mind as they often do. devices and desires is at least in part working in that space.

it also briefly touches on the adjacent theme of where including where nature stops and christian morals kick in - around abortion and birth, which is of course the subject of the science fiction Children of Men, which came soon after.

Dag Solstad: Armand V - I think Dag Solstad is a genius and I loved every page of this. IIRC James thought the conceit - these are footnotes from an unwritten novel - was a bit superfluous but I found myself adrift in the unwritten novel itself and I loved it.

Great to hear it - I'll have to get around to this. Tough to even get the time to go into a shop and buy this rn. Have you read T Singer?

No but it’s on the shelf ready.

I have stopped reading Rilke's letters for now to focus on Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. It is for sure - given the nature of the book and its size/scope - a book to dip in and out of however I find myself being swept along on the language and the sheer weirdness of what I am reading. Its a very fun book and difficult to stop. Its the combination of recognition - depression and mental health are (rightly) given such a prominence, recently becoming such a highly charged political issue and its interesting to see, first of all, how preoccupied people were with it at various points throughout human history, and how (edited by Burton like this) its in so much European thought. And, as listed in terms of cause, we know much of what causes depression as known then and discussed, such as diet, loneliness, heartbreak but the aggregation of known detail around these then reads so bizarrely - mostly now just simply wrong or disproven by the very different frameworks we use to look at the detail. Of course much of what is listed as causes, eg. witches, or the positions of the stars, are simply not there anymore, which is very funny too. xp = cool.

reading a short story collection from New Directions in galley by Mexico's Amparo Dávila -- this is remarkably good stuff, eerie little miniatures with incredible atmosphere, images and situations that stick in my mind for days, really highly recommended

pretty interested in Anatomy of Melancholly -- it was one of Gass's favorite books -- I have a very old copy, which means I will have to read it when I'm going to be at home for an extended stretch. Thanks for the write-up xyzzzz__, it will encourage me to get to it.

I finished Naipaul's Guerillas and In a Free State in quick succession, perhaps too quick: they blur. Enthusiasts have praised the former, but the structure and pace don't suit the muddled politics. The latter is better thanks to a road movie structure (and the queer politics surprised me).

The Hard Stuff the Wayne Kramer memoir.
MC5 have moved out to Ann Arbor after trouble in Detroit, I think I may have just got past the events at the Fillmore East when they were sharing a bill with the Velvet Underground and getting hassle with the Motherfuckas about selling out the Revolution.
Pretty interesting so far. Has me wondering how good teh Michael Davis book is.
Also if there might ever be a photobook of the outfits made by the girlfriends

& wanting to read the recent Sylvain Sylvain memoir and Jerry Nolan biography not sure what other semi related rock memoirs.

I'd just got into reading Broadway Babies Say Goodnight by Mark Steyn, a book about Broadway musicals when I bought the Kramer memoir. I had bought that a couple of years back and it had turned up as i tidied up my bedroom.

pretty interested in Anatomy of Melancholly -- it was one of Gass's favorite books -- I have a very old copy, which means I will have to read it when I'm going to be at home for an extended stretch. Thanks for the write-up xyzzzz__, it will encourage me to get to it.

― she carries a torch. two torches, actually (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Sunday, 19 August 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The NYRB edition (which has a great cover and ideally should've been split into two volumes) has a really terrific intro by Gass. Both Musil (another Gass favourite) and Burton have that similar intellectual density that promotes a dipping in-and-out, one which the A++ rthythm and style does not allow you to really do. The world is in these pages, and you just keep turning them till your eyes tire.

My late summer has unexpectedly turned into a dive-into the English Renaissance (was reading Milton last week and a selection of Thomas Browne's prose is to come).

I've been reading Imagining Robert by Jay Neugeboren, which is frequently quite grim but redeemed by its humanity and (seemingly) rather brave honesty.

Under The Net, Iris Murdoch.

Just finished War and War by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Was much easier than other Krasznahorkai I've tried, since for most of the book every sentence is numbered making it much easier to not get lost, but I can't help but feel a bit underwhelmed. Perhaps too short, perhaps too mundane, but the mystical philosophical core of it wasn't quite as developed as I'd hoped.

Now reading The Temple of the Golden Pavillion by Yukio Mishima and Zinky Boys by Svetlana Alexievich.

xp Stevo, have you seen the MC5 doc, A True Testimony? Release halted at the last second, but turns up online sometimes, currently here---a rip from the promo DVD, I think:
https://archive.org/details/Mc5-ATrueTestimonial-2002#
Still reading Rembrandt's Hat---even more of an improvement than the title story, "Notes From a Lady at a Dinner Party" gives me flashbacks to Grace Paley's The Little Disturbances of Man, although this is from a man's POV, the male gaze taken for a spin. Startling.

And more than his gaze

I've started UNDER THE NET too!

But also started rereading Lethem's DISSIDENT GARDENS.

XP Yeah i got a copy of True Testimonial several years ago taht looks like it's set up to be an official dvd with bonus tracks etc.
Had a lot of live stuff with it.
Did it finally get the go ahead for release a few months ago? I still don't really get what the story was on its last minute cancellation. It seemed to be true to its name and one of the better band biographies I've seen.

I just got the new Ugly Things yesterday which has a review of the Michael Davis book I Brought Down the MC5 which sounds good from the review so i want to read it. I saw an ad for it somewhere a few months ago which has had me wondering about it.

I started Masters of Atlantis, Charles Portis, last night.

The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Universities in the Nineteenth Century, George Elder Davie

Emma Reyes: The Book of Emma Reyes -- if you don't start this book loathing the Catholic Church, you will by the end - artist's memoir (in letters) of being a child slave labourer in a Colombian convent in the 1920s and 1930s after being abandoned by her mother

In the last (for now) of my Swiss odyssey (Year of the Drought, Clouds of Sils Maria), I'm reading Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Pledge. It's my first of his and it's clouded and dreamlike; the nested narrative is disorienting and keeps me making me think of Coleridge. It's also got a lot of Stefan Zweig in there.

And so help me god, after hours of wondering, it suddenly dawned on me this morning: it reminds me of the 'late' John bloody Lanchester.

Is C.F. Meyer translated at all? There's a Swiss author I enjoyed...

"My Son The Murderer," another one from xp Rembrandt's Hat: son is consumed with fear, which is often expressed as rage, most often at his father, who is what we would call a helicopter parent. The fear-->rage is very fixated, at least currently, on the prospect of being drafted into the Vietnam War. There were a number of ways to get out of the draft, or at least to be considered unsuitable for combat, and word about these ways got around campus (son has recently graduated from college), as I'm sure Malamud, veteran teacher at Oregon State etc., still at Bennington when these stories were written, also father of Paul Malamud (b. 1947, draft bait), was aware, even though B was "The Ghost Writer."

Still, there is the implication or at least inference (penultimate story in this lean dense collection, so even noob me has been properly groomed, despite reservations) of dark dim backstories: son has been properly groomed by life, his life, his grubby life, grubby as the lightswitch flick of first person between father and son, grubby and clear as the light can be, in the "smelly"(son's take) apartment hallway where the father tends to hover, near son's room (when they're not out near of at deserted Coney Island in February). Jeez.
Well-enough done, but I give it a B+, really need to get back to his prime time.

near *or*

Little disturbances of man wants an urgent reread

Yeah! Also, having said all that, I should add that son does have a plan of sorts: if drafted, he'll just go Canada dammit. And father, who's started monitoring the mail, suspects that son has recently written to his draft board (there was this whole squirrelly system of local draft boards x Feds), to bring everything to a boil, as perhaps he should, having apparently dismissed all other options---but he isn't depicted as having the kind of resources---other than stubbornness, rage, fear---that would get him from near-Coney Island to Canada. But what he's got counts, to some extent, so maybe.
Some of his mindset comes from being by far the youngest in his family, and some people do get stuck when the support system brings them to graduation (he may be the first person in his family to go to college; father "has a post office job at the stamp window," of course, Malamudy as hell).

No money, and he's enraged by parental suggestion that he should at least "take something temporary," by everything/anytning being temporary.
My father listens in the kitchen.
My temporary son.
She says I'll feel better if I work. I say I won't. I'm twenty-two since December, a college graduate, and you know where you can stick that. At night I watch the news programs. I watch the war from day to day. It's a big burning war on a small screen. It rains bombs and the flames go higher. Sometimes i lean over and touch the war with the flat of my hand. I wait for my hand to die.
My son with the dead hand.

Might be an A- if only he'd stopped closer to that part.

Or maybe not.

One of the things that sets him apart for me is the rhythms of his dialogue, very good and funny

I feel like he wrote the same story about shopkeepers like 6 times tho. I also don’t think I ever want to read his novel about black people

xxpost Also he and his original audience would have been well aware that title "My Son The Murderer" and the recurring "my son" bits in the story related (and succeeded many other media references) to the best-selling New Yorky Jewishy (50s-60s as hell commercially) comedy album My Son The Folk Singer, by Allan Sherman--hit single: "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah, here I yam at/Camp Grenada."

Maybe it's like, "What if Camp Grenada/Grenade-a were military---?"

Masters of Atlantis was wildly inventive, veering between satire and pure farce. I found myself wishing for more satire and less farce, tbh.

Now I have started a popular-science book, with the twist that it was written by a scientist rather than a journalist, titled (I kid you not)-- Gorgon: The Monsters That Ruled the Planet Before Dinosaurs and How They Died in the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth's History. That's a sweet 19 word subtitle for those interested in advanced statistics.

The book centers on research concerning the causes of the Permian mass extinction, when approx. 90% of the species on earth went extinct, which is the biggest known mass extinction event. For comparison the K/T asteroid impact event that killed off the dinosaurs is estimated at about 50% of species disappearing. The central question is whether it was an abrupt event, or a fairly gradual one, as was believed for many decades by paleontologists.

The less-sciencey content is about the day-to-day anecdotes that surround field work, the shoestring funding, the politics of sorting out conflicting theories, etc. It is all supposed to make the book 'more human' and accessible. It does. I'll let you all know how it ends.

Haven't posted here in a while, but trying to get back into it :)

This weekend, I started reading "Mumbo Jumbo" by Ishmael Reed which is very funny and enjoyable (and which I recommend to anyone who liked Paul Beatty's The Sellout). Great biting satire on race in the US, though depressingly still relevant (was published in '73). It reminds me quite a bit of Pynchon - it's the first of his books I've read. I think the less of the plot revealed beforehand the better, so I'll refrain from more detail, but if any of the above appeals to you, it's worth taking a look at.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Crashed, Fizzles. I'm looking forward to getting to it. I picked up his older book 'The Deluge' from the library (as Crashed was unavailable). It's very good, so far. It looks at WWI and the interwar period, layering in an economic history that had been largely absent from the accounts of the period I'd read. It looks at how diplomacy during this period was influenced by the rise of the US' industrial and financial power and hegemony (the book's subtitle is "The Great War, America, and The Remaking of the Global Order" which kind of says it all). It avoids being too reductive and Tooze does a good job of grounding the narrative of the war/post WWI period in tons of research.

I also read Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone - about a retired professor in Berlin whose life is affected by the migrant crisis - and which is very moving, unexpectedly funny in places, and elsewhere quite savage (it reminded me of Coetzee a couple of times).

pynchon explicit cites reed as an inspiration in gravity's rainbow

explicitLY

inherent vice, pynchon.

got about 30 pages in doing the laundry. enjoying it. I've seen the movie 3 times so doc sportello is joaquin phoenix in my head (which i find unfortunate, not because i don't like joaquin phoenix). of pynchon's books I've only read gravity's rainbow, which i found about the hardest novel I ever read, and I'm not in the mood for anything abstruse this weather, so the breeziness is welcome

Crying of Lot 49 is also breezy and even shorter than Inherent Vice!

Nixonland is too much to plow through quickly; I started reading The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down which is definitely gonna be a bummer also, because I’m stupid.

xp. good to know, will get to that after this

Cool, I didn't know he explicitly cited him (I haven't read GR - but can definitely see the influence on The Crying of Lot 49). Will one day work myself up to GR and Mason & Dixon...

I'm going through the Bonds in sequential order and just finished Thunderball; it's a huge improvement on Dr No and Goldfinger, which are prob the only two books improved by the movies.

Thomas Mann's Reflections of a Non-Political Man.

The Apex Book Of World SF

I can add to the Pynchon flavour by noting that I'm continuing to reread DISSIDENT GARDENS whose bad Pynchon elements continue to come through consistently.

Thomas Mann's Reflections of a Non-Political Man.

― The Silky Veils of Alfred (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 28 August 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Bet this one is a barrel of laughs..

re early TP also check V and Slow Learner. And re early Ishmael Reed, also try Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and The Freelance Pallbearers.

Bet this one is a barrel of laughs..

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, August 28, 2018

I caught myself laughing at pg. 61!

If I come across a copy that is the only page of it I'll read.

Thanks for the other Reed recs, I just finished Mumbo Jumbo and will double down on the high recommendation for anyone who liked Paul Beatty's The Sellout and The Crying of Lot 49. Will definitely keep an eye out for those other two.