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

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.

Though I mostly don't like Pynchon, I also somewhat admired THE SELLOUT! The first 20pp or so I thought a virtuoso outrageous riff, a bit like (in that sense though not the actual content) Amis's MONEY.

Oh I missed reed talk! +1 on early reed, I would add the last days of Louisiana red - I’ve also been wanting to reread them this year since reading the sellout and (possible missing link) platitudes by trey Ellis, which pushes a lot of the same buttons & is v funny

I finished Gorgon. Aside from learning far more about the author's personal life than I cared to, I learned that at the time of publication in 2004, scientists were coming around to the belief that the Permian mass extinction was not due to a collision with a large extra-terrestrial object (asteroid, comet) but was indeed rather swift in geological terms (under 100,000 years) and that the mechanism was a rise in global temperatures by as much as 6C (11F) due to a dramatic increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide coupled with a drop in atmospheric oxygen from about 20% to 10%. The source of the carbon dioxide is likely to have been volcanic, as one of earth's ancient supercontinents was ripped apart.

I started Stoner, by John Williams (one of the non-musical variety). Although the book is very much about academic life in a Midwestern state university, a subject full of tedium, the writing style is interesting enough I intend to read more of it, until it either hooks me properly, or the tedium overpowers me.

Oh right I plowed through Bad Blood (the sordid tale of Theranos) on audiobook in a couple days over the weekend. A hell of a yarn.

I am going to fly in the face of the accumulated wisdom of ILB and set aside Stoner as a book I do not wish to read any further than the first 80 pages (about 25% of it). There are reasons for this and I shall tell them, but recognizing that a fully developed critique is impossible for a book based on its first quarter.

The first problem I noticed, somewhat subliminally at the beginning and more so as I continued, is that both the characters themselves and the author's handling of them, are completely humorless. Not the slightest glimmer of humor is allowed to seep through anywhere. This not only renders the characters inhuman in my evaluation, but makes me distrust the author's intent. Such a choice is highly artificial and very unrealistic, and if the intent is to draw Stoner as a tragic figure, it is precisely the wrong choice in my view.

Next, I noticed that, although the character of Stoner makes at least three profoundly life-altering decisions in this part of the book, the author makes no attempt to justify, explain, or illuminate them from the perspective of his character. He is a cypher, a nullity in this regard.

Then, Stoner falls in love. The woman he falls in love with is described as somewhat pretty, but every other detail the author delivers about her makes it obvious she is emotionally stunted, vacuous, completely empty of human warmth. There is so little life in her she is not even capable of rising to the level of vapidity. Yet we are to believe Stoner falls in love with her at once and quickly decides he cannot spend the rest of his life without her. This is unfathomable.

Then comes some painfully clichéd scenes of their honeymoon and her frigidity. Then, with almost no transition, she becomes semi-hysterical in the first months of their marriage.

I recall how, a year or two ago I read O! Pioneers! and remarked admiringly how material that a lesser author would handle as melodrama, Cather handled with depth, grace and dignity. Stoner seems just opposite to me. It delivers melodrama and feigns depth, grace and dignity, using unusually well-crafted, grave and reticent sentences. But behind the dignified and reticent prose style is... nothing much.

Now, hit me in the stomach as hard as you can. I can take it. I've been working ou....OWWW!

Aimless, you’re not the only one who feels this way about that book. There’s ledge, I think, and myself, to name two. I managed to make it to the end and don’t recall it getting better. It’s no Ethan Frome, that’s for sure.

feel like the consensus on here was that people didn't like stoner

Before writing that I did a search on "stoner" confined to ILB and found far more admiration expressed than not.

Haha, this is just going to add further weight to my contrarian reluctance to read Stoner despite being a total NYRB stan. Speaking of which, I just finished The Gallery, by John Horne Burns, which is composed of vignettes of soldiers and citizens in a Neapolitan arcade in 1944. Some questionable depictions of black soldiers, though there’s a very interesting portrait of a gay bar (written in 1947). I think I’d only read about this particular part of the war in Catch-22, and this is a much warmer and more thoughtful exploration of what Americans and Italians were doing to get through it.

Butcher's Crossing is humourless too. Fwiw, I think Stoner's 'silence', or his affectlessness, can be seen as structural - something he inherits from his parents. Or it's modelled to him. I struggled with the book to some extent, but did find the end beautiful in its way; if anything, that's where the affect manifests itself, where he's finally allowed to breathe.

reading Aimless’ post just reminds me of how much i loved it. not that anything you say is off point; it *is* humourless, he *is* a void, his wife *is* zero-dimensional. it succeeded in spite of all those things, somehow. you gave up before my favourite scene (the dissertation defence) but it doesn’t really matter

Before writing that I did a search on "stoner" confined to ILB and found far more admiration expressed than not.

― A is for (Aimless), Thursday, August 30, 2018 12:09 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hmm, think i might have selective memory maybe based on some favored posters' opinion

I preferred Williams' novel about Augustus. First-person POV helps.

Aimless's description is intriguing, reminds me I still need to try that one, and Augustus too.
JoeStork, you might also like From Here To Eternity, maybe especially the edition (first ebook-only, but now in print, judging by some descriptions on Amazon) with restored/even more detail on interface of certain older white male gay circles in eve-of-Pear Harbor Honolulu w soldiers stationed at Schofield Barracks etc., most(?) of whom supposedly only do it for the drinks and pocket money. There's also a central character who only a few years ago was ateen hobo of the Great Depression (there were quite a few of these, apparently, though I've never seen their way of life dealt with at much length, and never anywhere else in fiction). Got raped by an older guy, knocked the guy out of the boxcar.
Whole thing is dense, layered, warm, pulpy, thoughtful, tending to the fatalistic, but driven and driving as hell, even more amazing to read as a bestseller of the early Korean War,the Cold War and McCarthyism--def in the same lineage as Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy and Catch-22 (prob The Gallery as well, but still haven't read it).

The gay element is only one of many in the cut version, and doubt that it dominates the restored, but certainly roils around in there with the overall "Whut Fools Us Mortals Be!"

Last day of Women in Translation month, which I have been observing this year. Best books of the month I read were:

Ricarda Huch: The Last Summer (German) - really clever and stylish short epistolatry espionage/assassination thriller from 1910 about a student embedding himself in a White Russian family as a tutor/helpmeet who is really there to kill the family father, a local Governor who has upheld the law sending a bunch of anarchist students to prison

Lidiya Ginzburg: Blockade Diary (Russian) - as grim and as fascinating as you'd expect, lightly fictionalised memoirs of life during the Siege of Leningrad

Barbara Yelin: Irmina (German) - really nicely done graphic novel about a German woman in the UK in the 1930s who falls in love with one of the first black students to attend Oxford, but then runs out of money, returns home and becomes a good Nazi wife and mother; could have been very heavy and programmatic, but dodges all the potential pitfalls

Madame Nielsen: The Endless Summer (Danish) - modernist, beautifully done group portrait of a family and various hangers-on over the course of a rural Danish summer

Emma Reyes: The Book of Emma Reyes (Colombian) - artist's memoir-in-letters of life as effective child slave in Catholic convent in Bogota

Regarding Madame Nielsen, she has said she hero worships Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen as a model, and she's not kidding: (Nielsen on left, Blixen on right)
https://www.kiwi-verlag.de/ifiles/autor/large/autor_1939.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--DoQP3TZCF8/TmjjaYmFrWI/AAAAAAAAESQ/h59nxKTGkns/s1600/isak-dinesen-67.jpg

woah, big blixen, sorry about that

My feeling is that Stoner is a guy who loves literature and the inner life but just doesn’t get other people or even have very much perspective on himself. The way the book is told is true to his limitations.