The Double Dream of Spring 2019: what are we reading?

I slogged through "Rotting Hill" by Wyndham Lewis, in which WL conjures a bunch of straw men with whom he can argue or agree, such that he can fulminate against the post-WWII Labour administration and the - apparently - inevitable slide of the UK into total, permanent, Soviet-style state control of everyday life.

This is fundamentally a bad book but the combination of occasional passages of glorious writing plus the weirdness of reading such trenchant political analysis that turned out so wrong made me just interested enough to keep going.

I just finished 'Jane Eyre' which is one of the best books I've ever read.

To celebrate I got 3 books out at the library

Anita Brookner - Hotel du Lac
Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea

Finished The Big Midweek which was a bit of a downer but has me wanting to be more familiar with teh era of fall I like most. Hadn't really heard Room To Live before. Do love Dragnet and Hex Enduction Hour. Not sure how late I'll go with it now. But that late 70s/early 80s does seem to be pretty peak.

So got Heads by Jesse Jarnow as the book by my bed. Seems to be 1973 and talk is about the birth of theh internet, graffiti and jam bands/living in bushes in Central park.

Started reading Bob Woodward Fear again & I think I'm roughly half way through. Tillerson has just called Trump a moron.

Been listening to Podcasts while i'm moving around town so not been reading on the bus.

Reading Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories From The Trailblazers Of Domestic Suspense. Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, some lesser known names.

ordered this immediately

Anita Brookner - Hotel du Lac
Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea

That's quite the trio! Enjoy.

I finished The Lay of the Land the third Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe quartet. Like the previous two, it details the lead up to a US holiday, this time Thanksgiving, and it's, I suppose, a narrative of the epic in the everyday. Bascombe is a one time writer now a realtor, and his worldview is a rational one, at heart, but like the rest of us, he's dealing with the sublimity and enormity of what it means to be human - albeit from an ultimately privileged, middle-class American viewpoint. As a reader, you're left to wonder why he writes (yes, it's a constructed narrative, a trick, of course), and you wonder if it gives his life meaning and vice versa. I've read somewhere that Ford's project is along the lines of 'writing is a report from the real world directed through the craft of fiction' which I need to think about a bit.

I'm now in that trough that comes after finishing a huge novel, and I'm reading bits of Emerson (who is probably Bascombe's closest thing to a guardian angel) and desultorily re-reading Homage to Catalonia for an upcoming trip to Barcelona.

This month's Penelope Fitzgerald is "At Freddies". It's (seemingly) less deep but so far lot funnier than anything else I've read by her (Bookshop, Human Voices, Offshore).

Leave it to Psmith is my favorite Wodehouse. Surprised it hasn't been made into a movie (or maybe it has?). First I read, and the gateway drug to all his other novels. Local 1/2 Price Books stores are sadly slim on Wodehouse novels, aside from a few constants. I keep hoping to luck into an estate sale quantity.

After seeing The Sisters Brothers, catching up on Patrick deWitt's novels. TSB, Undermajordomo Minor, both read & liked. Now 1/2 into French Exit, with Ablutions next.

I read "The Drawer and A Pile Of Bricks" by David Berridge, which is I suppose what they call experimental literature (the tell is the positive quote from Joanna Walsh on the back). I couldn't really work out what was going on, though I think something probably was going on. I found a certain pleasure in reading it, grasping odd bits and patterns, but it was a bit like reading a set of clues for a crossword, clues for which you don't understand the rules and the crossword grid's not there. I wonder if I read it again whether all will become clear? I may never find out.

I'm at loose ends. I read some of Virgil's Eclogues last night and due to their similarity to counting sheep, I fell asleep on the couch.

I still need to check PSmith, but enjoyed Uncle Fred In Sprigtime: the gallant UF is an alarmingly alternative Jeeves to his manor-born/borne relations.

"Uncle Fred Flits By" is the ultimate Wodehouse story for me

I read a Psmith in my adolescence, which I undoubtedly enjoyed but don't recall much of

This is fundamentally a bad book but the combination of occasional passages of glorious writing plus the weirdness of reading such trenchant political analysis that turned out so wrong made me just interested enough to keep going.

(If you want this knackered 1st edition of RH, Fizzles, it’s yours.)

Guy De Maupassant Bel Ami
1885 novel about an ex-m,ilitary social climber in Paris in the late 19th century. 1975 translation which flows nicely.
Quite compelling read, I don't think I've read any of his novels before. I did read some of his short stories a few decades ago and not sure why I haven't gone back to read more.
I was surprised that de Maupassant was as late as he was, maybe the short stories I read were set a lot earlier. i thought he was early 19th century.

I'm still mired in a lack of ambition, so I'm rereading a Mary Renault historical novel, Funeral Games, covering the period immediately following the death of Alexander of Macedon. I first read her stuff back in the 1980s and this was the one I remember as being the least romanticized.

Have you read railroad histories? I hadn't thought to, but suddenly encountered several at the library today. Great subject (and today's Wall Street Journal delved into a massive gathering of the railroad tribes re radically re-making schedules---past the latest relaunch into bits of chaos).

I read a biography of James Hill, founder of the Northern Pacific railway, last year. It was quite interesting, if a bit too mythologizing. It painted Hill as being capable of almost anything, legal or illegal, to win a contest he wanted to win, which seems correct.

The age of railroad expansion in the USA is mostly about high finance, rampant bribery, and low trickery, but also is some of the most revealing history of how laissez faire capitalism works in action. It isn't quite as heroic as Ayn Rand envisioned it.

Henry and Charles Francis Adams' long essay about the Erie is worth disinterring.

Picked up City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davies. This edition from 2006 has a new preface, which is very good. Interesting to read some of the pre-crash observations:

The city was subsidizing globalization without laying any claim on behalf of the groups excluded from the direct benefits of international commerce. There was no mechanism to redistribute any share of additional city revenues to purposes other than infrastructure or Downtown renewal. There was no 'linkage', in other words, between corporate-oriented public investment and the social needs that desperately fought for attention in the rest of the city budget.

and

In The Valley, a so-called 'slow-growth movement' had suddenly coalesced out of the molecular agitation of hundreds of local homeowners' associations. Although many of the movement's concerns about declining environmental quality, traffic and density were entirely legitimate, 'slow growth' also had ugly racial and ethnic overtones of an Anglo gerontocracy selfishly defending its privileges against the job and housing needs of young Latino and Asian populations.

Of course, these things were known. The GFC didn't suddenly create the failures with which we're grappling of course, it was a consequence and an intensifier of them. But it's striking reading them here on the eve of that crisis.

I'd be interested to know how any LA people here, who have read the book, feel it's aged. or what has changed since its depiction.

I read "Spring" by Ali Smith. I liked it very much and I think the current quartet (of which this is the third) is a very interesting project. She seems to divide opinion though?

I also read " A Close Watch on the Trains" by Bohumil Hrabal, which is a little bastard of a novella sloshing around in the absurdity and brutality of the dying days of WWII, from the point of view of a junior member of staff on a provincial train station as the Germans retreat through Czechoslovakia.

(great film)

Yes, I think I have actually SEEN the film CLOSELY OBSERVED TRAINS.

On Sunday I finished PROMISED YOU A MIRACLE (Andy Beckett) at last. On balance, it's tremendous and utterly my kind of thing.

Next I will finish the Myles letters at last.

Reasonably happy to have managed to read these books on the side while mostly doing other things.

Richard White - The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896
Amy Hempel - Reasons to Live

What's the Hempel collection like so far? Read a couple of very enthusiastically detailed presentations, but quotes from the stories didn't seem to support the reviewers' takes---seemed more tell than show, and her dramatic pronouncements not that deep---I dunno, will see if the library has it.

Some writing just isn't well-represented by brief quotes, and every sentence doesn't have to be and shouldn't be suitable for framing (otherwise things can get way over-ripe, like James Salter's lesser work).

What's the Hempel collection like so far? Read a couple of very enthusiastically detailed presentations, but quotes from the stories didn't seem to support the reviewers' takes---seemed more tell than show, and her dramatic pronouncements not that deep---I dunno, will see if the library has it.

― dow, Wednesday, April 10, 2019 7:26 PM (

James Woods' New Yorker review a couple weeks introduced me to her, so I started at the beginning. So far she's Lydia Davis -- terse, almost gnomic -- without the wit.

Magdalene Tulli: Flaw -- strange but beguiling; story seems to be set in a 1930s-ish Central European-ish place, told perhaps by (a) God, and the characters are halfway between real people and actors on a vast set the God has created? I don't know what's going on, tbh, but I like it.

people and actors on a vast set the God has created? I don't know what's going on, tbh, but I like it.

Have you seen marwencol?

Woah, no... BUT I'M GUNNA!

I checked a copy of Why Buddhism is True, Robert Wright, out my public library and read about 20 pages last night. He almost lost me right away by citing the plot of The Matrix, especially the goddamn red pill/blue pill scene, as a way of understanding some of the essential message of Buddhism. Fuck that, I thought. But I did read on and may continue it tonight. Past that, I can't say.

So far he seems to imagine his reader has zero knowledge of or sympathy with Buddhism, but rather believes it is nothing more than exotic nonsense. iow, an audience of Dawkins acolytes. Maybe that describes most of his circle of acquaintance, since he describes himself as an evolutionary psychologist, which is a field wholly entwined with sociobiology. I guess for these reasons alone, the book may have a sort of freak appeal as a glimpse into such a mind.

So far he seems to imagine his reader has zero knowledge of or sympathy with Buddhism
I assume, based on your screenname and other evidence, that this is not the case with you.

That is correct.

I'm reading "The Sioux", one of two novels by Irene Handl (at this point USians might want to do some googling)... and it's quite a thing, like a sort of louche campy Ivy Compton-Burnett... maybe? Anyway, talking of googling, I came across a tweet by Matthew Sweet (not that one) asking whether anyone had read it - to which he got a reply from Tanita Tikaram(!) saying she had a signed copy, dedicated to Sir Malcolm Sargent, and a reply from Robin Askwith(!!) who has a copy given to him by Doris Hare (I did advise you to google) signed by Irene Handl and her dog.

Metal Mickey Irene Handl???

The very same.

^^ Whoever invented language is currently doing that rubby hands thing, saying, *finally, they got there*.

Tanita Tikaram was on the Book Shambles blog and was surprisingly interesting and well read.

Reading Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories From The Trailblazers Of Domestic Suspense. Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, some lesser known names.

― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, April 2, 2019 3:08 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks so much for mentioning this, I tore through like 3/4ths of this over this past weekend and was delighted to learn that the editor followed this up with a box set of novels in the same vein for Library of America which I'm going to have to get now probably.

Thanks so much for mentioning this, I tore through like 3/4ths of this over this past weekend and was delighted to learn that the editor followed this up with a box set of novels in the same vein for Library of America which I'm going to have to get now probably.

You're welcome! Didn't know about the novels, will have to check these out! I'm almost finished and have to say the general level of quality in this anthology seems very high - a few of the stories at the beginning seemed to rely too much on their twists, is the biggest complaint I can muster. I don't read a lot of crime fiction, tbh - it's pretty much just Simenon and Donald Westlake for me.

Picked up Wolfgang Hilbig's The Females, another 100 or so hallucinatory pages depicting a man not in control of anything in his life except what he can put down on the page, and in that the control is absolute. Onto Jose Saramago's All the Names with its accumulation of the tiniest grain of detail over paragraphs that go on for pages. Both books have this plot in the form of a quest for a woman (or a group of women in Hilbig's case), but at some point there is nothing as mundane as plot, writing with little narrative direction, and seemingly more important things to say and talk about, only so much of which can be transmitted.

Its totally my jam.

Report from the middle of Why Buddhism Is True: he is good at simplifying Buddhist thought and putting it into frames that a novice western mind can grasp more readily. On the minus side, he has the maddening habit of assuming that evolutionary psychology ('EP') has the authority of "science", consisting of MRIs, experimental data, and doctors with degrees who form its theories, and therefore when its theories overlap with Buddhist thought, it is "science" that is the ascendant authority, which then validates Buddhism. He also keeps trying to tweak Buddhism so it will better fit evolutionary psychology, as if any deviation from the doctrines of EP represent minor flaws in Buddhism which need correction from or reconciliation with EP.

Buddhism is validated by the personal, living experience of Buddhists, as they live out its precepts. No further validation is asked or needed.

listened to a very good old RTE radio documentary about the last 149 days in the life of JG Farrell, who had moved to West Cork. Starts with an extraordinary eyewitness account of his death. Then explores and interviews the small network of relations (locals, visitors) that existed during that period for Farrell. You get a quite powerful blurred image of the days emerging from those interviews, a sense of the uncertainty at the perception of recollection and how much anyone can be said to be known, and the somewhat uncertain building of a life of isolation.

strongly recommend it if you have time.

the rte strand that it’s taken from, recommended by darragh cos of a chester beatty library episode, is often very good. the one on herring fishing recently springs to mind.

as for reading, been travelling a bit and continuing slowly with city of quartz, which i’m enjoying, and a James M recommendation for a long flight - Ascent by Jed Mercurio. Story of a deadly russian flying ace, fighting covertly in the Korean War and then later at the North Pole. don’t know where it’s going but it’s skilled in depictions of g-force dogfights, the competition of the pilots and the abstracted psychology of the main character.

Peter Smith – An Introduction to Gödel’s Theorems
I'm really enjoying working through this. It's quite accessible, and has a nice way of frequently pausing to sketch out the path ahead in increasing detail as more of the groundwork is developed.

Ascent: i said above that i wasn’t sure where it was going because it had just shifted from aerial dogfights in the Korean War to the Arctic and I assumed the clues that the protagonist was on a trajectory to space flight were wrong.

in fact in sum and having now finished it this is a book that turns the notion of the character “arc” into a series of cosmically ascending movements, from the basements of stalingrad to the moon.

a lovely moment late on pictures the story in reverse - falling from the korean sky like a comet or angel to the basements of Stalingrad.

the physical atmospheric conditions of each of these are a substantial part of the matter of the book: the freezing, the role of gravity and g force, liquid and vapour. it’s also a piece of counterfactual or rather invisible history. hidden rather than alternate.

it’s very good, and quite unusual.

just to add to the “invisible history” thing. at no stage is this conjectured fictional character allowed by the politics and administration of his situation, to exist, and in fact it is this that allows him to become achieve a piece of history that didn’t happen.

i’m a sucker for that sort of thing.

tana french's "the witch elm." she is such a good prose stylist.

really looking forward to reading that!

Roadside Picnic is indeed very good.

As we begin summer I finished Jose Saramago's Blindness, which I think is a weaker effort only because I take a heavy disliking to dystopian fiction these days, his writing nearly overcomes the poverty of the imagination that comes with the genre. Now nearly done with Quincas Borba by Machado de Assis - it uses a lot of tricks that just weren't utilised in fiction at the time (or that I've come across anyway): the self-commentary on the plot for one, as it happens, and then the plot of transmigration of a philosopher's soul to his dog that just is only mentioned now and then as the narrative then concentrates on his friend and his dealings with high society in Imperial 19th century Brazil. It reminds me a bit of Donald Barthelme but I should re-read to check (I won't, don't have his books anymore).

We should have a new thread?

hey brad how far in are you

― j., Tuesday, June 18, 2019 8:28 PM (five days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

about 200 pages

I started reading The Siege of Krishnapur, J. G. Farrell, but I'm not far enough into it yet to feel any lasting commitment. He was setting up the romantic interest as I set it down for the night and that direction did not bode well.

I read Claire Dederer's (not rhymed with Federer) memoir Love and Trouble. I loved it. It's kind of a mess but that fits with her flailing around trying to find a narrative for what she's experiencing (a midlife crisis, essentially, but within that is her coming to terms with her marriage, her attitude to sex - now and throughout her life) and also this kind of folksy dialectic she's aiming for. Apologies if I've made that sound shit because it really isn't. It's honest and questing and consoling.

She wrote a great essay for the Paris Review a while back; I was hooked on her from that: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/20/art-monstrous-men/

hey brad how far in are you

― j., Tuesday, June 18, 2019 8:28 PM (five days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

about 200 pages

― american bradass (BradNelson), Sunday, June 23, 2019 8:52 AM (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i could maybe get in on that! we should combine our earnest efforts

I finished SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY - its density required a lot of effort. Brilliant, but it doesn't have much momentum; there's little overall movement in the argument, save that the 7th type is somehow more dramatic than the others in combining opposites.

It's notorious that Empson hardly believed in the types and thought they could hardly be distinguished. I often couldn't really tell what a particular type was doing, or make out how an example was serving a particular one of the 7 ideas. And most of what he says about opposites in that late section is hard to follow, to the point of mysticism.

Why I like it is a) the great pedantic attention to detail, with his particular brand of paraphrase of the verse; b) his great readiness to offer cranky digressions and statements on almost anything; c) his awesome knowledge of the English poetic canon. It made me reflect that almost no one now has this, and that I should work at it myself.

Flann O'Brien short pieces / stories translated from Irish: a couple very good and anticipating great later works.

Terry Eagleton, HUMOUR.

(checks watch) Holy cow! It is summer!

Time for a new the WAYR thread, so the cleaning staff can come in and vacuum up the crumbs, polish the sideboard, remove the candle stubs from the candelabra, and toss sheets over the furniture.

> the cleaning staff can come in and vacuum up the crumbs

just leave it to the langoliers.

Don’t know which thread to put this on, but there is a feature up on The NY Times in which they list their favorite 50 memoirs of the past 50 years or so. Lots of things added to my wishlist.

I went and did it. There is now a Summer 2019 WAYR thread. Please inspect it carefully for damage inflicted during transport before taking delivery.

www link: 2019 Sum-Sum-Summertime: What Are You Reading, My Good People?