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

Very under the radar, even by his usual standards, a new Oliver Harris thriller - a spy novel this time, called "A Shadow Intelligence". It's a bit Belsey Does MI6, but very good so far.

Also working my way through Red Shift and Shadow of the Torturer.

Had no idea re new Oliver Harris, will be getting that.

Please submit info re under-the-radar Oliver Harris.

^Seconded. The name vaguely rings a bell but that's about it.

Halfway through, it’s very exciting. A few tweaks here and there and it could have a Belsey book. It’s got a similar contrapuntal setup - the shady but well-meaning investigator, reluctantly forced to solve a case in order to escape from a larger bit of trouble that he’s caused himself. But so far it’s a lot tighter than House of Fame, which was typically well-written but the plot was all over the place. And none of his books have really nutted the endings - hopefully this one will!

(And it’s a MI6 novel in Kazakhstan rather than a cop thriller in Hampstead this time. But there’s the same finesse and fun in describing weird zones of suburbia and eurotrash tat)

More broadly, Oliver Harris is a William Burroughs scholar who wrote 3 earlier books about a skilled police officer called Nick Belsey who is also unfortunately startlingly bent and suffering from massive impulse control problems. In the first book, The Hollow Man, he is bankrupt and homeless, so decides to secretly take up residence in the house of a missing Russian oligarch. The second book, Deep Shelter, is especially recommended -- it's also a deep dive into the hidden nuclear shelter infrastructure under London.

Interesting. Haven’t read any Burroughs in yearsdecades, but have really been enjoying this audio book I took out of the library of Naked Lunch read by Mark Bramhall.

Keep buying books even though I'm still reading GoThrones.

I'm reading Tom Drury's Hunts in Dreams, the second of his Grouse County trilogy. Drury is a joy to read and ostensibly a soft touch but he manages to smuggle meaning through and the cumulative effect of his storytelling is kinda devastating.

Also reading Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks wherein he produces a 'counter-desecration handbook', gathering lost language for the landscape in the hope of re-enchanting the world. I loved the Wild Places so much but it's been diminishing returns since. I find him so damn earnest at times I have to look away. Small doses.

Agree about Macfarlane. The Old Ways was too much about other writers, and it sounds as if his new one is similar. I loved The Wild Places.

Drury is wonderful.

Finishing Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, a book that can hardly be believed at times. A pile-on of hallucination, paranoia, sheer darkness to near (and the near is key here, it plays with the edges of) incoherence. I loved how the search and loss (and the transition of one to the other) of faith and meaning is realised by the people in it, to such an extent you feel there are no characters. Its rare to see matter really come out of the page like this, take a life of its own, the page impose its will on you like this. Although I've read a ton of things published after the 1870s that clearly go for this approach to life-on-the-page its really impressive how Dosto is able to leave a mark (or scars). I've read and stopped and re-started a couple of his books, The Devils I finished but that didn't quite hit, so I ended up feeling my time was past, that maybe he really works on the young and more impressionable, that I could go to others after him and get what he gave them - but that isn't true at all.

The worst of all is that its just fucking funny as well.

I am also reading The Psalms now, it just seemed appropriate from what was lying around.

I just started reading Before the Storm, Rick Perlstein. I enjoyed his Nixon and Reagan books, but this one seems to be early enough in the process that he hadn't quite found his approach. It begins with a fairly bogus recitation of grievances against FDR and the unions, from the point of view of an imagined conservative factory owner, but it is the usual self-serving bullshit the owning class likes to tell itself. I was not impressed. From there he segues into some background on Goldwater and his family which is far more informative.

"frankiemachine, I agree the movie plays with our perception of Bogey, but...impossible to discuss this w/o spoilers but in the end the movie does come down on one side."

I'm obviously reading this movie differently from other posters but for me its not about whether or not Dix is a decent guy. His moral character is a premise, not the conclusion.

It's a cliche to talk about Ray's European sensibility and the movie was immediately pegged as existentialist, being compared with Camus et al.

Dix is (admittedly in a slightly watered down Hollywood version) your standard outsider. Being morally repellent is in the character's job description.

Augusto Boal Theatre of the oppressed
Brazilian radical theatre theorist. Ties in with a course i did recently.

Ugly Things #50
another interesting edition of long running psych/garage/punk etc magazine. Pretty much a must read I think.

Albert Camus - The First Man
Julian Jackson - France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944

is that Vichy book worth checking out?

Yeah, it's good. I read it in an undergrad class on Vichy France where it was the main text.

excellent, thanks. I get the perception (possibly slightly misplaced) that Petain was probably as big an antisemitic cunt as Hitler. And he had enough autonomy to not make the statute of jews even worse than the nurembourg laws equivalents and he didn't need to deport Jews as freely as he did, but will have to check that book out.

I don't think outsider means morally repellent to Ray, really. Most often (Rebel Without A Cause, They Live By Night) it means unfairly maligned and misunderstood.

I also think the movie pulls our heartstrings for Dix in a way that say Camus never would.

Current reads:

http://i.imgur.com/GDShD3E.jpg

And he had enough autonomy to not make the statute of jews even worse than the nurembourg laws equivalents and he didn't need to deport Jews as freely as he did, but will have to check that book out.

Yeah. Jackson's book makes clear that Vichy enthusiastically cooperated in meeting quotas.

Where should I start with Parker Tyler? Would want a full tome to be as pertinent as all y'all's comments on In A Lonely Place (given that level, no prob with stoned campy deep dishin' stylistic proclivities of the anthologized PT pieces I've occasionally dined put on).

Underground Cinema?

CinemaFilm

Halfway through the final book of Olivia Manning's FORTUNES OF WAR series, and am going to be bereft soon

I finished O'Neill's Neverland. It was better than I was expecting - quite good actually. It reminded me a bit of Light Years, both in the paean to domesticity aspect and in the dissolution of a marriage aspect. Both did that thing where the woman is withdrawing from the marriage and the man is unhappy about it but oddly passive. Almost like a nightmare in which something terrible is happening, slowly and inevitably, and you can't open your mouth to scream or even protest. I guess some breakups are like that, though the depiction seems to be missing some ingredient: conflict, anger, resentment, or passion. I guess those feelings are there, but curiously muted. Anyway, it does have a cumulative emotional force that I'm underselling here.

Speaking of Salter, and perhaps inspired by the thematic connection, I'm now reading All That Is.

*Netherland, it's late here.

"I don't think outsider means morally repellent to Ray, really. Most often (Rebel Without A Cause, They Live By Night) it means unfairly maligned and misunderstood.

I also think the movie pulls our heartstrings for Dix in a way that say Camus never would."

Daniel I've obviously expressed myself badly.

I'm not talking about Ray's attitude to outsiders in the general meaning of the word.

I'm thinking specifically about the Outsider in existentialist literature. The term probably comes from Colin Wilson's book but it seems to have become accepted as useful shorthand when discussing this stuff.

The outsider has, in some senses, to be repellent: it's not enough that his bad behaviour be anodyne, or defensible, or in a noble cause. More traditional fiction covers those cases.

Dix is full of rage, with a history of violence against women. His response to the murder of a young woman is callous indifference. As Alfred says, he's a shit.

But repulsion doesn't preclude sympathy or nobility. The existentialist hero/antihero is always ambivalent. Dix's refusal to control his rage, or to pretend to sympathies he doesn't feel are signs of alienation but also of authenticity.

The reason I don't think the film is "about" Dix's moral character is that there's no possibility of salvation for him in moral improvement, in treating woman better, being a nicer guy. In existentialist terms that would be a retreat into bad faith, a refusal to be free. He can achieve salvation only through transcendence: transcendence he glimpses through Laurel (I lived a few weeks while she loved me) but which can't be sustained because the authentic Dix is too toxic for Laurel and a tamed Dix would not be free.

There's an argument that all this is adolescent nonsense and that all the film's existentialism does is provide a rationale for glamourising obnoxious behaviour. And yet, most of the power of the movie seems to derive from the way the philosophical element turns it into something much stranger than one in which a damaged man is shown to be too much of a bully to get a girlfriend.

Elizabeth Anderson - Private Government

Pictish progress: New studies on northern Britain in the Middle Ages edited by Stephen T. Driscoll, Jane Geddes, and Mark A. Hall.

Where should I start with Parker Tyler?

I would go for Magic and Myth of the Movies - nice piece about it here:

https://queermodernisms.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/magic-and-myth-of-the-movies-parker-tyler-cover-1/

Thanks Ward and James, will prob try inter-library loan for these, and maybe more PT.

My spring reading has been decent

https://i.imgur.com/7wKlwDm.jpg

Cover seduced me and it didn’t disappoint, sexy and surprising - has that Lanark thing where a lot of the most impactful stuff comes from the Bildungsroman rather than the postmodern fantasy (the two novels are not at all similar before someone says READ ANOTHER BOOK). I mean there’s a particular thing in here that is straight out of YA urban fantasy but what hits is the evocation of various queer scenes of the early 90s, and Paul is a wonderful character, protean, pretentious, cocky, insecure

Daisy Johnson, everything under: ehhh. I liked fen enough that I wanted to see the next thing but there’s something a bit missing here for me. If you wanted to be unkind you could parody her pretty easily, madlibbing different combos of language—bodies—wild places and things. Story is well told tho, I’ll keep checking her out

Listened to don Winslow’s the force, you get inside the head of a corrupt racist pig - it’s read by wire actor Dion graham and he has a quirk where he leaves such a large gap between a piece of dialogue and eg “Malone said” that you’d think there was a full stop instead of a comma between them

Currently taking my time with Joanna Walsh break.up and could not admire it/her more. I’d never have made the Lydia Davis comparisons that are all over the jacket but I can see it, she has a funny way of seeing things and a wryness that gives way to a disarming frankness. Dunno if it’s me being basic but I’m surprised none of the blurbs bring up the Maggie Nelson of bluets and the Argonauts, wrt the essayistic nature, quotations in the marginalia, passages addressed to a “you” &c (the addressee in this seems to be even more of a fuckboy than the “you” of bluets)

So Long See you Tomorrow, by William Maxwell, wonderful and odd, although wish I’d read it ten years ago so it didn’t make me think of a true crime podcast.

An Image Of Africa and The Trouble With Nigeria by Chinua Achebe, from a Penguin Great Ideas collection.

just finished The Count Of Monte Cristo (vol 1 great, vols 2 & 3 so so, vol 4 & 5 better)

The Tempest, only my third Shakespeare after macbeth and R&J.

next up, Hag-Seed, Atwood's retelling of The Tempest

Washington Square is breaking through my Henry James resistance, maybe due to the pace of the plot and perfect control. I definitely see the Austen comparisons.

that novel has one of the most beautifully calibrated uses of irony (i.e. every scene with Dr. Sloper).

Clarice Lispector - The Foreign Legion

these stories are insane, her narrators dive into intense metaphysical subjective ruminations at the slightest provocation. one is about getting invited to saturday lunch by someone you don’t actually like that much and ends

“I ate without any longing whatsoever. I was wholly deserving of that food. For I cannot always be my brothers’ keeper, just as I can no longer be my own keeper, for I have ceased to love myself. Nor do I wish to form life because existence already exists. It exists like some territory where we all advance. Without a single word of love. Without a word. But your pleasure comprehends mind. We are strong and we eat. For bread is love among strangers.”

man bread is love among strangers

That's the trick to making friends, you bring bread along.

In my queue is my luckiest 2nd hand purchase from a month ago, a 600pp collection of lispector’s “crônicas” called discovering the world. Have only flipped through so far but looks fucking great, I’ve wanted to explore more of her stuff since reading hour of the star and the two Elizabeth Bishop-translated stories and had no idea there was anything this massive to dive into

yeah this collection (the foreign legion) is half cronicas, havent gotten to em yet. i also have the massive and beautiful new directions short story collection but it was too unwieldy so i bought this slim volume used

In the last week read Ghost Wall, by Sarah Moss, have since recommended it to at least three friends whose wheelhouse it is exactly in. Short novel narrated by a teenage girl whose loathsome father is helping lead an experimental class that involves living like Iron Age people and exploring the bogs. Sacrifice comes up a lot. Tense and spooky and emotionally involving without feeling manipulative, I maybe wanted a little more from it once it was over but overall was very impressed. Apparently her writing strategy involves completing a first draft, deleting it, and starting over.

Also read The Sovereign by Andrew Elias Colarusso, a somewhat jumbled Dalkey Archive novel about combatants in a future revolution in Puerto Rico. It flashes back and forward in time, throws in a little anonspeak, Twitter messages between the characters of The Quiet American, explicit lesbian sex, and an opening chapter on cordyceps. It’s not as annoying as I probably make it sound, a lot of the set-pieces are very well done, but it feels a bit like a bag-of-tricks novel that could have been something great if its ambitions were a little more focused. I wonder if the author read Clark Gifford’s Body.

Percy's The Last Gentleman at last -- a hundred pages read by the pool this afternoon!

Reflections in the Library -- collection of literary essays by Antal Szerb, full of great insights and perceptive readings of the lives and works of various English-language writers

Percy's /The Last Gentleman/ at last -- a hundred pages read by the pool this afternoon!

Before the Storm has been lagging for me. The major thrust of the book is that the big upsurge in modern Republican-style conservatism rode into town as a result of the massive political realignment caused by the civil rights movement, as racists migrated en masse from the Democrats and blacks migrated en masse from "the party of Lincoln". This is no secret. The sixties capsized US politics, mainly around these issues.

The bulk of the details that are related in the book are about the day-to-day nuts-and-bolts organizing behind the scenes done by conservative political operatives, who were all there to push an agenda of laissez faire capitalism with a big dose of added anti-communism. The stampede of white racists and quasi-racists onto their bandwagon seems to have been welcomed by them with open arms, but only as a way to get votes and win power to push through their income-tax-abolition & business deregulation agenda.

The only sense in which all this is a 'hidden' part of recent history is the depth of detail Perlstein digs into about the political operatives and organizers who ran things behind the scenes. These kinds of operatives have been around since the nineteenth century and have always played a huge, but occult, role in US politics.

The only surprise in the first half of the book is how reluctant Goldwater was to run.