2019 Autumn: What Are You Reading as the Light Drifts Southward?

THE GOLDFINCH is a remarkably awful film! So that's not a good sign.

Where should I start with Narayan? The Guide? Swami and Friends?

Of those I've read, I can't say any are bad, but two that stick out in my memory are The Guide and The Painter of Signs.

I finally finished Rick Perlstein's epic tome Nixonland. I'm not sure I needed to read 700+ long pages about this, but I'll give him credit that it does pick up pace in the second half and manages to feel fresh while covering increasingly familiar material. The main context of the second half is how the American body politic slowly and haltingly comes to awareness that it is thoroughly bogged down in a world-historic shit show in Vietnam. There are lots of cautionary tales in the fact that the Democrats nominated a staunch no-nonsense antiwar candidate to face the notoriously slippery and dishonest Nixon, and despite the increasingly pervasive unpopularity of the war, still get their ass handed to them in '72.

It's familiar now because so many op-ed writers have ripped Perlstein fof.

*off

I just meant that it covers the more familiar '60s historical events like Vietnam, Watergate (though that remains one of many subplots in this book), the '72 election, etc. True that Perlsteins' take has become nearly conventional wisdom now.

The current Republican party has no idea how to address the place of Nixon in their history other than to vigorously deny that he has any relevance to the present, while hinting that he wasn't as bad as all that.

Remember that convention where Schwarzenegger talked about watching a JFK vs Nixon debate as a child in Austria, asking his dad who Nixon was, him answering "he's a republican" and Arnie going "THEN I'M A REPUBLICAN TOO"? Crowd went wild.

Also, Nixon's surrogates eventually claimed that he had to conduct his own investigations/stooges' break-ins of Ellsberg's shrink's office and Democrats HQ---after publication of the Pentagon Papers and McGovern's visit to Cuba, absolutely nothing to do with whether he'd taken bribes in antitrust settlements etc.---because he couldn't trust the (Deep State). And die-hard defenders still say he was driven too far by virulence of radial liberal uprising.

I finished PASSING, and decided to read Larsen's other novel QUICKSAND.

I think it's not as accomplished, can feel more naive; has a kind of PRIDE & PREJUDICE element (the woman who can't understand her own repressed feelings of love for a man who keeps cropping up) which yet gets frustrated. But contains some good writing on place and atmosphere, and remains basically interesting in content.

Larsen and Rhys both have a strong fascination with clothes, and enjoy listing differently coloured dresses, fabrics, etc.

I'm reading Concrete Island.

among my v favorite Ballards!

The first one I ever read, gave me a weird impression of his ouevre

Haunting of Hill House. Second time apparently or I’m a good guesser. Lol

The gate of angels. Which means I’ve only got the blue flower left after this :(

And also puttering through Dave Hutchinson's Europe in Autumn, which is much better-written than it needs to be

The Gate of Angels is probably her most off-the-wall novel. It has elements of a ghost story in it, and so, it's well-timed for Halloween.

I finished Chris Baldick, THE MODERN MOVEMENT. It ends in a blaze of over-the-top polemic, but is really a terrifically sound, inclusive survey of the era 1910-1940.

Haunting of Hill House. Second time apparently or I’m a good guesser. Lol

― nathom, Sunday, October 27, 2019 11:16 AM (yesterday)

we watched 1963's The Haunting, a remarkably good adaptation, a couple weeks ago, and I want to reread this.

I'm reading Younghill Kang's East Goes West, a pre-WWII picaresque about an educated Korean youth trying to make it in North America, in a Penguin Classics edition from this year that came out together with three other novels by Asian-American writers. It's funny, observant, and a stylistic marvel.

have that, must read that

I have started reading Clare Hutton's SERIAL ENCOUNTERS: 'ULYSSES' AND THE LITTLE REVIEW.

250pp+ of small print, publishing-history minutiae, charts and tables from Oxford University Press.

I may be some time.

Why Love Matters, Susan Gerhardt. Homework assignment from my therapist.

The past few nights I've been reading Henry Adams' 1300 page history of the two administrations of James Madison, but I'm hesitant to say I'm fully committed to it. I'm only a bit past 100 pages into it.

About five years ago I read his equally long and detailed history of Thomas Jefferson's two terms and it was pretty fascinating. Adams' main fault is his desire to be exhaustive, to uncloak all the evidence he sifted and correspondence he studied and to quote each relevant paragraph that substantiates his account of what every major participant thought or desired at each step along the way. He leaves no room to doubt his narrative, but being exhaustive is also exhausting. Luckily, the period he covers is hugely formative in the nation's history and extremely complex to grasp, so that having such a reliable guide is paramount to understanding what was happening.

If I do read it all, expect to see me come up for air some time in three or four weeks. I won't attempt to synopsize it, but I may offer some tidbits that I find especially tasty, if I run across any.

A great day for Danish literature yesterday as Jonas Eika won the Nordic Council Literature Prize for his book 'Efter Solen'. He gave an extremely political speech calling out Danish state racism, calling out prime minister Mette Frederiksens policies, even as he said he realized she was 'somewhere in the room' (she was in the front row, looking a bit uncomfortable). It's a great short story collection, btw, do seek it out when it gets translated.

I read Coetzees Disgrace, really powerful and condensed. I don't think I've seen this situation depicted this way before, the powerful becoming the powerless, and knowing full well that it's inevitable, that it's fair, that it's as it should be, but still not accepting it, of course not.

Now I'm reading Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk, the good one of the two Nobel winners this year.

The past few nights I've been reading Henry Adams' 1300 page history of the two administrations of James Madison, but I'm hesitant to say I'm fully committed to it. I'm only a bit past 100 pages into it.

About five years ago I read his equally long and detailed history of Thomas Jefferson's two terms and it was pretty fascinating. Adams' main fault is his desire to be exhaustive, to uncloak all the evidence he sifted and correspondence he studied and to quote each relevant paragraph that substantiates his account of what every major participant thought or desired at each step along the way. He leaves no room to doubt his narrative, but being exhaustive is also exhausting. Luckily, the period he covers is hugely formative in the nation's history and extremely complex to grasp, so that having such a reliable guide is paramount to understanding what was happening.

If I do read it all, expect to see me come up for air some time in three or four weeks. I won't attempt to synopsize it, but I may offer some tidbits that I find especially tasty, if I run across any.

― A is for (Aimless)

This volume fascinates less because Madison ain't Jefferson as personage and president.

I soaked up the first volume about nine years like a rich meal with subtle colors. Madison doesn't require irony; Jefferson does. And Adams' irony is among the subtlest and (quietly) funniest in American prose.

*about nine years ago

Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

I finished Jean Rhys, GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT.

I can't say this is really great writing. Maybe its main value is its sense of Paris c.1930s, and the poignancy of the vulnerable, despairing protagonist.

Midway through Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers. I think I would be enjoying it more if it weren't so damn long.

Started again on Ronald Firbank, VALMOUTH. Possibly the campest prose fiction I've ever read.

I liked The Flamethrowers, the end didn’t leave a big impression but I’m a sucker for stories of woman artists being misunderstood and disappointed

I read Stefan Zweig's novella Journey into the Past in the Anthea Bell translation. Bell was the major selling point for me, since I found out she translated two books whose prose style I admired (in the translation): All for Nothing and Austerliz. Sadly I now see that she has passed, but fortunately she has lots of other works I have yet to read. As for the novella, it was a pleasant and short read, a finely-observed melancholy quasi-romance.

Bell was great. She also translated the Asterix books into English.

Just read Melissa Harrison's All Among The Barley. Wonderful. Written in a slightly clipped arcane 1930s vernacular without seeming forced, and dealing with contemporary issues of English identity in a slyly murderous way. FFO The Falling, Ben Wheatley and the gothic pastoral in general. May contain scenes of harvesting.

Didn't have that modern-writer voice. Was moved to think 'they still make 'em like this!' - but of course the book is as much a critique of such thoughts, of nature-writing, of too-fervently celebrating tradition and history, as it is guided by them

Finished Rachel Cusk's Coventry (first half personal essays is good, second half book reviews is much less interesting). Also Karen Russell's Orange World. I know it's hard to end short stories, but most of these just...end, in a way that probably feels hip or sophisticated to writers (like ending on a jazzy unresolved chord), but also unsatisfying. Still a lot of images that will stick with me. The one about the ferrywoman living in a flooded post-apocalyptic Miami could have been a novel.

I'm reading the new Zadie Smith collection of short stories now, so far so good.

Never read a good Zadie Smith short story, so intrigued that people seem to like the new collection.

I hated White Teeth and the one or two random opinion-type pieces I've read of hers.

Yeah, I don’t get her. Another, similar author I can quite warm to is Helen Oyeyemi. In an interview I found her smarmy, and her fiction makes my eyes roll to clacking.

zadie smith is bad imo

So Zadie Smith is cancelled on here in a mere three posts? "Never read a good Zadie Smith short story", "hated White Teeth", "I don't get her." Really? Get the fuck outtahere.

"I don't get her" is the prize quote, from Remy Bean. Yeah, suppose you do in fact do not *get* her: who might be to blame for that? Her, of you? Sheesh. The worst of times etc :-/

xp lol and another one, "zadie smith is bad imo". Care to explain?

Hostility is fine, "Zadie Smith is bad" is fine, but for god's sake, back up these preposterous claims ppl

Okay: she’s boring.

I think it was over 20 years ago that I started (and put down) White Teeth so I'd be hard-pressed for details. I recall just hating the style and tone of it, overly precious and contrived.

I wouldn't say she's "cancelled" (ie, you shouldn't patronize her because of some loathsome views/actions), go ahead and read her what do I care. I will not.

I've only read on beauty and found it arch and unfunny and a bit "do you see?"

xxxp We're all boring, iirc.