About 2/3 of the way through Mrs Palfrey and - aside from Taylor's mastery of the subtle detail and the light she throws on the tiny hollows of misery that colour our days - the thing that's really struck me is how much she loathes writers, or, at the very least, what the process of writing does to writers (which I suppose amounts to the same thing). Ludo is pretty rancid, Beth from A View of the Harbour is in perpetual torment thanks to her writing and Angel. Well, Angel.
― Ngolo Cantwell (Chinaski), Tuesday, 28 January 2020 20:30 (four years ago) link
The writer in Angel is so damn exuberant though. I can't dislike her.
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 28 January 2020 20:32 (four years ago) link
Ach, I dunno. Exuberance is good but without an ounce of insight?
― Ngolo Cantwell (Chinaski), Tuesday, 28 January 2020 20:35 (four years ago) link
i’m not sure ludo is entirely rancid is he? iirc kingsley amis said it was an unusual portrait of a writer in fiction who is actually seen to do the work of writing. certainly he finds Mrs Palfrey picturesque or interesting subject matter. agree with Alfred on Angel, she’s incredibly present and vivid - bursts off the page in her awkwardness and will. both remarkable books. might have to revisit mrs palfrey.
― Fizzles, Tuesday, 28 January 2020 20:37 (four years ago) link
I'm probably being a bit unfair to Ludo (I've not finished - he might turn out to save her from a rampaging bear). I get his loneliness lends him a kind of searchlight quality, sweeping for any sort of contact, but it's his relation to Mrs Palfrey, which is kind of vampiric: she becomes purely about material or sustenance for his habit. And his writerly eye is beautifully rendered (that thirst for detail) but it's still grubby as hell.
― Ngolo Cantwell (Chinaski), Tuesday, 28 January 2020 20:44 (four years ago) link
yes i think that’s fair. the whole novel is pretty unsparing of people and of time.
― Fizzles, Tuesday, 28 January 2020 21:12 (four years ago) link
the thing that's really struck me is how much she loathes writers, or, at the very least, what the process of writing does to writers
I mean, she WAS friends with Kingsley Amis, so fair enough.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Wednesday, 29 January 2020 00:32 (four years ago) link
Haha - very true!
Well, I was totally wrong about Ludo. There is quite literally no end to the shit I don't know.
I finished the book in the waiting room of a health centre; I was totally overwhelmed and had to hide my face. What a writer.
― Ngolo Cantwell (Chinaski), Wednesday, 29 January 2020 19:16 (four years ago) link
I reread parts of Lorrie Moore, A GATE AT THE STAIRS.
And continued with Morris Dickstein's 'The Critic & Society: 1900-1950', on Edmund Wilson et al.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 30 January 2020 07:03 (four years ago) link
I'm currently reading a recently released NYRB book: Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness, Tim Parks. It's an odd duck. Kind of a cross between popular science, popular philosophy, a memoir, and an extended personal essay on the subject of human consciousness. I have yet to decide if he has anything new to say on this subject that is cogent or worthwhile, but his authorial voice is engaging enough to make him companionable, and that is worth much right there, so I read on.
― A is for (Aimless), Thursday, 30 January 2020 21:23 (four years ago) link
What are the innovations?
― the pinefox, Monday, 27 January 2020 11:18 (four days ago)
As an early historical novel, and the perspective of the narrator
― abcfsk, Friday, 31 January 2020 07:28 (four years ago) link
I just started reading Mike McCormack's odd sci-fi novella "Notes from a coma". John McGahern meets PKD!
― Saxophone Of Futility (Michael B), Friday, 31 January 2020 08:55 (four years ago) link
John Douglas and Olshaker - Mindhunter (1995). First book fail of my year. Douglas is one of the links in the chain that created the "genius serial killer" character in the 90s. In this book he doesn't recount any dialog from the interviews, and doesn't seem to have a sturdy methodology. The Anna Torv character in the TV show exists to point out the most obvious problems about his work.
Ginzburg - The Cheese and the Worms (1976). A deep dive into the life and times of a 15th century peasant who was burned at the stake for heresy. His hypothesis that the title metaphor came from an "oral tradition" is weak, and he admits it in one of the intros. Still quite interesting. I want to read his earlier book on the cult who battled witches while sleeping.
currently reading Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) for a book club. He can set up a story well enough to be interesting, but his characters are paper thin. I suspect it's just misery lit tourism -- an "American Dirt" for Afghanistan. (He left there when he was 11.)
― wasdnuos (abanana), Friday, 31 January 2020 14:44 (four years ago) link
I think Life is Meals is turning out to be more suitable for snacking than as a main course, so along with the occasional nibble I’ve embarked on The Odyssey in the Fagles translation. I enjoyed his Iliad last year.
― o. nate, Friday, 31 January 2020 19:55 (four years ago) link
in this thread we stan Emily Wilson's Odyssey
― Swilling Ambergris, Esq. (silby), Friday, 31 January 2020 19:59 (four years ago) link
I'm reading the first volume of Janet Frame's autobiography - To the Is-Land. I have a complicated relationship with NZ in that I went there for six weeks some 20 years ago and - this sounds trite as fuck but it's true - had a kind of epiphany - something like growing my eyes again. I've always thought if I go back, it'll be for good. Also, My sister has recently moved to NZ so this feels like one way of re-learning the lie of the land or something.
Anyway, irrelevant autobiographical sketch aside, I'm enjoying this. I'm always vaguely suspicious of richly detailed early memories, if only because my own recollections of my early years are basically non-existent, but this is told with such close-to detail and vigour it's hard not to be beguiled. She grew up in a railway family, so had a largely itinerant childhood, moving with the work around the South Island of the 1920s and 30s. There's no real hint as yet of the melancholy that would consume her but it's at the edge of things.
― Ngolo Cantwell (Chinaski), Friday, 31 January 2020 20:53 (four years ago) link
All of this is qualified by the frontispiece, really:
From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction always toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth.
― Ngolo Cantwell (Chinaski), Friday, 31 January 2020 20:56 (four years ago) link
Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness, Tim Parks
I really enjoyed this, while not being convinced that Riccardo Manzotti's theories make much sense or are even very meaningful.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Sunday, 2 February 2020 06:32 (four years ago) link
That Mike McCormack PKD-esque volume does sound unusual and interesting.
I continue with NW.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 2 February 2020 20:07 (four years ago) link
That one looks interesting. If I ever read it again I might try it. Fagles’ language seems to have a bit more grandeur which suits the heroic mood.
― o. nate, Monday, 3 February 2020 15:55 (four years ago) link
Needed an easy read so I picked up Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, which turns out to be absolutely terrific, with a Wodehousian density of (good) jokes. Roxane Gay on Goodreads complains about its thinness and over-jokiness, which seems like a classic Goodreads point-missing
― Chuck_Tatum, Monday, 3 February 2020 20:26 (four years ago) link
Social media indicates Roxane Gay seems like a classic misser of points.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Tuesday, 4 February 2020 00:11 (four years ago) link
I finished Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness a couple of nights ago. I most enjoyed it when he was pointing out how inadequate and incoherent existing theories of consciousness are. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. I came away less than impressed with his highly unspecific explanations of his own preferred theory, as devised by his Italian acquaintance.
My own conclusion is that for millennia humans have been accumulating vast amounts of well-observed data about how human consciousness behaves when it manifests itself in human activity, and how it appears internally as self-reported by acute self-observers. Very few novel discoveries are still being added to this body of knowledge. It's not 'sexy' like neuroscience.
Attempting to describe human behavior from the bottom up and from the inside out by correlating each thought or action with brain activity at the molecular level seems to me to be a fool's errand, if only because consciousness only accounts for a small fraction of brain activity. Most brain activity doesn't correlate to anything that can be described in terms other than neurons undergoing changes in their chemical states. The activity happens. One may presume it has consequences, but it happens in a black box and it seldom manifests as consciousness.
― A is for (Aimless), Wednesday, 5 February 2020 06:26 (four years ago) link
But the above post is just a playful dab at the subject. ILX made a bigger collective stab at it in this thread.
― A is for (Aimless), Wednesday, 5 February 2020 06:34 (four years ago) link
If you’re looking to read more on the subject, The Conscious Mind by David J. Chalmers is worth spending time with.
― o. nate, Wednesday, 5 February 2020 14:24 (four years ago) link
More than halfway into the new William Gibson, and I'm enjoying it more than the Peripheral... it has the advantage of not having throw you in the deep end like the Peripheral does, since it revisits the same concepts and many characters. Seems to make the narrative more enjoyable, although I'm not sure I'd say there's a lot more going on. Just more coherent.
― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel), Thursday, 6 February 2020 00:04 (four years ago) link
Unfortunately most of what's important in the new Gibson happens offscreen, so the characters basically run around for a while and then go home again. It's enjoyable enough, but a bit underwhelming.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Thursday, 6 February 2020 01:54 (four years ago) link
finished larkin's "jill" last week. really enjoyed this one -- larkin is such a great, observant, funny writer even in prose. it astonishes me that he wrote it when he was 21. going to pick up "a girl in winter" soon (thanks alfred!).
almost done with charles bowden's "blue desert" (arizona writer, sort of poetic/hard-boiled -- finding it a little less good than i'd hoped but it's short at least), then thinking of tackling jonathan schell's "the fate of the earth," which i picked up at an antique store. also rereading lee-ditko spider-man right before bed, for the first time in many years.
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Thursday, 6 February 2020 23:37 (four years ago) link
everyone has me killfiled, don't they?
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Friday, 7 February 2020 02:29 (four years ago) link
not me. bro
― A is for (Aimless), Friday, 7 February 2020 03:20 (four years ago) link
On a William Carlos Williams kick after reading Reed Whittemore's bio.
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 7 February 2020 03:22 (four years ago) link
xxp not only do i not have you killfiled, i'm trying to keep up with your damn twitter thread
― mookieproof, Friday, 7 February 2020 03:55 (four years ago) link
As mentioned at FAP yesterday, I finished Richard King's The Lark Ascending. Sort of a primer for the UK's changing relationship towards the countryside through the 20th century - ramblers, kinder scouts, eco-fascists, hippies, new age travellers, Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp - through the lens of music, so Vaughn Williams, Ralph McTell, Donovan, Vashti Bunyan, but also less obvious selections, Eno, Ultramarine, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Stan Tracey. King is quite a lyrical writer. There's a concert to accompany the book at the Barbican in March.
Now onto Sally Rooney's Normal People
― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 7 February 2020 10:34 (four years ago) link
it astonishes me that he wrote it when he was 21. going to pick up "a girl in winter" soon (thanks alfred!).
Cool! Let me know if you do.
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 7 February 2020 11:08 (four years ago) link
Been a while, but time to delurk after my brief show at the fap last night -
Aurora Leigh - always dragged my feet on reading this. Never took to her shorter poems much, and I bridle a bit at verse novels, novels in verse, w/e/ But it's bringing me more pleasure than anything in a while. Just bursting with stuff - knotty super-particular images, elliptical shifts of focus and digressions that just feel pleasantly 'f it, I'm going to think about this for a while'.
Some Trick, Helen DeWitt. Also enjoying this, almost inevitably. Not that far in, but completely up for her hymns to statistical software.
Also reading and working from Make: Electronics. Stopped drinking so I'm just having a period of faddishly deciding to be interested in new things (also - baking bread, meditation). Want to know how stuff works, learn a bit, play around, build some tiny things, fix stuff, burn off a fingerprint in a soldering accident etc etc.
And dipping in and out of a couple of academic oddball classics - Julian Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and John M Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.
― woof, Friday, 7 February 2020 11:35 (four years ago) link
I found King's book a bit flat. I wonder if I was in the wrong frame of mind when I read as it ticks a lot of boxes for me.
I'm taking a break from Janet Frame and am reading Kathleen Jamie's Surfacing. She's a poet by trade (and a creative writing teacher) and she's a great proponent of Gilbert White's entreaty to 'watch narrowly'. Her gaze here is very much about the vagaries of climate change. Not in a didactic way but the whole text is suffused with the evidence of change be it on an Alaskan dig to uncover hunter-gatherer artefacts or on the shores of Westray, where erosion has revealed evidence of neolithic occupation. She has always been able to weave in aspects of her own experience and is often quite candid about her family life (her best essay is about mother's cancer diagnosis ) but, as yet, this is largely absent from the text.
― Ngolo Cantwell (Chinaski), Friday, 7 February 2020 12:31 (four years ago) link
I've been re-reading The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, LeCarre. It's OK, but LeCarre wrote better stuff later on and I suspect the movie of this (which I haven't seen for a couple of decades now) is better than the book. Anyway, I needed something undemanding and this fits.
― A is for (Aimless), Friday, 7 February 2020 16:03 (four years ago) link
Aurora Leigh - always dragged my feet on reading this. Never took to her shorter poems much, and I bridle a bit at verse novels, novels in verse, w/e/ But it's bringing me more pleasure than anything in a while. Just bursting with stuff - knotty super-particular images, elliptical shifts of focus and digressions that just feel pleasantly 'f it,
lol I read half of it on of all places a plane headed to Seattle, years after my professor of a grad Victorian lit course raved about it. Yeah, it's got wooden passages, but it brims with possibilities, and, actually, Browning's use of blank verse to enjamb the gnarls of her thinking impressed me. If you read Wordsworth's The Prelude it serves as an answer poemm.
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 7 February 2020 16:07 (four years ago) link
having read three novels by alan burns over the last week: babel seems to be entirely composed of cut-ups sourced from a plethora of found material circa the mid/late sixties which to be honest i found a bit of a slog to get through, if occasionally diverting; europe after the rain on the other hand actually has a discernible (if exceedingly fractured) narrative about a quest through war-torn europe... some notable parallels between this and anna kavan's ice which was published a few years later; dreamerika! again with the cut-ups (& additional pictorial collage) depicting/satirising the travails of the kennedy dynasty. kind of curious to check out his first novel buster which from what i can gather is more in the angry young man mode.
but for now: ann quin's the unmapped country!
― no lime tangier, Saturday, 8 February 2020 06:20 (four years ago) link
Still reading essays in THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM: on Trilling, Richards et al.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 8 February 2020 14:13 (four years ago) link
It's enjoyable enough, but a bit underwhelming.
sadly a very accurate summary.
― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel), Monday, 10 February 2020 03:56 (four years ago) link
Decided to take the plunge with Ducks, Newburyport last night, 50p in & having fun so far. Rather than being an obstacle, the crazy stream of consciousness format seems like it might actually make it pretty easy to dip in & out of.
― turn the jawhatthefuckever on (One Eye Open), Monday, 10 February 2020 15:37 (four years ago) link
Wow, 50 pages is more than I can do, I mostly manage ten to twenty pages, and when I hit another puma episode, I take a break :)
I've returned to another book that just flows, am reading Proust again. Book 10 in the Danish 13 book version. Second part of The Prisoner. I have 10 and 11, and will make it through that little novel inside a novel. Then I should probably go back, I don't think I've read parts 7 and 8.
Also, slowly working my way through The Black Jacobins by CLR James, which is incredible, if a bit dated. And slowly making my way through The Radetzky March, one chapter at a time, for work-related reasons.
― Frederik B, Monday, 10 February 2020 15:42 (four years ago) link
I remember really liking the Black Jacobins when I read it.
― Bidh boladh a' mhairbh de 'n láimh fhalaimh (dowd), Monday, 10 February 2020 17:10 (four years ago) link
I'm now on to The Wicked Pavilion, Dawn Powell. It reminds me of a line in a Katherine Hepburn movie: "She did worse than insult you; she described you." So far, Powell seems intent on relentlessly describing her characters. This may shift, as I'm only 50 pages into it.
― A is for (Aimless), Monday, 10 February 2020 17:16 (four years ago) link
Sick On You Andrew Mathesonmemoir of the Hollywood Brats lead singer detailing the so far pretty lows of living in poverty while getting his protopunk band together.I think I'm still in 1972, & he's just met Cliff Richard thanks to a would be manager. Not sure if this is going to be positive.Oh well, quite enjoyable read if you like this kind of thing.Now to finally get their recordings.
― Stevolende, Monday, 10 February 2020 18:47 (four years ago) link
Man, I wish I had to read Joseph Roth for work
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Monday, 10 February 2020 22:00 (four years ago) link
Me too. Wish me luck with this book pitch.
― Frederik B, Tuesday, 11 February 2020 09:56 (four years ago) link
the wicked pavilion is so good
― adam, Tuesday, 11 February 2020 12:51 (four years ago) link
isn't it?
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 11 February 2020 13:12 (four years ago) link