Summer 2020: What Are You Reading as the Sun Bakes the Arctic Ocean?

Yeah, I read it last year. A good book, very dark. I thought it was worth reading.

Bruce Pascoe Dark Emu
reevaluation of the history of aboriginal agriculture etc.
IN the light of its destruction by incoming british settlers. Looking back over some early explorers' memoirs and a lot of physical evidence.
Hope this did start a revival of some of the techniques talked about.
I am hearing about Australians wanting to go back to growing plants that are more in tune with Australia's own environment than that of the places that people came from. or at least having to recreate the old version of it.
Good to see that the US seems to be picking up on ideas from native American nature stewardship so hope similar can happen in Australia. But don't know the Australian political system and the last documentaries I saw were showing quit ehow badly Australian behaviour to its original population has been over the years.

I also just finished Frederick Douglass's original slave narrative. I think he wrote autobiographies 3 time sover his life so covered some of the same areas differently each time. Want to read the other 2.
May be just about to start the narrative by Olaudah Equiano which is in the same omnibus book

Missing Person, Patrick Modiano. So far it's about a private detective suffering from amnesia. Expect it to get weirder.

The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States 1638-1870(1896)was the first book by W.E.B Dubois. It's a monograph, in professional academic format, included sources footnoted on each page, and a narrative, a story, with some individuals, factions, some counties, colonies, groups of colonies, as characters, realigning over the years, in relation to each other, foreign powers, and other socio-political elements: agricultural, technological, in the broadest sense, the coming and going of uprising, fears of same, the Revolution, Civil War, and other struggles (laws passed, ignored, deals made, superseded, etc.)
Impression is more of a conversational, down to earth report than Lecture etc.
By this account, in just about every colony (though least of all in Georgia),there was always a moral objection, or at least anxiety, but also the money, and what slaves, available at reasonable expense, could be traded for: rum and molasses especially, which were not only tasty, but very good for resale, even in colonies where there was no agricultural advantage to slaveowners. Also in every colony: fear of a black earth uprising, so that they all had some kind of slave-importation-limiting laws, usually duties, however (also if ever) they were enforced at any given point (deals etc.)
No real prob for several colonies in terms of importation, but they tended to be very dependent for goodies and $ on the trade, most of all Rhode Island Massachusetts. Puritan heritage incl. moral concerns, but it seems that only the Society of Friends really proved a formidable legislative influence---relatively speaking, and only within Pennsylvania.
All concerns came to a head as the Revolution approached, and indeed, an outtake from the Declaration of Independence rips the King a new one, accusing him not only of oppression via enslavement, profiting from it, and paying off the slaves to plot against the colonists.(from Jefferson, Works "This radical, and not strictly true" passage, as Du B. coolly tags it, didn't make the final cut, Jefferson says, because South Carolina. SC was very big on rice, which was very labor-intensive, much more, as Du Bois notes, than the tobacco farming of Virginia and North Carolina, which were not as unequivocally pro-slavery or pro-trade at this point.
We haven't gotten to the rise of cotton, or the Louisiana Purchase, which brought in sugar, which took the most and biggest turnover of slaves.
Also in this Library of America edition: The Souls of Black Folk, Dusk at Dawn (autobio), and essays.

Dow, have you read "DuBois' Telegram" by Spahr? You might find it interesting.

Stevolende, that book has been hugely influential in Australia, and so of course the Rupert Murdoch press has instituted a long-standing campaign to discredit Pascoe, trying to prove he isn't actual Indigenous, etc etc etc. They kept bitching he wouldn't do interviews to respond to their stupid gotchas all summer because he was out working as a volunteer firefighter against the hideous bushfires we had.

Basically, fuck Murdoch.

I want to read it now! On the list. Most of my knowledge of Aboriginal issues comes from being into Aboriginal poets, so I should probably get my hands on something rather than another Lionel Fogarty book sometime

It's an interesting read. Does have me wondering about a couple of things though. The idea that aborigines would grow some things as monocultures across vast distances seems to go against the biodiversity I'm seeing being integral to other native stewardship. I thought the more diverse the more robust, also thought that the film Living Soil was saying monocultures tended to wreck the soil. Could just be what that monoculture was though.

Also was a bit iffy about Pascoe extolling the idea of being able to make some money out of various types of native flora and fauna. Though maybe that is the point and he's trying to sell it to farmers who are making money out of non native product which is not good for the environment since it requires more water and pesticides etc. Just didn't feel right on reading it. But enjoying it overall.
& would really love to hear something more sustainable could be introduced.

I need to look at the map of Australia. I have an image of vast deserts between the main cities but maybe that's watching Mad Max and things. Or at least 2 since I thnik the first one may have a backdrop of green fields and things or at least grasslands.
Maybe that's a result of native agriculture being destroyed by European farming techniques leaving the ground less arable than it was with them.

Speaking of Australia, I finished The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, which I found a powerful read.

I finished Brossard's 'Mauve Desert' (a re-read), read 'Notebook of Roses and Civilization' in a day, now onto her 'Picture Theory.' I tend to get obsessed with writers whose work I find challenging yet simultaneously readable, and she's really doing it for me right now.

xpost such a good book!

The hydrogen bomb history was too bulky to take on a recent camping trip, so I took Maigret and the Lazy Burglar instead and finished it. Now I'm back to the Cold War.

Finished The Martian Chronicles. I think my favorite story is still the one that was my favorite when I first read it, now these many years ago, and perhaps my favorite ghost story ever, "Night Meeting", but there are so many good stories here, it's an embarrassment of riches. Now reading The Shadow of Vesuvius: a Life of Pliny by Daisy Dunn, which often reads like a collection of research notes placed on 3x5 cards, sorted into piles on a whim, and loosely linked together into chapters, but my interest in the material is enough to keep me going, so far.

Simone Weil - Anthology

This is almost an unclassifiable voice, like a three-way between anarchism, christianity and Montaigne. With a voice that channels matter that seems to be lost from antiquity. This anthology is an ideal starting point, but you probably need to know a little bit of Greek/Latin literature and any 2nd readings of anarchist thinking. I think I got about 20% of what she was saying about politics or anything else -- the details might take a lifetime. Someone I will definitely read more of.

Night Meeting (and about half the rest of the book) doesn't even make it into the two large volumes of Bradbury short stories, which are about 1000pp each. (and i'm still only 60% of the way through the first)

I have a couple of his other anthologies, "The Vintage Bradbury", which contains "Night Meeting" as well as a couple other Martian stories, and "Golden Apples of the Sun", which doesn't overlap. I should reread those as well. I always thought the common themes running through the Martian stories always added something to that book.

Juan Ramon Riberyo - The Word of the Speechless

Rarely enjoy short story collections these days. They have a 'hit' rate which means you have to put up with stuff you are not particularly enjoying, and the trend to do a 'Complete Short Stories' (as in the case of Clarice Lispector) exacerbates this but I wanted to read this guy -- nothing else available -- and actually the hit rate is near 100% in this case (the selection from Silver is excellent) and the longer stories the better they were. Besides, he is known as a short story guy and I guess you can tell. The title makes it seem like he is writing from the POV of the downtrodden and while that is often true it isn't always the case. My favourite story is Silvio in El Rosendal where the cast of characters changes fast in this fixed land as the fortunes of the people who own it undergo their ups and downs (its a little bit reminiscent of Boccaccio and Michael Kohlhaas at times). For Smokers Only is basically his medical diary, but I love that all sorts of little tall tales are inserted into it as well, he wants to imagine as well as tell. In a couple of other shorter works I love how he can write about death, the way he freezes it as a part of life. An act as much as anything else you get to do.

I love me a Complete Short Stories BUT the book should include the stories in the order they were originally published and ideally divided into the original books they were published in. Lorrie Moore's just put them all in alphabetical order, which is disgusting savage territory.

I have Raymond Carver: Collected Stories and it's my favourite book that I own. Just dip into it randomly ever so often. Have read all the stories before but always enjoy them.

reading jrr tolkien's translation of beowulf. i know the poem well -- i've read a couple translations, one back in high school and then the seamus heaney one several years ago -- but i'm amazed how difficult this one is for me to follow. i think that's down to it being very much a literal translation, emulating the odd flow of the original sentences. it's probably also a bit unpolished because tolkien translated it for fun and doesn't seem to have ever thought of publishing it. but i'm glad i own it anyway, it's a beautifully put together book and i'm looking forward to digging into the commentary (gleaned from tolkien's own notes and lectures on beowulf).

Sounds a bit like Nabokov's startlingly unreadable version of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

P.G. Wodehouse - Week-end Wodehouse

Raced through a compilation of stories and extracts from Wodehouse's career. There are a lot of stories where the action takes place on the golf course lol but that aside it was interesting to see the (very narrow) range, and in the extracts where he is introducing a volume you see the insecurities (Wodehouse as a 'light' writer). Tha racism on one of the Jeeves extracts took me aback, it must've been so common at the time. His career of poking fun is sadly an artefact of a time when everything wasn't so on a knife-edge politically. I know we can say things are "of their time" but that absolutely applies to Wodehouse, for good or bad.

Still: James Joyce, the PORTRAIT, and David Thomson, THE BIG SCREEN.

THE BIG SCREEN becomes baffling. It has (PART I) about 250 pages of material up to about 1950, dynamically organized into chapters which intrigue and surprise.

Then it has a PART II for about 100 pages, with no chapters, covering everything from late 1940s to 1960s.

There's no apparent reason for this organizational shift. PART II could easily include chapters on SUNSET BLVD, TELEVISION, JAPAN, BERGMAN and whatever else. But it's as though DT has forgotten to insert them.

Perhaps it will all change again after PART III.

Part 3 will consist entirely of his masturbatory Nicole Kidman fantasies.

I've already read that book. It's good.

So The Power Broker was good.

I got Reaganland in the mail. I'd hoped to take a break from novelistic history.

Du Bois is good at that, along w up-front analytical considerations, also zoom lens and aerial views, stylistic flights, dropping well-aimed rocks, eggs (still reading the xpost Library of America omnibus).

Got 'Late Victorian Holocausts' from the library. One of the only Davis books I haven't read... should be working more on my actual work and school work, but alas, I'm too busy being absorbed by his prose. He really is the best and most accessible radical scholar around.

I finished Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb last night.

The main times when it dragged were the chapters devoted to the specific details of Soviet espionage. Contrary to novels, espionage in action is extremely boring and humdrum, unless you happen to be the spy, in which case it is just nerve-wracking. Thankfully, the book makes clear that the USSR would have succeeded in making nuclear weapons in any event and even the information they did get from spying all had to be carefully verified experimentally. Helpful as it was, it probably only accelerated the Soviet program by 18 to 24 months.

I was also glad to see Rhodes, the author, calling out Curtis Lemay as a dangerous warmonger, and giving just enough information about thermonuclear bombs to make their destructive capability both vivid and terrifying. Even one H-bomb exploding anywhere that's heavily populated would be a catastrophic event unparalleled in history.

However, the companion book to which this is a sequel, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is more compelling reading, in that it lends itself to a more unified and exciting narrative. It also covers a more fundamental shift in world history than the arms race and cold war covered by this book. Read it first, but read this one, too.

I read and liked the first one a couple of years back. Dark sun is on my list. Thanks.

I’m not back in the habit* of reading yet, but I’m reading The Children of Men (PD James). Had never read anything of hers before, but got this in a kindle sale or something at some point and I think I’d read something that mentions the book.

It’s quite different from the film (that’s good not bad). All the major elements are the same, but she has much more time and space to build the universe so all the bleak little atrocities that happen slowly drop in to fill in the background: the pet christenings, the destroyed playgrounds, the Quietus (which is extremely upsetting btw).

I have only been to Oxford for a few hours but you can feel the sense of place come through and it’s interesting to set it in a small dying city rather than London. (Also darkly funny that the only way Theo can get good housing in Oxford is by a cataclysmic global event).

Her prose is exactly the kind of thing I like; very spare and sharp, so I think i will continue reading. Any recommendations on where to go next are very welcome.

Have you read James Tiptree Jr.? Maybe start with novella "Slow Music," where she creeps up on and then along with the reader. It's in an exemplary collection, the aptly titled Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. If you want something British, but never science fiction, as far as I know, try Muriel Spark and Ivy Compton-Burnett.

Wow, I thought the book of ChHildren of Men was a lot of ill-thought-through bollocks. The narrator is a man born in the late 20th Century who just happens to have the waspish prejudices of someone in their 70s in 1992. Those confounded noisy Beatles and their new-fangled rock music! The film, otoh, is brilliant.

Anything I read about the making of the hydrogen bomb always reinforces my opinion that Edward Teller was a monster who should have been suffocated at birth.

A good place to be when you finish The Power Broker and turn to Reaganland.

The narrator is a man born in the late 20th Century who just happens to have the waspish prejudices of someone in their 70s in 1992. Those confounded noisy Beatles and their new-fangled rock music!

he's a don at magdalen college?!

My general impression of Teller is that he was among the top eight or ten nuclear physicists available to work on the Manhattan Project and he was a valuable piece of the effort and contributed some core ideas to the H-bomb dsign. Otherwise he was a inchoate mess of a human being whose blend of egotism, ambition, cunning and paranoia found plentiful allies during the McCarthy era in DC who used him just as much as he used them. He ended his life a near-paraiah in the physics community and a hero to the "better dead than Red" cold warriors in the Pentagon and Congress.

_The narrator is a man born in the late 20th Century who just happens to have the waspish prejudices of someone in their 70s in 1992. Those confounded noisy Beatles and their new-fangled rock music!_


he's a don at magdalen college?!

I finished the Pliny biography by Daisy Dunn: some interesting material, haphazardly organized. Now I'm reading Weather by Jenny Offill, because my wife bought it and it was lying around the house. Rather charming and amusing. At 200 very small, generously spaced pages, its more of a novella, but that's ok by me. I guess maybe I should check out Dept of Speculation too.

reading Crashed by Adam Tooze

Read The Relutctant Fundamentalist over the weekend for a book club. It's...rubbish? lol at narrator describing the object of his affections as "more Paltrow than Spears".

I'm a little reassured to hear that judgment. That book has a good reputation but I feel it's somewhat cackhanded. The voice is very mannered, but I'm not convinced that the author is terrificially in control of this.

That's not to mention the strange irrelevance, as I recall, of the romance plot which isn't properly tied into the political story. Someone once told me that this was because the author had simply changed what the book was about between drafts.

David Thomson reaches a section on FILM STUDIES. Material on early film studies, in which he was somewhat involved, is engaging and interesting. He mixes it with the whole history of 1960s film. Again, naturally very interesting, with a few pages for instance on BLOW-UP. I also like his explicit bit to redeem the idea that films influence us.

Again, it's difficult, at present, to fathom the compositional principle, in terms of chapters and structure. I don't feel sure that DT was really paying attention to the basic architecture of his book - the simplest aspect of writing, you might think.

I finished reading A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN yet again. A simple observation is that this book is better to read concertedly, if not exactly fast, then in long sessions, not in pieces. Perhaps that's true of most novels.

More than before, I sense that the central character isn't necessarily a spokesperson for the author, but is a flawed figure among others. The observation is extremely primitive, but maybe I can make it sound mildly more sophisticated by saying that a Bakhtinian view is needed - that this novel should not be confused with SD's monologue, but is dialogic, relativising him amid a larger cast.

Specifically, it seems clearer to me than ever that his most engaging, simply nicest contemporary is Davin, by far the most nationalist. Which makes the book's scepticism of nationalism seem newly doubtful to me - with all the caveats anyone wants about any fiction taking a position on anything.

Along with my reading for classes I'm teaching and classes I'm taking, I must say that Late Victorian Holocausts truly is the most grim book in Davis' oeuvre. Infuriating and tragic, still I persist in getting through it because its subject is so important and details a history of which I previously knew only the vague sketches

I'm a little reassured to hear that judgment. That book has a good reputation but I feel it's somewhat cackhanded. The voice is very mannered, but I'm not convinced that the author is terrificially in control of this.

That's not to mention the strange irrelevance, as I recall, of the romance plot which isn't properly tied into the political story. Someone once told me that this was because the author had simply changed what the book was about between drafts.

The mannered voice feels like it could belong to an "Arabian" character in some old time adventure film, which might be a conscious choice but if so why?

A lot of the book seems like it's lecturing you on very basic misapprehensions on Islam/people from middle Eastern countries, which makes sense within the book as the narrator is presumably speaking to a not very enlightened member of the US military, but I already know that those don't correspond to the truth and I'm guessing the same holds for most people who'd pick up and read it.

The love story felt like it came straight out of an early 20th century novel, the tragic love interest suffering from a terrible illness. Mental as opposed to physical in this case, sure, but the arc was still the same as you'd encounter in novels by, like, Erich Maria Remarque.

Last night I started The Unforgiving Years, Victor Serge. I plan to alternate it with Uncle Fred in the Springtime, Wodehouse, as a leavening for the grimness of the Serge.

Daniel RF: I think you hit a couple of nails on the head here! The 'Arabian voice', indeed !!

Aimless, BTW LRB recently carried a Tariq Ali review of Serge.

In xpost Du Bois LoA omnibus edition of The Souls of Black Folk(1903), after (among other thing) very nuanced, even-handed history of the Freemen's Bureau and Booker T. Washington's influence---mixed blessings all around-- and his frequently moving, as always carefully detailed account of his first summer as a schoolteacher, deep in rural Tennessee---he travels the deReconstructed backside of Georgia, especially Dougherty County, in the Black Belt, experiencing population drain despite the vagrancy laws, though still busy; "the car-window sociologist" finds plenty of people to talk with and observe. But sometimes it's all about the places, which can be much more decimated than this, or more developed, even occasionally thriving (although "gaunt" is a frequent keyword, in my view). But somehow the notes he hits here keep coming back to me ,more than some overtly intense passages:

Now and again we come to churches. Here is one now--Shepherds', they call it---a great whitewashed barn of thing, perched on stilts of stone, and looking for all the world as though it were just resting here a moment and might be expected to waddle off down the road at almost any time. And yet it is the centre of a hundred cabin homes; and sometimes, of a Sunday, five hundred persons from far and near gather here and talk and eat and sing. There is a schoolhouse here---a very airy, empty shed, but this is an improvement, for usually the school is held in the church. The churches vary from log-huts to those like Shepherd's, and the schools from nothing to this little house that sits demurely on the county line. It is a tiny plank-house, perhaps ten by twenty, and has within a double row rough unplaned benches, resting mostly on legs, sometimes on boxes. Opposite the door is a square home-made desk. In one corner are the ruins of a stove, and in the other a dim blackboard. It is the cheerfullest schoolhouse I have seen in Dougherty, save in town. Back of the schoolhouse is a lodge-house two stories high, and not quite finished. Societies meet there---societies "to care for the sick and bury the dead"; and these societies grow and flourish.