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

Somebody well into middle age, or older.

Helen Garner?

Listening: Just started John Crowley's AEgypt. I struggle with Crowley. I've started both Little, Big and Engine Summer. The first was impenetrable, the second maybe a little easier on the brain.

I love all three of those, will reread them someday, but you inspired me to read Beasts which was also great, and basically takes Wittengtstein quote "If a lion could speak we could not understand him" as its starting point. Now to get hold of his book about intelligent crows. We have a John Crowley thread btw: Tell Me About John Crowley

Maria Gabriela Llansol - The Geography of Rebels
Janet Malcolm - The Silent Woman

Probably this year's most challenging read, not that it was difficult to read, more around getting hold of a writer's voice and where its coming from. The book seems to involve a series of tableaux involving a cast of characters drawn from the medieval all the way up to Nietzsche. They share a space in a commune-like manner, and all that comes with it - mostly thoughts, some around the practice of writing, in her obituary you get some of her own personal history.

An interesting writer except it will need more translations and multiple reads.

No problems as such with Malcolm's book on Plath. Like the poems, read Bell Jar and love Letters Home. It was good to live with this material and knowing the (boring, like so much of the literary scene) controversy before reading this book. Its a biography within a biography as Malcolm details the culture industry surrounding Plath and Hughes, where she goes after the biographers. She says she comes down on the side of Hughes (I think this is more out of the sense of the way he has been treated by biographers), but she details enough of all sides, for the most part. I think it lacks is a bit more detail on Assia Wevill (the woman Hughes left Plath for), as a counter balance to the detail on Plath's main boyfriend before Hughes came along. Plath disparages the previous boyfriend as not enough of a hunk; otoh Wevill was a beauty in the way Plath was not (Malcolm says this in one line but leaves it)). There is tabloidy level stuff that Malcolm often gets at but doesn't go on with, which you can be also thankful for. The story is as balanced as its going to get, but I can see how it could never be the final word. Although it is for me. What makes the book are the asides on the nature of writing, biography, journalism, stories and memory, so you learn things too, rather than just interviews with mostly terrible people.

Count me as someone who loves Murnane. Like tiggercut, some of the set pieces in The Plains left something to be desired, but the writing is so so good I ended up not caring. He is probably the only (maybe Anne Carson) writer in English that I'd like to win the Nobel (I get the sense Australians would be trolled by this, but its mostly because he is one of the few writers writing in English that aren't embarrassing). Really look forward to picking up a couple more books that have been published/re-issued over here in the last year or so.

I enjoy most of the stuff marketed as autofiction, and I think this one nicely captures a sense of the distractedness of modern life, of the struggle to pay attention and get something done, but still finding moments of joy within it all: from art, relationships, animals (Especially animals. She really loves her dog to a degree that is alien to me as a non-pet lover). Contains meditations on some of my own favourite writers like Walser, Sebald, Kafka, but she is mainly preoccupied by the life of Rilke, a writer I've always found it hard to connect with. Introduced me to the work of Durer.

I like this but I am really trying to avoid writers talking about other writers. Seems lazy, plus I think I am getting to a stage where I've read as much as the writer so any thoughts on it might rub me up the wrong way too (I've read a ton of Rilke, and all of those other people).

I've finally started on a book I've owned for years and never read: C.P. Curran, JAMES JOYCE REMEMBERED (1968). Despite having read a lot about Joyce over the years, I've been curiously neglectful of the genre of 'the Joyce I knew'. Well, I know Budgen, Gilbert (x2), Power - but I never read Curran, Colum or even, in truth, the brother.

It's fascinating, actually, to get this almost first-hand account. The detail of what Joyce really read at university, the way he talked, etc. Glad to be on this book now.

Helen Garner?
Sounds right, thanks triggercut! Think this is what I read:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/12/helen-garners-savage-self-scrutiny

one of the few writers writing in English that aren't embarrassing Helluva blurb!

I read The Silent Woman when The New Yorker published a long excerpt in the summer of '93; it haunted me. I love her Chekhov and Stein studies, but this one might be her best.

The meeting between Malcolm and Jacqueline Rose in The Silent Woman is p electrifying!

The Silent Woman is really great. In my memory it's a huge book: it fits so much into what is a pretty slim volume. Her book on psychoanalysis is fantastic.

oh wow -- she's in trouble today!

Re: Murnane, I read The Plains when I had a couple hours to kill in a library, and found it quite hypnotic and oddly funny, but I don’t really know what I took away from it. His story “Finger Web” still gives me chills, though - his weird stylistic tics, refusal to name characters, etc, have this kind of distancing effect even as the sense builds that something bad is going on, and then the last few paragraphs reveal the full horror of what he’s writing about. Very insidiously disturbing story, I recommend it!

I just finished reading Chaos, by Tom O’Neill, his unnerving book from last year on the Manson case, the various possible conspiracies surrounding it, and the author’s own tendency to get lost in this labyrinth of contradictions and impossible-to-prove theories. Inevitably frustrating but still worth reading. Vincent Bugliosi sure seems to be a terrible person!

I find Zambreno totally unreadable!

let it be known that table and i are the same person, i am a table sock, etc.

i am the table

Lol Brad.

I am to finish Mark Francis Johnson's Sham Refugia today, and then will spend the rest of the day preparing for the workshop I facilitate tonight...which means reading excerpts from a number of poets, plus poems from three workshop participants. Tuesdays are packed!

Virtual, flesh, both?

(None of the above?)(like a message board, then?)

It's a Virtual thing. I started running them this past summer. Participants from all over the country! I'm running two this fall and both are already full.

i reread (with a 15 year interval) room temperature by nicholson baker. it lands differently now i'm a father, but it has not aged well objectively. i remember liking mezzanine more, so i'm going to reread that at some point this month too.

i'm now reading the unconsoled by kazuo ishiguro. about 1/4 the way through. it captures the maddening logic of a dream well. there's a bit with a piano performance that reminded me very strongly of the coffee tasting scene in mulholland drive. not sure if it's going to be interesting after 300 more pages.

but i'm not sure that interesting enough to sustain 500 pages. i guess we'll see.

The meeting between Malcolm and Jacqueline Rose in The Silent Woman is p electrifying!

― Ward Fowler, Tuesday, 8 September 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Yes but I also love how, a mere 20 pages later, she is sitting in with Thomas.

Started Joyelle McSweeney's 'Toxicon & Arachne' this morning since I'm on a poetry jag. My feeling toward the book is pretty neutral, at this point-- like many poets with tenured jobs, the sociopolitical commentary in the work is a little too obvious and overdone to really make much of an impact on anyone whose read Language, KSW, or other associated movements. In other words, where it wants to be strident, it feels tame.

But seeing as how the second part of the book was written in the immediate aftermath of the death of her newborn and is supposed to be shockingly bracing, I'm going to stick with it.

As is often the case, I was sent this as a bonus with a book that the publisher thought I'd like to review...and that latter book turns out to be wholly unimpressive, imho, and this one more interesting.

I finished Curran's JAMES JOYCE REMEMBERED. Tremendous details in this book. I have Herbert Gorman's biography here, really ought to read that.

i'm now reading the unconsoled by kazuo ishiguro. about 1/4 the way through. it captures the maddening logic of a dream well. there's a bit with a piano performance that reminded me very strongly of the coffee tasting scene in mulholland drive. not sure if it's going to be interesting after 300 more pages.

i could almost wish it were twice as long. what sustains it imo is the use it puts this dream logic to - dissecting in agonising detail the quotidian agonies, anxieties, frustrations, and heartbreaks of human life (sounds amazing, sign me up!), leavened with a surreal humour that wouldn't be available in a more conventional narrative.

That McSweeney book I mentioned above doesn't get much better, sadly.

It makes me wonder sometimes how such mediocre talents get these fancy jobs, but alas, I guess I will be wondering such for the rest of my life. Or until I, a mediocre talent, get a fancy job.

10 years late to the party but I read A Visit from the Goon Squad last week. I think I would have enjoyed it a lot less if I had tried to read it before the pandemic: even when I didn't sympathize with the characters (which was often, because they're all pathological New Yorkers) I was willing to keep reading and allow the interesting things happening around them to distract me from the four walls closing in around my cat and me.

I then moved on to Nell Zink's The Wallcreeper, which I'm already nearly done with. Not sure there's enough plot and character development to keep the novel from dragging in places, but DANG! she can write. I can't remember the last book I read with such a high laughs-per-page ratio -- and the pages are small, so that's saying something!

Started Gravity’s Rainbow. Made it through 80 pages in college, then 300 pages in law school. This time I’m going all the way.

― Mazzy Tsar (PBKR), Thursday, March 28, 2019 11:24 AM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

Just this morning I finally finished after about 18 months of reading. Good god. So many questions; can someone explain it all to me? Why does Slothrop fade away in the last quarter of the book? Why the digressions to 1970 (is this to show a post-Rocket world living under fear of annihilation?)?

The Pökler chapter might be the most moving passage. The writing near the end is also very beautiful. More thoughts to come.

My mother gave me two copies of Going Squad in back to back years. One was signed. Both were put on the curb without being read, though that's probably for the Authors You Will Never Read thread.

Xpost I enjoyed some of GR too, and could see how it was an (over-) extension of prev. perceived agenda in earlier stuff, which I preferred. Don't try too hard with it, like he did (yeah, I'm that one guy). Some people say none of his subsequent works are as Great, so maybe I'll try some of those too.

I did subject Tremor of Intent to the totally unfair Random Read Test, and the words seemed to squirm with self-consciousness, but maybe I'll try again---the movie, at least: can see how he and Paul Thomas Anderson and Joaquin Phoenix might be kindred spirits, in a good way).

Other Zink books are such a disappointment after Wallcreeper, sadly.

Ciaran Carson - The Star Factory

Poet's prose. Full of words (you feel their materiality), a pile of digressions, reflections and experience. I'll check but I think Mandelstam does something similar in Journey to Armenia, except Belfast is where Carson has grown-up and lived. I think quotes about Belfast from other sources Carson picks up do at times detract a bit, just cutting him off when he is at his (and our) best. But that's a minor complaint in a great, great find.

just started Too Much & Never Enough the Mary Trump book and am a couple of chapters in.
Hadn't realised she was a clinical psychologist, just knew she was a niece.
She's going over the childhood influences on why he may be behaving the way he does.
NOt very long so will finish this before long i hope.
Seemed to be one of the books on the subject that might be better tahn others and add some insight.
I have soem o the others elsewhere that never moved down the to be read list

Robert Draper - To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq
Muriel Spark - Reality and Dreams
Robert Browning - The Ring and the Book

Norma Cole- Spinoza in Her Youth

Cole never fails to astound.

xxxp just reminded me I have his translation of The Táin on my bookshelf, I must read it. He was a Gaeilgeoir as well I think, fairly uncommon in the North.

Nice, want to read his version of Inferno next.

Someone - was it o.nate? - praised Jean Stafford's THE MOUNTAIN LION on here.

Last night I read this LRB review of Stafford:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n12/tessa-hadley/and-he-drowned-the-cat

Wole Soyinka Death and The King's Horseman.
Interesting play set in colonial Nigeria.
Shows a lot of racism and arrogant assumptions made by white colonial authorities. Reading it for a theatre group which should be interesting.

The Mountain Lion is terrific. The Catherine Wheel was the first novel I read under quarantine.

wondering where to ask about the book 1491 by Charles C Mann.
Are there major differences between editions, different years and different territories or anything.
Or is teh 2006 UK on going to be as good as the more recent US Update? & if so are they significant?

Robert Musil - Posthumous Papers of a Living Author
Stanislaw Lem - Highcastle A Remembrance

Lem's novella sized essay on his growing up in pre-war Poland among French novels and made up schemes was fine enough, in some ways his struggle with Proust points to why this doesn't endure. Not that Lem wanted this series of recollections to be anything more.

The Musil is again, a minor collections of sketches and fragments that, when framed in his best writing, take on another dimension entirely. Its interesting how fascinating and annoyed he was by psychoanalysis, but he needs length to explore.

I am reading some R.K. Narayan, The Bachelor of Arts. His tales are always both human and gentle, which qualities are good for my mental state atm.

xxxp don't remember The Catherine Wheel very well, but seems to be regarded as a letdown after Boston Adventure and The Mountain Lion, both of which i thought were outstanding. Ditto what I've read of Collected Stories, gotta get back to that.

Next April, Library of America will follow their Collected Novels with a volume of collected and uncollected stories, essays, and the somewhat notorious A Mother In History, from time spent w Marguerite Oswald. Stafford is in my literary punk pantheon, along with Flannery O'Connor and Kelly Link.

Someone - was it o.nate? - praised Jean Stafford's THE MOUNTAIN LION on here.

It wasn't me - this is the first I've heard of it, but it does sound like an interesting book. I just finished Song of the Lark by Willa Cather. It's a more interesting tale of the development of an ambitious young artist than Dr Faustus, which I abandoned earlier this year. It's a big canvas novel, in terms of settings, character development, and the range of time it covers, although the cast of characters remains fairly small and focused around the main character of Thea Kronborg. I guess it's on the cusp of the 19th and 20th century novel (it was published in 1915). The scenes of small--town, frontier Colorado are particularly memorable, and the development of the main character through childhood, adolescence and maturity is psychologically perceptive. I found it quite enjoyable. Now I'm reading a collection of 2 novellas by Natalia Ginzburg Valentino and Sagittarius.

he scenes of small--town, frontier Colorado are particularly memorable, and the development of the main character through childhood, adolescence and maturity is psychologically perceptive. The central character of The Mountain Lion, some shorter works, and Stafford herself came out of that setting, maybe more and certainly to an extent differently influenced by the remoteness and the terrain and the times than some other characters.

Cather's The Professor's House, which I went on about upthread, unless it was
the previous WAYR, is---not just like The Song of the Lark, but compatible.

"Stafford is in my literary punk pantheon, along with Flannery O'Connor and Kelly Link."

I find that interesting, Dow! Have read about Link, but not actually read the work.

I can't praise Cather enough.

She's amazing. Come to think of it, now I'm wondering if The Heart is a Lonely Hunter came in part from absorbing My Antonia and O Pioneers!---recurring characters through the years, in and out of the foreground, but w a sense of axis pov, of protagonist and/or author---and later Cather, like The Professor's House, following a more interior somewhat vs. exterior line of development---could apply also from going to The Heart... to Member of the Wedding and some of McCuller's shorter fiction.

xpost Pinefox, maybe start with Link's latest collection, Get In Trouble.
Others in the pantheon: Highsmith, Tiptree, maybe Jane Bowles, Plath---oh, and what I know of Anna Akhmatova, in the translations of Babette Deutsch and Lyn Coffin, set to music by Iris DeMent, on The Trackless Woods. But mainly punks on the page. that's about it. Standards are very strict.

Haven't read enough Cather. I teach "Paul's Case" quite often, and many students hate it, to my utmost horror. I think it's brilliant!