Are You There, God? What Are You Reading In The Summer Of 2021?

I read it two years ago and definitely agree with your assessment.

Reading Open Doors, Leonardo Sciascia. It's more a novella than a novel. So far it is quite slow-paced and contemplative compared with his other works I've read, with a knotty prose style that the translator seems to have struggled to bring over into English. It's in a volume with several other short works of his which I may or may not also read.

Finished Pedagogy of Hope by Paulo Freire.
Have had it out for way too long but it was in a pile on my bed last week so I finally got to it. Seeing somebody has a request out on it. So hope that hasn't dated back too long it kept getting teh loan extended thanks to lockdowns etc.
Anyway did enjoy it but it did have me thinking about abuses of the basic teaching method that I've come across locally.
Glad I've heard about his intentions and what shaped him coming to the processes he wrote about and had further developed through experience.

Inferior Angela Saini
I read this when i was drinking a lot over Xmas last year so think I need to get a clearer reading. Do love her writing and presenting.
It's her book on gender imbalance and the non objectivity of scie3ntific practise that lead to it getting so valorised and so on.

Read "Getting Ready to Have Been Frightened" by Bruce Andrews, a showcase of earlier work from a prolific period in the mid to late 70s. He's a piece of work, apparently, but I find the opacity and resultant associative freedom inherent in his poems to be rather lovely.

Today read Daniel Owens' "Celingak-Celinguk," and Indonesian word which means "look left, look right (in the context of being in a strange place)." It's a translingual book of poems written in both English and Indonesian, with translations on opposing pages. Really interesting work.

I've been reading "The Satires of Juvenal" in the Rolfe Humphries translation from Indiana University Press. I think this is probably the funniest work of classical literature I've yet read, which is some accomplishment. The slangy, anachronistic translation by Humphries is vivid and immediate (he uses anachronistic translations at times to make obscure ancient references more understandable to the reader). Humphries's sense of humor can be illustrated by this Wikipedia anecdote:

Humphries may be best remembered for a notorious literary prank. Asked to contribute a piece to Poetry in 1939, he penned 39 lines containing an acrostic. The first letters of each line spelled out the message: "Nicholas Murray Butler is a horses ass." The editor printed an apology and Humphries was banned from the publication. The ban was lifted in 1941.

I finished the Sciascia novellas a couple nights ago. The second and third were more conventional than the first one I described, then the fourth and final one was a cross between a recap of the history of a particular trial in 1913 and a running commentary on the judicial process and its flaws. All in all an interesting collection of short pieces. Not essential reading, but worth the time spent.

I'm reading "Leave the World Behind" by Rumaan Alam. I've been trying to make better use of my local public library, and I read a review of this that made it sound interesting. So far its been moderately interesting. I'm waiting to see if it gets better.

Rockin the Bronx Larry Kirwan
NOvelk about an Irish youth heading to New York to try to fetch his girlfriend home and starting a band with her tenant.
I picked this up thinking it was a memoir , now not sure to what extent this is pure fiction and what is based on his own history.
Enjoying it anyway.

The Mandarins Simone De Beauvoir
French existentialist philosopher etc's novel about the avant garde set in Paris in the wake of the 2nd World War.
Bought thsi a while back and its just kicked around in my front room for way too long. I think I saw it refered to recently so meant to get into reading it and now finding it pretty readable.
Probably should have read everything I bought at teh time i bought it though. But glad i've got to it.

Inferior Angela Saini
British science writer's book on Gender imbalance and how science has been used to perpetuate it. Views science as far from as objective as it makes itself out to be because of the agenda of those practising it.
I read this over Xmas but I think I was drinking a lot at the time so may not have taken it in as much as i could have.
I really like her writing and presentation on various media. I need to read her first book on scienc ein India Geek nation also looking forward to the next book on the Patriarchy whenever that appears.

finished Pedagogy of Hope by Paulo Freire a few days ago.
Enjoyed reading about the process by which he arrived at developing the though and writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed. & what the conno00tations on the understanding should be.
Took me way too long to get around to reading this. I think I had kept renewing it prior to the first lockdown and then had it continually extended automatically because of that. NOt sure what put me off, I found it an easy read when i did finally get to it. & i found out as I was getting through it that somebody had a request out on it so hope they hadn't been waiting too long.

Stamped From The Beginning Ibram X Kendi
History of Racist ideas in Us History. Told in 7 sections each one related to a figure from trhe given time.
I enjoy Ibram X kendi's writing and his podcast.
I find learning the history quit enlightening. Want to get the rest of what he wrote including the compendium he edited . Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

I tried to read Love's Work, Gillian Rose, managed to reach the halfway point and will not read another word of it. I picked it up because another ILBer spoke highly of it. I wish I could speak highly of it, but I can't. A book that I recently read noted that "nothing reveals a person like their book". In this case, the author's self-revelation did not lead to my admiration. It would take a much longer post to explain why this was so and I don't have the heart for that harsh and dismal task.

Jon Savage's crisply written and well-researched Teens, about the development of youth culture from the late 19th century through 1945.

Also: Molly Keane's delicious Good Behaviour (thanks, NYRB classics!).

"Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles" by rosecrans baldwin. very mediocre essays about los angeles. he explicitly states in the introduction that he's not concerned with whether people have said this stuff before, which, well, yes, i can see that.

piranesi by susanna clarke. this was a lot of fun! i recommend it!

the fisherman by john langan. the first half of this was great. incredibly weird. and the framing device(s) are very effective. but when it starts getting into the magical bullshit it's boring.

bury the chains by adam hochschild. history of the british abolition movement. presented as a ripping yarn which that arch/sarcastic way people right about georgian britain, which doesn't really fit the subject.

a paradise built in hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by rebecca solnit. this is unbelievably rambling and rarely on topic, but when it was on topic it was good.

now reading spencer ackerman's "Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump", which is a right good laugh so far.

"Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles" by rosecrans baldwin. very mediocre essays about los angeles. he explicitly states in the introduction that he's not concerned with whether people have said this stuff before, which, well, yes, i can see that.

yeah this book was bad!! shame cause the cover/design is good

I mean it’s not like he says anything … wrong per se. It’s just very bad.

it felt like and probably is repurposed magazine articles cut up into prose poems

Yeah the fact that he refers to “reporting” seems like kind of a tell that his goal was to gather quotes and observations and concatenate them.

Now in the homestretch of Afterparties, the new debut book by Anthony Veasna So, b. 1992, d. Dec. 2020: 258 pages of short stories, so far hitting me like My Brilliant Friend and few other things I can think of: rowdy and resplendent and tragicomic and endlessly resourceful, with the excitement of language cruising ghosty dusty Cali "Cambo" life and lives: even-especially when you think you know the kind of thing that will happen and not happen around the next corner, here are more drive-by insights---they seem that right, so far from my own experiences and yet not: pain and pleasure and success and failure as art pop narcotic that leaves you with whatever keys you wake up with this time.
May try to say something more analytical later, but so far it's hard to believe he already did all this, and is already gone.

Also a characteristic memoir in recent Fiction Issue of The New Yorker, so I hope that means there will be at least one more collection.

his goal was to gather quotes and observations and concatenate them. Could work! But apparently not this time.

it can work. it's just not what i read books for i guess.

I'd be interested to hear more, Aimless. I found Love's Work tricky but wasn't repulsed like you seem to have been.

repulsed like you seem to have been

More like a clash of personalities than repulsion.

Her book was essentially an autobiography. As I read the presentation of her self and thought, in her choice of language, I saw she was very carefully creating a mythology from her experience, but she elided so much detail that her experience was never truly present, only a heavily redacted and curated imagery, designed to feel deep and true, but was not grounded in real things. It it felt like she constantly edited and evaded her life in favor of the "lyrical", the idealized, and the intellectually processed version she wanted me to accept. She needed to heed more of Wm. Carlos Williams dictum, "no ideas but in things". I lost patience.

I am now reading The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson. The characters feel very Scandinavian.

I continue to appreciate THE PIGEON TUNNEL. John le Carré writes with such wryness and deftness of his numerous meetings with ambassadors, foreign secretaries, spies, writers, et al. What a life.

It's funny, I just finished Love's Work on Friday morning and enjoyed it for the same reasons you despised it, Aimless. But I tend to believe that we make up our lives and self-mythologize as a means of survival and the natural process of narrativization, whereas you seem to take those elements as deceptive. Super interesting!

I will say that I was expecting something entirely different.

In other news, I recently finished 'No Place on Earth's by Christa Wolf, and it was amazing. Currently reading 'Mon Canard' by the late poet Stephen Rodefer,.and it's quite good.

finishing ‘home land’ by sam lipsyte. kind of like if @dril wrote ‘confederacy of dunces’

I tend to believe that we make up our lives and self-mythologize as a means of survival and the natural process of narrativization, whereas you seem to take those elements as deceptive.

I agree that everyone processes their raw life experience into tidier and more manageable narratives. These narratives often provide the basis for an explanatory personal mythology that is necessarily reductive. My problem with the first half of Rose's book was that she provided so little experiential framework to support her mythos that I never felt she laid a basis for my trusting her judgment. I was simply expected to sit at her feet and accept her version, which included a large dose of implicit self-satisfaction and self-praise, as received wisdom. A little of that goes a long way and by the halfway mark, I'd had more than enough.

I found Rose aloof and self-mythologising but I'm closer to table's interpretation and never found it a turn off. I think the fragmentary nature of it must have been partly down to her cancer diagnosis and her knowing her time was short?

I read Gabor Mate's Scattered Minds and found it revelatory. I have a son with some severe mental health issues, one aspect of which is ADD. Mate's approach is to map the disorder as affecting those with a pathological sensitivity and sees it as a legitimate response to environment; a developmental disorder as much a genetic one, that can be acknowledged and helped with compassion and a deep understanding of how environment can be managed to best aid the development of autonomous and self-regulating human beings. It's beautifully clear and has really helped my understanding of my boy. It's also made me realise just how many of the traits of ADD I share with him.

I also read William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, which is a perfect miniature.

I near the end of the second half of Foster's Yeats, and once I finish it I should probably read the first half. I greatly enjoy it. But WBY has a lot of preposterous ideas and takes ghosts and spirit mediums literally.

and fascism!

That will be in volume 2.

now reading spencer ackerman's "Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump", which is a right good laugh so far.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, August 27, 2021 2:09 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is outstanding. highly recommended.

I reached the end of Yeats vol 1. And went back to the start, as I hadn't read the first half. So, another 250pp to go.

It's very entertaining, I love it, but the hardback book is so heavy that picking it up and reading a bit always has to be a deliberate event, carefully managed. Not one to take on the bus ... if I was taking any buses.

In that xpost LoA Agee, I also read The Morning Watch, drawing on events in his life about six years after the the basis of A Death in The Family--blindsiding me like some lost link between Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist: that kind of deep focus on inner and outer life, surefooted in the murk---but Rufus-now-Richard, and maybe 12, is deep in the Tennessee countryside, even deeper in an "Anglo-Catholic" boys school, to use the apt term of the LoA chronologist: it's that American part of the Episcopal Church that refers to itself as Anglican (or did when I first encountered it in college--not like the Renaissance Faire-hosting, petite sophisticate church back home, a few yards from my Southern Baptist massiveness!), aspiring to adhere to that part of the Church of England closest to Mother Church (at least as one of my fellow American students later claimed, when I asked him wtf)--outliving Henry the Eighth, after all, so why not.
So why not just be straight-up Catholic? One reason might have to do with one of the reasons Richard's mother, who lives on campus, won't let him come see her very often: she (or at least James Rufus Agee's real-life mother) has taken up with one of the priests, which is okay because they're *Anglo* Catholic and she's a widow---maybe thinking her son would be upset to see her with someone new and also judge her, and also he is no doubt a handful who needs a whole institution of male guidance---as Rufus, he even sneaked out the backdoor to go meet up with the school bullies (who increasingly were having problems figuring out what more to do with him really don't know what because he loves the attention), and now he could tell 'em, "My Daddy's dead," and watch! What! Happens!)
At this point, 12 or so, he's well aware of his performative core, and layers of self-awareness become more grandiose whips of self-flagellation, bad acid halls of mirrors in the ego that will not die--because he's JAMES FUCKING AGEE, Southern Anglo-Catholic rising)
But also it's a pretty tight novella, which I won't spoil.

george perec - life: a users manual

i’m about 60 pages in. like a mix of Borges and Proust. some moments are laugh out loud funny, but also like 50% of it so far is descriptions of furniture. just got through my first tour of the building and something resembling a plot is vaguely emerging. i read somewhere this was written under some oulipian constraints, anyone know which they are? the writing is fantastic and extremely French

i always forget that ilm doesn’t like any kanye after 808s

wrong thread lol

at least on ilb you won't have to suffer attacks for your kanye-related opinions

The constraints Perec devised for Life A Users Manual are many-layered and complex: it takes twelve or so pages of Bellos’s Perec biography to explain them!

My rough précis: he uses 10x10 grids:

(1) a grid superimposed on a picture of the house; the order of the chapters is based on “the knight’s move” a way for a knight in chess to make its way around a board - or in this case an extended 10x10 chessboard - visiting every square, once only.

(2) 21 grids, with a thing / name / concept in each square. Each row / column was a more or less coherent list of things with a title. By combining and recombining the elements of these lists he had what Bellos calls a “machine” to distribute material around the house and around the main plot (fee free to quibble with there being a main plot) and the 170+ other stories listed at the end of the book. Bellos reckons none of the stories in the book are untouched by this content-generating machine.

Past that, there were various other sets of book wide or chapter-specific rules, puns, references word-games and jokes.

Bellos says Perec didn’t use any of his rules completely consistently, the closest he came was the knight’s move stuff and even there he omits the content for square 66 (there’s speculation about what that means). Perec makes it impossible to trace the shape or nature of the constraints from the final work: once the scaffolding is removed the building has to stand on its own.

Personally I find this stuff interesting in a way that I might find the story of a recording session for a song I love interesting: the act and process of creation is cool, but what I love about the finished work is something else entirely.

I don’t know if the above is helpful or just obscure, I can scan and send the relevant pages if you like.

I’m not much of a consumer of literary biogs but the David Bellos biography “Georges Perec: A Life In Words” referenced above is really good.

I need to reread Life A User's Manual but I've been saying that for decades. I think I read it in my late teens or early 20s. I remember when I was on the protest camp somebody was coming up with books regularly and i think a copy turned up then but it may have been in French so not much use to me. Which is now a decade ago anyway.
I remember it being really good so need to reread that and read a few others of his.

Did get hold of 2 Marlon James books from the library yesterday. A Short History Of Seven Killings and Black Leopard, Red Wolf . NOt started into either yet though. Maybe shouldn't have got both at the same time since they're both pretty thick and I have other things already on the go

Am just finishing the Larry KIrwan book Rocking the Bronx his novel about the Irish punk immigrating illegally to the Bronx. Have found it quite great so will read the memoir Green Suede Shoes which I picked up a few weeks earlier.

That's a good post from Tim.

And also a stimulating thought about how relevant process is or isn't to the experience of the work.

My sense would have been that, in this particular kind of case (formalism, procedural art, or whatever), it is; that thinking about process is a big part of the experience. Tim seems to suggest otherwise.

For me, the central pleasure of LAUM is in the text itself, which I found and find dizzying and coherent (which is quite a combination). I read and loved the book with a vague sense that some kind of process was in place but without any idea of what it was or how it was applied. Only long afterwards did I even begin to understand how Perec structured and used his constraints.

Perec's preface to the novel is all about jigsaws, which is relevant to the "main" story but also a bit of a tease: it feels like a hint that it would be possible to take the contents of the novel and reassemble them into the source materials and constraints: that turns out not to be possible.

As I understand it the question of "scaffolding" is a live one in OuLiPo circles: some writers think it's important to retain and show the working process, others think it's important to remove it. I tend to take the cowardly and somewhat mealy-mouthed position that either's fine if the end product is rewarding on its own terms.

I am with you there, Tim. I find process fascinating, and have been working with intense formal and processual constraints in my own writing for years, but find that I don't want my readers to care too much about it...yet on the other hand, I want to know how books like LAUM, among others, were written. A bit of a contradictory position.

There's a somewhat interesting document from 2009, during a brief resurgence of more conceptual poetics within contemporary poetry. Due to the asshattery of some of its main characters— Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Nada Gordon, etc— it has been batted down and isn't part of the conversation any longer, though as an aesthetics document it holds some interest, I think. Free pdf: https://monoskop.org/images/1/1e/Place_Vanessa_Fitterman_Robert_Notes_on_Conceptualisms_2009.pdf

I look forward to reading that, and I will try to stay away from any asshattery if I possibly can. Thanks!

I said this:

For me, the central pleasure of LAUM is in the text itself, which I found and find dizzying and coherent

and I want to expand on it because it's not-very-meaningful personal shorthand. The other week I went to see some of Yayoi Kusama's infinity rooms at the Tate Modern: they're small spaces which (through carefully positioning of lights and reflective surfaces) seem to go on forever. In some you seem to be there everywhere you look, over and over and in others you seem to disappear completely into the infinity. My brain always feels on the edge of making sense of these impossible landscapes but never quite does.

That's the best comparison I can think of for LAUM: the stories seem to go on forever, to reflect and affect each other, it feels like everything is probably there if I look closely enough but I know it's impossible to look closely enough or hold enough of it in my head. I know that's an effect, generated by careful layering of stories and references, and I love it. Knowing there's a process and structure behind it makes the whole thing even more tantalising!

On top of which many of the stories hit me emotionally too.

The asshattery mostly has to do with some works created by these people that are racist. Place had a project where she tweeted out sentences from "Gone With The Wind" and the profile picture was a Mammy caricature, to draw attention to the racist elements of the most beloved novel in the US. Goldsmith read parts of Michael Brown's autopsy report, rearranged and "remixed," at a conference at Brown University. Basically doing poorly thought-out conceptual takes on Objectivist material, like idiots mimicking Reznikoff. Goldsmith is an execrable human, Place is (I think) rather brilliant but doesn't seem to have much emotional intelligence. Fitterman is a smart dude, and he co-wrote that PDF with Place.

I finished The True Deceiver last night. It's brilliant, but in a low key way. The story is spare and tersely told, but I found that so much was packed into each short chapter that I would frequently stop reading and lay the book down so that I could absorb what I'd just read and tease out what had happened between the lines. More so than any book I've recently read this short novel was beautifully constructed in every detail and each small incident bores in like another twist of an augur. A very fine book!

I finished "Leave the World Behind" by Rumaan Alam. Structurally, it is basically a horror novel. Emotionally, it proceeds from a gently comic calm to increasing cringe and low-level anxiety through to dread and eventually to a few moments of genuine horror. The setting is quite mundane for a contemporary novel, NYC creative-class types vacationing on Eastern Long Island, not the Hamptons, which they can't afford, but somewhere in that general direction. The initial family dynamics are also mundane, and one hopes this implies a payoff which is going to be as disturbing and weird as the setup is normal. The first major plot twist is clever, deftly skewering the latent awkwardness behind new social arrangements enabled by AirBnb and the sharing economy. Things get progressively weirder, but Alam pulls some punches, in my view, by keeping the real weird stuff offstage and only obliquely hinting at it in kind of arch H.P. Lovecraft fashion, implying that to fully reveal it would likely drive the reader to madness. So some good ideas, but it seems like the book kind of ends when it should be just getting going.

John le Carre, Little Drummer Girl - politically it holds up surprisingly well, I think? Socially not so much.

Rachel Cusk, Second Place - only a quarter through so far and not enjoying it as much as the Outline trilogy, but there's still a lot to enjoy in her writing.

Meghan O'G1eblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor & the Search for Meaning - only googleproofing because she's a friend, but it's really amazingly written. Talks about AI & consciousness, the pervasiveness of technological metaphors to describe the human brain, etc. Really approachable and personal given the subject matter.

Politically it holds up surprisingly well, I think? Socially not so much. How do you mean? Haven't seen this distinction (re anything) before.

Although some politically astute people aren't so good socially, come to think of it.