Now the year is turning and the eeriness comes: what are you reading in autumn 2021?

Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell

― youn, Wednesday, December 15, 2021 4:18 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i love this book!

whats up table. i'm a bit of a poetry dilettante, but i love bernadette mayer. i've been making my way slowly through the complete ted berrigan this year too, spent a few pleasant weekend afternoons with a few beers and his poems

i have also started reading alison rumfitt, 'tell me i'm worthless', which i haven't found too much to like in yet, but it's early days, and i started james baldwin's 'another country', which is wonderful

i've been dipping in and out of 'intersecting lives', a joint biography of deleuze and guattari. i always thought guattari was the 'weird' one, but now i'm starting to think it was the other guy, deleuze

Deleuze? A weirdo? No way!

Ha, anyway dogs, that's cool that you're into Bernadette's work and have been reading Berrigan. Do you dig Notley, Berrigan's wife at the time of his death? She's great, still alive, too. Here's one of her more famous ones: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50834/at-night-the-states

I finished Ted Dodson's 'AN ORANGE,' and think I'm going to go with Hugh Tribbey's "EF Zero" next

My next book is The High Window, Raymond Chandler. It was selected specifically to be easy reading, because I've been agitated and discouraged lately and I need something entertaining and soothing.

I think Backlisted did an episode on that one.

The High Window is the densest Chandler I think. The Backlisted episode is a good one.

I'm reading Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth. Good enough to feel like I've read it before.

Aimless, you might also try John D. MacDonald's The Empty Copper Sea: Travis McGee is trying to defend the good name of a friend or acquaintance, but gets as down on himself as he does the slow destruction of Florida by citizens-denizens, who seem as oblivious its and their own decline, for the most part: may be more neurotic than Marlowe, regarding himself as an over-qualified "beach bum," which can affect his behavior, uh-oh. Pretty entertaining.

as oblivious *to* their own decline (incl. ethical) I meant

can we talk about backlisted

QI is a dismal product... miller really comes across as sort of a blowhard or two, like your nightmare of yourself down the pub (and I can't imagine wanting to look at any of his books)... & there is this clubbiness I can just barely stand, really the opposite of the alleged parasocial value of podcasts (I am glad I am NOT friends w these people!)

and yet I do like it a fair bit

I basically agree with all of that. It's beyond parody - the clubbable enthusiasm, the lack of any sort of critical acumen, the endless line of posh voices presented as diversity - and I battle with myself for listening to it, but I've found lots of great things.

I read The Year of Reading Dangerously so you don't have to.

I'm reading Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth. Good enough to feel like I've read it before.

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Friday, December 17, 2021 1:42 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i bought a copy of this for my girlfriend as a christmas present, it is truly the greatest

xp yeah I think I'm just into hearing genuine enthusiasm about books bc I am somewhere between their critical largesse and the reflexive assumption that everything is shit you see elsewhere. also I've never been to an ilb fap. Just wish one time someone would yell "waterstones is a shit chain that doesnt pay a living wage" during one of their reveries

Tried an EP of backlisted once and couldn't hate it enough but I find book people who just talk books and nothing else hard going.

Chinaski and Brad, have you read The Fourth State of Matter, the essay by Beard?

If not get ready for a big gut punch. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/06/24/the-fourth-state-of-matter

Oh wait, it's in that book. Christ it's good.

If the rest of her writing even approaches that I should probably order a copy.

It's in the book Table and what led me to it. I swear I read about it on here but it might have been somewhere else. An extraordinary essay.

Xp - yep!

i also bought the book bc the fourth state of matter blew my mind. it's all great

Also just finished the high window - quite dense but I find it easier-going than the big sleep (too chaotically plotted) and the long goodbye (one of my favourite books but a hard book to write straight through)

I’m an unqualified fan of backlisted and pay for their patreon (which includes an **even more sel-indulgent** free extra fortnightly podcast). I’m not blind to (or un-annoyed by) their cultural blind spots and chummy self-satisfaction as presenters, but I find them both very entertaining company, and they’ve led me to a lot of good books, just like ILB

"At the end of the hallway are the double doors leading to the rest of my life. I push them open and walk through."

just finished the high window - quite dense

my favorite parts are where Chandler tosses in a brief chit-chat between Marlowe and some totally peripheral character with whom he just happens to talk to as he wends his way through the plot: security guards, elevator operators, bartenders, apartment managers and such like. these conversations are uniformly hilarious.

long-time ilx lurker here, since 2003 or so... (more of a *reader* than someone inclined to share, I guess). anyway, in compiling my list of books I read this year I thought of my debt to these threads' suggestions, & decided to pipe up w/ a little thanks for that and try a post -- from this year eugene lim's dear cyborgs and a couple peter culley books are 2 examples of recommendations I've taken to. other books I've read & loved this year include fanny howe's random love novel collection, john edgar wideman's homewood trilogy, marge piercy's woman on the edge of time, camille roy's honey mine, nikki wallschlaeger's pizza and warfare chapbook, amiri baraka's the system of dante's hell, joyelle mcsweeney's flet, bernadette mayer's sonnets (some mention of her upthread I see), alice notley's noir epic negativity's kiss, jim dickinson's memoir i'm not dead, i'm just gone...etc., many more... and more in keeping w/ the thread theme, at the moment i'm reading harmony holiday's negro league baseball and sesshu foster's atomik aztex. anyway, cheers all --

Hey zak - some interesting things there to check out. Nice one.

I was probably a bit chippy about Backlisted last night. I like it and they seem like good people. I did try the Locklisted episodes - the Beatles obsession gave me hives!

Lily, is that THE BELL JAR?

That's from "The Fourth State of Matter" by Jo Ann Beard.

Nammalvar - Endless Song, a cycle of 1102 stanzas and its my very much jam as far as poetry goes. A voice in the hightest pitch is hit over and over in this set of devotional music. There is an NYRB piece about it here, and its great to be introduced to a tradition (Tamil poetry), history, place and a time by reading an incredible work that survived, at all.

is it end of year time? is there normally a separate thread for that?

40 according to goodreads, although i think that's missing a couple. total was helped by a month of reading a dozen things of <200 pages each, some of them much less (although it still reckons the shortest was The Old Man And The Sea at 90 pages)

back on Stamped From The begiing by Ibram X Kendi
Currently reading about some semiu hypocritical misunderstandings by W.E.B. Du bois and other things contemporary to it. Last chapter had been on the Birth Of A nation. Kendi has been describing ertas since ther 17th century in realtion to one figurehead figure so late 19th & early 20 th century tie in with Webby and KIendi is not afraid to show some serious flaws I think he has shown some reason for his epistemology but it is not a fully balanced one anyway.
I just read about a feud with Marcus Garvey who I have to read . Did try I think in the mid 80s. But do want to know more right now. & now setting myself up with way too much to read in way too short a time. Which is never teh best set up. Just aware taht there is a lot of reading I should have done a lot earlier. Alsdo want to read Ida Welles and Booker T Washington though the latter does seem to be way too wishy washy. Oh & want to read Pan African stuff though not sure if teh focus of what was umbrellaed by that term would still be right.
Du Bois did set up or help set up the initial meetings in the early years of teh 20th century. hope things are way beyond taht now but don't know and probably should do.
Anyway I enjoy Kendi I enjoy learning about what he is saying and it does make me want to read more by the people he is talking about.
I am aware taht he has his own biases and i think he is too. But every human being has biases and it is better to acknowledge and try to show what those are in order to get a more objective perspective. Though taht very idea may be mythic.

Just finishging the appendices to Steven H gardner's first volume of Anothe rTuneless Racket.
just read him talking about the mysoynistic thuggery of teh Stranglers and how he can't get beyond the 1st 3 lps or at least those are the 3 he mainly focuses on. I think he has picked up copies of later Cornwe;; era stuff but doesn't listen to them much.
So have enjoyed reading himn talking about a bunch of bands taht I am semi aware of and a few i know a bit better. So will move onto his next volume some time soon. JUst got so many books taht I want to have already read right now that I want to read. & a stack that I keep buying. & still a fw i regret not having grabbed when I had the chance etc.
this was my bog book for teh last while, is set out in a good way for that purpose I think.
Havea few books set up to replace it. May go back to the history of torture in the Uk since the 1940s or carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World or THinking Fast & slow by Daniel Kahneman

"is it end of year time? is there normally a separate thread for that?"

We make a new thread every year. Here is last year's.

What did you read in 2020?

yeah, thought as much but the ilb board posts didn't scroll back that far

Xpost Hi Stevo, don't know how available Library of America editions are in the UK, but their DuBois collection is incredible---as an analytical scholar, pioneering sociologist, farseeing polemicist, artist---always a magnetic read---he's as strong as any American author I can think of---totally agree w the blurb here: "It is no exaggeration to say that [Du Bois] anticipated, and influenced, many of the events that led to the making of the modern world."---Washington Post
https://loa.org/books/39-writings?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI3J_Csbbw9AIVE4eGCh3qGQ48EAAYASAAEgIPzPD_BwE
Also the collection Blackwater, which incl. his essays, allegories, science fiction, fitting together, back and forth through the "walls" of genre and subgenre.

"Allegories" may not be the right word: no codes, just extensions of his characteristic concerns, thought patterns, stylistic excursions.

That's not an LoA publication, may be more widely available in the UK.

Hi zak m, nice list there. I'm always glad to see someone reading Peter's work :-)

I finished Julia Drescher's 'Disarticulation' as well as Hugh Tribbey's 'EF Zero' between Friday and yesterday evening.

I was in the mood to read an older novel, and so decided to pick up Silas Marner for a re-read. Love this book so much.

i've been working on mailer's the executioner's song for about a month, picking it up and reading a hundred pages or so, then giving it a rest. just reached the midway point and am feeling mildly frustrated that there's still so much of this thing left to read. i did find it very gripping for a while, and there's a genuinely vivid sense of the bleakness of this landscape, the depressing hollowness of so many of these characters' lives, the pointlessness and cruel randomness of the violence...but i can't shake the sinking feeling that the guy at the center of this epic is just not a very interesting person. maybe that's the point, though.

also picked up a collection of melville stories and am making my way through that. bartleby is still a perfect story (funny, too, even if it's also crushingly sad), and the sketches are amusing. reread billy budd for the first time in many years. it's a very strange story, in some ways an off-putting one, despite its greatness; even in such a brief narrative, melville can't stop himself from going on tangent after tangent, circling around what he really wants to say...

I started in on Edith Wharton's House of Mirth. Everyone in it so far is what my dad would have called 'a real piece of work'.

I've wanted to read it a third time but I suspect I might be drawing breaths.

i've been working on mailer's the executioner's song for about a month, picking it up and reading a hundred pages or so, then giving it a rest. just reached the midway point and am feeling mildly frustrated that there's still so much of this thing left to read. i did find it very gripping for a while, and there's a genuinely vivid sense of the bleakness of this landscape, the depressing hollowness of so many of these characters' lives, the pointlessness and cruel randomness of the violence...but i can't shake the sinking feeling that the guy at the center of this epic is just not a very interesting person. maybe that's the point, though.

J.D., I read it around this time 2013 and had a similar response. Harlot's Ghost is it for me.

Frank, Peter Eisenman's House VI: The Client's Response

Finally, the diagrams for House VI are symbiotic with its reality; the house is not an object in the traditional sense -- that is the end result of a process -- but more accurately a record of a process. The house, like the set of diagrammed transformations on which its design is based, is a series of film stills compressed in time and space. Thus, the process itself becomes an object; but not an object as an aesthetic experience or as a series of iconic meanings. Rather, it becomes an exploration into the range of potential manipulations latent in the nature of architecture, unavailable to our consciousness because they are obscured by cultural preconceptions.

-- Peter Eisenman

The coup de grace came more than a decade later, when we had spent all of our savings on the renovation of the house, and had to increase our mortgage to six figures.

-- Suzanne Frank

I'm not very interested in doing any more of these houses. I came to a dead end. I'm very proud of the houses that I've executed and the designs I've executed and they stand as a certain body of work, and that's past. This is a transitional period in my work - a kind of drying out between that, sort of what I call my "cocaine period," and where I'm going to be five years from now.

-- Peter Eisenman

...Instead it nearly turned into a fight of the ordinary kind when Eisenman, in a pattern that I only later learned was utterly commonplace, grew so paranoid at my presence in his office that he accused me of espionage (“How would you like it if I came to your office and spied on you?”) and drove me backward—a well-practiced bully—to the elevator...

-- A magazine article quoted by an ILXor years ago

By 1987, the house was already in a frightful state. The coating of stucco that had been applied was a shambles. There were streaks of stucco over windows, as well as clumps of it on the walls. Will Calhoun's Renovations Specialists had built up a good reputation in Cornwall within a few years, and so we asked that company to remove the stucco. In the process of doing so the workers discovered rotting beneath it. It shortly became clear that House VI needed to be virtually rebuilt; much of it would have to be torn down and carefully reconstructed...

-- Suzanne Frank

Reading Dancer From the Dance, which is fantastic, but progress is slowed tracking down each song mentioned and then getting lost in the music.

otm

J.D., I read it around this time 2013 and had a similar response. Harlot's Ghost is it for me.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, December 20, 2021 10:26 PM (yesterday)

i'm determined to get to that one someday! i also own mailer's lee harvey oswald book which i feel kinda obligated to read eventually.

Don't sleep on Armies of the Night--his very own kind of New Journalism, at its peak, and more satisfying than any of his fiction that I've managed to read---maybe if he'd done his own research, incl. eyewitness reporting and interviews(rather than sifting through Larry Schiller's mounds o' data) for The Executioner's Song, it would have turned out better.
Re-reading Billy Budd in the Library of America edition, I got the impression, from his appended notes and outtakes, that he wanted us to look over the narrator's shoulder and draw our own conclusions--that we could see how trapped in their own times, own heads and lives all the characters were, the narrator too---but also I thought he might be leaving it to us to (possibly) sympathize most of all with Billy, as I suspect Melville, being Melville, probably did---but the gamble was that we might do this more if no DO YOU SEE like just about all other Victorian fiction seems to have done (I haven't read it all, but happens a lot)
Also, some authors did back off, ultimately, from anything that might too sympathetic to rebellion and killing, unless, possibly as very obvious and reductive melodrama of self-defense etc.

House of Mirth should be stocked on the horror shelves

xpost So maybe there was some uncertainty on his part in the way the story was delivered, like stammerin' Billy's fateful outburst, kicking against it all.

Yeah Chuck, and the movie's pretty scary too (starring Gillian Anderson).