Bonfires In The Sky: What Are You Reading, Winter 2021-22?

On Stuart Hall: particular essays:

Cold Comfort Farm - on Broadwater Farm, racism and police in the 1980s

No Light at the End of the Tunnel - an outstanding analysis of the state of Thatcherism and the UK in 1986 - stands up as well as anything by anyone

Authoritarian Populism: a reply - entertaining format, to see Hall respond briskly to critics

The book is often compelling. I come back to the fact that it feels - prescient? Not quite that, more that because it was accurate at the time, it's also a good guide to how we got here.

i liked him on It's A Knockout

(i appear to have missed the bit about the child sex offences) 8(

Still stuck in (and very much enjoying) Crossroads.

I didn't know Jennifer Egan had a Good Squad sequel coming out soon: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Candy-House/Jennifer-Egan/9781476716763. I thought it had a mushy, disappointing ending but the first half was fun; I much preferred Manhattan Beach, which was more satisfyingly trad than Goon Squad was satisfyingly "experimental", whatever that means.

realise that this is far from universal, but I *enjoyed* Goon Squad tho do have a vague recollection that i found the end similarly disappointing. I prefer dissatisfyingly experimental to satisfyingly trad! (I think)

I enjoyed it too ftmp but the last several chapters are really very bad I think - also iirc the stuff about music was all really cringeworthy so it doesn’t bode well that this new one is using “EDM” as some kind of organising principle

I thought she navigated the cringe pretty well, but the sci-fi parts at the end were super parochial, in that way that literary authors often clunk when they try genre writing.

It's maybe not a good sign that the new book is mostly set in the future, but I'll still read it! IMO her best bit of writing is the boys-own-adventure shark attack section of Manhattan Beach.

i think there are far worse chapters in goon squad than the last two. chauvinist failed writer/journalist whose thoughts sprawl off into endless pointless footnotes one is unendurable

a sequel is deeply unpromising lol

If you thought Goon Squad, a thoroughly milquetoast bestseller, was 'experimental,' I might have to find a better adjective to describe the novels that I like to read. Not trying to shame-- I liked Goon Squad well enough-- but it isn't experimental, by any stretch of the imagination.

lmao

Ha, your post made me feel like defensive about the book, even though I basically agree. Egan's always described as "experimental" in profiles, but if so, they're pretty controlled experiments. Perhaps playful is a better word; on the other hand I don't think conventional storytelling and experimentation are mutually exclusive; and perhaps the distinction doesn't matter anyway.

I definitely don't think conventional storytelling and experimentation are mutually exclusive, but I think that a book that amounts to MFA-style formal exercises isn't "experimental," it's merely clever. Goon Squad is certainly that.

Been a long time, but I dimly recall liking most of it well enough, incl. the ending, though maybe because I don't expect that much from the endings of contemporary novels---I remember thinking that the sections weren't crucially related, and even that if I did decide that if some of them were too two-dimensional, I could just roll them overboard, with no detachment necessary.
The New Yorker Science Fiction Issue of several years ago incl. an Egan short story, a stylized thriller, poignant in passing, not mushy. But a much more recent New Yorker story, also science fiction, had some soft spots in its construction, and esp. ending, which bothers me more in shorties. Thinking it might be an excerpt from the new novel, hope not.

The Order Of The Day, Éric Vuillard - Account of the early days of Hitler's rise, mostly centered on the annexation of Austria so far. Written as a series of encounters between statesmen and other notables, which inevitably pushes it into Great Man Theory. Also the occasional outbursts of moral indignation ring a bit hollow - not that Chamberlain and Schuschnigg don't deserve a rinsing of course, but somewhat silly for the author to get so het up at already widely maligned historical figures, especially when the portrayal of Churchill (one character in this play that is still treated as a sacred cow by many) is portrayed entirely as a mischievous imp. The whole project feels very old fashioned for a Goncourt winner, reminds me more of Stefan Zweig than anything else.

He's very good at the darkly comical bits: Ribbentrop extending a social outing with Chamberlain to prevent him from reacting to the invasion of Austria, Exterminating Angel vibes; Austrian villages breathlessly awaiting the arrival of the German army which never comes because they're stuck in a logistical rut.

I couldn't even make it through the first few chapters of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tITdu1nyHHk

a book that amounts to MFA-style formal exercises isn't "experimental," it's merely clever.

This statement, from poster The Table, may be correct, but it relies on a knowledge of "MFA-style formal exercises", or a consensus about what are "MFA-style formal exercises" and what are ... ... "formal exercises" of a different kind, which might be ... ... "experimental"?

I suspect that poster Table may well be correct in their judgment, but am unsure how one could know without undertaking an MFA course.

Jennifer Egan is probably too old to have done that (60 this year?), so whatever her reason for writing as she did, it was presumably not because an MFA tutor advised her to do it. It could, I suppose, have been because she saw the work of other people who had, indeed, taken such courses?

The question of how one could distinguish between something that was genuinely experimental, and something that wasn't and was merely falsely claimed to be ... seems vexed.

For a writer of brief, difficult, obscure poems to write a fat, salacious blockbuster would be, for them, an 'experimental' gesture. And vice versa. In either case, the writer would have to try out new techniques that were unfamiliar to them.

It could be said that a real experiment only happens when a writer does something of a type that no writer has ever done before, but how often does that happen? How feasible is it?

I fear that the criteria would need to be scaled down a bit from that.

It's likely that there are ways of writing that are coded as 'experimental', and will be accepted as 'experimental' (minimalism, poetry that is fragmented and hard to understand, possibly maximalism also) -- but as such, we may doubt the application of this label. If something is generic then is it experimental?

I think that these questions are rather tricky and the targets are moving.

I daresay this has all been said before, here never mind anywhere else.

let me put it this way, a series of interconnected short stories that constitutes a novel is not "experimental." a chapter written in powerpoint could be construed as an experimental flourish within a deeply typical book

jeeeezus, I didn't think anyone remembered Goon Squad!

i do think the radical is realizable within super traditional forms tho, i like music too much to deny that

It's a marketing category really but that's no less legitimate than any other genre.

I was thinking, a good definition of "experimental fiction" might lean on the word experiment, i.e. be about putting unusual things together without knowing how they're going to react - but that would end up including Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as experimental literature too.

While staying in a yurt with no cell service read Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police in an evening. Overall I liked it a great deal, with a bit of reservation - i think the placid and simple style works very well, but it does really push against what you might want out of a story - no information of the outside world, or interactions with others who remember, or substantial progress except in a negative direction. It reminded me a bit of Never Let Me Go, both stories living inside a dystopian setting that is almost totally accepted, but I think The Memory Police works better as a enclosed story, while Ishiguro's attempts to engage with the larger world and wrap things up kind of expose how flimsy the whole thing is.

I've started reading A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, Alastair Horne. It looks pretty readable and should fill in a very large gap in my knowledge, because I know almost nothing about this war. It ended when I was seven years old and the hegemonic powers seem determined never to mention it again.

I will note that the British author is clearly a Francophile and his sympathies in that direction do color his tone, even if it doesn't prevent him from trying to collect and describe the facts. My awareness of this tendency helps to neutralize it somewhat. This is an NYRB reprint and was probably added to the catalogue in 2006 as a result of the Iraq War.

I think the word "experimental" in the context of literary criticism may be an example of what Frank Kogan calls a "Superword" in the context of rock-crit, i.e. a word whose primary purpose is to be fought over, like "a flag in a bloody game of Capture the Flag". A word that "will jettison adherents and go skipping on ahead of any possible embodiment". "For the word to be super, not only must people disagree on the ideal, but some people must consciously or unconsciously keep changing what the word or ideal is supposed to designate so the music" - or book, I would add - "is always inadequate to the ideal, even if it would have been adequate to yesterday's version of the ideal."

Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger and Geoffrey Willans/Ronald Searle's Molesworth.

xpost -- Yes, it feels v. much like a sunday supplement/music crit word. Like, "This sounds unusual, and my writing skills aren't sharp enough to describe what it's doing, so I think I'll call it 'experimental'".

And I guess, just as "middlebrow" is a putdown camouflaged as descriptor, calling something "experimental" is a way of self-congratulating one's reading prowess ("I'd like to read something more experimental next time").

The recentish NYer short story is, unfortunately, an excerpt from the book.

Geoffrey Willans/Ronald Searle's Molesworth.

Thomas Hardy - Far from the Madding Crowd
Victor Sebestyen - 1946: The Making of the Modern World
Shirley Hazzard - The Bay off Noon

Emma Dabiri Don't Touch My Hair
Dublin born mixed race author talks about hair and its significance in her life and others. By way of connotations of what being a mixed race girl in teh 90s and earlier meant, do wonder if I ever met her since I was around at the time but would have been a lot older and have had dreads since my own late teens.
But anyway am really enjoying her writing so hope there is more of it to come.

Beginning Theory Peter Barry
Book on literary theory etc taht looked interesting when I was looking through a charity shop earlier. Read the introduction and seems like something I will benefit from reading.

recent reads:

Sabrina Orah Mark - Wild Milk short story collection
Jesse K. Baer - Midwestern Infinity Doctrine
Karel Čapek - War with the Newts
Clarice Lispector - Soulstorm: Stories

currently reading Thomas Bernhard's Correction

Update on Bullet Train: this is a very enjoyable book. At the risk of using an overused term, his writing is cinematic. He's very skilled at maneuvering his characters within the confines of his chosen setting of the Shinkansen. Plus, it's funny AF.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if it won a Pulitzer, calling a book "experimental" might just not be accurate.

Plenty of people who aren't in their twenties get MFAs, the pinefox, tho it seems like Egan just did the normal Ivy to Cambridge rich kid route.

Yes, I'm sure a range of people get MFAs. My original point about them was that for those many of us who don't have them, we can't really tell what is an "MFA exercise" and what is something else.

GOON SQUAD may not be experimental. But the question of what that word actually, in practice, means, abides. I am inclined to think that posters O. Nate and Chuck Tatum are going along the right lines, on this question.

I tend to agree, too, but when I'm describing a book in a forum like this one, I'm not writing a book review for the LRB or anywhere else. Using the word 'experimental' as shorthand, both here and on ILM, is completely reasonable and not 'lazy' as these posters would so have it.

MFA exercises: play with this wacky formal constraint that readers will find charming and interesting, but don't make it so challenging that you can't get a book deal or sell the story to the New Yorker.

Also I was merely trying to be kind before, Goon Squad is fucking garbage.

In poetry, for what it's worth, the debate about descriptors like 'experimental,' 'innovative,' and others continues to rage.

What I often think is ignored in these debates is that the state of mainstream poetry and literature is as such that words like 'experimental' serve an important function in establishing a work or poet as against a dominant hegemonic aesthetic. Other than this function, the words don't mean a whole lot.

And if you want to know what the dominant hegemonic aesthetic might be, look toward the dilatory epiphanic tone that permeates the most popular English language poetry: Gorman, Kaur, Billy Collins, etc.

Ugh. When I hear the name Collins that’s when I reach for my ….

Anyway, I like your term “dilatory epiphanic.”

It's been growing on me since the first time you used it

I always like this takedown by August Kleinzahler, although I don't know if I have had any takers yet on this borad: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/60488/no-antonin-artaud-with-the-flapjacks-please

Ha! Apart from the forced imbecilic simplicity of Collins' verse, I thought his mortal sin was going straight for the arena rock climax in the first stanza.

You can also find it in the inexplicable fawning of the mainstream presses and book reviews of mediocre dead poets like Robert Lowell, who seems to have a new book around him every year for some godforsaken reason that no one I know can figure out. Heaping praise on dead people who were lauded mostly for their ghastly biography instead of engaging in challenging work of the present is not new, but it still irks.

Billy Collins was in attendance at a good friend's wedding. It didn't end well.

Norman Mailer's son was there too, to add to the fun.

You can also find it in the inexplicable fawning of the mainstream presses and book reviews of mediocre dead poets like Robert Lowell, who seems to have a new book around him every year for some godforsaken reason that no one I know can figure out. Heaping praise on dead people who were lauded mostly for their ghastly biography instead of engaging in challenging work of the present is not new, but it still irks.

mmm I disagree. Lowell did change the course of American poetry briefly even though I prefer the chillier early stuff like Lords Weary Castle and have little to no patience for most anything after 1960; those 1970s collections he shat out are doggerel at best.

He wrote one good poem afaic, and it's the most unlike the rest of his other work. Just a crazy racist Boston Brahmin who never should have been given a second thought.

But even if you love him, why does his work still command so much attention when...well, he's been dead for 45 years? I think it has a lot more to do with mainstream fetishization of mental illness than the quality of his poetry.

In a sense, what I'm getting at is there *is* an industry that keeps certain types of writing in circulation and has a vested interest in doing so. To my mind, being called 'experimental' often means that the work cannot be totally subsumed into the flow of capital that guides this industry's decisions. That's the kind of writing that I'm interested in, and similarly with music.

The idea that there is anything profound about ubiquity is a bankrupt one.