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

Hazlitt - On Theatre.

This is a collection of reviews from much of Hazlitt's play-going. And it functions as his: a) his critical work on Shakespeare, with many fine passages on Othello and Lear, b) his account of the best Shakesperean actors of that time (Kean, Siddons), what they do to the lines of the text against how (in Hazlitt's view) those lines of poetry should be performed. There are moments when the thing comes right, but at others they fall short - and so it goes on many times either way during the same evening. This is crit operating as it should be.

Don't dare compare St. Ursula to that awful lit-fic crap.

― we need outrage! we need dicks!! (the table is the table), Thursday, 3 March 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Bring proper snobs back, none of this fake shit!

I know this probably won't change your mind about Rooney, table, but her stand-in character goes off on a long dyspeptic rant about lit-fic in Beautiful World:

Have I told you I can't read contemporary novels anymore? I think it's because I know too many of the people who write them. I see them all the time at festivals, drinking red wine and talking about who's publishing who in New York. Complaining about the most boring things in the world -- not enough publicity, or bad reviews, or someone else making more money. Who cares? And then they go away and write their sensitive little novels about 'real life'. The truth is they know nothing about real life. Most of them haven't so much as glanced up against the real world in decades. These people have been sitting with white linen tablecloths laid out in front of them and complaining about bad reviews since 1983...
And they come home from their weekend in Berlin, after four newspaper interviews, three photoshoots, two sold-out events, three long leisurely dinners where everyone complained about bad reviews, and they open up the old MacBook to write a beautifully observed little novel about 'real life'. I don't say this lightly: it makes me want to be sick...

My own work is, it goes without saying, the worst culprit in this regard.

Did he ever confirm if he’d read Sally Rooney or not

I think besides "Detransition Baby" and maybe one or two others, I haven't read a book on the NYTimes Bestseller List in more than a decade. What I've read of Rooney's work— a short story here and there— makes it seem like the novels are exactly the sort of thing that would drive me up a goddamn wall. Flaccid characters who still manage to be loathsome, a liberal-progressive (yuck) political ideology, and little to nothing emergent or interesting in terms of form. At least make the sex weird or interesting!

and fwiw, I will honestly say that the avoidance of the Times thing has not been purposeful, in all actuality. I just don't find myself interested in popular literature lmfao.

xp right, so no. Thanks for your perspective. She’s more of a leftist than you are any day, fwiw.

I'm reading Lydia Davis's Essays Two at the moment. Delightful so far. All of the essays are centred around translation, and her efforts to learn other languages through the process of reading and translating. Makes me feel like a right fool for only being able to understand English, but that is no fault of hers, and merely my own insecurity. Her writing on translation glows with the joy that comes from the thrill of discovering more about other languages and cultures. There's a couple of essays on her Swann's Way translation, which I really need to read. I've read the Scott Moncrieff translation and felt a little disappointed that I couldn't quite understand the magic of Proust after reading it.

It also contains a brilliant essay on her attempt at "modernising" Bob, Son of Battle an English children's novel from 1898 which I had previously never heard of, but apparently deeply moved her as a child, alongside many others of her generation. I remember getting to the essay and thinking "uh, a 70 page essay on modernising a children's book about a dog?", but it was absolutely compelling. She mainly writes about the challenges she came across in attempting to modernise the language, but it also digresses to wonderful sections about the evolution of the English language, the idea of 'the children's novel' and how that has changed over time, and British and Scottish history amongst other things.

The only thing I've truly read by Rooney is an LRB article about abortion in Ireland, which I found very clearly, carefully reasoned and convincing.

re: poster Table's comments, something that has stayed in my own mind is "awful lit-fic crap".

We can take it that "lit-fic" is short for literary fiction. Many of us like literature, and like fiction. We might like things that are literary. Yet "lit-fic" appears to be pejorative.

The question then is: what are the criteria for identifying something as "lit-fic"?

If the answer is extraneous stuff like "this book sold a lot of copies" or "the author was invited to an event at the Metropolitan Museum", then I don't think that's a very good or reliable criterion. I think one would want internal and textual criteria.

Personally I greatly admire, for instance, Hilary Mantel's historical fiction, which has been a big UK bestseller, adapted for stage and screen, won awards. Those facts don't at all make me think that the work is bad.

I think it was the introduction to this talk on J.M. Coetzee, which was the one episode they recorded live in Galway during the Arts Festival, where the Blacklisted guys were talking about Rooney's new book . & that had me wanting to read some of her. So I picked up a couple from charity shops but haven't started them yet.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/15tTTwvepmDcR5nEzgh6Xw?si=5c075a8ea7234613
So I think somewhere in the first 10 minutes

Discovering Hazlitt in 1998 or so for the sake of my graduate thesis was a joy -- say, his essays on the Elgin Marbles and "self-love."

Finished Gottlieb's book on Garbo (beautiful miscellany comprising photos, commentary, contemporaneous responses), started for unknown reasons Martin Amis' quasi-novel Inside Story.

xxxp that’s because your entire personality isn’t built around reminding people that you like obscure things, which makes you special, and that actually you simply have no interest in popular things, which can only enhance your specialness by being scorned

Discovering Hazlitt in 1998 or so for the sake of my graduate thesis was a joy -- say, his essays on the Elgin Marbles and "self-love."

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 5 March 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Would've been reading a Selected around then too. So good how a favourite you read in your teens holds up.

I've been reading a very thin book of stories by Seán o faoláin for ages and they're not very good I think - full of clichéd scenarios and neat endings. Also rereading anthropology as cultural critique and it's very entertaining even if some of its readings of French theory are deeply off

Table's POV is ridiculous on a few fronts:

- No snob would go on about their snobbery by declaring they read and enjoy Science Fiction. Lit snobs hate that prose in the first place (it's written mostly badly about, and not very often in places like the LRB, even now, because they can't let go of the literary, more classic style prose they like).

- Then when asked about it some more it turns out Table actually has read one or two books from that list. So there is no discipline to it, either! The New York list is actually looked at in the first place. Pathetic.

- Usually people who are self-confessed snobs position are old, racist, rich and white. Why on earth you'd want ape that as a grown adult? But it's all v telling on table's actual, reactionary, politics.

Plax: that's interesting about O Faolain - have read lots of things about him but rarely delved into the actual fiction. His book THE IRISH is still on my shelf from the library! An important figure but wonder if his literary work hasn't held up well.

Current LRB has a long review of Gottlieb on Garbo.

I read Hazlitt's book of essays on contemporary writers he'd known, a few years ago - that must be THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE? - "the Mr Wordsworth I knew" etc - that was very enjoyable. I loved the sense of how close he was to them. The Walter Scott essay was the best.

Pinefox otm, great post.

I don’t understand why you would refer to yourself approvingly as a snob, a term a writer should surely recognise as a pejorative, unless you aspire to all the other connotations thereof. So xyzzzz__ also otm, and it seems…conflicting… with table’s professed politics as he notes.

Love how two posters have turned this into a thread of bashing me and no one has said anything.

You know nothing about my politics, what I do in my personal life, or anything else about me.

I didn’t notice you apologising for exploding on Tim for a mild joke directed at himself, if you’re going to start on about appropriate behaviour.

- you haven’t read the books you’re so dismissive of, as evidenced by your ignorant opinions
- you are proud of your ignorance because you’re a snob (your word, not mine)
- it’s everyone else’s fault for thinking this perspective is a load of shit

gyac, are you secretly Sally Rooney?

Yes, that’s a winning argument.

I'm on ILM because I love music, even music that I don't want to listen to ever again is okay by me.

I'm on ILE because I'm a grumpy dickhead.

I'm on ILB because I love books enough that I hate many of them, and also I get off on people calling me a snob or a dilettante depending on the day.

― we need outrage! we need dicks!! (the table is the table), Friday, 4 March 2022 02:50 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

btw, for someone who claims you get off on this, you’re not half prickly about it.

You have no sense of humor

omg, that’s like Evelyn Waugh calling someone else too snobby

"Love how two posters have turned this into a thread of bashing me and no one has said anything"

I disapprove of your posts as it discourages the place from being an environment where others can post whatever they are reading without these banal judgements of yours.

I will keep attacking you if you keep posting like this.

I'm done!

That's a relief.

I'm reading Danielle Collobert's journals, translated by Norma Cole, and also just began the only Kevin Killian book I've not read, 'Little Men.'

I will say that I'm sorry to Tim and to any others whose sensibilities I offended.

One of the things I need to do better at, and this is a big admission for me, is to just allow myself to not be interested in things without coming up with idiotic, empty justifications for why I am not interested in them.

So, if it pleases gyac and xyzzz, I'll say that I am simply not interested in Sally Rooney's work, and probably won't change. Any other justification is bullshit out of my mouth.

Appreciated, and thank you for this post.

Conversations with Men.

just started The Self Awakened by Roberto Managabeira Unger. Enjoying the brio.

Institutions and ideologies are not like natural objects, forcing themselves on our consciousness with insistent
force and reminding us that we have been born into a world that is not our own. They are nothing but frozen will and interrupted conflict: the residue crystallized out of the suspension or containment of our struggles.

also reading A Guardian Angel Recalls (trans from the Dutch Herinneringen van een engelbewaarder) by Willem Frederik Hermans, which is an interesting book and i’ll post a bit more about it when i’ve finished.

Finished Collobert's journals. For those interested, her work is peculiar and affecting, and while the journals aren't too interesting on their own, they're insightful in that they give context to her other works. For example, the halting phrases and fragments that mark her book 'It Then' are very much in evidence in the journals, so much so that one could become confused about which book one was reading. Fans of Beckett, particularly his monologues, will find her work fascinating.

Read an early bit of Robert Welch's THE ABBEY THEATRE 1899-1999. Won't read it all. I'm reminded for the umpteenth time that I should read George Moore. Has anyone read George Moore?

triggercut, thanks so much for your description of Lydia Smith's Essays 2. I hadn't thought to look for such collections, though greatly enjoyed her Swann's Way intro re why she translated it the way she did, in contrast to the Moncrieff etc., which she greatly respects, also other thoughts on Proust, especially her overview of In Search Of Lost Time. She was editor, whatever that entailed, of the ISOLT translation series, which some consider a letdown after her own version of Swann's Way: by far my own favorite volume, but I have no idea whether some subsequent dry areas were more the translators' fault or Proust's.
Will have to check the Moncrieff-Kilmartin-Enright, but doubt I'll ever get all that interested in all those Fin Doo Sickly high society leftovers--though of course Charlus is always worth waiting for, also "the gang of girls" and the painter and the narrator's musical theme and other elements, incl. influence of painting and readings in science and accruing effects of technology and the Dreyfus Affair and militarism---anyway, since you enjoyed her essays, I think the same would be true of Davis's Swann's Way, which sure seems like peak Proust, anyway you cut it, though it's hard to imagine a more enjoyable translation.

I can't read Lydia Davis for long because the envy gnaws at me.

conversations with friends is a very funny title

I don't know that much about sally rooney (i don't pay as much attention to what's on the bestsellers list as table!) but i did read some statement she made about her decision to boycott an israeli publisher that felt nuanced and principled in a way that felt quite rare in public life where those kinds of statements often feel didactic and haphazard

Has anyone read George Moore?

My first attempts were all quite brief. Then I gave up.

could you not read any moore?

I could stand no moore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG3VUXBcyt0

Collobert is a new name to me, sounds good

same, thanks table.

Her book of thematically linked short stories, 'Murder' (trans. Nathanael), is also really something -- every personage within its pages is marked or doomed in some way. Sometimes specifics are given, and sometimes Collobert really amps up her descriptions to a swell of overwhelming dread. Here's an interview that translator Kit Schluter did with Nathanael about the book.
http://htmlgiant.com/author-spotlight/kit-schluter-nathanael-on-danielle-colloberts-murder/

I paused the Algerian war for a short trip to the beach, where I read one of Walter Mosley's 'Easy Rawlins Mysteries', A Little Yellow Dog from the mid-90s. Mosley knows exactly what his target audience wants, lots of action and some sex scenes for spice, and he gives it to them, but surprisingly well-written and with plenty of lessons about how hard it is to wake up every day as a Black American. He makes it work. Now I'll go back to Algeria and a different take on racism.

To what does James Redd's video refer?

Plax: I forgot to mention Rooney's boycott decision. Personally I thought it admirably brave, as such decisions tend to bring massive opprobrium and abuse - perhaps even physical danger - and could well damage her income and other concrete aspects of her career.

To Eleanor Bron saying “I can say no more” over and over again in Help! which is quoted in the lyric of that song. Sorry, I’m as the 12ft Lizards made me.