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

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.

Read a short pamphlet containing a previously unpublished poem by Jean Daive, translated by Miri Davidson. Continuing with Killian's "Little Men," and a friend also sent me the PDF of Guyotat's "Eden Eden Eden," which is certainly the most vile book I've ever read in my life, and I'm only 15 or so pages in.

I think what's moving and motivating about the poverty in Rooney is that it is tied to a disappearing way of life that makes sense in and of itself but is displaced and out of time. WHen this comes up in Western European contexts (Ireland, France) I think of Korea before and after the war (as an outsider). I think this is what it is appealing at the end of Clem's story in Crossroads (however unfamiliar the story may be to the people of Central and South America). This is in contrast to the frustrating state of poverty as depicted in the United States now. I apologize for anything insensitive and wrong in this post.

I think part of it is no one else is that much better off and the other part is that you accept and resign yourself to certain kinds of hardship but not others.

Read the start of
Brian Klaas Corruptible
investigation into what factors determine corruptibility after having heardMueller she Write go over the book in their book club and am currently listening to the last episode of that where the author is being interviewed by the host AG.
Very interesting but realised I might as well try to finish

Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria by Beverley Daniel Tatum
which is about factors determining person undrstandings of race focusing on young people.
& is pretty good.
I should be concentrating on getting t finsihed but got the Corruptible from the library yesterday. & slept badly last night.
Anyway it is pretty interesting. Did have me wondering if i had somehow read an earlier version since I think I was recognising some of it and it does date back to an earlier version being published in the late 90s. This version is the 2017 update though. which is pretty thorough.
I like it when I can concentrate on it anyway.

I love the Lydia Davis "translation" of Bob, Son of Battle -- I'll have to seek out that essay about its translation.

Recently read Marie Darrieussecq's Being Here is Everything: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker. This great Dodie Bellamy essay about the book inspired me to read it: https://lithub.com/on-finding-the-book-rhat-returns-you-to-your-body/.

Currently reading Andrei Bely's Petersburg, which has been on my library "to read" queue forever. Just inching through it so far, loving the texture of the prose. The dated and snarky 1970s annotations in this edition are (just slightly) diminishing my enjoyment -- it's funny how that can alter a reading experience. (the fact of Russia's ubiquity in currents events water cooler discourse is an odd coincidence ~ perhaps seems a little on-the-nose to read a serious-looking Russian tome in the break room or on the bus these days...)

I'm feeling that about Stalingrad. chapter 22 and Russia has just been forced into ww2 by surprise German attacks and there are lines and lines of displaced people.

Read my first Lauren Groff story recently: seemed unusual, good, and unusually good for The New Yorker. How are her books?

Some elements could have been fabulistic, but were realistic, though not on the nose. Leading characters v. practical, even acute, in some ways, other ways not so much: relatable.