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

Yes she is! I would love to know what you think. And yes, agree the lack of sugar coating is a real strength. It’s very matter of fact.

I finished Killian's 'Little Men,' a real delight. Ramping up for some re-reads for lesson planning, but might take a night to look at something new.

I love "Stone Animals" so much, Alfred. I wonder what you'll think.

― we need outrage! we need dicks!! (the table is the table),

Weird and wonderful. Read it in one sitting.

RV Raman, A Will To Kill - Indian mystery novel that is rather shoddily written, a lot of noun verbed adverbially. A page on the Nilgiri Mountain railways train reads like a tourist brochure - we are told the railways are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, that the train is "much acclaimed" and, twice, that it looks like a toy train.

Nevertheless - I'm having fun! It's an old fashioned murder mystery with a far flung mansion and multiple wills and family intrigue.

I'm glad, Alfred. I love the paint swatch names best, it's a lovely device.

Finished Jerusalem, all 1174 pages of it. Some voices work better than others, and some sections are somewhat tedious (the afterword with a character looking through a gallery of scenes from the book really feels like something that'd work better in a comic), but there's also some cracking stuff, between the second half entirely dedicated to a group of ghost urchins having time travel adventures, the play featuring a dialogue between the ghosts of John Bunyan, Samuel Beckett, John Clare and Thomas Beckett, the old man and baby travelling to the end of time and the stream of consciousness chapter from the pov of a new labour councillor. Besides Moore's usual mystic notions of time and space, what really comes through is the working class rage.

Speaking of which, since I need a new doorstop for in bed reading, I'm now moving on to E.P. Thompson's The Making Of The English Working Class.

Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye
I seem to have picked up the bulk of her work from charity shops over the last 6 months and not taken the time to read it. I listened to a couple of webinars and podcasts where this book was talked about and the effect it had on black women readers re their understanding of their own identities shaped by understandings they got from it. Which prompted me to start reading it. Now got it as my bog book. Which means I don't give it the concentrated reading periods that it may lure one into. It is pretty delicious prose.
I think this will prompt me to try to get through the rest of what I have soon after too.
Plus i need to get down and read Angela Davis's Autobiography which she edited. Have seen taht there is a new edition of that work being released which had a Guardian interview tied into it
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/05/angela-davis-on-the-power-of-protest-we-cant-do-anything-without-optimism

Brian Klaas Corruptible.
I listened through a MSW book club series on this and caught a live webinar with the author before i realised he was one of teh writers of How To Rig An Election which I reada few months ago. Or at least somehow missed it was teh same authorl
I'm finding it an interesting read, though am noticing him citing Jared Diamond at one point which has me wondering if taht is a negative sign. Since this does seem to resonate as right for the most part.
Looking at corruption, who is likely to be affected by it, be prone to it and how much it can be replicated by and through systems etc.
Quite readable and I'm enjoying it.

Beverly Daniel Tatum Why Are All The Black Kids sitting together in the Cafeteria?
Book on personal identity and how it pertains to race etc. What factors go into defining it. Focus largely on high school ages children and college students though more widespread.
I found it pretty interesting. Probably should have read the earlier version of it if i didn't. & did find some of this rang a bell, buit since it was originally released in 1997 it may have permeated other work by influence etc.
Massive bibliography which I hope i get a chance to look further into.

I finished the Algerian War history. The white minority in Algeria was easily as racist and violent as the white Rhodesians and South Africans. I hadn't understood just how often the French military had tried to overthrow the French government, just to protect those fuckers from giving up a single privilege or granting any agency to the Muslim population.

When not working, I continue to read Welch's history of the Abbey Theatre, for fun and enlightenment. It has now reached about 1924, and passed Sean O'Casey's first Abbey production THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN.

It was, I think, a small theatre back then, unlike the Abbey now. And it seems to have been a chaotic history - drunken managers being hired and fired; actors, from a certain point, doing their own thing; Yeats and Gregory maintaining a vast majority of shares despite not really having been theatre people (until they decided to become such people).

The book gives the stories or scenarios of a lot of now forgotten plays. Some could be interesting to discover and read now.

Last night I started reading The Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler. I have to keep reminding myself that, however much she is employing the tools and methods of the novel, she is developing the story as a parable, which plays by a different set of rules. It's just that the traditional parable is about the length and complexity of one of Aesop's fables or a Grimms folk tale.

pinefox, you're reminding me that I long ago tried to read a collection of Yeats plays, ten of them, I think. Very rich veins of lyrical imagery, levels and textures, but/and somehow my mind resisted, and after rechecking it from library several times, I finally gave up, regretfully. Could have had something to do with his lack of experience in theater vs. my experience as an actor, that I couldn't imagine them in performance, but dunno.

Start with The Words Upon the Windowpane: short and in prose.

Italo Calvino - The Watcher and Other Stories
Garrett M. Graff - Watergate: A New History

I finished "Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula LeGuin. Its probably just as well that I never read this when I went through my classic sci-fi fandom phase, because I think a lot of it would have gone over my head. Its got pretty much everything one could ask for in a sci-fi tale: world-building, imaginative extrapolation from existing science and tech, good old-fashioned adventure and suspense, and best of all, it reflects our own society back to us from a perspective that makes it seem momentarily arbitrary and strange. Now I'm reading "The Postman Always Rings Twice" by James M. Cain.

Now I'm reading "The Postman Always Rings Twice" by James M. Cain.

real sci-fi

If by sci fi you mean a cheerfully amoral noir thrill ride.

How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti

Please report back on that; have read some very whack takes, pos and neg.
The Postman Always Rings Twice's narrating narcissist scarred me, like nothing 'til I went around with Mr. Ripley.

Skimming DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? (1968). Skimming naturally, gradually leads me back into properly 'rereading'.

I still can't quite tell how far this is a good novel or a bad novel that had influential ideas. It's easy to say it's the latter, but I don't think it's as simple as that. I think there might possibly be a 'good novel' element also. But then again the info-dumping via the protagonist 'recalling' or 'reflecting' aspects of his reality, and conversations with others about their intellectual implications, still does seem awkward to me.

Maybe a reason that this novel has long stood out amid PKD's oeuvre is that it contains multiple key ideas, not just one: 1) replicants, or rather 'andies'; 2) 'chickenheads', people affected by radiation (as far as I recall); 3) the animal theme -- plus the police procedural and action aspect.

It's not very often mentioned that it has an epigraph from W.B. Yeats.

Vron Ware Beyond The Pale
A very early book that would now be among the White Feminist titles. Looking at racism in the history of the power or recognition struggle for female emancipation and how it did the opposite of allying with racial emancipation way to frequently. Ware talks about ho wone of the early American feminists came out pro lynching in the introduction. I haven't got very far with this so far since I only got it yesterday.
I see taht the author is or was married to Paul Gilroy too.
This came out in 1990 and is currently published by verso books. I think it has been pretty influential I'm seeing it cited in a few places. Foreword by the author of Hood Feminism

Received Denise Riley's latest book of poems in the mail, spending the rainy weekend with her.

Interesting Riley, a bit uneven but I kind of like it? My friend and I were discussing how it's hard sometimes to suss out her tone, especially in this latest book, but the chatty erudite language jokes being beside rending accounts of childhood abuse actually work.

Anyway, onto Perse's "Anabasis," a book/poem I'd never heard of until recently. Half-way through and I'm a little puzzled, slightly uneasy, but admiring some of the lines.

Given what's happening elsewhere I'll flag up my gentle dig in the ribs... Trigger: semi-canonical dead white male poet alert!

I'm reading Edward Thomas' The South Country. I feel like I know more about Thomas than I do his work: his battles with depression, his compulsive walking and note-taking, the friendship with Robert Frost and spurred on by Frost's enthusiasm, his turn to poetry late in life, death at Arras two months after signing up. But I've also come to him with a *sense* of what I was getting. He's more the mystic nature writer than the systematiser and collector; more Richard Jefferies than Gilbert White.

Thomas is a jobbing (but respected) literary critic and has written numerous books and monographs. He writes to keep himself and his family alive, essentially. The South Country comes out in 1908 - a good 6 years before he begins to produce poetry - and is written quickly, cobbled together from notebooks. It's a series of sense impressions of Sussex, Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire (and, confusingly, Cornwall and Suffolk) and does feel rushed and disjointed but there is a joy in the rush of sensory language. If I didn't know better, I'd say he was influenced heavily by Manley Hopkins but of course, Hopkins wasn't really available in any complete way until after Thomas was dead. He has Hopkins' way with tumbling stress and sprung rhythm; his spray of alliteration and repetition. There is a Shakespearean flavour to a lot of what Thomas does, too - particularly the sense of the "poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling", the move from the particular to the metaphysical. It's probably fair to say the whole thing doesn't really hang together but at a sentence level, he's kind of astonishing - and it's no wonder Frost nudged him towards poetry, as Thomas has an innate sense of rhythm and a deep auditory imagination. I suspect I'll tire of the style over a book's length but it's pretty captivating all the same and there's something about knowing well some of the places he describes.

Wow, v. appealing, thanks. his compulsive walking and note-taking My man!
Hopkins wasn't really available in any complete way Still isn't, in an affordable way---although if anybody knows of US-feasible exceptions, please advise, thx.

Regarding How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti: I've read a bit past Act 1 and so far the writing makes me think of a calmer more controlled version of Miranda July without vulnerability or self-disclosure. I think the question that is the book's title is a good one and so far the method for asking it seems determinedly prosaic. I think the absolute bewilderment and confusion and inability to act that comes with freedom and with changes in life circumstances were accurately depicted. If critics are faulting it for being self-absorbed or obvious I can see why, but I think the writing is deliberately obvious.

I still can't quite tell how far this is a good novel or a bad novel that had influential ideas.

This is a quintessential PKD experience based on my reading of Ubik and High Castle. You go from earnest psychodrama to mind-blowing sci-fi oddness to scenes with laser fights that feel like they were scripted by teenagers. It’s v disorienting in an interesting way, but it’s hard to tell what’s deliberate vs what’s a happy accident. Fwiw I found that disorientation boring and alienating in High Castle, attached to a bathetically overserious plot; and then Ubik was sillier and more fun but somehow cut deeper.

I prefer his short stories, but honestly I like the novels most if you consider the 99% probability he was off his face and smooth any inconvenient plot gaps that way. Three Stigmata…very much that kind of book for me.

High Castle isn't v good, is my recollection. From about 1965 till the end the imagination was off the scale at times.

James Crumley (US)
Milo and Sugrue series

What's the one where someone thinks God looks exactly like Linda Ronstadt? That one was a bit trying

Godstadt Had an avatar DJ, Linda Fox, slogan, May The Fox Be With You
Will check the Heti thx. Only Miranda July I've read: novel The First Bad Man and a couple of equally ace short stories. Her narrators not nec. Unreliable, but sometimes self-revealing in a show-even-more-than-tell (or by-tell) way.
otm posts on PKD. Speaking of short stories, seems that some of the early ones, especially are very carefully, confidently thought-out and constructed, w/o seeming self-conscious, especially when it comes to dynamics within and between groups (wow wish I could offer some titles, but time has passed; see The Collected Stories Vulume I.

Seems like some family members on father's side were involved in a German worker's movement that valued self-and-other-education in arts, philosophy, history, as well as a more sophisticated approach to crafts.

I'm glad he got more freewheeling, It’s v disorienting in an interesting way, but it’s hard to tell what’s deliberate vs what’s a happy accident: part of thee appeal for sure, also that you never know if you're going to like the results, can't take him for granted.

Somewhere he recounted a very detailed, steady-cam dream about a wonderful machine, think it had to do with hydro-electricity. He woke up and made very detailed notes, but to make more sense of them, went to library and then ordered several books, including textbooks, on engineering. Decades before CAD and other graphic programs, went to a professional draftsman, then took results to a consulting engineer, who said it might work if you also invented a device that could do X and a part that could do Y with a system Z.
He said that was the end of the road for him, having spent (unspecified) on books, drafting, consultant's fee. Also having spent all that writing time, so back to it.

Seems like some family members on father's side were involved in a German worker's movement that valued self-and-other-education in arts, philosophy, history, as well as a more sophisticated approach to crafts.Could have had something to do with his Bay Area roots, big blue-collar-industrial x arts area, despite cultural friction.

I've avoided delving into his backstory very much, as with other writers who are so very much with us in their own writing as well as biographies; I think he comes through well enough on his own, to put it mildly (ditto Tiptree, Plath, Proust, Highsmith. Flannery O'Connor, though of course I can't unread etc.)

How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti captures very well the uncertainty and second guessing and circumnavigation that surround the guilty party's belief that procrastination or immobility from self-doubt or cynicism or despair is not laziness.

Finished 'Anabasis,' read a chapbook by Katie Ebbitt about/after Ana Mendieta that was pretty rending if strangely oblique.

Red Nation Rising Nick Estes et al
radical book on the borderland towns where Indians are oppressed by whites in current day US. Published last year.
Short book and a quick read . I'm finding it pretty fascinating anyway.
Does have me wondering how it got into the Irish library system, who orders things like this and for what reasons. Bit very glad it odes give me access to things like this.

I need to read Anabasis if its the Ancient Greek source for the story the Warriors is based on .
That's Xenophon so is that a modern retelling?

I just saw a good version of Aristophanes's The Frogs today put on as a year project by the local University's 3rd year of the Drama course.

I haven't read the St. John Perse book of poems he titled 'Anabasis', but I can tell you that the connections between the Warriors film and Xenophon's 'Anabasis' are easily detectable, but distant, like cousins with widely different personalities, but who share the 'family nose and ears'.

I loved the Xenophon in my 20s, because it was both a ripping tale and the first book that made ancient Greece seem like a real place full of real people to me. I reread it ten years ago and it's still a good story, but the excitement of discovering a whole new world was missing.

It's fear of failure.

The Postman Always Rings Twice's narrating narcissist scarred me, like nothing 'til I went around with Mr. Ripley

It seems Cain's book is one of the earliest examples (if not the earliest example) of a noir novel narrated by the villain in that sort of disarming/disorienting manner that blithely assumes the reader should have no compunctions about any of the nasty things taking place. It's a good trick and one that was subsequently much imitated, by writers from Camus to Highsmith to Jim Thompson, whose The Killer Inside Me, which I read last year, is a direct descendant of Cain's novel, with added violence and sadism. I'm curious what close precursors there are. Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" comes to mind. Apparently Cain himself was a well-bred, well-spoken, educated fellow, the son of a college president and former editor at the New Yorker, but you'd never guess that from the pitch perfect demotic voice he creates for Chambers. Cain never inserts any other disapproving perspective into the story or any sort of distancing effect. He relies on the fast pace and titillating details to keep you interested in the story Chambers is telling, no matter how much you might be disgusted by his coarse attitudes and actions.

Also, if you're curious about the title, like I was, which seems to have nothing to do with the story itself, this is an amusing story:

https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2019/10/how-the-postman-always-rings-twice-got-its-name/

Mildred Pierce impressed me about a decade ago.

A Guardian Angel Recalls - Willem Frederik Hermans (Herinneringen van een engelbewaarder - 1971)

Those ungrateful words from my ward were very disagreeable to God after all I had done for him. He decided to give the ingrate a small lesson, so that he might for once experience what it's like when no angel is watching over him.
...
It was as if an icy wind from a later life that was even darker than his present was blowing in his face.

An interesting book, about guilt and accidental violence and paths taken and not taken and confused accidents of intention and apprehension, set as the Nazis invade the Netherlands. It is particularly potent reading during the invasion of Ukraine, and seeing the queues of migrants leaving, posing the question 'how long do you leave it before you leave it too late?'. I always think of the descriptions of Walter Benjamin with his passport forever in his jacket pocket.

The main character is a public prosecutor, but this is not Camus, and the extent to which the two central acts, one of love renounced, and one of tragic violence, can or should be seen as symbolic, is uncertain, deliberately so. The deliberate moral framework of the novel, with the guardian angel overseeing their ward, is itself cracked and warped by the violence around it. In such a tumult what meaning can symbols have meaning that doesn't get washed out in the flood and fire - at the end poetry ends up in flames and administrative documents and papers in seawater, and with the dissolution of these bourgeois papers, moral meaning seems to flee with them. (I mean bourgeois favourably here ofc). And finally there is the brutal consequence of coincidence and error in a time of danger - coincidence that might be frivolous or amusing in safety, is mortal in war.

The whole might be seen as a test and examination of that Chestertonian problem posed in the Father Brown Mystery of the Broken Sword:

“Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest? … He grows a forest to hide it in…. A fearful sin.

The style is not compelling, but the narrative – of a bourgeois man navigating his heart, social position, psychology and moral sense in the eyes of his guardian angel, as he and his friends find their lives on the edge of a bloody, narrowing wire – is compelling. it poses complicated matters of faith and action, or perhaps i should say inaction, in a way that i think will work around my head for some time.

odd how the blurb and cover of the pushkin press edition i'm reading seem to want to pose it as a thriller. that seems entirely wrong tho the Publishers Weekly quote, beneath the John le Carré quote, of him being 'A modern Dostoyevsky' is not completely wrong.

I love Mildred Pierce, great book

xp wiki sez:
Themes
Underlying all of Hermans's works, says Hermans scholar Frans A. Janssen, is the theme of epistemological nihilism. Only the means employed by logic and the sciences are capable of producing reliable knowledge. All other fields of study, including philosophy, ethics, psychology, the humanities and societal studies, are unable to produce knowledge that can be called reliable or certain. Literature and the arts can "show truths" by employing irrational devices. For the greatest part the world is unknowable, and even language is no reliable tool of communication. Hermans's characters are personifications of this state of affairs, loners who continuously misinterpret the reality surrounding them, unable to do something meaningful with other interpretive views when confronted with them, victims to the mercy of chance, misunderstanding. They fail, OK, OK! But this whole profile makes him seem like a potentially compelling voice, as novelist, anyway, as does Fizzles' take, for sure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Frederik_Hermans

Really getting some very intriguing takes on this thread nowadays, thanks yall!

Interesting, dow - I certainly agree with that wikitake wrt A Guardian Angel.

Need to clear up some word soup in my post:

In such a tumult what meaning can symbols have meaning that doesn't get washed out in the flood and fire

One thing I might say about that para you posted - I think it's less about 'failure' as such, more 'what could it possibly mean to succeed, in a world like this?'

The main character - Alberegt - 'fails' less than his Guardian Angel, in the end, who ends up fleeing like the Queen of the Netherlands (I make no judgment on her btw - but the characters' response is one of bitterness, fatalism and pragmatic cynicism).

This is a quintessential PKD experience based on my reading of Ubik and High Castle. You go from earnest psychodrama to mind-blowing sci-fi oddness to scenes with laser fights that feel like they were scripted by teenagers. It’s v disorienting in an interesting way, but it’s hard to tell what’s deliberate vs what’s a happy accident. Fwiw I found that disorientation boring and alienating in High Castle, attached to a bathetically overserious plot; and then Ubik was sillier and more fun but somehow cut deeper.

Good post from Chuck Tatum, especially about the bizarre mixtures and transitions ... But I don't agree about HIGH CASTLE, by far the best PKD novel I've read, and I can't say that UBIK is fun - it's about death, decay, entropy, the loss of reality. Deep, yes, if not exactly fun.

I've picked up PKD's A MAZE OF DEATH, which I read closely 6 years ago, and most of it now seems very unfamiliar. A character in it talks about Gandalf. Gandalf ?!

It’s from lord of the rings

Finished Crossroads, a thumping good read as they say, less positive about the last third or so

Finished Red Nation Rising by Nick Estes et al. Need to read the couple of other Indian books i have in my to read list Heartbeat of Wounded Knee and Surviving Genocide . Should have both read by now i think.
May be overstretching myself in several directions.

Gone back to Walter Rodney's book on the Russian Revolution which was compiled by notes for a course he was teaching in Africa .
I possibly should know the history better tahn i do. I did read Orlando Figes history of the Revolution about a decade ago, possibly a bit more. Definitely sometime in that region cos it was a book on the solidarity camp in the first year and i think I took it out of the library later.
THis is interesting and so far is looking at historiography of the sources available at the time which is late 70s He's now looking at the timeline while still looking at the various sources.
I may wind up reading some other histories of the era eventually. But I do want to read through Rodney.

also looking at some of the stories in the Black Science Fiction anthology that i got for Pauline Hopkins Of One Blood which started out promising but i wasn't convinced by the end part. Got some other historic stuff in and a load of newer writers. Anyway hope i'm going to get through this and everything else over teh next month.
Found out taht my library book dates were extended a long way without my knowledge. Several weeks on almost all of them. THink most of them should have been due back by now. Was happening a lot during the pandemic so surprised it still is. Though do possibly need the more time. Need to finish some more of these things.