Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022

JUst got hold of Lenny Kaye's Lightning Striking where he looks at the scenes that created moments in rock history. I may be trying to read too many books at the same time as per usual but this sounded really necessary reading after I heard him on a podcast recently.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3pKGvGalCBYc5mBMKvbUqw?si=894d388c0d0548c9
The Ace Records podcast which has been good for a few other guests too, I listened to their episode on the Seeds where they interviewed Alec Palao alongside Darryl Hooper and the drummer who joined the band in 1968 who were all playing together in a reunion band.
Npt got very far in the book so far sine I just got it from the library yesterday. He looks at 10 scenes including Memphis 1954, San Francisco 1967, Detroit 69, NYC 75(which he emerged from as a member of Patti Smith's group) & London in 77.
Looks good so far.

Also need to gt through Monolithic Undertow by harry Sword which is about drone music.
Also looks good . & I know I have a deadline for finishing since it has a request on it after me.
I keep finding books appearing in the Irish library system that I really want to read but are disappearing before I get to them. Like lost book, destroyed or whatever or can't be lent out or something. Which is a pain. But have this now so do need to get into it.

JUst finishing David Treuer's heartbeat Of Wounded knee
In which a half native writer tries to look at what the living population of Indians who are so frequently depicted as a thing of the past are doing. It's part history part sociology or something along those lines. I'm just getting what the title means which I should have got earlier. as in heartbeat shows a body is alive.
Interesting book that I had recommended in a few places a while back and has probably taken me longer to read than it should . Which is a problem with reading several things at the same time. I would recommend it myself anyway.

also coming to the end of the book Soldaten by Sonke Neitzel and Harald Wenzler
in which they try to show the mindset 9of the WWII german army from transcriptions of tapes made of them as POWs it can be a hard read if you're squeamish. I'd be interested in reading more similar books from other armies and not sure what is out there. Like there must be a reason people think they are fighting for and checking taht against reality can be interesting.

but which is at the base of something that's nagging away at me, which I'm trying to scratch

Classic Fizzles.

Enjoying the surprising way that Howards End went from zero to DRAMA in two chapters

I thought the drama around a lost umbrella and the elephants in Beethoven were in one of the early chapters of that novel, but I may be misremembering.

Finally finished reading the Brothers Karamazov (on my phone). I'm here to tell you it's great! Found some characters and chapters more engaging than others but as a whole was much more fun to read than I expected. Lots of other thoughts but I'm sure I don't have anything particularly new or illuminating to say about it.

Which translation? Been trying to figure out the best one. Not a Pevear fan though.

I read the Constance Garnett one, which apparently is maligned for its inaccuracy but I really enjoyed the way it read. A friend is reading a different one (can't remember who but its supposedly the most literal translation) and it seemed way more stiff. Glad I didn't read that one, although I did ask him about certain lines.

I read Bros and some other D translated by David Magarshack: no idea how accurate, but enjoyed it.

I still haven' worked my way through a Constance Garnett translation but was beginning to think that her style was what effect Dostoevsky had been working on. I have heard he was heavily influenced by the English novel. So still wondering. I found her style offputting when i was trying to read him a few decades ago.
NOw still got all my Dostoevsky on the to read list and loads of other stuff I'm likely to read ahead of it. Do have a number of his books though. In several different translators versions. Had a more modern version of Crime & Punishmnet that I meant to get to over the original lockdown.

I think I might be a heathen because I'm reading Roberto Bolano's By Night in Chile and getting nothing from it. Where I feel like I should be reading patterns and motifs in the prose, getting the swirl and frenzy of a dying man's feverish recollections of the past and the dread of the build-up to Pinochet, instead I'm just blank, verging on annoyed. If I had my time again I'd take it one hit, but as of now, halfway, I think I'm going to quit.

I've got this weird dissonance because I feel like I know Bolaño because of Javier Cercas's Soldiers of Salamis and this feels like a betrayal.

I have confirmed that the elephants (as well as goblins) are in Beethoven and an umbrella has been lost, both rendered dramatically. The fear of poverty in the middle classes seems modern. I think the drama is there but elaborately cloaked as if he is parodying Henry James (as fussy, which might not be generous).

Conversations with Contemporary Continental Thinkers edited by Richard Kearney.

mainly for the enjoyable derrida conversation, which i found surprisingly conservative in that he admits several constraints in deconstructionism, and the inescapable or very very difficult to escape nature of working in the western logocentric world.

https://i.imgur.com/LvlEsdU.jpg

Just started Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. Too early to get a sense of it, but everyone in my book club who has got farther into it is loving it.

Had a lot of fun reading that Towles book. Reminded me a lot of Huckleberry Finn and As I Lay Dying. Will be curious what your opinion is at the end. Would love to read a sequel following several of the characters. The ending was a bit of a swerve, after multiple perils played out harmlessly. Wish Woolly had telegraphed his intentions, and leaving Duchess in the leaky boat wasn't well-thought out by Emmett.

If you like it, would recommend "A Gentleman in Moscow", also.

lol mark. always a classic pic.

tbf he could probably get in the england batting line up these days if he wanted.

more things i bin reading recently - the lewis trilogy by peter may. i don’t know. the main feeling of reading these was that it felt like reading a tv series.

grim detection burrowing back into the past for the answers to a crime committed now. interleaving alternating narratives - one the current investigation, one revealing layer by layer the history, until they meet at the climax of the novel. technically probably quite well done but it felt formulaic.

otoh, some of the past narrative segments, if they were taken as interlinked short stories, could in that light be seen as quite good, well-researched and fairly well-written vignettes of Lewis life.

uses the word desuetude far too often. twice in the first novel. more in the others.

uses the word desuetude far too often

always slightly embarrassed when i notice this sort of thing but also i like it

I finished No Fond Return of Love. It embodied Pym's mildly amused perspective on ordinary human behavior. Not her best (which is Less Than Angels), but still a pleasant meander through middle class English foibles.

Have now read about 1/2 of that Harry Sword Monolithic Undertow where he explores teh drone through history. or at least goes back to prehistory to look at its presence then through the artefacts surviving from teh time and then jumps forward to the jazz scene in the late 50s/60s and then goes into Minimalism. I think the book could have been better proof read, Cecil Parker the famous pianist is mentioned.
But I'm finding this an easy read and a compelling one. Quite enjoying it. Don't think I'm disagreeing with it overly, do think he skips a few bits and pieces. Did think he might have mentioned Peter Walker the guitarist that Timothy Leary used as an accompanist for acid sessions since he does talk about those sessions in passing.

Finished Lisa Robertson’s Anemones: A Simone Weil Project this morning, started my first experience with James Purdy last night with Eustace Chisholm.

Purdy is bat shit in the best sense.

Think his last book he really went off the deep end, maybe some medical thing was going on with him someone might have told me.

I have been told that I will love him, the first two chapters of Eustace are confirmation that those who have told me I'd love him are correct.

I think it was Brad Nelson who recommended Rachel Cusk's "Outline" trilogy here and prompted me to check out the first part. I'm now partway through the third (Kudos) and I've found them fascinatingly observant and wryly funny.

I got over my Bolaño block with Jim Thompson's The Getaway. I thought I must have read this before but I think I would have remembered the grisly realism of it and the batshit ending, which takes some, uh, hallucinatory liberties with the notion of a 'getaway'.

I started Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford. It's a great title for a novel and that drew me in, but a comedy on the social morés and personal dysfunctions of the English upper crust, set in an era when they had far more wealth and power, is rather tepid fun. I read Highland Fling last winter and not one bit of it remains in my memory. Not sure I'll finish this one.

I got over my Bolaño block with Jim Thompson's The Getaway. I thought I must have read this before but I think I would have remembered the grisly realism of it and the batshit ending, which takes some, uh, hallucinatory liberties with the notion of a 'getaway'.

― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski), Friday, June 3, 2022 7:45 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

oddly enough neither of the film versions uses the end that Thompson had on the novel.

Eustace Chisholm is truly balls-to-the-wall insane, highly recommended, highly readable if you can stomach it

I read James Purdy’s Malcolm a long time ago and remember it being impressively overwrought, so am interested in reading Eustace Chisholm

There’s a notorious scene that I arrived at today, and I immediately understood why he’s equally beloved and reviled. It was horrifying.

still want to read Bolaño's 2666

Me too./pvmic

read 2666's 'the part about the critics', found myself not caring at all, stopped

2666 would be on the shortlist for my favorite novel.

read 2666's 'the part about the critics', found myself not caring at all, stopped

perfectly valid response and one I can easily sympathize with. the whole book required me to fight against a desire to not keep traveling along the road Bolaño was pulling me down. I only continued because the novel eventually inspired a weird fascination with Bolaño's vision of his characters and the world they inhabit. it is a bit like what I've heard about durians. nobody's first impression of a durian is favorable.

are you talking about durian the fruit? because I don't want to ever encounter that

"has been described variously as rotten onions, turpentine, and raw sewage"

no thanks

I can assure you my copy of the book is nearly odorless and tasteless, if that's your worry.

Every part of 2666 (he meant for them to stand alone, incl. publication, wanting to leave more money for his kids) after the Woody Allen-ish "The Part About The Critics" is different from it, pulling me in more and more---don't know how well they would have worked if published one by one; anyway, context accrues. This thread has a lot about 2666, which tends to come back through my head like a late night train, with a very irregular schedule: Roberto Bolano

Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz & Dina Gilio-Whitaker All The Real Indians Died Out

Book refuting a number of widely held myths and misinformation about Native American people. I read Dunbar Ortiz 's book An Indigenous People's History of The United States last year and enjoyed it also caught webinars and podcasts with her so wanted to read more. I ordered this through interlibrary loan and got sent the wrong thing. This became inactive on the file system so I assumed it was the other book wrongly entered. Then I saw it was heading to my library last week and arrived yesterday.
I've now read the first few chapters and am enjoying it. But another book I'm reading at the same time. Good though and will be trying to read more by her.
I've also ordered Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States which she contributed to the research of.

Today I finished CONSUMING JOYCE. Not very well written. Some bad grammar and sentences that needed fixing. Not very ground-breaking in its claims. But contains a lot of primary material that's worth knowing. The author had put in time to research newspaper back catalogues.

One thing I take away from it is the bland, irritating, superficial quality of much journalism. The journalists seem often to have written from a POV of superiority to Joyce though they'd probably barely read him. Seeing so much of this material in sequence reinforces this realisation.

alright fine I’ll read ULYSSES (1922) stop hassling me

[...] journalists seem often to have written from a POV of superiority [...]

Agreed, and find this mystifying. No better is confessional self-qualification for diversity, equality, inclusivness (DEI) initiatives. But I guess we all find listening (and openness) difficult (, understandably?).

sorry missing that 'e'

and equity not equality (too many typos - sorry)

Finished El Golpe Chileño by Julien Poirier, taken on a whim from a stack that my bookseller friend was sorting through.

Some interesting lines and a lovely set of elegiac poems about the death of the Diner in many Us cities, but otherwise a strange book that seems mostly to collect random stray writings from Poirier’s decades as a poet. I don’t mind books without a unifying theme or formal conceit, but this was a little too much of a mish-mash for me.

Finally finished War and Peace, one of the best books I've ever read & a real pleasure to read right up to the second epilogue, which feels interminable because it's literally Tolstoy saying "here's what I was talking about, here's my point" and, you know, lol

having done that it's back to Serbia for me, got into Croatian lit two years ago and now it's a large chunk of my reading diet -- David Albahari's Leeches right now. The other one of his I read, Götz and Meyer, was a short and devastating novel of the Holocaust; this one's funnier, very modern to be reading after Tolstoy, kind of jarring as I expected