Bright Remarks and Throwing Shade: What Are You Reading, Summer 2022?

Poesia Descalza
Vida Rebeldes: Leon Trotski

Early reflections on JACOB'S ROOM:

Lots of material of interest, for interest re Scarborough and its sea front.

VW trying to experiment, to move fiction in a certain direction; to pause and linger over characters, objects, moments; to avoid story in a straightforward way (arguably lots of people had already been doing that - like James? - but VW here is maybe doing it differently.)

The novel seems to be marred, though, by a prevalence of a certain tone that VW nervously had, which can be called: irony, archness, even whimsy. This combines with odd grandiosity and even archaism in eg: her penchant for placing adjectives early in phrases: 'Dim was the evening'. I feel an uncertainty of tone here, or maybe it's just a tone that I don't like or doesn't convince me. It seems to me that this tone remains present in later masterpieces but there is taken up in a whole that is more assured, which allows the irony to do its work without dominating and spoiling the book. Then in ORLANDO the whole book is ironic and comic, which allows the dodgy ironic tone to be ... almost itself ironised, losing all its awkwardness as it becomes simply a comic mode.

I also reflect that the book currently describes a very elite world - Cambridge students and dons - which is fine in itself, but which casts a bad light on eg: VW's (I suppose slightly later) polemics against Arnold Bennett, complaining that one shouldn't describe the clothes and salaries of shopkeepers and so on. VW was making a serious aesthetic critique, but in context of a novel like this it comes across as class exclusion or disdain, which I don't think was what she intended. Put more simply, if you write about Cambridge dons then it doesn't look good to attack people who write about shopkeepers. (But Bennett was a big personality in his own right and doesn't, himself, seriously stand for 'the working classes' or anything like that, here.)

Grant & I Robert Forster
Go-Betweens co founder and co frontman memoir of times leading up to and in the band and after. I've got to a point where the band has split and they've toured as the 2 frontman Forster and the Grant of the title , Mclennan.
Pretty well written and I have been meaning to read this for a while and found it in a charity shop in a pristine copy which my shopping soon put paid to . like bummer.

Killers of the Flower Moon is v good indeed

(It’s the only time me and my partner have bought copies of a book at the same time so we didn’t have to wait for the other person to finish it first.)

Anyway! It’s a v compelling murder mystery that’s also about the Pinkertons and how the FBI started and how white supremacy became ingrained in American policing.

I'm reading Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and not feeling it. The narrators are pompous to beyond absurdity, the gestures towards unspeakable horror are far too vague to be unsettling, and some of the stories are just downright banal.

I wish I could read novels again

Jacob's Room defines "transitional novel" imo

I'm waiting for term to finish (four days!) and then I can start reading novels again.

I'm reading Hannah Gadsby's Ten Steps to Nanette. It does the work of filling in much of the stuff she alludes to in Nanette and Douglas - growing up in rural Tasmania (a mix of wildly beautiful and wildly regressive); her struggles in coming to terms with her sexuality; the extreme loneliness and dysfunction in her personal life; her ASD diagnosis, which led to a refiguring of most of what she'd been through. (There's more but a lot of it's brutal and I don't want to put triggering stuff here).

Much like her stand-up, it's intermittently hilarious but mostly - and very intentionally - confrontational and direct. Trauma runs through her like tree rings and she structures the thing to best show the formation of each layer as its laid down. I'm privileged enough to be able say smug things like 'I feel like I've learned loads from her - about internalised homophobia, about autism' without having experienced any of the brutality, but it's very much the case.

I loved this: Once I understood that I was always going to have difficulty with self-regulation, I stopped worrying about it. Once I am distressed, my moods are not mine to control, but my environment is. I am always working to remove myself from all the cycles and patterns of hostile environments... And I no longer search my behaviours exclusively for revelations about my character, I use my occasions of distress as ways to map the circumstances and environments I move through, and look for ways I can reduce my exposure to distressing situations.

Almost finished Harry Mathews’ collection, ‘Country Cooking & Other Stories.’ First Mathews I’ve read that isn’t a translation, the title story is a gorgeously done parody of stuffy regional French cuisine customs and books, really beautiful and tonally spot on. I’ve always had a deep fondness for the language of cookbooks and used to flip through my mom’s sizable collection when I was a stoned teenager. Great little book.

What is a transitional novel?

Stands athwart literary history and yells, "I am figuring shit out."

She was figuring out if she wanted to be some kind of modernist or else?

Monk decides to be a butterfly or vice-versa.

Did he publish sections early for financial reasons or for feedback? Could he have been ahead of his time but not had the right tools? I was reminded of the student in Ulysses and the ink blots with a bad pen. (He had sympathy with the student because the student was constrained by his surroundings?)

80pp or so into JACOB'S ROOM, similar feelings. Poster Alfred said it's a transitional novel. That's a widespread view, but what does it mean, in the sense: what is the transition between?

'Realism' and 'Modernism'? No, I don't think that catches it. I think it's something like: C19 voice and C20 structure. The 'structure' here is the ability to glide around, elide scenes, focus in and pull back; to tease at the edge of a character's consciousness then move away. It's also something about the non-event nature of the book (so far): the contentment with scene and juxtaposition rather than story. Here we would be in tune with VW's suspicion of narrative drive as expressed in, I think, 'Modern Fiction'.

The 'voice', on the other hand, is to me the thing that holds it back, seems more of a relic. It's hardly a 'realistic' voice. In fact it's often frame-breaking. It often talks of itself in the 1st person - much more, I think, than in VW's next two novels. It has personality and tone. These can cloy. I already mentioned an uncertain excess of irony, archness, whimsy, archaism. I'd add bathos: a regular feature, swooping from 'and so he read Cicero' to 'and she wondered about the price of strawberries', and the like. This is a very familiar VW tone, to be found in some of her greatest novels. My feeling here is that she's overusing it. I wonder also about the effect of the tones on the presentation of character - which is distanced, satirised, mocked. I don't think doing this as much as the novel does works well. Again, I feel that it's too heavily ironic.

So far the novel seems to me a valiant experiment that hasn't entirely worked, held back by what were the idiomatic resources of the author at the time.

"a valiant experiment that hasn't entirely worked" is certainly definition of a transitional novel

(I wonder what Joyce would have made of the Digital Humanities and Woolf of Afghan women's education.)

i was teasing my old pal ben w, a finnegans wake fan-scholar, by claiming that the best place to read it is in quotefragments on twitter, and he snatched the puff from my teasing by saying "yes, yes it is"

this proves joyce wd have loved the digital humanities IMO

Alfred: yes, we can agree that it might be called a transitional novel.

The question I raised, which I find more difficult (though tried to answer), is: transition from what to what?

As I said, perhaps long ago, on a Literary Twitter thread, I think the "FW is best on Twitter" claim holds up rather well.

I suppose you can take Twitter itself out of this and just say "it works best in unexpected fragments which pop up cheerfully and without advertising any particular meaning or context".

we shd persuade ilx poster tim to issue it as a ltd edn box of fortune cookie mottos, calling cards, pencils and such

Now that is the best idea you've had ... all day.

(carried to death and oblivion with an umbrella and surgical mask on a table in a pub in North London)

(What voice could she have affected if not for the whimsy of her class?)

I finished "Double Indemnity" by James M. Cain. Apparently he wrote this fairly quickly in the aftermath of the success of "Postman Always Rings Twice", and it reads like he's returning to the same well. The novelty of using the first-person point of view to narrate a crime has worn off, and this reboot lacks the raffish, demotic voice and atmosphere that gave "Postman" much of its louche energy. This one is more about plot velocity and whodunit-style revelations that keep the reader guessing. Certainly worth a read, but I would rank it a notch lower than its predecessor.

i remember spitting out my coffee when i read this howler from Double Indemnity

I thought about Lola, how sweet she was, and the awful thing that I had done to her. I began subtracting her age from my age. She was nineteen, I'm thirty-four. That made a difference of fiteen years. Then I got to thinking that if she was nearly wenty, that would make a difference of only fourteen years. All of a sudden I sat up and turned on the light. I knew what that meant.

I was in love with her.

Haha, yeah, one of many tonally jarring passages.

Reading poet Simone White's 'or, on being the other woman,' her debut on a "larger" press— Duke U put it out. Interesting book about navigating motherhood, Black femininity, performance, the academy, sex, and lots of interesting prosaic bits about hip-hop, such as an extended riff on Future's psychological landscape and Black masculinity.

xpost haven't read the book, but the movie's always seemed off too, characterization-wise, and even when not in comparison to any of the three versions of Postman I've seen.

Maybe I've missed the off elements of the film. I just love Barbara Stanwyck so much, I can't think of much else when I'm watching it.

I thought about Lola, how sweet she was, and the awful thing that I had done to her. I began subtracting her age from my age. She was nineteen, I'm thirty-four. That made a difference of fiteen years. Then I got to thinking that if she was nearly wenty, that would make a difference of only fourteen years. All of a sudden I sat up and turned on the light. I knew what that meant.
I was in love with her.

This sounds like it's from a Kids In The Hall monologue.

Hankering for some Victorian pulp action so I picked up Guy Boothby's Doktor Nikola. So far the writing is atrocious, hoping the plot will gather enough momentum for me to tolerate this.

It's been a few decades since i read the book Double Indemnity which may have been as part of one of those Pulp fiction anthologies 4 in ones in the Black something series. I think I got it from the local library who got in a few of taht series in the mid 80s . From what I can remember the ending is pretty surreal am I remembering this right, may be from a critical text about the thing but does the wife turn into a giant bird woman. Think this is more a psychological quirk on her part but does she convince herself she has become a crane or something and dress accordingly, swim out to a boat and meet her denouement or am I thinking of something else. The film is more realistic and fatalistic Fred MCMurray and barbara Stanwyck and a different ending.

Haha, wow, that is a surreal ending, but that is from a different book (I wonder which?) Some aspects of the ending did stretch my credulity a bit, and also just the general default assumption of lots of noir fiction that any regular person is capable of committing terrible crimes given the right opportunity.

Fortunately (in this case) I'm not much of a film buff and I've seen very few of the classic film noirs so I'm encountering these books without preconceptions.

This is grotesque!

I am an expert at judging age from the physiognomic lines of the brow: he is sixteen years and four months of age. He is as handsome as the retractility of the claws in birds of prey; or, again, as the unpredictability of muscular movement in sores in the soft spot of the posterior cervical region; or, rather, as the perpetual motion rat-trap which is always reset by the trapped animal and which can go on catching rodents indefinitely and works even when it is hidden under straw; and, above all, as the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table!

(The subject of my paraphrase was intended to be "the best idea"; I would treasure finding a ltd edn box.)

I probably shouldn't have mentioned the movie of DE in this case, but will say that The Postman is even more effective as a novel than any of its screen adaptations: in the pages, there's no escape (into visual considerations, other production elements) from that voice---the narrator doesn't seem so much unreliable as just---wrong, misbegotten, almost beyond bad, certainly breaking it, splintering it, sniffing it, chewing it---

DI, rather

> juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table!

where's this from, in kinda lost in all the cross posting...

anyway, it's a nurse with wound album title.

NWW alb title comes from a quote by Lautréamont, who wrote Goth fave Les Chants de Maldoror.

one does not just chant into maldoror

meanwhile i'm reading solzhenitsyn's cancer ward -- i read abt a third of it when i was a student and then got distracted by my wild young life (lol) and never finished it. 40-odd years later i have begun again at the beginning and got further than i did last time

i'm inclined to feel it's a wee bit DO YOU SEE in its approach to certain things but i will finish it before i comment more fully on this

I finished VW's JACOB'S ROOM. By the end, I had softened. After all my complaints, I liked the book more. Maybe the book changed, maybe I did; became used to it or accepted it. At times I felt: yes, this passage *could* be one of the great literary attempts at a description of the contingency of life in modern London.

I was similar with THE WAVES, long ago. It greatly frustrated me (there was no ILX then to record this fact), then by the very end I felt: I am reading an epic account of the nature of life and death. I am moved.

The 1992 Penguin JACOB'S ROOM I am reading contains notes, some of which are impressive and useful gatherings of fact (a long time before Wikipedia), some of which are hugely excessive editorialising - usually hammering home ideas that "Woolf rejects the male sentence" and "Woolf mocks the arrogance of men". That should have been left to the Introduction, which also holds plenty of it. Notes should be defter and more restrained. The novel itself, as it happens, is often as satirical about women - possibly to excess - as it is about men.

The novel is quite strong, though, on the gradual approach of war, briefly describing battleships going to sea, and so on, as punctuations of the main human action.

Again: in the end, I liked and accepted the novel more than I had thought.

I've started William Cooper, SCENES FROM PROVINCIAL LIFE (1950). Breezy, chipper, very lightly / slightly comic, easy to read. A book I've owned for decades, having probably bought it from Ellis Books in Norwich, for 95p - it would have been one of the pretty orange Penguins that they put in the window to attract customers. Reading the books I actually already own occasionally seems a good idea.

The most surprising thing about this book is how sexual it is. The sex is almost all between the lines, yet very heavily implied. I suspect as a young lad - including when I bought the book - most of this would have gone over my head.

I think I brought a Penguin paperback with me to an appointment at UCLA decades ago and the doctor who happened to be English remarked upon it along similar lines (regarding the Penguin and its ability to be recognized).

I own the edition of Maldoror published by Exact Change. I think it was around when Alasdair M. recommended or cited it IIRC and I was reading Denton Welch whose works they also published. I am glad they did.

(One day I will finish/read Maldoror, Infinite Jest, some novels by Thomas Pynchon, Ulysses (with the notes), Aesthetic Theory, and more. It is just a matter of being sufficiently deprived.)

It is worth remarking that SCENES (1950) is set in the past - specifically 1939, on the eve of war, despite being a comedy. It's a curiously strong example of the case that some have made, that while "the historical novel" is meant to be set c. 60+ years in the past, you could write one about more recent times if what you wrote about was a historical crux. It's probably a relatively significant novel about that era, in the way that eg Orwell's COMING UP FOR AIR is.

Perhaps the period setting helps to explain how in the world of the novel, a degree of sexual proscription applies - you can have a woman back to your lodgings during the day, but not do anything untoward with her. Yet the main female character has also started going to mysterious bohemian art school parties where people drink and lie on the floor.

This woman, Myrtle, is insistent on marrying the protagonist, and is deflated or alienated whenever it becomes clear that he wishes to avoid this prospect.

I am reminded of Stan Barstow's A KIND OF LOVING, with the difference that this earlier novel is more middle-class than that (or certainly than others like Sillitoe, anyway). The protagonist is a science teacher after all.

I can find something poignant about the straitened, limited world of characters in works like this - who lack the media of later ages, who are forbidden from certain actions, who must remain respectable (no doubt even in their dress) - though having said that, I'm not sure their lives are experienced as that straitened. There is also a gay, or perhaps bisexual, character who has a 17-year-old boyfriend whom he has to see in secret at a cottage.

Characters are all deliberately, physically described, except for the protagonist, who is not visually described at all.

Finished the Simone White book on Friday, loved the way it ends— no epiphanies!

This afternoon finished Jayne Anne Phillips’ MACHINE DREAMS. Don’t understand why she isn’t better known, love her lyrical prose style that often includes dynamic forays into vernacular language.