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

no that Wells beget Welles was the fib! A ridiculous thing to believe. He was a bit of a rudeboy, he goes over to visit Gorky and comes back to England with his gf on his arm.

amazing work all round

Next they'll be telling you that the guy who directed Let it Be was Orson Welles' son.

I haven't read The Invisble Man, but Claude Rains is equally FURIOUS in the James Whale film.

Doesn't David Thomson suggest that Welles also sired Peter O'Toole on his teenage ramblings through Ireland?

Sadly just finished Claire-Louise Bennett's CHECKOUT 19 - first book I've read this year which I never wanted to end. I absolutely adored POND a few years ago, but thought it was such a beautifully peculiar one-off that there was little chance of her following it up without diminishing returns. But it's great. Interesting companion to Tove Ditlevsen's COPENHAGEN TRILOGY which I read last month - except in place of Danish tenements, typewriters and tarts, a lot more cheap biros, Marlborough Reds and Brighton guesthouses. Also put me in mind of Kate Briggs' THIS LITTLE ART with its deft, intimate, moving phenomenology of reading and writing.

Have also been reading Joe Moran - his lovely recent books on shyness and failure. I think JM has quietly and diligently turned out to be one of the greatest living English essayists. So many brilliant details in these books - there are a couple of pages in IF YOU SHOULD FAIL where he manages to weave together Johann Cruyff, Virginia Woolf, Huizinga and the Brooklyn Dodgers and somehow manages to be very succinct, modest and wise.

I've started THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1890) for the second time. (The first time was merely a false start when I only read a few pages.) Essentially it's in the category of books that I happen to own, and ought to read before buying or even borrowing anything else.

I hadn't realised how epigrammatic it was - just in the way that we know Wilde was - like one of his plays. I had perhaps thought there would be more novelistic narrative business in it; perhaps there will be, I'm still only in chapter two. Perhaps Wilde really cared more for dialogue than narrative and description. I have a sense that aspects of Wilde are apportioned to Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wooton (not so much to Dorian Gray), ie that they each carry an aspect of their creator.

Remarkable career to have produced 5 foundational SF narratives by about 1901 (time travel, alien invasion, space exploration, superpowers, mad scientist experimenting with genetics), then, I believe, largely left SF behind and gone into other literary modes.

More recent narratives and modes seem to be about a struggle with nature, that is also about being a part of it, and adaptation, internal and external, to post-apocalyptic circumstances (a slight shift in focus with less forward movement).

I was legitimately confused for a few seconds— in the US, at least, when someone writes INVISIBLE MAN, one immediately thinks of Ellison, not Wells. Or at least I do— I have never given HG Wells a single thought until today.

He wrote a lot of short stories too; local library has a collection of 50 that I sometimes take off the shelf and read in-house, should just check it out and plow through. Here's a .pdf of "The Land Ironclads," published in 1903, set in a near-future European land war (the Science Fiction Encyclopedia site has an very detailed entry about this subgenre: they knew it was coming). I'm struck now by the persistence of "gun culture" imagery: pastoral manly can-do self-defense, also the sporting aspect, in peacetime, where everybody knows the rules--vs. intrusion of pushbutton warfare, AK-47s and drones---the aging war correspondent here picks up on all of that (btw, something in his tone, though not wet, reminds me that average man lived about 45 years at turn of century) http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0604041h.html

*a* very

is pinefox going through all of the league of extraordinary gentlemen?

beardsley next

I finished Killers of the Flower Moon and can recommend it purely on the strength of its stunning portrayal of how pervasively racist and corrupt Oklahoma was in the 1920s, which is not to say the rest of the USA was substantially different, only that the book doesn't try to cover the entire nation.

I then read some more of Eve's Hollywood. I'm a third done and she's still telling tales of her teenage life, and as often happens with collections of short pieces published haphazardly over a period of years, the constant return to the same themes and obsessions is becoming repetitive.

Looking for something more substantial, I began The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand, a history of how the US Civil War catalyzed new intellectual and philosophical approaches to US social problems. It looks to be very interesting. I'll see how that develops.

I liked Dorian Gray, it can feel a bit flimsy at times but it’s by turns joking and serious, like someone laughing with you and then throwing a drink in your face. Are you reading the unredacted version? I think I’ve only ever read the censored versions.

Koogs: yes, I am accidentally rediscovering the fin de siecle.

I have in the past considered reading Aubrey Beardsley's UNDER THE HILL - his one novel I believe.

Gyac: I think the version I am reading is quite scholarly (though merely a Penguin), in that it has endnotes stating where things have been changed from other versions. So quite probably this is an unredacted version.

quartermaine and nemo and nina harker are the others iirc.

(in fact the point of the books is that they are *entirely* populated with fictional characters. including molesworth and gang as the rolling stones analog)

I have an Olympia Press/Traveller's Companion edition of Under the Hill - says 'completed by John Glassco'?

After the Wells discussion here, it was pleasing to see a copy of The Time Machine, with Wells' name on the cover, turn up in the final episode of Better Call Saul.

I had to correct myself when I saw that paperback cos I thought I had it then realised it was a First Men In The Moon apparently from the same series. Bought it in UWO in London Ontario.
Great covers anyway look like pulp sci fi magazine ones.

The Penguin Book Of The British Short Story, Vol.1 - Edited by Philip Hensher. I enjoyed the second volume of this, which goes from Wodehouse to Zadie Smith (I have no opinion on the compiler as an author), so thought I'd backtrack to the first. REALLY rough start - a Defoe sketch of a ghost story that may be of historical interest but is painfully generic; Swift being his usual "I'm saying one thing but mean the opposite DO YOU SEE" self in an essay that's basically just complaining about a servant; a Henry Fielding story about a woman who is - gasp - A LESBIAN which again is historically interesting, certainly for queer studies, but I'm not going to read a 18th century dude on this topic for fun; Hannah Moore and Mary Lamb competing to see who can be the most saccharine incarnation of old timey gentility (a fruit selling girl abused by her landlady gets saved by a cop's wife and taught Christianity and a small child visits her grandmother on a farm, respectively). Things get better starting with a Thackeray story and from thereon it's mostly reliable big names, but boy did I have to do some skipping to get there.

The compiler's contention that the British short story is "probably the richest, most varied and historically extensive in the world" feels a bit citation needed as well.

That's an incredible comment, but no surprise coming from Hensher.

Was reading this short yesterday. I've had more luck with Latin America.

You can read Elisa's translation of "The Flies", which appears in BEYOND, at our website now: https://t.co/JeQB6zWx4x pic.twitter.com/0mzGfbNBKX

— Sublunary Editions (@sublunaryeds) August 16, 2022

Horacio Quiroga is great. See also Felisberto Hernández.

Home Eoin O'Broin
left wing politician's argument for social housing. Looking at the effects of a bill passed in the mid 90s taht has had pretty negative consequences in terms of housing. THough presumably at least supposedly done for the common good.
I caught the local launch of this and have meant to read it ever since.
Pretty interesting anyway.

I Am Damo Suzuki Damo Suzuki, Paul Woods
cowritten memoir pf one time Can frontman. I thought this would be more in his voice but has a lot of 3rd person description as well as oral history from those he was around. It also seems to go through Can a lot faster than I was expecting, only has a couple of chapters with him in the band before he leaves with his Jehovah's Witness wife whose religion he soon leaves behind too.
He went on to be a salaryman in a German branch of a Japanese firm for the next two and a half decades which is where i've got to so far.

finished
Mother of Invention Katrine Marcal.
starts off with some decent ideas and refers to some interesting facts but I think is argued poorly and tries to beat one over the head with too many things that are not as fully supported as the author would like. I think there are other books on the subject which argue the points better and I think the author cites them in her bibliography.
I'll look into those cos I would like to have a well argued version of the basic argument. Does seem a little like something that might be seen as white feminism and could be so much more.

Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory Nancy Fraser, Rahel Jaeggi
The 2 authors dialogue about the history and basic principles of Capitalism.
THink I might have done better not to rush read teh last few chapters in order to get book back and borrow more.
Cos i think what I did tale in was pretty worthwhile, think I am going to try to read more by both authors. & have a bibliography to work through.

& borrowed
Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir
which I think I got pointed to by tie ins with The Northman some of the research for which was done by the author.
Not really looked into this yet but should be pretty interesting. The role of woman in the Viking world which has recently been shown to have been more ethnically diverse than some would like to see it. & IO think most pre Industrial Revolution societies had a different attitude to the breakdown of gender work divide etc so will be good to see what is said here.

&
God is Red: A Native View of Religion Vine Deloria Jr.,
which looks into Native American understandings of religion etc and was something I heard referred to elsewhere. I think it was in the bibliographies of Thomas King's the Inconvenient Indian and the book on Bordertowns by native American authors i read earlier this year

if the defoe is "the apparition of mrs veal", it's also often cited as a precursor to the modern ghost story (not at all the same thing of course as the modern short story): as always with defoe -- who was a professional journalist at a fast-evolving highly conflicted time -- you have to be careful what's intended as fact, what's fable, what's grift and what's crusade (some of his writing is literally all four at once lol, and the ghost stories are i think generally categorised as "true", in the sense that defoe was inventing the weekly world news here rather than tales from the crypt

i checked why hensher is deplored on ilx (mid-level not-great novelist who writes amusingly rude reviews that ppl often don't agree with?) and i can't tell from daniel's summary what his stance as editor is on when the "short story" per se arrived as we understand it (mid-19th century makes sense, it's a product of a specific kind of magazine ecology) and what its actual relationship is to its precursors -- the examples listed are all in a sense of a kind of precursor of course, in that post-arrival the short story presumably picked up some of the readers who'd favoured one of the precursors, but they're also all performing a very different function for an identifiably different primary readership (different from the "short story" but also different from one another), and almost all also flourished before the novel proper (aka the "long story" haha) has settled into an agreed-on role

I met Hensher once. As far as I recall he was not especially pleasant or polite. But that is of no course no comment on his fiction.

"i checked why hensher is deplored on ilx (mid-level not-great novelist who writes amusingly rude reviews that ppl often don't agree with?)"

He is a South London local, see him now and then and will be sure to pass this on.

mark, Hensher goes into the genealogy of the short story in his intro: basically he sets up one camp as placing the short story as a 19th century invention, another as taking a wider view that might take in the Canterbury Tales and Manderville, and himself, I guess, somewhere in the middle (always a comfortable strategy to suggest two warring camps and yourself as the reasonable middle ground ofc).

Some of the more engaging parts of his intro are about the lost ecology of short story magazines and how reading stories in those differs from our current main way of consuming them, i.e. single author collections

The Defoe is indeed the one you cited - I did indeed assume it was included for its pioneering role in the ghost story, and truth be told I had a good enough time with it, tho having read many of those it certainly didn't stand out much

so i finally finished cancer ward, which i first began reading in like 1980 lol

i will post some thoughts at some point

i liked it mostly but the nobel shd have gone to césaire

Did you go back and start over from the 1980 bits?

Been reading Brazilian (Giovana Madalosso), Catalan (Jaume Cabré) and Portuguese (Mário Zambujal) authors, but none of the books I read have been translated into English so have nothing to contribute here.

― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, August 10, 2022

Other themes: friendship between men, rivalry between sisters, the microsocieties that evolve during wartime (I think my mother's family got by doing laundry and making bread (probably steamed not baked) for the U.S. Army; I'm not sure how my father's family survived; I'm guessing it was not an issue so therefore not as memorable or my father just doesn't talk very much)

I'm guessing the medical terminology was deliberately acquired and is not as convincing or moving as the art and history of art.

dow: i restarted tho even then the restart was also a bit bumpy (ie i re-began it two years ago and then there was a hiatus again and this time i didn't go back)

now i am reading little-known obscurity the satanic verses

I had known of some relation between A REBOURS and DORIAN GRAY, but hadn't realised how pivotal it was. It seems that Husymans' novel has a huge influence on the character and determines much of his course in life - though Wilde for whatever reason doesn't name the book or author.

Much of the book is more readable than I'd expected, When Wilde here does get away from dialogue and into more extended 3rd-person narrative, it doesn't always go well. I'm thinking especially of the strangely distended catalogues of historical facts that DG gets interested in, about which king owned which jewel, and so on - in Chapter XI. This particular section is at least as tedious as some people like to say the catalogues in the second half of Ulysses (Cyclops, Circe) are - in fact usually much more tedious, as Joyce is usually being comic.

The question of what DG's 'sins' are remains, thus far, murky. They dare not speak their names. It seems in part to involve drugs; opium dens for instance. One possibly interesting fact is that it doesn't seem to be all homosexual - it is implied that he has corrupted and disgraced women as well, even after his first disastrous romance with Sibyl Vane. That episode surprised me (DG is in love with a woman!?) and reminded me a bit of an old Guardian article headed something like 'James Dean: his secret straight life'.

I sense a relation between Wilde's precious narrative style and a) that of Joyce's Portrait (where that style is arguably ironised) and b) a bit more surprisingly perhaps, that of Virginia Woolf. The link in the latter case (and even, come to think of it, in the former) would probably be Walter Pater, whose sister, as I recall, taught Woolf.

I am only 2/3 through and thus my impression of the book is far from complete.

Much of the book is more readable than I'd expected, When Wilde here does get away from dialogue and into more extended 3rd-person narrative, it doesn't always go well.

Should more usefully have read something like:

Much of the book is more readable than I'd expected, especially as it's made up of witty quasi-intellectual dialogue. But when Wilde here does get away from dialogue and into more extended 3rd-person narrative, it doesn't always go well.

i'm guessing that 130-yrs-plus of political activism of various kinds make it very hard not to project back on wilde and beardsley and such a much more cut-and-dried modern sexuality than they or their readers (friendly or hostile) understood themselves to be declaring or revealing, or whatever, beyond the (i feel provocatively vague) idea of "decadence": what descriptor would you roll out for salome, for example (which they both worked on)*? clock jokanaan (aka john the baptist) flinching away from the heorine: WHAT IF SEX, BUT TOO MUCH?

(huysmans apparently mentions moreau's salomé paintings: moreau being one of the few precursors that breton would accept for surrealism… )

•wilde was pretty cutting abt beardsley's illustration-work for salomé: possibly bcz it's better than his play lol (i have never seen it; richard strauss's music is exactly what you' expect, like being force-fed a cauldron-full of delicious but faintly weird-tasting chocolates)

https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/beardsley/8.jpg

force-fed a cauldron-full of delicious but faintly weird-tasting chocolates) Goes perfectly w that illustration!

the (i feel provocatively vague) idea of "decadence" This worked better than I would have thought in the screen adapatation: at least, it kept me watching---wiki:

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a 1945 American horror-drama film based on Oscar Wilde's 1890 novel of the same name. Released in June 1945 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the film is directed by Albert Lewin and stars George Sanders as Lord Henry Wotton and Hurd Hatfield as Dorian Gray. Shot primarily in black-and-white, the film features four colour inserts in three-strip Technicolor of Dorian's portrait; these are a special effect, the first two inserts picturing a youthful Dorian and the second two a degenerate one.

That episode surprised me (DG is in love with a woman!?) and reminded me a bit of an old Guardian article headed something like 'James Dean: his secret straight life'. Will have to look for that---you're reminding me of an unexpected aspect of Tim Lawrence's Arthur Russell bio, especially the sexual tension between AR and the very articulate, candid, romantic, mystically educated Joyce Bowden, whose looks matched her "seraphic" voice, to an extent that even got the musically obsessed Russell distracted, exclaiming to his engineer, like, omg is she real, do I wake or dream, and declaring, "I'm a closet heterosexual." The tension between them was mostly creative friction, but hard to entirely sublimate, and seems to have been obliquely expressed when she was late to a session, and he said, "Oh well at least you look good," which she found crushing, and is the only cruel quote in the book: he could be Cap'n Ahab of the Perfect Take, but this was understood, by Bowden and several others (at least until some of the latter burned out) as not only compulsion, but a quest for something deeper, for finding himself in the music.
This also comes up in his relationship with Jennifer Warnes, as he taught her parts that she didn't understand in themselves, that he was trying to find himself in the music as well as vice-versa, and she also got that she was his guide, companion, and California Blonde Stoner Muse, a bridge back to and from his 60s Bay Area Buddhist minimalist student days, when, as Lawrence shows, he was known exclusively as a girl-lover, with at least a couple of intense relationships, and at one point seemed well on the way to getting married, until her parents broke it up.
He continued corresponding with that woman during the New York years, also stayed in touch with the other one, sometimes visited California, and, whether he ever got back into het sex---which seems possible; Tom Lee assures Russell that their long-time partnership was very open.

These relationships become part of what Lawrence calls Russell's rhizomes, which also include his sometimes recombinant subsets of musicians, to suit his very varied musical interests, and his birth family, certainly including his parents, who financially supported him his whole life (he pointed out to them that they'd given his sisters a new car and a house when each of them got married, so hey), his improbably long(but not infinitely)-lasting partnership in a record label, huge amounts of free time at a couple of studios (though one owner eventually got him to do work in return, for while; the other one just eventually burned out on Arthur, who ended up with a true Tower of Song, peeking out of stacks of equipment in his and Tom Lee's little living room, as photographed by Lee)(again, the open partnership helped, most likely).

Laying out the networks of networks is a Tim Lawrence specialty in his music culture trilogy, where paasion is matched by and maybe sublimated in his expertise and integrity as a historian.

Tom Lee assures *Lawrence* (Russell seems unlikely to have invited assurance) Also, another of Russell's long-time musical associates saw Arthur as bi, if not basically het, although yet another thinks that guy is projecting.

FOR people who like Aubrey Beardsley's artwork I'd recommend checking out harry Clarke who reminded me heavily of him when I first saw his artwork. Pretty great Irish painter/stained glass artist.

“TV’s man’s tarantula!”

https://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/30-clarke-faust.jpg

The comics artist P Craig Russell did an adaptation of Salome that makes definite nods to Beardsley:

https://oscholars-oscholars.com/special-issues/contents/dierkes-thrun/

summer reading

annie ernault - a girl's story

most of this bored me, but there was about 40p of it (the part at the summer camp during which the main dramatic events unfold) that i was completely absorbed by. so despite not enjoying it on the whole, i'm game to read more ernault. she's a great prose stylist and has a very dark sense of humour that strikes me as very "french". fun passage that i highlighted in my epub app:

As if language, a late arrival in human evolution, did not impress itself as readily as images, all that remains of the thousands of words exchanged with other instructors-in-training at the course held in a castle in Hautot-sur-Seine, during the Easter holidays, is one snickering comment made by a teacher with pitted skin and dark glasses, in the kitchen, where we were teamed up for dish duty. You look like a decrepit old whore. I attributed the comment to the excess of foundation and rouge on my pale skin, and was unable to think of any reply but: And you look like an old pimp, flustered and probably stunned by the untoward resurgence of the whore around the edges.

jordan castro - the novelist

new hyped post-alt-lit-meta-auto-fiction(?) novella about scrolling twitter while procrastinating writing a novel. contains what must be the most accurate second-by-second description of what it's like to be online in 2022 in literature, and also some pretty good scatological humour. pretty fun and fresh blend of tao lin, nicholson baker and thomas bernhard

roger scruton - kant: a very short introduction

i reconnected with an old high school friend this summer who is now a deep bearded philosopher who loves kant, and his enthusiasm was infectious enough to get me to download and read this epub. whether or not i "agree" with the arguments presented, they're pretty enjoyable to think through. also enjoyed this 20 year old mark s post

attempting a compromise between empiricism and rationalism, kant shd have gone back the wigshop and poured sloppy pancake mix into the shopkeeper's trousers

― mark s, Saturday, June 8, 2002 8:00 PM (twenty years ago) bookmarkflaglink

wilde was pretty cutting abt beardsley's illustration-work for salomé

Isn't that in part because the illustrations contained caricatures of Wilde?

The Picture of Dorian Gray was a formative novel. I read it for the third time in March 2020, and while I found much of the dialogue between the rich nimrods tedious (Wilde admitted he had to pad the novel for the sake of serialization), he perfected that kind of banter just a couple years later in his plays. A more fun read than A Rebours, which iirc boasts pages and pages of catalogues this or that bric-a-brac -- in its way a Balzac novel given a Decadent gloss.

I think I agree with Mark S in his suggestion that c.1890, the idea of being definitely and exclusively homosexual was not something that people were so keen to promote - not just because it was dangerous (it certainly was), but maybe because the idea of this exclusive identity had not caught on so much (eg, as Mark says, in an activist way). So Dorian Gray has hints of homosexuality but also repeatedly 'corrupts' or 'disgraces' women - in fact, it's oddly accurate to say that the book provides far, far more evidence of his heterosexual career than any alternative sexuality. Even about 20 pages from the end a Duchess is still thinking about whether to have an affair with him.

I think I agree with poster Alfred that DORIAN GRAY is more readable than A REBOURS, which is indeed, as I recall, much more of a catalogue and less of a story. I also note now that I shouldn't have said that Gray definitely reads A REBOURS: it's left implicit and ambiguous, and, more surprisingly, in the first edition it was apparently named as a fictional French book invented by Wilde.

Poster Gyac earlier mentioned censored and uncensored versions; I now know that what I've been reading is the 'censored' version of 1891, as against the first magazine version of 1890. The main difference seems to be that in the first version Basil Hallward is more open about his adoration of Gray, and in the second this theme is sublimated into talk of art.

I've finished the novel, which maybe leaves a bad taste in the mouth - which you could say is intentional. One aspect that kept coming to mind was the idea that this whole novel also has a, let's say, 'confessional' role for its author. Wilde was scandalous, was whispered about, led a double life with two sexual identities, was feted in some houses and shunned in others - etc. All of that also applies to Gray. To a degree, then, Wilde seems to be projecting an exaggerated version of his own situation into this character's. One complication here might be that Gray may actually resemble Wilde's lover Alfred Douglas more than he does Wilde himself (and Wilde would be closer to Lord Henry Wotton, but also to Basil Hallward, who more pathetically loves Gray and is later killed by him for no good reason). But another complication is that Gray is clearly ashamed of his life, knows that it's sinful (and this shows in his painting). Did Wilde think the same about his own experiences? I don't think he thought the same as Dorian Gray, but it's plausible to say that, like many people, he had mixed feelings, including guilt, shame and so on, which were naturally influenced by society and ideology around him, and that he partly projects these to the character. The whole thing could in these terms be considered an extrapolation, an experiment with Wilde's own feelings about himself.

Then again Wilde would I suppose have denied this, and he more often talks (in the Preface to this novel and numerous other places) of books as works of art separate from life.

On the dialogue, again, the late exchanges between Lord Henry and the Duchess are quite appealing -- virtually the only time in the book that a woman gets to talk on a level with the men. I suppose that somewhat more equal scenario is then played out again in the plays.

I think I read Wilde writing once that Basil what he wanted to be, Lord Henry whom the public thought he was, and Dorian whom he really was.

Cid Corman - Livingdying
Marie Darrieussecq - Pig Tales
Renee Gladman - The Activist
Martine Syms - Shame Space
Charlotte Salomon - Life? or Theater?: A Song-play

Currently reading Georges Perec's W or the Memory of Childhood and Norma Cole's Where Shadows Will

Norma!

A couple of aesthetics books:

Noël Carroll - The Philosophy of Horror: Paradoxes of the Heart (1990)
C. Thi Nguyen - Games: Agency as Art (2020)

Both very accessible, nicely written, on interesting topics.

speaking of the invisible man... the well regarded 2020 film is on itv tonight, 22:45