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

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

I finished "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge". It's definitely a good thing that my Vintage edition of the book comes with endnotes to explain the copious references to obscure late Medieval and Renaissance figures. Here's a random sampling of personages mentioned by Rilke with confidence the reader will get the allusion: Deodatus of Gozon, Teresa of Avila, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Louise Labe, the Countess of Die, Clara of Anduze, Julie de Lespinasse, Aisse, Pope John XXII, Christine de Pisan, Heloise and Abelard, Bettina von Arnim, Grishka Otrepyov, and so on. The book is not an easy one to read, partly because of the references, and partly because it switches gears rapidly as the narrator's thoughts roam over the centuries, and then to memories of his youth and childhood in an ancien regime noble household, and then to his current straitened circumstances as an anonymous poet in a Parisian garret apartment. Its hard to explain what makes the book so memorable, but if you're the kind of person who thinks reading and writing alone in a garret can be a thrilling and romantic existence, then this book may be for you.

poll those personages!

i know heloise and abelard (once-famous tragic love story) and christine de pisan (i think i have a book by her that i never read) and also i read mechthild of magdeburg as METH-CHILD of magdeburg (maybe they're related to the unicorn)

plus googling tells me that teresa of avila is in fact st teresa: "Teresa, who became a celebrity in her town dispensing wisdom from behind the convent grille, was also known for her raptures, which sometimes involved levitation" (same) "Examination of her [miraculously preserved medical record] has led to the speculative conclusion that she may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy.[20][21]"

I love that Rilke novel, found the switching (the speed of it) quite a thrill at the time. I probably would get more of the refs now as I've read Labe, Heloise, the Troubadours..

Do look up Labe's poetry from NYRB classics, who put out an edition of them.

I've started H.G. Wells' THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU (1896). Like that other island novel ROBINSON CRUSOE it poses as a 'found document', a true history of life on an island with a foreword by someone else. My impression is that some of Defoe's readers might have believed this, Wells's wouldn't.

The first few chapters are all in seafaring jargon which is rather overdone. Endless mainbraces, gunwales, and less familiar words. Reminiscent of Conrad save that Conrad knew this material intimately, and I don't think Wells did.

It's standard to say 'this old book contains some dubious ideas about race', but this one really pushes the ... boat out. For instance:

From him my eyes travelled to his three men; and a strange crew they were. I saw only their faces, yet there was something in their faces — I knew not what — that gave me a queer spasm of disgust. I looked steadily at them, and the impression did not pass, though I failed to see what had occasioned it. They seemed to me then to be brown men; but their limbs were oddly swathed in some thin, dirty, white stuff down even to the fingers and feet: I have never seen men so wrapped up before, and women so only in the East. They wore turbans too, and thereunder peered out their elfin faces at me, — faces with protruding lower-jaws and bright eyes. They had lank black hair, almost like horsehair, and seemed as they sat to exceed in stature any race of men I have seen.

More pushing the species boat out, isn't? it? Intimations ov too freaky/looks like trouble. From the time of "crime science," phrenology, tongue shapes, all of that and then some, seems to be in beholder's pre-radar. (Although race science could also be in crime science.)

Didn't mean to have extra question mark

Why the moon travels / Oein DeBhairduin ; illustrated by Leanne McDonagh.
Gay Irish Traveller author retelling a number of Traveller folktales. I've been meaning to read this since it came out.
He did a talk in the Sibin fake pub venue in a local exhibition on Saturday which reminded me that I wanted to read it. Plus he had a copy of the book with him which may be the first time I physically saw it, had thought i was going to be a larger children's picture book looking thing but it is filed under adult. I then found out taht the local library had copies which it is saying are New so recently acquired. I think this was released in 2020 during the first lockdown and I may have been at most things online.
Anyway looking forward to getting into this

A brief history of neoliberalism / David Harvey.
book I've wanted to read for a while since i wanted to further understand what neoliberalism really consisted of.
Been a bit of a chore getting hold of this through interlibrary loans since it appeared to disappear as either a lost or a long overdue book.
Well got it now. So need to read it.

The Alienist, by Caleb Carr. I realize I'm coming in on this 18 years late, but at least I haven't seen the show. It's fairly engaging, although it does have a bit of the "Oh, look! There's Franz Boas!" quality that some historical novels have. I'm more than half suspecting that I'm ultimately not going to care who the murderer is.

Eighteen? More like 28. Holy shit.

I finished THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU. Good adventure yarn with stimulating content about vivisection, genetics, humans / animals and so on. I'd recommend it. Yet one slight flaw, I feel, is that Wells doesn't make the beast-men especially vivid in their own right. By the time he's talking about a Hyena-Swine or a Rhino-Horse it's hard to picture them. I think a writer now might make more effort to describe each one.

The story is interesting in that Dr Moreau and his assistants seem like villains, but become allies, and the protagonist isn't involved in a final battle with them, as you might expect. Moreau, having discussed his ideas at length, is actually killed by a beast some way before the book finishes. And there's an unexplained mystery about the boat with two dead sailors, possibly recognised by the protagonist, in which he casts off from the island at the end.

A very late irony: on the last page the narrator says that only looking up at the lofty heavens can raise humanity from its bestial condition. Two years later THE WAR OF THE WORLDS begins in those lofty heavens, with Martians, rather than anything divine or benign, looking with interest at Earth.

I started Megan Abbott's QUEENPIN (2007). 1950s noir pastiche. To be honest the pastiche seems clumsily overdone - I'm disappointed.

I’m reading her latest, The Turnout, right now, and I’m finding it similarly overripe.

finished A Tale Of Two Cities. cobbled together a version based on the weekly episodes and not the monthly / collected version that Project Gutenberg has (probably). when i compared the two the differences were mainly hyphens, the odd word and a sentence and a half from one of the minor characters. still...

the Penguin Classics notes on this have pointed out Hugo's Ninety-Three and Dumas' Ange Pitou as similar but i can't find a copy of the full version of the latter - there's a 36 chapter version in PG but lots of scans of a wildly-different 70 chapter version on archive.org, but the OCR for the epub versions is k-rub (28% accuracy it says)

it's one of my favourite dickens novels, i think, despite being a bit atypical (historical). it's shorter than most, at least

I'm stuck between two Tanizaki titles: The Key and Some Prefer Nettles. Which?

I'm more attracted to the second title.
xxxpost

also cool:

And there's an unexplained mystery about the boat with two dead sailors, possibly recognised by the protagonist, in which he casts off from the island at the end.

A very late irony: on the last page the narrator says that only looking up at the lofty heavens can raise humanity from its bestial condition. Two years later THE WAR OF THE WORLDS begins in those lofty heavens, with Martians, rather than anything divine or benign, looking with interest at Earth.

I know I watched the film of The Key, can't remember if I also read it as part of a Japanese film & literature class.

Love love love Some Prefer Nettles.

Haven't read The Key.

I'm sampling a range of crime writers. Megan Abbott has struck out. Also trying:

Sara Paretsky, INDEMNITY ONLY (1982) - the first novel to feature woman private eye V.I. Warshawski. Set in its present day, very much in Chicago, it's much better than the Abbott novel. It's surprisingly 'sassy' in a proto-chick-lit way at moments ('I thought about the carbs and decided not to order fries'), but also pretty solid as detection so far. Has a background of radical / labour politics and business.

Ross Macdonald, THE ZEBRA-STRIPED HEARSE (1962): this is even better. I've wanted to read Macdonald for years. He doesn't disappoint. I can see how it's the successor to Chandler, but the language and tone are reined in by comparison. Best thing in it is essentially the dialogue between private eye Lew Archer and the various characters he encounters. I realise I could read this stuff for ever - I imagine the book as automatically generated, just going on and on.

I'm also going to read Patricia Highsmith, a writer who's always been quite mysterious to me.

Nick Seabrook - One Person, One Vote: A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America

Macdonald is indeed great, with the one caveat that he pretty much wrote the same Archer book every time - family secrets, melancholy philosophy, sea and sunshine, bourgeois callousness. Best not to ready too many in one go. Highsmith is a more varied writer and in some ways more inconsistent (albeit with a pretty consistent 'moral vision'), but there's nobody else quite like her within or without crime fiction. The first Ripley novel is a good one to begin with.

"A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America"

Is the surprise that gerrymandering hasn't happened in America?

the surprise is that it (occasionally) hasn't happened

https://www.masshist.org/database/images/985_gerrymander_trans_ref.jpg

The surprise, after a hundred pages, is who endorsed it, I suppose.

Beginning of semester reading has thrown me for a loop, of course, but in my spare time (ha!) I’ve been reading and enjoying Steve Benson’s ‘Blue Book.’ While he is associated with the Language poets, the work is not as highly abstracted and loaded with parataxis, instead moving through realms of the self, our everyday speech patterns, and the possibilities of an improvisational writing. Interesting work.

Tabes! I got Prynne's The Oval Window on Sunday -- the marvelous NYRB edition with illustrations and footnotes.

xps

I definitely prefer Paretsky to Abbott. And Highsmith to most writers.

I had to return The Man in the High Castle because the copy I checked out was too dodgy to read comfortably despite having been rebound; I checked out instead a Library of America compendium of his novels from the 1960s, which includes said novel. I plan to read the novels with Carlo Rovelli's There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness at different times of day.

I returned the novels by Anthony Marra and am curious to see what happens when he writes about film.

Tabes! I got Prynne's The Oval Window on Sunday -- the marvelous NYRB edition with illustrations and footnotes.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, August 24, 2022 6:09 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Alfred, this is great! But do you mean the Bloodaxe edition, which is mostly annotations? Yellow cover with a photo on it?

(I have this edition as well as the first edition— it is one of my favorites of his books, tho the big expanded version I think you're speaking of has not really been cracked as of yet, as I am waiting until we get to it in my Prynne reading group!)

It comes with both: the poem + photos and the poem + annotations. A generous introduction too.

Totally— I just mentioned the sheer number of annotations because the original book is quite slim!

I didn't mean to let it blurt re xpost Tim Lawrence's Arthur Russell bio, but since I did, I'll try provide a better overall description. The title is Hold On To Your Dreams---Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992. Lawrence explains Downtown and Uptown, in social and musical differences, time and space (they're pretty close geographically, until NYC real estate fever and other Reagan first term financial factors push artists farther apart in several ways, as depicted more broadly and deeply via the other volumes of TL's NYC music culture trilogy, which he doesn't rehash here).
He also loops back to Russell's ever-resourceful parents, making their way through the Depression and WWII to impeccably square social standing and an impeccably hip, wide-ranging record collection, a crucial influence on little Arthur, who is otherwise quite the handful. His antsy, awkward semi-sociable demeanor somehow stands him in good stead, too consistently to be uncanny luck, though there seems to be some of that.

He leaves Iowa and high school for the Summer of Love, gets in trouble, but somehow it works out for him to be in custody of a family friend (and older kid), until his 18th birthday. Then he gets involved with a Bay Area Buddhist cult, but, although the leader is tough on Arthur, he pays for music school---and not, "You will learn to play the cello even better, and bring the money and glory back to meee"--no, just because the talent was a flower that needed watering. So he goes and learns a lot about Indian music and more about Buddhism; he and the cult ensemble play and record with Allen Ginsberg (an amazing track on one of AG's box sets). When Arthur goes to New York (to be a star, his way), Ginsberg may be the one (night stand, apparently) who introduces him to the joy of gay sex, but mainly, they record some more excellent tracks, and Gins lets him and Tom Lee run a power line upstairs to their apartment.
Arthur becomes programmer at the Kitchen, and upsets the applecart by presenting a rock band, and not the Velvets, but the oddball Modern Lovers. This precedent proves to be influential in different ways, as described by Peter Gordon and Rhys Chatham, two fairly different composers. Arthur continues to adapt what he's learned in the groovy West to New York's crackling Dark Ages, and he and the ML's Ernie Brooks have a recurring professional relationship, upsetting more applecarts, incl. rock ones; Brooks persists in bringing Arthur into situations where he must know, on some level, things will then go sideways, b-b-but Arthur really does love and make pop-rock on his own, so...
His early NYC friend and admirer Philip Glass does him a solid/hands him off to Robert Wilson for a new project, in part because Glass has a more lucrative commission already, and doesn't want to go back to driving a gypsy cab and being a handyman, as happened yet again after the critical landmark of Einstein on the Beach This new opera is a big chance for Arthur, and he's all in, as always, however...
One of the ways that Lawrence keeps this from being a highbrow ep of Behind The Music, although it is that in part (unavoidably to some extent, being a bio of a muso, times the eventual advent of AIDS) is his own deep listening to and accessible description of some challenging music, the challenge coming not only from esoterica, but its opposite, the most poptastic, hype-inspiring kind, also admixtures of both kinds. Oncen again, the academic and self-taught discipline of the historian balances the passion of the fan, as mentioned upthread.

Lawrence also deals, as well as he can in this 2009-published book, with the extent to which Russell's still-emerging recorded work has proved to be "an iceberg," in the TL-quoted take of ikx alum Jess Harvell. An iceberg somewhere between the posthumous careers of eternally prolific Coltrane and Hendrix, and those of mostly-unknown-in-their-lifetime Joseph Cornell and Henry Darger.