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

the software developer stuff was another post tbh. you understand software development is a job right tho?

So you're saying that the detectives in BROADCHURCH are bad at their jobs?

That may be true of BROADCHURCH, but it's not true of eg: THE BRIDGE (the autistically brilliant detective), nor of Marlowe or Lew Archer.

So I don't understand the claim unless you're actually saying something else eg: "they are great detectives with damaged personal lives"?

My perhaps too-elaborate or even poorly written sentence was saying: these kinds of detective fiction are somewhat different, yes, but not absolutely different; some detective fiction (Chandler) may include less precise deductive work than others (Christie), but may still involve *some* notable deductive and intellectual work. I think the distinction here is overblown.

I'm sure I understand that it's a job ... but so is plumbing or F1 mechanics! Not easy for most of us to comprehend.

it is absolutely true of the bridge she takes 5000000 episodes to work it out and she still doesn't work it out it lands on her lap despite her poor cop behaviour.

ok yes point taken on the software job. i still think it can be understood as something which has significant implications on how we live our everyday lives.

I've just noted with concern that Fizzles' post cites Stephen Bush approvingly.

I agree that lots of things have massive implications for our lives, but I don't think that most of us understand most of them.

i agree with that last post. i do also think it's worth spending a bit of time to understand things that have massive implications on our lives.

is stephen bush bad? if so why?

he proved to be bad yes

really tho

I feel that, having already said more than enough, I should leave it to others to answer that last question.

I'm glad to see that someone is already doing so.

which series of the bridge are we talking about? and what was her bad cop behaviour?

(her bad behaviour is generally bcz she is too rigidly cop iirc)

i do also think it's worth spending a bit of time to understand things that have massive implications on our lives.

Is a bit of time enough?

Good questions and observation from Mark S. She did have one unprofessional personal thing where she was a bad cop because she behaved uncharacteristically, re her own past? But she seems a great cop on the whole to me.

no but that's bad personal behaviour. nothing to do with cop behaviour. *that's the whole point* right?

more importantly there are no clues, there is no sense she is following the obvious strands. literally in the first series the culprit is the most obvious person in any policier detection. it's just lead after lead after lead gets disproved. it's like anti-cop work.

Isn't a fact about THE BRIDGE that it's always 10 hour-long episodes so it really goes from one case to another to another, across the episodes, still introducing new characters about 6 hours in, and the original clues aren't very relevant by the end? Unsure of this. But it would perhaps be a violation of 'Detection Club Etiquette' in that the reader isn't given enough at the start.

yeah i think that's right. form determines plot. i have a prejudice that all the matter available at the start is what is required to solve the end. formal classicism if you like. but that is - as i say - formal constraints, which as in poetry i think are aesthetically useful.

yes none of the series of the bridge so far do that

they're more like those occasional eps of law and order where the initial crime and the final court case involve completely difft perps

I thought the highlight of The Bridge was the performances, not the cases. Particularly Sofia Helin, she was absolutely remarkable. I seem to remember Kim Bodnia departing under something of a cloud after season 1, but I can't remember what it was.

i think that nails the point i'm trying to make which is that - i don't reallty care about the golden age v the bridge. it's not a moral thing - it's just an aesthetic thing. we devise these lanbyrinths to create enjoyment.

is stephen bush bad? if so why?

― Fizzles, Thursday, 1 September 2022 bookmarkflaglink

he proved to be bad yes

― mark s, Thursday, 1 September 2022 bookmarkflaglink

really tho

― Fizzles, Thursday, 1 September 2022 bookmarkflaglink

This was the last time I saw him on my TL.

Surprised at the number of people suggesting this wouldn't happen - toddler repeats name that is often on the radio, more on this story as we get it. Have people on Twitter never sworn in front of a toddler? https://t.co/7rgo3qXO0w

— Stephen Bush (@stephenkb) August 31, 2022

that’s right tho? isn’t it?

O'Toole's tweet is clearly bullshit.

oh yeah absolutely. silly tweet. but only cos of the gloss. children absorb weird things. they’re sponges right?

No doubt but it could've been worded differently, not like a defense of it.

yeah agree. it’s a technocratic failure, which sbush is particularly vulnerable to. “it makes sense therefore” bullshit. still i think bush is a smart commentator trying make sense of things in public in a way that allows for interrogation, so i don’t get the hatred tbh.

his cultural knowledge is terrible tho.

Back to books the rest of us are reading, and not sheepish about it…

after a semester-beginning slog I am reading Michael Palmer’s ‘The Circular Gates,’ of which I was previously only aware of the titular sequence. It is pleasant tho perhaps more abstract in its images than I’d been prepared for.

I’m also reading Laura Riding’s Collected Poems for the first time, it is blowing my mind, she is tremendous.

read WE HAD TO REMOVE THIS POST by hanna bervoets, a very short novel about people who do content moderation for a facebook-like platform and a relationship between two of them. (there's little new about the content-moderation stuff if you've read an article or two about how awful a job it is.) the book seems fairly straightforward right up until the point where it is . . . not

Fizzles, I think it would be fair and simple to say that some people dislike Bush because of political views that he has expressed.

I'm not bothered about his cultural knowledge, but a person who has published, on one platform or another, the statements that he has is not a person that I will describe as a 'smart commentator'.

yeah i don’t see the latter point. but the first point is irrefutable. and this isn’t the thread for it so.

not really sure about “political views he’s expressed” either tbh. he seems pretty left-centre tbh. mainly his commentary is “how do we connect policy or lack of it to what people experience” which seems like an important journalistic function.

Nearing halfway through DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS. Quick, punchy, actually a short novel yet things are still simmering. Strikes me that the central character isn't, at the outset, a detective at all, and that this novel is as far from Detection Club "all evidence needs to be present from the start" detection as can be. There is virtually NO evidence, 90 pages in - barely even a mystery. This would help to establish the continuum on which Chandler is, by comparison, some way across on the intellection and deduction scale.

Poster Dow's comments about race in this African American story are pertinent. I'd like to see the film (again?) one day.

xpost to ledge, i'll be interested to know what you think about the anomaly. i picked it up at random in mercer st books nyc and.... well oulipian my ass. i sort of enjoyed it a bit and then ended up hating it?

I enjoyed it. It's a yarn - a great 'what if...' of little consequence - and a series of character studies, and i think it succeeds at both of those. What did you find hateable about it? The piling up of characters at the beginning did get a bit annoying but just as I was tiring of it the next, and most enjoyable, section came along. And maybe it's a bit pleased with itself? The obvious conceit that Victor is writing the story (I spotted a mention of 'ascot' which surely wasn't accidental), the list of Hollywood stars that Adrian not quite resembles (though as someone who's been likened to Michael Keaton, Matthew Broderick, and Tim Curry - not to mention Tony Blair and most plausibly Mick Jones of The Clash - I decided to enjoy the gag). Perhaps it helped that thanks to a few long train and bus rides I read it in one day, the first book I've managed to do that with in years. Yeah it's not obviously oulipian but I think there are some hidden tricks going on. (I searched the lrb for 'anomaly' to find the review and it came up with a poem by John Ashbery who's mentioned in the book - surely a coincidence!)

i don't know how much this matches fizzles's sense of a shift but the key to the cops in chandler (and possibly hammett before him?) is less that they're incompetent and more that they're many of them corrupt and just don't care

is this ever true in golden age? the only example i can quickly think of is in chesterton's the secret garden -- and that guy couldn't be less like a chandlerian cop lol (he's more of a figure in the dreyfus wars, and therefore in fact on the correct side, which chesterton with caveats was not). early on sayers had a fool called SUGG but she evidently bored of writing unclever ppl and replaced him with the guy who became wimsey's BiL (who is highly intelligent and an excellent detective, but unlike lord W has always to play by the official rules)

the underlying thesis of the father brown stories is that the human mind cannot be unpicked by mere forensics (which can be fooled): insteads you must apply reason to how ppl actually work -- which i wd argue is proto-golden age (take the "rules of detection" as they were after holmes and fashion perversely deliberate obstacles; sayers is like a realist translation of same, except her detective therefore needs to be even less realistic) (and even more annoying)

I enjoyed Devil in a Blue Dress enough when I read it years ago to consider more Mosely. I should have!

I'm reading J.H. Prynne, Elizabeth Taylor's short fiction, and rereading Tess.

Mark S's point is very accurate, that the distinction is about state / police corruption which is very strongly part of hard-boiled tradition (including Mosley) and not Golden Age.

I suppose it would be worthwhile for me, for my own purposes, somewhere, to stake out an account of 'narrative, detection, information, deduction (vs action)' in all the detective fiction I know from Holmes to Lethem via Christie and Asimov. It is not just that there is clearly a spectrum of all this within 'the detective genre' -- it is also the suspicion or hypothesis that the detective genre is *qualitatively different* from other narrative in this way; that detection makes for a separate kind of creative and narrative activity and experience. This view is entertained by Rzepka. I did not feel at all sure about it, but reading lots of crime fiction in a row does make me feel like this is a different entity from other fiction, even though in theory it ought just to overlap with other realist narrative.

Another enduring puzzle for me: is detective fiction realist fiction?

I have a Walter Mosley omnibus thing that i picked up a few years ago thinking i might get into him. THink I'd seen a film of one of the books a couple of decades ago.

Virginia Feito - MRS MARCH

maybe the best book I've read this year. kept me off kilter throughout thinking I knew where it was going then deciding that I didn't before finally going where it had to go all along. Fascinating character, sad and terrifying. The general feeling of unease heightened by the difficulty I had in in definitively placing what time period the novel is set in. pre mobile phones certainly but whether we are in the 90's or the 70's I was never sure.

I found Mosley to be toward the higher end of readable detective fiction, but that's me. After finishing last night's dose of Eve Babitz, I've decided my next book shall be The Summer Book, Tove Jansson.

I have started The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared. I'm only about 5% into it, but so far it's a good read. Very funny. Not sure what's going to sustain it over the next 95%, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.

Mike Davis: https://t.co/1eTlvRE8XD pic.twitter.com/HnqplqmDup

— Melissa Gira Grant (@melissagira) September 2, 2022

JUst finished The 1619 Project which I should have read earlier and definitely faster.
Has been pretty good, has a very good tie in Podcast from teh time it was published too.
Wish the information contained could be osmosed out to a lot of people who would benefit from knowing it.
Treatment of Africans then Afro-Americans since the first group of enslaved was land which is where the date in the title comes from.
Precisely the information that should be circulated as a 101 beginner level attempt to understand US history not dismissed and vilified as Critical Race Theory which is a different very specific thing though it is based on some of this information being tapped into here I think.
One of several books in the area that I have read so I may have come across some of the information contained elsewhere . But this is put together in a very readable way as is Ibram X Kendi's 400 Souls which also uses a lot of different writers to contribute to its message.
THis was edited and partly written by Nikole Hannah-Jones

Read that Melissa Gira Grant tweet as saying Miles Davis. Miles visiting Chandler's grave next to his local Home Depot.

I finished DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS. Brisk. Notable in depicting "ordinary worker who becomes a detective in the course of the story" - a bit like Lethem's MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN. I'd quite like to read the 2nd book to see what happens when the Rawlins character actually sets up as a private eye.

I then started Chester Himes' A RAGE IN HARLEM (1957). This is a bit deceptive. Detectives don't much feature in it so far. The author seems to have turned to crime writing almost as a money-making joke or experiment, not as his original vocation. And it is much more of a comic, caper novel than you might expect. I haven't actually read Raymond Queneau, but suspect that some of his books are like this.

I also glanced at Annie Ernaux's EXTERIORS - it was at a friend's house so I'm not reading it properly - and it seemed a relatively insightful bit of journalistic, reflective writing on things seen while on public transport. Would make a blog.

Finished ‘The Circular Gates’ and have decided that I will wait until trying another Michael Palmer book.

Currently re-reading ‘The White Stones’ for my Prynne book group and dipping in and out of Laura Riding’s collected in the mornings, and spending time with Mark Francis Johnson’s new ‘Doleful Hoo-Ha’ when I have spare moments otherwise

I finished The Summer Book. It consists of about two dozen vignettes featuring a grandmother in her mid-eighties and a granddaughter who appears to be about 8 years old, but it's not very clear just how old or young she is. All of the vignettes take place during summertime on a small island in the Finnish Gulf, occupied only by the two main characters and a father who is seldom invoked.

As with other Tove Jansson novels, it is sharply imagined and economically told. There is no plot and no apparent chronological order. Instead it is held together by continuity of tone, place and characters. What struck me most was how indeterminate the tone was. It seemed to me that Jansson was striving for a wholly unsentimental tone, but somehow the subtext kept nibbling around the edges of the romantic and sentimental, creating an unsettling cross-current. It's the sort of book that would repay multiple readings.

thanks Aimless, makes me want to read The Summer Book

The Need by Helen Phillips and Mostly Dead Things by Kristin Arnett were both interesting I thought

the red badge of courage by stephen crane: this one kind of washed over me. finished it because it was short but never really got into it.

five decembers by james kestrel. very highly rated new crime fiction/period thriller. great setting/premise. not a fan of the genre but i suspect a lot of people here would enjoy it.

heat 2 by michael mann and meg gardiner. if you like the movie heat then you will like this book.

drowned world by jg ballard. seemed extremely racist?

seeing like a state by james c. scott. wide ranging popular political anthropology (?) thing about the state's tendency to reductively manage and impose order on complex systems in a way that does them harm. bit of a slog, felt like i got the point early on, but an interesting idea.

raising raffi by keith gessen. good parenting/pandemic/nyc memoir.

master of the senate by robert caro. if you like the three previous volumes then you will like the fourth volume.

the life of the mind. diverting novel about adjunct teaching in the humanities, nyc, pregnancy etc. pretty good iirc.

james salter. light years. do people like this? i think it's my favorite thing i've read this year if you don't count aubrey-maturin seafaring tales.

I haven't read Light Years. I really like Salter's short fiction.