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

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.

Yes. Light Years is really good, as is pretty much all of Salter.

raising raffi btw a good example of how different mainstream literarly/middlebrow books <em>look</em> in the US to the same market in the UK

US

https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/1191-1/%7B23FEF674-AEAF-48BF-BF7E-CA595D7221CD%7DIMG100.JPG

UK

https://netgalley-covers.s3.amazonaws.com/cover265783-medium.png

see also rachel cusk's parenting memoir

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41qlwx1+r2L._SX305_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

https://media.loot.co.za/images/x400/221464696656179215.jpg

light years is indescribably pretty. if i like it can i pretty much pick up any of his other novels, or is it an outlier in some way?

The Need is fantastic novel about a mother of a smart 4 year old and a toddler, both of whom are very needy and consume their mother every moment of every day.

There is also a dopplegänger story, about two mothers sharing the same children

The descriptions of what it is like to be a parent of children that age and of the moments of magic and also of despair that occur daily are memorable.

It started out as a horror story, turned into a psychological drama, and ended up as a story of redemption

caek, most of James C Scott’s books are similar to ‘Seeing Like a State”— the idea is interesting and arguments sincere and well-argued, but there’s something about his style that makes reading him a bit of a slog, always. maybe it’s the academic language, maybe just a weird quirk that i can’t figure out. his book “Against the Grain” is similar

Light years is indescribably pretty. if i like it can i pretty much pick up any of his other novels, or is it an outlier in some way?

His short fiction is characterized by an admirable economy of language that delivers an emotional gut punch.

Gets kinda lush later, at least some of the imagery does. His screenplay for Downhill Racer(1969) came across very well, with championship skiers in the wild blue yonder and daily grind, like his fliers in The Hunters. But the skiers get to enjoy themselves a bit more, in the Alps and the 60s.

Cassada also good. Believe it was a rewrite of his second published novel The Arm of Flesh and one of his flying books like The Hunters and not one of his relationship books. Oh yeah, his memoir Burning the Days is really good too. Haven’t gotten around to reading some of the last things published.

table, interesting! i found the prose itself very academic in the formal and literally boring sense. that's despite it being quite plain and accessible at the sentence level to someone like me with no experience reading serious humanities or theory. i certainly struggled over 500 pages. the same book written by a good non-fiction journalist and half the length would have been great.

thank you all for the salter thoughts.

A Quick Ting On Afrobeats, Christian Adofo - Was intrigued by a book on such a recent genre, and one I follow mostly via clicking on youtubes in its dedicated threads on here. First few chapters were an engaging read on growing up in the UK coming from Ghana and how Afrobeats helped the author embrace his heritage. It then turns into an attempt to map out the origins of the genre via Fela, burger highlife (a genre I'll confess I never heard of) and hip-life (and probably others, but that's where I stopped). The writing's very clumsy, could def have used an editor, and while Adofo's dilligence on interviewing artists is appreciated, he doesn't employ much skepticism in parsing their statements; there's a section on a guy who claims to have released "the first rap record" in 1973 and admitidely I haven't heard it but colour me skeptical that it's somehow more valid than Jamaican deejaying, scatting, the Last Poets or any of the other many pre-Sugarhill Gang things that exist. Also a big focus on how songs express cultural values, which I'm not against but it comes at the cost of little focus on the actual musical evolutions. Don't think I'll continue, tho I'm sure a younger, more obsessive music geek than myself could derive hours of enjoyment from checking out all the artists mentioned. Good that it exists.

I am reading Ubik and wondering about advertising and writing for copy and their effect on language in the 1950s and subsequently (cf. meme).

Reading Seven Gothic Tales. First time. Advise?

xpost a little more about Downhill Racer, from NYTimes review by Roger Greenspun (will have to check more of his)

Writing about the lead character David Chappellet, Greenspun observed, "His world is that international society of the well-exercised inarticulate where the good is known as 'really great,' and the bad is signified by silence. In appreciating that world, its pathos, its narcissism, its tensions, and its sufficient moments of glory, Downhill Racer succeeds with sometimes chilling efficiency."

Never came across it anywhere, so I doubt it.

Penelope Fitzgerald's short story collection The Means of Escape. I really like the three novels of hers I've read but these stories were far too slight and enigmatic. They're full of her typical dry humour but pushed almost to the point of snideness, and I didn't feel like there was any fondness for the characters beneath the surface.

Johannesburg Katrin Fridriksdottir Valkyrie
A look into the female role in Viking society. By one of the advisors to The Northman. I think I also heard her as a guest on Kate Lister's podcast Betwixt the Sheets
Pretty interesting. She is using sagas and things as source material.
Quite enjoying it anyway.

Augusto Boal Games For Actors and Non-Actors.
Theatre for the oppressed author's book on methodology for his theatre work. He is taking leads from people like Stanislavski to apply work based in the thought of Paolo Freire to a new medium.
Bought this a few years ago and about time I read it. Plus thete is a workshop based on it next week.

Autocorrect hitting me when I thought I was keeping an eye on it. Valkyrie author first name is Johanna.

Cold Comfort Farm

i read meg forajter 'interrogating the eye' - great new poetry collection. i can't quite match the pyrotechnics of the people who blurbed the book - olivia cronk, joyelle mcsweeney, jay bessemer - but it does do what they say it does, which is to look at the gaze, the body, writing, in a way that feels contemporary, and it's much more tender than those blurbs suggest

also 'deceit' by yuri felsen, published in 1930 but only translated into english this year and put out by prototype. felsen was apparently described as the "russian proust" by his contemporaries... maybe! the book is very intense, written in the form of a diary and a quite self-conscious one (lots of passages about writing the diary, how the writing relates to the real experience it's describing etc). i don't know that that is proustian exactly, but he does have that deep, sumptuous engagement with emotion, action, conventions

'bonsai' by alejandro zambra, a very short meta love story (meta in the sense that he write say something like, "they had a friend called jorge, or perhaps it was tomas... let's say it was jorge." that kind of thing

helen dewitt's new one, 'the english understand wool', which i think has already been discussed here. i remember years ago reading a story, never published, by someone i knew in which the protagonist has an altercation with someone, they almost get hit by someone on a bike, something like that, and in the story the protagonist pulls the cyclist off their bike and beats him up. clearly this - the part before the cyclist was beaten up - was a real incident that had happened to the writer and they were writing out what they wished they could have done. the dewitt book is like that, but good

I recently read "Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History" by Simon Winder. It's a long book, 400+ pages, and covers German history from roughly the end of the Roman empire up to the eve of Hitler's rise. Although it roughly follows a chronological order, it's structured around personal stories by the author about his visits to Germany and travel stories about interesting places to visit there. This makes it rather less stuffy and formal than a typical history book. The author is determined to strike a whimsical tone and although sometimes the humor feels a bit strained (like a speaker at an accounting convention who has been instructed to leaven his material with jokes, however distantly related the subject), it also sometimes finds its mark, especially when he throws moderation to the winds and takes his axe to a sacred cow. Clearly the author is very knowledgeable on his subject, and the sociohistorical analysis to me felt both wise and refreshingly opinionated.

Pat Conroy is the wrong name for that character in Ubik. It is not dangerous enough and it is too white. She should look like M4r13 Ch4rl0t*23 P1n3t*21.

She should be how one might imagine R4ch3l C(-90sk. I apologize for not seeing beyond the surface, but I figure that is what names are for.