The (S)word in the Autumn Stone: What Are You Reading, Fall 2022?

I tried Babitz excerpts on the NYRB Classics site, soon got the impression of a snooty teen who couldn't spel too good, and that was about it. Maybe she got better later.

dipping back into the generally engaging and interesting erving goffman interaction ritual: essays in face to face behavior, and the chapter/essay Mental Symptoms and Public Order and i can only conclude he was going through a bad patch

The final triumph of this psychological, technical perspective is the implication that socially improper behavior can be psychologically normal (as when a man shows strength enough to terminate an unhealthy marital relationship), and a socially proper behavior can be truly sick (as illustrated by the obsessive concerns and sexual withdrawal of some research chemists).

respectively

: | (though this is 1967, still tho dude plz)

and lol.

positively nabokovian.

to earlier points about Diego Garcia - lol i knew i knew the quote from somewhere! WB is referenced, but my tired brane did not in fact register so thank you!

and pinefox on cultural markers: Sun Ra, Dave Clarke’s Red 2 at a rave, 90s, 00s and post GFC culture. They don’t hit a bum note in the way that 🚨 lanchester 🚨 inevitably would trying to do a roughly similar thing.

What is GFC culture?

Wikipedia: "The financial crisis of 2008, or Global Financial Crisis (GFC), was a severe worldwide economic crisis that occurred in the early 21st century."

Thanks, poster Aimless.

So Fizzles, you seem to be saying "this book is good at popular culture because it's good at ... culture, since the 1990s". That seems circular, and not very specifically related to ILX.

I'm not familiar with the two examples you cite, but don't they mean "this book some mentions quite obscure culture, which I know"?

Fizzles specifically mentioned ILX. I suppose ILX discusses "everything", and I'm not sure whether it has particular tastes. There was a time, 20+ years ago, when ILM / ILX had a focus on the pop charts. Many of us had no idea about that stuff, but some did. I feel that if someone wrote a novel that was full of chart pop singles from 2001-2, then I might say "that's very ILM" (or "very Freaky Trigger"!). Maybe that, in fact, is what Fizzles is getting at.

It wouldn't occur to me to read "good at popular culture" as implying "good at portraying current youth popular culture". I'd just think it means the pop culture references, whatever they were, were well integrated into the text, not drawing too much attention to themselves, not giving off "look at me I know this thing". It's much easier to describe when ppl fail at this than when they succeed, thus my definition centering around negatives I guess.

The Boys by Katie Hafner - This may be the first pandemic novel I've read and my favorite. As current fiction (with journalistic currency and expertise?), I think it represents the experience perfectly.

good awareness of a cultural mise-en-scene, with specific awareness of music and art which clearly shows knowledge of the subject matter. the ilx bit is just really saying 'there are music and other references (including eg that Benjamin quote) that jostle together in a way that reminds me of ilx'.

Read the first two Jackson Broddie books by Kate Atkinson: Case Histories (excellent) and One Good Turn (middling). One chapter in the first book is so sad, I broke into tears after finishing it, which never usually happens to me with books (films, all the time). Atkinson's plotting - baroquely complicated but easy to follow - is incredible, sort of Wodehouse/Tom Sharpe-level at times. I like her unbashful way of describing sex and gore; it made the Lawrence Block book I read before them seem quite prudish. (It was 8 Million Ways To Die - also very good.)

Pinefox, I highly recommend THE CHILL if you want another Macdonlald.

I finished Second Place, didn't really get on with it so well in the end. The characters seemed like theoretical exercises, unlike those in the Outline trilogy. (Not that some people might find them convincing or identify with them, but I didn't.) I found it hard to square some of the more absurd elements - e.g. a character deciding on the spur of the moment to become a writer and churning out a fantasy novel which turns out to be an unintentional and unconscious copy of one he read some months ago - with the otherwise painfully serious style and atmosphere.

My current book is The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene. Part One, down. Parts Two and Three, yet to read. He has a great sense of how to write a scene dramatically. No wonder he wrote many successful screenplays, too. The Catholic elements are designed to jolt you, and ultimately inspire a grudging wonder and admiration, but the jolting lets him conceal a lot of their inner machinery and ultimately they don't really move me.

By chance earlier today I was also thinking about what makes a novel dramatic or what makes a play a play and I had to fall upon the mechanics of the stage, the pressure of time and place. Place could be fudged with staging within limits. As You Were by Elaine Feeney strikes me as a novel that could be dramatized; it mostly takes place in a hospital ward. It has lines.

The screen would be different. There you would have the camera and if television the attention of the audience. Whether this is a freedom or a curse I don't know but I guess some have figured out how to use it to advantage.

There's a lot of silly stuff in 'Second Place' but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

I finished Joan Didion's "Complete Essays" (which is not complete of course, just three books, it was a pleasure to finally get into her work.

Thinking about reading that new Joshua Cohen next, anyone read it?

read BEAST IN VIEW, winner of the 1956 edgar award for best mystery novel, by margaret millar, wife of the oft-mentioned ross macdonald

not very impressed tbh. i can give it a pass for the gay-baiting -- such were the times, i guess -- but the twist was obvious and hoary and the characters were cardboard cutouts who often did nonsensical things. also the titular phrase was used twice in the last 10 pages and you only get to do that once imo

Maybe that's why he was so into his correspondence with Eudora Welty.

ditto on second place.

Thinking about reading that new Joshua Cohen next, anyone read it?

I read it earlier this year. This is what I wrote about it then:

My main quibble is that for a comic novel it's only occasionally funny. The Netanyahus themselves are interesting characters, and the book comes alive when they show up, but the Blum family never really came to life for me, and the opening subplot seems kind of a rote depiction of well-worn themes of assimilation.

In retrospect, this seems maybe a bit more negative than I intended. It was an enjoyable and amusing read. In more recent reading, I finished Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli. This book does a thing I've noticed in other contemporary authors like Helen DeWitt and Otessa Moshfegh of describing matter-of-factly and at-length some conceptual art piece that the characters are involved in in a way that seems to want to stand in for a more traditional type of character or plot development but mostly ends up provoking a nonplussed shrug. The contemporary art influence extends to the way the book is titled (leaving off the definite article makes it sound like a listing from a catalog raisonne) and the rather abstruse end matter describing the Luiselli's process and formal aims. As a novel I think it only partly succeeds.

My current book is The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene. Part One, down. Parts Two and Three, yet to read. He has a great sense of how to write a scene dramatically. No wonder he wrote many successful screenplays, too. The Catholic elements are designed to jolt you, and ultimately inspire a grudging wonder and admiration, but the jolting lets him conceal a lot of their inner machinery and ultimately they don't really move me.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless)

I haven't read Brighton Rock., though I did start reading it once.

In TPatG, the lieutenant who implacably hunts down the priest is motivated by his overwhelming resentments against the church from childhood onward, fueling his fanatical commitment to 'saving' the children of generations to come. As of the end of Part One, the exact nature of his resentments has not been described in terms sufficient to explain his zealotry. Perhaps these will be made more explicit later on.

This one of the keys to Graham's basic framework for the story. The modern, clean, efficient lieutenant's motives are extensions of the merely personal and secular. The shabby, alcoholic priest's motives arise from the sacred, and in spite of his obvious weakness and failings as a human vessel of the sacred, he recognizes his obligations to his sacred role as inexpungeable, even as he embraces those obligations in weakness, fear and degradation. Greene is leaning hard into this mystery and paradox and I expect this theme to be further developed as the tale evolves.

I note o.nate's comment: "mostly ends up provoking a nonplussed shrug".

"nonplussed" is a confusing-looking word which perhaps for that reason has drifted from its previous or canonical meaning, which was or I even still dare to hope is: "so surprised and confused that one is unsure how to react."

That is, it used to be mean shocked and it now means not shocked.

I see evidence that this is a UK / US split, that the latter is more normal in the US (in which case poster o.nate would simply be correct), but I am unsure even that this explains the drift.

I think the truth is that the word was never very descriptive and therefore a generation of people lost touch with what it was supposed to mean, and started using it to mean the opposite, to the point where even people like me, who remember the original or previous meaning, can no longer confidently remember it much of the time, let alone use it, as others, using it the new way, wouldn't know what we were trying to say.

I have been reading through John Scaggs, CRIME FICTION (2005) and Richard Bradford, CRIME FICTION: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION (2015).

The latter author is prolific and quite suspect. He has read a lot of novels, which is good, but he tends to repeat himself from one of his many books to the other, and also to be derivative of other books. He is also something of a self-styled conservative, which tends to lead him to him striking stances rather than focusing on factual statements. (He might flourish on UNHERD along with Dr Bastani!) In this book, not for the first time, he quotes badly and doesn't make enough of the quotations. So I'm not selling his book very well but as a simple factual guide to the names and history it is not so bad. He queries the influence of Poe on detective fiction, which is at least usefully bold, and is actually OK on the complexity of Sherlock Holmes. He also has a whole chapter on global crime fiction which I have not yet read. As I say, he has read a lot of novels.

John Scaggs' book again is useful as a gathering of facts, but veers badly into certain grooves, eg: an obsession with comparing Holmes and Poirot with CSI on TV. Likewise he drags MAGNUM: PI in to his discussion of hard-boiled fiction. He also has a hobbyhorse about THE WASTE LAND and hard-boiled fiction which is much more tenuous than he implies, and spends much time repeating claims that are either obvious or tenuous.

The book clearly replicates, repeatedly, a well-worn theme, namely "detective fiction is conservative because it defends social order by focusing on catching criminals". Considering how widely repeated this claim it is, it is curious how weak it is. Most people - including, say, Jeremy Corbyn MP - are actually against crime and in favour of safer communities, though they may have differently nuanced views on how to achieve it or on how criminals should be treated after arrest (which Scaggs rightly acknowledges is an area often ignored by detective fiction anyway). Wanting "social order" in this minimal sense is not politically conservative.

Scaggs also reminds me of a critical tendency to inflate dubious claims. Example: "Chandler's private eye is really a romantic knight-errant". There is some textual evidence for this (the title THE LADY IN THE LAKE is relevant, though it refers very directly to the plot), and usually some chatter about what Chandler read at Dulwich College, but it usually mainly comes to Marlowe's one observation of a window at the start of THE BIG SLEEP. The trouble is, Marlowe is not really a romantic knight at all - this is a faint analogy, which might tell us something, but only on the margins. The genre he is in has little or nothing in common with medieval romance (which I would say misses two elements central to Chandler: detection / deduction and comedy), and even his ethical deliberations and values do not need any medieval dimension to justify or understand them. On the contrary, they are comprehensible to us as modern people (and they entirely lack the elements of religion and of monarchical authority that would, again, underpin a knight's code). So a faint analogy is routinely blown up to casual critical orthodoxy when it should really be minimised and put in its place.

The thing that perhaps most fascinates me about detective fiction is its underlying narrative shape and how far it is different from other kinds of narrative, almost to the point of being a special kind of artistic form - in which information has a different status from what it does in other kinds of narration. It seems that the best / founding statement on this remains Tzvetan Todorov's essay of 1966. I suspect that there is more thoroughgoing development of it, that I should try to read. Another book, Charles J. Rzepka's DETECTIVE FICTION (2005), is better than the two above on this stuff, and in general.

It is a strange fact that I once saw Tzvetan Todorov give a lecture. I think it was on ethical or human rights issues. I imagined that this veteran would be a wizened old figure, stumbling on a stick to the podium. (This was only about 10-15 years ago!) And yet - no, he looked healthy, tanned, dignified, much more youthful than I imagined he had a right to be.

The same was true of Quentin Skinner. I was astounded - nay, nonplussed - that this character who seemed to have been a contemporary of C.P. Snow and Lionel Trilling was lounging around in jeans and putting forward lucid and energetic arguments against the Iraq War (and this was years after the Iraq War).

Have you read Brighton Rock? Catholic education is (futher) incitement for the central character, a little monster, a criminal punk of the 30s. It can be taken comment by the leftist middle class convert on the kind of treatment he escaped by birth, but also he seems attracted to the harshness, along the way to driving this thriller as far as he should to make it a satisfying read.

I remember having my mind blown a bit by this book because it shows Greene views faith as a burden, not a blessing: the atheist character is inherently trivial because since she doesn't believe in an afterlife so hey, let's do whatever, while the Catholic character is constantly tortured by the certainty of punishment down the line. This flew right in the face of my own conception, that it is the atheist's knowledge of mortality that is a burden while the believer's sense of an afterlife is a bit of a balm suggesting things will turn out all right if they behave in a moral manner (somewhat condescending I know; very difficult for believers and non believers alike to get into these differences without at least a hint of condescension sneaking in I've found).

Greene’s view is very in line with how my parents (but not me) were raised and the older way of educating children about religion; Joyce deals with a lot in Portrait of the Artist. The End of the Affair is absolutely required reading not just because it’s a banger in its own right but because the Greene analogous narrator has a lot of thoughts about God and faith and obligations and so on.

The book clearly replicates, repeatedly, a well-worn theme, namely "detective fiction is conservative because it defends social order by focusing on catching criminals". Considering how widely repeated this claim it is, it is curious how weak it is. Most people - including, say, Jeremy Corbyn MP - are actually against crime and in favour of safer communities, though they may have differently nuanced views on how to achieve it or on how criminals should be treated after arrest (which Scaggs rightly acknowledges is an area often ignored by detective fiction anyway). Wanting "social order" in this minimal sense is not politically conservative.

I'd say the conservative element here is not thinking crime is bad but rather accepting the legal system's definitions of what counts as a crime and what doesn't, thus drawing a veil over a range of behaviours that are as or more harmful. The vast majority of crime fiction doesn't question this, and when an investigator does break the law it is more common for it to be in the service of handing out harsher or more effective punishment against the evil doers (i.e. facism) rather than any sense that the system is inhumane or punishing people unfairly. There's obv plenty exceptions to this but as a general take on the genre I think it applies.

Barry Adamson Above The City Down beneath The Stars
Great memoir from ex Magazine, ex(?) Bad Seeds bassist.
Pretty scathing about himself and i didn't realise he was going through any of that at the time. It seems he was full blown losing it at the time he was first in the Bad Seeds I don;t think he showed it. Both hooked on heroin and having extreme mental issues apart from that before his family started dying and then he loses and elder sibling and his mother in rapid succession and gets told his dad was dying.
Can't have helped his mental stability but this is before he started putting out solo material so he must have improved somewhat from that point. I have got as far as Mufti who was staying on the houseboat he was living on has given him a cassette tape with a number of soundtrack artists from the 70s on which sounds like it must be a direct influence on Moss Side Story.
I am enjoying the writing in this so hoping that he writes more. I think this might be roughly up to date though I have got as far as the mid 80s with 30 pages left to read so maybe there is space for a volume 2.
I hadn't realised he had known the Birthday Party since they first appeared in London because they moved in with a crowd he was already hanging out with.

RE: the pinefox on "nonplussed": As he correctly pointed out, my usage was the more informal, predominantly North American one. I think the common element of the two contradictory usages (surprised and perplexed vs. nonchalant and bemused) is the element of being bemused or perplexed.

Sorry guys, this is the only correct usage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrq-2FFFcrc

Hypotheses and questions about (1) detective novels and (2) descriptions of art in fiction:

(1a) control of the narrative (omniscience)
(1b) What information is shared or revealed? What knowledge is held in common?
(1c) Could motive be more important than any statements about societal control and order?

(2) IMHO there was less emphasis on the conceptual aspect and more on the documentary nature of the art, and perhaps how one reacted to that depends upon one's feelings towards children.

(2) ... but I may very well be mistaken!

Experimentation with the form of (1) could involve predetermination or existence of answers to (1a)-(1c).

xxxxpost

as drifted from its previous or canonical meaning, which was or I even still dare to hope is: "so surprised and confused that one is unsure how to react."

I think the common element of the two contradictory usages (surprised and perplexed vs. nonchalant and bemused) is the element of being bemused or perplexed.

Good comments by gyac and Daniel on Brighton Rock, also Pinky the punk (and I think this gurl he's involved with) think of "good" and "bad" as merely secular, earthbound, bollocks.

And now I'm thinking of "The pure products of America go crazy": pure as in uncut, in their usual container 'til the right wrong circumstances come along---though it's nature x nurture once again: not every Catholic child acted out like Pinky, uh-uh (though maybe it's a wonder that more didn't---think Greene lets us fill that in along the way (this thing moves).

Perhaps what was ingenious about The Boys as a pandemic novel was realizing that social isolation would be the predominant experience and exploring the implications of that (i.e., an unmooring) and playing on that with the narrative and character development.

(Aimless's description reminds me to re-read The Power and the Glory; gyac re-reminds me to pull trigger and read The End of the Affair, which is already at the top of my Greene stack ffs.)

IMHO there was less emphasis on the conceptual aspect and more on the documentary nature of the art, and perhaps how one reacted to that depends upon one's feelings towards children

Well, in this case I'm thinking mainly of the husband's project/obsession, which is threatening to break apart the marriage, of recording random ambient sounds from a particular region of the American Southwest, which was the last region controlled by free Native Americans. Seems more of a conceptual art piece than a documentary one to me.

I misremembered the details of the husband's project and thought it was more about recording dialects as they are spoken and somehow thought it was more closely related to the documentary project of the author. My apologies!

Williams, The Blue Moment
Leising, Out of the Ether
Murnane, Last Letter to a Reader

eudora welty "the optimist's daughter", owen jones "chavs - the demonisation of the working class", gilbert sorrentino "myysterioso"

the sorrentino i realised after i started it was the 3rd part of a trilogy i haven't read the rest of, but that doesn't seem to make any diff to how much sense it makes

also was reading eva figes' "light" but gave up on account of boredom

I finished Martel's Fludd -- what a delightful little thing. I can see Spark making something out of the supernatural element but not of the cynical arguments about dogma and doctrine.

Dorothy L Sayers clearly enjoyed writing this paragraph, well might Wimsey exclaim at his staid policeman friend's observations:

‘Oh dear, yes! The people in the flat below and the girl at the flower-shop were able to give me quite a good description of her. Tall, overdressed, musquash and those abbreviated sort of shoes with jewelled heels and hardly any uppers – you know the sort of thing. Heavily peroxided; strong aroma of origan wafted out upon the passer-by; powder too white for the fashion and mouth heavily obscured with sealing-wax red; eyebrows painted black to startle, not deceive; fingernails a monument to Kraska – the pink variety.’

‘I’d no idea you studied the Woman’s Page to such good purpose, Charles.’

This from Unnatural Death – a book with some racial attitudes very much of the time, largely but not entirely distributed among the less pleasant characters, and a central plot mechanism a matter of the most intricate and obscure of legal points.

QUIZ TIME: Which year?

C- and L- flew the Atlantic, and S- bade farewell to Brooklands. The Daily Yell wrote anti-Red leaders and discovered a plot, somebody laid claim to a marquisate, and a Czecho-Slovakian pretended to swim the Channel. Hammond out-graced Grace, there was an outburst of murder at Moscow, F- won the Gold Cup and the earth opened at Oxhey and swallowed up somebody’s front garden. Oxford decided that women were dangerous, and the electric hare consented to run at the White City. England’s supremacy was challenged at Wimbledon, and the House of Lords made the gesture of stooping to conquer.

alimosina - how are you liking/did you like Last Letter to a Reader?

Hung out at a buddy's for most of the night doing not-so-legal things. At midnight, my idea, we went to the local karaoke joint, my first karaoke since early 2020. We hung out until before 3 a.m. I sang "She's So Cold." Got home at 3:30.

lol wrong thread

"Exclusive: The Cheever diaries, unxepurgated!"

Fizzles, I have never read anything by Murnane before so effectively I am reading him in reverse. He's an unusual combination of utter subjectivity and remorseless precision. He's comparable to Proust in a way, but Proust used models from life and Murnane makes everything up out of his visual imagination.

The writing is very dry at first, but one acclimates. It's notable how Murnane never tries to interest the reader in the slightest. He simply assumes that the reader will keep on reading.

The frequent references to, e.g., pages A of file B of cabinet C of archive D were curious. Is Murnane were slightly autistic? But an autist could not have written that beautiful ending. He's an enigma.

Typo: remove "were"

I am reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK (2009) - a volume of stories. So far the settings include both Africa and North America.