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

Patricia Waugh: HARVEST OF THE SIXTIES (1995)

Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee - I think it was his first novel, and perhaps semi-autobiographical. The first-person narrator has just described the self-discipline he practiced early in his career as a spy in completing daily registers or reports for his boss. The key was to write quickly following formal requirements without too much analysis or correction. This reminded me of the discipline cited by seasoned writers in setting aside time early in the day to write no matter what -- to get something down on paper for later revision, to practice a skill, and to let the act of writing clarify itself. The narrator also describes the art of being noticed enough but not more than required to be accepted without second thought.

Thanks to the Three Investigators discussion recently, I bought The Mystery of the Screaming Clock for a couple bucks used.

I must have read that long ago!

I have started rereading Samuel Beckett's NOVELLAS (so-called).

I am reading a collection of Don Paterson's aphorisms, having never read his poetry. They are quite funny.

I recently finished a book which I believe would fall into the category of detective fiction as discussed by Pinefox earlier in the thread, To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia. This is the first novel of Sciascia's that I've read, though I've also seen a film adaptation of another of his books (released as "Cadaveri Eccellenti"). Based on these two exposures to his work, it seems to me he occupies a distinctive niche within the taxonomy of detective fiction. His unique twist on the detective story is inseparable from the milieu of Sicily in which it take place, a place where it is generally accepted that it doesn't pay to stick one's nose in where it doesn't belong. The protagonist of To Each His Own is a professor of literature and a somewhat unworldly man, more comfortable with books than with the confusing motives and passions of the people living in his town. This being a detective story, a murder has taken place -- actually two murders -- and the professor gets drawn in, somewhat reluctantly, by his acquaintance with the victims (it's a small town) and his belief that the police are underestimating the import of a clue. His motive is not one of justice -- he doesn't seem to care very much if the murderer is caught -- but rather intellectual curiosity. An "obscure pride" prevents him from confiding in the police. There is an evocative passage: "At play in this obscure pride were the centuries of contempt that an oppressed people, an eternally vanquished people, had heaped on the law and all those who were its instruments; a conviction, still unquenched, held that the highest right and the truest justice, if one really cares about it, if one is not prepared to entrust its execution to fate or to God, can come only from the barrels of a gun." This view seems to fly in the face of the "conservative" streak that is supposed to run through detective fiction as a form.

That novel sounds good. I might enjoy it.

I continue with HARVEST OF THE SIXTIES.

The Haunting Of Hill House Shirley Jackson
playful liquid prose lightening the mood somewhat. Loving this writing.Mood created may be a bit weird for the subject matter but probably adds t the build. I've picked this up again after realising that Theodore Allen's The Invention of the White Race doesn't lend itself to short sharp bursts for a bog book.
I should be more familiar with her work. Think I will become so in the wake of this, hoping it as good. I also have a biography of her somewhere. Anyway enjoying this greatly.

Finding The Mother Tree Suzanne Simard
book on the intercommunication between trees by way of fungi. I thought it was going to be less autobiographical/memoir than it has turned out to be but may jsuty be helping establish c9ontext as to how and why the author knows what she does. Quite enjoying it anyway.
Wondering to what extent the market determines how much the author is in the book. I think other books I have read on similar subjects have been less personal/subjective. may be a reaction to the lack of possibility of fully objective perspective.
Pretty disgusted by the directives of teh Canadian Forestry services that she is talking about doing her early research work with. Seem overly destructive and she has talked about destroying very old growth forest which is sad and won't be replaced.
This has been very white perspectived too, not hearing anything about indigenous perspectives on treatment of woodland so far so hope that comes in later.

Insurgent Empire Priyamavada Gopal
book on the last century and a half of the British Empire and the role of indigenous and other colonised peoples in its demise.
I somehj9ow missed how recent the book was for a while , then became aware that the writer was referencing Brexit having happened. Book came out in 2019.
I thijnk it's pretty good and shouldn't have taken me as long to get to as it has done. I started it and then several others after doing so so its taken me several months to get through when I should have concentrated on it. I think it was a rewarding read when i did finally get to it.

Pat Barker - The Women of Troy

xpost o.nate, I think Joanie Loves Chachi mentioned Sciascia as a fave over on Crime Fiction, S/D, where there may be some more discussion of his work by now.

Good old thread, hadn't thought of it in a while.

I've picked up A Promised Land by Obama again and am determined to finish it on this trip. I left Native Speaker unfinished but was near the end.

As I'm reading about the public reaction to TARP and thinking back to how the perceived slowness of the recovery from the 2008 recession may have affected economic policies in response to the pandemic and the current problem of inflation, I'm wondering if being cautious may have been partially right and thinking how difficult it must be to calibrate an appropriate response to economic crises.

The Famished Road. The tale of growing up poor in Nigeria is very effective, I'm not so into the fantastical elements.

that stares at me from the bookshelf, bought the year it was released, unfinished and likely to stay that way 8(

I recently finished a book which I believe would fall into the category of detective fiction as discussed by Pinefox earlier in the thread, To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia.

I've read a fair bit of Sciascia -- when I first found him it was a used copy but a couple of years later Granta put a ton of his stuff back in print. There's really no-one like him in crime fiction, incredibly good writer who prefers ambiguity to resolve, really worth reading

I would say those bks are not like any Anglo detective fiction. One of a kind.

I've finished with Patricia Waugh, HARVEST OF THE SIXTIES - albeit having skipped some sections on religion and metaphysics in literature.

I can't help thinking that this book would be more useful and incisive if she'd structured it more intuitively and simply: a chapter on 1960s, one on 1970s, one on 1980s. Instead the thematic chapters go back and cover the same ground as each other. She trades in long lists of phenomena, and in generalisations, and doesn't dig into specific 'material conditions', 'institutions of literature' or just local contexts that much. Reading a given literary text she will often use a phrase from another text by the same writer, which I recognise but which a novice reader need not - unnecessary confusion here. Her reading of Philip Larkin is sadly ungenerous and evasive; she's better on some others like Martin Amis.

An oddity of the book to my mind now is its regular reference to 'Planners' as a (perhaps malign) post-war social phenomenon, when many of us now might feel that society needs more, not less, planning. A more concrete version of this is the remarkable frequency with which she uses 'welfare state' as a negative, saying things like 'the welfare state's planners had failed to account for the spiritual' or 'the play savaged welfare-state compromises and conservative myths alike'. I think that welfare states have been a good thing, a historic achievement for humanity, secured largely through the efforts of labour movements (sometimes via their labour parties), and with various background conditions like WWII and the USSR. Welfare states, in general, make people's lives better and more bearable. If you think you don't like welfare states, wait to see how much you like not having them. Casually dismissing them as a flawed, tired phenomenon that writers can see through is crass and misleading. This can't be specific to Waugh, so it must be that she is actually reflecting a rather longer and broader tendency to be complacent and impatient about welfare states, one that I, plainly, think was unwise.

I'm sorry I can't find more positive to say about this book. Its main problem really, put at its simplest, is that it's too abstract.

I would say those bks are not like any Anglo detective fiction. One of a kind.

Yes, though also I'd point out distrust of official authority and general cynicism regarding laws, norms, etc. runs through Italian postwar culture (it's why it rules).

Just picked up Robert Aickman The Unsettled Dust in the library in a Faber Finds edition. Anyone read it? I've read his We Are For the Dark collaboration with Elizabeth Jane Howard, which I liked.

The opening page of first story reads slightly heavy handedly, but he's a skilled writer. Not sure I can justify taking it out with my book pile as it is at the moment, but then sometimes those are the best books to read, right?

been an Aickman fan most of my life and Faber (and NYRB) doing a great service by putting his stuff back into print; unlike the true acolytes I don't devour everything and only know "Ravissane" from Unsettled Dust. His heavy-handedness is part of the deal but when you're in the mood for him nothing else will satisfy

that said I suspect him of fascist sympathies

Joan, what's a good Sciascia to start with?

I'd recommend To Each His Own as the best of Sciascia and it's entirely accessible, as opposed to recondite or difficult.

Howard Zinn A People's History of the United States
Been meaning to read this for a while, certainly since i read Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz's An Indigenous People's History of the same. She had worked as a researcher on this and he had said he couldn't really tackle indigenous people of teh area as much as she suggested because it wasn't an area he was well versed in. So she should write a book on the subject herself, she eventually did and it is really worth reading.
THis is pretty good, leftist history looking at things like racism from the start of the white population in the area. I heard one of the black comedians on My Momma Told me talking about not havi8ng read all of this recently as though it was an expectation that one would have done but certainly couldn't be expected of him. So not sure how well known this is. I'm enjoying it.
Currently I'm at the end of the 18th century and the declaration of independence has been made. I'm making some headway but I'm also reading several other books at the same time. Trying to get several of them that I've renewed multiple times finished by the next due date on the 25th while also having just started a full time course.
Need to read this for its won sake though and enjoying what I'm reading.

Vine Deloria God iS Red
Book by indigenous American author on beliefs of his people and other tribes and misrepresentation of those beliefs in popular thought.
I was seeing him and this book referenced in a few things i read at the beginning of the year. I'm finding it at least semi enlightening , possibly would be more so if I hadn't read Thomas king and others having overlapping thought and some of that has referenced him anyway.
BUt pretty great book. He also got Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz involved in native affairs when he got her included in a tribal case he was involved with, as I heard her say in an interview i heard with her last month.
Enjoying this too.

I've started Ian Littlewood, THE LITERATURE STUDENT'S SURVIVAL KIT (2006).

It's not what it sounds like.

The Zinn book was required reading on almost every course I did at UC Santa Cruz (natch) but man it’s a dry book, I found, I wish it wasn’t written in plodding Silmarillion style

Obviously it is righteous and good and has opened the mind of millions et cetera – I just wish it was better written

Finished a number of poetry books, including the extraordinary 'Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me' by Choi Seungja, a pretty wild South Korean feminist poet. (It was co-translated by Cathy Park Hong and Won-Chung Kim).

Also finished Wanda Coleman's 'Heavy Daughter Blues' and Chika Sagawa's 'Selected' (translated by Sawako Nakayasu). Seems I have been on a radical and abject feminist poetics tour, something that wasn't really planned but just happened. It's been great.

I've also been keeping up with my Prynne reading group, which has been nice.

There are some great stories in Aickman's *The Unsettled Dust*. The title story is one of his best, I think and features some of his key obsessions. The Cicerones is one of his most (MR) 'Jamesian', albeit the reek of violence is much stronger in Aickman. The Stains is just all-time - like some 70s sitcom turned inside out and left in a cellar for 20 years to curdle.

Many xps

Yeah, I've not read The Unsettled Dust but all those Faber collections tend to have at least a couple of his all-time bangers - 'The trains', 'The swords', 'The hospice', 'Into the wood'.

Recently I read some weird fiction by Walter de la Mare and L. P. Hartley and realized Aickman's style and methods aren't as unique as I'd assumed. He still rocks, ofc.

Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me is great! Reminded by her mention here, I just read the 2022 Wanda Coleman Complete American Sonnets collection. These were originally published across a couple books and it's great to encounter them together, the cumulative effect heightens their power. Other recent reads include Joy Williams' newish Harrow (this mostly disappointed me) and Max Aub's Field of Honour. Also Stacy Szymaszek's The Pasolini Book and Pasolini's Roman Poems collection with which The Pasolini Book was written in conversation. Currently reading The Judy Grahn Reader and Garielle Lutz's grammar book The Gotham Grammarian.

yes Walter de la Mare is central to the MR James to Aickman through line. WdlM’s uncanny writing is wonderful. Some of my favourite short stories.

zak m, glad someone else has read Seungja! Stacy is great, tho I admit that I've never had a taste for her poems— the essays in The Pasolini Book are more what I found interesting, but I also got my copy for next to nothing since Golias also published my second book.

Judy Grahn is extraordinary, a few years ago I saw her give a reading of "A Woman is Talking to Death" and she nearly fainted 3/4ths of the way through— her partner came up and finished the rest. It was stunning.

(for interested parties, it's long but whew one of the best poems of the past 50 years imho: https://poets.org/poem/woman-talking-death)

I read that last year - from a link you posted, table. One of those I immediately passed on to a bunch of people. Think about it often.

I'm still rereading Beckett - outstanding in familiar ways, though I also think that people forget the extent of the ... what might now be called 'queer' or 'pansexual' elements (not sure what Beckett would have called them, probably nothing).

Started on the essays in F. Scott Fitzgerald, THE CRACK-UP (just a collection). Evocative, useful, yet they also make me slightly suspicious. Is Fitzgerald on the Jazz Age more reliable than ... Christopher Hitchens or (aargh) David Aaronovitch on the 1970s, or John Harris on the 1990s? More elegant, but can still come over as glib. Basically a kind of quality weekend journalism. Unsure how much rigour is in these essays, or how much interest in testing his own memories against recorded fact or the fact of other different experiences.

Then I, after many years, started John Wain's HURRY ON DOWN (1953). It's very droll already: I should have read it decades ago. The cover drawing on this old orange Penguin is by ...

LEN DEIGHTON.

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1377729802l/880277.jpg

otm

Giant Splash: Bondsian Blasts, World Series Parades, and Other Thrilling Moments by the Bay - Andrew Baggarly.

Sigfredo Sanchez had to be cajoled into getting on the plane to San Francisco. He hoped at best to see his son throw a relief inning or two, then spend some time with him over the All-Star break. He shared so much more than that. At one point late in the game, a friend in Puerto Rico called Sigfredo’s cell phone to make sure he was watching on television, aware of what his son was doing. “I’m here,” he replied, holding out his phone to the crowd noise as proof. The father and son stayed awake for hours that night, watching replays and highlights. At one point, Sigfredo disappeared and nobody could account for his whereabouts. He went in search of the morning newspaper, both to take a souvenir, and to see the headline in print. Then he could be sure it was real.

Ishikawa reacted. He kept his front shoulder closed, whistled his bat through the zone, and felt the connection. There was no need to hope as he watched the ball shrink up into the stars, only the need to run. He knew he’d gotten enough of it, that at least the ball would hit the brick arcade and the winning run would score. When Ishikawa saw the ball clank off the green metal roof atop the right-field arcade, he let out a yell that nobody could hear but him. Morse’s decibel record in China Basin lasted all of one inning. The Giants won the pennant, and Ishikawa’s three-run home run clinched it in a 6–3 victory.

In his no-hitter at San Diego, Lincecum was Jackson Pollock: all drips and splatters and scattered tosses. In front of his home fans, Lincecum was Piet Mondrian: tidy, sparse, structured, and restrained.

Lincecum’s reaction was beyond understated. It’s almost as if he didn’t understand the game had ended. He watched the ball return to earth with his eyes wide, and gave the gentlest pump of the fist. He never saw Posey coming. He only felt the sudden bear hug from behind, as the catcher scooped him up like a forklift.

Lincecum had just thrown the greatest postseason game in the Giants’ San Francisco era on a night when anything less probably wouldn’t have been enough. His team managed just one run, and needed a blown call plus a single under an infielder’s glove to manage that much. Lincecum, so miraculously good on the mound, made loaves and fishes out of it.

New nighttime book is Clint Burnham’s dialogue-based novel, SMOKE SHOW. Interesting characters abound, Burnham has a real knack for the seedy patois of PNW/BC-area drug users.

Also reading and re-reading Prynne’s ‘Wound Response’ and a lengthy, 100-page commentary on it by the scholar Michael Stone-Richards.

Evocative, useful, yet they also make me slightly suspicious. Is Fitzgerald on the Jazz Age more reliable than ... Christopher Hitchens or (aargh) David Aaronovitch on the 1970s, or John Harris on the 1990s? More elegant, but can still come over as glib. Basically a kind of quality weekend journalism. Unsure how much rigour is in these essays, or how much interest in testing his own memories against recorded fact or the fact of other different experiences.

He wrote them for Esquire, at the time ruthless about concision. They're glib insofar as he writes several lines that have become part of his legend but they're about as honest as he could be in the late '30s.

After following an unofficial scanlation of Tokyo Girls Bravo (Kyoko Okazaki) for months, it’s finally finished, and I’ll miss it! It’s not unusual for niche or unpopular manga to be never translated here and TGB is definitely the former. Kyoko Okazaki’s officially translated works, Pink and Helter Skelter are very different - Pink is about a young office worker who does sex work at night to pay for her pet crocodile’s food, and Helter Skelter is about a top model whose body breaks down due to grotesque experimental surgery.

Tokyo Girls Bravo is…nothing like that. It’s really more of a slice of life where nothing much really happens…and that’s fine?

It is probably best enjoyed by people old enough to have been teens in the mid to late eighties due to the cultural references - the main character is a big fan of New Wave and drops references constantly - and it’s about how it is to be young, poor and wanting to experience big city life while going to school, dealing with family restrictions and not knowing anybody.

I found it very soothing to read due to the flowing line work, sharp dialogue and occasional drifts into dreaminess. The references to music and fashion are great and are very good at giving a strong sense of both time and place.

I think the almost final word should go to one of the unofficial translators though:

…the point is that our teenage years are very formative and we ignore the fact that we are still shaped by things we experiences in those years decades later and I think it's silly to imply that your first contact with things isn't important, your first concert, your first kiss, your first designer dress, your first sneaker purchase (not the times when your parents bought you shoes doesn't count, I don't care if your mom is still dressing you even though you're 25), your first true friendship, your first fight, your first fuck, your first heartbreak, your first rejection, these simple things can feel like the end of the world... but then you feel fine. Your taste in things also changes but the foundation is still built at that age, think about how your mind explodes when you first discover Kubrick at 16, or Tarkovsky, or Oshima, think about finding those albums that destroy your brain and heart and then do it again when you replay them…

I am on page 630, but tracking back to a memorable quote:

But as I'd discovered about myself during the campaign, obstacles and struggles rarely shook me to the core. Instead, depression was more likely to creep up on me when I felt useless, without purpose-- when I was wasting my time or squandering opportunities. Even during my worst days as president, I never felt that way. The job didn't allow for boredom or existential paralysis, and when I sat down with my team to figure out the answer to a knotty problem, I usually came away energized rather than drained.

gyac, thanks for that post. Students brought up House of Leaves in a uni class I’m instructing at the moment, and it got me thinking along similar lines as your post. That was the first book I’d read that utilized extensive visual and formal elements as a way of creating a narrative texture, so even tho the book can be derided as a bit of trauma porn with some visual poetry, it made a deep impression on me as a teenager and shaped what I thought books could do.

Music another thing— I was always on the hunt for new music then and now, but there will always be some foundations for me, and they were first encountered between 13 and 18.

I'm not sure why I didn't connect the Nobel laureate with the film based on Happening released last spring. Anyway, I'm reading it now.

I finished the double-feature book by Sylvia Townsend Warner published by NYRB as Mr. Fortune. As they say, it was a study in contrasts. The phrase that kept coming to my mind as I finished the second story was 'songs of innocence and experience' - not that they had any direct connection to Blake's poetry, but because the first and second parts diverged so drastically in those two directions.

The novel Mr. Fortune's Maggot I'd describe as a love story, where the love involved was innocent to its core, but irrevocably marred by the world's imperfections and finally made impossible. It was told simply and elegantly in direct statements that said all that was needed to be said.

The novella, The Salutation, follows the main character years later into a far different tale told in far different language. He is nameless, emotionally empty, and stricken by a grief he has never faced. Warner's prose often becomes a dense thicket of metaphoric imagery as she attempts to describe his state of negated being. All the actions of the tale are motivated through another character, an old woman, a widow, whose own depth of experience surrounds him, succors him and to a small extent heals him.

It's pretty good stuff.

Sounds it, thanks. Also for Sciascia rec.

xpost to gyac re quote: I am thinking of my niece when she tasted different types of solid food for the first time and frowned, but as it turns out, the exposure was not a sign of rejection but what came to be in my opinion a sophisticated palate able to adjust to context. Franzen describes this in relation to the sense of smell in Purity.

Mouth to Mouth, by Antoine Wilson. The narrator runs into a barely-remembered classmate3 from college who proceeds to relate how he saved a man from drowning. I'm not far enough into it to see where the author is taking the narrative, but the prose thus far is crisp and economical.