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

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.

HURRY ON DOWN is entertaining.

John Wain remains not quite a novelist that no one reads anymore.

I've launched myself into To The Finland Station, Edmund Wilson. Because he was a literary critic at heart, he starts out approaching the subject mainly through that lens. I'll see if that m.o. continues.

As a work of theory, To the Finland Station is a dud; as journalism, it's fantastic. Wilson's an influence on my prose.

Yeah, that book is big fun. Have you read his fiction, Alfred? Been wondering about it, never seen it anywhere.

My first reading of The House of Mirth since 2006, and the inevitability of Lily Bart's fate gets more crushing with each re-acquaintance.

It's a good one to re-read, who doesn't need a little mirth now and then?

"Mirth, that is!"

https://i.imgur.com/YKDH4dP.jpg

Been a long time, but I remember liking the movie, starring Gillian Anderson.

I am 30-odd pages from the end of HURRY ON DOWN. In picaresque fashion the protagonist has gone from one scenario and place to another. An odd fact is that he is not likeable or admirable. In fact serious crime and guilt hangs over him, among other things. He is mostly not very nice to others. I am unsure yet whether the last 30pp will see a tying up of long-standing elements in the novel, or just an end to this last section. You would expect the former. The novel is quite erudite and cleverly written.

I finish the novel. In a sense it does resolve itself in that, yes, familiar characters turn up again. Indeed this is part of the knowing unrealism of the novel, that the protagonist keeps running into the same fairly small cast of people in different settings.

The title indicates that a) he has 'come down' from Oxbridge, b) that he has 'come down in the world' - from middle-class, to window-cleaner, to driver, to drug smuggler, to hospital patient, then orderly, then chauffer; then homeless, then nightclub bouncer and at last, from nowhere, highly-paid radio gag writer - thus he has also ultimately gone back up; c) perhaps also that he has morally gone down, as he gets involved in some quite bad things.

I think the novel wants to carry an implication of randomness, of 'life coming at you' with its unexpected twists and turns. I even think that this may have been part of a 1950s mood of 'Existentialism': cf also early Iris Murdoch. But if so, I don't think this convinces, because such major life changes as it shows are not just random. Most specifically one can aver that the character's final rise back to wealth is not random but a reversion to type, a return to the comfort of the class he started in. I don't think that Wain registers this, the historical predetermination of such things or the intractability of things like poverty, as much as he should - if he wanted to be realistic and serious. Maybe he doesn't. Maybe I'm treating a comic picaresque novel as if it were really saying something about society.

I then return to Wain's contemporary:

Sigggggh, I love Philip Larkin...

woman at point zero - nawal el saadawi

i let amazon's algorithm push this to me based on my like of "season of migration to the north," and while not as deep and arresting as that novel, it was enjoyably fierce (almost campy from my gay male pov). a journalist visits a woman on death row who tells her life story. born to peasants in egypt, brutalized by a succession of men, various veils torn from her eyes regarding patriarchy, until she becomes a successful prostitute and finally kills men and becomes a goddess of sorts. some nice imagistic passages, including repetition, creating an almost songlike effect. one glaringly unbelievable plot point is that the protagonist never becomes pregnant during the first 25 years of her life when she is raped by a succession of men, though later on abortions are mentioned in passing when she has the money to afford them. anyway, this book probably harrowing for some based on the events that happen to the protagonist, and to be sure i kind of glossed over some of the more intensely violent scenes, but i found the overall story to be a delicious, soap opera-ish revenge dish against patriarchy.

Derek Walcott: IN A GREEN NIGHT - early poems. Unsure how far the title is meant to be a pun on 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' - it wouldn't seem to mean much if it were - so perhaps it isn't at all.

Taking a break from The Famished Road. Just finished Black Teacher by Beryl Gilroy, a memoir of her experiences in Britain from the 50s to the 70s. It's written in such matter of fact, unemotional style, so that while you definitely feel for her when she talks about the racism she experiences, when she talks about the things that happen to her friends and colleagues - suicide after a child abducted by the father, child born out of wedlock to a black father and white mother abandoned in the hospital - it almost feels like she's talking about creatures from another planet. It really shines when she talks about her experiences teaching underprivileged children; the way she tailors her approach to reach the violent ones, the quiet ones, the slow ones, those who have picked on their parents prejudices, shows her as a highly accomplished and deeply thoughtful teacher.

Now on to The Wall by Marlen Haushofer.

A short and intense reading of early Derek Walcott, with a glance at later Derek Walcott, leaves me impressed but deterred. Impressed for I can see that Walcott was a gifted, bold, ambitious poet from the start. Deterred because I often can't very well tell what the poem is trying to tell me. I don't get much of an idea from it. Some of it just goes round and round talking about this island, this character, to what end I don't know. A lot of it may be called texture - often the texture of the Caribbean, though he does write about the US also and I believe he later lived in Boston.

I am reminded of Heaney, Walcott's later friend, whom I also find very textural and whose ideas I also sometimes find elusive.

It is reasonable to say that as a reader I would need to be more patient and carefully read through the later Walcott while also learning more about its contexts and the places he was writing about.

I went back to Larkin and his first book THE NORTH SHIP (1945). This is rather unlike the better-known Larkin. The poems were all written at ages 21-23. Many of the poems just have numbers (in Roman numerals); a few also have titles. Most could be called ... mood-pieces? - describing a moonlit night for instance. They are moody in that they describe loneliness, alienation between lovers. While the words are simple enough, what Larkin wants to say, if anything, is not always especially clear. A longer poem talks quite interestingly about finding more value in two old blokes shovelling snow than in watching a pretty girl being playfully (and happily) pulled through the snow by a lover.

I had always thought that Yeats was the great influence or model for THE NORTH SHIP. Indeed he can be seen here, occasionally very clearly, but not always. Eliot and others probably just as much.

It tickles me a bit that you are so intent on finding out exactly what a poet wants to say— poems are much more like paintings than novels, and don’t need to say anything (or even be coherent) to be interesting or good poems.

Lately I've been dipping into The Simple Truth by Philip Levine, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1995. Levine seems fairly well forgotten these days, but his poems are quite engaging and enjoyable. He seems kind of similar to Frederick Seidel, in that his poems have a very casual approachable style, with occasional surprises.

I also recently finished A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway has historically been kind of a blind spot for me. I enjoyed Moveable Feast but always rebounded off the fiction when I tried to get into it. This time I finally got going with the novel, and read it through to the end. The trademark style of long sentences made up of the shortest possible words has always been a stumbling block for me, but in this novel I have to admit, it mostly works. What he seems to do best is to write around the action kind of like a jazz musician plays around the melody, letting the story come through as much in what is not said. The story is basically an adventure story with a tacked on "serious" ending, and the depiction of the love affair definitely feels like the work of a very young man, but I was pretty entertained.

After a few unsatisfactory experiences, I started up Rachel Kushner's book of essays The Hard Crowd, and this is my shit. First piece starts with her in her dad's garage looking at his Vincent motorcycle (only time I've heard this brand namedropped outside of the Richard Thompson song) and then moves on to participating in an illegal race through Baja. She's there with her racer boyfriend, but has her own machine and her own ambitions; she recognises the boorishness of her bf and the other dudes involved but doesn't deny her attraction. In a way it feels like being 18 again and reading Kerouac - the wide open spaces, the loser types, the mix of ecstasy and mental collapse - except this protagonist is self-aware, skeptical and, of course, female. Can't wait to dig into the other essays.