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

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.

Vladimir Sharov - Before & During.

Sharov is a historian of late medieval Russia by training and his skill is evident in a kind of historical novel, which starts in a psychiatric asylum, as the narrator hears stories of the USSR and Russia's past -- it actually covers a period between the 1880s to the 1940s, but his skill is to distort and make fantastical what might be familiar, so you have Madame de Stael as a protagonist (even if she died in 1817, she is leading a 2nd life in the novel) where Scriabin, Lenin and Stalin (and many others) weave in and out. It covers a Russia that is very familiar to those who have read the classics from the late 19th century. A place in constant upheaval, whose characters are constantly searching for something inside themselves, or God, a place of experiments and near-philosophies where things are barely kept from exploding, and then they do.

Just in the last stretch now and its really, really great. Its from 1993 so you could say it was a look back to the painful Russian history but I'd have to read some more of his novels to know for sure.

Derek Walcott: IN A GREEN NIGHT

reminds me more immediately of marvell's "in a green shade"

(i feel i am neglecting my own interpreting poems thread but i am mentally quite busy at the moment 😔 )

so as promised i read some of byron’s marino faliero, doge of venice today. i realised why i hadn’t read it before - because verse dramas always make me say “no i do not want to read that” unless they are jacobean or elizabethan.

it’s fluent enough as you would expect, but only one bit with real bite, where Faliero explains the loving union with his much younger wife:

Twas not a foolish dotard's vile caprice,
Nor the false edge of aged appetite,
Which made me covetous of girlish beauty,
And a young bride: for in my fieriest youth
I sway'd such passions; nor was this my age
Infected with that leprosy of lust
Which taints the hoariest years of vicious men,
Making them ransack to the very last
The dregs of pleasure for their vanish'd joys;
Or buy in selfish marriage some young victim,
Too helpless to refuse a state that's honest,
Too feeling not to know herself a wretch.

Making them ransack to the very last
The dregs of pleasure for their vanish’d joys

Byron says in his introduction that from his reading he does not think Faliero’s downfall was brought about by jealousy, which it would have been easy to make the crux of the drama, and that he was advised by both William Drummond and oh balls another famous person i can’t remember the name of to not do jealousy as the prime motive as it would immediately bring him into competition with shakespeare who had covered the subject so exceptionally.

This is what makes the poem - at least the first three acts that i read - quite interesting. for two reasons.

1 - the motive is a psychological obsession with the failings of the Venetian state regarding the mild punishment of someone who has slandered his young wife. there are meaningful involutions of justice explored here. faliero himself decides to align himself with an anti state rabble provoked in his anger to do so. it has insight for today’s brain-wormed world! anyway, that obsession and motive is abstract, slight and in some respects uninvolving: not so much to do with the heart but psychology of faliero - it’s quite technical! that’s quite appealing.
2 - friends/relations of both faliero and his younger wife - who is v strict about her devotion to her elderly husband are both sceptical - are you *sure* she/you don’t find young beardless men hot? and indeed despite byron’s intro, his stilted justifications suggest he himself doesn’t really buy all this. it’s an interesting tension.

i had to put it down at this point as i went to see flux gourmet so must hie me to another thread.

I've started, at last, Grace Blakeley's STOLEN: HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD FROM FINANCIALISATION (2019).

I've thought often recently of wanting to read and understand economics. Perhaps Blakeley is a person to help me with this task.

But will I understand the book? Within the first few pages, I'm not sure I do.

In the first para I read of a 'speculative boom' after which 'the bubble burst'. What does that actually mean? I'm not sure.

In the second para I read of 'the securitisation of mortgage loans' - a concept I don't know. I read that 'markets started to seize up' - what does that mean?

On the 3rd page I read that financialisation means an increased tole for financial motives, markets and actors, in economies. But then what does 'financial' mean here? Isn't any person spending money in M&S a financial actor?

My point is not at all to ask people on ILX to answer these questions. It is that GB seems to write with an assurance that we all know the answers. And while that might be because she genuinely does know the answers, I also have a feeling of her not wanting really to confront them, or not being able to explain them, and - like many people who write about finance - skating over whatever the facts are with rhetoric.

But if I am able to continue with the book, perhaps I will understand slightly more.

In the first para I read of a 'speculative boom' after which 'the bubble burst'. What does that actually mean? I'm not sure.

In the second para I read of 'the securitisation of mortgage loans' - a concept I don't know. I read that 'markets started to seize up' - what does that mean?

Not the thread for it , but these can be understood without your requiring any technical expertise. Many newspaper and magazine articles from that era had 'explainer' pieces to help the lay people know what happened. At the moment my personal life doesn't have a sliver of space for such matters. (Family in hospital and soon to be on hospice.)

Poster Aimless, I send my sympathy for your family situation. It is one of the most difficult things that one can go through.

there's a layer of abstraction in writing about finance that in part seems like an effort to cargo cult the abstraction inherent in less dismal disciplines (e.g. mathematics), and in part seems necessary because if you write things down literally they are insane.

all the best to you and yours aimless.

Sending good thoughts to you and yours, Aimless.

the pinefox, what the paragraphs you are referencing are talking about: amid a housing bubble fuelled by speculation, finance companies were pooling mortgage debt into bond-like instruments, creating assets out of less than ideal elements such as subprime and predatory mortgages. that is, they were pooling toxic assets, trading and betting on their value, and driving up the costs of housing artificially.

when housing prices began to fall, mortgage delinquencies soared, leaving these financial companies holding the bag on the assets that they had pooled in mortgage debt. in essence, they created the environment for the situation to occur, cheered it on as it happened, then cause a worldwide financial crisis which US taxpayers had to bail them out of, all while many people were left with nothing after being predated upon by shady subprime lenders.

i know that might just make things murkier, but essentially: a bunch of douches were playing with mortgages like they were monopoly money, and then were thrown to the kerb when it turned out that their actions were risky and depended on predation and idiotic assumptions about market dynamics.

that’s my layman’s understanding— i got B grades in all my econ classes through uni