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

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

Thanks, poster table, for providing your explanation.

I'm not certain that the thing you're describing is the same thing as what GB describes (she starts by talking about events in the 19th century), but it's certainly relevant.

I have read your sentences a few times and I'm not sure that I truly understand them. For instance, I don't really know in what way a mortgage is an item that can be bought or sold. In fact the very idea of a mortgage is an idea that I struggle to hold in my head.

re: poster caek's comment on abstraction: actually what I have in mind re economics writing of this kind (GB's) is rather a rhetoric, in which things sound exciting and dynamic (bangs, booms, crashes; 'money flowing across borders at the speed of light') - a kind of dramatic literary language - yet where I am not sure what is truly being described. But yes, you could probably say that this is abstraction too.

Another example: poster table writes "when housing prices began to fall, mortgage delinquencies soared". I don't understand this. Isn't a lower house price good for someone trying to buy a house?

It's not for people on a Books thread to explain these matters. I'm merely remarking on the opacity of it all, by my own lights.

“What is metaphor if not informal abstraction” — caek

finance jargon is over the top, even relative to the rest of economics. when you start hearing contango and backwardation, run

not familiar with GB but i don’t think a book with the word “financialization” in the title is a good place to start learning about economics. to me that’s a sign that the book is either too advanced or jargon-heavy twaddle. the kind of metaphors you’re using are also a red flag

fun book i like and might be both accessible and fun to a beginner is “lying for money” by dan davies. uses the lens of “fraud” to explain some deep concepts of economics and finance

i also enjoyed ‘house of debt’ by atif mian and amir sufi and ‘the return of depression economics’ by paul krugman when i read them in undergrad

my favorite writer on finance is Matt Levine. he has an incredible ability to explain the logic behind each financial security and contract from first principles in a funny way

Dan Davies is excellent on twitter (as long as he keeps to economics).

lying for money is v good, so is book he wrote with his partner, the secret life of money, with chapters like “why does it cost more to love a piano than install a lift?” and “who are rip-off label jeans actually ripping off?”

i’ve also heard good things about money in one lesson by gabon jackson.

gavin.

we could move this discussion here:

a thread in which ilx interprets economics and finance, sometimes linen by linen*, and disagrees a lot (probably)

Dan Davies is excellent on twitter (as long as he keeps to economics).

but yes good idea xpost

When I wrote that I was thinking of a couple of tweets from a few months ago on how even a small rise in interest rates could be highly consequential after a decade of near zero.

Now I don't really great lot of economics beyond its political effects, but that has turned out to be brutally right. It probably wasn't too that much of an interesting prediction but no one was talking about it much then.

i find dan davies’ twitter inscrutable. i can never tell which level of irony/sarcasm he’s on

I don’t do Twitter but I enjoy Davies

I won’t attempt much further explanation, but the pinefox, financialization is essentially the transmuting of debts into assets that can be bought, sold, packaged as securities, etc.

Vine Deloria Jr God Is Red
Native American writer compares Native beliefs to Christianity. Finds the practise of Christianity pretty wanting and heavily abused.
Very interesting book. I think I need to see if I can get hold of other work by him now that I'm coming to the end of this one. But this does seem to be the only one of his in the library system unfortunately.
Hope i can find stuff elsewhere over time.

Shirley Jackson Haunting of Hill House
I'm enjoying the prose here, so again think I need to pick up some more of her work once I get through this.
How subtle is the lesbian sub theme?
Really enjoying this , writing is quite playful for a subject matter that looks like it could get very dark.

Suzanne Simard Finding the Mother Tree
Scientist's memoir showing how she worked out importance of mycorrhizal fungal interaction with trees as part of a Wood Wide Web and also the importance of older trees in the network some of which are deemed to be mother trees who shepherd the younger shoots etc. Not quite Ent like but interesting idea which appears to be heavily supported by her work. I will see if i can read more on the actual process. Have found several podcast appearances by her tied in with the book and was initially turned onto her by the BBC science show The Infinite Monkey Cage a few weeks ago. I do like the idea of a woodland as an interconnected communication network with trees passing messages to each other about ensuing conditions , dangers etc.

bell hooks Communion
3rd in her series on Love. This one is about mature women looking for self fulfilment, trustworthy relationships etc.
I enjoy bell hooks , find her a quick read once I can actually get my hands on her books. Seem to be way too few copies in the whole of the Irish library system . One copy of each of about a dozen books . I thought she wasa lot more popular. So I think they may need to pull the finger out and buy a load more.

just got
West of teh Revolution by Claudio Saunt
which is about the other events going on across the Americas in 1776 . Spanish setting up San Francisco on the Pacific coast and French expanding their trapping set up and screwing up local native economies in what would later be Canada.
Not read any of it yet but saw it turn up in a bibliography from something recently and thought it sounded pretty fascinating.
Have a lot less time for reading right now and have a stack of other stuff still out from the library. Hopefully going to get through a lot more of it.

take the money talk to the money thread! a thread in which ilx interprets economics and finance, sometimes linen by linen*, and disagrees a lot (probably)

pinefox! poster bernard snowy is already explaining stuff for you there (i think he may have begun at an over-ambitious level but we shall see)

correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think poster pinefox is looking for help understanding particular topics (I’d read a thread on them though, so no harm) but rather is interested in why writing about finance fails?

I'm happy for there to be a finance thread and I will look at it with interest, but I post about GB's book here because it is the WHAT ARE YOU READING? thread and I am ... reading it.

I suppose I would like to understand topics - I think my point earlier was to say that it was not the responsibility of people on ILX to explain them, even if they could. It's GB's responsibility, in her book, I suppose!

Poster flopson warns against the word 'financialization', then poster table defines it anew!

The word 'debt' figures a lot already in GB's book. I know what a debt is in theory (if I owe Mark S £20 for a copy of his book I haven't paid for, that's a debt), but I can't really get from that to these more advanced things that people say about it.

(I did pay for my signed copy of Mark S's book.)

"we inhabit a revolutionary moment" - Grace Blakeley (2019), p.28.

Blakeley has made one point that was possibly new to me and that I understood:

Capitalist ideologues say "planning is bad", meaning "command economies are bad", or something. But actually big corporations are massively top-down planned (p.21).

This implies that ideologues are hypocritical and know that planning is actually good, not bad.

But perhaps this is sleight of hand from GB. Perhaps it is logical to plan within your own company which is competing against others, but not to plan a whole society, eliminating competition (a thing that the ideologues would say they like).

I'm loving the formality of pinefox's titles ("Poster flopson").

Now on to The Wall by Marlen Haushofer.

This was fabulous. The dystopian premise (woman on holiday in an alpen hunting lodge wakes up to find herself trapped behind an invisible impenetrable wall, everyone on the other side dead) is really just a pretext for a sort of solitary farmer's country diary, along with ruminations on loneliness, past regrets, and man's (not woman's) inhumanity to man (and woman). The repeated accounts of scything, milking, planting potatoes, chopping wood, are almost meditative, and the animals (cow, dog, various cats) are lovingly described and individual characters in their own right.

It's a really great book.

By about p.35 of GB's book I had reached a point of strangely almost anxious dismay, as though my inability to follow was important.

I have been meaning to read this book for some time but the way it's going, I think I will probably just have to stop.

Lol @ Blakeley shouting about revolution. That's all these people and the Novara lot know. They'll tell you to vote Labour at the next election.

xpost
Not read the Haushofer novel, but the film version from 20212 by Julian Pölsler is also excellent.

I have wondered about the film version. I need to have a look at that.

As for the book the writing is superb! Definitely worth a go.

lol I'm not watching German films from the future. Yet.

Still reading Fellowship of the Ring for the first time. I was hoping to be contrary, but man, the Tom Bombadil stuff is as annoying as its reputation.

Otherwise, the creepy bits are great

Thanks for the good wishes, pinefox and table. It's def not the right thread for it, but since this is the only one where I mentioned it, I need to say that my family member took a step away from the brink (and hospice) and my wife and spent the first night away from the hospital and together in the past 11 days.

Life breaks in sometimes. It’s ok!
Best wishes to you both and hope for a better outcome.

Yes.

^ best wishes aimless.

reading that robert aickman the unsettled dust. i think he likes the term 'strange stories' or something? (i could check but the book is upstairs). it's well written and enjoyable, but his knack almost exemplifies my general point about the incorporated horror going to the states and leaving the unincorporated horror in Britain... no, England I think.. at more or less the turn of the century, via Vincent Starrett, who transferred Machen's physically visible decay to Lovecraft and thence to US comics.

In the UK you were left with the most insubstantial of ghosts, barely even ghosts as we see in this collection. Still, a general *mood* is very well done in this collection. i could do with a bit more *threat* – I mean MR James is hardly lurid.

Glad to hear it, Aimless.

I am reading 'After Such Knowledge Park' by Mark Francis Johnson— the only book of his I know written entirely in prose. Unsettling, concept-based, and ridiculously funny.

All the best Aimless.

The threat is insubstantial in Aickmann for sure - to the point where I wonder if he was deliberately avoiding the Jamesian wallop. Albeit, in total, I think I find him more, ahem, *unsettling* than James. Have you read his story 'Swords'? One of the grimmest, most unsettling things I've ever read. 'The Hospice', too.

To be clear, James has the better canon.

I've just got back from 4 days in Paris - a school trip with 35 15year olds. It's broken me, physically and spiritually but it was an amazing trip. I'm in that strange zone where my body is back in the UK, but my head is still in France. I'm putting myself back together by re-reading *A Moveable Feast*. Ironically, I've always felt his coming apart in this book - the nastiness, the mythologising of his past, his generosity to his past selves. However, I'm still in the early stages of it and am in the right mood for Hemingway's sentimentalism and his polysyndetic recreations of the 1920s.

i haven't read either 'swords' or 'the hospice' - apparently 'the stains' in this volume is v good as well.

i'm pretty certain he was avoiding the jamesian wallop (a critical term for the ages). and i find it interesting, and unsettling. i just don't *enjoy* it as much. i think it's a high wire act in some ways, and i enjoy him trying it and me wrestling with it.

was sufficiently moved by light years to try another salter. picked all that is, essentially at random.

i liked the huge cast of characters and his willingness to describe the lives of so many people, although given his known willingness to appropriate real events (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/15/the-last-book), part of me thinks this he made this choice simply to allow him to use as many real events as possible.

it (or rather the many characters) are also very mean and quite sexist, which surprised me given it was written 35 years later than light years.

I've been rereading Joan Didion's THE WHITE ALBUM (1979). It does not stand up very well.