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

Poster Alfred: I could try to explain fully, though I know others would not share my views. I know that there is a very extensive Joan Didion thread on which people have already had their say about her - I must have first posted about 16 years ago, and many times since - so one should not really relitigate it.

But ... specifically from this rereading:

1: I think the book is poorer than people might think or remember simply because it is a collection of reports culled together from magazines. Less good, really, than the average collection of LRB reviews (by Frank Kermode, James Meek, et al).

2: I think her writing is often brittle, mannered and not as good as she thinks it is. It contains a lot of redundancy and unnecessary verbiage in the form of rhetorical tics.

3: I think that when political judgments come through, they are often very conservative (which for some people would itself be a demerit), but are not argued through rationally and carefully; rather, usually, they are presented as sarcastic snipes. I understand that this mode may suit a weekly magazine that people then throw away, but it does not wear well as a book to be assessed decades later. The sarcasm is very limited and unpersuasive. The points that it makes do not convince me.

Again, the impressions that keep coming to mind are brittleness and an overestimation of her own powers, wit, persuasiveness. The style and the ideas feel much thinner and weaker than she seems to think they are.

Here is one particular point, which does not prove or disprove my view or any other view in general:

In the possibly famed essay on the women's movement (1972), Didion writes that the feminists seek an escape from adulthood and the body; cleanliness; an avoidance of things like the mess of the body and sex, things that come with being a woman.

This is particularly strange as I think the reverse could be posited. It could well be said that feminists of the 1970s were actually insisting on the body and sexuality; menstruation, blood and the menopause; the reality of sex (pleasure and violence); childbirth and childrearing (as has sometimes been pointed out in the past, feminist writers of that time were often also young mothers, sometimes bringing up children in more collective forms than the middle-class norm of the time). It could well be said that feminists were inserting these things into a public discourse that had indeed been too 'clean' and polite to acknowledge them (arguably in the interests of masculinity, patriarchy, inequality, etc).

In this specific regard, then, Didion seems to me to arguing the opposite of the truth.

However, it must be acknowledged that it must have depended on specifically which feminists one was reading, and on differences between schools of feminist writing in different places.

I tend to prefer most of her work from the '80s onward: Salvador, Miami, After Henry, Political Fictions. She perfected the hawk-circling-its-prey distance/attack.

Didion was small-c-conservative and big-c conservative, but, unlike many Orange County peers, Reagan broke her.

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.

British horror of the first half of the 20th century vs American horror of same era comparable to UK cinema vs classic Hollywood in these times maybe? I.e. first one stodgier, almost allergic to showbiz sparkle, occasionally producing works of great genius but not at a rate comparable to the latter?

october's reading was:

macbeth - william shakespeare
by the pricking of my thumbs - agatha christie
something wicked this way comes - ray bradbury

do you see what i did there?

did macbeth for o level in 1984

pricking was ok, tommy and tuppence, not attacking the labour party this time. and interestingly they appeared to have aged in real time, given they were teenagers in the first book.

first time for something wicked. felt a lot like stephen king but more poetic. maybe would've been more effective without some of the more outlandish things.

multiple xposts to ward f. yes good stuff: ravissante is excellent and your phrase “uneasy sexual fear” is on point.

A quick rereading of THE CRYING OF LOT 49 (1965), skimming slightly early on but then less and less.

By far my favourite Pynchon, even one of my favourite novels; yet this time it felt thinner than before. Maybe the stage management and narrative mechanics seemed more awkwardly on show. The dialogue is an example of that. And the drama of discovery which so thrilled me first time, many years ago, doesn't now. Yet it's still very densely packed for a short book.

The theme of information - and information theory, retrieval, memory, loss - came through strongly; more than the alternative term 'communication', though to be that's raised sometimes. The sequence where the heroine thinks about a hobo with delirium tremens and how much sweat is sunk into in his bed, and will eventually be lost - which as I write it out seems a pretty unsavoury image - is longer and more emphasised than I'd remembered. I don't fully understand this theme, still don't understand the Maxwell's Demon theme after over 20 years. But I do sense that Pynchon was one of the first, at least outside SF, to write fiction with information, in this sense, as such a theme and concern; with an idea, for instance, that matter contains information or could be described in terms of information. Mucho Maas's interesting peroration on how to analyse music down to its component parts would be a related example.

Hey, take it over to the book crying of lot 49

If not Itt videos of people singing “Crying”

Started Warren Ellis' book about a piece of Nina Simone's chewing gum. He retrieved it from her piano after a transcendent gig at the Festival Hall in 1999, wrapped it in the towel she'd used to mop her brow, and kept it a secret from thereon, holding onto it as a kind of sacred relic. The book is about his bringing it out into the open, as part of an exhibition Nick Cave put on in Copenhagen in 2019, and how it opened up into an archaeology of his past via various objects.

It could be pure self-indulgence (and it kind of is) but Ellis is so wide-eyed and generous that some of the more hokey spiritual stuff comes across as completely genuine. It's beautifully put together as well, particularly the photography.

I have to reread Crying of Lot 49 now. (I never connected that theme to the book and am intrigued that it is of interest to scholars in literature.)

I feel the same. I'd never thought about it from the angle of information theory before (and wouldn't have known enough about information theory to connect it anyway), and I'm probably due for a re-read at some point.

pinefox otm. Thought about that California again while reading Devil House (and especially when the narrator of Wolf In White Van walks to the convenience store and actually talks to somebody in real time, although Cali is always right there, now that I think of it duhhh), also Emma Cline's The Girls

Now I'm intrigued by the Warren Ellis mention as well, thx Chinaski.

The Ellis book is lovely. The central conceit - the archaeology of the self and ideas through the uncovering of a found object - isn't particularly original but his devotion to the magic of this thing he possesses is quite something. In some ways, the book is a bagatelle, really, almost a kids' book because of Ellis' lack of overt style and pretension, its structure and its use of repetition, but there are a couple of recurring stories in there that I found quite overwhelming.

Finished Mark Francis Johnson's 'After Such Knowledge Park,' a prose poem piece of 135 pages that is by turns insane, hilarious, and quite sad. It involved a "future" protagonist in what appears to be a version of the Earth, but this protagonist has several more limbs than we humans do. Like many future dystopias, the spectre of what amounts to enslavement hovers over the book, with talks of "selling parts of my cash-bod" and etc. Unlike any of his other books in form, it does contain some of the antic elements of Johnson's poems— there is a section of about four or five pages in length that is ostensibly naming starships, but they're all actually the names of daycare centers stolen directly from the phone book.

Also continuing with the Prynne reading group, spent some time this week with Wordsworth and Marvell as a result, too.

i re-started The Peripheral a few weeks ago to get past the initial (deliberate) disorientation. got past it. felt it was ok. then got bored again. then saw there was a tv series and thought “ah fuck it” and put it down for good.

I've been reading The Housing Lark by Sam Selvon. A novel about West Indians living in London in the '60s trying to get around racist landlords by buying a house, it's unusual for being told in the third-person in a West Indian patois. It's also acute about race, irreverent, and funny.

I really like Selvon, I’ve read Ways of Sunlight and I think The Lonely Londoners is somewhere around.

Has Warren Ellis been rehabilitated?

I assume you mean the twatty comic writer Warren Ellis? The memoir is him off Dirty Three/Bad Seeds.

Unless I've missed something major.

Mostly been reading newspapers, as most suited to my available time, energy level and attention span, but before bed I've been reading a few pages of Mowat's Greatest Hit: Never Cry Wolf. I should finish it before New Year's Day.

Is there another Warren Ellis? Who writes books, I mean.

There is a Warren Ellis who writes mostly comics, yes.

And yes, musician Warren Ellis (different from comic book/shitty dude Warren Ellis) apparently has a book now

It's great! (See garbled reviews from about 7 posts ago. Have I gone through the looking glass?)

I had not heard of musician Warren Ellis. I thought you were talking about the guy who writes comics, novels, screenplays, etc.

He was the front guy in Dirty 3 viewed as a master violinist and a bit of a raconteur. Took over from Mick Harvey as musical director of teh Bad Seeds too. Bought me a pint once.
He saved the gum that Nina Simone stucck to her piano when Nick Cave hosted Meltdown. He wrote a book about that and various other things. I need to read it.

At the moment I am reading Kid Congo Powers memoir Some New Kind of Kick which I got on Friday. I think I held teh door to the bookshop open for the person delivering it, then got told book wasn't in yet then got a phonecall saying it was like 2 minutes after that. Great coincidence. Bookshop is around teh corner from teh course I'm on so popped in there for a browse anyway thinking the book was still a few days away.
Quite great book, hope Kid writes some more after this. I'm 100 and something pages in and Kid is being a hellion on the LA punk scene. Has met the rhythm section he is going to play with in the initial Creeping Ritual/Gun Club way before he met Jeffrey Lee Pierce. Is dabbling with drugs a lot. Thankfully more acid than harder stuff so far. I think its a pageturner and will recommend it to anybody into his music or related. Glad I told him he should write a memoir, seem to have not been the only one to have done so. I remembered him telling me he kept a journal when he was with the Gun club , in 1984 o0r around then so hoped he kept one going.
I thought thsi was partially ghostwritten before i got it but it doesn't really seem to be. Thought there was a credit to a with somebody but if thsi si all him hope it is not the only thing he writes.

I have occasionally been reading Colin MacInnes' ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS.

Been a long time, but I remember preferring the first in that trilogy, City of Spades, about low-budget bohemian black-white youth subcultures in London.

I think I have an omnibus with both.
There was an overhyped film of Absolute Beginners in the 80s. Had Bowie in it I think.
Paul Welled used the book title for a good Jam track too.

After my 36 hours in hospital, settling into George Crabbe’s THE VILLAGE

Rereading Angela Carter, THE PASSION OF NEW EVE (1977).

I am still reading baseball books and I finished Andrew Baggarly’s first book about the 2010 SF Giants team which I’ll write up later. For reasons best understood by my seemingly enduring fascination with the World Series winning teams of the past decade, I’m currently reading Barry Zito’s autobiography, Curveball.

Zito is a really weird character. Literally every interview I’ve read about him I thought, is this a bit?

Reader, it was not.

The truly great sports book needs a rise and a fall, and maybe a rise again later. You also need brutal honesty about the person’s shortcomings and foibles. Does Curveball deliver? Does it ever.

From chapter 10, entitled Nobody’s Fault But My Own:

The strange feeling was likely the result of a crazy experiment I got in on when one of my spiritual practitioners offered me a homeopathic remedy to connect me with my “spirit animal.” You probably figured spirit animals would enter the picture at some point, right? After assessing me over the phone, the scientist declared mine to be a lion. He gave me some tablets to take that he said contained real lion’s milk. I never asked him how you milk a lion but I often wondered. After several days on “the milk,” Brian and I were on the double date when the thoughts of choking someone began to overwhelm me. As a normally chill, laid-back guy, this was completely out of character for me. A couple of hours later while still out on the town, a friend of mine saw me and asked if I would come next door to grab a drink at the bar where she worked. I gladly agreed.

…

Later at home trying to settle myself down, I called Paul and told him what had happened. After hearing my odd, out-of-character story, he got fired up, which made his accent sound even thicker: “Well, mate, do you know how a lion kills its prey?” He paused for a dramatic effect. “He goes for the throat and chokes ’em out! You’re becoming a lion, Barry!” Paul was obviously referring to the tablets I had been taking. In that moment, my mind rushed back to what I had texted Brian at the beginning of the night about choking someone. Finally connecting the dots, I thought it was obvious the lion’s milk had taken effect, because I had never wanted to do such a thing before; in fact, violence was always something I avoided.

In hearing everyone’s stories, I saw right away that—compared to me and my almost unlimited resources—these people had real problems. I don’t mean to say I wasn’t drowning in my own issues, but as humans who gain some wealth, we can all too quickly forget what struggling to pay rent feels like. That reality check was a positive element for me.

I had been growing a mustache for the past month, which also worked in my favor. She later told me, “I never thought you would propose to me with that thing on your face.”

I admit that I do admire your tenacity in a genre that means nothing to me, great write up.

Listen if anyone had ever told me I would give a shit about baseball six months ago, I would have laughed them out of it.

I should also tip my cap to one of the greatest ilb posts of all time about Zito

kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius)
Posted: 7 April 2010 at 02:49:41
Not only is Zito throwin zeroes, his ass and legs are lookin great.

I really should read the earlier Carter, THE MAGIC TOYSHOP and FIREWORKS at last - have been meaning to for ages.

Listen if anyone had ever told me I would give a shit about baseball six months ago, I would have laughed them out of it.

I should also tip my cap to one of the greatest ilb posts of all time about Zito

kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius)
Posted: 7 April 2010 at 02:49:41
Not only is Zito throwin zeroes, his ass and legs are lookin great.

Thanks!

lol morbs

I am also quite enjoying going back to THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS in book form. I love the brightly coloured books and the expansive interviews. This week I read G G Marquez who kept talking about being a journalist and a socialist. The interviews with Larkin and Faulkner, among others, are classic documents that one can read many times.

Angela Carter, NOTHING SACRED: essays.

Carter had a big reputation for this sort of thing. She knew quite a lot, eg about film, which is a good start. But her style seems to me hampered by rhetorical over-emphasis and forced jollity. The sense can be of brassiness compensating for insecurity. She was a significant writer and figure, but I have never been entirely convinced by her prose.

Reading Carter's 1977 essay on Viv Nicholson, thinking: well, yes, she could still get a job as TV critic for the Observer or New Statesman, I realised that her journalism reminded me of something - with its deliberate exaggerations, provocations, flourishes, elevation of rhetoric over coherence.

Julie Burchill.

The dates even make sense, in that Burchill was coming through when Carter had been, and still was, writing a lot of this stuff. But Burchill, I believe, went on to be denigrated (no doubt for various reasons), and Carter is still revered.

Elizabeth Bowen - The Little Girls
Charles Blow - The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

Since it's Noirvember I thought I'd read nothing but hard boiled crime fiction this month. Started this with Walter Mosley's short story collection The Awkward Black Man, which so far is turning out to be not what I'd expected. Mosley is known for his crime fiction and the book was indeed in that section of my local shop, but so far the stories are much more about sad middle aged people going through life; there's the occasional criminal activity, but no mystery or investigation. It's much more Raymond Carver than Raymond Chandler, and as with my experience with Carver as a teen, sometimes there's moments of pathos and beautiful sadness and sometimes it just feels like a bunch of events that don't seem to amount to much. Frequent themes: cancer, divorce, workplace sexual harassment.

I am reading Jay Caspian Kang and think I have the same sentiment: what a handicap it is to want to be a chum or a bro.

All Souls by Javier Marias, not yet convinced by this highbrow academic farce - just like ordinary academic farce, including male narrator obsessing over women he has barely met, but with longer sentences and paragraphs.