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

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.

Chachi Aerosmith loves that guy. I've been intrigued by the plot descriptions but have never cottoned to those serpentine sentences. Maybe finished one and a half of his novels.

Crossfire, by Nancy Kress. One of about a dozen books by female science fiction writers I got from Humble Bundle a few years back. A very readable first contact story.

PARIS REVIEW interviews with James Thurber and Robert Lowell.

Lowell starts by saying that he's teaching a course on The Novel that features short stories and Baudelaire.

I reflect that short stories are not novels and I am not yet aware that Baudelaire wrote novels.

Just finished Dodie Bellamy’s ‘Academonia,’ her only book that isn’t widely available and which a friend who was working with her snagged for me. She was my thesis advisor, and a very fine writing teacher, so reading her takes on the travails of being an artist and part of the academic undercommons was pretty illuminating, even if some elements of the writing echo in later works.

I was particularly interested in one of her essays on difficulty and genre, “Crimes Against Genre,” as I find myself having to reiterate to students that there is no set way of writing poetry or fiction or non-fiction— the rules and boundaries they’ve learned are mostly arbitrary. Throw prose into a poem— include memoir in fiction— completely upend a piece of memoir by slathering it with dense theory. Why not? It might not sell, but if it is what the writer feels the writing demands, there’s no reason not to do whatever one wants!

Anyway, glad I have a copy, it’s a brilliant book.

never cottoned to those serpentine sentences.

I think a lot about how Romance languages encourage this kind of writing a lot and how even with the best translations it ends up feeling a bit awkward in English.

moments of pathos and beautiful sadness and sometimes it just feels like a bunch of events that don't seem to amount to much.

Halle Rubenhold The Five
Writer who I think normally does historical fiction looks into the backstories of the 5 women better known to history as the victims of Jack the Ripper. Her purpose was to show that these were actual people not the entities that the public mind had created. So this is looking at social history and how it effected 5 specific women.It looks like most of them were not the prostitutes they are publicly remembered as. Writer also comments early on that the quietness of the killings, the lack of screaming etc is likely to indicate that the killer killes sleeping women.
I am about half way though the section on the first of the women. & she obviously lived a really messed up life far more from pressures on women and moral strictures etc and an inability for a woman of the time to comfortably live alone thaniks to the patriarchy. She appears to have tried and struggled.
Writing is pretty good and I'm learning things i wasn't fully aware of beforehand. She starts the book talking about the Jubilee for Queen Victoria in 1887 6 months beofre the killings. & how one thing going on at the time was a shanty town in Trafalgar Square where the poor set up home. Writer says it was known that this was a crossroads point denoting the border between East & West London.

Scott Ellsworth,The ground breaking : the Tulsa Race Massacre and an American city's search for justice
book on Greenwood and the race massacre . White locals just killing off a load of semi successful black residents who were trying to make lives for themselves. Disgusting & I should probably have heard about it way before trump wanted to hold a political meeting rather too close geographically and temporally to its centenary. & 2 different tv shows had it appear as a plot theme they approached from a sci fi pers[ective at around teh same time. The book says that it was an event that was 'not talked about' intentionally and vehemently.
IT is something people should know about and was also one of several events along the same lines that happened around the same time. Like anytime blacks could be seen to be standing on their own 2 feet and possibly even getting a little ahead it was a trigger for racist idiots to 'teach them a lesson', disgusting. & it appears that that mentality is not a thing of the past with rather too many.

ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS, which I read now and again, is quite interesting and challenging. For instance the teen protagonist is pretty disdainful of the Attlee era, c.10-15 years earlier -- an era that for many of us now is relatively sacred, but that for him is more like 'the Blair years' to us.

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.

― ledge,

I discovered it last month. Funnier than the usual David Lodge exercise.

!! Want to FP you for that.

Chachi Aerosmith loves that guy. I've been intrigued by the plot descriptions but have never cottoned to those serpentine sentences. Maybe finished one and a half of his novels.

I do think he's real good, yeah - the middle volume of Your Face Tomorrow is a triumph, and if you've stuck with the long sentences through that one, he repays you generously.

I haven't his sentences being any more serpentine than Bernhard or Sebald's.

*haven't noticed

If there's another one with less "male narrator goes on endlessly about the women he is or isn't fucking, can fuck or can't fuck. wants to fuck or doesn't want to fuck" then I'd give it a go. (This is an unfair exaggeration but it feels like a dominant theme to me and I'm 100% not into it.) There's also a fair amount of sexist language (harpy, fat tarts) - yes I'm aware any similarity between the narrator and the author is entirely coincidental.

entirely agree with ledge here. thought it was dismal. really hard to work out what distinguishes it in any way and i’m a machen fan.

Of the three Marias I've read All Souls Day is the weakest. I don't much like campus fiction; even Pictures from an Institution crumbles into awesome bits.

I loved A Heart So White by Marias. Yes, dense as all get out, but as the story slowly crystallised out of that denseness, it was revelatory. I think about the book often.

My reading has been pretty scattershot since I got back from Paris. I re-read *A Moveable Feast*, which was both more acidic and self-forgiving than I remembered, and quietly beautiful, albeit those passages are rare. I've been dipping back into Sarah Bakewell's *At The Existentialist Cafe*, which, despite that annoyingly twee title, is actually a good summation of existentialism and provides a nice snapshot of Paris in the 1920s.

I've also started Geoff Dyer's *Paris Trance* (do you see the theme?). It's got all the Dyer trademarks: irony, smugness, deftness of narrative voice and perspective. Dyer writes sex well, I think.

It's much more Raymond Carver than Raymond Chandler

After Mosley established himself as a successful writer of popular and very well written detective fiction, he started trying to break out of his genre confines and be taken as a "serious" writer, but with a mixed success. As I see it, "serious" writers have a miniscule audience compared to popular genre writers, and academics have appointed themselves as the gatekeepers of who is serious and who isn't. They guard this tiny bit of power jealously and actively dislike having a genre writer crash their party. It's by invitation only and Mosley might have to die before he's invited.

What academics are you talking about?

What you say doesn't resemble any academic I've encountered. Which is hundreds of people.

In any case, academics' influence over literature and the literary world is very limited.

Yes I think gatekeepers of highbrow culture in general have decreased or been made irrelevant in the past few decades, but that's not to say that they don't still exist within certain niches.

Meanwhile the Mosley collection has moved to different territories, though still not noir - instead there's been multiple mad scientists!

There could also just be the fact that Mosley’s non true crime writing isn’t very good. Not every writer is talented at every genre, no need to invent a conspiracy about it

I don't think ppl's personal preferences and biases are a conspiracy, unless we're talking in a Bourdieu sense here.

I also find the idea that anyone's writing being good or bad could be seen as "a fact" suspect and, if we accept that it can, the idea that critical or academic consensus is going to be right about what's Good or Bad doubly suspect. Might as well believe in sales figures as indicators of quality once we get to that kind of thinking.

I actually find that I agree with poster table here.

I don't know the writing in question, but whether it can be shown to be good or bad or not, maybe people didn't much like it, and didn't think it was as good as his other writing.

Again, academics are largely irrelevant - their only consensus on Walter Mosley, I guess, is that he's good and important, and most people don't care what they think anyway.

I saw Mosley speak once at the now long gone Donnell Library in midtown. A lot of what he said was classic protesting too much of the "Most people don't realize that I am actually a good writer and not just a genre writer" variety.

maybe people didn't much like it, and didn't think it was as good as his other writing.

Well of course that would be the case but when you get to a critical consensus it always becomes about preferences - formal, of marketing, of identity. "Maybe they didn't like the writing" is just restating the premise.