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

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.

anyway I don't think I've ever heard of Mosley as "a good crime writer whose literary fiction is bad", I've only heard of him as "a good crime writer". So I don't know if this critical consensus even exists, really.

"Literary Fiction" overrated imho, except when it isn't.

It's like "Classically Trained." If I want Classically Trained, I'll go to Lincoln Center for some actual classical music, on the train perhaps, maybe even the A train, but I will get off at 59th Street instead of riding it all the Sugar Hill way up in Harlem. Of course Monk liked classical music too and that is yet another thing.

But those are ancient ILX tropes, from the time when the Twelve Foot Lizards were merely hatchlings.

I don't understand any of these last few posts.

Me riffing.

Trust by Hernan Diaz
Wikipedia and Investopedia articles on fiat money

Unrelated: description of Karst from Aesop (Has anyone tried this fragrance and if so, could you please describe it in your own words?)

The LRB recently carried a marvellous review of the book TRUST.

Please allow me to try to explain. There is an old pattern that has been discussed on this borad many times before, of genre writers, because they feel stung by being ghettoized and desire access to greater prestige and $tatu$, stating that they better than (and perhaps thereby implicitly “more literary than) Literary Fiction. Which argument these days, in a perhaps less defensive form, probably pretty popular in some circles particularly within academia and this borad, I would think. But in fact it is obvious, as the mathematician said before pondering for a half hour it was obvious and concluding that it was indeed so, once one applies Sturgeon’s Law and sees that the 10% of good genre writers will be better than the 90% of brisk crap nebula writers of literary fiction who by Redd’s Rule will never be read anymore by anyone in the future. QED.

Which has a parallel in rock musicians wanting to escape their long distance information (stuck inside of) Memphian roots by appeals to classical ideas of virtuosity and lyrics being poetry etc.

So many typos such a small chat box, such dirty glasses.

So you don't write 'borad' deliberately?

Genuine question.

Poster Redd -- insofar as I grasp your argument immediately above -- I broadly agree with it and think it is, as you say, uncontroversial, among academics, ILX, and most people.

Defensive has deep roots though.