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

:)

I re-read Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways. I liked it more the second time around. It's probably the weakest of Macfarlane's books, mostly because it fails to cohere. The framing device is something like 'how we might configure knowledge of the self through exploration of outer landscapes', via a biographical reading of Edward Thomas. But Thomas is akin to Peter Matthiesen's snow leopard: elusive, ghostly, always out of sight along a chalk track, beyond the next range or peak. Unlike Matthiesen's book, the psychological aspect isn't developed enough, and with the protagonist remaining spectral, it can't carry the narrative, the book becoming a series of (beautifully wrought) descriptions in search of a unifying theme. For all that, I could honestly read Macfarlane on landscape all day.

When I read Macfarlane, I think of a couple of things: Kathleen Jamie's waspish comment about the 'lone, enraptured male, come to save us from ourselves' and Nietzsche's comment that earnestness is the 'sure sign of the slow mind'. He is undoubtedly the former but believes so strongly in his subject, and writes so precisely and with such a grasp of the specialist vocabularies he employs, that I find myself transported by him. The latter, well possibly: earnest, yes; slow-minded? Nah. And like Nietzsche wasn't earnest.

the Spillane mode suggests cops are useless because they've been tied down by red tape and are unable to go on glorious murdering sprees of the criminal element. Sciasi sees the police as part of a fundamentally rotten, authoritarian system. They both view the police as corrupt, so there's overlap, but it's not really the same thing.

Close enough Although I'm saying that w/o having read Sciasi's novel, which I really gotta.

Wallace Stegner - Crossing to Safety.

Love this book. An overdue for a reread. First Stegner I read and led to a handful of his other books.

Got my mom two Sciasci books for her birthday— will have to ask her about her experience, I have never read him.

I read “The Big Rock Candy Mountain “ by Stegner about 8 years ago and thought it was great!

Love this book. An overdue for a reread. First Stegner I read and led to a handful of his other books.

― the body of a spider... (scampering alpaca),

I couldn't, alas. Its lace-doily lyricism and its subject were inseparable, and by the end the thing unraveled in my hands. My impatience with novels about academics was part of the problem, I'll admit.

barbara tuchman - the guns of august

eating this up

good book

I continue to reread WHITE NOISE.

The American mystery deepens.

dow I really don't think it is close enough when one perspective is about wanting the cops to not be fascists and the other is about wanting them to be more fascist, but I guess this is more a political argument than a literary one

I was thinking in terms of results: that you try to deal with it, however extreme your methods might seem to some, like the reader, without calling the cops, not trusting them for whatever reasons, but the reasons, like the methods, can make a significant difference---anyway, since I haven't read the book and am far from an expert on crime fiction, I'll shut up about it.

This particular book is not really about taking the law into your own hands. The protagonist gets involved mainly it seems out of curiosity, and expresses many times that he has no particular interest in seeing justice being done. But there is also a beautiful woman involved, and he ends up getting drawn in further than he had intended, for reasons that have nothing to do with justice or vengeance.

I eventually crawled my way through Never Cry Wolf. I've just come down with a rip-roaring head cold. I wasn't planning on reading anything very demanding anyway, but this clinched the matter. I am now slowly re-reading The Letter of Marque, Patrick O'Brian. It's the twelfth book in the twenty book Aubrey/Maturin series of naval tales, all set during the Napoleonic Wars.

Haven't read Never Cry Wolf since they assigned it to us in the 9th grade. Worth revisiting?

It's def well-crafted, though rather slight. Mowat knows what makes for good storytelling and this tale sold hundreds of thousands copies (over a million?) so it has a basic appeal as infotainment. If you have a vaguely fond memory of your first reading, and no better prospects in sight, sure, it's worth revisiting.

The second to last story in that Mosley shirt story collection ties in to the debate on here some days ago directly - it is a ghost story, written from the perspective of an unpublished author haunting the editor of the literary magazine that kept rejecting him (not in a deliberate way; the idea is that his hatred of him keeps his presence about, through no effort of his own). Not sure that we're supposed to side with the protagonist entirely - the prose feels overwritten in a way the other stories in the collection aren't, which might suggest we're supposed to understand he's just a bad writer - but I was also interested in the idea that, while his stories do get rejected for being "genre fiction", the editor also says they are "neither fish nor fowl", so perhaps they would get rejected as too literary by genre mags?

Anyway, now I'm on to The Plotters by Kim Un-su, which is much more the straightforward Noirvember read I wanted: hitmen doing long aching sentimental monologues, gangsters grumbling about new gangs coming into town, late capitalism grinding everyone down.

Both of those sounding good, thanks. For those who want something that is fish and fowl, the jacket flap of Colson Whitehead's Zone One promises literary satisfaction x pulp gratification; book deliverahs. Narrator is one of many zombie hunters, hired to clean out some choice Manhattan commercial properties, cause we just know this pandemic's winding down. Zombie professionals still go to their offices and wait for zombie clients; habit is key in this environment, incl. for narrator, who remembers for instance holiday meals with his (now exterminated zombie) parents at this cafeteria.
His recent crime novel is said to be good this way too; reviewers' descriptions make me think of Chester Himes.

I just got a Le Carré Smiley collection and enjoying it very much. So far I've read Call For The Dead and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

Both great! I enjoy the former most.

Sand, The End of the French Intellectual
Hossenfelder, Existential Physics
Bullough, Butler to the World

Scott Ellsworth The Ground Breaking
This was actually less about the massacre which it covers in a couple of chapters and more about the long process of getting the story out. The author had been working on the story as a University project and going down a massive rabbit hole in doing so. The story of the riot/massacre had been treated as something nobody could talk about for decades before he did the research which uncovered a load of things people, largely white would have rather kept silent. This eventually wound up with a local committee to look into the event and a number of other books on the subject. Initially things were also covered in a more sensationalist way by a couple fo different outlets too.
Investigation into what had happened to a load of dead bodies was started but then stopped and put to rest for a couple more decades.
Very interesting book but i think it leaves me needing to read his earlier book still and possible a few of the others he mentions. Earlier book looks at the event itself with more focus but there has been more information uncovered in the interim. He had done a lot of interviews with survivors in the preparation of that book and knows even more now.
For some reason he mentions the Watchmen tv series being one place people came across the story but says nothing about Lovecraft Country which I thought also touched on it at around the same time.

I finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK (2009), at last. Short stories. I'm afraid that I ultimately wasn't very impressed. I kept hoping this book would get better, that the next story would show something more. But the style remained simple and plain throughout (that's OK, it's better that she writes clearly than overreaching and becoming pretentious), and the attitudes and moods remain the same ... a kind of passive-aggressiveness maybe (though I may not be using that phrase properly).

She writes about the same sorts of things over and over - basically, a Nigerian woman going to the US - so it makes a good change when she does vary it and writes about eg: an elderly Nigerian professor in Nigeria ('Ghosts'). Here she seems to be pushing herself more and I'm more impressed. The final story 'The Headstrong Historian' has the same kind of ... maybe faux-naif implicit polemic, as other stories do, but it's distinguished by taking place in an earlier historical period (mainly late C19?).

The story 'Jumping Monkey Hill' also stands out a bit. It has much of the same mood and voice as the others, but it's about (African) literature, set in a creative writing retreat, so has a certain meta-literary interest.

(One other earthquake worthy faultline in the strategy of the 1% to buy immunity from conscience or insulation from unpleasantness is not being able to foresee what will cause torment.)

Pat Califia - Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex (1994)

Loved this essay collection from the writer on queer politics of the 80s and early 90s. Essays on AIDS (including one on how the epidemic played out in the Lesbian community), the antiporn movement (with some v sharp words on the feminists of the time), with the final piece on sex work. There was some nuance on this that I would never picked it up if I hadn't read 10000 tweets from activists on twitter over the years. Really grateful that I was just able to absorb a bit more.

Strangely enough there was almost nothing on the trans community (he transitioned a few years after this was published).

I'm just finishing up The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler. Aside from Chandler's prose flourishes, which are usually quite witty and entertaining, the main interest for me is comparing the original narrative to the version Howard Hawks adapted for the film. Hawks stayed close to the original about 90% of the time, but his divergences are revealing. Mainly, Hawks enlarged Bacall's part, but there are other small choices that speak well to Hawks' sense of what the audience would feel was more 'just'.

A Band of Misfits - Tales of the 2010 San Francisco Giants

I mentioned in my baseball threadhow this was one of the first baseball books I started reading - it was actually through insomnia late at night and reading the previewed pages on Google books til it turned up.

The team has a great story - they were a mix of young aces, some hypertalented rookies (Posey! Bumgarner!) and some castoffs who brought the first WS title to the team since they moved to San Franscisco. You can feel the team's affection for each other and the camaraderie pouring out of the clubhouse and onto the page with small details like this:

On Opening Night in Houston, Lincecum spent the early part of his day tshirt shopping at a mall. He picked up shirts for a bunch of his teammates including one for Aubrey Huff. He knew Huff was a huge fan of the cartoon series Transformers as a kid - so much so that Huff had huge Autobot and Decepticon logos tattooed on each shoulder blade.
"Aubrey, catch," Lincecum said, throwing him a shirt. "Thanks," said Huff, who reached in his locker and held up an identical one. He'd gone shopping at the same store.

He doesn't shy away from opening paragraphs like this:

Nobody wanted them.

Aubrey Huff's phone had been silent all winter. Another team paid Pat Burrell to disappear. Cody Ross was given away. Andres Torres and Juan Uribe arrived as minor league free agents.

This is the real torture baseball team, with stretches of games won by one run and huge dependency on the starting rotation. Luckily they pulled it together to make the postseason and the rest is history. I've read about the 2014 WS and the way Bumgarner (also a part of this rotation) dragged that whole team forward, but I don't think the guy ever got it as bad as prime years Cain, who got absolutely fucked by the lack of run support more than any other starting pitcher, to the extent they called a one-run loss "getting Cained."

Because Baggarly was a beat reporter, he spent many, many hours in the clubhouses and on the road with the team, getting stories like Lincecum getting sonned by the Barrys in his rookie year over missing a flight. It was for me an interesting insight into the team's culture because even a team made up of characters is fiercely disciplined and often players take this task on to keep each other in line:

The Giants had a 10.30 wheels-up time to Cincinnati. Lincecum, who had been in the big leagues only three months, thought the team was meeting at the ballpark at 10.30. He slept in, then got to the clubhouse and knew something was wrong...No game was scheduled that day so no real harm was done - except for the $800 fare that came out of Lincecum's pocket.

But it caused a stir in the Giants clubhouse. As the bus rolled away without Lincecum, Zito took charge. "I said, 'By a show of hands, how many of you guys have missed a flight in your career?'" Zito said. "And it was just, you know, crickets. So Timmy had to do a little self-preservation on that one." Barry Bonds, of all people, called a meeting the next day and got in the rookie's face. "Are you kidding me, Timmy?" said Bonds, in front of the whole team. "This is ridiculous." Then he practically pinned a copy of the itinerary to Lincecum's chest. “Dude, I don't want this thing to leave your fricking sight the entire trip,” Bonds said.

When the road trip continued to St Louis, Lincecum was ordered to carry all the veterans' luggage up to their rooms. He was given one brass cart to do the job.The team walked into the lobby after midnight. Lincecum wasn't finished until close to 3.00am,
Lincecum fumed. But, as infielder Rich Aurilia said much later, "He hasn't missed another flight, has he?"

Baggarly writes with great affection for this team, and the city's love for them, and how the team was seen to reciprocate this. They had heritage nights for various groups and they even had an ad for season tickets following the 2010 WS parade where Lincecum mentions a fan in the crowd wearing leather chaps, which is about as blatantly fanservicey as I can imagine a deeply conservative sport getting towards its home city. (My 2022 eyes cringe at Cody Ross having the followup line to that, he's almost as bad as Huff nowadays.)

In summary: a very affectionate book compiled from millions of notes over the course of this historic season, with chapters on most of the players and plenty of background detail. This is what got me into watching old baseball games in the first place, I wanted to read about this postseason and honestly? Book (and team) delivers.

Moneyball - Michael Lewis

This is another highly granular story of a team, the neighbours across the Bay in fact, but this one doesn't censor its curses and it isn't shy of making its major players sound bad. (Not that Baggarly really does this, but you can sense Lewis's glee every time Billy Beane paces or breaks something.)

Anyway, HIGHLY entertaining. The various trading scenes where Billy Beane is running around on the phone like a hyped-up carlessHarry Redknapp character trying to insert himself into the middle of other teams' trades to squeeze out a minor league player or a few thousand dollars are hysterical. The various players we get covered in detail - Jeremy Brown, I felt so bad for this guy - are done with affection but also brutal in how candid they are, and you can imagine people described in some of these scenes cringing at the way they are portrayed.

I can recognise that a lot of the thinking behind this book is now considered dated or not applicable. But I was genuinely shocked at the FIP statistic being invented during the process of this book, because even starting to watch baseball games, I would think "but why does the pitcher have to wear the loss cos an outfielder fucked up a catch?" But baseball is a game very married to its traditions, and this whole book is very much About That. Hugely enjoyable. I read it in about three hours.

I returned to / skimmed / reread parts of Patricia Highsmith's THE GLASS CELL (1964), mentioned before. Such a remarkable book - in describing such extreme personal events with such plainness, never seeming shocked by anything. Nothing flowery either, scarcely any metaphor in the whole novel. Just the protagonist reacting to and thinking about things. His moment by moment reactions to things that people say are so superbly perceived and rendered by the author. The whole novel could be said to invert other kinds of crime fiction - in that it starts with the innocent protagonist in prison, then he gets out and commits a crime, then a detective fails to convict him; a reversal of a paradigm.

I’m also reading a Highsmith currently, The Blunderer.

gyac – have you read the Bullpen Gospels?

great post gyac

Big Sleep (the movie) definitely improves on Big Sleep (the book) - the bookstore scene! The Long Goodbye (the book) is Chandler’s masterpiece and imo even the Altman movie doesn’t better it (although they’re almost entirely different stories).

(Xposts)

gyac – have you read the Bullpen Gospels?

There are two different versions of The Big Sleep (film) in circulation

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038355/alternateversions

Also of course the Michael Winner masterpiece.

Back on Charles J. Rzepka, DETECTIVE FICTION (2005) - a book I've used before and the best book about the genre I've ever read.

Loads of material, often good judgments, clear and lively writing. Also a first chapter which digs into the profound questions of detection narrative, the way it moves backwards in moving forwards (cf Todorov, Brooks), and a second on the rise of science, history and psychology as intellectual bases for the genre. Such a sophisticated, substantial, yet brisk and readable book.

I can't be so bothered with C18 Newgate writing, though, and am inclined to skip to the detailed account of Poe's 1840s stories. I've come to realise that it's curious how Poe sort of founded a genre, but in such an offhand, haphazard, eccentric way.

Agreed, pinefox. The solution to the mystery of Rue Morgue is def not, erhm, the most solid blueprint for the whodunnits to come.

I have not - should I?!

Ty, ob!

if you like the clubhouse culture stuff, i'd highly recommend. "Out Of My League" is good too, but I liked Hayhurst's first book the best.

I read Geoff Dyer's *Paris Trance* and enjoyed it. It's the first of Dyer's fiction I've read but, as suspected, fiction only loosely describes what Dyer is doing.

Everything is covered with a sheen of irony: the classic Dyer armour, which, if I were being a cynic, he wears to avoid being accused of ever actually meaning anything. That title. The fact that it's based on *Tender is the Night*, basing the story around two couples falling in love; it quotes directly from *The Sun Also Rises* but in a deliberately banal way. It doesn't really have a plot. It plays fast and loose with narrative perspective - the 'we' is sometimes a direct character perspective, sometimes like an emanation from the entwined relationships.

For all that, it's affecting, the sex is great and it moves to a conclusion that is dislocating and weirdly Ballardian in its disassociation - of self and landscape, of time and place.

Now reading Jacquetta Hawkes' *A Land*. It's a book I've had for a long time but have decided to give it a go as part of my (poor attempt at) deliberately avoiding reading anything associated with JB Priestley. Hawkes was Priestley's second wife and a fundamental part of his move late in life towards Jungian mysticism. They authored a bunch of books together. Hawkes wrote a huge amount; was the first woman to study the Archaeology & Anthropology degree course at the University of Cambridge.

This book is broadly landscape mysticism I guess, tracing the geological and archaeological history of Britain. She starts from her home in North London and moves inwards, outwards, backwards - spanning epochs and genealogies to arrive, well, I'm not sure where. It's more literary than scientific, though the science is sound (for the time) and shows obvious deep learning. It's weird and I'm enjoying it.

Why are you attempting to avoid reading anything associated with JB Priestley?

And if you are attempting this, why are you reading a book by his wife?

I'm being daft. I have to teach Priestley and, outside of the necessary knowledge to teach, have always thought him stuffy and not worth bothering with. A bit of other contextual reading has led me to read a couple of memoirs and a novel and, as with most things, I was wrong - he's good company, a decent novelist and an interesting character.

She sounds a bit like Annie Dillard

Aye, fair comparison. Albeit, Hawkes doesn't achieve that almost psychedelic pitch of transcendence that Dillard reaches.

Helen DeWitt - The English Understand Wool.

Forgot I read this a few nights ago, but it is only about 60 pages. Delightful!

"I have to teach Priestley" - interesting - in what context? Multiple classes or lectures about Priestley? Sounds unusual.

I’ll have to find a book of hers, Chinaski.

I finished Jean Day’s new book, ‘The Night Before the Day on Which,’ which shows the continuing turn toward a more legible lyric that Day’s work has taken over the years. There’s still a fair amount of parataxis and strangeness, but the poems feel more grounded and precise in the concreteness of their images. Excellent book, she remains a favorite.

I also had a sudden urge to read John Wieners, so reread the posthumous ‘a book of PROPHECIES’ yesterday. His poverty and instability shown through more on this read than my previous, but as expected, so did his genius.

Maggie O'Farrell - Hamnet
Tom Breihan - The Number Ones

I teach secondary English at a state comprehensive, pinefox, where *An Inspector Calls* is still canon. In truth, I don't need 'more' Priestley to teach the text at all, but I always like to have a wider sense of an author in the (erroneous I'm sure) belief that it thickens the texture of my teaching and, well, for my own sanity.