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

Currently switching between the following:

Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard - Richard Brody; a director who never made a film I love (I prefer Rivette, Rohmer, Marker, usually Varda), and a writer whose opinions I often find silly. Yet this is compelling so far and written with an impressive command.
The Philosophy of Modern Song - Bob Dylan. Put this down a couple of weeks ago and haven't been eager to return tbh. I enjoy Bob in full trickster mode but the tricks are getting wearisome.
The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow. I've had a copy for over 20 years but felt like now was a good time to dig in. Good-to-great.

ledge, glad to hear you like it, I also highly recommend The Friend

and The Last of Her Kind, but that's a somewhat dense read in comparison (riyl Ferrante)

Two friends recommended Sigrid Nunez, which was probably quite nice of them. I read the LRB review of, I think, THE FRIEND (one with a dog?).

One of the (real life) friends sent two screenshots from the book and they were both poor. They read like a low quality 'personal essay' making sonorous but actually not particularly convincing statements about writing. But perhaps this was just a character voice within the novel and something that Nunez was manipulating, not something she took seriously. I won't know unless I read the book.

Finished (among other things) Jacob Kahn’s ‘Mine Eclogue,’ the first full book of poems from a Bay Area poet. Enjoyed myself, Kahn has a delightful quality of including mundane details of his own existence into poems that are often abstract or based in deep, lyrical passages.

Now I’m onto David Larsen’s ‘Zeroes Were Hollow.’ Better known for his translations of Arabic poetry and prose, Larsen is also an astonishing poet in English, utilizing parataxis in a way that doesn’t seem ham-handed but is really driven by an openness to form and association. Love this book.

Rereading Jonathan Lethem, THE FERAL DETECTIVE (2018). I likely repeat myself here. The novel is interestingly organised in sections named after places, and in sometimes very short chapters. It deliberately takes on a massive topicality, with cultural references that might feel very oudated in, say, 2028. The novel carries a good sense of place, inland CA; clearly part of its project. It's also keen on animals and an 'animal theorist' type could write about it. So could an 'anthropocene' type.

The novel very much raises that old controversial chestnut, 'male writer writing female character' and its pros and cons. I think that the creation of the protagonist Phoebe is in some ways excellent and impressive, and JL gives her a witty, riffing voice that is sometimes like pastiche Lorrie Moore. Yet I still find I have the same problem with this that I did on first reading: he makes her too sexualised, ie: too obsessed with sex. Thinking about sex is one thing; feeling an actual need for it, while on a complex mission to perform another urgent task unrelated to it, is another. I think this overemphasis is a result of a) the author expressing his own feeling and b) overcompensation for the risk of writing a desexualised, prim female character.

pinefox, you might also like MacInnes's previous City of Spades, set in 1957 London, tracking black and white kids, immigration, low-budget subculture, weed as a link---I liked it better than Absolute Beginners because the narrator of that seemed as earnest all though as you found him toward the end: oversold as a cleaned-up Holden Caulfield (who is nothing if not a real-seeming teen boy, who smokes too much, talks too much, has zits and omg a range of other problems/conditions). But I read those a longgg time ago, might be wrong. Still, I think I was led to City... by Simon Frith's favorable mention, so it might be worth a shot, esp. since you liked most of the other book.

still reading the xpost Dylan book, as I mentioned on Is Bob Dylan overrated? It's a bit frustrating occasionally, but I still haven't gotten tired of it.

poster Dow, is that book separate from ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS or part of a trilogy of some kind?

I'm not DOW but I can tell you that the London Trilogy consists of:

City of Spades
Absolute Beginners
Mr Love and Justice

I wonder whether, if I were to read them again, AB would still be my favourite?

Thanks Tim - and is the trilogy officially connected, with the same characters, or just a set of 3 books that he wrote that all featured London?

Three books all featuring London and addressing similar themes and whatnot but without shared characters as I recall.

I finished rereading THE FERAL DETECTIVE, strongly feeling again the verdict above: that the novel is bizarrely over-sexualised, despite being very good in many ways. The female narrator is also presented as obsessed with the approval and favours of the titular character. I have a suspicion that this is Lethem deliberately trying to write 'how women approach relationships', ie: an idea (true, false or otherwise) that they are keen to take possession of partners, lock them in to relationships, show them off to others, etc. I'm not sure that this rings true for the specific situation described in the novel. I don't find the character's motives, desires and actions altogether plausible.

Feeling very unwell, I then read something easy: the PARIS REVIEW interviews with Peter Carey and Stephen King. Carey was more politically critical and anti-colonial than I expected. King was unbuttoned and entertaining, attacking Kubrick's film of THE SHINING and firing back very strongly at Shirley Hazzard for putting him down. He seems to have lived an extraordinarily productive life as a writer. One of the funny things here is him talking about making money from books and saying 'well, I only make a quarter of what Danielle Steel or John Grisham make' - ie: he's in a different realm of popularity and money from most authors.

Ending the year on a cheery note with Derek Raymond's He Died with His Eyes Open and The Whites by Richard Price.

I am really struggling with Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, which is a puzzle as it’s a very short book, and written in basic sentences that an average eight-year-old could understand. Nonetheless, I’m finding it very boring.

I did have the radical idea (at least for me) that I could stop reading it and pick up something more enjoyable. Once I might try that instead of bending to my usual anxiety about sunken costs.

I am really struggling with Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, which is a puzzle as it’s a very short book, and written in basic sentences that an average eight-year-old could understand. Nonetheless, I’m finding it very boring.

I did have the radical idea (at least for me) that I could stop reading it and pick up something more enjoyable. Once I might try that instead of bending to my usual anxiety about sunken costs.

I shouldn't talk since I just finished Seven Gothic Tales (Blixen) which was really overlong for my taste but as a rule of thumb I find you should always put down a book that's not enjoyable

maybe it will be enjoyable another time

something else will be enjoyable now

reading is joy

Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra, about 100 pages in and feeling it is the rococco period with extra embellishments

side question: How do you process uncertainty in understanding while reading (analogous to not knowing the parse for a sentence but applied to content and being confident, or not, that you'll be able to make sense of it later)?

Chuck Tatum: I read THE THIN MAN when I was about 14 and loved it. Definitely didn't find it boring then!

My spelling is also getting worse. What an atrocity!

Ha yes - it’s got sex and guns and boozing and even cannibalism, it’s basically a perfect 14 year old’s book. But I wasn’t feeling it for reasons I can’t explain. I do love GLASS KEY though.

Good advice Corrs!

Xpost:

Youn - how do I cope? Terribly. Which is why I always fail at David Peace and Steve Erickson books. I think it’s something as I was better at when I was younger and (not to be operatic about it) death seemed much further away.

Derek Raymond is fucking great. That is all.

I believe Ken Bruen is a fan.

I loved The Crust Of Their Uppers in college. I wonder what it would be like to re-read.

Raymond's Factory novels are brutal, ugly indictments of late 80s Britain. Peace's Red Riding novels certainly wouldn't exist without them.

Currently reading "The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims" by Arthur Schopenhauer translated by T. Bailey Saunders.

The Philosophy of Modern Song - Bob Dylan. Put this down a couple of weeks ago and haven't been eager to return tbh. I enjoy Bob in full trickster mode but the tricks are getting wearisome.
― Chris L, Tuesday, December 13,

still reading the xpost Dylan book, as I mentioned on Is Bob Dylan overrated? It's a bit frustrating occasionally, but I still haven't gotten tired of it.

― dow, Tuesday, December 13,

...You're high-principled, chivarlous...but you don't have to pretend with me. You're the spoofer, the playactor, the two-faced fraud---the stool pigeon, the scandalmonger---the prowler and the rat---the human trafficker and car jacker. Take your pick and be selective and be honest about it. You're the hardliner for fair play and a square deal, just as long as you've got your irons in the fire and enough on your plate. Muckraking, chaos and bedlam, you're a party to it all.

At the same time, you find the lack of justic intolerable and the lack of mercy even more so. It sets you off, and you wonder if it's even possible in this world...You like to praise it and put it on a pedestal, but it has no place in your life as long as you're employed. Whatever your racket, your shit job, whatever your routine task is, you never had it so good, so let's leave justice and mercy to the gods of heaven. Better to go to the local movie theater, be a movie goer, sit in the opera---some wacky farce, some silly bull-crap stage show, or better yet stare at a crack moving down the wall. Think about kindness and benevolence, giving people a second chance.

This song says let's be just and honorable to the point of our natural ability.

Let's not make empty gestures, or expect people to let up on us, let up on us, let's not expect to be pardoned or forgiven. Mercy may be a trap for fools.

Re' the song as song, record as record--he often steps back toward the blackboard toward the end of each entry:

The word mercy comes from the same latin root that the word mercantile or merchant comes from...This song could easily be the skeleton of the monster that is "Ball of Confusion."...But where the Temps sang a frenzied jumble of words exploding from the center of the frey, Mose is the detached observer of a few extremely carefully chosen words, resigned to our foolish foibles but unwilling to let them pass without comment.

"perusal < I think every reader-viewer will agree": < was meant to be ---.

He says "fray," I made it "frey," sorry.

Reading Bruce Boone and Robert Glück’s La Fontaine before bed, also finished some shorter works by Kevin Nolan and Prynne (of course) this week.

Today I read the 1986 PARIS REVIEW with William Gaddis, by an enthusiastic Hungarian.

In very Kinbote mode, he spends the last page repeatedly asking Gaddis about Hungarian influences on his work.

He also cites John Alridge's comments on Gaddis's work. An unexpected string to the bow of the Oxford United marksman.

whut

He said the pinefox
I said whut

Or maybe
He said Kinbote
I said wot?

No, the part I didn't get was

An unexpected string to the bow of the Oxford United marksman.

I reread the minimalist existentialist classic Be Boy Buzz yesterday before taking it back. I think I 'kin love it and want to decorate the flat with it. Need to read some more of bell hooks work for younger folk. This was pretty resonant anyway.
I later found a copy of Neil Gaiman's The Wolves in the Walls which I read last night and thought pretty cool. Great work aimed at younger people bit pretty resonant. Hoping starting around there will lead to people enjoying reading less mainstream stuff.

Took Be Boy Buzz back to the library it actually comes from since I was going to be on taht side of town. Had a browse around the library and found that they had the Robbie Krieger memoir so got that. Finding it quite a compelling read so have got through first 80 pages on first day.May get a copy. I thought it was supposed to be disparaging towards Morrison but he skipped the possibly cheapshot of linking morrison's dad to the start of the Vietnam war which may have just been a bit cheap but I do think is an interesting link, is that actualkly the reason Morrison claimed his parents were dead in early press releases?
Anyway, had been meaning to buy this so glad to get a lend of it.

Mainly been reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States which I've been enjoying. I do find it pretty readable so wonder what the problem mentioned on here last time I mentioned the book on here is. Been reading a few other things in tyhe interim or might be further along in it. Just on the 2nd World War treatment of ethnic minorities which is about 2/3s of the way in. Just been reading about treatment of Japanese which was quite disgusting. I'm not in the States so not sure what coverage of this was like. interesting to see a mainstream tv show like The Terror depicting it at about the same time that a couple of other shows were depicting The Greenwood Tulsa massacre. So is it becoming easier to show things like this on tv.

& just bought Vernon Joynson's A Sharp Shock To The System book on punk/post punk etc. Interesting to see the Moodists make it in but Nick Cave didn't in either Birthday Party or Bad Seeds guise so not sure what criteria for inclusion is. Thought Cave etc were UK based for longer , & Moodists recorded in Australia. Oh well, massive book which I've been meaning to get for ages. Hope i can get it to dry out without pages sticking together, got a bit wet in the bag on the way home what with the cellophane wrapping coming apart and the weather being like totally soaking and all.

I read the 1972 PARIS REVIEW interview with Eudora Welty. I don't know her work. The interviewer says she was nervous and guarded but she is terrifically forthcoming here, about elements of writing, in a way that is modest, thoughtful and not overbearing.

Then the 1979 compound interview with John Gardner. He is very verbose, makes long speeches not just about his own work and others - including saying that Beckett's world view is wrong, for instance - but also about 'moral fiction'. He talks about having wanted to be the greatest writer ever. The funny thing is, I don't think anyone now reads or even thinks about him.

Haven’t read as much Eudora Welty as I thought I would, but I recommend The Optimist’s Daughter. Also, she had some kind of epistolary not-so-brief encounter with Ross Macdonald, that has been compiled into a book which is currently cued up in James Redd’s Aleph-Null Library of Books to Be Read When I Have World Enough and Time. I will respond to the John Gardner question on the other thread, time permitting.

She's not worth reading after her first two collections, but Eudora Welty's early short stories are a delight. I'll second the recommendation of The Optimist's Daughter, which begins in a recognizably realist mode (middle-aged Southern ladies gossiping) before taking a credible turn into the Woolfian.

Her memoir ranks with her best work too.

Oh wait, One Writer’s Beginnings too.
(xp!)

There's a whole book of Welty / Macdonald letters? Extraordinary!

Whole book of her correspondence with William Maxwell too, which is the one I actually have, the Ross Macdonald I only borrowed from the library once. Same person who worked on both those books also wrote a biography of her which seems to draw on further correspondence with the likes of Elizabeth Bowen which is also intriguing.

I never got round to reading Delta Wedding, but it seems to have a lot of fans including Elizabeth Bowen. They were a mutual admiration society.

All I've so far read of her Collected Stories is fine, and often see very affordable second-hand copies listed here and there.

Violet Kupersmith - BUILD YOUR HOUSE AROUND MY BODY

really liked it but didn't understand it.

I did have the radical idea (at least for me) that I could stop reading it and pick up something more enjoyable. Once I might try that instead of bending to my usual anxiety about sunken costs.

I've done this a fair bit in recent months and it's playing with fire tbh, once you allow yourself to do this once you get far more demanding of instant gratification and end up with dozens of half read books.

I am reading Georges Simenon, MAIGRET TEN UN PIEGE / MAIGRET SETS A TRAP (1955). I have not read Maigret before. I like detective fiction and this is very much the sort of thing I would like. It is easy to read and I am enjoying it. Quite possibly I will go on to read lots more.

However, I am unsure ... how good it is.

For one thing it seems to bear little resemblance to the classical detection paradigm in which there should be a range of suspects and a lot of clues for the reader to consider. The 'puzzle element' is apparently lacking. That doesn't make it bad, just possibly removes one set of pleasures. But as I have not finished the novel, perhaps I am wrong in this particular assessment.

The writing can be confounding in that it will elide one scene or moment to another - Maigret is in his office, then in the corridor, then in a bar round the corner, in the space of a couple of sentences. The author uses lines of dialogue to interrupt his narrative accounts of thought and action, and they seem in effect to wake us up in a new location.

The writing is plain. That can be fine, but it can also seem ... clumsy? And yet, one immediately says, this is a translation. So is it a bad, clumsy translation of something that was originally elegant? I doubt that it is actually a bad translation. I suspect, rather, that French has something (elegance, indeed) that easily gets lost in translation.

The book seems like it can easily be read in a day. I like this. Quite probably next year I will read more in this very extensive series.

From my understanding, Maigret books become richer and more fulfilling as one reads more of them. A professor friend of mine was obsessed with him a few years ago and read everything that had been translated, says it was an excellent experience.

I finished Christa Wolf’s last piece of fiction, ‘August,’ a lovely novella that engages with a simple
man’s memories of his experiences in a post-WW2 German tuberculosis sanatorium. Like all of
Wolf’s writing, it is psychologically incisive, rather beautiful, and deeply sad. I love her work, truly think she’s one of the greats of the past 100 years.

I’m getting ready for a reading of Bernadette Mayer’s ‘Midwinter Day’ on the 21st, so am catching up on chapbooks from a number of poets until then.

NB this is coming from a guy who never cares about the mysteries anyway but for me Maigret is all about the vibes, what kind of booze he orders at the local café and such.

Talking Pictures in the UK is showing a Maigret series from the 60s on saturdays iirc. seems like an odd mix of french settings and english actors (i'm only taping them because Pauline Boty is in one)