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

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)

You can also catch Rowan Atkinson as Maigret in a series of recent tv films!

Or, you know, go to the source and watch Jean Gabin as same.

In the two Maigrets I read he seemed to solve the cases based entirely on the physiognomy of the suspects.

Lots of crime stuff lately:

Jo Nesbo - The Bat

His first Harry Hole novel, and was surprised that he started off by placing his Oslo detective in media res in Sydney, Australia. And then he stays there for the whole novel. It’s pretty interesting in some ways, with some awkward stabs at Aboriginal issues not quite covering for the somewhat rote serial killer plot, which differs from some others by being a little unpredictable and more absurd and with one wild Grand Guignol scene two thirds of the way thru. It has an unfortunate lead female character who serves as both idealized dream and ultimately a sacrificial lamb and I’m kind of over these types of characters who exist to merely die and give the lead dude some future trauma to work through. Not a bad book, I think Hole just exists in this story somewhere uncomfortably between Kurt Wallander and Jack Taylor, minus the compelling pull of the former’s grim devotion to his work and the latter’s pitch-pitch black humorous avenging angel-as-private detective-as-secret list making ILXor. I’ll check out the followup novels, looks as if the next one sees Hole in Thailand, I assume he makes it home at some point.

Charlotte Carter - Rhode Island Red

Better is this one, about a busking sax player who has an on-off boyfriend, and finds herself mixed up with a busking undercover cop, a failed gangster obsessed with Charlie Parker, a very angry not-undercover cop, and various others in pursuit of the mysterious title object. It’s a little rough around the edges, but it’s a quick read and has a very resilient and tough and occasionally unabashedly thirsty central character trying to make her way through a world a very shitty dudes. This is the first in a trilogy, recently reprinted (I read a beaten-up library copy.)

Donald Westlake - What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

Always love this guy’s books, whether as Westlake or Richard Stark. This is, so far, really hilarious. Dortmunder in the first scene tries to rip off a wealthy, terribly despicable media and real estate baron who happens to be home when he’s supposed to be away, and the guy decides to take an almost-hilariously inconsequential ring from Dortmunder, claiming to the cops that it’s his ring. Dortmunder, whose girlfriend just gave him the cheap brass thing because she didn’t want it (and had just received it as a meaningless gift in her least favorite uncle’s will), gets extremely angry about this unfair turn of events and decides to wreak thieving vengeance upon said baron, who has now become also hilariously obsessed with the ring as a symbolic token of his glory. Still not halfway through but seems to be a totally peak comic crime novel.

I am looking for recommendations for a book for my sister for her birthday. Must be a female author and preferably someone younger than 50. She loved Moshfeghe's first couple of books but didn't like the last one. Liked Sally Rooney's first couple of books. She did not like Patricia Lockwood at all. Immigrant stories, orphans, and dark humor are areas of interest.

Any recent Ali Smith.

xxpost, Omar, that last one sounds great! All three appeal to me, thanks.
Agree w all these takes on Maigret. Re: translations, I've read that, having lived in the US fpr several years and becoming more attuned to English, Simenon decided that all of his books needed re-translation, and so it came to pass--concluding fairly recently, because he wrote so much.
I may have been lucky to start near the end of this process, with A Maigret Trio, the original subtitle of which was something like Three Novels Never Before Published in The United States, think this was in 1972 (there's also a 1994 edition: English and Frence in one volume) In these stories, protagonist and author are entering their last professional decades, starting in the late 50s or early 60s. Increasingly resistant to/avoiding change (mostly the former via the latter, with as little exertion as habit and professional demands will allow).
He keeps encountering reminders of his early life, mostly unwelcome. Indeed, in the first novel, Maigret's Failure, he considers his personal distaste for an old acquaintance (now known as The Meat King to tabloid readers: the bullying son of the village butcher is a tycoon, who prevails on M.'s boss's boss's boss, the Minister of the Interior, for concierge service from this reputedly good police detective, once the smart kid, son of the swells' stewart, who later flunked out of college and started over as a beat cop, pounding the pavement in the City of Light---and here they are, together again!), and such associations, to have affected his decision-making---nobody else, incl. the tabs, seem to think that, but what do they know.
His feelings, including those about suspects, always, at some points, come to grate against his great preference for detachment and routine, but they also make him a better cop. And sometimes just a more enjoyable one, though the routines are dope too: as one female reviewer observed. his wife feeds him "like a toddler," and he has to drink his way through certain stages-locales, also hang out at or near crime scenes, though so far always missing the perp's violent return ("You should have seen this place an hour ago, Boss!") Part of his procedure, of course.

*Maigret* is increasingly resistant to change.dunno about author.

Intan Paramaditha - APPLE AND KNIFE

collection of short stories set in Indonesia, some based on Indonesian folk tales. A couple of weak ones but also a couple that I think will stay with me a v long time.

I'm reading Fitzgerald's *Tender is the Night*. I'm sure someone has already done this, but I'm intrigued as to how you could map this onto *The Waste Land*. Locations sure (Zurich, Lausanne) but also the terrible air of decay and dislocation that runs through it. The central wound may be different (broadly, WWI vs Zelda's tragedy) but the sense of dissolution is palpable.

It's impossible not to measure it against the Gatsby, of course. Is it as *good*? I don't think so. It has the sighing sentences that pull you up short, but the dissolution isn't just thematic: it lacks the Gatsby's focus and concision.

I wrote my eleventh grade term paper on The Waste Land and images of decay in Gatsby!

Would read!

Me too!
Chinaski, have you read Calvin Tomkins' Living Well Is The Best Revenge? If you haven't, it's about Gerald and Sara Murphy and their whole scene & zone, crucial to Tender Is The Night. The 2013 edition (published by MoMa, but used copies can v. very cheap) has a lot of photographs and a section with Gerald's paintings, which, even though smaller in reprocution of course, look excellent to non-art-expert me.

I'm reading Fitzgerald's *Tender is the Night*. I'm sure someone has already done this, but I'm intrigued as to how you could map this onto *The Waste Land*. Locations sure (Zurich, Lausanne) but also the terrible air of decay and dislocation that runs through it. The central wound may be different (broadly, WWI vs Zelda's tragedy) but the sense of dissolution is palpable.

I've read it seven or eight times. I go from admiring the casual lope of the Rosemary section to hating the horribly overdone homophobia and being amused by Fitzgerald working overtime to turn Diver into some kind of Magical Presence because he can organize beach parties and minister to his ailing wife.

Any recent Ali Smith.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, December 19, 2022 1:08 PM (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Thanks Alfred. I ordered Artful, it sounded like a possible winner.

Just finished Assembly by Natasha Brown. A short novel - just over 100 pages - if you want a book that gives an idea of the psychological violence of everyday racism (and sexism, but mostly racism) you couldn't do much better.

Chinaski, have you read Calvin Tomkins' Living Well Is The Best Revenge?

I've read it seven or eight times. I go from admiring the casual lope of the Rosemary section to hating the horribly overdone homophobia and being amused by Fitzgerald working overtime to turn Diver into some kind of Magical Presence because he can organize beach parties and minister to his ailing wife.

Yeah, the homophobia, the creepy gaze all over Rosemary. I was reading Diver (in that section at least) as a form of self-aggrandizement but I guess 'magical presences' - particularly men - is Fitzgerald's stock in trade.

I finished MAIGRET SETS A TRAP. It didn't have a huge twist. At the end a particular crime had probably been committed by one of two people and one of them effectively confessed. The other crimes were committed by the one person the police had arrested. Thus there was very little uncertainty, choice of possibilities, pondering of evidence for the reader. The investigation was quite linear and the reader followed along.

This is definitely a case of the 'police procedural'. I have been unsure whether the PP is a very different subgenre from others, but in this particular instance the PP story dispenses with the classical norms of detection. I suppose that the PP is also about teamwork and multiple police, and this novel has that. Probably reading several Maigrets that becomes part of the appeal.

I realised that I own Paul Morley's YOU LOSE YOURSELF, YOU REAPPEAR, on Bob Dylan, and thought I should start reading it. Thus far it is abstract, talking in general terms about all Dylan's work in the same way. I think it would be stronger if it becomes more specific and shows an understanding of how Dylan in 1962, 1972, 1982, 1992 etc are all distinct and belong to cultural moments that can be finely drawn. But I am not particularly hopeful that it will do that. It seems more likely to keep saying 'Dylan showed what he'd been up to, and where he was going, or where we were going, in 2012, as he had done, in fact, in 1962, except that not many people were paying attention then'.

Yeah, the homophobia, the creepy gaze all over Rosemary. I was reading Diver (in that section at least) as a form of self-aggrandizement but I guess 'magical presences' - particularly men - is Fitzgerald's stock in trade.

― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski),

I still admire the thing. It's interesting how it anticipates The Razor's Edge but in reverse: Diver doesn't seek enlightenment, he goes from debauch to debauch.

Must be a female author and preferably someone younger than 50. She loved Moshfeghe's first couple of books but didn't like the last one. Liked Sally Rooney's first couple of books. She did not like Patricia Lockwood at all. Immigrant stories, orphans, and dark humor are areas of interest.

Maybe Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli? It’s got immigrant stories, orphans and some dark themes, though maybe not so much dark humor.

I finished Tender... tonight in the pub. I wonder if going from debauch to debauch is as good a form of enlightenment as any other.

xp thanks for the recommendation

Bora Chung - CURSED BUNNY
short story collection. sci-fi/magic realism. p terrific if sometimes grotesque. in particular found 'the head' ' the embodiment' and 'snare' truly remarkable.

Cursed Bunny! Bad Bunny! Sounds promising, will check thx

I suppose that the PP is also about teamwork and multiple police, and this novel has that. Probably reading several Maigrets that becomes part of the appeal.

Re Simenon - I haven't read any of the Maigrets (police procedurals not really my thing) but have read plenty of his "romans durs" which are mostly magnificent ("Dirty Snow" would be a good one to start with) and I read most of them in French and can confirm that his French is pretty plain and workaday - I think I read he deliberately restricted himself to a vocabulary of 2000 words - so it's not just the translation making him sound plain. Apparently he wrote his novels in 10 days flat!!!

Which means there are some novels that took me longer to read than it took him to write...

Somehow that reminds me of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/10/nyregion/how-to-be-the-fastest-puzzler-in-town.html

Reading Dave Rimmer’a 1985 book on Culture Club and new pop, “Like Punk Never Happened”, just reissued with a Neil Tennant introduction. It’s terrific, like a feature-length gossipy Smash Hits feature, but somewhat more thoughtful. Huge fun. As a Smash Hits writer, Rimmer seems to have had access to every key player from the early 80s uk pop scene.

It's so wonderful.

I remember that book from hours spent in the music aisle at the bookstore, plus the title of another Culture Club biography, When cameras go crazy.