I have coveted everything and enjoyed nothing: what are you reading in Spring 2024?

Holly George-Warren's A Man Called Destruction. Itinerate commenter Edd Hurt dismissed it several weeks for not delving into the sources of Alex Chilton's guitar playing, but as someone who owns the Big Star albums and nothing else K found the bio was well-sourced and literate.

About to start The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World.

March was:

Zola - Germinal
Henri Alain Fournier - The Lost Estate
Dumas - Black Tulip
Balzac - An Episode Under the Terror
Balzac - At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
(the last two were very short, less than 100 pages total)

i'm not sure what i was expecting the lost estate to be like but it wasn't that.

germinal and black tulip a lot more readable than you'd think.

i'm not sure what i was expecting the lost estate to be like but it wasn't that.

in a good way or a bad way? (I love it.)

I picked up that book (The Lost Estate) about 15 years ago on the recommendation of a friend. I have yet to read it. I'm not sure why, other than this friend is a bit of a misanthrope. More than a bit, actually.

it's definitely not a misanthropic book.

it was probably a bit more modern than i was expecting. and i guess the cover suggested flouncy 20-something female and i got mostly scruffy teenage boys.

i liked the mystery of it. it was a bit tom's midnight garden. but i was expecting Thomasina.

(i guess it's not so modern that places even 20 miles away are practically unknown to people, because 20 miles is a day's travel)

There's a quality in him I find off-putting, but hard to pin down.

same tho i don’t think i agree with your point about cruelty. as i feel similarly about how it’s hard to pin down i’m not sure i have a reason for why i don’t agree.

whatever that quantity is, it’s less visible (but still disconcertingly present) in the deptford trilogy than the cornish stuff.

Yeah, cruelty isn't the right word for that quality. I was reaching and overreached. Whatever it is, it is submerged and cumulative in effect.

picked up after you were, i am by camille ralphs, which i’ve seen some fuss about.

this is - or at least the first section is - religious poetry, or rather religious poetry/texts from various periods (George Herbert, John Baillie, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Rumi) brought into contact with modernity.

Ralphs’ stylistic markers are so visible - word play, antithesis, dense clusters of alliteration and assonance (there must be a term for this) - that it’s a little difficult to work through the thicket as it were and find what else is there.

the project seems to be to divine something of the just future by applying mystic texts to the syllabic cacophony of the present.

i think there’s enough of interest on a first reading to go back and work through it some more.

from veni sancte spiritus:

Give to those who, doggèd, wait
on your fingers’ click and bait
the worried bone of friendliness

i suppose dogged needed the grave. but yes it gives a good general sense of it: the imv successful play of “your fingers’ click and bait” and something about in an age of social media captured well by the phrase “the worried bone of friendliness”.

when ralphs cuts loose a bit from their acrobatics they get some punch:

Like that last phrase, you run, like blinding colours through the eyeless world
and when the mind forgets itself, you’re there — where what is left to know is left to live.
Fine, hold me in your Holocene: give me a kicking; and the goods,
the martyrs with their hopscotch blood and nails as fragrant in their palms as cloves

(from Wessobrunn Prayer)

i’m looking forward to digging in, even if periodically i wish they’d let up a bit.

oh i think there must be something of the Pound here. interpreting the prosody of these old texts and modes to create unusual modern poetic forms (the alliteration, obv a form in old english/german etc)

periodically i wish they’d let up a bit

based on the fragments you quoted, understandable. sonically, it invites you to move right along, but semantically it's a slow, dense obstacle course, which tends to fight itself

I've started in on Kokoro, Natsume Soseki. The translator is Edwin McClellan. Too soon for comments.

S. Yizhar - Preliminaries.

Review here that is fine with giving the synopsis of the book:

https://wordswithoutborders.org/book-reviews/preliminaries-by-s-yizhar/

The writing is wonderful, if you like that kind of thing. This will do it for you, no question. If it is a well I will walk for miles everyday to drink from it, for sure. And so on.

Except: what is it to read this now? Arabs have been displaced and we see the images of what that means on our screens. Every day for the last few months. The politics of that situation isn't discussed much in that review.

What saves it (if you like) is a measure of acknowledgement, some guilt, some awareness of what it is to have moved to a place so alien.

Above all the writing on nature, friendship, people. This guy can extract every ounce of feeling for the sky in his writing. If we were all truly able to have those feelings as expressed here maybe things would not have turned out as they have. I am no doubt wrong about this.

really enjoying the ralphs. it's actually caused me to get my bible down this easter sunday to check the story of job against the prose poem Job 42:10-17 (the final verses covering god's double restitution to job of that which he had lost), which has the epigraph:

Yesterday P. asked: 'Do you think the children from Job's second chance could actually be happy?' Anna Kamieńska, A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook

His Children (whom he'd seen the fired pyres stripping of their nakedness and every woolly talisman) came back: came bringing groceries: and they said, this is what a bad trip feels like, we were never dead, you only thought we were: and though he had mislaid his face in tumuli of boils, had dropped his Eyes in lozenge-bottles crouched behind the ziggurats of shipping boxes at the docks, screamed at Life's fair unfairness, they beatified him

potent. i particularly like the mislaid face in the tumuli of boils, the brutality of those woolly talismans going up in flames, 'ziggurats of shipping boxes' does the job of the architecture of the ancient world in the modern well. and later, "And he blessed the World in turn because he feared to curse it" speaks plainly of what's been done to Job.

After This is That, he said, and if this were a bad trip I would know it. And did not escape the Feeling, angry as a tennis racquet, of his being made to serve.

And then Ralphs goes and does this! The actual metaphor, the maximal tautness of the strings in the tensile frame, the thwock of the tennis ball - no question, brings something to the quality of Job's anger. but 'of his being made to serve' can only be a joke. it's hard to see it as anything else. the immediate suspicion is that Ralphs couldn't find another way of putting it, was reluctant to relinquish this form of words, liked it too much maybe. on the other hand this could be depicting a nasty rhyming cruelty of the universe, indifferent to bathos. either way it's extremely disconcerting, and pulls you up short.

the final lines though, reassert the general tone of the poem, of Job alone retaining the memory of that which has been done to him:

You're dead, you're dead, he said, watching his children reproduce; and soon they too grew to believe it.

ralphs is willing to untether words from their moorings and use them for their abstract quantities, but this has the effect sometimes of causing you to wonder what a word is doing there - is there any constraint of meaning hanging off it at all? it can have the feeling of an LLM set to high temperature. but as i say, i'm really enjoying getting my teeth into it. it's fecund, energetic, smart etc.

Yeahm was already thinking that some of the word choices seem more willful than anything else, on first reading--but

And did not escape the Feeling, angry as a tennis racquet, of his being made to serve.

And I suppose that capitalizing "Feeling" could be sarcastic/counter-Serious, making your own damn book/Book, twisting the other side of the story around to the front.

oh i agree the psychology is apt - it’s partly the point, but the serve-as-in-tennis-serve is, well it’s just silly. introducing an image that does nothing for the poem.

germinal ... a lot more readable than you'd think.
i did germinal in january & this was my takeaway too. definitely piqued my interest for more zola.

recent reads have included ivan turgenev's virgin soil, austen's persuasion, and anna kornbluh's immediacy. hoping to get to sand's the devil's pool soon.

Fludd by Hilary Mantel. A strange little book, the kind where I feel like I'm on a completely different wavelength from the author, despite her easy cynicism concerning religion. (Though in an afterword she says she wishes that everyone could be brought up catholic, or something like it, because of the sense it gives that everything is not as it seems. Hmm.) You wouldn't think it was by the same author as Wolf Hall.

because of the sense it gives that everything is not as it seems

most religions and a fair number of drugs provide this sense, but catholicism will do in a pinch

a few children's books and an average imagination will do it.

Thurston Moore Sonic Life
Avant garde guitarist's memoir. He's just got to having Lee Ranaldo in Sonic Youth who have Richard Edson back in the band after playing as a drummerless 3 piece.
Been pretty good so far.
I needed some lighter reading. Feeling fluey or something.

So not getting as heavily into a number of other non-fiction books as I wanted.

Rashid Khalidi the Iron Cage
Book looking at why Palestine is not doing better in its struggle by a Palestinian academic and historian. Looking at 20th century history of the place.

Enzo Traverso
Book on Marxist explanations of the holocaust.
I really dug the author's name when it turned up in a bibliography. So grabbed the book when I saw it was in the local library.

Peter Fryer Staying Power
Book on black presence in the British isles. Pretty scathing on widespread racism.
I'm having the same problem trying to work out how you read a text peppered with endnote reference numbers. Which this has several per paragraph frequently. How frequently you turn to the end of the book to read the notes thereby messing up flow reading the text.
Had this with Federici and Theodore Allen too. Maybe shows level of research but doesn't help flow.

And several other books I'm part way into.

I've stuck with the Clark book, it's vastly entertaining. Steampunk without being annoying, that's a feat in and of itself.

javier marías - a heart so white

very good. i thought the modernist long stream of consciousness sentences would tire me out (tbh they do, a bit) but he keeps it moving and mixes in enough dark humour to keep me afloat. the weirdness of spain is underrated

A Heart So White has stayed with me. Great novel.

I'm reading *Night Soldiers* by Alan Furst. It's a spy novel, set in the 30s, and the central character (Bulgarian, but Russian by allegiance) is first trained in Moscow, then sent to Spain to infiltrate the Republican army. He's now on the run in Paris. I'm not at the stage where I can intuit a grand plan, so am sustained by Furst's moment-to-moment world-building. Furst clearly knows his subject but the sweep is so grand it can fall into national cliche pretty easily. Everything is buoyed by bawdy humour; weirdly, it makes me think of Jeffrey Eugenides in places.

Also reading *Empire of Normality: Capitalism and Neurodiversity* by Robert Chapman. He's using Marxist theory to show how capitalism both creates and exploits neurodiversity but how neurodiversity may provide a new mode of organisation against capitalism's worst excesses.

I'm in the middle of writing some essays for my MA, so I've had to take my first break from reading books in a few years.

That said I'm puttering through Jane and Prudence (great) and Pet Shop Boys vs America (complete classic, just page after page of prime Lowe/Tennant one-liners and mischievous glibness)

I finished Alan Furst's *Night Soldiers*. I come to espionage fiction for the tight plotting and this had an odd mix of almost picaresque and what I came to think of as ambient passages of detail. I liked the latter quite a bit in the end. Weird comparison but some sections come on like Poker Face (the Natasha Lyonne series), wherein, to set up a new location, Furst introduces peripheral characters 'at work' in their particular milieu (Paris, New York, Bessarabia), as a stage-setting for the central characters to arrive into. He's great at. Plot? Maybe not so much.

It's 100% made me want to take a trip down the Danube though.

Alejo Carpentier - Explosion in the Cathedral. Set during that period between post-American and French revolutions, this novel draws on the life of Victor Hughes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Hughes), where Carpentier basically uses him to sketch revolutionary undercurrents and alliances between members of the ruling class and the peasantry. The novel explores this episode of Caribbean history through the eyes of three characters as viewpoints. As a writer working in Castro's Cuba, Carpentier gets to write about revolutionary history, pre-communism (Peter Weiss does similar things with a Peasant revolt in the Aesthetics of Resistance (the 2nd part), drawing on peasant revolts in Sweden). All done in a Baroque framework (it is a new translation, released late last year). Can't recommend this enough.

Carpentier's wonderful. The Kingdom of This World is one of my favorite novels.

Great - need to read that and The Lost Steps (the other novel recently re-translated)

reading this Marcel Schwob collection Spicilège, laughed harder than I had in a long time reading the essay on François Villon, serious tears of hard hard laughter at the exploits of the Coquillards in the aftermath of the 100 years war and the ridiculousness of Villon. Highly recommended.

I finished Kokoro, Natsume Soseki. I found the intersection between Meiji Era Japanese culture and the lives and attitudes of the main characters interesting and revealing. It's basically a character study, where the psychology is equally foreign to modern American culture and familiarly human at the same time. It builds itself slowly and patiently, never rushing, so it requires a similar mindset for reading it.

By way of contrast, I've just started reading The Real Cool Killers, Chester Himes, which starts right out at a breathlessly violent pace and doesn't slacken.

Kokoro is a favourite.

Two books published within two years of each other - '73 and '75 respectively. Each feeling *very modern&

Japan Sinks - Sakyo Komatsu. I was slightly surprised to see this was two volumes in the original Japanese, given that it was quite short, but it turns out the English version is abridged. I haven't seen any of the films or anything. It's extremely competently done. There are two tracks to it: the progress of the scientific discovery and analysis, and the urban and social impact of the tectonic irruptions and eruptions. The former presents the sense of an increasingly scientifically tangible inexorable process, of an inevitable end, in a tone of calm analysis. In the latter, the right angles of the urban environment, the scientists lives, their parabolas and projections are thrown into disarray and disorder, via spectacular and explosive urban scenes. These are impressive btw - you get the feeling of someone who has done their research - and more widely Sakyo creates a descriptive context that draws on the mythic and the modern mythic (eg Godzilla) that produces some extremely potent imagery.

In one sense it's a standard template for scientific disaster narratives, but the alternation of the two, the impact of the one on on the other, and the fact that the cataclysms move the final event closer much more rapidly than the scientists can update their projections produce a compelling sense of two cadences coming to a single point. It feels intuitive to apply this feeling to climate change - that projections produce one view, alarming certainly, but that the manifestations of it will be uneven and extreme, and in the extreme areas, the frontier of change moves much more quickly than the generalised views can accommodate.

Of course, in Japan Sinks there is a definitive end, and climate change is a progressive alteration, upheaval and adaptation to an unknown degree, but still Japan Sinks certainly gives the reader an extreme way of viewing it all.

The Twenty Days of Turin - Giorgio de Maria. Surprised ilb doesn't seem to have covered this yet. It's a lot of fun so far, with an overall feeling of cryptic dread, revealed in only loosely connected events, gradually pieced together which is the sort of thing I really like - it allows the reader to project some uncertainty and speculation of their own into what's happening, produce their own terror and unease. What's surprising and delightful, is it's an unexpectedly perfect parable for the social media age, as at the uneasy centre of events is the Library, where people share to the point of exhaustion their quotidian psychopathologies in reams of unfiltered texts, bound and available (anonymously) for reading and, with a payment, for the reader to get the identity of the writers.

Or rather they helped to furnish the illusion of a relationship with the outside world: a dismal cop-out nourished and centralized by a scornful power bent only on keeping people in their state of continuous isolation. The inventors of the Library knew their trade well!”

...

The typical patron of the Library was a shy individual, ready to explore the limits of his own loneliness and to weigh others down with it.

...

Library. And so, a web of mutual espionage came together piece by piece—malicious and futile. You couldn’t leave the house anymore, take a tram, visit a public place, without sensing the leer of somebody who wanted you to believe he’d soaked up all your deepest secrets. If I’d left any of my confessions in that place, I’d probably have lost sleep too . . .” “So you think there’s a relationship between the Library and the insomnia cases?”

and so forth.

oh, and I've got Cyclonopedia: complicity with anonymous materials - Reza Negarestani (apparently from 2008!) lined up, which looks like it should be a trip.

Your take on your first find there reminds me of this WAYR conversation:

The Crazy Iris and other Tales of the Atomic Aftermath, edited by Kenzaburo Oe - Got this decades ago when I was reading a lot of Japanese authors in preparation for a trip to Nippon. Never got around to it, partially of course due to the very grim subject matter. But with Oppenheimer opening so much discourse on here and elsewhere, I felt its time had come - I think with these kinds of tragedies it's very easy to start from a point of "yes yes of course it was terrible we all agree" and then move on to the Philosopher King part of the debate on whether it was justifiable/inevitable without fully digesting exactly how it felt to the people caught up in it, and that's quite dangerous. Kinda like the information in the media that an atrocity has happened doesn't do much to public opinion but pictures do.

Anyway: most of the authors collected, though not all, were actual witnesses to the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombings. What comes across above all is the immense strangeness of the event - no one living through it had the slightest notion of what had just happened, ppl unsure of where to flee to, fears of incoming bombings continuing. Small groups of local doctors and nurses totally at a loss as to how to treat the people that need their help. Taken as a whole, the stories also give a strong context for life around that time: the before (a young schoolkid on his way to the mine that the Imperial Japanese regime had ordered his class to work in) and the after (Hiroshima survivors living in basically slum housing many months after the bomb was dropped destroying their homes).

― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, September 12, 2023

Daniel, have you read John Hersey's Hiroshima? based on interviews with survivors, it tracks their movements, in alternating third-person narratives, just before the blast and soon after, through the city built around a confluence of six rivers---well, one interviewee was swiveling around in her office chair, about to ask another worker something at the moment of the blast, was trapped in rubble for a long time--but later the German priest makes his way to the hospital, meets her, they have a conversation---I want to read the second edition, when Hersey follows up with more interviews and research.
He says in this first one that Japanese physicists deduced what had happened fairly quickly, from international professional scuttlebutt, despite Manhattan Project security (there was some awareness that Americans and others were working toward a thermonuclear weaoon, like that science fiction story that earned science fiction author Cleve Cartmill a visit from the FBI), and news reports added more evidence, which the Japanese physicists contextualized clearly enough for public consumption, while the US Gov was still not doing that so much. Hersey's book made a whole issue of The New Yorker, edited very quietly.

― dow, Wednesday, September 13, 2023 9:50 PM (six months ago) bookmarkflaglink

The second edition was researched and published in the 80s, I think. The science fiction story reflected some awareness that was around, at least on mid-40s geek fringes (as well as among those with security clearances).

― dow, Wednesday, September 13, 2023 9:55 PM (six months ago)

dow, I have not, sounds interesting. According to this anthology there's actually a lot of published testimonials from victims, tho who knows how many have been translated.

― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, September 14,2023

Hersey's book made a whole issue of The New Yorker, edited very quietly.

oh, and I've got _Cyclonopedia: complicity with anonymous materials_ - Reza Negarestani (apparently from 2008!) lined up, which looks like it should be a trip.

Taking Woodstock Elliott Tiber
jewish kid grows up in Brooklyn, finds out he's artistic and also a gay masochist all of which become thematic throughout the book. His parents decide to sell up their hardware business and buy a hotel in the Catskills. Because of lack of experience and wanting to economise they buy a rundown place which they do up and then keep expanding. Subsequently they owe way more than they take in.
Elliott the jewish kid mentioned earlier has managed to put himself through art school by keeping his grades high and winds up teaching design etc and working in interior design. So he's spending the week in New York doing so then gets sucked back into the parents' motel business which is a sprawling run down space with corners cut wherever they can be. After happening to be at Stonewall when the riot started and taking part in it two weeks later he's up at the motel when he hears the Aquarian Exposition had lost its planned location. One thing he has managed to do over his time building and semi maintaining the sprawling motel complex is to become head of the chamber of commerce for Bethel the town where the motel is. He's also got a standing permit to hold a music festival, though til then it has meantt a tiny gathering or a bunch of garage bands playing the stage in a theatre that's part of the complex.
He rings the Woodstock Festival people and offers up his space, though it really isn't up to scratch. So he asks his neighbour Max Yasgur if he'll accommodate and things escalate from there.In the book there is a month between this happening and the festival taking place. So for a month the Festival people are setting up and people are coming to Bethel to buy tickets and set up the Festival also hang out before the festival starts. I'm not sure the timeline is right. Hundreds then thousands of alternative types turning up in a sleepy town causes a lot of reaction including the town council trying to get the festival canceled. It went ahead of course and was somewhere between an iconic heaven and a disaster zone. Elliott comes out on top, has debts payed off because entire motel complex has been let during preparations. & festival has been a success . &his parents can actually retire
Elliott has also had a chance to hobnob with some famous gays which must be late 50s/early 60s. There's a film made of the book where he looks way too young for that timeline. & I'm not sure how accurate his timeline is.
But I enjoyed the book and found it a really fast read> Probably not for everybody since some of the s&m sex scenes and anonymous cinema cruising do come across as pretty sordid. I'm not sure how objectively accurate some of this is either.But, good, fast read.

Staying Power Peter Fryer
History of Black presence in Britain dating back to around the 16th century. Interesting book. I'm still struggling with how to respond to a text so peppered with endnote reference numbers, thankfully a load of these are citations. Other books I've read with a similar peppering have had longer actual notes which makes reading less easy. Never sure how long an interval between looking at the notes to leave which does effect reading, if its each paragraph or each page or what. Easier to read if numbers can be ignored totally which I'm not sure is possible. & means missing background info.
Anyway, pretty scathing, heavily researched book showing narrative of black presence and community in GB. I've just read his chapter on slavery and am now in his chapter on racism. He's looking at travellers tales about Africa's population in the light of black already having a traditional valorisation in English culture. He's talking about the idea of interbreeding with apes being widespread. It's pretty harsh.
Not sure what had predated this with the same erudition and research level before its 1984 publishing date.
I've stupidly let this be bacburnered in my reading it when it should be prioritised. Possibly a book that everybody should read if they can.
Now I've been reading this when I hadn't slept brilliantly.and it is one I think I would recommend. It's not the first book on the subject I've read and it does seem to be widely cited. Does have a lot more anecdote in constructing the narrative, some depiction of the immediate personal of individuals over time from cited sources etc. Would probably take a lifetime to read through all the material cited.

The bad trip : dark stars, blown minds and the strange end of the sixties James Riley,
Looking at the dystopian end of the 60s.The various conspiracy theories, cults and their explanation and understanding at the time. I just read a bit on Woodstock which was interesting in the light of Taking Woodstock. But does have me needing to look up cloud seeding which I thought was a thing, even if not the way it was being thought of as shown here. Paranoid hippies claiming the man was making it rain on the Festival, I thought it was something people had done in some crop growing areas, which it does appear to be. Not as good as directing hurricanes by Sharpie but probably more effective.

Testimony and retrieval of memory and activity from zones of existential extremity is a very valuable activity. I'm thinking here of Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl project (or Chernobyl Prayer) as well. There are all sorts of reasons it's valuable, obviously, but the main one I'm thinking of is expressed extremely well in an interview with Alexievich:

The things that people said were unique. These were texts from some new life of another world that is approaching very fast now. We have Chornobyl, coronavirus, the revolution, war. We are approaching a new reality for which we are not prepared. But Chornobyl is beyond all that because of the cosmic scale of the catastrophe, cosmic in the sense that it’s a shock to our understanding, our worldview. It’s something entirely new.

I guess my view is that most of the time we live in quite extended cultural phases - that is to say the imagery, cultural and moral assumptions, tone of our intellectual and emotional discourse is quite hoary. you might say of it that it's twenty years or a generation, or a cultural cycle out of date. We're working on old precepts while the future is rushing headlong at and past us. Our ability to see The Future Now, to get in place the new apparatus (language, imagery, cultural logic) is extremely limited.

Now, it feels quite crass to say one useful aspect of the recreation of dismal and cataclysmic events is their ability to give us a lens on the interaction of politics, technology and the human components that will go to make up the future, but I do think it is one valuable function they have.

I touch on the danger in the Japan Sinks post, which is that the language that come out of these holocausts, creates a language for the future which is only suited to disaster. We shouldn't see the 'new reality' only in terms of disaster, I think that would be a huge failing. I diverge slightly from Alexievich there. Still, it creates new frontiers in what it means for us to understand existence, new maps, new images and concepts that we need to incorporate.

As I've said elsewhere of Helen deWitt, although it's extremely lightly held (deWitt is such a good stylist), the fact their writing incorporates so many different frameworks means it's also doing quite a lot that's similar:

The concepts with which Helen DeWitt plays cover a wide ground of thought, across literature, language, coding, heuristics, probability, business, getting things done, and modern anthropology, to name a handful. These are not all the standard inputs to literary work, and they provide tensions, rules, systems, motivations and structure to the behaviour of [their] protagonists and to the world they perceive and their management of it.

Finding the new ground at the margin, at the frontiers of our current mores, at the points where they break down, or deliberately and actively framebreaking them, are always interesting to me.

Related, two relatively recent artefacts in this area are the Philippine marines on the rusting Sierra Madre strategic hulk on the Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea, a fragile point at the centre of a geopolitical crisis. The vocabulary alone is extremely piquant with its mixture of visibly old and extremely now - it feels like it might be something out of Warhammer 40k. Similarly, and I think I posted on this at the time, the picture of trench warfare in the age of the internet in Ukraine in this New Yorker piece - foxholes decked with LED lights, warfare co-ordinated by whatsapp messages with locals etc.

Sorry, the link to that New Yorker piece Two Weeks at the Front in Ukraine here. Sierra Madre stuff obv in the news at the moment, but report from last year here.

Excellent to hear about Cyclomania, table, thanks!

xpost

The Golden Child, Penelope Fitzgerald. Definitely the least out of the four I've read, I would go so far as to say inessential. Now on to Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin.

the hand of ethelberta, the last thomas hardy novel i need to read and his first attempt at cyberpunk, judging by the cover.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50961568-the-hand-of-ethelberta

Henry Green - Concluding. Beautiful book.

Never read Concluding, for some reason, and it's a good reminder to pick it up. Henry Green is wonderful.

I ordered an omnibus of Living, Loving, and Party Going from the library a couple of days ago. Never read any of his before.

Concluding is his funniest book, several laffs per page.

aw, he responded extremely promptly with a very nice and informative email.

In sum: Everyone read Cahokia Jazz, it's great.

I read Light Perpetual by Spufford some time age for a book club, and I liked it, though a flippant take would be "the 7up series did it better"; def no issues with cultural tourism in this one, it is very very British. He also has a certain amount of style, and I feel like amongst the kind of books his audience reads that's not very common?

former ilxor max is a fan of Cahokia Jazz iirc

right - it may even have been from max's substack that i picked up the rec? At least it was floating round my head for some reason, which is why i got it as a holiday read.

Mevlido's Dreams, the latest of Antoine Volodine's to be translated, is now out from Univocal @ UMinn, I started it yesterday. It's big like Radiant Terminus. Seems great so far but I'm completely in the tank for this guy, there isn't a living writer whose work just hits all my pleasure centers like Volodine

Oho, ahoy: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/07/08/from-nowhere-an-interview-with-antoine-volodine/ Looks promising; where should we start?

Yeah, that description in dow's link sounds like catnip for me.

Also on my list is the sequel to Sergio Pitol's The Love Parade.

lol i saw moira donegan express regret today for having once loved 'the argonauts'

moira donegan…

go on . . .

every generation gets the market apologist they deserve

lol i saw moira donegan express regret today for having once loved 'the argonauts'

― mookieproof, Saturday, 15 June 2024 bookmarkflaglink

This behavior really is lol.

I finished Life with Picasso. It was well written and well observed, full of anecdote, and gives a very full and revealing portrait of Picasso in his 60s. That was enough to keep my interest, mainly because Picasso was an interesting character who led a very eventful life. The best parts of the book were Picasso speaking about his art, his methods, and his evaluations of other artists and their work. Francoise Gilot was able to recall some of those conversations in great detail and they were quite illuminating. These bits were few, but valuable.

The other, lesser, parts of the book display Picasso, the person, rather than the artist. They were necessary to include in this memoir of their relationship, but simply put, he was an egoist, often cruel, and psychologically abusive. His rationalizations for his behavior were rather amazing, showing the sort of acuteness that he brought to his art, but in the service of manipulation for his selfish ends. He used DARVO at an unusually refined level, but it was still DARVO. There's some fascination in seeing this side of him through the eyes of the person he manipulated, but it's also wearing to expose oneself to it, even at second hand.

Girouard, Big Jim
Berenyi, Fingers Crossed
Hoban, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

i read On Locations: Lessons Learned from My Life on set with The Sopranos and in the Film Industry by Mark Kamine

it's much more than a sopranos crew member trying to cash in on their behind the scenes knowledge, really an admirable, heady look @ the movie biz life, largely bereft of gossip or star fuckery. recommended for fans of final cut -RIP Steven Bach, former United Artists exec and author of "Final Cut," one of the essential books about movies

I've started an early Eric Ambler spy thriller, Background to Danger (aka Uncommon Danger), published in 1937. It uses various tropes that Hitchcock soon picked up and used in his various spy thrillers, mostly the ordinary man who is innocently caught up in a web of international intrigue and must call upon all his resourcefulness to outwit his professional opponents. It is a period piece now, but well done.

pretty sure i've read that ambler if it's the one that starts out in an industrial region of italy? have yet to read one of his that bests epitaph for a spy.

currently in the middle of the minor english poet wh davies's adventures of a super tramp. was enjoying his retelling of his days hoboing around america and experiences in hobo jungles & work camps in the late nineteenth century till it suddenly hit an unpleasantly racist seam that's effectively tarnished it all.

“say nothing” (a dua lipa recommended book)

It's Ambler's Cause for Alarm that starts out in an industrial region of italy and is unabashedly anti-fascist. This one begins in Nuremberg, but rapidly moves to Austria. The anti-fascist element is there, but more muted.

ah right, cause for alarm it was!

the proper title for the davies book is *autobiography* of a super tramp, not adventures (also as i discovered later in the book he was welsh not english). it's an interesting portrait of the down & out milieux of both sides of the atlantic at the turn of the twentieth century written in a very plain prose style of wide eyed wonder, but can't say the examples of his poetry at the end have encouraged me to read any of his other work

now started on robert tressell's the ragged trousered philanthropists

You might also like Jack London's People of The Abyss, in which---maybe considering a roots move back to his American boxcar phase a little too redundant--he goes to London, buys old clothes, and hits the streets, then roads----working in a momnpop bookstore, I sold a collector kid's mom an edition I'd never seen before, and haven't seen since, with Jack's funky photos. (This book was said to be an inspiration for Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, as JL's The Iron Heel was a forerunner of 1984, and thematically Animal Farm.)

I've seen an early edition of People of the Abyss with London's photographs included! That was long ago. The copy currently in my library is part of an omnibus collection in the Library of America that also includes The Road, The Iron Heel, Martin Eden, and John Barleycorn. London's reputation has been unfairly whittled down until Call of the Wild is about the only title of his most people can name. He badly needs rehabilitation.

NLT (and all), the best book about hoboing around is “You Can’t Win” by Jack Black. Nothing else compares

I've taken the liberty of starting a summer 2024 WAYR thread:

'In a somer seson, whan softe was þe sonne': What are You Reading in Summer 2024?

xpost: was given a flash looking reissue of the jack black book a number of years back, so def on my agenda!

& jack london yeah, need to investigate more. think i read some of his sea stories years ago but that's about it.

unfortunately he was a vocal white supremacist. So if that's not a dealbreaker I guess he could write a bit.

A lot of 19th-century working-class socialists in the U.S. were pretty racist and supported the Chinese Exclusion Act and were completely paranoid that Asia would overrun this country. To be fair, every white person in the 19th century was totally friggin' racist. And also pro-eugenics. And they beat their children and their horses. But not all white people in the U.S. were as popular in Japan as Jack London was. So, there is that.

(then again if a writer wasn't being anti-japanese did the japanese ever really care how racist a writer was? especially in the olden days.)