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

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.

It's funny. It also uses the word 'lied' a lot.

I finished the bio of Teddy Roosevelt's younger years (basically from childhood up to the eve of his second marriage) by David McCullough. That turn of the century period is one I always find fascinating. Close enough to feel relatable but distant enough to give a sense of the past as a strange country. Now I'm reading an ILB fave, "Dog of the South" by Charles Portis. First couple of chapters were outstanding.

Halfway through Things Fall Apart. It's a challenging read for its brutality, but the prose is crisp and sharp. I want to see where it goes.

Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar. Taking it slowly; enjoying my brain being afire.

I Googled how to spell her name (I was right, fwiw) and saw it's being made into an Amazon series. Is nothing sacred?

I needed a quick, simple book, so I'm reading The Majestic Hotel, Georges Simenon. It's a 1940s Maigret novel. Standard issue fare, but soothing in the way all Maigret novels tend to be.

After reading the Maigret, I've now started Summer Will Show, Sylvia Townsend Warner. It is set in the late 1840s among the minor English aristocracy and will eventually move the scene to Paris and the Commune of 1848, but hasn't, yet.

My strongest initial impression is how confidently and solidly she creates her main character's inner and outer life. Although she's describing an era that was already long past when it was written in the 1930s, the author's convictions carry such weight that her descriptions feel like final and unshakeable truths. In that respect it reminds me of Marilynne Robinson.

I discovered Warner in 2020. Lots of laughs.

I'm liking the hell out of Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines/

Rereading The Leopard. In my 20's I was mostly impressed by the fatalism of a society that will not change no matter how many regimes come and go, and associating that with my own country. Now as I'm about to hit the big 40 I focus more on Don Fabrizio as a man, how this entropy dovetails nicely with his own mid life crisis and disillusion over his own life, how convinient these arguments are for him.

10 Myths About Israel Ilan Pappe
Israeli historian debunks some Israeli misinformation. Pretty interesting, maybe should be mandatory reading.
He cites Shlomo Sand's books as worth reading as I've seen others do.
Short book so should be a quick read.

Latest Xgau Sez answers questions about his (non-music) reading, incl. a Drabble I hadn't heard of---surprised that he found The Communist Manifesto rough sledding; Marx & Engels' combined journo skills sailed me right along. This is the free section:
https://robertchristgau.substack.com/p/xgau-sez-april-2024?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=17167&post_id=143674984&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=6pvn1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Finished go tell it on the mountain. Really powerful and lyrical. Despite being a massive god hater I even found the two or three page transcribed sermon vivid and transporting. But to me the cruelty of their religion shone from every page and I couldn't help but see the ending as a kind of defeat. (I know it's semi autobiographical and aiui baldwin did later distance himself from the church.)

Now on to the magic mountain!

Did you mean to read two books with 'mountain' in the title?

read kawabata next

I did not plan it but when the opportunity presented itself I knew it had to be.

if i hadn't read them both already i'd do the booker prize winners the sea and the sea, the sea.

Followed by booker nominee C

Shirley Hazzard - The Great Fire

i did

The Old Man and the Sea
The Sea, The Sea
The Sea Wolf (jack london)

the first wiped the floor with the others tbh

Wittold Gombrowicz - Ferdeydurke
Yasunari Kawabata - The Rainbow

Both of these express anxieties in shifting sands, and in v different ways:

- Gombrowicz is fantastical, surrealist, anti-novelist.

- The Kawabata is conventional but his voice is something I love coming back to. Lamenting a past lost, though very ambivalent about the glorious (imperial) past.

I've read much more Kawabata but I just didn't quite care for Gombrowicz in a way my 18 yo self would've loved.

Incidentally, idk if England has ever produced a novelist like Kawabata. Both islands lost a lot in the last century (though England has never been humiliated like Japan was), but I've yet to read an English novelist that really plots the decline of the place in a cool and quiet manner though I have to wade through a lot of shit here (it's been done much more in UK music and film, I think)

actually, looking just now, kawabata's sound of the mountain is cheap at the moment. and it's not one of the 3 I've read.

just bought it.

I finished "Dog of the South" which was as wonderful and funny as everyone said it was. The best part of True Grit was the voice of Mattie Ross, the narrator. This book was even better because it focuses more on unique voices and less on plot.

I finished Summer Will Show, Sylvia Townsend Warner. It did have a bit of humor from time to time, aimed at the habits and opinions of the petty aristocracy and pretensions of the Romantic movement in art, but on the whole it was full of serious intent. Perhaps more than was good for it. The main character never stopped analyzing her motives and taking her emotional temperature, or supplying a similar analysis for everyone around her.

The book makes some sturdy observations about the ambiguities and difficulties of revolutionary times and I took these to be Warner's primary interest in how she chose to construct the book. At the time of writing, the early 1930s, Warner was a committed member of the Communist Party. It was evident she had given deep thought to both the Communist theory of revolution and the real world developments in the Russia and her conclusions were far from cheerful.

Last night I read the first half of Rum Punch, Elmore Leonard, the novel that supplied the source material for the movie Jackie Brown. Leonard is bad at writing human characters but great at plot, action, and interesting details of criminality. It moves along quickly. Ill probably finish it tonight.

just finished Bukowski's POST OFFICE (and have learned for the first time the meaning of ilxor Chinaski's handle -- hi there)

going back to Lloyd Bradley's BASS CULTURE, which i made a good dent in earlier this year but lost steam.

Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman's White Rural Rage has become a best-seller and deserves it.

Hey Budo. Glad to be sat at the bar with ye. With the now-canon caveat that Bradley is wrong about dancehall and beyond, I love Bass Culture.

I started Heather Clark's Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. I'll see you in about six months.

Peter Fryer Staying Power
Just been reading about racist riots in Cardiff and Liverpool in the wake of WWI. Also tied into black seMen being laid off in favour of white to great degree.
So again pretty scathing

Chronicle of Guayaki Indians Pierre Clastres
Ethnologist writes about South American Indian tribe in early 60s .

V. S. Pritchett - A Cab at the Door

A terrific little book, detailing the author's somewhat chaotic early years.

The end of Things Fall Apart was bleak as hell. Any thoughts on the two subsequent novels?

Prichett's stories and Turgenev bio are wonderful

I love A Cab at the Door. like you say Alfred his stories are wonderful. language and writing of great style, managing tension, amusement, swiftly achieved and insightful character portraits. that he’s able to craft these feels like virtuousity but it doesn’t look like virtuousity.

With A Cab at the Door you feel all of that but there’s a certain relaxed brio and humour - it doesn’t need the same tensile self supporting structure of a short story. This is his life and he relishes the pattern of characters and behaviour and the world it gave him.

A great English writer. Possibly not all that visible these days? Though surely right at the front of great english short story writers.

Septology had been sitting on my bedside table this whole year, with just the last book to read. Typical case of me not wanting to finish something great. Totally absorbed in the world of Asles. The first book contains what I thought was a very funny scene of a man pushing a woman on a swing. When it returns to it in the 7th, it’s no longer funny, it’s truthful and beautiful. The final pages of this are a knock out. Absolute pleasure spending 700 pages in this world, wish it never ended.

Complications by Atul Gawande was a good intro to the human world of surgery

i have finished all the Hardy novels, the last two being Desperate Remedies and Hand Of Ethelberta, and started on The Time Torn Man, the Hardy biography by Tomalin, which, happily, starts by talking a lot about the two i've just read.

I'm midway through The Magic Mountain. It's moderately amusing, often thought provoking, clearly very intelligent and (questionable translation notwithstanding) marvellously written. But it's not giving me any *feels*, it's not a world I would say it's an absolute pleasure to spend time in.

That's next on my list! I really fubbed it not reading it while I was in Davos a couple years ago

i have finished all the Hardy novels

lol for a split second i read this as all the hardy boys novels

I started "Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking" by William James, based on a series of public lectures he gave in Boston and at Columbia University in 1906-7. Roughly 500 people attended the series of Boston lectures, and about 1000 in NYC, and the book was popular, but it caught a lot of flak from philosophers for being written in down-to-earth layman language.

I finished:

Elric of Melnibone
Elric: Sailor on the Seas of Fate
Elric: The Weird of the White Wolf

I'm now reading The Elusive Shift, which is a recent book about the development of conflicting play cultures in roleplaying games in the wake of the release of Dungeons & Dragons. Really great book so far. Fascinating how debates in the hobby the last 20 years go right back to the earliest days (and before that even).

The only "minor" Hardy I've read is Two in a Tower. Which should I go with next? The Trumpet-Major?