2018 Summer: A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine, and What Are You Reading?

Been thinking of the Malamud story about the dad who advises his daughter to marry an artist and the mom who advises her to marry a professional or businessman but can’t remember the title, it’s been a while.

I finished Imagining Robert - an affecting look at what it's like to love someone with mental illness - with all the frustrations, anger, guilt, shattered hopes, and fleeting joys that go with it. Now I'm reading Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton.

Slaves is one of my favourite books, with one of Hamilton's most monstrous bore characters.

Stewart O'Nan: A Prayer for the Dying -- very well done and deeply grim; main character is currently living with the corpses of his wife and child, kidding himself they're still alive, in the middle of a C19th diptheria outbreak

Now 2/3rds of the way through Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Reading through the section on Love Melancholy and wondering if Freud has read it. It seems like a similar sort of project to mine the literature of antiquity for insights into the working of the mind and body. I only have a sketchy knowledge of Freud (and of course he developed more of a theory from all that).

Doubling that up with Dante's La Vota Nuova and sorta enjoying its lack of immediate pleasure in Dante's dry, technical commentary to the poetry/balladry.

I'm roughly halfway through Troilus and Criseyde.

Random thoughts: Chaucer takes pains to cast the story into the mold of earlier tales of romantic chivalry, such as the dozens of Arthurian romances, or Tristan and Iseult. He mostly succeeds in pasting the correct sentiments into the mouths of his characters, but the basic story rather resists his efforts.

So far, Troilus is a pasteboard parfait knight, a lion in battle, completely lovesick, honorable to the last scruple, and boring as hell. No indications yet that this will change. Criseyde is more interesting in that her concerns seem far better grounded in reality and her judgment of the situation is cool under fire. Pandarus is the only character given variety and interest, but he hovers in an indistinct territory where he does lip service to noble ideals, but his actions just don't synch up with his sentiments and Chaucer doesn't seem to know what to make of him, yet.

Of course, Chaucer may well pull a few rabbits out of his hat and all the above may be turned on its head before the end. He was nobody's fool.

Been thinking of the Malamud story about the dad who advises his daughter to marry an artist and the mom who advises her to marry a professional or businessman

Reminds me of the Langdon Jones story about "Ludwig van Beethoven II." The boy dreamed of going into law, but his father forced him to compose music. Late at night the boy would sneak up to the attic and pore through law books.

Robin (Williams bio) by Dave Itzkoff

finished céline's london bridge (continuation of guignol's band) & now started on ee cummings' eimi: a journey through soviet russia... a sort of novel based on the journal he kept during his 1931 visit to moscow/kiev/odessa

far too much work has meant I haven't really been able to keep up with this thread. putting down a few things i've been reading recently for the record.

Will Eaves – Murmur, this on a James M recommendation from the Nothing is happening in British literature thread.

This was a good recommendation (I didn't doubt it would be).

My rather stenographic summary that I put up on goodreads:

Mirror worlds, divided selves, replicated selves, and of course fictionalised selves all wondering at their definition, and the bounds and autonomy of their selves. bodies 'disenchanted' from their inhabiting selves, programmatic routines occupying past figures from the life of 'Alec Pryor' (a fictional proxy for Turing). inability to humans to understand how, or *that* they are thinking or that it is distinguishable from hyper-efficiency, similar to machines who also do not know they are thinking. pryor's hallucinogenic passing from one world to another.

desire and intention, cause and effect, as reversible equations, death as a dissolution of a contextual framework, a passing through of the context. An intensity of 'I'-ness, when you are have been chemically altered to no longer be the person who you were.

the writing is often good, sometimes poetic (whether that is good or bad i'll leave) ..

eaves also uses the natural ecology of england to both provide context and the setting of some of the material transformations that take place in the book. this produces a pleasing sense of being linked to the seasons, frosts, mists, water, trees, and an obsession with birds, their thought process, their intentions.

the writing doesn't always avoid a sense of having a touch of the writing school about it. though that is mainly a feature of the initial chapter / short story (in itself with a number of good bits).

So that's stenographic but it's also lazy in another way, in that it doesn't really examine the interplay of the elements it lists, which is fairly vital to engaging with the book. I say that, but I'm not entirely sure whether the interplay is indicative of a schema or structure in Eaves' head (I *think* it is, that it must be), or whether he just scumbles the elements to provide a sense of relation, which perhaps lacks structure. As I say I think it's the former.

The comment on the writing style is worth unpacking a bit, because I don't really understand it properly myself. I can give examples of both the poetic, and other places where it thickens into something that is neither of the writing school or of poetic diction:

So, an example of the poetic – June, Alec Pryor's former wife and correspondent, is described as follows, on a walk on the South Downs:

She smiles through hair. Clouds flee the ridge. The red flash of a goldfinch darts up from a thistle clump. It is an art to be fearless. June's like a guelder rose, the dogwood's umbels and the bark of the elder, all plants that mark these hills with centuries of growth and form. Unpretty, strong.

That 'unpretty' seems to me to be a word of poetic diction. And though it's very good here, and I wouldn't want it not here, it is also noticeable, with its Larkin final line like cadence as well. The writing school method – what I call the writing school method! – bit is harder to define, but is perhaps a flip side of the poetic, in that there is something self-conscious to it. Perhaps in that sentence it's expressed with the specificity of the iteration of flora. The *writer* has noticed something, found out the words for it and put them into Pryor's internal speech. I was just flicking through the book to find more convincing examples, but I'm not sure it's that easy to cite. I think one way it finds its way in is where you find the author heavily mediating some of the messages of the book around AI and other modern implications – there is a sense of that awful thing relevance at play. The following example captures something of that, though I would say my issue is more one of tone than this passage conveys:

Two people at a table, together, each on the phone to someone else. The physically present companion incidental to the real contact. The sign, you see, is contradictory: those people on the phone are saying, 'Yes, I know exactly what you mean', but there is no do distinction between you and you, between an electronic echo and the occupant of space. And that is what it will look like, to begin with – a sort of ecstatic, immediate empathy (I know exactly what you mean) increasingly detached from any one person's presence. You will see more and more people perplexed, distressed, distracted by the men and women they are with, people they love, prefering to take calls or messages from friends or strangers who are elsewhere, and so full of potential.

It's fair to say that this 'future reaching' and 'authorial bleed' are both completely valid in the terms of the book. Its reference to field awareness and of controlling entities outside of the immediate frame of reference (which may nevertheless be available through mirrors and that field awareness) (author, future, the ability of characters to reach outside the frame as well) these things are present as concepts in the book.

He frowns. 'But no one thinks a character inside a book has actually written it?'

'And yet the author is a part of his material. It's paradoxical, that's all.'

That which is outside, is also inside, and as it is inside may be considered elements in our computational processes. We are not fully aware of this operation. And of machines: 'If part of how you think is inaccessible to you, perhaps a sham, and theirs is totally, then where's the point of severance?'

The bits of writing that got me most excited here were sentences and images that prosaically combined the natural and the subject matter:

The room is dark, the window bright, and through the glass the stricken researcher sees deep into a complex green: the beeches from another vantage point, shifting dynamically, hidden birds' eyes taxed with their subroutines of grooming, sex and predation.

Is that a magpie or a jay? Its puppet head confronts the scientist. It looks without seeing, alert. Its vision is a corvid mystery of weak interpretation and associated forms.

The joint of the mechanical and the natural. It is what the prosaic does best - that flexible and flat co-existence of disparate ideas with explanatory and descriptive force. The awareness and description of a 'corvid mystery' to computation both explicit here and implicit at other points is where the book is at its strongest. The paradox of state preservation and persistence.

One remarkably section takes the Snow White story, and uses it to create a hallucinogenic depiction of a family confrontation, with a paranoid sense that these family members are computational processes designed to elicit information, and which hallucinogenic characteristics are later 'explained' by the depiction of the whole scene in a concave mirror.

It's good.

While trying to nail down what it was distracted me about the tone in certain places, I thought I'd pick something very different off the shelves to see if the distinction made it easier to frame the tone. This was a penguin classics collection of Cervantes' Exemplary Stories, and I read The Jealous Extremaduran.

An exemplar is not a great counterweight tonally, as its tone is didactic and fabulistic – the formality of it isn't required to achieve nuances of naturalism and voice. That said it's worth pointing out that Cervantes is witty and present, despite the form he's chosen. Slightly more surprisingly, I realised I was reading a story on closed systems, exactly the same as the book I'd just put down. The Jealous Extremaduran of the title – Filipo de Carrizales, wealthy, 80 – marries a 15 year old he has spotted leaning out of a window while on a stroll. He takes every precaution of locking her up, not even male animals are allowed in, and the door is guarded by a Moorish eunuch... this is described in a fascinating line:

...never was monastery more enclosed, nor nuns more withdrawn nor golden apples more strictly guarded; but for all this it was impossible to avoid falling into the danger he feared, or at least thinking he had fallen into it.

That seems also the heart of the argument presented in Murmur via Turing. The crucial bit is the thinking of the thing you are thinking about, not the thing you are thinking about itself - that is here what has undone the de Carrizales, it is what creates the possibility of an sealed system's undoing, since to be able to think about it is to have created a way into it.

The Jealous Extremaduran is generous in the face of the inevitable, and recognises his folly. this tale is also a circle, as he has been a young nobleman dicking about europe and frittering away his cash, and his young bride's virtue is attempted by the same, who also goes off to the Indies tho it is his heart and head that has been beggared rather than his purse.

Also read:

An essay on James Merrill by Edmund White in a book of his essays that i picked up in a second-hand bookshop for £2.99 on a work lunchtime foray. He has that mandarin certainty that brings lucidity:

These are books of ideas (as well as of feelings, visions, people and personages), and the ideas are comprehensible. Whereas Eliot's ideas about tradition or Pound's economic theories are stated in clear, no-nonsense formulations only in their essays, the poetry acting as a dramatiziation (sometimes a fragmentation) of thought, Merrill's epics are as straightforward as Pope's Essays. Nor are the cultural or scientific allusions in Merrill obscure .. Of course Merrill is playful in the way we might say Mozart is playful – alternately noble and funny, disarmingly unrhetorical but never afraid of true grandeur.

Looking forward to dipping into the rest of the essays.

Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart by Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M Todd and the ABC Research Group. Not, I should point out, a self-help book, but a proposal for how humans use heuristics successfully and what the characteristics of those heuristics are.

iThe Belle Sauvage – Philip Pullman. A patrician old-school approach to fantasy, which happens to be one i like. this is a voyage of the dawn treader / odyssey like connection of incidents on a single thread of a river journey. He is capable of some exceptional images and description which i'm sure will stick in the mind of a child:

But then he did see something at the base of the wall: just a shadow slightly darker than the building. Something man-sized but not man-shaped – a massive bulk where the shoulders should be and no head – and it moved with a crabwise shuffle.

..

The shadow appeared around the side of the building again. And then the man staggered, and the burden on his shoulders seemed to squirm away and fall to the ground; and then they heard a hideous high-pitched cry of laughter.

The man and the dæmon seemed to be spinning around in a mad dance. That uncanny laughter tormented Malcolm's ears; it sounded like a high hiccuping yell of agony.

'He's hitting her...' whispered Asta, unable to believe it.

When she said that, it became clear to Malcolm too. The man had a stick in his hand and he had forced the hyena-dæmon back against the wall, and he was thrashing and thrashing her with fury, and she couldn't escape.'

Quoted for that central image of the dancing shadows and the high-pitched cry of laughter.

The ending of Belle Sauvage is such a puzzler - it's hard to tell how much is deliberate anticlimax, or if it's just clumsy writing (or both).

I just finished Wodehouse's Uncle Fred in the Springtime - it's very good but not quite up there with Joy in the Morning or Leave it to Psmith.

An unusual amount of repressed violence - there's a death fantasy in almost every chapter - references to skinning someone alive, setting them on fire, or bashing them in the head with a break... it's all very lightly handled as you'd expect, but there's such a **lot** of it.

*with a brick

on Belle Sauvage, I think it's a common problem with high episodic narratives – one thing happens then another thing happens then another thing happens and then it stops. the fact they don't get anywhere or complete anything is peculiar I agree. very hurried.

the book has been very insistently trailed as a part of a trilogy, including the cover where the title of the book is confusingly beneath the 'Book of Dust' wider work, and with the heavy-handed 'to be continued' at the end, that I wonder whether this was something that was also noted by the publisher. or whether the publisher insisted a larger work be chopped up and released in more books. or something like that anyway.

There's something so unsettling about the way it fails to provide resolution to many of the plot strands (especially the part about Malcolm being used as a honeytrap) that it's hard not to think it's deliberate. But then we get that very rushed final chapter that's all a bit "[throws up shoulders] fuck, here's some plot to finish it off". So I came out unsure whether I'd felt unsettled by the deliberate, Aickman-esque choice to avoid resolution, or if, like you say, it was just clumsy packaging.

Mostly I found it very engrossing and relievedly easy work after Amber Spyglass.

Not sure if I'm completely remembering, but I think in an NYTimes interview around the publication he said that the next book was already finished, but the third one wasn't. Ah, here we go:

"Now he is rejuvenated, though there remains more work to do. Before it can be published, the second volume of “The Book of Dust” requires what he calls “carpentry.” The structure needs to be sawed up and reassembled, the sentences sanded smooth. The third book then needs to find its way out of his head and onto his two-holed paper. He warned there would be a delay, just as there was before the last volume of “His Dark Materials.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/magazine/philip-pullman-returns-to-his-fantasy-world.html

new shteyngart

there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.

I finished CHRONIC CITY again.

[SPOILERS re: Belle Sauvage]

The thing that really bothered me was the total lack of follow-up to the implied sexual assault of a major character right near the end - for a book that was so deliberate, and that took into account the more commonplace work that was foisted on the female characters, it seemed really off.

I’ve had Patrick O’Brien’s Master & Commander on my shelf for a few years. I did not suspect that the wholly delightful first chapter would be followed by 400+ pages of impenetrable naval architecture porn, inc. long discussions of the relative merits of grommets to pulleys in sail maintenance. I’ve read easier pages of Gravity’s Rainbow.

I still dug it though. Has anyone read the sequels? Do they get any more plotty and less, er, shippy?

The fanfic is all shippy

You don't need to understand much, if any, of the nautical jargoning to read the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O'Brien. Just skate past it and you won't lose a thing.

All that shippy stuff mostly gives you a sense of how complex a sailing ship was and how important it was for the crew to 'know the ropes'. The characters who spend a lot of time gabbing about this nautical minutiae have worked on ships for the great majority of their lives, and by contrast, know almost nothing about life on land. They are just as lost and "at sea" when ashore as the landsmen are when aboard ship.

If you read many of the novels, you'll start to see many of the same jokes reappear multiple times, but that, too, is probably authentic. Old jokes get handed down in small isolated communities, just as playground games get passed down by children.

The Fire and the Fury Michael Wolff
Funny that people with both the male and female versions of this name were causing the White House discomfort at roughly the same time.
I just got around to reading this when the Bob Woodward book came out. Wondering what of the books on the current regime are still worth reading.
Also saw Active Measures this week which was good.

Philip Roth - "Portnoy's Complaint"

A few pages in and I feel this is going to be a lot more Freudian than the other Roth books I've read

lol well you aren’t wrong

Getting into Howards End (someone was talking Forster upthread I think) and it’s remarkable so far. It’s impossible for me to read the Miss Schlegels as other than Jewish, which may yet turn out to be contrary to the text but no matter. Seems like it will be an instructive contrast to Brideshead Revisited, in some ways. Nice to read something of this ilk with no barons in it (so far)

I don't think they're supposed to be Jewish, just German - but I don't remember anything in particular in the novel that would state clearly they're not.

Certainly they could be German liberal aesthetes and be gentiles but as a descendant of German Jewish liberal aesthetes I’m predisposed to read that type as a Jewish one

Joseph Lelyveld. Move your shadow: South Africa, black and white. Picked this up in a box of books on the pavement on the walk to work on Wednesday morning. Good appalled account of apartheid South Africa written in the early 80s by the NYT correspondent who had been expelled from South Africa in the 60s after a year by the South African government for his reporting and allowed back in 1980, staying for 3 years.

is it worth continuing with the trilogy if i wasn’t totally blown away by Three Body Problem?

I finished Troilus and Criseyde last night. It was a confusing work for a modern reader, because nothing added up to an integral whole. Chaucer took an older story and reworked it, but he failed to rework it into a shape that was satisfying, because he kept elements of the story that glaringly didn't fit with the direction he wanted to take it.

The result was kind of a mess. He spent the first four books making the two main characters fit the mold of chivalric romance, then in the fifth book they fail entirely to live up to the ideals they have lengthily and poetically declared they believed with all their hearts and souls. I can't begin to count how often they invoked their willingness to die for love, then when push comes to shove, Criseyde changes her mind in the most perfunctory way imaginable and takes another lover. Afterwards, Troilus, the paragon of princely virtue declares he will seek honorable death in battle to satisfy his vows of perfect service to love, but as the story peters out, Chaucer mentions briefly in passing that he failed both to die or to get his revenge on his rival.

One is left with a parable of courtly love that conflicts with itself and an author who shrugs and sidesteps the glaring issues no reader can fail to notice. This dangling conclusion is not meant as irony or as cynicism; it is just a problem Chaucer doesn't know how to resolve, so he punts.

chaucer sonned by an aimless in epic poem beef

T & C doesn't seem like something I'd be interested in, but I appreciate your take, Aimless. Cheers for sticking with it even though you found it confusing.

I finished Slaves of Solitude. It was good. It reminded me a bit of Skylark (another NYRB reissue) in the way it's psychological acuity and careful rendering of aspects of small town life made it relatable to a modern reader, though admittedly 1940s England is already a bit closer to modern times than Belle Epoque Hungary. The rendering of civilian life during the long days before Normandy as stretches of anxious dreariness punctuated by the odd boozy bacchanalia seemed believable. And its portrayal of the boarding house boor, Mr. Thwaites, was devastatingly acute, even though the author's deployment of much felicitous prose to take down an annoying dunderhead did seem a bit like a bazooka being aimed at a gnat.

I finished Thomas Browne's Religio-Medici, and as a perfect follow to Burton's Anatomy..., just as a fireworks display of language and learning, anchored by a deep well of faith in a god, which in their hands its a complex figure. Burton and Browne are companions in the best sense and you realise what pub talk as prose could be.

Lawrence Goldstone - Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903

I could not disagree more re: Chaucer's Troilus, which to me seems pretty clearly Chaucer's multi-angled comment on the future fate of all such starcrossed-lovers tales

Currently reading Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety. Love it! I tried it once before but gave up early...really glad I tried again. You can see the way she perfected her style with Wolf Hall etc later...all the building blocks are there. Also love the way she has written the various women.

Debating whether to pursue another fictional French Revolutionary novel afterwards, or a meatier non-fiction instead. Def want to stay in this arena though.
Maybe that Marie Antoinette book by Antonia Fraser?
We’ll see.

I just finished Ourednik's The Opportune Moment, 1855 btw and it was fucking great. I loved Europeana and didn't really understand Case Closed entirely but 1855 is just terrific - clever and biting and fun and dark. I'm glad Dalkey has this guy, wanna read everything he writes

I'm now digging into Crashed, Adam Tooze.

I'm taking some time out of town and Crashed is too massive and unwieldy to bring with me, so I'll probably start and maybe finish another book before I can get back to it.

Violette Leduc: The Lady and the Little Fox Fur -- another really good Penguin European Writers book with a lovely cover and hideous paper stock

I keep meaning to talk about stuff I’m reading, but never get around to it. Anyway, started to reread ‘Seibi There Below’ by Krasznahorkai, and reminded how much I loved it. The writing is gorgeous.

Should be Seiobo

Vile Bodiesm Evelyn Waugh. It's funny! Was taken with this passage:

"Adam ate some breakfast. No kipper, he reflected, is ever as good as it smells; how this too earthly contact with flesh and bone spoiled the first happy exhilaration; if only one could live, as Jehovah was said to have done, on the savour of burnt offerings. He lay back for a little in his bed thinking about the smells of food, of the greasy horror of fried fish and the deeply moving smell that came from it; of the intoxicating breath of bakeries and the dullness of buns...He planned dinners of enchanting aromatic foods that should be carried under the nose, snuffed and thrown to the dogs...endless dinners, in which one could alternate flavour with flavour from sunset to dawn without satiety, while one breathed great draughts of the bouquet of old brandy."

T. Singer by Dag Solstad, in which a fellow hamstrung by self-consciousness lives his life. The book does its Dag Solstad thing, which is to say I loved it. I think he's probably my favourite living writer at the moment.

I have also been reading Dag Solstad. His Armand V, which I finished last night. This one has very light games played with narrative although apart from that it isn't that different to his other books and what they work over in all its European white-male neurosis in a tragic-comic mode with an awareness of priviledge. Both he and Thomas Bernhard have a lot in common although there are some key differences - in Bernhard, whose central figures like to berate you with truths - although they hate themselves for never standing outside of it. They are very much post-war and dealing with something like the fall out from the politics of the 60s and 70s, but then Solstad also engages with the aftermath of the Berlin Wall, and Western imperialism too -- something Bernhard never got to do as he died in the late 80s. Both write with a really addictive rhtyhm to their sentences (although Bernhard has that trademark density of his). Its quite a novel to be reading today -- as we drive toward what feels like the end of certain projects -- the EU, NATO, etc. as the kind of consensus fractures and we march toward what nobody knows.

Other than that its poetry via a couple of key NYRB issues:

Poems of the Late T'Ang
Proensa An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry

The first set fo translations is by Welsh sinologist A.C.Graham who seems to, in his introduction, attempting to bridge a gap between a conception of Chinese culture and poetry somewhere between Ezra Pound and William Empson. I often wanted to engage a bit more with ancient Chinese poetry but I never found a starter volume. Till now. The notes are good - when I can understand them, and I feel that I can go on a learning curve now. No such problems with Troubadour poetry although I have only started on Proensa I've read a couple of vols in the past. This one is translated by Paul Blackburn (who had a corerspondence with Pound) and there's a quote in the back from Richard Sieburth (translator of, among many things, courtly love poetry and an editor of the Faber Selected poetry of Ezra Pound) so join the dots.

Re-reading Derek Walcott's The Arkansas Traveler and just started The Sellout.

started hugo wilcken's the reflection and hoping it becomes a bit more than wow this narrator is *really* unreliable

In the home stretch of Ha Jin's Waiting, but slowing down my reading, resisting the tide, even though I know it's time, it's time---so much quiet momentum, the characters are so fluid within their constraints, their circumstances, their logic: lightning in a bottle, across the decades, that is.