The Double Dream of Spring 2019: what are we reading?

In addition there may be an off-putting element of his fan base to get past.

are there a thing? Like Berniebros?

I dunno. I just was driving around with some slackers decades ago and one said "I like Southern writers. What about you guys?" I responded first with "I like Flannery O'Connor" which was met with a pained silence which was rescued by "I like Faulkner." "Me too!"

I told one of those people another time, "I just watched a Luis Buñuel film" and got "Cool! Was it surreal?" I seemed to detect some sort of pattern.

Perhaps this is just anecdotal evidence.

"I love Bresson."

"Awesome! Did you notice overacting?"

That reminds of a different but probably related issue, more relevant to the original board perhaps, described by a good friend of mine by “You know you’re in trouble when someone says ‘I love the blues!’”

I'd that Eric Clapton, Robert Cray or who's the contemporary? Nick Cave?

Now I'm reading Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia 1941-1945 by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, recommended by someone on ILB, if I'm not mistaken.

― o. nate, 3. juni 2019 03:45 (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I recommended it! Then I kinda got lost in it, needed to know about Singapore for a piece I was writing, read only about Singapore, then put it down for a while. Have just begun reading it again. Still good.

Also, I'm finishing the Book of Ezekiel today. I've been singing at a lot of confirmations lately, and at my church, the kids choose their bible words themselves. Wonder what happens if somebody chooses something from Ezekiel. 'And your words are from Ezekiel, chapter 16: “Therefore, you prostitute, hear the word of the Lord!"

Interesting vacillation in those Father Brown stories - first one gives a pretty sympathetic account of a militant atheist being bested by Brown's intelligence and taking it in a spirit of fair play; second story turns super reactionary and the amiability disappears.

On a tangent, am I right in thinking that most notable British x-ian writers are Catholic? Chesterton, Greene, Waugh. I guess CoE kinda has "don't think too much about it" built into it.

CS Lewis probably the biggest exception? but yes, disproportionate number of Catholic converts (Muriel Spark, too)

(for c20th fiction - things different in poetry - there's a strong Anglican line, basically because of Eliot I suspect)

Some non-converts: Anthony Burgess and David Lodge.

Last night I started my third-ever book by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed. Already I notice the distinctive marks of her style, her preferred themes, character types, sentence structures. While these are all good in their way, I can tell I will need to space out her books, so they do not quickly merge into a kind of Le Guin porridge.

picked up house of leaves today

xp Charlotte Brontë's Anti-Catholic Burns

xp I really enjoyed House of leaves when i chanced on it in the college library in the summer of 2003. I assume it must have been taught on one of the English courses in the year before since there were multiple copies of it there.
very odd.
I listened to a podcast on it recently. Not read anything else by the writer Danielewski. Is there anything else as good?

picked up house of leaves today

and boy are my arms tired!

What's the House of Leaves podcast? I love the damn book; I think about it most days without really being able to say why.

I started John Banville's The Untouchable. I'm frequently dazzled by Banville but, god, it's so full up. I get that the narrator is a SPY and the web of his noticing would be preternatural, but some of the sentences are almost parodically overstuffed.

That's the only Banville novel whose otiose sentences don't sink it.

I'm reading:

Fiona MacCarthy - Byron: Life and Legend
Alejo Carpentier - Reasons of State

xp

I can see the moment: the thin October sunlight on the parquet, a curl of steam from the teapot's spout, the somehow evil glitter of the marmalade in its cut-glass dish, and my father and Hettie waiting like frightened children to hear what London thought.

Evil glitter!

p down with evil glitter

House of Leaves Podcast was an episode of Overdue. #265 I think

I enjoyed Danielewski’s subsequent novel, Only Revolutions, I like things that play with the format of the novel to some effect, and you have to keep turning this one over and around. I haven’t read House of Leaves so I can’t compare.

I read a few of W.B. Yeats's plays: THE POT OF BROTH; AT THE HAWK'S WELL; THE CAT & THE MOON - in THE COLLECTED PLAYS OF W.B. YEATS.

I return yet again to Empson's SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY. I don't think I am a quarter through it. It is very dense.

That's the only Banville novel whose otiose sentences don't sink it.

It's the only Banville novel i haven't finished - the main character was a huge dick and i didn't want to deal with him. I'm fine with his sentences, it's the endless parade of sad post middle aged men that started to grate.

I think of Banville as my least favourite writer - though clearly there is much competition.

Finished Red Shift at a suitably spooky Midlands cottage this weekend. Wow. I’ve never read any Garner before but I was pretty blown away - even though it’s a hard, austere book and not much fun to read! - and it keeps getting bigger in my head since I finished it. I guess I was expecting some sort of angsty, proto-YA adventure novel, but instead I got this astonishing, weird, idea-stacked modernist masterpiece - I’ve never read anything like it. Plus it’s SUPER SAD. Good little book.

red shift fuckin rules

greatest ya novel i've ever read bc it makes that category extremely fuckin meaningless

I wanna go back and read everything he’s done in order (once I’ve fisnished doing the same for Penelope Fitzgerald)

That ending stayed with me like few others.

I found Red Shift tough going but have had a similar experience of it mushrooming in my imagination. It's a bit like Monk in that the elisions are where the magic is happening.

The Tony Shalhoub procedural?

Well, you needn’t.

I was a little delirious when I wrote that. I meant Thelonious Monk. The meaning being in the gaps and the weird breaks.

just finished will eaves’ “murmur”. really beautiful book

^^^^^^^ 1000x

Antonio Munoz Molina - Like a Fading Shadow
Rachel Cusk - Outline

Two similar autofictiony novels around writing, creation. Both conversational, both full of flat sentences (and not in a bad way at all).

Short intro on French Revolution.

I'm about 85% through The Dispossessed. It is an interesting book to me, mostly for reasons other than what Le Guin wanted me to be interested in. It is both crammed with matter and action, while at the same time it is oddly impoverished. The plot has managed to incorporate a couple dozen themes, including (but not limited to) exile, linguistics, the physics of time, cultural norms, anarchy, dreams, capitalism, sexuality, proxy war, censorship, ecology, marriage, the role of the scientist in an economy, and class war.

Le Guin obviously was an intelligent, curious and perceptive person who investigated every academic subject she encountered and thought broadly about global current events. She has an incisive opinion on all these themes and weaves them all into a story that has a convenient hook upon which she can hang each of these incisive opinions and perspectives. But all these abundant ideas are given only brief notice before passing on to the next one. Each is a little capsule of intellect, but each contains no more than that. They're provocative hints, but stop there.

For me, this makes it a queer sort of novel. Kind of like eating a 24 course meal of intellectual tapas or dim sum. Or watching a film festival showing with 90 minutes worth of 3 minute animations. How she did this is a fascination to me, mainly because of its novelty compared to my normal reading, but I'm fairly sure that almost nothing of this book will stick with me past the moment I read the last page.

Last night I started reading The Day of the Owl, Leonardo Sciascia. It's an NYRB reissue of a Sicilian author; it was written in 1961 and concerns a mafia killing. Good so far.

Sciascia is genuinely great IMO.

Gert Hofmann, The Parable of the Blind: wonderful

Cool! Is it translated by his son, Michael Hofmann: poet, translator, critic?

Been a long time since I read The Dispossessed--early 90s, if not late 80s---but what's stayed with me is the sense of a group, which sees itself/has inherited the self-image of a principled community, now challenged by the option of taking a chance on unprecedented adaptation (true to the spirit, not the letter?), or of trying to stay the course, and maybe stagnating at best.

Present-buying question. Can anyone recommend any good travel journalism or non-fiction about Australia, that's not written from a Brit/white/outsider perspective?

Not a Michael Hofmann translation--though he does write an afterword! It's a Christopher Middleton translation.

Off the top of my head, recenti-ish Australian non-fic by Australians, would recommend
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/leviathan-9781742741628 (excellent, blackly funny history of Sydney)
http://www.nicholasjose.com.au/books/black-sheep-journey-to-borroloola/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tall_Man:_Death_and_Life_on_Palm_Island (true crime)

Travel: this is a series by novelists about their home cities. Haven't read the one on Brisbane, but be warned that the author is a nitwit.
https://www.goodreads.com/series/67917

Edouard Louis - Who Killed My Father - read this for university, I guess pop auto-fiction with a short, sharp, political message about France. It's sort of written as a letter to the author's father, personal relationships mixed with the father's industrial injury and subsequent struggles with the state.

I guess I feel like auto-fiction or creative nonfiction seems incredibly fashionable and I'm a bit suspicious of it all. Dunno if it's the Catholic in me but it sort of feels like the literary equivalent of a selfie. This was a decent personal story though.

I'm nearing the end of the collected stories of John McGahern which I think I mentioned upthread. It's been on the Kindle app on my phone for times when I don't have a papperback. A really giant collection, so much mournful Catholic regret. Like anything that comprehensive it is not without its duds. The meandering, meditative and I suppose emotionally soft nature of the stories is sometimes refreshing and other times just old-fashioned. Still, it has the same deep compassion for its characters as William Trevor or the like, I enjoy that a lot.