Autumn 2020: Is Everything Getting Dimmer or Is It Just Me?

Some cultural groups were infiltrated pretty well, others were indeed fronts, at least as far as leaders and/or founders were concerned. Also, there were assets, whom you might sometimes drink and talk with; a lot of writers like to do that. And the more a writer gets around, the more likely he (think it was usually a he) might be approached. Nowadays of course, you can just check their social media, with an algorithm or two, if you like.

the manner in which aesthetics have been weaponized by the US government to nefarious ends

I honestly love the idea of the CIA having an operation to suborn prominent poets. Imagining Lowell getting involved in such a scheme doesn't really make him less interesting to me.

― o. nate, Saturday, October 10, 2020 9:48 AM (twenty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This post makes me want to scream.

(not that there aren't still people in the field, on the ground.)

"I honestly love the idea that a genocidal agency of warfare utilized artists to further its cultural operations" is honestly an evil opinion, full stop.

Might be yanking your chain

Tbh I hope so!

This might be beyond the purposes of the thread, but the Cold War in part paid for the post-WWII cultural moment; it's complicated and dialectical. I wrote about it a few years ago after reading Frances Stonor Saunders’ remarkable The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letter.

Thanks, Alfred! That's been on my list, and your write-up is enticing. Have you read "Du Bois' Telegram" by Juliana Spahr? Some very dense chapters there about the US government's thwarting of radical Black artistic projects worldwide. Some juicy bits about Richard Wright in particular.

In any case, I'm reading more Norma Cole at the moment, 'Moira.' Excited to get back to it after some days away, off in the woods.

yes, that's terrific!

Call me crazy, but I think radical geopolitics is about the least interesting angle from which to read Lowell. I finished reading True Grit. I liked the first half better. It kind of turns into a more conventional western adventure, and the comic elements recede, but still a good yarn. Now I'm reading Marrow and Bone by Walter Kempowski. Originally published in 1992 in Germany, its about a young man, Jonathan Fabrizius, living in West Germany in 1989 who gets the chance to visit East Prussia (ie. western Poland), from which his family was forcibly displaced during the war. There are some parallels to American novels like Everything is Illuminated, ie a young person revisits the site of a family's historical trauma, and both novels go the unexpected route of playing the setup for comedy. Also it links of course to Kempowski's more recent novel All For Nothing which tells the tragic tale of an East Prussian family during the war that could almost be Fabrizius's.

The idea that the CIA orchestrates genocides isn't radical, it's fact, but whatever.

Also, reading Lowell is never interesting, that's part of my whole point-- it's the scribblings of a crazy, racist, rich white dude, propped up to seem interesting by a power structure that is invested in maintaining the status quo. Talk about agonies and quiddities of the ruling class.

I liked seeing Aimless's report on THE MOUNTAIN LION.

I'm now reading another book with 'mountain' in the title: Mountain City, Gregory Martin. It is non-fic and simply tells stories describing a hamlet of 33 people in remote northern Nevada, where the author has family history and grew up. It's a quiet book, but has real depth, too.

Next up is Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine A. Porter.

Gregory Martin? George Martin’s son?

I guess that Gregory Martin wrote a different book.

"Noon Wine" and the title story (which I reread when COVID started) are startling. Porter's been a huge influence on me since reading "Flowering Judas" in high school.

Christine falls. Enjoyable

about 2/3 of the way through Piranesi and it's gotten quite good, can't wait to finish (hopefully tonight after work)

Eula Bliss: On Immunity -- this is really good, as everyone else but me noticed in 2014.

Yeah it’s great. I have her next one in my library queue.

also belongs in Great Real Names (despite/extra-because *biss* no L)

I think I confuse here with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Blissett

I have misread her name is Bliss the entire time, and not noticed until you told me that. The book's probably called On Invisibility for all my brain is capable of telling at this point.

this is a pretty good interview possibly of interest to users of the i love books message board, cc table is the table. the thumbnail bio at the start! i had no idea!

https://thelandmag.com/the-land-interview-mike-davis-jeff-weiss/

Thanks caek!

I had to quit the Kay Jamison. It's probably a false correlation but it was giving me supremely fucked up dreams.

Picking through the essays in The Good Immigrant now.

There is some kind weird voyeuristic thing about that KRJ books so that makes sense.

i just finished brideshead revisited. perhaps you've heard of it? big thumbs up for that one.

now reading sisters by daisy johnson. that's new this year. i enjoyed her previous (first) book, everything under, which was shortlisted for the booker a couple of years back (controversially IIUC since it was kind of genre).

still slogging away at riddley walker. very funny but only managing a couple of pages at a time.

That's it I think, James Redd - it's a window into psychosis and presented so matter-of-factly that it's often too much to bear.

Speaking of which, I read Riddley Walker last year, holed in up on Anglesey in a howling gale. It was perfect and traumatic all at the same time.

I had a friend who was a psychologist who saw at a convention or two and had a little crush on her or something- too much!

Yeah, she's been in panel discussions, Q&As etc..also one-to-one interviews on BookTV etc: v. cogent, cuet, charming, but not tooo charming

But yeah she's got the real talk; stay braced.

If you continue to know someone who has been quite plausibly diagnosed as bipolar, and even if they're doing well, reading her books can be the kind of experience which Willie Nelson compares to "Seeing your mother-in-law drivin' over a cliff in a Cadillac you ain't paid for: a combination of 'Right On!' and 'O Shit!'" The books can seem like an implicitly mixed, necessary blessing. And kind of enjoyable sometimes, like some (no no, not all) necessary evil.

i finished wild seed and mind of my mind by octavia butler. both good, interesting, entertaining. started clay's ark but it's not grabbing me. time to move on to something and someone else. i'm having a hard time finding that something / someone though. i feel like something current. flipped through the new hari kunzru book but i'm not sold, i just don't want to read about the gestapo right now after having read sebald. if someone wants to recommend something very *now* / *21st century* but not facile and not necessarily fiction please do.

Riddley Walker gets a lot easier, I don't know if there's a learning curve or what but the fist 60 pages or so took me weeks or even months to get through, and then i finished it off in a couple of days.

I attempted CM Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta a couple of years ago. That one never gets easier, the language is ridiculous. There was something densely atmospheric about it that made me want to keep at it - the combination of faux-King James English and exotic landscape is pretty singular- but i gave up in the end.

Binging on middle grade fiction at the moment and it suits my mental age and reading ability much better.
Bunnicula is the best thing ever, I am completely obsessed and might even read it again before Halloween. I tried the second book in the series but it's not even remotely in that league.
From the Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E Franweiler is my 2nd fave so far.

Bunnicula is brilliant, so happy that I got my daughter hooked on that and the Moomins.

Map, you might enjoy Karen Russell and Kelly Link's 21st Century speculative fiction, for lack of a better term, their short stories are imaginative and a lot of fun. Also, Russell is an empath; Link is punk. Maybe start w KR's Vampires in the Lemon Grove, KL's Get In Trouble Karen Joy Fowler started with science fiction per se, with stories in Asimov's, novels harder to classify. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves has grown offspring dealing with wtf & aftermath of Primatologist Dad's bringing a new little sister home from the lab---there have been nonfictional accounts of this kind of experiment accumulating over the years, as one of the main characters discovers.

KELLY LINK! KELLY LINK! https://www.eddostern.com/RISD/Stone-Animals-by-Kelly-Link.pdf

I love her.

Finished my Norma Cole binge. Finding it hard to read any non-fiction atm, so have started the new Buffy Cain chapbook. will probably try to move toward actually reading non-fiction again next, though i might have to put down the Mieville— while I admire his style, the dryness of it all is really making it more of slog than i anticipated...

but actually, this gets into a question i have for all of you.

Do you have a reading "practice," so to speak? Do you take notes? What about routines?

I try to read poetry in the morning, as a way of waking up my brain and reminding myself of myself.

If I have time during the remainder of the day, I try to read non-fiction or philosophy, but sometimes— and especially as of late— I've had a more difficult time doing so.

Then at night, I go for either fiction or poetry, usually the latter since it's so much more my wheelhouse.

Today, I have to grade some papers, record the lectures for next week (on Dorothy Allison and Jayne Anne Phillips!), then plan the reading that I'm giving tomorrow. It's raining heavily. Think I'm all set!

I used to just read on public transport, in the Beforetimes. These days I alternate between reading prose and comics in the late afternoon and before bed.

I routinely alternate between binge-reading and avoiding books completely aside from the bare minimum for my work. The latter usually accompanies feelings of disgust towards academia and the hyperanalytic frame of mind It fosters, but I also go through periods where words strike me as the most unnecessary entities of all (cue Dave Gahan).

I also strive towards monogamy - hate that situation where I've got five different books on the go and feel like I'll never finish any of them.

Same here. I also wish I could abandon certain books more readily – those that 'fall from one's hands', as we say in French – but my completist instincts are too strong.

pom, I think that the disgust you talk about above is what really drove my decision to not get a PhD, tbh. Too many friends telling me that they hate reading and never have time for whimsy or reading "light" crap also helped.

I totally respect that tbh. I'm glad I went through with it in the end but part of that 'gladness' is just commitment to a sunk cost fallacy.

Should I bother with Seven Gothic Tales? The prose seems a bit much.

I read Dinesen when I was writing my thesis on Borges 17 lifetimes ago. I can't remember very much about it all except, as you say, that the prose was a bit much (I can do purple, I can do thickety but I don't know, it was a slog).

I find it increasingly difficult to read at home and always feel I should be doing something else. So, I only read in bed, usually non-fiction, particularly in term time.

She reminds me of the worst of Broch.