Winter 2021: ...and you're reading WHAT?!

I mostly lurk but popping my head up to say...

Bravo! Encore!

Confessions of a Fox - Jordy Rosenberg. The one littered with critical praise often with the words 'romp' and 'rollicking' in, hence it being about a year since I bought it to reading it. I'm *just about* persisting despite it being yet another example of a version of 18th century style - you know the Sort, all Capital Letters and Rhetorick with a k and an entire slang dictionary slathered onto the pages to produce Effcts both Comical and Tragicke. I only know of one decent version of this mode, and that's Pynchon's Mason and Dixon.

There's also an unreliable academic narrator who communicates mainly through footnotes, in a facetious and grating tone.

it's very much a first novel.

there are aspects which deserve longer scrutiny, trans erotica and an attempt to dramatize gender fluidity in the language of the time, but it comes across as current thought cloaked in an ersatz version of the language of the time*. After all 18th century english was how serious people communicated seriously in the 18th century. it's not a joke or cartoon.

I'm thinking of giving up persisting soon, but will keep going for the moment.

* I should add that by this i very much do not mean 'oh god woke 18th century,' - gender fluidity and frameworks of gender representation in that period are a real discipline, and the other is a real academic of them. but there's a lack of the sense of the cadence of thinking and representation of thought from the 18th century doing the work, it's more like current frameworks with 18th century argot.

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett. Collection of short stories. Good, I think. Interior monologues in domestic spaces, with a careful awareness of the mechanics of interiority, the circling round a thing, the unusual snags of feeling and recognition by which thought progresses or insight is gained. The elliptical and non-cliched nature of thinking and feeling. Someone said that she was similar to Jen Calleja, but i don't get that at all tbh, in fact Pond reminds me more in some ways of Gerald Murnane, an understanding of how to get to the profound from the repeated mundane and quotidian, and how the unusual or genuinely strange is actually part of that fabric.

The effect to me is a little like trying to catch an elusive thought that seems to have whisked away just before the moment you were aware of it, but which you feel has insight. Sometimes you find it and can look at it, most of the time it flits away without any sense of what meaning or importance it may have had. CLB is adept at catching them.

Hello, I have never posted to this board before, but I have just started reading Sensoria Thinkers for the Twenty-first Century by McKenzie Wark as I finally finished reading the Jacques Derrida biography that came out last year.

confusing ambiguity in my post:

for 'and the other is a real academic of them' read 'and the author is a real academic of them'

Hi Oor Neechy. How are the 21st Century thinkers?

Started Chess Story, Stefan Zweig, last night. It's novella length and I should have finished it last night, too, but couldn't keep my eyes open. No reflection on the story, which was taut and beautifully constructed (as far as I got).

Hey Neechy.

Chess Story is fabulous. One of those books I know I own but which has been nabbed by the book poltergeist.

I'm reading Love's Work by Gillian Rose. Like Aimless, I should probably have finished it last night but was blinking back tears and couldn't manage it. It's propelled by onrushing death and Rose releases a torrent of wordplay and memory; it's full of wry observation and shatteringly unadorned descriptions of what happened to her people and the important relationships she's maintained and lost. What a beautiful book.

love’s work is amazing.

I think I picked it up from a recommendation on here - may well have been you Fizzles so thank you. I vaguely knew of her through Jacqueline Rose and Adam Phillips but hadn't read anything by her. Jesus, for such a short book it's got extraordinary heft.

^ I've heard enough. I just ordered a used copy for myself.

think i got the rec from xyzzzz and others itt. but yes - more the better! incredibly moving. i need to go back and revisit some passages.

Hi Oor Neechy. How are the 21st Century thinkers?

― Fizzles, Monday, 8 March 2021 17:14 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Just started it, but I think its trying to stay away from old white guys from the west

I've heard mixed reviews of the Rosenberg book, even tho a friend of mine loved it, he also has sometimes...well, our tastes align to a certain degree, but there are things he enjoys that I find awful. Like Zizek.

Chess Story is fantastic, agreed.

Just finished The Jakarta Method, by Vincent Bevins. It never rubs the reader's face in the horror, doesn't go in for graphic details of torture/murder, but manages to be emotionally overwhelming just by the loss experienced by the people he talks to and writes about, both of their friends/families/lovers and of their hopes for something better. Devastating book, highly recommended.

Nearly finished with Wolf Among Wolves by Hans Fallada. Much less stressful to read once it moves out of Berlin, still not quite sure what I think of it.

Started Log of the USS Mrs. Unguentine while outside on a really nice day, kind of waiting for another day like that to finish it.

Glad you found The Jakarta Method to be as bracing and informative as I did! One of the best books I read last year.

Just finished The Jakarta Method, by Vincent Bevins. It never rubs the reader's face in the horror, doesn't go in for graphic details of torture/murder, but manages to be emotionally overwhelming just by the loss experienced by the people he talks to and writes about, both of their friends/families/lovers and of their hopes for something better. Devastating book, highly recommended.

I read it in October at tables' rec. OTM.

is James McBride good? Seems like somebody on ilb said book x was v good, book y was shit (or vice-versa).

Another vote her for Deborah Levy's non-fiction. There's a third volume coming out this year.

https://lithub.com/50-very-bad-book-covers-for-literary-classics/

😬

Speaking of Jane Austen... I'm almost done reading Mansfield Park for the first time and jeez what a slog. All of Austen's fine observation and irrepressible irony in service of a complete nothing of a story, dragged out to interminable length and populated almost entirely by creeps, schemers, dunderheads, sluggards, harridans, and drips.

I believe James Morrison did some posts on crazy print-on-demand covers for classics ages ago?

Yes, a classic!

Finished Mansfield Park, I can see how it might be an interesting book to discuss - Lady Bertram as a reductio ad absurdum of the idea that once a woman has secured her living through marriage she need no longer even think, let alone act or speak; the whole thing a subversion of a romance, where all the action happens off-stage in the last twenty pages. And I actually liked Fanny, yes she is quiet and timid and compliant, but she is clear sighted and keeps her head and stands her ground when she ultimately needs to. Still think it was a snoozefest though.

Stranded by Clinton Walker
really great so far, gone through the early years of Saints & Birdman and just been introduced to the Boys Next door and their mate Chris Walsh.
& the author's opwn background.
Very readable, do wish I had picked this up when it first came out and wonder if tehre is a reason I didn't. Other tahn not seeing it. BUt would have thunk that Tower in Dublin would have got it and failing taht Rough Trade in London. So wonder if there was a reason I wouldn't have been aware of it. Obviously no internet at the time at least for me.
Oh well, reading it now.

Jean Stafford didn't write short stories so much as reports or dispatches about people she's observed. Occasionally it works.

I'm re-reading some Chekhov and I can't stop thinking about Easter Night.

I am caught between two stool, having started both My Dog Tulip, Ackerly, and Psmith in the City, Wodehouse. It's now a race for my affections.

hott

I've started Siri Hustvedt, MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE. It's very readable. NYC and poetry in the late 1970s - goes down surprisingly easily. Look forward to more.

ON the last section of David Olusoga The World's War and armistice has been signed. just been reading about black troops fathering babies in the Rhineland and the later Nazi response which is disgusting.
& Black troops who had got some respect from fightig as part of teh French Army triggering the US army to try to get them treated with acomplete lack of respect. Which seemed to be more prevalent after the fighting ended.

Good book, think I'll read more by him.

Finished Kehinde Andrews New Age of Empire which was a pretty scathing overview of the West's exploitation of the colonies and how it doesn't seem to be getting much better just teh exploiters seems to have changed. China and the rich of various countries exploiting resources and allowing teh money to go to the white west. NOt sure what any form of egalitarianism can build on if the resources are all going to be gone.

Stranded Clinton Walker
JUst getting to the Birthday party imploding and me getting the timing of Jeffrey Wegener's playing with tehm wrong. It wasa Dutch tour after which Mick Harvey took over the drums again and then teh antipodean dates at the end are Des Hefner.
OH and just when i was wondering why the Moodists hadn't had much coverage they appeared on about the next page. Chris Walsh having appeared much earlier since he was around to help teach Tracy Pew bass.

Last night I finished both Psmith in the City and My Dog Tulip. Remarks follow.

In this book Wodehouse delivers a Psmith who is recognizably in character. This is a sequel to his earlier 'public schoolboy' stories in which Psmith plays the eccentric second fiddle to one Mike Jackson, a handsome lad who is normal as milk and wields a wicked bat in cricket. Both Mike and Psmith appear again here, but now as apprentices in a bank.

Wodehouse wisely pushes Psmith to the fore here, rather than as a secondary character. The major flaw in this yarn is a lack of scope for Psmith to fully blossom out, as he did once he was finally untethered from the stolid Mike and sent to NYC in Psmith, Journalist, a much finer book. This novel is comparatively tepid compared to Wodehouse in full cry.

As for My Dog Tulip, I was rather less impressed with it than the critics who supplied the Introduction and cover blurbs, which tout it as a masterpiece. One blurb from a NYT reviewer claims the book "shakes up our sentimental preconceptions about dogs". This is nonsense. Ackerly is hugely sentimental about Tulip. He keeps trying to deliver her a life of perfect unclouded happiness; he describes her beauty in the rapturous tones of a lover; he is often consternated because his attempts to be the perfect dog owner for his pet keep coming a cropper through his lack of practical judgment. Unsentimental this is not.

I kept wanting to tell him to settle down, try less hard and just find a reasonable balance of his needs and hers, some pleasant life together that he knew how to accomplish, instead of imagining how wonderful it would be if Tulip could be made blissful, then failing at it over and over.

As normal as milk?

The Ackerley to read is My Father and Myself. That's his masterpiece.

There's a Captain Beefheart album and song called "Safe as Milk", featuring the lyric, "I may be hungry but I sure ain't weird".

xp

Heh, when Pinefox used that phrase,Beefheart's explanation of the title popped into my head: after WWII and subsequent nuclear tests, fallout isotopes were found in mother's milk (cdc.gov still has something about this).

haha (presumably in response to https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/14/books/review/autofiction-my-dark-vanessa-american-dirt-the-need-kate-elizabeth-russell-jeanine-cummins-helen-phillips.html)

strange to have come of age reading great novels of ambition, substance, & imagination (Dostoyevsky, Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner) & now find yourself praised & acclaimed for wan little husks of "auto fiction" with space between paragraphs to make the book seem longer...

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) March 16, 2021

So 'autofiction' has finally caught on in English?

unlike, say, Joyce Carol Oates.

JCO wrote some amazing stories, but God she's just awful.

Gore Vidal: the three scariest words in the English language are "Joyce Carol Oates."

I like autofiction bc im not very smart

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/8197RW+F2hL.jpg

i knew someone would reference that awful, catty gore vidal comment ugh

I nabbed a free copy of Lincoln in the Bardo and started it last night. It seems to me rather too self-concious about telling its story unconventionally, so that people will know instantly that this book is Experimental and therefore Important, but it did manage to not grate on me, yet.

after a couple of months of mostly adventure/spy/thriller/detective/mystery novels am now reading the old grove press jarry selected works... just about to start on the exploits & opinions of dr faustroll, pataphysician which i did read a few years back in a separate edition, but a revisit in this case is no bad thing.

This has doubtless been linked everywhere already, but enjoyed this on wanhuskgate: https://www.the-fence.com/online-only/from-husk-til-dawn

In particular this tickled me

Elsewhere, there are dissenting voices, to be found. Ben Northman, the 56-year-old author of England is Piss and The Skipton Goblin, has no time for trendy movements. ‘We don’t have autofiction in Barnsley,’ he told me. ‘Folk round these parts want granite-hard muscular fiction, about witches building dry stone walls.

finished try, the third novel in dennis cooper's george miles cycle, last night. it's my favorite so far i think? even though it didn't really have the meta dimensions of frisk or uncut misery of closer. it was kind of a straight up love story, albeit embroidered by the most nihilistic depravity like ever—and it's a love story between a bi dude (who is earnest and beautiful and pretty thoroughly fucked up by all of the sexual abuse his parents and relatives visit upon him) and a straight dude (who can barely move from the depths of his heroin addiction) no less! hopeless ppl feeling profound tenderness for each other... i wanted to cry every other page

it's also uhhh so funny. i feel very weird reading dennis cooper bc he is capable of making me laugh at the most awful, evil shit, i.e. my favorite line in the book, delivered from the main character to one of his dads:

“If you loved me . . .”—Ziggy slugs—“. . . you wouldn’t rim me while I’m crying.”

it is fun to read the goodreads reviews that totally don't get it, or think that it's celebrating the abuses it documents