Spring 2021: Forging ahead to Bloomsday as we read these books

I wrote a lot about Thomas Mann's bat shit political tome, published by New York Review Books.

I'm increasingly resigned to life being about how we deal with being *wrong* about things, which is to say Light Years almost entirely won me over. I'm inclined to say that it's governing tone is sentimental and that it considers life to be too short - and that we must wake up to this, probably too late. I think I felt Salter's mode was collusion early on, but now I think he considers Nedra and Viri emblematic of something flawed and grasping, but forgivably so. The light of the title is, I think, an adjective, as in we miss the simplicity of our early years (their lightness) and are doomed to mourn them from the position of age.

In the interest of balance, here's a passage from towards the end that is like being sung too.

The leaves had come down, it seemed, in a single night. The prodigious arcade of trees in the village gave them up quickly, they fell like rain. They lay like runs of water along the melancholy road. In the turning of seasons they would be green again, these great trees. Their dead branches would be snapped away, their limbs would quicken and fill. They would again, in addition to their beauty, to the roof they made beneath the sky, to their whispering, their slow, inarticulate sounds, the riches they poured down, they would, besides all this, give scale to everything, a true scale, reassuring, wise. We do not live as long, we do not know as much.

Gah, stray 'it's' there. Ugh.

tldr; didn't see it:)

Walter Abish alphabetical Africa an oulipan caper where in the first chapter all the words begin with A, in the second chapter A & B and so on, adding a letter each time, and then after chapter 26 he starts removing a letter until it gets back to all As. The constraint is interesting, I had a go at writing a review with all A-words and it does sort of push you in cool directions, like it’s your hand moving the planchette but not. I found it very neat that even in the middle chapters where abish had recourse to the entire alphabet and could write “normally”, he stuck to an odd idiosyncratic style established in the earlier chapters.

Authors can be circumscribed in other ways tho & it’s funny for as surreal & cerebral as it is it can feel oddly bound by 70s mores: the Africa it explores is avowedly a construct (itself a very late 70s move) but does that excuse the dark continent cliches; the main female character is in some ways a stock femme fatale (luckily “breast” is available two chapters in!) — but then it will get pretty explicitly anti-colonialist and portray a trans character... relatively well for 1978

Anyway it is of course an achievement in itself - but I spotted this in the first J chapter
https://i.imgur.com/FzsXxdR.jpg

& then towards the end https://i.imgur.com/9J4UvDa.jpg
A line of what, Walter? (This in the second S chapter). Then a few pages later I think I’ve cracked the code when I read consequently Jacqueline misses a description of Alva on page forty-nine and on page ninety-nine. The second mistake is on page 99! So I go back and the first mistake is on... page 26. Bah.

The citationless Wikipedia article says there are at least 4 errors and up to 43 (! I do not believe this for a second) & it is disputed as to whether they are intentional; along with the two above I came across two that were so glaring that it was almost impossible to believe they weren’t deliberate, but I can’t think of a single reason for them to be there so who the fuck knows

Chinaksi, that book also told me some things about middle aging, about time, that turned out to be true. I still think of the guy who liked to visit, who thought of himself as a Dickensian uncle (think that was the exact phrase), who gets mugged, and beaten down in the street, badly injured. He's never the same: more reserved, way back there among the characters, occasionally mentioned. A friend of my father's was like that after his heart attack in Vegas---he outlived it by many years, but.

David eagleton Sum another exercise in imagination that sort of bumps up against the authors limits. 40 very short (~2 page) stories each set in a hypothetical afterlife; the first, title, story sets the tone: in the next world you experience again everything that happened in your life but sorted by category, so you spend a day being about to sneeze and two hours pretending to recognise someone or whatever

The writing is good and some of the scenarios are really poignant, funny and sad - the author is a neuroscientist and all the models of the hereafter have an admirable lucidity - but this attitude starts showing through the general cloud of humanism that I keep bristling against. Most egregiously there’s a story that seems to gravely misunderstand MLK and has god commiserating with him & Gandhi about “movements that sweep over the tops of their founders”

I did like it despite all that, but in the spirit of the thing im allowed to imagine a reality where this exact book gets written to the same standard by an author with a more salutary weltanschauung

Just read Alfred's xpost review: yep, Reflections of a Nonpoltical Man, just paring his nails n the tower, reflections incl. good one on irony of art and btw nonironic nod to the pure German spirit-->war, just sayin. Wonder if he ever though better of that, or was it like, "Lenin good, Stalin bad" before Putin's ascendancy (maybe some Russians still say it, not so loudly).

An Indigenous People's History of the United States By Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
Scathing look at America's treatment of its indigenous population from Penguin's Revisioning series. Dunbar-Ortiz helped Howard Zinn with research for his A People's History Of the United States as i found out while watching Exterminate All The Brutes. She pointed out to him that he had left out pretty much all reference to the indigenous population. He said he wouldn't know where to start, why didn't she write one so decades later she came through with this. Or something to that effect with more focus on her own agency.
Anyway I'm still in the 18th century, a couple of years after Independence and there's already a heavy pall of intentional genocide.
Quite great though.
I think I may make my way thorough a few more of this Revisioning series, definitely the one on Black and LatinX US History written by her husband Paul Ortiz,. I saw a good webinar with him on his book. I'm also picking up some more Indigenous focused US history stuff. Bought a couple yesterday.

THe Lies That Bind Kwame Anthony Appiah
Interesting look at identity from a Harvard professor who grew up as a mixed race kid in the UK then Ghana. |I think this may have been a book Angela Saini recommended on a podcast a few months ago.
It has an outline of intersectionality that was similar to the one I had surmised. Like an expansion on the queer feminist focused one taht was due to teh person who devised it originally. I thought it was probably something that was a universal thing but with each person having their own layers. he doesn't quite say that but what he does would lead to that understanding I think. I was looking for a succinct description of the process. I assume that everybody does have different facets and aspects they communicate with different people from and it is something that is just more enhanced in a marginalised person because of different valorisation and leverage etc. & is deeply interlinked with what is also known as codeswitching though that may appear more superficial. I think the reasons for it are far from cosmetic though.
Anyway finding it an easy book to read when I find the time to do so. & it does have a lot more to it than what I have said so far.
I think it and teh Angela Saini are both books i wish some people who are supposed to be progressive but seem to be unaware of tehir own prejudices would benefit from reading which is something that keeps running through my head as i read it and the other decolonisation and anti-racism books I'm reading.

How To be An Antiracist Ibram X. Kendi
Another reasonably easy read other than potentially triggering about racism being faced and exclusion of some individuals being talked about. & i think if that puts you off you're not facing reality
This was the book i managed to get for a Euro a week and a bit ago. I'm really glad that I found it so cheap though would have paid more for it. Again something that I wish people who don't seem to be aware of how racism works and tends to permeate society would read instead of whitewashing things.
Good book anyway. Author talking about his upbringing and what he faced throughout growing up and the things he learnt in the process.
I think I will be looking to read his other work afterwards if I can get my hands on it

I've started Molly Prentiss, TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980 (2016), a book I've owned for about 5 years and not properly read till now.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/07/books/review-tuesday-nights-in-1980-offers-bright-lights-big-strivers.html

It's mainly about the NYC downtown art scene in 1980, I think, with reference also to the Argentinian Junta. It has a good concept in an art critic with synaesthesia, who writes down his unusual sense perceptions. It's not terrifically well-written - I haven't noticed a good image or fine sentence in 50 pages. It partakes of a slack idiom that's happy to be obscene: 'this had fucked up his life', says the 3rd-person narrator. A generation or two earlier, I think that narrators didn't talk that way. (Updike, say, was very sexual but wasn't his approach to descriptive prose more rigorous?) I find the slack obscenity lazy and striving too hard to be cool and mean. It's fairly normal nowadays though - I'm sure that eg: Franzen would do it. If I were a writer, I would try not to.

The novel contains a horrible promiscuous male who casually has sex with women once then ignores them. I find this hateful and it puts me off the novel. However, he is only part of it. I must persist.

I went to grad school with Molly. She is a lovely person, and I actually really loved her poems, which were strange and did a lot of interesting stuff with narrativity; was never really attracted to her prose, and haven't read the novel.

It is worth noting, though, that our profs were people like Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Tom Barbash, and Miranda Mellis— the more abject and experimental side of the fiction spectrum, in other words.

I've started reading "History of Rock and Roll Vol 1: 1920-1963" by Ed Ward. I'm up to 1954. The book focuses a lot on the labels and personalities that released early singles that were influential on the music that would become known as rock and roll. It can turn into just a list of songs with brief descriptions, but that works fine when you can pop open any one that sounds interesting on Youtube and listen to it.

Finished Rindon Johnson's "The Law of Large Numbers." Got a package from my friend Ed in the mail of a collaborative book he did with an artist entitled "The Rose" alongside a chapbook from M. Elizabeth Scott. Going to read the latter when I get off work this evening.

found the copy of Ken Kesey's the Last Roundup that I have to return at the end of the month yesterday/
Quiite enjoying the prose. Read the first few chapters.

bought some more books today cos I didn't think I was reading enough at the same time

Finished both of the books in the package from Ed. Now re-reading Dennis Cooper's "The Sluts," because Jackie Ess' "Darryl" makes explicit reference to its universe, and I am pondering writing a review of the latter.

reading some swedenborg for the first time. was hoping for descriptions of conversations with angels & demons and depictions of heaven & hell... what i got: 300+ pages of biblical exegesis.

I just got Impro by Keith Johnstone, who was a British theatre guy who specialized in improvisation and spontaneity. A friend recommended it for running/playing rpgs.

speaking of dennis cooper i started b.r. yeager's 'negative space' which feels like a post-cooper book: a lot of kids and they're all fucked up on drugs and stuff like that, lots of violence and blankness, the internet is in there too. sadly it just makes me realise again how singular cooper is, because the yeager book seems flat, cliche, even tedious in comparison - there are some alright parts, but a disappointment based on how enthusiastic the reviews and endorsements for it have been

Sill reading this Library of America Melville, and struck by how the third person narration of "Benito Cereno" seems integral, after the struggles with it in Pierre. It's not omnisicent narration: everybody but the POV character is a mystery to him, less to the reader, seeing through the well-meaning American Captain Amasa'a limitations what he keeps trying to explain away, soothing his riled self, with professional observation and filters of courtesy, congeniality, and confidence of status---as a superior, he is even something of a negrophile, as Eddie Murphy used to put it. This almost gets him killed, but the system adjusts. Testimonial documents don't incl. motive for the slaves' revolt---does incl. descriptions of several of the core participants has having been known as smart, talented negroes, good negroes in the community---but it's easily inferred that they were driven to it by having been uprooted from that community, sailing with their master to wherever--even if it were to turn out to be a better place than they've known, could just as or more likely be worse. there is still no agency.The Captain is as much a creature of his own gilded cage as the first-person narrator of "Bartleby, The Scrivener," as tested by the Other, but what the hell, both old privileged white guys are the survivors (spoiler).

Apologies for being lazy, but I'm looking for a recommendation - can anyone recommend a good, short book or article about Yugoslavia in the 80-90s? I'm looking for something that covers culture as well as history and politics. (I have a work thing I need to get up-to-speed for fairly quickly...) At the moment I'm just cribbing bits from Judt's Postwar...

I continue with TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980 - I realise that it would seem rational to abandon it but I have this nice hardback and I want to do it justice.

So far I can't really remember reading a good sentence - though it's better on the synaesthetic colours, its best theme. It's strangely wooden on 1960s Argentina - does the author know much about this world? - it all feels very potboiler-level - but disappointing on the US too. A girl in the Mid-West suddenly realises that she needs to move to NYC - especially when she sees a postcard of it and "Her heart actually stopped". Actually? When she gets to NYC she sees the horrible womaniser artist and experiences, wait for it, "love at first sight".

Meanwhile I returned to a couple of chapters of Hugh Kenner, THE POUND ERA. The magnificence of this book is known. I wonder, though, how easy it is to learn concrete facts and ideas from it, as it's all a montage of suggestions and asides.

I'm closing in on the end of World Light, Halldor Laxness. My major impression is that it is a sort of ambitious anti-epic extended to epic length. But even though Laxness had many things he wanted to say and he says them all, the book never quite settles down or decides what kind of story it wants to be. It sloshes around from spirituality to sentimentality to satire and this dilutes the effect of all of them.

Finally cracked open In the Land of the Cyclops, the Knausgaard essay collection that I received earlier this year via my Archipelago sub. Despite never having read K's fiction, I am pretty squarely in the target audience for this type of thing; and the brief piece I read this morning (a laudatory review of Houellebecq's Submission) was perfect in its length, depth, breadth, and the rhythms of its prose.

I'm also taking a rare excursion into contemporary fantasy with my book club's latest pick, The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune. The first 100 or so pages have been long on setup and short on conflict, but I appreciate that the setup is heavily character-focused, with the world-building happening unobtrusively around the edges.

Another reason to never read Knausgaard is his love of Houellebecq, a vile writer and person.

He said in the review that this was the first book of Houellebecq's he had ever read, after years of ignoring people recommending his work *shrug*

I thought it was a very fair review that didn't turn into a defense of Houellebecq, though I could see others reading it as special pleading (he is keen to downplay the ~contemporary relevance~ of Submission, in favor of its more putatively universal literary virtues)

There is literally nothing that Houellebecq has written that isn't Islamophobic, misogynist trash— perhaps I'm missing something in translation, as I've only <<Les particules élémentaires>> in the original, but he's not a great stylist, just a racist provocateur. Not trying to attack you, bernard snowy, I just find anyone actually liking his books to be a bit suspect because there doesn't seem to be a way to enjoy his books without endorsing his ideology, which is monstrous to say the least.

He's also been writing a variation on the same book for his entire career: depressed middle-aged man with addiction problems has racial anxieties that are confirmed by outlandish, fantastical acts. In the meantime, he has bad sex and ponders the meaninglessness of existence. The end.

Submission had a very funny ending

One funny thing about Submission is that Islamic government is in many ways an improvement over the previous secular French regime, not least for sozzled, aging, sex-obsessed, economically-precarious, bachelor intellectuals.

Yes exactly! I love that the threat of this scary alien religion gets totally neutralized when it comes to power as a pragmatic and venal ruling order, and none of the sharia restrictions really have teeth provided one knows the right people and is willing to at least make a public show of converting. The idea of wealthy Arab princes amassing prestige by generously endowing university chairs of French literature is admittedly farfetched, but it's also a very funny rebuke to neoliberal austerity -- like, "If you're so worried about this culture changing or being lost, why haven't you done anything to help the people whose life's work is preserving and transmitting it?"

Forging ahead to Bloomsday.

Ok

Happy #Bloomsday2021! Introducing my son Daedalus way back when to his namesake. Look at that smile. He knows good literature when he sees it. 😍 pic.twitter.com/tLY09BRqTt

— Nora McGregor (@ndalyrose) June 16, 2021

.

Finished the Penguin Book Of Japanese Short Stories. Loved it, with one main reservation: I like Haruki Murakami well enough, but two (admitidely short) stories and an introduction in which he himself admits to not being big on Japanese literature and not having read many of the stories before is way overkill. Still, gotta move copies I guess.

Some highlights:

"Peaches", Abe Akira - on the unreliability of memory, long deconstruction of a childhood recollection.

"Cambridge Circus", Shibata Motoyuki - deals w/ the infinite possibilities brought up by our everyday choices, great sadboi stuff.

"Kudan", Uchida Hyakken - Narrator wakes up to find himself a cow demon that people demand prophecies from.

"Mr English", Genji Keita - About an office worker whose only skill was speaking English before this became common in the Japanese business world; a cantankerous, insecure jerk, but we end up feeling for him because he's such an underdog. Apparently the author wrote a bunch of salarymen stories, would love to track down.

"American Hijiki", Nosaka Akiyuki - Middle aged middle class dude has to entertain american tourist couple his wife made friends with in Hawaii; meanwhile he's remembering being a pimp in the early days of the US occupation.

"Pink", Hoshino Tomoyuki - A horrible heat wave hits Japan, leading to people spinning for hours on end as a sort of spiritual remedy. Thing quickly escalates into Japan going to war. A description of how a right-wing radical is recruited feels very much akin to the western alt right playbook.

Today is the anniversary of when James Joyce wrote the entirety of Ulysses in a single day. You don't have to like the result to respect the process!!!

— scott manley hadley (@Scott_Hadley) June 16, 2021

*burps*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm51ihfi1p4

Just starting north and south by Gaskell. Early days but must admit I’m finding it a bit of a slog so far. Any thoughts before I tap out?

It's good; it has like two false starts before the story gets going, but it ends up working.

It's her most clunkily written book, though, on a sentence level. And she has a huge crush on her main character so you have to deal with A LOT of her going on endlessly about Margaret's white taper fingers. It's still really good though, somehow.

All the cultural stuff, south vs. north, the pov of mill-owners and the pov of workers, she handles really well.

“False starts” is good enough for me to persist. Thank you!

ha I'm a squinter and was reading that as referring to Kentucky-Cali-Kentucky's own Mary Gaitskill---I love most of her stuff, but could kinda see her going in that direction (but I'm a squinter).
Still reading the library's Library of America Melville, and just finished (for now) The Confidence Man--His Masquerade, which, appropriately, resists any any comfortable stance of interpretation, or at least mine. All I can do is watch, as the con or cons (one guy in many guises, I assumed, but come to think of it, maybe nor: there's a lot of that going around), on a riverboat "bound for the auction blocks of New Orleans, " as the jacket flap copy emphasizes, approaches his or their lastest chosen mark, adapting conversational gambits accordingly. It seems too patterned at first, like a popular Saturday Night Live sketch, methodically working that premise to death, 'til time for the next recycling---in a more longwinded and otherwise complicated-not-complex way.
But the con just has to keep going, in and around the moment and boat (hi ho, lets go though the "poor emigrants" banging against the walls in their shoddy hammocks, didn't know riverboats had steerage too, but why not), changing even before the pushback gets stronger and scarier, with stories from Reality vs. The Man's sweet undertow of reductive optimism-p-eventually, his own pushback even seems honestly, and understandably, indignant, vs. one relentless revelation of financial snares (searing focus evoking the experience of the author's father, who died young, his uncle, who then tried to sort things out, and Herman himself, as compulsively hapless heads of household, at least on contracts)--which gets twisted back, reduced to one point, now seeming the pissiest--the Confidence Man pushes back against such zealous overkill (that he thought he could turn aside), and, in scenes like these, he seems not entirely wrong: we do need some kind of basic lower-case confidence, faith in faith's ability to keep us going, despite all the amputations, beyond-below the limits of rational discourse and all its elaborations---but he/they can't leave it alone, can't be alone, or lower-case for long (and then there's the money, which can sometimes seem like a trophy, but 0 social safety net here, as the reader is often reminded in passing: money and talk about money occupy all tables and pews here).

So despite all the talking, it's effectively more show than tell, much more.

An unexpected connection, from an email I sent this morning:

Just read (mark s)'s incredible Sight and Sound deep focus survey ov Alice on film (and in the art of Tenniel, Ernst etc), http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49605...Struck by the description of Dodgson-Carrol-Tenniel creative tension, incl. in connection with this:

Louis Aragon and André Breton lauded Carroll, for whom nonsense, as Breton wrote in his 1939 Anthology of Black Humour, constituted “the vital solution to a profound contradiction between the acceptance of faith and the exercise of reason, on the one hand, and on the other between a keen poetic awareness and rigorous professional duties… No one can deny that in Alice’s eyes a world of oversight, inconsistency and, in a word, impropriety hovers vertiginously round the centre of truth.”

(Which also makes me think of recently read Library of America edition of The Confidence Man---His Masquerade, last finished novel by Melville the artist and head of household, finally on his way to being salaryman, having first passively received and then extracted hand-outs through most of his life)

Now I'm reading World of Wonders, third book in the Deptford trilogy by Robertson Davies. Like so many of his books, the theater in all its many forms plays a very prominent role. In this case it is far, far from the "legitimate theater". This tale features carnival side shows, vaudeville, and stage magic, where the essence of the job is putting something over on the rubes. There's a lot there to play around with and Davies plays out his story at fast clip.

Deptford, London SE8? That's about 20 minutes from me.

I finished "History of Rock and Roll Vol. 1 1920-1963" by Ed Ward. It's a long and fairly dense book, so probably for specialists and serious fans only. Mostly it reads like a guy with a massive record collection taking you through all his favorite early rock, r&b, country, pop, vocal, gospel, etc records in roughly chronological order and telling you a little story about each one, giving equal time to the artists and the label heads (who in those days of small, independent labels were at least as colorful personality-wise). It's a good way to discover lots of forgotten songs and get a sense of how the form evolved in those early days. The book ends fittingly with the story of the formation and early days of the Beatles up to their EMI signing and the eve of their arrival in the US. I'm assuming that story is picked up in the next volume.

Hmm, that sounds like something I might be interested in reading.