Bonfires In The Sky: What Are You Reading, Winter 2021-22?

Now I'm reading "The Postman Always Rings Twice" by James M. Cain.

real sci-fi

If by sci fi you mean a cheerfully amoral noir thrill ride.

How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti

Please report back on that; have read some very whack takes, pos and neg.
The Postman Always Rings Twice's narrating narcissist scarred me, like nothing 'til I went around with Mr. Ripley.

Skimming DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? (1968). Skimming naturally, gradually leads me back into properly 'rereading'.

I still can't quite tell how far this is a good novel or a bad novel that had influential ideas. It's easy to say it's the latter, but I don't think it's as simple as that. I think there might possibly be a 'good novel' element also. But then again the info-dumping via the protagonist 'recalling' or 'reflecting' aspects of his reality, and conversations with others about their intellectual implications, still does seem awkward to me.

Maybe a reason that this novel has long stood out amid PKD's oeuvre is that it contains multiple key ideas, not just one: 1) replicants, or rather 'andies'; 2) 'chickenheads', people affected by radiation (as far as I recall); 3) the animal theme -- plus the police procedural and action aspect.

It's not very often mentioned that it has an epigraph from W.B. Yeats.

Vron Ware Beyond The Pale
A very early book that would now be among the White Feminist titles. Looking at racism in the history of the power or recognition struggle for female emancipation and how it did the opposite of allying with racial emancipation way to frequently. Ware talks about ho wone of the early American feminists came out pro lynching in the introduction. I haven't got very far with this so far since I only got it yesterday.
I see taht the author is or was married to Paul Gilroy too.
This came out in 1990 and is currently published by verso books. I think it has been pretty influential I'm seeing it cited in a few places. Foreword by the author of Hood Feminism

Received Denise Riley's latest book of poems in the mail, spending the rainy weekend with her.

Interesting Riley, a bit uneven but I kind of like it? My friend and I were discussing how it's hard sometimes to suss out her tone, especially in this latest book, but the chatty erudite language jokes being beside rending accounts of childhood abuse actually work.

Anyway, onto Perse's "Anabasis," a book/poem I'd never heard of until recently. Half-way through and I'm a little puzzled, slightly uneasy, but admiring some of the lines.

Given what's happening elsewhere I'll flag up my gentle dig in the ribs... Trigger: semi-canonical dead white male poet alert!

I'm reading Edward Thomas' The South Country. I feel like I know more about Thomas than I do his work: his battles with depression, his compulsive walking and note-taking, the friendship with Robert Frost and spurred on by Frost's enthusiasm, his turn to poetry late in life, death at Arras two months after signing up. But I've also come to him with a *sense* of what I was getting. He's more the mystic nature writer than the systematiser and collector; more Richard Jefferies than Gilbert White.

Thomas is a jobbing (but respected) literary critic and has written numerous books and monographs. He writes to keep himself and his family alive, essentially. The South Country comes out in 1908 - a good 6 years before he begins to produce poetry - and is written quickly, cobbled together from notebooks. It's a series of sense impressions of Sussex, Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire (and, confusingly, Cornwall and Suffolk) and does feel rushed and disjointed but there is a joy in the rush of sensory language. If I didn't know better, I'd say he was influenced heavily by Manley Hopkins but of course, Hopkins wasn't really available in any complete way until after Thomas was dead. He has Hopkins' way with tumbling stress and sprung rhythm; his spray of alliteration and repetition. There is a Shakespearean flavour to a lot of what Thomas does, too - particularly the sense of the "poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling", the move from the particular to the metaphysical. It's probably fair to say the whole thing doesn't really hang together but at a sentence level, he's kind of astonishing - and it's no wonder Frost nudged him towards poetry, as Thomas has an innate sense of rhythm and a deep auditory imagination. I suspect I'll tire of the style over a book's length but it's pretty captivating all the same and there's something about knowing well some of the places he describes.

Wow, v. appealing, thanks. his compulsive walking and note-taking My man!
Hopkins wasn't really available in any complete way Still isn't, in an affordable way---although if anybody knows of US-feasible exceptions, please advise, thx.

Regarding How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti: I've read a bit past Act 1 and so far the writing makes me think of a calmer more controlled version of Miranda July without vulnerability or self-disclosure. I think the question that is the book's title is a good one and so far the method for asking it seems determinedly prosaic. I think the absolute bewilderment and confusion and inability to act that comes with freedom and with changes in life circumstances were accurately depicted. If critics are faulting it for being self-absorbed or obvious I can see why, but I think the writing is deliberately obvious.

I still can't quite tell how far this is a good novel or a bad novel that had influential ideas.

This is a quintessential PKD experience based on my reading of Ubik and High Castle. You go from earnest psychodrama to mind-blowing sci-fi oddness to scenes with laser fights that feel like they were scripted by teenagers. It’s v disorienting in an interesting way, but it’s hard to tell what’s deliberate vs what’s a happy accident. Fwiw I found that disorientation boring and alienating in High Castle, attached to a bathetically overserious plot; and then Ubik was sillier and more fun but somehow cut deeper.

I prefer his short stories, but honestly I like the novels most if you consider the 99% probability he was off his face and smooth any inconvenient plot gaps that way. Three Stigmata…very much that kind of book for me.

High Castle isn't v good, is my recollection. From about 1965 till the end the imagination was off the scale at times.

James Crumley (US)
Milo and Sugrue series

What's the one where someone thinks God looks exactly like Linda Ronstadt? That one was a bit trying

Godstadt Had an avatar DJ, Linda Fox, slogan, May The Fox Be With You
Will check the Heti thx. Only Miranda July I've read: novel The First Bad Man and a couple of equally ace short stories. Her narrators not nec. Unreliable, but sometimes self-revealing in a show-even-more-than-tell (or by-tell) way.
otm posts on PKD. Speaking of short stories, seems that some of the early ones, especially are very carefully, confidently thought-out and constructed, w/o seeming self-conscious, especially when it comes to dynamics within and between groups (wow wish I could offer some titles, but time has passed; see The Collected Stories Vulume I.

Seems like some family members on father's side were involved in a German worker's movement that valued self-and-other-education in arts, philosophy, history, as well as a more sophisticated approach to crafts.

I'm glad he got more freewheeling, It’s v disorienting in an interesting way, but it’s hard to tell what’s deliberate vs what’s a happy accident: part of thee appeal for sure, also that you never know if you're going to like the results, can't take him for granted.

Somewhere he recounted a very detailed, steady-cam dream about a wonderful machine, think it had to do with hydro-electricity. He woke up and made very detailed notes, but to make more sense of them, went to library and then ordered several books, including textbooks, on engineering. Decades before CAD and other graphic programs, went to a professional draftsman, then took results to a consulting engineer, who said it might work if you also invented a device that could do X and a part that could do Y with a system Z.
He said that was the end of the road for him, having spent (unspecified) on books, drafting, consultant's fee. Also having spent all that writing time, so back to it.

Seems like some family members on father's side were involved in a German worker's movement that valued self-and-other-education in arts, philosophy, history, as well as a more sophisticated approach to crafts.Could have had something to do with his Bay Area roots, big blue-collar-industrial x arts area, despite cultural friction.

I've avoided delving into his backstory very much, as with other writers who are so very much with us in their own writing as well as biographies; I think he comes through well enough on his own, to put it mildly (ditto Tiptree, Plath, Proust, Highsmith. Flannery O'Connor, though of course I can't unread etc.)

How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti captures very well the uncertainty and second guessing and circumnavigation that surround the guilty party's belief that procrastination or immobility from self-doubt or cynicism or despair is not laziness.

Finished 'Anabasis,' read a chapbook by Katie Ebbitt about/after Ana Mendieta that was pretty rending if strangely oblique.

Red Nation Rising Nick Estes et al
radical book on the borderland towns where Indians are oppressed by whites in current day US. Published last year.
Short book and a quick read . I'm finding it pretty fascinating anyway.
Does have me wondering how it got into the Irish library system, who orders things like this and for what reasons. Bit very glad it odes give me access to things like this.

I need to read Anabasis if its the Ancient Greek source for the story the Warriors is based on .
That's Xenophon so is that a modern retelling?

I just saw a good version of Aristophanes's The Frogs today put on as a year project by the local University's 3rd year of the Drama course.

I haven't read the St. John Perse book of poems he titled 'Anabasis', but I can tell you that the connections between the Warriors film and Xenophon's 'Anabasis' are easily detectable, but distant, like cousins with widely different personalities, but who share the 'family nose and ears'.

I loved the Xenophon in my 20s, because it was both a ripping tale and the first book that made ancient Greece seem like a real place full of real people to me. I reread it ten years ago and it's still a good story, but the excitement of discovering a whole new world was missing.

It's fear of failure.

The Postman Always Rings Twice's narrating narcissist scarred me, like nothing 'til I went around with Mr. Ripley

It seems Cain's book is one of the earliest examples (if not the earliest example) of a noir novel narrated by the villain in that sort of disarming/disorienting manner that blithely assumes the reader should have no compunctions about any of the nasty things taking place. It's a good trick and one that was subsequently much imitated, by writers from Camus to Highsmith to Jim Thompson, whose The Killer Inside Me, which I read last year, is a direct descendant of Cain's novel, with added violence and sadism. I'm curious what close precursors there are. Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" comes to mind. Apparently Cain himself was a well-bred, well-spoken, educated fellow, the son of a college president and former editor at the New Yorker, but you'd never guess that from the pitch perfect demotic voice he creates for Chambers. Cain never inserts any other disapproving perspective into the story or any sort of distancing effect. He relies on the fast pace and titillating details to keep you interested in the story Chambers is telling, no matter how much you might be disgusted by his coarse attitudes and actions.

Also, if you're curious about the title, like I was, which seems to have nothing to do with the story itself, this is an amusing story:

https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2019/10/how-the-postman-always-rings-twice-got-its-name/

Mildred Pierce impressed me about a decade ago.

A Guardian Angel Recalls - Willem Frederik Hermans (Herinneringen van een engelbewaarder - 1971)

Those ungrateful words from my ward were very disagreeable to God after all I had done for him. He decided to give the ingrate a small lesson, so that he might for once experience what it's like when no angel is watching over him.
...
It was as if an icy wind from a later life that was even darker than his present was blowing in his face.

An interesting book, about guilt and accidental violence and paths taken and not taken and confused accidents of intention and apprehension, set as the Nazis invade the Netherlands. It is particularly potent reading during the invasion of Ukraine, and seeing the queues of migrants leaving, posing the question 'how long do you leave it before you leave it too late?'. I always think of the descriptions of Walter Benjamin with his passport forever in his jacket pocket.

The main character is a public prosecutor, but this is not Camus, and the extent to which the two central acts, one of love renounced, and one of tragic violence, can or should be seen as symbolic, is uncertain, deliberately so. The deliberate moral framework of the novel, with the guardian angel overseeing their ward, is itself cracked and warped by the violence around it. In such a tumult what meaning can symbols have meaning that doesn't get washed out in the flood and fire - at the end poetry ends up in flames and administrative documents and papers in seawater, and with the dissolution of these bourgeois papers, moral meaning seems to flee with them. (I mean bourgeois favourably here ofc). And finally there is the brutal consequence of coincidence and error in a time of danger - coincidence that might be frivolous or amusing in safety, is mortal in war.

The whole might be seen as a test and examination of that Chestertonian problem posed in the Father Brown Mystery of the Broken Sword:

“Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest? … He grows a forest to hide it in…. A fearful sin.

The style is not compelling, but the narrative – of a bourgeois man navigating his heart, social position, psychology and moral sense in the eyes of his guardian angel, as he and his friends find their lives on the edge of a bloody, narrowing wire – is compelling. it poses complicated matters of faith and action, or perhaps i should say inaction, in a way that i think will work around my head for some time.

odd how the blurb and cover of the pushkin press edition i'm reading seem to want to pose it as a thriller. that seems entirely wrong tho the Publishers Weekly quote, beneath the John le Carré quote, of him being 'A modern Dostoyevsky' is not completely wrong.

I love Mildred Pierce, great book

xp wiki sez:
Themes
Underlying all of Hermans's works, says Hermans scholar Frans A. Janssen, is the theme of epistemological nihilism. Only the means employed by logic and the sciences are capable of producing reliable knowledge. All other fields of study, including philosophy, ethics, psychology, the humanities and societal studies, are unable to produce knowledge that can be called reliable or certain. Literature and the arts can "show truths" by employing irrational devices. For the greatest part the world is unknowable, and even language is no reliable tool of communication. Hermans's characters are personifications of this state of affairs, loners who continuously misinterpret the reality surrounding them, unable to do something meaningful with other interpretive views when confronted with them, victims to the mercy of chance, misunderstanding. They fail, OK, OK! But this whole profile makes him seem like a potentially compelling voice, as novelist, anyway, as does Fizzles' take, for sure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Frederik_Hermans

Really getting some very intriguing takes on this thread nowadays, thanks yall!

Interesting, dow - I certainly agree with that wikitake wrt A Guardian Angel.

Need to clear up some word soup in my post:

In such a tumult what meaning can symbols have meaning that doesn't get washed out in the flood and fire

One thing I might say about that para you posted - I think it's less about 'failure' as such, more 'what could it possibly mean to succeed, in a world like this?'

The main character - Alberegt - 'fails' less than his Guardian Angel, in the end, who ends up fleeing like the Queen of the Netherlands (I make no judgment on her btw - but the characters' response is one of bitterness, fatalism and pragmatic cynicism).

This is a quintessential PKD experience based on my reading of Ubik and High Castle. You go from earnest psychodrama to mind-blowing sci-fi oddness to scenes with laser fights that feel like they were scripted by teenagers. It’s v disorienting in an interesting way, but it’s hard to tell what’s deliberate vs what’s a happy accident. Fwiw I found that disorientation boring and alienating in High Castle, attached to a bathetically overserious plot; and then Ubik was sillier and more fun but somehow cut deeper.

Good post from Chuck Tatum, especially about the bizarre mixtures and transitions ... But I don't agree about HIGH CASTLE, by far the best PKD novel I've read, and I can't say that UBIK is fun - it's about death, decay, entropy, the loss of reality. Deep, yes, if not exactly fun.

I've picked up PKD's A MAZE OF DEATH, which I read closely 6 years ago, and most of it now seems very unfamiliar. A character in it talks about Gandalf. Gandalf ?!

It’s from lord of the rings

Finished Crossroads, a thumping good read as they say, less positive about the last third or so

Finished Red Nation Rising by Nick Estes et al. Need to read the couple of other Indian books i have in my to read list Heartbeat of Wounded Knee and Surviving Genocide . Should have both read by now i think.
May be overstretching myself in several directions.

Gone back to Walter Rodney's book on the Russian Revolution which was compiled by notes for a course he was teaching in Africa .
I possibly should know the history better tahn i do. I did read Orlando Figes history of the Revolution about a decade ago, possibly a bit more. Definitely sometime in that region cos it was a book on the solidarity camp in the first year and i think I took it out of the library later.
THis is interesting and so far is looking at historiography of the sources available at the time which is late 70s He's now looking at the timeline while still looking at the various sources.
I may wind up reading some other histories of the era eventually. But I do want to read through Rodney.

also looking at some of the stories in the Black Science Fiction anthology that i got for Pauline Hopkins Of One Blood which started out promising but i wasn't convinced by the end part. Got some other historic stuff in and a load of newer writers. Anyway hope i'm going to get through this and everything else over teh next month.
Found out taht my library book dates were extended a long way without my knowledge. Several weeks on almost all of them. THink most of them should have been due back by now. Was happening a lot during the pandemic so surprised it still is. Though do possibly need the more time. Need to finish some more of these things.

Welch's history of the Abbey Theatre reaches the 1940s. All the founders are now dead, Yeats last. Ernest Blythe, now taking control, seeks to orient the theatre more toward the Irish language. Actress Ria Mooney is a very recurring presence. Playwright Teresa Deevy, author of THE KING OF SPAIN''S DAUGHTER (1936), seems talented and significant. As this entry shows, Mooney appeared in it along with Cyril Cusack:

https://www.abbeytheatre.ie/archives/production_detail/2309/

I've literally just learned online that the café at the Abbey now is called PEGEEN'S.
https://www.abbeytheatre.ie/your-visit/food-and-drink/

Also reading just a little of Olaf Stapledon's FIRST AND LAST MEN (1930) - or is it the other way round? - and I reread the first part of Lethem's THE ECTASY OF INFLUENCE: a marvellous book that probably hasn't received its due as a commentary on life, literature and culture especially in late-C20 USA.

sp: ECSTASY

Jonathan Lethem: 'How We Got In Town And Out Again' (1996). A second reading for this SF story. Worthwhile. What stands out is the casual invention and inventorying of a plethora of cheap, corny, commercial websites, as experienced within a kind of virtual reality tournament in the story. Maybe one of the best early SF renditions of the Internet in the age of Internet use (as against premonitions of this, which SF had also previously done).

Welch's history of the Abbey Theatre, though often not well written, contains nuggets of fact, some of them droll.

For instance: one key Irish-speaking Abbey actor later took the role of Tarzan (in Hollywood?) and when he spoke Tarzan-language to the animals of the jungle, he was, Welch says, really speaking Irish.

Do you have the luxury of being able to use "droll" blithely in conversation and if so with whom do you converse?

Tarzan = ape = Neanderthal = someone not as smart as someone else = nowadays offensive like TinTin, Babar, or Dr. Seuss for all that was good and bad in them?

How Beautiful We Were, by Imbolo Mbue. This is a novel about a small African village being poisoned by an oil company. The author is from Cameroon but lives in the U.S., and has a very crisp prose style. She also does some really interesting things with point of view, alternating between the voice of "the children" collectively and one child in particular, which to me subverts the usual centering on the individual. Worth the read.

I finished Parable of the Sower two nights ago. Yesterday I went hiking and spent a bit of time thinking about it. The one thing that struck me most was how deeply and essentially American it was, both in how the dystopia was imagined, but also in how it presented the "Earthseed" idea as the most practical response. I found Earthseed very reminiscent of the various utopian religious communities that sprang up all over the USA in the nineteenth century, but with a much harder edge to it, more Waco than Oneida. Even the details of how the social chaos, extreme violence, and disintegration were imagined would not be a good fit for any nation but the USA, right down to the ubiquity of handguns.

Octavia Butler's strengths as a storyteller in this were exactly the same set of strengths I found in Kindred. She brushes aside the temptation to write backward-looking 'explanations' for exactly how her dystopia arose or how life was outside the locale of the book. It is just what exists for her characters and must be accepted as such. Her dialogues are succinct and powerfully realistic and her characters take on life, depth and dimension through them.

I think I would like to reread Herodotus next. I'll give it a whirl tonight and see how it grabs me.

Youn: I consider 'droll' a very normal word to use in conversation. Among individuals on this board, for instance, I can readily imagine saying it to Tim. He may not wish to imagine this, though. But he is often droll.

Tarzan = ape = Neanderthal = someone not as smart as someone else

Tarzan def offensive but not for that reason! It's the idea of a white man getting dropped into the jungle and quickly becoming its Master that's the problem.

Yeah. The books make him more complicated and darker than the movies, except the last one I saw, Greystoke, gets his origins and early adulthood right: born John Clayton, Lord Greystoke (and I think the movie makes him a viscount as well), he's rescued and raised by the great apes after his parents die, learning the ape language, which series creator Edgar Rice Burroughs demonstrates, to a degree, not pushing his luck (Greystoke extends this via real life expertise of researcher Roger Foutts), and he makes himself literate in several languages by studying his father's books, also becomes a very strong and graceful Greystoke x primate life proto-superhero, especially after he renounces the civilized life he's been rescued by and to, returns to the jungle, and settles in, among the apes and strange humans there---lot of race and gender problems, as noted here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarzan
But if you're curious at all, the first book, Tarzan of the Apes, is worth a look, and usually considered the best (only one I remember, though I think I read most of them as a child)(preferred Burroughs' swords and sandals in space books)

Earl, not Viscount, and Fouts, not Foutts. The director also used Dr. Earl Hopper, the American author of Social Mobility, as an adviser on the film's psychological and social plausibility. Would like to read that.

Ah, so being addressed in Tarzan-language was meant as a compliment to the animals of the jungle and the Irish, the opposite of what I surmised. Thank you for the clarification!

Tarzan language, if you mean "Me Tarzan, you not," was only in the pre-Greystotek movies, but yeah books had him as White Savior/Top Cop in a loin cloth.

Also some rando action on his part from time to time, xpost wiki covers all that pretty well I think.