Bright Remarks and Throwing Shade: What Are You Reading, Summer 2022?

i finished the marbled swarm. wrote a goodreads review about it, which doesn’t happen v often https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4827080781

great review, Brad. i wrote a review of 'I Wished', you can read it here.

While I get through Machine Dreams, I want to read something else, so trying to figure that out atm— have a few books that just arrived, but not sure I want to start with any of them just yet, though one of them is a large art-book on freight train graffiti and hobo monikers with some essays in it and I might just flip through that during idle moments.

Where should I start w Patrick Modiano?

I've only read "Paris Nocturne" but I thought it was a good entry point. It has a plot and some sense of momentum to go along with the atmosphere, and it's fairly short.

Cool, thanks!

I finished Ian Pindar's JOYCE. Agreeable to read.

But Pindar's summary of the plot and characters of Finnegans Wake reawakens my suspicion of those. I have long felt that these large elements of that book are clumsy and lumbering and hobble the book while its extraordinary words go about nimbly. Reading Pindar's account (which is not negative at all) confirms this view and repeatedly makes me feel exasperated at the conceptions of structure and character that Joyce had in this last work.

(Could the plot and characters have been made to lumber and to hobble? Or are you suggesting that Joyce was not up to par, saddened, debilitated?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lumber
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hobble

Bloom was a Jew among the Irish? He carried soap in his pocket (for his wife or himself). That progression (walking) could carry anything ...

KSR not SKR, sorry, and for the general nonsense I post to this thread.)

I finished "The Idiot" by Elif Batuman. It's a long book and I nearly gave up on it because it was still meandering at about 150 pages in, despite the occasionally very funny asides, but it gradually unveils a dramatic conflict that gives it a sense of momentum, a classic "he's just not that into you" kind of conundrum. Currently reading some pieces from a Kurt Tucholsky anthology of short Weimar-era magazine and newspaper pieces called "Berlin! Berlin!".

Youn: it's true that Joyce was debilitated in health by say the mid-1930s, but no, that doesn't explain why he crafted and planned the book as he did much earlier, by say 1925. He believed in FW, thought it was a good idea, and was frustrated by others' inability to get it.

I think that the characters / structure are meant to have a deliberate simplicity - to be 'archetypal' - but no I don't think they're meant to be lumbering in the bad sense that I find them to be.

A basic angle here is the one identified by Wyndham Lewis in 1927: that Joyce typically wrote simple content / structures / stories because it made it easier for him to write complex style. That's not the whole story but there's something in it.

But the FW structures and characters dismay me every time they, yes, lumber into view in an account of the book.

After the Tey book I started a re-read of a Patrick O'Brian naval novel, Treason's Harbor. It's another light entertainment, which seems about all I can handle this week.

I've started Virginia Woolf's JACOB'S ROOM (1922).

So Joyce did most of his work when he was fairly young?
He wanted to start from a known story to experiment with style? In FW the experiment was not successful because ...
I know you admire Flann O'Brien. I've only read At Swim Two Birds but remember being reminded of it when reading Independent People by Halldor Laxness. I wish I were better able to understand what you think is good writing.

have heard of this for years and years---good??

finally finished...wow pic.twitter.com/mnV2Hxcj7g

— julia (@eathedocument) July 15, 2022

julia liked it

grann has a rep for very thoroughly reporting intersting things

haven't read any of it myself

James Joyce wrote DUBLINERS in his 20s, the PORTRAIT around 30. ULYSSES was published on his 40th birthday. FW when he was 57. He died aged 58.

The gap between ULYSSES and FW is the largest and perhaps the longest as experienced. (No answer regarding good writing. Hmmm ...)

FW was always fun to read at random and aloud, but now it's disappeared from local library. If I ever read the whole thing, will also have A Skeleton Key To Finnegan's Wake at hand, or is there something better?

Poster Dow, you could try just reading A SHORTER FW, ed. Anthony Burgess, which contains linking summaries.

That wouldn't be 'reading the whole thing' but it could be a good thing to do first.

As I indicated above, summaries of story are in a sense the problem with FW - they make it seem more banal than it does on the surface.

Poesia Descalza
Vida Rebeldes: Leon Trotski

Early reflections on JACOB'S ROOM:

Lots of material of interest, for interest re Scarborough and its sea front.

VW trying to experiment, to move fiction in a certain direction; to pause and linger over characters, objects, moments; to avoid story in a straightforward way (arguably lots of people had already been doing that - like James? - but VW here is maybe doing it differently.)

The novel seems to be marred, though, by a prevalence of a certain tone that VW nervously had, which can be called: irony, archness, even whimsy. This combines with odd grandiosity and even archaism in eg: her penchant for placing adjectives early in phrases: 'Dim was the evening'. I feel an uncertainty of tone here, or maybe it's just a tone that I don't like or doesn't convince me. It seems to me that this tone remains present in later masterpieces but there is taken up in a whole that is more assured, which allows the irony to do its work without dominating and spoiling the book. Then in ORLANDO the whole book is ironic and comic, which allows the dodgy ironic tone to be ... almost itself ironised, losing all its awkwardness as it becomes simply a comic mode.

I also reflect that the book currently describes a very elite world - Cambridge students and dons - which is fine in itself, but which casts a bad light on eg: VW's (I suppose slightly later) polemics against Arnold Bennett, complaining that one shouldn't describe the clothes and salaries of shopkeepers and so on. VW was making a serious aesthetic critique, but in context of a novel like this it comes across as class exclusion or disdain, which I don't think was what she intended. Put more simply, if you write about Cambridge dons then it doesn't look good to attack people who write about shopkeepers. (But Bennett was a big personality in his own right and doesn't, himself, seriously stand for 'the working classes' or anything like that, here.)

Grant & I Robert Forster
Go-Betweens co founder and co frontman memoir of times leading up to and in the band and after. I've got to a point where the band has split and they've toured as the 2 frontman Forster and the Grant of the title , Mclennan.
Pretty well written and I have been meaning to read this for a while and found it in a charity shop in a pristine copy which my shopping soon put paid to . like bummer.

Killers of the Flower Moon is v good indeed

(It’s the only time me and my partner have bought copies of a book at the same time so we didn’t have to wait for the other person to finish it first.)

Anyway! It’s a v compelling murder mystery that’s also about the Pinkertons and how the FBI started and how white supremacy became ingrained in American policing.

I'm reading Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and not feeling it. The narrators are pompous to beyond absurdity, the gestures towards unspeakable horror are far too vague to be unsettling, and some of the stories are just downright banal.

I wish I could read novels again

Jacob's Room defines "transitional novel" imo

I'm waiting for term to finish (four days!) and then I can start reading novels again.

I'm reading Hannah Gadsby's Ten Steps to Nanette. It does the work of filling in much of the stuff she alludes to in Nanette and Douglas - growing up in rural Tasmania (a mix of wildly beautiful and wildly regressive); her struggles in coming to terms with her sexuality; the extreme loneliness and dysfunction in her personal life; her ASD diagnosis, which led to a refiguring of most of what she'd been through. (There's more but a lot of it's brutal and I don't want to put triggering stuff here).

Much like her stand-up, it's intermittently hilarious but mostly - and very intentionally - confrontational and direct. Trauma runs through her like tree rings and she structures the thing to best show the formation of each layer as its laid down. I'm privileged enough to be able say smug things like 'I feel like I've learned loads from her - about internalised homophobia, about autism' without having experienced any of the brutality, but it's very much the case.

I loved this: Once I understood that I was always going to have difficulty with self-regulation, I stopped worrying about it. Once I am distressed, my moods are not mine to control, but my environment is. I am always working to remove myself from all the cycles and patterns of hostile environments... And I no longer search my behaviours exclusively for revelations about my character, I use my occasions of distress as ways to map the circumstances and environments I move through, and look for ways I can reduce my exposure to distressing situations.

Almost finished Harry Mathews’ collection, ‘Country Cooking & Other Stories.’ First Mathews I’ve read that isn’t a translation, the title story is a gorgeously done parody of stuffy regional French cuisine customs and books, really beautiful and tonally spot on. I’ve always had a deep fondness for the language of cookbooks and used to flip through my mom’s sizable collection when I was a stoned teenager. Great little book.

What is a transitional novel?

Stands athwart literary history and yells, "I am figuring shit out."

She was figuring out if she wanted to be some kind of modernist or else?

Monk decides to be a butterfly or vice-versa.

Did he publish sections early for financial reasons or for feedback? Could he have been ahead of his time but not had the right tools? I was reminded of the student in Ulysses and the ink blots with a bad pen. (He had sympathy with the student because the student was constrained by his surroundings?)

80pp or so into JACOB'S ROOM, similar feelings. Poster Alfred said it's a transitional novel. That's a widespread view, but what does it mean, in the sense: what is the transition between?

'Realism' and 'Modernism'? No, I don't think that catches it. I think it's something like: C19 voice and C20 structure. The 'structure' here is the ability to glide around, elide scenes, focus in and pull back; to tease at the edge of a character's consciousness then move away. It's also something about the non-event nature of the book (so far): the contentment with scene and juxtaposition rather than story. Here we would be in tune with VW's suspicion of narrative drive as expressed in, I think, 'Modern Fiction'.

The 'voice', on the other hand, is to me the thing that holds it back, seems more of a relic. It's hardly a 'realistic' voice. In fact it's often frame-breaking. It often talks of itself in the 1st person - much more, I think, than in VW's next two novels. It has personality and tone. These can cloy. I already mentioned an uncertain excess of irony, archness, whimsy, archaism. I'd add bathos: a regular feature, swooping from 'and so he read Cicero' to 'and she wondered about the price of strawberries', and the like. This is a very familiar VW tone, to be found in some of her greatest novels. My feeling here is that she's overusing it. I wonder also about the effect of the tones on the presentation of character - which is distanced, satirised, mocked. I don't think doing this as much as the novel does works well. Again, I feel that it's too heavily ironic.

So far the novel seems to me a valiant experiment that hasn't entirely worked, held back by what were the idiomatic resources of the author at the time.

"a valiant experiment that hasn't entirely worked" is certainly definition of a transitional novel

(I wonder what Joyce would have made of the Digital Humanities and Woolf of Afghan women's education.)

i was teasing my old pal ben w, a finnegans wake fan-scholar, by claiming that the best place to read it is in quotefragments on twitter, and he snatched the puff from my teasing by saying "yes, yes it is"

this proves joyce wd have loved the digital humanities IMO

Alfred: yes, we can agree that it might be called a transitional novel.

The question I raised, which I find more difficult (though tried to answer), is: transition from what to what?

As I said, perhaps long ago, on a Literary Twitter thread, I think the "FW is best on Twitter" claim holds up rather well.

I suppose you can take Twitter itself out of this and just say "it works best in unexpected fragments which pop up cheerfully and without advertising any particular meaning or context".

we shd persuade ilx poster tim to issue it as a ltd edn box of fortune cookie mottos, calling cards, pencils and such

Now that is the best idea you've had ... all day.

(carried to death and oblivion with an umbrella and surgical mask on a table in a pub in North London)

(What voice could she have affected if not for the whimsy of her class?)

I finished "Double Indemnity" by James M. Cain. Apparently he wrote this fairly quickly in the aftermath of the success of "Postman Always Rings Twice", and it reads like he's returning to the same well. The novelty of using the first-person point of view to narrate a crime has worn off, and this reboot lacks the raffish, demotic voice and atmosphere that gave "Postman" much of its louche energy. This one is more about plot velocity and whodunit-style revelations that keep the reader guessing. Certainly worth a read, but I would rank it a notch lower than its predecessor.

i remember spitting out my coffee when i read this howler from Double Indemnity

I thought about Lola, how sweet she was, and the awful thing that I had done to her. I began subtracting her age from my age. She was nineteen, I'm thirty-four. That made a difference of fiteen years. Then I got to thinking that if she was nearly wenty, that would make a difference of only fourteen years. All of a sudden I sat up and turned on the light. I knew what that meant.

I was in love with her.

Haha, yeah, one of many tonally jarring passages.

Reading poet Simone White's 'or, on being the other woman,' her debut on a "larger" press— Duke U put it out. Interesting book about navigating motherhood, Black femininity, performance, the academy, sex, and lots of interesting prosaic bits about hip-hop, such as an extended riff on Future's psychological landscape and Black masculinity.

xpost haven't read the book, but the movie's always seemed off too, characterization-wise, and even when not in comparison to any of the three versions of Postman I've seen.