The (S)word in the Autumn Stone: What Are You Reading, Fall 2022?

Helen DeWitt - The English Understand Wool.

Forgot I read this a few nights ago, but it is only about 60 pages. Delightful!

"I have to teach Priestley" - interesting - in what context? Multiple classes or lectures about Priestley? Sounds unusual.

I’ll have to find a book of hers, Chinaski.

I finished Jean Day’s new book, ‘The Night Before the Day on Which,’ which shows the continuing turn toward a more legible lyric that Day’s work has taken over the years. There’s still a fair amount of parataxis and strangeness, but the poems feel more grounded and precise in the concreteness of their images. Excellent book, she remains a favorite.

I also had a sudden urge to read John Wieners, so reread the posthumous ‘a book of PROPHECIES’ yesterday. His poverty and instability shown through more on this read than my previous, but as expected, so did his genius.

Maggie O'Farrell - Hamnet
Tom Breihan - The Number Ones

I teach secondary English at a state comprehensive, pinefox, where *An Inspector Calls* is still canon. In truth, I don't need 'more' Priestley to teach the text at all, but I always like to have a wider sense of an author in the (erroneous I'm sure) belief that it thickens the texture of my teaching and, well, for my own sanity.

richard osman : THE BULLET THAT MISSED. really enjoy his books even though none of the characters are even slightly believable.

Deniable Contact Niall o Dochartaigh
Book by a lecturer at local university that I saw a talk by during the Druid's Ball exhibition. It's about back channel communication attempting to create peace during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. & the reasons why this failed. The British stablishment only pretending to take the IRA seriously for one thing and wanting to maintain control etc.
Quite interesting and unfortunately this seems to be the one copy of the book that is allowed to be lent out in the Irish library system. It's am academic press book so I think buying a copy would be expensive.
Wanted to read it after seeing the talk to get a better grounding. Worthwhile read anyway.

The narrator of Graham Greene'sThe End of The Affair is a novelist who can't see his way to the end of anything, and eventually thinks of his characters who refuse to respond to their creator's touch, who have to be tortured into coming alive (often the ones that reviewers cite as the "best-drawn," which he associates with "drawn and quartered" etc.). He wonders if this is what God is doing to him, if there is a God, or is there just a sudden pile-up of coincidence? There's no way to know, of course---why do ya think they call if faith, brother-man?--but I found myself upset as well, thinking that Greene was coming to rely way too much on this gmmicky spirtual melodrama as 4th Quarter play. Now, on rewind, the particulars of these truly shady events become more recognizable for their inferably comic qualities: the stubborn one is getting a whoopee cushion, a hotfoot, a radio in the bathtub, unplugged before too much damage---or did the cord just come out of the outlet, aieee (the particulars aren't in such broad strokes; Greene's too sneaky for that, if he's going for this kind of possibly-comic thing at all---it seems too [deliberately?} reduced to be thought of as "tragicomic," or doesn't deserve to be---Greene the writer also of what he calls "entertainments, " thrillers etc. comes off closer to a carny or pickpocket pro in these coincidences-or-More.)
Not quite, so far, as satisfying a balance of art and entertainment as Brighton Rock---and very probably not up The Power and the Glory, wnich I haven't read since the late 70s---but there are a lot of lines and passages that leave their marks, and lead me on---like I just now realized that this fictional testimonial, concocted by a believer, anticipates by twenty years Lennon's "God is a concept by which we measure our pain/Say it again---"
(Sour-grapes narrator can't forget that his lover found some weird beauty in there too, for all the good it did her, and he's still jealous dammit.)

Not any of the genre-structural sense of "entertainment" as in the hustle of Brighton Rock, but some WWII boom-boom for civilians as familiarity and more, also for sure some moments of comic relief leading somewhere else (also possibly comic, for the reader, not the characters), and love and hate and sex and death and alcohol and so on, mostly more serious than bullshit Serious---I think---I want to believe, because when he's unquestionably good he's real good, and if he didn't push his luck he wouldn't be as Greene.

in reverse chronological order of reading, with the first in progress:
Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth
Crying in Hmart by Michelle Zauner
Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth
(I think I did not credit the writer of the third, a realization that came after starting the first, and wonder if I commonly make the mistake of conflating writers with narrators or characters when it comes to certain genders or races and if this is a form of implicit racism.)

(or gender bias)

LONG LIVE THE POST HORN! sounds uncannily close to THE CRYING OF LOT 49.

Still reading Charles J. Rzepka on Sherlock Holmes.

funnily enough just ripped through the novels and the first two collections of Sherlock Holmes short stories. Any highlights from what you're reading pf?

Agree with both you and Daniel that Poe essentially discovering the basics of the modern crime and detection novel in Rue Morgue is piquant. origins in the grotesque and arabesque - and the solution to Rue Morgue is certainly grotesque - gives a different angle to the genre (not a complete view by any means, but an interesting angle certainly): that it is a case of bringing rationally available (if recondite) evidence to bear on apparently supernaturally evil or morally absurd (ie grotesque) occurrences.

Am reading Sherlock Holmes w my 10 year old at the moment and surprised by how often the vague apparition of "gypsies" seems to swim into view, but always as a red herring, which is nice I think. Racism as a kind of irrational superstition that the modern sleuth must discard in the search for the truth.

Also quite a bit of thrills, danger, violence.. hadn't really remembered all that.

i was astonished at the one where the main character nearly gets crushed to death in a hydraulic press

and

is also suprisingly relaxed about losing his thumb

given his moment and who he overlaps with there's another dimension to holmes always worth digging into: conan doyle isn't a decadent but SH sometimes very much is (lassitude, shooting up, plays the violin). viz holmes as lawrence llewellyn-bowen as oscar "this wallpaper will be the death of me" wilde -- a horrible murder is the private detective's excuse to break open an englishman's home/castle to public view and there deploy snark abt his horrible curtains as the "solution" to the "crime" (of course for wilde and llewellyn-bowen they ARE the crime)

i mean lestrade aren't going to solve the mystery via attention to drapery

lol s/b lestrade isn't

“lestrade aren’t” to become canon plz

but holmes as decadent aesthete i think is correct. and there are strong fin de siecle elements in the stories more generally. eg if you take Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights as an essential model.

Charles J. Rzepka specifically compares Holmes to Wilde (p.131) and, more surprisingly to me, states that DORIAN GRAY and THE SIGN OF FOUR were both commissioned by the same publisher at the same luncheon.

Rzepka's book is very good on centuries of detective fiction, and has whole sections on Poe and Holmes. I would recommend it to anyone who wants a critical and historical book on this material.

Fizzles, re Holmes he a) gives good professional and scientific context for Doyle, b) articulates Watson's qualifications for being the sidekick, and an idea of 'bohemianism'; c) explores ideas of 'rivalry' between Holmes and other detectives and thus the reader; d) produces quite a detailed reading of THE SIGN OF FOUR.

FWIW he also gives a very elaborate reading of Poe's 'Rue Morgue'. I think he mentions that Paris had no Rue Morgue avenue at the time (but New Orleans did? Or Dylan and Lloyd Cole later sang about one anyway).

I haven't got back into The Sign Of Four with my son because the length is a little daunting. Does this thread rate it?

i think all the novels are a long slog in places

(hound maybe least so?)

Truth is, I haven't even read THE SIGN OF FOUR yet!

I have read SCARLET and would say: it's not long at all, but - as previously discussed with Mark S, and agreed by Rzepka - it has a preposterous proportionately long Mormon interlude which has basically nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes, which is not ideal for a ... Sherlock Holmes novel.

Rzepka actually states that this bad fictional structure is directly drawn from Gaboriau's Lecoq mystery, THE HONOUR OF THE NAME (unknown to me, but incidentally J-F Lyotard ends his most famous essay with that phrase).

well like A Study In Scarlet, the first crime and Holmes parts are the best and the “here is a long explanatory narrative set in our former territories and dominions” less so. that said the whole victorian attitude to the mormons is kind of fascinating.

Baskervilles remains the best imo as it has the least of this and Dartmoor is a brilliant setting, also used in the excellent Silver Blaze of. it’s surprisingly underused as a literary landscape - its laureate Eden Philpotts aside, who needs to go on the “authors no one reads any more” thread), Sign of Four is v enjoyable as they race around London, and ASS (sorry) introduces Holmes, so all good.

that first para referring to The Sign of Four. (consistently referred to as The sign of the four in the text)

Confusing divergence that!

apologies! comes from lazily/inattentively posting on my phone

Silver Blaze is so good.

Fizzles, though I do often find your posts quite difficult, in this particular instance I was just remarking that it's an odd divergence that people variously refer to THE SIGN OF FOUR and THE SIGN OF THE FOUR. Think this may actually have been a US / UK publishing divergence.

I would now like to go back and read many more of these stories. Though there seems only to have been 3 years of them in the first instance.

there is a considerable decline in quality after Conan Doyle brings him back.

I thought I had read all of the stories, but I have read the plot summary of "Silver Blaze" and for the life of me I don't remember it.

Speaking of John Watson, there is an amusing exchange at the beginning of The Sign of Four, where Holmes is being insufferably pompous and Watson is entirely correct. Holmes' response is pathetic:

“There is no great mystery in this matter,” he said, taking the cup of tea which I had poured out for him; “the facts appear to admit of only one explanation.”
“What! you have solved it already?”
....
"I have just found, on consulting the back files of the Times, that Major Sholto, of Upper Norwood, late of the Thirty-fourth Bombay Infantry, died upon the twenty-eighth of April, 1882.”
“I may be very obtuse, Holmes, but I fail to see what this suggests.”
“No? You surprise me. Look at it in this way, then. Captain Morstan disappears. The only person in London whom he could have visited is Major Sholto. Major Sholto denies having heard that he was in London. Four years later Sholto dies. Within a week of his death Captain Morstan’s daughter receives a valuable present, which is repeated from year to year and now culminates in a letter which describes her as a wronged woman. What wrong can it refer to except this deprivation of her father? And why should the presents begin immediately after Sholto’s death unless it is that Sholto‘s heir knows something of the mystery and desires to make compensation? Have you any alternative theory which will meet the facts?”
“But what a strange compensation! And how strangely made! Why, too, should he write a letter now, rather than six years ago? Again, the letter speaks of giving her justice. What justice can she have? It is too much to suppose that her father is still alive. There is no other injustice in her case that you know of.”
“There are difficulties; there are certainly difficulties,” said Sherlock Holmes pensively;
Damn straight there are difficulties, and Watson is entirely correct to point out that Holmes is overreaching by saying he'd pretty much cleared up the mystery, in fact the mysterious bit of the mystery remains entirely. His response really is very silly, and Watson is correct to point out elsewhere Holmes' vanity.

There's also this interesting exchange at the beginning of A Case of Identity

“My dear fellow.” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generation, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable. “
“And yet I am not convinced of it,” I answered. “The cases which come to light in the papers are, as a rule, bald enough, and vulgar enough. We have in our police reports realism pushed to its extreme limits, and yet the result is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor artistic.”

Holmes here is in an enjoyably baroque and fantastical strain, and suggests he does see something magical in it all - the *outre results* of life. Watson, who is often accused of romanticism by Holmes, is enjoyably brusque in response, and again there's a lot to be said for his view.

I mentioned RLS's New Arabian Nights upthread and I really should emphasise how much of an influence they had on literary London (like Sherlock Holmes they were serialised in a London periodical). They are well worth reading. Conan Doyle was a big fan - The Pavilion on the Links (seven years before A Study in Scarlet) was one of his favourite short stories. They set the template for anything being possible in London, and the visits 'low disreputable corners and suburbia', ie beyond Camberwell. Both Machen (in his very bad, very good The Three Impostors) and Conan Doyle take its geography and cadences. The idea that the stories that emanate from the commonplace are more fantastical than those that emanate from the upper classes is here too.

This

>>> “My dear fellow.” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generation, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.
“And yet I am not convinced of it,” I answered. “The cases which come to light in the papers are, as a rule, bald enough, and vulgar enough. We have in our police reports realism pushed to its extreme limits, and yet the result is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor artistic.”
<<<

is extremely good material.

1: the first statement about rooftops directly resembles something that Dickens wrote in DOMBEY AND SON.

2: the second, on 'realism', takes you towards that Wildean territory of, say, life not living up to art. James Joyce said related things - that journalism was about the exceptions, fiction about the norm, or something.

"most stale and unprofitable"

also sounds like Hamlet?

i think it's prob a deliberate reference on the part of holmes.

and yes it immediately struck me as an important section, probably something that was playing out in CD's mind. how to frame his dramas, out of what material to make them, how close to watson's view, how close to holmes'.

we read the speckled band in middle school (age 10ish). that feels like a solid intro to conan doyle for kids.

Dickens, admittedly making a different point from Doyle:

Oh for a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a mole potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes, to swell the retinue of the Destroying Angel as he moves forth among them! For only one night's view of the pale phantoms rising from the scenes of our too-long neglect; and from the thick and sullen air where Vice and Fever propagate together, raining the tremendous social retributions which are ever pouring down, and ever coming thicker!

In his very namedroppy autobio Conan Doyle talks about having tea with Wilde before the unpleasantness, and states something like "cannot believe the writer of such beautiful fiction could be all bad". Mind you, he is militant about trying to say a good word about everyone he meets, unless they're disgusting German soldiers of course.

Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler.

Thanks for the Dickens quote, pinefox! Where is that from? I sympathize with the frustration in that, more evident than (though also detectable in) Holmes' flight of fancy---was already thinking that newspaper accounts aren't necessarily any more reliable, and maybe moreso back then, with xpost bald accounts (which *might* be something for bored newspapermen, to push agains, concocting Jack The Ripper, at least as correspondent x super-serial kiler).
Doyle seems to set Holmes and Watson as a balancing act, based on aspects of his own personality or persona, but I think he may have been closer to Holmes, in terms of outside thinking that's sometimes more pie-eyed than magpie---ACD the adamant believer in fairies etc---but as an artist he knew he needed Watson in there.

and maybe less (reliable) back then, I meant.

Re-reading some of xpost The End of the Affair deepens the impression that you don't have to be a Christian, or engage in willing suspension of disbelief (in that, though as I said I do want to keep believing that Greene is a good writer), to find your attention span humming like a sympathetic string along this increasingly stress-tested, already scorched homeland Commons ov forked paths (core characters are neighbors and/or family, others easily find them).

It's DOMBEY & SON.

Colson Whitehead, THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD (2016).

I greatly enjoyed Whitehead's The Nickel Boys and would gladly read his other works.

Heinrich Heine - Travel Pictures
Bei Dao - City Gate, Open Up

Typed a short post about these in the Prose works by Poets thread.

Autumn
Winter
Spring
Summer

all by ali Smith. enjoyed them but probably the first one most, and that was a reread. nice mix of politics and literature and art mentions in them but I'm not sure they'd hold up in 20 years without notes on what exactly was happening at the time because they are kind of specific

(that said, the mentions of COVID in detention centres aligned perfectly with the news of diphtheria in detention centres so maybe not)

this was followed by Mother Of Invention where i was hoping for more examples than just the 3. but i kind of agree with her main point, that we can't basically ignore 50% of the population

and rounded the month off with the last 80% of Pandora's Jar which i enjoyed more when i had some idea of the stories beforehand (ie pretty much all of them bar Phaedra).

I finished "The Blunderer" by Patricia Highsmith, an entertaining and effective crime noir novel, although I thought the first half was brilliant, and the second half merely good. Highsmith is especially entertaining on the social behavior of the mid-century American upper middle class, and its impossible to put the book down as she sets the trap that will ensnare the comfortable Long Island lawyer protagonist. As the focus shifts a bit to the less interesting immigrant bookseller and ambitious detective characters, and as the plot becomes more predictable, the excitement flags a bit, but still overall an effective and impressively nihilistic thriller.