I have coveted everything and enjoyed nothing: what are you reading in Spring 2024?

Happy spring reading everyone!

A link to the old thread: Nothing Doting Living Loving: What Are You Reading In The Winter of 2023-24?

As mentioned in the Winter WAYR thread, I'm reading Grand Hotel, Vicki Baum and I'm now about 3/4 through it.

It's an odd duck. If I were to write a brief synopsis of the characters and plot it would sound like so much stereotypic, romanticized tosh (e.g. a handsome Baron who's a cat burglar?!), but strange to say it rises far above that level. A bare description of the book would sound rather garish and affected, but the details on the page make it both human and affecting.

just finished “things fall apart” by chinua achebe. 10/10 masterpiece

currently reading “the rebel angels” by robertson davies. my dad gave it to me years ago when i first started grad school, saying something like “this book will make you want to do a phd.” it’s since sat on my shelf unread, but i’m now reading it in the last few months of my phd. finding it loads of fun so far

I have always wanted to read that. Maybe I'll pause my current read--A Master of Djinn, by P. Djeli Clark, a Kindle Unlimited book--just to tackle it.

(Never come across the book or stage version, but Grand Hotel is a grand film, with peak turns by Garbo at her wittiest as a hardcore diva spinning just past her commercial peak, John Barrymore as the well-born English cat burglar, a black sheep and desperate gambling addict, also Lionel Barrymore, of course shamelessy chewing all the grand scenery, wised-up low-expectations yet still young Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery[as mogul on the brink of Depression, not tugboat captain etc. this time] and an international cavalcade of character actors.)

Recently finished my first Iris Murdoch, The Red and the Green(1965)---study of an Anglo-Irish and Irish extended family, during "the seven or eight days leading up to the doomed Easter Rising in Dublin,1916," as jacket flap says, and I think I hit it lucky: jacket thinks this is "warmer" than previous, though also it's not too effusive/loose/garrulous, as I've seen complaints about re several later novels. This 'un moves adroitly between all the characters, checking in on latest seismic movements and dithering of male interiors, while the women are mostly known by what they say and do, incl. in male gaze.
Sex and money figure, ditto environment---weather, picturesque to appalling cityscapes, incl. poverty--but so what,"You can see a hundred scenes like that all over town every day"--news of the War and British promises for the peace, many points made in arguments and gossip and oratory re: Ireland, with even the mystical terrorist proving capable of second thoughts, for a while.
It's a well-tracked whirl, and I'm reminded of Ta-Nehisi Coates on the US Civil War: "Don't say you know what you would have done. You don't know."

Also curious about Under The Net, and what else should I read by her, incl. later ones?

Under The Net is, against all expectations, a fun romp of a novel, I had a great time.

The other Murdoch I read was The Sandcastle - more of a conventional literary novel, main detail I remember is the couple mourning a dead dog who managed to bring them together "the way their own children never had".

Agreed on Grand Hotel.

i'm rather sure audiobooking is forbidden here, but i happened to fall across maugham's _the moon and sixpence_ and it is... not how i figured maugham really. i'd not recommend other than for how odd the characters come across, it's almost interesting how weird and unlikely they seem.

Audiobooking counts, unless you aren't really listening.

a nice thing with audiobooking is that my absorption is deeper than much of my reading because i will relisten to sections simply to re-experience or reparse, it feels pretty weightless to do.

Rereading an anthology of Akutagawa short stories. Had forgotten the Kurosawa film is a) based on two different short stories and that b) the one called Rashomon ISN'T the one with the multiple perspectives.

currently reading “the rebel angels” by robertson davies.

Thanks for the tip! I saw I have a combined edition of the whole Cornish Trilogy sitting on my shelf and your post encouraged me to try out The Rebel Angels as my next book. I've enjoyed several of Davies' novels in the past, but I tend to space them out at multi-year intervals. Luckily his trilogies aren't so conjoined that later entries require a knowledge the prior ones.

Have finished Justin Torres' Blackouts and Fuminori Nakamura's The Thief, and both were excellent. Am now almost through the second of the 5 parts of Roberto Bolaño's 2666

I read the first chapter of Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine, which was very heavy on the lingo but I'm already enjoying it.
I read a short collection of short stories by Clarice Lispector, it was good to very good, clearly I should have gone for an anthology (now that I'm done with Lydia Davis' complete stories). I guess it worked as a taster to compare to her novellas.
Before that I read The House on the Borderland. It was certainly much more digestible, but ultimately with similar strengths and weaknesses as The Night Land. Interesting as a curiosity, but no masterpiece.

Finished Total Doing That, a book of poems from Thomas Delahaye, a heteronym of a friend of mine. More accessible and dare I say obviously humorous than the other books of his I have read, it retains some undercurrents of sexual trauma that is evident in his other work.

Today it’s been pissing rain mostly, so I started in on So Much for Life, the selected poems of deceased British cult poet Mark Hyatt. Hyatt was a half-Romani queer who didn’t learn to write until he was in his twenties— by 31, he was dead, leaving behind hundreds of pages of poems, most of which were preserved by Barry MacSweeney and Jeremy Prynne on the eve of Hyatt’s suicide.

This interesting and tragic life is reflected in the poems, which crackle with rage and beauty and also with sex and a very unorthodox, nearly Californian approach to language— there are times when one could be convinced that they were reading a lost poem from the Spicer/Blaser/Duncan circle.

Ted Gioia History of Jazz
Pretty thorough history by writer I had recommended and found in a couple of bibliographies. Interesting. Taken me longer to read than I meant to. May need to revisit.
But I think I can recommend it.

Eddie Piller Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances.
Memoir of mod/Acid Jazz label head I met several times in my teens and early 20s.
He came from an area I lived in as a child and was about 5 miles away from where we moved to shortly before most of what I read so far took place. So I'm hearing talk about areas I knew and mentions of people I met and half knew.
So quite interesting to me anyway. I van see a couple of details he got wrong and thought he'd know better about. Calling a Regal shirt a poloneck when those are quite different (and something I've meant to make for ages) and I thought the term for this side of neck and top of shoulder buttoning style was Dr. Or Dr Kildare. Also Regal didn't move from Kensington market it opened a 2nd branch that coexisted with it for a couple of years.
One was a small premises like a walk in stall the other was a standalone shop.
Otherwise finding this fascinating. Him finding his way through being a mod in the revival's earlyish days when I was too young to know about it. I'm about 3 or 4 years younger.
So yeah very interesting to me cos it's local history. Not sure if it would remain immediate to anybody more distanced from it.

Those are the main 2 right now. Going to get back into another load as soon as I'm through.
David Greener Debt
A couple of anthropological/historic books on African tribes.
An anthropological book on Guayaki Indians by Pierre Clastres.
& a few others.

Gioia reached its maximum renewals I can do online so needed to be finished. Had been backburnered.

currently reading “the rebel angels” by robertson davies. my dad gave it to me years ago when i first started grad school, saying something like “this book will make you want to do a phd.” it’s since sat on my shelf unread, but i’m now reading it in the last few months of my phd. finding it loads of fun so far

― flopson, Tuesday, 19 March 2024 18:07 bookmarkflaglink

oh i enjoyed this v much. lot of fun like you say. every page has something that you want to read twice. maybe slightly exhausting? in the end i prob preferred the deptford trilogy (I say that, i still haven't read the last). rebel angels more clearly a comedy, a farce even. rd was my main find last year and was surprised I hadn't previously stumbled across him.

my long run of not really being arsed with fiction continues:
some poetry: dipping into michael hofmann and tom gunn selecteds, and a late-ish RS Thomas - Counterpoint. the hofmann is fine, highly competent, and the thom gunn contains some striking stuff. to the extent i'm competent to judge (on grounds both of theology and poetry) the rs thomas is only intermittently successful, and somewhat arid - it feels v dated (mysteriously this slender volume of theological poetry was the only physical book i took with me for the 24hr flight to australia and back), but does have moments where you are aware of a profound poetic intelligence grappling with faith, evil and creation.

more generally re-engaging with poetry, the poetic act, feels like electricity coursing through the body and mind.

a history of fake things on the internet - walter j scheirer. good this, apart from an ill-advised foray into structuralism in the second section. the book starts from a place that questions how much fake stuff there is - sophisticated 'deepfakle' attempts to deceive us in terms of audio/visual media - very little. synthesized and selective creative acts, cobbled together images and text memes etc - 'participatory fakery', designed to make a point - a lot. and also questions the term 'fake' as it's generally thrown around:

Do all falsehoods necessarily mislead us? Are those who produce false content always malicious? What would happen if media that facilitate the widespread dissemination of fictions were strictly regulated or even banned? Who even has a good grasp of what those media are and how they work?

the author is sensible to then go into use cases to look at the mechanics and history of misleading content on teh internet. early hacker communities and 'culture jamming' ('the news is, in practice, is a system that can be hacked'), photoshop ('What was not initially appreciated by creators and observers of visual disinformation was that a fake image could be more effective in a democracy if it were obviously fake'), 'cheat codes' as a line into the passing about of information designed to provide special insight or knowledge, media forensics, shock content sites, and a couple of others that look more general on AI, and the internet (and social media) as creative spaces.

this all files under 'epistemic health' for me, and how we need to update it practically as the internet changes, and the book does good work identifying the mechanics of manipulations of cultural information on the internet.

Descartes' Error - António Damásio. Updating my very out of date understanding of neuroscience - especially the generally somatic view and approach. Hate reading about the brain - its complexity is so great and the impact of damage is so profound, it makes me feel very queasy, an enormous sense of fragility and dependency on it for everything. ugh. anyway, once it gets over some slightly irritating literary flourishes at the beginning and gets clearly into the topics about which Damasio knows and is interested in, it's very good.

Cybernetics and the Origin of Information – Raymond Ruyer. An old (now) book of engaged critical theory writings on information theory. interesting to see what needs updating because of recent developments. Reminds me I should pick up On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects by Simondon again - it was dense, but possible to engage with, and probably would be a good counterpart to this.

Monsieur (or 'The Prince of Darkness') - the first of Lawrence Durrell's Avignon Quintet, whose main subject matter appears to be gnosticism. I don't know whether i can stick it. It's laughably precious:

Sabine was older than the rest of us – not in years, to be sure: but in judgment and insight. Her voyagers and adventures had forged her mind already while we were still upon the threshold of our emotional maturity. The word I was looking for, I suppose, was "sphingine"

This produced an actual yelp of laughter from me. Yes, I suppose it was now I come to think of it. Sure. aiui the quintet or 'quincunx' (¬_¬) is meta-textual, so i'll continue into the second volume, Livia, to see if the nauseating polycule at the centre of Monsieur is undermined and made a justifiable laughing stock. Title isn't promising though is it.

I admit to a sneaking enjoyment of the flummery around the gnosticism. it's what's kept me reading.

also, also, he has a habit of putting *all* foreign words in italics. This gets extremely funny and irritating:

the scarlet bedsocks he always wore to match his vivid Egyptian babouches
at each corbner of the court rises a quaint and crusty little tourelle [sounds like a euphemism for penis]
I lit my candles and quickly put on the traditional black velvet coat which Piers had given me, with its scarlet lining; also the narrow stove-pipe pantaloons, dark sash and pointed black shoes – tenue de rigueur for Christmas dinner at Verfeuille. [also incidentally how i dress to put the rubbish out]
He will become the régisseur of Verfeuille while I am absent en mission [gone to the corner shop for milk]
I was seized by a singular sort of constraint, almost a pudeur [*almost*. not quite]
with always the danger of a fugue staring me in the face
at any rate she wore a red velvet carnival cagoule through the slits of which her eyes looked at us [£5.99 from M&S]
he had gone out to the Café Durance for a croissant and a cup of coffee [moi aussi, mon vieux, moi aussi, have u seen the price these days tho]
all but united in this central despair about the metaphysical status quo. Slowly, in his quiet voice, with its flavours of an ever mounting disenchantment he sketched in the terrible fresco of the present world, often in the form of a long quotation which attested as always to the formidable memory of this stage man. "The praying Mantis which devours its male even while it is fecundating her, the spider trapping the fly, and the pompile which stabs the spider to death, the ceceris which with a triple stroke of its sword scientifically destroys the three centres of the bupreste's nervous s ystem: and carries it off so that its larvae will be able to eat it still living, choosing their mouthfuls with skill, preserving the vital parts with a terrible science, unto the very last mouthful of the victim's flesh. Then the leucospis, the anthrax, the worm of which simply applies itself to the flank of the chalcidone, and sucks it dry through the skin, ingests, pumps out this living broth which is the young larvae, and then dries it cunningly, in order to keep it also fresh, living, until the last mouthful... The philante, the bee-killer, before even carrying off its victim presses out the crop to make it disgorge its honey, and sucks the tongue of the wretched dying insect as it sticks out of its mouth..."

[sorry sir this is a wendys etc]

why isn't fresco in italics why.

just to prove that i am indeed possessed by the ghost of a 50-something british woman who choked to death on turkish delight at a church jumble sale in the cotswalds in 1976 i am really enjoying Joanna Trollope's The Rector's Wife. she is a very good writer!

Last night I finished The Rebel Angels, Robertson Davies. It was a tour de force, a descriptor that aptly fits any of his novels I've read. This one displays the usual erudition, wit, mastery of form and strong sense of playful mischief. It's entertainment with an intellectual flair.

It also reminded me why I tend not to avidly seek out another Davies novel soon after finishing my most recent excursion into his work. There's a quality in him I find off-putting, but hard to pin down. He strikes me as having a depth of understanding of human nature, but one that is artificially induced via intellect. There is a cruelty in him, hidden beneath a mask of flamboyance and theatricality. He tries hard to seduce you into this attitude and does a good job of it, too, but he leaves me feeling uneasy about what's at the core of his art. YMMV.

Holly George-Warren's A Man Called Destruction. Itinerate commenter Edd Hurt dismissed it several weeks for not delving into the sources of Alex Chilton's guitar playing, but as someone who owns the Big Star albums and nothing else K found the bio was well-sourced and literate.

About to start The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World.

March was:

Zola - Germinal
Henri Alain Fournier - The Lost Estate
Dumas - Black Tulip
Balzac - An Episode Under the Terror
Balzac - At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
(the last two were very short, less than 100 pages total)

i'm not sure what i was expecting the lost estate to be like but it wasn't that.

germinal and black tulip a lot more readable than you'd think.

i'm not sure what i was expecting the lost estate to be like but it wasn't that.

in a good way or a bad way? (I love it.)

I picked up that book (The Lost Estate) about 15 years ago on the recommendation of a friend. I have yet to read it. I'm not sure why, other than this friend is a bit of a misanthrope. More than a bit, actually.

it's definitely not a misanthropic book.

it was probably a bit more modern than i was expecting. and i guess the cover suggested flouncy 20-something female and i got mostly scruffy teenage boys.

i liked the mystery of it. it was a bit tom's midnight garden. but i was expecting Thomasina.

(i guess it's not so modern that places even 20 miles away are practically unknown to people, because 20 miles is a day's travel)

There's a quality in him I find off-putting, but hard to pin down.

same tho i don’t think i agree with your point about cruelty. as i feel similarly about how it’s hard to pin down i’m not sure i have a reason for why i don’t agree.

whatever that quantity is, it’s less visible (but still disconcertingly present) in the deptford trilogy than the cornish stuff.

Yeah, cruelty isn't the right word for that quality. I was reaching and overreached. Whatever it is, it is submerged and cumulative in effect.

picked up after you were, i am by camille ralphs, which i’ve seen some fuss about.

this is - or at least the first section is - religious poetry, or rather religious poetry/texts from various periods (George Herbert, John Baillie, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Rumi) brought into contact with modernity.

Ralphs’ stylistic markers are so visible - word play, antithesis, dense clusters of alliteration and assonance (there must be a term for this) - that it’s a little difficult to work through the thicket as it were and find what else is there.

the project seems to be to divine something of the just future by applying mystic texts to the syllabic cacophony of the present.

i think there’s enough of interest on a first reading to go back and work through it some more.

from veni sancte spiritus:

Give to those who, doggèd, wait
on your fingers’ click and bait
the worried bone of friendliness

i suppose dogged needed the grave. but yes it gives a good general sense of it: the imv successful play of “your fingers’ click and bait” and something about in an age of social media captured well by the phrase “the worried bone of friendliness”.

when ralphs cuts loose a bit from their acrobatics they get some punch:

Like that last phrase, you run, like blinding colours through the eyeless world
and when the mind forgets itself, you’re there — where what is left to know is left to live.
Fine, hold me in your Holocene: give me a kicking; and the goods,
the martyrs with their hopscotch blood and nails as fragrant in their palms as cloves

(from Wessobrunn Prayer)

i’m looking forward to digging in, even if periodically i wish they’d let up a bit.

oh i think there must be something of the Pound here. interpreting the prosody of these old texts and modes to create unusual modern poetic forms (the alliteration, obv a form in old english/german etc)

periodically i wish they’d let up a bit

based on the fragments you quoted, understandable. sonically, it invites you to move right along, but semantically it's a slow, dense obstacle course, which tends to fight itself

I've started in on Kokoro, Natsume Soseki. The translator is Edwin McClellan. Too soon for comments.

S. Yizhar - Preliminaries.

Review here that is fine with giving the synopsis of the book:

https://wordswithoutborders.org/book-reviews/preliminaries-by-s-yizhar/

The writing is wonderful, if you like that kind of thing. This will do it for you, no question. If it is a well I will walk for miles everyday to drink from it, for sure. And so on.

Except: what is it to read this now? Arabs have been displaced and we see the images of what that means on our screens. Every day for the last few months. The politics of that situation isn't discussed much in that review.

What saves it (if you like) is a measure of acknowledgement, some guilt, some awareness of what it is to have moved to a place so alien.

Above all the writing on nature, friendship, people. This guy can extract every ounce of feeling for the sky in his writing. If we were all truly able to have those feelings as expressed here maybe things would not have turned out as they have. I am no doubt wrong about this.

really enjoying the ralphs. it's actually caused me to get my bible down this easter sunday to check the story of job against the prose poem Job 42:10-17 (the final verses covering god's double restitution to job of that which he had lost), which has the epigraph:

Yesterday P. asked: 'Do you think the children from Job's second chance could actually be happy?' Anna Kamieńska, A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook

His Children (whom he'd seen the fired pyres stripping of their nakedness and every woolly talisman) came back: came bringing groceries: and they said, this is what a bad trip feels like, we were never dead, you only thought we were: and though he had mislaid his face in tumuli of boils, had dropped his Eyes in lozenge-bottles crouched behind the ziggurats of shipping boxes at the docks, screamed at Life's fair unfairness, they beatified him

potent. i particularly like the mislaid face in the tumuli of boils, the brutality of those woolly talismans going up in flames, 'ziggurats of shipping boxes' does the job of the architecture of the ancient world in the modern well. and later, "And he blessed the World in turn because he feared to curse it" speaks plainly of what's been done to Job.

After This is That, he said, and if this were a bad trip I would know it. And did not escape the Feeling, angry as a tennis racquet, of his being made to serve.

And then Ralphs goes and does this! The actual metaphor, the maximal tautness of the strings in the tensile frame, the thwock of the tennis ball - no question, brings something to the quality of Job's anger. but 'of his being made to serve' can only be a joke. it's hard to see it as anything else. the immediate suspicion is that Ralphs couldn't find another way of putting it, was reluctant to relinquish this form of words, liked it too much maybe. on the other hand this could be depicting a nasty rhyming cruelty of the universe, indifferent to bathos. either way it's extremely disconcerting, and pulls you up short.

the final lines though, reassert the general tone of the poem, of Job alone retaining the memory of that which has been done to him:

You're dead, you're dead, he said, watching his children reproduce; and soon they too grew to believe it.

ralphs is willing to untether words from their moorings and use them for their abstract quantities, but this has the effect sometimes of causing you to wonder what a word is doing there - is there any constraint of meaning hanging off it at all? it can have the feeling of an LLM set to high temperature. but as i say, i'm really enjoying getting my teeth into it. it's fecund, energetic, smart etc.

Yeahm was already thinking that some of the word choices seem more willful than anything else, on first reading--but

And did not escape the Feeling, angry as a tennis racquet, of his being made to serve.

And I suppose that capitalizing "Feeling" could be sarcastic/counter-Serious, making your own damn book/Book, twisting the other side of the story around to the front.

oh i agree the psychology is apt - it’s partly the point, but the serve-as-in-tennis-serve is, well it’s just silly. introducing an image that does nothing for the poem.

germinal ... a lot more readable than you'd think.
i did germinal in january & this was my takeaway too. definitely piqued my interest for more zola.

recent reads have included ivan turgenev's virgin soil, austen's persuasion, and anna kornbluh's immediacy. hoping to get to sand's the devil's pool soon.

Fludd by Hilary Mantel. A strange little book, the kind where I feel like I'm on a completely different wavelength from the author, despite her easy cynicism concerning religion. (Though in an afterword she says she wishes that everyone could be brought up catholic, or something like it, because of the sense it gives that everything is not as it seems. Hmm.) You wouldn't think it was by the same author as Wolf Hall.

because of the sense it gives that everything is not as it seems

most religions and a fair number of drugs provide this sense, but catholicism will do in a pinch

a few children's books and an average imagination will do it.

Thurston Moore Sonic Life
Avant garde guitarist's memoir. He's just got to having Lee Ranaldo in Sonic Youth who have Richard Edson back in the band after playing as a drummerless 3 piece.
Been pretty good so far.
I needed some lighter reading. Feeling fluey or something.

So not getting as heavily into a number of other non-fiction books as I wanted.

Rashid Khalidi the Iron Cage
Book looking at why Palestine is not doing better in its struggle by a Palestinian academic and historian. Looking at 20th century history of the place.

Enzo Traverso
Book on Marxist explanations of the holocaust.
I really dug the author's name when it turned up in a bibliography. So grabbed the book when I saw it was in the local library.

Peter Fryer Staying Power
Book on black presence in the British isles. Pretty scathing on widespread racism.
I'm having the same problem trying to work out how you read a text peppered with endnote reference numbers. Which this has several per paragraph frequently. How frequently you turn to the end of the book to read the notes thereby messing up flow reading the text.
Had this with Federici and Theodore Allen too. Maybe shows level of research but doesn't help flow.

And several other books I'm part way into.

I've stuck with the Clark book, it's vastly entertaining. Steampunk without being annoying, that's a feat in and of itself.

javier marías - a heart so white

very good. i thought the modernist long stream of consciousness sentences would tire me out (tbh they do, a bit) but he keeps it moving and mixes in enough dark humour to keep me afloat. the weirdness of spain is underrated

A Heart So White has stayed with me. Great novel.

I'm reading *Night Soldiers* by Alan Furst. It's a spy novel, set in the 30s, and the central character (Bulgarian, but Russian by allegiance) is first trained in Moscow, then sent to Spain to infiltrate the Republican army. He's now on the run in Paris. I'm not at the stage where I can intuit a grand plan, so am sustained by Furst's moment-to-moment world-building. Furst clearly knows his subject but the sweep is so grand it can fall into national cliche pretty easily. Everything is buoyed by bawdy humour; weirdly, it makes me think of Jeffrey Eugenides in places.

Also reading *Empire of Normality: Capitalism and Neurodiversity* by Robert Chapman. He's using Marxist theory to show how capitalism both creates and exploits neurodiversity but how neurodiversity may provide a new mode of organisation against capitalism's worst excesses.

I'm in the middle of writing some essays for my MA, so I've had to take my first break from reading books in a few years.

That said I'm puttering through Jane and Prudence (great) and Pet Shop Boys vs America (complete classic, just page after page of prime Lowe/Tennant one-liners and mischievous glibness)

I finished Alan Furst's *Night Soldiers*. I come to espionage fiction for the tight plotting and this had an odd mix of almost picaresque and what I came to think of as ambient passages of detail. I liked the latter quite a bit in the end. Weird comparison but some sections come on like Poker Face (the Natasha Lyonne series), wherein, to set up a new location, Furst introduces peripheral characters 'at work' in their particular milieu (Paris, New York, Bessarabia), as a stage-setting for the central characters to arrive into. He's great at. Plot? Maybe not so much.

It's 100% made me want to take a trip down the Danube though.

After flopping around in Creeley’s early collected for a few days, I picked up a copy of Lee Harwood’s ‘HMS Little Fox’ at a stoop sale and have been reading that during evenings and nap time— I have a hard time sleeping 8 hours in a row but am a champion napper, for whatever reason. He’s an interesting poet, for sure.

Breakfast reading now taken up with André Schiffrin’s ‘The Business of Books,’ which I am gobbling up— nothing like stories of corporate conglomerates running and ruining mass culture to get me going.

Cahokia Jazz – Frances Spufford

If this had been a pulp/airport novel, mixing it with a lot of indifferent, throwaway stuff, I would have thought it was punching well above its weight and would have probably been quite enthusiastic. However, blurb quotes like the one from the TLS saying 'With this third novel Spufford joins the front rank of living novelists' are laughable.

The first pages prompted two thoughts immediately, 'is this supposed to be pastiche?' and 'urgh, this reads like China Mieville'. Oh, and it reminded me of Disco Elyium, but that's one more mark in the 'pastiche' column (Disco Elysium much better). Vanilla quality Chandler similes, that sort of thing.

But *how* does it read like China Mieville? It's an interesting question because it's not bad in the obvious Mielville ways - Spufford can write ok. I *think* – and I've managed to pick up a lousy cold [update: covid ffs] on return from holiday so I'm pretty foggy – that it is to do with 'world building' (not a phrase I love - what else are you doing when you're writing a book?)

So a got some amusement when I read in Spufford's acknowledgments at the end that he was (and I haven't got it in front of me so this is a paraphrase) indebted to China Mielville for a single vital suggestion. But doesn't say what the suggestion was.

I think something they share, possibly, is the feeling, especially strong here, that they are describing a film – the words on the page are not in and of the world. Their relation to the world is muted, like you're seeing it through cellophane. So maybe it does relate to descriptive weaknesses after all. It was something about the spartan map at the beginning that made me feel it too - like it lacked in richness of imagination. Maybe that's it? There isn't enough richness in the background, so you feel what's on the page is everything, rather than the writer selecting details from a rich inner view.

It's an alternate history, a genre I quite like – The Alteration and The Man in the High Castle are favourite books. Spufford says he decided not to deal with the crux of the alteration (a weaker strain of flu brought over by the Spanish iirc), but I think this is a huge mistake. Your alteration has to be at the centre of things in some way, creating the constraints and difficulties and descriptive and moral strangenesses. The alteration is at a distance, and indeed you're very unlikely to guess what it is until Spufford tells you in his acknowledgments imv.

There are some strengths, the development of Joe Barrow, the Aztec lore, and I felt it picked up as it went on tbh, but in the end, it was very good for what i used it as, which was a beach book.

I read *Bluets* by Maggie Nelson.

1. It made me think of a less garrulous Patricia Lockwood.
2. I wasn't sure what the sex was for (could be one of Nelson's aphorisms but equally, I'm not sure what the sex was for).
3. I haven't looked for who came first.
4. 'Tell a dream, lose a reader' is the least observed truism in writing.
5. Our moods do not believe in each other.
6. I looked for more blue things today and saw a heron being mobbed by a seagull.
7. The Joan Mitchell painting is lovely.
8. I do actually like aphoristic texts jumbled into (cleverly organised) abstraction.
9. It's got Knausgård on the back, it must be good.
10. I do not repeat myself but I say the same thing over and over again.

I do not like Maggie Nelson. The two books of hers I have read seemed sort of “mainstream queer,” facile in their observations and smugly liberal-but-thinks-they’re-leftists politics. Whenever people say they love her, it’s a red flag for me lol

but in the end, it was very good for what i used it as, which was a beach book.
Reminds me of something I read recently---already blanking on title and most else---but incl. an agreeable quotation, a sentence or two, bobbing along in the tide, from Peter Benchley's Jaws. And your mention of The Man In The High Castle reminds me that PKD doesn't necessarily bother with much description, knowing that a strong enough situation can do more with less, as happened with the Jaws quote,although I haven't read that book, don't know how it holds up.
At first, I thought that TMITHC was seeming too drab and low-key (way back when I was reading a lot of colorful hustle-bustle science fiction), but then I found myself swaying through windy grimy old San Francisco streets with a raincoat character, getting immersed in the lasting effects of Japanese Occupation, an alternate Post-WWII 1961, I guess, since that was when it was published and it seemed like the same year (from my childhood). Bay Area native and early resident (Le Guin's successfully invisible schoolmate at Berkeley High) PKD evidently familiar enough with said streets to imagine and convey how such walks might feel.As with Benchley's Hollywood-ready High Concept, don't disturb this groove.
So I can see how Spufford's distancing could be frustrating in one way but work out as immersive, lulling beach read. (Maybe that's what more flattering reviewers can't admit to themselves, like with some of the things blurbed for "spare, elegant prose." Turns out: duh, yeah, it's easy to read!)

Xp I can see the smug liberal accusation tabes. Not sure I can see the value of pathologising people who read her, like.

I kind of liked The Argonauts but that kind of memoir and most memoirs for the most part don't sit well with me. It is something I can't recommend to anyone

I read the first two Jon Fosse novels of the three-volume Septology, so far it is an amazing work, shrouded in grief and full of religious belief, with doppelgängers of some of the characters and with a very atmospheric sense of rural Norway. It has many commas and question marks and many instances of hesitations like "I think" and "yes" and "maybe", but no periods, just a run-on sentence

I read that Fosse is associated with Karl Ove Knausgärd, and have started listening to the first part of his 6-part My Struggle, which is maybe 4000 pages long

Chinaski I recommend Gass's On Being Blue as a sort of companion volume/tonic for Nelson. I liked Nelson at points but also found it a little weighty. Gass I am in the tank for and On Being Blue is really him having fun.

seconding

I also love On Being Blue, and Gass in general.

I do not like Maggie Nelson. The two books of hers I have read seemed sort of “mainstream queer,” facile in their observations and smugly liberal-but-thinks-they’re-leftists politics. Whenever people say they love her, it’s a red flag for me lol

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Sunday, June 9, 2024 3:00 PM

incredible stuff lol

red flags for everyone

Lol imagine being a red flag over a queer author who sold a few books for a while.

Love getting you two riled up over literally nothing, Nelson (like Solnit) has publicly trashed leftists and radical movements for not being polite enough for her upper class liberal sensibilities, I like plenty of people with whom I don’t agree but a “red flag” in this instance literally means “i cannot trust this person’s politics.” nothing more.

also, admittedly, i both distrust and resent rich writers who were able to financially go into the fellowship-residency-visiting faculty circle. getting onto that track takes money, and many more worthwhile writers who don’t have it will never get the exposure they deserve. this isn’t shocking or surprising or anything new, but i still dislike it and distrust such people

"a “red flag” in this instance literally means “i cannot trust this person’s politics.” nothing more."

And that would be a strange conclusion on that person. I personally would need a bit more than that but you do you.

Got a great deal into that David Maurer The Big Con and can see how the Sting relates to it. Since the story is pretty much given as one of the set ups. Book is really interesting, may be a bit dated but it is 84 years old. Hearing about marks swallowing the con so deeply that they seek out the con men after losing a load of money thinking they will win next time is priceless and only part of the story. seem to be even worse cases of gullibility or self-conning
I can't remember what turned me onto the book but it's a good read.

"a “red flag” in this instance literally means “i cannot trust this person’s politics.” nothing more."

And that would be a strange conclusion on that person. I personally would need a bit more than that but you do you.

I am reading M. John Harrison’s ‘Climbers’ on the recommendation of a friend, I am having a great time reading about UK dirtbag climber culture of the 80s.

That's interesting about Spufford. I've seen so many positive reviews of his books over the years, but I've struggled to get through single paragraphs without cringing. The new one (British guy does indigenous American culture) seems like the Sort Of Thing We Don't Do Now, for good reasons.

right. and i wondered this. me circling round pastiche and the sense of being at a remove when reading it is another way of saying there’s a distance there. it feels research intensive and i think you can usually smell that on the page. exceptions being Pynchon, where yeah it’s clearly research intensive but that’s the wild trip you’re on and it’s super super dense or, say, Hilary Mantel, who manages something like alchemy turning what must have been an extraordinary amount of reading into a world with the material and psychological detail and presence of a george eliot novel.

where here i got the sense of someone going (and this horribly unfair but hey it’s ilx) “heres a topic i can do some literary fiction at”

There’s a question of whether an English author can or should do this sort of thing - yeah my view tends to be “you can do anything you like” - but certainly an english writer tackling US race relations thru an alternate history of the south in a noir style… you gotta go be pretty sure of your chops imo. or cut loose in the way that say, Percival Everett (or Pynchon!) does and just go “no rules, sux to be you if you don’t like it”.

the modes and methods of literary fiction as it is taught by people like spufford militate against that imv.

i’m still very curious about the mieville point! because my immediate reaction was “oh god this reads like mieville” - regulars will know i’m not a fan, and apologies to those who are - so id love to know what the *single suggestion* was. the key to that manner and approach i don’t like… i might email him, but will have to be mealy mouthed about my appreciation for it.

(Maybe that's what more flattering reviewers can't admit to themselves, like with some of the things blurbed for "spare, elegant prose." Turns out: duh, yeah, it's easy to read!)

yeah i'm cautious about *recommending* against reviewers and though I draw the line at 'one of the finest writers of the 21st century so far' everyone seemed to *love* it, can't find a bad review. The most I'd like to claim is it didn't entirely work for me above the level of 'fun'. i like plenty of bad stuff and don't like a lot of good stuff, and I hope people itt read and like Spufford/Cahokia Jazz.

i'll usually recommend stuff i love, but don't really believe in anti...dis......un...recommendations (how long can i carry on blaming covid for my mental decay), and there's nothing i love more than someone who can show to me that my cavils or dismissals have caused me to miss out on an actually excellent piece of music, book, volume of poetry, film etc that I then come to enjoy thanks to that person.

also i go through cycles - when I first joined ilx it was because i asked a friend what to do about the fact that i was consuming everything i already knew or was validated - classics etc, and not just books - that there was no route in for things outside my existing ambit. I think the phrase I used was 'breathing my own exhalations'. Friend said 'hey you should go on ilx' so i did, and was v grateful for it.

that meant picking up very deliberately a load of new stuff and not applying the 'classics' mentality, where everything you read is the quality of idk Flaubert or whatever. it means you're going to read things that are likely to have things that are done well and things that are done less well, and sometimes things that are entirely shit, but that engaging with that process is an essential corollary of reading great works. And you do it because doing it means you're treating with people who are at the very least working *in* the contemporary world, ideally refreshing the artistic and cultural mores modes and forms so their art is operating in and illuminating the now, rather than running on the generational fumes of the hegemonic cohort where most things operate, and even better just ahead of the now, speculating, divining, painting.

but right now I'm at the... aphelion (the furthest away one – I just checked) of that approach, where i'm tired of the sheer amount of middle-ranking stuff and have less tolerance for there being something of interest in most things. That may just be because of a lack of energy and time on my part tbh... and focus actually. but regardless there is a 'this isn't as good as it should be' response (Spufford) or a 'really tho?' response (Quignard).

so yeah, I'd hate to think anyone who might see Cahokia Jazz and have their interest tweaked might go 'nah actually' because of anything i'd posted (total egomania - covid, promise). It's got Aztec symbolism freighted in by Jesuits as a controlling and protective false consciousness and popular belief system for a city/state community preserving racial and indigenous power ffs and who's not going to have their curiousity piqued by *that*.

anyway, wrote him an email asking about the Miéville thing.

aw, he responded extremely promptly with a very nice and informative email.

In sum: Everyone read Cahokia Jazz, it's great.

I read Light Perpetual by Spufford some time age for a book club, and I liked it, though a flippant take would be "the 7up series did it better"; def no issues with cultural tourism in this one, it is very very British. He also has a certain amount of style, and I feel like amongst the kind of books his audience reads that's not very common?

former ilxor max is a fan of Cahokia Jazz iirc

right - it may even have been from max's substack that i picked up the rec? At least it was floating round my head for some reason, which is why i got it as a holiday read.

Mevlido's Dreams, the latest of Antoine Volodine's to be translated, is now out from Univocal @ UMinn, I started it yesterday. It's big like Radiant Terminus. Seems great so far but I'm completely in the tank for this guy, there isn't a living writer whose work just hits all my pleasure centers like Volodine

Oho, ahoy: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/07/08/from-nowhere-an-interview-with-antoine-volodine/ Looks promising; where should we start?

Yeah, that description in dow's link sounds like catnip for me.

Also on my list is the sequel to Sergio Pitol's The Love Parade.

lol i saw moira donegan express regret today for having once loved 'the argonauts'

moira donegan…

go on . . .

every generation gets the market apologist they deserve

lol i saw moira donegan express regret today for having once loved 'the argonauts'

― mookieproof, Saturday, 15 June 2024 bookmarkflaglink

This behavior really is lol.

I finished Life with Picasso. It was well written and well observed, full of anecdote, and gives a very full and revealing portrait of Picasso in his 60s. That was enough to keep my interest, mainly because Picasso was an interesting character who led a very eventful life. The best parts of the book were Picasso speaking about his art, his methods, and his evaluations of other artists and their work. Francoise Gilot was able to recall some of those conversations in great detail and they were quite illuminating. These bits were few, but valuable.

The other, lesser, parts of the book display Picasso, the person, rather than the artist. They were necessary to include in this memoir of their relationship, but simply put, he was an egoist, often cruel, and psychologically abusive. His rationalizations for his behavior were rather amazing, showing the sort of acuteness that he brought to his art, but in the service of manipulation for his selfish ends. He used DARVO at an unusually refined level, but it was still DARVO. There's some fascination in seeing this side of him through the eyes of the person he manipulated, but it's also wearing to expose oneself to it, even at second hand.

Girouard, Big Jim
Berenyi, Fingers Crossed
Hoban, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

i read On Locations: Lessons Learned from My Life on set with The Sopranos and in the Film Industry by Mark Kamine

it's much more than a sopranos crew member trying to cash in on their behind the scenes knowledge, really an admirable, heady look @ the movie biz life, largely bereft of gossip or star fuckery. recommended for fans of final cut -RIP Steven Bach, former United Artists exec and author of "Final Cut," one of the essential books about movies

I've started an early Eric Ambler spy thriller, Background to Danger (aka Uncommon Danger), published in 1937. It uses various tropes that Hitchcock soon picked up and used in his various spy thrillers, mostly the ordinary man who is innocently caught up in a web of international intrigue and must call upon all his resourcefulness to outwit his professional opponents. It is a period piece now, but well done.

pretty sure i've read that ambler if it's the one that starts out in an industrial region of italy? have yet to read one of his that bests epitaph for a spy.

currently in the middle of the minor english poet wh davies's adventures of a super tramp. was enjoying his retelling of his days hoboing around america and experiences in hobo jungles & work camps in the late nineteenth century till it suddenly hit an unpleasantly racist seam that's effectively tarnished it all.

“say nothing” (a dua lipa recommended book)

It's Ambler's Cause for Alarm that starts out in an industrial region of italy and is unabashedly anti-fascist. This one begins in Nuremberg, but rapidly moves to Austria. The anti-fascist element is there, but more muted.

ah right, cause for alarm it was!

the proper title for the davies book is *autobiography* of a super tramp, not adventures (also as i discovered later in the book he was welsh not english). it's an interesting portrait of the down & out milieux of both sides of the atlantic at the turn of the twentieth century written in a very plain prose style of wide eyed wonder, but can't say the examples of his poetry at the end have encouraged me to read any of his other work

now started on robert tressell's the ragged trousered philanthropists

You might also like Jack London's People of The Abyss, in which---maybe considering a roots move back to his American boxcar phase a little too redundant--he goes to London, buys old clothes, and hits the streets, then roads----working in a momnpop bookstore, I sold a collector kid's mom an edition I'd never seen before, and haven't seen since, with Jack's funky photos. (This book was said to be an inspiration for Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, as JL's The Iron Heel was a forerunner of 1984, and thematically Animal Farm.)

I've seen an early edition of People of the Abyss with London's photographs included! That was long ago. The copy currently in my library is part of an omnibus collection in the Library of America that also includes The Road, The Iron Heel, Martin Eden, and John Barleycorn. London's reputation has been unfairly whittled down until Call of the Wild is about the only title of his most people can name. He badly needs rehabilitation.

NLT (and all), the best book about hoboing around is “You Can’t Win” by Jack Black. Nothing else compares

I've taken the liberty of starting a summer 2024 WAYR thread:

'In a somer seson, whan softe was þe sonne': What are You Reading in Summer 2024?

xpost: was given a flash looking reissue of the jack black book a number of years back, so def on my agenda!

& jack london yeah, need to investigate more. think i read some of his sea stories years ago but that's about it.

unfortunately he was a vocal white supremacist. So if that's not a dealbreaker I guess he could write a bit.

A lot of 19th-century working-class socialists in the U.S. were pretty racist and supported the Chinese Exclusion Act and were completely paranoid that Asia would overrun this country. To be fair, every white person in the 19th century was totally friggin' racist. And also pro-eugenics. And they beat their children and their horses. But not all white people in the U.S. were as popular in Japan as Jack London was. So, there is that.

(then again if a writer wasn't being anti-japanese did the japanese ever really care how racist a writer was? especially in the olden days.)