Now the year is turning and the eeriness comes: what are you reading in autumn 2021?

The last of these short story reviews.

May Day is, according to the author:

New fiction from me which is a very loose riff on a nightmarish element from the Mabinogion story Lludd a Llefelys! (TW for pregnancy loss) Thank you to @The_Fence_Mag & @John_S_Phipps https://t.co/HzL6YPOA4o

— Sophie Mackintosh (@fairfairisles) November 2, 2020

February, March and April teemed with birthdays. The heat of so many candles raised off the earth.

After the first class, we were allowed a rest break. I gathered with Jane, Lucy and Emily on a bench. Their names were pieces of sugar, and I hated them all but couldn’t admit it.

I could run alone now, any time of day. Men swerved away from my body. The talisman bumped over my heart with every footstep, and the trees lining my running route reminded me of the quiet of that night, of how the man hadn’t made a sound.

I see echoes of myself everywhere, shared mannerisms and hairstyles and laughs, like a video whose images keep freezing and stuttering. They are things that belong to me and yet they don’t. Three redheads in a row; a bracelet I also own on somebody else’s wrist.

finished Mary Barton. lots of people died. any suspense over the trial spoiled by the chapter title. lots happened and not much did.

Finished The Makioka Sisters. One of the best novels I’ve ever read.

line of the day, at least: "Carrie doesn't like to go home at night, and she doesn't like to go to sleep," and not just because I've known people like that.
mention of Mary Barton reminds me I'd been wondering about Lucy Barton's creator, Elizabeth Strout--local library has a ton of her books---descriptions make it seem like her leading characters might be caustic, layered, Jean Staffordesue (though also remind me of a favorite line of greeting cards)---is she good?

― dow, Monday, 8 November 2021 1

She's okay.

Thanks.
I finished xpost The Sentence, maybe too quickly, but momentum of second half seemed to encourage skating along the translucent surface, despite layers just below, and some seemingly baggy first-half elements now snapping together: seemed like some of the big themes and historical events, def incl. George Floyd Days of horror and rage (and shit from opportunistic looters of community, also more copshit, duh) seemed dumped in there and spread out, after being received: v. granular detail, but nothing revelatory (although some of it is startling, w possibilities I hadn't thought of, such as a new mother who is knocked down, spilling her breast milk---quickly pulled up and running again, she discovers that tear gas seeks moisture, including that of her nipples).
Was especially put off to find that a radio documentary I heard last night clarified and cogently expanded backstory of urban Indigenous, incl. how they got that way->what they're doing now, in Minneapolis: v relevant to these characters---doc did this in a few sentences, in ways that Erdrich's weaving and traffic management didn't quite, or sometimes at all.
Also, the whole thing about the ghost came to contrived-seeming, on the nose resolution---but there were good scenes and turns of thought-phrase-plot-life all along the way: it wasn't a bad read, just left me detached, for the most part.

Finished Driss Chraïbi's "The Simple Past" (an incredible and forceful bildungsroman, imho), then quickly read poet Chris Sylvester's "Book Abt Fantasy," a strange book that has more in common with performance art than poetry, to my mind. Still very interesting!

I'm now going to start Dodie Bellamy's "Bee Reaved." You can read more about Dodie and the book here:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/15/american-experimentalisms-best-kept-secret-dodie-bellamy-bee-reaved

She was my thesis advisor, and Kevin Killian was a mentor as well. Going to be a bit of a weeper, as a result.

Loved Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower, I wasn't sure at first about the setting or main character but the supporting cast, Fitzgerald's gentle sardonicism and the general Germanity of it all slowly won me over, I think I rate it higher than The Bookshop or Offshore.

A few stories into that Ashton Smith anthology and so far my takeaways are:

a) he's very good at coming up with weird blobby nightmare creatures

b) ppl point out a lot that Lovecraft was racist even for his time, which is true, but in terms of the actual fiction I think it shines through in Ashton Smith more than it does in HPL; so many stories featuring primitive natives worshipping evil idols. Even the one he sets on Mars is full of orientalism.

wrapped up louis menand's The Free World last night and am sorry to see it go. idk what ilx thinks of menand but i liked it a lot. agree with Raymond Cummings assesment of it in the summer thread: I guess I've aged into a 10-15 pages per day reader for stuff like this. It's just so rich, like a dark chocolate cake. I had to take a couple breaks from it over the months to cleanse my palate & read other things, but was always happy to get back to it.

particularly like how it was structured, not chronologically but as self-contained capsule histories of figures & ideas, often doubling back to the same moments or inflection points to view them from a different angle & spin off in other directions. (also made it easier to dip in & out of it, of course.) i'm sure some of the chapters must have started off as NYer pieces, but didn't feel at all like one of those books of frankensteined-together magazine articles.

I don't remember details of structure, but his The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America was very good for information, some of it startling. But his occasional narrow, small c conservative tendencies turned up in here, like dismissing abolitionists as a bunch of troublemakers, not letting the responsibles gradually find a middle way (yeah like Missouri Compromise, with plenty slavery left in place,'til it was torpedoed by Kansas Nebraska Act, also 'member The Fugitive Slave Act etc etc right through Congress, perfectly legit). But you can veer around such things, keeping an eye out.

(Also: he follows judiciously granular clarity of the New Yorker excerpt from his latest, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War with lament re too groups in wake of Berkeley's Free Speecn Movement so messy and not nicely organized, like [buttoned-down bespectled lining up in their little raincoats: carefully chosen pic here] like FSM etc.)(And I'll read the book anyway.)

too *bad* groups in wake

I had no problems with The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Idea when I reread what is essentially some superb New Yorker profiles. Agassiz and Adams' anti-Semitism is quite clear.

Yeah, he's usually very fair.
Would like to re-read some of AMC, including his mention of Abolitionists among the Transcendentalists.
(Somewhere in ILX, Scott Seward posted a pic of them incl. his ancestor Rufus S. King [related to Secretary of State William Seward, who, though wounded, fought off attacker on the night of Lincoln's assassination]---then an official portrait of Rufus, still looking much the same, as Union Brigadier General.)

Back to Menand: I'm fairly sure he said some of the Ts were very pro-John Brown, even maybe w fundraisers?! Yeah, no doubt a good read and re-read.

It's just that when the New Yorker latched on to these one-stop-shopping polymaths (Gladwell, Gopnik etc etc), their most annoying tendencies turn up again and again also.

dang I took xpost The Sentence back to library and now I'm missing some of those characters and their interactions, despite the frequent detachment of reading experience.

raced through Richard Osman's The Man Who Died Twice in a couple of days. v undemanding but I do really enjoy most of his cast of characters tbh.

a few chapters into Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mitzuki Tsujimura and I am properly hooked so far. 7 early teenagers who for various reasons aren't attending school are transported during school hours each day to a magical fairytale castle.

George Eliot - Middlemarch. Of course this is great, classic and everything though on this one read I think I was a lot more into Dorothea and her journey through the patriarchy than anything else. The universe in an English TOWN does come into full view in the end, and the chapters leading up to the 'persecution' of Balustrode/Lydgate are fantatstic. So much of England in that whole business.

Though the novel it reminded me the most of was Musil's Man Without Qualities, in that both are partly looking back at events in recent history. The main protagonist seems too clever and wasted on what everyone else is up to, they know it and are stuck, and the relationship between Dorothea/Will reminds me a bit of Agathe/Ulrich. These observations don't take account with what they are up to though, they are ambitious novelists who express their art quite differently.

Driss Chraïbi's 'The Simple Past.' Someone else here had read it, yes?

I read it last year. An angry stream-of-consciousness story of a young man with an oppressive, authoritarian, possibly murderous father, living in a conservative, traditional, religious society, ie. mid-20th century Morocco. Hard to follow for me at times, but impressively single-minded in its rage.

Natalia Ginzburg - Family and Borghesia
Sophie Collins - Who is Mary Sue?
Baudelaire - Intimate Journals

So glad there is a focus on Ginzburg as it allows me to fill me in the gaps on stuff I haven't read by her. The novella is where she is at her most powerful, where a universe of character, feeling and need is flattened by her deceptively simple prose that seems to accumulate the spectrum of life.

As for Collins' poetry, its her first collection - I got to know of her by the (now deacivated) presence on twitter, and followed that up with Baudelaire's prose. He is a 'bad boy' as much as Collins is careful and considerate.

a universe of character, feeling and need is flattened by her deceptively simple prose that seems to accumulate the spectrum of life.

Quite well put. As much as I dislike artists of the same gender, I see a similarly elusive simplicity in Elena Ferrante.

🤨

Last night I finished My Home is Far Away, Dawn Powell. It felt like one of her weaker efforts, largely because it was strongly tethered to her own life story and I think the pull of memory interfered with her natural instincts as a satirist and storyteller.

Now I've started The Ten Thousand Things, Maria Dermoût, set in the Moluccas.

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes - Janet Malcolm

If you asked me about what I thought about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, my view was formed at 16 and hasn’t moved on much since. I loved Plato’s poetry intensely for the two years I studied it, but I admittedly haven’t thought of her much since, although I own her collected works and still find great enjoyment in them. So a few weeks back, I was talking about how my entire English class haaaaated Hughes, because of him cheating on Plath and then both Plath and Assia Wevill’s suicides, xyzzzz__ mentioned this book, which I’ve never heard of.

What a book, though. Malcolm picks her way carefully through the stuff we all know; the work, the deaths, the rumours. Somewhere in reading this, I came to feeling almost sympathetic towards Hughes, which Malcolm freely admits is her bias in writing this book.

The book delves a lot into the other biographies about Plath and Hughes. Hughes himself is the great unseen in this; he is never directly interviewed by Malcolm, but instead is glimpsed through letters, stories and most of all through his sister Olwyn’s passionate advocacy. But his presence towers over everything. It is hard to forget his anguish about being treated as though he is dead by biographers, in terms of what they see fit to speculate about. When Malcolm writes about Wevill’s suicide, and in passing says (of Hughes), that his pain must have been unimaginable, it startled me. It’s a totally obvious point to make, of course, but I had been so set in the image of this couple that I’d held more or less untouched for the last 18 years that it shocked me.

Malcolm picks her way through Plath’s own words, in the form of her poetry, letters and journals. Between this and the various coverage of people who knew her, she tries to sift down to some kind of truth, but freely admits at all times the difficulty in doing so. Although she confesses her bias towards the Hugheses, I still felt sympathetic towards Plath. It is clear that she was in a lot of pain in life, pain that perhaps none were equipped to help her handle. Malcolm notes the casual cruelty of even Plath’s supposed defenders in this life towards her memory, and is sharp about what they gain from it. In this, her view is very much aligned with that of the Hughes siblings.

Memory and its failings as a method of establishing some kind of objective truth are a theme visited and done well here. Malcolm is skilled in the way she releases information at key points, so I was surprised when she is surprised, and the ending of the book is sublime.

What did I most like about this? Her portrayal of, and various entanglements with, Olwyn Hughes is up there. The meeting with Jacqueline Rose is a highlight. The careful piecing together of the story - for it is a story, as much as it was also people’s lives - is incredible, and I find myself thinking about certain phrases from Hughes’s various letters excerpted throughout.

A truly amazing book, and one that I will return to time and time again. Thank you so much for recommending me this xyzzzz__!

Lol that Plato is obviously meant to be Plath.

Excellent book. It got me to read Anne Stevenson's (okay) poetry.

👍👍👍 xp

xp I have a lot of thoughts about this book but absolutely zero curiosity about her work. I was more interested in Malcolm’s thoughts about her.

Even from a distance of two years from reading The Silent Woman, Malcolm's stance on Hughes still feels radical to me. As in received opinion is such, and the urge to pathologise Plath and Hughes so strong (and, to a lesser extent, Wevill), that it almost has to be a process of ongoing revision to hold the possibilities Malcolm constructs present in one's mind. If it's at all relevant, I think, if anything, I've come to admire Plath's work more and Hughes' less, though this may not all be entwined with Malcolm's book.

I'm reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's book Gathering Moss. She's a professor of forest biology so it's a specialist text but presented to a lay audience; it's that crossover that I'm struggling with a bit as each chapter is framed with what can be quite pronounced containing metaphors. It's also oddly edited in places, with a frustrating amount of repetition. It's convinced me to get a hand glass though, so there is that.

xp I really liked her repeated characterisation of Plath’s work as extreme - I never thought of it as such but those sharp sentences and zero punches pulled, of course it is. I found the anecdote that the book’s title is from fascinating. Couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Is there a thread for posting random connections between consecutive books that you've read? I just finished Virginia Woolf's Orlando and am about halfway through Jim Thompson's The Kill-Off and both have characters named Marmaduke.

Judging by reviews and excerpts I've read, collected letters of Plath to her mother seem to have incl./consisted of very detailed candor, at least regarding some topics and experiences. Also the diaries. Will try to read all of that before going back to any more biographies, though Malcolm's sounds worth a look. Somehow you're reminding me of A. Alvarez's take on her in The Savage God, his study of suicide and art. He was her and Ted's friend and neighbor, also published some of her poetry or other things, i think. Talks about that, and (says why he) thinks she meant to be found while still alive. Guess that would fit with interpretation of "cry for help," (that's what he seemed to think, as best I recall), and/or "being provocative," difficult," "fuck you."

Dammit, can't find my copy of his book right now---but he's candid here, about how he thinks he failed her, and on context:https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/mar/19/poetry.features

Wow, review by Joyce Carol Oates no less, NYTimes '72, sympathetic to his then-oddball syncretic approach, which she says will get "harsh criticism," also she paraphrases his views on Plath's suicide w far more nuance than I remembered, in NYTimes, '71: says will be controversial because a book like no other, at that point, and
...The most compelling section deals with Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963. Alvarez was acquainted with her and her hus band, the poet Ted Hughes, and was evidently one of the last people to see her alive. Her death is analyzed in terms of her poetry; Alvarez believes she attempted to “exorcize the [subject of] death she had summoned up in her poems,” that her suicide was not absolutely deliberate, not a totally conscious choice. Ted Hughes and others acquainted with Sylvia Plath have objected to Alvarez's writing on this point, but since I have no way of knowing what is fact and what is speculation, I will assume that Alvarez reported the events as honestly as he could. In any case it is his theory about the relationship of certain poetic subjects and the self‐destruction of the poet that is really significant. Alvarez raises some disturbing questions. Is art therapeutic? Is the Aristotelian idea of the cathartic function of art perhaps mistaken? Does the poet instead involve himself more and more deeply, fatally, in the morbidity he tries to expell from his system through a formal construction of images and arguments?

It may be objected that the suicidal artist chooses morbid images be cause he cannot choose others, that he is rehearsing his own suicide, or perhaps feebly postponing it, through his art. Or, what is
more likely, that certain artists project the deathliness within them, which then seems to “predict” their own suicides, and that certain other artists become too involved with their own subject‐matter and perhaps with their own mythological concept of what they (as “artists”) must be, so that it is too late for them to turn back. There are no final answers. But Alvarez's questions are superb, for they cause us to wonder not only about ourselves— not only about isolated individuals— but about our entire culture, which exhibits so proudly and, indeed, so lavishly, public images of violence, death and comic horror in such billion‐dollar industries as the movies. If art has no power to do evil, then it has no power to do good either; it is, then, powerless. And few liberals would want to believe this.
Gotta serve somebody! Did I mention it's by Joyce Carol Oates? Whole thing is worth checking, not paywalled yet:
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/04/16/archives/the-savage-god-a-study-of-suicide-by-a-alvarez-299-pp-new-york.html

Though in the xpost 2000 Guardian quotes, seems like he may be saying that she did seem more conscious of what she was about to do---judging by that last visit, that poem she brought---and that he didn't want to face it back then, incl. while writing about it?

Judging by reviews and excerpts I've read, collected letters of Plath to her mother seem to have incl./consisted of very detailed candor, at least regarding some topics and experiences. Also the diaries. Will try to read all of that before going back to any more biographies, though Malcolm's sounds worth a look. Somehow you're reminding me of A. Alvarez's take on her in _The Savage God_, his study of suicide and art. He was her and Ted's friend and neighbor, also published some of her poetry or other things, i think. Talks about that, and (says why he) thinks she meant to be found while still alive. Guess that would fit with interpretation of "cry for help," (that's what he seemed to think, as best I recall), and/or "being provocative," difficult," "fuck you."

I also recommend Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage.

Just finished African Popular Theatre which I've had out for way too long. Think I got it between lockdowns last year and should have got to it sooner.
It is very interesting i think i just let getting sidetracked by other stuff. Gives a history dating back to precol9nial tradition and up to time of publication in the mid 90s.
Want to read more on the subject and definitely more on African film which it gives one chapter to.

Back to Black Kehinde Andrews
I read his New Age of Empire last year or the start of this and that is supposed to be a prequel to this. I like his writing so got an interlibrary loan of this. I'm reading a lot of anti racism stuff still.

Audrey Lord Compendium
3 books by black lesbian feminist. Mainly seems to be short pieces.
I think I need my own copy since this is a library interloan

Another Tuneless Racket Vol1 Origins.
Steven H Gardner.
American writers history of Punk. Interesting. He's looking into the prepunk bands that influenced things so far. I read about Count Bishops yesterday who I hadn't known the timeline for. Knew the singer from Buffalo was in them at one point as well as the singer from The Cannibals but wasn't sure who replaced who and hadn't listened to them really. Did check out something with each singer on Spotify yesterday. May return to that again.

Ngl, totally uninterested in anything seeking to redeem Ted Hughes. Shitty poet (especially in comparison to Plath) and shitty human, period.

yeah but he sure knew how to bite

you mean bite from Sylvia's poetry?

(Really, it's his editing of the original collected poems that makes him an unforgivable character to me, on top of all the other known horrible things he did— to edit your suicided ex-wife's poems to make yourself look better and not culpable in any way for her desperation is pretty fucked)

No, as in bites! During their first hookup Plath and Hughes bit each other hard enough to draw blood.

I'm mostly indifferent to his poetry; it's D.H. Lawerence's animal poetry but studied and self-conscious. I did like his translation of the Oresteia.

i read malcolm's book many years ago and absolutely loved it. i remember being quite surprised and at least sort of convinced by her more sympathetic take on ted hughes. that said, it came out a few years back that hughes was apparently physically abusive to plath during their marriage, so I’m not sure how i would feel about malcolm’s take on him now.

ftr Malcolm doesn't at al try to redeem Hughes. His presence is defined as absence: he doesn't speak, he has emissaries. Instead, she suggests -- an unassailable point based on the surviving letters and testimony from contemporaries -- Hughes did love Plath and was destroyed by her suicide.

Ngl, totally uninterested in anything seeking to redeem Ted Hughes. Shitty poet (especially in comparison to Plath) and shitty human, period.

Sort of sounds like it is, tho, based on what everyone is saying.

"Oh he loved her"

Then he should have treated her with more dignity and respect, end of story.

The Malcolm book explicitly picks its way through the evidence of what he published and left in, in order to make the case that he was torn between the real two impulses of telling the truth and protecting himself and their kids. It’s a very interesting analysis.

At the time of Malcolm's book the letters in which Plath alleges physical abuse hadn't emerged yet.