ILB Gripped the Steps and Other Stories. What Are You Reading Now, Spring 2017

'I FALL upon the spines of books! I read!' -- Autumn 2014: What Are You Reading?

^contains link to review by and pull quote from Terry Eagleton to which I was just referring

I am reading "Wayward Heroes" by Halldor Laxness, his go at Norse saga business. I am a sucker for this kind of thing.

be interested to hear how this is.

A fifth of the way through it's brilliant but I'll let you know.

the sparseness and almost vague sense of the main character was a sort of strength for me

I think it worked beautifully for the most part, ie. the quickly sketched-in backstory, but something about doing that with his war experience seemed a bit off to me, but it might have been just the mood I was in at the time. Anyway, I'm now reading Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves, which will presumably sketch in a war experience with a lot more detail.

Haven't read that one, but some veterans have mentioned the sparseness and almost vague sense of battlefield experience, maybe the mind's defensive deprivation--- with the registration of certain things, some very relevant, some random, but filtered---can be actual smoke, fog, and/or dust, but the same effect can be in broad daylight. Can start, that is.

While on a brief camping vacation I read Graham Greene's early novel Stamboul Train. After reading the Zweig novel, it was surprisingly shallow and, for want of a better word, garish, in comparison. But comparisons are odious, as we all know, so had I not read the Zweig I could say with confidence that Stamboul Train is a readable and modestly entertaining novel, but nothing to cross the street for.

In addition, while camping I cracked open my used copy of the Penguin Classics edition of R. J. Hollingdale's translation of Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra and read the translator's very fine and perceptive Introduction to the book, which was so perceptive and convincing in its insights into Nietzsche's oeuvre and Zarathustra's place within it that it immediately convinced me that I wanted nothing whatsoever to so with reading that book or anything further by Herr Nietzsche. I plan to give away my copy to a charity shop.

Finally, this morning, sitting by a clear rushing river of snowmelt water from the Cascades Range, I dipped into an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson on 'Solitude and Sociability' and my god that man could string together the most self-assured series of assertions about What Is Most True About Life, with the fewest references to solid fact or fig leafs of qualification or doubts, than any writer I can recall reading, because I have mercifully forgotten every word by Ayn Rand I ever read. You are forced either to wag your head in endless imbecilic agreement with his every sentence or else hurl him across the room in a fit of rage.

xp What if someone buys it from the charity shop and is thereby persuaded that charity is slave morality?

tra-la-la-la-la and fiddle-dee-dee! they are welcome to their brilliant nihilist superhumanity and much good may it do them. but, by and large, R.J. Hollingdale convinced me that Nietzsche merely backtracked in the end to a sort of egoistic maniac's version of Lutheranism (<-- my words, not his.)

Reading Don Paterson, 40 SONNETS which Stevie T of ILB fame gave me. Nearly halfway through. I didn't think I liked Paterson as a persona - macho? tough? sarcastic? - but apart from craftsmanship, this volume has a certain quality of ... the phrase is probably 'unflinching honesty' - it tends to look into the abyss, is challenging about bleak existential outlooks, rather than engaging in false uplift. And there's a pretty good generic sonnet in honour of a dead person, something you could read aloud at a funeral. Quite a few quite striking little poems.

Also a poem addressed to Tony Blair which turns out to be an attack on him for familiar post-Iraq reasons.

Because I have not finished any of the books so far listed, I have now started THE DAMNED UNITED by David Peace. It is about football apparently.

True enough, although I believe it can be enjoyed without extensive knowledge of (English) Premier League etc.

I loved it and (because?) I know nothing about football

i want to read it - i am trying to write some fiction about football at the moment so also reading this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Living-Volcano-Secrets-Surviving-Football/dp/1780893272

some pretty harrowing stuff - if anything it highlights what a wilderness these managers are in, they are essentially clueless and unqualified, the vast majority of them, wading through a complex and multifaceted job with for which they have only paltry training and precious little skill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgXunbW4h9Q

actually remember this^^^ as a kid (not the match lol, but bremner's shirt-strip tantrum as he left the field) (haha also the commentary, a vanished world)

They always mention David Peace hails from Dewsbury in interviews etc. He is from Ossett which is a whole different culture from Dewsbury, there are only a few miles separating them but they are quite far apart in other ways. You won't find the calm, genteel atmosphere of Ossett's Gawthorpe estate anywhere in Chickenley, The Moor or Thornhill! Although there did used to be a book shop in Dewsbury run by a Chinese lady who told my partner David Peace's dad was a regular customer.

Hi Aimless, I suspect Greene might agree with you---in one of his memoirs, he says he was so unhappy with the early crap he was turning out that he tried to crawl back to a journo job he'd blown off---his editors had pointed out to him that there were other novelists on staff, that it was possible to do both. Was trying to figure out his first good book; the earliest I've read is Brighton Rock, but it's from '38, not terribly early for him. Might be this one, written in the early 30s, published in 1974:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/20/specials/greene-monkey.html

He even suppressed his 2nd and 3rd novels--they've not been reprinted in decades.

Reading MALAFRENA by Ursula Le Guin: 19th-Century writer revolutionaries in an imaginary country vs the Austrian govt. It's enjoyable and well-written, it's just that given there are a number of very good books about such revolutionaries in ACTUAL existing Central European countries written by actual Central European writers, it all feels a little ersatz and unnecessary. Good fun, though.

I recently finished & enjoyed TOUCH by Courtney Maum and THE SARAH BOOK by Scott McClanahan.

On Saturday, I finished The Persian Boy, my first Mary Renault. I'm hooked.

Mary Renault writes historical romances with the emphasis on the second word. If you want to understand Alexander, read Peter Green's Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C..

well, yeah, I'm reading a historical fiction -- I know what I'm getting into (although what criticism I've read since I finished it suggests she was fairly accurate).

and I don't want to understand Alexander, actually!

thanks for the recommendation, though. I don't read enough historical fiction. I'll probably start Mantel soon.

Alexander is worth understanding, not so much because he is crazy different from all other conquering leaders, but because he is such a perfect specimen who can be studied in some detail as the pure example of his type. Understand him well and you instantly open a window onto large chunks of human history, both before and after.

Memoirs of A Geezer by Jah Wobble. Just got as far as Jeanette Lee joining P.I.L.
Quite enjoyable so far.
Makes me regret not buying a bass a few years ago when i was thinking of doing so.

Finished Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti this morning.
God Genesis P Orridge comes off asa hateful arsehole from that.
& I now want to go and check out more of Carter and tutti or whatever name they worked under's work.
Also wondering if the Temple of Psychic Youth's location remained the same until it left London. Cops i got taken down there in the late 80s. But not sure if that is the Beck rd premises.

aimless wrong as usual

^ you almost baited me into responding seriously to that troll.

The best way to understand history is to read novels anyway.

Ditched Henderson the Rain King and am reading Remajns of the Day. I'm kind of cynical of the cohort that came out of Malcolm Bradbury's UEA course, inasmuch as there's a voice I associate with it: immaculate, mannered, a little bloodless. Ishiguro seems to be the apotheosis of this - and Remains is riddled with a kind of structural neurosis that almost swamps the already neurotic narrative voice. It's fascinating to watch Stevens' fear of being though, and how the affect sort of seeps out, gradually accumulating in the margins.

xp How do the people who write those novels acquire their understanding of history then? By reading other novels?

Obviously! But your initial post sounded as if you were tut-tutting me for reading a novel about a historical personage; I said I don't read fiction to "understand" real people.

(I'm reminded ofWilde's remark about memoirs being the best novels)

EP Thompson - William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary

bedside reading: Raymond Carver - Collected Stories

I've read The Persian Boy and about four other Mary Renault novels, so I must have been tut-tutting myself as well. I also read a variety of historic novels by other writers, most notably Gore Vidal's series on US history. But historic novels aren't history and while Renault's accuracy extends to broad facts and some minor details, these are woven into a larger fabric that is largely imagined, highly colored, and no more accurate than anyone else imaginings about characters, a place and a time wholly outside their experience. Compare The Persian Boy to The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald, and it is quickly obvious the degree of romantic fairy dust that has been sprinkled upon it.

I'm not sure how you define "romantic"; The Blue Flower is set during the apex of German Romanticism. Or why you imply that "romantic fairy dust" is something to wince at.

You still sound as if you're urging me to rip scales from my eyes about the verisimilitude of historical fiction that I never applied! And I think you underestimate to what degree a Gibbon or Dangerfield embellished historical narratives with irony and asides.

And Vidal's Lincolnis as truthful to the historical Lincoln as anything Eric Foner has written.

The idea that we can history /= fiction is rather pedantic...

omit "we can"

The Blue Flower is set during the apex of German Romanticism.

Surely you can appreciate the difference between an historical setting and an artistic style. The style in which The Blue Flower is written is not the German Romantic style.

You still sound as if you're urging me to rip scales from my eyes about the verisimilitude of historical fiction that I never applied!

Sorry. This was not and is not my intention. I didn't think I was talking about you, but about books and about how I perceive them, individually and generically. I am sorry that my statements have obviously promoted a misunderstanding between us.

The idea that history /= fiction is rather pedantic...

I think the imperatives of the historical fiction writer produce a rather different kind of fiction than those of the historian. Each has a purpose in its own sphere, but I don't think they are equivalent to one another simply because each contains a certain amount of questionable interpretation, omission, or bias. So, call it pedantry, but I don't think it is truthful to say history = fiction, if fiction is taken to mean historical novels.

Came to post that History is Blecch I don't know how Alfred made it through an American Junior High School or Intermediate School without reading The King Must Die.

Sorry. This was not and is not my intention. I didn't think I was talking about you, but about books and about how I perceive them, individually and generically. I am sorry that my statements have obviously promoted a misunderstanding between us.

It's all good!

I don't know how Alfred made it through an American Junior High School or Intermediate School without reading The King Must Die

I don't read Bernie Taupin lyrics!

just finished "riders in the chariot" by patrick white. i loved it, but i knew i would, as i love everything i read by him. definitely felt that it in many stages crossed the line between visionary and eccentric/mad after threatening to often in the novels that came before it. perhaps better to say that in the work the line doesn't really exist or is arbitrary. lots of very beautiful scenes that read more as set pieces.

picked up a copy of "today i wrote nothing" by daniil kharms. the microfiction is amazing, lots of absurdities and breaks of causality. the poetry is more hit and miss, lots of it feels like free association, reads like scribblings in a journal which makes sense as it is. i envision leaving this on my desk for a while so i can pick through the microfiction often.

/I don't know how Alfred made it through an American Junior High School or Intermediate School without reading The King Must Die/

I don't read Bernie Taupin lyrics!

Some of Kharms I really enjoyed, but I found a lot of it a bit, "I'm so crazy, I am, I really am, watch me put this, uh, here, this lobster... IN MY HAT!"

Now reading Dawn Powell, Angels on Toast.

^^ nice one

Am withdrawing my reservations about Le Guin's 'Malafrena', was completely absorbed in it by the end

dissolution, disaster & decay:

robert walser - jakob von gunten
alfred kubin - the other side
géza csáth - the magician's garden

What's the last like? Loved Csath's diary, have not been able to afford a collection of his fiction.