And The Snow Fell Softly On ILB: What Are You Reading Now Winter 2017/18

damn, mr. joyce, well done, sir

"And the snow fell softly on Lil B"

I'm reading The Demolished Man and Deep Learning With Python, but I'm excited about starting Birds, Beasts, and Relatives, which I picked up because it was mentioned in a movie I liked. I also want to read Wind, Sand, and Stars before my vacation is over, because I'm seeking the headspace I think it'll put me in

Pointed Firs is great!

Gerald Durrell's first stab at this sort of book, My Family and Other Animals was the most enjoyable for me, but Birds, Beasts, and Relatives is fine stuff, too, and I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

Aimless, you've read Country of the Pointed Firs, right? Is it good?

― dow, Sunday, December 24, 2017

I can answer: it's terrific. I read in grad school years ago.

All these endorsements (and now I recall Scott Seward really liked it too, after initially hesitating because of cute title)! Think I'll make it my next early (?) 20th Century mainstream etc. item on the bucket-list-go-round, even though I had almost decided on The Earl of Louisiana--real good too, right? Haven't read much Liebling.

My Family and Other Animals is quite a fest, yeah.

Ah, maybe I should get that one too and read it first.

Michon's Winter Mythologies are good so far. They're very short so you want to savour each one. They're also opaque in meaning, so you want to reflect on each one. The first three were commissioned by The Alliance Française of Ireland, and describe brief anecdotal or sacred moments in the early Irish engagement with Christianity. They're also attempts on the part of the people they describe to understand where Grace resides. Patrick, not yet saint, archbishop of Armagh, 'the founder', converts many of the tribal kings with simple 'conjuring tricks' and a well-rehearsed patter:

And perhaps because he is growing old, and his ardor and his malice are becoming blunted, Patrick regrets this facility as he walks along this road. He would like a real miracle to occur, just once, and for once in his lifetime, matter in all its opacity to be converted to Grace before his eyes.

These short texts mix the style of the fable - precise language in short sentences - and mystical texts, in that they stop short of complete meaning, leaving understand and meaning just out of reach. That seems appropriate to the matter of an early uncertain engagement with Christianity. These are not btw Christian apologetics or anything like them. Michon is cynical within the mysticism. His concern is with the *pagans*, and the uncertainty of the Christians, the He manages to 'cinvert' precise detail (I was going to say realism, but it's not that, not really) into intimations of Grace (to rephrase Patrick's desire).

I was reminded of the Kierkegaard line: Mysticism has not the patience to wait for God's revelation. It seems pertinent to each of the three stories, but they *are* patient and precise in their execution. Very good. Moving on to the Vendée stories now.

Oh and I loved this bit on reading. It's describing Saint Columba of Iona, 'who was still called Columbkill, Columbkill the Wolf':

... this wolf is also a monk in the manner of monks at that time, a manner that is inconceivable to our way of understanding. When he lays down his sword, he rides from monastery to monastery, where he reads: he reads standing up, tensed, moving his lips and frowning, in the violent manner of those times, which we cannot conceive of either. Columbkill the Wolf is a brutal reader.

'inconceivable to our way of understanding' is something that Michon somehow manages to convey throughout this stories. Some job. And that image of the brutal reader, I never would have thought of, but it immediately brought to mind marginal illustrations of monks standing reading at lecterns, and also brought to mind that passage in St Augustine describing Ambrose Bishop of Milan, the first person to read without moving their lips. A tense unnatural (paradoxically) engagement with reading, which when Michon describes it, reflects on the reader themselves, and ties them in a bond of difference.

mistake, this second set of stories in Winter Mythologies are set in the Causses not Brittany - that’s where the stories in Abbots are set.

all translated by Ann Jefferson, as described in the NYRB article, which prompted me to buy it in the first place:

There is, however, excellent news on the Michon translation front: an exceptional translator has, at last, appeared. Ann Jefferson, a former professor of French at Oxford, has delivered Michon’s two books of short stories, Mythologies d’hiver (1997) and Abbés (2002), in a single slim volume. I read Jefferson’s versions in something close to shock: they feel as Michon feels in French. There is the velocity, the precision, the music, the compression, the singularity, the power.

foucault lectures, schopenhauer, allen wood on kant, laszlo foldenyi on melancholy, karen armstrong's history of god, books on cognitive therapy, epictetus' discourses, seneca's letters

seneca is pretty cool

Now read the Nine Passages on the Causses by Pierre Michon, and even more impressed by these than the Three Miracles in Ireland. Nine anecdotal, elliptical stories which include matter about the nature of writing, the nature of transmission of belief and understanding.

The first is about a late 19th Century anthropologist who unearths an ossuary in a Causse.

The second is about an ex-bishop who has retired to a Causse as a hermit. He ventures out of his hermitage one day and feels full of energy and pride and life and then as he reflects is not sure whether this has been something which God or Satan has encouraged.

The third is a very simple vignette about a Merovingian episode where a 15-year-old girl, Éminie, daughter of King Clotaire of Paris, who, for pragmatic reasons, gets made Abbess of a distant abbey she will never visit. At the end the story says 'it is said she died of leprosy'.

The next, the fourth, is the story of monks many years later who decide to revive a ruined abbey, but are opposed by the local barons. One of the monks tells another to go and find a name, that will allow them to create a legal fiction in latin to justify their presence in the abbey. The other monk returns with the name of Eminia, as described in the previous story. Just a name in a ledger in a distant monastery, but they concoct a life about her, much as Michon fills these very peripheral barely detailed lives with his own fictions.

One of the monks sees a leper woman and decides to make Eminia a leper. Suddenly that phrase from the previous story 'she is said to have died from leprosy' recurs to you. Is the previous story true? Or has it been tainted by later interpretation? Just because a thing is said to have occurred early doesn't mean it is true. Later interpretation can provider the truth.

The fifth shows the full story of the Vita sancta Enimia (the life of Saint Enimia). This has elements of the first story and many embellishments such that it's not clear whether the person writing this has by god's grace seen a vision of Énimie's actual life, or whether the earlier story has taken on the aspects of later retellings of it. This feels like a profound enactment of how early modern history was created.

The sixth, again many years later, finds monks once again trying to preserve the legal ownership of the abbey. The bishop decides the Vita sancta Enimia into the vernacular Occitane, so that its story (its false story?) may be used as legal evidence for the local barons and as cultural evidence for the storytellers and jongleurs in the streets, creating a saintly myth.

This tale is full of sly allusions to the nature of writing, of doing what Michon himself is doing and what you as a reader are doing. About lies, translation, truth within lies (fiction) and original creation as a writer.

The seventh is about a warlord prince called Seguin. Much of Michon's stories are about the ambiguous qualities of violence.

The eighth, in 1793, is about a innate Republican, who is got drunk on wine by Monarchists and persuaded to march against the Republic.

The ninth is about the father of speleology, who has doubts, but takes a great pleasure in being a scribe of the wonders of the Underworld. He brings back up to the date of the first story.

Together they create a remarkable analysis of belief, knowledge and the transmission of the same, as well as a sly commentary on the sort of writing that Michon is doing. They're really great.

also sex and desire is an important part of the stories.

I finished At the Existentialist Cafe. It seems like no one talks about the existentialists that much any more, at least the French ones, so maybe it's a good time to think about them again. Interesting to think about how Beauvoir and Sartre became celebrities by simply trying to articulate and live a thoroughly atheist ethical ontology. Hard to think of anyone who makes philosophy sexy like that these days. Contemporary famous atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, etc.) seem light-weights by comparison.

I've read Much Ado About Nothing for the first time. Seen the Branagh film a couple of time, but never read the play. Claudio is an asshole. I've also re-read CA Bayly's The Birth of the Modern World for the first time since uni, which I should have done ages ago. A brilliant description of the 19th Century, wish I knew of more books as good as this on other periods. And I've finished the Quran. Which is really really repetitive, but some of the Surahs are very good.

Today Fresh Air replayed the September interview of John Le Carre, on Legacy of Spies and much else related. What a presence. Will download so can catch some more; as I start to absorb what he's saying, he's on to something else, not that he rattles on, there's just a lot to take in, although I'd heard or read some of it.
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/28/572625559/novelist-john-le-carr-reflects-on-his-own-legacy-of-spying

Atlantic Hotel by João Gilberto Noll, after __xyzzzz’s enticing review in the last thread.

spare, attenuated sentences, moving towards ultimate dissolution. the main character, an ex soap-opera star, lacks affect and agency, drifts around brazil on a cold winter wind, accompanied by paranoia, death, mutilation and sex.

^ aims for 2018

I'm reading The Demolished Man and Deep Learning With Python, but I'm excited about starting Birds, Beasts, and Relatives, which I picked up because it was mentioned in a movie I liked. I also want to read Wind, Sand, and Stars before my vacation is over, because I'm seeking the headspace I think it'll put me in

I begin to see the pattern.

drifts around brazil on a cold winter wind, accompanied by paranoia, death, mutilation and sex.

^ aims for 2018

Godspeed!

Keen, Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? No. Next question.

Chavchavadze, Museum of Matches

Sasha Chavchavadze is an artist living in Brooklyn and Cape Cod. She is the descendant of Georgian princes and a Russian grand duke. Her dad was in the CIA and also translated the memoirs of Stalin's daughter, who became a family friend. Chavchavadze's mom had an affair with JFK while he was in office, and Sasha got to ride on Air Force One as a little girl. Her Romanov grandmother had a romance with Nabokov in their student days in Cambridge. The weight of family history is like something out of Garcia Marquez.

Borges, The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory
Shirley, Turn up the Strobe

Recently started reading Vol. 3 of Knausgaard's My Struggle. It's been over a year since I finished Vol. 2 so I took a bit of a break. I wouldn't say it's exactly gripping so far. The "action" wanders a bit too much for that. But there are frequent moments of brilliance, when Knaugaard seems to open up a wormhole in the space-time continuum and channel directly into the mind of a young boy, enough to keep the reader's interest.

Rosamond Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets. It's wild and inventive, and the centre of consciousness is as captivating as Invitation to the Waltz, but it's not gripping me quite in the same way. Something to do with the sprawl of it, I think, and the more episodic 'and then this happened' nature of it - compared to Waltz's relative hermetically sealed narrative. Intrigued by the title as, again, compared to ITTW, there's remarkably little weather in the book. Which may well be the point.

Grand Hotel Abyss > The Existentialist Cafe

I'm almost done with In the Spirit of Jazz: The Otis Ferguson Reader, which I've enjoyed even more than The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson ... this is the only detailed contemporary criticism I've read of 20s and 30s jazz, and it has put many things in a slightly different perspective for me, especially the transition from sheet music and vaudeville to the phonograph, radio, and film as it affected regional scenes and players.

Interesting.

First became aware of Otis Ferguson as a film critic and then as a sort of hipster mentor to some famous literary critic, Alfred Kazin, I think

He was constantly quoted by Leslie Halliwell, iirc

That's nice, Fizzles! *looks at Lanchester thread* sorry you are reading crap now.

I am ending the year on a couple of memoirs. First up is Simone De Beauvoir's Force of Curcumstance (vol.3 of four), which starts as WWII ends - it ploughs through various intrigues, friendships and relationships and gives an account of the writing around The Second Sex. I started this in September, put it down, now a 1/3 in - reckon I'll finish although who knows when. Its a solid read whenever I pick it up. One of the things I find it amusing (to go back to o. nate's post around At the Existentialist Cafe) as a read on ppl who don't exactly matter to me. Malraux, Koestler, Leiris (whom I sorta want to read but don't think he will be good), Camus (who I think she calls on his bullshit, and is penetrating), Sartre too (can't quite work out how much leeway she is giving him, and how much she leaves out). Its very good on the anit-communist left (Beauvoir and Sartre could not exist within party structures), those old struggles that feel like coming back on the plate again in different forms. I am still thinking a lot of this through. In a similar vein I am finishing Franz Fuhmann's At The Burning Abyss: Experiencing the Georg Trakl Poem which is really good on its subject but also on his relation to it, as much as Nazism and Communism, which Fuhmann more than flirted with at various points - its never simply a confessional, both intellectual biography and crit are interwoven into each other in a way I haven't quite encountered before. I am really interested in reading Heiddeger's book on Holderlin (Fuhmann also draws on Holderlin, Rilke, Goethe and much else in German letters) at some point too - as someone who read and loved the same things as Fuhmann but did not apologise or turn back when those things got ugly.

Finally, Lazlo Krasznahorkai's War and War has those inflated sentences that anyone acuqinted with Germanic/Eastern Euro fiction would know well. Unfortunately I perceive a lack of control - an overabundance of description, taking 3-5 lines longer to say the thing just because you can, as flatly - whereas someone like Thomas Bernhard never feels this superfluous. Here its just not v cutting or funny, there isn't a lot to say and he's saying it, but I don't have to read it, so I stopped it 20 pages from the end.

xp Parts of Ferguson's music writing are startlingly modern, especially some of his record reviews and the behind-the-scenes pieces based on working as a volunteer roadie for the Goodman band. He's also pretty funny about his frenemy John Hammond.

Ferguson's reviews of the first two volumes of Mencken's autobiography made me want to give those a try. He does a nice job of explaining why he still worships Mencken (hardly the flavor of the month in 1940) in spite of their diametrically-opposed politics.

Is The Second Sex the best place to start with Simone de Beauvoir?

Haven't read it, only a few of her novels - none of which stayed with me. These memoirs are v good. I'll probably read The Second Sex one day.

I don't have to read it, so I stopped it 20 pages from the end.

^ demonstrates the correct spirit!

Just noticed that Otis Ferguson is one of the subjects of a potentially interesting recent book that I have yet to read, David Bordwell’s The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Studies

Been about 30 years (or more?), but I got caught up in Man's Fate, the Modern Library edition--was impressed by his back-and-forth between b-movie drive and seemingly astute backstory takes on economic pressures (street and Big Finance) times political infighting/grandstanding and other. B-movie aspects, in fact all of it, might seem pretty dated now, some did then. Pretty striking to read during China's 80s transitions. Also got into Koestler's Darkness At Noon.

Haven't read Sartre's fiction, but seem to recall that A. Alvarez wrote that his novels could be compulsive reading, thrillers.

Happy 2018 ILB.

Is The Second Sex the best place to start with Simone de Beauvoir?

Also haven't read, but the excerpts/breakdowns I've read feel to me like most of her insights in that book have been followed up on and absorbed by those that followed sufficiently to now register as kinda obvious. Read the first volume of her memoirs though and that was great.

Sartre's WW2 trilogy of novels is very good, thrillerish and surprisingly humourous.

Been meaning to chime in here: At the Existentialist Cafe is very good. Sorry to prestige-drop, but I'm a struggling visiting professor with a focus in that area. It's definitely now the first thing I'd recommend for anyone interested in existentialism (primarily Sartre).

As for Sartre: After the classics Nausea and No Exit, the other highlight I'd recommend is the short-story of "Childhood of a Leader" (blegh to the film). The trilogy of novels is alright, but the third one was definitely the most interesting for me to get a perspective on Sartre's relationship to Marxism.

With regard to Beauvoir, The Second Sex is probably the best place to start, but it's quite helpful to have some background in existentialist/Sartrean terminology for portions of it. She herself gets into that terminology in the Ethics of Ambiguity, but I'd recommend some sort of shortish secondary literature (perhaps Steven Crowell's piece on Sartre in The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism). But yeah, The Second Sex is a long read, and I'd recommend skimming large chunks of it because (as noted above) so much of it is obvious now.

Finally, if you're interested in fiction, I'd easily say that Beauvoir is more consistently good. I'm still meaning to finish the memoirs, but the fiction is generally way more reliable and engaging. Sartre had a way of depicting short scenarios, but Beauvoir is generally much better at character studies and engaging writing.

Also, I'm curious about why one would think "Grand Hotel Abyss > The Existentialist Cafe". Just read the first full chapter, and it seemed like some navel-gazing to me.

Thanks for the comments

Probably my favourite Sartre is The Wall. I quite like to see the BBC adaptation of the Roads to Freedom tetralogy. I missed the screening at the BFI a few years ago.

She Came to Stay impressed me when I was twenty; I forced myself to finish The Mandarins. The best Sartre is The Words, maybe "The Wall."

I've been dipping into the Frankfurt School in recent months, so I was probably better prepared to enjoy Grand Hotel Abyss. The author has a definite, snarky point of view, but at least until the final chapters he remains in the background. At the Existentialist Cafe almost lost me in the first chapter for the opposite reason -- I found the author's enthusiasm excessive and the overt autobiography off-putting. I'm glad I persisted because she soon eases up on the hard sell and uses her personal story in a more restrained and constructive way for the rest of the book.

Both do a reasonably good job of delivering what I wanted, which was an overview of the relevant biographies and texts with some historical context and continuity. Both could have been longer. ATEC is better on biography, though it seems a little soft on Sartre's flirtations with Stalinism and is too dismissive of Camus. GHA is better on theory (or maybe those theories are just more interesting to me these days).

the anatomy of melancholy

is too dismissive of Camus

This is true. Book sides with Sartre and Beauvoir pretty explicitly throughout, but tbf few would do that nowadays so it's interesting.

Starting the year off with Dumas's The Three Musketeers. I'm gonna try to read heavily in French this year, and this is an easy and fun start.

I finished Moontrap. It was the weakest of the three Don Berry novels I read in 2017, but still good. Much of it was set within ten miles of my house. Now I am reading A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr and I like it very much so far.

hotel - joanna walsh.

i’ve been meaning to read vertigo by her for a while. a conversation about john lanchester’s characteristic uninterest in his description of a hotel room led to a friend recommending this.

good recommendation. i spend some time each year in hotels for one thing, and a book like this helps educate and tune your eye and experience.

i guess it is, as the series it belongs to categorises it, an “object study”, but it’s interleaved with her recovery from a break-up.

more and more i like this adjacent placing of emotional and abstract spaces.

i’m not sure abstract is the right word. i think i mean “abstract or material” (but with the implication that they are usually denuded of emotional content.

also on hotels, got up this morning and read some rosemary tonks, lent to me by someone who i very much love, but who for a number of reasons i can't be with, but who said this poem reminded her of us, and yes it does, exactly so, and so absolutely kills me. also selected by Philip Larkin for his Faber Book of 20th Century Poetry for those of you more prosaic or squeamish - it's a very Larkin poem. She's ace, tho obv i am partial:

Story of a Hotel Room

Thinking we were safe – insanity!
We went in to make love. All the same
Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom.
Then in the gloom....
... And who does not know that pair of shutters
With the awkward hook on them
All screeching whispers? Very well then, in the gloom
We set about acquiring one another
Urgently! But on a temporary basis
Only as guests – just as guests of one another's senses.

But idiots to feel so safe you hold back nothing
Because the bed of cold, electric linen
Happens to be illicit...
To make love as well as that is ruinous.
Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us
That without permanent intentions
You have absolutely no protection
– If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,
The concurring deep love of the heart
Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.

She disappeared after a series of mental, physical and spiritual traumas. She went after healing of various sorts, including various eastern religions, and acquired an incredible and incredibly valuable set of Asian religious sculptures, mainly on trust from people she knew.

after feeling she was haunted and cursed she smashed and burned them all. later to be found handing out bibles on speaker's corner. died 2014. early in life she had been very chic (and beautiful if the photos are to go by) and mixed in v artistic circles, although already she had been scarred by illness. after her various breakdowns, she was so crippled by fear of other people she often refused to talk to them, handing them notes instead.

however, just before she died, she felt the need for human company again, and was well known and liked in her local hotel in Eastbourne, and even started getting to know other Christians in tea shops and talked about perhaps attending some off their services.

Wow. Knew nothing of Tonks, and must now find more.

That is a weird sentence.

I finished A Month in the Country. It's a sweet little book, the sort of writing that is drawn from a deep well of memory, feeling and understanding that resides beneath the level of conscious thought. The emblematic elements are never crude, never forced into place, never schematic. They speak simply, quietly and lovingly.

I shudder to think of students being forced to write essays about this book for pedagogical purposes. Everything excellent about it happens in the spaces between the sentences, and the very young would have too little to bring into those spaces.

her mother’s maiden name was Verdi tho it’s unclear whether she was Giuseppe Verdi’s granddaughter as Rosemary liked to believe.

her father died before she was born. His first name was Desmond and it was in his memory that she was christened Rosemary Desmond Boswell Tonks.

She used the name Desmond Tonks for some of her novels. (haven’t read any)

(Tonks as in son - i think - of Henry Tonks at the Slade, attacked by Wyndham Lewis in BLAST!)

im reading this collected.

xpost to JM.

Excellent: thank you.

As I understand it Tonks disowned all of her prose work and refused permission to republish it. Consequently any prose work is now hard to find and expensive.

Thanks for your great post Fizzles, I'm def intrigued. The Bloodaxe book looks great.

Finished The Crucible of War, which was an interesting look at a period of history that I haven't read much about since high school. Looking for something a bit lighter now, so I think I'll try Alan Furst's Night Soldiers, which has been lying around the house since my wife bought it, and since I've read some positive things about him on the board.

We went through that song, full of travelling and goodbye. An American man leaving his woman. He keeps thinking of her as he passes through the towns one by one, verse by verse, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Oklahoma, driving down a long road, the way my mother never could. If only we could leave things behind like that---I guess that's what my mother would have thought. If only sadness could be like that.

I hate when novelists do this

"that song"

All night long
We would sing that stupid song

"that song" in reference to a title he had just mentioned, had mentioned several times.
I like the way his narrators never tell me too much. Why, for instance, after the security guard flips the lights on in the hotel ballroom about 3 a.m. to see what the ruckus is, does the LAPD cop not more extensively question the man and woman standing on stage? They tell him they've been looking for munchies, and he does wonder aloud why room service isn't good enough for them, judging by his own experience---he's a guest too; maybe he's off duty and on vacation, just wearing a suit and carrying his badge when the guard calls, but wanting to get back to his plush room (how can a cop afford this ritzy place?) The lady he's interviewing is wearing a very fine bathrobe, the fact that she and the gentleman are wearing bandages that cover their whole heads, except for mouths and eyes, evidently working in there somewhere, are further indications of status, which he may take into account (LAPD prob knows about the context). Better to back off, for now anyway.
And maybe the guy who sees them on another night, and comes up with his own tentative explanation in the form of a question, also knows when to go about his business, in this town of endless business permutations. The co-stars of "Nocturne" mean to stay on point too, but they just have to take the scenic route, especially when they get to the "go back to cover our tracks" fallacy (not so far from "spend money to make money," a given here). But there's much more to it---not too much, just typically spare and graceful and energetically generating textured details all along, for the right number of pages, although I hope the last story won't go to a downtempo ending, as usual----its titled "Cellists," so not expecting fireworks finale.

Finished A Room With A View. It does indeed feature a stronger positive female character than anything in Forster so far; it's also interesting that the book is actually quite affectionate towards the deadly Suburbs that Forster so despised in his previous two novels (all three written more or less at the same time, to be sure); Cecil, with his disdain for the family and high aspirations towards Art, is almost a dark version of Ansel from The Longest Journey. I repped for that book so long that now it's creaking a bit under the weight - and the breezy feeling of A Room With A View feels superior, which I guess lands me back into conventional wisdom. Howards End and A Passage To India should arrive at my local bookshop Monday. My first new purchases - I'd not read Room With A View before but had it laying around for years.

I just read the Life of Alfred the Great by the contemporary monk named Asser. It was hardly scintillating narrative prose, really very flat, barren even, but it has the virtue of brevity and does throw some light on a very unfamiliar period of English history, when the Vikings were about as powerful as the Saxons and ruled a good swath of now-English territory. I read a translation by Simon Keynes that was in a larger Penguin Classics volume about Alfred.

It's hard to commission this shit when you're still alive, and I worried about kids reading it.

Tore through a handful of books the last couple of weeks: lidia yuknavitch the book of Joan, Jennifer Egan look at me, chris petit the butchers of Berlin, trey ellis platitudes - all diverting and interesting and I might work up something half intelligent to say about some of them at some point but not today (I will say that platitudes has some of the funniest bits I've read in awhile); and now I'm on page 8 of correction and I feel like I'm wading through tar

So "Cellists," the last story in xpost Nocturnes, turns out to be a strong finish. Continuing the recombinant flow, we go back to the opening "Crooner"'s setting, the Venetian Piazza San Marco, with the hopeful cafe managers and tourists and pigeons and musos. "The big Czech guy with the alto sax," mentioned by the "Crooner" guitarist-narrator, tells this one, and an American lady appears, with a secret, a talent, a calling, none of them quite the same, keep thinking she's also from a story by Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield, even, vibe-wise, Jane Bowen---but mainly she's another driving, veering, purposeful, impulsive, compulsive, improvising self-projecting muse-agents in the winter of discontent, racing the clock or feeling it, at least, one of the ones in all these stories (one's in two).
Good stuff. Could be quite different from the novels in some ways, at least judging by descriptions in the endpages of this Vintage International trade pb: grafs re An Artist of the Floating World, Never Let Me Go, A Pale View of Hills,The Remains of the Day, The Unconsoled, and When We Were Orphans.

Jane Bowles, not Bowen, of course! Sorry, Jane!

Just to confuse things further - there's an English photographer named Jane Bown. Here's a picture Bown took of Bowen:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/15/elizabeth-bowen-author-fiction

After dipping into James Baldwin's essays on Sunday night, last night I switched over to start one of his novels, Another Country, Lord Alfred's relative estimations of Baldwin as a great essayist and mediocre novelist notwithstanding.

Ooof. That's harsh - Another Country may not cohere, precisely, but goddamn the constituent parts are extraordinary.

Gillian Rose - Love's Work. Reflections on death, medicine (western or otherwise), love, relationships and philosophy as the author approaches the end game in her battle with cancer. I loved the last 10 pages (they were a strange experience - how is she going to end this? It felt like the middle of the book), in the manner which she turned the density of philosophical reflection into an 'ending' that was one and yet didn't feel like one - of life and learning, with the willingness to learn and live and love - and to the last second. You are sure it carried on until the last breath, beyond the last page of the book in which you are holding.

Now more love - onto The Letters of Abelard and Heloise

You'll find the letters are rather more chaste and philosophical than ardent. The infamous consequence of their relationship for Peter Abelard doesn't get much play in the letters. Or at least, it used to be infamous. Lots of these old iconic stories are getting buried under the onslaught of contemporary media.

I know about it cos it was in The Sopranos :)

the sexy version is rousseau's julie

Eudora Welty: The Ponder Heart -- objectively this is pretty good, but not sure that my own tolerance for the endless blather of a folksy racist hasn't been exceeded by p35

I felt the same way - I pressed on and was pleased I did but I haven’t gone back to Welty.

Haven't read the novels or novellas, but much enjoyed what I've read in The Collected Stories(1982 edition); reliable sources have encouraged me to read One Writer's Beginnings and On Writing, also
collection of correspondence w William Maxwell, ditto Kenneth Millar AKA Ross MacDonald (reliables have also endorsed the longer fiction, but I may not get to any that, or any more of hers). Oh and I liked a collection of her photography and an exhibition of same, with some pix not in the book, but related to stories, views of the Natchez Trace etc.

Her short stories and photos are definitely great. I think I just have an allergy to the sort of Southern whimsy 'Ponder Heart' is strong in.

I love this photo she took of Katherine Anne Porter, who i also read some of and loved recently

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/18/1c/1b/181c1b769f2ccd3beaf658448bea8660.jpg

Wow. Reminds me: where should I start with her writing?

'Pale Horse, Pale Rider' is a set of 3 novellas you can't go wrong with. The last one is set during the outbreak of the 1918 'Spanish' flu.

New thread: 2018 Springtime For ILB: My Huggles. What Are You Reading Now?