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

That is, although I'm certainly no expert, his comments on films, actors, cinematographers, directors, producers, studios etc. that I am somewhat familiar with often seem astute (passing put-downs of other authors, not so much). Comments on the audience/public ehhh to some extent, though I'm no expert there either (put-off by some of the deprecation of women's magazines, women's fare, although that's part of his theme about fucked-withedness, and points about accepting your lot, standing by your man etc. well-taken as far as he takes them, aside from some notes of condescension). He's strong on what all the (All-) American audience "should" properly or possibly ask of the Movie Negro.
Doesn't say that Noel Coward's problem is that he's gay, exactly, but once removed from tropes of normalcy as what-we're-fighting-for in his patriotic war movie; thus NC's view of said tropes-traits are distanced enough for some perspective, good observation of detail, but not the depth of experience---though most other moviemakers/contributors also fall short of conveying/making something coherent and otherwise brave and strong of depth, and anyway Coward's a good actor, despite his handicap (shared in some sense by a lot of other British; Americans aren't the only ones with problematic cultural conditioning).
(Why aren't you in uniform, James? He'll probably indicate something about it at some point.)

He's strong on what all the (All-) American audience "should" properly or possibly ask of the Movie Negro. James has a zingfest here.

And astuteness aside, he's fun to read, if sometimes exhausting (can hear him hammering the manual keys all all day and night, between shows).

Perhaps my favourite-ever film review, by James Agee: pic.twitter.com/tF2Q9AEJuP

— Caustic Cover Critic (@Unwise_Trousers) September 18, 2017

Sorry for posting own tweet, but could not get image to link on this ipad

thanks for the takes on Agee, dow - made me really curious to check that anthology out

fwiw I do think Coward often suffers from an attachment to various normativities - the end of Brief Encounter is understandable, considering the mores of its time, and reminds me of how all those gangster movies from the 30's had to end with the hero's death for moral reasons despite them clearly wanting us to root for the bad guy, but I watched a staging of Relative Values a few years ago, and for all of its supposed satire of snobbishness at the end the artistos are with the artistos and the new money is with the new money and that, it seems, is as it should be.

Less than a hundred pages of Proust left. I may be finished today.

Don't count on it. The last volume is so good though, don't you think? One of the most satisfying, as it certainly should be, after all that.
Oh speaking of xpost Josephine Tey, Daugther of Time is the one people always rec. to me for starters, but also today in the WSJ read a microrave for Miss Pym Disposes, set in a girls school, the title character getting pulled into a complicated garden, esp. re the studious, decorous Miss Innes, with her "Borgia-like face": "Tey's dignified passion for Innes is a strange flame that lights this strangely magical novel," strange strange yeah I'll probably check it out (reviewer is Laura Thompson, whose Agatha Christie bio got some good reviews; despite familiar themes, even got Washington Post reviewer comparing Christie to Ferrante??). Also intrigued by her take on Margery Allingham's The Fashion In Shrouds, which apparently is more deep female chess; my simple male mind will just have to go it (Conclusion: "The book is an elliptical fantasy, yet it has the gift of making one care.")

Sorry for posting own tweet Not at all, didn't know about your account! Good stuff thx

xpost yeah I thought he was pretty fair to Coward. Does low-rate Greene, Waugh, several other British writers, in drive-by swipes, while committing to more space for evaluating Coward.

The last volume is so good though, don't you think? One of the most satisfying, as it certainly should be, after all that.

Yeah, marvellous, though they're all amazing and I'm not sure how I'd rank them. I was in the mood to read something on WWI as well, so this coincided nicely. I love the image of this unlit Paris where bombing raids are actually a relief to the brothel patrons because it means there won't be a police raid for at least a few hours, and where's there's a convenient excuse for bumping up against strangers in the dark.

you should probably go out and get a steak or something after that

thinking about reading THE POWER BROKER

Finally read My Brilliant Friend and grumpily realised it was so good I'd have to read the rest. Now I'm rereading Harry Thompson's fun old Herge biography.

thinking about reading THE POWER BROKER

it badly needs a good ebook so i don't break my back lugging the thing around

^^^

Well done on finishing the Burton (if you have :))

oh, i'm a loooong way from being done with the anatomy. the copy i have is not very reader friendly so have been taking frequent breaks to read some lighter fare. currently onto a third tey which is(xposts) miss pym disposes!

always feel burton is not v linear and more of a branching, delving book anyway. frequent breaks is good.

as noted elsewhere, did two liu cixin - The Three Body Problem is just... very enjoyable, full of concepts and fun-serious *thinking* about society. thomp landed some fairly heavy blows on it in the SF thread, but i think it comes through. The Dark Forest (the sequel) is bloody heavy going and is about the logistics of preparing for a centuries-hence alien invasion, but about halfway through I started enjoying that too, even tho its main narrative force is just *waiting*, and a very amusing and ott told you so at the end.

after that picked up the knowledge we have lost in information: the history of information in modern economics by philip mirowksi and edward nik-khah, which i laid into on the academic writing is often purposeful obfuscated thread, and deservedly, I think, but I've started really getting into *this* as well ffs. The excessive, shit-academic prose, conceptually laying into rational-agent and information-hooked economic theory is suspect, fun, and a good space to be in directly after the liu cixin. the writing really is abysmal at times tho.

idk maybe my taste buds are just fucked.

Reading Robinson by Muriel Spark, her second novel, and seemingly one of her more obscure ones (or maybe I just don't see it as often as second-hand copies of Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). It's a stranded-on-a-desert-island story - curiously reminiscent of The Invention of Morel in some ways! - and so far as funny and clever as all her early books.

I read “Mothers” by Chris Power, recently published
Short stories, and it’s really bloody good. I don’t know what to tell you about it really apart from I loved it.

I finished Another Country, James Baldwin. It had its moments, but I can't say I thought it was particularly illuminating or enjoyable. The characters seemed like lost souls, but once the reader gathers this much, neither they nor the author had much to add to that. Perhaps coincidentally, the amount of booze and cigarettes consumed in this book was staggering. It was ongoing on nearly every page of this 400 page novel. Yet, the author and his characters don't seem to find this remarkable.

Onward to Stefan Zweig's Journey Into the Past!

Getting republished in November, so I know what we'll all be reading then: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZ-ikpuU0AA8A8E.jpg

I finished Night Soldiers by Alan Furst. It was a fun ready, just what I was looking for. Nominally a spy novel, but maybe more of an historical adventure story, as the main character wanders through various colorful episodes of European mid-20th century military conflagration. Furst has done his homework and you can pretty easily imagine yourself in the scenes he draws. His relish at telling a good yarn is also infectious, if some of the plots seem a bit recycled at times.

Next up is Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford.

Furst is wonderful.

As xposted to the cute octopus thread, I'm reading the very very very excellent OTHER MINDS by Peter Godfrey-Smith, about cephalopod intelligence/consciousness

Journey Into the Past was very short and a bit overwrought, even for Zweig, but he is (as ever) extremely astute about the psychology of people in stressful situations.

Last night I dipped a toe into the waters of Chateubriand's Memoirs From Beyond the Grave in the new NYRB edition. I'm not entirely sure if I will stick with it atm. I may skip sideways into something else. What will suit my mood is not easy to guess right now. Some family turmoil on the horizon, but nothing ott.

I read 1977, the second of David Peace's Red Riding quartet. It's almost laughably bleak and brutal - to the point that it stops being human at all, and becomes a horrific dreamstate. I keep returning to aspects of it, like finding bits of sick in one's teeth days after a hangover has passed.

Also re-read the first part of Richard Holmes' Coleridge biography, in preparation for a solo walk across the Quantocks. He's so clearly in love with his subject that critical distance is largely absent, but it does make for a totally immersive experience. It also led me to listen to the Burton reading of the Rime, which is just magnificent (and on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/3omLIUBA47D2ISP3yGE0XN?si=G0JFkBm5St6XptWtgwZ4NA).

like finding bits of sick in one's teeth

up one's nose ime, but yes good analogy. i keep meaning to read him, but everything says that i will need cleansing salts and muscular christianity exercises ready when I do.

Yeah, i read the first one and it was so over the top i couldn't take it seriously enough to go on with book two

You can see he's taken inspiration from Elroy and - particularly - Derek Raymond, but there's no letup, none of the fallow spaces to breathe. It's clearly a strategy, but it's exhausting, and aye, occasionally laughable in its relentless extremity.

I've read some of the later stuff and there's more control, more variety in the field of vision. GB84 has the same grimness, but its scope is wider. It's a brilliant book.

reading Icehenge by Kim Stanley Robinson. from 1984. it has Russians. it has carbonaceous chondrites.

(i actually started to read fred pohl's first solo novel Slave Ship but i couldn't do it. i was kinda forcing myself to read it. which didn't seem like a fun thing to do at all.)

Platonov - The Return. Some of the sentences are all-time, so it was never a question enjoying one of my favourite writers again. The title is great but it can also apply to most of the stories as many are about varieties of return - and whether the loss can be overcome, whether people that are away can reconnect.

Burton reading of the Rime unavailable in US, apparently :(

I'm reading The Glass Castle and some Arthur C. Clarke short stories.

I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and it left me scientifically unfulfilled so I've moved on to The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

Rather than dive into Chateaubriand, I've made a sideways juke into Geoffroy de Villehardouin's chronicle of the Fourth Crusade, which never got around to fighting any infidel Saracens, but did briefly conquer Christian Constantinople and controlled the shrunken rump of the Byzantine Empire for a few years. It is a surprisingly factual and even-handed history for its period.

Flann O'Brien - Myles Away from Dublin*
Philip K Dick - We Can Remember it for You Wholesale

The O'Brien is another nice bunch of reprints of his newspapers columns. 100 pages in and I felt like I wasn't going to get much out of it so I left it. Nice enough.

Its been years since I read any PKD, and I never read his short stories before. I am really loving these. The title story became Total Recall. So far the compressed nature of the format means its a more dizzying experience than the novels.

Still on Howards End, but also started Pride & Prejudice because me and my gf have decided to analyse books together (I got her to read Our Man In Havana).

HAve moved on to different intelligent animals after the octopi: Esther Woolfson's 'Corvus', about living with a rook, magpie, etc. Lovely.

Also read a George RR Martin novella (never having tackled his Fire and Ice and Thrones books), and it was balls.

Will Carruthers Playing Bass With 3 Left Hands which is quite good.

Finishing up Detroit 67 by Stuart Cosgrove which I've enjoyed. Enough to make me want to read his Memphis 68.

mainlining Caro

mainlining Caro

Healthier than mainlining Karo!

James Morrison, what partic Geo RR Martin novella was balls? Only non GOT things I've read by him, long time ago, was the novel Fevre Dream, which as far as i can remember was gd pulpy fun - riverboat gambling vampires, basically - but not much more than that.

That's my memory of Fevre Dream, too. This was Nightflyers, which was over-the-top psycho-killer-in-space stuff with loads of sex described with what was obviously MEANT to be worldly off-handedness, but which came across instead as the ineptly transcribed wet dreams of a teenaged virgin.

SOON TO BE A MAJOR TV SERIES, i believe.

I've started to re-read an autobiography my mother wrote about 25 years ago. It would not interest anyone outside my immediate family, but it's pretty interesting just because she wrote well enough that I can hear her voice in the writing. And although most of the stories are not completely new to me, many of them are not ones she told repeatedly, so I'd forgotten them.

Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization
Jo Walton, Among Others

Paul Celan - Complete Prose. Its only about 60 pages of a poet's prose. The above reads still go on but its the World Cup's fault!

I finished The Violent Bear it Away. I'm kind of bummed that I've already read both of O'Connor's novels and probably half of her published stories. I really enjoy her milieu of doomed hard-luck cases, drunk on fire and brimstone, adrift in a world of grifters, bums and - perhaps worst of all - concerned liberals.

I finished the Keegan book. It was an odd mixture of extremely high level strategic matters and descriptions of four particular sea battles, which included extremely low level details to the point of tedium. He is terrible at describing action so that it comes alive to the imagination, at least he was in this book (1988). Maybe he improved later on.

Not sure what direction I will go next.

I've started reading James Salter's Light Years. I guess he's one of the now-mildly-tarnished generation of 20th-century literary phallocrats, alongside Roth, Updike, Bellow etc. I'm only a few chapters in and the main character's already boinking his secretary. I'm not sure he's the one to interrogate his own privilege, but his writing has a lightness of touch and luminosity that are unusual.

Lucy R. Leppard - Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972

Salter's good. I liked his rock climbing novel too. No secretaries on the mountain.

xp Lippard, damn autocorrect

I'm reading Barbara Pym's Excellent Women for the first time.

Light Years told me some stuff about middle age that turned out to be right, the changing perspectives etc., but not the usual autumn leaves stuff. You'll see. Some of the obsessive sentence-writing took a lot of getting used to; was really intrigued by subsequent reading of his debut, The Hunters, based on his experience as Korean War pilot, the daily rounds, the tautness and bits of lyricism coming out only when absolutely necessary. Became required reading in some sectors of the Air Force. But think he revised it a bit? Would not want it to be more like Light Years, effective as that was, at best. There's a .pdf, but haven't checked it against my memory (the one I read is no longer in the library). A Sport and a Pastime is generally considered the peak of his lapidary (main) phase, I take it. There'a a long New Yorker piece about him, posted a few years before he died.

Haven't read Excellent Women yet, but Pym's The Sweet Dove Died told me some scary shit about middle age! Not all of it has turned out to be true so far, but

All of Salter I found great, except for his last novel, which was a bit tedious and unoriginal. But Hunters, Light Years, Solo Faces, A Sport... All excellent.

Xp yes, Pym is wnderful, though sometimes I just want to yell WHO CARES WHAT THE VICAR IS DOING???

^ a commendable and sensible impulse, especially if one will not unduly startle bystanders through its indulgence.

I always care what vicars are doing! Wodehouse taught me that.

Wodehouse vicars are almost always doing something mild-mannered and ineffectual.

If you don’t keep an eye on your vicar they might cut some crucial pages from their sermon the weekend of the big handicap.

Are you guys referring to The Great Sermon Handicap?

Oh wait sorry. Didn’t read previous post closely enough

Maybe I shouldn’t go there, but I thought Salter got more of a pass than those other guys and wasn’t nearly as tarnished

Maybe just because he wasn't as widely read.

Here's a nice Jhumpa Lahiri tribute to "Light Years" that I just found: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/06/26/spellbound-2/

Maybe I shouldn’t go there, but I thought Salter got more of a pass than those other guys and wasn’t nearly as tarnished

― Uncle Redd in the Zingtime (James Redd and the Blecchs),

Maybe because Salter kept his nose to the ground, concentrating on the failings of his male character instead of using it as a metaphor.

(that's how I remember Light Years)

I'm not sure those other guys deserve all the trouble they get either.

Yeah, not as widely read and not as self-regarding.

I read Patrimony by Philip Roth a few weeks ago, my first Roth book (thanks to Alfred for putting the idea in my head that this should be the first one I checked out). Roth in autobiographical mode, with his father as subject, sounded more inviting to me than any of the novels. I found it moving and, in places, startlingly intimate. The ending made me cry of course. I've lost a parent to cancer, so a lot of it resonated with that experience. Herman Roth is so much like one of my grandfathers that I wound up thinking just as much about what it was like losing him.

xp Evelina is hysterically funny and sharp, and pretty rough. There's real violence, sexual harassment, ogling men around every corner.

Yeah, there are a couple of scenes where she's alone, and drunken men in packs are coming up at her, and the menace is really well captured. For a comic novel it is amazingly good on the feeling of being powerless.

After a week of bloody naval warfare, for my next book I chose something where the battles are more sedate: Barchester Towers, A. Trollope, wherein High Church and Low Church clerics politely vie for social supremacy, unsheathing their well-manicured claws at one another, while the reader is invited to look on in fascinated amusement.

Cesare Pavese: The Beautiful Summer -- wonderful book, lovely cover, but Penguin also fail to give the translator's name and seem to have printed the actual pages on crappy old newsprint and then charged 8 quid for it

HALT! Are you aware that a summer reading thread has begun at 2018 Summer: A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine, and What Are You Reading?, and if not, why not?