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

Was wondering about that translation

It’s blurbed on the back by no lesser a personage than the former Archbishop of Canterbury. I also really liked it. It’s bloody, funny, suitably familiar and unfamiliar at once. I saw it at the bookstore today next to another brand new translation and I thought “sorry buddy, you’re late”

Oh yeah, Rowan Williams, also a poet. I keep coming across that one he wrote called “Simone Weil at Ashford.”

"Hons and Rebels" was quite enjoyable - an amusing tongue-in-cheek inside glimpse at an eccentric (but aren't they all) English upper crust family and country manor childhood circa 1920s, then an eventful tale of youthful rebellion, first love and bohemian glamour on a shoe-string budget. The roguish and carefree Esmond steals the show in the book's second act (rather by design), and not knowing the ending in advance, I found the final pages almost unbearably poignant.

Was wondering about that translation

I have the T.E.Lawrence translation lying around waiting to be read. I enjoyed 7 Pillars of Wisdom so should give it a better shot. Just always seem to be reading something else.

Also just started reading the Coke Machine a history of Coca Cola from a not very sympathetic perspective.

"I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts" by Mark Dery

Started reading "The Man Who Watched Trains Go By" by Simenon (my first by him).

Fizzles do you have more points of comparison for the Odyssey than I do? Bc I had only my vague memories of whatever I read in high school and I’d love to hear more.

I seem to have committed to reading Alan Watts, Nature, Man and Woman.

I'm only about a quarter of the way in. He rambles a bit, but some of his points on difficult matters of religion and psychology are exceedingly well and clearly presented, in ways that few other writers I've read are capable of. He has a knack of illustrative imagery, fresh metaphor, and drawing verbal distinctions using le mot jus. It makes up for some weaknesses of repeating himself and losing the thread at times.

I read Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13. I was quite surprised by how much I liked it and despite the oblique approach to character, its accumulative emotional impact. It reminded me of Tom Drury in its use of place as narrator and its evocation of the wheel of the years.

Read "Mothers" by Chris Power, a very fine collection of short stories. Not sure I can tease out any particularly distinguishing features but the whole affair seemed made up of very high-quality writing, and I say that as someone who loves a stupid gimmick.

Read "Pure Hollywood" by Christine Schutt, there's something very weird about how Schutt phrases things, something unsettling that I didn't manage to put my finger on (I wondered whether it was that some established syntax was messed about with* but I haven't gone back to look for examples because you don't even care. And ultimately I'm not sure I do because although I enjoyed the strange-feeling texture, none of the stories really got to me.

Read "Hotel Silence" by Audur Ava Olafsdottir, apologies for my failure to deploy the appropriate diacritics, which I enjoyed very much but did not love. A very diverting few hours though.

Now I'm reading "The Antichrist" by Joseph Roth.

*(it's not that she uses the phrase, but the slightly uncanny feeling you get if someone said "green big car" instead of "big green car" - it's not a thing a native English speaker would do, but most (myself included) couldn't tell you why; the feeling of something being off but it not being clear quite what.)

Just got 'Mothers' yesterday, it looked really good.

> green big car

there was a thing a couple of years ago about how there are rules for this... googles:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/sentence-order-adjectives-rule-elements-of-eloquence-dictionary

Yeah I remember the article but there is no way in the world I'd be able to remember (in the abstract) the order things should come in. The point I was making was the off-ness rather than that as a specific technique.

Malcolm Bowie's Proust Among the Stars, probably one of the best and richest lit-crit books I've ever read. I want to devote a lot of time to studying Proust in the future, and suspect I'll be coming back to this book again.

I haven't quite finished Nature, Man & Woman, but I'm close to it. It's much more polemical than the other books I've read by Alan Watts.

It was published in the late 50s. After watching the bad run of the 1930s with Depression + Fascism, the 1940s with WWII, Hiroshima and the start of the Cold War, and the 1950s with the emergence of the era of impending nuclear annihilation, people were pretty shook. There was a spate of books by theologians and by social and religious philosophers trying to diagnose what ailed western civilization. This book fits that trend. Watts takes the side of those whose favorite whipping boy for What's Wrong With Us was christianity.

True to the form of such polemical books, Watts draws a very large number of generalizations about How Westerners Think and Act, and then makes sweeping and absolute statements about How Wrong That Is. Sometimes he hits his target and sometimes not, but he writes as if all his arguments are conclusive, because that is what polemicists do.

He especially goes wide of the mark when he reaches the last part of the book, which psychoanalyzes the sexuality of western societies, a task for which he was no better informed than the average philosopher or theologian, meaning not very informed. He dabbles around in one corner of human sexuality and presumes he is adequately covering the territory.

Conclusion: if you like Alan Watts as an author and thinker, this book should not be near the top of your list of his works to read. It's extremely uneven. He did it better elsewhere.

Malcolm Bowie's book is so good, its one of those where if you don't read the thing its looking at well then at least read this richly detailed study of it.

Roberto Bolano - The Insufferable Gaucho.

The Insufferable Gaucho! Camping tonight in the endless plains of Society, awaiting suitable attentions, while taking it allll in. I'm sure I'll be re-reading the whole thing at some point, now that I know what to expect (many hills all round).

Haven't read it, but that's my vision of B.'s title.

I just finished it. Its a bunch of short stories although the last piece is a nice commentary on Latin American lit and politics (Funnily enough a lot of the people mentioned have now been translated into English.)

Oh, I thought you meant it was another study of Proust, I'm crosseyed projecting somehow (will see the Narrator as Gaucho from now on).

Just read Margaret Killjoy’s brief The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, a weird anarchist/punk/queer fantasy story. Read if you like those things.

"The Antichrist" (Joseph Roth, as mentioned above) is a very strange book indeed. It comes off as the middle point between Pilgrim's Progress and the doomiest of Frankfurt School social criticism, written in the context of the gathering horror of 1934. The narrating character travels the world and notes how "the antichrist" (which is not a person or a character but I suppose some mixture of irreligiousness and some tendency for all human activity to turn rotten and corrupt) infects and ruins everything. The righteous and unrighteous, communist and capitalist are exposed as corrupted and compromised.

Also peculiar is "A Compass Error" by Sybille Bedford, which is a sequel to " A Favourite of the Gods" - I liked the latter very much. "A Compass Error" spends at least a third of its length more-or-less reporting the plot of the previous novel, which is a strange choice, and I didn't think it shed much new light on the story as it was being told from the perspective of the grand-daughter. After all that catching up is done, just at the point when I was about to write it off as no good at all, the book manages to evoke a horrified sinking feeling better than any other book I can think of just now.

I love "The Antchrist" and yes its perhaps Joseph Roth's strangest book. Almost everything he wrote were tales well told and/or historical novels with a journalistic eye. Interesting you mention Frankfurth school in relation to it.

Some poetry at the moment:

Anne Carson - Glass and God
Szilard Borbely - Berlin-Hamlet

Anadolu Psych by Doug Spicer.
Book long expansion from his Wire Turkish psych primer.
Got it yesterday and so far only read the first chapter but seems interesting.

The Coke Machine Michael Blanding
History of the soft drink giant. Not very sympathetic and highlights ethical issues etc.

Kill Em and Leave James McBride
black author retraces steps of James Brown's history. I've got as far as the blind ex- Famous Flame but good book.

stop reading books everyone, i need to bloody catch up.

silby, just seen your q upthread on the odyssey. my experience is in order, latent cultural awareness, a reasonably adult version i can’t remember the name of, ulysseeeeees cartoon, then late teens/university: chapman, pope, some loeb and other dipping. joyce obv.

basically i’m not at all qualified to judge it as a translation. however two things make it stand out.

1) the reduced per line syllable count, and the overall constraints of an equal number of lines to the greek, which i think gives it a spareness. at least i identified the spareness and lucidity (image or utterance uncluttered by verbiage) and the colin burrow review in the lrb pointed out the reduced syllable count, which i felt explained it. this feeling also spuriously attaches to a sense of the sparse mediterranean sea and shore landscape. of lucidity brought by the atmospheric light, of clean lines etc. perhaps, i’m thinking now, like my teenage experience with camus’ algerian solar harshness in the plague and the outsider, in those short spare lines - get it a bit in hemingway as well). as i say that feels spurious but i don’t particularly want to shake it, as it produces a sort of spell.

the second is that despite my little learning, i’m a bit sick of prosaic, heavy vocab, “this morning s complicated” translations. wilson does clearly do some modernising, though largely the lives in her translation feel simple and comprehensible rather than modernised. i dislike the urge to make the past feel “relevant” and feel my irritation wo i’d be triggered far more frequently if this is what she was doing.

really enjoying it. tho haven’t picked it up for a bit because reading product management stuff and that *extremely enjoyable* economics book, which the experts on economics ilx assure me v convincingly is incontrovertible garbage and which is abominable in many aspects of style and yet.

Loved If Beale Street Could Talk. The combination of tough/traumatic subject matter and a highly lyrical tone makes it pretty clear why Barry Jenkins wants to film it.

On A Passage To India now.

I have now begun to read The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy. I think I can handle its prose style this time. Last time the narrator's voice didn't click with me. Probably my mood at the time wasn't receptive enough.

I love that one.

Finished "The Man Who Watched Trains Go By", which was very entertaining and a tour de force of third person limited perspective, keeping you mostly inside the mind of a rather unpleasant person, but giving you just enough distance to be able to enjoy the ride.

Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant
Reed, A Stranger on Earth

how is the kavan bio?

have been reading: highsmith, sayers, allingham, dickson carr, cyril hare, ellery queen

Finally finished Alexander Barron's The Lowlife, which I started in December but somehow managed to lose (found down the back of the bed). It's great for so many reasons: the humour, the tracing of the diasporic move to the north London suburbs, the delicate revealing of the barely buried nature of the Holocaust subtext. Kind of stunned it's not been filmed (though its DNA is apparent in all manner of later films (it made me think of Performance a fair bit) and, god help us, hopefully, Guy Ritchie never reads it).

Also reading Chesterton's book on Stevenson for a thing.

Started reading A Million Windows by Gerard Murnane on a flight recently, and recall enjoying it, though I've just gone back to see what i was enjoying about it, and I barely recall any of it. I'm putting this down to the special conditions of reading on a flight, rather than incipient mental decay. Anyone read any of him?

oh also Weaver and Shannon's The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Information theory just keeps popping up in stuff I'm reading at the moment, so I thought I'd whisk through it. Plus i'm expected to have some knowledge of video compression for my job, so going back to where it all started felt like not a totally unreasonable thing to do.

xp I was intrigued by this encounter, but haven't decided where to start
---from Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction:
Gerald Murnane was given a long profile recently:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/magazine/gerald-murnane-next-nobel-laureate-literature-australia.html

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, April 17, 2018 6:00 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Wow, perfect build, and for once the perfect use of this kind of presentation, thanks.

― dow, Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Ok, hadn't seen this – thanks dow (and xyzzzz__)

Finally finished Alexander Barron's The Lowlife, which I started in December but somehow managed to lose (found down the back of the bed). It's great for so many reasons: the humour, the tracing of the diasporic move to the north London suburbs, the delicate revealing of the barely buried nature of the Holocaust subtext. Kind of stunned it's not been filmed (though its DNA is apparent in all manner of later films (it made me think of Performance a fair bit) and, god help us, hopefully, Guy Ritchie never reads it).

Just listened to an episode of the Backlisted podcast about this book! Must be something in the air. Apparently there's a terrible sequel where he goes to Venice?

Finished A Passage To India.The portrayal of the anglo-indian community is suitably scathing, and reminded me quite a lot of today's respectable white supremacists - there's the same self-righteousnes, the trick of casting the victims of your violence as the perpetrators. It's an India that no longer exists, of course, and it was interesting to see how Aziz, the muslim character, is as baffled by hinduism as the western characters are. The portrayal of Aziz is certainly complex and very loving, but still....a little bit infantilized? Is that unfair?

Anyway, now I reread Maurice and then I decide if my project will go beyond the novels and into short stories, travel writing, the biographies he wrote, etc.

how is the kavan bio?

Bleak.

Just listened to an episode of the Backlisted podcast about this book! Must be something in the air. Apparently there's a terrible sequel where he goes to Venice?

That's what prompted me to look for it! The recent episode on Gayl Jones is excellent, too.

I finished The Dud Avocado and enjoyed it. The bumptious humor of the first two thirds does tail off somewhat as the book progresses, but the character of the narrator stays true and consistent to herself, so the fading of its humorous perspective is more due to where the plot takes her than to a simple change of tone.

Read The Lowlife years ago and it's wonderful. The sequel -- Strip Jack Naked -- is not awful, just not as good. But Baron's other books are mostly excellent, especially FROM THE CITY, FROM THE PLOUGH.

took a break from Caro and studying for prelims and read Denis Johnson - The Name of the World in bed Sunday morning. i don’t think it is a good book yet it was very well written. it seemed written in one sitting and made to be read in one sitting. it’s the first novel of his ive read and i picked it essentially at random from the library, may read Fiskadoro next unless someone itt has a better rec?

TRAIN DREAMS, which is a brilliant one-sitting book

jesus' son is the quintessential denis johnson novel but i think tree of smoke is my favourite of his - way more of an investment of time involved tho and jesus' son is slim and composed of interlinked vignettes so if you're time-poor that might be a better one to go for next

reading Moonseed by Stephen Baxter and enjoying it.

That's one of his better ones, lots of groovy ideas.

tree of smoke is on the long-list, but i'm picking up jesus' son and train dreams from the library, thx james and bizzarro

Prose:
Antonio Tabucchi - Requiem
Hilda Hilst - Letters from a Seducer

That is 2nd best Tabucchi (after Pereira Mantains ofc, highly unlikely he topped that), just love this series of conversations over a day's journey - with some excellent writing on food and manners. Hilda Hilst is actually a modernist writer* from Brazil - in the sense that she engages with a particular tradition fully: Beckett, Joyce, Bataille but also De Sade. A kind of damaged erotics. Nothing in it was too compelling about the encounter (and what I want is the encounter - what is this kind of writing going to reveal/conceal. Another Brazilian - Raduan Nassar this time, in his A Cup of Rage - sets the example here), although I'll revisit (its part of a loose trilogy so it might make more sense) and I wanted to read this for quite a long-time (With My Dog Eyes is more available and pretty great imo).

*(the label of Brazilian modernist is attached to Clarice Lispector - who was more of a sort of one-off spirtiualist visionary (which does form part of that texture of the writing from that time), but the English Language discourse is often wrong)

Poetry:

113 Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems (tr. Richard Zenith, who also translated Pessoa's poetry and prose for Penguin)