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

Belated lol at blold meridian

I'm nearing the finish line with Emma. I will be glad to leave Emma Woodhouse and all her friends and enemies behind me. They are somewhat overstaying their welcome, so that their mental ticks and crochets are becoming both predictable and rather tedious.

I had thought that Austen would run through the entire book reserving the privilege of our knowing a character's interior thoughts solely to Emma, while showing the interior of all other characters solely through words and actions, but she's recently stepped outside that convention to rope in Mr. Knightley, Emma's beau ideal (a fact every alert reader figured out 300 pages ago, but Emma remains unaware of as yet at my currently attained stage in her progress toward the ultimate happiness of marriage. That end is so obviously unavoidable that it may as well be an accomplished fact even before she sees it coming.

Anyway, Austen's great strength is not concealing where the plot is trending, but her ability to frame the perfect phrase to describe her precise ideas down to the smallest fraction of a degree, and doing it as regularly as McDonald's spits out burgers. She's a perfect wonder in her ability to sustain that particular perfection over hundreds of pages. I can't think of another author who does it better, perhaps because I cannot read Flaubert in French.

Kosztolanyi is fucking awesome and there's one book by him in English I can't afford because no bugger will reprint it.

Which one's that, James?

I am reading Blue Self-Portrait by Noemi Lefebre - it's a tangled internal monologue and I'm finding it really slow going; when I remember to read it really fast and let my eyes skate over the sentences I'm enjoying it very much, when I slow down I'm getting tangled up and not achieving any greater understanding from the additional attention. But I keep forgetting to speed up!

wiki only lists three more books, one of which is available (Kornel Est which I own a copy of). That leaves:

Anna Edes: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anna-Edes-Revived-Modern-Classic/dp/0811212556
Darker Muses: The Poet Nero: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darker-Muses-Poet-Dezso-Kosztolanyi/dp/9631328414

Yeah I have a copy of Anna Edes ( nice Quartet Encounters edition obv) and it’s great.

I'm fifty pages into The Pursuit of Love and finding it a little slight, or at least slighter than I expected. Quit or soldier on? It's short, I guess.

Darker Muses is the one I can't get. kornel Esti and Anna Edes are both wonderful.

Passing, Nella Larsen. Very impressive so far.

Excellent book, getting this deluxe edition later this year: http://restlessbooks.org/bookstore/passing

Outline by Rachel Cusk - not much happens, narrator goes to teach a writing workshop in greece, has a bunch of conversations, some one-sided with awful people, about relationships, writing, life, we hear some life experiences and anecdotes, and it's phenomenal.

Read Patricia Lockwood in the LRB on Cusk, ledge. Sounded rly interesting. Good to get ilb confirmation.

Speaking of life experiences and anecodtes, the Marguerite Duras selection of conversations/essays collected in Practicalities are fantastic and tearing me up a bit.

xxp

Emma, the character, annoyed me a bit by the end of my first read-through, but when I read the book again I recognised what everyone was saying about the intense complexity of details dovetailing, the formal and technical innovations of the book, and I appreciated it and its wit more, see it now as one of Austen's best and am always ready to re-read it.

In this season, though, Mrs. Eaton's rambling notes on strawberries always pop up in my head

The best fruit in England—every body's favourite—always wholesome.—These the finest beds and finest sorts.—Delightful to gather for one's self—the only way of really enjoying them.—Morning decidedly the best time—never tired—every sort good—hautboy infinitely superior—no comparison—the others hardly eatable—hautboys very scarce—Chili preferred—white wood finest flavour of all—price of strawberries in London—abundance about Bristol—Maple Grove—cultivation—beds when to be renewed—gardeners thinking exactly different—no general rule—gardeners never to be put out of their way—delicious fruit—only too rich to be eaten much of—inferior to cherries—currants more refreshing—only objection to gathering strawberries the stooping—glaring sun—tired to death—could bear it no longer—must go and sit in the shade.

Patricia Lockwood has been a terrific find for the LRB. All you got from reading about Cusk before that was hysteria around what she was doing or the way she conducts her life. Lockwood makes her into something worth checking out.

I agree that "Outline" is phenomenal, although "Transit" is even better - a book I uncharacteristically re-read very soon after first finishing it. But Cusk breaks lots of rules of "good writing", particularly show don't tell, and it's easy to imagine that many readers won't like her at all.

I like the Lockwood review a lot, but there have been plenty of other positive reviews of Cusk's novels, including some heavyweight reviewers. I'm encouraged that she seems to think "Kudos" is of a piece with the first two, because the only other review I've read was by someone who liked the first two but thought "Kudos" was a falling off, or least too much more of the same. I look forward to reading it.

I saw a copy of Charles Mann's The Wizard & The Prophet at my public library, checked it out and have started reading it. Its subject is basically how humankind is going to deal with 10 billion people on earth in the not-so-distant future, or to put it another way, it asks how doomed are we?

In order not to look like any of several dozen other books that approach the same subject matter, he packs the material around two seminal scientists with opposing views. One was the godfather of the "reduce, reuse, shrink our footprint" rather ascetic approach. The other was primarily instrumental in the Green Revolution and solidly in the "science and ceaseless innovation will let us all prosper" camp.

Even before picking up the book, I know which camp I'm in. The earth is finite and a human population crash can be avoided only for so long and will be all the worse for having been postponed. But Mann is a very good researcher and finds especially interesting facts to decorate his books. He also writes clear readable prose. So, I'm in this book for as long as he can tell me new things, or old things in new ways.

Joao Gilberto Noll's Quiet Creature on the Corner is truly trippy, the author has to write a plot twist (its like some sort of ouliaipian constraint, or just wilful attention deficit), you end with so much chop and change at barely 100 pages that it feels like barely anything at all. Obviously not reading it in one sitting didn't help. Now onto Return to Region by Juan Benet and he is a writer to be discovered by, and surely to be re-issued one day. Maybe the Spanish civil war novel - although written in that Proustian block paras (with some ineteresting twists), whose effect is often to take it away from anything historical and specific to something else - its an experience very unique to the act of turning pages. I'll try and type up some more if I have it or to block quote something juicy from it.

On the poetry front I put down Durs Grunbein's Selected. Its kinda ok, just couldn't quite connect with it.

I finished “Skylark” which seemed rather low-key at first, but which by the end seemed instead well-paced and judiciously modulated. It’s a small gem of a book, in which minor yet colorful events are presented with such clarity that they achieve outsized resonance.

^^^^^^^^

JA Baker: The Peregrine -- basically, peregrines are excellent, which I can't argue with

Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story Of Recorded Music, Greg Milner

This is a badly-written review - like a school essay - but it sort of confirms for me that Cusk is Not My Thing. Which is fine, but I feel like I'm missing something. I've tried and failed with her work a few times. It just seems so airless and dull. What am I doing wrong?

https://slate.com/culture/2018/05/rachel-cusks-kudos-reviewed-by-sally-rooney.html

All Gates Open Rob Young

got as far as Tago Mago . Quite enjoying it.
NOt sure why Young didn't interview Damo Suzuki about his childhood/Pre-Can years . Seems to have gone to 2ndary materials for that stuff. Would have thought Suzuki might be open to being interviewed about it. & then i see that he answers a couple of questions on that period in a Mojo interview this month. So not sure what gives there.
Book does give me more information on that early period than I was aware of, but just not sure why not first hand?

Also saw more on Malcolm Mooney's early years and those of the rest of the band.

So would recommend this but i think I need to find my copy of the box set book and see what's said in there too.

reading moving kings by joshua cohen, its comparatively less annoying/showy than book of numbers, im digging it

bluets maggie nelson. good but not as good as argonauts; probably bc the relationship at the centre of it is less interesting? also thematically a bit more shallow. but still the m nelson signature genius on every page so i ant complain. anyone read newest one?

I loved bluets - read it last month ago when my library finally got it - it’s brilliant

I guess I agree argonauts is better

Darker Muses is the one I can't get. kornel Esti and Anna Edes are both wonderful.

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Wednesday, May 16, 2018 5:06 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

James, I was curious about this book and found a copy for $5 today. After I read it and you're still desperate for it, I can send it your way if you care to pay postage.

this edition:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51wAtvLSDDL._SL300_.jpg

I WILL DO THAT THANK YOU YES PLEASE

I’ll let you know when I’m finished!

Introduction to Perfecting Sound Forever already almost hilariously out of date (hadn't noticed the book's from 2009 when I first picked it up); fidelity wars put in terms of vinyl vs SACD, not vs FLAC files or whatever.

First chapter so far annoying to me because of a pretty uncritical stance towards Edison, which grates because he was A Very Bad Man. This objection possibly unreasonable as none of his Badness had much to do with recording technology, afaik.

Anyway, still a very interesting read and I do feel like I'm learning more about what recordings actually are. But I feel it'll be too dry for today's mission - I'm visiting someone in detention near Gatwick, about two hours on public transport - so I'm bringing David Copperfield instead.

I started reading Numbers in the Dark, the story collection by Italo Calvino. Some very enjoyable tales - some of my favorites so far have been the unpublished ones. The only ones I've skipped so far have been the ones that were too clearly aiming at some sort of political allegory.

I read “Egress” a new collection of short pieces on Little Island - rather stellar in the main I thought. Predictably enjoyed Eley Williams and David Hayden.

I read “Killing Time” by Donald E Westlake, partly because I was interested by the typography on the (old green spine Penguin) cover, partly because I’m meeting up with a Westlake-enthusiast friend in Chicago next week and partly to remind myself that I don’t much enjoy hard-boiled stuff (while I do admire it when it’s well-done, as it is here).

Now I’m reading “Young Törless” by Robert Musil and I’m loving every page so far.

The Wizard & the Prophet, as expected, has some nice, out of the common run nuggets of fact in it, but the baseline is all too familiar, even though it is well and clearly summarized. We are solidly wedded to fossil fuels and lack any effective mechanism to change course. We're fast plunging into a very dangerous and doubtful future and the main questions are how fast and how far we will go down the chute.

The biographical stuff on Vogt and Borlaug, the two figures he chose to typify the two sides of the argument, is moderately interesting, but compared to the scope of the main subject matter, descending back down to details about how Vogt got along with Margaret Sanger is too close to triviality.

xp Daniel, you might enjoy David Byrne's opinionated and detailed history of recording in How Music Works, re interaction of technology, environment (what sounds good in arenas, clubs, how and why CBGB became a prestigious and popular Scene but still wondering why similar locales did not)(also a great quote on mutual embarrassment of stumbling upon someone who was listening to music all alone, when recorded music was still new and strange), and his personal experiences over the decades, like having studio professionals convincing him that you had to do it this way, then later what no that sounds horrible have to do it *this* way, also the stages of conceiving writing recording etc (fave in this sequence is the tour on which the dancers had the musos dancing and the musos had the dancers playing instruments).

Now that's what I call reading and writing--from Paris Review staff picks:
On a lark, I decided to climb the highest hill in South Dakota: Black Elk Peak in the Black Hills. Four hours later, doused in sweat and crumpled forward like a folding chair, wheezing and admiring a plaque proclaiming “the highest point east of the Rockies and west of the Pyrenees,” I had reached the vista point of a sacred American landscape. The Black Hills have been held as holy for centuries by the Sioux, an ellipse of green-shadow pine and bald gray rocks like an iceberg floating on the Plains. Shadows, scarce on the Plains, accumulate in the folds of the Black Hills, dense and irregular as a mosaic. From atop Black Elk Peak one can watch the cloud tufts pitch and roll, watch the hills, gone black and heavy in the transient shadows, light up like bulbs ticking on. It is a landscape that has been transformed by centuries of humans who have perceived it as sacred, and by the weight of those expectations. By Sylvan Lake, at a trailhead to Black Elk Peak, Crazy Horse had his great vision, in which he received instructions about the necessary preparations to render him invincible in battle. And it was to the peak that now bears his name that Black Elk, the Lakota Sioux medicine man, was taken in his prophetic experience, and from where, as he says in Black Elk Speaks, his brilliant end of life memoir and sermon, he saw “the whole hoop of the world.” The existence of Black Elk Speaks is a product of extraordinary luck—the result of the meeting of a poet, John Neihardt, and the aging Black Elk, who was unknown beyond the remote part of the Pine Ridge Reservation where he lived. The two understood each other enough for Black Elk to entrust his story to the poet. And it is an extraordinary life—from fighting in the Battle of the Little Bighorn to touring Europe with Buffalo Bill to growing old on the reservation (recounted also in Joe Jackson’s excellent biography Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary). The Black Hills, an ancient American sacred space, are like a cave mouth opening towards the sky, and Black Elk is one of its great voices. —Matt Levin

Fear and His Servant, by Mirjana Novaković: deeply odd, very enjoyable Serbian work that may or may not be fantasy. A man who MIGHT be the Devil is on a quest to track down reports of vampires in 1730s Belgrade: he fears them because they are the dead come back to life, a Biblical sign of the Last Judgment and Satan's final defeat. But he's a strange, timorous, oddly powerless Devil, though he has an odd knowledge of 19th- and 20th-Century literature and song. And the vampires may not even be real, but the rumours part of a power struggle between the Serbs, the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarians.

Interested in that Westlake, Tim. I especially enjoy his non-comedy novels, though I will read anything by him I can get my hands on.

“Young Törless” is brilliant.

I was initially surprised by how explicitly queer Young Torless seemed to me but once you read enough from that era and milieu it becomes apparent that "it's fine to experiment in college" was already a thing.

Daniel, you might enjoy David Byrne's opinionated and detailed history of recording in How Music Works, re interaction of technology, environment (what sounds good in arenas, clubs, how and why CBGB became a prestigious and popular Scene but still wondering why similar locales did not)(also a great quote on mutual embarrassment of stumbling upon someone who was listening to music all alone, when recorded music was still new and strange), and his personal experiences over the decades, like having studio professionals convincing him that you had to do it this way, then later what no that sounds horrible have to do it *this* way, also the stages of conceiving writing recording etc (fave in this sequence is the tour on which the dancers had the musos dancing and the musos had the dancers playing instruments).

Yeah, tbf reading Perfecting Sound Forever a frequent thought I have is "I really should be reading How Music Works instead, shouldn't I?".

partly because I was interested by the typography on the (old green spine Penguin) cover

Penguin UK issued a number of early, non-Parker, non-funny Westlakes round about the same sort of time:

https://pictures.abebooks.com/GDP/md/md16609830317.jpg

https://pictures.abebooks.com/GDP/md/md16609830357.jpg

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41n5jrIUvcL._SX373_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Yeah my “Killing Time” is like that “Killy” there. Three near-perfect typefaces that work really badly together imo. I suppose I bought the book though, so who’s the loser?

got Helen DeWitt, Some Trick on Tuesday, knocked out the first three stories (of 13) yesterday. There's so many exclamation points!!!!!!! It's a delight, I kept cackling.

Then I sent her an email.

John Keats - So Bright and Delicate. Love Letters and POems of John Keats to Fanny Browne. Jane Campion did a film based on their relationship - I should track it down sometime.

My 'Some Trick' is allegedly on its way, am very impatient.

not released here until 26th apparently. <taps foot impatiently for 24 days>

I'm reading a collection of the journalism of Nellie Bly. At the moment she has contrived to be committed to the insane asylum for NYC and is exposing the fecklessness of the doctors, the brutality and cruelty of the nurses, the highly insanitary conditions and the loathsome inedibility of the food. And yes, she names names. Plus, the fact that many of the women were not insane, but merely didn't speak English or had been troublesome to their employers.

btw, Nellie Bly wrote during the last decades of the nineteenth century and early twentieth.

Social Sculpture - The rise of the Glasgow art scene - Sarah Lowndes

I Always kept A Unicorn by Michael Houghton which I picked up a couple fo months ago and have been meaning to read for ages.
Seems pretty good so far. Sandy has left home and is getting solo spots in folk clubs while working in the day asa shorrt term nurse which means she's turning down extra training she's offered and getting stuck with the worst jobs.

Social Sculpture - The rise of the Glasgow art scene - Sarah Lowndes