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

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

I read the third in the Red Riding Trilogy. Grim as hell, but increasingly moving towards a mythic reading of place.

Now reading Tim Robinson's Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage. It's been ages since I've had an appetite for the 'enraptured man, abroad in nature' book. I'm ready. I think.

Manchette: Ivory Pearl -- unfinished political/historical thriller, sort of like an ultraviolent Melody Blaise with more serious intent

William Trevor: Last Stories -- great stuff, and now I have no more stories by him to read, which sux

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.

― valorous wokelord (silby), Thursday, May 31, 2018 11:31 AM (six days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Then I sent her an email.

― valorous wokelord (silby), Thursday, May 31, 2018 11:31 AM (six days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

post her reply if she does :)

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

The one who was once married to the Nobel Prize winning poet?
― omgneto and ittanium mayne (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, June 5, 2018 2:37 PM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't know. she is married to the artist Richard Wright at the mo

Nellie Bly was an interesting figure, kind of similar to Amelia Earhart, in that her legacy was more to have existed in the public mind and challenged stereotypes than anything she did directly. Her writing was less florid and cliché-filled than other leading journalists of her day, but it was still journalism.

I've picked up Keegan's The Price of Admiralty, which so far is a bit helter-skelter and not well-focused, but has a certain interest in that it tries to address naval history through the lens of global military strategy, starting with the Napoleonic Wars.

Sorry, I was thinking of Sara Lownds. Really.

I finished Sergio Pitol's The Magician of Vienna (the last in the trilogy to be translated) - its effectively a brilliant, sometimes moving and disturbing (both go hand-in-hand), strangely put reading (Pitol was a reader, writer and translator who knew Russian, Polish, English) and travelling (got to do that as part of the Mexican diplomatic service) diary, that zig-zags from one point in his life to another. I can't remember ever encountering someone's passion for literature (which I find it to be a bit boring in comparison to a passion for music, say) in this way - to the detriment of other people (I think he has a wife, and maybe children, his grandmother was a passionate reader of Tolstoy). Here, for this person, books are his way of engaging with the world, of forming friendships - which then dissolve back to the writing desk where you are alone reading, writing or translating. Very little like it.

Wolfgang Hilbig's I is his way of processing the years of surveillance, collaboration and backstabbing within artistic circles in the former East Germany. I often think things like this are best collected via a non-fictional framework as no transformation takes place. This isn't true here, Hilbig is steeped in a Gothic mood spread over these labyrinthine sentences. I've spent much of this late spring day with it. Flipping between this and Joseph Wrinkler's Graveyard of Bitter Oranges. I loved the books of his I've read so far - and they are all very similar. Tableaux like descriptions of what can only be described as Dante-ian hell circles transplanted to the Austrain countryside. The difference is the 400 pages of it (as oposed to the usual 150 pages) so its another type of challenge.

I suppose you mean Joseph Winkler, who writes nightmarish stories about rural Austria.

Josef Winkler, sorry.

lol sorry yes, always make that mistake when I google him.

Here is an excerpt: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/01/01/selections-from-graveyard-of-bitter-oranges-the-torch/

Actually quite a few excerpts available, he is such a singular writer (at a stretch there are snatches of Genet crossed with something like Claude Simon): https://bodyliterature.com/2014/02/15/josef-winkler/

I am going to do the Boston Public Library challenge this summer. It is hokey, but I’m into it.

https://bpl.bibliocms.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/2018/05/BPL-2018-ONE-MILLION-MINUTES_English_Bingo.pdf

I need recommendations for books

A) set in summer
B) audiobook (decent reader)

Reminder: it's getting on time for the quarterly WAYR change of season. think of your clever thread titles now and avoid the rush.

Magpie Murders is a good audiobook

Not everything in Numbers in the Dark completely works, but it's impressive how Calvino never repeats himself - it's almost like each story is also a different idea of what a story can be. It made me want to re-read "If On a Winter's Night a Traveler" and to read some of his other stuff too. But looking over my shelves I realized I hadn't finished part 3 of "3 by Flannery O'Connor" so I think I'll read The Violent Bear it Away now.

Dag Solstad: Armand V -- this is wonderful, though the conceit of it being "footnotes" to another, unwritten text seems entirely redundant

can I elicit recommendations for short story collections that are child-appropriate (but not necessarily "for kids"?) whenever my 8 year old cousin sees me reading on my tablet she asks if she can read to me out loud. it's real cute but the other day it resulted in her reading Robert Caro to me for an hour :-/

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00JTCJER0/

The best book of stories there ever was

Frances Burney: Evelina -- loving this, can exactly see why Jane Austen did too

Oh ho, saw that in the library recently---James, I keep meaning to ask, did you know that a lot of Margaret Millar is back in print now? Very copious omnibus editions, for inst, and attractive stand-alones too. Also a memoir, described as starting with cute stuff about birdwatching and proceeding in a natural way to classic California conflagration.

Ooh yes, I have all the omnibuses. Was worried for a while, as the last 2 vols kept getting postponed for month after month, but now I have them. Really enjoying all the ones I hadn't read.

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