2018 Summer: A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine, and What Are You Reading?

I just read Aucassin & Nicolette and Other Tales, tr. Pauline Matarasso, a Penguin Classics compilation of five medieval tales. The occasion was a short backpacking trip and the impetus was that this slender collection was a mere150 pages and weighed under 3 oz. making it easy to carry up and down mountainsides.

The tales themselves were entertaining, but very much in the vein of medieval tales, they were full of formulaic elements, unbelievable plots, and stiff underdeveloped characters. You have to overlook these factors and enter into the spirit in which they were written. The translations seemed thoughtful and strove to communicate what the translator most loved and admired about the works, across what must seem an unbridgeable abyss of cultural strangeness.

Xp funnily enough I am reading krúdy’s sunflower atm, it’s 12 years shy of the 30s and I wouldn’t have thought to call it pulp but I’m really into how torrid and unashamedly high-flown it is

Based on ILB enthusiasm, I checked out a copy of The Soul of an Octopus, Sy Montgomery, and started it last night. Seems like a sound choice for summer reading.

John Fox's The Boys on the Rock, which has been haunting me ever since I finished it last night.

It’s my favorite kind of memoir - meandering, personal, and sciencish.

I'm assuming you're referring to something upthread, as The Boys on the Rock is only two of those things.

The Soul of an Octopus is very good; 'Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life' by Peter Godfrey-Smith is probably even better--more hard science, much of it both boggling and beguiling

I finished The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei. I would definitely seek out more work by him. For some reason I thought it was going to be science fiction, but it wasn't at all. Sort of dreamlike neo-noir, in a Murakami-esque mode.

Can second the Godfrey-Smith book. A really fascinating account of the octopus as a kind of alternative experiment in intelligent life, since its common ancestor with mammals/reptiles is probably a sightless almost brainless worm living 750 million years ago.

currently averaging < word a day at the moment.

Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything by Graham Harman. One of the attractive new Pelican series, got waved in front of my nose by an ilxor. Extension and significant variation of Bruno Latour's actor network theory. Appealing in many ways, as it encourages the common sense appeal to the existence of things (including fictional and theoretical entities) rather than hard empiricism, and having attributes are more than the sum of their parts, and not defined entirely on their impact on the human observer.

As always I approach these things with a very wary scepticism (no not that kind). Harman lets himself down quite badly with his choice of terminology for approaches to objects that are elemental or atomic, and do not allow for higher order emergent properties - this he calls 'undermining' an 'object'. 'Overmining' he terms the definition of an object entirely through that which is available to us as perceivers. Because he's dealing with new abstract terminology, the use of 'undermining' throws forward its military/siege warfare meaning, in the absence of anything else, something then further confused by the use of 'overmining' for its opposite.

I'm not convinced - as in I'm still working through - by his application of the mechanics of metaphor to allow for objects to retain, effectively, an imperceptible, impossible to conceive, interiority, or, i guess, noumena (forgive me - my philosophy, he's very sick). This is a general wariness around the application of aesthetic philosophy to artistic method, where that application feels like a constraint - or i guess in his terms, 'undermining'.

He then looks at some practical applications of what I suppose he's right in insisting is abbreviated as OOO, but that is also distracting. Great! I thought, let's see what use this approach can have. He then applies it to what i assume is an area of expertise - the US Civil War.

Using the magic of OOO to identify truths otherwise hidden, he discovers that the start date of the war (or the beginning of the existence of the object) is the same as historians have generally identified, and the end is... about the same as historians have generally identified. Going through a few more twists and turns, it wasn't at all clear that OOO was bringing anything new to the US Civil War party other than making things slightly more difficult by insisting they all get re-interpreted by OOO.

Fortunately, I have also picked up David Edgerton's really brilliant The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History. Now, i don't know for certain that this is a specific application of object oriented ontology, but it might as well be, as it is the project of the book to understand the hidden notion of the British nation to make sense of the 20th Century (and beyond). Any of you who've read his very good The Shock of the Old will know how careful he to meticulously, and with documentary evidence, unravel received wisdom and assumptions, many of them academic, many of them popular or political, to try and get a clearer image of the matter in hand.

Adam Tooze, who is a close ally and also a very good historian, gave an example of this recently in an excellent podcast, where he points out that though the Third Reich is often characterised as a 'war machine' - exemplifying heavily mechanised and inhuman warfare - in fact this characterises Britain better prior to the second world war (an argument Edgerton reiterates) and that the third reich war effort was still reliant to a surprising degree on for example horses. (Edgerton remarks that things like conscription in the UK were disparagingly seen as 'Prussianisms' and it was only after the second world war that Britain aligned with the European standard of peacetime conscription).

The wider project of the book is to understand 'Britain' better in terms of the economic, political and ideological forces at play: his project is to bring the workings of capital and the theories of political economy at play in the 20th century into the light, and to essentially identify (as an object) the ideology of a 'British nationalism' realised on both the right and the left, and within a context of a response to Free Trade Liberalism and the project (more project than actuality until the Second World War DE argues) of Imperialism.

Clearly with such a high-wire act, he has to be bloody careful and rigorous, and for the most part he passes (to this non-expert). There are a couple of flabbier bits where you feel slightly less easy, but on the whole this is a fantastic book. So much in there that can be applied to our current situation fruitfully.

I've read.. largely read.. The Old Rendering Plant by Wolfgang HIlbig but that will have to wait another day. And I've been slightly harsh on Graham Harman - it's an interesting introduction to a modern concept in philosophy and has interest as such, and as a set of ideas that are v thought provoking to explore.

It's a thrilling read – I hesitate to say that on the K Amis rule that you should only really say that of writing which doesn't include 'a gunshot rang out' somewhere in it – but to see so much so brilliantly reworked, with new concepts and narratives in place on every page, produces a real rush.

er, well, good to see not having posted for a while i haven't lost any knack for sentences missing vital words, or indeed general direction, also clanging GCSE repetition and that last para refers to the Edgerton history not to the Object Oriented Ontology book.

Library's got The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy, Norton 2013, intro by John Waters, blurbists incl. Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes---good? Better at novels? (Says here he wrote 19, not to mention plays and other.)

Having finished The Soul of an Octopus, I found it both pleasurable and suitably lightweight for summer reading. soda's description of it as a rambling and 'scientish' memoir fits the book better than to call it popularized science. There are plentiful anecdotes about various people she met and interacted with and many ornate descriptions of her feelings about particular octopuses she met and played with at the Boston aquarium. It does convey a fair bit of information about marine life alongside this, but the personal far outdistances the scientific.

Based on that Murakami/neo-noir description, have The Invisibility Cloak at the library for pick-up. Will fit nicely into the time waiting for new Daniel Silva.

Thanks to Alfred, I am now reading Democracy Reborn, Garrett Epps, about the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.

The Maigret detour (?) unexpectedly continues into A Maigret Trio(Harcourt, '73), billed as "three novels published in the United States for the first time": Maigret's Failure, Maigret In Society, and Maigret and the Lazy Burglar.
Failure is set in the middle of the wettest, rottenest March in modern memory, when an obnoxious childhood classmate appears in Maigret's office, now a devouring sack of meat, wealthy and in with the Minister of the Interior, M.'s boss. He promptly announces that he's the target of anonymous threats, demands and promptly receives protection, is promptly murdered. M. wonders if his attitude to this deliberately repellent, obviously (to always-watchful old "chum" M.)fearful butcher shop baron has influenced the Superintendant's professionalism and sense of duty, that it's to some degree his own fault that the guy is killed, at least so promptly (lots of enemies, trophies of his success). All this and much more in the first few pages.

Those Maigrets sound great, I need to read more.

Started and finished Jean Rhy's Voyage In The Dark on a flight. Depression, homesickness, London as a total dump, sex used only as a desperate measure that'll leave you feeling exploited anyway. Really grim stuff, and (as the blurbs bleat) "surprisingly modern". Man, there's a lot of great English novels about hating England (though obviously this author's colonial roots play a large part, too).

Next up: Girls & Dolls And Other Stories", Damon Runyon.

Finished Brideshead Revisited, which maybe dragged on too much but had good bits up through the end. Don’t think Waugh really earned his way to the deathbed conversion et sequelae but he presumably wouldn’t care. Will probably be a classic for a long time for its gorgeously gay first third.

Reading The Secret Place, the fifth Dublin Murder Squad by Tana French, which seems to retread the previous entries a bit but breaks format a bit by alternating the tight first person narration with omniscient flashbacks to some of the teenage girls at the center of the plot. The New Yorker review that got me on to these books originally didn’t think much of that but I’m digging it. I’m a sucker for sentimental-ish stuff about being a teenager.

The new Megan Abbott is a lot of fun, but piles on the unlikelinesses at the end to become a bit OTT.

xp miniseries of Brideshead is a beautiful memory, with its own sense of time (in part because it took a lot longer to finish than intended; Jeremy Irons kept going away to do other stuff). Better than the book overall.

This DUBLIN MURDER SQUAD sounds promising!

I've just about started Daniel Fuchs' SUMMER IN WILLIAMSBURG (1934 - I hadn't realized it was the exact same data as CALL IT SLEEP).

[*date not data]

Thanks to Alfred, I am now reading Democracy Reborn, Garrett Epps, about the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.

― A is for (Aimless), Thursday, July 19, 2018

Keep us posted!

Swans Sacrifice and Transcendence the oral history. I just got onto the 2nd incarnation of Angels Of light and the arrival of Devendra Barnhart. Been pretty fascinating and puts different focus o some things i was semi aware of.
BUt I'm just wondering where Virgil Moorefield came in. I just checked the line up of the Foetus band on Rife and it has Ted Parsons on it. I thought that was Foetus fronting the same band that had played as Swans in London that week.
& I've always had the heavy folk rock band I loved in '88 as being the same band as Children of God i.e. with Ted Parsons so am I remembering that wrong. Can't think how many times the band hit london that year. I remember seeing them in Edinburgh in '89 with Vinniwe Signorelli who went onto Unsane on drums. & I think I do recognise Virgil from somewhere.

ah well, great book which has had me wanting to read it continually. Love it.

May need to read that Soul of the Octopus thing somebody else has been reading. I just turned it up while tidying my room.

Yeah, he played with the Swans, Laswell etc., wanna say he did some art (album cover or two?)
xp Maigret's Failure is shaping up to be a true whodunnit, a locked room groove: the Meat Baron victim and the semi-survivors among the multitudes he's exsanguinated all seem to have been going through the motions for quite some time, to the extent that no one seems capable of making a radical change. Nevertheless, some of the leftovers take news of his death a little bit like Christmas/occasion for another drink; "Father hung himself too soon--="
In further news, the real scandal is what's legal.

I've been reading The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell, one of the 3 books I scored from the NY Review Books sale a few weeks ago. I really loved Troubles. This one is pretty good so far, but perhaps doesn't that have extra bit of magic- maybe it was a happy marriage of subject and style. I think maybe the Indian colonial situation doesn't lend itself quite as well to Farrell's slightly oddball comic touch - perhaps it's just not as fertile ground for comedy.

having sped through the first part of elizabeth bowen's final novel eva trout in one sitting & thought it splendid, curious how her earlier work compares? think i may have a copy of the heat of the day lying around somewhere.

All Bowen is worth reading, though I find her unusually hard to speed through: not that she's not gripping, but that something in her style makes me slow down and appreciate it. If you try her Collected Stories you can see how consistently good she was through her whole career.

I just finished reading Helter Skelter by Kyoko Okazaki. I generally don’t read manga (this is a josei book, aimed at adult women), but I was intrigued after a friend described it to me.

What a book, though. It’s about a model at the top of her game, Liliko, who’s achieved everything she has through illegal surgical modification and treatment, and what happens when it all starts falling apart. Josei is strong on emotions and expression and this book more than delivers. I loved the contrast between the dreamy art of the characters and scenes and how deeply ugly and flawed almost everyone in this was.

I really liked Liliko even though she’s awful. I generally almost always like troubled female characters but they’re seldom so terrible. I liked how frank the whole thing is; about being a woman, about beauty, about expectations. It doesn’t hold back at all.

This was completed in 1996 so some of the musings about women, fashion and celebrity are no doubt dated but it’s as sharp as anything I’ve read on the subject. The Japanese context lends it some unfamiliarity as well but it’s all pretty much otm even for being written as far back as it was since then. It’s incredibly graphic - there’s sex (censored) and gore (less so), so not one to read on a commute.

I read it all pretty much in one go, and I’m still thinking about it now. The ending alludes to a sequel, but sadly that never happened as the author was struck by a car after completing this and left bedridden.

This is only one of two works she has translated into English, which is such a pity, because I’d love to read more if her stuff.

That sounds really interesting. I've only ever read one manga book I genuinely liked, so I may have to ivercome some prejudices to actually read it.

yup, same - no prejudices against manga just a part of human endevour I never got around to checking out. We should merge I Love Comics and ILB sometime.

Anne Carson - Red Doc >

Finished my Irish murder. Snuck in Stefan Zweig’s short and good as hell Chess Story tonight. And I think now I’m going to start plowing into Nixonland in earnest. This Nixon fellow is coming across as pretty unpleasant.

I just finished Garrett Epps' Democracy Reborn. I feel much better informed than I did prior to reading it. He was very clear about the constitutional issues created by the three-fifths compromise and how the slave states' oligarchy had a stranglehold over their own state governments and consequently over the Congress and the federal courts.

He made it plain that the anti-slavery elements in the post-Civil War Congress well understood the necessity for altering the fundamental structure of the constitution before re-admitting the secessionist states, or they would simply win back all the power they'd lost. He clearly defined the players, their positions and their faults, plus the political climate in the Union. He describes the immediate and instinctive migration of ex-slaves away from their plantations, homeless and uprooted. In short, he set the stage for the drama very well.

What I found ultimately dissatisfying is how, after defining the profound stakes at play, and giving a modest set of details about how Congress did its work, he rushes headlong through the election of 1866, the ratification process by the states, and gives only a couple of pages to explaining that in spite of the Fourteenth Amendment, the southern oligarchy rapidly emasculated it and indeed won back all their power for nearly another century, despite the passage of the fourteenth.

The amendment was an abject failure in accomplishing its aims until many generations had passed and he quickly glosses over why this happened. He never comes to grips with the extreme depth and persistence of racism in every part of the USA. He never concedes that it was the ceaseless, heartbreaking political work of black people, decade after decade, that did the real work and still does it now. The amendment was just a handhold, not a resting place. The book seemed excellent as far as it went, but still seemed incomplete. I wanted more.

another 25 pages of Terry Eagleton's RADICAL SACRIFICE.

I carried on about The Collected Stories of xp Elizabeth Bowen on at least one previous What Are Your Reading?, maybe more; because it's a brilliant doorstop, but still haven't gotten to the novels, though read some very intriguing descriptions. The stories are so dense, usually in a good-to-great way, that they're almost like mini-novels at times.

Thinking about starting John Berger's G next, or Malamud's Rembrandt's Hat---which is better?

An acquaintance's poetry book I will not name, since I am struggling to think of nice things to say. "Nice paper stock!"

Don’t go with that.

I am reading a lot of Frank O’Hara poems rn for my class. They are hit or miss. I’m also reading a lot of Gwendolyn Brooks poems and they are all A+.

The amendment was an abject failure in accomplishing its aims until many generations had passed and he quickly glosses over why this happened. He never comes to grips with the extreme depth and persistence of racism in every part of the USA. He never concedes that it was the ceaseless, heartbreaking political work of black people, decade after decade, that did the real work and still does it now.

I thought this was in there, but I may be projecting what I've read of Eric Foner and Douglas R Egerton. The amendment wasn't a failure -- the Supreme Court gutted it in Cruikshank and the Slaughterhouse Cases, and he makes it clear.

Will Hobson’s Musketeers translation, which is better at the jokes than Pevear

went back to OSCAR WAO, having never finished it. I really don't like this book.

By chance I stumbled upon the works of Welsh writer Cynan Jones, and the first I've read of him and finished last week - The Long Dry - has blown me away. Sparse and succinct, with quite a lot of white lines between paragraphs or even sentences for 'breathing' (I thought this would annoy me but it didn't), he's a master of punching you in the gut when you don't expect it, (heart)breaking and important plot-twists delivered almost offhandedly cool. He develops his characters beautifully and deep, without overdoing it. It's about our shortcomings, about regret quite a bit, about how we're captives of our own 'fate' perhaps, or the path we go down in this life which is so hard to leave even if you wanted to. Idk, I, shit at writing about literature but he's a master of fine, crafted prose that gets under your skin quickly. Also, he knows his nature (farm life, animal birth, dogs, the weather) and uses this for maximum atmosphere, without showing off. Highly recommended.

Reading his The Cove now.

(Also his books are rather short, 100-250 pages at most, which suits me well)

I'm reading Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Thomas Merton. These essays were not written for a broad audience, but get into some rather technical aspects of Catholic theology while explaining Zen to interested theologians.

I read 99 stories of God by joy williams, never read her before. I thought it was really good, just the right level of arch. I read the whole thing through quickly as I thought the cumulative effect was the point, more so than most collections - it felt very like flipping through a book of cartoons, with the title of each story printed at the bottom like a caption.

I haven’t really read much flash fiction so my main point of comparison is Bernhard’s the voice imitator which is at something quite different - but then sure enough Bernhard himself shows up in story number 76 which mostly consists of a character reading a newspaper

Right, got to get some Cynan Jones.

That Joy Williams is really good.

Last night I decided to re-read The Aran Islands, J. M. Synge. It's been 40 years since the first time I read it, and I recently acquired the copy I bought for my father, a 1911 edition.

Spent much of the day going through Geoffrey Hill's Selected and a selection of poetry by the Bronte Sisters.

Eimear McBride - A Girl is a Half-Formed thing. Catholicism, sex, growing-up, Ireland, Joyce. Kinda know where its going to go. I'm not sure whether I want to finish it - It will be fine, it won't take long yet life is short.