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

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.

I love Hill through the nineties up until the terseness I so admired often turned him inscrutable.

Its my first reading of him really. Quite like to chase some of the individual books.

Talk by Linda Rosenkrantz. great summer read

Have dented Nixonland, which is enlightening and infuriating. The guy had to have been history’s biggest piece of work.

Worse to have lived it than to read it, I can assure you.

First as tragedy, then as farce, or something.

I have read the McBride debut 2 or 3 times!

Would really like to make time for Synge's ARAN ISLANDS and other prose.

James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

I liked that a lot!

His last completed novel, I think? Soon to be a film by Barry Jenkins of Moonlight.

Yeah, I gotta get on that one.

Speaking of books soon to be movies, I'm 2/3 of the way through Emily M. Danforth's The Miseducation of Cameron Post, which is excellent so far. Pumped for the film.

Lidiya Ginzburg: Blockade Diary -- fucking hell

½ way thru nabokov's collected stories

(thanks for e. bowen recommendation: will keep an eye out for it... & after reading a collection of elizabeth taylor's stories think i need hers as well!)

Antonio Tabucchi - The Edge of the Horizon
Milton - Selected/Paradise Regained