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

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

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett
The Bird's Nest by Shirley Jackson

Would really like to make time for Synge's ARAN ISLANDS

It is quietly excellent. There's none of the wild extravagant language you might expect after reading Playboy of the Western World. He writes about very simple and ordinary things in very clear and simple prose, and lets the things described shine through.

after reading a collection of elizabeth taylor's stories think i need hers as well

YES YOU DO

Anybody read Leonard Woolf? Leon Edel's references to and contextualization of Tales From The East and The Village In The Jungle are intriguing. Kept telling himself he was anti-Imperialist, but watched himself get deeply involved in grassroots governance of Ceylon.

Very observant of self & others, it seems.

The Wise Virgins by Leonard Woolf is really good, and also really makes you wonder how he put up with his horribly anti-semitic wife.

Toook me a while to get into Damon Runyon but now I'm loving it! I think as with Wodehouse part of the trick is having this utterly self-contained world, where people agree on the same absurdities and thus can interact with each other regarding them.

"Well, I state that this sounds to me like stealing, and stealing is something that is by no means upright and honest, and Regret has to admit that it really is similar to stealing, but he says what of it, and as I do not know what of it, I discontinue the argument."

"I never know Jack O' Hearts is even mad at Louie, and I am wondering why he takes these shots at him, but I do not ask any questions, because when a guy goes around asking questions in this town people may get the idea he is such a guy as wishes to find things out."

Also the description of Alice In Wonderland as "nothing but a pack of lies, but very interesting in spots".

Last night I started The Golden Spur, one of Dawn Powell's NY-centered novels, from 1962. Last year I read a much earlier novel of hers, Angels on Toast (1940), which was a bit on the grim side. The other one of hers I've read was The Locusts have No King (1948), which saw the failings of its characters in a more humane light.

This one seems a bit more comedic than the other two. The characters are treated a bit more frivolously and there's a touch more buffoonery at work, but it is not mean-spirited in the least.

A Time to Live is one of the century's funniest novels.

a time to be born? (not trying to be a dick, just checking)

Was wondering

I finished Siege of Krishnapur. My initial impression held- it wasn't as good as Troubles but still pretty good. I still want to read The Singapore Grip. This one had more action and historical detail, but lacked a bit of the surrealism and humor. Now I'm plowing through Jonathan Mahler's Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, which is eminently readable, though at least a passing interest in baseball doesn't hurt.

a time to be born? (not trying to be a dick, just checking)

― mookieproof, Friday, August 3, 2018 8:37 PM (ye

yep!

Ronald Firbank, THE FLOWER BENEATH THE FOOT (1923)

THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE (2003) for the 3rd time.

My sense-memory of that ^^ is that the first half is magnificent and hallucinatory (perfect for this incessant heat) and that the second half, when it became more conventional, couldn't match the intensity. Would like to read it again.

I finished the Red Riding Quartet by David Peace and, overall, it's a brilliant achievement. Incantatory, oneiric and like plunging one's head into the orphic soup of the Real. It needn't be about 'truth' in the end, but given the Savile revelations, there's something of that, too. Fuck knows what Yorkshire did to Peace, but damn he takes some sweet revenge.

Also read Olivia Laing's The Trip to Echo Spring, which was fine, but is fading. I think part of the issue is writing about already familar characters, and using a familiar narrative (they were pissheads: who knew?). There's also the problem of the diagnostic framework, which is under-explored, or maybe inadequately explored. I did enjoy the road trip element of it.

Now reading Stuart Jeffries' book on the Frankfurt School. It's ripping along well enough so far.

I’ve been wanting to read Laing for a couple of years now, since hearing her speak at a thing; was thinking I might work backwards from her new novel “about” Kathy Acker. I know ilx seems cool on her in general

Rebecac West - The Fountain Overflows

Chinaski, what you say about TFOS is what seemed to be something of a conensus on the ILB thread, years back. I think I'd largely agree also. The first section is impressing me all over again -- it's by far the richest, deepest, most painterly bout of writing JL has ever done.

The Trip to Echo Spring was mildly disappointing when I finally got round to it. I mean, it was fine, but hardly revelatory.

Never got past the first Red Riding book, it was so OTT that it became ridiculous.

Just finished Who Is Martha? by Marjana Gaponenko, which was charming and clever but a bit ruined by endless dream sequences.

Anybody read The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary, edited by S.P. Rosenthal? Contents (via page linked below) look even better than this description:

The first section of the volume, Bloomsbury on Bloomsbury, contains the basic memoirs and discussions of the Group itself by the original members, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Desmond MacCarthy, and others. These recollections range from unpublished private correspondence and diaries to formal autobiographies. Published here for the first time is the remainder of Desmond MacCarthy's unfinished Bloomsbury memoir. Virginia Woolf's complete Memoir Club paper on Old Bloomsbury and excerpts from her letters and diaries also appear, as do letters about Bloomsbury by Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, E.M. Forster, and Vanessa Bell. The second section, Bloomsberries, contains observations on individuals by other members of the group and their children. Virginia Woolf's hitherto unknown biographical fantasy on J.M. Keynes is newly added, as are accounts of Molly MacCarthy, Lydia Lopokova, and David Garnett. Bloomsbury Observed, the last section, consists of reminiscences of the group mainly by their contemporaries. Additions to the revised edition include an early anonymous newspaper account of Bloomsbury, and observations by Quentin Bell, Beatrice Webb, Gerald Brenan, Christopher Isherwood, Frances Partridge, and others.

Also included are an updated chronology recording the principal events in the careers of Bloomsbury's members and an enlarged bibliography. (This is the second edition.)
https://www.amazon.com/Bloomsbury-Group-Collection-Memoirs-Commentary/dp/0802076408

Just finished The Changeling, by Joy Williams. I found it oddly hard to focus on in the beginning and I feel like I need to read it again but it was deeply unnerving. NYT slammed it when it came out, highlighting the sentence “She was young but some day she would be covered with ants.”

“but”?

“She was young but some day she would be covered with ants.”

lol i love joy

You might enjoy Karen Russell's take on her (they're two of *those* Florida writers):
https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/the-bracing-wisdom-of-joy-williamss-the-changeling

I finished Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning. I think I would have preferred more baseball actually, and maybe a bit less on the mayoral race, but it was pretty enjoyable. Now I'm reading Ottessa Mossfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which is off to a strong (and funny) start. Not sure if the narrator's eye is jaundiced or gimlet, but probably one of those.

You might enjoy The Red Smith Reader. His takes, his visions of what made baseball and many other sports glorious and childish and corrupt and otherwise involving and emblematic, for fifty freakin' yeahs, from the Great Depression to the Age of Reagan, presented in a very concise, compressed, translucent way--sunlight through the blinds behind the breakfast table, smokelight in the auditorium, etc.=the best rip 'n' read clip file ever. There's also a collection in The Library of America, dunno how much overlap. H'm-m-m

I've been out hiking and camping in the mountains. While out there I read The Grand Babylon Hotel, Arnold Bennett. It was a grandly silly pot-boiler of a novel, written to be serialized in the English popular press of 1902, so every chapter is short and ends with a jolt of mystery or intrigue. It's mostly rather stupid, but fun, about on a par with 1960s 'high concept' television adventure series, like Wild, WIld West or The Man From U.N.C.L.E..

I also read about halfway into Watership Down, Richard Adams, which does a very creditable job of cribbing from such Greek classics as the Oresteia, the Odyssey, and Anabasis and transforming them into something midway between a talking animal fable and an English pastoral. For such a weird pastiche, it is amazingly compelling stuff. They say it's not stealing if you can make it your own.

Milton - Lycidas/Samson Agonistes/Paradise Regained/some translation (Psalms). Connect with Milton a lot more than Shakespeare (maybe its unfair to compare and so on).

Prose-wise I started on a wide ranging selection of Rilke's Letters. Some really entertaining passages, one early on around Count Tolstoy's villa. Other letters display his (really awesome at times) powers of description and making a scene or a person come alive. Plenty of egos stroked and much self-pity too, that can get tiring (I have read a lot of Rilke's letter writing over the years).

Andrew Smith - Grasshopper Jungle

About armageddon, giant insects, sexual confusion, coming-of-age, Iowa, Ronald Reagan's balls, and Exile on Main Street. Edgar Wright apparently has an adaptation in the works.