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

there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.

I finished CHRONIC CITY again.

[SPOILERS re: Belle Sauvage]

The thing that really bothered me was the total lack of follow-up to the implied sexual assault of a major character right near the end - for a book that was so deliberate, and that took into account the more commonplace work that was foisted on the female characters, it seemed really off.

I’ve had Patrick O’Brien’s Master & Commander on my shelf for a few years. I did not suspect that the wholly delightful first chapter would be followed by 400+ pages of impenetrable naval architecture porn, inc. long discussions of the relative merits of grommets to pulleys in sail maintenance. I’ve read easier pages of Gravity’s Rainbow.

I still dug it though. Has anyone read the sequels? Do they get any more plotty and less, er, shippy?

The fanfic is all shippy

You don't need to understand much, if any, of the nautical jargoning to read the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O'Brien. Just skate past it and you won't lose a thing.

All that shippy stuff mostly gives you a sense of how complex a sailing ship was and how important it was for the crew to 'know the ropes'. The characters who spend a lot of time gabbing about this nautical minutiae have worked on ships for the great majority of their lives, and by contrast, know almost nothing about life on land. They are just as lost and "at sea" when ashore as the landsmen are when aboard ship.

If you read many of the novels, you'll start to see many of the same jokes reappear multiple times, but that, too, is probably authentic. Old jokes get handed down in small isolated communities, just as playground games get passed down by children.

The Fire and the Fury Michael Wolff
Funny that people with both the male and female versions of this name were causing the White House discomfort at roughly the same time.
I just got around to reading this when the Bob Woodward book came out. Wondering what of the books on the current regime are still worth reading.
Also saw Active Measures this week which was good.

Philip Roth - "Portnoy's Complaint"

A few pages in and I feel this is going to be a lot more Freudian than the other Roth books I've read

lol well you aren’t wrong

Getting into Howards End (someone was talking Forster upthread I think) and it’s remarkable so far. It’s impossible for me to read the Miss Schlegels as other than Jewish, which may yet turn out to be contrary to the text but no matter. Seems like it will be an instructive contrast to Brideshead Revisited, in some ways. Nice to read something of this ilk with no barons in it (so far)

I don't think they're supposed to be Jewish, just German - but I don't remember anything in particular in the novel that would state clearly they're not.

Certainly they could be German liberal aesthetes and be gentiles but as a descendant of German Jewish liberal aesthetes I’m predisposed to read that type as a Jewish one

Joseph Lelyveld. Move your shadow: South Africa, black and white. Picked this up in a box of books on the pavement on the walk to work on Wednesday morning. Good appalled account of apartheid South Africa written in the early 80s by the NYT correspondent who had been expelled from South Africa in the 60s after a year by the South African government for his reporting and allowed back in 1980, staying for 3 years.

is it worth continuing with the trilogy if i wasn’t totally blown away by Three Body Problem?

I finished Troilus and Criseyde last night. It was a confusing work for a modern reader, because nothing added up to an integral whole. Chaucer took an older story and reworked it, but he failed to rework it into a shape that was satisfying, because he kept elements of the story that glaringly didn't fit with the direction he wanted to take it.

The result was kind of a mess. He spent the first four books making the two main characters fit the mold of chivalric romance, then in the fifth book they fail entirely to live up to the ideals they have lengthily and poetically declared they believed with all their hearts and souls. I can't begin to count how often they invoked their willingness to die for love, then when push comes to shove, Criseyde changes her mind in the most perfunctory way imaginable and takes another lover. Afterwards, Troilus, the paragon of princely virtue declares he will seek honorable death in battle to satisfy his vows of perfect service to love, but as the story peters out, Chaucer mentions briefly in passing that he failed both to die or to get his revenge on his rival.

One is left with a parable of courtly love that conflicts with itself and an author who shrugs and sidesteps the glaring issues no reader can fail to notice. This dangling conclusion is not meant as irony or as cynicism; it is just a problem Chaucer doesn't know how to resolve, so he punts.

chaucer sonned by an aimless in epic poem beef

T & C doesn't seem like something I'd be interested in, but I appreciate your take, Aimless. Cheers for sticking with it even though you found it confusing.

I finished Slaves of Solitude. It was good. It reminded me a bit of Skylark (another NYRB reissue) in the way it's psychological acuity and careful rendering of aspects of small town life made it relatable to a modern reader, though admittedly 1940s England is already a bit closer to modern times than Belle Epoque Hungary. The rendering of civilian life during the long days before Normandy as stretches of anxious dreariness punctuated by the odd boozy bacchanalia seemed believable. And its portrayal of the boarding house boor, Mr. Thwaites, was devastatingly acute, even though the author's deployment of much felicitous prose to take down an annoying dunderhead did seem a bit like a bazooka being aimed at a gnat.

I finished Thomas Browne's Religio-Medici, and as a perfect follow to Burton's Anatomy..., just as a fireworks display of language and learning, anchored by a deep well of faith in a god, which in their hands its a complex figure. Burton and Browne are companions in the best sense and you realise what pub talk as prose could be.

Lawrence Goldstone - Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903

I could not disagree more re: Chaucer's Troilus, which to me seems pretty clearly Chaucer's multi-angled comment on the future fate of all such starcrossed-lovers tales

Currently reading Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety. Love it! I tried it once before but gave up early...really glad I tried again. You can see the way she perfected her style with Wolf Hall etc later...all the building blocks are there. Also love the way she has written the various women.

Debating whether to pursue another fictional French Revolutionary novel afterwards, or a meatier non-fiction instead. Def want to stay in this arena though.
Maybe that Marie Antoinette book by Antonia Fraser?
We’ll see.

I just finished Ourednik's The Opportune Moment, 1855 btw and it was fucking great. I loved Europeana and didn't really understand Case Closed entirely but 1855 is just terrific - clever and biting and fun and dark. I'm glad Dalkey has this guy, wanna read everything he writes

I'm now digging into Crashed, Adam Tooze.

I'm taking some time out of town and Crashed is too massive and unwieldy to bring with me, so I'll probably start and maybe finish another book before I can get back to it.

Violette Leduc: The Lady and the Little Fox Fur -- another really good Penguin European Writers book with a lovely cover and hideous paper stock

I keep meaning to talk about stuff I’m reading, but never get around to it. Anyway, started to reread ‘Seibi There Below’ by Krasznahorkai, and reminded how much I loved it. The writing is gorgeous.

Should be Seiobo

Vile Bodiesm Evelyn Waugh. It's funny! Was taken with this passage:

"Adam ate some breakfast. No kipper, he reflected, is ever as good as it smells; how this too earthly contact with flesh and bone spoiled the first happy exhilaration; if only one could live, as Jehovah was said to have done, on the savour of burnt offerings. He lay back for a little in his bed thinking about the smells of food, of the greasy horror of fried fish and the deeply moving smell that came from it; of the intoxicating breath of bakeries and the dullness of buns...He planned dinners of enchanting aromatic foods that should be carried under the nose, snuffed and thrown to the dogs...endless dinners, in which one could alternate flavour with flavour from sunset to dawn without satiety, while one breathed great draughts of the bouquet of old brandy."

T. Singer by Dag Solstad, in which a fellow hamstrung by self-consciousness lives his life. The book does its Dag Solstad thing, which is to say I loved it. I think he's probably my favourite living writer at the moment.

I have also been reading Dag Solstad. His Armand V, which I finished last night. This one has very light games played with narrative although apart from that it isn't that different to his other books and what they work over in all its European white-male neurosis in a tragic-comic mode with an awareness of priviledge. Both he and Thomas Bernhard have a lot in common although there are some key differences - in Bernhard, whose central figures like to berate you with truths - although they hate themselves for never standing outside of it. They are very much post-war and dealing with something like the fall out from the politics of the 60s and 70s, but then Solstad also engages with the aftermath of the Berlin Wall, and Western imperialism too -- something Bernhard never got to do as he died in the late 80s. Both write with a really addictive rhtyhm to their sentences (although Bernhard has that trademark density of his). Its quite a novel to be reading today -- as we drive toward what feels like the end of certain projects -- the EU, NATO, etc. as the kind of consensus fractures and we march toward what nobody knows.

Other than that its poetry via a couple of key NYRB issues:

Poems of the Late T'Ang
Proensa An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry

The first set fo translations is by Welsh sinologist A.C.Graham who seems to, in his introduction, attempting to bridge a gap between a conception of Chinese culture and poetry somewhere between Ezra Pound and William Empson. I often wanted to engage a bit more with ancient Chinese poetry but I never found a starter volume. Till now. The notes are good - when I can understand them, and I feel that I can go on a learning curve now. No such problems with Troubadour poetry although I have only started on Proensa I've read a couple of vols in the past. This one is translated by Paul Blackburn (who had a corerspondence with Pound) and there's a quote in the back from Richard Sieburth (translator of, among many things, courtly love poetry and an editor of the Faber Selected poetry of Ezra Pound) so join the dots.

Re-reading Derek Walcott's The Arkansas Traveler and just started The Sellout.

started hugo wilcken's the reflection and hoping it becomes a bit more than wow this narrator is *really* unreliable

In the home stretch of Ha Jin's Waiting, but slowing down my reading, resisting the tide, even though I know it's time, it's time---so much quiet momentum, the characters are so fluid within their constraints, their circumstances, their logic: lightning in a bottle, across the decades, that is.

During my short beach vacation, I started reading Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson (Freeman Dyson's son). Now I am halfway through it and must decide whether to set it down and pick up Crashed where I left off, or finish the Dyson before I return to Tooze's book.

Is it bad, or just overwhelming?

I'm reading the Confessions of Augustine in the new Sarah Ruden translation. The translation is great: jazzy, punchy, and thoroughly unstuffy. The work itself can be repetitive at times and elusive at others, rather like a stream of consciousness, despite the overt devotional character of the work, I do picture Augustine indulging in a tipple while leisurely dictating this to an amanuensis, but at times it snaps into focus and you feel like a bit of historical vertigo as you catch a personal glimpse down through the centuries.

The Unforeseen by Dorothy Macardle. A woman, Virgilia, staying in isolation in a cottage in the Wicklow mountains, realises she's developing second sight. Her daughter, Nan, is trying to decide whether she's in love with Perry, a dick, or should be dedicating herself to her art. There's a combination of building dread, confined hysteria, and uncertainty, within a lovingly depicted Wicklow countryside and its bird life, which is striking. In fact one of the successes of this book is how Virgilia's visions and the nature surrounding her are seen to participate in each other.

As the main characters attempt to come to decisions about their futures you are shown them probing the future in different ways, whether it is the predictive force of hereditary traits, a sense of unease, being able to visualise yourself in alternative futures successfully or common sense. The way these interact and compare with the dangerous certainty of second sight is well done.

It has a terribly glib resolution though, which squanders the building unease. The scientific seriousness with which the male characters take everything makes this feel, as an introduction also suggests, that this is doubling up as an assault on scepticism about second sight and paranormal things generally. The overall lingering message – that which is unforeseen is sometimes the most important thing, in our previsions and attempts to make decisions based on a perception of the future – is a decent one.

And the shadow of the war sits within this book (published 1945, set summer 1938), with so that the decisions the characters are trying to make are laced with a presentiment of death:

'And, you see, for our generation, life is not going to be a summer holiday. What we've got to find out is whether we shall want one another when things are frightening and terrible.'

It's written in what I would call an Edwardian fashion - that is to say it's pretty stately, but i quite like that mode of writing, which is well done here at least, and which made this perfect reading while convalescing, and the descriptions of Wicklow and Dublin Bay made me wish I were there rather than blowing my nose in London.

also started forbidden line by paul stanbridge. in many ways it looks like the sort of thing i should like - a mixed plate of history, pseudo-religion and the arcane, - but it’s written in that facetious, garrulous style that seems like its intended to be described as pynchonian but which also seems to be the congenital style of a category of well-educated young male tyro, and to be lacking in any sort of constraint that might make it interesting.

am ambivalent. will continue with it for a bit.

That Dorothy Macardle book is going on my wish list.

Same.

Robert Harris's enjoyably sprightly SELLING HITLER, about the fake Hitler diaries, is lots of fun

That Dorothy Macardle book is going on my wish list.

Hey, it’s fall

so it is.

Oh yeah, basis of the Ray Milland movie The Uninvited (made during WWII, I think). Never watched the whole thing, but have seen it compared to Val Lewton signature films re (post-Turn of the Screw?) supernatural as lens/prism of character development.

I just started 2018 Autumn: The Rise and Fall of What Are You Reading Now?. Feel free to commandeer the throw pillows and stretch out on the sofa.