2018 Autumn: The Rise and Fall of What Are You Reading Now?

I like Bruce's BORN TO RUN book a lot.

I also feel that I should read Steve Bruce's books.

Also Lenny Bruce's autobio, How To Talk Dirty and Influence People.

I finished The Gate of Angels. It had Fitzgerald's characteristic excellence. The story, characters, and prose avoided every kind of cliché and staleness and all were drawn with sure, strong strokes. It even had the tiniest whiff of a ghost story about it, though without insisting. Never insisting. Lastly, in its own indirect and understated way, it was highly feminist and class conscious. A fine book.

I read Municipal Dreams, which is a history of council housing in the UK. It made me angrier and better-informed.

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

Today I finished How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti which, like all good books, is about women.

(And other things, like the struggles of art and Judaism)

still plowing through vol 3 of Callow's Orson Welles bio ("One Man Band") and Oriana Fallaci's "If the Sun Dies", plus occasionally dipping back into some Ballard and Moorcock short story collections

The Dead Girls, by Jorge Ibargüengoitia: surely an influence on the most gruelling part of 2666. The back cover and the intro by Colm Toibin both describe this book as hilarious, which is wildly innaccurate (not a criticism--it's not TRYING to be hilarious).

I got "If the Sun Dies" and keep not getting round to it. How is it?

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, so now I know where one Ilxor got their screen name...

Coincidentally, I also finished a Fitzgerald novel: At Freddie's, the only one I hadn't read and a minor disappointment.

I got "If the Sun Dies" and keep not getting round to it. How is it?

I am only 75 pages in but I love it. She's a remarkable writer in the right place at the right time.

Anthony Powell - Afternoon Men
Dezso Kosztolanyi - Anna Edes
Anthony Powell - Venusberg
Thomas Bernhard - The Lime Works

Alternating between the usual (mostly) European/Latin American fiction I read and starting on a few English novels written white, mostly Tory sorts. In these early Anthony Powell novels the comedy really hits, and the dialogue is so good. Afternoon Men has a streak of anti-semitism running through it and both of these books have this deeper tragedy on the relations between men and women that wouldn't be out of place at all today.

I need to give Powell another try after a fruitless summer reading the entire A Dance sequence.

The early novels are short so worth a go at tuning into his worldview. A lot of the comedy is really sharp, actually (I'll need to re-read some of the Perry Anderson essay but I think he undersells this?) I want to finish a couple of his short books before getting to that sequence - maybe next year.

xp Seems like you gave Powell an extensive workout already, so I see no 'need' to go back to him unless it is, in fact, a misnamed 'want' to go back.

vintage aimless

I remember The Gate of Angels being clever further in, but otherwise about all that stuck was the lovely exhilarating opening scene of bicycle action. Should probably go back. That was some great bicycling.

recently read some v. appealing descriptions of short stories and novellas in three new stand-alone Andre Dubus collections. I like that he was an early fan of Chekov (also Hemingway and his own instructor, Richard Yates). Also that he was apparently not a stylist in the-then dominant Carveresque key, and was a deep diver into big messy family situations and resulting inner conundrums of friends and relations. Also saw Part I of The Woman In White on PBS, and thinking I need to check out Wilkie Collins too: seems to have the observant foregrounding of gender codes (def incl. legal) that I associate Trollope at his best, plus melodrama x class-anxious, striving young characters re Dickens---also a detective.

david peace - 1974. gruelling. claustrophobic. in a good way. particularly effective at dragging items of pop culture into the mire. very effective. < note effect of staccato prose rythms.

xp Seems like you gave Powell an extensive workout already, so I see no 'need' to go back to him unless it is, in fact, a misnamed 'want' to go back.

― A is for (Aimless),

"Short and funny" is a wonderful tag, worked for Woody Allen's early movies. I'm a fan of the Anglo-Irish miniaturists (Waugh, Pym, K. Amis, Spark, Fitzgerald).

See also Beryl Bainbridge

I'm a fan of the Anglo-Irish miniaturists (Waugh, Pym, K. Amis, Spark, Fitzgerald).

― You like queer? I like queer. Still like queer. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 22 October 2018 20:48 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Early Powell definitely fits here. Dance is substantially different in tone, while still retaining many characteristics.

david peace - 1974. gruelling. claustrophobic. in a good way. particularly effective at dragging items of pop culture into the mire. very effective. < note effect of staccato prose rythms.

I read these over the course of last Spring/ Summer and the cumulative power is quite a thing.

I read Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. As a tale of the Irish diaspora (though this might just be my prejudice), Toibin's task was somehow a battle with sentimentality. He gets around it by seeming to wrap his character (Eilis) in a kind of bubble wrap of free indirect style, in which he moves her from experience to experience, shielding her, and us, from the worst excesses of sentiment and tragedy.

It does mean a separation from the rawness of things, but I think that's a stylistic choice anyway; it also means that the emotion of the story sort of seeps into you - the tragedy being that of character and circumstance rather than a clumsy tugging at the heartstrings. I don't know if I loved it, but I certainly can't stop thinking about it. I think Toibin, much like people said about Flaubert and Bovary, fell in love with Eilis; I did a bit, too.

I've been vacationing for a few days. I raced through Maigret Gets Angry, Georges Simenon. It was exactly what one wants from a Maigret novel, neither more nor less.

Now I am three-quarters of the way through The Little Nugget, a very early P.G. Wodehouse novel (1913). It demonstrates all the Wodehouse trademarks, but has one unusual feature; it is narrated in the first person by a character who displays an unwodehousian self-knowledge and level-headedness.

The standard-issue lovesick swain in later Wodehouse has been streamlined down the farcical basics and is a chucklehead. Peter Burns is more of a holdover from Wodehouse's earlier public-school hero Mike, the athletic, noble-minded sixth-former at Wryken School, except now he is 30 years old. This makes The Little Nugget one of those evolutionary transitional steps which are so difficult to find in the fossil record, rather like a proto-bird emerging from the dinosaurs, with feathers and wings, but recognizably not yet a modern bird.

https://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/9781613399040_p0_v1_s600x595.jpg

Yes thanks, online bookseller, I'm sure I will enjoy that one too.

Re-reading Kathleen Jamie's Findings. It's very much part of that confessional style that characterises a lot of 00s nature writing (albeit it came out two years before the lodestone, The Wild Places) but it's the pinnacle of that style, I think, and just cuts to the heart of me. I was going to select a bit to share but (to paraphrase John Muir) you pick up one corner and you drag the whole damn thing into the air.

Oh now you gotta do it!

I read Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. As a tale of the Irish diaspora (though this might just be my prejudice), Toibin's task was somehow a battle with sentimentality. He gets around it by seeming to wrap his character (Eilis) in a kind of bubble wrap of free indirect style, in which he moves her from experience to experience, shielding her, and us, from the worst excesses of sentiment and tragedy.

It does mean a separation from the rawness of things, but I think that's a stylistic choice anyway; it also means that the emotion of the story sort of seeps into you - the tragedy being that of character and circumstance rather than a clumsy tugging at the heartstrings. I don't know if I loved it, but I certainly can't stop thinking about it. I think Toibin, much like people said about Flaubert and Bovary, fell in love with Eilis; I did a bit, too.

A lovely little novel I read in two sittings in summer '09. OTM.

Read an extended review of CT's new nonfiction Mad, Bad, and Dangerous, biographies of the fathers of Yeats, Joyce, and Wilde, whose families were all acquainted with each other in the small, shopworn world of Dublin, when it had "a shapeless aura," according to the author. Mad daddies, each in his own way, but it says here that JB Yeats finally gave up on finishing his self-portrait (after a decade; apparently, none of these geezers ever finished anything), and ran off to NYC at the age of 68, reporting back that he'd found big fun as a Colorful Irish Character, and I'd like to stroll the sidewalks and saloons with him a bit more---maybe I'll get the library to order it. Seems like pretty hairy subject matter for Toibin.

(Haven't read Brooklyn, but enjoyed the movie. don't know if I loved it, but I certainly can't stop thinking about it. Yes, the ending, for instance, did leave me with more to think about than most endings, re how the characters' lives might go later.)

The three essays making up that book were all in the LRB: not sure if they're publicly accessible

John Le Carre's The Little Drummer Girl, an adaptation of which is soon to air on the BBC, directed by Park Chan Wook! First 100 pages are spent setting up all the characters involved, next 100 deal mostly with a truly exhausting interrogation scene which I'm sure forms part of what drew Chan Wook to this material. I've only read one Le Carre before - Spy Who Came In From The Cold - and by contrast this is much less sad-sack, much weirder.

Read an extended review of CT's new nonfiction Mad, Bad, and Dangerous, biographies of the fathers of Yeats, Joyce, and Wilde, whose families were all acquainted with each other in the small, shopworn world of Dublin, when it had "a shapeless aura," according to the author. Mad daddies, each in his own way, but it says here that JB Yeats finally gave up on finishing his self-portrait (after a decade; apparently, none of these geezers ever finished anything), and ran off to NYC at the age of 68, reporting back that he'd found big fun as a Colorful Irish Character, and I'd like to stroll the sidewalks and saloons with him a bit more---maybe I'll get the library to order it. Seems like pretty hairy subject matter for Toibin.

― dow

About five years ago he collected about a dozen essays on mothers and mothers in fiction, including a first-rate one on the fucked-up Mann family.

I haven't (yet) read Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman but I'm in the middle of The Undoing Project by Michael 'Moneyball' Lewis about Kahneman and his research partner Amos Tversky, their research, and their relationship. Some books are like a gourmet meal, you want to consume them slowly and linger over every detail. This is like a cake you want to cram handfuls of into your mouth as fast as possible.

"A Furious Oyster" by Jessica Sequeira - in Santiago, scientists have discovered that the dead can make shadowy returns to life during storms; the rival schools of research in the field have coalesced around Neruda and de Rokha. This is another Dostoyevsky Wannabe thing and it's really very good.

"Strandloper" by Alan Garner, I wonder whether I will end up liking it very much or not at all? I'm still not sure, two thirds of the way through. The way he does speech is always enjoyable whatever.

Oh I bought a spare copy of the Osip Mandelstam volume in the Penguin Modern European Poets series because I saw it in the shop and wanted to have a read of it. If anyone needs a copy, (London preferred but not essential) let me know.

(Meant to say Pablos Neruda and de Rokha, didn't mean to erase Winett de Rokha. Apols. NB I am not well-versed in Chilean poetry, I'm sorry to say.)

I forgot for a moment that Dostoyevsky Wannabe was a publisher and was struggling to remember which of D's books was about the dead coming back to life in storms.

I spent the whole weekend laying around and reading. I'm mainly reading The Count of Monte-Cristo, which is wonderful and is going by really quickly, and I started on volume 3 of Kilmartin's Proust.

I started Under the Glacier, Haldor Laxness last night. Evidently it is a comic-mythic outlier among his works. I'm curious to see what he does with a story that places so few limits on him. Developing any internal logic when your story is akin to a dream is always an interesting task.

I finished Twilight of the Superheroes, and I've started reading The End of the Past by Aldo Schiavone, sticking to my plan of alternating fiction and non-fiction. Schiavone has some interesting theories about ancient Rome.

What are his theories? Intriguing title.

I don't know if I should have used the word "theories". It's more a manner of selectively arranging and emphasizing historical facts to develop themes and patterns that (hopefully) form a more cohesive and multi-dimensional picture of Roman society. One of his main emphases is on the fact of slavery, which is often underplayed in the mostly aristocratic Roman cultural content that has come down to us through literature, sculpture, etc, but which according to Schiavone was a major factor - perhaps *the* major factor in Roman modes of production, both agriculture and manufactures. This rather ugly truth was rather vigorously repressed by Roman aristocratic society and fed into the near fetish on purely mental/spiritual activity over anything that smacked of manual labor, even forms that we would consider highly skilled. Further he sees this feeding into the stagnation of Roman productive capacity. Rome had built an engine of wealth which could only run on veritable rivers of captive slaves fed into its maw by unceasing wars of conquest. Basically once Rome ran out of wealthy provinces to conquer, the engine had to start sputtering. At least that's the impression I'm getting so far (only about a third of the way in).

I'm reading Afternoon Men thanks to thsi thread.

Slavery supplied almost all of the labor force for Roman society, from about 100 BCE onward. It took them a while to find a workable equilibrium that created an economic space for non-noble Roman citizens, but they did eventually cobble one together. It included several kinds of public dole, much private patronage, & the professionalization of the army and its pay base. Because the children of slaves were also slaves, the need for vast numbers of new captives eased.

One thing not widely understood about Roman society is how often it went through major political and social upheavals. But through it all, the wealthy and aristocratic families made sure that when the dust settled, they stayed on top, giving the misleading impression of it being a stable system. It was anything but stable. Even Octavian-Augustus ruled through spies, terror, and the constant purging of his enemies.

Also, I should mention that apart from his main thesis, and despite being a rather compact book, Schiavone's writing is filled with interesting asides for the student of history, such as:

Nothing reveals the intensity of long-distance trade in the centuries of the imperial expansion like underwater archeology. The coastal depths of the Mediterranean are an extraordinary involuntary museum of the material civilization of Europe: ships from the days of Augustus or Hadrian lie close to Venetian or Spanish galleys, medieval furnishings, and airplanes (Spitfires or Savoia-Marchettis) from World War II. Sand and rocks a few dozen meters underwater still preserve an incalculable number of Roman relics: hulls, often well preserved, nautical equipment, amphorae, a great variety of objects.

This is into 'cool story bro' territory but what the hell.

It's probably the time of year, but after reading Kathleen Jamie's Findings I needed something even more fey so went for Richard Mabey's Nature Cure. It's the story of his recovering from depression, moving to Norfolk and how place kind of saved him - a change of place and how that influenced his ability to see, to watch narrowly again.

I started the book about 8 years ago and took it on a trip to The Gambia, that, long story short, partly meant I was on a birding tour with Chris Packham - a tour populated by almost entirely old couples, most of whom were led by strong wives, barely hiding their lust for dear old Chris. While I was there, I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy - not the ideal choice when I was 2000 miles away from my newly-born son. It destroyed me. Anyway, coming in one evening, having read it that afternoon, I sort of seized on Packham saying I needed someone to talk to fancy a beer? It turned out McCarthy was his favourite writer and we sat out for most the evening talking about books and music and whatever.

Naturally, we got to talking about nature writing and it turned out he explicitly hated it - particularly the confessional style. Part of his love for McCarthy is how he writes about place and landscape as part of a larger picture, not as a thing in and of itself, which is a view. Anyway, he lighted on Mabey's Nature Cure as his bete noire, his exemplar of the particular style, saying it was embarrassing to wash one's clothes in public etc (I think he might have said 'shit oneself in public' but I could be misremembering). Being a mixture of starstruck and suggestible, I mentally put the book behind my back and claimed ignorance of its existence. It's taken until now to take it back out.

All of this is more enlightening given Packham's recent autobiography (which I've not read but know a bit about from radio coverage and conversations) and his own, now very public struggles with depression and Aspergers. I wonder if it was a case of hating that thing that is closer to home than you want to admit or if it was a simple timing thing? Either way, I'd be intrigued to hear what he'd make of Nature Cure now. I think it's honest and fiercely attentive and more than worth a read.

I like this story.

Dag Solstad - T Singer
Juan Rulfo - The Plain in Flames
Ilse Aichinger - The Bound Man

I loved T Singer - at times it was almost annoying how much control over people and events there was on the page. I can see why Solstad said this novel was a high point for him. Like other Euro novelists - thinking of Thomas Bernhard and Peter Stamm - you see a particular kind of life, a post-60s/70s politics reaching some kind of conclusion. Life before the apocalypse. Aichinger's stories start out as Kafka-like but more direct (she starts writing just after the end of WWII), less ambiguous, and there are as many ghosts as the dead in Rulfo's somewhat hard-boiled stories. They were more difficult to get into so I'll need another read through sometime.

Taking Jonathan Swift's Major Works, Natalia Ginzburg's All Our Yesterdays and Violette Leduc's La Batarde on my week off.

"A Furious Oyster" by Jessica Sequeira - in Santiago, scientists have discovered that the dead can make shadowy returns to life during storms; the rival schools of research in the field have coalesced around Neruda and de Rokha. This is another Dostoyevsky Wannabe thing and it's really very good.

this sounds interesting.

my grandfather had a mysterious friendship with De Rokha. they were from the same area of Chile, Licantén commune in the Maule Region. and about a generation apart. they didn't have much in common. my grandfather, a civil engineer, wasn't literary at all, and while De Rokha was a communist my grandfather was a conservative. my grandfather would go and visit him from time to time.

there is no paper record of my grandfather's father in any of the local archives that an uncle of mine with a hobby for genealogy could discover, and while my grandfather's mother was an illiterate washerwoman, one of my grandfather's uncles was named Rabelais.

tl;dr am i the illegitimate great-grandson of chile's 4th most esteemed poet?

answer: probably not