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

Just found a copy of If The Sun Dies - can't wait to dig into it.

i similarly have a copy from the LAPL here now, going to dig into it after i finish some others:

- a pair of Dan Epstein baseball books clemenza mentioned on ILBaseball

- The Planet Factory: Exoplanets and the Search for a Second Earth by Elizabeth Tasker

- If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens, Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life by Stephen Webb (occasionally amusing musings on the theories of why we've never encountered or found evidence of extraterrestrial life. The first solution in the book is "They are already here, and they are Hungarians"

I just read a John McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy, that offered that Hungarians/aliens thesis based on the experiences of people who worked on the Manhattan Project with seriously odd, seriously brilliant Magyars.

I'm reading Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet - an odd book so far, occasionally funny, somewhat interesting as a panorama of mid-19th century scientific doctrines.

I've started on The Sicilian Vespers, Steven Runciman. Medieval politics are like an overly complicated board game played by hundreds of petty aristocrats and scheming clergy, all throwing their own pairs of dice at once, but Runciman seems determined to explain all the moves, which seems both admirable and delusional.

Simon Garfield: In Miniature -- an interesting and entertaining look at the appeal of small versions of bigger things, but it really stints on the illustrations, which is a shame

Natalia Ginzburg - All Our Yesterdays. Her writing is so...flat (which is almost my only observation from all my time reading her, its a very hard to sensibility to expand upon), but here it feels even more like it - as events and how they impact a group of friends in Italy before, during and after WWII seem just like another slight drama. Its not exactly 'Italian'. I need to check some of her other novels and stories but in this early one there is one page of actual dialogue (a lot of he said, she said, he asked, etc.), which is her own voice sorta coming through (rather than an application of a formal experiment) although later she would distill things a bit more. Worth a read if you lke her already.

I'm still slowly making my way through Proust. Getting into the latter stages of Sodom. May take a break after that.

As what I hoped might be some light relief but turned out not to be, I read The Last Samurai. This seems to be an ILB favourite but I did not care for it.

I'm now reading Kudos, the last of Rachel Cusk's trilogy. I thought the first two were brilliant, particularly the second one. So far this one is a falling off.

Andre Breton's anthology of black humour.

I finished The Sicilian Vespers. The "vespers" themselves, an uprising against and a massacre of the French in Sicily, were mainly carried out over the space of a week, but the history roves all about the Mediterranean and covers the half century from 1250 CE to 1300 CE. What struck me most was how rapidly the cast of characters turned over due to their habit of dying soon after they showed up, even the youngsters in their twenties. The popes especially kicked off within a year or two of their ascension.

Now I really should move directly to reading Dante's Divine Comedy, while all this is moderately fresh in my mind, since large numbers of the people I've just read about show up in Dante, most of them in hell. Instead, I've picked up one of Alfred's perennial recommendations, A Time to Be Born, Dawn Powell.

I finished Bouvard and Pecuchet, at least as much as one can finish an unfinished novel. It's a very odd book, somewhat relentlessly one-note in some ways with masses of undigested information presented to the reader, but at the same time oddly charming. Somehow it also feels quite modern, with the bumbling main pair as antiheroes in the Pynchon/Vonnegut mode, though the book feels ultimately less cynical than Vonnegut at least. There's something genuinely admirable, almost superhuman really, about their boundless curiosity, drive, and idealism. It also works pretty well as a time capsule of the late 19th century.

Finally found a copy of Forgotten Armies by CA Bayly and Tim Harper, and so far it's pretty amazing. It's about WW2 from the perspective of South East Asia, and the way it ties everything into a story told from a different perspective completely changes the way you'll look at that war. There's a sequel, Forgotten Wars, which follows the wars of indepence in the region over the next decades, and apparently does the same to for instance the Vietnam War. Must read for anyone interested in global history and adjusting for eurocentrism.

That sounds interesting - thanks!

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These are both very, very good fictional approaches to what Fred B is talking about--the first about Indian soldiers in WW1, the second about a West African soldier in WW2.

I've started reading Helen C. Epstein's Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda and the War on Terror. A readable, interesting narrative about a history (the modern history of Uganda) that I knew next to thing about going in. I'm also interleaving with bits from Maeve Brennan's The Long-Winded Lady.

Struggling a bit with that André Breton collection. He's good at introducing the authors, but the actual content...transgression for transgression's sake, as discussed on ILX elswhere recently? Different times, I know.

Surrealists are terrible at literature. I am not 22 anymore so not allowed to re-think this.

otm

Ballard took surrealism to extraordinary places, but I wouldn't call him a surrealist, per se.

No, not quite.

Breton's Nadja works, but it's short.

"Surrealists are terrible at literature" is one of those statement which, while wrong, is truthy enough to count as good challoping.

This is Breton selected but not Breton written, tho - no actual surrealists in the stories I've read so far. And as I said, his insights on the writers in question are sometimes interesting, the texts he chooses to highlight not so much.

On vacation I read:

The Witch Elm by Tana French. Both a departure and not from the procedural mode of the Dublin Murder Squad books. As ever, she is spectacular at texturing environments and characters, and writing dreadfully plausible stories around what should really be somewhat cockamamie crimes.

The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz. Much less serious and somewhat metafictional Sherlock Holmes fanfic with the author himself as Watson. I preferred Magpie Murders, but this still made me giggle in parts. Some bits of trite post-2016 liberal handwringing over something or other injected into the narration, for some reason.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. Everyone on earth (including Hugo and Nebula voters) has been saying this is good for ages and they're right. Search: political maneuvering, Roman Empire in space, premisey bits about AI spaceships, views into assorted made-up cultures including the genderless one at its center.

Since I got home I started reading Learning from Las Vegas by Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, which is about how to say things with buildings.

"Surrealists are terrible at literature" is one of those statement which, while wrong, is truthy enough to count as good challoping.

― Tim, Monday, 26 November 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thank you sir, my challops are all I have left for the year

Tho Leonora Carrington can be very very good

There are lots of literary genres, such as ghost stories, some experimental narratives, science fiction, or myths, that contain surreal elements, but do not identify themselves as surrealism. Self-identified surrealism in literature is often too preoccupied with producing surreal effects and not enough occupied with creating an interesting story.

Brian McHale, POSTMODERNIST FICTION.

Properly reading this many years after buying it.

Thoughts:

1: I always felt that it looked dense and dull, but actually I admire the clarity of the writing and thought.

2: PoMo might sound a dreary topic, but what I like about the book is that it's a kind of 'introduction to the poetics of fiction' that goes beyond PoMo - it has a transferrable quality.

3: I like some of the relevant PoMo authors - Vonnegut, Alasdair Gray, for instance - but a lot of them seem quite dull, in their avant-garde way.

4: He tends to come back often to saying 'and the most exemplary case of all is Thomas Pynchon', even though TP seems a lot less extreme and exemplary than his other cases. It makes me think that he just can't get enough of Gravity's Rainbow.

5: One thing that runs through it, unnoticed by McHale but uncomfortable to me - and something I have long tended to suspect. A lot of the PoMo narratives he quotes seem very sexist in some way; or seem to revolve around promiscuity, or the sexual availability of women, sometimes sexualized violence and even murder of women, by men. Every time I have encountered Robert Coover's work it has given me this impression, and parts of TP's GR for instance also echo elements of it. But in McHale, case after case does it. There is plainly a kind of subconscious / cultural / psychological subtext that he doesn't seem able to perceive. I would say reasons for it:

a) it's a period matter: this kind of thing was more normative anyway, in some ways - cf James Bond

b) more damagingly, there is some kind of connection between the sexual and literary 'transgression' - for these, almost all male, writers, writing 'experimentally' also implies having an 'adventurous' attitude to sex (sometimes including violence). So there's a kind of 'dark side of the counter-culture' element.

The curious thing about it is how this repeatedly shows through despite McHale going out of his way to write a formalist book where such issues aren't really up for discussion. Even though almost ruled out of court from the start, the sexual politics keeps insisting on being noticeable.

Despite this, in case of doubt, I find POSTMODERNIST FICTION an admirably clear, inclusive, ambitious, useful book.

I guess if Surrealist lit is limited to those with some connection to the original movement, then I haven’t read much at all, apart from some Artaud. Its influence however probably extends to lots of other writers I like, even though it’s probably stronger in film, having the visual dimension, and poetry.

Someone like Borges for instance seems to have a little Surrealism in him. According to Wikipedia he was involved in the Spanish Ultraist movement which seems to have been a close cousin.

Sure I mean that is part of where Borges came from but his reading is way wider than any surrealist.

I am mildly interested in Carrington but I bet its merely ok, off-focus bunch of stories. The discourse that I've seen is one of a neglected female writer. Fine, but I need more than that. Might try some if I see it.

xps. Alasdair Grey's opus is about an incel who murders a young woman who spurns his affections

so fits in with your thesis on sexism in pomo

having finished fitz hugh ludlow's the hasheesh eater: being passages from the life of a pythagorean (& continuing with mid-nineteenth century american metaphysical speculation) i'm making a reattempt on melville's mardi which i put down about a fifth of the way in close to twenty years ago... feel morally obliged to get it out of the way before starting on m-d.

Seconding pinefox re Brian McHale. Used that book a lot at university. Should reread, see if it's still good.

I finished A Time to Be Born a short time ago. Whether or not it was based upon the characters of Clare Boothe Luce and Henry Luce (as is often said to be the case), what stood out for me was that Dawn Powell sank her incisors deep into those characters, along with the many social climbers and sycophants who populate this book, and drew blood repeatedly and voraciously. This was in contrast to every other book of hers I have read, where she reserves some human sympathy for the failings of her characters, even as she exposes them nakedly to the reader. Powell must have truly despised that piece of the NY scene with a depth of scorn unusual for her.

It also had some of her wittiest take downs. For example, (paraphrasing from memory) one character 'attacked her squab with a ferocity that made you think it had pulled a gun on her first.'

Ok, first actual pleasant discovery from that Breton anthology: Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont. Really wild stuff, these rambling pseudo-scientific essays that remind me of a 19th century Groucho Marx monologue. Well worth checking out.

I finished Another Fine Mess which was a great infuriating piece of muckraking. It seems most tinpot dictators have figured something out that still eludes many Americans. The US cares about human rights up until you have something more tangible to offer.

Using whatever brain cells I have left for reading fiction this year on:

Christa Wolf - Cassandra (anyone interested in Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey should give this a go btw)
Gert Jonke - The System of Vienna

re Alasdair Gray, I think of him as a special / different case: unlike the US writers who seem to glory in a kind of misogyny, he (at least in one or two books) explores in a very open way a kind of shameful, pornographic imagination. There is a real element of 'anatomizing masculinity' here that I don't see in the other misogynist PoMo people in McHale. It's connected to a kind of disarming modesty / self-criticism in Gray (though in his way I suppose he can be bumptious / self-important also).

Adam Mars-Jones articulated all this quite well in VENUS ENVY (c.1990).

I just knocked off a quick read of a very short (114 pp.) book, The Wet Engine, Brian Doyle. He's a local author, recently deceased, whose style is very distinctive; it displays a kind of wonder and innocent exuberance while speaking of matters rarely discussed in such a style -- congenital heart defects, open heart surgery on infants and children, the early deaths of many of them and other weighty emotional things. That innocent wonder and exuberance is somewhat refreshing, but much easier to take in small doses, since it slips into emo tweeness a bit too often to gain my whole admiration.

Since my own daughter was born with a congenital heart defect requiring open heart surgery at 8 weeks old, I had more of a reason to read this than most.

Was he a surgeon? I love the title.

Not a surgeon. He wrote novels with a bent toward magical realism, and YA stuff, and some poetry. His day job was editing the literary magazine of a local Catholic university.

I'm now reading Raffles, Maurice Collis, a short bio of the East India Company factotum who founded Singapore and was among the first European scholars of east Asian culture. It was written during the early 1960s, when it was still an article of faith among 'university men' that British colonialism in Asia was a fine thing that brought peace and prosperity to its subjects. So, no breath of criticism of the enterprise seeps into this work. Other than that, it's a fairly good bio, touching all the main points and not getting bogged down in minutiae.

Altamont Joel Selvin
INteresting to hear the background to the story. I knew the basics, Rolling Stone rescheduled gig or relocated gig cos they made the wrong announcement at the wrong time to get a gig in the Golden gate Park. & the deat ho f Meredith Hunter at the hands of Hell's Angels.
Hadn't heard further details Like the guy who claimed he could get the go ahead for passes for the concert to go ahead who just seems to have been utterly shady. Or that when the gig had to be relocated outside of San Francisco it meant that the Hell's Angels chapter that the area would be inside the territory of changed. People had been working with teh San Francisco chapter to some extent and trusted tehm better than the unfamiliar bunch who were now in play 7 who brought a load of prospects with them who caused even more chaos.
Or how bad the area around Altamont was, or the drugs that were available which seems to be all the brown acid and mixed with speed etc.
INterestinig book, but I did notice that Selvin doesn't seem to have noticed who Dillard and Clarke were when he'd just been talking about other members of the Byrds so does make me wonder what else he's missed. He dismissed them as a bluegrass group.

Bob Woodward Fear
Imteresting history of the era. Does have me wondering how well it was researched if Woodward could dismiss the idea of Russian collusion a couple of weeks before some pretty definitive testimony came out.
BUt have wanted to read this since it came out. & it was €10 in a sale last week thanks to Black Friday.

Have you seen Gimme Shelter the Altamont concert documentary? Mostly shot in real time, and could use a re-release w more backstory/aftermath (or maybe it's had that?), but anyway essential film experience re rock history (and no, the murder didn't happen during "Sympathy For The Devil"; Rolling Stone had to retract that, though the legend continued).

Not in the last few years. May be about 20 years ago I remember seeing it.
Book makes it sound pretty hellish. Site sounds like it was bad to start off with quite apart from anything else.
Plus larger crowd than expected with little provision for them.

I read the Bert Berns book by Selvin and thought it was pretty weak

I'm reaching the end of Daniel Deronda. I wasn't expecting the first 12 chapters to be about someone called Gwendolen Harleth. At the halfway point Daniel's story had still barely begun; when Eliot gently admonished him for putting off his search for Mirah's brother till after Christmas I wanted to shout at her "it's not him, it's you." Still. Might have found the best joke in Eliot:

In fact, his mind seems so broad that I find my own correct opinions lying in it quite commodiously, and how they are to be brought into agreement with the vast remainder is his affair, not mine. I leave it to him to settle our basis, never yet having seen a basis which is not a world-supporting elephant, more or less powerful and expensive to keep. My means will not allow me to keep a private elephant.

Maybe you had to be there.

Daniel Deronda is the kind of novel I can't imagine anyone having the patience and vision to plan and execute. So many ideas. So dense. But still a lot of fun.