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

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.

Yeah it is pretty extraordinary.

The first time I read it I was tetchy about what I thought were the tenuous connections between Gwendolyn and Deronda.

I got it the second time.

And in my Gentile reckoning she rendered the Jewish rituals with great sympathy.

You could definitely criticise the number of fortuitous occurrences, though if you did you'd never be able to read any Dickens.

When the needs of the story conflict with the need for probability, the story should always win.

I've always wanted to read some Margery Allingham, and picked up "Traitor's Purse" at a secondhand without reading the back cover - so glad I did, it's fantastic.

Written during the war, it's a totally weird genre-crossover - part whodunnit, part amnesia story, part Hitchockian man-on-the-run caper, part uncanny English ghost want story, wrapped around a goofy but plausible conspiracy plot. It's basically a Doctor Who regeneration episode minus the sci-fi bits.

It's fun! Would say more but wouldn't want to spoil.

I've started reading Frazer's The Golden Bough, in the OUP one-volume abridgment. Kind of cool that he wrote this huge book (which was eventually expanded to 12 volumes) because he wanted to understand a painting of Turner's.

I discovered Elizabeth Bowen!

What took you so long?

That Margery Allingham sounds ace Chuck, straight to my goodreads want to read pile!

I am reading my first Barbara Pym novel, Excellent Women. So far, she seems like an author who wastes little time in rambling digressions or reaching for 'effects', instead she keeps her attention squarely on exposition and development, with great economy of means. I like that immensely.

Eliot's psychological landscaping---incl. gender and class, natch---provide the hinge or stepping stone between Austen and V.Woolf; for me, they're the Big Three---but her plot twists can seem very conveeenient, not really a prob but keeping her further from protomodernism than say Thomas "Debbie Downer" Hardy--no not really a prob but duly noted every time and putting a little more distance than would already be there. (Well the ending of The Mill on the Floss bothered even some reviewers of her time, and certainly suggests class-out-the-ass heartplucking 1940s Hollywood treatment---p. sure Austen never bothered with anything any where near this shit.)
Allingham take v. appealing!
The only Pym I've read is The Sweet Dove Died, funny-scary as hell re desperate delusions going deeper in middle age, "the bottom of the bottomless lake," as Prine puts it.

i want to relate a story, or really a finding i guess, and i don't really know where to put it, but since people interested in books frequent this thread it seemed like a reasonable place.

i've been listing books online for a bookstore in a small town since april. the collection of books i've been listing belonged to a lawyer in d3nver named j0hn hutch1ns. apparently the amount of books in this man's basement upon his death was pretty extreme. going through the small sample of his collection represented by 30+ boxes of books my boss hauled, i'm struck that his collecting habits were compulsive and not very discriminating, although there are a few items of value and interest scattered throughout. he mainly collected history -- american, military, western + mining history in other countries. he seemed very into a sort of triumphal mainstream view of history represented by occasionally brilliant but mostly second-rate white male historians erecting tomes in service of the status quo. he wrote a few pieces for local colorado history organization the d3nver w3st3rners. he served in the military in his youth and there are books related to military history, uniforms, flags and seals that give me the impression of an older man playing army men through books. he also seemed to be religious.

anyway, i picked a book out of the box, "love stories of famous virginians," and found a letter laid in at the rear. i'm going to transcribe it, with some google-proofing.

J0hn--

I'm too miserable to sleep, so I'm writing this -- I don't know if 1) you'll read it or 2) if you'll care -- probably not -- since anything I think or feel is my fault because I'm crazy -- but I need to do something, so I'm writing this.

So tell me, how do I live, knowing that any time you get really angry with me -- and it I never knew when that will be -- that you will 1) blame me for the loss of all your hopes and dreams and 2) tell me that I am a rotten wife -- that I have failed to support you, ruined your career, your dreams and your life. I do not agree with your assessment -- but what matters is that you believe it -- so tell me, since I have ruined your life and am a terrible rotten failure as a wife -- why should I live? how can I live under that burden? That burden is more than the weight of the world -- more than the weight of the universe -- but I can't kill myself because that is against God's law and because it would have a terrible impact on 4dam -- so I can't live and I can't die -- what can I do?

Don't answer. I can't take any more. I'm just going to do my best to wipe my memory and wipe my emotions. I'm sorry you ruined your life by marrying me. Feel free to rectify that mistake an way you see fit.

phew!! i was definitely under the impression that this dude was a real dusty dick. i hope the wife left him but i don't think she ever did.

a request to the book collectors of ilx: don't be like this asshole and treat your wife like shit, and don't collect boring, bad books if you can help it.

I read three Pym novels within a week in July and she struck me as the least, ah, fulsome of the Anglo-Irish miniaturists. The gestures in her books I can barely remember.

Thomas "Debbie Downer" Hardy-

Many times when I praise Hardy as one of my nine or ten favorite novelists I get serious wtf looks. I have to keep explaining, "Have you read one of his major novels? They're weird as fuck."

her plot twists can seem very conveeenient, not really a prob but keeping her further from protomodernism than say Thomas "Debbie Downer" Hardy

Hardy is the king of the conveeenient plot twist, no?

Also, what's a good Hardy that isn't Tess, Casterbridge, Madding Crowd or Jude?

The Return of the Native and The Woodlander. I've tried Two on a Tower and A Pair of Blue Eyes. Every twenty years a publisher attempts to reactivate interest in those minor novels.

The Woodlanders rather

Hardy is the king of the conveeenient plot twist, well yeah, but he wants you to suffer with Jude The Obscure, Jude The Obscene, Obs The June Moon---sorry, that Thurber piece keeps coming back---or anyway keep your head down (and keep reading) and don't show any interest (just keep reading)---wheras Eliot is cute with it, even when it's a sick sad world scene, maybe nudge-nudge invitation to take it as send-up of Victorian conventions, or at least exploitation, because a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

When Ford Madox Ford moved to the country, he wrote about meeting a grocer who found Hardy's books crucial for understanding or at least standing his life out there.

Thos Hardy anecdotes:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DttKs6GU4AAwuS3.jpg

Iirc Two on a Tower is nothing but plot twists - was released as a serial first and has almost laughable cliff hangers ever few chapters.

There’s a literal cliffhanger in a pair of blue eyes!

My high school English teacher was friend's with Thomas Hardy's gardener (!), who - spoiler alert - said that Hardy was a miserable bastard.

There's a story I read somewhere of a younger writer going to visit Hardy and the entire time being spent on an extended tour of the local countryside, having the locations of various pets' deaths pointed out.

Virginia Woolf records in her diary a charming visit to the old man (who kept writing exemplary poetry into his late eighties).

When, in the summer of 1923, the Price of Wales (later and after his abdication the Duke of Windsor) was about to pay his annual visit to the Duchy of Cornwall, someone at Court suggested to him that he should, on his way, visit Thomas Hardy at Max Gate, his home in Dorchester...

A Luncheon (by Max Beerbohm)

Lift latch, step in, be welcome, Sir,
Albeit to see you I'm unglad
And your face is fraught with a deathly shyness
Bleaching what pink it may have had.
Come in, come in, Your Royal Highness.

Beautiful weather? -- Sir, that's true,
Though the farmers are casting rueful looks
At tilth's and pasture's dearth of spryness. --
Yes, Sir, I've read several books. --
A little more chicken, Your Royal Highness?

Lift latch, step out, your car is there,
To bear you hence from this antient vale.
We are both of us aged by our strange brief nighness,
But each of us lives to tell the tale.
Farewell, farewell, your Royal Highness.

-- Jacobus Gerhardus Riewald

Yes. and the dour Male presence, though not omnipresent (thank Christ for V. Woolf and others, also for Molly Bloom etc), is a hallmark of modernism, which is one reason I think of him as proto (also I was taught to think that way, in a 70s course, Modern British Fiction).

Today I learned that if you talk about Fanny Burney on Twitter, a bot comes along and gently chides you, asking you to refer to her as Frances.

Am reading Wolfgang Hilbig's THE FEMALES, which is as jolly and calm as you'd expect.

So many good songs and good performances

Ha, sorry, meant that for the Pete Shelley thread

Hardy wrote tons of good lyrics imo

Ha, exactly

Here's the Hardy/pets anecdote: it was EM Forster:

"T. H. showed me the graves of his pets, all overgrown with ivy, their names on the head stones. Such a dolorous muddle. ‘This is Snowbell––she was run over by a train. . . . this is Pella, the same thing happened to her. . . . this is Kitkin, she was cut clean in two, clean in two––’ ‘How is it that so many of your cats have been run over, Mr Hardy? Is the railway near?’––‘Not at all near, not at all near––I don’t know how it is. But of course we have only buried here those pets whose bodies were recovered. Many were never seen again.’ I could scarcely keep grave––it was so like a caricature of his own novels or poems."