The Double Dream of Spring 2019: what are we reading?

Having finished The Train, I am of two minds about it and it is difficult to explain without describing the entire book. Maybe it would be sufficient to say that the story is set in 'a time taken out of time', where a young ("22 or 23 year old")woman simply appears, attaches herself to the protagonist, has sex with him within hours of their meeting, makes no demands upon him, and after many weeks of liaison she disappears at the proper moment, gratefully absolves him of any further responsibility, and he more or less resumes his prior life.

The mechanism that makes all this ring true is that the story is set at the first weeks of Germany's invasion of France in WWII and the main characters are refugees from the area near the Belgian border, thrown violently out of normal life into chaotic circumstances. Within that framework, the premise is less jarring. But the fact that the plot runs directly along lines of a common male fantasy just kept niggling at me as I read it and I never did feel like Simenon quite managed to put enough complexity into his story to distance it from that simple underlying fantasy world.

Then I had some extra time last night and read Elizabeth Hardwick's critical essay, "Melville in Love". As indicated by Alfred, it was a good one.

<i>Leave It To Psmith</i>. Had no idea Comrade Psmith was a Blandings spin-off; I'd read some Blandings before but this being a novel it still feels really weird to read a Wodehouse that is not in Bertie Wooster's voice,

Psmith started life as a secondary character, a student of Wryken, the public school where Wodehouse set some of his earliest novels, patterned loosely after Tom Brown's School Days. He later moved up in the world.

/It's ab time I did./

Just remember you are not required to like his books. He has his flaws and limitations, like any author.

I like the Maigret books that I've read (not very many) for their undersold invitation to a measure of compassion, or sympathy, in the justice meted out by getting the goods on characters, however they may fare in crime, court, or anywhere else in the System: there's a sense of dry desperation even in success, where legit biz and rackets parallel and merge, not to mention on other rungs, indoors and out on the streets, day and night. Maigret can't ever seem to forget his own origins for long, as s motherless hick who flunked out and started over as a beat cop in the City of Light, hungry all the time, and now, as a celebrity cop with a decent check maybe, he eats a lot (one commentator mentions that his wife feeds him "like a toddler), drinks a lot, smokes a lot, as his best friend the doctor reminds him, though some of it is stress of the job---he's certainly no bleeding heart, but he knows what makes people tick, and he has a conscience.
In Maigret's Failure, a bloated figure from the bad old days in the sticks suddenly materializes, richer than ever and demanding protection--M blames himself for letting personal distaste (the Meat King is a poison madeleine for all kinds of unwelcome memories) interfere with professional judgement. No one else seems to agree---the guy was a notorious ahole, had it comin'---but he knows.

I've been reading the Homeric Hymns in a poetic translation by Jules Cashford.
I must say it is a nice translation, modern enough to be readable while preserving a sense of the archaic. Another plus: no thees and thous.

I also own the Loeb edition of the Hymns, with the Greek text and a prose translation on the facing page, but it's mostly in my library so as to have the Battle of the Mice and Frogs and other odd fragments of Homerica.

there's a sense of dry desperation even in success

There's a really great instance of this in the first Maigret adaptation featuring Jean Gabin - case has been solved, everything's ready for the ending, and Maigret just walks into the Paris rain, grim music letting us know there's nothing to celebrate.

Was wondering about the Gabin connection, since his picture is on a bunch of Maigret audiobooks.

Yeah, he did three Maigret adaptations late into his career.

Not as intuitive a choice for him as Rowan Atkinson of course.

I have kicked off spring with some Jose Saramago. Cain is a re-write of a bundle of old testament tales, some of which (Abraham) worked really well, and recalls Pasolini in his readings - although the abrupt ending hints that he didn't quite know what to do with what he started. Now on another one of his All the Names, which is shaping up to be something else, there is a re-writing of Kafka's bureaucracy going on already and I am definitely here for it!

I am also pacing through Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, and nervously laughing. Its quite soemthing picking this one up - the failing upwards hits in a way that it might not have done if I picked this up in the late 90s.

Eugenides, Fresh Complaint

still Jane Eyre, over halfway. Fantasizing about a sequel/fanfiction AU where Jane and Rochester do crimes together

https://www.dclibrary.org/sites/default/files/styles/new_large__480x480_/public/EyreAffair_0.jpg

close enough

I read that ages ago actually! Catching up to the source material. Maybe if I reread it I'll get more of the jokes.

I finished Big Brother by Lionel Shriver. It won me over. The characters get more fleshed out (as they slim down) and she has a few other tricks up her sleeve. I'm now reading Spartacus by Aldo Schiavone. I liked the previous book on Ancient Rome that I read by him, and this one is shaping up to be just as good.

Reading Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories From The Trailblazers Of Domestic Suspense. Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, some lesser known names.

I have kicked off spring with some Jose Saramago. Cain is a re-write of a bundle of old testament tales, some of which (Abraham) worked really well, and recalls Pasolini in his readings - although the abrupt ending hints that he didn't quite know what to do with what he started.

I remember the hype around that one felt very stale at the time - Saramago pointing out that Christianity is fucked up for the millionth time, the church throwing its usual temper tantrum, rest of the nation went on as usual.

I slogged through "Rotting Hill" by Wyndham Lewis, in which WL conjures a bunch of straw men with whom he can argue or agree, such that he can fulminate against the post-WWII Labour administration and the - apparently - inevitable slide of the UK into total, permanent, Soviet-style state control of everyday life.

This is fundamentally a bad book but the combination of occasional passages of glorious writing plus the weirdness of reading such trenchant political analysis that turned out so wrong made me just interested enough to keep going.

I just finished 'Jane Eyre' which is one of the best books I've ever read.

To celebrate I got 3 books out at the library

Anita Brookner - Hotel du Lac
Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea

Finished The Big Midweek which was a bit of a downer but has me wanting to be more familiar with teh era of fall I like most. Hadn't really heard Room To Live before. Do love Dragnet and Hex Enduction Hour. Not sure how late I'll go with it now. But that late 70s/early 80s does seem to be pretty peak.

So got Heads by Jesse Jarnow as the book by my bed. Seems to be 1973 and talk is about the birth of theh internet, graffiti and jam bands/living in bushes in Central park.

Started reading Bob Woodward Fear again & I think I'm roughly half way through. Tillerson has just called Trump a moron.

Been listening to Podcasts while i'm moving around town so not been reading on the bus.

Reading Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories From The Trailblazers Of Domestic Suspense. Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, some lesser known names.

ordered this immediately

Anita Brookner - Hotel du Lac
Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea

That's quite the trio! Enjoy.

I finished The Lay of the Land the third Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe quartet. Like the previous two, it details the lead up to a US holiday, this time Thanksgiving, and it's, I suppose, a narrative of the epic in the everyday. Bascombe is a one time writer now a realtor, and his worldview is a rational one, at heart, but like the rest of us, he's dealing with the sublimity and enormity of what it means to be human - albeit from an ultimately privileged, middle-class American viewpoint. As a reader, you're left to wonder why he writes (yes, it's a constructed narrative, a trick, of course), and you wonder if it gives his life meaning and vice versa. I've read somewhere that Ford's project is along the lines of 'writing is a report from the real world directed through the craft of fiction' which I need to think about a bit.

I'm now in that trough that comes after finishing a huge novel, and I'm reading bits of Emerson (who is probably Bascombe's closest thing to a guardian angel) and desultorily re-reading Homage to Catalonia for an upcoming trip to Barcelona.

This month's Penelope Fitzgerald is "At Freddies". It's (seemingly) less deep but so far lot funnier than anything else I've read by her (Bookshop, Human Voices, Offshore).

Leave it to Psmith is my favorite Wodehouse. Surprised it hasn't been made into a movie (or maybe it has?). First I read, and the gateway drug to all his other novels. Local 1/2 Price Books stores are sadly slim on Wodehouse novels, aside from a few constants. I keep hoping to luck into an estate sale quantity.

After seeing The Sisters Brothers, catching up on Patrick deWitt's novels. TSB, Undermajordomo Minor, both read & liked. Now 1/2 into French Exit, with Ablutions next.

I read "The Drawer and A Pile Of Bricks" by David Berridge, which is I suppose what they call experimental literature (the tell is the positive quote from Joanna Walsh on the back). I couldn't really work out what was going on, though I think something probably was going on. I found a certain pleasure in reading it, grasping odd bits and patterns, but it was a bit like reading a set of clues for a crossword, clues for which you don't understand the rules and the crossword grid's not there. I wonder if I read it again whether all will become clear? I may never find out.

I'm at loose ends. I read some of Virgil's Eclogues last night and due to their similarity to counting sheep, I fell asleep on the couch.

I still need to check PSmith, but enjoyed Uncle Fred In Sprigtime: the gallant UF is an alarmingly alternative Jeeves to his manor-born/borne relations.

"Uncle Fred Flits By" is the ultimate Wodehouse story for me

I read a Psmith in my adolescence, which I undoubtedly enjoyed but don't recall much of

This is fundamentally a bad book but the combination of occasional passages of glorious writing plus the weirdness of reading such trenchant political analysis that turned out so wrong made me just interested enough to keep going.

(If you want this knackered 1st edition of RH, Fizzles, it’s yours.)

Guy De Maupassant Bel Ami
1885 novel about an ex-m,ilitary social climber in Paris in the late 19th century. 1975 translation which flows nicely.
Quite compelling read, I don't think I've read any of his novels before. I did read some of his short stories a few decades ago and not sure why I haven't gone back to read more.
I was surprised that de Maupassant was as late as he was, maybe the short stories I read were set a lot earlier. i thought he was early 19th century.

I'm still mired in a lack of ambition, so I'm rereading a Mary Renault historical novel, Funeral Games, covering the period immediately following the death of Alexander of Macedon. I first read her stuff back in the 1980s and this was the one I remember as being the least romanticized.

Have you read railroad histories? I hadn't thought to, but suddenly encountered several at the library today. Great subject (and today's Wall Street Journal delved into a massive gathering of the railroad tribes re radically re-making schedules---past the latest relaunch into bits of chaos).

I read a biography of James Hill, founder of the Northern Pacific railway, last year. It was quite interesting, if a bit too mythologizing. It painted Hill as being capable of almost anything, legal or illegal, to win a contest he wanted to win, which seems correct.

The age of railroad expansion in the USA is mostly about high finance, rampant bribery, and low trickery, but also is some of the most revealing history of how laissez faire capitalism works in action. It isn't quite as heroic as Ayn Rand envisioned it.

Henry and Charles Francis Adams' long essay about the Erie is worth disinterring.

Picked up City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davies. This edition from 2006 has a new preface, which is very good. Interesting to read some of the pre-crash observations:

The city was subsidizing globalization without laying any claim on behalf of the groups excluded from the direct benefits of international commerce. There was no mechanism to redistribute any share of additional city revenues to purposes other than infrastructure or Downtown renewal. There was no 'linkage', in other words, between corporate-oriented public investment and the social needs that desperately fought for attention in the rest of the city budget.

and

In The Valley, a so-called 'slow-growth movement' had suddenly coalesced out of the molecular agitation of hundreds of local homeowners' associations. Although many of the movement's concerns about declining environmental quality, traffic and density were entirely legitimate, 'slow growth' also had ugly racial and ethnic overtones of an Anglo gerontocracy selfishly defending its privileges against the job and housing needs of young Latino and Asian populations.

Of course, these things were known. The GFC didn't suddenly create the failures with which we're grappling of course, it was a consequence and an intensifier of them. But it's striking reading them here on the eve of that crisis.

I'd be interested to know how any LA people here, who have read the book, feel it's aged. or what has changed since its depiction.

I read "Spring" by Ali Smith. I liked it very much and I think the current quartet (of which this is the third) is a very interesting project. She seems to divide opinion though?

I also read " A Close Watch on the Trains" by Bohumil Hrabal, which is a little bastard of a novella sloshing around in the absurdity and brutality of the dying days of WWII, from the point of view of a junior member of staff on a provincial train station as the Germans retreat through Czechoslovakia.

(great film)

Yes, I think I have actually SEEN the film CLOSELY OBSERVED TRAINS.

On Sunday I finished PROMISED YOU A MIRACLE (Andy Beckett) at last. On balance, it's tremendous and utterly my kind of thing.

Next I will finish the Myles letters at last.

Reasonably happy to have managed to read these books on the side while mostly doing other things.

Richard White - The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896
Amy Hempel - Reasons to Live

What's the Hempel collection like so far? Read a couple of very enthusiastically detailed presentations, but quotes from the stories didn't seem to support the reviewers' takes---seemed more tell than show, and her dramatic pronouncements not that deep---I dunno, will see if the library has it.

Some writing just isn't well-represented by brief quotes, and every sentence doesn't have to be and shouldn't be suitable for framing (otherwise things can get way over-ripe, like James Salter's lesser work).

What's the Hempel collection like so far? Read a couple of very enthusiastically detailed presentations, but quotes from the stories didn't seem to support the reviewers' takes---seemed more tell than show, and her dramatic pronouncements not that deep---I dunno, will see if the library has it.

― dow, Wednesday, April 10, 2019 7:26 PM (

James Woods' New Yorker review a couple weeks introduced me to her, so I started at the beginning. So far she's Lydia Davis -- terse, almost gnomic -- without the wit.

Magdalene Tulli: Flaw -- strange but beguiling; story seems to be set in a 1930s-ish Central European-ish place, told perhaps by (a) God, and the characters are halfway between real people and actors on a vast set the God has created? I don't know what's going on, tbh, but I like it.

people and actors on a vast set the God has created? I don't know what's going on, tbh, but I like it.

Have you seen marwencol?

Woah, no... BUT I'M GUNNA!

I checked a copy of Why Buddhism is True, Robert Wright, out my public library and read about 20 pages last night. He almost lost me right away by citing the plot of The Matrix, especially the goddamn red pill/blue pill scene, as a way of understanding some of the essential message of Buddhism. Fuck that, I thought. But I did read on and may continue it tonight. Past that, I can't say.

So far he seems to imagine his reader has zero knowledge of or sympathy with Buddhism, but rather believes it is nothing more than exotic nonsense. iow, an audience of Dawkins acolytes. Maybe that describes most of his circle of acquaintance, since he describes himself as an evolutionary psychologist, which is a field wholly entwined with sociobiology. I guess for these reasons alone, the book may have a sort of freak appeal as a glimpse into such a mind.

So far he seems to imagine his reader has zero knowledge of or sympathy with Buddhism
I assume, based on your screenname and other evidence, that this is not the case with you.

That is correct.

GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is not rewarding and takes a lot of effort.

― the pinefox, Monday, June 17, 2019 11:57 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

come on, not even the franz pökler sequence? the flash forward at the end?

the lightbulb? so many rewards imo

also Zemyatin's "We", of course

but if you want amazing Russian sf this is yr guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Pelevin - Omon Ra, Buddha's Little Finger, the Life of Insects, or Babylon/Generation Pi/Homo Zapiens are good starting points

avoid this asshole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Sorokin

xp

I'm reading Full Surrogacy Now by Sophie Lewis, which is provocative to say the least. Compelling and readable, relatively light on assumed background in the language of Marxist theorizing. (Like if you've read Rius' seminal Marx para principiantes you'll do ok)

yeah gravity's rainbow is rewarding, i did find it incredibly hard to read in parts and didn't know wth was going on at the end there but still, def worth reading

GR blew my mind when I was 20. I’m kind of scared to return to it now.

i reread it last year and it was still awesome. not perfect or anything, i think the overriding slapsticky tone dulls the emotional impact of other parts of the book, but this is a v minor complaint

It's a gas

enjoying the endless hemming and hawing of border districts by gerald murnane. i also bought a nice hardback of the golden bowl that i'm going to try soon.

still haven't read it, been looking for a long novel to read fresh

As soon as I posted my entry, I thght: omfg i forgot to mention Nabokov. But in some fucked up way I don’t regard him as a Russian writer. I know I know. :-(

I will def read We.

which reminds me that if i ever finish doctor faustus i really want to read mason & dixon next

hey brad how far in are you

roadside picnic is marvellous.

Brad Nelson, I found GR very difficult, took years to read it and, to be succinct, I hated it.

The one interesting thing from my POV might be why people can be so different ie: why other people who on some counts share tastes and views of mine feel so differently about GR. You could say it's because they read it lots of times and I didn't; but then I didn't because it was so difficult and so unrewarding. To read it again would not have been a good use of this limited lifetime. I suppose I will never read it again. I need to read THE FAERIE QUEENE first. I wonder if that's better?

I do feel that GR has a relation or a resemblance to Finnegans Wake, which from my POV is one shorthand way of naming some of what worries me about FW, even though I try to reconcile myself to FW these days.

Roadside Picnic = good not bad

We = bad not good

Roadside Picnic is indeed very good.

As we begin summer I finished Jose Saramago's Blindness, which I think is a weaker effort only because I take a heavy disliking to dystopian fiction these days, his writing nearly overcomes the poverty of the imagination that comes with the genre. Now nearly done with Quincas Borba by Machado de Assis - it uses a lot of tricks that just weren't utilised in fiction at the time (or that I've come across anyway): the self-commentary on the plot for one, as it happens, and then the plot of transmigration of a philosopher's soul to his dog that just is only mentioned now and then as the narrative then concentrates on his friend and his dealings with high society in Imperial 19th century Brazil. It reminds me a bit of Donald Barthelme but I should re-read to check (I won't, don't have his books anymore).

We should have a new thread?

hey brad how far in are you

― j., Tuesday, June 18, 2019 8:28 PM (five days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

about 200 pages

I started reading The Siege of Krishnapur, J. G. Farrell, but I'm not far enough into it yet to feel any lasting commitment. He was setting up the romantic interest as I set it down for the night and that direction did not bode well.

I read Claire Dederer's (not rhymed with Federer) memoir Love and Trouble. I loved it. It's kind of a mess but that fits with her flailing around trying to find a narrative for what she's experiencing (a midlife crisis, essentially, but within that is her coming to terms with her marriage, her attitude to sex - now and throughout her life) and also this kind of folksy dialectic she's aiming for. Apologies if I've made that sound shit because it really isn't. It's honest and questing and consoling.

She wrote a great essay for the Paris Review a while back; I was hooked on her from that: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/20/art-monstrous-men/

hey brad how far in are you

― j., Tuesday, June 18, 2019 8:28 PM (five days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

about 200 pages

― american bradass (BradNelson), Sunday, June 23, 2019 8:52 AM (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i could maybe get in on that! we should combine our earnest efforts

I finished SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY - its density required a lot of effort. Brilliant, but it doesn't have much momentum; there's little overall movement in the argument, save that the 7th type is somehow more dramatic than the others in combining opposites.

It's notorious that Empson hardly believed in the types and thought they could hardly be distinguished. I often couldn't really tell what a particular type was doing, or make out how an example was serving a particular one of the 7 ideas. And most of what he says about opposites in that late section is hard to follow, to the point of mysticism.

Why I like it is a) the great pedantic attention to detail, with his particular brand of paraphrase of the verse; b) his great readiness to offer cranky digressions and statements on almost anything; c) his awesome knowledge of the English poetic canon. It made me reflect that almost no one now has this, and that I should work at it myself.

Flann O'Brien short pieces / stories translated from Irish: a couple very good and anticipating great later works.

Terry Eagleton, HUMOUR.

(checks watch) Holy cow! It is summer!

Time for a new the WAYR thread, so the cleaning staff can come in and vacuum up the crumbs, polish the sideboard, remove the candle stubs from the candelabra, and toss sheets over the furniture.

> the cleaning staff can come in and vacuum up the crumbs

just leave it to the langoliers.

Don’t know which thread to put this on, but there is a feature up on The NY Times in which they list their favorite 50 memoirs of the past 50 years or so. Lots of things added to my wishlist.

I went and did it. There is now a Summer 2019 WAYR thread. Please inspect it carefully for damage inflicted during transport before taking delivery.

www link: 2019 Sum-Sum-Summertime: What Are You Reading, My Good People?