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

man bread is love among strangers

That's the trick to making friends, you bring bread along.

In my queue is my luckiest 2nd hand purchase from a month ago, a 600pp collection of lispector’s “crônicas” called discovering the world. Have only flipped through so far but looks fucking great, I’ve wanted to explore more of her stuff since reading hour of the star and the two Elizabeth Bishop-translated stories and had no idea there was anything this massive to dive into

yeah this collection (the foreign legion) is half cronicas, havent gotten to em yet. i also have the massive and beautiful new directions short story collection but it was too unwieldy so i bought this slim volume used

In the last week read Ghost Wall, by Sarah Moss, have since recommended it to at least three friends whose wheelhouse it is exactly in. Short novel narrated by a teenage girl whose loathsome father is helping lead an experimental class that involves living like Iron Age people and exploring the bogs. Sacrifice comes up a lot. Tense and spooky and emotionally involving without feeling manipulative, I maybe wanted a little more from it once it was over but overall was very impressed. Apparently her writing strategy involves completing a first draft, deleting it, and starting over.

Also read The Sovereign by Andrew Elias Colarusso, a somewhat jumbled Dalkey Archive novel about combatants in a future revolution in Puerto Rico. It flashes back and forward in time, throws in a little anonspeak, Twitter messages between the characters of The Quiet American, explicit lesbian sex, and an opening chapter on cordyceps. It’s not as annoying as I probably make it sound, a lot of the set-pieces are very well done, but it feels a bit like a bag-of-tricks novel that could have been something great if its ambitions were a little more focused. I wonder if the author read Clark Gifford’s Body.

Percy's The Last Gentleman at last -- a hundred pages read by the pool this afternoon!

Reflections in the Library -- collection of literary essays by Antal Szerb, full of great insights and perceptive readings of the lives and works of various English-language writers

Percy's /The Last Gentleman/ at last -- a hundred pages read by the pool this afternoon!

Before the Storm has been lagging for me. The major thrust of the book is that the big upsurge in modern Republican-style conservatism rode into town as a result of the massive political realignment caused by the civil rights movement, as racists migrated en masse from the Democrats and blacks migrated en masse from "the party of Lincoln". This is no secret. The sixties capsized US politics, mainly around these issues.

The bulk of the details that are related in the book are about the day-to-day nuts-and-bolts organizing behind the scenes done by conservative political operatives, who were all there to push an agenda of laissez faire capitalism with a big dose of added anti-communism. The stampede of white racists and quasi-racists onto their bandwagon seems to have been welcomed by them with open arms, but only as a way to get votes and win power to push through their income-tax-abolition & business deregulation agenda.

The only sense in which all this is a 'hidden' part of recent history is the depth of detail Perlstein digs into about the political operatives and organizers who ran things behind the scenes. These kinds of operatives have been around since the nineteenth century and have always played a huge, but occult, role in US politics.

The only surprise in the first half of the book is how reluctant Goldwater was to run.

admittedly i didn’t know a tonne about us politics in the 50s and 60s when i read it but i found that book a blast. bit hard to keep up with names, and the convention confused the hell out of me.

When I was a kid and my family drove out to rural areas on camping trips, we'd see big "Impeach Earl Warren" signs by the rural highways.

The Year Of Reading Dangerously, Andy Miller

How was it?

I read "Berg" by Ann Quin, which is maybe as romp-y as grim mid-century English experimentalism got, along with Christy Malry, I guess. Definitely more fun than Three, but I think Three hit me harder. Whatever, a real goodie that I've been meaning to read for years.

I read "The Mussel Feast" by Birgit Vanderbeke, a novella where not very much happens but still a good, sad family story anyway.

I want to an event in a bookshop recently meant to publicise the recent re-rublication of Berg. In the pub after wards, someone I didn't know asked me whether I'd read much Quin.

"I've only read 'Three'... oh and the recent fragments thing that came out"

She gave me a very strange look, like I was being super-pompous, unusually pompous even for me, and I realised that she thought I was saying that I'd 'only' read three of Quin's four novels, oh and a book of collected bits and bobs.

We laughed and laughed.

Of potential interests to NYC readers; free copies of books available in person at Bryant Park's Reading Room -

Classics BookClub Schedule - all events on Tuesday at 12:30pm

June 4: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Hosted by Kayleen Schaefer, Text Me When You Get Home

June 18: The Gallic War by Julius Caesar
Hosted by Barry Strauss, Ten Caesars

July 2: On Murder by Thomas De Quincey
Hosted by Abbigail N. Rosewood, If I Had Two Lives

July 16: Villette by Charlotte Brontë
Hosted by H. S. Cross, Grievous

July 30: The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Hosted by James Mustich, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List

August 13: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Hosted by J. A. Dauber, Mayhem and Madness

https://bryantpark.org/programs/bookclub

Oh man, Washington Square has one of the best final sentences ever. Perfect coda section.

Love Walker Percy. That's a great read.

Just read Matt Ruff's Bad Monkeys. Found it entertaining in a Max Barry (new book 2020!) way. Good twists, some guessed, some not. Now reading Ruff's Lovecraft County, which, 40 pages in, is setting itself up enjoyably.

Oh man, Washington Square has one of the best final sentences ever. Perfect coda section.

― jmm,

"...for life, as it were"

Alpaca, have you read Ruff's The Mirage? A really clever, audacious and underrated book.

finally completed melville's mardi: & a voyage thither after one failed attempt and various interruptions along the way, so now moby-dick; or, the whale

read lispector's the foreign legion a couple of months back and loved it yet didn't think to check if there was a fuller set of cronicas published... looks like the carcanet edition is more extensive than the new directions (and ridiculously expensive!)

Moby-Dick’s good especially if you like Shakespearean pastiche and long descriptions of whale butchery.

I finished Milkman, Anna Burns, which had something in the vein of a happy ending

I'm reading Richard Lloyd-Parry's Ghosts of the Tsunami. It's probably a bit glib to say it's a tough read, but there it is.

I love Quin. It forms part of a vague 'seedy British underbelly' canon in my mind: Crash, The Lowlife, Chris Petit's Robinson, David Seabrook's All the Devils Are Here, Young Adam. There must be a ton more but my brain's not working this morning.

This week's library haul:

Charles Dickens – Bleak House
Vladimir Nabokov – Pnin
Flann O'Brien – At Swim Two Birds

My favourite book from my the last trip was 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie'

Yeah The setting of Berg made me think of that Julian McLaren-Ross novel “Of Love and Hunger”. I know what you mean about a strain of seediness, some sort of tension deriving from people becoming gradually unmoored from some sort of self-image of respectability. Or something.

Never got what people love about Lispector. Feels a bit livejournal to me.

How was it?

70 pages in and I'm loving it! Very incisive on the foibles of being a reader (thinking you're a fan of someone you've never actually read, buying books mistaking this for being cultured - "I had mixed up art and shopping"; these are clichés but he has enough empathy to lead you to how they arise), quite good on the books themselves, often very funny. There is something a bit matey about it that could turn off an ILX crowd, I suppose - the Daily Torygraph blurb of "High Fidelity for book geeks" is unfair (Miller is miles away from the petulant baby in Hornsby's book), but not super out of the blue.

Finished Mrs Osmond by John Banville, his sequel to The Portrait of a Lady. At the sentence level his mimicry of James is near perfect, as with the original the story is largely driven by a great deal of introspection (though he doesn't reach the giddy heights of chapter 42 of the original); unfortunately there's very little narrative tension, no sense of slowly approaching doom, no turn of the screw, no hammer blow in the last page.

Alpaca, have you read Ruff's The Mirage? A really clever, audacious and underrated book.
― And according to some websites, there were “sexcapades.” (James Morrison), Friday, 24 May 2019 00:44

Not yet! Thanks for the rec! Will go for The Mirage next, then maybe Set This House in Order.

Rereading: Lorrie Moore, LIKE LIFE.

I went on a Moore binge in 2016.

Like Life is an astonishing collection. I think about the title story a lot.

I read The Mussel Feast by Birgitta Vanderbeke, A’s all and somewhat jagged German thing that takes place around a kitchen table.

And I read Fräulein Else by Arthur Schnitzler which is told from the not-very-convincing first person point of view of a young woman, but it’s diverting enough I suppose.

After a winter/spring of heavy fiction I'm on a rock bio kick. Reread Goodbye 20th Century and Girl in a Band, and am now onto Duff McKagan's It's So Easy and Moby's Then It Fell Apart. All great and go down easy.

Don't sleep on Don Felder's Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (1974–2001)

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81x1VKPA2mL.jpg

Which reminds me: Aimless, anyone, what should I read by and about the Stoics? Also yoga. I need to cool it down.

Stoics? Aiyeee! imo, it's a philosophy that counters its inherent nihilism by invoking a set of moral values it cannot defend, apart from simply asserting it is better to keep a stiff upper lip and act as if you weren't really a nihilist, because otherwise nihilism is just too miserable.

But the gentlest and easiest to assimilate Stoic is Marcus Aurelius. The Enchiridion of Epictetus is basically a loose set of lecture notes jotted down by his student and it concentrates on laying down 'rules for living', kind of like self-help books. If you want a more systematic explanation, you'd need to find a more modern source. Maybe look at the Stoicism chapter in Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy for a basic overview.

Strindberg, "Son of a Servant". Whingy, self-pitying proto-Emo, though if you're interested in politics and religion in Sweden in the 1860s this could be the book for you... any takers?

Also a fairly crappy book of literary criticism on Henry Green, published last year, full of typos and mistakes.

Two brief kindasorta historical novels: “Tell Them
Of Battles, Kings and Elephants” by Mathias Enard (Michelangelo goes to Constantinople, builds bridge) and “Moonstone - the boy who never was” by Sjòn (adventures of a promiscuous young fellow in a 1918 Iceland ravaged by the Spanish Flu). Very pleased I read both.

I loved that Sjon book, very vividly imagined.

Just started on this astonishing collection
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D7xPrMAWwAgiGL3.jpg

soory, hueg

Getting to the end of The Year Of Reading Dangerously and would heartily recommend it, though I did skip the chapter on Houellebecq (life's too short) and Miller severely misinterprets Forster for his "writers hate the suburbs cos they hate the middle classes" pet theory. But it's a really great read.

Got a collection of Father Brown stories up next.

Strindberg, "Son of a Servant". Whingy, self-pitying proto-Emo, though if you're interested in politics and religion in Sweden in the 1860s this could be the book for you... any takers?

I read a political essay of his which was all "yes, the working man is oppressed by the ruling class, and when you think about it, isn't that a lot like how men are oppressed by women?". State of this guy.

Marooned : The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs ed by Phil Freeman
a collection of essays on desert island discs. Has some interesting choices. More alternative focus tahn the BBC show that had the concept way before it.

Theatre of teh oppressed Augusto Boal
brazilian writer's take on theatre.

christine schutt - a day, a night, another day, summer (some amazing sentences, it's short fiction on the edge of poetry but doesn't lose the plot entirely)
david means - instructions for a funeral (pretty good overall, hadn't read his other collections, a bit determinedly masculine or macho in places)

Finally finished Before the Storm. The only thing I would add to my earlier remarks would be the surprising degree to which Goldwater's campaign was solely the product of a few extremely sharp conservative operatives who seized on Goldwater's popularity to use him as a convenient front for their own agenda, without his consent or participation.

As I read the narrative Perlstein put together, it appears Goldwater knew he was being used and pushed into a campaign he didn't really want, so he sabotaged his own campaign by seizing it away from those operatives, who might have succeeded in electing him, and running it strictly according to his principles, which he seems to have known would result in his losing. Thus, he kept his self-esteem intact and punished his would-be puppet masters for pushing him into a campaign he hated. Right after Goldwater lost, those same puppet-masters tossed Goldwater back, took the electoral machine they'd built, and seized on Ronald Reagan, who was happy to oblige.

Marooned : The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs ed by Phil Freeman
a collection of essays on desert island discs. Has some interesting choices. More alternative focus tahn the BBC show that had the concept way before it.

enjoy Early '00s ILM: The Book. scott's and j0hn's pieces are still really incredible, i go back to them all the time

plus douglas wolk on stereolab

Am just about to start reading Mega City Zero by said Douglas Wolk

Mega City Two, sorry. Have just finished Mega City Zero...

Cool, looked like it would be interesting when I saw Marooned on shelf.
Have lookedat a couple of things so far not a lot. Have picked it up when I'm falling asleep which hasn't helped but has some interesting choices anyway.

Got some books from the London Library for a weekend trip: Red Shift, Beginning of Spring, Heavy Weather, and Outline. Outline is a bit like a book written by a very observant 15 year old, the sort of thing that gets published in a high school magazine. I like it though.