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

I guess I feel like auto-fiction or creative nonfiction seems incredibly fashionable and I'm a bit suspicious of it all. Dunno if it's the Catholic in me but it sort of feels like the literary equivalent of a selfie. This was a decent personal story though.

i’d add zin

Sebald makes me feel like I'm really not getting something. It reads like dull wittering to me, like being trapped inside a boring Harper's article for all eternity.

After reading another ~50 pp. of Vertigo last night, I decided to lay it aside for something else. My second notable 'fail' this year. Some day I might try another of his books to see what he has to offer, but not this one.

@wins I understood auto-fiction to be a term which is quite old, that's the context in which I heard of it. I think it's hard to deny writing about the self, creative non-fiction, call it what you will, is in fashion though. It is huge in academia and there are a lot of best sellers.

I don't know if that quote sheds much light for me, of course all fiction draws on the self and at some point the two blend into each other, but some of the non-fiction that's popular at the moment is pretty deeply about the self in a way that goes beyond the smoke and mirrors or fiction.

As for the selfie thing, I mean I don't generally dismiss the selfie either but I cited them generally as I think at worst they can be symptomatic of an age or narcissism. Sometimes in creative non-fiction I find myself thinking I am bored by the writer's determination to aggrandise their own life. It's not quite the same as disliking a character in a work of fiction, to me.

*of - both times

I know the term’s been around awhile, just suggesting the concept is older (Proust et al as Laing cites), also didn’t mean to suggest it isn’t a thing that’s au courant with varying levels of success. I guess I’m wondering if there’s an objection to the premise itself as opposed to the examples you’ve read, and do you have the same issues (“the writer's determination to aggrandise their own life”) with “straight” memoir?

they can be symptomatic of an age of narcissism

My sense is that public life has grown so disconnected from the wellsprings of meaningful action that people are turning inward to a degree that was not common back when communities were smaller and more isolated. People are feeling that the power to effect change has drifted away from them, flowing upward to concentrate in ever more remote and 'elite' centers they feel no connection to and have no influence upon. I would guess that this trend is not due to narcissism so much as social fragmentation.

It is hard for me to distinguish it from memoir at this point - I'm coming to the end of a creative writing MA and there were two separate modules for this type of writing, "creative non-fiction" and "writing the self". I didn't take either of them but I've read a lot of work of that type as a result of swapping stuff or seeing people's work in the wild. A lot of it was like memoir, a bit.

Except my feeling is that memoir or eg the sort of non-fiction I probably read via the Longform website every day tend to be very concerned with representing the facts as far as possible, whereas maybe these more modern forms seem to fictionalise factual stories freely, or even disregard facts.

Yet they're still putting themselves as characters in the story, it just feels sort of disingenuous to me.

I guess something like Knausgaard felt so boring, deliberately and otherwise, that my only concerns about the "truth" were the ethical side of things as regards his family etc, which I don't really have to think about I suppose. But it's still bad if I do.

Louis's book felt very true to me, though for all I know it isn't. In parts I guess I felt like a person insisting to me that I be concerned with minute details of their life and their suffering but with no sense of trust that they're not lying to me. And yes I could just run with it regardless, I sort of can.

But when I read this style and it's classmates or people I know, it can be more difficult to allow them the leeway and easier to guess what's fabricated, that sort of makes it all feel a bit like a house of cards.

I suppose I think at heart most people's lives aren't interesting enough to merit being made into auto-fiction. I definitely think that about my own life, even the parts I know I'd be encouraged to write about if I took an auto-fiction class.

It feels sort of egotistical whereas I've found writing fiction to be a process that strips away a lot of that. It is very hard to extricate from two years of a lot of change in how I think about books and stories though, so apologies if none of that makes sense.

xpost

TLDR I sometimes feel emotionally manipulated by it

Read and enjoyed Dave Weigel's prog history. Now working my way through Grand Hotel Abyss, was tough going for the first 60 pages, but really opens up after that. Great introduction to the work and personalities of the Frankfurt School, putting them in much needed historical context.

Which of these doorstoppers should I try to tackle next?

2666
The Pale King
The Silmarillion
1919 (Pt 2 of USA trilogy)
Gravity's Rainbow

I "enjoyed" 2666 and can recommend it as a highly worthwhile book. But it can be harrowing at times. I found The Pale King to be uneven and fitfully interesting. I could not finish Gravity's Rainbow. The others, I can't say.

That makes perfect sense fh. I think I’d need to read more of the stuff that’s lumped in with this (have read like 10 pages of knausgaard) but I have a feeling the things that bother you wouldn’t bother me if I thought the writing had merit otherwise

I see that, like in a way they are sort of technicalities. I feel like this shouldn't matter in art but maybe my MA gives me a sort of warped sense of this, plus it makes me speculate about "what if I personally knew this writer" - again a technicality.

I saw Julian Barnes speak a year ago (never read any of his books) and he said "fiction is telling hard exact truths through beautiful elaborate lies" and it's one of my favourite quotes about writing, but to me maybe auto-fiction etc is that inverted.

gravity's rainbow is extremely rewarding but takes a lot of effort

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

I have started Doctor Faustus four times. Yet I read Joseph and His Brothers blissfully, wishing it were 16 volumes.

As for Sebald, Aimless, Vertigo is his least interesting "novel." The Emigrants, which at least presents itself as a story collection, has a couple of gems. His best work is Austerlitz, which also presents itself as a meditation on post-Napoleonic Europe.

Finally, I don't wish to connect them other than they write a fiction that's purportedly autobiographical but I doubt is, I vastly prefer Elena Ferrante to Knausgaard. She has a relish for basic narrative besides a curiosity about other people that makes Knausgaard look insufferable.

I’m the kind of degenerate who loves and agrees with every good “fiction is <x>” quote while absently gathering up counterexamples in my mind

xp Ferrante I have read (the first Neapolitan novel) but was unsure if that even purports to be autobiographical

I never assume anything is autobiographical, despite the artist's best efforts to promote it as such. I know how it works.

at the moment:

- re-reading Etel Adnan's The Arab Apocalypse, which remains one of the most harrowing poems I've ever read.

- a catalog of Dana Claxton's first major retrospective

- the introductory pages to a massive and rare Lakota/English dictionary that my friend gave to me

- Christa Wolf's Accident: A Day's News, which i purchased for a dollar at the local sidewalk sale today

i should probably really get on reading more to prepare for my classes this fall, but oh well.

the rings of saturn is my favorite book, vertigo is a very early draft of what he ends up achieving there

re: sebald, which i feel like i end up in a sebald conversation on ilx at least once a month

an addendum to the auto-fiction piece - although it didn’t have the name at the time Jocelyn Brooke writes in this mode and i wrote fairly extensively about the opportunities and problems it presents here.

It helps that Brooke is an exceptional writer. But there are some specifics that i think led him to this mode. he cites his shyness, and also wanting to avoid “the laws of libel”, and between the two seems to sit Brooke’s only partially successfully expressed sexuality, which is of a part with a habitual self-effacement and irony.

the autobiographical mode appears to be chosen because he had a strong sense of the places he inhabits, and the people who he has encountered. the self-effacement and laws of libel, the imperative of art and aesthetic means he sifts the elements into fiction.

it works very well, for me.

it is i think as Alfred said - it can be unclear even when an author states a thing to be one or the other, whether that is in fact the case. both involve emphasis and selection.

Brooke quotes Thomas Browne in relation to this very matter:

Some Truths seem almost Falsehoods and some Falsehoods almost Truths; Wherein Falsehood and Truth seem almost aequilibriously stated, and but a few grains of distinction to bear down the balance... Besides, many things are known, as some are seen, that is by Parallaxis, or at some distance from their true and proper beings, the superficial regard of things having a different aspect from their true and central Natures.

I tried to re-read Austerlitz a year or so ago and found it too much. It has a kind of structural melancholy that seeps into your bones. Like all Sebald's first-person narrators the story the narrator is really telling - beneath the still surface of his tightly controlled sentences - is of actual and deferred silence. All of his work seems to orbit this absence and I think that's why it possible to find him directionless or not providing nourishment.

I need to think about Fizzles' post about Langley. He's a magician.

I need to think about Fizzles' post about Langley. He's a magician.

I looked it up! I can totally see how Langley is a kind of mystic, reading nature as a holy text (without the attendant naffness that that implies - eg like Iain Sinclair at his worst).

Finally, I don't wish to connect them other than they write a fiction that's purportedly autobiographical but I doubt is, I vastly prefer Elena Ferrante to Knausgaard. She has a relish for basic narrative besides a curiosity about other people that makes Knausgaard look insufferable.

Jumping into this, if you put craft to one side (which you can't ofc) I think part of my enjoyment of Ferrante is that to me it is inherently fascinating to hear about what it was like growing up poor in 1950's Naples, and I'm more than willing to take some embellishments along with that (assume most ppl talking about "the old days" irl are embellishing to make their narratives more interesting too, besides memory being an unreliable narrator anyway). Hiero's fellow student's experiences will probably be fascinating on that level too, in some future and for people in different places, tho I see that this doesn't make them any more interesting here and now.

Semi-related: I sometimes feel like proto-reality tv - Chronicle Of A Summer, Place De La Repúblique, the Up series, as well as oral histories, Studs Terkel's stuff - is my favourite genre in any medium, tho i don't care much about reality TV itself.

I'm reading The Saga of Grettir the Strong, translated by Bernard Scudder. I've read nearly one Icelandic saga per year for about a decade now. It's been a good run, but this may be about the last one I'm interested in.

180pp into Empson, after a digression back into Finnegans Wake with HOW JOYCE WROTE 'FINNEGANS WAKE' and Burgess's SHORTER FINNEGANS WAKE.

This last does seem a real way that one could read the book (I have read the book) but even with the clarifying frames every few pages there is still often a sense of hypnotic drift among the sounds. But then, line by line it is often clear enough. So perhaps the drift is a version of what happens with so much reading, not just FW.

Burgess's introduction is admirable but tends to confirm my long-held view that the frame / story of the book is not good and doesn't do justice to its texture.

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

About to start Roadside Picnic. Hurrah. I really want to read russian lit. Only book I read is bulgakov’ master n marg.

Burgess's SHORTER FINNEGANS WAKE.

I bought this in a charity shop a couple of weeks ago. My copy of Finnegans Wake found itself in a burn while I was feeding ducks. :(

(I rescued it, but now it's about twice as thick)

About to start Roadside Picnic. Hurrah. I really want to read russian lit. Only book I read is bulgakov’ master n marg.

Babel, Nabokov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy all better than that bullshit imo

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.