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

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.

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?