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

I agree about PKD: I can't think of a novel of his that was altogether satisfying (but I have many many more to read), whereas the stories, in their own way, are.

As though, in a fairly basic and obvious way, he could hold things together over a short and not a longer stretch. Or as though some 'aesthetic' aspects, or maybe issues of depth, don't seem to matter in a story and do seem to in a novel.

Though that still feels over-simple now I think about it. But I do think the stories succeed more unequivocally than the novels.

SPQR

great

I partly share the view that his novels can seem improvised, but in this instance it would seem that a larger vision is driving it all.

I finished Ubik last night. While it does have a central plot 'device', probably inspired by his reading in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, most of the remaining pieces were completely heterogenous and unconnected to that central device.

To give one non-spoiler, minor detail that illustrates PKD's lack of method, the money in the book starts out as something called "poscreds", but very swiftly afterwards he has the characters doling out nickels and dimes, and later parts of the plot include paper bills. The poscreds don't go away entirely, but linger on in parallel, without any rhyme or reason how both forms of money relate to one another.

Different characters are introduced as clearly being important ones, including one prominent villain named Hollis. But by the end Hollis has been relegated to the dustbin as uninteresting and unimportant. A wholly new villain is promoted in his place at the last moment, but what that villain's new importance portends is left unresolved.

The ending is a cheap variant of "and it was all a dream, or was it?"

These items are obvious weaknesses. As with The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, I think the one strength that carries the book and gratifies the reader is the wild profusion of PKD's imagination. He starts so many wild hares running that he cannot keep track of them all and most of them go uncaptured and disappear, but when each one jumps out of the brush running there is a moment of exhilaration - and that brief exhilaration is repeated frequently enough to keep you breathless. That's a rare quality and it is worth finding.

pkd short stories are the best, but although his novels can be v uneven, i like the different pace of his world/problem building.

the hares is a really nice observation!

I think by the 70s he had largely mastered his problems w structure, he became much less prolific and more focused (also generally sadder. And more theological)

Like his last five or so books dont have nearly as many “hares”, in Aimless’s terms.

Yes agreed (on both posts). I prefer the hares, unrealised or not. The massive theological stuff is compelling but gloomy.

"History," Elsa Morante

Just read Yu Hua's "Cries in the Drizzle", enjoyed it, some of it was funny, I liked the infolding of time in the narration, I liked the sustained minor key.

I feel like the objections to PKD's shagginess are valid but irrelevant to me tbh. I'm not so bothered that every book has to be seamlessly clockwork.

The shagginess and uresolved plotlines in Ubik felt very deliberate and haunting to me!

At the very least, you have to credit PKD for finding the perfect story to shape around his "weaknesses" as a writer.

I agree, to me it's a feature not a bug

Started my summer with Juan Goytisolo's Count Julian which is the usual (if you know your way around Latin American literature) tale of fragmentary exile, and then moved onto Auerbach's Dante: Poet of a Secular World which is his account of Dante's achievement in the way in which he is able to gather reality, what makes him unique for his time and for all time, too. It helps if you've read his theories in Mimesis and I love his prose anyway.

Catching up on some of the TBR pile:
László Krasznahorkai, Satantango - pretty much an equal slog to the (7 hour) film version, but what a slog. Mud, beer, despair, everything you'd want from a prize-winning Hungarian novel. Apparently he's worked with Bela Tarr on most of his films, which figures.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Earthsea Trilogy - as good as I remembered it from previous reading. Scratches my epic fantasy itch wholesale, thus saving me from having to plow through some 10-volume series by GRRM or whoever.
Brian Aldiss, some short story collection - the story that inspired Kubrick/Spielberg's AI is by far the best thing here. Not really one of the better new wave SF short story writers from this evidence, and the gender politics haven't dated too well (probably like every other (male) writer from the era tbf).
China Mieville, Embassytown - his sole SF novel I think? Linguistics feature heavily, which makes a nice change from most SF dealing with alien races (Ted Chiang's Story Of Your Life excepted of course). Sometimes I think he has just too many ideas though, and also his style can get a bit ranting. I read it in my head in this kind of breathless splurge, it tires me out.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Earthsea Trilogy

what about the other three?

The Poem of the Cid, as translated into prose by Rita Hamilton, from extensive notes provided by Janet Perry. It's in a bi-lingual edition, with the original (archaic) Spanish on the facing page, but I am unable to read the original and can only derive a few hints about the prosody by inspecting it.

Jorma kaukonen Been So Long
Hot Tuna have just been formed after 4 lps by JA. Thought he might explain the swap from.Spencer Dryden to Joey Covington but has said very little.
Very interesting so far. Hadn't really heard much about his background before.
Dad was in diplomatic service so he'd lived abroad in his youth.
Also is in a marriage he just seems to be stuck in.
Could do with something similar from Paul Kantner or Martyn Balintore. Don't think there is anything though.

Marty Balin not sure what they corrected to. Predictive text how fun.

Paul Mason very wayward and ambitious but does at least include a lot of talk about economics. The kind of thing I rarely understand and I'm not always sure I understand it here either.

Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck. It’s not my usual cup of tea but I’m enjoying it. Agreeing w most of what he says. Actually started it w my 13 yo.

The Making of DSM III

and the gender politics haven't dated too well (probably like every other (male) writer from the era tbf).

I remember Ursula K LeGuinn had a beef with him? Or more specifically accused him of having a beef with her'

Aldiss was an insanely prolific short story writer, especially in the 1960s, so am not surprised there are many more hits than misses.

His non-SF army books - Hand Reared-Boy etc - seem to be going for the same audience as Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas, and I imagine their sexual politics are even more grotesque when read today (also, there were reasons he was pally w/ Kingsley Amis). Greybeard, on the other, has a quite tender portrait of a long-lived marriage - might be his best SF novel?

I started reading the Aeneid of Virgil last night, in the verse translation of Robert Fitzgerald. I am incapable of reading the original Latin and so cannot appreciate all the felicitous turns of Latin phrase I hear are in there. So far, 'Book I' read as a bit clunky, with Virgil playing the sedulous ape to Homer, while also planting as many kisses upon Augustus's ass as possible. I expect this sad aspect will improve as the story progresses.

Based on my high school reading (ahem), the Aeneid was the staid and often colorless cousin to Homer's epics. I was astounded by how funny and lush Virgil could be when I read a couple of the Eclogues.

I remember Ursula K LeGuinn had a beef with him? Or more specifically accused him of having a beef with her'

are you confusing LeGuin with Joanna Russ? LeGuin loved PKD. Russ took issue with one of his stories for being explicitly anti-abortion, and this is noted in his notes to the story in one of the complete short story collection volumes. (It's a dumb story)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pre-persons

PKD: In this I incurred the absolute hate of [fellow SF writer] Joanna Russ who wrote me the nastiest letter I've ever received; at one point she said she usually offered to beat up people (she didn't use the word people) who expressed opinions such as this. I admit that this story amounts to special pleading, and I am sorry to offend those who disagree with me about abortion on demand... But for the pre-person's sake I am not sorry. I stand where I stand: "Hier steh Ich; Ich kann nicht anders," as Martin Luther is supposed to have said.

"Hier steh Ich; Ich kann nicht anders," as Martin Luther is supposed to have said.

Principled stand or not, going by the plot summary you linked to it's still a very dumb story.

It is you who are confused, Οὖτις

I just looked up the Le Guin-Aldiss beef and found this letter she wrote on being asked to supply a blurb for an anthology:

Dear Mr Radziewicz,

I can imagine myself blurbing a book in which Brian Aldiss, predictably, sneers at my work, because then I could preen myself on my magnanimity. But I cannot imagine myself blurbing a book, the first of the series, which not only contains no writing by women, but the tone of which is so self-contentedly, exclusively male, like a club, or a locker room. That would not be magnanimity, but foolishness. Gentlemen, I just don’t belong here.

Yours truly,
(Signed)
Ursula K. Le Guin

A book on popular delusions written by mackay

Ah sorry wins my bad

First I’m knowing about any of these beeves tbh!

I put away that horror book for the time being and started BRAINQUAKE by Samuel Fuller (I don’t normally do the yelling titles thing but this title seemed to call for it). I didn’t even know he’d written any novels, this is his last, lost apparently; it starts with a baby shooting its father and goes from there.

I was a big Aldiss fan until I read this stuff

I finished A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan last night, which was mostly pretty enjoyable but sort of lost me in the end when it suddenly indulged in some near-future speculative fiction stuff. I realized that my least favorite genre is precisely that: near-future speculation by literary fiction writers who are maybe not entirely aware of the present, especially when written a few years in the past. It's grating and rings false. Anyway, helps with bingo.

goon squad's ending is awful. turned me against the whole book

well i also hate the "rapist journalist with aggressive footnotes" chapter

The future bits are insanely bad, I’d really liked the book up until then but those last chapters are embarrassing and sort of highlighted some earlier embarrassingness that I’d been overlooking

Her book look at me had the same problem, it would occasionally lapse into bad speculative fiction, mainly at the end, and whenever it did it seemed really off the ball

I was delighted when I reached the unanticipated powerpoint section because it meant I was much closer to the end of the book than I had thought

Thanks, everybody. Makes me feel a bit better that I stopped reading much earlier on.

Yeah, the SF stuff is awful, really thin and un-thought-through

I'm a quarter of the way through the Aeneid and I think I can see its main problem: Aeneas has no character flaws to build a story around. He exhibits endless piety and prompt devotion to each and every kind of duty. But underneath that brave and handsome boy scout exterior there beats a heart of pure piety and devotion to duty. Yup. It's pious and dutiful turtles all the way down.

Speaking of "turtles all the way down", that Bertrand Russell anecdote shows up midway through Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt, which I just finished. It's a pretty interesting book if you have a tolerance for philosophy. It reminds me of the book The Courtier and the Heretic by Matthew Stewart, which tried a similar trick of popularizing philosophical arguments for a non-specialist audience. Holt is good at clearly explaining the various arguments with a minimum of jargon, even if you may not always agree with his judgments on which is the more persuasive. For some reason, the book ends with a couple of chapters on the problem of consciousness, perhaps because it's another philosophical question of broad interest. Sometimes I feel like the philosophical mode of reasoning is trying to apply tools borrowed from math and logic to materials that are too shapeless to stand up to such precision, so by the end of the book I felt most sympathetic to the position taken by John Updike (in an interview given shortly before his death) that after considering all the arguments perhaps making a personal statement of faith is not a bad way to settle it.

Still a very long way to go in Mason's CLEAR BRIGHT FUTURE, but I note something:

His narrative is, perhaps characteristically, flamboyant and exaggerated. He claims that neoliberalism totally remade the self; turned us all into homo economicus; then crashed in 2008 and left an utterly different world. The West now, he suggests, is like the USSR c.1991 -- a system has collapsed, people have seen through an ideology, the world is totally new.

This doesn't ring very true for me. To me, that financial crash was a big economic event, but it's not evident that it has fundamentally transformed the system in which I live. Most things are quite similar to before. Some specific bad things happened - like one that stays in my own mind, the end of Woolworths, or B&S some years later. (Both of those surely also belong to 'crisis of the high street' which is a different story again.) Some of the things that are different are because of other factors (like technological acceleration). Many things seem just to be getting 'even more neoliberal than before' - soccer, for instance, or universities, or aspects of transport. The more I think about it, the more Mason's account (asserting that neoliberalism has crashed) feels like wishful hot air.

I think a simple reason for the difference between my view and his is that he, I'll assume, understands the 2008 financial crash, and, even after reading him, I don't. My non-understanding encourages me to think it's not that important, or rather, it doesn't allow me to see how important it is.

imo, the 2008 crash affected the outlook and habits of a lot of individuals and households, but the structures of the financial system were carefully preserved and nourished back to strength by the central banks of the western governments and quite a few mega corporations were bailed out, so that most of the severe financial dislocations were felt almost entirely at the grassroots level, not among the power elites. Apart from the anger and cynicism this bred, which people like Trump have capitalized on, the people running the system seem to be wholly unchanged by the experience.

Aimless, that seems to me an excellent analysis and I agree!

Rather than *BHS*, in my post I symptomatically managed to invent the closure of B&S, and not even M&S.

Cod: A Biography Of The Fish That Changed The World, Mark Kurlansky.

Chapter Four: Whence Came the Breading

Elizabeth Jolley's Vera Wright trilogy

I'm now reading another novel by Sicilian author, Leonardo Sciascia. This one is To Each His Own.

The next 'What Are You Reading' thread here:

2019 Autumn: What Are You Reading as the Light Drifts Southward?

Check out ILB's exciting all-new lineup for Fall!