Poetry uncovered, Fiction you never saw, All new writing delivered, Courtesy WINTER: 2019/2020 reading thread

I don't think I can think of one thing in Pynchon that is funny.

_Last night I picked up /The Dog of the South/, Charles Portis. I've been looking for lighter entertainment to shake off the after effects of imbibing too much information about the James Madison Administration. This fits the bill._


karl malone put me on to portia, which was a great service. haven’t read this one, but it’s good to know there’s more there for me to read.

I’ve been wanting to read Dog of the South for a while. Curious to hear how you like it.

"Garlicky" reminds me of Martin Amis writing about Antony Burgess's "garlicky puns": the phrase seems vividly memorable but irritatingly opaque.

When JG Ballard died amis wrote an obit where he praised JB’s “creamy prose” which struck me at the time as a very rong and blaggy description

ugh that’s awful.

Ballard's prose isn't creamy at all! It's machine tooled.

right??

If it had been Kingsley Amis who wrote that about Ballard's "creamy prose" I'd just figure he was drunk and didn't give a flip. I've never paid any attention to Martin.

Now reading The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead. Psychological it's wonderful but with self-indulgences that make it an occasionally stodgy read: given its length I'm not sure I'll stay with it to the end. It's a pity I didn't read it when younger when I'd have had much more tolerance for its weaknesses.

― frankiemachine, Friday, December 20, 2019 9:00 AM

Stick with it! One of the few novels about which I'll say its weaknesses improve its verisimilitude.

Chinaski: I like this about Joycean rhythms. I'd like to read that analysis at convincing length, from someone.

Fizzles: yes I think I see the humour in that. Though not in Pynchon.

I agree also that 'creamy' sounds wrong though I suppose MA was trying to get at unflappable smoothness of some kind - which would go with motorways, airports, function, in its own way?

But who really is 'creamy'? Maybe Proust? We'd need to decide what on earth the adjective really meant re: language anyway.

I finished After Claude. Kind of a strange book in that the first half and the second half, despite featuring the same narrator and following a continuous sequence of events, feel so different in tone as to almost be separate books. The first half is scabrous and funny, and although you begin to feel there's something a bit off about the narrator, she still has your trust. In the second half, the same self-destructive tendencies that were funny in the first half become alarming and ominous. Thematically, it reminded me a bit of My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Now I'm reading Dreams from My Father by Obama.

I started the Nick Lowe bio and Joseph Roth's The Hundred Days.

Been thinking about buying that Nick Lowe bio for months but maybe now I’ll wait until you finish reading it tonight to see what you have to say.

Curious to hear how you like it.

The Dog of the South is not an easy book to describe, but I'll take a whack at it. All views are my own, unsupported by any authority or external evidence.

As I saw it, Portis created his characters and situations using the same techniques as a skilled caricaturist drawing a portrait, where everything typical is exaggerated and disproportioned, but the likeness is immediate, striking and unmistakable. His subjects are Americans whose lives are shaped by the paradox of marginal life in the USA, most often seen in rural areas, where there are profound constrictions and limitations in some directions, but nearly unlimited freedoms in other directions. So people may grow into crazy shapes, partly stunted and partly luxuriant.

In particular, the characters in Dog of the South have become untethered from any roots or responsibilities that might keep them stable, and all of them have drifted south through Mexico, converging on Belize. Metaphorically speaking, they are sinking toward their ultimately grotesque shapes. Their misadventures can be read as hilarious farce, but for me, their stories had too much truth hidden in them not to be taken somewhat soberly, too.

It's an odd book.

Began reading A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion. It was published in 1977 and very obviously plays off of the Patty Hearst situation for a large chunk of the plot. She employs some very sore-thumbish stylistic quirks. Mainly short sentences. Some repetition. But short, yes. These sit reasonably well within the overall compression and terseness of the exposition. Didion really pared away at this novel well past any brevity attempted by Hemingway. Outdid him.

I expect I'll finish this quickly, in spite of all the diversions and distractions that come at this time of the year. It is extremely short and moves fast. Time to post to the What did you read in 2019? thread. No way will I finish another book after this one and before New Year's Day.

I read it two weeks ago -- the only Didion novel I finished and found effective.

The Caravaners, Elizabeth Von Arnim - Very funny, though the protagonist's non-native sentence constructions make it somewhat opaque for a light entertainment. The Prussian main character a total chauvinist militarist asshole, all Brits depicted as meek, progressive proto-hippies. How times change, eh?

My Friend Maigret, Simenon - Maigret takes off to an island in the South of France, accompanied by a Brit tasked with analyzing his methods. Solid as always, tho I think I have a problem with Maigret's post-resolution endings - I'm always expecting some slice of life bow at the end, because the mundane is what keeps me coming back to these, but instead it always seems to end with an angsty reflection on the horribleness of the crime, when mostly through the books Maigret doesn't seem too bothered.

Now reading: The Doomed City by the Strugatsky Bros - More magic realism or maybe weird fiction than sci-fi. There's an Experiment, involving a City, and the protagonist, an idealist from Stalin era Russia, has been brought to said City, where he interacts with ppl from all around the world and different periods of 20th century history. No one knows what the Experiment actually is, some believe it's controlled by aliens, some think it's already been a failure. Obviously a handy metaphor for the Soviet Union itself, but a lot of fun also comes from seeing ppl with different political orientations trying to make sense of it; our protagonist just assumes it's a continuation of the road to communism. Also people are asked to change jobs at random, so far he's been a garbage collector, police inspector and journalist. Tiyl Kafka, China Mieville.

I have read 2 or 3 Didion novels, including that one, and sadly never been convinced by any!

I finished THE LIFE AND DEATH OF HARRIETT FREAN, by May Sinclair. A study of self-denial, isolation, frustration. Chilling in a way. As a depiction of childhood, quite interestingly comparable to Joyce's PORTRAIT.

I then read a bunch of Sherlock Holmes stories: A Scandal in Bohemia, The Copper Beeches, The Red-Headed League, a couple more. I started to realise that they were a bit more formulaic than I'd hoped. Slightly relevant to a recent discussion of detective fiction with Fizzles and Tim of ILB fame.

I have finally started a book I have meant to read for months: Jane Austen, NORTHANGER ABBEY.

Sadly, this Didion novel is turning out to be deeply flawed to the point where I am only finishing it out of a misplaced sense of duty. Also, I am 3/4 of the way through it already and the sunk cost fallacy is in play.

Inexplicably, I spent the hour between 5 am and 6 am this morning trying to summarize in my mind what I found lacking in A Book of Common Prayer, so I could pass it along in I Love Books. It's not like it is that important to anyone.

My central thought was about her first person narrator, who starts out very strong, but after when the scene of the book moves location the narrator rather abruptly becomes omniscient(!), while all the time maintaining the exact same writing style as before, then just as abruptly switching back to a limited first person perspective. Moreover, Didion makes the narrator's character be an anthropologist-turned-microbiologist, but she clearly knew nothing at all about microbiology and drops in some details that are not just ignorant, but weren't even necessary.

The upshot of all this is to make it more than usually plain that there is really only one voice and one character in the book and it is Joan Didion. The image that kept recurring to me is a girl having an imaginary tea party with a dozen stuffed animals and pretending to talk for all of them.

So, then the question comes down to whether Joan Didion has anything interesting to say about life, using this story as her vehicle. For me the answer is, god, no.

I could go on and critique the plot and her style and how these give only a superficial and highly artificial impression, suggesting a meaning or depth they do not possess, but I've already driven this post into the tl:dr weeds. Let's just say I didn't like the book, ok?

I liked the random observations and, yeah, I realized by pg. 50 it's a Didion-esque narrator telling the story, and that's fine. She never wrote a great novel.

i finished parable of the sower over the holiday and i'm just blown away. i can't stop thinking about it. of course i'll be picking up the second in the series and everything else butler wrote, but if anyone has any other suggestions in this vein i'd really appreciate them: prescient books that deal with the disaster of now, that understand social reality outside protected bubbles and point ways forward, from queer povs a bonus.

i'm about 2/3s through stoner by john williams and finding it increasingly repulsive. it's going in my goodwill pile.

i read more over the last week than i have all year. i'd really like to keep it up but it feels like a challenge to find promising material. at least i have the rest of butler i can dig into.

xp ah joan didion - speaking of protected bubbles...

re: reading more in a week than a year - I've been like that with films in the last week!

That post about Didion's bad novel being like an imaginary tea party is hilarious !!

I read Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising for the first time. I liked it - the landscape writing in particular and the way it totally nails the delirium and eldritch whack of the Christmas period - but I do wish I'd read it when I was in my early teens. Credulity, innit.

Speaking of landscape writing, I've been re-reading Blood Meridian. It's a hoary old tale and beyond parody in lots of ways but jesus christ, some parts of the midsection are extraordinary in their world-building and brutality.

for landscape writing D.H. Lawrence can't be beat; his travel writing has a lightness that his novels often lack. I've owned and treasured Sea and Sardinia for years; now NYRBC published this delectable collection.

Frederic Jameson came up with a word to describe Barthes' writing - scriptible - because it makes one want to write further sentences in that style. McCarthy is like this. I find myself narrating, say, a trip to buy shoes and making it into a comma-less hellscape with a sagacious cobbler thrown in for good measure.

Totally agree on Sea and Sardinia - what a beautiful book. That edition looks amazing.

Wonderful to go out on a frozen road, to see the grass in shadow bluish with hoar-frost, to the grass in the yellow winter-sunrise beams melting and going cold-twinkly. Wonderful the bluish, cold air, and things standing up in the cold distance. After two southern winters, with roses blooming all the time, this bleakness and this touch of frost in the ringing morning goes to my soul like an intoxication. I am so glad on this lonely naked road, I don't know what to do with myself. I walk down in the shallow grassy ditches under the loose stone walls, I walk on the little ridge of glass, the little bank on which the wall is built, I cross the road across the frozen cow-droppings; and it is all so familiar to my feet, my very feet in contact, that I am wild as if I have made a discovery.

available in the uk/commonwealth in this form:
https://cdn2.penguin.com.au/covers/original/9780241344606.jpg

His writing on New Mexico is some of my favourite Lawrence.

If I was going to choose one book for landscape writing perfection, I think I'd go for Dorothy Carrington's book about Corsica, Granite Island.

have a copy of that sitting around which i've yet to start on^

at the moment i'm reading alfred doblin's massive panoramic trilogy NOVEMBER 1918. have finished the first part which switched between demobbed/invalided soldiers, deserters & racketeers, sdp vs sparticists, worker/soldier/sailor councils and a duplicitous military command playing the different groups against each other. all this is set to the menacing beat of the remnants of the defeated army marching back from the various fronts to a berlin experiencing food shortages and mass unemployment. the second part sees their return... and somewhat annoyingly it looks like the third & final part doesn't seem to have ever been translated into english!

Chinaski, surely it was Barthes himself who introduced that term? At the start of S/Z, as far as I know. But I know that Jameson essay you mean, if it's 'Pleasure: A Political Issue'. And I'm not sure how well I've ever understood this aspect of Barthes.

I have taken another copy of NORTHANGER ABBEY out of the library and it is growing on me. Beautiful Bath; very deliberate comic irony; metafictional reflections about novels, heroines, etc -- a lot to enjoy.

I didn't know ANY of that Doblin had been Englished!

neither did i till i came face to face with it... mid-eighties translation published as a people betrayed; november 1918: a german revolution. doesn't have the concentrated power of berlin alexanderplatz but still worth a read. also a reminder to myself that i need to get the nyrb collection of stories.

Last night I started reading Iceland's Bell, Haldor Laxness. Everyone is starving, except the gentry.

eric hobsbawm, "the age of extremes"

Which used to be called AGE OF EXTREMES !

age of exxxtremes

i am actually about to jump into 'the age of capital', having both started and ended 2019 finishing 'the age of revolution'

You're right, pinefox. I didn't have the Jameson or Barthes to hand and was too lazy to search for them! (And I kind of assumed I'd get away with it. Story of my life.)

In between alternately recoiling and laughing at Cormac, I've been reading Robert Richardson's biography of William James. The things I love about this (and the same with the Emerson bio) are pretty simple: being embedded in the ideas and events of the time: the Civil War, the impact of Darwin, the rise of positivism. Interesting to note that when James went to Harvard it was actually at its lowest ebb as an institution: poorly run, lacking in vision, a tiny student body. James didn't last long and returned to being self-taught.

JUst got heavily into Viv Albertine's To Throw Away Unopened after not touching it when I was in London. Her mother's been dying so far and she's just been called away from a launch of presumably her first book to go to the death bed. & she's having her siter acting weird.
Also finding it very difficult to find a dating partner taht isn't an ossified adolescent
THink this is about as good a read as that first book with the repetitive title.
THough far less about music and the punk subculture.

THis after having finished Defying Gravity Jordan's Story by Jordan Mooney.
The memoir of the one time Westwood/McClaren shop assistant and later Adam and the Ants manager.
Which was very good on the punk subculture too.
Very interesting book, not sure how much of this is down to cowriter Cathi Unsworth or at least in asmuch as wanting to hear more of this voice. Would be interested in reading more if there was more taht read like this though.

Tristan Gooley The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs
book I was recommended by a speaker doing a talk on how to read weather during a workshop in the last Tulca festival.
Enjoying it a lot so gave a copy to my mother for Xmas.
& you can get copies in the 3 for £5 offer in FOPP. Alongside 2 of his others . So grabbed How To Read Water from there and had already started teh copy of Wild Signs and Star Paths I'd bought for her before realising that the writing style of The Walker's Guide was probably a better cold introduction to him. & more likely therefore to get her to read the thing through instead of just shelving it.

Masters of Deception: Escher, Dali, and the Artists of Optical Illusion
by Al Seckel,
which si more about the visuals but does give biographies of the artists involved.
Also gives a list of other artists whose work wouldn't have worked as well on the printed page in book form which is worth exploring too.
I looked at theis in a bookshop at a launch for another book and was impressed, back a couple of months ago.
It has some interesting stuff in including a japanese artist having made 3D sculptures of some of Escher's impossible architecture

Chinaski: I don't usually think of the James family in relation to the Civil War!

Younger brothers Wilkie and Robertson served in the war, and Harry couldn't because of an injury (the so-called "obscure hurt").

Aye, William and Henry were drafted but not held for service. Wilky fought as an officer, in a regiment composed mostly of black soldiers, including Frederick Douglass's two sons.

Winter:

Sadegh Hedayat - The Blind Owl
Petrarch in English
Pierre Michon - Small Lives

Into the cold with the intensities of Hedayat's novel. Maybe I shouldn't be impressed as I've read an awful lot of alienated fiction like this, but I am not going to sit here and pretend The Blind Owl isn't damn good for being published in 1937 because it is. The collection of English translations of Petrarch are best with its first ones (Wyatt and Henry Howard) and the later ones (Musa). Lots of so-so in between but an interesting project to mull over, i.e. how does a literary culture engage with x throughout the centuries. The problem is the Canzionere has always been good in bits and you need to be in synch with the curator's choices as well. Michon's Lives was his first published work and for the most part you wouldn't know as his style and what interested him arrived ready. I say most because one of the stories is a lot more biographical, there are half a dozen histories here that are told like few can. Its all tell, little on the tale, and how rare is it that you can say this?

i must read that Michon. Winter Mythologies and Abbots is one of the best things i’ve read in last few years.

Speaking of William James, Harvard, and the Civil War, that reminds me of Louis Menand's book The Metaphysical Club.

https://www.amazon.com/Metaphysical-Club-Story-Ideas-America/dp/0374199639

It's been a while since I read it but it talks about the beginnings of pragmatism in American philosophy in Cambridge, MA, against the backdrop of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

It's one of the better books based on the New Yorker ethos, and it's pungent about their beliefs in phrenology, eugenics, etc.

Yes, I remember it being a book of many interesting tangents, and interesting to see how respectable academic theories of the 19th century have often aged poorly.

So Henry James almost fought in the Civil War? I probably should have known this but what an extraordinary literary fact. He died in the middle of WWI, after all.

I don't have the book to hand but as I recall something like 350,000 were (initially) drafted but only 70,000 were held for service. Henry and William were drafted but not held. There's an interesting list of East Coast luminaries and whose children were drafted and who not; from memory, Oliver Wendell Holmes' son was but Emerson and Hawthorne's weren't.

That Clash bio is interminable. I tried twice to get through it and failed.

Came across this brief, fervent thread: Obit: Larry Brown What should I read by him? Also by Harry Crews? Still hoping for some help!

trying to finish 'bring up the bodies' so i am only bringing 'the mirror and the light' on the plane

Harry Crews' A Childhood: The Biography of a Place is his best book. Of his novels, I'd start with A Feast of Snakes.

feast of snakes seconded

i have a soft spot for body

Are we ready for a Spring thread...?

Yes. Tradition must be served.

Done and done!

"And sport no more seen / On the darkening green" -- What are you reading SPRING 2020?

Started reading William Golding's Adventures in the Screen Tradea fter having it sitting on my shelf way too long.
Very interesting. Not sure what I've read by him outsid eof this, did read princess bride a couple of years back and Lord fo the Flies way back but not sure what else.
Oh he gave lovelock the name Gaia.
But this is a great look into various aspects of the film making scene

The Philosopher's Stone:A Quest for the Secrets of Alchemy by Peter Marshall
Picked this up in a sale an age ago have started reading it a couple of times then moved over onto something else. I think its an interesting subject so hopefully going to stick with it this time.
He's currently talking about early Chinese Alchemy at the moment around 10th century and especially the significance of sex. Tantric like rites and things.

All-new, exciting 'Springtime Collection' thread is linked right above your post. Try it on for size!

Adventures in the screen trade, princess bride = William Goldman

Lord of the flies = William Golding