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

Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness, Tim Parks

I really enjoyed this, while not being convinced that Riccardo Manzotti's theories make much sense or are even very meaningful.

That Mike McCormack PKD-esque volume does sound unusual and interesting.

I continue with NW.

in this thread we stan Emily Wilson's Odyssey

That one looks interesting. If I ever read it again I might try it. Fagles’ language seems to have a bit more grandeur which suits the heroic mood.

Needed an easy read so I picked up Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, which turns out to be absolutely terrific, with a Wodehousian density of (good) jokes. Roxane Gay on Goodreads complains about its thinness and over-jokiness, which seems like a classic Goodreads point-missing

Social media indicates Roxane Gay seems like a classic misser of points.

I finished Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness a couple of nights ago. I most enjoyed it when he was pointing out how inadequate and incoherent existing theories of consciousness are. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. I came away less than impressed with his highly unspecific explanations of his own preferred theory, as devised by his Italian acquaintance.

My own conclusion is that for millennia humans have been accumulating vast amounts of well-observed data about how human consciousness behaves when it manifests itself in human activity, and how it appears internally as self-reported by acute self-observers. Very few novel discoveries are still being added to this body of knowledge. It's not 'sexy' like neuroscience.

Attempting to describe human behavior from the bottom up and from the inside out by correlating each thought or action with brain activity at the molecular level seems to me to be a fool's errand, if only because consciousness only accounts for a small fraction of brain activity. Most brain activity doesn't correlate to anything that can be described in terms other than neurons undergoing changes in their chemical states. The activity happens. One may presume it has consequences, but it happens in a black box and it seldom manifests as consciousness.

But the above post is just a playful dab at the subject. ILX made a bigger collective stab at it in this thread.

If you’re looking to read more on the subject, The Conscious Mind by David J. Chalmers is worth spending time with.

More than halfway into the new William Gibson, and I'm enjoying it more than the Peripheral... it has the advantage of not having throw you in the deep end like the Peripheral does, since it revisits the same concepts and many characters. Seems to make the narrative more enjoyable, although I'm not sure I'd say there's a lot more going on. Just more coherent.

Unfortunately most of what's important in the new Gibson happens offscreen, so the characters basically run around for a while and then go home again. It's enjoyable enough, but a bit underwhelming.

finished larkin's "jill" last week. really enjoyed this one -- larkin is such a great, observant, funny writer even in prose. it astonishes me that he wrote it when he was 21. going to pick up "a girl in winter" soon (thanks alfred!).

almost done with charles bowden's "blue desert" (arizona writer, sort of poetic/hard-boiled -- finding it a little less good than i'd hoped but it's short at least), then thinking of tackling jonathan schell's "the fate of the earth," which i picked up at an antique store. also rereading lee-ditko spider-man right before bed, for the first time in many years.

everyone has me killfiled, don't they?

not me. bro

On a William Carlos Williams kick after reading Reed Whittemore's bio.

xxp not only do i not have you killfiled, i'm trying to keep up with your damn twitter thread

As mentioned at FAP yesterday, I finished Richard King's The Lark Ascending. Sort of a primer for the UK's changing relationship towards the countryside through the 20th century - ramblers, kinder scouts, eco-fascists, hippies, new age travellers, Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp - through the lens of music, so Vaughn Williams, Ralph McTell, Donovan, Vashti Bunyan, but also less obvious selections, Eno, Ultramarine, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Stan Tracey. King is quite a lyrical writer. There's a concert to accompany the book at the Barbican in March.

Now onto Sally Rooney's Normal People

it astonishes me that he wrote it when he was 21. going to pick up "a girl in winter" soon (thanks alfred!).

Cool! Let me know if you do.

Been a while, but time to delurk after my brief show at the fap last night -

Aurora Leigh - always dragged my feet on reading this. Never took to her shorter poems much, and I bridle a bit at verse novels, novels in verse, w/e/ But it's bringing me more pleasure than anything in a while. Just bursting with stuff - knotty super-particular images, elliptical shifts of focus and digressions that just feel pleasantly 'f it, I'm going to think about this for a while'.

Some Trick, Helen DeWitt. Also enjoying this, almost inevitably. Not that far in, but completely up for her hymns to statistical software.

Also reading and working from Make: Electronics. Stopped drinking so I'm just having a period of faddishly deciding to be interested in new things (also - baking bread, meditation). Want to know how stuff works, learn a bit, play around, build some tiny things, fix stuff, burn off a fingerprint in a soldering accident etc etc.

And dipping in and out of a couple of academic oddball classics - Julian Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and John M Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.

I found King's book a bit flat. I wonder if I was in the wrong frame of mind when I read as it ticks a lot of boxes for me.

I'm taking a break from Janet Frame and am reading Kathleen Jamie's Surfacing. She's a poet by trade (and a creative writing teacher) and she's a great proponent of Gilbert White's entreaty to 'watch narrowly'. Her gaze here is very much about the vagaries of climate change. Not in a didactic way but the whole text is suffused with the evidence of change be it on an Alaskan dig to uncover hunter-gatherer artefacts or on the shores of Westray, where erosion has revealed evidence of neolithic occupation. She has always been able to weave in aspects of her own experience and is often quite candid about her family life (her best essay is about mother's cancer diagnosis ) but, as yet, this is largely absent from the text.

I've been re-reading The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, LeCarre. It's OK, but LeCarre wrote better stuff later on and I suspect the movie of this (which I haven't seen for a couple of decades now) is better than the book. Anyway, I needed something undemanding and this fits.

Aurora Leigh - always dragged my feet on reading this. Never took to her shorter poems much, and I bridle a bit at verse novels, novels in verse, w/e/ But it's bringing me more pleasure than anything in a while. Just bursting with stuff - knotty super-particular images, elliptical shifts of focus and digressions that just feel pleasantly 'f it,

lol I read half of it on of all places a plane headed to Seattle, years after my professor of a grad Victorian lit course raved about it. Yeah, it's got wooden passages, but it brims with possibilities, and, actually, Browning's use of blank verse to enjamb the gnarls of her thinking impressed me. If you read Wordsworth's The Prelude it serves as an answer poemm.

having read three novels by alan burns over the last week: babel seems to be entirely composed of cut-ups sourced from a plethora of found material circa the mid/late sixties which to be honest i found a bit of a slog to get through, if occasionally diverting; europe after the rain on the other hand actually has a discernible (if exceedingly fractured) narrative about a quest through war-torn europe... some notable parallels between this and anna kavan's ice which was published a few years later; dreamerika! again with the cut-ups (& additional pictorial collage) depicting/satirising the travails of the kennedy dynasty. kind of curious to check out his first novel buster which from what i can gather is more in the angry young man mode.

but for now: ann quin's the unmapped country!

Still reading essays in THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM: on Trilling, Richards et al.

It's enjoyable enough, but a bit underwhelming.

sadly a very accurate summary.

Decided to take the plunge with Ducks, Newburyport last night, 50p in & having fun so far. Rather than being an obstacle, the crazy stream of consciousness format seems like it might actually make it pretty easy to dip in & out of.

Wow, 50 pages is more than I can do, I mostly manage ten to twenty pages, and when I hit another puma episode, I take a break :)

I've returned to another book that just flows, am reading Proust again. Book 10 in the Danish 13 book version. Second part of The Prisoner. I have 10 and 11, and will make it through that little novel inside a novel. Then I should probably go back, I don't think I've read parts 7 and 8.

Also, slowly working my way through The Black Jacobins by CLR James, which is incredible, if a bit dated. And slowly making my way through The Radetzky March, one chapter at a time, for work-related reasons.

I remember really liking the Black Jacobins when I read it.

I'm now on to The Wicked Pavilion, Dawn Powell. It reminds me of a line in a Katherine Hepburn movie: "She did worse than insult you; she described you." So far, Powell seems intent on relentlessly describing her characters. This may shift, as I'm only 50 pages into it.

Sick On You Andrew Matheson
memoir of the Hollywood Brats lead singer detailing the so far pretty lows of living in poverty while getting his protopunk band together.
I think I'm still in 1972, & he's just met Cliff Richard thanks to a would be manager. Not sure if this is going to be positive.
Oh well, quite enjoyable read if you like this kind of thing.
Now to finally get their recordings.

Man, I wish I had to read Joseph Roth for work

Me too. Wish me luck with this book pitch.

the wicked pavilion is so good

isn't it?

Powell's A Time to Be Born is even better -- one of the period's essential American novels.

reading the Milk Bowl of Feathers, an anthology of surrealist writing and... a lot of it is not very good. might abandon it for the complete stories of leonora carrington

Been reading some stories from Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber for a book club I plan to attend tonight. Quite a variety of tones in this collection! I think "The Lady of the House of Love" made the deepest impression of the ones I've read so far, though "Puss-in-Boots" was the most simply enjoyable. Will be interesting to hear what others have to say.

Really like what I’ve read in that, but haven’t read the whole thing.

I heart the Bloody Chamber!

Last night I finished The Wicked Pavilion, Dawn Powell. It walks a line between brutal satire and full-throated cynicism. No one in it could be called happy. Of the ten or a dozen prominent characters, all but one is to some extent a hustler who's always on the make, including those who are wealthy enough they have no lack of means. Even the nicest character displays no real kindness, but rather a sort of forlorn, pathetic hope the world will treat her well, without expecting it actually will.

I found the characters to be convincingly drawn. Their motives are selfish, but they are not intentionally cruel to one another. Their selfishness is so unconscious, such a given, that it emerges as a social standard they are simply conforming to, for it is how 'everyone' acts and is expected to act. So, as indicated in the title, it is a very wicked book. Funny, if you assume an Olympian detachment, but a bit depressing if you feel you live in the world she describes.

Phineas Finn, which like all long Trollope feels rather peristaltic: sometimes nothing happens for a little while, and then the plot lurches into motion for a dozen pages, and then everything relaxes for another fifty. Not sure I am on board for another four books of this.

recently, The Bonfire of the Vanities, which was not as bad as I expected it to be in some ways, but bad in a few ways I didn't expect

Long time no see, thomp. Your peristaltic experience is close to mine re some (not all) volumes of In Search of Lost Time, but I stayed with it and the last volume was sufficient reward.
Have you read The Way We Live Now? Enough momentum to pull me right through that doorstop, with no slow-downs---no speed-reading either, but the pace schooled me.

Reading it at the beginning of the Trump Administration may have helped.

I think of going back to Elizabeth Bishop. All over again? Well, quite apart from the poetry, there's so much prose to read, that I've never touched.

Elijah Wald Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties

book on Dyaln up to Newport '65 and the other folk artists around at the time. Running through Dylan's stylistic evolution of the early 60s so far.
Want to read a few more of Wald's books did really enjoy his book on the delta blues, Escaping The Delta when I read it a while back.
Very interesting.

Phineas Finn, which like all long Trollope feels rather peristaltic: sometimes nothing happens for a little while, and then the plot lurches into motion for a dozen pages, and then everything relaxes for another fifty. Not sure I am on board for another four books of this.

PF was my first Trollope too! Not the best intro. I next read The Way We Live Now, after which I was hooked.

Have finished Rachel Cusk's Kudos and now I want to read the trilogy again (and her other works for the first time) - just spellbinding. This one maybe slightly less compelling than the first two, but only slightly, it leans harder into the literary circuit critique and seems almost dreamlike in places - a journalist interviews the narrator, speaks non stop for four pages without the narrator saying a word, then finishes the interview saying "well I think I've got enough!"

Also Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, somewhat more blackly comic than the title suggests, I love the narrator's theory of "testosterone autism" where old men's capacity for social intelligence declines, they develop an interest in "various tools and machinery" and "the second world war and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains". Full of great lines like "It's strange how the Night erases all colours, as if it didn't give a damn about such worldly extravagance."

I am now reading a narrowly focused history called Money Mountain: The Story of Cripple Creek Gold, Marshall Sprague. It details the more lurid parts of the history of the Cripple Creek, Colorado mining district from the earliest cattle ranching homestead in the area, up through the boom years in the early 1890s and on into the 1930s. Like any confined place that generates masses of wealth, a lot happened, more than enough to fill 300 pages.

I'm considering reading Trollope's The Way We Live Now as an apt follow-on to this one.

Yeah, go for it. Don't let its size intimidate you. What Trollope lacks in Eliot and James' psychologizing he compensates with momentum and portraiture.

The Trollope I've read so far has been centered on ecclesiastic politics, which against all probability, he managed to make entertaining, so I expect he'll do just fine with much juicier material.

I finished the two books I was reading: The Odyssey (tr. Fagles) and Life is Meals by James and Kay Salter. LIM was a unique mish mash of anecdotes, food-related facts, historical trivia and the odd recipe, all united by the themes of cookery and entertaining. It's a bit breezy, but it makes a cumulative case for a particular theory of the good life (and gains some emotional punch from coming near the end of what was by all appearances a long and happy relationship). In that sense, it could almost be read as a companion to Salter's All That Is. I'm guessing everyone's read The Odyssey. I found it quite enjoyable. More fun and less grim than The Iliad, but in its own way just as bloodthirsty. The gory climax should appeal to anyone who's ever had house guests overstay their welcome.