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

gosh.

(Am holding The Mirror and the Light off to prevent it from all ending, reading A Place of Greater Safety in lieu, have some other irons in the fire)

have been reading early novels by elizabeths taylor (palladian) & bowen (to the north) and am now pondering on whether or not to start on a dance to the music of time

last shift at work, no actual work to do so managed to read olga tokarczuk's Flights, liked it a lot.

i've seen that twice today in various lists. the cover is remarkable. is there a reason for that?

https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/31xpRQB0p6L.jpg

All fitzcarraldo ed books look like that

The fiction ones are blue and non fiction are white

Fitzcarraldo Ed only the worldwide publisher of a few things in their list sadly, but happily including "This Little Art"

I think I mentioned on the technological backward steps that I checked out flights from the library last year but couldn’t get more than about 30pp in because something about it (I think the illustrations) was causing the library e-reader to keep crashing. & it struck me that of all the reasons not to have finished a book “it crashed whenever I tried to turn the page” was a potential candidate for that thread

first pandemic book order finally arrived - Warren Zanes' Tom Petty bio. After that terribly written Clash bio (Marcus Grey's "The Last Gang in Town") was so gratifying to read opening paragraphs by someone who can really write and clearly has some insightful things to say about the subject, looking forward to this.

Also dug out my copy of Nabokov's "Bend Sinister" for a re-read

Flights is so good. So many little stories have stuck with me, especially the letters about Angelo. I knew the story - there is a great film about him - but the way she uses it is so great.

it's cheap on amazon uk at the moment (which is where i saw it)

(but that might change in 4 hours when the month changes, because i think it was in the monthly deal for march)

Thanks for the comments on Flights--was wondering if it might be too esoteric, at least in translation, but sounds like you guys straight-up enjoyed it, without too much homework (not that I don't need and even want some headflexing, but not too much).
xp think I might check that Petty bio, though not the biggest fan----here's Zanes on the experience and process of writing a biography, being a biographer, and effects on subject, incl. a conversation not in the book: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/tom-petty-death-biographer-warren-zanes-731414/

Can't resist a few quotes: His unexpected death forced me to acknowledge, in a visceral way, the degree to which biographers bring their subjects in through the stomach as much as through the mind. Biographers consume their people to understand them...I hadn’t been alone when I went through the process of writing the Petty biography. There was a family around me, even if it had splintered by the time of Petty’s death.
...The second half of the book, involving divorce and heroin use and the blending of families, got some divided responses among Petty’s family members, some contention, some trouble. I think Petty found himself at the center of it, and in a way that proved uncomfortable. But my job, from the beginning, had been to tell the man’s story based on interviews, primarily those with him. And that’s what I’d done. But that going public part of the process changed things, brought some strain. If it hadn’t, I believe that the absence of strain would have been the sign that I’d failed in writing the book Petty wanted me to write. In some ways, I’d been ready for this. But I thought we’d have a few years to process it all, to move past it. He’d invited me to be a guest DJ on his radio show. There were signs of thawing. But then he was gone.

I don't think Flight ever felt like homework. There is definitely a lot of references, but she uses real stories just like she uses fictional ones, so it's very readable. And then all of a sudden there was something where I went 'wait a minute...'

the thing that immediately grabbed me about Zanes in his intro was his pointing out how Petty differed from other singer-songwriters (Springsteen, Waits, etc.), that his songs drew listeners in with what was omitted or implied - they weren't about narrative sweep or detailed characters, he employed mythic strokes to create outlines that listeners could then step into.

paraphrasing - he makes the point better than I can

Yes, and that's hard to do, without nudging listeners/readers toward foregone conclusions, easiest associations---you have to trust your audience and yourself to be capable of more. Also reminds me of xgau once comparing earlier and then-current Randy Newman: once he brought you to think about his characters, now it's just what he thinks about them---"and that just isn't as interesting."

Erm, sorry for repeating words, anyway Christgau's Newman take on his site.

Born Again [Warner Bros., 1979]
This has more content and feeling than Little Criminals. But as with Little Criminals its highlight is a (great) joke--"The Story of a Rock and Roll Band," which ought to be called "E.L.O." and isn't, for the same reason supergroupie radio programmers have shied away from it. Hence, the content comprises ever more intricate convolutions of bad taste; rather than making you think about homophobes and heavy-metal toughs and me-decade assholes the way he once made you think about rednecks and slave traders and high school belles, he makes you think about how he feels about them. Which just isn't as interesting. B+

ha, that's good

The Mirror and the Light is really fucking good. I think part of Mantel's power is that she's a misanthrope but also an incorrigible gossip - that and her sense of the proximal, her apprehension of the closeness of the spirit world and the voices of history. With 'novelist' swapped out for 'king', this ripe passage (being one of about ten I've wanted to copy down and share), strikes me as a decently hubristic manifesto for Mantel's vision of what a novelist is and does.

He once said to Cranmer, the dreams of kings are not the dreams of other men. They are susceptible to visions, in which the figures of their ancestors come to speak to them of war, vengeance, law and power. Dead kings visit them; they say 'Do you know us Henry? We know you.' There are places in the realm where battles have been fought, places where, the wind in a certain direction, the moon waning, the night obscure, you can hear the thunder of hooves and the creak of harness, and the screams of the slain; and if you creep close - if you were thin air, suppose you were a spirit who could slide between blades of grass - then you would hear the aspirations of the dying, you would hear them cry to God for mercy. And all these, the souls of England, cry to *me*, the king tells him, to me and every king: each king carries the crimes of other kings, and the need for restitution rolls forward down the years.

So I finished the 2 books I was reading. Waning of the Middle Ages was mostly interesting, despite a few longeurs, such as the chapter trying to analyze why the visual arts of the Middle Ages seem more immediate and relatable to us than the literary works, which seemed to be not especially mysterious or worthy of such heavy analytical lifting. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline was fairly entertaining. I especially liked the author's note added to the 2012 reprinting, a nostalgia-tinted look back at how he came to write these stories and what his life was like at the time. It was interesting that he mentioned Dr. Seuss as an inspiration. I could see that, along with Mark Leyner, Mad Magazine and William S Burroughs.

Actually the author's note is available online if anyone's interested: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/01/07/civilwarland-in-bad-decline-preface/

Good posting, Chinaski, thanks.

Juan Benet - A Meditation.

There were times when I was reading this 365 page one paragraph monster that I felt like it was consuming me rather than the other way around.* Maybe one day -- whenever I've dared to re-read this? -- I will put up a thread called crappily titled "Undercover Canon" where we could talk about novels like this**, just bizarro examples of the written word, that have been consigned to the dustbin (this was the cheapest novel, £2 quid on amazon). In one way it isn't at all that weird, this is a post-Faulkner -- Region is modelled on Yoknapatawpha County -- post-Proust world where people interact and reminisce about relationships, war, exile and whatever the fuck else, coming in and out of Region's geography. The narrator recounts in a series of episodes of narrative that switch to meditations on all manner of abstractions -- and back again.

A Meditation is probably coming from the greatest Spanish modernist writer. But its a very lonely voice. In the main Spanish writers like to do other things altogether, more into a sense of play (thinking of Vila-Matas) (if not fun) with er stuff, or they were into their dictators (Inclan's Tyrant Banderas however Benet isn't one for doing the obvious -- you couldn't get a digestible line out of him about the Spanish civil war or on anything else for that matter). What you do get is what I can only describe as these rational hallucinations (something very calculated, but you feel the mind that is writing these sections is seeking to expand but not quite explode your undertanding of the world and people in it, maybe like a bomb that goes off now and then, then has its mechanism put back together again to only go off again later, on and on till the end)

* I spent a month with it, even though I read about a quarter of it in a day. The horror of covid-19 'got in the way', and then other distractions. Even so its a novel that can be very exhausting and yet just drags you down to a hole. Thomas Bernhard (its not at all like him btw) is actually really easy to read, and he makes it so. This lacks a music that Bernhard has, but makes it up by willing a sense of forward motion (that's my way of saying that I think the guy could write). I couldn't put it down for long strecthes of time, but when I did put it down it would stay down for days, and I couldn't pick up anything else as nothing would or could equal it. I was stuck but it didn't feel like it, because it was so enjoyable.

** So I think Carlo Emilio Gadda's The Experience of Pain is possibly most like it (both this and Benet share a pain, both also happened to be engineers too), Saer's La Grande, Broch's The Death of Virgil, to name a few other forgotten ones that draw on the same models form the 20s and 30s.

That sounds both exhausting and weirdly intriguing.

Finished At Dusk, and yeah, it got really good. I was quite astonished at how much space there was for different voices in such a little book. At one point one of the main characters is telling a story she heard from a friend, that the friend heard from a colleague, that the colleague heard from a former cellmate. The plot really is nearly nothing, it's just voices and stories from the fringes, and from the past, which the architect has tried to pave over and leave behind. Very touching.

Capital and Ideology is also really good. I'm still just at how the French Revolutionaries dealt with ancient unequal privileges, but it's so interesting.

What should I read by her?

How preposterous is it that Vita Sackville-West, the best-selling bisexual baroness who wrote over thirty-five books that made an ingenious mockery of twenties societal norms, should be remembered today merely as a smoocher of Virginia Woolf? The reductive canonization of her affair with Woolf has elbowed out a more luxurious, strange story: Vita loved several women with exceptional ardor; simultaneously adored her also-bisexual husband, Harold; ultimately came to prefer the company of flora over fauna of any gender; and committed herself to a life of prolific creation (written and planted) that redefined passion itself.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/03/31/the-fabulous-forgotten-life-of-vita-sackville-west

Been reading a bit of this and a bit of that: poems by Tagore, one of the vocation lectures by Max Weber (in the new NYRB translation), I finished One Lark, One Horse by Michael Hofmann (having been looping back and rereading a bunch - I may post one in the poetry thread). Not sure what to read next.

I'm halfway through Parting the Waters. 1961. The sit-in movement is sweeping the Jim Crow south. It pries loose some minor concessions against strict segregation. Those little successes are spark off a wave of murderous Klan retaliatory violence, with bombings, beatings and lynching. I know this trend will get much worse before it gets any better.

The biggest surprise to me so far is how tiny the organizations of SCLC and SNCC were, compared to the breadth of the movement, which is being driven almost entirely by spontaneous local (mostly student-led) protests. Almost everything that happens occurs via loose informal networking, usually centered around black churches and colleges, with hardly any central planning or training. The movement is spreading and growing itself rapidly and King is somehow at the very core of everything, while having almost no power to steer anything.

Finished A Place of Greater Safety, that French Revolution was a doozy and a half huh

To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, when Saint-Just was my age, he had been dead for four years.

In on the The Mirror And The Light reading club too. Previously my reading was done almost exclusively on public transport, so I'm using the shutdown to tackle some hardcover doorstops that would be a pain to lug around.

a collection of rober walser's short stories including, and titled after, the walk. my first time reading walser despite him being an influence on several of my favourite writers. most of the 'stories' are two page sketches and ideas than conventional short stories, have found these more interesting than enjoyable. the walk itself is magnificent; a bipolar odyssey of the magic and mundanity of living.

I finished War and Peace. Good novel imo.

About to start a Metternich bio published last year.

I overcame my reader's block, to a degree, by reading Alan Sillitoe.

I'd had a copy of THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE RUNNER on the shelf for years. I finally got round to reading the title story. It's told by a criminal, and he's thus unpleasant. Yet the actual writing is strong, bold. I've read about 3 other stories that follow it, and again what strikes me is that Sillitoe isn't really quite what people might imagine - Ecky Thump tough brassy Northerner or something (well, he was from Nottingham anyway, but it seems all to have been conflated into the North) - but bolder, darker, more exploratory. A relevant period term is 'Existentialism'. The stories can be a bit disturbing. But they're easy enough to read, for me to get back into reading a bit.

I've been looking for a copy of Travels in Nihilon forever

just finished Helen Eustis's The Horizontal Man. Patton Oswalt recommended it alongside Tey's the daughter of time (which I love) in one of his books. it's a rare mystery novel that gets inside the head of many different characters, where they all have different ways of thinking. Too bad the mystery solution becomes obvious to modern readers as soon as the first clue come up. I bet Alfred Hitchcock read it.

halfway through Elizabeth Kolbert - The Sixth Extinction
https://i.imgur.com/m5FOWxJ.png
should have been 100 pages max. she needs to go on a travel adventure for each chapter, describing what the lab looks like where they study coral reefs, etc. so much filler for such a big topic.

I finished Sillitoe. 177 pages, a way out of my Reader's Block.

Then back to Jennifer Egan, LOOK AT ME - now page 50, a long way to go, but a lot more user-friendly than Conrad was. I think I'll keep at this and finish it.

I paused that to begin, at last, Michael White: POPKISS: THE LIFE & AFTERLIFE OF SARAH RECORDS, as a Good Friday treat.

Happily easy to read. 80 pages or so in a day: a relief to be finding a way to read again.

JUst had It Was a New Day Yesterday arrive yesterday.
So have read the first chapter of that.
So may not get to finish Adventures in The Screen Trade quite so fast.

Still readeing the Philosopher's Stone book on Alchemy through various cultures which si very interesting. Gone from China into India and possibly onto another Asian tradition

mark haber's reinhardt's garden, really fun sort of anglo take on bernhard and the zeal which certain writers find in 'melancholia' as a theme.

that benet sounds fantastic xyzzzz__. i keep meaning to read gadda too.

I'm Afraid That's All We've Got Time For by Jen Calleja, collection of short stories just issued by prototype publishing. really interesting, by which i probably mean i'm not entirely sure what to make of it, of them. for some subterranean reason throughout reading the word algebra,al-jabra kept springing to mind, along with the image of bones poorly set or deliberately dislocated or asunder. that was the feeling of the prose.

using that as a key gets you somewhere with these stories: their parts are not connected. a story starts with a flood coming into a girl's school, moves through an incipient sexual relationship between a male teacher and a student, and vatic advice by dead and decaying farm animals.

it may take place in France. there is here a sense of dislocation as well. a story about crab fishermen *felt* like it took place in the states, but on going back i realised this may just have been projection on my part. some stories *seem* to take place in the future, without quite specifying it; they could just be taking place in a slightly de-ranged mentality.

i think this is all managed through a mixture of exclusion and breaking language slightly. In A Town Called Distraction tenses and sentence structure are maimed:

I loosely calculated faint figures in my hand. The bridge to the east side of town would be down and crossable for a quarter of an hour from quarter past twelve, and for ten minutes at twelve forty-five. Even if I were to make the close of the first window, I would still be fifteen minutes late, yet the second window glowed in pink neon next to the faded twelve-fifteen. I knew I would be distracted by the world. The world requests time. I'd been listening to the news on the radio before leaving and had to spring back upstairs to note down names mentioned in the broadcast to look up later on. The bus pulled in while I was scanning the headlines in the newsagent's in front of the bus stop and I rushed out to meet it. I had been the wrong bus, so i waited and wondered how long ago the council had had the bus shelter repaired, if ever.

Causation and the connective conventional glue that holds together a lot of 'realism' is excluded. This produces a not-quite dream logic, but it is not delivered in any sort of dreamy way - the short directness of the sentences means that causation is, tonally, very much conveyed - ah there it is again, as I write, the sound or image in my head of bones being forcibly dislocated... the point is that this isn't quite dream logic. it's real world logic deprived of that set of social causative glue with which so much writing and visual media is conventionally held together.

Exclusion of this sort allows the reader to project into a very deep conceptual space, which I think gives an awful lot of the substance of feeling to reading these stories.

I guess I may need to unpack that a little. On twitter recently, I said the impact of Covid felt like it might be best understood by looking at one of those historical graphs, which takes a sudden and spectacular dip, or spikes suddenly, like in the 1530s with western European prices, or the consequences of the black death or the 30 years war, and then a hundred years later you see the consequences. i said i could imagine in 2134 'The Sack of Singapore' being the symbolic event of the fall of capitalism. Ignoring the whimsical analysis and looking only at the imaginative construction, for science-fiction purposes, I should probably have said something less obvious - so it couldn't be European cities ('sack' having very much that connotation of classical history) and Singapore was too obviously connected with capitalism. It needed to be something like Brazilia, or maybe Chandigarh. Making it obvious (Singapore) is very much the Black Mirror error (imv), what you want to do from an imaginative pov is produce a gap between what seems likely now, and the event itself, for the reader to project into.

It feels like Calleja is doing something like this at a conceptual, causation and sentence by sentence level. It is I think quite deliberately jarring <- that could almost be the aesthetic of the stories. It's hard to find similarities and I think this may be because they are each experiments at the level I just described.

In some of the stories separate events are tied together only by their proximity, so that you go searching for the other things that might be there - again that projection into an excluded middle.

this makes it very surprising when you come across a story like The Amnesty, a sort of gender monde renversé. It feels very direct on the basis of the previous stories - women occupy the hegemonic position in society and clearly have done historically. The directness means that Calleja can drive through with force beyond the obvious low-hanging fruit of such an idea, and treat the concepts at play quite violently. So another thing I would say characterises her writing is 'violence done to concepts'.

It's all quite off-putting and it's extremely welcome to be being 'put off' at this level, 'off-putting' as an aesthetic, again. 'what is this taste? why? i don't like it or do i?' etc.

Local Knowledge by Clifford Geertz. A re-read this - I go to Geertz when I want a cooling breeze of sanity in my mind. I feel, and I really want to explore this properly, that there is a deep reductiveness currently at work in how many people want to see the world. To throw a few things together to generate a congeries of what i mean: dominic cummings, thinking fast and slow, tim harford and 'economics', data science, the sort of watershed oppositional world that engenders culture wars, brexit, Trump.

What i get from Geertz is clear exploration of the spaces which are not only interpreted via their extreme point of conclusion; he can be intelligent about lines that are uncertain. In another of his collections he points out why he is 'anti-anti-relativist'. it's a very clear explanation why people who are anti-relativist are more of a problem than relativism is itself. I feel that needs to remembered as an important point, not at all difficult to understand with a little effort, in the state of things today.

the opening sentence of the first essay here – Blurred Genes: The Refrigeration of Social Thought – is a very good example of the tone: A number of things, I think, are true.

In fact I've just found a paragraph at the end of that essay, which states very clearly what I was trying to say at the beginning of this post (by 'refiguration' Geertz means use of theatre, play, symbolism, and other traditional terms of the humanities to explore the social so-called 'sciences', a move he welcomes):

One thing it means is that, however raggedly, a challenge is being mounted to some of the central assumptions of mainstream social science. The strict separation of theory and data, the "brute fact" idea; the effort to create a formal vocabulary of analysis purged of all subjective reference, the "ideal language" idea; and the claim to moral neutrality and the Olympian view, the "God's truth" idea – none of these can prosper when explanation comes to be regarded as a matter of connecting action to its sense rather than behavior to its determinants. The refiguration of social theory represents, or will if it continues, a sea change in our notion not so much of what knowledge is but of what it is we want to know. Social events do have causes and social institutions effects; but it just may be that the road to discovering what we assert in asserting this lies less through postulating forces and measuring them than through noting expressions and inspecting them.

I think (perhaps a use of being a white middle class male is that you can sense inside you some of the worst impulses at play in the hegemonic situation) that the appeal of the "brute fact" is very great to the commentariat, and to many other people besides, who want very much to be shown to be *right*. It is i think to a degree sometimes difficult to understand an overriding impulse. They have even created their own ersatz "formal vocabulary of analysis" (call it "Sensiblese") to examine their own rightness.

To use a phrase he uses in another essay, with Geertz the appeal is that he explores clearly a world where "the matter is one of degree, not polar opposition" and just as importantly shows how you can still make working and workable observations and conclusions in such a world.

One challenge, politically, I think, is how in our abrasive and oppositional cultural world you ensure languages of degree do not, Laodicean like, backslide or get luke-warmed into radical centrism, but retain their necessary capacity for progressive action.

Anyway, regardless of the wider political challenges, reading Geertz is a great way of maintaining a certain intellectual freshness and elasticity. The fault is clearly mine that each time I read him I think 'ah yes, *this* is how it should be done'!

i've got The Wheels of Commerce by Fernand Braudel on the bookstand where I tend to eat, which means I will read a few paras every week. it's hardly a study but it's very pleasant reading about the development of markets in Europe, say. Despite the fact as a member of the Annales school of history he did exceptional work drawing together complicated statitistics into a coherent picture of European history, he is also a remarkably and pleasingly picturesque writer. So, for instance of how livestock and foodstuffs were got to the major markets of European capitals:

Thus Madrid in the eighteenth century drew to excess on the means of transport of Castile, to the point of disrupting the country's entire economy. In Lisbon, if one is to believe Tirso de Molina (1625) everything was simplicity itself: fruit, snow from the Serra d'Estrela, and food arrived by the all-providing sea: 'The inhabitants, as they sit eating at tale, can see the fishermen's nets fill with fish ... caught on their doorsteps.' It is a pleasure to the eyes, says an account of July-August 1633, to see the hundreds and thousand of fishermen's barks on the Tagus. Lazy, greedy, perhaps indifferent, the city seems from these accounts to be swallowing the sea. But the picture is too good too be true: in fact Lisbon and to labour endlessly to find enough grain for her daily bread. And the larger the population, the higher the degree of risk to supplies. Venice was already having to buy cattle for consumption from Hungary in the fifteenth century. Istanbul, which had a population in the sixteenth century of perhaps 700,000, at flocks of sheep from the Balkans, and grain from the Black Sea and Egypt.

Incidentally, I see someone has posted some reading notes from the wonderful Structures of Everyday Life (the first volume of Civilisation and Capitalism, of which The Wheels of Commerce is the second). Haven't been through them yet, and the name Tyler Cowen brings me out in authentic plague, but may well be worth a dip.

The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem - great christmas present from house mate.

SO MUCH to disagree with in the introduction as the editor (Jeremy Noel-Todd) tries to get to grips with defining rules for inclusion and exclusion for prose poems. But what made me extremely argumentative in the introduction makes for a superb collection of anything that slips between prose and poetry (you will, as surely as i did, disagree with many entries – oh come ON, that's just PROSE – but this is just part of the fun). It allows for a diverse collection continually working in peripheral spaces and so increasing one's range of imaginative perception.

it is, for reasons i cbf'd to go into, arranged in reverse chronological order. as yet another exercise in defamiliarisation it works well enough.

let's have some Peter Reading, from C (you know what C stands for):

The brass plate polished wordless. Stone steps hollowed by the frightened hopeful ascending, the terrified despairing descending. (Probably between three and four months, perhaps one hundred days.) Out of the surgeries in this Georgian street, and similar streets in similar cities, some of us issue daily, bearing the ghastly prognostications. How we hate you, busy, ordinary, undying – taxi-drive, purveyor of the Evening Star, secretary bouncing puddings of malleable flesh. Incongruously I plan 100 100-word unites. What do you expect me to do – break into bloody haiku?

Verse is for healthy
arty-parties. The dying
and surgeons use prose.

Peter Reading (1984)

*taxi-driver - should have proof read and in case it wasn't obvious that's one of the pieces collected in the prose poem book.

great post on reading Benet, xyzzzz__ - will have to give it a go.

Presumably"lefto journo": David Corn, I meant.

Having finished the book about Bell Laboratories, which was adequately informative, while waiting to decide which book to read next I took a side excursion into some of Orwell's essays from a humongous (over 1350 pp.) collection published by Everyman's Library. At random I read mostly political book reviews from 1938-39. They were extremely sound, fair-minded, and always drove straight to the heart of the matter.

Dow: it's nice that you have been able to get so much out of Berman. That work feels a bit overfamiliar to me but I haven't read it as closely as you have for a long, long time. It was clearly always meant to be exciting so it's good that someone is still responding to it that way.

I recall that Berman wrote an early book on Rousseau but the later works, I think, are patchy - collections of essays that partly overlap with ALL THAT IS SOLID, etc - like ADVENTURES IN MARXISM. I also have a co-edited collection, NEW YORK CALLING, which is appealing if you like modern NYC history, people talking about 1970s Manhattan, blackouts, graffiti, etc.

Berman's response to Perry Anderson's scintillating if rather unkind critique of him (c.1984), 'signs in the street', might eventually be of interest.

I've settled on re-reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. I first read it at college, decades ago, when Stein was just re-emerging from the eclipse of her reputation during the 50s and 60s. Gertrude channeling Alice is much more readable than Gertrude striving to do away with the noun, but I have the Selected Writings, so I can dabble a bit around after I finish with 'Alice'.

I started printing a Gertrude Stein pamphlet today, I hope it turns out ok.

I haven’t read a book since the lockdown started, can’t seem to make myself do it. Have dipped into “Life A Users Manual” a bit.

I liked that book. Kind of lost my mind at how many octagons were in it though.

"haven’t read a book since the lockdown started"

☹️

I've had real trouble finishing books since lockdown started, but thanks to the Dylan album I managed to finish re-reading The Master and Margarita, which was every bit as amazing as I remembered it, and then read The Strangers in the House by Simenon, which I liked a lot. Bob Dylan to the rescue yet again.

I'm still going with Nagel's View from Nowhere, but it's not an easy read, so for some light distraction I've also started Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann, which someone had put out on their stoop.

Lily Dale: is there a specific connexion between the Dylan LP and these books?

About 200 pp into PREP.

Meanwhile about 40pp into David Thomson, THE BIG SCREEN. Vividly written.

Billy Budd, Sailor

After finishing the Atocha Station about three weeks ago, I've not been able to consider fiction. Nothing to do with the text, as such, which I liked, without loving. I was leery from the start at dealing with another struggling writer of privilege, however much, and however skillfully (and amusingly) it is battling with that particular conundrum. The Ashbery section is pretty extraordinary and will lead me to at least read his Hatred of Poetry.

I've recently finished Seamus Heaney's Finders Keepers, which Good Reads tells me I've been reading, off and on, for eight years. Magnificent.

pinefox: not exactly. I posted upthread that the Dylan album got me thinking about art and death and immortality in a way that sort of suggested The Master and Margarita to me; it's more of a mood than anything else. But also, listening to new Dylan seems to have jolted my brain out of its lockdown-induced rut and helped my attention span temporarily. The Simenon was just something my brother gave me, and from his recommendation I felt pretty sure I would like it, but I didn't want to read it until I was back in a reading frame of mind.

I finished spring reading with:

Various - A Hidden Landscape Once a Week (ed. by ilxor mark s)

This is the first time I ever contributed to a book being published (through kickstarter) (I was spectating at the conference much of this book is drawn from on the last day). I suppose I'll describe myself a satisfied customer. Reading and flicking through all the contributions felt at times like a music magazine. By turns good, bad, irritating, or sometimes you just flick through with little to no feeling. Taking things in, letting it settle to...what exactly only time will tell (like when I started picking up music mags in the late 90s). Things work through and you end up where you end up. The editor's essay does a very good job on addressing (or squaring up to) what a contributor brings to the table in terms of perspective, but does not seem to work through - which is a common enough struggle for all of us (anyway there was a gap here). Politically it was a weird read because -- picking this up post-Corbyn, BLM, at our current moment etc. -- and seeing a few music/culture writers behave badly on twitter is a thing I just rubbed up against (I'd like to think Mark smartly covered this up when mentioning John Harris lol). But it was a thing for me. I ended up thinking someone like Charles Shaar Murray or Edwin Pouncey would be bad on twitter. Maybe Morley too. Penman is on twitter (and is often really good, so I didn't feel his absence from the book).* Liz Naylor (who was great on the conference panel I saw) is on there but a quiet presence, she doesn't tweet ofen.

You wouldn't really know unless you were present but what does come through is Penny Reel's heckle/engagement/questions from the audience (in a light enough way as it appears on the book, there are a couple of instances, maybe one or two more on the day). The panel with him on was great -- and I love how this was the placed last in the book, and Richard Williams' interview with Val Wilmer placed first, this partic bit of ordering here is A++ although its probably just chronology with jazz mags covered a bit more upfront -- and his assertion that he wrote for Black people (after saying at first he didn't care who read him) moved me very much.

* this is a book where time on twitter enhances in whatever way your experience of it. Reading Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary recently was the first time I became more aware of this dimension.

* this is a book where time on twitter enhances in whatever way your experience of it. Reading Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary recently was the first time I became more aware of this dimension. Sorry, I don't follow this ending to your post at all. What do you mean?

I mean that I would have a different reading of the book if I wasn't on twitter. With the Serge I credit twitter with a wider knowledge of anarchist thinking (as opposed to state communist thinking) so by the time I'm reading the Memoirs certain passages aren't as obscure as they might have been.

You found that responses to Landscape on twitter further stimulated-clarified your own take?

That's what happened when I started reading Creem---not that I always agreed with reviewer's verdicts or house doctrine, but that wasn't the point.

Twitter makes me think a little further about a reading of the book, because some of the people who write about music/culture as a job/vocation are on it.

I don't think I even was on twitter (or if I was it couldn't have been for long) when I attended the conference.

Will have to dig around on Twitter for responses. Here's a good informative and extensive interview/conversation:
https://rockcritics.com/2019/08/09/interview-with-mark-sinker-editor-of-a-hidden-landscape-once-a-week-a-book-about-the-uk-music-press-which-any-critical-person-could-learn-from-and-enjoy/
And my initial take, posted on there:
Great interview—can see I’m going to have to re-read to catch every bit of it (possibly)–as with Mark’s intro to the anthology (was immediately gratified by his hailing of 80s syncretism, a new age [somebody pointed out that this was in part because of cassettes, rough and ready in areas around the world where record and CD players weren’t feasible}. In contrast to some of his contributors, who dismissed the 80s for plastic on everything, Phil Collins and shoulder pads bleghh).
Fave contributions pretty obvious choices: adventures of Val Wilmer, Cynthia Rose having lunch with Andy and his corsets, Hon. Chas Shaar Murray stylin’, Penny Reel! )thanx so much for link to Mark’s Freaky Trigger on him) Also the intriguing Paul Morely, applecart-upsetter Paul Gilroy, and Mr. Frith on his experience in xgau’s version of the Voice line-edit (goes with what I’ve heard from other survivors). That last was presented *after* another participant, an early reggae writer, complained about Frith editing his own work, trying to clarify for a wider readership, apparently---so the sequencing could be inferred as turnabout, comeuppance---results: I was always struck by austere, downcast, depressive even, Frith's Voice column seemed in contrast to his Creem contributions---and now I know at least part of why that was. Cannot imagine going through the Voice line-edit with Christgau, patient though he was with me under most other circumstances---it was a weirdly intimate process even in the very gentle hands of Chuck, who was no fool, yet no self-appointed Dean.

xxxpost Thanks Pinefox, will keep your Berman comments in mind.

Should we do a summer thread?

go for it! I can't believe an entire season has passed already since I started this v_v

I started one: Summer 2020: What Are You Reading as the Sun Bakes the Arctic Ocean?