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

*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.

FUCK macOS autocorrect in the Geertz post - the essay is the 'Refiguration of Social Thought' not refrigeration lol.

Antonio Tabucchi - The Woman of Porto Pim
Ciaran Carson - In the Light of
Colette - Cheri
Marina Tsvetaeva - Selected
Pushkin - The Tales of Belkin

The Tabucchi basically mines literatures on the sea and the whale (the title is a short story at the end of the book), anything from Melville to stuff that reminds me of old Portuguese travelogues I have read about but never actually looked at (according to this account of Portuguese lit that book was some of Portugal's first writing of note. The Colette is a marvel of a novella, exploring relationships and forbidden desires with an ending that could be devastating depending on your mood. Pushkin you can just go in my veins: duels, marriage schemes, lives turned upside down and up again in a blink of an eye, the going-ons of small towns, all told colourfully in a way that just isn't quite done, almost as if pages are too well-written now to go to the mess of it.

Poetry-wise I am engaging with Ciaran Carson re-tellings of Rimbaud, and another Tsvetaeva collection where it takes off on the uncollected section. A lot of her poetry (her way of seeing things) just barely leaves the desk its been written on, or so it seems.

re: Benet -- good luck to all those who were interested :) I first came across him when reading about The Construction fo the Tower of Babel which I never got hold of and could be a better starting point.

i’ll be fine, just prepping for it by binge reading miss marples.

👍👍👍

First thing that has truly struck me about the new Mantel: how easily she gets you on Cromwell's side - why must all these people be so difficult, man's tired - even though if you think about it for a few seconds there's no earthly reason why you should be.

Causation and the connective conventional glue that holds together a lot of 'realism' is excluded...the short directness of the sentences means that causation is, tonally, very much conveyed Got this from your quotations, will have to read these stories, thanks!

The Refrigeration of Social Thought efficiently maintains and contains their own ersatz "formal vocabulary of analysis" (call it "Sensiblese") to examine their own rightness.

Braudel reminds of how much is required to maintain refrigeration, and get it all to the fridge.

Excited and daunted by the prospect of reading the latest dispatch from Fizzles, let alone books the books themselves.

Someone mentioned Two Serious Ladies in the last thread, so I bought it, just read it, what a weird and troublesome thing this book is, straightforwardly concerned with the abject complexities of desire.

Also reread The Great Gatsby, 15 years later, FScott writes the good sentences, inarguably

You might also enjoy the short stories, play (In The Summer House, which got a rave from Tennessee Williams), letters, hell you might well check around for a nicely priced copy of this collection, the most complete I know of (still not that long, alas), put together by Bowles biographer Millicent Dillon: https://www.loa.org/books/531-collected-writings

Reread Colm Toibin's The Empty Family, who understands characters alienated from but still drawn to their families, especially if they're queer.

I read Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking so you don't have to.

Now reading my first Iris Murdoch - The Bell. It's set in a lay community, attached to an abbey housing an order of Benedectine nuns, which of course it is, and it has this odd tonal mix of vast existential crises and an episode of Midsomer Murders. I'm in.

I made POPKISS my Easter reading and I finished it in the middle of last night. Reflections:

I welcome a breezy, readable book (after my failure with NOSTROMO etc) and this does fly by fine. But it also contains many infelicities - emphatic or colourful adjectives that are wrong, as in many music writers (Simon Goddard's Smiths book the classic example), and any number of dangling modifiers. This is a Bloomsbury book. Why isn't it edited?

I look at the C87, C88 etc CD compilations and notice how few among the 60+ tracks are from Sarah bands. In other words there were actually *lots* of other indiepop labels at the same time. How did they compare? Was Sarah different from them, or were they copying its methods? I realize this is a book about one label, but something more on that ecology of indie labels would be relevant to a real understanding here.

Sarah as a business. I puzzled over this at times, sometimes bemused by how the emphasis was on saving money (buying the cheapest parcel tape, etc) while also charging as little as possible ... I had to remind myself that what it sounded like was doing things for a hobby: like when Pamela Berry and I, 20 years ago, recorded our first single and sent a cassette of the tracks to a bunch of indie labels around the world. We probably wanted to save money, and certainly weren't looking to make money. Lots of the Sarah activities make sense if you see them as someone not running a business, but just doing something they liked do, for their friends.

But then ... they also keep giving a band, say, £400 to go and make a record - which was even more money then (in fact it's apparently £900 now). So they *were* a business, and that money presumably came from sales. There's a slight tension, or at least relation, between these two things, that isn't fully explored.

The author says it won't be obsessively completist - fair enough - but some omissions are still notable. What's the greatest Sarah track of all? I think to me it's Secret Shine's 'Loveblind' - which isn't even mentioned in 250 pages! Still, the MBV context for that band is quite well introduced.

The chapter on Heavenly, Riot Grrrl, feminism gets dreary for me I'm afraid - in that I've reached a point where most claims about the gender politics of indiepop look overplayed, and too often they're pitching at straw targets.* Example: the band name Heavenly is described as 'A word *real* men are never heard to say'. Irony, of some kind, but not managing to make a very substantial point. The truth is, Heavenly is a much less 'fey' band name than Gentle Despite or The Sweetest Ache, if that's the competition you're in. The claim that Heavenly sounded like the Dixie Cups or Shangri-Las also seems like wishful thinking.

[* The exception to this is the much simpler and more direct fact, cited here p.172, that the label didn't put pictures of women on record covers.]

Certain rather significant things are picked up oddly in passing.

Example 1: a one-line footnote on page 203 (!) states that 'Sarah had no contracts and didn't demand exclusivity from any of its bands'. Maybe this fact, its significance and whether it was distinctive should have been discussed in, say ... the first 50 pages?

Example 2: the whole thing rests on Haynes and Wadd's relationship, sharing a flat and working from it, etc, and on p.243, in about 1995, they break up, and it's explained that it was a natural progression. Fine. But meanwhile, on p.109, we suddenly learn that half the Field Mice songs in one period were about Clare Wadd, with whom the songwriter had been involved - 'the by-product of an agreement between her and Haynes to see other people while remaining a couple'. Crikey !! Again, maybe this might have been worth mentioning ... a bit sooner?

That said, the Field Mice chapter is actually one of the strongest. Harvey Williams, Hit Parade are well enough covered, though the Orchids chapter confirms my sense that this is the most overrated band on the label - I can just never hear what everyone else can in them.

Glad to have read the book. May yet refer to it in future.

I'm dipping back into my William James biography and a few things spring to mind: how easy it was for James to get his medical degree from Harvard (it took, basically, a year, at the end of which he had an MD and a license to practise. Christ alone knows what kind of stuff was going on behind surgery doors); the opportunities open to James: he travels, incessantly, including an amazing trip with Louis Aggasiz to the Amazon basin to collect specimens with the notion of disproving Darwin's theory of transmutation; how mad his dad is: a self-published writer on religion and philosophy who no-one read; how ILL everyone is - always: Henry's constipation, William's back, various friends and relatives dropping like flies (I know it's the 1860s but it's still shocking).

That's a lot of punctuation.

Interesting thoughts about Popkiss, PF - I like Michael a lot, and I think there are interesting discussions to be had about Sarah records, particularly its politics and its business model but I couldn't face reading the book. Mostly that was because I have my own more-or-less functional memories of how it was when it was, and I don't particularly feel the need for reminders (or contradictions).

I was hoping you'd see my post, Tim, as possibly the only ILB person who knew that stuff. I'm not surprised you wouldn't read the book.

I met the author once and he was friendly. He has constructed a readable and quite well-structured book, but one could wish for fewer basic errors in the writing.

It did make me dig out 'I'm in love with a girl who doesn't know I exist' on 7-inch.

how ILL everyone is - always: Henry's constipation, William's back, various friends and relatives dropping like flies (I know it's the 1860s but it's still shocking).

and poor Alice

about halfway through the bostonians, absolutely loving it

Wide-ranging, in-depth profile here: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2018/winter/feature/the-thinker-who-believed-in-doing-0

I'm dipping back into my William James biography and a few things spring to mind: how easy it was for James to get his medical degree from Harvard (it took, basically, a year, at the end of which he had an MD and a license to practise. Christ alone knows what kind of stuff was going on behind surgery doors); the opportunities open to James: he travels, incessantly, including an amazing trip with Louis Aggasiz to the Amazon basin to collect specimens with the notion of disproving Darwin's theory of transmutation; how mad his dad is: a self-published writer on religion and philosophy who no-one read; how ILL everyone is - always: Henry's constipation, William's back, various friends and relatives dropping like flies (I know it's the 1860s but it's still shocking).

That's a lot of punctuation.

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski),Tuesday, April 14, 2020 10:39 AM (thirteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I listened to a Podcast earlier thsi week that said that up to a certain point US medical schools were all about making money and little to do with real accreditation and doctors with real integrity tended to go to Europe to get anything worthwhil ei terms of tuition/accreditation.
Now forgetting which one it was , possibly Ologies or Stuff you missed in History.

I've been reading Max Havelaar by Multatuli, in the recent NYRB translation. It's kind of an odd, but amusing, 19th century novel, apparently considered a classic in the Netherlands. It's set in the Dutch colonies of (what is now) Indonesia, and apparently prompted a political conversation that led to some reforms in the administration of the colonies. Since I spent a couple of years in that part of the world, I was kind of interested to learn more about that period of history.

Oh it's a classic. A lock for top three Dutch books ever in the canon etc. It was a never before seen or heard indictment against (inequality in/because of) the colonial system. He longed for a new position as a clerk in the very same colonial system after he got fired. And he was offered a high position, coming with wealth and influence, on the condition he'd never publish his book. He turned down the offer.

I'm curious how they translated it into English now!

Well, whatever I expected from my first Iris Murdoch (The Bell) it wasn't an existential folk horror with an actual 'intrepid, amphibious nun', in which one of the three central characters learns that the true spiritual life has no story and is not tragic and another finds an ancient bell at the bottom of a lake.

I love that feeling of being in the presence of a giant intellect and knowing you need to read everything they've written.

reading hurricane season by fernanda melchor, which keeps getting (aptly imo) compared to 2666. it's the same sort of storytelling-at-the-edges trying to catch violence/horror traveling scales. anyone here reading?

Afraid not. Kiberd, IRISH CLASSICS: finished the chapter on Yeats (again) and started one on George Moore -- now here's a writer that I have never read and really should.

(I started on Monday by reading the chapter on CASTLE RACKRENT - a book that we have discussed here before - then one on Synge's THE ARAN ISLANDS: another book I should try to read.)

George Moore - 'A drama in muslin'

late 19th century writer who never really got the kudos he deserved. the libraries of the time wouldnt stock his books and Yeats wrote an essay after Moore died which ripped him to shreds. the book has similar themes to Jane Austen (young women preparing themselves for the marriage market) but its more biting and satirical.

― Michael B,Wednesday, November 18, 2009 1:54 PM (ten years ago)

He gets compared to Turgenev a lot also

Indeed that's Kiberd's chapter!

Maybe I should resolve to read Moore.

TS: George Moore vs Lorrie Moore

i have been reading james barr's a line in the sand, a popular history of the incompetent and immoral british and french mandates in the middle east.

i am finding it tedious. this bit, on one of the leaders of the druze revolt, seemed to exemplify some of what's bothering me about it:

"Sultan (Atrash) cut a menacing figure, even twenty years later. When the British explorer and soldier Wilfred Thesiger met the man he called his 'boyhood hero' in 1941, he was delighted to see that even in middle age Sultan surpassed his expectations. 'His face, framed in a white headcloth, was austere and authoritative; his body, wrapped in a black cloth of finest weave, was lean and upright,' Thesiger recalled. A photograph from the 1920s shows Sultan, then a wary outlaw, staring alertly at the camera. He sports a debonair mustache and, befitting his then status as a fugitive, several days' stubble."

a bit of ekphrasis; a bit of triangulation from a recognisable english name. nothing about how atrash might have described himself, or his aims as a nationalist, nor of how anyone, bar thesinger, outside the colonialist apparatus regarded him. and this is true of all of the arab figures in the book: we only get them through the lens of the british and french, not in their own versions, nor in how the arabic voices of the time or later have seen them. (there are something like two dozen british or french papers listed in the index, and not one arabic-language one.)

yes, the book's purview is narrowly defined, but proceeding in this fashion means that everyone in it who never met churchill just disappears into a kind of orientalist murk, occasionally emerging behind a rifle or an explosive.

Synge's THE ARAN ISLANDS

I read this first in the late 1970s, then again in 2018. It is a pleasant, refreshing little book and an important one in its miniature field of interest. Pampooties!

Virginia Woolf - Three Guineas
Elizabeth Gilbert - City of Girls

btw, I finished Parting the Waters last night. It is quite harrowing to read and still barely touched the breadth of the sacrifice, courage, and brutality involved in the movement during the 10 years it covered. As could be expected, J. Edgar Hoover comes off as one of the worst humans on the planet. Robert Moses and Septima Clark, otoh, are names which should be much better known and appreciated for their amazing steadfast contributions.

reading sic-fi this year. less critical theory and history, more entertainment. this was my view at the start of the year and if anything reality has reinforced that this was a good idea for my brain. finished dune and then in short order read sirens of titan - my first Vonnegut - and a scanner darkly - my first dick (ha). enjoyed them all tremendously. Vonnegut definitely the writer of the 3 on this small sample of evidence.

Read Le Guin next and leave them all well to the back

I don't have my usual access to books so just been reading from my gf's collection but I don't think she has any le Guin sadly, once books are easier to come by I will acquire some of her books

i prefer dick to vonnegut but that was more to do with a teenage identification with his themes, methods; certainly vonnegut writes better sentences. read herbert's whipping star if she has that one, though, what a bizarre book that one is.

Aimless: *The* Robert Moses?

The grey security cam footage sentences always went well w Dick's themes etc: go tromping with him and he'll take you places, often pretty briskly. Not w/o modulation, and he went through several phases on 30 years of professional writing and sometimes desperate living.

*in* 30 years of professional writing, not like mine. He's like a good pro pathologist on a cop show, but takes it much further.

Aimless: *The* Robert Moses?

*This* Robert Moses.

Elena Ferrante - Troubling Love
Colette - The Last of Cheri

I took a 'break' and read Gideon Haigh's book on Shane Warne. Haigh has a deep knowledge of his subject and writes well. I know these are bland statements but they're all I've got.

So, my question is, something like: what do you read that is the closest to not-reading, ie that still gives nourishment but isn't immediately draining or demanding?

I'm now reading Penelope Fitzgerald's Innocence, set in 1950s Italy. As usual, it is strongly imagined and creates its world using a minimum of verbiage, where every sentence is like a stone set by a master stonemason in a dry stone wall that will last a century.

Elena Ferrante - Troubling Love
Colette - The Last of Cheri

― xyzzzz__, Friday, April 17, 2020

The Ferrante is moving, another attempt to parse a sexually liberated woman whose instincts clash with her upbringing.

For sure, and in a very compressed way. Very impressed how she was able to expand these themes out in the Quartet, and losing only a little of its power when doing so.

There was a fascinating lost/excised chapter from Innocence published in the LRB a couple months ago.