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

Excellent Women was the book in the latest episode of Backlisted. I will get around to it eventually.

The Gaol Ferry Bridge comp was one of my favourite albums for a long time. anyway.

An Indifference of Birds - Richard Smyth. 'A history of humans seen from the perspective of birds'. Very poetically written. It's hard not to feel that this is the processing of information read elsewhere into 'literariness' without any real gain or additional insight. He generously provides a bibliography of books that informed each section and it feels like going to those would stimulate the imagination in ways not confined by notions of literariness or rich prose.

Then you come across a few sentences that do seem to make it worthwhile:

Where today beetle-black grackles crowd the power-lines of the Dallas-Forth Worth metroplex, Austinornis lentus – a first pheasant or junglefowl – pecked and scraped a living in the steamy maritime climate of Texas. And back when 'Europe' was a marshy archipelago, knee-deep in the turbid waters of the Sea of Tethys, what's now the limestone lakeland of south-east Germany was the fenland home of Archeopteryx, the Ürvogel, the 'first bird' – Archeo-pteryx, the ancient feather.

the approach to prose there is *extremely* reminiscent of RLS's quite rich, of-their-time, views of good writing and use of sounds in prose, but that said sometimes Smyth does seem to generate new insight from the stated aim of looking at people via birds:

We didn't invent lentils or vetch, we didn't come up with the idea of chickpeas, no neolithic Archimedes ever leapt from his tub with excitement at having discovered linseed; the birds were already well-versed in these things. What we altered, with our heavy brains and capacity to plan, were their concentrations in the landscape, their profusion, their availability, This is how we (farmers, now, landscapers, terraformers) shaped the lives of birds.

'heavy brains and capacity to plan' does decent work emphasising lumbering humans v airy birds (a theme). and i'm fascinated by what that 'now' is doing in the bracketed list. it's really arresting, but i don't know what it means - i did wonder whether it should have been (farmers, now landscapers, terraformers), but i quite like 'now' as an element of change. it's arresting, even if i'm not sure it's not just a mistake or bad writing.

still, it feels a bit overwritten, especially when i compare to something like RF Langley's Journals - written with restraint, but with continual insight to nature and history and human life and one's internal life, in that context.

however, birds *are* very strange, and i think that will keep me going - despite reluctance and a bit of grouchiness i think i'm quite enjoying the book.

Excellent Women is v low-key and non-plotty, so if you’re expecting something else, maybe it might seem overrated? But it’s v funny and savage without going full Muriel Spark, plus you could read it in a long afternoon.

Fizzles: I agree that 'now' looks like a mistake and doesn't make sense as it stands.

I think the idea is that we (humans) once shaped the earth as farmers whereas now we do it as landscapers. Makes sense to me although maybe a dash would have worked better than a comma before “now”.

With Tim, it's a different kind of reaction, that is very foreign to me. My experience very rarely involves liking something and then turning to strongly disliking and avoiding it as 'the past'. If you go back to things I liked over 30 years ago - Go West, Deacon Blue - I like them as much as ever.

For whatever it's worth, there aren't many records I loved in the late 80s that I have turned against* - it's more that I began to find other kinds of music more interesting around the time that Sarah came into being. But I kept hearing the records because I knew some people who liked (and made!) them and in the main I found them pretty unpalatable. There may have been some element of finding it less appealing because it reminded me of a couple-of-years-previous me thatI wasn't keen to remember. Or it may have been that the records really were not for me- the Sarah sound was generally a bit different from the index scene it had grown from. But most of my favourites from the 86-89 seasons remain favourites.

*All the instances of this i can think of were singing voices I just went off - Pastel, Gedge and the goaty one out of the Sea Urchins come to mind.

Hey I've been having real trouble reading books during lockdown, but I'm working on typesetting a couple, so that's something. I read this sly little pamphlet, which looks and reads like an early-70s architectural guide but is also a ghost story of sorts: |Modern Buildings In Wessex" buy Stewart Brayne:

https://precastreinforced.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/cover_shot_modern_buildings.jpg

(Actually written by a fellow called Ray Newman. It's good, brief fun.)

Tim is book design your profession or are you doing it recreationally?

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.

Having finished it now, I can see why it's regarded as a classic. What starts as a satire of bourgeois complacency and small-mindedness, slowly expands into a tale of the price of taking a stand within and against a morally deficient system where everyone is complicit. The heart of the book is apparently a lightly fictionalized of the author's own experience, and it reads that way, despite the clever framing. The books isn't interested in shades of grey or understanding the psychology of guilt or the perspective of its villains - it's a burning polemic, with a savage anger that still has the capacity to shock. It's interesting to think how it would have struck mid 19th century readers.

SIlby - I don't know about recreation, but I don't do it for a living. This is me: http://halfpintpress.uk

I have to agree with Tim that Pastel, Gedge and Sea Urchins singer are bad singers.

I like the look of MODERN BUILDINGS IN WESSEX.

The word WESSEX seems possibly a clue to oddness?

Oh Tim that’s rad!!

Kiberd on Shaw, O'Casey, O'Flaherty, now Louis MacNeice.

Having finished Innocence I would rate its a very fine, accomplished novel, but within Fitzgerald's oeuvre I'd rate it fairly low. The main problem, as I see it, is that, while her observation of 'Italian-ness' which provides much of the materiel for her characters, feels fairly keen and probably exact enough, these characters do not elicit her deepest understanding and sympathy.

The understated comedy that pervades the book does not descend to the level of the notorious English penchant for making fun of foreigners; she extends them as much understanding and humanity as she knew how to, which is far more than most English authors would have achieved. But I mentally compare this book to her German characters in The Blue Flower and Russians in The Beginning of Spring and she does not penetrate to their inner springs of life quite as deeply. They withhold more and are less well explicated.

I think this one was the final novel of hers I had left to read. Makes me sad to reach an end of them. She never failed me once.

P.S. I picked up my Collected Poems of Louis MacNiece last night and read there for the final hour before bed. I may dabble in him some more before moving on elsewhere. His early stuff had some fine, strong sinews.

I'm reading Sean Carroll's The Big Picture which seems to be a decent 'state of play' regarding the current understanding of, uh, science stuff. I suspect it may collapse under the weight of its ambition but we'll see. I like his podcast right enough.

Also read Farenheit 451 for the first time (which, a couple of short stories aside, is my first Bradbury). I mean he wrote the bastard in 9 days (albeit built around a framework of other short stories he'd already written) and it stands and falls on that fact: it's in a hurry, is clunky and overwritten (the adjectives, Raymond!) but it belts along, is full of conviction and he never writes at anything less than the top of his lungs.

Just started Magda Szabó's The Door.

I don't remember Bradbury's novels, unless you count some others built from sequential stories, like The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles: most recently, I encountered the anthologized account of a stray Martian child, the last of his kind in an area that includes a battered colony of Earthlings: he's seeking company, but he's had no training in how to control his shape-shifting abilities, and the colonists project images of their lost loved ones onto him, into him---it gets horrifying pretty quickly, and then it's over, in a way that's even worse. His short stories are worth seeking out, if you liked him at all.

there are two huge (900pp each) volumes of his short stories (which aren't even everything)

my favourites of those i've read so far (just over half way through volume 1, but have read 3 of the collections elsewhere)

There Will Come Soft Rains (pdf - https://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf)

The Emissary (pdf - http://www.newforestcentre.info/uploads/7/5/7/2/7572906/the_emissary.pdf)

The Scythe (html - https://talesofmytery.blogspot.com/2013/11/ray-bradbury-scythe.html)

the miracle of castel di sangro - Joe mcginniss

not bad so far. although as valid as all the observations are there is something a little grating about an American commenting about how corrupt and cack-handed everything in Italy is

F-451 is a remarkable little novel. So imaginative, provocative, subtler than you might think. It may be 'overwritten' but at least in that sense it's 'written' - it has stylistic ambition, a kind of over-reaching Romantic verve -- from the first paragraph on.

The ending, where you can leave the city and it's OK mearby even though an atomic bomb has just been dropped on it, and people are walking around with the speeches of Abraham Lincoln memorized -- not quite so sure about that.

I've never read Oliver Goldsmith, but have now read Kiberd's two chapters on him in IRISH CLASSICS - on 'The Deserted Village' and SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER. The latter sounds quite an appealing play.

I note that Goldsmith wrote:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay

Last night I started reading Less Than Angels, Barbara Pym.

Finished George Steiner's In Bluebeard's Castle (bleh), Elizabeth Gilbert's City of Girls, and may start another Bernhard.

I've always found Steiner to be a pill.

Insufferable.

I have a certain appreciation for Gallic snobbery but that guy is just too much.

Reading our kid Mark Sinker's "A hidden landscape every week"

how ambiguous

Thanks for the linked stories, koogs! That first one showed up in mind while I was writing the above post. His antennae are especially tuned into or toward community tensions, group dynamics, incl two or three people/entities, inside one, even.

Kiberd on Goldsmith has led me to start watching SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER on YouTube - a 2008 production of at least 2.5 hours. Does anyone here like this play?

It has a catchy title.

I saw it last year. It's fine, I wouldn't call it memorable. The production I saw had a ska thing going on.

Type of comedy

This section possibly contains original research.

type of comedy???

Posted by mistake on the autumn thread

I finished the 2nd of Max Weber's vocation lectures in the NYRB translation Charisma and Disenchantment, the one on politics. Like the one on academic vocations, it had enough thought-provoking assertions to make it worth reading, some interesting theorizing on how modern political bureaucracies and political parties evolved from the class structure of monarchical society, although I'll admit it also put me to sleep a couple of times. Now I'm reading Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (60 cents on Kindle) which was mooted as timely reading in the NY Times book section.

Another gloomy connection to current events: Max Weber died suddenly in 1920 of the Spanish Flu, the year after this lecture was given.

I didn't recall that about Weber. I can see that he'd be good to read, if possibly stodgy.

I liked the Goldsmith play. I followed it last night by watching a terrific new KING LEAR on BBC4. It brought back things about the play, and suggested things I hadn't recalled. For instance the fact that Cordelia's French army is defeated at the end. The whole play was made more military: 'knights' were in UK military uniform.

I finished with Kiberd yesterday - Sheridan, Kavanagh, Irish critical history - and went back to Jennifer Egan's LOOK AT ME. 75% to go. Curious novel: rangy, digressive, unpredictable - I've read 130pp and genuinely can't see where it's going.

current reading pile (books i've recently started -- not books i own and haven't finished, which takes up bookshelves):

jean rhys - wide sargasso sea
plato - 5 short dialogues
tig notaro - i'm just a person audiobook -- not funny or particularly interesting; i might abandon it
emil ferris - my favorite thing is monsters
rafael bob-waksberg - someone who will love you in all your damaged glory
Richard Rhodes - The making of the atomic bomb -- wider look than i anticipated, for example, covering the history of antisemitism and the discovery of the electron. There are sections that are long strings of scientific epiphanies that really stir me up. Some of the history is in conflict with things I learned in Richard Evans's The Coming of the Third Reich (the reichstag fire, hitler's takeaway on the protocols of the elders of sion), which I think is a product of Rhodes's book being written over 30 years ago.

do people have balzac faves?

Sorry, haven't kept up with my lurking lately. :)

Cousin Bette, Lost Illusions and A Harlot High and Low are pretty good; If I find a particular character interesting, I'll consult the bibliography and see if that character appears elsewhere in La Comédie humaine and go from there (e.g. really enjoyed Peyrade and Corentin in A Harlot High and Low so went from there to A Murky Business, which is also worth reading). I know there's a recommended reading order out there on the net somewhere that's nowhere near how I have approached his work so far. :)

Also, just finished Accordion Crimes by Proulx and was checking in to see if anyone here rates her? I've had The Shipping News on the shelf for a few years but I've been hesitant to pick it up.

I'm reading The Process Genre, a hot-off-the-press monograph about labor on film. My dear friend who is in grad school is also reading it right now (and ahead of me) and productively arguing with it in a paper they're writing so I'm excited about that too.

I finished Barbara Pym's Less Than Angels, which rather slyly played against the conventions of the romance novel in the service of a comedy of manners. The English seem to lend themselves to sly comedies of manners. One might say they excel at it.

I need to give her another try. Two summers ago I read two of her slim novels, each a case of diminishing returns (prefer A Glass of Blessings over Excellent Women); it's as if she shrunk herself out of, if not existence, then feeling. Among what I call the Anglo-Irish miniaturists I'll take Elizabeths Taylor and Bowen.

Just ordered Less Than Angels.

alfred u should check out the book I mentioned above if u haven't killfiled me

Just finished Mirror for Observers by Edgar Pangborn, well written, slow-moving, slightly cloying 'humanist' SF from 1954 that apparently was cited by Ursula K Le Guin as a formative favorite. The last third of the book describes a man-made viral pandemic overtaking New York in 1972 that has some amazing echoes of our current situation, only grimmer. One of Pringle's 100 Best SF Novels, and worthy of inclusion.

Now reading: Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck. Anti-Nazi journal entries written between 1936 and 1944, in a NYRB edition. Praiseblurb on back by Frederic Raphael, it's that kind of book.

I don't think you'll find Less Than Angels ascending to the top of your favored Pym novels, Lord Sotosyn. It passes the time somewhat pleasantly. The main character may have been Pym, self-deprecated, which adds a minor side interest. But it fits well with the 'miniaturist' categorization.

alfred u should check out the book I mentioned above if u haven't killfiled me

― silby, Tuesday, April 28, 2020

The Process Genre?

Yah that one! I don’t know if you like reading contemporary academic work at all but you mentioned in some thread loving watching people work in movies and it’s a treatment of that.

I think in re Phantom Thread

Diary of a Man in Despair is excellent