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

Yeah it's a good book, I like the way LBI described it. There is a grotesque, relentless black humor that I think helped to balance out the rawness and keep it from being like, The Jungle or whatever.

I tried to start The Savage Detectives last night and man, I don't know...does it get better? I remember some rough stretches in 2666 so I dunno, maybe I'll give it another chance. Put it down and picked up My Antonia instead. Will definitely get around to The Shipping News sooner than later, though.

love Cather.

I have O Pioneers by my bed and need to get around to it soon. Is My Antonia the best place to go next?

I'm struggling with The Door a little (Magda Szabó) mainly because of the claustrophobic nature of it and the sense of a world around it to which I have little access. I have been reading a little Hungarian history to try and make some sense of it. The door functions as a useful free floating metaphor, one reading of which is precisely this sense of being shut-out of the traumatic space of wider history.

Hart Crane - Complete
Geoffrey Hill - Complete
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o - Decolonising the Mind
Derek Walcott - What the Twilight Says

Alternating between essays and poetry. Decolonising.. and Walcott's essays are two sides of the same coin and really instructive to read alongside each other. Questions like - How do you write this stuff for a hungry (as in actually starving) audience? What is to do 'culture' in the Caribbean or Africa. Thiong'o dispense with English completely, he has a mother tongue and will now only write in it (the section where he is in jail thinking this out and writing his first novel in Gikuyu on toilet paper is great). Walcott doesn't have this choice but the questions keep flowing (halfway through as I type this post).

Crane's poetry doesn't do a lot for me on this re-read whereas I ripped through Hill (its up to the ealy 80s). The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy is something else.

I lost the plot with Hill in the '90s, but I pull his Complete off the shelf and reread the early poems marveling at the elisions and gnarled syntax, particularly "The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy."

recent reading:

George Eliot - The Mill on the Floss
Rachel Cusk - Outline
Rachel Cusk - Transit
Elmore Leonard - Split Images (in progress)
James McBride - Kill 'Em and Leave (in progress)
Jill Lepore - These Truths (in progress)

I want to read the third Cusk but the libraries are all closed, should have grabbed it before lockdown.

Can anyone recommend some authors/novels that are similar to Leonard. I've read a ton of his stuff and it's all good-to-great but I'd like to branch out. Charles Portis seems to be somewhat in the same vein but I've already read most of his major stuff.

I'd still really like to read THE MILL ON THE FLOSS.

evol j, how about Ross Macdonald?

evol j: George V. Higgins, for sure.

seconding Macdonald and Higgins

Richard Stark's Parker series would also fit the bill

cool, yeah I've heard all those names but haven't investigated any of 'em, that's a good start. I know Macdonald did Briarpatch that was recently turned into a show on USA or TNT or one of those type networks.

John D. MacDonald, pioneer of Florida noir, incl. early perspective on Big $ viral corruption & fertilizer, maybe start with The Empty Copper Sea. Maybe, so I'm told, Carl Hiassen is good in the same vein, later on. Richard Price, maybe especially Lush Life: police procedural on the gettin'-plush mesh and mosh of post-9/11 Lower East Side Giuliani York, Quality of Life Squad and all.

Briarpatch

I think that's a Ross Thomas book (and a good one)

also recommended by Ross Thomas: The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

Will have to check that one--title reminds me of the plot of Dashiell Hammett's tasty Red Harvest, which some think was the basis of Yojimbo, although Kurosawa said he was more influenced by Hammett's The Glass Key.

Actually, both Thomas titles make me think of both Hammett plots.

I have been reading Glory, one of Nabokov's early (1932) novels, written in Russian while he was living in Germany. It's a cheap Fawcett paperback with a lurid cover that would be appropriate for a Harlequin Romance. This is one of the painstaking translations to English undertaken in tandem with his son.

For the first third of the book the language was so ripe and heavily laden with imagery that I kept thinking about the English phrase about 'over-egging the pudding'. That surfeit of language has eased off enough in the next third that it has finally settling into telling a story, more than overwhelming you with its heady linguistic perfume. The story itself is only moderately interesting, but it is keeping me engaged.

The introduction written by Nabokov for the 1971 new English translation is quite self-congratulatory and preening. He must have been, as the saying is, quite a piece of work.

B-b-but that's part of his charm!

Will have to check that one--title reminds me of the plot of Dashiell Hammett's tasty Red Harvest, which some think was the basis of Yojimbo, although Kurosawa said he was more influenced by Hammett's The Glass Key.

― dow, Wednesday, April 29, 2020 4:48 PM (three days ago)

Knocked out Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead in a few hours today. Fun sort of Borgesian-inflected crime story with an amiably fucked up detective and a detection-as-tao te ching quasimystic text everpresent.

Haven't read any Gran, but Infinite Blacktop is one I've had recommended to me and been meaning to read for a while.

xxxpost Thanks, James! I'll have to check that, never read Goldoni. wiki sez:By 1743, he had perfected his hybrid style of playwriting (combining the model of Molière with the strengths of Commedia dell'arte and his own wit and sincerity)... As with his comedies, Goldoni's opera buffa integrate elements of the Commedia dell'arte with recognisable local and middle-class realities. Incl. manipulation of local blood greed feuds, eh.

I finished A Journal of the Plague Year. Many parallels to our current situation. Interesting that our best countermeasure (social distancing) was quite well understood, and fairly rigorously practiced, even in 1665. Also interesting that government support and charity were seen as necessary to prevent a second tragedy of hunger from befalling the many people driven into unemployment by economic disruption. The book is occasionally repetitious but reads pretty easily for a novel that will turn 300 in 2022.

Now I've started The Simple Past by Driss Chraibi.

Aimless, thanks for the push: I relished every comma in Less Than Angels. More gently malicious than her other books, she inspired at least three chuckles (and sometimes an LOL moment) per page. My favorite set pieces: the impoverished Mark and Digby taking the older ladies out for lunch; and the anticipatory anxiety at Professor Mainwaring's over getting the rant. Mark and Digby should've starred in a series of novels. What a duo.

And I thought your admiration would be limited. Wrong again. *sigh*

It's possible I wasn't ready for her in in 2018. Like third albums, the third novel will often do.

*getting the grant

I agree heartily about the entire episode at Mainwaring's country house. It was razor sharp without being mean-spirited.

I finished Nabokov's Glory. It is only necessary for anyone out there who is a Nabokov completist. Otherwise, I thought it was the work of an obviously brilliant mind, still deeply entangled with juvenile ideas.

John Berger - ways of seeing

I want to read that book but I hate the font

I want to re-read it, and maybe I'll read his G this year---prob should read/re-read a bunch of others, like first novel A Painter of Our Time (so glad I finally got around to Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth, a wonderful novel about a painter, via his compulsive POV).

work of an obviously brilliant mind, still deeply entangled with juvenile ideas. Ha! Reminds me that one of my fave high school reads was his The Defense, the mini-saga of a perhaps increasingly crazy, Russian chess prodigy---maybe "mini" isn't the right word, but it seemed like a cadence of well-timed turns of the spade, moves of the pieces, well you can imagine, but it's not the what, but the how, and his kind of subject.
Also remember liking Transparent Things later on, but not as many details come to mind. Ditto Pale Fire, but what an idea for structure, must re-read.
That was about it until a few years ago, soon after James Morrison and I were enjoying Mary Karr's memoir Lit on a previous WARYR, I checked the required reading list for classes in her The Art of Memoir, and tried VN's Speak, Memory!, but old-as-little V and his damn butterfly net of imagery were too rich for my blud.
(Her other leading requirement, Frank Conroy's Stop-Time, seemed more effectively lyrical for being more spare and suble---MK: "When I knew him, he was a professional jazz pianist." Must finish that one.)

Aww, Speak, Memory is a lovely book!

I love The Horse's Mouth.

13th Floor Elevators A Visual History arrived this morning.
Paul Drummond's 2nd take on the 13FE story.
Looks good but not read any of it yet

Just getting to the end of A New Day Yesterday Mike Barnes' prog history. Just read the thing on Gong/Steve Hillage oh & Eno/Quiet Sun/Diamond Head surprised by no mention of the John Cale Island lps or This Heat which was an almost straight development out of Quiet Sun.

bought a couple of books from that Duke University press sale yesterday. Not sure how long they'll take to arrive.

13th Floor Elevators book seems ultra-thorough, judging by press release on ILN's Rolling Reissues. Appropriate, given mynd-challenging aspirations ov band.
Aww, Speak, Memory is a lovely book! Someday I'll try again. Library still quarantined, but just started curb service.

*ILM's* Rolling Reissues.

My wallet wishes you hadn't reminded me of this, stevo! Post from Good Books About Music:

Duke University Press is doing a half-price sale on their books till May 25--- Tony Allen one, some reggaeton ones, more

https://www.dukeupress.edu/explore-subjects/browse?subjectid=110&sortid=3

― curmudgeon, Friday, May 1, 2020

I want to read that book but I hate the font

― silby, Tuesday, May 5, 2020 11:59 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is fair

I tried out a Raymond Chandler short story collection, but bogged down quickly. I switched over to Kurzweil's How to Make a Mind, which is a bit too far in the direction of most 'strong AI' books for my tastes, but even with overselling its ideas as to the correct and final model of human thought, it provides enough intellectual excitement to justify my continuing attention. I dabbled in natural language parsing long ago and through that cloudy lens I can somewhat appreciate the sophisticated design problems and solutions he is describing.

Reading Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War. So far this war seems: bad

Reading Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge. It's not bad - it's probably very good - but it's hard to like.

Those are meant to be good! I read one story in the NEW YORKER last year and grew to like it.

it's the cumulative effect of the increasingly bad or unpleasant things that happen in the stories that's the problem. so it's definitely effective at conveying that unpleasantness.

Getting into Verginie Despentes’ Vernon Subutex as well as Amerika.

tore through Less than angels this weekend, which i'd picked based on the discussion upthread. really enjoyable, as alfred said it was three chuckles a page. this is the first i've read by pym and i'm definitely looking forward to reading others

I'm within a short chapter of finishing How to Create a Mind. When Kurzweil was discussing the subject matter in which he is expert, namely the application of mathematical models to the problem of natural language recognition and understanding, he was unassailable. His ideas about the similarities between his models and the basic structures of brain architecture in the neocortex were fascinating and very persuasive. Best part of the book, by far.

In the final third of the book he strays into such subjects as free will, the origins of consciousness, the rights of machines that can think, and a lot of similar semi-philosophical fodder. As you might expect from a person who has intensely devoted his life to successfully advancing AI programming, his grasp of these subjects is the equivalent of any bright person whose engagement with these subjects is casual. His thoughts on them would not be particularly impressive if he had contributed them to any of the ilx discussions around these same ideas. No better than the ilx average, I'd say.

He's thoroughly imbued with the ethos and self-aggrandizement of Silicon Valley. He really believes the Valley is creating a new superhumanity. He needs to get out more.

i want to know if he thinks natural language is solvable as a self-contained problem (i.e. without the ai having any other sensory inputs) but i don't want to read his book.

I finished Driss Chraibi's The Simple Past, an interesting book, but for me at least, a hard one to love. The author of the introduction to my edition cites Celine and Faulkner as two influences, neither an author I've read much of, so maybe I didn't have the background to appreciate this. The writing style seems to be deliberately evasive, elliptical, defiant, almost confrontational at times. He will string out a metaphor to the point of incomprehensibility and then make a joke out of it - at whose expense? one wonders. Yet there is a relatable emotional core and straightforward narrative to the book, the story of an angry adolescent and a dominating father, so it never goes completely off the rails. Perhaps the book is about the way language can be a form of armor for the vulnerable and dispossessed.

I have started reading The Human Factor, Graham Greene. Early on it has a somewhat similar feel to Le Carre.

i want to know if he thinks natural language is solvable as a self-contained problem (i.e. without the ai having any other sensory inputs)

This is never directly addressed, but in the coda he envisions humanity somehow or other imbuing the entire universe (yes, all those millions of galaxies) with that magical thing: Intelligence! His vision of what intelligence is, is somewhat vague and mostly seems to consist of eventually fitting everything that exists into neat, interconnected hierarchical categories, which activity seems to have a mystical power he never succeeds in condensing into words. Make of that what you will.