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

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.

I love Greene, I should read more.

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

― COVID and the Gang (jim in vancouver), Thursday, April 16, 2020 5:15 PM (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

found the left hand of darkness! will begin it in the bath later

read 'facing the wind' by julie salamon ~ picked it up cuz she wrote the excellent 'the devil's candy' reportage re: the bonfire of the vanities film.. facing the wind is quite wrought and emotional, its abt a man who essentially has a psychotic break and murders his whole family, attempts but does not kill himself, and later goes on to have a significant second act life.. the bk keeps a wholly nonjudgmental tone that worked for me well, i was kinda worried at the outset; would recommend

i'm reading dhalgren! it's a horrible idea

i love it so far though omg

I'm re-reading "The Plague" by Camus. A bit on the nose, I guess, but I last read it at least 20 years ago, and have only vague memories of it.

I got a copy of "The Plague" again recently as I really wanted to read it again. It's probably been 20 years since I last read it too. Critics tried to make out its an allegory about fascism but no its about a FUCKING PLAGUE...but I guess if you aren't living through a plague it's hard to remember how central it can be to the human experience.

At the moment I am reading Steinbeck's "Tortilla Flat". 40 pages in and it's funny but some sort of story better develop cos right now it's "I'd love some wine, where can drink more?, the boys get wine, Pablo drinks a gallon of wine like hair growing on someone's forearm" etc etc

Tbf it is ALSO an allegory for fascism. Books can do more than one thing at a time.

Tortilla Flat is mostly a string of moderately amusing stories about some endearing lowlifes, because Steinbeck knew some endearing lowlifes in Monterrey and some amusing stories about them that he could fictionalize. It's only slightly racier than the Saturday Evening Post, but kind of endearing and amusing. People like that.

https://s.ecrater.com/stores/75577/4a27f8a55ecd2_75577b.jpg otm

I totally forgot about the "allegory of fascism" angle for reading "The Plague". I did notice however how much the shape and tone of the book is directly inspired by Defoe's "Journal of the Plague Year", having just recently read that. He even uses a quote by Defoe as the book's epigraph. I'm about half way through it now, so my thoughts on "what it's all about" are still gestating.

it says a great deal no matter how you read it

it is about how humans think and act in dire circumstances where many basic social connections are broken, such as during a plague

or a fascism.

Intrigued by recent New Yorker piece re Kierkegaard, who produced a stream of unclassifiable books---hybrids of philosophy, autobiography, fiction, and sermon. Where should I start with this hybridization? I confess to being more interested in this process than the philosophical and religious elements (though Adam Kirsch presents those well enough, as far as I know, never having read SK).

But I mean what he does present seems clear as an overview of this length can be.

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

If I were in an uncharitable frame of mind I'd say Le Carre's entire career is basically an attempt to ape Greene.

Yep.

I started Knut Hamsun's Mysteries

Ages ago when I read Mysteries I never could decide if its ultra-romanticism was satire or not. It was much too late in the century for unironic Byronism, but I found the tone was hard to gauge.

I finished The Human Factor. It was fine, although the women characters seemed created only to justify the actions of the male characters. About halfway through I began to get twinges that I'd read it before, but so long ago it had disappeared from any viable lingering memory. Probably before 1985.

To finish the evening I picked up Joseph and His Brothers and read two dozen pages, but I suspect its too big a commitment for me to pursue right now and I'll fall back to a shorter easier book tonight.