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

I just finished the quiet american. Very good!

Finished Egan's short story collection, Emerald City - also lots of stories about models and kids and gap year holidays. Kind of middle-of-the-road but lots of incidental pleasures. I still think Manhattan Beach is her best book by a long distance.

I picked up some Pym's to support my local bookstore: Glass of Blessings, Less Than Angels, Jane & Prudence, and Quartet in Autumn, plus another Dumas telephone book translated by Robin Buss, The Women's War.

Also just finished The Secret Commonwealth - it's probably Pullman's sloppiest book, with a lot of generic blockbuster writing and no visible editing, but very enjoyable - it's a lot more fun than "Amber Spyglass".

Ford seems pretty insufferable himself

Just before bed on Sunday, I cracked open the new translation of Michael Kohlhaas that New Directions brought out this year, which has become unexpectedly timely.

I don't have my copy of the Penguin Kleist volume handy to compare the translations, but there were several baffling choices just in the first few pages (including a confusing mixing of direct speech in quotation marks and narrated speech without quotes in the span of a single paragraph). No introduction or other editorial content, so no way to know whether there was, e.g., a deliberate choice to use awkward English in places for faithfulness to un-idiomatic German... These are just minor annoyances, they don't detract much from such an obviously great work, and I look forward to flying through the remaining ~100 pages once my boss stops asking me to work late.

Read some nice pieces on Kleist as a result of that new volume even though I'm not getting it (v happy with the edition on Archipelago)

Started Arthur & George, Julian Barnes last night. Seems OK so far, but slightly bland.

Kleist's short stories are great great stuff. Dude was seriously deranged, tho it doesn't seem to show much in his fiction iirc.

Now reading "Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy" by Ben Sonnenberg.

Arthur & George has picked up steam, and the story has grown compelling enough to keep me reading ahead, but there's something about the mannerisms of it that I don't enjoy that I have not yet put my finger on.

My Father and Myself - JR Ackerley. Stunning, can't recommend this one too highly. Fantastic on what it was like to be gay in Edwardian London, on trench warfare in WW1, and above all an intriguing detective story about the author's father and his double life.

All Ackerley is excellent

something about the mannerisms of it that I don't enjoy that I have not yet put my finger on

all Barnes is this for me

Side question - can anyone recommend a good 2ndhand online bookshop in the Uk that’s not amazon?

I just use bookfinder.com and then go straight to the vendor if I can.

Got quite a few through hive.co.uk

Chuck, yes I can: Undercover Books.

http://undercoverbooks.co.uk/

If you make contact directly they should be very responsive. Good people.

Thank you!

I went to Undercover Books last year. Fantastic stock - prices on the high side.

That's really interesting to hear, WF. Didn't know that about the prices - it's all relative of course ... I know that like many places, they have a lot of much more valuable stock that's online only.

But I love browsing the stock and I'm keen to support that business, especially during this period, so I hope that Chuck is able to take a look there for what he wants.

I'll take a look too.

Jane Austen - Manfield Park.

Finished it last night and its the second novel (or author) I can think of (the other being Moby Dick) where I avoided it for barely digested reasons (Moby Dick is just about whaling! Austen more for the discourse around her, beginning with those BBC adaptations in the 90s). Once you get into her voice and mode (I had a good couple of hours with the first few pages, it can be hard to get into whereas MD was a gas! Just this miraculous transformation of arcane material in this hot language!) I was finding it ok though irritating (I didn't like the people or the world in it very much) until Fanny grew up and the question of her being **in or out** became a thing (it was there from the beginning of course). It helped that by coincidence I watched Losey's The Go-Between as its a similar set-up - and then also looking at the BLM protests, their focus on a world that began around here.

*Mansfield

Did you start your Austen reading with Mansfield Park? That's bold! I like it, I'll rep it, but I read it knowing it was the most divisive of her books among fans or non-fans and was perhaps looking for an alternative way in. Key to me was reading between the lines, Fanny not quite the character she says she is or other people think she is.

Yeah my first one. What would have been your starting point? Quite like to read another one next year.

Tom: Mansfield Park! You got to be kidding.

Audrey: No.

Tom: But it’s a notoriously bad book. Even Lionel Trilling – one of her greatest admirers – thought that.

Audrey: If Lionel Trilling thought that, he’s an idiot.
Audrey: You find Fanny Price unlikeable?

Tom: She sounds pretty unbearable, but I haven’t read the book.

Audrey: What?

Tom: You don’t have to have read a book to have an opinion on it. I haven’t read the Bible either.

Audrey: What Jane Austen novels have you read?

Tom: None. I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get the novelist’s idea as well as the critic’s thinking. With fiction I can never forget none of that has really happened. It’s all made up by the author.

im Reading breaking and entering by joy williams

^ "Novels are all so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that t'other day; but as for all the others, they are the stupidest things in creation."

xp

Maybe Emma. Northanger Abbey was mine though, and it's amazingly funny and easy to like

im Reading breaking and entering by joy williams

― flopson, Tuesday, June 9, 2020 7:44 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

omg <3 joy williams

I'm reading this thread and having a random flashback to Maigret and the Informer: needing a bit of case-related background info, and being x decades from having a departmental computer nerd or geek, M. goes to see a cop known among their colleagues as the Widow---not the Widower: they think, or used to think when they gave a shit, that it's been a longass time since his wife died, and still he sits in certain bars in his rusty black suit, nursing a drink and observing those milling about and occasionally stopping by to deposit bits of info. This is his beat, and his life.
Except that he also sits in his room, where Maigret goes to visit, and I think he has some notebooks, but mainly he's the griot of the grids, and Maigret kind of enjoys asking him questions for the sake of a sure return, better than dropping coins in a vending machine. And as the dried up old Widow replies, succinctly, and apparently accurately, or at least Magrait seems satisfied (he already knows or knows about some of these people places, things and times; he and the Widow have both been around here quite a while), I get a glimpse of so many lives still being lived in this old sector---probably it isn't all that old, but some area majorly affected or constructed during Haussman's drastic recasting of Paris, between the early 1850s and 1870, I think (don't have the book at hand, but it's an early 70s American edition). Not that old as cities go, but there's something so layered, not far from geological measurements, in the cop's-eye view of this city, especially in this brief chapter: kick over a rock, whether you mean to or not, and see what comes out from under---maybe it's because I'm sitting here on a dark soggy summer evening, that I'm struck by this. Oh well, on to the next stop, as with Maigret (off somewhere in my shelves).

I should read Maigret.

NORTHANGER ABBEY has a lot of interest, including lots of discussion of fiction. Quite remarkable novel.

I finished Arthur & George, Julian Barnes. It was OK enough, in that I learned a variety of things about the English police, courts and prisons in the Edwardian period.

I think I figured out what I found off-putting about the author's telling of the story, but I wouldn't want to defend my conclusions in depth; they are more impressions than conclusions. To say it briefly, the degree of intellectual control that Barnes asserted over the story, the characters, and the reader felt so tightly held that there was no interstitial space in which to form one's own meaning. It was impressively articulate, often perceptive, but it felt like being held in a vise and worked on with an engraving tool.

Recently read Tim Lawrence's Life And Death On The New York Dance Floor, 1980-83 (Duke University Press, 2016), and found it to be of considerable historical interest, cha-cha-cha. Excerpt from his preface: This book makes three core arguments. First, New York experienced a community-driven cultural renaissance during the early 1980s that stands as one of the most influential in its, and perhaps in any city’s, history. Second, the renaissance was rooted in opportunities that came to the fore during New York’s shift from industrialism to post-industrialism, and it began to unravel when New York assumed the character of a neoliberal city organized around finance capital, gentrification, real estate inflation, and social regulation. Third, although party culture is routinely denigrated as a source of mindless hedonism and antisocial activity, it revealed its social, cultural, and even economic potential during the period examined here.
Also announces his intention to "move crab-wise" through various interrelated activity clusters (my phrase not is): as before, we get interviews with and reviews and profiles of DJs-dancers-performers-records-producers-suits, also showrunners of venues, but these are now more often multi-media environments, so we get more media, invasions from/melding with prev per se art world figures and processes, and we get a spectrum of these scenes, from the 80s-as-60s-and-90s might-as-well-call-it-rave-culture of the Paradise Garage, to the more comedic theme camp of Club 57, to the very polished, what Warhol might call "business art" of Area, to the punk drag Pyramids, very much in opposition to the plush cosmic Aryan-tending, upscale druggy dreamscape (incl. planetarium over and around dark dancefloor) of the Saint---
also the countervailing spread of hip=hop, how it came to be called that, and was conceptually framed (in the movie Wild Style, in the Village Voice, in Artforum, and other publications) as break-dance, as well as audience response of various approaches to dance, as DJ-centric (they were increasingly expected to speak over and between records, mixing--MCs were mostly just announcers, crowd-rousers, at first)--coming from the South Bronx to Manhattan clubs---also part of the package: graffiti, from the streets to the galleries and clubs---and so we also get, from there and elsewhere, artists crossing over to music-making purposes
---preface favorably mentions somebody else's book about this---but I was disappointed to find Lawrence's own account so Basquiat-centric: I don't know beans about the art world, but even I know plenty about B. Nevertheless, this adds details (and I'd forgotten that he's the central somewhat Candide-like figure, a tracking device though various hip scenes, much later released as Downtown '81---haven't seen it, but the soundtrack has some very rare keepers, and is a true time trip through strengths and soft spots of all that it surveys). Did learn more about Keith Haring, and his art as a response to music etc.
Presentation of all this, and more (effect of city financial woes, rise of righteous Reagan capitalism, Koch, real estate fever etc etc)is dense, with sliding layers, yet clear enough---with recurring figures and storylines, like Ken Burns docs---especially effective when The Saint comes back at peak---just before AIDs becomes another medium, a lens for different angles, increasing heat. Enter, for instance, the harsh, yet sometimes, in retrospect otm rants of RIP Larry Kramer, among other perspectives (also just the right amount of references to And The Band Played On, I think)
I do miss the author's insightful Love Will Save The Day comments, sometimes punchlines---although he does make the point, wryly and sadly, re an alt-weekly AIDS-related amateur advice column, that even real doctors had precious little better to offer during this period.

Listening companion: https://reappearingrecords.bandcamp.com/album/life-death-on-a-new-york-dance-floor-1980-1983

This also incl. late 70s roots---and and before that, Steve Maas, of Macon GA, is running buddy of Phil Walden, who goes on to manage Otis Redding and the Allman Brothers Band, while Steve morphs into (semi-ironic but still a handful to work for at times) megaphone-breath Dr. Mudd of Mudd Clun notoriety--and his brother, who is openly gay and "estranged from the family," becomes one of the first doctors to develop paradigms and protocols for AIDS, adapted to shifting awareness, not as much in the lab as in treatment, speaking of creativity. So, that kind of historical survey.

Love Will Save The Day's David Mancuso still comes around, the syncretic sun, though not like Elvis Dylan, because he does not demonstrate how to make wads of money by getting things all shook up, as many others in this era are trying to do, and sometimes succeeding, for a while. But he's the one who sets the example, not only artistically, but endurance-wise, with a virtually unbroken, unparalleled run of public access---emerging in 1966 as a "music host" (he'd rather not be called a DJ, and eventually, iin this book, removes the mixer, for an even more perfect sound system [engineers also figure in these annals, for sure]---going from, for instance, excerpts from compilations of environmental sounds, to a string quartet, to relatively more predictable tracks, also mixtures of maybe all of that, before he ditched the mixer---and the audience, his invite-only friends their plus ones, twos, responded however the hell they chose to, except no sitting, no gawking) to near the end of this book, when he finally loses in the real estate rounds. He is something like a psychedelic Mr. Rogers--always a beautiful day in his neighborhood, as best he can manage it, incl. multimedia-wise (also practicing set and setting, after his League of Spiritual Discovery master, Timothy Leary), for older children, yet forever inspired by the nuns playing records in his upstate orphanage, and by a picture a friend gave him, of Spanky and Our Gang--the Depression-era kid comedy stars, not the folk=rock-pop group--he may never have seen any of the kids' short films, but didn't need to.

Wow, have been listening to that compilation with no idea it was from a book!

Really need to read that,love saves the day is superlative

This is a *little* bit of a comparative let-down at times, but only when I miss those Love Saves The Day]astute punchlines: more into show than tell now, though tells what and when needs to (good traffic manager).

I started reading an easy one, Maigret's Failure, Georges Simenon. I expect nothing more from it than a well-told story that is entirely satisfying. I may just read a couple more Maigret novels in succession, depending on my mood and desires.

On a pleasant note, my local public library just re-opened for curbside pickup of items on their own shelves. Inter-library items are not yet available. I must place a hold on the items I want and schedule a pickup time. This is a major step forward!

read 'the book of eels'

it was good; even the parts you worried would be maudlin were fine and short, and eels are fucking weird as hell

sold!

I finished Lost Property, the Ben Sonnenberg memoir. For most of the book, the narrator is not an especially likeable character, and at times it threatens to devolve into a parade of names, minor celebrities, women he slept with (of whom we learn only a few sketched biographical details) or obscure authors he has read in the original language, yet the book maintains a certain gravitational pull. At times the sparsity of context verges on the gnomic, but he has an eye for the telling detail (or at least he was capably edited) and the book is remarkably free of both self-criticism and self-pity.

it appears that this october will be the centenary of agatha christie's first published novel (in the usa; a bit later in the uk) if any of You Writers want to pitch something

"100 Reasons Agatha Christie Gives Me the Shits"

Actually, there's only like 6 reasons, she's not complex or interesting enough for 100

I'm reading Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground.. At the two-thirds point in it I can't say I've been enjoying it, or found it in any way enlightening, or universal, or truthful, or funny, or penetrating. Even considered as puerile ravings it falls apart.

Jean Renoir - Renoir, My Father
Blake Gopnik - Warhol

My book club is meeting tonight for our third discussion (of four) of Louise Erdrich's Future Home of the Living God. I'm the one who suggested it, having just read it late last year, so no surprises for me in the plot; the connections we are drawing to contemporary world events, on the other hand...

I've been reading fiction again, some of it in conjunction with the NYPL/WNYC bookclub. This is what I've read since the lockdown began. Cliche picks are books with obvious pandemic content.

My Dark Vanessa -- Kate Elizabeth Russell (better than I thought it would be)
Severance -- Ling Ma (cliche pick, but this is my all-star find)
Station Eleven -- Emily St. John Mandel (cliche pick)
Breasts and Eggs -- Mieko Kawakami (witty and wise)

In progress:

Pizza Girl -- Jean Kyoung Frazier (fun debut, L.A. content)
The Plague -- Camus (rereading, ur-cliche pick)

Bought for the book club but haven't read yet:

Deacon King Kong -- James McBride
The Glass Hotel -- Emily St. John Mandel (this author again)

Ordered, but haven't picked up yet:

The City We Became -- N.K. Jemisin

Oh I forgot -- I was reading War and Peace with some Twitter book club but I gave up after about 150 pages. I wonder if they are finished now.

Just had the Tony Allen autobiography drop through the mail yesterday from the Duke University Press sale.
Started reading the introduction but was falling asleep so did that instead.

Been reading a bit of Japanoise which was also Duke UP sale.should be interesting once I get underway. Already coming across some interesting stuff. Price of entry to gigs in Japan for 1 $50 has been mentioned for a small literally underground gig.
Also people's reaction to loud mesmeric noise. Can make some lash out. Author mentions one guy needing to be brought down and sat on to prevent him hurting people with his flailing arms etc.