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

^ "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.

Really enjoyed PIZZA GIRL, and keep meaning to get to BREASTS AND EGGS.

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.

― Virginia Plain, Thursday, 18 June 2020 bookmarkflaglink

I am mutuals with people on book twitter who were doing this and some of them got deep into it.

I finished it in late March as the virus got rollin'. As good as people say, and quite easy to read, but I'm not sure I'd return to it like I do Anna Karenina.

Vladimir Nabokov - Lectures on Russian Literature
Pierre Michon - Masters and Servants

Nabokov's lectures are, as they say on the internet, problematic. Love the way he can attack the page, close read the hell out of it (the sketch of the timelines in Anna Karenina are impressive, as is his insight into the nature of time in the book/realist fiction (the way Tolstoy can follows the reality of time in which his characters live so closely, from even A, to B, to C...as oposed to how someone like Proust would do it)). On the other hand his account of Dostoevsky eats @ his narrow conceptions of art, individual genius (and this is from someone who quite likes D and doesn't hold him up as a god or anything) and what the nature of the novel. By the time he lectures on these books its very clear that even reading D for him is an ordeal, to an extent that he can hardly pick up the page (almost as if there isn't a technical display he can enjoy and make the reader, in turn, enjoy his taking apart of it). Kinda feel his liberal-ish politics falls apart too, its almost as if a person cannot be (as one of Dosto's books put it) Humiliated and Insulted, or that a book for adults -- very telling he liked Crime and Punishment when he first read it at 13 -- cannot contain imbalances and still be an artwork. The insight that D could've been a playwright makes you doubt his knowledge of the theatre. In these lectures you see the failures of a kind of literary criticism in the way it can deal with something that isn't polished in that literary manner.

As for Michon I really liked it, as I love almost anything by him (one of my favourite discoveries in the last couple of years). His pieces are these fake autobiographical tales, re-tellings (a lot of them in this volume are to do with painters like Goya, or Vasari -- someone who did not succeed as an artist) that allow for a set of thought-flights. Just finished an hour ago, the three books I have read need a week's worth of re-reading and more of a think. I love the writing, but find I do wonder what he is driving at.

It's nice to see Virginia Plain again !

yes, good post! pizza girl sounds like my cup of tea thank you.

jenny offill - weather. not as smart as dept. of speculation and absent that smartness her style (snippets from notebooks pasted together in a word doc?) is kind of grating.

I finished Notes From Underground, which did not improve my opinion of it.

Next I read Equal Danger, a brief 'crime' novel by Leonardo Sciascia. This was much better. Unlike the other two novels of his I've read, it was only loosely tethered to realism, setting itself in a non-existent country and allowing the characters to drift slightly away from the human and into the emblematic, so as to shift the tone nearer to the border of fable by the end.

Now I am reading a history of Bell Laboratories, The Idea Factory, by John Gartner.

I'm currently reading The View from Nowhere by Thomas Nagel.

I read NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND when I was 21!

If nothing else, at least it's short.

There used to be an ILX poster named after Bell Laboratories.

I continue with Curtis Sittenfeld, PREP : about 120pp in. It's readable and fun so far.

I read NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND when I was 21!

I read it some time in my youth, too, but that would put it about 45 years ago. I'm pretty sure I couldn't make heads or tails out of it, but took it for granted that, being by Dostoevsky, it must have had profundities in it I was just unable to decipher. Now it reads like a very crude pamphlet in an obscure shadow fight among Russian intellectuals.

Bob Dylan's new album is giving me lots of Feelings about history and art and death and immortality that can only be dealt with by re-reading The Master and Margarita. God it's such a good book.

And inspired or led to "Symphony For The Devil," according to some---think I first saw it cited in Anthony Scaduto's bio, Mick Jagger: Everybody's Lucifer (1974 hardback).

"Sympathy"!

So I finally (will try not to say too much about it, knowing that some of you will be like, "Ah, dow discovers the wheel") read Marshall Berman's 1981 All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. Perfect title, from prime-time Marx, and neither means it as a complaint, not entirely: There are times when it is good to melt (ooo babe), and we need air. Both sides now go also with subtitle, The Experience of Modernity, inevitably, so we must find our way in the modern maelstrom, dig out the ghosts of modern past for modern present and future for a better bearable modernist and modern space and time---developing a dialectic(al vision) that can be---beautiful---to use many of his keywords in one sentence.

Like the previously noted David Mancuso, he could be seen as the psychedelic Mr Rogers---but, less discreetly than Mr R., Berman and Mancuso challenge their audience: Prof B is so nice and reassuring as he passes out the syllabus incl. 150 years of writing on a lengthy reading list (suspect he made his actual CUNY students write their butts off too), through which he proceeds (eventually "crabwise," as Tim Lawrence describes his own progress, through inter- and intra-related developments in the arts and other), on several translucent, action-packed levels---concisely enough---this Penguin trade paperback is 381 pages, counting the index, of nice-size type---but also with a jeweler's eye for detail, presented just so. It is granular, in the grain of his voice, stylistic->conceptual flights still on a leash, and for the greater good.

He reads 'em, so maybe we don't have to, but this trek is very involving---and brings out facets I'd missed in things I had read, or tried to read: gave up on Faust Part Two way before the best stuff (some of which, he indicates in typically valuable footnotes, is in passages belatedly and gradually discovered and restored). After many toils and snares and other teachable moments, Faust becomes an inspired real estate developer, unprecedented since the ancient world---and he doesn't need an Empire to back him, he's got running buddy Mephistopheles--he does need many many workers, and they come, also inspired, wanting a new town, a new life---but many are sacrificed---nevertheless, the Master Plan is fulfilled, But then---no spoilers, but poetic justice, not of an obvious development: sucks for him, not for his audience, incl author and Mephistopheles. This could be taken as a cautionary scientific romance, finished in the late 1820s, Berman says, so in the wake of Frankenstein. Yet Goethe was also a big fan of the Saint-Simonists, with their big ideas that many dismissed: Panama Canal? Gettouttahere!
And Marx wanted to, did, in vision, build on the best of bourgeois civilization, as the rest melted away (tensions, contradictions, fallacies, other probs in Marx duly noted, and/or notes of other notetakers).

Yadda yadda, Haussmann realigns Paris, to put it mildly (critiqued in an essay by Robert Moses that foreshadows the decidedly mixed blessings of his own career). Baudelaire goes slipping and sliding through his own responses to the boulevards and their actual mud, losing his halo and then kind of digging the lighter head (I must read Paris Spleen). Le Corbusier not so much, but then he also has to dodge automobiles, and so his City of Tomorrow builds above and beyond the street (and eventually, Berman points out, seeds a kind of AntiCity, an Antitommorow, an everlasting Now of building, in and between old civic centers, via suburbs, interstates, etc---self-perpetuating--until the financial crises of the 1970s, when Berman is writing this).

But not so fast---there's also "the modernity of underdevelopment," exemplified here in Saint-Simonist stan Peter The Great's Faustian Petersburg---which wears "the mantle of civilization, " as one contemporary observer puts it, over the equally Faustian inner murk, the pressures of modernity. So the Nevsky Prospect is a great street, worthy of Haussmann, on which to see and be seen, to behold the crystal world of wares from beyond, because no modern means of production, because---cue, in the mud, the underclass of scriveners and scribblers, in certain stories of Pushkin, Gogol, Chernyshevsky, Dusty--eventually also at least one double or triple agent of "police socialism" and revolution---and Biely's Russian Modernist As Fuck novelPetersburg, which asks, where's your shadow passport? Go get it. Meanwhile, here's several devastated, devastatingly beautiful poems of Mandelstam, such as "Leningrad," included in their entirety.

That was lovely!

Sure is, bravo dow!

Back in the USA, with young Berman and his local friends observing first hand the advance of Moses's expressway through the heart of their Bronx--from junior high school through early college years--something for Berman to come home to, in breaks from Columbia. But he recognizes that Moses, whose career of good and evil lasted "from the early 1900s to the late 60s," tapped into the modern and modernist and modernizing, from when that last was the great good thing--earlier on, he did bring the ideal, idyllic Jones Beach, and many parks, and his gradual decline in good works/ascent of power was so much in the spirit of the age, as were his fellow New Yorkers---although, even before he and many of them ran out of financial etc. juice, there was a countermovement,, first cresting in Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities(1960)--which Berman and others came to critique as another mixed blessing, but needed, in several ways (she never mentioned "feminism," not in 1960, but it was a woman's view of the city, all day and into the night, shopping and taking care of babies etc, while Dad was at work or asleep).
Much more going on, all over town, but for instance, later in the 60s, Berman meets a famous futurologist just back from Vietnam. B is New Left, but that night he didn't want any trouble just then, so I asked him about his years in the Bronx. We talked pleasantly enough, till I told him that Moses's road was going to blow every trace of our childhoods away. Fine, he said, the sooner the better; didn't I understand that the destruction of the Bronx would fulfill the Bronx's own moral imperative? What moral imperative? I asked. He laughed as he bellowed in my face" "You want to know the morality of the Bronx? 'Get out, schmuck, Get out!'" For once in my life, I was stunned into silence. It was the brutal truth: I had left the Bronx, just as he had, just as we were all brought up to...I pulled back and went home as he began to explain Vietnam...His laughter carried all the easy confidence of our official culture, the civic faith that America could overcome its inner contradictions simply by driving away from them.
Cue Part 3 of Modernism in New York, "The 1970s: Bringing It All Back Home."

xpost Thanks yall. I'll shut up now (but don't sleep on for instance "my Bronx modernist dream: The Bronx Mural," for Moses's Cross-Bronx Expressway).

I do think he's wrong to dismiss all post-modernism, which is also part of our experience---I'd say the death of Oswald, on live TV and surrounded by police, not to mentioned the whole(?), so-far cockeyed narrative of O, incl. death of JFK and everything left here and there---is a good example, also lefto journo, who actually seems to have examined the hanging chads etc., said that it was a post-modernist experience, and George W was sometimes referred as a or the post=modern President. But Berman heaps scorn on those po-mos who heap scorn on all idealism, in his telling.

Other disagreements, but he does give me a vision of his vision that I don't duck, and that's---enough. For now---what other books of his should I read?

Presumably"lefto journo": David Corn, I meant.