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

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.

Having finished the book about Bell Laboratories, which was adequately informative, while waiting to decide which book to read next I took a side excursion into some of Orwell's essays from a humongous (over 1350 pp.) collection published by Everyman's Library. At random I read mostly political book reviews from 1938-39. They were extremely sound, fair-minded, and always drove straight to the heart of the matter.

Dow: it's nice that you have been able to get so much out of Berman. That work feels a bit overfamiliar to me but I haven't read it as closely as you have for a long, long time. It was clearly always meant to be exciting so it's good that someone is still responding to it that way.

I recall that Berman wrote an early book on Rousseau but the later works, I think, are patchy - collections of essays that partly overlap with ALL THAT IS SOLID, etc - like ADVENTURES IN MARXISM. I also have a co-edited collection, NEW YORK CALLING, which is appealing if you like modern NYC history, people talking about 1970s Manhattan, blackouts, graffiti, etc.

Berman's response to Perry Anderson's scintillating if rather unkind critique of him (c.1984), 'signs in the street', might eventually be of interest.

I've settled on re-reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. I first read it at college, decades ago, when Stein was just re-emerging from the eclipse of her reputation during the 50s and 60s. Gertrude channeling Alice is much more readable than Gertrude striving to do away with the noun, but I have the Selected Writings, so I can dabble a bit around after I finish with 'Alice'.

I started printing a Gertrude Stein pamphlet today, I hope it turns out ok.

I haven’t read a book since the lockdown started, can’t seem to make myself do it. Have dipped into “Life A Users Manual” a bit.

I liked that book. Kind of lost my mind at how many octagons were in it though.

"haven’t read a book since the lockdown started"

☹️

I've had real trouble finishing books since lockdown started, but thanks to the Dylan album I managed to finish re-reading The Master and Margarita, which was every bit as amazing as I remembered it, and then read The Strangers in the House by Simenon, which I liked a lot. Bob Dylan to the rescue yet again.

I'm still going with Nagel's View from Nowhere, but it's not an easy read, so for some light distraction I've also started Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann, which someone had put out on their stoop.

Lily Dale: is there a specific connexion between the Dylan LP and these books?

About 200 pp into PREP.

Meanwhile about 40pp into David Thomson, THE BIG SCREEN. Vividly written.

Billy Budd, Sailor

After finishing the Atocha Station about three weeks ago, I've not been able to consider fiction. Nothing to do with the text, as such, which I liked, without loving. I was leery from the start at dealing with another struggling writer of privilege, however much, and however skillfully (and amusingly) it is battling with that particular conundrum. The Ashbery section is pretty extraordinary and will lead me to at least read his Hatred of Poetry.

I've recently finished Seamus Heaney's Finders Keepers, which Good Reads tells me I've been reading, off and on, for eight years. Magnificent.

pinefox: not exactly. I posted upthread that the Dylan album got me thinking about art and death and immortality in a way that sort of suggested The Master and Margarita to me; it's more of a mood than anything else. But also, listening to new Dylan seems to have jolted my brain out of its lockdown-induced rut and helped my attention span temporarily. The Simenon was just something my brother gave me, and from his recommendation I felt pretty sure I would like it, but I didn't want to read it until I was back in a reading frame of mind.

I finished spring reading with:

Various - A Hidden Landscape Once a Week (ed. by ilxor mark s)

This is the first time I ever contributed to a book being published (through kickstarter) (I was spectating at the conference much of this book is drawn from on the last day). I suppose I'll describe myself a satisfied customer. Reading and flicking through all the contributions felt at times like a music magazine. By turns good, bad, irritating, or sometimes you just flick through with little to no feeling. Taking things in, letting it settle to...what exactly only time will tell (like when I started picking up music mags in the late 90s). Things work through and you end up where you end up. The editor's essay does a very good job on addressing (or squaring up to) what a contributor brings to the table in terms of perspective, but does not seem to work through - which is a common enough struggle for all of us (anyway there was a gap here). Politically it was a weird read because -- picking this up post-Corbyn, BLM, at our current moment etc. -- and seeing a few music/culture writers behave badly on twitter is a thing I just rubbed up against (I'd like to think Mark smartly covered this up when mentioning John Harris lol). But it was a thing for me. I ended up thinking someone like Charles Shaar Murray or Edwin Pouncey would be bad on twitter. Maybe Morley too. Penman is on twitter (and is often really good, so I didn't feel his absence from the book).* Liz Naylor (who was great on the conference panel I saw) is on there but a quiet presence, she doesn't tweet ofen.

You wouldn't really know unless you were present but what does come through is Penny Reel's heckle/engagement/questions from the audience (in a light enough way as it appears on the book, there are a couple of instances, maybe one or two more on the day). The panel with him on was great -- and I love how this was the placed last in the book, and Richard Williams' interview with Val Wilmer placed first, this partic bit of ordering here is A++ although its probably just chronology with jazz mags covered a bit more upfront -- and his assertion that he wrote for Black people (after saying at first he didn't care who read him) moved me very much.

* this is a book where time on twitter enhances in whatever way your experience of it. Reading Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary recently was the first time I became more aware of this dimension.

* this is a book where time on twitter enhances in whatever way your experience of it. Reading Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary recently was the first time I became more aware of this dimension. Sorry, I don't follow this ending to your post at all. What do you mean?

I mean that I would have a different reading of the book if I wasn't on twitter. With the Serge I credit twitter with a wider knowledge of anarchist thinking (as opposed to state communist thinking) so by the time I'm reading the Memoirs certain passages aren't as obscure as they might have been.

You found that responses to Landscape on twitter further stimulated-clarified your own take?

That's what happened when I started reading Creem---not that I always agreed with reviewer's verdicts or house doctrine, but that wasn't the point.

Twitter makes me think a little further about a reading of the book, because some of the people who write about music/culture as a job/vocation are on it.

I don't think I even was on twitter (or if I was it couldn't have been for long) when I attended the conference.

Will have to dig around on Twitter for responses. Here's a good informative and extensive interview/conversation:
https://rockcritics.com/2019/08/09/interview-with-mark-sinker-editor-of-a-hidden-landscape-once-a-week-a-book-about-the-uk-music-press-which-any-critical-person-could-learn-from-and-enjoy/
And my initial take, posted on there:
Great interview—can see I’m going to have to re-read to catch every bit of it (possibly)–as with Mark’s intro to the anthology (was immediately gratified by his hailing of 80s syncretism, a new age [somebody pointed out that this was in part because of cassettes, rough and ready in areas around the world where record and CD players weren’t feasible}. In contrast to some of his contributors, who dismissed the 80s for plastic on everything, Phil Collins and shoulder pads bleghh).
Fave contributions pretty obvious choices: adventures of Val Wilmer, Cynthia Rose having lunch with Andy and his corsets, Hon. Chas Shaar Murray stylin’, Penny Reel! )thanx so much for link to Mark’s Freaky Trigger on him) Also the intriguing Paul Morely, applecart-upsetter Paul Gilroy, and Mr. Frith on his experience in xgau’s version of the Voice line-edit (goes with what I’ve heard from other survivors). That last was presented *after* another participant, an early reggae writer, complained about Frith editing his own work, trying to clarify for a wider readership, apparently---so the sequencing could be inferred as turnabout, comeuppance---results: I was always struck by austere, downcast, depressive even, Frith's Voice column seemed in contrast to his Creem contributions---and now I know at least part of why that was. Cannot imagine going through the Voice line-edit with Christgau, patient though he was with me under most other circumstances---it was a weirdly intimate process even in the very gentle hands of Chuck, who was no fool, yet no self-appointed Dean.

xxxpost Thanks Pinefox, will keep your Berman comments in mind.

Should we do a summer thread?

go for it! I can't believe an entire season has passed already since I started this v_v

I started one: Summer 2020: What Are You Reading as the Sun Bakes the Arctic Ocean?