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

Barely read a thing over the last month. I feel listless and incapable. Have been desultorily picking through some of Adam Phillips' essays and reading the LRB. I've got Kavalier and Clay lined up for when this term actually ends. I might give Ulysses a go over the summer.

I think a lot of people are feeling that. All this time for reading books and instead I'm reading stupid Twitter beefs.

I'm kinda wondering if I should abandon 'serious' books for a while and read fantasy instead.

Highly recommend audiobooks from your local library in the present circumstances

I find audiobooks too stressful, somehow. I zone out too often; I'd forever be rewinding.

I've been alternating Octavia Butler's Earthseed books with Agatha Christie novels because the Earthseed books are pretty intense

Still crawling towards the end of that damn Mantel, but I did get the audiobook of Emma Warren's Make Some Space, about Total Refreshment Centre, and listened to it while walking from Stokey to London Fields. Didn't expect I'd be as into it as I was, this being a place that I never even went to, but it makes a passionate case for the importance of physical space, which is all the more poignant now that...developments beyond gentrification have endangered the concept even more.

Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
Pier Paolo Pasolini - Roman Poems

I'm still c.240pp into Curtis Sittenfeld, PREP, and c.100pp into David Thomson, THE BIG SCREEN.

I should really focus on finishing PREP before I do anything else.

But catching up also with LRBs: still on 21.5.2020, on James & RLS.

midway through robin hyde's wednesday's children, one of her five novels published over a few years before she took off for england. was not expecting quite the level of whimsey/fantasy in this given her engagé reputation (such as it is) & that it was written in the midst of depression era nz, though socially conscious elements do creep in: passing mention of the first labour government, depictions of working class auckland neighbourhoods, pākehā/māori relations, but mostly deals with the place of women and individuals who don't quite fit into a conformist society (see also anna kavan's nz writings from slightly later for more on this). going to give her collection of journalism a go after this.

Japanoise book on noise music in Japan.
Just reading about people's effects set ups. Though writer doesn't go into technical details.
But awareness of awareness of set up plus random elements that come in and have to be communicated with is interesting. Set ups can be custom created from semi decent pedals etc but there's always this extra presence of randomness.

About a third of the way in, I'm having a problem with Austerlitz. The problem is that the narrative technique is so strikingly unusual that it led me to start thinking about the choices made by the author to achieve this effect. This combination of engaging with the continued oddness of the narrative as I read along, coupled with a simultaneous consciousness of how the author is leveraging several peculiar techniques layered one upon another, keeps me mentally falling between two stools. It doesn't help that all this artifice in pursued in service to promoting a perspective I do not personally find sympathetic.

It would have been better to read it naively first, then dissect it. I do plan to continue with it though.

i'm midway through children's bible by lydia millet. it's very good so far.

I found James Woods' concise intro to Austerliz very helpful: he sketched the plot, explained use of photographs---He'd interviewed the author, seen the archive--and other use of "journalistic" elements, like the constant "Austerlitz said," and that this could lead to stories withing stories within stories, as A.is quoted on what X said that Y said etc,also the way time-bending effects can include dropping phrases like "a fate untimely" and less noticeable bits into into the stream (I think of it as going back and forth and sideways in time-space, establishing its own groove, like Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace, and Tim Lawrence announcing and fulfilling his self-imposed mission to proceed "crabwise" through the inter-and intra-related scenes of Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor 1980-83.) Also, the blurbs that mentioned Borges didn't hurt. So I felt like I knew some of what I was getting into.
But maybe you have the same edition, and found that the intro was too much of a load to take into reading the novel itself? I can see how that might be. I did find Austerlitz to be a fairly sympathetic character, even "relatable" somehow, though my own parents died in normie ways. To some extent it seems like Alfred said, the book suits these times. yeah, keep reading,if you can stand it; there are some (some) changes ahead

the Woods preface is not included in my edition ( Modern Library) of Austerlitz. the perspective I am not sympathetic with is not a lack of sympathy for the character Austerlitz, but rather that the time sense being promoted through many subtle rhetorical and narrative means is one I think is founded upon poorly grasped linguistic and mental confusions the author is exploiting rather than something found in time itself.

Time itself can be many things to many people though.

Which is why instead of saying I think it is a wrong view, I say it is not one I find myself in sympathy with.

Prepping to teach a re-vamped version of a short fiction class this fall, so I just finished Toni Cade Bambara's 'The Sea Birds are Still Alive,' and am now ploughing through Charles Yu's 'Sorry Please Thank You.' Next up is ZZ Packer, then an anthology of older Black writers.

While I am enjoying myself to some degree, I am eager to return to my stack of new poetry books...most of my reading on that front has been going to the readings I've selected for an online workshop I'm facilitating at the moment. The workshop is a real joy, of course, and I love talking about weird poetry that I love with people who are reading it for the first time.

I read the Wood essay in one of his collections, and I agree, he preserves the book's remoteness.

I discovered Sebald at the same time he published Austerlitz but to school myself in Sebaldism I read The Emigrants first. It consists of four short stories, Aimless, and it was a splendid intro.

Will have to read that too; I'm more of a short story junkie anyway. xxpost ZZ Packer! Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is one of my favorite collections. Please keep us updated on your reading, incl. what might further fertilize the Modern Poetry thread.

have been too anxious to read for several weeks and I'm grouchy

The Age of Innocence, this new oral history of The Office, and the Neil bio Shakey.

Modern Poetry thread? The rolling poetry thread? Oh gosh.

I am 4/5ths of the way through “Burr” by Gore Vidal and I dont want it to end, it’s so much fun.

I'm going to admit I've never read Gore Vidal. I'm a bad fag.

his novels are great. He makes dusty old history very lively & amusing. Well worth the time if you’re inclined!

Another vote for ZZ Packer here. What happened to her? Did she never recover from that terrible punning in the Updike cover blurb?

I'm a bad fag.

Very little of Vidal's output attempts to portray any aspect of lgbtq issues. He was a patrician and therefore his bisexuality was not very consequential compared to someone lgbtq who was raised among the plebian masses.

^ vidalsplaining

^ creativeneologismproposing

Aimless, I've heard as much,.but have also read about the queerness of his style... And isn't there a book or two that could be called smut? Or am I making that up?

According to a baggy but relevant thinkpiece in Salon, his first novel, Williwaw ( based on his WWII time in Aleutians"), was, like, haled--but he followed it w "homoerotic" (1n 1948!) The City and the Pillar, whereupon, says Salon, The New York Times' Orville Prescott "issued a fatwa" that got him banned from reviews for 20 years. The article's author says that this only added to Vidal's aversion to any kind of gay affirmation, identity or approval-wise---oh here it is, still online: https://www.salon.com/2014/05/22/how_one_sexy_gay_novel_derailed_gore_vidals_literary_career/ It's quite a theme for his biographers etc., as referenced here. I really don't know much about it, so I'll speculate: something to do with his Southern old school origins, which, as with Tom Wolfe, could twitch his contrarianism this way and that (in the Voice, Richard Goldstein eventually gave it up to "the old Anti-Semite" for his perfect comment on Leon Wieseltier: "He has very important hair." In Saul Bellow's introduction toThe Invisible Man, the Bellows and the Ellisons occupy a house not far from Vidal's, but only as the crow flies. "Gore regarded us with ironic pity. 'He's a campy patrician,' said Ralph.")
Closer to homo--well, the Salon writer talks about the class thing, and it might also be in part the Greatest Generational background: somewhere I read a comment by one of Warhol's early colleagues about the disapproval they got from older modern artists who were gay or bi and maybe married with children, specifically World War II vets like Vidal.
I used to own a paperback of The City And The Pillar, republished in the 60s, but don't remember a thing about it. of course there was that genial conversation about snails and oysters that he slipped into the screenplay for Spartacus---may have been excised from original release, but I remember it from TV, long before TCM. Also the film adaptation of his play, The Best Man, in which a decent presidential candidate (bemused Henry Fonda) has a chance to foil scurrilous Nixon-lookalike with charges of a Wartime man-man affair, while serving abroad...

HAILED, sorry!

Also, online descriptions of his 1952 novel The Judgement of Paris seem pretty polywhatevah, despite the fatwa.
And wiki sez: Myra Breckinridge is a 1968 satirical novel by Gore Vidal written in the form of a diary. Described by the critic Dennis Altman as "part of a major cultural assault on the assumed norms of gender and sexuality which swept the western world in the late 1960s and early 1970s",[1] the book's major themes are feminism, transsexuality, American expressions of machismo and patriarchy, and deviant sexual practices, as filtered through an aggressively camp sensibility.(cast of 1970 movie incl. Mae West
John Huston
Raquel Welch [titular trans]
Rex Reed
Farrah Fawcett
Tom Selleck)

Yes, it was that Salon article I vaguely remember reading about this issue, actually. Thanks!

Executioners song

his novels are great. He makes dusty old history very lively & amusing. Well worth the time if you’re inclined!

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Sunday, July 12, 2020 10:05 PM (two days ago)

otm. Lincoln, I think, is a legit great novel.

speaking of faggy authors i ordered a later delany novel and i can't wait to read the smut tbr

Chip is great, one of the finest SF authors and smut authors we have. Also his memoirs are astounding.

I will say, though, that to see him read is an exercise in frustration. It's like he's reading aloud to himself rather than to a room, and he has no sense of time but is old enough that no one wants to risk being seen as rude to tell him to cut it short, but whew...I once saw him read an experimental narrative on 95 degree summer day and after the first forty minutes I was out.

I finished Austerlitz last night.

I very recently read Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and recently seen a French film (unfortunately I can't recall the title or director) whose plot was centered on a French Holocaust survivor and explored somewhat similar themes about a life adrift, a past largely erased, and memories fragmented. Consequently, some of the impact it might have had was vitiated by recent engagement with many of the facts and themes which occupied the book.

What remained which was signature to the novel were the many stylistic choices Sebald employed: the wrapping of narratives inside narratives, the use of photographs to 'authenticate' the fiction, frequent lists of objects and tiny objective details, the stubborn refusal to allow anyone but the highly-effaced narrator to speak directly in their own voice or for any aspect of the novel to exist in the present tense, the frequent use of dreams, visions, hallucinations, and many just plain oddities. All of which were intended to disorient the reader to some degree. Except I was too aware of them and their intention.

I tracked down the James Wood essay and read it after finishing the book. In it he identifies much of what I had already observed about the book and praises these contrivances for their positive contribution to the experience of the reader. Personally, I found them more obtrusive and distracting than not and the overall effect of disorientation and dysphoria they were intended to induce, while admirably artful, were not ultimately helpful to my understanding of the character or his story.

I readily admit I am sensitive to seeing what authors are doing 'behind the curtain' as I read and this is not common among recreational readers. It makes me uncommonly intolerant of some books, based on aspects that would not bother most people. Consider it a bug, not a feature.

I finished children’s bible by Lydia millet. brutal on the rage children will have for our generation when the climate change penny drops. Story somewhat unsatisfying/irrelevant but the ideas are too interesting. Recommended. Verging on speculative fiction/sci-fi but not really.

I know what you mean, Aimless, although it bothers me more often in music---"pattern recognition gets us all in the end," Jane Dark observed long ago, although he kept reviewing for quite a while, and may still be at it---in my case, especially in country and jazz (my specialties after all), new albums by a fairly wide age-range of artists can seem distractingly retro, whether they seem merely retro or not---but if I refer to it as vintage, "O Vintage Youth!" etc., that means they did it right, that means I like it. Yet other veteran listeners, incl. those much younger than me, can still be like, "wha," like either it's new to them, or it's fair/given use of trope, a trope-cal blend.
It does bother me sometimes in reading, some George Saunders stories, especially---more often in my own attempts at Creative Writing ("oooo, how Symbolic." "Nowww, claaasss, what does the author meeannn here??" So for instance Poetry->poems->verse->verses->lines get more anecdotal, though with spaces to be filled, if the imaginary reader chooses to do that.)

xp Aimless, any chance the French film you're describing could have been the 1961 documentary, Chronicle of a Summer?

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-extraordinary-chronicle-of-a-summer

Not a documentary and some time post-2000.

My present book is a translation of Ovid's Heroides. It is the Penguin Classics paperback edition with (as the saying goes) copious notes, most of which are fairly rudimentary and aimed at college students unfamiliar with Greek and Latin classics. The translator is Harold Isbell. It is quite readable and moderately enjoyable.

Reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Black Swan, years after everyone else probably. Only a short way through but it's shaping up to be highly idiosyncratic, loosely argued (full of anecdote and autobiography), entertaining, and persuasive. I'm cantering through, I'm sure a close reading would throw up lots of questions and criticisms - e.g. at one point to demonstrate the deceptiveness of categories he suggests trying to explain to a martian how most pro-choicers are also anti capital punishment, as well as pro high taxes (i.e. in favour of personal but not economic liberty). Not that hard imo. But I don't doubt he'd have answers for those criticisms too.

Took the thread's advice and took a break from Dr Faustus and return to Nagel's The View From Nowhere, which is kind of a model of clarity for a contemporary (well 1980s) philosophy book. Nagel almost always strikes me as eminently sensible. The book's theme is roughly about the incommensurability of the first- and third-person perspectives and how this can inform philosophical topics ranging from the mind-body problem, to epistemology and ethics.

Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet (tr. Margaret Jull Costa)

Its one of the great books for me, read it before in the Richard Zenith translation. The book is written as the Soares heteronym whereas this version has entries from Vicente Guedes that are translated here for the first time, which he wrote about 10 years earlier. One of the later entries talks about a bit of writing found from years ago, and he goes on to roughly say how little he has changed, however these earlier entries feel on the immature side. The misogyny and misanthropy is a tad more apparent, whereas later with Soares this a bit more under control as his conception of a thinking feeling dreaming individual is more fully hashed out. iirc Musil cast MwQ (or his writing) as a kind of lab, and while I can see that its Pessoa that fully carries this out here to an almost sinister extent. This is basically someone who sacrificed everything for his art: look at how his 1-2 relationship events with another person (it appears he broke it off before it became anything that would basically interfere with the way he wanted to live his life) scars him somewhat -- he experiences something outside of himself rather than dreaming it, say -- he works at what he was up to in 2-3 entries, as he often does with other matter, so he can write 2-3 entries about things such as oh, men and animals are not so different, for example. But you see there is an additional charge of seeing someone so humiliated that is just striking, someone who wanted to become pure thought seen, for once, as flesh and blood. (btw, it looks like he is revisitng and adding a thought he hadn't done so earlier and I'd guess that's because it never got to be an actual book in his lifetime. One of the great things (though perhaps accidental) about this book is watching the process of revisiting and re-working a take obsessively years apart, but I wonder if it would've ended up as one entry in an edited final version.)

Anyway, I'll revisit the Zenith one day again.

Finishing Anna Gurton-Wachter's 'Utopia Pipe Dream Memory' today and finding it is a slow burn-- expands in its range and feeling as the poems, mostly longer sequences, move forward. Whether this qyality is due to the referentiality of later sections to previous sections or whether it is because the sense of the project's stakes are raised in later sections is difficult to decide. Either way, recommended for those who enjoy Bernadette Mayer, Lisa Robertson, and Julianna Spahr's earlier books...

Now in the homestretch of A.J. Liebling's The Earl of Louisiana, first published in 1960; this is the 1970 edition, with an introduction by Southern historian T. Harry Williams, who says that the author got a few facts wrong, but he clearly relishes the book. As well he might: I could hardly believe how painlessly, how infotainingly, how Marshall Bermanly, AJL inserted my head into arcane intricacies peculiar to Louisiana (yet in context of outside world!), and turned on the light bulb. And that's during work hours; we also get some struttin' with the barbecue and all manner of aleatory chin music as he makes the NOLA rounds---necessarily going much further afield, where the motorway food is as bad as anywhere else, but always with an ear for passing relevance (so far, I've counted exactly 1 of the expected cute barroom set pieces, good enough to count for lagniappe).AJ
AJL loves Governor Earl Long for his motoriffic gift of gab, strong enough, amidst so much stiff competition---Liebling says that W.T. Cash's classic The Mind of the South should have a companion volume, The Mouth of the South, and that in part is what this---as said gift is in the service of (among other things) his and long-gone brother Huey's vision of a decent living for the poor---including the poorest of the poor, mostly black, necessarily disparaged in public speaking, but rewarded more privately--as are a lot of other voters, and pols, but he, like Huey before him, has kept the whole thing going basically by "soaking the oil companies."
But the oil companies and other commercial interests now see Earl faltering as another election comes close, and they're ready to rise with trending racists---Louisiana's finally getting in the swing of things, with the rest of the Deep South. So the narrative's lucidity, vivid as ever, becomes chilling, as author and reader watch and feel the initially occluded dye spread through the system, as it still is spreading, of course.
Damn, I gotta study this. It's exemplary writing.
(PS: Liebling doesn't present previous Long time as Edenic, it's all the things in the system, all the wheels and deals and other volatile elements in a precarious balance, previously enforced---Louisiana reminds him of Lebanon---that are now finding new purchase, for a while. As Malcolm X said a few years later, when asked about the death of JFK, "Some chickens came home to roost.")

I was about to ask about that, I’ve been put off reading that book for this reason

He takes as much delight, for example, as those he-men directors in taking Pauline Kael down a peg in the basest of terms.

Biskind is vile about Kael and is nakedly voyeuristic about any number of the female actors and (to him) bit-part players he profiles. It plays as a dispassionate, objective look at the 70s but really, he's way too invested in the lurid details and clearly revels in it.

Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983 is exactly like the continuation of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire I wanted it to be. Thanks to table (I think) for the recommendation.

How's Riddley Walker going, caek?

I think it was me! Such a good book, Lawrence is a great writer.

You guys otm about Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. I enjoyed it at the time but in retrospect feel unclean.

Diarmid Ferriter: A NATION NOT A RABBLE.

Odder than I thought. It doesn't announce a very clear argument or theme; it has a very odd structure, much of which is about retrospects on the revolution; it has very short chapters, about some of which I wonder if they came from newspaper articles.

I was the one who carried on so much about Lawrence's books, but no doubt the table knows like the Shadow knows, as always!

Also, you can stream all of a listening companion for one of the books: https://reappearingrecords.bandcamp.com/album/life-death-on-a-new-york-dance-floor-1980-1983 and a few more freebies from Love Saves The Day, I've got 'em both on double CD sets as well, so far seems like Life and Death is a bit more consistent, but both are amazing, with Lawrence's notes providing even more context.

By gum, this thread's natural lifespan of one season will be up in a couple of days.

After struggling with reading maybe three pages of Gravity's Rainbow a night for so long, I am really, really enjoying knocking out 10-20 pages of the Lawrence book at a clip with no stress.

When I get the chance I plan on putting together a playlist of all the discographies Lawrence includes in Life and Death.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4fNpY29kDNLfEjdPi58jOH

(Not trying to burst bubble, just pointing it out!)

No bubbles bursted! I'm lazy, so thanks.

Finished my chronological Penelope Fitzgerald run-through with The Blue Flower — still to read: The Golden Child, Means of Escape, the non-fiction.

The middle run of four, from Human Voices to Beginning of Spring, is as great a sequence of novels as I can think of. Gate of Angels was the only dud for me; Blue Flower is remarkable but maybe overrated — somehow easy-to-read but colossally dense and difficult at the same time — I felt like I was never finishing it.

Funny that the last four books are all variations on “smart woman meets clod”

Have you heard about her husband?

You may well not need it as a guide through her writing life and novels, but might anyway enjoy Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, Hermoine Lee's Plutarch Award-winning bio: very dense, always clear, moving right along, as far as I read---got hooked, kept me up all night--before giving it to my auntie, along with PF's own bio of her father and uncles, The Knox Brothers. Lee tells some more stuff about them and later generations, without getting lurid (again, far as I read)
The most poignant passage that I came across: an early review by an always respectfully candid reviewer of her work, Frank Kermode, seemed to indicate that (in my interpretation) that she *may* (it wasn't a big dramatic review) have finally hit a wall in her abilities---forget which novel; certainly not the last. Think the main concern, as reported, was how this would affect sales/influence other reviews, since Kermode had cred.

Heh, yeah her xpost husb@nd was some kind of influence I think.

Has anyone read pillars of the earth? On a historical fiction scale from wolf hall at the literary end to like Tom Clancy but with monks at the other, where is it?

Related to the Cather novel I just finished, I was reading Jed Perl's review of Alex Ross's new book on Wagnerism in the NY Review of Books and came across this:

Ross aims to demonstrate that the novels of Willa Cather, to whom he devotes an entire chapter, exude a Wagnerian spirit. There's a good deal of evidence that might support this view. In her youth in Nebraska, Cather studied piano with a man whose father, also a musician, had been a strong supporter of Wagner and conducted a number of the operas in Germany in the 1850s. Much later, in New York, she was friends with a well-known Wagnerian soprana, Olive Fremstad. Cather knew and admired the operas. In _The Song of the Lark_ and other works, she wrote brilliantly about the women who sang the great operatic roles. Even fairly casual readers of Cather will remember that one of her finest stories is entitled "A Wagner Matinee".

It continues in that vein for another paragraph.

I'm reading Death Comes for the Archbishop again, and I'll repeat: let's replace Hemingway in the canon w/Cather.

I still need to read that.
PBKR, you might also like The Disco Files, Vince Aletti's Billboard column of that name, and some related writing: as it happened, with his vivid mini-reviews, also reports and playlists from many places, week by week, from peak to peak (Lawrence will tell you about the decline, but Aletti was gone by then, having jumped to A&R, then back to writing about music and photography for the Voice etc.).

I just finished I'm Still Here, Austin Channing Brown. It's a remarkable little book mainly for the simplicity and directness with which she bears witness to her experience of being Black in the USA and her experience of what whiteness looks like from the receiving end.

She brings an excellent mix of passion and clarity to page after page. Even if it teaches you nothing you didn't know, it is heartening to see someone laying it all out in language so clear no one could misunderstand the message or its import. It achieves a sort of minor greatness, just by constantly and humbly aiming for the good.

I recommend it to ILB, just because it was written in a way to reach the widest possible audience and will do the most good the more broadly it is recognized and read.

I started an new What Are You Reading thread: Autumn 2020: Is Everything Getting Dimmer or Is It Just Me?