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

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.")

Richard Usborne's Clubland Heroes. Happened upon this in a stray line of a LRB review of a John Buchan biography and decided to track it down - it's an affectionate study of Buchan, Sapper and Dornford Yates, the author's favourite writers in adolescence. Even on first publication in 1953 Usborne views these writers as old fashioned and problematic, and the book seems to doa. good job of pointing out all the privilege and bigotry that underlines them while still being sort of in love with them, which I can relate to, if not necessairily for these particular authors - I find Buchan tedious as well as unpleasant, Sapper gives better pulp thrills while being foaming-at-the-mouth bigoted; I'd never heard of Yates, though, and the idea of an author who does comedy as well as spy yarns appeals. The Berry stories seem a bit Wodehouse but w/o Wodehouse's subversion of the class system - the butlers aren't wiser than their masters here - and it's funny how changes in the UK tax system make the family move from England to France to Portugal. These people are The Enemy, no doubt, but there's something entertaining nonetheless about seeing people enjoy the good life - Usborne describes the characters as "idlers but not wasters". Apparently Yates was the only author still alive when the book was published and very hostile to Usborne whom he saw as a radical leftist.

I finish Curtis Sittenfield, PREP (2005) at last. It's very appealing, but long at 400 pages. I should have made myself read it much faster: it was best when I was reading in what by my standards are substantial bursts - like 60 pages or so yesterday.

It's good enough that I would now like to read more by this author.

There is something enigmatic, even disturbing about the protagonist. You're with her for 400 pages, yet never know what she looks like; and barely what she likes (books, music, films? hardly at all). Her whole identity seems to centre on being undistinguished, and she seems to have few good feelings for anyone. She is watchful but also negative, morose, self-obsessed. Maybe she troubles me because she's recognisable.

I must crack on with David Thomson's BIG SCREEN but might take a diversion through another book first.

Started reading the Derek Bailey biography after having had it sitting around for 2 or 3 years.
Finding it an easy read. So much oral testimony.

Also got Japanoise most of the way through. Have enjoyed that.

Started Conor Cruise O'Brien's The Great Melody, his Edmund Burke. Thanks to a week at the beach, I was able to finish:

Georges Simenon - Maigret at the Coroner's
Elizabeth Taylor - A Game of Hide and Seek
Wendy Moffat - A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster
Ottessa Moshfesgh - Death in Her Hands

A week at the beach reading Simenon sounds perfect right now.

Still plugging on w/ Earthly Powers, which I am enjoying/not enjoying.

which I am enjoying/not enjoying

I hear Anthony Burgess was like that in real life, too.

Dissertation reading: Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories
Non-dissertation reading: Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films Revisited

Ben Lerner Leaving the Atocha Station - Great read. It really had to win me over; I though the constant use of hash/weed was an unnecessarily on-the-nose way of expressing there was a veil over perception; or if it wasn't to express that, I just don't care about an American in Madrid being high all the time and saying so. In the end it didn't matter a lot though: he very much succeeds in describing the sense of loneliness in a foreign world, alone with your thoughts and insecurities you are ashamed of. Slacking it, questioning talent, poetry, and everything else. There are highly original passages on the fraudulous, the struggle. His passages on Ashbery were a highlight for me. I saw someone else saying invoking the train bombing was too unimaginative, but I thinked it worked in showing he knew History was being made but he couldn't find a way (or desire) to be part of it. And yes, it's pacy and at times very funny.

(File under minor quips to get worked up about: I totally would have ditched the definite article in the title. It's felt like a stumbling block every time I pronounce the title, or think about it even. 'Leaving the Heathrow Airport', 'Leaving the Berlin Hauptbahnhof' sounds just as lame. Unless I'm missing some genius use of the article to express his alienation or lost-in-translationness, which is entirely possible, but for now I'm not buying it?)

I hadn't really considered the article in the title, but I wonder if it's part of the ostentatious need to create meaning - to make it sound more meaningful? There might also be something to say about his inability to leave the station.

I read this a couple of months back and am still in two minds about it. Fundamentally, I didn't really need another novel about a struggling writer, no matter how ironically and cleverly that central conceit was staged. That said, it has grown in my imagination, and like LBI says, the Ashbery section - although only a couple of pages - absolutely sings and elevates the whole text. The ending is problematic in a way I can't quite put my finger on. It's wrapped up in the unreliability of the narrator, who undercuts all attempts at typical gestures at meaning and structure, but that redemptive closure was neither earned nor needed.

I admit that after learning about his person from a number of colleagues and students who worked with him, I have been unable to read Lerner.

I remember his 'Angle of Yaw' to be a nice book of prose poems, tho.

I'm finishing up Lawrence Giffin's 'Untitled, 2004,' a book-length long poem addressed to the author's infant daughter that dwells on questions of art, agency, fate, and how we make a life. Beautiful and rather moving, it's certainly Giffin's most accessible book. It was reviewed favorably over at Hyperallergic if yr interested in reading more: https://hyperallergic.com/?p=573032

Somehow (power of suggestion, after reading your description of the novel) Having "the" in there, the cadence of the full title, with pronunciation of "the" at that point in the phrase (I hear "th" as clunky, "ee" as slight loss of air, mocking very idea of escape from clunk) as dead middle dragging down, making a drone of (as insect, not Velvet Underground) the potential crispness of, for instance, "Now leaving Atocha Staion." Thus emphasing the weary and/or spooked irony: no matter where he may roam, no matter how big the ticket, he's still just barely peeling himself away from the station. Been there.

Walking past a box on the sidewalk, found a copy of Fifth Business. Narrator's habitual disdain and tendency to punch down grated, but an enjoyable read. Some scenes, like his vision of the Madonna, were excellent. Also the phrase "night plungers".

Is the definite article in 'Leaving The Atocha Station' not a typically Lerner-ironised allusion to 'To The Finland Station'?

Good point!

Delaying Thomson's BIG SCREEN by starting Terry Eagleton's MATERIALISM.

Naturally enjoyable but it seems to skip past the difficult questions of what matter is anyway, and what is its other - spirit? ideas? - and how far these things actually exist. It goes straight on to more specific sparring with people like Deleuze, which is fun but not a great way into the real heart of the concept. TE says in the foreword that he cut the first 40,000 words in response to a peer reviewer. Maybe he shouldn't have.

xposts I haven't read the Lerner so maybe I'm missing some kinda joke that y'all are in on, but... "Leaving the Atocha Station" is the title of a poem in The Tennis Court Oath (1962) by John Ashbery, and I always assumed that was a good enough reason for the book to be named that.

Reading Borges' (Labyrinths) for what feels like the first time but isn't. Found him too impenetrable about eight years ago, and it's hardly something I can speed through now, but it contextualises so much! Why didn't I try harder before? In the process of realising how many artists are deeply indebted to him.

For some reason I wasn't prepared for it to be as experimental as it is. Those mid-sentence u-turns in logic... It is the best time.

Borges is god.

Xp of course! It might even say so in the book. I'm blaming lockdown senility.

Here's a Borges doc that I haven't finished watching but ... I dunno why I'm surprised that there's a film in color with him being interviewed (in English), he died in the 80s. But I am surprised.

http://ubu.com/film/borges_portrait.html

Stanisław Lems somewhat famously wrote a kind of takedown of Borges, dismissing those u-turns as a cheap logician's trick, but the charge doesn't stick. It's a classic case of narcissism of small differences.

My friend (who is a former ilxor) really loves Lem...but I just can't get into him.

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?