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

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.

xpost Thanks for the doc link, lukas. You might also enjoy transcripts of student cassettes, collected as Professor Borges: A Course in English Literature, his own 1966 fanverse.
I long ago enjoyed Lem's Solaris, and Tarkovsky's Russian As Fuck screen vision, but somehow those were enough, so far.
Good thread: Borges translation?
And maybe this one, which I don't remember:
Labyrinhts (1962) - Jorge Luis Borges POLL

From the publisher, New Directions:
Writing for Harper’s Magazine, Edgardo Krebs describes Professor Borges:

“A compilation of the twenty-five lectures Borges gave in 1966 at the University of Buenos Aires, where he taught English literature. Starting with the Vikings’ kennings and Beowulf and ending with Stevenson and Oscar Wilde, the book traverses a landscape of ‘precursors,’ cross-cultural borrowings, and genres of expression, all connected by Borges into a vast interpretive web. This is the most surprising and useful of Borges’s works to have appeared posthumously.”

Borges takes us on a startling, idiosyncratic, fresh, and highly opinionated tour of English literature, weaving together countless cultural traditions of the last three thousand years. Borges’s lectures — delivered extempore by a man of extraordinary erudition — bring the canon to remarkably vivid life.

Now translated into English for the first time, these lectures are accompanied by extensive and informative notes by the Borges scholars Martín Arias and Martín Hadis.

I should have incl. translator, Katherine Silver.

I’m finally at the epilogue of War & Peace (Maude/Mandelker translation), a book which I’ve been reading slowly and with long breaks over the last six months. It’s quite a journey. I did hit a few lulls, particularly in the middle third, but everything from 1812 onwards is really exciting. I probably need to read an actual history of these wars at some point. There's so much that Tolstoy's contemporaneous Russian readers would know like the back of their hands but which was totally unfamiliar to me. I spent quite a bit of time on Wikipedia reading about the battles to try to make them more vivid for myself.

The first long novel I read when quarantine began. It's pretty good.

I feel that Eagleton's MATERIALISM somewhat missed an opportunity - he's too interested in 'the body and the soul', but those are not the only kinds of matter and non-matter. He really should have gone deeper into the question of just what matter is, and what is not matter. And what difference it makes.

Thank you Bernard for pointing out it's the title of an Ashbery poem. I can't remember if I knew that and then forgot about it. Will now have to read it to see why that definite article is in the poem's title!

It's probably just Ashbery being cheeky, as most things Ashbery are

Pinefox's comments on "Materialism" remind me that I've had Bertrand Russell's "The Analysis of Matter" on my to-read list for a long time. Some day I will read it. I've been casting about for what to read next, searching through my old books to see what's due for a re-read. I first tried Beckett's "Molloy", which I remember having liked when I first read it in my college days, though I think I forgot how much of it I had just skimmed. It does have some pretty funny jokes, but it's too much work to get to them, so I set that one aside. I tried "Malone Dies" next, which is more readable, though less funny. I'm trying to decide whether to stick with it, or give Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles" a whirl.

The Beckett books are masterpieces, but I think not things to approach casually. You really need to feel ready to encounter them - probably reading in a very sustained way - would be my own view.

I don't agree actually that MALONE DIES is less funny that MOLLOY. I recall it as among the most comic of all Beckett books.

But that Bradbury idea is a great one, O.Nate - let us know if you do make the trip to Mars.

MATERIALISM: stimulating on Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, more than on Marx. A lot of the old Marxian claims - eg that the era of capitalism abstracts objects, dulls the senses - are just repeated again, though there seems no empirical evidence for them.

Overall the title should really be something like SUBJECTIVITY. It's more an account of TE's view of that than of matter as such.

Nearly done with Black Swan (in the middle of the second edition's postscript essay). It is very entertaining, Taleb is not afraid to sing his own praises or to rubbish other people - directly or indirectly, he takes a swipe at "a well respected Harvard professor" but also calls people out by name (one poor guy is described as "abject") - whole professions get taken down as well. His thesis is original (or I'm prepared to believe him when he trumpets its originality) but lots of supporting arguments borrowed (with acknowledgement) from others, especially Kahneman and Tversky (former of Thinking Fast and Slow fame). It jumps around a lot ("As we shall see in Chapter 17", "As we saw in Chapter 6", "As you will recall from my conversation with Daniel Nebbish in Chapter 3" - er, nope) and often leans heavily on jargon ("The Fourth Quadrant") that doesn't get explained till later. I was reminded of The Origin of Species, another book about a simple idea packed with supporting evidence - there one is impressed with the steady accumulation of a moutain of reliable evidence, this seems more like one of those walls in a crime thriller with photos and newspaper clippings and scribbled names all linked with a maze of red string.

Oh, and somewhat hearteningly he is not immune (none of us are) from the psychological errors he warns against, in the second edition postscript essay the section on personal fitness (which seems out of place even in a book full of somewhat irrelevant personal anecdotes) is reliant on confirmation bias and the narrative fallacy.

o. nate: There are some really fantastic E.C. Comics versions of Bradbury stories. Million Year Picnic is the best, IMHO, but if you've got a way to look up the graphic versions, they're worth your time. (Some info here... https://marswillsendnomore.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/ec-comics-ray-bradbury-the-handler/)

The best way to read Bradbury is to consume a slew of his short stories in one sitting. His tics – the midwestern cadence of his language, his use of color (red, green, metallic/silver) and consistent symbolism (balloons, grass, rockets, shoes, sports, rain) – seem more intentional when they're allowed to play out across a number of stories.

Most Ray Bradbury Theater episodes are on Youtube. Most episodes are well done. Mars is Heaven is a genuinely fun hour of TV.

For me, the Bradbury Rosetta Stone is a gorgeous little essay that ran in the New Yorker on the week that he died: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/04/take-me-home

It's like, at the last minute of his life, he wanted to pull back the curtain and say 'look! here's what I was doing this whole time!'

That sounds excellent, Soda. Good post.

The most lyrical and sentimental major SF writer I can think of - and the motif of fire as well as Mars.

Also, the wages of compulsive sentimentalizing in some of his stories, like the one I mention below:
Also read Farenheit 451 for the first time (which, a couple of short stories aside, is my first Bradbury). I mean he wrote the bastard in 9 days (albeit built around a framework of other short stories he'd already written) and it stands and falls on that fact: it's in a hurry, is clunky and overwritten (the adjectives, Raymond!) but it belts along, is full of conviction and he never writes at anything less than the top of his lungs.

Just started Magda Szabó's The Door.

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Thursday, April 23, 2020 10:28 AM (three months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't remember Bradbury's novels, unless you count some others built from sequential stories, like The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles: most recently, I encountered the anthologized account of a stray Martian child, the last of his kind in an area that includes a battered colony of Earthlings: he's seeking company, but he's had no training in how to control his shape-shifting-reflective abilities, and the colonists project images of their lost loved ones onto him, into him---it gets horrifying pretty quickly, and then it's over, in a way that's even worse. His short stories are worth seeking out, if you liked him at all.

― dow, Thursday, April 23, 2020 10:55 AM (three months ago) bookmarkflaglink

there are two huge (900pp each) volumes of his short stories (which aren't even everything)

my favourites of those i've read so far (just over half way through volume 1, but have read 3 of the collections elsewhere)

There Will Come Soft Rains (pdf - https://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf)

The Emissary (pdf - http://www.newforestcentre.info/uploads/7/5/7/2/7572906/the_emissary.pdf)

The Scythe (html - https://talesofmytery.blogspot.com/2013/11/ray-bradbury-scythe.html)

― koogs, Thursday, April 23, 2020

I teach There Will Come Soft Rains on occasion, always gets very despairing reactions.

Here are my favorites. I couldn't tell you how they've been re-anthologized, but by original volume:

From "Collected Stories": Pumpernickel, The Witch Door, Toynbee Convector
From "Dark Carnival": The Night
From "Golden Apple of the Sun": The Murderer, The April Witch
From "I Sing the Body Electric": I Sing the Body Electric, Night Call Collect
From "The Illustrated Man": The Long Rain, The Rocket, The City, The Other Foot, The Highway, Marionettes, Inc., Kaleidoscope, The Fox and the Forest
From: "The Martian Chronicles": The Long Years, There Will Come Soft Rains, The Million Year Picnic, Mars is Heaven,
From: "The October Country": The Scythe, The Jar, Skeleton (dumb...), (Uncle Einar, Homecoming, The Traveler... these three are all part of an abortive novel Bradbury started about a family of monsters. I wish he'd finished.)

Of these...
My sentimental and endearing favorite: "The Rocket"
My favorite non sci-fi: "The Night"
My spooky one-shot favorite: "The Witch Door"
My favorite for 'experimental' Bradbury (not actually experimental, but fun): "The City"

Thanks for all the Bradbury suggestions. "Martian Chronicles" is a book that I esteem very highly though the last time I read it was assuredly more than a decade ago. I have a few other collections of his stories that I also love. For now, I'm sticking with "Malone Dies". The humor to me seems much more muted than in "Molloy", which often reads like a comic monologue, in bravura passages such as:

And in winter, under my greatcoat, I wrapped myself in swathes of newspaper, and did not shed them until the earth awoke, for good, in April. The Times Literary Supplement was admirably adapted to this purpose, of a neverfailing toughness and impermeability. Even farts made no impression on it. I can't help it, gas escapes from my fundament at the least pretext, it's hard not to mention it now and then, however great my distaste. One day I counted them. Three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an average of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it's not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. It's nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes. It's unbelievable. Damn it, I hardly fart at all, I should never have mentioned it. Extraordinary how mathematics help you to know yourself.

But then he tries your patience in long passages describing very precisely and with perfect diction some tedious piece of inane business. I think the voice of Beckett is unique and definitely worth knowing, but maybe easier to encounter in the theatrical works.

I remember enjoying this one, but in the 80s, so I take no responsibility for saying so.
Take it away, wiki:
Mercier and Camier is a novel by Samuel Beckett that was written in 1946, but remained unpublished until 1970.[1] Appearing immediately before his celebrated "trilogy" of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, Mercier et Camier was Beckett's first attempt at extended prose fiction in French. Beckett refused to publish it in its original French until 1970, and while an English translation by Beckett himself was published in 1974 (London: Calder and Boyars and New York: Grove Press), the author had made substantial alterations to and deletions from the original text while "reshaping" it from French to English.[2][3]

The novel features the "pseudocouple" Mercier and his friend, the private investigator Camier, in their repeated attempts to leave a city, a thinly disguised version of Dublin, only to abandon their journey and return. Frequent visits are paid to "Helen's Place," a tawdry house modeled on that of legendary Dublin madam Becky Cooper (much like Becky Cooper, Helen has a talking parrot). A much-changed Watt makes a cameo appearance, bringing his stick down on a pub table and yelling "Fuck life!"

Scary surprise (not Watt) near the end.

robin hyde: dragon rampant

Oddly that description of MERCIER & CAMIER is totally unfamiliar to me. Maybe because I haven't read it for ... 26 years.

Started today by finishing Eagleton's MATERIALISM.

I'm about halfway through the first volume of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time: A Question of Upbringing. I'll admit to a certain amount of immediate disillusionment with its milieu (Eton, ffs) and even the roman-fleuve in general, but so far it's Powell's eye, the lulling unfolding of his sentences and the humour of it that's keeping me going. This description of Le Bas, a housemaster at Eton is fabulous.

He was a tall, untidy man, clean-shaven and bald with large rimless spectacles that gave him a curiously Teutonic appearance: like a German priest. Whenever he removed these spectacles he used to rub his eyes vigorously with the back of his hand, and, perhaps as a result of this habit, his eyelids looked chronically red and sore. On some occasions, especially when vexed, he had the habit of getting into unusual positions, stretching his legs far apart and putting his hands on his hips; or standing at attention with heels together and feet turned outwards so far that it seemed impossible that he should not overbalance and fall flat on his face. Alternatively, especially when in a good humour, he would balance on the fender, with each foot pointing in the same direction. These postures gave him the air of belonging to some highly conventionalised form of graphic art: an oriental god, or knave of playing cards. He found difficulty with the letter “R,” and spoke – like Widmerpool – rather as if he were holding an object about the size of a nut in his mouth. To overcome this slight impediment he was careful to make his utterance always slow and very distinct. He was unmarried.

That final payoff is exquisite.

I spent a month reading it in 2007. It disappointed me but I'm glad I read it.

I'm reading Ford's Parade's End, which covers the same ground with a tad more art.

I think ADTTMOT is utterly brilliant but I wouldn’t want to read the whole lot straight through. I think some time has to be allowed to pass between each (the whole thing, after all, is weaved around a series of set pieces, where two or more of the main characters’ lives intersect and they catch up).

E.M. Cioran - Short Histroy of Decay.

This seems like parts of a reckoning with a strand of German philosophy I know about (like all philosophy) through 2nd hand readings (Kant, Hegel, Nietzche), published around the time of French existentialism. What it most reminds me of is parts of Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, and post-Pessoa, writing around the struggle to exist. The best bit was the third part, which is a 10 page essay that veered into a kind of SF-ish post-apocalyse post-human post-loss of language, but I do prefer Pessoa's imagination - or at least I am far more attuned to that.

Back to Thomson, THE BIG SCREEN.

He does France (to the 1930s) in a chapter called ... FRANCE. A couple of pages each on Meliés, Vigo, et al. Then a whole chapter on RENOIR - whom he adores. Then AMERICAN: suddenly a chapter on Welles.

I enjoy the boldness. It's not a rigorous 'history' in that it doesn't, for instance, describe the French production system to compare it with the US or Soviet at the time. It's a very long series of vivid sketches. It makes me want to spend less time watching recent films, more time watching old ones - say, pre-WWII.