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

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.

Going to spend some more time with poet Ed Steck's latest today, 'An Interface for a Fractal Landscape.' This is the first in a trio of books about the same world, using lots of computer engineering and video game jargon to create strange surfaces revealing an alternate reality of language. He's pretty incredible, highly recommend all his former books, particularly if you're a "head" who doesn't need typical lyricism in your poetry.

I finished two books last week while on a hiking/camping trip, A Few Green Leaves, Barbara Pym, and Maigret in Society, Georges Simenon. Both of these are among the authors I consider highly reliable and I was not disappointed.

The Pym novel was her last and according to Wikipedia she was not entirely satisfied with its state when she submitted the manuscript, but she was dying of advanced cancer and sent it in anyway. She needn't have worried. It was fine, and revisited some characters from previous work, placing them later in life.

The Simenon was slightly uncharacteristic but I thought it one of the best of the Maigret novels among those I've read. It should be said there are more than 50 Maigret novels I have not read.

Wyndham Lewis - Tarr (1918 version)

Its a pretty good novel, overall. Found myself thinking it sits between Anthony Powell (the milieu, the cynicism around marriage, women, relationships, money and art and failure) but then a modernism in prose also sets in at points in the way he describes motion and action both in the dance party and the duel later on. Will definitely read his criticism at some point.

i think tarr is good in both its iterations, but have a slight preference for the og version. coincidentally recently read two works in a row where a character is reading time & western man (one of them being powell's a dance to...)

if you're looking at reading his non-fiction i remember the creatures of habit and creatures of change collection being a good way in, also the julian symonds ed. essential wl.

j symons, that is!

TIME & WESTERN MAN is hilarious - at least in part unintentionally.

Delightful that Thomson finishes his chapter on Welles and Kane, AMERICAN, and follows it with ... what? ... AMBERSONS!

I admire his Welles book from the '90s, but he does disparage him for weight problems often and makes purely speculative claims about whom he slept with.

Last night I tried starting Orwell's A Clergyman's Daughter and it was... not good. It suffered horribly by my having recently read some Barbara Pym and Simenon, so the relatively poor quality of the narrative prose was all the more glaring. I think I need to ferret out a non-fic book from my shelves to occupy me next.

I've been slowly chipping away at Hesse's Magister Ludi for most of the summer. Not sure what I think of it tbh. In the meantime I've been trying to read more short stories, which is something I don't do very often. Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales and Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage were both pretty good.

Just finished another Maigret and started on Wharton's The Custom of the Country, which is very promising so far.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage has some of my favorite short stories by anybody ("Floating Bridge" for one), and I've tried imitating them.

She's my favorite short story writer, maybe. Top 3, which switches around depending on the day.

I found Dear Life, Runaway and The View From Castle Rock at a used book sale last year and figured I'd grab them all; which one should I read next?

Superior:The Return oF Race Science by Angela Saini
Interesting recap of the history of race science so far or at least the roots of it in the 18th and 19th centuries so far.
Quite well written. I think I'm about aware of the stuff so far. Saini's main point in the book is saying that dodgy science with pretty subjective interpretation which had been hopefully sunk into the past has returned to be an active thing in supposedly reliable areas.
I think it is a decent book but I've only read about the first 3 chapters.

Runaway, cwkiii, her last strong collection. I found her concentration faltering in the last decade.

I finished Malone Dies. It was okay. Beckett's ability to wring comedy out of the state of being bedridden is impressive. Instead of trying the reader's patience with prolixity, as in "Molloy", here he tries the reader's patience with vagueness and incomplete information. It's not clear why we should care about the stories that Malone is writing and they're too intentionally crude to stand on their own. Overall I would judge it an interesting but not wholly successful experiment.

Now I'm re-reading "The Martian Chronicles" by Bradbury.

Returned books and got books from the just-reopened uni library where I adjunct today, and am very excited about the books I got: a load of Brossard novels I haven't read yet, a book of Norma Cole's poetry and one of her essays on art, plus a P. Inman book that a friend recommended.

xp. I absolutely adore the trilogy. very fucking frustrating reading at times but also hilarious

I've been reading Dark Sun, Richard Rhodes. It's his sequel to The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which is excellent. This book mainly follows the further development of nuclear weapons after WWII ended, including the Soviet Union nuclear program (and nuclear spying), the invention of a working hydrogen bomb, and most aspects of the Cold War and arms race.

The contrast in this sequel is that it is less about the step-by-step solution to a long series of thorny physics problems and the scientists who engaged and solved those problems. In this book politics take over center stage. Mostly national security politics and internal scientific community politics. The experimental science and technological advances aspects still appear, but in a much less central role. This makes it a much different story than the original, somewhat less intellectually thrilling and somewhat more depressing.

I read Ben Macintyre's The Spy and the Traitor. It ripped along right enough and painted a picture of the 80s that I wasn't wholly aware of but it wasn't exactly keen to bring any nuance to the idea of Russia as the evil empire.

Then I read Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me which moved me deeply but at which I can only chuck platitudes like profound and unsettling.

In a potentially absurd move, I'm now reading Houellebecq's Platform. Eck, I'd forgotten how grubby he makes me feel.

Now in the homestrech of (re-reading, after many years) Willa Cather's The Professor's House(1925), and trying to slow down, because so far what I distantly rembered about it has been confirmed and then some: Professor St. Peters, with whom I somehow identify, has to on extent painted homself and been painted into a corner emotionally, is bound to fall. He's finished lifeswork, an eight-volume history of Spain's North American exploration, in early middle age, and reaped rewards, in terms of professional recognition and even a bit of money, which, as the book opens, had finally provided a new house, but he keeps going back to his attic study--though he now does no more writing, it's still a good refuge---ih the old place(which was always "funny and somewhat bare," but if he and his wife couldn't afford a suitable item, they and their daughters did without--none of the "pathetic" settling-for so common in the little Hamilton College faculty community.
He knows it was always a mark against him that he wrote beyond the minimum requirement---for magazines and shit---and now he's got these honors from outside, extra money, oooo--and not from climbing, and cultivating the kind of commercial "academia" favored by the State Legislature (courses in bookkeeping, egads sir!), But he's been here so long, also teaching his ass off when not writing (he's Lord of the Books, so why should he mind all these courses, sayeth the Powers), because it's a familiar, orderly setting for his productive perch---and because, when he was young and in love and ready to marry---it was the first school that accepted him and was near his eternal resource, Lake Michigan--- Professor St. Peters, of French-Canadian descent, from just over the border, identifies mostly with France and Spain, the wells of his other increasingly crucial memories,,,,
He is sophisticated, aesthetic, sensitive--but also increasingly insular/moving out of his depth, and he senses this too, even while reflexively observing, appraising, whenever possible: hes older daughter does indeed have a beautiful face, as everyone agrees--but he's the one who also perceived a subtle slope to her bod, a slight but unmistakable, inescapable legacy of her Canuck great-grandfather. She's also the sole heir of the Professor's best student ever, the *one* whose brilliance lasted---'til he was killed in the Great War, after making a remarkable discovery, later commercialized by the heiress's charming, brainy new husband, whose name is Louie and who is beginning to be something of a local Medici, only nicer, and uh, Jewish, though it's seldom mentiojed outright, but he's a supersalesman and, you know, good with money---realigning family and other dymanics, but then The Professor sees his daugther, Madame Louie, also his wife, respond with their own realigned dynamics (Mrs. St, Peters, whose husband is fading, now plays what he sees as the game of womanhood with her sons-in-law, trying to balance and advance everything).
Challenge to the young reapers, and to student Tom's seemingly ironclad will are beginning to surface, to which The Professor is somewhat sympathetic, though what can he do; he feels himself more useless in such matters than ever---also he remembers Tom's confided secret (better than he sometimes remembers Tom himself, who is becoming "a dazzling idea," maybe especially via Louie's Commemorations, though Louie never met the guy, and sure wishes he had): Tom's *first* discovery, when he was a young cowpoke in New Mexico, of a beautiful, deserted mini-civilization, which he ahd his colleague/best friend first called Cliff City, and then they found some more settlements on the same nesa---so he went to find Smithsonian or some other source of recognition and support of further, deeper study, in D.C., which turns out to be much more a deserted city--of the heart, yet swarming with climbers, other talkers---and then he goes back and really gets crushed, also crushing---goes way up to Hamilton College and starts over'
Stays on the wheel, as The Professor sees it now---and of coursel the author and her characters can't know how much of this will have been moot, re the Great Crash of '29---but I'll bet she wasn't too surpised: the slide is already in place.
Having said all that, I should give it up for Cather, who seems at the top of her game, leading mel discreetly, unstoppably, though rooms and buildings and mesas in layers of compressed clarity, incl. appetites and affections and amusements and archness and sadness and a sense of the tragic coming back(also the shit you can't take back). As Willie says in his recent "Love Laughed," "It was fun---in a strange kinda way..."

Tho I didn't understand all of what you just wrote, it made me want to read that book. Thanks!

That's the main thing, thanks to you too. Sorry for typos! Why didn't I magnify? Getting too set in my ways, like the or The Professor.

Hope that's not too spoiler-y---*how* she presents all this is what's amazing.

Memoirs and Misinformation by Jim Carrey and Dana Vachon

I read Ben Macintyre's The Spy and the Traitor. It ripped along right enough and painted a picture of the 80s that I wasn't wholly aware of but it wasn't exactly keen to bring any nuance to the idea of Russia as the evil empire.

The Professor's House's structure emphasizes its queerness.

right now:

i'm listening to friends and strangers by j. courtney sullivan.

it's mostly pretty trashy, but it has some very keenly observed moments about class, parenting, new york etc. and i'm enjoying it.

never read/heard of her before this. her previous books all have very conventional Serious But Accessible Women's Fiction covers (cf. kate atkinson etc.), but this one has an extremely sally rooney cover. the comparison is not off the mark but it's not as good, and it's about older people. but if you like sally rooney you might like this.

i'm rereading outline by rachel cusk because it takes about 90 minutes to read, it's great, and i'm about to read the other two for the first time.

recently:

october by china mieville which was... informative. it came alive a bit in the final chapter where it felt like he finally allowed himself to analyse things. aside from that it was extremely stodgy "and then what happened was ... and then what happened was ..." history writing. some awful prose too.

our man in havana by graham greene:

"comedy" but not funny.