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

Rereading Seamus Deane on Joyce. Insight and intellect but also, as always, sometimes gnomic to the point of meaning very little.

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

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)
The scenes down in old New Mexico did bring Willie's (and Ned Sublette's) "Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Found of Each Other") to mind a little bit, but what's another example?

"Fond" even

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.

― no lime tangier, Sunday, 2 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Thanks there is a copy of his book on Shakespeare around here.

Well, Houellebecq's Platform was desperate to be provocative ('insolent' says Julian Barnes), full of Islamaphobia and affectless sex. Who knew?

I've started Michael Chabon's Kavalier and Clay. Can I take 600 pages of that intimate, folksy voice?

Bernhard's Old Masters and Caro's The Power Broker last week.

My mom got me the new Houellebecq for Christmas and I immediately put it in a little free library. Like, that day. Can't stand the guy.

I read a book, the first novel I've finished since March. It was "A Liar's Dictionary" by Eley Williams. It's very good - without the intense blasts of the short stories (which I love so much), it has a lightness that reminds me of Elizabeth Taylor or maybe Shena Mackay. Which is not to say that it doesn't tangle with its own language quite often, to does so very pleasingly. I think - I'm not sure - it does something quite clever with the momentum of the storytelling, but my sense of a quickening pace may have mad more to do with my circumstances than the book itself. I'd have to read it again to find out, and I look forward to doing so at some point.

You read the power broker in a week Alfred?!

I put it down to finish Elizabeth Taylor, but I resumed reading this morning. I should finish it by Friday, yeah. Caro's such a confident storyteller.

"i don't care what anyone says, i think the power broker is a good book" -- me being edgy

I loved kavalier & clay at the time, suspect it would annoy me now. The bit everyone hates in the Arctic is the best bit imho.

I have about thirty pages to go with Earthly Powers, have been reading this fucker for over a month. What a boorish, tedious, entertaining, eccentric, imaginative, funny, inhuman, obscure, wanky, and above all, unconvincing read! For all his linguistic whatsits, erudition, self-awareness etc etc Burgess is extraordinarily slapdash at times, he really is using this fictional alter ego to rehearse yet again all his old indulgences (obscure wordplay, puns, dialogue in untranslated foreign languages, reactionary prejudices, you know the usual) but that just makes the world and story he conjures so utterly unbelievable (without ever slipping into the fantasy that makes Clockwork Orange/Wanting Seed more bearable - and besides those books are much, much shorter!) You sort of feel that Burgess really thinks this one is his best bid for airport bestsellerdom but he's out of his fucking mind! Although he affects to be interested in everything - including popular fiction - he's actually got a total tin-ear - or contempt - for modernity and the popular. One example, the narrator's brother is a professional comedian whose most popular skit revolves around jokes on Shakespeare's Hamlet and the Danish language! Later on, one of the main characters, a composer, starts to write ghastly modernist stuff involving shudder a synth and tapes, to indicate his moral/spiritual/physical decline (this is after a never-ending description of an imaginary opera about St Anthony by the narrator and this composer). All of this stuff that bungs up the book - the fake songs, novels, plays, films, poems, stand-up comedy routines etc - are all fake fake fake. All of the constant scatalogical Joycean stuff is wearying and grotesque - no city visited is without its foul smell, forensically described. Needless to say, all of the stuff about Africa, just for starters, is deeply problematic 40 years on. Yet at the same time there are moments that are very human, well observed, interesting, thought-provoking, clever, obviously converted from the author's own experience - he definitely doesn't seem oblivious to things,he's not actually that self-absorbed and - I guess like all good authors - he can surprise you sometimes with his empathy and identification with people and groups outside his own experience. It's just - it's all too much, and six hundred pages in I'm hankering for something much more streamlined, next read round.

To console myself I have also been reading the sublime Essential Avengers Vol 6 containing Avengers #120-140, Giant-Size Avengers #1-4, Captain Marvel #33 & Fantastic Four #150 by Steve Englehart, Roy Thomas, Jim Starlin, Gerry Conway, Bob Brown, John Buscema, Don Heck, Dave Cockrum, Joe Staton, George Tuska, Rich Buckler & Friends - heroes all!

I liked that one, but yeah.

Has anyone read Lonesome Dove? I’m into the first few chapters but it is LONG

Yeah, I read it last year. A good book, very dark. I thought it was worth reading.

Bruce Pascoe Dark Emu
reevaluation of the history of aboriginal agriculture etc.
IN the light of its destruction by incoming british settlers. Looking back over some early explorers' memoirs and a lot of physical evidence.
Hope this did start a revival of some of the techniques talked about.
I am hearing about Australians wanting to go back to growing plants that are more in tune with Australia's own environment than that of the places that people came from. or at least having to recreate the old version of it.
Good to see that the US seems to be picking up on ideas from native American nature stewardship so hope similar can happen in Australia. But don't know the Australian political system and the last documentaries I saw were showing quit ehow badly Australian behaviour to its original population has been over the years.

I also just finished Frederick Douglass's original slave narrative. I think he wrote autobiographies 3 time sover his life so covered some of the same areas differently each time. Want to read the other 2.
May be just about to start the narrative by Olaudah Equiano which is in the same omnibus book

Missing Person, Patrick Modiano. So far it's about a private detective suffering from amnesia. Expect it to get weirder.

The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States 1638-1870(1896)was the first book by W.E.B Dubois. It's a monograph, in professional academic format, included sources footnoted on each page, and a narrative, a story, with some individuals, factions, some counties, colonies, groups of colonies, as characters, realigning over the years, in relation to each other, foreign powers, and other socio-political elements: agricultural, technological, in the broadest sense, the coming and going of uprising, fears of same, the Revolution, Civil War, and other struggles (laws passed, ignored, deals made, superseded, etc.)
Impression is more of a conversational, down to earth report than Lecture etc.
By this account, in just about every colony (though least of all in Georgia),there was always a moral objection, or at least anxiety, but also the money, and what slaves, available at reasonable expense, could be traded for: rum and molasses especially, which were not only tasty, but very good for resale, even in colonies where there was no agricultural advantage to slaveowners. Also in every colony: fear of a black earth uprising, so that they all had some kind of slave-importation-limiting laws, usually duties, however (also if ever) they were enforced at any given point (deals etc.)
No real prob for several colonies in terms of importation, but they tended to be very dependent for goodies and $ on the trade, most of all Rhode Island Massachusetts. Puritan heritage incl. moral concerns, but it seems that only the Society of Friends really proved a formidable legislative influence---relatively speaking, and only within Pennsylvania.
All concerns came to a head as the Revolution approached, and indeed, an outtake from the Declaration of Independence rips the King a new one, accusing him not only of oppression via enslavement, profiting from it, and paying off the slaves to plot against the colonists.(from Jefferson, Works "This radical, and not strictly true" passage, as Du B. coolly tags it, didn't make the final cut, Jefferson says, because South Carolina. SC was very big on rice, which was very labor-intensive, much more, as Du Bois notes, than the tobacco farming of Virginia and North Carolina, which were not as unequivocally pro-slavery or pro-trade at this point.
We haven't gotten to the rise of cotton, or the Louisiana Purchase, which brought in sugar, which took the most and biggest turnover of slaves.
Also in this Library of America edition: The Souls of Black Folk, Dusk at Dawn (autobio), and essays.

Dow, have you read "DuBois' Telegram" by Spahr? You might find it interesting.

Stevolende, that book has been hugely influential in Australia, and so of course the Rupert Murdoch press has instituted a long-standing campaign to discredit Pascoe, trying to prove he isn't actual Indigenous, etc etc etc. They kept bitching he wouldn't do interviews to respond to their stupid gotchas all summer because he was out working as a volunteer firefighter against the hideous bushfires we had.

Basically, fuck Murdoch.

I want to read it now! On the list. Most of my knowledge of Aboriginal issues comes from being into Aboriginal poets, so I should probably get my hands on something rather than another Lionel Fogarty book sometime

It's an interesting read. Does have me wondering about a couple of things though. The idea that aborigines would grow some things as monocultures across vast distances seems to go against the biodiversity I'm seeing being integral to other native stewardship. I thought the more diverse the more robust, also thought that the film Living Soil was saying monocultures tended to wreck the soil. Could just be what that monoculture was though.

Also was a bit iffy about Pascoe extolling the idea of being able to make some money out of various types of native flora and fauna. Though maybe that is the point and he's trying to sell it to farmers who are making money out of non native product which is not good for the environment since it requires more water and pesticides etc. Just didn't feel right on reading it. But enjoying it overall.
& would really love to hear something more sustainable could be introduced.

I need to look at the map of Australia. I have an image of vast deserts between the main cities but maybe that's watching Mad Max and things. Or at least 2 since I thnik the first one may have a backdrop of green fields and things or at least grasslands.
Maybe that's a result of native agriculture being destroyed by European farming techniques leaving the ground less arable than it was with them.

Speaking of Australia, I finished The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, which I found a powerful read.

I finished Brossard's 'Mauve Desert' (a re-read), read 'Notebook of Roses and Civilization' in a day, now onto her 'Picture Theory.' I tend to get obsessed with writers whose work I find challenging yet simultaneously readable, and she's really doing it for me right now.

xpost such a good book!

The hydrogen bomb history was too bulky to take on a recent camping trip, so I took Maigret and the Lazy Burglar instead and finished it. Now I'm back to the Cold War.

Finished The Martian Chronicles. I think my favorite story is still the one that was my favorite when I first read it, now these many years ago, and perhaps my favorite ghost story ever, "Night Meeting", but there are so many good stories here, it's an embarrassment of riches. Now reading The Shadow of Vesuvius: a Life of Pliny by Daisy Dunn, which often reads like a collection of research notes placed on 3x5 cards, sorted into piles on a whim, and loosely linked together into chapters, but my interest in the material is enough to keep me going, so far.

Simone Weil - Anthology

This is almost an unclassifiable voice, like a three-way between anarchism, christianity and Montaigne. With a voice that channels matter that seems to be lost from antiquity. This anthology is an ideal starting point, but you probably need to know a little bit of Greek/Latin literature and any 2nd readings of anarchist thinking. I think I got about 20% of what she was saying about politics or anything else -- the details might take a lifetime. Someone I will definitely read more of.

Night Meeting (and about half the rest of the book) doesn't even make it into the two large volumes of Bradbury short stories, which are about 1000pp each. (and i'm still only 60% of the way through the first)

I have a couple of his other anthologies, "The Vintage Bradbury", which contains "Night Meeting" as well as a couple other Martian stories, and "Golden Apples of the Sun", which doesn't overlap. I should reread those as well. I always thought the common themes running through the Martian stories always added something to that book.

Juan Ramon Riberyo - The Word of the Speechless

Rarely enjoy short story collections these days. They have a 'hit' rate which means you have to put up with stuff you are not particularly enjoying, and the trend to do a 'Complete Short Stories' (as in the case of Clarice Lispector) exacerbates this but I wanted to read this guy -- nothing else available -- and actually the hit rate is near 100% in this case (the selection from Silver is excellent) and the longer stories the better they were. Besides, he is known as a short story guy and I guess you can tell. The title makes it seem like he is writing from the POV of the downtrodden and while that is often true it isn't always the case. My favourite story is Silvio in El Rosendal where the cast of characters changes fast in this fixed land as the fortunes of the people who own it undergo their ups and downs (its a little bit reminiscent of Boccaccio and Michael Kohlhaas at times). For Smokers Only is basically his medical diary, but I love that all sorts of little tall tales are inserted into it as well, he wants to imagine as well as tell. In a couple of other shorter works I love how he can write about death, the way he freezes it as a part of life. An act as much as anything else you get to do.

I love me a Complete Short Stories BUT the book should include the stories in the order they were originally published and ideally divided into the original books they were published in. Lorrie Moore's just put them all in alphabetical order, which is disgusting savage territory.

I have Raymond Carver: Collected Stories and it's my favourite book that I own. Just dip into it randomly ever so often. Have read all the stories before but always enjoy them.

reading jrr tolkien's translation of beowulf. i know the poem well -- i've read a couple translations, one back in high school and then the seamus heaney one several years ago -- but i'm amazed how difficult this one is for me to follow. i think that's down to it being very much a literal translation, emulating the odd flow of the original sentences. it's probably also a bit unpolished because tolkien translated it for fun and doesn't seem to have ever thought of publishing it. but i'm glad i own it anyway, it's a beautifully put together book and i'm looking forward to digging into the commentary (gleaned from tolkien's own notes and lectures on beowulf).

Sounds a bit like Nabokov's startlingly unreadable version of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

P.G. Wodehouse - Week-end Wodehouse

Raced through a compilation of stories and extracts from Wodehouse's career. There are a lot of stories where the action takes place on the golf course lol but that aside it was interesting to see the (very narrow) range, and in the extracts where he is introducing a volume you see the insecurities (Wodehouse as a 'light' writer). Tha racism on one of the Jeeves extracts took me aback, it must've been so common at the time. His career of poking fun is sadly an artefact of a time when everything wasn't so on a knife-edge politically. I know we can say things are "of their time" but that absolutely applies to Wodehouse, for good or bad.

Still: James Joyce, the PORTRAIT, and David Thomson, THE BIG SCREEN.

THE BIG SCREEN becomes baffling. It has (PART I) about 250 pages of material up to about 1950, dynamically organized into chapters which intrigue and surprise.

Then it has a PART II for about 100 pages, with no chapters, covering everything from late 1940s to 1960s.

There's no apparent reason for this organizational shift. PART II could easily include chapters on SUNSET BLVD, TELEVISION, JAPAN, BERGMAN and whatever else. But it's as though DT has forgotten to insert them.

Perhaps it will all change again after PART III.

Part 3 will consist entirely of his masturbatory Nicole Kidman fantasies.

I've already read that book. It's good.

So The Power Broker was good.

I got Reaganland in the mail. I'd hoped to take a break from novelistic history.

Du Bois is good at that, along w up-front analytical considerations, also zoom lens and aerial views, stylistic flights, dropping well-aimed rocks, eggs (still reading the xpost Library of America omnibus).

Got 'Late Victorian Holocausts' from the library. One of the only Davis books I haven't read... should be working more on my actual work and school work, but alas, I'm too busy being absorbed by his prose. He really is the best and most accessible radical scholar around.

I finished Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb last night.

The main times when it dragged were the chapters devoted to the specific details of Soviet espionage. Contrary to novels, espionage in action is extremely boring and humdrum, unless you happen to be the spy, in which case it is just nerve-wracking. Thankfully, the book makes clear that the USSR would have succeeded in making nuclear weapons in any event and even the information they did get from spying all had to be carefully verified experimentally. Helpful as it was, it probably only accelerated the Soviet program by 18 to 24 months.

I was also glad to see Rhodes, the author, calling out Curtis Lemay as a dangerous warmonger, and giving just enough information about thermonuclear bombs to make their destructive capability both vivid and terrifying. Even one H-bomb exploding anywhere that's heavily populated would be a catastrophic event unparalleled in history.

However, the companion book to which this is a sequel, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is more compelling reading, in that it lends itself to a more unified and exciting narrative. It also covers a more fundamental shift in world history than the arms race and cold war covered by this book. Read it first, but read this one, too.

I read and liked the first one a couple of years back. Dark sun is on my list. Thanks.

I’m not back in the habit* of reading yet, but I’m reading The Children of Men (PD James). Had never read anything of hers before, but got this in a kindle sale or something at some point and I think I’d read something that mentions the book.

It’s quite different from the film (that’s good not bad). All the major elements are the same, but she has much more time and space to build the universe so all the bleak little atrocities that happen slowly drop in to fill in the background: the pet christenings, the destroyed playgrounds, the Quietus (which is extremely upsetting btw).

I have only been to Oxford for a few hours but you can feel the sense of place come through and it’s interesting to set it in a small dying city rather than London. (Also darkly funny that the only way Theo can get good housing in Oxford is by a cataclysmic global event).

Her prose is exactly the kind of thing I like; very spare and sharp, so I think i will continue reading. Any recommendations on where to go next are very welcome.

Have you read James Tiptree Jr.? Maybe start with novella "Slow Music," where she creeps up on and then along with the reader. It's in an exemplary collection, the aptly titled Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. If you want something British, but never science fiction, as far as I know, try Muriel Spark and Ivy Compton-Burnett.

Wow, I thought the book of ChHildren of Men was a lot of ill-thought-through bollocks. The narrator is a man born in the late 20th Century who just happens to have the waspish prejudices of someone in their 70s in 1992. Those confounded noisy Beatles and their new-fangled rock music! The film, otoh, is brilliant.

Anything I read about the making of the hydrogen bomb always reinforces my opinion that Edward Teller was a monster who should have been suffocated at birth.

A good place to be when you finish The Power Broker and turn to Reaganland.