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

I've started reading: B.S. Johnson, CAN I COME IN AND TALK ABOUT THESE AND OTHER IDEAS?

It's a slim collection of facsimiles of his proposals that weren't used by the BBC and publishers.

If you like BSJ, you might enjoy it.

It includes, in mildly Half Pint Press fashion, a postcard which is also a fascimile of something that BSJ wrote.

http://texteundtone.com/

I have various BS Johnson things around the house, none of which I've read. I need to sort that. Is the Coe biography the/a place to start?

I finished Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (first book I've actually finished in about six weeks). It was lurid and ugly and sad: so many shattered lives, so much bullshit.

As I'm listening to so much ambient stuff at the moment, I've picked up David Toop's Ocean of Sound again. Three pages of reading and I was sucked right back in. I need to read some of his later books.

Biskind is as much a misogynist as the directors he reveres.

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

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

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

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

How's Riddley Walker going, caek?

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

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

Diarmid Ferriter: A NATION NOT A RABBLE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you heard about her husband?

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

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

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

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

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

It continues in that vein for another paragraph.

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

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

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

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

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

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