Autumn 2020: Is Everything Getting Dimmer or Is It Just Me?

Great to hear all this Borges talk.

My gateway/first love object: The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969

Portuguese bookstore employee blogger I used to follow had a story abt someone coming in the store requesting "the ALF".

I finish Terry Eagleton's 'The Good-Natured Gael' at last. He praises Edmund Burke a bit more than I expected.

Then his essay on 'The Masochism of Thomas Moore'. Superb analysis: incredible that TE worked his way through the complete writings (and loads of criticism and scholarship) of this writer who he says at the end of the essay doesn't even stand up very well. TE's judgment of writers and their place in history is so consistently sound. But the attention to detail in these essays would be uncharacteristic of his later work.

Really enjoyed the Borges discussion, will track down 'The Aleph and Other Stories' (and I love the Labyrinths poll thread, ILB at its best)

Ward - that looks like an excellent comp. One aspect (of many) I neglected to emphasize is his love of fantastical literature (brings to mind his love of James, who seemed to be at ease with both fantasy and something more 'psychological'), something that I just don't read that much of these days. It might explain why he never won the Nobel prize too, its not their bag. Might be interesting to contrast his essay on The Detective Story with Auden's in The Dyer's Hand. For Auden iirc it seems to be something to relax with. For Borges, aspects of it appear every now and again in how he perceives the world of the page.

"I finished the collection of 2 Natalia Ginzburg novellas Valentino and Sagittarius. I thought they were pretty great. I will definitely be seeking out more of her books. It's hard to think of who to compare her to. For some reason, I thought of Collodi's Pinocchio."

Lol I love those Ginzburg novellas (read them in a past edition, one of NYRB's best reissues in the last year imo) but never thought of it along Pinocchio (which I have always meant to read ever since NYRB put out an edition of it).

NYRB are also putting out a couple more Ginzburg novellas next year.

Working through Norma Cole's "Mars" today. One of her books that isn't featured as heavily in her selected poems, I can understand why— it is strange and hermetic, in a sense, mixing prose and poetry and without standard reference points. I still find myself enjoying it, though, but as we've been discussing on the poetry thread, my tastes run pretty weird.

Sweet, that's my main thing these days, why I've gotten hooked on W.E.B. Bu Bois, who fearlessly ranges though forms, themes, data, imagery, whatever's right. New Sante book is said to do some of that as well.
Also v. interested in this, from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/21/when-a-virus-becomes-a-muse (shit title, but can see relevance in this essay):

The several dozen stories of “Written in Invisible Ink,” artfully translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman, read like schoolyard confessions carved into a desk. Surveying Guibert’s work from 1975 to 1989, the book reveals a young writer confident in his themes yet restlessly experimental in expression. Realist vignettes alternate with fairy tales, ghost stories, and descriptions of imaginary erotic machines. In one story, a knife-thrower tricks the narrator into agreeing to perform as his partner (in drag); in another, a man steals a wax head of Jeanne d’Arc. The over-all impression is that of a writer in search of shapes for his unruly energy, as though picking through limbs in an anatomist’s workshop.
...Other, more sinister stories revolve around codependent relationships.
"A streak of cruelty" also noted, along w splatters of cold obscenity, but I say this is Teentown, buddy, and I consider myself warned.

Chronologically not all from Teentown, but he seems like the perpetual adolescent for quite a while in this saga.

The fantasy anthology Borges mentioned---I've got it, read from it sometimes, not something I wanted to plow straight through, as I do with everything else:

The Book of Fantasy Hardcover---November 1, 1988
Edited by
Jorge Luis Borges
Sivina Ocampo
A. Bioy Casares
Introduction by
Ursula K. Le Guin

From Publishers Weekly
Originally conceived of by its Argentinian editors in 1937, and now published in English for the first time, this unusual and provocative volume is an omnibus collection. In addition to stories by Ballard, Poe, Saki, Max Beerbohm, Ray Bradbury, May Sinclair, de Maupassant and Julio Cortazar, there are shorter pieces, anecdotes, folkloric fragments, dreamlike moments. Most of the 79 selections are only a paragraph or two long, giving us brief passage into magical visions of the world culled from the work of an international array of authors of the past three centuries, including less well-known authors such as Santiago Dabove, Edwin Morgan and Niu Chiao. The keynote tale may well be Borges's own "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in which an imaginary world, conjured up by manufactured documentation, ends up eroding our reality: reality is malleable, and imagination necessarily subverts and alters it.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Amazon purchaser Martin Chandler says:
This collection is excellent. Along with the deservedly famous selections such as The Monkey's Paw and The Man Who Liked Dickens, there are many stories even the most erudite fantasy reader may be unacquainted with. Some of the tales, such as The Story of the Foxes by Niu Chiao and the unsettling Guilty Eyes by Ah'med Ech Chiruani, are half page at most, but will implant themselves in the memory as effectively as the longer narrations. ("Guilty Eyes" is as durable as a poison oak seed.) Also present is a fine selection of Latin American fictions, with a focus on Argentine writers. Kafka' Josephine the Singer, Cocteau's The Look of Death, and Beerbohm's Enoch Soames sound straight out of the world of Borges, a tribute to the latter writer who managed to forge a world view at once deeply personal yet universal. Borges's own Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is included as well as a piece by the under-read Casares. All in all an indispensable collection, marred only by an astonishing number of typos. Buy it! (At 92 cents it's a steal.)
Haven't spotted any typos in mine, maybe it's a later or earlier printing.

"The Aleph" probably my favorite Borges.

It's a good one.

Doesn't that particular Borges anthology contain a little passage from Ulysses episode 9, about the definition of a ghost?

(Unless that's another anthology again, about ghosts, Gothic, or something.)

New month and time to trawl through 72 pages of Kindle monthly deal... Penguin Classics ghosts stories (in fact they had a few Halloweeny things) and the big Greek myths book by Graves were the only things that caught my eye.

Currently reading, very slowly, The Man Who Laughs. Has been two days and I'm still literally on page 1 because I keep falling asleep.

TE's long essay on Cork is incredible. The erudition, the detail, the obscurity, the humour.

I get on to the Father Prout business - Cork wits, pen-names, fake plagiarism. It's Flann O'Brien 100+ years early.

Where The Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens - Reading for a book club, and certainly wouldn't be otherwise, but it's pretty good? Great description of swampland, and a sort of Robinson Crusoe tale of an abandoned girl growing up alone. Uncomfortable with the portrayal of black characters - there solely to help the protagonist, overly angelic and while all characters speak in Southern US dialects whose authenticity I am no fit judge of, the black characters in particular sound a lot like black characters in a 1940's Hollywood film.

In my teen years I once read a guide to writing better fan fiction and one piece of advice that's stuck with me is to not impose your cultural tastes on your characters. Owens does this quite a lot, with the swamp rat characters getting into Edward Lear and other poetry.

Finished Norma Cole's 'Mars,' then finished Sophia Dahlin's 'Natch.' She's a young queer poet with a lot of talent, this book is hopefully a promise of many more good things to come...it is sensual, weird, and resistant toward any expectations. Great book, out from City Lights.

Now I'm onto 'October,' my first Mieville book. I'm excited so far...I think I've read more of the theory and speeches of Russian Revolutionary leaders than a history, and it's promising to deliver those lessons in a somewhat entertaining manner.

The only Mievelle I've read is The City and The City, a richly imagined and developmental urban and urban (alternating, hey it's cultural buddy, don't judge)thriller, also implicit satire (and homage, seems like, though I won't drop any names), very entertaining, though with a few moments of accidental comedy (the best kind), a few wobblers along the way, but well-worth a read if you end up liking October pretty well, and it does sound promising, his kind of material.

I have been reading Susanna Clarke's new novel Piranesi (I keep wanting to write Pirandello). I am in the second part, and so far everything remains very mysterious. Shades of Borges's "House of Asterion," perhaps also Wittgenstein's Mistress although I may be just thinking of the latter because I tried (and failed) to reread it earlier in lockdown.

going back to butler's wild seed, the ending of which i gave up on last year because i could tell it was gonna be depressing. but after having read two sebald novels i feel like i can handle it now.

Yes, I want to read Clarke's new one, and her others too, intriguing article about her life and works in recent New Yorker.
Butler is amazing, not that much like any other writer, in range, combination of elements, presentations. Doesn't always seem to work, at least expectations-wise, but yeah, worth going back in.
xxpost Natch sounds good, and as I said in response to your original description of Norma Cole's Mars, Sweet, that's my main thing these days, why I've gotten hooked on W.E.B. Bu Bois, who fearlessly ranges though forms, themes, data, imagery, whatever's right.----in the same vein, I've just finished my first reading of Homeland Elegies, by Ayad Akhtar, with a brief, incisive quote of De B. therein, and also ranges through various forms, themes, storylines, jumping back and forth, usually with good timing. He's mostly a playwright by trade, the kind who sits in the audience at many performances, and he's learned about attention spans.
The playwright skills bring fiction, memoir, essay through many voices within monologue---as with Dylan, this Pultizer Prize-winning creator->narrator drives fast cars, eats fast foods, contains multitudes, although his spill out, and at least for a while in here he'd rather take limos and eat and especially drink, also fuck, richly beyond dreeems---when he's traveling with a fan and mentor, a fellow Pakistani-American who has become a billionaire of debt.
This guy, who is also a or maybe the central character in one of Akhbar's plays, where he is deliberately presented in an ambiguous way, resulting in some confused responses, in reviews and post-performance Q&A: such confusion, among Muslims and non-Muslims, to this play and some (not all) others, is a big part of why this book is being written, this explanation given, says the narrator: it's all How We (Pakistani and American and others who are tagged as "Arab," among other things, who are natives, immigrants, sons and daughters of the pioneers, going back and forth and/or through one homeland and/or another when "homeland" is becoming and long since has become a common word) Got and Are Getting This Way. With a lot of dirty laundry aired, which some from the narrator's "background" find exhilarating---he's saying what they feel they can't say---others find it disconcerting for the same reason, or distorted in expression.
I haven't seen or read the plays, but having all this performed and extended on the page, through a fairly long, unpadded book, does give the individual audience member time and space to absorb, beyond the limits of stage performance, no matter how well-timed that may be. I do think that here, the billionaire of debt, still deliberately ambiguous, is also blurry, and mainly a subplot device, although it's a good subplot, and one that teaches the narrator things (De Niro: "I hear *things*") about himself and others. Although this also has to do with what I so far find to be the most limiting aspect of the essay/lecture turns, in what the Pakistani-American Citizen King of Debt (and another, better character, a Black Republican Billionaire who considers himself to be secretly gaming the System built on exploitation, expropriation and exclusion of the Other, thus confusing even the narrator), both of these legends in their own minds lecture the narrator, as he does us elsewhere, in terms which he finds revelatory, but I, probably like you and many of the author-narrator's fellow financial-political laymen will, find all of it---familiar, as far as it goes.
Still, he's a hell of a storyteller, yarnspinner, occasionally too gimmicky, even annoyingly so---yes you're a fascinating child, now run and get you parents, your other relatives back, now there are some characters omg
I think that if any of you think you might like this at all, you probably will.

WE also incl. non-"ethnic," also part of where the narrator is coming from, as an American-born son of medical professional immigrants, himself well-educated, nurtured in a leafy suburb of Milwaukee, one of the more traditionally liberal-to-grassroots-left parts of Wisconsin (though his father, secular and exasperated with Muslims who he sees as using the obvious downside of the System as an excuse, is also, has a secret life as a high roller, and for a while in the 90s, is a specialist called in to treat Trump---this professional-personal relationship is all in the first chapter though, mercifully enough).

non-"ethnic" also in that he grew up not wanting to see himself as so, like, brown in the kid mirror.

I didn’t like october. Surprisingly light on analysis and context until the epilogue. Really just: “and then what happened was...” for hundreds of pages. City and the city is great.

many xposts: i didnt know Clarke had a new book out, i will have to read that. I loved Jonathan Strange et al

I finished Toop's Ocean of Sound. It's brilliant albeit the further I got with it, I was surprised at an almost total lack of crisis in the text. Instead, it functions as a kind of gazetteer for a particular mode of exploring sound. It has led me back to a whole bunch of stuff: Pauline Oliveros, Morton Feldman, Thomas Koner.

Now reading Kay Jamison's Unquiet Mind.

That's a good one. What do you mean by "crisis"? A kind of gazeteer is what I expected. You mean not exploring tensions within and between musics, incl not enough saying "he fucks up here, but this part is better"? Which is what I always want.

Caek, not far in enough to agree with you, but I've read enough analysis of what happened...so the sort of 'and then what happened' historical side of it is appealing to me. He's also clearly a great stylist.

Mike Davis books can sometimes do the same thing that you're ascribing to October, and I love Davis.

Yeah I think it just wasn’t what I was looking for. Agreed he’s a good stylist. But I would put like Davis on another level of non fiction to october (haven’t read his new one yet)

Haven't read Davis' new one either. Already read Prisoners of the American Dream and Late Victorian Holocausts this year, so going to wait a minute before I get the new one. Late Victorian Holocausts did me in, it's the bleakest book I've ever read tbh

I have to give it up for just one more Homeland Elegies character: Asha, who is serially involved long-term with a crazy white guy, but the narrator is her sidepiece/has a relationship with her. She is complex, also complicated, but never scatterbrained: "I'm a lawyer, I can pick it apart," she says of the situation with her fortune teller: she's well aware of the angles, levels, shell games, all sides of the board, but the teller's told it right enough, often enough, including that she will meet someone with certain traits, and the narrator fills the bill, in her estimate--so, whatever the percentages of "suggestibility and coincidence," the process as a whole feels right so far.
That's just one example, and she affects the narrator in several important ways, more than he affects her, I think, and then she's on her way, no more downlow with him. I miss her.

In reply to a post a bit upthread:

I also read Where the Crawdads Sing for a book club, and was very much not a fan of the way she wrote the black characters, or of the way she uses accent to signal morality, so that the "bad" characters all speak in heavy hick accents regardless of their social status or level of education, while the "good" characters - including our entirely self-educated protagonist - sound like they're on NPR. The abusive dad has the heaviest accent/dialect, the unscrupulous rich kid has the second-heaviest, while the pure-hearted poor kid, the protagonist, and the protagonist's brother all speak standard English.

Huh, I hadn't noticed that, will look out for it. There's definitley a striver impulse in there, with the whole "ain't isn't a word" thing.

In response to your question, dow, it wasn't a criticism so much as an observation - that a book so concerned with the crossing of cultural and sonic boundaries doesn't discuss appropriation at any great depth. It is implied in the text, of course, and his open almost aphoristic style encourages conversation and engagement anyway.

No, I didn't take it as a complaint, but the xpost gazetteer approach can leave out a lot, you're right---good to know his style encourages response, not the lulling tourist ride etc. I haven't read it; my "That's a good one" was for Kay Redfield Jamison's remarkable An Unquiet Mind, a memoir in which (among other things, she doesn't have a one-track unquiet mind) the author outs herself as an example mentioned from case studies in Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression (there's a 2nd Edition, at least), which she wrote with Frederick K. Goodwin: massive and lucid, for laymen and professionals---pricey but worth it, I'm told, and second-hand copies online aren't rare (for whatever reasons).

Also wrote a book-length study of Robert Lowell, don't think I'm ready for that one.

I'm around 50 pages into An Unquiet Mind and so far it feels quite gentle - with intimations of the horror that is to come. She's painfully honest and clear-eyed and obviously focused on education. I've got a good medical library at my local university; I'll look those other texts up for sure.

Robert Lowell is the most overrated poet of the past 150 years, anyone who wrote a book-length tome on him and his work cannot be trusted afaic.

Maybe that's what she says?

I've looked at it a little bit: seems to be mostly examining, from extant evidence, incl. medical, and maybe police records/news coverage as well, also prob what Stafford and others wrote from experience, his bipolarity, and how it was treated, and how it may have affected his writing. Not a valentine.

I like Robert Lowell, but not sure there's any point in arguing about it.

Speaking of Lowell, I recently finished The Mountain Lion, Jean Stafford and found it very fine. It is an oddment, in that it manages to smoothly combine a highly realistic and 'naturalistic' tone, while including a main character whose morbid eccentricity seems to challenge the very idea of what should be considered 'natural'. Yet, it all works and delivers on a level rarely touched so gracefully.

I also read the first Inspector Maigret novel by Georges Simenon, Pietr the Latvian, which had already achieved at least 90% of the fully-realized and mature Maigret series.

I like Robert Lowell, but not sure there's any point in arguing about it.

― o. nate, Tuesday, October 6, 2020 8:12 PM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

There's plenty of a point in arguing about it, since his racist, privileged bullshit continues to get a front seat from publishers and critics in this country. His work, along with others, continues to be pushed as a paragon of excellence when poetry as a whole has become more experimental AND inclusive, challenging ideas of the materiality of language and representation. On top of that, HIS POETRY SUCKS. It simply isn't very good, for the most part.

Don't get me started on Lowell and the confessionals.

Like, the connections between Lowell and CIA fronts are documented. His advocacy for a personal, confessional poetry opposed to the more political and anti-imperial poetry of groups like the Beats and those in the SF Renaissance is clear. He was a hawk and advocated for anti-communist ventures at home and abroad.

That racist, conservative trash like Lowell is remembered fondly, but poets like Baraka continue to be raked over the coals for various inflammatory statements is just one example of a wild double standard being applied when it comes to the political orientation of poets and poetry.

Robert Lowell is the most overrated poet of the past 150 years, anyone who wrote a book-length tome on him and his work cannot be trusted afaic.

― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table)

OTM. Lord, have I tried.

Every ten years a new edition or bio or something will emerge, but I get the sense Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill have (at last!) properly eclipsed Lowell.

I mean Bishop is only slightly better, IMHO, and I find Merrill to be utter pablum, but the latter is more about pure aesthetics and not about the manner in which aesthetics have been weaponized by the US government to nefarious ends.

Hard disagree! I find Merrill a total delight, especially now that I'm older and enjoy the complexity with which his mastery of meter and rhyme and rhythm complicated the relationships he limned.

Welp I like some of Lowell's poetry, in various modes, and always try not to let personal assholery get in the way of the song of the singer, the message of the bringer. Pound's remix of "The Waste Land" is still a keeper, at least as an antique template.; some of his St. Elizabeth's poens as well.
Jamison's book also seems to be a critque of Lowell's psychiatric treatment over the decades, a case as historical tracking device, as in Sylvia Nassar's A Beautiful Mind, which is a v. multi-dimensional life-and-times, much moreso than the movie duh

Certain poets -- Gluck, Jorie Graham, Lowell too -- I can only read their early work before their manner hardened.

Yeah, that's Eliot for me.
The St. E poems can be pretty affecting, as w some of Lowell's own selectivity, past the assholery for a moment.

G K Chesterton - Robert Browning

I finished this short biography/critical appraisal by Chesterton and I very much enjoyed following his logic as he not only deal with Browning's life and work, but also his critics. At times it was a counterpart (of sorts) to what Janet Malcolm was doing to Sylvia Plath's many biographers.

I broke down and started a new WAYR thread:

Winter 2021: ...and you're reading WHAT?!

only post to it if it's 2021 in ur time zone please folks

I finished Lethem's THE ARREST.

It ends with quite a large climax, which rearranges key items and characters of the novel in a quite a vividly schematic and spatial way.

It may leave some loose ends and unexplained story elements.

I finished Dissipatio H.G.. It belongs to that special pantheon of books that were finished shortly before the author committed suicide (cf. Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday). It's hard to read a book like that without looking for clues to the author's pathology. This books offers plenty of suggestive clues if that's what you're looking for. I don't want to completely conflate the author with the narrator, there are some obvious differences, such as their age, but also plenty of overlap. Both seem to be very well read, moderately-antisocial autodidacts, who live by choice in a remote mountain village, dislike cities, and distrust the bien pensant intellectual currents of their day. The book is short but chock full of obscure allusions. I was halfway through before I realized there were end notes, which helped quite a bit. The title is illustrative, in that it is putatively drawn from a Latin letter written by an obscure Neoplatonist philosopher. The philosopher is real, although the letter itself may have been a little joke of the author's. It seems that many of these little jokes were intended for a very select audience, possibly including only the author himself. I guess that fits with the book's imagined scenario, but can make for frustrating reading, if that's not your sort of thing. Now, I'm reading The A26 by Pascal Garnier.