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

I finished Pale Horse, Pale Rider last night. All three of the stories were fine pieces of work, but the final one from which the book takes its title was pretty goddamned amazing!

James, as my wife uses the term empath, it seems to apply to people whose empathy for the feelings of others rises to a level where it consistently interferes with their ability to stay grounded in their own feelings and not become overloaded with trying to soothe everyone else's fears, anxieties, griefs or worries. They have a hard time understanding and maintaining personal boundaries.

G.K. Chesterton - The Best of Father Brown
Adelbert Von Chamisso - Peter Schlemihl

Following on from Borges earlier in the month I went onto read these sets of fantastical-type tales. Think I'll get another selection of Father Borwn, lots I quite liked even if I couldn't keep the stories going in my head. Detective Fiction is just a very different mode for me.

I finished Pale Horse, Pale Rider last night. All three of the stories were fine pieces of work, but the final one from which the book takes its title was pretty goddamned amazing!

James, as my wife uses the term empath, it seems to apply to people whose empathy for the feelings of others rises to a level where it consistently interferes with their ability to stay grounded in their own feelings and not become overloaded with trying to soothe everyone else's fears, anxieties, griefs or worries. They have a hard time understanding and maintaining personal boundaries.

― the unappreciated charisma of cows (Aimless),

She's fantastic, Porter is. I reread the title story at the start of the pandemic. Her Collected Stories is one of my touchstones.t

Ah, thanks, aimless, that makes sense.

Began The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins last night. Back on my non-fiction as a result-- engaging writing about a geopolitical moment of which I only know the basics.

I finished TE's essay on Cork and went on to his essay 'Home & Away'.

The level of obscure reading and learning in these two essays is staggering.

I meant it pretty close to the SF sense that James first mentioned: her narration tends to omniscience, but in a goood way--come along if you can, and you probably can (emotions don't interfere with narrative drive through layers of clarity, not in any stories I've read)(haven't checked the novel).

And speaking of clarity, Aimless, I meant "punk" in the attitudinal sense associated with a tag first applied, often as a compliment, by rock music writers to certain acts, especially bands, or groups, in the 1970s. Not in the older sense(s), such as most if not all definitions of "gunsel."

Sorry, too much coffee this morning, too much time with words this weekend (lost in productivity, now there's a word).

As of last night I am officially reading one of Dawn Powell's earliest novels, Dance Night, published in 1930. It has introduced so many different characters in the first few dozen pages that it seems destined to be a 'portrait of a small town' novel, rather than tracking a couple of main characters through their personal trials.

Nothing wrong with that, as long as I can actively keep all the names attached to the correct storylines in my memory. If I let several nights elapse between readings that can become unduly burdensome.

Phil Dellio, You Should've Heard Just What I Seen
L.C. Rosen, Camp
Sasha Geffen, Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary

i started the alex ross wagner book yesterday, had a discussion about it with my boyfriend last night that has sapped my enthusiasm about the subject and now i don't feel like going back to it. part of the issue is that while ross picks out details that feel immediate / relevant to now, i find the survey approach to be a little bland and the bits of his own thesis that have emerged so far are too general to be of interest to me. plus wagner himself does seem like a particularly vile and unlikable person with a bloated ego. on the other hand that can make for juicy reading...

i remembered a book that my ex had, the front runner, a big hit in the 70s about a track coach (ex marine naturally) and his love affair with one of his student athletes. not on kindle, unfortunately. said ex had this carefully curated collection of "power gay" books that he never read. i wouldn't mind breezing through something pulpy in that vein.

Is Alex Ross Wagner different from Alex Ross? Or a half brother fathered by RJ Wagner when he wasn't with Natalie Wood.

both are true, if you would like them to be. namaeste

Ann Quin - The Unmapped Country (Stories & Fragments)

Ripped through this in a day. A collection of never finished (she died by drowning), or stories that were in archives (sometimes personal ones, so its a great piece of labour by editor Jennfer Hodgson to track this stuff down). The title piece was shaping up to be an excellent novel set in a mental institution, with some juicy sketches with the therapist, fellow inmates and the like. Motherlogue is just as the title implies, and the other great piece is Nude and Seascape, which is a little bit like Mishima's Patriotism. This violent act which is carried out, a simple description of its physicality and sorta left there for you to go over. Its probably worth it for that piece alone.

Because I'm overdue for a Trollope novel, I started Barchester Towers yesterday. I usually read one of his every 15 months.

Absolutely loving "Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor" - it's exactly what I was looking for, which is a continuation of Love Goes to Buildings On Fire with a focus on rap, graffiti, art, etc.

xp I love Trollope, as you can probably tell from my username. Barchester Towers is probably the Barsetshire book I've spent the least amount of time with, but I love that whole series so much.

The Palliser series, which I finished over a couple years, brought great pleasure during Obama's presidency.

PBKR, if you didn't see my exclamations about that book and related on prev. WAYR?, there's a listening companion of the same title, released last year, put together by TL, who also therein comments on the tracks re New York Dance Floor historical context. Good related reading and listening can be found in the slipcase of The World of Keith Haring, also 2019, and released by Soul Jazz Records in time for a UK Haring exhibit.

You can also listen to (and order) the author's whole comp here, but his booklet isn't posted, oh well: https://reappearingrecords.bandcamp.com/album/life-death-on-a-new-york-dance-floor-1980-1983

Yes, thank you, I did on the Keith Haring thread where, I think, you and table is the table mentioned this book which is why I bought it. I've been listening to a playlist that has many of those tracks and more.

I read that book right after the Ghost Ship fire where I lost a bunch of people. It was a harrowing yet beautiful read for me, felt like therapy.

I know it delves into the early aids epidemic so I imagine things will get tough.

Have temporarily shelved Children of Men because I’m not reading that much atm and when I’m reading, it’s mostly the Invisibles ( see the comics board). It being October, I dipped into The Stepford Wives again and it’s so great, still! Moves along without a pause for breath or an inch of waste. I think I prefer the film’s ending for sheer creepy, but that’s my only criticism.

Last night at last I finished Terry Eagleton's long essay 'Home & Away', on the Irish novel.

I think this means that after many years, I have read the whole of his dense, detailed book CRAZY JOHN & THE BISHOP (1998).

I can no longer really remember whether I finished the long title essay, which is about Medieval theology. I think I did - long ago.

This is a remarkable book, so unlike much of TE's work in its extraordinary attention to obscure literary and scholarly details that most people don't know.

I have moved on to reread Elizabeth Bowen: THE LAST SEPTEMBER (1929).

jeez, I still need to get to her novels; The Collected Stories is catnip doorstop.

70pp into rereading THE LAST SEPTEMBER, I observe (perhaps again):

1: quality of the style - often surprising, estranging, perverse.

2: how pervasive the politics are - the sense of Ireland as an increasingly dangerous place is constant. Maybe it's 'background' yet so insistent as almost to be foreground.

3: the tartness of the social comedy - the way that, say, Livvy's sentiment about soldier beaux is disdained by Lois. Bowen doesn't really hold back on this. As with the politics, she goes for it more fully than I might have recalled.

The book maybe involves a certain structural irony, ie: 'silly comedy of country house manners' (unsure who would be the exemplar of this) is played out yet surrounded, threatened, undermined by really serious geopolitical / colonial struggle.

Saying that, though, I'm also mindful that a great many comedies of manners probably have something similar going on, ie: a sense of turbulent politics going on just beyond the walls, that relativise their perhaps trivial personal concerns. And eg: Virginia Woolf indulges in such upper-class silliness while also disdaining and satirising it. This combination of tones, from the comedy of manners to things that lie beyond its ken, seems the primary way that Bowen follows Woolf.

Several striking stories in and involving Ireland, especially the more priveleged Anglo-Irish ways of life(have read that one reason for so much writing, and some public speaking, I think, was for retention and upkeep of the ancestral property that she sprung from).
One involves a son of the lace curtain soil back for a visit from WWII London, the connection with which complicates how he now sees and is seen by these lofty social inverts even more; also there's now a girl, whom I think he only recalls as a small child, who wants to get out of this place, and he's wary as ever, kind of sympathetic in principle, but she seems like she might be as manipulative in her own way as the older people.
Another one is a kind of ghost story, seems like, in a vanishing way:I read it several times in a row, was more satisfied than frustrated by indeterminacy/indecision.
Think a lot of times, maybe always, she delves into "omniscient" narration as something that changes and is changed by and how and what and whom it regards.

privileged, sorry (also privillaged, in her A-I settings).

'by it regards"? Well yeah, changing.

i finished sisters by daisy johnson. a bit like early (good imo!) mcewan.

song of achilles by madeline miller. a modern prose novelization of the odyssey, which i read in an attempt to fill in the huge gap in my knowledge of the classics. very readable, certainly a ripping yarn, and now i know what people are talking about. if anyone can suggest anything else like this (prose, not poetry) then please do!

lanny by max porter. excellent. nominally literary horror i guess, but i read it for the Real England content.

having and being had by eula biss. i LOVED on immunity, and i smashed that hold button on the library website when i heard that the new one was about capitalism. but it's extremely slight, and really leans into the auto-non-fiction thing that on immunity hinted at, i.e. too many quotes and not enough interconnecting tissue.

i have now read (mostly listened to) 73 books this year.

Song of Achilles has got me excited to read more Greek myth based stuff. And there seems to be quite a bit about, mostly written by women, of the myths from a female perspective.

Penelopiad by m attwood
A thousand ships by Natalie Haynes
The silence of the girls by pat Barker
Circe by mm again
(There's a whole series of modernised YA retellings of the Odyssey by some bloke I can't remember the name of. Percy?)
And Stephen Fry's just-out third book of myths focuses on the Illiad.

Those are all Homeric stuff, and Natalie has also written the children of Jocasta which touches on Oedipus.

couple of other things. Natalie has a book out this year called Pandora's Jar, which is a long essay about how the myths have been treated over the years, specifically on how all the women have been mistreated

and this is natalie doing her trot through the illiad
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000d7p2
there are 6? series of these, i've listened to them all twice.

she's ex-standup comedian and did classics at cambridge so knows her stuff and how to present it

oh, Percy Jackson.

I haven't read much Jeanette Winterson, but in that vein I remember her "Weight", retelling the Atlas myth, was really good.

I got Pandora's Jar for my birthday, have yet to crack it open. Also a biography of Toussaint Louverture.

Just finished Our Spoons came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns and The Thing around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, very different but both eye-opening about female experience. I read Our Spoons came from Woolworths in about two hours since it's written in such a simple, almost child-like style, and because I wanted to rush past the increasingly horrific events as quickly as possible. It's set between the wars and the chapter about childbirth - shudders. The Thing around Your Neck is short stories about Nigerian or Nigerian-American women, and Adichie is a highly gifted storyteller.

I reread Carter Scholz's story 'The Amount to Carry'. Good conceit but now seems a bit heavy-handed, 2nd or 3rd time round.

I also reread some polemical prose by Mina Loy.

Over halfway through THE LAST SEPTEMBER: like many books it appeals more to me as it goes on. I like the character Marda who turns up 1/3 through. Again the sense of light satirical comedy is quite strong, alongside more serious elements. Which I suppose makes it an odd combination of tones.

ledge thank you!

(and of course song of achilles is a retelling of the illiad, not the odyssey, my bad)

Mary Renault's novels involving ancient Greeks are all historical, far as I know, but she can get way the hell back in there, like The Mask of Apollo.
If you did admit poetry, verses from Alice Oswald's Memorial: A Version of Homer's Illiad are looking pretty damn good to me in the August 24 New Yorker essay om her. Also what I've read from Anne Carson's translations of Sappho.

Mary Renault's novels involving ancient Greeks are all historical

The ones I've read are pretty good, but the amount of verifiable history that exists, upon which she builds her novels, is fairly scanty, thus requiring a fair amount of extra window dressing to fill them out. An alternative suggestion, equally historically-based and well-imagined, but less inclined to romanticing, would be Gore Vidal's Creation.

But for my money, if you want to know classics, read classics. Many of them are surprisingly ripping yarns. That's why they've survived so long. Only some of them are poetry.

I could wax on about quite a few page-turners, if anyone wants to hear.

i'll accept specific translations too! (i'll be listening to them as audiobooks if that makes a difference)

or Julian!

ledge thank you!

credit where it's due, i think you meant koogs!

ah yes! i do not recommend having kids during a pandemic. not good for sleep.

I have no idea which classics are available as audiobooks, how well done they are, or what listening to, say, Arrian's History of Alexander would feel like in terms of following the thread. Can't help you there.

One obstacle to absorbing an audio version of ancient history that I can think of right away is that all the place names are unfamiliar, since almost all of them have changed since ancient times. With a printed book you can flip to the handy map and figure out, for example, where the hell Bithynia is before continuing. I find it helps a lot.

my general rubric for audiobooks is: anything particularly poetic doesn't shine (although it's not necessarily a problem if it's read well), and i need a paper copy to make sense of anything with maps. (e.g. i'm going to do read "guns of august" soon, now that my $4 copy of that has arrived from thrift books.)

The ones I've read are pretty good, but the amount of verifiable history that exists, upon which she builds her novels, is fairly scanty, thus requiring a fair amount of extra window dressing to fill them out. Yeah, that's what I was thinking of with she can get way the hell back in there: she can turn the mists of history to creative advantage, I think, for instance, in The Mask of Apollo, life and works and times of an actor. All of hers are famous for gayness, which I guess was more library-acceptable/overlookable because of classy creative window treatment historicity.

Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian is accurately titled - a fictionalised memoir, definitely not a ripping yarn - but hugely impressive all the same.

There's also Lavinia, by Ursula Le Guin, though I have to admit I didn't get very far in it as I found the style irritating. (Mostly I like Le Guin; this book just didn't do it for me.)

And Rosemary Sutcliff is brilliant, though her books are mostly YA, mostly about Roman Britain, so not retellings of the classics, and mostly about men. The Lantern Bearers is her masterpiece, I think.

Last night I finished Dance Night, Dawn Powell. Apparently, later in life she was heard to say it was the best among her novels. Authors are not the most reliable judge of such matters. It was hobbled by the limitations of her characters, which is really to say the limitations she placed on her conception of them, I'm guessing it was because they were based on real people she knew and she didn't sufficiently break free of the originals.

I'm pretty sure they were true portraits of the sorts of small town people she knew growing up, but in the end they couldn't uphold the amount of scrutiny she focused on them by putting them in a novel. They were rather small, most of them, and the one character who most repaid careful attention, the mother who owned the millinery shop, was left hanging as rather a cypher.

Powell did much better work later.