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

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.

Circe was fun but ultimately not that satisfying for me. I did think it was interesting how there was essentially no character development, which I think was a choice to stay in line with Homer.

I finished Marrow and Bone, a nicely understated story about the fundamental hollowness of travel, the easy camaraderie that can form between traveling companions, which dissolves just as easily at journey's end, the pathos of missed connections, the meaning that inheres in a place, and what remains of the past. Now I'm reading a collection of William Faulkner short stories, which was recommended on this board as perhaps a less daunting way to approach the formidable oeuvre. Clearly Faulkner knows how to write a story, but there's something slightly clinical or field study-ish about the contrast between the elevated form and the lowly characters which I don't fully enjoy. Pity is an essential element of tragedy, but I think too often the characters lack the heroic element that would raise their sad stories to the level of tragedy. At least at this point I think I still prefer Flannery O'Connor's style of Southern Gothic, maybe its the mad fundamentalist fervor that lends her characters a slightly more heroic cast.

I absolutely love Faulkner. Even at his grimmest he can be absolutely lol funny.

I still dream of a ten episode prestige HBO version of As I Lay Dying. Social media would go nuts with that ending. That was my first Faulkner and still possibly my favorite.

There was a big film of it only a few years ago!

Directed by James Franco and starring Danny McBride! Holy shit! This can't be good. Also, how do you do that book in 2 hrs?

Yeah, ugh. My Mom used to show her classes a VHS of "Barn Burning," with Tommy Lee Jones as Flem Snopes, prob still worth a look on the 'Tube or wherever. Think it was from the old PBS series called something close to American Short Stories; like another one they watched, "A Rose For Emily," which is one of the selections that seemed less effective in The Portable William Faulkner, having to precede and follow some v. strong acts. That's a good doorstop even if you know some of the material: for one thing, it puts stories and chapters from the Saga in chronological order, from the early 1800s (incl. Indians calmly tracking their black runaway slave) to the early 1950s. I think the edition I read was expanded a bit, but no filler (which he admitted he did write, paying bills etc.)

Well there are a couple more weak spots, maybe too slick, too impulsive, but it must be hard, also nice, when you know whichever they will publish anything with your name on it.

But even that stuff has his voice, of course.

I was in a play adaptation of a number of Faulkner's stories when I was a freshman in college. It was some student's senior project, and wasn't terribly good, but I do remember re-reading TSatF and AILD and enjoying myself much more than I did when I read them in high school.

Still working on 'The Jakarta Method,' which remains just unbelievably brutal history to be honest.

In the meantime, tho, I've also read Amandine André's 'Some Thing' chapbook, which was translated from the French by a friend of mine, and it is really stunning stuff. Blanchot meets Bachmann meets the Montreal feminists. Also re-read Barbara Guest's 'The Türler Losses,' her weirdest book, and enjoyed myself immensely.

I mean AILD is hysterical. SPOILERS, but there are multiple scenes that play out like a teen sex or gross-out comedy (Dewey Dell trying to get the abortion, them setting Cash's leg with fucking cement, come to mind). In addition they are absolutely horrifying and tragic as well. Then the story literally ends on a (gut) punchline. As a humorist, Faulkner was an SOB.

I read Dhanveer Brar's monograph on Dean Blunt. It casts Blunt (primarily through a listening to '“BBF” Hosted by DJ Escrow') as an avatar of dissent, a continuation of various voices, from Beefy (from Babylon), through Kwesi to AR Kane. It sent me back to the music, as all good music writing should.

Now reading Roadside Picnic. It might just be the translation but as much as I love the premise, the hardbitten noir of the narrative voice is leaving me a little cold.

That should have said that Brar places Blunt's work as part a continuum, critiquing Britishness and the exclusion of certain voices.