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

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.

Peckinpah directed Porter's "Noon Wine"

Wow, forgot about the series he did that for, after the heyday of anthology TV (the later series that Mom got those Faulkners from was on PBS, mostly or all in the 80s, I think):
Five years after the final broadcast of CBS’ Playhouse 90 symbolically signaled the end of the “golden age of television,” ABC-TV announced plans for an ambitious new anthology, Stage 67, with an eclectic single-season slate of twenty-six programs across genres.
promising description---now I think I'm remembering an image from it---the original AMC sometimes showed prestige items from 50s-60s TV, so maybe I saw it there:
https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/2013-03-23/abc-stage-67-noon-wine-abc-112366-human-voice-abc-5467
Getting more strictly thread-relevant, I intend to soon read at least some of Porter's Collected Stories.

Oops, Tommy Lee Jones, played Ab, not Flem, sorry. This is the series, also incl. Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall." (I remember several of these, like "The Blue Hotel" and "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" and "Paul's Case" and "I'm a Fool," but must have flushed all memories of Henry Fonda in so many of these, jeez, never did like him much in anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Short_Story

incl. Indians calmly tracking their black runaway slave

That story is in the collection I'm reading. It's a ripsnorting tale, I could imagine it directed by Quentin Tarantino, though I'm not sure even he would have the balls to tempt the gods of cancel culture that much. Faulkner's depictions of native Americans tend to border on caricature, but I guess that was not unusual for the time.

recently finished The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. the immediately striking things about it are the futurist Thai and bioengineered setting, which is by far the biggest success of the book:

Around him, the market soi bustles with Bangkok’s morning shoppers. Mounds of durians fill the alley in reeking piles and water tubs splash with snakehead fish and red-fin plaa. Overhead, palm-oil polymer tarps sag under the blast furnace heat of the tropic sun, shading the market with hand-painted images of clipper ship trading companies and the face of the revered Child Queen. A man jostles past, holding vermilion-combed chickens high as they flap and squawk outrage on their way to slaughter, and women in brightly colored pha sin bargain and smile with the vendors, driving down the price of pirated U-Tex rice and new-variant tomatoes.

i got somewhat bored about half way through, and when i started thinking about putting my thoughts down here, that was going to be my takeaway; it struggles with propulsion. this got me thinking about one of the propulsive elements of some science-fiction, which is to say the mechanics behind unfamiliar language, images and behaviour get revealed through the course of the book. that never really happens here, there are all sorts of phenomena left unexplained. equally, any plot there is never really coheres as such.

and herein lies something of its... interest? charm? basically the story is one of several quite differently motivated, historied and not unequivocally sympathetic characters, within a city and state zone, beyond and within whose boundaries is looming destructive threat. That threat - effectively of non-state agrifood industrial actors – has many vectors. Characters are all making plans, which never come to fruition, actions are regularly made on the basis of error or misinterpreted information, nothing tends towards any form of completion, and the scenes of coup and urban collapse, are the natural completion of a set of hidden

i don't think this is always enormously *good* or entirely satisfactory as such, but it is interesting, and it's interesting also to read how the author really struggled with direction, themes, closure, arc etc - all that is fairly evident - I'm pretty certain it was the ultimate source of my boredom and sense of lack of movement and shape - but it does result in a quite unusual book.

So once I sat down to think about it, i ended up being rather more intrigued and satisfied by my reading of it than i necessarily was when I put the book down.

Have you read Mieville's The City and The City? Some stumbles, but a good-faith urban and urban interzone multi-cultural thriller/procedural (doesn't let the conceptually layered settings or the plot get in each other's way, or not too much).

For the most part, they advance each other.

I finished Jenny Offill's hilarious Lydia Davis-indebted Dept. of Speculation. I started my first Stefan Zweig, Burning Secret.

I auditioned a few moderately demanding books to see if they met my mood, but it turns out my mood is for something utterly plain, neutral and emotionally undemanding. Therefore I'll be reading Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America, Michael Ruhlman.

xp I think that was my first Zweig as well (it leads the collection of his novellas published a few years ago), and if I'm not mistaken I devoured it in a single sitting -- though I didn't exactly love it, and I have trouble recalling anything at all about it now beyond a vague sense of the setting.

On the other hand, Chess Story -- which I approached somewhat warily, not being a chess player -- haunts me.

Was somewhat lit up last night and got deeply into the first few sections of Jean-Luc Nancy's 'Being Singular Plural.'

Have you read Mieville's _The City and The City_? Some stumbles, but a good-faith urban and urban interzone multi-cultural thriller/procedural (doesn't let the conceptually layered settings or the plot get in each other's way, or not too much).

I met him once. He said he didn't like THE DARK KNIGHT because it endorsed a fascist Batman.

He hadn't actually seen the film.

I didn't really like The City and The City when I read it, but it's grown in my imagination. I love the concept. Perdido Street Station is immense.

I loved the Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic. It was all about the concept for me but the last 80 pages or so were finely written and constructed. I wanted more of the Zone (which is clearly part of the point: it is a motor of pure Desire after all).

I've started a collection of Nina Coltart's essays on psychoanalysis.

If you have the inclination, Fizzles, I'm intrigued by the idea of Miéville not 'listening to anything he says'...

75% through THE LAST SEPTEMBER. Much that's compelling about this novel, even as it dallies so blatantly in frivolity (that is, country-house manners and trivial upper-class talk).

I come back to the fact that the novel seems to hold together (or hold apart) two things: the frivolous or decadent social world (even whirl), and the menace of the War of Independence. It keeps both in mind throughout, even though most of the time it's only the former wondering about the latter. I suppose I'm impressed by a novel that can do the frivolity so naturally, while also being, in a way, politically and historically serious.

If you have the inclination, Fizzles, I'm intrigued by the idea of Miéville not 'listening to anything he says'...

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Saturday, 31 October 2020 11:05 bookmarkflaglink

i feel i just shouldn't talk about him, because people like his books, and i kind of feel i *should* like them, which makes me feel and act a bit jilted when i don't. hence my incoherence itt and also in the mieville thread (i will not be taking any questions on the statement 'can't creatively imagine for toffee'):

Is English not his first language?

Certain they're dictated. Some sentences in whatever that one I read before were just unbelievable, impossible to write for anyone from primary school level up (not even necessarily bad writing as such, just 'how could you write those words down next to each other? It was some sort of 'had, had had clusterfuck I think). I've read two of his now - The City and the City and that one... hang on, oh god - Embassytown, that was it. He's becoming a real grudge read. The thing is I want him to succeed at what he does - his approach appeals - but I swear he can't write or creatively imagine for toffee.

Feel I must be RONG about some stuff tho, cos plenty of clearly more or less good/sensible people like him. Feel slightly embattled and defensive about my dislike. Makes me touchy and incoherent about him.

― If you live in Thanet and fancy doing some creative knitting (Fizzles), Thursday, 5 July 2012 18:11 bookmarkflaglink

Going to finish The Jakarta Method today. While it has some minor structural issues, I believe that it should be taught in every high school in the US.

Fair enough, Fizzles - sometimes you have to trust your instincts with writers eh.

I loved Perdido Street Station and The Scar but with reservations with the latter (it collapsed under its own weight). The City and The City was conceptually glorious but clumsy at a plot and character level. I think the best thing I've read is a short story about disappearing streets in London, which is pure Borges and again, a lovely concept.

Fizzles: probably neither of us truly knows, but I would it is very, very unlikely that CM dictates his novels to a person who transcribes them (if that's what you meant).

[I would *say]

Fizzles: probably neither of us truly knows, but I would it is very, very unlikely that CM dictates his novels to a person who transcribes them (if that's what you meant).

So we'll put him on the list with R023rT Lxw*l% and my contribution:
Everybody draws the line somewhere---I had my fill of Stanley Crouch's personality and literary persona long ago, can't read any of the tributes either. Bye schmuck.

― dow, Saturday, October 10, 2020
Who else pushes your button ppl? Don't be shy.

Shut up and play your drums, Crouch.

Croz you know they got a hell of a band.

i liked perdido street station but also have no inclination to ever read anything else by him

i didn't like city and the city at all but embassytown and iron council are both excellent. he's pretty good at the idea-and-system part but a dire stylist. also his cornball borges devotion is detrimental to his work and kinda weird for a supposed leftist.

The one Mieville I tried - Kraken - was so pisspoor (like, sub-Pratchett pisspoor) that I haven't ventured further, though I understand that one is something of an outlier among his novels.

I have thoroughly given up on October, btw. Dry dry dry dry dry.

My book about grocery stores is predictably mediocre. The author appears to have sold the idea to his publisher, got a green light, then found out the subject matter was not only vast, but complex in its details, and that narrower segments of the subject had been covered in depth by better-focused books. But, since he had a contract and had fucked around for several years gathering material, he went ahead and wrote a scattershot, thinly researched book and handed it over.

Still, this book is about my speed until the election is clearly decided, which I fervently hope is long before the end of November. In 2000 it dragged on into December.

Yeah, narrower deeper coverage would def work better for that subject. I once saw C-Span testimony to a Congressional (sub?)committee about the personal experiences of those who pay for placement on shelves: one guy was covering a store (or department?) manager's child support and alimony for a while---but products can get shoved behind others anyway, or no longer displayed at all, for whatever reason: none of this was illegal, then or now either, probably; I haven't heard of any changes.
Music biz permutations too much for this thread, but I'm told that Frederick Dannen's Hit Men is a good read.

I have thoroughly given up on October, btw. Dry dry dry dry dry.

You did! And I thought I could plough through. Maybe another time! Will keep it on the unread shelves

I think I actually prefer the less typically Faulknerian, perhaps more commercial, stories from this Faulkner story collection to the Yoknaphatawpa county (sp?) stories that are often cited. They're just more fun. He had good range, and was competing against some very strong talent during the golden age of the commercial short story, at least in this country. The guy wrote a lot of books, I'm curious about all the less famous, post-Nobel novels.