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

Aimless, I know you and I don't get along in many respects, but I do appreciate hearing about what you're reading, among other things. I'll have to pick this one up, sounds right up my alley.

He wrote way too many books to bother to keep up with, but that one is worth reading for various reasons.

I've never read Burgess. I should probably remedy that.

I've read about a half dozen of his books. A Dead Man in Deptford is an interesting recreation of Kit Marlowe's shadowy life and death. Inside Enderby was a rather fun send-up of poets and their highly equivocal position in society. I've never read A Clockwork Orange, but glancing through it, it strikes me as a very sneering and sour book, an epitome of an old man yelling at the world to get off his lawn.

Ha, don’t think he was too old when he wrote that one, but yeah.

The thought of wading through all the made-up slang was enough to deter me any time I picked that one up.

I thought it was pretty good, as was his reason for making it up.

I think it was a clever idea, it's just my laziness.

Progress report on the Hardy autobio: early years marred by grandmother instilling body image issues on her, which she still struggles with - somewhat upsetting (tho I guess shouldn't be surprising) to think that the sort of melancholic, sorrowful style that made her such an icon of gallic chic came down to her being a person deeply unhappy in her own skin. She's critical of her early work too, and how quickly the book turns from her being a regular kid to a superstar really shows how young she was. She's smart and scathing on journalists who tried to humiliate yé yé singers with political/literary questions and of "intellectual" directors like Jean-Daniel Pollet (who directed her) who used cinema as a vehicle for their ideas without checking if those idea's visual translations had aesthetic value.

Also the very begining of the book is a story her mum tells of her crying every night the first month of her life but, because the mum never went to her, finally stopping. This is told by her mum as a "that's how you treat children!" story.

I've begun By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolano. 130 pages of pure monologue, no chapters, no paragraphing.

Read that one in summer 2009 when I was deadly ill with strep throat, don't remember anything about it except I liked it enough to spend what little money I had on 2666 afterwards.

I've started Gail Scott's 'Heroine.' Guess I'm on an experimental lesbian novelists from Montreal kick this year, given my Brossard obsession of the past few months.

Anyway, Scott mixes in a lot more French than I was expecting, which is fine because I can read the language relatively well, but was surprising nonetheless.

Misread 'Gail Scott's 'Heroine' as Gil Scott-Heron, was startled by lesbian references.

i'm (re)reading Blood Meridian by listening to the audiobook, and i do love the book, and the guy reading the audiobook is good, but the experience is reminding me of "you can type this shit, but you can't say it".

Finished Aubyn's A Clue to the Exit, his worst novel by some distance, with prose purpler than a Swamp Thing caption, and yet... some great one-liners as usual, and a few pages are cut-out-and-keep-in-your-wallet good.

I finished By Night in Chile. It was what normally gets described as a tour de force, a display of the author's sheer power over their material. In this case, Bolano's material was the intellectual and literary community of Chile, just prior to and during the Pinochet junta. It was filled with references to specific authors, as touchstones for specific points Bolano wished to make about that community, none of whom did I recognize apart from Pablo Neruda.

But, even though I am an ignoramus about Chile's literary canon, it was a compelling and astonishing book. It was not a book with a plot or a plan, so much as a pure, ceaseless artesian spring of imagination, memory and language, the overflow of his personal vision of Chile. Like ttitt, I'll promptly forget every detail of it, but it was a remarkable experience anyway.

Yes, your description in your second 'graph there matches my experience to a 't.' Will never forget how much I enjoyed reading it— I actually believe I've given it as a gift once or twice since!

By Night in Chile was my intro to Bolanos too -- I was carried away. The Savage Detectives disappointed me. 2666 won me back.

Bolaño obv

Yeah, understood, but I don't have an easy way to include the ñ, unless there's one nearby that I can c&p.

That's what I usually do

I finally figured that out, on an all devices. Bolaño, Buñuel, etc.

éåߥ øñ måçböök

I used the hell out of this old win 7 and its predecessors for a total of 15 years, at least, before I read a kid's mention of character maps, which this one sure has---thanks, kid!
Good old thread: Roberto Bolano

thx. i just found the character map utility on my win7 desktop. will use.

If one is using a phone, it's also pretty simple these days: Glück, Bolaño, s'arrêter, etc

Right. And on my Mac laptop, I just use alt-something for the magic signs, so alt-u for umlaut, alt-n for the tilde, alt-I for the circomflex: Glück, Bolaño, s'arrêter, etc.

I'm now on to The Curse of Bigness: Anti-Trust in the New Gilded Age, Tim Wu, based on a comment by caek on another thread. Seems very readable, but after 50 pages of laying the historical groundwork I'm waiting for it to get to the modern era. I'm already fully in agreement with the premise that the USA and the world in general is beset by a heavy burden of monopolies and near-monopolies, funneling vast sums of money into fewer and fewer hands and this must be reversed.

Yeah that was more of a legal history than the manifesto (with historical context) I was expecting

see also https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed-their-populist-soul/504710

Yeah he wrote a book on the same subject. I read the wu one because it was 150pp instead of 600.

Finished Oryx and Crake, which turned out to be a pandemic novel. The one bit I don't understand is why he killed oryx.

And I enjoyed it but am not clamouring to read parts 2 and 3. Same happened with Wool a few years ago. They sit fine as a single book with a mystery ending.

Is Fat City any good? Saw the NYROB edition at Barnes & Noble of all places. I'm in the area again today, so I may pick it up if y'all approve.

iirc the John Huston movie is a faithful adaptation, I liked them both

I am reading "Master and Margarita". Crazy magic realism larks tend to irritate me but I'm enjoying it so far.

Fat City is very good indeed.

Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century by Mark Sedgwick

big thumbs up for ‘fat city’ from me

saw a nice used copy of The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book at the shop today. i flipped through it and it looked totally nuts, in a good way but also i have a hard time imagining myself actually reading it. i didn't end up buying it but kinda tempted to go back and grab it

If you ever do, flopson, I'll gladly talk about it with you. That stuff is my bread and butter.

that's a great incentive :-)

This Kate O'Brien novel is going to take a while to finish ... again.

I'm about 50 pages into a public library copy of Reaganland. Now I need to decide if I am enthusiastic enough to read the remaining 850 pages. I'll dip in again tonight and decide if it's just too depressing.

Is Kate O'Brien any good? She's about the only Virago Modern Classics-revitalised writer who never really appeared, but I don't know why. Had an impression of religiosity and Mills & Boonishness which is probably very incorrect.

appeaLed, not appeaRed

I finished Vuillard's The Order of the Day. More people should write books like this, and I don't just mean the length. Find a few minor characters and less-well-known moments that illuminate a well-known historical event; apply some literary techniques and drop some philosophical-poetical asides; allude to other interesting rabbit holes that the reader can follow or not, given time, interest and access to Google and/or Wikipedia; don't overstay your welcome.

Now alternating between Nikolai Leskov stories and a 1950s SF anthology.

I'm about 50 pages into a public library copy of Reaganland. Now I need to decide if I am enthusiastic enough to read the remaining 850 pages. I'll dip in again tonight and decide if it's just too depressing.

― Respectfully Yours, (Aimless)

I couldn't stop reading, my depression was too advanced.

James M: massive interest in Catholicism, yes. Mills & Boon, from what I've read: no. She's much more serious than that.

In this novel a senior nun writes to another senior nun in French, and the novel just presents the 3 pages of French. That wouldn't be allowed now.

Reaganland is too much like torture. It's going back to the library. If Perlstein's detailed dig into the electoral history of the modern conservative movement has any core message it's that organizing is the muscle, brains, heart and soul of electoral politics, just as it has always been. All that changes are the tools.

The War of the Poor by Eric Vuillard, as it happens.

i enjoyed The Order of the Day, though i wasn't entirely sure *why*. probably along the lines generally of nate's post. it felt *selective* in a... good way, but also to an end i couldn't really pin down. just found my original post on it here. that's fairly harsh tbh. i enjoyed it more than that and felt it had an impact beyond my immediate interpretation of it. in truth i read it fairly carelessly and shd probably read again.

anyway, The War of the Poor is very slight, and takes a slightly serpentine route following Thomas Müntzer's millenarian career - he'll be familiar to anyone who's read The Pursuit of the Millennium. The tone is very hither and thither, no real sense of focus, leading to a similar feeling of... 'what is this?' i got with the order of the day. the short chapter on the peasant's revolt is good, but i found myself wondering about the blend of anecdote and history in there. also - someone else on ilx will be able to put me right -

'Today, the lowliest user's guide is in English; they speak English everywhere: in train stations, business offices, airports; English is the language of merchandise, and these days, merch is God. But back then Latin was used for public announcements, while English remained the lingo of ragmen and roughnecks.'

This all feels wildly suspect, as always in that space between translation and the translated. French was the language of the court, 'English' feels like an extremely equivocal term here, also 'business offices'?

Elsewhere tone is suspect but it's not clear whether because of translation or original. As with The Order of the Day, I can't quite make up my mind about it, which is interesting in itself.