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

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.

ugh, tho now i'm not sure, because i was checking against norman davies' the isles for this period, and he's just said in this chapter 'Richard II was said to have addressed Jack Cade's rebels in their native tongue.' well that would be weird as Richard II was deposed as is well known, thanks Shakespeare, in 1399 and died a year later. Cade's rebellion wasn't until 1450ish. wat tyler, sure. but not jack cade.

Again from Davies

"In 1363, for example, the Lord Chancellor was said to have opened a parliamentary session for the first time in English. That same session passed the so-called Statue of Pleadings: ‘The King has ordained . . . that all pleas which shall be pleaded in any court whatsoever . . . shall be pleaded, shown, defended, answered, debated and judged in the English tongue, and that they shall be entered and enrolled in Latin.’"

idk, Vuilldard's point feels forced for *reasons*, and given the looseness of his approach, in itself quite appealing, you expect that cloth of looseness to sit on a framework of rigour imo. that is the only excuse for looseness, that you have hidden constraints.

by god this davies book on the isles is serious garbage. it has ONE (1) passing reference to the peasant's revolts, which it gets wrong, by half a century (see above). it has only THREE (3) references to Richard II.

ONE of those is cited in a quote from a medievalist bemoaning the influence of shakespeare on a student perception of history:

I have lately begun to realise that the great majority, even of those who claim to be educated, are very hazy ... about everything that happened before 1485. To the brighter schoolboy, the reign of Richard II suggests (with luck) the Peasants Revolt...

to the brighter schoolboy, *not including Norman f'ing Davies in his history of the British Isles. gah. that's really annoyed me.

i've literally picked this book up to pick into and refer when i need it, not to read from cover to cover. and literally the only times i've picked it up, it's proved itself to be egregiously shit.

literally literally.

i genuinely would have been better informed reading 1066 And All That.

My present book is Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Döblin, in the NYRB edition. The narration and prose style are idiosyncratic, but interesting and it comes off fairly well in the Michael Hofman translation.

Then watch Fassbinder's film!

TV series, really.

(I know this is the most annoying argument but I saw that damn thing in the cinema and when a "film" gets broken up in regular intervals for opening credits...)

yeah I remember catching a great chunk of taht tv show when it was on was it Channel 4 in the early 80s.
I know taht Chris Bohn loved it so much he adopted the name Biba kopf from the name of teh main protagonist which he may still go by.
THink I tried to d/ld it a few years ago but couldn't get the subtitles to sync or something.

Saw some of it but managed to miss most of it. I wonder what I was doing instead? Probably rehearsing with some band or something stupid.