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

i’ve read a *lot* of garbage pop factual books this year, but one that isn’t garbage is Because Internet: Understanding How Language is Changing by Gretchen McCulloch. That’s doubly good, because it’s a subject that could be done *very badly* and glibly imo. But this is thoughtful, clear and exceptionally well annotated, and contains structured thinking and analysis. It’s slightly overfriendly in places for my taste but that works because of the subject matter.

anyway, in a year where i read a load of shite, this is... ok-to-good.

no, it’s good. it’s christmas. enough with the parsimonious.

Seeing with Fresh Eyes: Meaning, Space, Data, Truth - Edward Tufte, big fan of his earlier books on data visualisation, with amazing things like indonesian timetable representation etc, and this is also v good. but man i cannot quite get away from a nagging feeling 'you know, edward, your pages are kind of a hot mess to read?' and frankly seem to work against some of his statements on space. i'm surprised, because his wife and co-designer is Inge Druckrey, subject of this lovely short documentary on design.

also enough about your f'ing park already please.

Read Mark Francis Johnson's '800 JKS,' an exercise in world-building poetry that will inevitably be slept upon by the majority, who can't stand poetry that challenges rather than confirms.

Also read Denise Riley's 'Selected Poems,' which mostly consists of her most famous book, 'Mop Mop Georgette,' and of course love her to pieces still.

Flipped around a bunch in Tom Raworth's collected poems.

Read a lovely pamphlet on literary influence, criticism, and death by Claudia La Rocco.

Finally, and perhaps most excitingly, I picked up a book I've been carrying around with me for almost a decade but could never access...but I had an intuition that the day would come when I could. And so, the other evening I began Taylor Brady's 'Microclimates,' which is a bizarre and majestic hybrid novel that treats each sentence as its own little climate, playing around with syntax, subject/object, and so on. Really amazing work.

that sounds good, will add to my infinity pile (which as always i say 'i'll aim to make a good dent in it at christmas')

Yes to those and yr own latest recs., Fizzles. Thanks guys!

Which of Edward Tufte's previous books is your favorite?

I found a copy of Visual Explanations on a coffee table in a lobby when I was in uni, with a big COLLEGE REPUBLICANS sticker on the back of it. I contacted the woman whose name was written in it, and she never wrote back, so I kept it. Nice come-up, also my favorite.

I now only have 85 pages of THE LAND OF SPICES to read.

Oddly indulgent, very long description of a Catholic schoolgirls' school play for the priests. Unsure that the tone is as well judged as Kate O'Brien's admirers would assert.

I finished Berlin Alexanderplatz last night. First, I must applaud the translator Michael Hofman for carrying this off so beautifully. The book succeeds just as much on its stylized tone and authorial voice as upon any interest generated by the plot and characters and it is obvious that the translator had to patiently invent an English near-analog to Döblin's highly idiosyncratic German, while conveying the essential tone and feel of the original. The loving care he took was very evident.

The Afterword quotes Musil to the effect that it is not an intellectual book, but full of interest, and I wholly agree. Döblin incorporates a great many ideas, religious, mythic, scientific, psychological, but they do not add up to anything coherent. They are jumbled together in a grab bag, just as they are experienced in life.

NB: It was published in 1929, so we should soon see it making an appearance in the "Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of..." threads, assuming Daniel Rf perseveres that far.

I read the previous translation about 25 years ago and loved it, I should investigate this one. I agree that the book is full of stuff that doesn't necessarily add up, but details are fuzzy at this point.

Will have to check that. Recent publication of Kafka's prev, mentioned The Lost Writings shows Hoffman keeping up his standards w quite a range of material.

So, I checked out three P.K. Dick novels from the library and on advice of ilxors started reading A Scanner Darkly. Right away, from the first three sentences I can tell PKD had started writing the book by just throwing out a vaguely 'promising' sentence off the top of his head, not having the slightest clue what story he would connect to it. All his books I've read seem to start this way, with the possible exception of Man in the High Castle.

He rambled around for a few pages, just riffing on the first sentence, until he darts sideways into a new riff, then another, until there's a tiny bit of solid ground established, barely enough to stand on. Then he builds out from there, but haphazardly. For example, early in the second chapter he starts riffing on the amazing 'scramble suit' worn by some cop named Fred. PKD tells me how the identity of the wearer of the suit becomes blur and their voice is filtered to be toneless, flat and mechanical, bereft of personality. Wow. Very imaginative stuff!

Then, just a few paragraphs later, PKD describes Fred (wearing the suit) and speaking to a Lions Club audience. But PKD has already forgotten about the toneless flat mechanical voice. He now has Fred giving a speech full of scripted dramatic pauses and changes of tone. These totally contradictory details are printed on fucking consecutive pages! Why? Because PKD apparently never went back and read what he wrote five minutes earlier, or gave it a second thought once it got blurted out on the page. It makes me want to slap him retroactively and shout "You're just blabbering complete nonsense, Phil! Give me a fucking break!"

This is not encouraging. If PKD couldn't be bothered to pay the slightest bit of attention to what he wrote, then why should I? Did he take his readers for such fools or did he just not give a damn at all?

you should stop!

i should also breathe while I'm at it, but I don't care for an author who carelessly doles out intellectual wedgies to his readers.

my understanding is that he was drugged out of his mind most of the time? anyway i've read a couple and there is absolutely no prize at the end if you hate the first three sentences that much

having read four of his books, I already have some idea about his utter lack of method and disregard for telling a coherent story, but the beginning of this one feels like wading through a swamp that's had trash dumped in it and I had to vent. I will take it as far as 35 or 40 pages to see if he sobered up enough to write something worth sticking with. But, damn, the start of this one reeks.

I think you have to accept a certain amount of, uh, chaos with Dick? He wrote so quickly (to stay alive, mainly), was battling psychosis and addiction. The vision comes through almost by osmosis or something. Or he'll drive you mad with his lack of discipline and you'll give up, I guess.

I just read the first few pages and, like the first time, was instantly transported into the world of a paranoid and delusional drug addict, so consumed by his own nightmares as to be almost devoid of any fellow-feeling. And the bit about the scramble suit, yes it says the voice is 'toneless and artificial', then the guy gives a speech with pauses and where he raises and lowers his voice, I don't really see a contradiction there.

The Hardy autobio's getting a bit more of a chore as we head into the 70's - which is where my knowledge of her career ends - so I'm alternating it with The Penguin Book Of Japanese Short Stories. Opens with a predictably great Tanizaki story.

Peter Baker and Susan Glasser - The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III
Elizabeth Bowen - The Last September
Ali Smith - Autumn

Charles Dickens: A Life. wanna know who dickens had dinner with on the 26, 28, 29, 31st of december 184*? then this is the book for you. lots of details pulled in from the various sources, but not much of it interesting. and 600 pages long.

it's interesting when it's talking about and around the books (made me want to reread Dombey and Dorrit), but the rest of it not so much.

(his poor wife though, and i've not got to the abandonment yet)

and his poor kids!

Only 10 pages or so of Kate O'Brien to go. I suppose what I feel now is that this book is sentimental about its two heroines, but in a deceptively formal and dignified way. They are - up to 10pp from the end - perhaps too perfect.

I'm touched, though, by the fate of Charlie, after he takes a purple / white / green ribbon from a suffragette to make a Votes for Women tie.

OK. I got far enough in to A Scanner Darkly that PKD has settled on the story he wants to write and it is basically about the hard drug addict culture in 1970s California with a light dusting of sci-fi tropes. The point in the book where it gels is when he more or less sets aside the sci-fi content and the writing becomes almost documentary realism, drawn straight from his own life, I presume. I was near enough to the fringe of that scene in the 70s that the squalor of it feels depressingly familiar.

Yes, for those of us who were around then, and any one else who can relate, it's something dark that still smells bad, always there, as soon as the book is opened---in your face, and his: he is testifyin' while still in the midst of it, bringing his talents and skills---incl., always, the documentary realism, to bear and to ground on his crackpot control-freak earthquakes and mudslides and fires of whatever origin, the California Kid locked in Manichean Civil War---although I think the talent won, more often than not, if you read enough of the fiction---though Lethem did him a stan disservice by pushing The Exegesis through the Library of America: that stuff should never be read out of context. Drug culture (inc. cops) were just part of the source material for his ongoing chronicles of illusion and delusion and all manner of fakery as part of consensual realties, incl. as they become known as such, sometimes---basically all the time, because this world is a bad copy of the real one, as became clearer during Watergate, as the False One stumbled (the real world is just a few years A.D.---as became even clearer when he beheld the Christian fish-symbol earring of the Dark-Haired Girl who delivered his pizza)
think you have to accept a certain amount of, uh, chaos with Dick? He wrote so quickly (to stay alive, mainly), was battling psychosis and addiction. The vision comes through almost by osmosis or something. Or he'll drive you mad with his lack of discipline and you'll give up, I guess.

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Tuesday, December 15, 2020 2:38 AM (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I just read the first few pages and, like the first time, was instantly transported into the world of a paranoid and delusional drug addict, so consumed by his own nightmares as to be almost devoid of any fellow-feeling. And the bit about the scramble suit, yes it says the voice is 'toneless and artificial', then the guy gives a speech with pauses and where he raises and lowers his voice, I don't really see a contradiction there.

― ledge, Tuesday, December 15 word

But I do think some of this comes, to some cold-sweat degree, from/toward a place of/desire for fellow feeling--he has to tell us, testify, warn us, maybe to scold some of us who were/are also getting too far into something (and I think this is the one where he mentions having done permanent damage to I wanna say pancreas, via speed)

I think my favourite Dick-adjacent thing is the Emmanuel Carrere sort of biography, autobiography, flight of fancy I Am Alive And You Are Dead'. I read it a while ago but have that residual sense of being close to Dick's consciousness for better and worse.

did carrere do that book on the french/swiss man with the fake life? hang on...

ah yes here we go, The Adversary.

meant to read it when it came out in english but completely forgot until just now.

I don't know that one, sounds interesting. I have his memoir about the tsunami in Sri Lanka in 2004. Girding myself to read it.

(lol "bad Primo Levi" sez ever-reliable Guardian; just for that, I'll check it out)

Books in which PKD's talent and skillz def prevail incl the first volume of his collected short stories, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Man In The High Castle, Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, also some of the "mainstream" novels, like Confessions of A Crap Artist. Mary and The Giant, and The Broken Bubble.

By the time lists come out, incl. mine, I'm usually pretty much ready to shrug and move on, but this one has a lot of appealing comments---https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/06/the-best-books-of-2020-picked-by-our-acclaimed-guest-authors---incl. several mentions of Hamnet---is it good?

PKD's birthday today. And Arthur C Clarke's.

incl. several mentions of Hamnet---is it good?

I wasn't moved by it as much as the people in that article - my wife was - but it was pretty good, as historical fiction goes maybe slightly more fanciful than Wolf Hall. It had the best explanation that i've read of the famous 'second best bed' of shakespeare's will.

People latch onto the "second best bed" only because there are only a couple dozen verifiable facts about Shakespeare's personal life, if that many, and it is quirky enough to jump out from such a meager handful. But it means nothing in particular other than what it says on the face of it. That he purchased the right to a family coat of arms is much more boring and conventional, but as a bare fact it is more revealing.

Books you are never going to read:

Mayflies (Faber, £14.99) by Andrew O’Hagan is a gorgeous novel, full of crisp and evocative images. It concerns the love between two best friends. It begins in lustful youth, with a pilgrimage by a group of Glasgow boys to Manchester in the mid-1980s to see Morrissey and visit the Haçienda. It concludes with the same characters in middle age, confronting a crisis.

Hahaha

But it means nothing in particular other than what it says on the face of it.

it may not - we'll never know - but o'farrell gives it a plausible and amusing spin.

No, never gonna read about the lustful journey to Morrisey, but also intrigued by all of this (except the term "pacy"):
Shadi Bartsch’s new translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid (Profile, £16) is terrific (and a gorgeous physical book, too) – fresh and pacy. Bartsch walks the tightrope between maintaining the grandeur of the original and making the poem accessible to modern readers and makes it look easy. The Aeneid is the great refugee narrative of its own time, and it should be for our time too. I am obsessed with Thebes, the home of Cadmus, Oedipus and Antigone. So Paul Cartledge’s Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece (Macmillan, £25) is exactly the book for me. Academic books are often a bit dry, but this study of the city – its myth and its history – is anything but dusty. Religion, war and myth are all interrogated with equal rigour. Don’t tell me Thomas Cromwell wasn’t as beautiful and nuanced as Hilary Mantel makes him in The Mirror & the Light (HarperCollins, £25): I don’t want to know, I want to maintain the fantasy. As a sustained act of world-building, time travel and mind-reading, I’m not sure her Cromwell trilogy will ever be equalled. At the beginning of the first lockdown it was honestly more consoling than food.

xp the naive reading is that it was not a happy marriage, the conventional one is that this was standard practice, the best bed was for guests and not the family bed. o'farrell has will give her a fancy new bed to go in her fancy new town house and she says 'i will keep the bed that i conceived and birthed my children in thank you very much', so it becomes a private joke between them.

Yeah, I'll take a look at that when library no longer re-locked down.
xp Also, we need to issue a ban on "makes it look easy," though lack of evident strain v. important. But thanks Natalie Haynes
Broadcaster and author of Pandora’s Jar!

eh. connecting the "second best bed" to any more detailed meaning requires connecting it to missing information. the very fact that multiple, equally plausible speculations have been proposed to explain it only highlights the central vacancy of information that all the theories revolve around. we don't know, can't know, what it means beyond 'I bequeath to my wife the second best bed'. but that never stops anyone from trying.

it's just a bit of fun let's be cool!

obviously, in a historical novel about Shakespeare's family life there's no way an author could avoid including it.

obviously

I guess if the novel was "Shakepeare and the Zombies" the author might dispense with it, but that's more of an ahistorical novel.

Dennis Cooper's list came out a few days ago

https://denniscooperblog.com/mine-for-yours-my-favorite-fiction-poetry-non-fiction-film-art-and-internet-of-2020/