Winter 2021: ...and you're reading WHAT?!

Makes sense, relating it to resurgence of (even more broadly xenophobic) Klan after WWI, and rolling right through the Twenties, into the Depression-era heyday of Father Coughlin's populist fascism, other figures like Lindbergh.

200 pages into Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad. It’s very absorbing, with lots of interesting footnotes regarding the various manuscripts that were revised depending on the official attitude towards Stalin, and the level of openness to criticism of Soviet leadership.

Currently about to finish Kimberly Alidio's once teeth bones coral. Took me a minute, but I finally picked it up and its sparse, quotidian method of composition finally clicked.

Jon Ronson - So you've been publicly shamed ... decent throughout, the Jonah Lehrer chapter being more critical of lehrer than I had heard. no real conclusion, much like the other Ronson book I read.
Charles Portis - Masters of Atlantis ... very good until the (thematic) fizzle out of the ending
Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea ... gets too obfuscated for me, like eliding the wedding and revealing the sandi relationship very late on. still has a lot of good parts.

I read Don DeLillo's new novella, THE SILENCE (2020). It's pretty bad. I suspect that it may well be the worst thing DeLillo has ever published. It's barely even interesting enough to be self-parody. Possibly the most interesting thing about it is that it's printed in Courier font.

I then started on Jennifer Egan's MANHATTAN BEACH (2017).

I finished Froissart's Chronicles (abridged Penguin Classics edition, 470 pages). Perhaps the most interesting aspect was that the height of the Black Death plague years occurred within the time frame covered by the book, but Froissart mentions it only once in a single sentence. Admittedly, this book was an abridgement and Froissart was working from an earlier chronicle for that time period, not his own witnessing, but one mention that "a third of the people died"? Yikes!

His cavalier attitude becomes a bit more explicable in light of the complete contempt Froissart has for peasants. They only appear in his account because the Jacquerie in France and the Peasant's Revolt under Wat Tyler took place as he was writing his chronicle. The grievances of the peasants are dismissed as nonsense and their leaders as criminals. By way of contrast, Froissart apparently spent dozens of pages describing in detail every single combat that took place in one month long jousting tournament. In this edition they are abridged down to only about 8 or 9 pages worth. Oh, how he loved the nobility!

I began Diarmuid Hester's 'Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper,' and it's pretty absorbing, but Dennis is also a friend and a favorite author, so my bias is obvious

Are Sally Rooney's novels good? Thinking about trying the latest.

I suspect not!

But I'd quite like to find out for sure.

I liked Normal People fine. A quick read, too.

I preferred Conversations with Friends

I wanted to shout at the 'Normal People' to just bleedin' talk to each other.

Hsve you met teens??

Well the older they got the more exasperating it was.

I liked Normal People although the book barely contained a 'normal' person. (Maybe that's her point! Makes you think.)

There are a couple hundred posted about them on the bbc thread iirc

Covering McKellen: An Understudy’s Tale by David Weston is a slightly ludicrous vanity publishing book written by a prim and fussy old luvvie about a disastrous world tour of Lear, but it does contain this ludicrous anecdote about jeremy paxman:

Ian gives one of his finest performances to date, full of invention and spontaneity. After the show, I spot Jeremy Paxman waiting sheepishly among a group at the stage door to see Ian, like a small boy who’s about to meet Santa.

Friday May 18th

Ask Ian what Paxman thought about the production. Ian replies, acidly: “He said it was great fun.” Indeed, a strange comment to make on Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy. Ian had only agreed to meet Paxman and his friends because Paxman had gone to the same Cambridge College, St Catharine’s, and had said that Lear was his favourite play.

great fun.

Thanks guys, I went to the library and checked out Normal People today, mostly to get out of the house, but also read a couple of favorable descriptions, but also that it's not quite as good as prev.---quotes to prove this seemed okay to me, out of context of course.

I would have started with the first, but second was all they had.

I'm reading a book of local Oregon history, Massacred for Gold, R. Gregory Nokes. It attempts to piece together as much as can be known long after the fact about a massacre of Chinese gold miners in an extremely remote spot in Hell's Canyon on the Snake River in 1887. Because the murderers were whites and the courts were essentially made up of their white neighbors in a very small community, this massacre was swept under the rug at the time.

So few verifiable facts have been preserved that a fair bit of the book is just laying the groundwork for understanding how racist the West was against Chinese, trying to get across how such a thing could have been covered up and excused by the "law-abiding" settlers who allowed the perpetrators to get off free.

Add: the number of miners killed was either 34 or 31, making it the biggest mass murder in Oregon history by a large margin.

MANHATTAN BEACH is readable, engaging, maybe rather like a film or a glossy TV series. The sense of period detail being plastered on can be strong, but I can't blame her, when period is a big part of the point.

Garth Greenwell's Cleanness.

Today's nugget from the Françoise Hardy autobio: she was super into Nick Drake and they hung out a few times but didn't talk much because of the language barrier.

so it's not true about love being the universal language?

Aimless, that book sounds very interesting.

so it's not true about love being the universal language?

The Stars down to Earth: The Stars down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture - Adorno

Pattern Recognition again, Gibson's last good book? Not SF, as such, but lots of contemporaneous references which dates it somewhat (she uses a phone card to make a call from a public phone box). Great turns of phrase (mirror-world for the tiny cultural differences between countries, children's crusade to describe Camden on a Sunday...).

David Toop's Sinister Resonance. I'm only partway in, but Toop pulls a bit of an Of Grammatology trick here, arguing (against Berger) for the primacy of hearing over seeing as the primary mode of sensual awareness and orientation. His style is open enough that this doesn't come across as provocative as such - it's more suggestive than anything.

(PR might also be my favourite book cover as well, the english hardback edition. and i bought it in a shop visible on the map on the front)

https://sciencefictionbookart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/pattern.jpg

Part 2 of in search of lost time

(Just remembered another tiny detail in PR that ages it but that is very evocative - he mentions the wooden escalators at Camden tube)

I've begun The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, Herman Melville.

Finished Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, started The Aleph.

Borges or the twitter mystic?

I've begun The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, Herman Melville.

― Respectfully Yours, (Aimless), Thursday, January 14, 2021

It's got its longeurs, but whatta guy.

Borges.

In the homestretch of xp Sally Rooney's Normal People. No major flaws that I've noticed so far, and having it in third person---unusual in contemporary lit, seems like---is refreshing: I don't have to get past the Unreliable Narrator's face x breath to find room for my own interpretations and/or the ones I'm led to, as the author flicks by the character's points of view---also, she can keep me in one protagonist's head and lifeline for quite a while, then the other's, or shift back and forth quickly. Which goes, for instance, with increasingly furious response of Marianne's mother and brother, seen only briefly so far, to her passive or impassive resistance (elsewhere, she's decided to become a submissive, seems to consider herself failing at that too, part of the internalized judgement of the increasingly "validated" scholar-to-?)
Also: those who she eventually recognizes as users of, dealers in "friendship as social commodity"---as she's sometimes done herself, I'd say, but she comes to see them as doing it up front, in plain sight, once again giving herself a bad mark, this time for not noticing the obvious, despite being so proud of her brain (such a "good machine," as everybody knows, like when she wins the scholarship she doesn't need financially, being from what's tagged as a good family).

Insights, or gut knowns shifted into notes to self, don't nec. make things less painful, sometimes more:
Back in fifth year when Connell had scored a goal for the school football team, Rob had leaped into the pitch to embrace him. He screamed Connell's name, and began to kiss his head with wild exuberant kisses. It was only one-all, and there were still twenty minutes left on the clock. But that was their world then. Their feelings were suppressed so carefully in everyday life, forced into smaller and smaller spaces, until seemingly minor events took on insane and frightening significance...And on Debs night, Rob showing them those photographs of Lisa's naked body. Nothing had meant more to Rob than the approval of others...to be a person of status. He would have betrayed any confidence...Connell couldn't judge him for that. He'd been the same way himself, or worse. He had just wanted to be normal, to conceal the parts of himself that he found shameful or confusing. It was Marianne who had shown him other things were possible. Life was different after that; maybe he had never understood how different.

A few pages later:
He was like a freezer item that had thawed too quickly on the outside and was melting everywhere, while the inside was still frozen solid.

Their friends seem like dabs, well-placed, but still. Maybe that's deliberate? The young and the restless, and "College is a bus station," declared drop-out Lester Bangs.

Penultimate bit's set-up well-planted, but then basis of change for ending seems a bit rushed, both segments now a little suspect, but not too bad. Will check first one because would like to see her writing be better incl. even better, because overall impression of this is still pretty favorable.

I finished the collection of three Pascal Garnier short novels: The A26, How's the Pain, and Panda Theory. A26 is the darkest and most unconventional, though there is a decent amount of variety amongst the thematic similarities. Garnier is good at juxtaposing innocence and tenderness with senseless violence and nihilism, against the backdrop of somewhat shabby regional towns in France.

Now I'm reading Malicroix by Henri Bosco. It was published in French in 1948, but set in the early 19th century, and the story feels kind of 19th century gothic but filtered through a more 20th century psychological lens. It's good at describing being alone in somewhat inhospitable natural surroundings, listening to the wind and rain.

"College is a bus station"

I like bus stations, and I romantically associate them with college, but otherwise the two don't bear much resemblance.

I made a Malicroix soundscape, need to find the link.

xp Bangs went from high school in El Cajon ("The Box") to Grossmont Junior College in the same town, sold shoes and soon dropped out, sending a review over the transom to baby Rolling Stone, so for him it pretty much was a bus station, if nor bus stop.

The campus in Normal People is oooo Trinity, but the hustle (incl. hustling bullshtters) and bustle and the main characters' discontent recalled what Bangs said.

Arnold Bennet's 'The Card'

some mentions on ilb, but not many. most of his books are 1900 +/- 10 years so they've popped up in the recent polls, with 0 votes every time.

set in the potteries, which is the only reason i picked it up, but this one is more of a comic novel and less of the working class thing i wanted.

Read Lonely Christopher's upcoming chapbook after finishing the Dennis Cooper critical biography. Both good, wrote a blurb for the former and had a nice time doing so.

Finally getting around to Kevin Killian's Shy, a very difficult-to-find book by a sadly-departed mentor. Haven't been in the mood until now, and it's pretty brilliant about 20 pages in— lots of camp and play mixed with more serious philosophical underpinnings.

I made a Malicroix soundscape, need to find the link.

Sounds intriguing. The book is making me fantasize about spending a week alone in the cabin in the woods.

Autofiction can be fine, imho... I was taught by two of the main members of the New Narrative school, so I have some bias, yes. But a lot of more mainstream autofiction seems a little lazy and/or suspect, and the oversaturation of the market with that type of stuff is a real thing.

Also, I fucking hate Gore Vidal, even before I read that quote for the first time today. Ghastly misogynist shite.

you have more of a talent for hating than I do

Might very well be true.

Regarding your experience with LitB, I will honestly say that I think Saunders is a masterful short story writer, and a pretty middling to mediocre novelist. And that's okay!

(As in, I also didn't care for LitB, thought it was a novella-length book that he stretched out interminably)

i'm half way through shuggie bain. so far it's been a mixture of this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5VaPQflLq0

and comic scenes that are about as funny as a bbc1 comedy for old people, and extremely light and superficial melodrama. i understand it gets better, so i'm going to stick with it, but staggered it won so many prizes tbh.

Regarding your experience with LitB, I will honestly say that I think Saunders is a masterful short story writer, and a pretty middling to mediocre novelist. And that's okay!

― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Friday, March 19, 2021 10:33 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

fundamentally agree with this even though i enjoyed bardo more than expected (likely bc i went in with low expectations)

it DOES feel like an overextended novella

Brad, Guide and Period are....uh...probably the most insane of the Miles cycle. That line you posted is one of my favorites, too, lol.

― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Friday, March 19, 2021 10:13 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

two people have suggested that period will be my favorite and i'm so excited to get to it

Period is the most like The Sluts, if you've read any other Cooper. Very much about the lines between online sociality and fantasy vs/ the "real world"

Having one of those weekends, so rather than sleeping away the day I found myself rereading The Mystery of Mercy Close (Marian Keyes). I’ve actually read this before, probably about a year after it came out, but had only meant to dip into it today and instead ended up rereading the whole thing with barely a pause.

I think her stuff is very unfairly maligned, mainly by people who’ve never read her and mainly because of the marketing, cos her subjects are dark. There’s addiction (Rachel’s Holiday), bereavement (Anybody Out There?), all the classics. But even the lightest books are tinged heavily with darkness, as the author has experienced these things herself and writes them too.

TMOMC is about depression - something the author talked about a lot - but it’s also as the title says, a mystery. Not just the titular one in the plot but the things that our narrator Helen, a misanthropic post-crash private detective struggling through the ruins of her life - has going on in the background. Why won’t her former best friend speak to her anymore, what happened with her and sleazebag Jay, why has she ended up homeless?

So I really enjoyed it and all its wonderfully detailed characters on reread, particularly the overachieving sister (been there) and the fussy, overinvolved mammy (been there too), but most of all the long slow tightening as Keyes unravels the plot and as Helen falls apart. Even the tertiary characters in this have life and vigour and the short sharp sentences that sometimes fade into spiralling vague thoughts exactly mirror Helen’s personality at different times. Sometimes it is brisk, sometimes it is slow (but not very often, the whole thing takes place over a week with sparingly used flashbacks). Truly a great way to spend a grey Saturday morning/evening.

Also, it’s March, shouldn’t we have a spring thread?

yes. great idea!

Done and dusted.

Spring 2021: Forging ahead to Bloomsday as we read these books