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

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.

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/custom.php?l=53451587537269743044&m=SLEDDOGS0~SLEDDOGS1~SLEDDOGS3~WIND4~STREAM5~STREAM5~STREAM6~STREAM6~STREAM7~STREAM7&d=0&title=Malicroix

That's great! It would make a very congenial background soundtrack to reading the book. It's nice that you can adjust the levels too. I made the wind louder and the rushing water a bit quieter. It sounded more desolate to me that way.

Yay!

I picked up my Penguin Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and ended up reading all 12 stories. It'd be one of those books I could sort of convince myself I'd read over the years but nope, 90% of the stories were new to me and I enjoyed the shit out of them. If I had to pick 3, I'd say The Beryl Coronet, The Speckled Band (apparently Conan Doyle's favourite) and The Red-Headed League.

speckled band is an absolute banger

Grimesby Roylott has to be one of the finest names in all of literature.

I love Holmes' suspicion of the countryside (I don't live that far from where the Copper Beeches would be and, well, he's not far wrong):

It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”
“You horrify me!”
“But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.

That's funny because I just was leafing through 'Adventures...' thinking I should read the whole thing. I've read maybe half of the stories.

I'm about 150 pages into Bleak House and 550 into Crime and Punishment.

the tv series (Adventures) is on every day on itv4, around lunchtime. i think they've filmed every single one of them over the years, watched them all whilst unemployed the last time. (this week has Scandal in Bohemia, Dancing Men, Naval Treaty and Solitary Cyclist, Mazarin Stone and Dying Detective, Cardboard Box from Memoirs, and twice as many on catchup)

41% through bleak house (a reread after 8 years) but i've taken a month off.

There's one story where they just follow some footprints. I think it's "Boscombe Valley Mystery". All of the other ones are great.

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