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

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.

Are they the Jeremy Brett ones? From memory, they're great and he's the definitive Holmes for me.

I finished Melville's The Confidence Man: His Masquerade last night.

Much as I hate to fly in the face of esteemed ILBer James Morrison's love for this book, I found it heavy weather, more like an extended series of sermons delivered by characters who had more akin to allegorical sketches than any known human beings.

This, in itself, would not disqualify it from my love, but, alas, I found the sermons repetitive and their arguments insufficient to produce conviction in any direction. It felt as if Melville knew his philosophizing and allegorizing were too weak to persuade his readers by simple force of reason, so he compensated by amping up his eloquence to the highest pitch he could reach and battering the reader into submission through repetition. As his reader, this felt like a lack of kindness which was uncharacteristic of Melville.

In sum, it was a strange book, whose peculiarities are striking, but I didn't like how they struck me, and I ended up feeling more stricken than enlivened.

I wasn't mad about it either, but it's weird enough to have kicked off a Melville phase. Redburn!

Reading Ruth Wilson Gilmore's "The Golden Gulag"

Jonathan Lethem: THE FERAL DETECTIVE. Rereading.

I read Melissa Harrison's All Among the Barley. It has a lot on its mind: at once a bildungsroman, a study of clashing folk wisdom and modernity, folk horror via feminine psychosis and confinement, and a commentary on rural fascism in rural Britain in the 1930s. Harrison is predominantly a nature writer and the stitching that holds all this together is her observational eye and her clear love of the source material. It does sometimes fall away from the lyrical and the local, becoming trapped by the straitjacket of specialist vocabularies and research, but it's Harrison's control that keeps this compelling. It could (and maybe should, ymmv) have tipped into melodrama but it doesn't: the hints of witchcraft and secrets lead away from what could have been a Carrie or Kill List ending to something more subtle and upsetting.

I finished Malicroix. It was interesting and odd, but I'm not sure it completely worked for me. I liked best the section where when the narrator is in a tenuous mental state driven by isolation and the need to feel some kind of spiritual connection to his deceased uncle. These were days in which not very much happens, though the narrator seems to be slipping in and out of some kind of mystical ecstatic state, eventually culminating in a kind of breakdown. I also liked the sinister figures of Dolmiol and Uncle Rat. The business about his uncle's will seemed more of a McGuffin, and I kind of lost interest the more those machinations took center stage. Not sure what to read next..

Book club pick: In Our Mad And Furious City, Guy Gunaratne. So far impressed with the stylized and urgent prose style but skeptical at its portrayal of London ends ruffness. We'll see.

raymond roussel - the alley of fireflies and other stories (spoiler: mephistopholes gets killed in the first story)

pynchon - bleeding edge (great beanie baby material)

yi sang - selected works (found the first poem so disturbing i shut the book and looked at the wall for five mins)

I needed something soothing that goes down easy. I'm reading Hindoo Holiday, J.R. Ackerly.

All I seem to be reading this month are exclusively rereads, mainly of things I first read as a teenager, and I could stop myself from doing so but I feel like nostalgia this month tbh and so we go:

Sex and the City (collected columns) by Candace Bushnell, read in conjunction with Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis

These two occupy the same space in my mind - they are both 90s New York (at least in part for Glamorama), there are mentions of some of the same locales and they even share one alias for a real person. CB even has an appearance in Glamorama!

The SaTC columns are very different from the series; they are cold where it was warm, sharp where it was soft and extremely worth a reread any day of the week, imo. There are a few of the columns still online if you want to see what I mean; I’m interested to see that some of the names have been changed because they are different from the ones in my book! As a portrayal of a certain demographic at a certain point in time, there’s a lot to be said for the columns.

Glamorama is a book of two very different halves, which appeals to me partly for this reason, partly because it is just relentlessly weird and Goes Places. I was trying to do a playlist of every single song mentioned or referenced in it but stopped doing it around fifty; in terms of how situated and embedded it is in its time it’s pretty flawless. The plot? Still fucks me up, and there are several scenes that still are very difficult to read. I think I find the section on the QE2, short as it is, most fascinating because I know how it will end but the feeling of not knowing what’s happening and the sense of something bigger going on that is yet to be revealed is never better done during this section. It’s the line between sleep and consciousness when you see a shape just out of sight of the corner of your eye and know if you move it will reveal itself.

Also dipped into Less Than Zero, which I am sort of disinterestedly rereading and tbh, don’t really like? I’ve never warmed to it at all. Also The Informers, an early short story collection, which is a lot better and is very sinister and sharp in places. I liked it a lot and still do.

Then I had this craving for the Dark Tower series, so for reasons mainly unknown to me, I am now 70% through Wizard and Glass, a book I first read when I was 15 and loved instantly. I’m always judging people who say they hate it, tbh. The setting within the story is so well fleshed out in terms of characters and Roland’s early ka-tet is so compelling to read. This reminds me that I have the DT graphic novels about them, which I’ve never read and should! But the buildup to Reaping still stays with me even now and the sense of something that’s already lost without knowing it- too painful. I think I’ll read Drawing of the Three next.

Raymond roussel's teh surrealistic writer who traveled teh world on ship but never left his cabin when the ship was docked isn't he?
Writer of Impressions of Africa?