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

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?

yeah man, though i think he seldom left his cabin rather than never

started dodie bellamy 'when the sick rule the world' last night (i feel like ray smuckles shouting "this is a homeboy" whenever i read her writing)

Dodie was my thesis advisor.

Paris Review is pitching a year's subscription bundled with three free New Directions novels:

Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, by László Krasznahorkai. Winner of a 2019 National Book Award, this sprawling story follows an exiled Hungarian baron who returns home at the end of his life. Krasznahorkai’s Art of Fiction interview appears in issue no. 225.

Hurricane Season, by Fernanda Melchor. A literary murder mystery set in a world of myth and violence, in which a whole village is swept up in the hunt for answers. An excerpt of the novel appears in issue no. 231.

Mac’s Problem, by Enrique Vila-Matas. An unemployed sixty-year-old gets sucked into the habit of keeping a diary that begins to take over his life. Vila-Matas’s Art of Fiction interview appeared in issue no. 234.

Are these books good?

Deal details and links to interviews (those of the three authors and a 2-part James Laughlin):
https://mailchi.mp/theparisreview.org/new-year-new-directions-a-special-subscription-offer-136994?e=36a3a066a1

The Bell Jar for the first time, believe it or not.

so good

In a similarly 'believe it or not' moment, I'm reading the collected M.R. James for the first time. I started off scattershot (Casting the Runes) but now I'm going straight, front to back.

A True History by Lucian
Which has more illustrations by other people than it does by Aubrey beardsley though do like this guy William Strang.
& hadn't realised how old the translation was, I'd assumed that Beardsley indicated it was Victorian but its a reprint of a version fro 1634.
Anyway, now got something I've wanted to read for decades. & have seen the artwork of William Strang who looks like he may have influenced others possibly including Moebius.

PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK, Annie Dillard. This is sooo great, mind and spirit expanding, like a funny, psychedelic Thoreau. Bought the Dillard anthology The Abundance a couple of years ago and didn't get on with it for some reason, but now I think I have to read everything she's ever written.

LOVE'S WORK, Gillian Rose. Another brilliant memoir/freeform essay about love, sex, poetry, dads, cancer, Judaism etc etc. Just finished a bracing chapter on colostomy bags.

HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE, Andreas Malm. Love AM's casually dismissive ire, but this is a more forensic than it needs to be critique of XR pacifism and defence of direct action on SUVs/diggers/pipelines.

THE OVERSTORY, Richard Powers. Has been heartily recommended by a couple of friends, but though it's often beautiful, thought provoking etc, like all the Powers I've read, feels like notes for a longform New Yorker essay that have been fictionalised, rather than a novel as such... In the doldrums of the mid 200 pages and not sure I will finish :/

ha, the overstory was one of those things that has been recommended so many times (often in quite annoying ways) and i’ve seen so many people reading (often in quite annoying ways) that i now absolutely refuse to read it.

i realise this is not a healthy attitude.

love’s work is utterly wonderful.

xp never heard of it, going to read it just to spite you oppose this attitude

i have the overstory out of the library on recommendation from my brother but yeah i'm a bit skeptical, more so now because i don't usually like new yorker essays. i didn't start yet because i am reading the jakarta method. but i only have 21 days to finish the overstory so i guess i should start.

The Jakarta Method, a table recommendation, is terrific.

yes, i like it a lot. surprisingly fast and easy read given the subject matter, too.

xps

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is so damn good. Psychedelic is a great way to describe it. It's so freewheeling and euphoric. She sees into the heart of things. Her faith is kind of incidental, I think? It never gets in the way for me, at least.

I really love this woman's explanation of her thesis, which was a visual study of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Really amazing details about blood!! http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2013/03/08/a-visual-approach-to-syntactical-and-image-patterns-in-annie-dillards-pilgrim-at-tinker-creek-essay-images-anna-maria-johnson/

I'm about two-thirds through Hindoo Holiday, but that's easily enough to allow me to evaluate its merits. It is excellent, in its own remarkably low key way. The entire book is a series of short vignettes, wherein he meets and converses with various people who are connected to his position as a maharajah's 'personal secretary', but actually he is a kind of mascot, having no defined duties but to live in a guest house and be a companion to the maharajah.

What makes the book special is partly the peculiarity of the people and events which are his subject matter, but mostly it rests on the great care Ackerly takes to avoid treating those people and events as exotic. They are just people, doing and saying things which are entirely natural to them, and his success in stripping away all hints of patronizing and exoticizing from his prose adds up to a kind of genius. Quite enjoyable!

Finished 'Golden Gulag' (highly recommended!)

Now onto poet kari edwards' 'having been blue for charity,' one of hers I haven't read.

I should read Annie Dillard but she has terrible white person dreads and I think to myself "how can someone with hair so terrible have any insight into anything?" which I realise is incredibly stupid.

Oh, shit, I'm wrong, I'm thinking of Anne Lamott; as you were.

ha, the overstory was one of those things that has been recommended so many times (often in quite annoying ways) and i’ve seen so many people reading (often in quite annoying ways) that i now absolutely refuse to read it.

I should read Annie Dillard but she has terrible white person dreads and I think to myself "how can someone with hair so terrible have any insight into anything?" which I realise is incredibly stupid.

...

Oh, shit, I'm wrong, I'm thinking of Anne Lamott; as you were.

this is the content i crave

i was reading table's favourite writer alexander chee on being in annie dillard's writing class and this was enough for me to get her book the writing life, which now I am reading*

*i read the epigraph from goethe and now it is in my reading queue, but it looks great. that's this 'reading' that you talk of, right? good enough for goodreads.

I started Anna Karenina. I thought I was on a role with my 19th century doorstops so may as well give this a go.

There are some great passages, but in the last third I couldn't wait for the inevitable.

I'm reading Symbols, Signals and Noise by JR Pierce, a gentle introduction to Claude Shannon's seminal work in information theory.

Price of salt by Patricia highsmith

not enough murders

I'm reading _Symbols, Signals and Noise_ by JR Pierce, a gentle introduction to Claude Shannon's seminal work in information theory.

That's interesting.

I finished rereading THE FERAL DETECTIVE. It's a good exciting story, and curiously original and distinctive. My doubt about it is the depth of admiration and desire that the narrator experiences for the title character. He is never made to seem interesting or attractive enough for that. Their whole relationship seems empty, in fact. The book would be better without it.

Back to MANHATTAN BEACH with a long way to go. She's just worn a diving suit for the first time.

I'm missing the wilderness, so I am re-reading the memoir of a wilderness guide who grew up in Alberta and guided in the Rockies: Tales of a Wilderness Wanderer, Andy Russell, published 1970. He knows how to tell an entertaining story/anecdote and has a deep fund of them.

Cool! Didn't you write a book about hiking?

I didn't know this, and am now very curious.

Download a book written by Aimless

You can d/l an epub of it from dropbox, but I disclaim any pretense to it being perfectly formatted. It should be readable enough, if you desire to read it.

Got it, thanks! Now I'm going out to walk much less challenging terrain.

Me, too.

thanks Aimless!

brian! crazy <3

I really love this woman's explanation of her thesis, which was a visual study of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Really amazing details about blood!! http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2013/03/08/a-visual-approach-to-syntactical-and-image-patterns-in-annie-dillards-pilgrim-at-tinker-creek-essay-images-anna-maria-johnson/

This is fabulous. Nicked a bunch of ideas for a lesson I'm going to teach on writing and motif metaphor at some point!

I have also utilized it in the classroom, Chinaski. It's really great.

wd also recommend the v accessible introduction to said seminal work (the mathematical theory of communication) by warren weaver under the chapter title RECENT CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE MATHEMATICAL THEORY OF COMMUNICATION and shannon’s intro itself.

Thanks, I'll take a look at those. Pierce is an interesting writer and thinker in his own right. He's good at finding interesting angles and deciding what is the right amount of mathematical depth to capture a bit of the flavor of the work, without bogging down the non-specialist reader, and he seems to regard Shannon with something approaching awe. For instance, he uses the word "ingenious" to describe Shannon's experiment in which he determined that each letter in written English contains approximately one bit of information, although no one knows how English could actually be encoded that compactly.

keen to read the pierce myself.

this is a great bit from the weaver intro:

It is most interesting to note that the redundancy of English is just about 50 per cent, so that about half of the letters or words we choose in writing or speaking are under our free choice, and about half (although we are not ordinarily aware of it) are really controlled by the statistical structure of the language. Apart from more serious implications, which again we will postpone to our final discussion, it is interesting to note that a language must have at least 50 per cent of real freedom (or relative entropy) in the choice of letters if one is to be able to construct satisfactory crossword puzzles. If it has complete freedom, then every array of letters is a crossword puzzle. If it has only 20 per cent of freedom, then it would be impossible to construct crossword puzzles in such complexity and number as would make the game popular. Shannon has estimated that if the English language had only about 30 per cent redundancy, then it would be possible to construct three-dimensional crossword puzzles.

I began Danielle Collobert's Murder, translated by Nathanaël. Poetic micro-fictions, it seems, with Collobert's trademark bleakness intact— quite good so far.

I discovered Natasha Ginzberg. I finished Happiness, As Such and two of her novellas collected by NYRB.

Because I can't leave her alone, I started Spark's The Comforters, predictably insane and hilarious.

I want to take another shot at (this time succinctly as I can manage) describing The Professor's House: The Professor actually has two houses (subdividing in his head: "In my father's house are many mansions). In one, the old family home, he still comes to ruminate, perched way up in the study, where he finished his masterwork. He's always been isolated in his core, ripped from beloved backcountry to Civilization, but he went off to study and found a position in a small, insular college near enough to beloved lake. In Europe, he the intellectual aristo early glimpsed the cliffs of lifework, which he came back to the US West to write: a history of European adventures in said West, unflattering enough to further isolate him academically, although he has become marginally aware of younger historians here and there, beginning to glimpse their own ways forward in his.

But meanwhile, he also thinks about his other house, the new one built from masterworks proceeds and social ambitions of wife and daughter--daughter, the older one, has also inherited royalties from a marvelous invention, bequeathed to her by Tom, the Professor's best student ever, who then volunteered for and died in The Great War. The professor is increasingly troubled in mind about subsequent implications and developments, troubled also by interactions with increasing pressures of heiress daughter, who is pressured as well, in various ways (possible legal challenges ahead, by Tom's tech mentor etc, also some see son-in-law/business partner-regent as uppity Jew)
The professor also draws out the minimal editing and writing intro for Tom's memoir of finding an abandoned cliff-dwellers' city much farther Southwest, and how that went over in D.C.
Many mansions, much room, much echo, waves coming back.
Style: wicked wit, sunset sorrows and beauty upside head.

Also, all this $ocial jockeying etc, and woolgathering, for that matter, will have been headed for the Crash of '29, something the author couldn't have known any more than her characters did in the early-to-mid 20s, but which makes it even better in hindsight, as she prob came to think (such a thought suits her persona)