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

Jean Stafford didn't write short stories so much as reports or dispatches about people she's observed. Occasionally it works.

I'm re-reading some Chekhov and I can't stop thinking about Easter Night.

I am caught between two stool, having started both My Dog Tulip, Ackerly, and Psmith in the City, Wodehouse. It's now a race for my affections.

hott

I've started Siri Hustvedt, MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE. It's very readable. NYC and poetry in the late 1970s - goes down surprisingly easily. Look forward to more.

ON the last section of David Olusoga The World's War and armistice has been signed. just been reading about black troops fathering babies in the Rhineland and the later Nazi response which is disgusting.
& Black troops who had got some respect from fightig as part of teh French Army triggering the US army to try to get them treated with acomplete lack of respect. Which seemed to be more prevalent after the fighting ended.

Good book, think I'll read more by him.

Finished Kehinde Andrews New Age of Empire which was a pretty scathing overview of the West's exploitation of the colonies and how it doesn't seem to be getting much better just teh exploiters seems to have changed. China and the rich of various countries exploiting resources and allowing teh money to go to the white west. NOt sure what any form of egalitarianism can build on if the resources are all going to be gone.

Stranded Clinton Walker
JUst getting to the Birthday party imploding and me getting the timing of Jeffrey Wegener's playing with tehm wrong. It wasa Dutch tour after which Mick Harvey took over the drums again and then teh antipodean dates at the end are Des Hefner.
OH and just when i was wondering why the Moodists hadn't had much coverage they appeared on about the next page. Chris Walsh having appeared much earlier since he was around to help teach Tracy Pew bass.

Last night I finished both Psmith in the City and My Dog Tulip. Remarks follow.

In this book Wodehouse delivers a Psmith who is recognizably in character. This is a sequel to his earlier 'public schoolboy' stories in which Psmith plays the eccentric second fiddle to one Mike Jackson, a handsome lad who is normal as milk and wields a wicked bat in cricket. Both Mike and Psmith appear again here, but now as apprentices in a bank.

Wodehouse wisely pushes Psmith to the fore here, rather than as a secondary character. The major flaw in this yarn is a lack of scope for Psmith to fully blossom out, as he did once he was finally untethered from the stolid Mike and sent to NYC in Psmith, Journalist, a much finer book. This novel is comparatively tepid compared to Wodehouse in full cry.

As for My Dog Tulip, I was rather less impressed with it than the critics who supplied the Introduction and cover blurbs, which tout it as a masterpiece. One blurb from a NYT reviewer claims the book "shakes up our sentimental preconceptions about dogs". This is nonsense. Ackerly is hugely sentimental about Tulip. He keeps trying to deliver her a life of perfect unclouded happiness; he describes her beauty in the rapturous tones of a lover; he is often consternated because his attempts to be the perfect dog owner for his pet keep coming a cropper through his lack of practical judgment. Unsentimental this is not.

I kept wanting to tell him to settle down, try less hard and just find a reasonable balance of his needs and hers, some pleasant life together that he knew how to accomplish, instead of imagining how wonderful it would be if Tulip could be made blissful, then failing at it over and over.

As normal as milk?

The Ackerley to read is My Father and Myself. That's his masterpiece.

There's a Captain Beefheart album and song called "Safe as Milk", featuring the lyric, "I may be hungry but I sure ain't weird".

xp

Heh, when Pinefox used that phrase,Beefheart's explanation of the title popped into my head: after WWII and subsequent nuclear tests, fallout isotopes were found in mother's milk (cdc.gov still has something about this).

haha (presumably in response to https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/14/books/review/autofiction-my-dark-vanessa-american-dirt-the-need-kate-elizabeth-russell-jeanine-cummins-helen-phillips.html)

strange to have come of age reading great novels of ambition, substance, & imagination (Dostoyevsky, Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner) & now find yourself praised & acclaimed for wan little husks of "auto fiction" with space between paragraphs to make the book seem longer...

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) March 16, 2021

So 'autofiction' has finally caught on in English?

unlike, say, Joyce Carol Oates.

JCO wrote some amazing stories, but God she's just awful.

Gore Vidal: the three scariest words in the English language are "Joyce Carol Oates."

I like autofiction bc im not very smart

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/8197RW+F2hL.jpg

i knew someone would reference that awful, catty gore vidal comment ugh

I nabbed a free copy of Lincoln in the Bardo and started it last night. It seems to me rather too self-concious about telling its story unconventionally, so that people will know instantly that this book is Experimental and therefore Important, but it did manage to not grate on me, yet.

after a couple of months of mostly adventure/spy/thriller/detective/mystery novels am now reading the old grove press jarry selected works... just about to start on the exploits & opinions of dr faustroll, pataphysician which i did read a few years back in a separate edition, but a revisit in this case is no bad thing.

This has doubtless been linked everywhere already, but enjoyed this on wanhuskgate: https://www.the-fence.com/online-only/from-husk-til-dawn

In particular this tickled me

Elsewhere, there are dissenting voices, to be found. Ben Northman, the 56-year-old author of England is Piss and The Skipton Goblin, has no time for trendy movements. ‘We don’t have autofiction in Barnsley,’ he told me. ‘Folk round these parts want granite-hard muscular fiction, about witches building dry stone walls.

finished try, the third novel in dennis cooper's george miles cycle, last night. it's my favorite so far i think? even though it didn't really have the meta dimensions of frisk or uncut misery of closer. it was kind of a straight up love story, albeit embroidered by the most nihilistic depravity like ever—and it's a love story between a bi dude (who is earnest and beautiful and pretty thoroughly fucked up by all of the sexual abuse his parents and relatives visit upon him) and a straight dude (who can barely move from the depths of his heroin addiction) no less! hopeless ppl feeling profound tenderness for each other... i wanted to cry every other page

it's also uhhh so funny. i feel very weird reading dennis cooper bc he is capable of making me laugh at the most awful, evil shit, i.e. my favorite line in the book, delivered from the main character to one of his dads:

“If you loved me . . .”—Ziggy slugs—“. . . you wouldn’t rim me while I’m crying.”

it is fun to read the goodreads reviews that totally don't get it, or think that it's celebrating the abuses it documents

I gave up on Lincoln in the Bardo last night.

As far as I read, the qualities of his imagined version of the bardo was the most interesting feature of the book and by 100 pages in, that particular feature was fixed and its continuing interest was exhausted. As befits ghosts trapped in the bardo, all the characters are unhappy and tormented by some aspect of their earthly life which they obsess about endlessly. This tends to make each character very sketchy and one-note, which Saunders seems to understand, because he keeps multiplying them.

All this was very keenly imagined and depicted. My difficulty was that such characters became extremely tedious company, no matter how many of them I was introduced to. I just couldn't stick to it. NB: Many ILBers enjoyed this book, so take this opinion as personal to me.

I think Piedie Gimbel's link is good.

‘I think it’s generational jealousy really,’ said Moneyshire when asked about Carol Oates’ comments. ‘The typical reader of Oates’s time, the olden days, was probably wealthy, had a lot of time on their hands, maybe had a few slaves and could devote a lot of time to big complicated books. Whereas now, because of the internet, we don’t have to spend hours evoking trauma. We can just write the word ‘trauma’ on a page of spotless creamy paper, with a grainy black and white image of some twigs or a bruised leg – and that really does the same job.’

Just read The Fourth Island by Sarah Tolmie, which I saw recommended on Reddit, of all places. A novella about a fourth Aran Island, existing out of time and hidden from almost everyone, on which lost and despairing people occasionally wash up and find themselves fixed in certain ways. It’s written in a kind of fragmented folktale style, skipping backwards and forwards in different characters’ lives. I thought it was quite lovely.

That sounds quite good!

My experience with Lincoln in the Bardo is that is gets more fluid and readable later on - it really starts by throwing the format and eccentricities at you but coheres much more in the second half.

I finished Garth Greenwell's Cleanness, which is a book I appreciated, and then Patricia Lockwood - No One Is Talking About This, which a lot of people here are talking about, also a good example of "starts by throwing the format and eccentricities at you but coheres much more in the second half."

Currently reading: Kelly Link - Get Into Trouble.

Cleanness was uneven, as a series of anecdotes might be. The first couple were the best.

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.

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