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

Count fosco is the best villain in literature

Rivaled only by Wilkie Collins's other great villain, Lydia Gwilt in Armadale.
I've gotten to the part of the book that Fosco is in, and he's such a perfect Sydney Greenstreet part it's hard to remember that Collins created him well before Greenstreet was even born.

Due to the manuscript workshop I'm running at the moment, most of my non-work reading has and will consist of shorter chapbooks for the next few weeks, though I started keeping Clark Coolidge's 'Solution Passage: Poems 1978-1981' by the bedside, and it's been making for some really lovely reading— I'd never been able to access Coolidge's body of work on previous attempts, but it's sticking this time. He's had such a voluminous output that I kept picking up books of his that are more for the 'true heads,' so to speak.

Anyway, I finally 'get' Coolidge because I picked up this somewhat-rare paperback omnibus of his first few books, and other than some chaps and pamphlets, I'm awash in the manuscripts of of younger poets looking for guidance and feedback. Not a bad place to be!

'

Love Coolidge's verbal drumming. 'Jerome in His Study' is all-time.

It took me so long! I'd read 'The Crystal Text,' of course, but every other book of his I'd get a few pages in and realize I was just not in the right headspace...I'm definitely understanding why friends kept urging me to get this book!

I had my timeline a bit mixed up. The first four of the F. Scott Fitzgerald stories in the Dover edition I'm reading were published in the Princeton student literary magazine. That makes more sense, actually. I can't imagine a mainstream national weekly in those days publishing something as edgy and dark as "Sentiment - And the Use of Rouge", which is basically about how WWI led to the loosening of morals among the young women of Britain.

I read the first half of Ta Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me first thing this morning.
Resonated I Thik. I'm assuming this is mainly his own biography as told to his son supposedly.
NOt read him before but do have some more of him coming.

Also started reading heads by Jesse Jarnow again over the night before the Coates arrived. I read the bit about Keith Haring and his girlfriend which surprised me since I thought he was gay, then got to the end of teh section to find out he was just discovering he probably was. Need to get through this sometime this year.

Our iNner ape by Frans der wal
which has been sitting on a shelf since I picked it up cheap in a local newsagent chain several years ago. Read teh first chapter might go back to it.

& Charles C Mann 1491
He's gone back in time to what I thought was going to be teh timeline and is looking at teh inka empire which connected the peoples along the west coast of South America for several thousand miles for the first time.

I have continued obsessively reading Annie Dillard: FOR THE TIME BEING is almost as good as Tinker Creek, but more... gnostic? Structured on some obscure principle, threading clouds, sand, birth, death, Teilhard de Chardin and Baal Shem Tov. The theodicy of HOLY THE FIRM is even more baffling. AMERICAN CHILDHOOD, which I just started, by contrast feels almost too light - blithe memories of gilded youth? Still think she's the most brilliant writer I've read in the last five years.

LUX THE POET by Martin Millar. Remember picking this up when it came out in the late 80s but never finishing it. Now feels incredibly redolent of that even-then vanishing sCity Limits-squat-GLC era London - a kind of hysterical-realism partner to Geoff Dyer's Colour of Memory. Has some charm, but even at barely 160 pages outstays its welcome.

THE EXPLORER - Katherine Rundell. I have enjoyed Rundell's natural history bits in the LRB, and heard her kids books were good, so started reading as this month's bedtime book with my daughters. Honestly surprised that this kind of poshos-in-peril stuff is still published! Four kids stranded in the Amazon and they're all frightfully earnest public school types (one of whom is wearing a cricket jumper for the first three chapters), obsessed with Percy Fawcett. Take out the incessant references to snot and it might have been published in 1927.

LIGHT PERPETUAL - Francis Spufford. Follows the might-have-been postwar lives of kids killed in the Woolworths New Cross V2 explosion. Quite nicely written on a sentence by sentence basis - certainly compared to similar stuff by Lanno - but doesn't escape the temptation to drop soc-historic DO-YOU-SEEs - eg the character who works as a Fleet St compositor, on strike as the Tories are voted in in 1979 (allows FS to drop lots of lovely but strictly irrelevant science about hotmetal printing), another who makes a killing from ex-rental property after Right to Buy etc etc. This felt like a cliché when eg Tim Lott did it, decades ago - kind of hoped for more from FS. Still have 100 pages to go, so maybe he pulls it around?

SLOW DAYS, FAST COMPANY - Eve Babitz. Have been reading this off and on since last year and as with all the Eve I've read, it's so pleasurable I never want it to end.

For reference, an essay by Willa Cather:
https://cather.unl.edu/writings/nonfiction/nf012

Piedie, many consider HOLY THE FIRM to be a sort of hallucination— many believe Dillard was under the influence of psychedelic drugs while she wrote it, which I wouldn't doubt. Her daughter from her first marriage is a fine poet, C0dy-R0se Clevidence.

finished dennis cooper's guide a few days ago. probably the novel in the george miles cycle i liked the least, but it still felt necessary? it's like the tropes of the series so far are so outrageously exaggerated that they start to disintegrate, leaving the skeleton of the novel exposed, c.f. when "dennis cooper" is breaking the fourth wall and telling you he's arranging these people who may or may not be real into situations of his own contrivance. i also found the return of george's name to the text super heartbreaking. finally i will never not be loling at his choice of pseudonymizing silverchair as "tinselstool"

just started period, about twenty pages into it and it is the best book i've ever read

what should i read next: pnin or 2666?

Youll know when you get there.
Bob Gluck's book on the Mwandishi band.
Only in the first chapter where the band is being introduced but been meaning to read this since it was reviewed in Wire.
Seems to have rather extensive end notes so i need a 2nd bookmark.
But looking forward to knowing more about the band.

1491 Charles Mann
Now in the bit about how disease preceded initial contact in a lot of places. Which is why small groups of Europeans could succeed in conquest. Do now see there is an alternative understanding as to how disease spread could happen but he's looking at white dismissal of population estimates pre Columbus and reasons for that. So I need to read the more recent counter claims and know their context better.
I'm finding this book difficult to stop reading so it's not great as a bog book.
But now I've started it I want to get through it.

Between the World & Me Ta Nahesi Coates
His letter to his teenage son regarding his own context in society etc. Quite eye opening. Possibly would be more so if this was the first thing I'd read on dealing with racism. Still a good read I'd recommend.

We Were 8 Years In Power
Coates look back at several articles he'd written for magazine etc publication in a post Obama world. The title is a reference to a Reconstruction era statement by a black politician who has been stripped of power by changes in government becoming a lot more racist. But it also fits the Obama era having ended and a far more racist and corrupt one starting. This came out in 2017 so not sure exactly how much impact had been felt so far.
I have read the first section which was triggered by Bill Cosby facing trial. Need to read the rest.

I was very confused there for a second when I saw the name Bob Gluck, as there's also my friend Bob Glück, who...uh...wouldn't have written about the Mwandishi band, knowing him lol.

Glad you're enjoying the last of the cycle, Brad.

I'm halfway through HEARING, a collaborative poem written by Lyn Hejinian and the late Leslie Scalapino. It is the sequel to their book, SIGHT, which dealt with that sensory realm. An interesting history behind it— when Scalapino passed away from pancreatic cancer in mid-2010, Lyn shelved the work, thinking that because she was unable to edit it with her friend and collaborator, it wasn't respecting Scalapino's legacy or their friendship.

Then, in 2017 or so, one of the trustees of Scalapino's papers, my friend Michael Cr0ss, was searching through Hejinian's correspondences with Scalapino and came upon a *FAX* that had Scalapino's edits of the collaborative manuscript, and a note that once these were implemented, she thought the book should go to print.

So, more than ten years after her passing, a new work emerges. It's a very cool thing, and a great book.

I'm still reading Siri Hustvedt: MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE. A hybrid form I suppose: memoir, fiction, essay, together. It could just be non-fiction, but she seems to change certain facts and thus complicate that.

I quite like this book: late 1970s NYC, literature. She's serious about memory, time, mortality, looking backward and forward in life.

Less good is the very long and tiresome series of scenes where she listens through the wall to her odd neighbour. SH doesn't seem to have any idea how boring these are.

The book also contains too much whingeing about things, which becomes too generalized. She goes to a lecture by Paul de Man, doesn't like it much (fair enough, I find de Man dull and fiddly too, would genuinely be quite uninterested in listening to him). It then becomes very convenient that de Man is later disgraced (a pretty old story now). But she also extrapolates that any time anyone gives a talk he's a 'Great Man' communicating nothing but his charisma and power to his adoring audience, and thus the same as Donald Trump.

Not very convincing.

But I still, on balance, tend to like the book.

Last night I finished I Capture the Castle, having enjoyed it quite a bit. The plot was updated Austen, but the voice was wholly original.

Unlike horseshoe, who in the Novels of 1948 thread expressed the idea that Dodie Smith found high modernism dubious, I thought Smith produced a very cogent defense of it. She chose to place that defense in the mouth of Simon, a different character than her narrator, Cassandra, whom we the readers are clearly meant to identify with, but in doing so I didn't read that choice as Smith dissing Joycean modernism. It just made more sense to do it that way in terms of the plot and characters she had created and who her likely readership was. Anyway, a greatly engaging book.

Now I have started Gringos, Charles Portis.

you think we're meant to identify with Simon? i...disagree.

i just think Cassandra is an aspiring writer in a Dodie Smith mode. i think Smith acknowledged that there must be merit in high modernism, because some smart people liked it, but personally it left her cold.

you think we're meant to identify with Simon?

uh, no. we're very much meant to identify with Cassandra. sorry if the referent of that clause wasn't clear.

oh sorry, no, i just read carelessly. you're right, she does produce a defense of it, but i think Cassandra's lingering skepticism reflects Smith's own.

laughin my butt off @ Pnin

As I only read books I hear about on here, I'm reading Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?. I'm well and truly caught up in the tumble of her sentences and the way in which she beautifully creates the illusion that her characters are enigmas to themselves, following digressions to the seeds of the past.

I sense I should read everything but where could one go next?

Alice Munro? Pretty much Lorrie Moore's own favourite writer.

i read a lot of de man pre-disgrace and got a lot from it, abt ultra-close readings which reveal that the surface argument is undermined by internal assumed but unarticulated arguments (which is handy practice when yr an editor) -- i shd probably reread allegories of reading, to see how still on-board i am. at the time of the disgrace i convinced myself his US career was him working to make up for who he had been (not atonement bcz that would obviously need public admission and acknowledgment)

the edition i have of blindness and insight does something i've only ever seen in fiction or poetry otherwise: different essays are run in different typefaces, not as far as i can tell for any aesthetic purpose, just bcz they could be bothered to decide on a unified look

like all strong fabulators pdm is potentially someone we could learn a lot from, assuming you believe you know when he is not fabulating -- and would also make a good character in a book, assuming you don't lean too hard on moralistic gotchas (always hard to do when nazis and their collaborators are involved)

s/b could not be bothered

(what abt allegories of writing eh?)

The Penguin Book Of Japanese Short Stories.

>>> the edition i have of blindness and insight does something i've only ever seen in fiction or poetry otherwise: different essays are run in different typefaces, not as far as i can tell for any aesthetic purpose, just bcz they could be bothered to decide on a unified look

Interesting!

>>> and would also make a good character in a book

Surely this happened -- John Banville for instance wrote an odious-sounding book about a version of him, called SHROUD. Sounds very typical Banville.

I'm rereading Stafford's The Mountain Goat and started Robert Elder's new John Calhoun bio.

i will bring B&I to an ILB FAP if such an event ever takes place again!

done well PdM would make a good character, done by banville not so much tbh lol -- but yes, i imagine more than one novelist has already borrowed versions of him for inspiration

THE MOUNTAIN ... LION?

I like how everyone on ILB (except me, I'm afraid) has set about reading that book.

Lion, of course. Can't stop thinking about aerosmith

After a failed attempt 10yrs ago, finished Saramago's Baltasar and Blimunda last night and still feel under its spell this morning. Wish I'd gotten to it sooner, during the scarier days of the pandemic. His macro/micro sense of scale, the sweep of human lives bobbing along the tide of history, was a comforting perspective to be immersed in right now.

That's a great one, all right.

I recently finished Kelly Link's story collection, Get In Trouble, and it wasn't really for me, and am following that up with another story collection by an author that's often compared to K Link, Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, and am kind of loving it. It's kind of funny how a certain kind of stylistic eccentricity can fall flat but a similar one can totally hit the mark when it's weird and absurd in just the right way. Currently I'm in the middle of the story that's composed of Law and Order SVU synopses, which is not a conceit that attracted me, but it's just so engrossing.

Machado is great, I teach 'Especially Heinous' to my students every chance I get...often at the same time as Link's 'Stone Animals.'

It's funny, I've grown to like Link a bit better than Machado, though, if only because Machado's stories are so much more tied together and 'neat,' whereas Link's rely on ambiguity and readerly attention, imho, which is a quality I admire much more.

The PdM issue seems somewhat complicated to me, I actually didn't know anything about it until reading up on it because of this thread. (I've never read him, probably because he fell out of favor for obvious reasons!)

What do we make of philosophers and thinkers whose contributions and insights into literature are invaluable, but who were also inarguably awful? Is it utter shit that I still find parts of Heidegger valuable? What about Black and Jewish writers who still study and quote Carl Schmitt? Mbembe, one of our foremost African scholars and post-colonial thinkers, utilizes ideas from Schmitt extensively in many of his works, alongside Fanon and any number of others— is he wrong to do so? I'm not sure! I know it's an old question, of course, but one that still troubles me.

For example, I read Nick Land before I knew about his turn toward fascism. His early writings, particularly on Kant, gave me insights and understanding into the latter's work that I'd never been able to access before. That said, I keep my copy of 'Fanged Noumena' hidden in a box, alongside my copy of the Pisan Cantos and a few stray Heidegger texts.

Anyway, not trying to derail, but interested in how others think around this issue— point me toward a thread if there is one!

Curiously I was thinking about this perennial question earlier today. I was thinking about how disgusted I am, even many years later, remembering the proto-fascist passages in BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, but how I still probably couldn't write off the author for that (though I think that particular novel is execrable).

I don't think my view would be especially typical, but I think I'd now say something like:

Almost everyone in history can be found to be 'compromised' or bad in some way, so rather than writing them off for any given infraction I'd rather take what's good and leave what's bad.

I wouldn't read de Man, not because of the controversy, but because he seems dull and anaemic to me. Many will say I'm then just bad at seeing how great he is.

I wouldn't read Heidegger either - I don't get anything out of him whatever.

People don't like Philip Larkin for things he said. I would gladly read him. I like lots of his poems and think I understand what he is trying to say and how.

I find that I am now giving a bland and boring answer to a vast and perennial question. But I think I would stand by my starting point: that you should read stuff that you get something out of, and discard what you don't like in it.

In some ways, I agree with you, Pinefox— the idea that artists, philosophers, or anyone else needs be a paragon of virtue and right thinking seems absurd to me. At the same time, I think it's fine to be uninterested in and even rejecting such figures outright if one sees fit to do so. I

One that I've talked about a lot with friends is Althusser— the manner in which we discuss ideology and interpellation would not even exist without his thinking. But he murdered his wife! He was, by many accounts, a vile person! How do we reconcile these facts? We can't just throw away our understandings that arrive from his thinking.

"Interpellation", I agree, he rather inserted (interpolated?) into discussion. I still use the word today for this and that, and might not do without him.

Having said that, I don't think that he has affected my sense of "ideology". I was never able to make much sense of his idea of it. I would say that most of the senses of it that I have found relevant probably existed before his did.

It occurs to me that the dilemma of "I like X, but I shouldn't because they did Y" may be less common than the more convenient formula "I dislike X, which makes sense, because they did Y". This might imply that "ideological disapproval", or whatever, is often happily in tune with what we want to feel about someone or something anyway. Maybe this is a guess.

Althusser's "murder" of his wife - again, oddly I was thinking about that only yesterday or so, and wondering if "murder" was even the word (not that it was good, whatever it was) -- my understanding is that it was spontaneous, almost accidental, in some kind of mania -- not a cold-blooded or premeditated murder; but goodness knows I don't want to look into it any more closely than I may already have done.

In any case I don't think that killing has much to do with the pros and cons of LA's thought -- almost all of which, of course, came earlier. I would suppose that it might be more logical to suspect that he was very mentally unstable during his major years as a philosopher, and that this could conceivably throw doubt on it. Though I suppose many will disagree with that view in turn.

But as I said, his work doesn't really do much for me anyway. Which is, as I said, convenient.

I feel like this is an entirely different conversation when it's about philosophers as opposed to writers of fiction, and that there are even more separate conversations about when an author has sins outside their work and when, as per pinefox and Brideshead Revisited, the evil is right there in the work.

Very true!

Again, didn't mean to derail.

#onethread, but I'd post thoughts on an ILB thread on the topic if you were to make one. I'm sure there's ILE ones already, but have a feeling those are best left unrevived.

yes apologies i am a known #onethread militant aka gemini flibbertigibbet w/o discipline or sense of boundaries

I might! Though might take me a minute.

Stafford's Complete Stories and Other Writings round-up from Library of America fucken finally upon us: in bookstores April 7, but supposedly you can get it sooner if order direct. It's Collected Stories, uncollected stories, and A Mother in History, comprised of visits (and travels, in the mental sense) with Marguerite Oswald. This incl. link to one of her milestones, "Children Are Bored on Sunday," with backstory:
https://loa.org/books/648-complete-stories-other-writings

Also essays.

I spent time with her collected stories three weeks ago, coincidentally, and was consistently underwhelmed.

Haven't read any of her stuff yet, but I found this writeup amusing: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/books/review-jean-stafford-library-america-boston-adventure-mountain-lion-catherine-wheel.html

Shuggie Bain: good but not great melodrama, couldn’t see what the fuss is about

A swim in the pond in the rain: not generally a big short story fan but I do like the Russians so I was optimistic about this. The analysis chapters were kind of sweet but mostly pretty uninteresting or superficial or mechanical. I think mainly I just don’t want to be in a classroom any more and the book is explicitly an adaptation of a class so I’ve only myself to blame.

Klara and the sun: enjoying this a lot so far. Usual Ishiguro unreliable narrator.

“False starts” is good enough for me to persist. Thank you!

ha I'm a squinter and was reading that as referring to Kentucky-Cali-Kentucky's own Mary Gaitskill---I love most of her stuff, but could kinda see her going in that direction (but I'm a squinter).
Still reading the library's Library of America Melville, and just finished (for now) The Confidence Man--His Masquerade, which, appropriately, resists any any comfortable stance of interpretation, or at least mine. All I can do is watch, as the con or cons (one guy in many guises, I assumed, but come to think of it, maybe nor: there's a lot of that going around), on a riverboat "bound for the auction blocks of New Orleans, " as the jacket flap copy emphasizes, approaches his or their lastest chosen mark, adapting conversational gambits accordingly. It seems too patterned at first, like a popular Saturday Night Live sketch, methodically working that premise to death, 'til time for the next recycling---in a more longwinded and otherwise complicated-not-complex way.
But the con just has to keep going, in and around the moment and boat (hi ho, lets go though the "poor emigrants" banging against the walls in their shoddy hammocks, didn't know riverboats had steerage too, but why not), changing even before the pushback gets stronger and scarier, with stories from Reality vs. The Man's sweet undertow of reductive optimism-p-eventually, his own pushback even seems honestly, and understandably, indignant, vs. one relentless revelation of financial snares (searing focus evoking the experience of the author's father, who died young, his uncle, who then tried to sort things out, and Herman himself, as compulsively hapless heads of household, at least on contracts)--which gets twisted back, reduced to one point, now seeming the pissiest--the Confidence Man pushes back against such zealous overkill (that he thought he could turn aside), and, in scenes like these, he seems not entirely wrong: we do need some kind of basic lower-case confidence, faith in faith's ability to keep us going, despite all the amputations, beyond-below the limits of rational discourse and all its elaborations---but he/they can't leave it alone, can't be alone, or lower-case for long (and then there's the money, which can sometimes seem like a trophy, but 0 social safety net here, as the reader is often reminded in passing: money and talk about money occupy all tables and pews here).

So despite all the talking, it's effectively more show than tell, much more.

An unexpected connection, from an email I sent this morning:

Just read (mark s)'s incredible Sight and Sound deep focus survey ov Alice on film (and in the art of Tenniel, Ernst etc), http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49605...Struck by the description of Dodgson-Carrol-Tenniel creative tension, incl. in connection with this:

Louis Aragon and André Breton lauded Carroll, for whom nonsense, as Breton wrote in his 1939 Anthology of Black Humour, constituted “the vital solution to a profound contradiction between the acceptance of faith and the exercise of reason, on the one hand, and on the other between a keen poetic awareness and rigorous professional duties… No one can deny that in Alice’s eyes a world of oversight, inconsistency and, in a word, impropriety hovers vertiginously round the centre of truth.”

(Which also makes me think of recently read Library of America edition of The Confidence Man---His Masquerade, last finished novel by Melville the artist and head of household, finally on his way to being salaryman, having first passively received and then extracted hand-outs through most of his life)

Now I'm reading World of Wonders, third book in the Deptford trilogy by Robertson Davies. Like so many of his books, the theater in all its many forms plays a very prominent role. In this case it is far, far from the "legitimate theater". This tale features carnival side shows, vaudeville, and stage magic, where the essence of the job is putting something over on the rubes. There's a lot there to play around with and Davies plays out his story at fast clip.

Deptford, London SE8? That's about 20 minutes from me.

I finished "History of Rock and Roll Vol. 1 1920-1963" by Ed Ward. It's a long and fairly dense book, so probably for specialists and serious fans only. Mostly it reads like a guy with a massive record collection taking you through all his favorite early rock, r&b, country, pop, vocal, gospel, etc records in roughly chronological order and telling you a little story about each one, giving equal time to the artists and the label heads (who in those days of small, independent labels were at least as colorful personality-wise). It's a good way to discover lots of forgotten songs and get a sense of how the form evolved in those early days. The book ends fittingly with the story of the formation and early days of the Beatles up to their EMI signing and the eve of their arrival in the US. I'm assuming that story is picked up in the next volume.

Hmm, that sounds like something I might be interested in reading.

Deptford, London SE8?

Kit Marlowe died there! But for the purposes of Davies' novels Deptford is a small town in Ontario Province, Canada.

I went back to a short book once given to me as a gift: Alain Robbe-Grillet, WHY I LOVE BARTHES (UK edition 2011).

If you like Roland Barthes then this is priceless stuff: it mostly consists of a R-G lecture at a symposium on Barthes, in which Barthes is on the stage and interjects and converses, along with others. In vintage French Intellectual style they say daft things; Barthes quite casually remarks that 'The body is the most imaginary of all imaginary objects' (p.13).

This lecture is followed by R-G's tribute after RB's death, and 'Yet Another Roland Barthes', from as late as 1995, which talks of RB's insecurities and concludes with a quite startling conceit: R-G imagines RB writing a novel in which he repeatedly transforms, changes his name, even ending up as ... Orlando (p.75). Was R-G thinking of Woolf? You'd think so, but as this is French not English culture, I'm unsure.

The little book concludes with R-G's list of 'I like / I don't like', including: 'I liked Roland Barthes's voice' (p.78).

Two I just started:

Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor. Slow-motion-breakdown-of-civilization stuff intrigues me after the year we've all just had, so I jumped on this when I saw it mentioned in a Bookforum essay. First Lessing I've ever read. It's... odd.

Michael Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human bondage in the early modern Atlantic world. A quite dry but interesting looking history of 17th-century English attitudes towards slavery, and attitudes towards non-European races, as those two attitudes were in the process of becoming welded together in the single idea of the plantation economy.

White Fragility.
Have read first few chapters and recognise what's being talked about.
Wonder if there will be a point after the thought processes talked about here cease to be widespread.
Got from library and have on loan for a guaranteed 6 months which seems weird.
But an extended return date for other books I have out automatically extended a few days ago and this has early December listed. I checked library website to see if it picked up that earlier extension and no its longer.

Read a lot of scattered poetry this week, including some John Weiners and Jack Spicer, as well as two new-ish JH Prynne chapbooks.

Started "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf. I was assigned in once for a college humanities course once but only skimmed it, for the most part, and bounced off the long and winding sentences. God knows how I managed to say anything intelligent-sounding about it in the discussion section. Still not an easy read, but managing to digest most of it this time around.

Forging ahead to Bloomsday.

― the pinefox
Have you ever taken the Bloomsday tour? I'd like to, if it's good.

Which also provides a good reminder that a summer 'what are you reading' thread is in order.

I needed something propulsive and comforting, so I'm on what is becoming my biennial re-reading of Jonathan Raban's Coasting. Raban is best when he's running from something (which is most of the time) and here he's trying and failing to escape the gravitational field of the UK as he spends four years orbiting the main islands in his boat. Like lots of boys of his generation, there's a sense that Raban is always dealing with the trauma of boarding school and the boat becomes a little like an extension of that milieu - down to the library he assembles the and gross figurehead of Thatcher he puts up in the galley.

I'd forgotten that he meets Paul Theroux halfway round. Theroux is writing his own 'what's Britain really like?' book (The Kingdom By the Sea) and it's a weird and intense meeting, neither wanting to reveal too much. (I forget if Theroux mentions Raban in his book. I'd assume not.) There's a also a cute meeting with Larkin in Hull.

Anyway, I always come for the descriptions of the sea and the dreams of escape; there are few who do those better than Raban.

We discussed TO THE LIGHTHOUSE here a year or two ago, but I'll just repeat the view, both my own and fairly standard, that it's a magnificent masterpiece.

I don't know if there is one 'Bloomsday Tour' but I have extensively visited the Dublin locations of Ulysses, on Bloomsday and other days.

I've heard of that book before, Chinaski - it sounds remarkable, especially the Larkin episode which I didn't know about.

We have a summer thread now, thanks to dow:

Buffalo Moon, What Are You Reading In The Summer Of 2021?