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

It's wild just how little we work with at GCSE (14-16) - even with a top set. We've read longer texts, but even something short like Jekyll & Hyde we read together and it takes more than a month. Which is to say, I like the idea of a more hands-off approach - 'what do you notice and how does it work' - but it would probably be just the passage, maybe a page.

I wonder if I misunderstand style or we're talking about different things? It may have sounded like I was sneering at style when what I meant is that (particularly with someone like Moore) style is inseparable from how a writer creates meaning - and how hard that is to notice and develop your own version of. It might even be the whole deal with developing a voice?

If it's already not abundantly clear, I've really not taught enough pure 'writing' to know what I'm talking about.

That was what I meant too! Sorry if I wasn't clear.

I was just thinking about how to get students to recognize that.

"Hey, let's dig into this idea of 'style,'" and have them look at that passage

In my experience, I have always found it more fruitful to think in terms of "voice" instead of "style". Authors with a style impose that style on every piece of their writing and their writing usually suffers from that. For me, the writer needs to find a voice that connects to the reader and delivers what the writer wants that piece to deliver.

Because no writer will be equally proficient at every kind of voice, their voices will tend to converge on those they best understand how to write. If that voice gets narrowed down to just one consistent unvarying one, then that is what turns it into a "style".

You were clear Lily Dale - it's me being 'end of term' foggy! I have totally derailed the thread; what I actually need is a thread like La Lechera's amazing thread about her music class!

One thing this has certainly cleared up for me: we simply don't (or don't have the time to) discuss the fundamental nature of style as a generator of meaning. Which is kind of staggering, now I think of it.

I agree, Aimless, I usually talk about voice as well. I was thinking it more as myth-busting about style, for students who may have picked up the idea that they are supposed to have a style but don't really know what that means.

Chinaski, you may find some useful thoughts provoked by the wide-ranging discussion in this ILB thread: Creative writing considered as an industry

That looks great - thanks Aimless.

I'm probably guilty of conflating style and voice to some extent.

The best lit courses I took were based on texts discussed in class times required reading lists (books; short stories, essays, topics, themes)---not everything in the list was required, but you had pick some of it for papers due at midterm and end of semester: I'm thinking especially of Modern British Fiction, the one course I ever took that still comes back into my head like literature or music. It didn't have to be anything all that elaborate, but we at least found/had to make the time, out of class, to read whole pieces, not just passages, with some degree of selectivity, which was pleasing, as was just reading, absorbing in a quiet way, w/o thinking about what we were going to say in class.

The only writing class I took, re poetry, had 0 required reading; it was based, as it happened, pretty much on personal experience, just reading each other's latest, then hearing the writer read it aloud (Students: "Oh, now I get it, cool." Teacher "But it has to work on paper!" was a frequent thing)Lots of comments, some rude, some people got better, maybe as a result of those.

That thread is populated with lunatics from what I can make out (YMP and Aimless excepted). I always figured the best use of a creative writing course would be the deadlines.

That and permission to write, think of yourself as a writer, take time away from other things so that you can devote sustained time to writing.

I've never done an MFA program but I hung around a lot of MFA candidates when I was adjuncting, and one thing I noticed was that regardless of the quality of teaching they were getting, they all got way better at writing over the three years.

Forgot about that thread.

xpost Yeah, and great idea to have a La Lechera-type Help Me With My Class thread for reading and writing (and other things): thinking about her questions and how to respond and reading other responses always made for a good learning experience, brane exercise anyway.

(YMP and Aimless excepted)

Nabisco had many cogent observations, too, I thought.

As for Gringos, it is less satiric than the other Portis novels that aren't True Grit. The characters have just enough humanity in their portrayal to give them life and dimension and just enough absurdity to illustrate Portis's worldview. He's pretty hard on the hippies though and it's clear he found them a complete waste.

Re LUCKY PER, that he mistook who his central character should have been and then the book defaltes in its last fifth after she dies is its main problem. Enjoyed it a lot despite that, and despite the anti-anti-semitic author also endlessly needing to point out that various people were Jewish.

That thread is populated with lunatics from what I can make out (YMP and Aimless excepted). I always figured the best use of a creative writing course would be the deadlines.

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski),

Good morning!

Lunatic tic tic

Lol. I didn't make it all the way through - I got sockpuppet fever and bailed. Also a little bit of sockpuppet nostalgia if I'm honest.

Finished AUSTERITY BRUNCH, then read a long poem by Jeremy Hoevenaar, COLD MOUNTAIN MIRROR DISPLACEMENT. Interesting work from him, I am now much more excited about his new book than I was previously.

Then read a short little squib of Stephen Rodefer, FOR MORE LECTURES, which continues where his FOUR LECTURES left off. Only ten or so pages, but nice to read.

I have too many opinions about teaching writing to further detail the thread, but what I will say is this: in the workshops that I facilitate, the goal is always to help the poet (or writer) write the best version of what they want to see in the world.

Am I crazy or is the tone of the first part of No One is Talking About This similar to the tone in the first part of White Noise?

I avoid contemporary literary fiction like the plague...though I wouldn't be surprised if you were right, much has been taken from DeLillo.

I'm currently reading "Brighton Rock" by Graham Greene, the 3rd best novel of 1938, according to this message board.

Love that book. The film, with Dicky Attenborough, also worth seeing - the closest the UK ever came to the kinetic energy of Warner Bros gangster flicks.

The film sounds intriguing. So far the book reminds me of certain movies, specifically Coen brothers movies like "Fargo". You have an implacably ruthless character (ie. Pinkie) kind of standing in for the immanence of evil, drawn into a conflict with a flawed but determined person trying to do a decent thing. The theological undertones seem rather Coen-esque, and the somewhat distant and slightly condescending treatment of the characters, who align perhaps a bit too perfectly with their sociologically-determined stereotypes and flaws.

yeah, but it goes even narrower, like a needle, or a hatpin.

I'm still only halfway through the book, so my opinion could shift. I'm not surprised though to find that Greene had a rather patrician upbringing. The rough side of Brighton depicted in the novel is keenly observed, but doesn't feel lived in. Still that's a nitpick, and maybe my own personal bugbear. I enjoyed this description of Greene's writing method, as described by Michael Korda in this wonderful New Yorker profile (the scene depicted takes place on Korda's uncle's yacht in the Mediterranean):

An early riser, he appeared on deck at first light, found a seat in the shade of an awning, and took from his pocket a small black leather notebook and a black fountain pen, the top of which he unscrewed carefully. Slowly, word by word, without crossing out anything, and in neat, square handwriting, the letters so tiny and cramped that it looked as if he were attempting to write the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin, Graham wrote, over the next hour or so, exactly five hundred words. He counted each word according to some arcane system of his own, and then screwed the cap back onto his pen, stood up and stretched, and, turning to me, said, "That's it, then. Shall we have breakfast?" I did not, of course, know that he was completing "The End of the Affair," the controversial novel based on his own tormenting love affair, nor did I know that the manuscript would end, typically, with an exact word count (63,162) and the time he finished it (August 19th, 7:55 a.m., aboard Elsewhere).

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/03/25/the-third-man-4

I started reading Our Spoons Came from Woolworth's, Barbara Comyns. It is quite a different-feeling first-person narrative voice from that in I Capture the Castle.

Interesting. I just started reading something else that somehow led me to another one of her books, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead.

Isn't the actor who played Mr. Memory in The Thirty-Nine Steps also in Brighton Rock? Wylie something, not Wiggins.

Wylie Watson

The Diary of Anne Frank, incredibly powerful. Would recommend for anyone who didn't read it in school, even male middle aged old farts like me.

Cotter's England by Christina Stead. It's reminding a little of Angel by Elizabeth Taylor, but I can't tell if that's just because I'm reading the Stead in a similar Virago edition to the Taylor

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1497731940l/35453358._SY475_.jpg

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1504698408l/8313057._SY475_.jpg

At last I finish Siri Hustvedt, MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE (2019). I suppose I'd have to say that this ends less well than it begins. It starts like a multi-layered memoir, mainly of NYC in the late 1970s, but with aspects of the present (especially SH's old mother in a home) well rendered. This memoir form works well, with the sense of place and time especially, and the young writer's love of poetry and modernism.

But the book gets rather overwhelmed by the saga of her next door neighbour, who turns out to have various friends who are all in a witches' coven - which sounds dramatic, but these people never become very vivid or interesting, though they take up so much of the book. Other elements include the writer's own attempts to write a (YA?) detective story, which reaches a kind of resolution but not a really satisfactory one; and a very long-running, strong-minded, broad-brush feminist polemic, which might appeal to many people but I'm afraid doesn't appeal to me - it's too undifferentiated and lacking nuance, notably about historical changes which have made such polemic mainstream by now.

There is some real interest and thought in this book, especially about time, memory, narrative - abstract cogitation that is true enough to the legacy of Virginia Woolf, and which sometimes comes off quite well. And as a 'blend of fact and fiction' it's more intriguingly indeterminate than almost any I've ever read - I can't tell what I should take as real, if anything, and what invented. But it doesn't all come together as well as I'd hoped.

XXpostThe Diary of Anne Frankas part of the complete works, tracked here, intriguingly: https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/diary/complete-works-anne-frank/

Giuseppe Ungaretti - Allegria

I started reading Our Spoons Came from Woolworth's, Barbara Comyns. It is quite a different-feeling first-person narrative voice from that in I Capture the Castle.

― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless)

Interesting. I just started reading something else that somehow led me to another one of her books, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead.

― It Is Dangerous to Meme Inside (James Redd and the Blecchs)

big fan of comyns / these novels, although her novels always seem just shy of their full potential to me. in some ways it's the least ambitious but woolworth's seems like the most successful on its own terms to me, with an astonishing childbirth set piece. the vet's daughter as well has a great opening, really nails that faux-naïf tone that seems to loosely echo someone like walser.

reading the wall by john lanchester, which i am hating, and rereading a girl is a half-formed thing, which holds up very well. also going through the short stories in grand union by zadie smith very slowly, some of which are near her best work and some of which i forget before i finish.

Bit of a run...

I finished Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, which I loved and am still making sense of.

John Dickson Carr's Hollow Man, which was the perfect palette cleanser. I could probably have done without the meta stuff but huge fun all the same.

Disclaimer: this is a mate's book, but I also read the Archive of Bernard Taylor, which is presented as an archive of a suburban photographer but is more complicated than that. The photography is beautiful and the presentation of old maps and the sense of the whole thing being a series of vanishings and appearances is right up my street. More info here: https://nowherediary.co/books/the-archive-of-bernard-taylor

Winter by Ali Smith. I feel mixed because the characterisation is quite pat and some of the dialogue is maddening but I found this very moving in the end.

Now reading the The Prince of West End Avenue by Alan Isler. I'm 50 pages in and have belly laughed ten times already.

reading the wall by john lanchester, which i am hating,

taps sign.

_reading the wall by john lanchester, which i am hating, _

taps sign. 🕸

I'm due my six-monthly re-read of that thread. *puts on smoking jacket*

I'm finding it hard to make headway in Our Spoons Came from Woolworth's, not because it is poorly written. The narration is terse, direct and somewhat harrowing in how it unerringly picks out the details that matter most to people living hand-to-mouth on the precarious knife's edge of dire poverty.

Any critic's appraisal of this book that hints it has comic moments should be read as that critic never having lived in poverty. For me it cuts a bit close to the bone in terms of bringing back my own half decade in somewhat similar poverty, although I was not married or trying to raise a child in those circumstances. I keep having to put the book down and soothe myself, which means I can only finish about 25 pages a night.

Kazuo Ishiguro, THE UNCONSOLED (1995).

It's everything you've heard it is: a dream-like story, close to Kafka. It's oddly long - does it need to be this long? - and I'm still not halfway through, so please no spoilers from the more initiated. I like the emphasis on municipal high culture, classical music, gentility; and I like the other running motif of soccer - even Marco van Basten has been implicitly referred to.

strictly speaking it doesn't need to be as long as it is.

i didn't enjoy it much while i was reading it a year ago, but i've thought about it more since than any other book i read last year.

I finished Alan Isler's The Prince of West End Avenue today. It's set in an upmarket Jewish care home in New York, in which the residents are putting on a version of Hamlet. On the surface, it's a very funny look at old age and memory (the first-person narrator is present at the birth of Dada and is keen to reveal his founding role) but it's as much about the story the narrator is avoiding telling as the one he is.

Isler taught Lit at Queen's College for 30 years and didn't finish the book until he was in his late 40s. All that experience and formal knowledge are clearly apparent and the book is immaculately structured; the way the Hamlet script and rehearsals are woven in is perfect - to the point where I want to re-read it as I'm sure I missed a bunch of clues and cues.

I remember enjoying the Backlisted episode on that.

Read Sunday Fall's SUBWAY POEMS, a lovely group of neo-Objectivist (a la Zukofsky and Oppen, not Rand) poems written by a young man from what seems like Queens or Brooklyn. Self-published outsider. Interesting work.

I finished "Brighton Rock". I've read that Greene was partly at least trying to write something that would adapt well to the screen, although of course it ended up being much more that. It's interesting to see how much more clipped, visually-oriented, and physical literary style had already become in this book than in say a random literary work of 20 years prior. I think some of this was probably the influence of film as a medium, also perhaps the rise of the tough and taciturn style epitomized by Hemingway. Greene can write tough and taciturn, although he is also prone to surprising flashes of poetry. Either way words are always carefully chosen and placed. Using a thriller plot to propel an investigation of moral taxonomy seems an influential innovation.

That's a good analysis, O. Nate.

I forge across to the second half of THE UNCONSOLED. It's long.

speaking of which: i finished klara and the sun. it's good but minor ishiguro. almost a pastiche of never let me go.