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

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.

Speaking of Bloomsday, somebody around here co-wrote a quiz that some of you might be interested in, especially you, teh pinefox:
https://www.learnedleague.com/oneday.php?jamesjoycesulysses

James Redd: I knew 11/12 - the exception being that it was Zero Mostel who played Leopold Bloom in a 1974 production. I'd thought it might be Cyril Cusack. I only know Mostel from his performance in WATERSHIP DOWN.

Wow. I'm reading The Ministry of Fear. Three years ago Brighton Rock also impressed the hell out of me. In January I readThe Comedians. Sometimes the debt to Conrad overwhelms him.

I re-read Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It's a short book but it's huge in scope and argument, and positively levitating with rage at the meagreness of women's lives. It becomes a little didactic amid the rawness of the final act but the narrative arc is still surprising. It seems amazing that it was such a success when it was published in 1926 (particularly in America).

I read it in September. Agree

Joao Cabral de Melo Neto - Education by Stone (Selected Poetry)

20odd pages from the end of Bleak House yet I'm lying here reading crap one the internet

Finished Clark Coolidge's SOLUTION PASSAGE, after some time with it.

Now reading Tan Lin's HEATH COURSE PAK.

Going to try to finish Mary Gaitskill's Veronica today - I'm liking it, but (or rather, because) a lot of the writing is dense in a very poetic way that's always about t]o slip out of my grasp, like a big piece of chocolate cake that is really rich yet bittersweet, in a way that is heady and sad. So, yeah, sad chocolate cake is what it feels like to me. Would like to read Bad Habits, too.

Any thoughts on Norman Rush - I'm intrigued by Mortals but am ambivalent about committing to it a long book right now. Wondering if "Mating" is a better starting point?

I loved both Mating and Mortals. I think I'd go with Mating though I have a sense that he belongs in the previous century. (I mean Mating literally does but thematically and stylistically he feels like a Great American Writer in the old Updike-Roth-Bellow-DeLillo sense of the phrase. I could be doing him a disservice there).

I'm 3/4 of the way through Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay. I am enjoying the subtle humour but I am kind of waiting for it to catch fire.

iirc it catches fire in the last few pages

Juan Carlos Onetti - Complete Short Stories

Onetti is a mood - of whiskey, tobacco, whores, murder, suicide and an inner emptiness that is near-total, he uses tropes from crime and existential mumbo-jumbo to craft this one pure note for these stories that span his entire career of 50 odd-years. The last 100 pages are just sorta small pieces and fragments from his years in Spain (he had to move to Madrid from Montevideo after being imprisoned by the junta for 6 months). He had made it as a writer by then so there is a disinterest here in that he took all this as far as it could go, plus prison and exile.

This collection has about three or so really great stories in it. It should've been those + some fragments though you get to see development though I am sorta ho-hum about having everything translated (do we need the Complete set of stories from Clarice Lispector, its not a trend I welcome). His novels should get a reissue.