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

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

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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.

I've never read a page of Norman Rush but James Wood loves him, as shown by an essay in THE FUN STUFF.

Mating is one of my all time favorite novels! One of these days I’ll read Mortals

o. nate, you read Dissipatio H.G. a few months ago, yes? I'm hesitating before checking it out of the library. Is it good future s(c)h(l)ock?

Not sure what you mean by future shock/schlock. There's not much that's very futuristic about it. It's set in the '70s, and apart from the central premise (which is never explained) it's fairly realistic. It's interesting as a monologue of an isolated person who spends a lot of time in his own head and in conversation with long-dead philosophers and thinkers. It's also timely I guess as a depiction of the psychological effects of isolation (somewhat like "Malicroix" in that respect). The narrator is someone who has had little use for other people but finds that he misses them when they're gone.

Terrific. Thanks. I got it in front of me.

MATING is much more fun than MORTALS I think, but both are great, and significantly better than SUBTLE BODIES, Rush's last book, which is absolutely terrible. Struggle to think of a sharper drop-off of quality in a writer.

I have been continuing on my Annie Dillard odyssey. LIVING THROUGH FICTION was a curious bit of litcrit, which might have been subtitled WHY I AM NOT A POSTMODERNIST. Will be interesting to turn to her novels after reading it. Right now I'm almost done with AMERICAN CHILDHOOD, which is a hoot. Spendidly lyrical memoir of growing up a gilded blonde in 50s Pittsburgh, that has actually made laugh out loud three times. Can't remember the last book I read that provoked IRL LOLs.

Have dipped a toe into Donna Haraway's STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE. For all her dodgy anti-natalism, I find DH often very charming as an interviewee, talking about her dawgs etc, but not sure I have the stomach for her prose anymore...

I have personally witnessed DH yelling at young people selling vegetables at one of the Santa Cruz farmers markets. She also continuously defended one of her colleagues who was eventually forced out of his position due to substantive sexual assault allegations. I gave away all her books years ago.

Kind of brings it back to the very subjective nature of the answer to the question, "well, can I still find this person's thinking instructive while finding them to be heinous?"

For some reason with living philosophers and theorists, I find it much more difficult to stomach their work if I know they are an awful person; not as much with dead philosophers and theorists.

I pecked at the edges of four different books lately, faling to find one that held me -- and these were recognizably good books, too. I've finally got a bit of traction with a non-fic, The Monkey's Voyage, wherein the author thrashes out the recent scientific in-fighting over the relative importance of plate tectonics vs. individual dispersal events in determining the geographic distribution of species among widely separated land masses.

It's hardly a suspense thriller, but it does model the sorts of arguments scientists engage in and how they differently weigh the evidence that supports their preferred theory. And it is getting me slowly past my unfortunate bout of reader's block.

I just had to look up 'anti-natalism'.

the ethical view that negatively values coming into existence and procreation, and judges procreation as morally wrong. Antinatalists argue that humans should abstain from procreation because it is morally wrong (some also recognize the procreation of other sentient beings as morally wrong).

Does Prof Haraway assert that procreation is morally wrong? I have only ever read (just about) her most famous essay (never my cup of tea), so don't know.

Funnily enough the mere phrase STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE does stay with me, as a relevant thought in life, quite in isolation from whatever she actually says in her book, which I promise never to read.

There was a Jenny Turner essay in the LRB!

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n02/jenny-turner/nothing-natural

S0phie and her wife are execrable humans for too many reasons to name. Talk about theorists and philosophers who are awful people.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain - good, interesting, maybe even important - the culture of Harvard Business School that encourages or even enforces extroversion sounds horrific. But I did raise an eyebrow when she said Moses was an introvert (footnote: "based on my own reading of Exodus") and spent two pages talking about his achievements ("climbing a mountain in search of wisdom and writing down carefully on two stone tablets everything he learned there") thanks to the strengths of introversion.

S0phie who?

Piedie Gimbel: yes, I certainly saw that, but I don't remember it saying that DH had said procreation was inherently bad and no-one should do it.

Perhaps I didn't read it properly, or perhaps I don't remember it properly. I think I didn't enjoy it anyway.

I finished No One is Talking About This. I liked it - the writing is excellent - but I think I liked the first half better than the second half because the latter gave me some of the same conservative undertones as Juno.

Just started Blood Meridian.

Pinefox, S0phie Lewis, whose book 'Full Surrogacy How' is the main subject of that review about DH posted above.

Not sure how Blood Meridian is viewed these days/around here/both PBKR Id only say persist with it if the beginning seems too clouded

Took me three efforts i think

Thanks. It will take me a while, but I basically don't stop once I start a book.

Table: I see. Very coincidentally I have just been invited to attend an online lecture by the person you mention. I am almost intrigued to do it just to see how bad this person is. I have heard of the book but I certainly, again, promise never to read it.

I now think that there were two LRB reviews by Jenny Turner, one of Haraway and one of this other character, and I only read the first one and couldn't bring myself to read the second. Hence my continuing ignorance about the views of Haraway, and everyone else involved, but that's fine, because in truth I'm no more interested in them than they are in me.