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

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.

fwiw, I was friends with her. We live in the same neighborhood.

Then a dear friend told me some things about S0phie that involve covering up a sexual assault accountability process and other misdeeds, and that was the end of our friendship.

I read, this week, a couple of old Seamus Deane essays on Joyce, in his collection CELTIC REVIVALS.

Deane still has a grand reputation. But the truth is, these weren't good - especially 'Joyce and Stephen: The Provincial Intellectual' (1972), full of high-faluting claims that don't convince.

I've gone on, or back, to the old CASEBOOK on DUBLINERS and the PORTRAIT, and read Joyce's original 1904 Portrait essay; a selection of his epiphanies and the brother's diaries; and essays by Harry Levin, Frank O'Connor, Hugh Kenner, Wayne C. Booth (a terrifically accessible, disarming writer) and Morris Beja.

I've also reread Empson on Donne's poem on weeping; and read Hans Walter Gabler on the composition and publishing history of the Portrait.

I suggest that Wayne C. Booth may now be one of the most underrated literary critics. No one in the UK reads or cites him now (it may still be different in the US), but he talks more well-informed sense about literature than almost any current academic critic.

Euripides - Grief Lessons: Four Plays (tr. Anne Carson)

What makes this collection a keeper as oposed to other translations -- apart from the merits of this translation itself -- are Carson's intros to the plays. They are a bit like Borges' essays on various literatures. It is interesting how she tries to situate the plays among Beckett or Hitchcock, you could say its a play for contemporary relevance if you were feeling ungenerous. Anyway, its nice to get re-acquainted with classical Greek Tragedies again.

I've realised that the best available edition of the PORTRAIT is the Norton Critical Edition of 2007.

The editorial approach and textual history is sound (and brief). The text is well presented (with each chapter number at the top of every page!). The supporting historical documents are terrific - I've just read speeches by Pearse and Hyde and extracts from Synge that I didn't know or hadn't looked at for ages. The critical essays appended at the end are a more eccentric selection (Kenneth Burke?), but still often interesting (Kenner in 1965 I again, I'm sorry to say, didn't even know).

Michael Davitt's use of the phrase 'one thing and one thing only' agreeably reminds me of Ted Hastings.

an utter utter mess of reading at the moment. need to sort it out:

The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History - Alexander Mikaberidze: "Austerlitz, Trafalgar, Leipzig, and Waterloo all hold prominent places in the standard histories of the Napoleonic Wars, but alongside them we must also discuss Bueons Airies, New Orleans, Queenston Heights, Ruse, Aslanduz, Assaye, Macao, Oravaiers, and Alexandria." huge but oddly readable so far, setting global contexts for revolutionary turmoil in France in the 1780s - as the author points out the revolution is often presented as an outcome of purely internal forces, so this is welcome. nothing will not make the balance of power arrangements in 18th century europe complicated, difficult to summarise and difficult to remember in a grand schema, despite remembering the big ticket items - partitions of poland, russian-ottoman war, etc - from school. seemingly prone to contradictions - were revolutionary principles well communicated across europe or not? (two different things seem to be said - though this may just be different moments on a timeline) and there are a couple of other moments like that, though I can't guarantee i didn't just misread. quite well timed in that it arrived at the same time as a recent In Our Time on the Franco-American Alliance. the maps in this book are truly terrible. unforgivable in a history like this - sort it out CUP.

No One Is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood. Very readable, but i'm not sure in the first half (which is where i still am) what it's doing. She doesn't get Twitter, being online wrong, which is frankly an achievement in a book, but the avoidance of wrongness is not enough to actually be doing something. if i didn't recognise every other tweet lockwood's talking about, or wasn't fairly well-versed in twitter, i guess it might perform the function of applying the logic of online to the experienced world, disrupting and adapting its perceptions, how we use and see our body-avatars, the logic of it, the lifecycle of its interpretative and gadfly memes available to us. but i find myself going 'oh yeah i remember that tweet' and feel like i'm basically reading twitter.

Perfumes/Parfums Le Guide - Luca Turin tr. Tania Sanchez. Some lovely forward material to this. I was interested to see that Sanchez used in part google translate, and in part their husband Luca's original intent, which makes for an interesting translation story. I wonder if they used google translate as a way of defamiliarising the language and inventive adjectives and emotions. it's a lovely book. i love the casual, exciting categorisations: avatrice bas-bleu (bluestocking aviator), to be avoided: le style ex-bab de quarante ans (the style of a forty-year-old ageing hippy). "For those who like to go the whole day without knowing what the weather's like outside".

Finite and Inifinite Games - James Carse. Of dubious philosophical robustness, it's main quite enjoyable achievement lies in the definition of the space comprising infinite games. comprises so far abstract 'pensées' on the theme. frivolous but stimulating enough.

John Dickson Carr's early Bencolin mysteries. Largely bad, but it's very interesting seeing an author find their way to their very good later period. Clearly loves the unsubtle drama of ROMANCE (capital everything), and grand guignol murders. The organisation of his material and murders is awful here, and it shows how important an development this was later - clearing much more space, while also managing atmosphere much better.

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right - Atul Gawande. These awful awful books, which are in fact of varying quality of insight, but can effectively be characterised as 'business self-help' or methods for management. i don't find them uninteresting, but they all have a something to them that i'm quite keen to capture, an intrinsic disgusting philosophy. Anyway, the basic material here is good and sensible, and Gawande himself i think worked in medicine and showed how checklists can significantly reduce deaths in hospitals, a principle he applied to other highly complicated or complex environments.

if i didn't recognise every other tweet lockwood's talking about, or wasn't fairly well-versed in twitter, i guess it might perform the function of applying the logic of online to the experienced world, disrupting and adapting its perceptions, how we use and see our body-avatars, the logic of it, the lifecycle of its interpretative and gadfly memes available to us. but i find myself going 'oh yeah i remember that tweet' and feel like i'm basically reading twitter.

What I liked about the first section was (a) the writing, and (b) the way she captured a sort of collective reaction to being online in 2016-2018, which simultaneously reveled in it and punctured/trivialized it. I think the intention is that the second part highlights/contrasts this with the real world, but my feeling was she did a better job capturing the portal than she did "real life."

Oops, sorry, I missed that you were only still in the first part.

that’s ok PBKR - i’ve heard it’s a book of two halves, and it’s good to get that positive response to the first part. i mean don’t hate it, just didn’t find it particularly compelling. tho whenever i find myself thinking about it, i find new interesting things to say about it so maybe i should reappraise.

really bad summary by me, with several confused or meaningless sentences. glad 2b posting again.

Not confused or meaningless at all!

I finished the Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macauley. On reflection I found it moving and powerful. In some ways, it feels a bit like a wish-fulfillment novel, where Macauley gets to live out the 'if only I was able to travel back in time and know then what I know now' - at the end of her life, creating an almost impossibly knowledgeable and aloof character, free, and wise, exploring the Levant and herself, finding, well, what? That God is unknowable, the church is a glorious but rotten edifice, people are maddening and absurd (as are camels and apes).

I'm reading Jane Erye. Most of my life, I really struggled with books and language earlier than, say, early 20th century stuff but even then my tastes were mostly postwar. just the language and way of writing was hard for me to get into.

but late last year I read Rudin by Ivan Turganev, then Crime and Punishment, and now I seem to have found a way into it, I am starting to enjoy the more verbose, formal vibe of older writing.

that's a wonderful corpus of literature to have opened up to you!