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

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!

yeah I'm excited, for some reason it opened up for me

jane eyre is really impressive, the way she writes about jane's inner life is really striking

Jane eyre is a good book imo

just the language and way of writing was hard for me to get into.

lol i started reading 'the woman in white' last week and was all like why are you using two dozen words where ten would do

denis johnson - angels

Fizzles you need to stop compulsively apologising for your thoughtful, interesting posts :) #leanin #fizzleboss

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.

I was thinking the other day that the whole golden age of detective fiction is interesting because with most genre booms - sci-fi, say, or western - it's about trappings that all sorts of different sensibilities can engage with and then there's lots of lesser writers who can still provide some pleasure by delivering on those trappings. But I don't know if a murder mystery can be satisfying if the mystery itself - which feels like a v specific skill to have as a writer - doesn't come off, even if the author is good at describing country houses or coming up with an eccentric detective.

Read Jane Eyre many times but Spotify are testing audiobook waters with some classics and the JE recording is very good, so I'm reading (listening) through it too. I love how good little orphan Jane is at comebacks - honing in on the satisfaction, and described in terms that you can feel on your body, muscle memory from bursts of righteous anger in your past.

"shaking from head to foot, thrilled with ungovernable excitement"

I love Jane Eyre— I believe I was the only sophomore in my high school class who loved it. That was a banner year for me, didn't have many friends but boy did I read and write a lot.

Anyway, I finished Tan Lin's 'Heath Course Pak,' which was unexpectedly moving, then Ian Dreiblatt's new book of poems, 'forget thee,' which made me weep at its ending, and started Jamie Townsend's 'Sex Machines,' a book that seems to take equal parts from Language Poetry and gender theory. I'm also dipping in and out of Harsha Walia's 'Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism.' I think she's one of the most insightful activist-thinkers of our time, grounded as she is in community rather than academia.

I recently finished Geoff Dyer's "But Beautiful", an unusual sort of fiction-criticism hybrid: little vignettes in the lives of famous jazz musicians, inspired by historical sources but giving his imagination free rein. It's kind of a reverie on the tortured genius motif, with almost all of the musicians portrayed dealing with serious drug problems, mental health issues, on top of the struggle to evade the repressive forces of a racist society, yet somehow being able to conjure forth musical brilliance. There's a bit of early '90s junkie chic as well (the book was published in '91). An enjoyable read. Now, I'm reading "Strangers on a Train" by Patricia Highsmith.

Thanks, o. nate, will check Dyer's book! Description reminds me of Ishiguro'sNocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, which I posted about on the KI thread. Despite classy title, it's mostly pleasingly rough-edged, in a fairly musical way at times.

Also, and in much more direct correlation, your description makes me think of Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, a novel about Boddy Bolden.

I think the Ondaatje comparison is a good one. It has that same freewheeling, immersive style. I do mistrust Dyer sometimes (always that sense that his subject is himself) but But Beautiful is mostly great. I think this bit on Monk is pretty magical.

You had to see Monk to hear his music properly. The most important instrument in the group - whatever the format - was his body. He didn't play the piano really. His body was his instrument and the piano was just a means of getting the sound out of his body at the rate and in the quantities he wanted. If you blotted out everything except his body you would think he was playing the drums, foot going up and down on the hi-hat, arms reaching over each other, His body fills in the gaps in the music; without seeing him it always sounds like something's missing but when you see him even piano solos acquire a sound as full as a quartets. The eye hears what the ear misses...

Part of jazz is the illusion of spontaneity and Monk played the piano as though he'd never seen one before. Came at it from all angles, using his elbows, taking chops at it, rippling through the keys like they were a deck of cards, fingers jabbing at them like they were hot to the touch or tottering around them like a woman in heels - playing it all wrong as far as classical piano went. Everything came out crooked, at an angle, not as you expected...Played with his fingers splayed, flattened out over the keys, fingertips almost looking like they were pointed upward when they should have been arched.

He played each note as if astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to. Sometimes the song seemed to have turned itself inside out or to have been entirely constructed from mistakes...

If Monk had built a bridge he'd have taken away the bits that considered essential until all that was left were the decorative parts - but somehow he would have made the ornamentation absorb the strength of the supporting spars so it was like everything was built around what wasn't there. It shouldn't have held together but it did and the excitement came from the way that it looked like it might collapse at any moment...

That is great.

Yes, thanks, Chinaski!
Judging by this and some eyewitness testimonials, I'm sure Monk's music would or could be even better if I could see him make it (not much on film, is there?), but doesn't seem like it's necessary to hear him "properly"--but just go with that, and what a vision. The very end reminds me of xgau's scimpier references to "sprung" music: can use that bottom left search box on his homepage to see how he used it re the Band, Beefheart, Big Star, Gang of Four, the Kinks, Pavement, maybe others. the Band is the only act he complains about, but also the only one with a somewhat Dyeresque description: I've always been put off by the sprung quality of the Band's music--the sense that if someone were to undo the catch its works would be propelled forth in all directions. Pretty appealing to me! (Go4's sprungness as described by xgau is huge compliment and maybe also Dyer-relevant.)

Is that sprung rhythm in the G.M. Hopkins sense of the term? Or does it have a different meaning when it's applied to music as opposed to poetry?

That Monk description reminded me of the story of how, against his wife's protests, he nailed a picture frame to the wall at a diagonal. Eventually, she agreed with him that it had to be that way.

Heh, I thought for a second when I saw G.M. Hopkins it was referring to this trumpeter who teaches at Berklee that they call GHOP. https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/greghopkins #OneThread

I'm sure Monk's music would or could be even better if I could see him make it (not much on film, is there?)

There is the excellent documentary "Straight No Chaser" which is I think Dyer's primary source for his description above.

Thanks, will check that. Hi Lily Dale, I think English major Christgau does take "sprung" from the vernacular justification of Hopkins for sprung rhythm, and also sprung (half, slant etc) rhyme: Real People bending syllables to make them rhyme, as in Realness of some hip-hop and song lyrics, getting away from predictability (Christgau: "bored enough to fuck with it"). And the same can apply to sounds, for instance in harmonies, notes made to fit---I take it that's what his (predominately) passing references usually reference, at least in part (you gotta actually listen to get it, which seems to be his main purpose in using the term, other than using something that's appropriate and real handy).
My favorite of his comments on this, other than the one about the Band, are these on Gang of Four (also archived on his site:
Only when a jazz critic uttered the word "harmolodic" in conjunction with this music did I realize why I admired it so...I admire it, and dig it to the nth, for its tensile contradictions, which are mostly a function of sprung harmony, a perfect model for the asynchronous union at the heart of their political (and rhythmic) message. Which I originally took to mean the inherent stresses of democracy, and other kinds of union. But also (reviewing Entertainment!), he says:
Though the stressful zigzag rhythms sound thinner on record than from the stage where their chanted lyrics/nonmelodies become visible, the progressive atavism of these university Marxists is a formal accomplishment worth attending. By propelling punk's amateur ethos into uncharted musical territory, they pull the kind of trick that's eluded avant-garde primitives since the dawn of romanticism. And if you want to complain that their leftism is received, so's your common sense. No matter how merely liberal their merely critical verbal content, the tension/release dynamics are praxis at its most dialectical. Don't let's boogie--let's flop like fish escaping a line.