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

found the copy of Ken Kesey's the Last Roundup that I have to return at the end of the month yesterday/
Quiite enjoying the prose. Read the first few chapters.

bought some more books today cos I didn't think I was reading enough at the same time

Finished both of the books in the package from Ed. Now re-reading Dennis Cooper's "The Sluts," because Jackie Ess' "Darryl" makes explicit reference to its universe, and I am pondering writing a review of the latter.

reading some swedenborg for the first time. was hoping for descriptions of conversations with angels & demons and depictions of heaven & hell... what i got: 300+ pages of biblical exegesis.

I just got Impro by Keith Johnstone, who was a British theatre guy who specialized in improvisation and spontaneity. A friend recommended it for running/playing rpgs.

speaking of dennis cooper i started b.r. yeager's 'negative space' which feels like a post-cooper book: a lot of kids and they're all fucked up on drugs and stuff like that, lots of violence and blankness, the internet is in there too. sadly it just makes me realise again how singular cooper is, because the yeager book seems flat, cliche, even tedious in comparison - there are some alright parts, but a disappointment based on how enthusiastic the reviews and endorsements for it have been

Sill reading this Library of America Melville, and struck by how the third person narration of "Benito Cereno" seems integral, after the struggles with it in Pierre. It's not omnisicent narration: everybody but the POV character is a mystery to him, less to the reader, seeing through the well-meaning American Captain Amasa'a limitations what he keeps trying to explain away, soothing his riled self, with professional observation and filters of courtesy, congeniality, and confidence of status---as a superior, he is even something of a negrophile, as Eddie Murphy used to put it. This almost gets him killed, but the system adjusts. Testimonial documents don't incl. motive for the slaves' revolt---does incl. descriptions of several of the core participants has having been known as smart, talented negroes, good negroes in the community---but it's easily inferred that they were driven to it by having been uprooted from that community, sailing with their master to wherever--even if it were to turn out to be a better place than they've known, could just as or more likely be worse. there is still no agency.The Captain is as much a creature of his own gilded cage as the first-person narrator of "Bartleby, The Scrivener," as tested by the Other, but what the hell, both old privileged white guys are the survivors (spoiler).

Apologies for being lazy, but I'm looking for a recommendation - can anyone recommend a good, short book or article about Yugoslavia in the 80-90s? I'm looking for something that covers culture as well as history and politics. (I have a work thing I need to get up-to-speed for fairly quickly...) At the moment I'm just cribbing bits from Judt's Postwar...

I continue with TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980 - I realise that it would seem rational to abandon it but I have this nice hardback and I want to do it justice.

So far I can't really remember reading a good sentence - though it's better on the synaesthetic colours, its best theme. It's strangely wooden on 1960s Argentina - does the author know much about this world? - it all feels very potboiler-level - but disappointing on the US too. A girl in the Mid-West suddenly realises that she needs to move to NYC - especially when she sees a postcard of it and "Her heart actually stopped". Actually? When she gets to NYC she sees the horrible womaniser artist and experiences, wait for it, "love at first sight".

Meanwhile I returned to a couple of chapters of Hugh Kenner, THE POUND ERA. The magnificence of this book is known. I wonder, though, how easy it is to learn concrete facts and ideas from it, as it's all a montage of suggestions and asides.

I'm closing in on the end of World Light, Halldor Laxness. My major impression is that it is a sort of ambitious anti-epic extended to epic length. But even though Laxness had many things he wanted to say and he says them all, the book never quite settles down or decides what kind of story it wants to be. It sloshes around from spirituality to sentimentality to satire and this dilutes the effect of all of them.

Finally cracked open In the Land of the Cyclops, the Knausgaard essay collection that I received earlier this year via my Archipelago sub. Despite never having read K's fiction, I am pretty squarely in the target audience for this type of thing; and the brief piece I read this morning (a laudatory review of Houellebecq's Submission) was perfect in its length, depth, breadth, and the rhythms of its prose.

I'm also taking a rare excursion into contemporary fantasy with my book club's latest pick, The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune. The first 100 or so pages have been long on setup and short on conflict, but I appreciate that the setup is heavily character-focused, with the world-building happening unobtrusively around the edges.

Another reason to never read Knausgaard is his love of Houellebecq, a vile writer and person.

He said in the review that this was the first book of Houellebecq's he had ever read, after years of ignoring people recommending his work *shrug*

I thought it was a very fair review that didn't turn into a defense of Houellebecq, though I could see others reading it as special pleading (he is keen to downplay the ~contemporary relevance~ of Submission, in favor of its more putatively universal literary virtues)

There is literally nothing that Houellebecq has written that isn't Islamophobic, misogynist trash— perhaps I'm missing something in translation, as I've only <<Les particules élémentaires>> in the original, but he's not a great stylist, just a racist provocateur. Not trying to attack you, bernard snowy, I just find anyone actually liking his books to be a bit suspect because there doesn't seem to be a way to enjoy his books without endorsing his ideology, which is monstrous to say the least.

He's also been writing a variation on the same book for his entire career: depressed middle-aged man with addiction problems has racial anxieties that are confirmed by outlandish, fantastical acts. In the meantime, he has bad sex and ponders the meaninglessness of existence. The end.

Submission had a very funny ending

One funny thing about Submission is that Islamic government is in many ways an improvement over the previous secular French regime, not least for sozzled, aging, sex-obsessed, economically-precarious, bachelor intellectuals.

Yes exactly! I love that the threat of this scary alien religion gets totally neutralized when it comes to power as a pragmatic and venal ruling order, and none of the sharia restrictions really have teeth provided one knows the right people and is willing to at least make a public show of converting. The idea of wealthy Arab princes amassing prestige by generously endowing university chairs of French literature is admittedly farfetched, but it's also a very funny rebuke to neoliberal austerity -- like, "If you're so worried about this culture changing or being lost, why haven't you done anything to help the people whose life's work is preserving and transmitting it?"

Forging ahead to Bloomsday.

Ok

Happy #Bloomsday2021! Introducing my son Daedalus way back when to his namesake. Look at that smile. He knows good literature when he sees it. 😍 pic.twitter.com/tLY09BRqTt

— Nora McGregor (@ndalyrose) June 16, 2021

.

Finished the Penguin Book Of Japanese Short Stories. Loved it, with one main reservation: I like Haruki Murakami well enough, but two (admitidely short) stories and an introduction in which he himself admits to not being big on Japanese literature and not having read many of the stories before is way overkill. Still, gotta move copies I guess.

Some highlights:

"Peaches", Abe Akira - on the unreliability of memory, long deconstruction of a childhood recollection.

"Cambridge Circus", Shibata Motoyuki - deals w/ the infinite possibilities brought up by our everyday choices, great sadboi stuff.

"Kudan", Uchida Hyakken - Narrator wakes up to find himself a cow demon that people demand prophecies from.

"Mr English", Genji Keita - About an office worker whose only skill was speaking English before this became common in the Japanese business world; a cantankerous, insecure jerk, but we end up feeling for him because he's such an underdog. Apparently the author wrote a bunch of salarymen stories, would love to track down.

"American Hijiki", Nosaka Akiyuki - Middle aged middle class dude has to entertain american tourist couple his wife made friends with in Hawaii; meanwhile he's remembering being a pimp in the early days of the US occupation.

"Pink", Hoshino Tomoyuki - A horrible heat wave hits Japan, leading to people spinning for hours on end as a sort of spiritual remedy. Thing quickly escalates into Japan going to war. A description of how a right-wing radical is recruited feels very much akin to the western alt right playbook.

Today is the anniversary of when James Joyce wrote the entirety of Ulysses in a single day. You don't have to like the result to respect the process!!!

— scott manley hadley (@Scott_Hadley) June 16, 2021

*burps*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm51ihfi1p4

Just starting north and south by Gaskell. Early days but must admit I’m finding it a bit of a slog so far. Any thoughts before I tap out?

It's good; it has like two false starts before the story gets going, but it ends up working.

It's her most clunkily written book, though, on a sentence level. And she has a huge crush on her main character so you have to deal with A LOT of her going on endlessly about Margaret's white taper fingers. It's still really good though, somehow.

All the cultural stuff, south vs. north, the pov of mill-owners and the pov of workers, she handles really well.

“False starts” is good enough for me to persist. Thank you!

ha I'm a squinter and was reading that as referring to Kentucky-Cali-Kentucky's own Mary Gaitskill---I love most of her stuff, but could kinda see her going in that direction (but I'm a squinter).
Still reading the library's Library of America Melville, and just finished (for now) The Confidence Man--His Masquerade, which, appropriately, resists any any comfortable stance of interpretation, or at least mine. All I can do is watch, as the con or cons (one guy in many guises, I assumed, but come to think of it, maybe nor: there's a lot of that going around), on a riverboat "bound for the auction blocks of New Orleans, " as the jacket flap copy emphasizes, approaches his or their lastest chosen mark, adapting conversational gambits accordingly. It seems too patterned at first, like a popular Saturday Night Live sketch, methodically working that premise to death, 'til time for the next recycling---in a more longwinded and otherwise complicated-not-complex way.
But the con just has to keep going, in and around the moment and boat (hi ho, lets go though the "poor emigrants" banging against the walls in their shoddy hammocks, didn't know riverboats had steerage too, but why not), changing even before the pushback gets stronger and scarier, with stories from Reality vs. The Man's sweet undertow of reductive optimism-p-eventually, his own pushback even seems honestly, and understandably, indignant, vs. one relentless revelation of financial snares (searing focus evoking the experience of the author's father, who died young, his uncle, who then tried to sort things out, and Herman himself, as compulsively hapless heads of household, at least on contracts)--which gets twisted back, reduced to one point, now seeming the pissiest--the Confidence Man pushes back against such zealous overkill (that he thought he could turn aside), and, in scenes like these, he seems not entirely wrong: we do need some kind of basic lower-case confidence, faith in faith's ability to keep us going, despite all the amputations, beyond-below the limits of rational discourse and all its elaborations---but he/they can't leave it alone, can't be alone, or lower-case for long (and then there's the money, which can sometimes seem like a trophy, but 0 social safety net here, as the reader is often reminded in passing: money and talk about money occupy all tables and pews here).

So despite all the talking, it's effectively more show than tell, much more.

An unexpected connection, from an email I sent this morning:

Just read (mark s)'s incredible Sight and Sound deep focus survey ov Alice on film (and in the art of Tenniel, Ernst etc), http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49605...Struck by the description of Dodgson-Carrol-Tenniel creative tension, incl. in connection with this:

Louis Aragon and André Breton lauded Carroll, for whom nonsense, as Breton wrote in his 1939 Anthology of Black Humour, constituted “the vital solution to a profound contradiction between the acceptance of faith and the exercise of reason, on the one hand, and on the other between a keen poetic awareness and rigorous professional duties… No one can deny that in Alice’s eyes a world of oversight, inconsistency and, in a word, impropriety hovers vertiginously round the centre of truth.”

(Which also makes me think of recently read Library of America edition of The Confidence Man---His Masquerade, last finished novel by Melville the artist and head of household, finally on his way to being salaryman, having first passively received and then extracted hand-outs through most of his life)

Now I'm reading World of Wonders, third book in the Deptford trilogy by Robertson Davies. Like so many of his books, the theater in all its many forms plays a very prominent role. In this case it is far, far from the "legitimate theater". This tale features carnival side shows, vaudeville, and stage magic, where the essence of the job is putting something over on the rubes. There's a lot there to play around with and Davies plays out his story at fast clip.

Deptford, London SE8? That's about 20 minutes from me.

I finished "History of Rock and Roll Vol. 1 1920-1963" by Ed Ward. It's a long and fairly dense book, so probably for specialists and serious fans only. Mostly it reads like a guy with a massive record collection taking you through all his favorite early rock, r&b, country, pop, vocal, gospel, etc records in roughly chronological order and telling you a little story about each one, giving equal time to the artists and the label heads (who in those days of small, independent labels were at least as colorful personality-wise). It's a good way to discover lots of forgotten songs and get a sense of how the form evolved in those early days. The book ends fittingly with the story of the formation and early days of the Beatles up to their EMI signing and the eve of their arrival in the US. I'm assuming that story is picked up in the next volume.

Hmm, that sounds like something I might be interested in reading.

Deptford, London SE8?

Kit Marlowe died there! But for the purposes of Davies' novels Deptford is a small town in Ontario Province, Canada.

I went back to a short book once given to me as a gift: Alain Robbe-Grillet, WHY I LOVE BARTHES (UK edition 2011).

If you like Roland Barthes then this is priceless stuff: it mostly consists of a R-G lecture at a symposium on Barthes, in which Barthes is on the stage and interjects and converses, along with others. In vintage French Intellectual style they say daft things; Barthes quite casually remarks that 'The body is the most imaginary of all imaginary objects' (p.13).

This lecture is followed by R-G's tribute after RB's death, and 'Yet Another Roland Barthes', from as late as 1995, which talks of RB's insecurities and concludes with a quite startling conceit: R-G imagines RB writing a novel in which he repeatedly transforms, changes his name, even ending up as ... Orlando (p.75). Was R-G thinking of Woolf? You'd think so, but as this is French not English culture, I'm unsure.

The little book concludes with R-G's list of 'I like / I don't like', including: 'I liked Roland Barthes's voice' (p.78).

Two I just started:

Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor. Slow-motion-breakdown-of-civilization stuff intrigues me after the year we've all just had, so I jumped on this when I saw it mentioned in a Bookforum essay. First Lessing I've ever read. It's... odd.

Michael Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human bondage in the early modern Atlantic world. A quite dry but interesting looking history of 17th-century English attitudes towards slavery, and attitudes towards non-European races, as those two attitudes were in the process of becoming welded together in the single idea of the plantation economy.

White Fragility.
Have read first few chapters and recognise what's being talked about.
Wonder if there will be a point after the thought processes talked about here cease to be widespread.
Got from library and have on loan for a guaranteed 6 months which seems weird.
But an extended return date for other books I have out automatically extended a few days ago and this has early December listed. I checked library website to see if it picked up that earlier extension and no its longer.

Read a lot of scattered poetry this week, including some John Weiners and Jack Spicer, as well as two new-ish JH Prynne chapbooks.

Started "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf. I was assigned in once for a college humanities course once but only skimmed it, for the most part, and bounced off the long and winding sentences. God knows how I managed to say anything intelligent-sounding about it in the discussion section. Still not an easy read, but managing to digest most of it this time around.

Forging ahead to Bloomsday.

― the pinefox
Have you ever taken the Bloomsday tour? I'd like to, if it's good.

Which also provides a good reminder that a summer 'what are you reading' thread is in order.

I needed something propulsive and comforting, so I'm on what is becoming my biennial re-reading of Jonathan Raban's Coasting. Raban is best when he's running from something (which is most of the time) and here he's trying and failing to escape the gravitational field of the UK as he spends four years orbiting the main islands in his boat. Like lots of boys of his generation, there's a sense that Raban is always dealing with the trauma of boarding school and the boat becomes a little like an extension of that milieu - down to the library he assembles the and gross figurehead of Thatcher he puts up in the galley.

I'd forgotten that he meets Paul Theroux halfway round. Theroux is writing his own 'what's Britain really like?' book (The Kingdom By the Sea) and it's a weird and intense meeting, neither wanting to reveal too much. (I forget if Theroux mentions Raban in his book. I'd assume not.) There's a also a cute meeting with Larkin in Hull.

Anyway, I always come for the descriptions of the sea and the dreams of escape; there are few who do those better than Raban.

We discussed TO THE LIGHTHOUSE here a year or two ago, but I'll just repeat the view, both my own and fairly standard, that it's a magnificent masterpiece.

I don't know if there is one 'Bloomsday Tour' but I have extensively visited the Dublin locations of Ulysses, on Bloomsday and other days.

I've heard of that book before, Chinaski - it sounds remarkable, especially the Larkin episode which I didn't know about.

We have a summer thread now, thanks to dow:

Buffalo Moon, What Are You Reading In The Summer Of 2021?