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

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?