Now the year is turning and the eeriness comes: what are you reading in autumn 2021?

I prefer it too. The depiction of the gang of rich kooks descending on Water Mill, that beautiful post-clambake talk about God with her dad, the Jenkins family and their evangelism and acquisitional spirit (Fitzhugh makes the connection) -- beautiful.

lol dogs, I don't know if I posted about it here, but I think 'Toxicon & Arachne' is awful...but I'm not allowed to say that publicly because of the subject matter. oh well.

Thanks, Lily Dale. Great post! I want to read the Long Secret right away, of course, but unbelievably NYPL doesn't seem to have a single circulating copy??? I guess I'll have to buy it...

Harriet does a lot of things you wouldn't expect of a kids' book. wtf did I just read? It doesn't really have any clear point, it demands further inquiry. There's so much mirroring in it, it's practically a funhouse. Most of the characters aren't really good or bad, but the parents suck for sure and Janie Gibbs's mother is the closest thing to a Disney villainess.

Is there enough interest for a Fitzhugh thread?

Alfred, your link is broken :(

> but unbelievably NYPL doesn't seem to have a single circulating copy?

amazon uk only has the first one as an ebook, none of the others. maybe that's why.

Alfred, your link is broken :(

― The 25 Best Songs Ever Ranked In Order (Deflatormouse),

Oops! Here's the link.

Harriet's parents come off significantly better in The Long Secret.

They have 1 copy of the Long Secret as an audio e-book (currently checked out, not that i'd want it) and 2 reference copies at the Schwarzman bldg for in-library use only. Very strange.

xxp. thanks for the new link!

Typical of Louise Fitzhugh’s tact...

Yeah, good example

The only time Fitzhugh almost disappoints me in that regard is where she employs a psychiatrist (obviously where this was going) to bring the story to a swift resolution by explaining everything. But thankfully the shrink only tells us what we already knew, and mainly just reinforces the obliviousness of the parents.

I'm currently reading The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. The titular friend seems at first to be her old friend, a professor of literature and lady's man, who has recently died at his own hand. A bit later it seems the titular friend will be the first friend's Great Dane, which she feels obliged to take in after his non-dog-loving wife has exiled it to a kennel. The book builds up a good head of steam in the first several chapters, but then there is a palpable deflationary hiss as she fritters away the next several chapters with digressions. I'll have to see if the momentum can be regained.

(I am very glad that the pinefox plans to read Harriet the Spy. I might stick to my memory of it in case anything changes. I recommended it to my brother for his daughters this Christmas.)

Flet is the only Joyelle Mcsweeney I've read, besides some translations maybe. It's prose or prose-y, another "poet's sci-fi" - a lot of fun to read imo, especially as a antidote to mundane dystopias. Some great sentences and imagery (my low bar for enjoyment I guess). Haven't read Toxicon and Arachne but I know how fraught subject matter can swallow a conversation... Reading Harmony Holiday's Negro League Baseball slowly. So far I am connecting with it less than some of the more recent books of hers I've read - - but enjoying the looseness -- it's a nice horizontal book with sprawling lines.

revisiting some of the books i've enjoyed this year:

deep wheel orcadia

i was surprised how well this worked. the spareness of the orkney – orkney 'supplemented by a large reserve of Scots' – seems entirely appropriate to people working at a subsistence level on the edge of void. in this space *everything* is on the edge of things, Orcadian, so to speak. the poetic lines connect only the essential elements together – people, their labour, love – so that those things feel connected to each other with no intervening matter (appropriately enough in space), and to the 'haaf' (deep space) around them. in other words people *become* their labour, in the way that subsistence labour is your life. here Olaf and Astrid out sailing/farming for Light (their income):

Thay work the park the station wis biggie
tae wirk, hint the fuel at fuels,
the oyl at owls

a interstellar system o industry,
traed, galactic expansion: Light.
Inga an Olaf is aye a kord
wi voltage differes, atmospheric
dabble, mairjins

...they work the work that the station was built to do, gathergleansnatching the fuel that fuels, the oil that oils
an interstellar system of industry, trade, galactic expansion: Light.
Inga and Olaf are always a chord with voltage differentials, atmospheric ripplesagitationconfusionchoppiness, margins.

v occasionally orkney parallels, english/scots (deep wheel orcadia/mars) and gender/youth/age politics/and the experience of youth returning home, are clumsily mapped, but for the most part the elements combine v effectively. and around and into their lenten space, the pressure of the past/future/other world is pushing in through their computer screens and machinery, and the whole is broken up into songs of the individuals and events taking place in the community.

Sheu snacks the monitors wan by wan,
fer the plant tae idle the sleepan oors.

Sheu lillilus tae her machines
her aald face in ivry gless

- but no, yin's no her face. Sheu blenks.
A karl sportan some kinno helmet

(but maed of some kinno metal? an glessless?)
is skirlan - but silent. He chairges the screen.

A flist o Light. Sheu shuts her een
but feels the sair lowe trou her lids.

But eftir a spell sheu peeks an than
thir notheen thir. Nae willan Light,

nae flegsome man. Sheu skites ootbye
an slams the doar, an waits ahint hid,

an sings a peedie bit looder, looder
as the hivy clankan an crashan inbye

at isno the weel-kent tick o the plant
mairkan hids time, but soonds instead -

no - ya - no - but -
like steel brakkan steel, a draem o a sword

She turns off the monitors one by one, for the plant to idle the sleeping hours.
She lullabies to her machines, her old face in each grey mirrorglass
- but no, that's not her face. She blinks. An older man wearing a kind of helmet
(but made of a kind of metal? and without glass?( is shrieksqualling - but silent. He charges the screen.
A rushrageboastbang of Light. She shuts her eyes but feels the harshdireoppressive flameglowflickerflare through her lids.

But after a short while she looks and then there's nothing there.
No wildwandering Light,
no terrifying man. She slidebouncesshoots outside and slams the door, and waits behind it,
and sings a little louder, louder than the heavy clanking and crashing inside
that is not the familiar tick of the plant marking time, but sounds instead -
no-yes-no-but-like steel breaking steel, a dream of a sword.

'like steel brakkan steel, a draem o a sword' shows how the lyrical is reached out of the spare functions of the space station 'tirlan in the haaf' (turntwistwhirlspinning in deep space) and the language.

The relationship between Astrid - a returning student - and Darling - a high born on the run from her family on Mars, is intimate and touching:

Than eftir, whan the cruisies brighten tae morneen,
wi Darling yet sleepan, Astrid busks an leuks
fae porthole tae bunk, fae the tide tae Darling's hair,
an speirs o the gods, at dinno exist, if
thir both fund whit thay waant, or need, or no,
or if thir maed hid, or if hid ivver matters.

Then later, when the lamps brighten to morning, with Darling still asleep, Astrid dressprepares and looks from porthole to bedbunk, from the seatimetide to Darling's hair, and asks of the gods, who do not exist, if they have both found what they want, or need, or not, or if they have created it, or if it even matters.

it does quite a lot well and is full of lovely moments - the archaeologist – english speaking, on the outside – being invited, unexpectedly, shyly, by the barman, to a festive dance at his bar:

Thir quiet a piece. He poors, sheu drinks, thay smile.
An a thowt comes tae Eynar at warms him, o somtheen
he coud share wi this bonnie aakward body.

"If thoo waants tae ken fock better, come
tae the Dance Firstday next. Hid's wiss at wird best."
Noor coudno, sheu didno, sheu wadno waant tae impose,
disno think sheu'd be walcome, canno dance,

but Eynar's insistan wi more an more blide wirds
as ony gien the night. Forbye, Noor waants
tae gang, an dance. Whan sheu's finished her drink,
he asks, "A'll see thee thir?" an Noor says, "Yaas."

They are quiet for a placedistancepartwhile. He pours, she drinks, they snile. And a thought comes to Eynar that warms him, of something he could sahre with this finepretty awkward personbody.
"If you want to know us folk better, come to the Dance next Firstday. It's us at our best." Noor couldn't, she didn't, she wouldn't want to impose, doesn't think she'd be welcome, can't dance,

but Eynar's inissting with ore and more happyfondpleased words than any he's offered all night. Besides, Noor wants to go, and dance. When she's finished her drink, he asks, "I'll se you there?" and Noor says "Yes."

but it all takes place at the sharp end of an impoverished place, at the edge of a mystery, and with no future

So mibbe this bairn'll waant tae brak

the next speed barrier, or the next?
In this peedie bunk, draeman
o cities, draeman o meanan more.
Or draeman a love fer a dwynan piece?
Whit wan o this futurs is bruckit most?

So maybe this child will want to break

the next speed barrier, or the next? In this little bedbunk, dreaming of cities, dreaming of meaning more? Or dreaming a love for a pinefadewithinering placedistancepartwhile? And which of these futures is the most brokenrubbishruined?

and in fact at the sharp edge of commerce, the question they all live their lives with, which the songs in DSO exist to question:

fer then this twa taal men
dinno hiv tae blether
aboot the peedie chairs

or age, or wirk, or Light,
or whit lot o credits
this haep o dirt is wirth.

because then these two t all men don't have to talkchatramble about the little chairs
or age, or work, or Light, or how manymuch credits this heap of mudshitrubbish is worth.

so yes, by no means perfect, but a striking, affecting, rich book with plenty to explore and bits, lines, thoughts, images that resonate.

currently dipping into The Atlas of Anomalous AI ed. Ben Vickers and K Allado-McDowell. It's an attempt to bring Aby Warburg's 'mapping' of cultural images and memory to the field of AI, to help it escape the 'westernised Hollywood futures that dominate popular discussions of AI'

that attempt is i think necessary and useful, but *goddam*, 'cultural' writers or critics like this need to be a lot more careful about the language they use and how it connects to the practicalities of AI. No Aby Warburg did not create a way of working that 'could be called digital' – it's not at all digital. if you're imprecise about this sort of thing, you're not doing the hard work about where there are connections.

there are reasons to think about colonialism wrt to AI, but these writers often take a lazy route to it (similar to Tom McCarthy in that recent LRB essay we complained about), and they need to distinguish carefully between the mechanics of capitalism and colonialism.

eg to call 'the black box of AI' (an enclosure, apparently) 'a hyperdimensional space' requires some... definition i think? 1) AI can often be hidden, but that doesn't mean it's a black box - in fact transparency around data updates and use case failures is an important part of the practical usage of AI. Not all providers do this, but it's definitely a practical thing that can be done, which belies the black box definition here. hyperdimensional space - well it's true that much of the data will have considerable amounts of metadata, which possibly make it something described as hyperdimensional. and indeed the 'curse of dimensionality' creating sparse local data everywhere is a well-known problem in AI/ML. here it's deployed as a sort of fuzzy high-concept word that links AI to *shamanism*.

However, as an encyclopedia of images and relevant or peripherally relevant thinking, it does serve a useful function. and it's worth entertaining the hokum, which may be just a shortcut to some interesting approaches to thinking about AI. eg medieval maps of the humanistic space wider than ours is today, that is to say of a scholastic humanism that required the supernatural as the competion of the natural world and will map angels and daemons onto a cosmos with terra and subterranean tenebrae activae, may help us think how we get outside a contemporary technocratic humanism that places us at the centre of things and allows new spaces to be mapped in new ways.

i should add there are good artists like james bridle mapping this space it’s just you have to tread with some care.

Zak M. and dogs, I think that McSweeney is at her best in the critical mode— her book, The Necropastoral, is really astonishingly cogent and well-thought through literary criticism. I have never found much in her poetry— it is, at its heart, "workshopcore," seemingly crafted for the exact environment that McSweeney was educated within and teaches within. It is not very interesting, to my mind, but I know that's a minority opinion.

Re: Toxicon, it functions similarly to Prageeta Sharma's book about the sudden death of her husband, in my mind— both are important books, but I don't find either of them interesting-qua-poetry or convincing as books about loss, but that is probably more a function of the ultimately subjective experience of immense grief than anything else, so I don't say much about either.

I've been trying for months to read the fairly recent Kipling biography If, by Christopher Benfey, and I think I'm just going to have to give up. It started out ok, with the young Kipling, just arrived in America, tracking down Mark Twain's house and managing to talk his way in. But now I'm at the bit where the author talks about Kipling's friendship with Wolcott Balestier, and it's written in this awful suggestive wink-wink-nudge-nudge way that never actually says Wolcott was gay or argues in so many words that Kipling was involved with him romantically, but instead says stuff like this:

Pale as fine porcelain and impossibly slender, Balestier resembled nothing so much as a graceful Meissen figurine, illuminated by candlelight.

If there had been an understanding between Kipling and Carrie...the couple had kept it a secret even from their closest friends. Was there a long-simmering romance, hidden to all? Or had Wolcott Balestier, dying in Dresden, exacted a deathbed promise from his sister to marry his best friend?

(For the record, I've got no objection to the idea of Kipling being gay or bi, though I think the most compelling evidence for his having romantic (not necessarily sexual) feelings toward men is in his writing rather than his biography, and I don't think there's sufficient evidence to say for sure what those feelings added up to. But I dislike the contortions writers go through to hide a lack of evidence for their assertions, and I really dislike it when those contortions feel like the writer elbowing me in the ribs.)

I also dislike that particular contortional style of certain biographers, Lily Dale. I've even found myself reading fewer biographies as a result!

Those two quotes would make me want to throw the book across the room, shouting imprecations.

Currently reading the new Gary Shteyngart (fun), and the Brothers Karamozov for the first time. Other than that, here's what I read this year, a lot of escapism but definitely some good & enjoyable stuff in there:

Arkady Martine - A Memory Called Empire
Hari Kunzru - Red Pill
Lorrie Moore - Birds of America
Wells Tower - Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Barrett Edward Swanson - Lost in Summerland (Essays)
Lorrie Moore - Bark
Patricia Lockwood - Nobody Is Talking About This
Natalie Zina Walschots - Hench
John le Carre - Little Drummer Girl
Rachel Cusk - Second Place
Meghan O’Gieblyn - God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
Patricia Lockwood - Priestdaddy
Robin Kelley - Thelonious Monk: The Life & Times of an American Original*
Lauren Groff - Matrix
Ursula K. Le Guin - A Wizard of Earthsea
Jonathan Franzen - Crossroads
Claire Vaye Watkins - I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness
Ayad Akhtar - American Dervish

Do we have a thread for 2021's reading lists yet? I still need to transfer from my planner to a document on the computer. I know it's longer than it's ever been, I think.

Do we have a thread for 2021's reading lists yet?

We do now. What did you read in 2021?

Thank you, Aimless!

eg to call 'the black box of AI' (an enclosure, apparently) 'a hyperdimensional space' requires some... definition i think?

Aren't the current wave of machine learning AIs typically considered as black boxes because the link between input and output is by its very nature entirely opaque? And maybe hyperdimensionality refers to the fact they process hundreds of billions of parameters? Haven't read the book so feel free to ignore me.

a friend ran a supercomputer in australia of multiple nodes that was wired up not as a grid, or a cube, but as a hypercube. i can imagine a neural net similary connected, or moreso.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxDycRoR9VY

_eg to call 'the black box of AI' (an enclosure, apparently) 'a hyperdimensional space' requires some... definition i think?_

Aren't the current wave of machine learning AIs typically considered as black boxes because the link between input and output is by its very nature entirely opaque? And maybe hyperdimensionality refers to the fact they process hundreds of billions of parameters? Haven't read the book so feel free to ignore me.

lol what i’m trying to say with a v fuzzy head is that i’m not clear the extent to which they’re using “artistic licence” or not. my first impression was “quite a lot” with a caveat about it how much it mattered. but your comments are making me go back and re-evaluate!

Unintepretability/opacity are not givens in machine learning but they’re pretty common problems that take work to overcome and may be in practice insoluble problems.

Pretty much every interesting model describes data in a space with more than three dimensions, ie is “hyperdimensional”.

Whether those observations of facts support the (metaphorical?) deployment of those terms in criticism I don’t know. Hyperdimensionality is extremely mundane in the technical sense, so I’m very skeptical about that being a load bearing term in critical theoretical discussions.

<Whooshing sound from previous posts>

I started to read Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Corner That Held Them. It's set in the 14th century, in a remote Norfolkian nunnery; I got about 30 pages in and a derelict, posing as a priest, was hallucinating as he died of the black death and I thought 'do I need this?' and decided no I don't.

Huh, now I want to read it.

She's fantastic and I will go back to it, it just felt a bit on the nose as it were.

Yeah, I think I just have a thing for books set in religious, cloistered communities.

Have you read Frost in May by Antonia White? That's a stunning little book.

Nope! Another added to the Abe list.

The corner that held them is great. Wonderful bunch of women to spend a half century with. Highly recommended.

At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s quite similar to matrix by Lauren groff, which I’m half way through right now, but the corner that held them’s focus is more prosaic/domestic, eg how will they fix the roof, etc.

ooh, and that's what i like best— the stuff about hay and rooftops and long hard winters

This tweet is how it ended up on my reading list

I'm reading the book, “The Corner that Held Them,” which is about a bunch of nuns at an abby over decades during the plague in the 14th century, and it's just a lot of little episodes, so I've started to treat it like Twitter and think “time to check in on my nuns.”

— Paul Ford (@ftrain) April 19, 2020

Oh I've got to read that!

Unintepretability/opacity are not givens in machine learning but they’re pretty common problems that take work to overcome and may be in practice insoluble problems.

Pretty much every interesting model describes data in a space with more than three dimensions, ie is “hyperdimensional”.

Whether those observations of facts support the (metaphorical?) deployment of those terms in criticism I don’t know. Hyperdimensionality is extremely mundane in the technical sense, so I’m very skeptical about that being a load bearing term in critical theoretical discussions.

The one time I abandon a book and now I can *feel* those nuns lining up to be all like 'so you don't care about our roof eh?'.

Got another 2 added to the about to read list since my Xmas present arrived from my brother.
THe iNconvenient Indian by Thomas King
& Surviving Genocide by Jeffrey ostler.
Both books on the treatment of Native Americans over the 19th & 20th centuries probably a littel more on each end too.

Have had tehm gboth pretty heavily recommended so, great to get them.

I'm thinking of a spectrum from "nuns" to "sexy nuns" with The Corner That Held Them on one end, Benedetta on the other, and Lauren Groff's Matrix right in the center.

If I receive some of the books I'm expecting to receive for the holidays, then I'll be quite busy for a while.

A new comet has been spotted in the skies over ILB, thanks to dow:

Bonfires In The Sky: What Are You Reading, Winter 2021-22?

that’s interesting table - i found that ‘toxicon…’ transcended its subject matter. i kind of went into it with some trepidation because of the circumstances of its writing, but i found a lot more than that in it. i liked its intensity and knottiness. weirdly i’m less keen on joyelle mcsweeney’s critical work, i like the necropastoral book but i didn’t get much out of her old blog, the gurlesque etc

Lolly Willowes (O052) - Sylvia Townsend Warner
Pattern Recognition - William Gibson (R)
The Card - Arnold Bennett
Shift - Hugh Howey
The Owl Service - Alan Garner
Dark Entries - Robert Aickman (+)
Seeds Of Time - John Wyndham
Slade House - David Mitchell (+)
The Last Day of a Condemned Man - Victor Hugo
The Man Who Was Thursday - G K Chesterton
Autumn - Ali Smith
Bleak House - Charles Dickens (R)
Ramble Book - Adam Buxton
XX - Ryan Hughes
The Old Man And The Sea - Earnest Hemingway (+)
The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch
The Sea Wolf - Jack London
Inverted World - Christopher Priest
The Story Of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang
One Thousand Ships - Natalie Haynes
Amber Fury - Natalie Haynes
Alcestis - Euripides
Agamemnon - Aeschylus
Death’s End - Cixin Liu
Children Of Ruin - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Ella Minnow Pea - Mark Dunn
Driftglass - Sam Delany
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
24 Jigsaw - Ed McBain
The Monarch Of The Glen - Neil Gaiman
Black Dog - Neil Gaiman
Body In The Library - Agatha Christie
An Event In Autumn - Mankell
Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) - Thomas Hardy (+)
The Castle Of Otranto - Horace Walpole
O009 Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock
1848 Mary Barton - Elizabeth Gaskell
Small Island - Andrea Levy
Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler (R) (+)
The Honjin Murders - Seishi Yokomizo
Anna Of The Five Towns - Arnold Bennett (+)
Slaughterhouse V - Kurt Vonnegut (R)
Sketches By Boz - Charles Dickens

(R) = reread
(+) = favourites, probably

(that's 40+, helped by skipping the usual long foreign novel in spring and reading a bunch of sub-200 page things in october)

wrong thread, dipshit

dogs, yeah, I guess that I was unmoved by the knottiness of Toxicon— it felt forced and unsurprising, plodding.