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

Blood meridian is very good

JUst finished Pauline Hopkins Of One Blood
it's a bit gothic or something. Not exactly what I was expecting might compare to an H Rider Haggard or something.
Well I've read it now. Think I was more impressed by WEB du Bois' contribution to this book The Comet. Well will try to get through the rest of it anyway.

also
Carol Anderson White Rage
which is really depressing and aggrovating and did clarify what Shelby County meant. So pretty topical still in a way that one would have hoped might have been corrected. It does go into corruption too which might also be topical. It was published the year taht t got the Presidential role and this copy does add an epilogue covering some of that era

Small Things Like These and Foster by Claire Keegan, short and beautiful and I wept at the end of the second. Now on to The Count of Monte Cristo, I know it's a celebrated example of the genre but at the moment I feel like I wouldn't be too unhappy if I only had similar adventure stories to read till the end of my days. Not sure how he's going to spin it out for another 1000 pages though.

It spins out and spins out and never lets up imo

Make sure you read the Robin Buss translation!

I heard that it originating as magazine instalments meant that is not as coherent as it might have been if it was written as a stand alone book. I know i read an article on teh subject, may be in an Umberto Eco anthology I read.
NOt read much Dumas. have heard about his background him being the son of a black general who had managed to build up his own rank through merit I think. has been a few years since i listened to the Stuff You Missed in History podcast on Dumas pere. But interesting story.

The Alasdair Gray story becomes slightly more cogent: the narrator is interviewed in the Tower of London by an official and they discuss the history of language and the Tower of Babel. The narrator claims that he can reunify the languages of humanity.

The Tower motif strongly echoes the tower of the other story, about the 'Axletree': so I perceive some coherence across the book.

Make sure you read the Robin Buss translation

Any particular reason? I'm reading the Gutenberg version, presumably the original anonymous English translation and it seems fine, only occasionally obscure in matters of 19th century French politics which is perhaps unavoidable.

This is a thing from 2019 where Eco talks about Monte Cristo. I think what I was remembering was older though and had been anthologised at a much earlier date
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/10/28/the-cult-of-the-imperfect/

I had thought some details had actually changed between instalments as it was gradually published in a magazine when it first appeared.

Monte Christo is not the greatest novel ever written, but when I'm reading it and learn I haven't moved an inch in an hour it's the greatest novel ever written.

I just read The Prisoner of Zenda, a great little adventure story, very nicely paced, and thankfully short enough that it didn't lose its charm by the end. The sequel looks intriguing too - apparently it takes a darker turn.

Not read the book though may have it somewhere. have seen at least a couple of films of it.
Ruritania what a lovely place to visit, but possibly a bit white.

Oho, will have to try those, now that Melville's truly high generic (for Melville) historical Israel Potter has given me a good taste of those.
re A. Gray's parallel columns: can work, like when I briefly got Bible-curious around the turn of the century, read some of an edition with the Synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke & John all lined up with their own accounts of how it all went down---think it's pretty well established that none of these versions were actually written down by the eyewitness Disciples who got their names on the covers: the earliest known manuscripts are from several hundred years later, whatever relationship they had to the ur-sources--but still engrossing, once you get used to reading that way.
The only other example that I've come across is in some passages of Long Time Gone: The Autobiography of David Crosby, where co-author Carl Gottlieb asks various Croz associates how something happened, if at all---I think he just asked cold, without reading them David's side of the story. Makes it an even better read: whole thing even had me wanting to revisit some of his music that I'd dismissed, if not detested. Well-played, DC & CG.

I am reading a WWII memoir, And No Birds Sang, by Canada's favorite beardo, Farley Mowat. He spent months continuously under heavy fire at the front lines in the Italy campaign, which, as he strongly conveys, was a highly unpleasant place to be.

finished plotters - good but didn't quite maintain it's early momentum.

currently reading Outline , Rachel Cusk. terrific so far.

Reading Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped for the first time (I vaguely remember the Disney film from when I was a kid). A decent boy's adventure story so far, and queerer than Treasure Island, at least.

Make sure you read the Robin Buss translation

Any particular reason? I'm reading the Gutenberg version, presumably the original anonymous English translation and it seems fine, only occasionally obscure in matters of 19th century French politics which is perhaps unavoidable.

― for 200 anyone can receive a dud nvidia (ledge), Monday, 24 January 2022 13:32 (eight hours ago) link

They're both good but IMO the Buss is better and more faithful: Buss keeps the dirty innuendoes and the fourth-wall-breaking asides that get cut from the Gutenberg version; his sentences and paragraphs are closer to the original Dumas without being cloth-eared and awkward in the Richard Pevear style; the jokes are funnier; and the Gutenberg version flattens everything in a Walter Scottish way, without Dumas's joie de vivre. But they're both good! I read the Gutenberg as a kid and still loved it. Try and chapter from both and see which you prefer. Just don't read the abridged version!

just realised that Verso books is a Leftist print publishing house

The Slavoj Zizek book that I'm currently reading (Living in the End Times) is published by Verso. Its kind of interesting to me despite knowing very little about Hegel and even less about Lacan. I take it he repeats a lot of the same jokes in other books, but they are new to me. I do have to skim when the dialectical reasoning gets too heavy going.

'when we cease to understand the world' by benjamin labatut. just started it but i'm loving it so far. it's supposed to be dystopian historical short stories about science and mathematics. but so far it's mostly about nazis

Cold Water, Gwendoline Riley's book. She's so good. The voice is fully there, even in the debut she wrote in late teens. Proper "fold up my biro and go home" good.

Glad to see all the Cercas love itt

Billy Bragg's history of skiffle just introduced a guy who was "gardening critic for the Sunday Times". The past truly if a foreign country.

Maybe son or grandson of the guy who reviewed the countryside in Scoop!

I'm on a Clark Coolidge kick right now, reading his massive Selected Poems and often finding myself seeing if the books that poems are taken from are available. They often either aren't or are vanishingly rare. Great poet, the selected is well worth getting for any poetry fan.

I've also been tasked (a paid task, at that) to review Dennis Cooper's most recent book for a publication, so will be diving back into some damaged Twink ass for a while.

White tears brown scars; How white feminism betrays women of color. / Ruby Hamad
Finding this quite compelling. have read about half of it since picking it up from the library yesterday.
Australian Arabic feminist talks about race and the ideal of the white damsel and how white tears are a negative tool. I've seen this compared to Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility but this seems to look much closer at history. Colonisers attitudes to various ethnicities that they are attempting to control sexualising women in a very instrumental way. She talks about the abuse of aboriginal Australian women as black velvet which is something i hadn't come across before, the veil in its earlier form and its ability to disguise women in their sexual endeavours in a way contrary to the way the tabloid press depicts the more recent version of the veil.
Yeah quite enjoying this book.

Bessie Chris Albertson
Later update of a thoroughly researched biography of the 20s/30s blues singer. Slowly reading this.
Includes a series of stories of her ribald carrying on as well as the recording process.

The History Of White people Nell Irvin Painter
I'm now up to the 18th and 19th century.
Author has just been talking about the popularisation of German thought in the 18th century when I wasn't sure there was a Germany to have thought in that way. & has then moved onto de Tocqueville and his companion Gustave de Beaumont travelling around the US and leaving with different foci. De Beaumont made a lot of the one drop of black blood idea and used it as a basic hingepoint for the novel he wrote whereas de Tocqueville concentrated on teh boston white male asan ideal . de Beaumont appears to have been largely written out of history including having his name removed from the title of the book about their travels which is now simply called Alexis de Tocqueville In America

Bought the Buss translation of Monte Cristo, it's half as long again as the Gutenberg one! Also sadly lacking repeated use of 'mephitic' ('méphitique'), replaced with 'sulphurous' or 'musty'.

Just now made it almost all the way through Klara and the Sun before echoing another ilxor's recent cry re another offering, "What the Hell, Ishiguro?!" Because of a spot of fantasy appearing in the swirl and clank of fairly rigorous, or at least committed, faith-keeping science fiction, the kind with nuances of individual characters, in context of small group and societal dynamics, influenced by technological options and some related shades and spaces back there (a lot of detail, but gaps for readers to fill as well, agreeable balance, I think).
So better to think of it the way Wells labelled his most popular novels as "scientific romance," like, don't expect total rigor, and know that this sweetened spot (though not "sweet spot," in terms of ideal balance) of authorial convenience leads around and back into the overall cadence, groove of involving elements (Eliot did some of this shell game switcheroo too). What the hell, still, but already thinking of checking the rest of local library's KI stash.

re show and tell, lots of expository conversations, but also hearing yourself say that, and how verbalization x thought loops, plans, decisions snowball that way, re diff ideas and "Oh it wasn't even really an idea...(later, re same conversation)Mom just had this shitty idea..." as everything keeps moving along.

I finished And No Birds Sang. The book's major narrative momentum was simple enough, following Mowat's transition from a youth impatient to participate in the war, up through his escalating battle experiences to the point where his battalion had suffered more than 50% losses including many close friends, he was experiencing frequent and crippling panic fear he manages via large infusions of rum.

The book ends shortly after his apparently fearless and battle hardened commanding officer hands him a poem he wrote that amounts to a suicide note, then the next day commits suicide-by-enemy-fire by charging at a machine gun emplacement. His epilogue is brief, not specifically pacifist, but harshly anti-war, warning younger generations that war grinds up both soldiers and civilians into unrecognizable shapes, both living and dead, and is neither glorious nor usually even necessary, and any suggestion to the contrary is a lie. His story reinforces these facts with brutal clarity.

I started Riddle of the Sands, a pre-WWI tale of espionage last night, but may set it aside for something less war-centered.

Yeah, those two in a row sound like a lot, though have seen RINTS referred to as a classic of its kind, so would be worth coming back to. The plot's pretty tight, so hard to highlight w/o indicating spoilers, but, re xpost Klara and the Sun as scientific romance, I now notice that Library of Congress data has it classified as Science Fiction and Love Stories, which is right: these are the love stories, as told by Klara, AF (Artificial Friend) series B2, of her and her chosen child owner,Josie, of Josie and her longtime best friend, Rick, as they now struggle with new roles of boyfriend and girlfriend, also stories of love of children and parents, incl. more struggles of course.
Model B2, state of the art/being superseded by new B3, but perhaps compensating for relatively limited features, is here especially challenged tune into and understand humans, sometimes remixing on the fly, as do the humans--because Josie is one of those lucky children, not just gifted, but lifted, genetically edited, which is risky, expensive in a lot of ways, but worth it, if you want your child to have a chance at anything in this world, which is strange and getting stranger, also more familiar, just up the road a little way (copyright 2021, but no pandemic culture; he probably wrote it before we were assured of the probably lingering elements of that, but isolation is a way of life in this story, though Josie and her privileged peers are now reaching the age, as part of college prep, when they must have meetings, which means learning how to be with people outside of the immediate family and household---and that's enough for this month, kids).

Wah? RotS, sorry.

I seem to be sticking with Riddle of the Sands. It is sedately paced and has spilled no blood so far.

finished the sluts, started outline

the sluts was a hilarious thrill-ride about homicidal topping fantasies

Finished Ruby Hamad White tears, Brown Scars; How white feminism betrays women of color.
Found it really good , it expands on White fragility and ties it into further historic context. As the white damsel is seen to be a major tool of racism which I can see to be true. An artificial level where the feelings of a white woman are more important tahn the reality of a BIPOC woman's existence. Have seen how that impacts on me as a black person in similar situations. But this hasa theme of how feminism is undermined by the ignorance or utilisation of racism involved. I think there is more widespread context with that racism that the subtitle might put people off reading that would benefit from knowing about. Do wonder if taht is something taht would put people off who are not already not reading things because they are written by a woman of colour.
I found this pretty eye opening and can see it's truth. Because she is based in Australia I am also hearing things tied into Aboriginal women that i haven't heard elsewhere. I need to read more about that.
One thing that did confuse me was that I thought she had explained why the idea of a Middle East was a misnomer and inherently confusing and misrepresentative and then she uses the term quite a bit later in theh book. Wonder if there should be quotation marks around it in that context or something cos it does seem to be the one thing I would question. Oh that and her referring to the female Doctor Who as being inevitably as far as they would go with the character in terms of minorities when there's since been a black female incarnation presumably very shortly after the book appeared,. If I'm reading that character right.
Anyway glad i read this and i found it pretty compelling so i got through it in a couple of days.

Paul Gilroy There Ain't No Black In The Union Jack
late 80s book on race in the UK. I think it's from a sociological background . First chapter seems pretty academic but I'm beginning to enjoy it

hey uh, why haven't people aggressively pushed me to read outline before? this is magnificent

xpost reminding me that I meant to read Gilroy's Black Atlantic---Modernity and Double Consciousness, putting modern music in context of Black diaspora, among other things---he was the applecart upsetter at a conference transcribed in A Hidden Landscape, the chronicle-anthology of UK music writing edited by mark s, who rec BA to me, and there are pdfs of at least some of the text online, also quite a few references.

some of Black Atlantic's text online, that is.

lucie elven - the weak spot: pretty so-so uk experimental lite in the tradition of walser's 'the assistant' or similar. set in a pharmacy in an alpine village and partly about a despotic pharmacy manager who eventually runs for office (sidebar: you could not set this book in the UK because all UK pharmacies are incredibly depressing, and the one in this book is meant to be just ok. sidebar 2: i don't like plots about people running for office. it seems to be an obsession with american writers and filmmakers, remember the guy in polygamy drama 'big love' who ran for office? why?)

i read '91/92' by lauren elkin: almost comically slight. a diary of bus travel in paris

i also read some of elle nash - nudes: bleak american short stories with teenagers doing drugs and gas stations and all that stuff. the territory is familiar but there's enough in the book that goes beyond the merely lurid

i'm continuing with 'the luminous novel', which i put down a while ago after being put off by the misogyny and homophobia. that's still very much there and still offputting, but it does build to something very satisfying - a slow accumulation of coincidences and unexplained events but narrated with a straight face. the book is definitely a "grower not a shower"

i picked up but have not yet started 'fuccboi' by sean thor conroe. i recall some controversy about this last summer(?) regarding accusations of plagiarism from sam pink, who i really respect as a writer, so i'm interested to see what this one - which is on a big publisher and has had some push, neither of which are true of sam pink's books - is like

hey uh, why haven't people aggressively pushed me to read _outline_ before? this is magnificent

Mande Music Eric Charry
History of the Malian region and its culture and how it ties in with the music produced. So showing the roots of people like Tiamate Diabate, Ali Farka Toure, Rail Band, Ambassadeurs . I think when i started reading this last month i was finding it too dry to get into at that point. I picked it up yesterday and found it really fascianting.
Would love to find some more books like this on the history of Africa and its music.
I think the writer is a French ethnomusicologist which might give it a perspective that is a bit remote but it reads pretty good. Also interested in reading books by people more closely involved.

Clean living under difficult circumstances : finding a home in the ruins of modernism / Owen Hatherley.
Collection of articles by British writer with an archaeological theme. I found one piece on the shop fronts of Walthamstow High st which was an interesting thing to find especially since he highlights Saeeds one of my regular stops for fabric if I'm there.
Title comes from one time Who manager Pete Meaden's description of mod.

Zami : a new spelling of my name : a biomythography / Audre Lord
her memoir. I'm still at the point where she has started school and been tranferred from a school which focused on saving eyesight to the main Catholic school in the area. So she's being taught by nuns. I need to look up her sight problems again since I'm not remembering the exact details.
Anyway another really good read. I enjoy her writing.

started Franzen Crosssroads (not even a guilty pleasure at this point) finished Jeffers Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (had not kept in mind the fundamental violence)

I would like to read that Franzen novel. One day.

Don't bother, he's awful

Crossroads is great, definitely worth your time.

I finished Jeffers’ Love Songs of WEB DuBois last week, i loved it. Still thinking about it a week later, it has such long tendrils. She writes so beautifully that there’s no work to even start, or “get into” the story… it just flows like a river.

Today i finished Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet”. Also beautifully written, it knocked me out as well. A believable, affecting story that’s really not “about” Shakepeare in the normal ways, centering his wife & children of whom so little is known instead. Really stunning.

Metaphor - Terence Hawkes (from the reissued Critical Idiom series). Very handy, very brief guide to the history of metaphor and its changes, though 'some 20th century views' is putting it mildly - it's a very partial view, with sections on IA Richards and Empson, and something of a fixation on Levi-Strauss, but little on the other theoretical linguistic and theoretical developments (Hawkes has also written a v good guide to Structuralism).

The Making of Incarnation – Tom McCarthy. A novel largely comprising a series of analyses of simulations and reconstructions: motion capture, hyrdo and aero dynamics, Lilian Gilbreth wireframes of motions of labour, and how they constitute reality, new realities, new vectors of meaning, and what glitches and memories these new spaces might create or retain. I'm very much interested in the topics, but it's delivered in a very baggy literary voice, with some seriously embarrassing stylistic solecisms appearing from time to time, and little in the way of bringing emotional content or dramatic impulses to the quite essayistic topics. More rambling here, with the pinefox providing a suitable, sceptical foil. I'm not *not* enjoying it though.

Social Contagion, and other material on microbiological class war in China – Chuang. A series of essays on Covid and China brought together in one volume by the Marxist Chuang collective. A very nice little volume, so much more appealing than those large hack-historian *takes* that appear. Chuang are dedicated to representing and describing China from the inside as a corrective to western representations. The first essay is the one from which the volume takes its name, and deals with three topics: pandemic as a consequence of capitalist processes, via an examination of how agri-industrial practices intensify the process of zoonotic viral transfer, and the way that Covid and lockdown has been a good test and analysis of Chinese state capacity, and what lessons this might teach people about how to rise up, disrupt or otherwise revolt against that state capacity. The authors suggest that the Chinese shutdown has many similarities to the global impact of a Chinese general strike.

The essay originally appeared here - though it's significantly expanded in the book, and there are some important corrections. Probably the most important of those is dialling down the disagreement about the possibility of accidental lab leak hypothesis. As Zeynep Tufekci points out here, lab leaks have been by far the most common cause of viral epidemics, including many previous SARS outbreaks and eg the disastrous 2007 foot and mouth outbreak in the UK. It seems at least very possible that an accidental lab leak was responsible here.

Regardless, this doesn't affect the authors' central thesis that pandemics are a consequence of intensive farming and creation of monocultures, with little in the way of natural firebreaks to transmission and viral mutation. A lot of the detail of their argument here rests on one book (Big Farms Make Big Flu by Rob Wallace, and in summarising that single book, phrases like 'because pigs are often susceptible to both avian and human-adapted viruses, those viruses remix across pig populations to create new varieties of influenza that can lead to epidemic diseases' make you a little jumpy.

Remix? Really? As I say, the overall content that we have seriously disrupted our agricultural environment creating new vectors of disease doesn't seem too contentious, and it's to their credit that the authors spell out the argument to allow the reader to examine the connecting premises.

There are striking phrases and arguments throughout:

... capitalism's tendency to repeatedly position humanity on the brink of extinction. In past decades, that extinction was threatened through global nuclear war. Today, it confronts us in the shape of an ecological catastrophe which is as much microbiological as macroecological.

There's an excellent section called There is No Wilderness that looks at how vectors between wild animal and environmental spaces have been brought into capitalist processes and supply chains, partly through driving scarcity in local populations, then required to look elsewhere for food, partly by industrialising... well, they say it better:

Again, Wallace and his numerous collaborators point to not one but two major routes by which capitalism helps to gestate and unleash ever more deadly epidemics: The first, outlined above, is the directly industrial case, in which viruses are gestated within industrial environments that have been fully subsumed within capitalist logic. But the second is the indirect case, which takes place via capitalist expansion and extraction in the hinterland, where previously unknown viruses are essentially harvested from wild populations and distributed along global capital circuits.

I found this section particularly interesting because of a fascination with the grotesque, that artistic examination of the boundary between the truly wild, and let us say subconscious, and the civilised. Chuang's contention is that with the viruses we are seeing the result of internalising the wild into our 'civilised' global supply chains, an interesting new aesthetic boundary as well as an important socioeconomic question. My mind, as so often, inevitably drawn back to Kipling's short story, The Eye of Allah, as the medieval monks look at microbes through the lens of the new microscope they have acquired - incidentally the sort of dramatisation of abstract spaces that Tom McCarthy would do well to study.

There is of course plenty of latent and explicit argument in the west about Chuang's characterisation of capitalism. They note that the significant medical advances brought about by capitalism are incontrovertible, but point to their uneven distribution - too little, too late. At the beginning of the second essay, on Chinese worker organisation and the dynamics of corporate and state institutions under Covid, they say of the US and a perceived direction of state capacity into 'the hands of a police state', "Such a shift is clearly indicative of a once capacious state in the throes of a decades-long decay." To set against that you might set Audrey Tang's comment in an interview with Tyler Cowen (i know i know, he's a preposterous prick, but his interviews can be interesting and this one is):

COWEN: Now, my country, the United States, has made many, many mistakes at an almost metaphysical level. What is it in the United States that those mistakes have come from? What’s our deeper failing behind all those mistakes?
TANG: I don’t know. Isn’t America this grand experiment to keep making mistakes and correcting them in the open and share it with the world? That’s the American experiment.
COWEN: Have we started correcting them yet?
TANG: I’m sure that you have.

That of course is part of the capitalist argument as well - that is to say, flows of capital are mutable enough to enable renewal *at some level*. Now that level is often at the level of the wealthiest, so we come back to Chuang's key point about uneven allocation, but of course also capitalism's tendency to bring us to the edge of extinction. Hell of a gamble. Hell of an experiment. I think again about Tufekci's point about the precariousness of gain-of-function experimenting and the porousness of even top graded biological labs. Add that to Chuang's observation that actually, we have been lucky these have just been Covid viruses - an aggressive flu virus finding a vector into the global circuits would be considerably more damaging.

Anniversaries Vol 1 - Uwe Johnson. Started reading it. Put it down. Went to a Patrick Wright lecture mainly on The Village that Died for England, and then ended up also buying his book on Uwe Johnson's time in Sheppey, The Sea View Has Me Again. picked it up and put it down. Finally, got a copy of Luke Ellis' Twenty twenty, which quotes liberally from Anniversaries. I found myself enjoying the Anniversaries sentences more than Luke Ellis', so I've picked it up properly this time, and am finding it quite compelling. More at another time though!

The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II - Vol I – Fernand Braudel. As always a delight in style, intellect and observation. His separation of the book into levels is justified wonderfully:

The first part is devoted to a history whose passage is almost imperceptible, that of man in his relationship to the environment, a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles....

On a different level from the first there can be distinguished another history, this time with slow but perceptible rhythms. If the expression had not been diverted from its full meaning, one could call it *social history*, the history of groups and groupings. How did these swelling currents affect Mediterranean life in general...

Lastly, the third part gives hearing to traditional history – history, one might say, on the scale not of man, but of individual men, what Paul Lacombe and François Simiand called '*l'histoire événementielle*', that is, the history of events: surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.

(sic: man and men in their unwelcome blurred old form as proxies for 'people' and 'humankind': obv for dynastic history as well as social women play and major part and more generally gender constructions exist on a spectrum across which people participate in the dynamics of history)

And so in that first section you get a wonderful disquisition on the commerce in snow and ice-water, which i will quote in full to conclude this overlong entry:

These are the snows that explain the long Mediterranean history of 'snow water', offered by Saladin to Richard the Lionheart, and drunk to fatal excess by Don Carlos in the hot month of July 1568, when he was imprisoned in the Palace at Madrid. In Turkey in the sixteenth century it was not merely the privilege of the rich; in Constantinople, but elsewhere as well, Tripoli in Syria, for instance, travellers remarked on merchants selling snow water, pieces of ice, and water-ices which could be bought for a few small coins. Pierre Belon relates that snow from Bursa used to arrive at Istanbul in whole boatloads. It was to be found there all the year round according to Busbecq, who was astonished to see the janissaries drinking it every day at Amasia in Anatolia, in the Turkish army camp. The snow trade was so important that the pashas took an interest in the exploitation of the 'ice mines'. It was said in 1578 to have provided Muhammad Pasha with an income of up to 80,000 sequins a year.

Elsewhere, in Egypt, for example, where snow arrived from Syria by relays of fast horses; in Lisbon which imported it from great distances; in Oran, the Spanish *presidio*, where snow arrived from Spain in the brigantines of the Intendance; in Malta, where the Knights, if we are to believe them, would die of snow did not arrive from Naples, their illneses apparently requiring 'this sovereign remedy', snow was, on the contrary, the height of luxury. In Italy, as in Spain, however, snow water seems to have been used widely. It explains the early development of the art of ice cream and water-ice in Italy. Its sale was so profitable in Rome that it became the subject of a monopoly. In Spain snow was piled up in wells and kept until summer. Wstern pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land in 1494 were none the less astonished to see the owner of the boat presented, on the Syrian cost, with 'a sack full of snbow, the sight of which this country and in the month of July, filled all on board with the greatest amazement'. On the same Syrian coast, a Venetian noted with surprise in 1553 that the 'Mores', 'ut nos utimur saccharo, item spargunt nivem super cibos et sua edulia, 'sprinkle snow on their food and dishes as we would sugar.'

couple of additional things: a key point across the Chuang essays is that Covid has shown the Chinese state capacity to be significantly less robust than western depictions of it. It is highly effective when focused on a single area - eg Hubei in the case of Covid – but does not have the capacity to apply that level of rigor nationally, leaving local areas to apply their own, occasionally ferocious, lockdown rules.

second, i meant to quote part of the final paragraph to the first essay - the overall essay is excellent, clear in a way that allows you to see its argument, strikingly phrased in places, and this final para summarises nicely in tone, image and argument:

In quarantined China, we begin to glimpse such a landscape, at least in its outlines: empty late-winter street dusted by the slightest film of undisturbed snow, phone-lit faces peering out of windows, happenstance barricades staffed by a few spare nurses or police or volunteers or simply paid actors tasked with hoisting flags and telling you to put your mask on and go back home. The contagion is social. So, it should come as no real surprise that the only way to combat it at such a late stage is to wage a surreal sort of war on society itself. Don't gather together, don't cause chaos. But chaos can build in isolation too.

Finished Clark Coolidge's "Selected Poems 1962-1985," a 464-page opus that took about two weeks for me to get through. Now onto a re-read of Dennis Cooper's "I Wished," probably followed by a re-read of the George Miles cycle, then another re-read of "I Wished" before finally writing a review...

*correction - Twenty twenty is by Ellis Sharp, not Luke Ellis. Luke Ellis is someone I work with.

I hope you get to it one day (xp). I had heard that he lived in NYC and wondered what he made of the Central Park birdwatching incident and the Arbery case in light of his own hobbies and the urban and residential development in gritty areas and class themes that were topics in his earlier work and presumably his lived experience with first generation immigrants. I haven't yet figured out what makes it compelling in spite of all of the naysayers and one's own perception of gullibility while reading. I have made scant progress.

The writing to me was candid, and the coverage made me aware of alternate worlds and new things to explore (including working with archival and historical materials ... xp).

Sounds appealing, but what book are you referring to?