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

Done. While I'm up, anything else you'd like?

Reading Grossman's Life and Fate. My father-in-law's favorite book, decided I should read while he's still around to talk about it. Other than the challenge of tracking all the patronymics, diminutives, etc., really enjoying it.

Love The Radetzky March.

Done. While I'm up, anything else you'd like?

If that is your desire, you may whistle up the wind.

Plenty of that when you’re around.

Joseph Roth rules.

I want to hear what you think of the book.

As soon as I've read enough to form an opinion beyond the one-sentence impression I gave at the end, I'd be glad to share it.

Not sure whether that is a publisher's blurb per se--I just copied off of Goodreads. But, I understand the point you are making.

I didn’t mind it, I like reading descriptions of stuff I’ve never heard of because I can go off and read elsewhere about if it’s something I’m interested in.

I will go back to Roth for sure. I need a good block of time to read fiction. Which is to say, it was me, not Joseph.

Eh, the Lockwood is good but something in there is making me think of Martin Amis. I will articulate this badly but I think it's the war against cliche 'here comes a metaphor and by god I'm going to make it new' aspect of it. I absolutely appreciate it's in service of a wider point about digital culture and the affected, viral nature of the always online voice but I can't shake it now I've thought it.

This poster will eviscerate itself in t-minus 10 minutes.

Not sure what a quoted squib about a book, written by someone who might have an idea of what the book is about or "doing," is against the spirit of the thread, but maybe that's because I find blurbs to be an interesting literary form. Either way, we're talking about books or quoting other people writing about books. Who cares?

xp I almost agree except that there's something deeply surreal and idiosyncratic about Lockwood's metaphors that makes them seem less affected, more a product of seeing the world at a very peculiar slant. Usually with writers like that I figure out the trick after a little while and can generate metaphors in their style almost automatically; with Lockwood I can't.

Count me in on the "blurbs are fine" side. Well maybe not if you're reading Great Expectations, but a Japanese thriller that most ppl on this thread haven't heard of yet? It's fine.

I finished Alasdair Gray's collection UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY (c.1983, 1997).

The long story 'M. Pollard's Prometheus' was another remarkable work, containing a complete, miniature allegory about the nature of power, government, oppression, liberation. This story is also, I suppose, contained and criticised by the frame story in which the beloved woman, a radical and feminist, rejects the allegory. It's a sad, bleak little work but once again shows how extraordinarily ambitious Gray could be, and how learned he was.

The book ends with further very short stories, and a postscript which turns into a critical essay - characteristic Gray again, letting his book be invaded by another author (who is not actually Gray in disguise) - which, on close reading, is perceptive and convincing. It even takes in the paratextual material and images around the edges of the book. I went back and looked at the map of Scotland at the front, full of the scribbled names of Scottish authors, and finally saw that at the bottom right was 'Mistress Spark in Rome'.

A remarkable book. I should have read it long ago.

I went on to read some of THE METHUEN DRAMA BOOK OF PLAYS BY BLACK BRITISH WRITERS (2011), edited by Lynette Goddard.

Mustapha Matura's play WELCOME HOME JACKO (1979) is quite disturbing in its depiction of violence and abusive behaviour. Now on to Jackie Kay's CHIAROSCURO (1986) which is more peaceful, also much less naturalistic and more stylised, and describes Black lesbian life in England. The original production starred Bernadine Evaristo, with music from Gail Ann Dorsey !!

Unable to sleep last night I returned to Adam Mars-Jones' essay collection BLIND BITTER HAPPINESS. It has the odd feature of very short paragraphs (often one sentence or two), probably a legacy of appearing in newspapers but actually disconcerting to the reader of a book. Someone as attuned to form as AM-J should surely have noticed this, might have altered it?

But what a writer he can be - his review of Gore Vidal is devastating, one of those performances with lines to rank alongside Vidal's or Capote's own. And he has a tremendous doggedness about matters of fact and logic that helps him in eg: his dedicated, detailed reading of a random gay detective novel as a sign of gay culture in the 1980s. He swerves through all this in clipped elegant style

I suppose that the whole collection is a legacy of a moment when 'gay' meant something slightly different, more prominent and controversial: when there was barely LGBT, let alone LGBTQIA+ or whatever name one now finds most accurate.

despite everyone saying it's very good, it looks like The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is going to be very good. Removing teleology/whig approaches to economics and history, and looking at developments

I can't actually start it yet until I've got other things out of the way (new year, new rules), but there were a couple of great things in the first few pages I flicked through.

I did a v cackhanded edge round Braudel's use of 'Man' in his introduction to The Mediterranean in the Age of Phillip II upthread. My usual approach is in this order:

• 'Man' meaning 'humankind' was standard in English-language writing pretty much since the Enlightenment, and while it's good it's being retired, there's no point asterisking every use of it.
• However, how Braudel/Braudel's translator (what is the original french?) uses it here is quite awkward. The first 'man and his relationship to nature' is fine in the standard 'humankind' transfer, but his second use is unhappy: "history, one might say, on the scale not of man, but of individual men". Its all but imperceptible adjacency to the first use, an all-but seamless Man-as-humankind = man-as-significant-men is poisonous. Or to put it another way, the connotation/denotation blurring isn't helpful.

as I say it was clunky though.

ANYWAY

The Mushroom at the End of the World has a lovely exuberant formulation in its introduction:

Ever since the Englightenment, Western pilosophers have shown us a Nature that is grand and universal but also passive and mechanical. Nature was a backdrop and resource for the moral intentonality of Man, which could tame and master Nature. It was left to fabulists, including non-Western and non-civilizational storytellers, to remind us of the lively activities of all beings, human and not human.

Several things have happened to undermine this division of labor. First, all that taming and mastering has made such a mess that it is unclear whether life on earth can continue. Second, interspecies entanglements that once seemed the stuff of fables are now materials for serious discussion among biologists and ecologists, who show how life requires the interplay of many kinds of beings. Humans cannot survive by stomping on all the others. Third, women and men from around the world have clamored to be included in the status once given to Man. Our riotous presence undermines the moral intentionality of Man's Christian masculinity, which separated Man from Nature.

The time has come for new ways of telling true stories beyond civilizational first principles. Without Man and Nature, all creatures can come back
to life, and men and women can express themselves without the strictures of a parochially imagined rationality.

the phrase 'interspecies entanglements' also threw me back to the passages in Social Contagion - the section on the economic and biological relation of human capitalist structures and Nature was part of the reason i picked this book up.

The focus for the short chapters that follow is the Matsutake mushroom, with a distinctive smell associated with autumn in Japan, and the author quotes this lovely fragment:

The sound of a temple bell is heard in the cedar forest at dusk,
The autumn aroma drifts on the roads below.

Akemi Tachibana (1812-1868)

One of the key questions the book looks to answer, via its central theme of mushrooms, is 'How might capitalism look without assuming progress? It might look patchy: the concentration of wealth is possible because value produced in unplanned patches is appropriated for capital.'

I finished Jackie Kay's 1986 play CHIAROSCURO, about Black lesbians in Britain.

Continuing with Adam Mars-Jones' essays, I reflect again on how the place of 'gay culture' or 'gay identity' has changed. And with it, gay style or deportment. AM-J's prose (from the 1980s & 1990s) can often be catty and camp, with great skill and humour. Few critics are more entertaining. But this in turn made me wonder how far camp had been diminished as a necessary gay style since then. Camp still has a strong association with gay men (if not women) - for sure. But it seems more an option, less compulsory, than it did.

AM-J at his most amusing:

What is art? That's a big question. Let's discuss that another day. What is a critic? That's much more tractable. Here's where we scale down from philosophy to ethics. We can settle that now if you like.

Argh, I cannot unsee that actually quite otm Amis/Lockwood connection

Do I even want to scroll up and so what that is about?

Too late.

Angela Davis Autobiography
Somehow taken me 20 years to start reading this deeply. I think It may have been started when I got it about 3 houses ago. I know it's been sitting on a shelf for as long as teh unit has been there I think. May have meant to start it before it went up there.
Now wondering why it took so long and why I didn't get into it when I got it. May have needed me to have read other stuff before I really contextualised it. Really don't know.,
Anyway Angela has been arrested while trying to get away after a gun she bought had been used to kill a couple of people or used in an escape attempt which wound up with that result. & she is in prison being kept in isolation after having been initially put in to the psych unit.
have been meaning to read this for a while so glad i'm now getting into it. I think the writing is good so wish i had read it when i got it.

Yeah---The Marin County Courthouse shootings (and hostages-taking), part of an ongoing prison war, spilling out along the way: https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/11697197#Background

Operation Shylock by Philip Roth, from the book-swap shelf of the Co-op near my dad's house. It's been said plenty of times, but Roth really had a burst of creative energy in the 90s.

xp She was accused of smuggling at least one gun into prison, having taped or glued it to her head (covered up by her afro, of course). Really don't think that would work.

I'm sorry about the Amis Lockwood comment! I do sort of stand by it. Fwiw, I was much more thorough and uh, glowing, on the Lockwood thread.

Natalia Ginzburg - The Dry Heart
William Congreve - Incognita
The Poems of Wilfred Owen

Two novellas, published centuries apart. Congreve, from the 18th century, where love ends well. Ginzburg, from the 20th, where love can't even begin. Owen's poetry is written in between either where his skills from a time spent with late romanticism is used to document something else entirely. He would've probably been a good but minor poet but life had other plans.

Fizzles, I am teaching the Tsing book later this spring, to high schoolers. I like how it is both provocative, investigative, and accessible. Great book.

Owen's poetry is written in between either where his skills from a time spent with late romanticism is used to document something else entirely. He would've probably been a good but minor poet but life had other plans.

My AP English teacher recited "Dulce et Decorum Est" from memory.

Fizzles, I am teaching the Tsing book later this spring, to high schoolers. I like how it is both provocative, investigative, and accessible. Great book.

Natalia Ginzburg - The Dry Heart
William Congreve - Incognita
The Poems of Wilfred Owen

Two novellas, published centuries apart. Congreve, from the 18th century, where love ends well. Ginzburg, from the 20th, where love can't even begin. Owen's poetry is written in between either where his skills from a time spent with late romanticism is used to document something else entirely. He would've probably been a good but minor poet but life had other plans.

“having” ffs > *writing*

Is that some kind of scripting language redirecting its output?

as someone who has never knowingly closed brackets in their life i think i’m just going to have to say “no, it’s just a malfunctioning human correcting themselves”

eg rosenberg

https://i.imgur.com/qm1Q9Qi.jpg

what a mix of timbres and locutions!

right! it’s really… idk, *chewy*.

definitely worth checking Isaac Rosenberg in this respect. a v different background - Lithuanian East London Jews - and an extraordinary letter writer and poetry theorist, as well as having poetry v different from Owen.
― Fizzles, Monday, 7 February 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Thanks Fizzles,I will.

and it doesn’t mind - like the content - flaring out. it’s not looking for internal consistency - that mix, as you say.

I finished The Disappearing Spoon. It stayed a grab bag throughout. Various ideas were knit into its anecdotes, but they were not pursued or developed outside the confines of brief stories that covered four pages at most, but the stories and snippets of elemental chemistry were usually interestingly told. Some were far enough off the beaten path that I don't think I would have encountered them outside this book. So, I found it generally engaging.

xpost “chewy” was completely the wrong word. but there’s no lyrical decorum (in distinction from Owen) and that makes it v exciting to read.

ariosto - orlando furioso

Finished Re-reading Dennis Cooper's George Miles cycle, and also finished Robert Glück's 'Reader,' a now scarce volume of poetry where Glück imitates and pays homage to favorite poets... including Cooper, as well as Shakespeare, Keats, and a number of others. Well worth the $45 spent on it.

I finished the Zizek book ("Living in the End Times") including the 80+ page afterword added to the paperback edition, and it only took me the month of January. Hopefully will pick up the pace by reading shorter books for a bit. Next up is "Beautiful World, Where Are You?" by Sally Rooney. First impression: she's still got it.

Adam Mars-Jones: the writing is always good and perceptive, but the essays are at times flimsy and ill-assorted for a collection. A profile of Boy George (very well done) from before 'Karma Chameleon'! An interview with Marc Almond. A report on the Rolling Stones from ... 1982! (There are so many of these, aren't there: Sunday newspaper interviews with the Stones way past their peak.) Then again, a long LRB essay on some confessional poetry that seems quite bad and tiresome.

But the book does contain some major things, notably the remarkable long essay VENUS ENVY which I tend to feel was the best thing anyone had ever written (c.1990) on Amis and McEwan. AM-J also has a long-standing interest in disability (I'm not sure why exactly), and writes a very long essay here about its representation in mainstream cinema.

Emma Dabiri What White People Can Do next
Short book on racism and anti racism from perspective of Nigerian-Irish writer . I read it overnight. Want to read her Don't Touch My Hair Too.
Quite enjoyed this but it is a small book and I think bite sized to entice new readership into the subject.

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, Michael Lewis.

Just finished first read of Stop-Time, the apparently hybrid memoir by Frank Conroy, first known to me (via mentions in 70s-early 80s New Yorker and Dowbbeat) as a self-taught, professional jazz pianist and writing instructor.
I say "hybrid memoir" because he taps in, constructs with, a lot of precise detail, incl. exact quotes, dialogue at times, though never boilerplate realness for its own sake, or scene-setting for more sympathy's sake---he could have eidetic memory, up to a point, if that's possible---he recalls walking by a brownstone in middle school age, looking/not looking, refusing/stealing a glance (in character as hell: he even rebels against his proudly refusenik self): it's where, he's always been told, he lived the first eight years of his life, but he's creeped out/drawn to this place that evokes 0 memories on the face of it---but maybe if he were to go inside, get inside, someway---? That process would be boy Conroy-typical too, except he does have also have some sense of when to pull back from dubious endeavors, though can be when they're already in "progress". He's learned, is learning, incl. in asides while writing the book, about teaching, testing himself, and the messy void---his earliest memories, and probably related to the reason he may have shut out earlier ones, incl. his only experience with prescience, of realizing that his father was about to materialize, on unscheduled flight from the latest "rest cure," and chase young Frank under the bed---though his mother has had maybe the same inkling, leaving in the middle of a work shift for the first time ever, to come home just in time.
He also recalls dread of and being drawn toward the everyday vastness of empty winter sky, while relating it to the eyes of the "feeble-minded" men his de facto stepfather of sorts tends in yon cottage, so better not go there again, self. Back in NYC, peeling back the top bread slice the sandwich his mother sent along, "with catatonic rapture, gazing into the paradox" of being consumed with hunger and repulsion--perfect balance of the chronically picky eater!---then the bell rings, and he gets up and leaves.
Yet fascinated also with detail, with the possibility of meaning, and/or just the pleasures of perception, following the beam as well as the dream---at one point, he becomes a yo-yo wizard (this was a huge trend, when the Duncan yo-yo Co. sent roving adepts, demonstrating hi-tech/more durable product, then conducting levels of competition). The different moves, up to The Universe, are elegantly described--turns opt the state-wide contest comes down to who can do the most Loop-de-Loops, whose string happens lasts the longest--a "fat kid's"---but secret knowledge, incl. of his own talent and capacity for self-discipline, stays with him through subsequent zone-outs and zoom-ins. Also understands chess well enough to convey why he loses. Has revelation when sees his Paris friend John Rich's drawing of the parts of a humble Metro lock in motion, a microcosm of motion, caught on the page. (Rich's portrait of the teen future author, featured on the cover of this early edition, is otm visual equivalent of "voice": deep focus/total dilation dark eyes, w braced, skeptical gaze---but also w hilarious pout of outsized lips: apotheosis of resting bitch face in 1953, and fascinating to compare with
cover flap photo of Conroy in '65, still young and etc.)
The jab and flow of jazz piano is suggested by structure (incl a three-line sentence, a two-line sentence, an abrupt fragment, and there's yr graf, followed perhaps by something much more of a network/traffic management), also the aforementioned fascination w void and detail, sometimes the one of the other, also makes me think of negative space, emptiness bordered, defined, made use of by placement of elements around it---rather than just playing fancy notes, notes, notes alla time.

Stop-Time is appropriate use of musical term: when the rest of the world/accompaniment disappears, he keeps sensing, breathing, writing to the other side, sometimes of small spaces, within and between chapters. The book takes itself out of the running, the massing of time as river and sediment, until he has to come up for air, also for driving to London in his sports car, playing jazz, and coming home,to wife and baby, way after dark, on deserted little motorways of the early 60s, is the real blast.

Or so he says as intro and outro.

Ted Hughes: most of RAIN-CHARM FOR THE DUCHY (1992): poems as Poet Laureate.

Sometimes you might be able to admire the artistry here, including the detail of TH's knowledge of flowers, rivers and birds. He does bring his animalistic, nature-oriented poetics to the laureate task.

On the other hand, most of the time he's celebrating royal personages whom we know not to be worthy of the mythology. The nadir has to be a poem celebrating the wedding of ... Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson. Yes, really. It mentions a helicopter. Yes, really.

Of all the poems I've ever encountered of which you could say 'That didn't age well', in 2022 a poem celebrating Prince Andrew probably goes to the top of the list.