Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022

I finished Herodotus. It picks up considerably in the final third, but he still runs after every digression, giving equal weight to world-shaking battles and trivia. My overall impression is that if one can suspend the desire to know which details are factual, which are rumor-mongering and which are pure folktales, he gives the fullest possible picture of greek culture of his era. He was the chronicler of greek normcore.

I've started reading The Flâneur, Edmund White, one of those books where the author just writes about whatever comes to mind, as a sort of monologue version of 'table talk'. It's pleasant and convivial.

How does someone go on living through what most of us would consider an intolerable situation, and what are the limits and consolations of escape? Central to his books that I've read (which are all except the first, Master of Reality), and many of his best songs. Question before that also often pertains. I'll have to read MoR, his first (in the xpost 33 1/3 series, so a response to the album of same title), and re-read the two since WIWV, but that one's a genius consolidation, if there is such a thing.

I owe Edmund White for introducing me to the term xpost

How does someone go on living through what most of us would consider an intolerable situation, and what are the limits and consolations of escape?

This is a great distillation and pretty much sums up Master of Reality too - a book which didn't add up to much when I read it but which I think about often.

I finished James Shapiro's 1599, which like 1606: The Year of Lear wears its considerable learning lightly and which has sent me back to Hamlet and Henry V, looking for new things.

Not really sure what to read over Easter. I have A Place of Greater Safety, Priestdaddy and, uh, a Reacher book lined up.

Interestingly, Darnielle claims to have written the last chapter of WIWV first.

"I just started typing it up and it ended with a guy shooting himself and I said, 'Well, that’s not a good story.' So then I wrote a bunch of other chapters with no direction at all."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_in_White_Van#:~:text=The%20title%20Wolf%20In%20White%20Van%20is%20a,song%20Six%2C%20Sixty%2C%20Six%20is%20played%20in%20reverse.

My only complaint about The Flâneur so far is that it explains flâneurie quite well, but engages in it metaphorically far more than literally. I had hopes for more street-wandering and crowd-gazing. As disappointments go, I'd say that's a trivial one.

I've just realised I've read the Wilson book - as part of the 'Writer and the City' collection. I'm going to be honest and say I don't remember a huge amount about it but I do recall thinking I'd read it again next time I went to Paris (whenever that might be). I loved Peter Carey's addition to that series, 30 Days in Sydney.

Greatly enjoyed

To The Finland Station.

EIGHT DETECTIVES approaches its end. A basic fact about this ingenious, compelling novel remains that the frame story seems less well crafted and compelling than the embedded stories, which often have terrific ingenuity; as well as, again, being fine exercises in pastiche.

I'm also oddly unsure when the frame story is actually set - the early 1970s? Strange for it to be so unspecified.

a visit from the goon squad
everyone remembers their formative years
why are they so compelling
detective stories are for ingenuity in plot devices and as a challenge to the reader in interpreting c(l)ues
i imagine they are for the reader who likes to solve puzzles and problems of a certain kind
but has the nature of the problem to solve been thoroughly explored by the genre

still reading war & peace, hoping to finish before I leave for a 3-week work engagement but that's looking decreasingly likely. it's utterly fantastic.

which translation are you reading?

March 28, 1972 pic.twitter.com/MvKCBEAkSb

— Peanuts On This Day (@Peanuts50YrsAgo) March 30, 2022

W&P was my first pandemic novel and I gobbled it up in eight blissful days.

tom mccarthy's THE MAKING OF INCARNATION

impressive (if less so than it thinks it is), interesting, rather less than the sum of its parts. the characters go various places so the reader can learn about intellectual property law, taylorism, motion-capture technology, modern movie-making, the properties of windows, etc. but have no other purpose. for a while it seems like there's a plot, but in the end there just . . . isn't

also two characters, almost laughably, have sex for no reason and to no purpose. it's as if the author thought 'well, let's make this a bit less bloodless' and then inserted a couple emotionless lines noting that they hooked up. (it's barely mentioned in passing and not graphic at all, which is just as well, although i'm grimly curious about what a full-on mccarthy sex scene would be like)

i have nothing against egan and i know this is publicist patter but my god could you specifically create something i'd less want to read

From one of the most celebrated writers of our time, a literary figure with cult status, a "sibling novel" to her Pulitzer Prize– and NBCC Award–winning A Visit from the Goon Squad -- an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity and meaning in a world where memories and identities are no longer private.

The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is "one of those tech demi-gods with whom we're all on a first name basis." Bix is 40, with four kids, restless, desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or "externalizing" memory. It's 2010. Within a decade, Bix's new technology, "Own Your Unconscious" -- that allows you access to every memory you've ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others -- has seduced multitudes. But not everyone.

In spellbinding interlocking narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Intellectually dazzling, The Candy House is also extraordinarily moving, a testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption. In the world of Egan's spectacular imagination, there are "counters" who track and exploit desires and there are "eluders," those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of narrative styles -- from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter and a chapter of tweets.

If Goon Squad was organized like a concept album, The Candy House incorporates Electronic Dance Music's more disjunctive approach. The parts are titled: Build, Break, Drop. With an emphasis on gaming, portals, and alternate worlds, its structure also suggests the experience of moving among dimensions in a role-playing game.

The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away.

a chapter of tweets

They forgot to mention the waffle party.

I wrote to a magazine offering to review that novel. They completely ignored me.

I finished EIGHT DETECTIVES. It maintained the twists to the end.

Then I started Isaac Asimov's FOUNDATION (1951). I had imagined FOUNDATION as a vast, lengthy, demanding project, and I realise that there are several more books - maybe they're bigger. But what's surprising to me is that this first book is only 230 modest pages, highly readable, zips by - I was halfway through after a day of not reading it very solidly. That's refreshing.

The book narrates the decline of a Galactic Empire, and the rise of a Foundation that seems to be designed to preserve knowledge against this decline, over a period of - decades at least, maybe it will become centuries or millennia. The scale is already vast. I expect it gets vaster as the books go on. There is a sense of Asimov playing a canny, wry sense of enduring realpolitik against his knowledge of science and higher things. So far, after over 100pp, the book includes no women characters.

Back to Mande Music by Eric Charry
just onto the bit about the Guitar and groups. Which may be he section I was mainly looking for when getting the book.

Peter Barry beginning Theory
still reading through this and finding it pretty interesting. It's part of a series of introductory books on various facets of art, culture, literature etc. The copy I'm reading is about 15 years old and I know it has been updated since. So wondering if that means details updated or generally rewritten in total. Anyway I';m finding it rewarding but do wonder if I would be better served reading the recent one. Though a book in the hand is worth 2 in the bush and all like that.

finished
David Toop Flutter Echo
his memoir published by Ecstatic Peace. Really interesting read. I was going to order his Into The Maelstrom but it appears to have been destroyed or not returned. Not entirely sure what the term write-off on the library system means.
Anyway did enjoy and does triegger me to want to look more into his work. I'm semi familiar with him . Got some stuff Simon Finn, some of the Virgin compilations he did. & I think Ocean of Sound though not sure why no others if that is true.

also Walter Rodney Russian Revolution
the book compiled/edited from his teaching notes for the course he taught in Tanzania.
Again seriously enjoying and hoping to investigate more of his work. Waiting for How Europe Underdeveloped Africa through the interlibrary thing too.

& buying a load of books from charity shops. Possibly too many bu it is giving me some exercise in walking between the ones dotted around town,. But I have less dosh now so need to not overindulge myself. Also don't have as much space as this entails . May need to rethink certain habits but I have turned up a lot of interesting stuff. Now to reinvent time so I can read it all.

just finishing jack black "you can't win", just starting jose saramago "blindness"

Wow I'm really glad I didn't read any marketing copy before I started Candy House (or Goon Squad, for that matter -- I went in cold a couple of years ago, knowing only that it has been much-praised on this forum). Not sure why every sales pitch for these books makes them sound so shite (I have some theories), but it's definitely one of those "fans make it hard to love the band" situations.

Various - The Tragic History of the Sea. All of the pieces in this book are accounts of Portuguese travellers and their journeys to establish African colonies in the 17th century. I found out about it after reading an interview with a blogger who gave the items in this compilation as examples of the earliest, good Portuguese prose -- as oposed to France having a Rabelais or Italy having a Boccaccio, and while none of the writing is on that level I can see his point. These accounts veer from what they attempt to be, which is something like a functional guide of snakes that future explorers should avoid in their quests, to these tales of losses...whether that's of life or health or nerve, with the constant need to keep moving to survive from one day to the next, and with some embellishments for sure (that's where a thing is on a path to becoming a literature of sorts, from one POV anyway). Its like an almanac of grotesqueries mixed with a religious fervour, where God is repetitiously thanked whenever fortune shines on these explorers, and no faith is ever shaken when a bad thing happens (which is often enough).

I finished FOUNDATION and have started Ian Sansom: THE SUSSEX MURDER (2019).

Will keep an eye out for The Tragic History of the Sea, thanks.

(or Goon Squad, for that matter -- I went in cold a couple of years ago, knowing only that it has been much-praised on this forum) Also much denounced, alas---on ILB, it's the Bizarro World The Mountain Lion.

My current book is A Small Town in Germany, John LeCarre. It was published after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but prior to the George Smiley series. His approach in this is well advanced toward his final voice, but he was still only half-formed as a writer. My reissue edition includes an Introduction by LeCarre from the mid-90s in which he clearly expresses his overall dissatisfaction with the book. It's not as bad as all that, especially after he gets past the somewhat clumsy early exposition and the characters take over from the plot as the force moving the story.

about to tackle the behemoth that is john cowper powys's a glastonbury romance

Good luck! How many pages is that one again?

I like the fact that THE MOUNTAIN LION is ILB's favourite book.

FWIW Smiley is the protagonist of two - very compelling - novels before THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, as well as featuring in that novel itself.

A woman character did appear in FOUNDATION on about p.188 out of 234. She was the wife of a planetary ruler. She was sharp-tongued and critical. She knuckled down when given a trinket. But she later appeared again and was still sharp-tongued.

That was literally the only woman in the book. I believe that this balance changes slightly as the FOUNDATION series goes on. I'll find it, to a degree, if I manage to read more of the series.

1/3 through THE SUSSEX MURDER which is the 4th or 5th in a series of THE COUNTY GUIDES, a series that Ian Sansom seems to have concocted to get a secure publishing and creative platform. In the 1930s a polymathic professor and his beautiful daughter travel England, accompanied by the narrator, researching for guides to the English counties (a bit like Pevsner but less architectural?). Seemingly, in each county they encounter a crime and have to solve it. However, 1/3 through this they still haven't got near the crime (except that the crime is mentioned on the first page). So these are detective novels with the balance only 50% or so detection and the other half comedy and travelogue. There is a great deal of historical pastiche and detail that Sansom will have enjoyed. The heroine lives in the Isokon Building in Hampstead. The Professor knows A.A. Milne. The narrator has a long scene around the top of Brick Lane in the era of its market and pie & mash shops. The interest of particular places is a very big part of the appeal. Overall it's very well done save that it could be handled with a lighter, less repetitive touch.

xposts: in the edition i have it comes to 1100 pages of text. suspect this might take me some time to get through!

Sue Steward Salsa : musical heartbeat of Latin America
which was a recommendation in David Toop's Flutter Echo since he set her on teh way to discovering the music concerned . Haven't really started it beyond reading teh Willie Colon introduction but trying to get into it.l Seems like something I m gooing to want to know a lot more about anyway.

Hip, the history John Leland
a book on the history of what is considered to be what's happening etc cutting edge like amongst the tuned in and so on.
I had seen this while browsing through the new Irish library system over teh last couple of weeks since that was set up. Think I'd even flagged it asa thing I would be interested in reading. Then went into town yesterday and went looking for a book by Gramsci which I didn't find but did see this . So gonna be reading this. well one of a pile of things i have on teh go anyway and now have a bunch of things goingto land on me over tyhe next couple of weeks after pursuing books i requested taht have just sat in the system as 'Available' for ages.
Well this could be good and should turn me on to some things I'm not already familiar with.

finished
Walter Rodney Russian Revolution A third World Perspective
David Toop Flutter Echo
Mande Music Eric Charry or at least on last 10 pages. This is pretty good and I want to read more and hear more.

A Glastonbury Romance is bonkers and all over the place and very great. Humblebrag or whatever but I dragged a copy around in a backpack in the South Pacific. The heat melted the binding glue, so I discarded chunks of pages as I read them.

Think you might just win ILB with that post.

Also, reminds me of some story I think I heard about Anthony Burgess smuggling a chopped up copy of Ulysses on his person across the border so as not to run afoul of the censors.

Which border?

After weeks of reading and prepping for articles and classes, finally got back to some full books read for pleasure, including Quartz Hearts by Clark Coolidge and Heroic Dose by Matt Longabucco. Ilxors into poetry might be interested in the latter— chatty and beautiful without being too dependent on epiphanic moments.

Which border?

In Little Wilson and Big God, he claims a teacher ‘had brought it back from illiberal Nazi Germany in the two-volume Odyssey Press edition’, while in Here Comes Everybody, his critique of the works of Joyce, he recalls his acquisition of the novel: ‘As a schoolboy I sneaked the two-volume Odyssey Press edition into England, cut up into sections and distributed all over my body’.

https://www.anthonyburgess.org/banned-books/anthony-burgess-censorship-ulysses/

a chapter of tweets

― mookieproof, Monday, 11 April 2022 02:30 (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

tbf i read several chapters of these every day

according to the internet the first recorded chinese restaurant in london opened in 1908 in Glasshouse Street near Piccadilly Circus -- it was called the Chinese Restaurant (clever name) (i imagine the chinese community that was active in limehouse in the early 1800s also had its own eating houses, but they weren't the kinds of places the anthony powells of 1810 wd be frequenting)

Believe Burgess told yet a third version in M/F.

Holidays back home means all Portuguese language reading list:

The Living And The Rest, José Eduardo Águalusa - Published in Portuguese, forthcoming in English. Angolan novel about a writer's congress on a tiny island off Mozambique getting cut off from the rest of the world. Always a bit suspicious of writers writing about the life of the writer, unless it's autobio, seems a bit indicative of having lost touch with anything else to write about. But I ended up enjoying this, especially for its insights into the intergenerational dynamics as well as those between writers of different African countries. Particularly liked one writer going off on a rant against local supersitions because "then when I write a realist novel critics end up talking about magical realism!". The island atmosphere also well captured; the mystery of their isolation alas sometimes a bit reminiscent of the TV show Lost. The author's stand in is described as a journalist who gave up his good work in that field to write mediocre novels - that is in fact Águalusa's CV, and the only journalistic work of his I've read, A Stranger In Goa, is indeed a bit better than this.

A Reading Diary, Alberto Manguel - Argentinian author who apparently has written many books on books and reading, though I'd never stumbled upon him before. Read to Borges after he went blind! Anyway, this is twenty years old, a sort of trawl through the man's favourite books with the backdrop of moving to a small village in France and living through the world's events (lots of talk of the Iraq war and Le Pen pére getting good results). It's now been reissued in Portugal - Manguel currently lives in Lisbon - with a new chapter focusing on a Portuguese book. A lot of name dropping and dick waving, as there's bound to be in this sort of exercise, and his trick of dropping in a sentence by some unrelated author that's supposed to effortlessly sum up a situation gets a bit old. But he's indeed well read and some of the descriptions are very well done.

O Susto, Agustina Bessa-Luís - The foremost chronicler of 20th century Portugal's upper classes. Often scathing, but not any sort of marxist critique, nor is it Wodehouse-style comedy about the idle rich. Antonioni might be a point of comparison, but being a writer instead of a director, she takes a lot of advantage of the passing of time; all the books of hers I've read so far take in lives from birth to death, a succession of stages of vanity, melancholia and decay. This one's a thinly disguised fictionalised biography of the poet Teixeira de Pascoaes - his family protested, which is understandable considering how they were portrayed; the introduction insists that Bessa Luís saw Pascoaes as an idol, and indeed within the novel his stand in's work is often referred to as brilliant, but the man himself does come across as weak, passive, devoid of life. I've not read any of Pascoae's poetry, did read his essay on "the art of being Portuguese", which struck me as fascist nonsense.

Bessa Luís's style is really something else, every paragraph contains these seemingly vague pronouncements that, if digested properly, give you insights into not just the characters themselves but the entire society they exist in. Really she should be read a page a day, certainly not in large chunks on planes like I did; not an author served well by the eagerness to finish as many books as possible, as quickly as possible.

Anyway, this novel isn't available in English, and unlike other works of her, not in French either. So I'd usually not write about it on here, what would be the point, but in this particular case I did have to mention that Fernando Pessoa, whom many here know and enjoy, makes an appearance. He is portrayed as a drunk, whose poetry deeply angers the Pascoaes stand-in, as does his indifference towards arguing over these matters. Later the main character learns that he has died, and is struck by a deep sense of loss, at not having been able to tell him that his anger stemmed, in the end, from love. He hears that, on his deathbed, the Pessoa stand-in's main concern was that he keep his eyes closed, so no one could close them for him after he died.

Read to Borges after he went blind!

Manguel is really keen for everyone to know this iirc

not before he went deaf tho iirc

He’s a pampas wizard iirc

But perhaps I shouldn’t comment since these days he’s out of my compass.

recent reads:

Fanny Howe - Night Philosophy
Lewis Warsh - One Foot Out the Door (collected short stories)
Andrei Bely - Petersburg
Stanley Elkin - Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers

just starting Bernadette Mayer's Work and Days

i need to reread the bely at some point, might try one of the other translations.

The heat melted the binding glue, so I discarded chunks of pages as I read them.

awesome. didn't happen to be the picador edition by any chance? purposely avoided getting one of those due to their spine issues. also reading it in the south pacific, but given the season little chance of meltage!

only 3 chapters in, but bonkers it is.

Ah 'preciate the way Brad Watson's novel Miss Jane gets the sectionality in the intersectionality of Deep South small-town-and-country life, the isolation that can be more of family situation and occupation, also self-image and terrain, than of distance as the crow flies---also, of course, there are boundaries of class, race, income, education---but here it's more about going down the road just a little way, or turning a corner anywhere, and finding a distinction, sometimes an unexpected variation---the plot does this, minus what might be called twists, but to sometimes startling effect, before the plausibility bumps in as well, given what's already happened, not too predictably, since the author's enough of a stage magician to slip in distractions between the feats---also, it covers a lot of ground, in time as well as space, discreetly fleet.
Veteran short story writer and novelist has long since absorbed the lessons of Dubliners re inner and outer realities of private and social life, also As I Lay Dying, re shifting POVS, good shell games---he's no genius, but he knows his stuff. The title character, Jane Chisholm, is based on his own great-aunt, born with a "uro-genital irregularity, " as the family doctor, her only confidante, puts it, in frequent correspondence over the decades with a friend and med school classmate at Johns Hopkins, still in a JH-related practice and relevant specialty---reminding me, though he isn't mentioned, that the well-named Dr. John Money became known for this kind of surgery (also sex changes, as they were once called, which could include medical decisions made in infancy---eventually, in the wake of Money in particular, there were repercussions). The novel continues into the 80s, the Money era, but I won't tell you how it ends.
Only reservation is that she is a little simpler than necessary, though not one-note. Born to a family of intelligent, resourceful, isolated characters, she also turns out to have some of their temper. Realizing that her blind date probably has a "debilitating war wound, " as students of Hemingway once dutifully put, and that this is her unlikely matchmaker's idea of a charity unfuck, Miss Jane doesn't like that, and reacts accordingly.