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

I finished The Women Troubadours. It was necessarily short, since so few poems or names have come down the ages, but it is excellently constructed and the original texts & her translations are very interesting to anyone who takes an interest in such things.

I finished Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Carcopino. It basically does what it says on the tin, so its recommended if you have an interest in the subject matter. (Some wag on Twitter posted that when a bookish man reaches a certain age he must adopt one of the following interests: WWII, Civil War, Ancient Rome, etc. I guess I feel seen.)

Next I read a fantastic autobiography in verse, Martin & Meditations on the South Valley by Jimmy Santiago Baca. I also grew up in the American Southwest and found his evocation of that landscape to be very resonant.

Currently I'm reading another autobiographical work, My Struggle: Vol 4 by Knausgaard.

I read a book called Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods a couple of decades ago. sounded like it might be interesting, think it was but may need to reread it if I still have it.
But yeah interesting to see how a bunch of people of similar intellect to the population of today would spend their time in a much different time. I think I've seen things like taht from a number of different eras too.

Certainly it is possible to fill up all one's time with endless trivia concerning WWII, the US Civil War, or the history of ancient Rome, but taking any interest at all in the world around you and where it came from will include some reading in those areas. I look at the other books you mention and I think you're safe from Roman history becoming a hobby horse you ride to death.

I don't think it (Rome) has reached obsession stage for me yet. It does seem to be wear most of my historical nonfiction reading is concentrated these days though.

read HARROW by joy williams, which is somewhat like alice in post-apocolypticland

not sure it really held together as a novel but she writes wonderful sentences suffused by rage

(Some wag on Twitter posted that when a bookish man reaches a certain age he must adopt one of the following interests: WWII, Civil War, Ancient Rome, etc. I guess I feel seen.)

I saw this (think the list actually said Mongols or other ancient stuff and *not* US Civil War), and I broadly get the joke, but as 'observational comedy' I find it also strangely inaccurate. I know many males over 40 and I don't think I know a single one who is obsessed with one of these things. Maybe the one exception, now I think of it, is ILX poster 'DV' from Dublin who did become an expert on WWI (which I think was not one of the listed topics).

But equally, I think it's good to have such interests and expertise, and not very helpful to mock them. And poster Aimless is correct: knowledge of them could be seen as a valid part of general knowledge.

interesting to see how a bunch of people of similar intellect to the population of today would spend their time in a much different time

I was thinking about this recently.

People from the past (say, Medieval peasants) seem to have thought quite differently from us.

And yet they had pretty much identical brains.

So why aren't we more similar?

A large daft question.

Finished Shape of Things by Greil Marcus
which was somewhat interesting and does feature Pere Ubu and Twin peaks quite heavily but may need to be revisited to be fully encapsulated. Like.
Well has some interesting suggestions for further watching and listening and things. I guess.

differences in thinking between different ages if one takes there to be a constant array of intelligence in the different environments and maybe diet doesn't quite make things like taht constant.
Would think it had a lot to do with what one was influenced by at what times and what one thought could or shouldn't be thought and what prevailing epistemology would be. Also how much constraint things like religion and peer pressure had. So how much thought was kept covert and therefore not documented etc.

There's always chance elements taht have later consequences and influence etc. Waves, fads, representation and noise.
& so on.

I think the questioning as to why the difference is a large part of the process , larger than actually finding a fixed constant quantifiable answer cos I don't think you can really fully nail those things down. & the process of questioning has the effect of turning up new things, innovations etc. Like. Asking how long is a piece of string is probably the wrong focus whereas what you need it for or what you want to know for may be a bit better focus.

Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford (book club read) - Central conceit of this is a bunch of children got killed by a German bomb during WWII. But what if they hadn't? Book then checks in on these children every couple of decades. This makes it enjoyable social history; my wife said it reminded her of the Up series, which is an apt comparison. However: these kids grow up to have very ordinary lives, as interesting as anyone else's, which kinda lets down the sense of loss which I guess the original premise is meant to evoke. They live lives much like millions of others, if they had died others would still have lived similar ones. And yeah OF COURSE any death is tragic, it would be evil to mourn only the extraordinary, etc. But it does raise the question of why go with this premise in the first place? A bunch of unconnected lives wouldn't be enough for a novel without it?

(think the list actually said Mongols or other ancient stuff and *not* US Civil War)

Yes, you’re right. Your memory is better than mine. It’s probably not broadly true. Actually the idea seems a bit quaint these days, more men my age probably are more interested in comic books than any historical period. I find it fascinating to try to imagine myself in one of those times. At some point one has lived long enough to see some changes in society and the material substrate of daily life (this happens more rapidly now than it used to) and so the puzzle of how human personality has adapted to different conditions becomes more interesting. Rome is interesting because it’s the oldest period for which we have a very rich record. The Middle Ages is also fascinating. Carlo Ginzburg has written some books on how ordinary people viewed the world in those days which I want to read, I think one was reviewed in the LRB recently.

It was.

I would like to read LIGHT PERPETUAL. In fact I am rather encouraged by the news that its characters do not turn out very special. But I'm mainly interested because I believe it touches on geographical areas somewhat familiar to me.

I am now reading The English Teacher, R.K. Narayan. He was one of the rare novelists who could tell an interesting story about quite ordinary people in ordinary circumstances doing ordinary things. There's a touch of gentle humor in him that shines in all his books.

In the mood for a little light reading, I returned to Caihm McDonnell, who has put out a few since I last read him. Finished Dead Man's Sins and am mostly through with The Quiet Man. Fairly standard police/detective fare from a writer who, I think, started as a standup comic (?). Fairly formulaic, but he writes good dialogue and he's just fucking funny.

finished Chasers by Stephen Ira, a fine book of queer love poems.

getting back into Dodie Bellamy’s When the Sick Rule the World, which is good tho not as engaging as her more recent book, but that might just be a result of the more recent book being primarily about her partner’s death.

read HARROW by joy williams, which is somewhat like alice in post-apocolypticland

not sure it really held together as a novel but she writes wonderful sentences suffused by rage

― mookieproof

Cheers. I discovered her short fiction in October -- impressed.

I was impressed by her early fiction: first novel, State of Grace(1973) (Florida Gothic, kinda early Patti Smith x Joan Didion), and 70s stories that made it into her first collection, Taking Care (1982). Was put off by fairly recent New Yorker story, but maybe I'll try again (maybe pick up where I left off).

Watch out for some Joyce Carol Oates-level snobbery in interview quotes.

like the pinefox, i've been reading hg wells -- a couple weeks ago i finally read "the island of dr moreau," which i've been hearing about all my life. it is almost hilariously fast-paced: as the book opens, the protagonist is escaping from a sinking ship into a fragile lifeboat, and a few pages later his two companions get in a fistfight and both fall out of the boat. a few pages later he's rescued, only to get kicked overboard for getting in an argument with the captain. then he's rescued again! but wait, it turns out it's the bad guys who rescued him! (why they bothered to rescue him is never really explained.) there are multiple chase scenes, and more than one scene where buildings get set on fire. and on and on and on! but it's masterfully done and, as with all of wells's earliest novels, very gripping. it's also quite grisly and rather upsetting in places: the basic concept (a mad vivisectionist who transforms animals into human-like beings, also for no real reason) is, thankfully, impossible. the last few pages turn quite wistful and melancholy in a way i associate with wells, who seems to me to have had a strong streak of instinctive pessimism despite being a progressive/socialist/futurist/etc.

i followed that up with another wells: "the food of the gods," the one about the food that makes plants and animals grow to giant-size. the first third of this book, which is about giant bees and wasps and cows terrorizing the english countryside, is delightful. the utterly blase reaction of many of the characters to this phenomenon is especially funny. the rest of the book, about the first giant-size humans' struggle to be treated with dignity, i found rather uninvolving and dull. i suspect there was some very specific 1904-era social satire here that flew right over my head.

now i'm on to joseph conrad's "the secret agent." not enjoying it much, honestly: i've realized that i find conrad's style to be a bit of a slog -- i've enjoyed a short story here and there, but i find him tough to take in large doses. kinda eager to be done with this one so i can move onto something else.

Bell hooks Teaching to Transgress.
hooks talking about a new form of pedagogy that is much more level with particular influence from Paulo Freire and a Buddhist monk called Thich Nhat Hanh.
I like bell hooks I find her very easy to read.
Had this on order since December through interlibrary loan and recently found that while there seemed to be a queue of readers there were also copies claiming to be available. I wound up ringing a couple of the libraries involved to see if I could get things moving and this turns up a week later. Which is really great. I thought I was a few behind and I would just get things faster if the people ahead of me got the available copy. But turned out even better.

Unfortunately this doesn't appear to have worked with the other book I got yesterday.
Blood and Land JCH King
Which is a native American history of America. More encyclopaedic than narrative.
It was ordered as
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz All The Real Indians Died Out.
I think it came from the same library and I'm assuming it was misfiled or something. That Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz appears to be vanishing from the system. I tried looking it up yesterday when I got home and couldn't find it. It is listed as such in my orders entry still but not through the search engine. Shame I want to read more of her work enjoyed An Indigenous People's History of the US .

In fact I am rather encouraged by the news that its characters do not turn out very special.

Feel like I should now add the caveat (spoiler): once character does spend some time in the entourage of a Rock star in 70's Laurel Canyon.

now i'm on to joseph conrad's "the secret agent." not enjoying it much, honestly: i've realized that i find conrad's style to be a bit of a slog -- i've enjoyed a short story here and there, but i find him tough to take in large doses. kinda eager to be done with this one so i can move onto something else.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.),

This was the novel that unlocked him for me, so if it doesn't work....

I've still not read much Conrad. Did enjoy some films of his work.
& Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost which gives the background for Heart Of Darkness not sure how completely incidentally. Conrad was a ship's captain dealing with the regime. Have heard he was more right wing than I would have liked, do hope he was disgusted by what he saw beyond it being a factor in a famous novel he wrote.

Good to hear about THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU - I was reading about it just recently and actually keen to read it.

I do like THE SECRET AGENT - a very cinematic / proto-Hitchcockian novel at times (never mind that Hitchcock literally adapted it)- with a great deal going on. Probably my favourite Conrad. I would certainly persevere with that.

Mine too. I'm also fond of Nostromo, which complicates the relations b/w natives and colonizers/imperialists.

Found The Secret Agent a slog too, until the last few chapters.

Conrad does tend to stomp into rooms with heavy boots.

hadn't realised that Conrad was born in what's now Ukraine so deeply topical like. Is anything being made of that right now.
I always though of him as Polish but the borders there had a major habit of changing over the centuries.

Yeah--Stanislaw Lem was born in Lyiv when it was in Poland (it's still only 40 miles from current border).

y’all have convinced me to persevere with the conrad! only about a third of the way through it so there’s hope for me yet. i had forgotten there was a hitchcock film of it —don’t think i ever saw that one.

Shirley Jackson The haunting Of Hill House
picked it up from a charity shop a while back and its been floating around for a while. I read teh first page a few months back and thought it was really something, descriptions of trees that seemed otherworldly. An opacity taht reminds me of Rowland S Howard's lyricism or something. THought yeah really need to read this then and then had a pile of books i was trying to get through.
Anyway, not feeling great earlier so I went an lay down thinking I'd get a lot further into a bell hooks book that I picked up yesterday and then wound up reading the first couple of chapters of this before getting to that. So the female protagonist has arrived at the house at the moment and nobody else has arrived yet. I'm enjoying her prose anyway.
So need to work out how to read this and several other things really rapidly.

I like her short fiction even better--and not just "The Lottery."

"Charles" is a gem.

I finished Willy Vlautin, DON'T SKIP OUT ON ME. The story of good people in a hard world ends sadly. A very plainly written book - deliberately I assume. A kind of ingenuous quality, so the style can simply relay the naive protagonist's earnest questions and rebukes to himself. Easy to read. I'd tend to recommend it.

Reading Conrad always puts me back in sixth form, having to slog through Heart of Darkness, and I find myself repeating those patterns of stuckness and boredom. Yes, we get it Joe, everything is black. Even The Secret Sharer, which is very short, felt black-hole-dense and inesacapable.

(I don't get that feeling with Henry James, depsite an equally unpleasant freshman-year experience of Roderick Hudson.)

I read Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan. It's a short novel, almost entirely lacking in ornamentation, and uses the microcosm of a tiny border village to show the horrors of partition. I read it straight after Patricia Lockwood, which might explain why the lack of ornamentation was so pronounced, but there's also something about Singh's purpose and subject matter that renders anything figurative unnecessary or even offensive. That said, Singh is I think known for the plainness of his style and, as an editor of local stories gathered after partition, was renowned for his austere editing style.

Also this week, I was walking in the Mendips and took a detour down to East Coker to see Eliot's memorial in the church. I read Four Quartets in the churchyard, alongside a row of almshouses there, and was taken this time by how, underneath the deep meditations on time and purpose, conservative and nationalistic it is - particularly Little Gidding. 'Eliot in deeply conservative' shocker isn't a great revelation I know, and that particular poem was written when he was literally watching London burn, but still.

Now reading, as part of my project not to read any more farty old JB Priestley, Bright Day by JB Priestley. It's written at a similar time to Four Quartets (published in 1946) and takes a similar path to An Inspector Calls in casting an eye back to the golden age immediately preceding WWI - this time taking Priestley's growing up in Bradford as its subject matter. It's much kinder to that generation than AIC, and the clear difference is how he gives free rein to his Jungian preoccupations, frequently referencing the unconscious, magic and - less overtly - the role of archetypes in our lives. It's a bit plodding, tbh.

man, I wish I'd attended a school where Roderick Hudson was on the reading list.

I could make the case for Heart of Darkness, like Wharton's The House of Mirth, as worst introduction to a major novelist's work.

er, sorry, Ethan Frome.

I think I did Heart of Darkness at A-level. Certainly no Wharton.

Worth reading Chinua Achebe on Heart Of Darkness.

Yup.

Edward Said too.

And Sven Lindqvist.

Just about almost nearly finished Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob, would recommend it for fans of her other work or of vast sprawling contemplative literary historical dramas.

Bridget Christie A Book For Her
Found this in a charity shop last week after having looked at it online a few months ago. Have enjoyed some of her standup before and panel show appearances.
So, just read the preface and first chapter of this and found it quite funny.
Surreal and realist and scatological (flatus is a word I've rarely heard on its own) and intelligent and childish and things.
Seem to be some overlap with some comedy of Stewart Lee who I think she's married to, so wonder if this reflects conversation topics between them.
Well enjoying it so far but I am reading a stack of books at teh same time.

Peter Barry Beginning Theory
coming to the end of the book in the beginning series dealing with Literary and Cultural theory. Think I may be looking into picking up some more of these if they turn up in charity shops. Possibly including later incarnations of this book since this is like 10 years old right now.
Interesting to see outlines of the forms of theory. Not sure how much of this I'm going to remember permanently. But good grounding I think. Will try to read some fo the books cited too.

Nelson Algren Never Come Morning
Book about various people of Polish American extraction etc living in Chicago in around teh turn of teh 40s. Algren apparently had some trouble with censorship at teh time. Nice gritty work though.
Mainly deals with a bunch of youth . One of whom is currently in a jail cell.

Imperium in Imperio Sutton Griggs
Turn of the 20th century speculative fiction about a brilliant black student and his activity post graduation. trying to work out how to describe this further without giving spoilers. Other than to refer to his rivalry with his onetime classmate.
THis was one of teh longer entries in the Black Science Fiction anthology put out by Flame Tree Publishing last year. I mainly got this for Pauline Hopkins book Of One Blood. Incidentally I've just heard she has a large entry in the new book Linernotes For A Revolution by Daphne Brooks. She was talking about that and other people she was writing about in the interview she did with Love Is The Message
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3kWmdOjUGRdbdF22gBTdKT?si=526bb2e4a6304304
I managed to read almost all of this book over the last few months apart from Blake, or The Huts of America by Martin R. Delany which I think I'm going to skip since i need to return a book to get one I have on order out. May be something i will regret but it is late 19th century largely written in phonetic versions of imperfect English from enslaved characters and also is apparently not complete since no copies of the magazine that the concluding chapter was in could be found.
The rest is pretty good though and hopefully this being published will lead to more people looking into the area. & I hope a copy of this will turn up in a charity shop somewhere I can find it.

Mande Music Eric Charry
Ethnonusicologist's book on music from the Northwest of Africa . very good and deeply recommended.
I'm mainly reading through the Appendixes cos I've finsihed the main body of the text. Also need to write down the music and books cited

I finished The English Teacher. I must note that it is unusual among Narayan's books I've read in that the plot incorporates some strongly polemical elements, most prominently his beliefs about an afterlife. He tries to dispel one's doubts about his version of life after death simply by creating fictions that require them to be true. It's obvious he is sincere in his beliefs and means well.

On a whim, started The Martian, which has been sitting in my Kindle library forever. So far, it's . . . interesting, but plodding. Not sure how you can make the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars dull, but Weir is doing his level best. Not having seen the film, I have no idea how this comes out, and I'm willing to stick with it to see, but it's not exactly drawing me in.

Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do by Jennifer L. Eberhardt - eye opening as these things usually are, entirely US centric unlike say Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez (not a criticism, just an observation). Leans very heavily on 'we took two dozen students and made them look at images of professional athletes and criminals while running on a treadmill and eating a sandwich' type research which, knowing about the replicability crisis in psychology, does make me slightly sceptical, unfairly or not. But also plenty of other statistical data, and hugely depressing stories of police racism and brutality, many of which were new to me, and other problems like innocent people systematically compelled into plea bargaining.

Also had one weird section where she describes going into a near panic attack when her husband hires a car on a caribbean island where - gasp - they drive on the other side of the road.

I read that a few months ago and thought it quite good. Seems to be being cited a lot since.
I then went and listened through a number of podcasts where she was guesting.
I think she is pretty interesting.
Also read Sway by Pragya Argawal and Corruptible by Brian Klaas around the same time. Thought they were all pretty good.
Will have a look at Invisible Women if I get teh chance.