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

Listening to THE SPACE MERCHANTS: A RADIO PLAY sounds good to me!

One place I found it is here:
https://archive.org/details/OTRR_CBS_Radio_Workshop_Singles

Or even
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUhDcp20Rck

Vasily Grossman - Life and Fate. Finished this vast novel set during WWII, at around the battle of Stalingrad. Sometimes there is very little to say about a thing, and this is one of those times.

Mediocre : the dangerous legacy of white male power Ijeoma Oluo
book on the problems with the white patriarchy mainly in the US. Starts with Buffalo bill, goes into a pair of male feminists from the early 20th century and goes on looking at problems with representation of such things as the ideal man and pseudo allies and things. Pretty coherent and I'm only in the 2nd chapter but looking forward to reading more.
Still want to read her other book So You Want to Talk About Race but they only have it as an e-book on the library system so looking for a physical book.

Soldaten
book based on the transcriptions of recordings made of German POWs in WWII without their knowledge. So shows their epistemology etc,
HOw compliant with Nazi policy etc they were.
Currently on a bit about fighting to the last bullet , how willing a soldier would be to die for the Reich and so on.

Harvey Mandel Miles, Ornette, Cecil Jazz Beyond Jazz
Jazz critic talks about the avant garde using the examples of 3 pivotal figures. Possibly inserts himself a bit much, possibly needs to do so to show perspective.
Interesting anyway and I think I need to read more about these last 2 figures. Mandel shows how they communicated while speaking which i wasn't very familiar with. Seems to be more holistic or zen like or something than the man in the street. I would love to know what is in the record collection he refers to Cecil Taylor having.
THink I have another couple of book sin the library system I will be ordering that cover these artists and a few others.

Never Come Morning nelson Algren
1942 dirty realist novel about a Polish community in Chicago. Quite good, I should have read it faster I think.
Have enjoyed what I have read by him. Though that was mainly a few decades ago.

Read some smaller things, also finished Liz Waldner’s Trust, I think the least of her poetry collections I have read— not strange enough, relying more and more on an empty-feeling alliterative wordplay.

Been reading Lisa Robertson’s Boat in the mornings with breakfast and coffee, and never want it to end. No one can do what Lisa does— it’s extravagant and coarse, fulsome and spare, fabulist but grounded in her own subjectivity. Incredible book.

Kingsley Amis' The Alteration, which doesn't populate this alternative non-Reformation universe as adeptly as critics led me to believe but still works as a droll, sometimes harrowing exploration of the terrors of emasculation.

I've started No Fond Return of Love, Barbara Pym. So far no vicars have appeared in it. Fingers crossed.

Are you hoping for vicars or no vicars?

I've already explored with Pym the many facets of the vicarage, its problems and discontents, and now rest content that I need no further education in that direction.

It's worrying when there are no vicars at all; like maybe they're massing for an attack.

I loooove Less Than Angels.

^ her best novel (and noticeably vicar-uninfested)

Having the vicar for tea

read THEY WILL DROWN IN THEIR MOTHERS' TEARS by johannes anyuru, a swedish muslim, which explores the possible ramifications of a terrorist attack on a bookstore

there's a lot of sudden bouncing around -- it can be difficult at times to tell whose point of view we are sharing. i found it vaguely reminiscent of marge piercy's WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME, which is a good thing

Has the ilxor poster known as a vicar disappeared or does the poster go by a new name?

he did resurface for a while as "the new dirty vicar" but it didn't seem to take

I don't think that poster is on ILX now. Could be wrong. I know that he still lives in Dublin.

THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS is so good. 1960s and FP is now editor of GALAXY! A job he loves, following some very welcome pages on Horace Gold. I was so glad to get that part of the SF scene. FP has also become expert in 'number theory' and claims to know as much about science as Asimov.

The tone of this extremely readable book is generous, thoughtful, also down to earth and droll.

i irl-met (n)DV for the first and only time at a friend's wedding a couple of years back -- he is intermittently active on twitter and possibly FB also

tho not as any kind of vicar

Thanks. I am nearing the end of Copenhagen Trilogy and find it painful to read. I hate reading about victimization and loss of agency.

I was supposed to be reading a different book, but I needed a smaller book to bring with me on a short trip, and I had Patrick Modiano's Paris Nocturne out from the library, so I brought that and finished it. I sensed that it's the kind of book you want to read quickly, because it conjures an ethereal, dreamlike mood, which could dissipate if left too long on the shelf. Not that its surreal in any way - it tells a story that could come from real life, but in such a way that it makes you reflect on how real life is often quite strange. The atmosphere is reminiscent of a noir detective story, but with a seemingly random accident instead of a crime at the center.

Finished George V Higgins Kennedy for the Defense, which got better as it went along, then just stops when the plot runs out.

I ended with the general impression that he's a better sentence writer than Elmore Leonard, but a worse book writer. There's a welcome humanism in Leonard that was lacking here -- if anything Higgins reminded more of Joseph Wambaugh: the claustraphobia, the saltiness, the sleaze.

(Overall v. impressed though. Now starting on Howard's End.)

Wait, Higgins wrote a book called Howard’s End?

sp: Howards End

Pym has now stealthily introduced a vicar into the novel. Oh, well.

Introducing Victor at the end of the Copenhagen Trilogy may have been a cop out and the way one composes a story to make one's life make sense (the way this can be conspicuous and time bound is notable) may be deemed a weakness but maybe the ending of an addiction is only meant to be sorted out in real life. I think B & S fans will be sympathetic to the novel and to B & S for the same reasons and that they are good.

read THE SCAPEGOAT by sara davis

it involves an increasingly unreliable narrator trying (ish?) to solve the mystery of his father's death

fantastic on a sentence level and pacing; does not, like everyone else, stick the landing

does not, like everyone else, stick the landing I like this! What does it mean?!

so many things have brilliant premises and so few reach legitimately satisfying conclusions — eg monty python sketches that just abruptly end whenever they ran out of ideas, or the x files, or lost, or smilla’s sense of snow

and obviously not every story needs to be tidily wrapped up! but i think this one just ended without dealing with the issues it raised

Today I finished THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS. That was tremendous.

Then started John McCourt, CONSUMING JOYCE: 100 YEARS OF ULYSSES IN IRELAND (2022).

Bane of my pedestrian existence on campus, but yes, good idea for a book, maybe by ilxor alumn?

Loved getting to review Jody Rosen’s endlessly curious new cultural history of the bicycle - with cameos by everyone from Keats to Hitler https://t.co/XQCIwwm2lv

— Charles Finch (@CharlesFinch) May 29, 2022

Bike was heavily instrumental in Women's Liberation in the 19th century & vilified for it a lot.

Not our JBR, fwiw

Jody Rosen v few degrees of separation from this place but yeah I don't think he's ever posted.

I think he did post once, blaming ILM for leading him to buy a Pitman LP!

His book about the history of the song "White Christmas" -- which is also a sort of a potted biography of Bing Crosby, and a history of Jewish songwriters -- is one of the most enjoyable music history books I've read (and aggressively avoids Gladwell-iness).

Ha! Yes, I seem to recall he posted here at least one time.
(xp)

He's also one of the few good angry tweeters

Unrelatedly I can't wait till the UK version comes out as my partner is expert on women's cycling (esp in the 19th century) and am curious to see if she's been referenced

A few novellas and a couple of vols of poetry to round spring off:

Peter Stamm - The Sweet Indifference of the World
Wole Soyinka - A Shutter in the Crypt
Cesare Pavese - The Beautiful Summer
Xavier de Maistre - Voyage Around my Room
Christopher Logue (Homer) - War Music

Vesaas, The Ice Palace
Lafferty, Okla Hannali
Lurie, The History of Bones

John Lurie's memoirs are sourly amusing. Taking them at face value (although at one point he says that he has "run out of madeleines"), he has near-total recall of every humiliating, tawdry, or disastrous event in his life, whether it's the haze of cocaine and heroin he lived through, holding back vomit from hepatitis during a solo concert, or betrayal by most people he worked with. Even the numberless women he took to bed, or vice versa, don't enliven the book much. (A 20-year-old Uma Thurman in his bedroom is mentioned once in passing while talking about someone more important to him.) His few triumphs are musical, and thus transitory. Strangely, the greatest catastrophe in his life, the loss of music later on to Lyme disease, is barely mentioned.

Downtown NYC from the mid-70s to the early 80s will live in legend the way Paris in the 1920s does. Lurie appears to have known everyone, such as Basquiat, who lived in his apartment and was his best friend. Also Boris Policeband, Rene Ricard, Eric Mitchell, Julian Schnabel, Andy Warhol, Ornette Coleman, Jack Smith, David Byrne, and Patti Astor. Jim Jarmusch, in the telling, became a famous auteur thanks to Lurie's ideas. Later, in the wider world, there were Willem Dafoe, Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Stan Brakhage, Rei Kawakubo, and Flea. (There is no index, so that is from memory.)

Lurie is not a writer and tells the story as though in casual, irritable conversation, where one anecdote follows another for 435 pages until the book simply stops. There is a constant undercurrent of anger as Lurie believes that he is being written out of history. If so, how much of this is on account of his permanently adolescent personality and how much the Woody Allen effect in reverse (no longer being able to show up) is unclear. Lurie's flaws aren't important in the long run. One hopes that he will get his rightful due.

Almost bought that one on sale but decided to give it a pass for some reason.

xxxpost I know that JR, *Professor* JR, is not JBR, but yeah was thinking he posted on ilm at least once, to lecture another professional writer about something or other, though I only saw gen. reference to it, by bystander

Wonder if Lurie's tour incl. this phase:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/16/sleeping-with-weapons

And JR started, then contributed good comments to, a good thread:
P&J&...Latin Music???

Lurie mentions that article in passing as just another betrayal.

A few novellas and a couple of vols of poetry to round spring off:

Peter Stamm - The Sweet Indifference of the World

Diverting is it, really. Just a nice couple of hours in the afternoon. The plot (if you like) wasn't as strong as Seven Years, which is a favourite.