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

It's really good, though, and I will definitely be finishing it. I can't wait to see how the various sections line up with one another, or fail to.

Highly recommend my sister in law Eleanor Limprecht's third historical fiction novel "The Coast," about an Australian leper colony. I thought it was excellent.

I saw the Norton Intro to English Lit at a charity shop and considered buying it to fill in some of my literary gaps. Does anyone read these for pleasure of does it just feel like homework?

[xp from way back] Yeah, the Towles book was overall extraordinarily well written. There were maybe a few too convenient plot points, but overall it was a very well-crafted book with, for me anyway, a lot of emotional resonance. I agree with scampering alpaca that the last chapter was unexpected, and in many ways at odds with a good part of the rest of the book; I'm still not sure how I feel about it.

xpost I have read sections of Norton anths just for infotainment, should prob get back into that.

Perhaps "edification" would be the more seemly term.

I just finished reading "Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West" by Anne Hyde. I thought the idea of focusing on a handful of prominent mixed indigenous/European families, who happened to have fairly extensive written records reaching back to the 18th century, was a fruitful one, providing a more personal angle on some familiar historical events and shedding new light on some more obscure ones. An enjoyable and thought-provoking book.

Will make a note of that one.

All The Real Indians Died Out and 20 other myths about Native Americans.
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker.
This was the only other book on the Irish library system than An Indigenous People's History of The United States by Dunbar Ortiz. I had hoped her more recent work might be somewhere in there. But this is pretty good, refuting widespread misconceptions about the native population.
I had ordered this through the interlibrary loan system and something else appeared. Subsequent searches made it look like this was a misfiring of the other book or something. So it was great to see this was coming. Even better to get it.
Quite a good read. Very informative. I definitely want to read more Dunbar Ortiz will look out for Gilio-Whitaker too.

Harlots, Whores and Hackabouts A History of Sex For Sale Kate
Great book by the presenter of the Betwixt the Sheets podcast. I caught a webinar with her when the book was being released a few months ago. It has been sitting neglected for a while since I was concentrating on other books I have out.
I picked it up a couple of nights back and read a few chapters and it is well written and a quick read. Filled with images of the relevant eras. Coffee table sized book.
Recommended as is the podcast.

Lightning Striking Lenny Kaye
The curator of Nuggets/ PSG guitarist depicts the scenes around 10 major points in 20th century music. So far I've read him talking about Memphis in 1954. Pretty great.
Think I may look into his other books after this. I was aware he had done music journalism but not read much beyond the Nuggets linernotes. I think he had a book on doo wop I'd heard of but he has several others too.

Angela Davis An Autobiography
Finally getting to read this after it sitting on a shelf out of reach for way too long. Really something I should have got into on first purchase. I may have been busy with other things at the time I dunno.
Anyway very good read now I'm getting into it. She also does really good webinars and other talks so worth looking out for those and her other books of which there are a few.

I'm going to see Lear next Saturday, so I'm re-reading the play and James Shapiro's 1606: The Year of Lear.

Also reading Yannis Varoufakis' Talking to my Daughter About the Economy.

xp typed that on my phone and this is missing the author's surname
Harlots, Whores and Hackabouts A History of Sex For Sale Kate LISTER

who seems to be a pretty good writer and definitely an enjoyable presenter. She has another book I think I'll be looking for after this.
A Curious History of Sex which I think is also in the library system

I've been reading the Lenny Kaye book too Stevo - enjoying it much more than I expected. Was inspired to pick up the ROCK 100 book he wrote in 1977 with David Dalton - 100 capsule biogs of notable pop/rock/soul figures from Elvis to Bowie - stands up remarkably well I think! the Al Green entry is particularly fine.

BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU, Sally Rooney. I was a bit underwhelmed by the book of Normal People (tho I loved the tv show), but I thought this was great. Can clearly see how people might find it obnoxious - everyone is very beautiful, very clever, blessed with a beautiful singing voice and/or very rich; the email correspondence between Alice and Eileen is over-ripe with earnestness; Felix felt like a much less substantial character than the other three. But nevertheless I found it very moving!

WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE, Shirley Jackson. One of those rare books that I knew I was going to relish from the very first paragraph ("My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.") The feral fairytale atmosphere put me in mind a little of Night of the Hunter. Are any of her other novels this good?

SUPER-INFINITE: THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF JOHN DONNE, Katherine Rundell. Think I have written on here before about how much I dislike Rundell's kids books, so god know why I picked this up. As with the kids books, Rundell seems weirdly out of time - like she'd be happier writing boys own adventures circa 1912. It's a brisk romp through Donne's life and times which never really gets to grips with the poetry, but is so awestruck by JD's intellectual glamour, it feels like it's been written by Miranda Richardson's Queenie in Blackadder.

O PIONEERS, Willa Cather. Read this for my bookclub. Despite studying American Lit for several years at university, never picked up a book by Willa before and not sure I will again. The bizarrely belated plot felt like an afterthought to what should have just been a memoir/nature journal.

Have also been looking at EMERGENCY by Daisy Hildyard. Got a lot of advance praise but it's not really grabbing me yet - a memoir of a childhood in rural 90s Yorkshire, composed in lockdown.

Incidentally, you can read Lenny's doowop/acapella essay here

https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1567-lenny-kaye-the-best-of-acapella

It's really lovely. Came across it while researching an essay on Patti Smith I was writing last month - supposedly reading it inspired her to track him down and persuade him to play guitar with her...

xp Sounds like if any Cather novel is for you it might be Death Comes for the Archbishop. Tons of atmosphere in that one.

Or A Lost Lady.

Cather was America's best novelist between 1910 and 1935. Read her instead of damn Hemingway.

I have never read Hemingway either :0

But unless she had a sudden personal/artistic rebirth, find it hard to believe that Cather wrote anything in the ballpark of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hughes, Barnes, Larsen etc?

How can you if you only read one novel?

Fitzgerald only wrote one great novel anyway.

Are they any close seconds from him? The Last Tycoon? Think that one has its moments iirc. Not a novel but I also like "The Crack-Up," as I probably have said many times on this borad.

Tender is the Night. I love many of his short stories too.

But unless she had a sudden personal/artistic rebirth, find it hard to believe that Cather wrote anything in the ballpark of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hughes, Barnes, Larsen etc?

― Piedie Gimbel, Tuesday, June 14, 2022 10:06 AM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol

Professor's House and My Antonia would be my recs. She was an odious person and an incredible writer.

also i feel like she's foundational to the school of Midwestern realism that produced writers like William Maxwell

^^ this

She was an odious person

Curious about this. I know next to nothing about her as a person, beyond the fact that she grew up in Nebraska and lived with a woman for a good part of her adult life.

Here's a good read: https://newrepublic.com/article/114897/willa-cathers-correspondence-reveals-something-new

This is fun too https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n24/terry-castle/pipe-down-back-there

Odious seems likes it's putting it mildly. Really didn't detect anything approaching an incredible writer in Pioneers - which I found hackneyed, cliched, stagey, misogynist - but like I say, maybe she suddenly miraculously got good?

It's an early novel.

can someone give me a cliff's notes - was she horribly classist, racist, patriarchal or more just a run of the mill egotistical asshole?

A wishy-washy lesbian and a less wishy-washy anti-Semite.

Here's a typical quote from the Terry Castle LRB I linked above:

"There was only one problem, as Acocella, now gimlet-eyed, points out. Cather herself was a full-bore raving misogynist, at least on the subject of female authorship:

‘Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts literary talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it,’ she wrote in 1895. ‘I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.’ Female poets were so gushy – ‘emotional in the extreme, self-centered, self-absorbed’. As for female novelists, all they could write about was love: ‘They have a sort of sex consciousness that is abominable ... If I see the announcement of a new book by a woman, I – well, I take one by a man instead ... I prefer to take no chances when I read.’

Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Pauline Kael made similar noises. They internalized misogyny like most people did and do.

Her novels Song of the Lark and Saphira and the Slave Girl give a fair number of clues to where she sits within the spectrum of racism, classicism and patriarchy. Within the context of her life and times, she places more toward the liberal end. Within the context of our times, there's plenty of racism, classism and patriarchy to criticize or scorn.

If you're looking for a full-throated critique of USA racism, classism and patriarchy during Cather's period, you may as well go straight to Emma Goldman, because there's not a whole lot of well-known women writers to keep her company. Almost everyone else was a voice shouting into the storm and immediately lost.

never mind her bollocks, check xpost The Professor's House. Hemingway's Collected Stories, starting with some recent peaks and then starting over from the beginning, is also worth staying with. I still haven't read his novels, but have heard he's better w stories. A Movable Feast is a graceful stroll through zee Paree of his youth, with shitty little claims about Fitzgerald and Stein, a colorful anecdote in which Ezra Pound saves the day, also a good zing of Wyndham Lewis:"He had the eyes of a disappointed rapist."
Totally agree about Lenny Kaye's xpost acapella essay.

o pioneers is doper than dope

cather prob not for u

i mean i also find the control exercised and the painterly precision of the desert landscape evoked in death comes for the archbishop magical and worlds away from the melodrama of o pioneers, but i love a melodrama that's all unresolved inner tension :)

anyway, i rate her higher than fitzgerald barring tender is the night, hi alfred

Bracing tho the Cather chat is, actually more interested in Shirley Jackson recs, tho it's admittedly not a vast oeuvre.

The last Shirley Jackson thing that I read and really enjoyed was a short and mysteriously nasty story called 'The Summer People'. I see it's included in a Penguin anthology of Jackson's 'Dark Tales', which looks tremendous:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30303793-dark-tales

I may have praised Thte PRofessor's House in another thread: structurally odd, most homoerotic of her fiction.

I was glib about Hemingway, my first adolescent crush on a writer; all I need are the first 15 stories and TSAR. Creative writing majors can learn about concision and understatement from Cather without the bullshit, though.

Cather herself was a full-bore raving misogynist, at least on the subject of female authorship:

‘Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts literary talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it,’ she wrote in 1895.

Piedie, you should try reading the work of the average female poets and novelists of her era, the sort who were widely read because they were published in mass circulation magazines. She wasn't raving in that quotation, she was raging.

She's one of those white writers from the Gilded Age, the Progressive pusbback "yellow journalism," all that and more---incl. awareness of European and Russian advances in modernism---struggling with conditioning and other pressures, not to give her a pass, or other Western writers you also have to scavenge from, like Frank Norris and Jack London (or Michigan's own crazy Hemingway, Minnesota's more likable and rewarding art-pop Fitgerald, Ohio's genius-to-perverse-fuckoff

I may have praised The PRofessor's House in another thread: structurally odd, most homoerotic of her fiction.

Ohio's genius-to-perverse-fuckoff*SHERWOOD ANDERSON**, Ah meant to say---sorry, Sher!

Are Anderson's novels worth reading? Poor White's supposed to be the one. My uni library copy was last checked out in 1986.

oh i like cather. thanks for the cliff's notes, not really enough to tarnish the magic for me given the time and place. that being said i'd rather find some of the 'lost' ones than go back to cather but there's only so much time in a day.

Do people not rate Faulkner here? Fitzgerald and Hemingway keep getting mentioned from this era.

Yeah, I think a fair number of us do rate him; I was just responding about Western incl. Midwestern heads. The Hamlet was my gateway, but The Portable Faulkner (orig. 1954, but I think the '77 edition I read might have been expanded or corrected a little?) is also an early fave, with stories and excerpts from novels in chronological order of their setting, clarifying unity without trying to give us everything Essential in one volume (and at least one excerpt might be spoilery), but, while not ideal it's an awesome portable doorstop. Also of course As I Lay Dying seems exemplary. Pylon is purple prolix Midwest-to-New Orleans Depression de facto proto Beat barnstorming, letting off steam while writing something else, he said: crazy and good. Still need to read a lot more of his.

Some perceptive, reasonably qualified praise for TPF here:
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-portable-faulkner_william-faulkner_malcolm-cowley/377833/#edition=4482139&idiq=35495202

Faulkner rules.