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

xpost the Blind Tom passage was striking enough to get me looking up the real-life Thomas Wiggins, who may have been an autistic savant---by all accounts, she seems to have been right about his powers of mimicry (which some found reassuring: he wasn't a black genius, so much as a freak)as well as his being a prodigious pianist and composer, exploited as hell. Striking subject of at least one novel and many shorter works, also book-length nonfiction and a documentary.
Some details are disputed, but think most of this is right:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Tom_Wiggins

I reached the end of Trust last night -- I'll not say "finished" because I don't feel I will be done with the book (pondering, discussing, rereading) anytime soon. An absolute wonder.

I'm currently reading The Children of Men, P.D. James.

Bob Spitz - Led Zeppelin

Stayed up way late last night watching The Natural on TCM, wish I hadn't, but kept thinking more Malamudian qualities might come through. ("There must be a pony in there somewhere!") Any of yall read the novel??

I see where a new thread for discussing our summer reading is almost due!

Finished David Thomson: HOW TO WATCH A MOVIE (2015). We've discussed already here how this isn't his greatest work, but in a sense DT spinning the wheels is still enough for me.

An oddity though is that the book really isn't about ... how to watch a movie. He declares on p.226: "You came into this book under deceptive promises (mine) and false hopes (yours). You believed we might make decisive progress in the matter of how to watch a movie. So be it, but this was a ruse to make you look at life".

He can almost uniquely get away with sudden, sweeping statements from nowhere, which are like whims or gambits. The last lines (p.228): "If you really want to watch a film, you must be ready to recognize your own life slipping away. That takes a good deal of education. But you have to be stupid, too".

I've been reading George Moore's ESTHER WATERS (1894). Moore was very important in Irish letters, including eg: in the formation of the Abbey around 1900. He comes up all the time if you read about Yeats et al. I needed to read him. This famous novel seemed a good bet. It has nothing to do with Ireland, though.

I'm about 1/3 through and on balance it's disappointing: not very well written or narrated, though it has improved and picked up momentum. Much of the first quarter describes a great house, where our heroine works as kitchenmaid, and it's nigh impossible to tell characters apart. Much of their talk is about horse racing and is impenetrable. As storytelling I find this all quite cackhanded. But once Esther goes to London and has a baby, it seems to gain focus, though it still has little evident special literary quality.

Moore gets credited for things like free indirect discourse, maybe even internal monologue, but I'm not so far detecting narrative innovation here; nor fine writing. If anything it seems stronger as a 'social problem novel', a work of naturalism detailing the struggles of the poor, in which righteous content is more important than fine form.

"You came into this book under deceptive promises (mine) and false hopes (yours). You believed we might make decisive progress in the matter of how to watch a movie. So be it, but this was a ruse to make you look at life".

I find myself very resistant to this sort of writing, the whole "tipsy man who thinks he's charming" vibe

(Still love the BDoF though)

Finished Purdy's book of short stories, reading Josef Kaplan's 'Democracy is Not for the People,' and looking forward to seeing a friend tomorrow who just bought a huge collection from a prominent older poet...I get some first dibs :-)

ESTHER WATERS, by halfway, has included some better passages describing London. Here I can see the hints of, say, the descriptive style of parts of Joyce's DUBLINERS - or for that matter Ford, Conrad or whoever. It's not outstanding writing but suggests more ambition than the first quarter.

i read jordan castro's 'the novelist' - very short novel from the post alt-lit miasma. i don't really know how i feel about it, partly because it and castro seem to be caught up in a broader discussion about art, politics, new york, catholicism, transgression that i guess must interest me because i read about it and read this novel but which is also confusing and offputting.

anyway, he can write, though his prose style is heavily reminiscent of tao lin. certain of the expressions of disgust in the novel are entertaining and feel identifiable in the moment, even as i recognise that identifying with them - everyone on twitter is terrible, everyone in publishing is an embarrassing sham - is a trap. certain set pieces, whether banal or grotesque, work in the sense of a writer feeling pleased with himself for being able to do them and take them to an extreme (there is a long passage about shitting and wiping yourself), push something as far as it can go. the ending is supremely trite in a way that some american books are

also breton/soupault - the magnetic fields, barbara pym - excellent women and been making my way through '4 dada suicides' from atlas press

Just finished reading and copying the biography to the Ibram X Kendi edited book 400 Souls which was pretty good and quick reading 0nce I took it off the backburner. A load of authors writing chapeters on the black experience over the last 400 years since the first enslaved were traded with an early colony.
Got some good writers on it. Shjouldn't have taken me as long to get hold of it and read it once i did so but am reading a stack of other things at teh same time. Will look out for further work from the writers and try to work through a number of these books i transcribed. been doing that with teh books I've read since ta least the start of the year. So do have a pretty large to read list.

Have the book of the 1619 Project to get to as one of teh next books. As well as a number of others.

JUst got the Gerry Johnstone edited A Restorative Justice Reader which i hope gives me more of a grounding in a field I think I have some understanding of.
Also got Howard Zinn's A People's History of The United States to get through which I hope to dfo over the next couple of months.

JU7st about 2/3s of teh way through Ge9orge Yancy's book of interviews On Race which is pretty good and again I seem to be racing through now that I've actually got into it.

About 30 pages away from the end of Angela Davis An Autbiography and just heard a recent talk from teh City Arts& Lectures series from her
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1S2q1UQStGcOSbTUxW7g8h?si=a301b8ff893441da

I may move onto Jorge Luis Borges the Total Library after that since its the other book I've had around for years and somehow not read. Was very excited to get it but somehow just never got to it. Love his short stories.
May get further into Games For Actors and Non-Actors by Augusto Boal though it does remind me of teh group I thought were whitesashing his work.
Also possibly 25 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism or thinking Fast & Slow or Haunting Of Hill HOuse or something else entirely

two more aubrey-maturin books. absolute bangers.

the return of the soldier - rebecca west

the turn of the screw - henry james. am i in the minority if i say this guy is an indescribably bad prose stylist?

sea of tranquility - emily st john mandel. you will like this if you like her other books?

the age of revolution - eric hobsbawm. from a different era in the sense that it assumes a lot of knowledge about what happened in the 18th/19th century that i simply don't have. very good that nowithstanding.

clade - james bradley. climate change/pandemic thing. jumps around the 21st century so kind of scifi i guess. mostly set in australia. not great imo.

The idea of James being a bad, not good, prose writer is interesting to me.

i have yet to make it through a single james novel, including the incredibly short turn of the screw, assumed the problem was me

guys. no. James rules. Turn of the Screw is really not like anything else he wrote (I really like it, though; it’s nuts.)

I think it depends on the era, for me. I love Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady, but could not figure out The Wings of the Dove.

Looking back at earlier message I thought I had typed bibliography and it's come out as biography. So I copy the book lists for further reading . Come away from something like 400 Souls with a stack of pointers which I will eventually find and read.

love so much that horseshoe is thoroughly here for this

henry james > mark ruffalo (although perhaps only slightly)

I was the only person who loved The Aspern Papers when we had to read it for a class in tenth grade

so, agreed with horseshoe

I’m not saying he’s bad in general. I’m saying that his prose style in particular is bad. Does he have a reputation as a stylist?

Bbc loved him.for some reason and made a load of tv interpretations of his ghost/ supernatural work.
I thought that was because of his ability to maintain suspense and that had to do with his writing style.
But haven't read what I have by him.

i think you might be thinking of M R James there

Yeah was just going to correct that.

BBC still seems to have made a number of interpretations of Henry's stuff. Assume that is because he's a respected writer or is it just what is presented as a great one to aspire to. Cultural icon better than he he's worth or something.

'Turn of the Screw' is one of the first pieces of prose that James dictated to a typist, rather than wrote out by hand himself (he was literally suffering from writer's cramp). This late style is notoriously difficult, but that may or may not be the same thing as a 'bad prose style'. It certainly has a kind of poetry when read aloud, although I concede it's the poetry of evasion and interiority. I think the style is doing exactly what James wants it to do, for better or worse, and that human thought and feeling still lies at the heart of his subject matter, however obscurely rendered.

But just as a wordsmith, a composer of sentences, the James of Portrait of a Lady or The Aspen Papers or etc etc is pretty unimpeachable imho, and not radically different from similar writers of the era. Just better.

Washington Square is gorgeous, although I never finished it. I had to read Roderick Hudson as a student and was bored, but I suppose I might find it more bearable now.

I am probably in the minority but I absolutely despised Turn of the Screw. Interesting experiment to tell a ghost story by removing all the exciting bits, but it’s a prissy slog, and once you understand what James is trying to do, utterly monotonous.

It’s only a small book; I’d rather eat it than read it again.q

"If you really want to watch a film, you must be ready to recognize your own life slipping away. That takes a good deal of education. But you have to be stupid, too".

Challenge accepted my man.

Washington Square and The Europeans are what I recommend to new Jamesians.

TOTS is as wrong a place to start with James as Heart of Darkness is with Conrad.

Portrait of a Lady is breathtaking, a masterpiece of design and architecture.

"once you understand what James is trying to do"

Not sure I do, or could say.

Nor sure there is a right or wrong place either. HEART OF DARKNESS probably as good a place as any to start with Conrad.

The question of HJ's style (like anyone's), its + or - features, is still inherently interesting and it would actually be most interesting to see someone actually quote eg: 2 or 3 sentences or paragraphs, and explain why they were good or bad; eg on the HJ thread which I think exists here.

Just saying 'HJ is brilliant' or the opposite is fine as an opinion but doesn't really provide much information for anyone to go on or think about.

Right. I have heard all about him, but think all I have ever read myself has been Washington Square and “The Real Thing” in high school and then a university wall graffito that said he “chewed more than he bit off.”

he does have a reputation as a stylist! But it has definitely risen and fallen several times since his death. He was certainly v invested in style! I guess I would say the specific thing I appreciate about his style, esp late James, is his take on mimesis of consciousness (thinking of the passage on the sticky and the slippery at the beginning of Wings of the Dove) which I find very beautiful, though it can certainly be less than fully clear on a first read.

His prose is not transparent glass, for sure

Aw hell let me find my copy of Wings of the Dove and I’ll try to do what pinefox suggested.

I do think Portrait of a Lady is the best entry point into his work.

tbh i think PoaL is fairly clumsily structured in one major way (tho i am happy to accede to the other superlatives): it very much feels like it was written in two separate but sustained bursts and these are then ineptly glued together

on the whole i prefer the early funny stuff (washington square) or the super-creepy super-modern-seeming stuff (what maisie knew)

TOTS is hugely overpraised as a ghost story SORRY IF THIS OFFENDS: it's a story of someone's mind collapsing ftb relentless gaslighting (possibly by ghosts)

All my books are packed in boxes because we’re moving; it’s v disorienting

Is Washington Square funny?? I guess I need to reread it.

mark s on turn of the screw is otm

notable point of legacy: the early new yorker writers (like e.g. thurber) all ADORED him but all also acknowledge they only got good as writers themselves when they cast off his mannerisms (while such modernists as hemingway were dedicatedly all abt casting him off stylewise)

xp i found WS funny yes (disclaimer: effect may not transfer, i find all kinds of weird shit funny)

In 1913, 'a delightful young man from Texas' asked James to recommend five of his works as a starting point. James sent two lists, the second more 'advanced':

They were:

Roderick Hudson
The Portrait of a Lady
The Princess Casamassima
The Wings of a Dove
The Golden Bowl

The American
The Tragic Muse
The Wings of a Dove
The Ambassadors
The Golden Bowl

James added, "when it comes to the Shorter Tales the question is more difficult (for characteristic selection) and demands separate treatment. Come to me about that, dear Young Man from Texas, later on - you shall have your little tarts when you have eaten your beef and potatoes."
Now that's good writing!

I still haven't read any James but his quote (misattributed?) "write a dream, lose a reader" pops into my mind every single time I read a book with description of a dream in it.

I have definitely never seen that line attributed to HJ. Whether he said it or not, it doesn't sound like him.

Not sure I recall WASHINGTON SQUARE being funny, when I read it 21 years ago.

It occurs to me that the *late* HJ style at least might be compared to FINNEGANS WAKE, ie: it's not "good" writing, by anyone else's standards, but a particular, perverse mode of writing that's trying to do a particular thing, and not necessarily something that anyone else should think of emulating.

I don't now remember "early HJ style" clearly enough to opine whether it's good compared to anyone else.

LATE JAMES IS GOOD. ITS NOT FINNEGANS WAKE IMPENETRABLE. I KNOW I HAVE NO CITATIONS BUT MY BOOKS ARE IN BOXES

of course I have to be moving when ilx decides to slander Henry James

Right. I have heard all about him, but think all I have ever read myself has been _Washington Square_ and “The Real Thing” in high school and then a university wall graffito that said he “chewed more than he bit off.”