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

Among poets with similar there/not there qualities, I'd include Thomas Hardy.

from the James thread, here's what Ezra Pound wrote in a loving, mostly accurate essay of a writer he revered:

If one were advocate instead of critic, one would definitely claim that these atmospheres, nuances, impressions of personal tone and quality are his subject; that in these he gets certain things that almost no one else had done before him. These timbres and tonalities are his stronghold, he is ignorant of nearly everything else. It is all very well to say that modern life is largely made up of velleities, atmospheres, timbres, nuances, etc., but if people really spent as much time fussing, to the extent of the Jamesian fuss about such normal trifling, age-old affairs, as slight inclinations to adultery, slight disinclinations to marry, to refrain from marrying, etc., etc., life would scarcely be worth the bother of keeping on with it. It is also contendable that one must depict such mush in order to abolish it.

When I read late James (quite different from the early one), I see a reader not limning interiority so much as limning his own subtle, ponderous, lacey response to a character's interiority.

I like tables' quote the best: we're directed by a man in the atmosphere of his head watching another man looking at something as neither of him speaks; then he directs us to himself and a gondolier wandering the canals at the narrator's direction, relationship of him and gondolier, with words exchanged, some of them in a direct quote, a final sentence/decision that fits perfectly. This might be what West is missing in the later writing, and Alfred's quote from The Europeans seems like a transition: he makes his point in a droll way, giving us a tour of the circle, but then keeps on going a little too long.

What is your quote from, tables? I want to read it.

it’s The Aspern Papers, from the fifth section, I believe!

I read that novel c. 3 years ago and liked it. A length and density I could manage. An interesting topic - the legacy of a late poet. And a lot of emotional and moral ambiguity on top of all that.

"once you understand what James is trying to do"

Not sure I do, or could say.

FWIW this was actually a defence of HJ. Another poster said that TTOTS was utterly monotonous once you understand what HJ is trying to do. I said: I'm not sure I do understand. It would follow that I find it less monotonous, and more mysterious.

Does poster Alfred receive a commission from the Pound Estate every time he posts that quotation from EP?

If so I hope he's made several ... several ... pounds.

p.300 of George Moore, ESTHER WATERS.

I observe:

1) this is basically all about the English working class, making it remarkable that it’s by an upper-class Irishman. If you told me that George Moore was a cockney geezer who'd taught himself to read and write and written this novel from life, it would be more credible than the reality.

2) SO much of it is about horse racing! Technicalities and discussions that go on, and are not well balanced into any aesthetic whole. Maybe if you were into that sport you’d enjoy it.

Does poster Alfred receive a commission from the Pound Estate every time he posts that quotation from EP?

If so I hope he's made several ... several ... pounds.

― the pinefox,

Don't force me to paste the Cantos excerpt in which he fulminates against paper money

I dug my Aspern Papers and Washington Sqaure for a second try.

Books read this month: I'm loving Howards End, but I have a big work project due this month, and my brain couldn't cope with something so rich and dense, so I temporarily dropped it for a few easier reads:

* The Entropy Effect (Vonda N. McIntyre), a well-written Star Trek novel, a time-travel murder mystery with lots of Spock being a badass. Lots of fun but the descent into time-travel-paradox madness at the end gets resolved too quickly and neatly.

* The Fade Out (Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips), a graphic novel thriller set in late 1940s Hollywood: blacklists, murder, dames, poorly-drawn b00bs, etc. Not really pushing any boundaries for the creative team but mostly competently realised. The ending, as always with Brubaker, is a half-assed expectation-defying anticlimax -- but he's done too many of those endings now, and they're getting predictable, like Le Carre killing his leading man in the last chapter.

* My Phantoms (Gwendoline Riley) Starts off as a redux of First Love, but gradually goes to different places. Kicks off with a fifty page setpiece about her dickhead dad that's witheringly mean and totally exhilarating.

Back to Howards End and Henry James, then a tossup between Middlemarch, Lonesome Dove or Duma Key for my long summer read.

I love Forster's dialogue generally.

Same. It's my first Forster. I guess I was expecting something closer to to Henry James, or Somerset Maugham god forbid, but it's very breezy and fun. Like Gissing with better jokes.

It's why he attracted so many adaptations.

I haven't seen those films, but until now my main association with Forster was the six-foot tall Maurice poster on my older sister's bedroom wall.

I’m reading ‘Narrow Rooms’ by James Purdy at the moment, it’s amazing but also makes glaringly obvious why the guy is still a cult writer— a novel about a gay sadomasochistic death cult in the hollers of West Virginia, no matter how allegorical, is not going to be well-received by the mainstream establishment lmfao.

That said, I am loving it.

Yeah, it's bat shit crazy.

oooh gimme

I mean, look at this cover

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51AE63QPPhL._SX319_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

"A narrow room, you say? Hm."

I knew from the first two sentences that it was going to be infinitely more wild than I had even anticipated.

ESTHER WATERS chapter - unsure, I can't read these Roman numerals; pp.326-331 - is dedicated to the court verdict of a magistrate who condemns a woman for theft and gambling. It's a different narrative mode, in effect, as the report of the judge's verdict takes over, with a legalese voice, and interpolated with occasional parentheses about his hypocrisy, viz: his enjoyment of drink while condemning it in court.

'One law for the rich, one for the poor' (p.331) is an occasional theme.

On p.349 I detect a conceivable small point of influence for Joyce's 'Oxen of the Sun'.

Finally reading Pete Dexter's Deadwood and enjoying it a lot. Amazing he and David Milch took the same historical characters and both developed their own singular and entertaining vernacular around them. Also, Milch was full of shit saying he had never read this before developing the show.

I listened to the Blacklisted episode on the book a few months ago where they talked about that.
Episode is December last year. Did make me want to read the book.

I done went and did it:

Bright Remarks and Throwing Shade: What Are You Reading, Summer 2022?

I read them as if they were writ­­ten in a foreign language, treating obscurities as idioms and translating every word into my collo­quialism.

This actually makes me wish someone would write a translation of James into a more colloquial English. The architecture of those interminable sentences with their dependent clauses hanging off in all directions like the elaborate turrets, gables and dormers of some Victorian mansion gives me the willies. But someday I will steel myself to read one of his books.

Just now on the radio: a passing reference to Dave Chapelle playing the martyred artist card re trans people joeks, and it reminded me of how much more artful and implicitly fair-minded is Hemingway's kinetic portrait of Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises: "Nobody ever made him feel like he was a Jew" until he got to Princeton, and he's still the object of loud 'n' proud antisemitic outbursts from a couple of other characters, especially the more successful writer, who also likes to call for "irony and pity," but he's seriously pissed at Cohn---who is seriously shady, a manipulative underdog (good income from his mama, pissed a lot of it away in connection with his furtive first marriage, has recently let his obnoxious long-time fiancee down, with a lot of tears, tears, tears, on his part, making it all that much more disgusting---also he tries to shake hands with guys he's just punched out). He can even be a danger to himself and others, the way he inserts himself into situations where he's not or no longer wanted, beyond limited underdog appeal and/or financial usefulness). So Bill the bigot with the writer's eye shares the others' distrust of Cohn for good reason, but has to add "Jewish superiority," the kind of shit that's added to Cohn's scar tissue and outsideriness. (Hem's got me thinking The Merchant of Venice too.)
(Jake, the narrator with the Debilitating War Wound, also gets increasingly tired of Cohn, though mainly because he's gone off with Jake's love object, cracked lodestone, Brett, for a little time away from her rowdy, flailing fiance, Mike-with-an-allowance, who is not only bankrupt, but "a bankrupt," as he keeps yammering back to: it's becoming his ID: "Cohn's a Jew, I'm a bankrupt": paraphrasing, but not by much,
Jake does resent Brett's gay running buddies for what he takes as [their airs of superiority, but also he seems a bit challenged by her having platonic friends besides himself, since he's got the Debilitating War Wound.)

So a lot of this is about antagonism and destruction at different speeds (incl. possibly drinking yourself to death, killing bulls as art and fun, also getting yourself gored, also passing references to effects of "the war," a few years back, and we know they're between Wars/wars.) Also really trying and sometimes succeeding at having a lot of fun, killing time, working and playing around knowing that, while still being thirtysomething, so it's still not as sad as it may well come to be.

DUH Award, yes, because I just now finally read that: another brick in my 1957 liberal arts degree.

xpost there's also the 19-or-20-year-old matador whom Jake and Brett are smitten with, but Jake's not jealous of either of them, might be better if he were, to a large (not total) extent.
A previous reader of this book, who has underlined and otherwise marked up most of it, notes at the end that Hemingway has "renounced" fancy Henry James writing, and then quotes James, accurately or not: The greatest human virtue is renuciation." The only renunciation in this story seems a little out of character in terms of high-mindedness, but not in terms of desperation (gotta fly on no matter what, also gotta somehow see myself as a good person), and the author himself, though my impression was already formed by the collected stories, also seems like his wings are singed by high-flying vs. desperation, and reaching for principle, like Beyond The Old Man's Fancy Writing Towers, is part of that (lots of wounds and flashbacks and compulsive travel in those stories too).

Terrible James joek exchanged b/w Bill and Jake too.

I did not really admire THE SUN ALSO RISES. Disappointing.

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

Turns out I learned this via a post by user Eazy on the thread Chicago's Greatest Hits: 1982-1989

Looked into where I'd read this, and it turns out Martin Amis attributed "Tell a dream, lose a reader" to Henry James in a number of essays and interviews. More recently in Inside Story he amended it:

Tell a dream, lose a reader’ is a dictum usually attributed to Henry James (though I and others have failed to track it down). Dreams are all right as long as they exhaust themselves in about half a sentence; once they’re allowed to get going, and once the details start piling up, then dreams become recipes either for stodge or for very thin gruel. Why is this? Any dream that lasts a paragraph, let alone a page, is already closing in on another very solid proscription, Nothing odd will do long (Samuel Johnson). But it’s even more basic than that. Dreams are too individualised. We all dream, but dreams are not part of our shared experience.

Amis full of shit shocker

Ugh. Gave up in him long ago. Will still stan for Money, maybe.

On him. Maybe in him works too, somehow.

My tom-tom ticker gave out.

That Amis quotation is very poor.

He says something is "usually attributed to HJ", but admits that there is no evidence for it (and the rest of us haven't seen it thus attributed except by Amis), and doesn't observe that it doesn't particularly sound like HJ.

He then says that writers shouldn't write dreams. But aren't there actually good dreams in literature, including ones that aren't immediately presented as dreams?

Even "nothing odd will do long" is a very inapt quotation as it's usually quoted to show how wrong Johnson was.

lol yes, the complete johnson quote is "nothing odd will do long. tristram shandy did not last"

finnegans wake is a dream tho possibly amis and pinefox are as one in feeling this proves the dreams-are-bad-lit argt

B-but listening to someone recount a dream for more than a minute or two can be excruciating. And in fiction and especially drama, I think of the whole thing as a dream state, so a dream within the dream can break the spell rather than enhance it. (Saying all of that having rewatched Eyes Wide Shut this week, which is all about whether a dream of infidelity is the same as a confession of infidelity or an act of it.)

Anyway, and off topic from HJ, but the line resonated with me more than where I read it.

I mostly adopted it because it's pithy and fun to burst out when someone's doing a bad dream scene, but yeah I think there's obv differences between having someone tell you their dream and having a talented writer make one up!

Someone telling you their life story in the manner of a typical novel would also be considerably excruciating.

I have problems with FW, as I'm sure does Amis (I suspect that unlike me, he hasn't read it, but I'm not sure of that now) -- but the argument that "FW is (or depicts) a dream" is contestable, according to good Wake scholars.

Which might be a pity, as "FW is a dream" probably makes more sense of FW than one might otherwise.

I think it's plain that there can be good dreams in fiction. One: at the start of an episode in THE LINE OF BEAUTY, where it doesn't seem like a dream, is taken as real ... but strange ... then gets stranger ... then he wakes up. Lasts probably less than a page.

A book that is much more dreamlike than FW is Ishiguro's THE UNCONSOLED, though it's not presented as a dream. The dream quality of the whole is implicit.

Dreams are boring to talk about, because people who talk about their dreams tend to focus on the surreal details of the dreams rather than the raw emotional insights they provide, which makes for very one-dimensional conversation.

But we're also bad listeners, and listening to someone else's narcissistic fantasies is hard work, which is why it's probably more productive to talk to your therapist about a dream than your partner.

Martin Amis is a grandiloquent twerp who speaks like he writes and hates being interrupted, so it makes sense that he'd confuse speaking with writing.

There’s a whole list of these things that boring cw maintains should/can never be represented in prose: dreams, music, sex, insanity… even without all the counterexamples that leap to mind it always just sounds to me like repping ur own lack of imagination

A notable example is Lydia Davis who has written fiction that not only represents dreams but is in fact based on specific real dreams she has had!

the phrase "finnegans wake is not a dream" seems to lead to some interesting discussions i don't have time right now to explore

however all of them immediately also concede that it is dreamlike or brings to bear the technics of dreamwork or whatever: even the guy who says we should pay more attenton to the psychotic episodes of his beloved daughter and the way schizophrenics use language also immediately compares this use to dreams

iirc correctly Colm Tóibín's iffy novel about Henry James, The Master, begins with HJ awakening from a bad dream

Finnegans Wake is not a dream in the same way as Ceci n'est pas une pipe? (onethread)

in a sense there is nothing that is not a pi(p)e