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

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

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.

amis is on thin ice (or as he might write it "exceedingly low temperature h20 arrayed in the manner that one spreads marmite on a morning slice of toasted comestible") talking about stodge and thin gruel tbh

some good dreams in bolaño

"It's not so easy writin' about nothin'." The ole cowpoke settin' at Patti Smith's kitchen table and talkin' while he's writin' (and, come to think of it, sounding and looking like Seinfeld meets one of Smith's ol' buddy Sam Shepherd's plays)(She does mention watching TV, though so far all detective shows) is ignoring her, and she doesn't like that, so she wakes up and goes to the Cafe 'Ito (black coffee, toast, olive oil, table, chair, notebook, pen: all she needs for quite a while) and writes about him, briefly, then goes on to next item. She gives the occasional arresting image its due, but then back to what the hell, dreams? They're not allowed to crowd her waking life, the things that happen as she keeps writing. (The ol' cowpoke does poke his oblivious head back in occasionally.

Sorry, that's Station M, my current bedtime buzz.

Dreamlike Vs a depiction of a dream seems to be the error here.

(M Train, that is) she's good at both, more into the former, and only as these things come by the intent, fairly careful traveler.

In Homeland Elegies, Ayad Ahktar's somewhat autobiographical novel, the Pakistani-American narrator has himself set (with pen tied to hand, I think) to record dreams as soon as he wakes, for a while. Mainly, he manages to write down a sequence about going up into the hills in the old country, near the town where he still has a lot of relatives, a place he used to visit occasionally. Now he's reminded of things he saw and how they and the new-seeming dream images relate to thoughts about his family and their situations that had faded into the background, as given, at best, as he'd become more self-absorbed.
It's not that long a passage, but all the parts about his family, in Pakistan and America, give the book most of its strength (and taking dream lessons, then reverse-engineering the results, is completely in character).

I liked that book

The Housing Lark, Sam Selvon - More straightahead comedic than I remember The Lonely Londoners being. A great Dudes Rock novel (and thus unsurprisingly not great on gender), love the poetry of the language and the liveliness of a London long gone. Selvon should have much higher standing in popular British literature imo.

ah wrong thread