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

Getting a lot further into Lenny Kaye Lightning Striking.
Now in the Liverpool 1962 thing with the early Beatles or possibly the same era London with Joe Meek.
Enjoying it but the copy I had could be better proofread. So assume that means the full printrun. KorLA Pandit was an artist and I think there are several of those dotted through the book. I thought from some Windrush Foundation events dedicated to him that the Beatles early manager was Lord Woodbine not his business partner Alan Williams. But mainly quite enjoying it and looking forward to what he says about SF 67 and Detroit a couple of years later.

Jorge Luis Borges Total Library.
compilation of a lot of essays and shorter writings with non Argentinian focus translated and compiled in the 90s. Has sat on bookshelves in my various flats for the last couple of decades waiting to be read. Now finally getting to it. & finding it pretty interesting.
But interspersing other things with it including

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism Ha Joon Chang
which is interesting but seems to be a little weird in its gaze, overly Eurocentric or something in places. Which wasn't what I was expecting, and could be a projection/expectation of mine on seeing the writer's name. Still think this is going to be something I do want to read through.

Mario Vargas Llosa - Conversation in the Cathedral*

Halfway through this late 60s Latin American novel about...late 60s things: students, communism, fascism, that whole spaghetti. The halfway interesting thing about it is that Llosa makes a chaffeur one of his main characters so its not your usual intellectual, if you like, navigating through this mess. I start and stop, its a territoy I know quite well so its getting to be a bit of a chore - as well as finding it a bit tasteless given his politics today, so I'm going to stop at the end of Book Two and read something else.

It bored me. The only one of his novels beside the stepmother stuff I enjoyed was Feast of the Goat.

Meant to put my comments here---might as well do replies as well:

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.)

― dow, Sunday, June 26, 2022 5:46 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

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.

― dow, Sunday, June 26, 2022 5:54 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

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

― dow, Sunday, June 26, 2022 5:56 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

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).

― dow, Sunday, June 26, 2022 6:24 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

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

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, June 26, 2022 6:26 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

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

― the pinefox, Monday, June 27, 2022 2:34 AM (eleven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I had to acquire a taste for Hemingway:there's a sense of something tightly yet just barely lashed together, something that I have to get used to all over again each time I read another story or book, that is off-putting in his compulsiveness, beyond and within his strict commitment to art, which does remind me of James, but Hemingway's damaged goods, like his characters, and pretty up front about it, take it or leave it---is easy to infer, but that doesn't make it easier to get used to, which could be part of his art.

It's more apparent in the short stories, but also brushing by from time to time in the whirl of TSAR, he continuing preoccupations w lots of wounds and flashbacks and compulsive travel

I mean, among his leading contemporaries (incl. older and younger writers), I don't have that same sense. even with Virginia Woolf, though it's entirely possible that my simple male mind is missing things---but she seems to sublimate her damage into something great at times, something at least good usually, and it's vibrant as hell, but there's more of a sense of poise in itself, not that little shiver as he rides the wave.

Sometimes he does overcompensate.

I read, and hated, The Sun Also Rises at University; as a non-practicing Jew I found the Cohn character - if not antisemitic in itself, certainly highly suggestive of Hemingway's antisemitism, if that's a distinction worth making. I mean, the novel ends with the annoying Jew getting punched in the face, a bit like the trope of the rich bully who gets pushed into a fountain at the end of a 1980s college movie. And Hemingway's reputation rests - unfairly or not - on his Spartan sentence construction; that might be right, but I didn't find them to be very interesting sentences.

That said - is there another Hemingway worth trying? My take on him is still the take of a sullen 19-year-old.

The Garden of Eden, his unfinished and deeply weird novel about gender/sexual roles.

"And Hemingway's reputation rests - unfairly or not - on his Spartan sentence construction; that might be right, but I didn't find them to be very interesting sentences."

This seems to me accurate.

It's odd that people are so often praised for sparse or spare writing, when what this amounts to is quite often not very interesting writing.

It’s about an assertion of toughness and manliness in the limp-wristed and female ( if no less abysmally racist and anti-semitic) affront called modernism—

ie “Spare, tough sentences are manly.”

One can find the same sort of thing happening around Carver nearly 50 years later— the experimental and feminist works were vastly overshadowed by the hype around Carver’s spare stories of awful alcoholics being awful.

Carver's later stories aren't much about alcoholics tbh; the best ones in Cathedral deal with children.

Rereading Hemingway's short stuff a couple years ago, I was struck by the effect of repetition, by those sentences that a teacher might mark as run-ons. This notion of spareness disappears. At its most mannered -- and it is a manner -- it's another James-indebted attempt to limn a consciousness but instead of going inward it uses landscape and food as signifiers of interiority.

I don’t think we’ll agree about these matters.

That wasn't a defense, though I (can) still read his early stories with pleasure.

I'm reading Hemingway influence (and later subject of a not terribly amusing parody called Torrents of Spring) Sherwood Anderson, and Poor White strikes me as a booklength attempt at extending the psychological landscape of Winesburg, Ohio; in places it's Cather-esque in its evocation of terrain encroached by industry and its effects on these foreshortened lives. And the novel's quite queer quite often, again, like Cather's stuff.

It's odd that people are so often praised for sparse or spare writing, when what this amounts to is quite often not very interesting writing.

The movie equivalent of this is French magazines praising Clint Eastwood as a "Hollywood classicist".

I took Cohn as a sympathetic enough character, though also hard to deal with , in part because of the antisemitic ,treatment he's gotten beginning at Princeton, and the complicated relationships with women, his financially significant mother, his ex-wife, his ex-fiancee, Brett---I enjoy him as a disrupter, currently, away from his desk, not-writing, as writers do, a romantic legend in his own mind, and always good for breaking up the mindlock of the other principals' partying. So I look forward to him like I do Baron Charlus (wonder if that's where Hem got the idea, In Search of Lost Time meets The Merchant of Venus).

meant to type: currently away from his desk, not-writing (procrastinating/researching), as writers do: a a romantic legend in his own mind Jake sees that too.

Jake sees the romantic bit, and mentions Cohn's mention of frustration with writing the follow-up to his (badly received, not very good) first novel. Jake's takes on Cohn are marked by his recall of what happened on this fun trip, but could already seem condescending, like Hemingway on some of his own writer friends in A Movable Feast--but I think that here, the way he deploys Cohn makes up for Hem's asshole tendencies.

What's good by Mohammed Mrabet? Good translation of Zamyatin's We? Looks there are quite a few versions.

Under The Glacier, Halldór Laxness - Young theologian gets sent to a far off corner of Iceland to investigate a parish where, the church fears, the local priest has gone astray. On arrival he is faced with villagers who are philosophical, drily humourous and incapable of giving straight answers. They do, however, provide him with an endless supply of dried up cake and prodigious amounts of coffee - suffering from IBS I really feel for the narrator's horror at having to empty jug after jug of the stuff for fear of offending.

Been dipping into Lorine Niedecker’s collected. Had never been able to access her work before, and am
now completely convinced of her brilliance. Great when this happens!

paging ledge. have you read this

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/mother-of-invention-how-good-ideas-get-ignored-in-a-world-built-for-men

(she was on a podcast i was listening to this week and it reminded me of that design-ignores-women book you read recently but with a more positive twist. the rolling suitcases anecdote sounded fascinating)

thanks, just bought it!

There’s something about the description of that book that gave me pause, as its premise seems tied to the idea that growth and expansion are a social good, and also that having more women in the boardroom will somehow make the necrotic effects of capitalism better.

A more radical take would be that pantsuit corporate feminism has nothing to do with actual women on the ground, and that the mindset of constant growth is what immiserates populations and women in particular. I understand this isn’t a popular view and so it wouldn’t necessarily sell a lot of books, but just something about the description that rubbed me the wrong way— is it just that the PR materials don’t do a good job of explaining what the book is doing, or is it actually just another book about the dearth of women in the boardroom that completely sidelines 99.9% of actual lived experience?

'Constant growth' is ecologically bad, I believe.

An argument against 'corporate feminism' was made by this UK journalist:
https://repeaterbooks.com/product/lean-out/

I've been reading a lot of white feminism this year. brown women talking about a perspective on female empowerment that includes the women who were excluded by the earlier narrative. One synechdochal summary point has been that in order for women to take on corporate roles they have had to rely on housekeepers and childminders to alolow them to be able to dedicate their time but tend to be overlooked and ignored in terms of their role/part of the equation allowing women to be powerful.

Also white women have been used as and to an extent intentionally gone along with the damsel in distress role which has been integral in excusing things like lynching black males. Also using white tears as an instrumental tool for shaming other women and excluding tehm from dialogue.

I agree that constant growth is unsustainable and that slow growth would be more enjoyable for everyone. However, I think that trusting in others in power to act on your behalf or to see your point of view has in past history been futile. That is why I think so many DEI initiatives in the US focus on hiring. The differences in male and female leadership might not be felt in workplace decisions and conduct but are felt IMHO in terms of worklife balance and the work that is not considered work.

that last paragraph sounds to me like it was added to get men to read it... the podcast was more about the inventions and the sexist nature of wheels, the economy didn't get a mention.

(although she said in the podacst that it got some odd traction as a father's day gift in her native sweden)

podcast here: https://cosmicshambles.com/bookshambles/katrine-marcal

Thanks koogs, i don’t “do” podcasts for various reasons but I really am curious about this book, and your explication makes sense.

Another podcast with the same author
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4CL1hNuceONzfn36VMkeCv?si=8e7698e616d64819

(June 16, rather, many posts above. Was Hemingway admired because of the influence of certain philosophers in literary theory?)

J. R. Ackerley's My Father and Myself

I don't do podcasts either, just because I am not up to the technology of this stuff at this point.

A pity as people constantly recommend it.

I discovered Niedecker through her collected poetry, too. Browsed it from the shelf at the bookstore and immediately bought it.

> I am not up to the technology of this stuff

"the technology" in this case = clicking a single button. that second one is just spotify. the first one uses an embedded player (although it does divert to making you install the soundcloud app if you're on mobile and don't have it (i don't)) (i guess spotify does the same but i don't spotify) should be ok if you stick to using the pc

It bored me. The only one of his novels beside the stepmother stuff I enjoyed was Feast of the Goat.

I read La guerra del fin del mundo, and I thought it was tremendous.

I discovered Niedecker through her collected poetry, too. Browsed it from the shelf at the bookstore and immediately bought it.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Friday, July 1, 2022 8:52 AM (thirty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

The surprising thing for me was that I had tried getting into her before, and had the Collected sitting on a shelf for years and years. I'd take it down every so often, read a bit, then put it back up— I just didn't "get" it.

Then the other night I read a review in an old fugitive periodical from 1987 published by the UCSD Library that included a review of her work, which I read and found interesting. It prompted me to pick up the book again, and all of a sudden, I was completely blown away by her poems— the early work and late work is especially great, imho.

In any case, it goes to show that sometimes it's worth keeping books around that you have a *feeling* you might be into someday. Happens to me once or twice a year, tbh!

Koogs: anything that just involves playing something from a website, on a computer, that I can plug in to a hi-fi - should be OK for me.

That should include BBC Sounds.

Other things like Spotify, let alone Apple or whatever else, less so.

On the BBC they say 'wherever you get your podcasts' and I don't really understand what they mean - as if any given individual has some kind of podcast provider - an unknown concept or experience to me.

Anything that involves a mobile phone for this stuff, is probably not going to happen for me. I'm not sure whether my mobile even has the capacity (ie: space, in some sense - I don't mean it's not advanced enough, I acquired it in 2019).

Tbh I'm no technophobe or Luddite and I also found the "wherever you get your podcasts" think really difficult to parse for a while.

I also hate podcasts and podcast culture, tho, so I figured it out enough to d/l "S-Town" back in the day when I was doing a lot of looooooong drives, and then never did anything else with that knowledge

I finished the Louis Armstrong bio. It's long but kept my interest throughout. Armstrong was a fascinating character. It seems very difficult to find anyone who knew him who had anything bad to say about him. Not that he was a saint by any conventional definition. The relationship between Armstrong and his long-time manager, Joe Glaser, was also interesting, esp in contrast to the abusive Col Parker-Elvis relationship depicted in the recent "Elvis" movie. In many ways Glaser was just as controlling, but somehow the dynamic was more fruitful on both sides.

I'm about two-thirds into The Oregon Trail. I wondered what I'd make of it now after first reading it in the late 1970s. First off, it is a detailed eye-witness account of life among the Ogallala Sioux written by a keen observer, which gives it considerable value as a historic document. Unfortunately, he could not speak a word of their language(s) and was therefore confined to crude translations and looking only at surfaces.

The biggest drawback of the book is that Parkman was a wealthy East Coast university-educated Brahmin, who was fascinated by, and clearly admiring of, the Sioux, but feels a constant need to distance himself from them by treating them as colorful savages. This belittling tone is so deeply woven into his observations that it feels obsessive, like he's protesting too much, all to reassure himself that his culture and education endow him with an innate superiority. This is an irritant and I do what I can to block it out.

Even with these glaring deficiencies, it is worth reading, if only because it records accurately observed sights and experiences that have since vanished, leaving few traces. This book is both distorted and irreplaceable.

was gonna update this thread to say i’m reading the marbled swarm by dennis cooper which is both vile and hilarious and then got confused by all the podcast talk

Marbled Swarm is a great departure for him, but it’s one of my favorites of his

Glen Matlock I was A Teenage Sex Pistol
Quick read, thought I'd give it a shot in the wake of Pistol. Still need to read teh Jones version.
Not sure about chronology since he has teh band already mostly formed while Malcolm is away trying to manage the New York Dolls. John hasn't joined but the previous line up is playing a lot .Need to check that out, when Sex started and how it ties in with that Red Patent Leather era, Cos might assume that NYD was before.

Anyway it's an interesting quick read

Jorge Luis Borges Total Library.
I had just read the piece on the various translations of 1001 Nights this morning when i got a podcast on Folk Stories from Gone Medieval which overlaps. Quite a coincidence since it overlapped & I could have read the Borges any time over the last 20 years, think that was the latest edition of the podcast though
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1xuUNWYWRNvRT6OZFgwBkW?si=e624ae87ec104389

Another podcast with Katrine Marcal that I just noticed on seeing it was about the wheeled suitcase which she talked about on the other pdcast I sent a link to. I found out that her book Mother of invention is in the local library so may get it this week
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6VOYopbeE6BvTbKy8BRF7m?si=88f21963938a475f

Also not sure why I didn't add in that I had got to the section of Lenny Kaye's Lightning Striking on the London Punk scene when i found out that Glen Matlock book had come in. I'm just up to the point in Matlock where he's about to leave. Got as far as Kaye talking about their (Patti Smith) London debut in Lightning Striking. Quite enjoying both. Though Matlock shouldn't be slagging off the Slits really should he?

not beatley enough for glen's tastes iirc

just finished - "things we lost in the fire" by mariana enriquez/just started - "the man who saw everything" by deborah lwvy & "bringing the war home" by kathleen belew

Coolidge’s ‘Far Out West’ was a fun paratactic poetic romp through old western films. Fun book and a little foreboding, too .

Reading Prynne’s ‘Brass’ for reading group and also thinking of reading a James Purdy or non-fiction book as a palate cleanser— been reading a ton of poems for work and pleasure, the relative ease of a strange novel seems like a good idea.

I'd thought that THE COLLEGIANS would prove stodgy but actually it rollicks along well enough. Protagonist Hardress Cregan becoming increasingly manic as his actions work out badly. I suppose that this novel is close to an 18th-century world of the hard-riding Irish gentry, roguish squires, whiskey-swilling peasants and the like.

Occasionally the novel falls into first-person-plural oratory about humanity - 'We always find it easiest to love that which is far, and neglect that dear treasure that is close at hand', etc - which reminds me that Proust and George Eliot constantly do this and massively annoy me.

whiskey-swilling peasants

aiui, Irish peasants back then were far too poor to swill much whiskey, even poteen, so that it was considered a personal triumph if one ever managed to become drunk.

table, I've been reading Prynne's The White Stones with pleasure

Nice, we just finished that a few weeks ago. Amazing book, we sort of sussed out that Prynne considers love a sort of elemental force at odds with a world that ignores "long time" in favor of a crass immediacy and fealty to, well, the commodity form. That's a simple take, but it was really helpful reading it with others. I also highly encourage reading them out loud, they have a real aural force that is lost on the page.

Good call, all of you who recommended Teenager by Bud Smith.

I also finished Teenager. At first I thought it seemed too heavily influenced by Denis Johnson and it was kinda bugging me, but after a while it started to seem more Coen Bros. Or maybe a Coen Brothers adaptation of Denis Johnson. Anyway, it ends strongly.

Anyone read Thackeray's Henry Esmond recently?

Stuart Hall (ed) Representation
Looks like this was done as a text book for an Open University course but is a good introduction to the subject of Representation on several levels. How language works, citing de Saussure. How things are mediated through various media.
I should have this read now but have a stack of books going on at the same time. THink I'm geting pretty heavily underway anyway. Just read teh section on Documentaries this morning. Hoping to get it read while I still have time to do so. Think I have a full time course starting soon which is going to make the amountof reading I can do dip heavily.

God is Red Vine Deloria
INdigenous American writer writes about teh subject of belief among the peoples of the Americas . Attempts to correct some misinformation passed on by pseudo native writers and various other popular misconceptions. There is some overlap with the writing in Thoams King's the Inconvenient Indian but they are different enough writers that this remains fascinating.
I just heard in a webinar Roxanne Dunbar ortiz held last week that he had been the individual who got her interested in Indian affairs , got her in for a court case he was working on .
Another great book that I'm not giving enough attention to. Think I will try to read more by him after this

Insurgent Empire Priyamvada Gopal.
great book on native radical attempts to get rid of the British Empire over the 19th & 20th centuries.
very interesting and again should be spending more time dedicated to it. I think I'm about half way through it and should have got through it a few months ago. Focused on other things instead and now yet another one I want to get finished before something else starts or possibly never will.
I think it is well written and if I was reading a book at a time instead of double figures i would be very into it. Recommended if you are into the subject.

Just finishing Augusto Boal the end note added material to his Games For Actors and NOn-Actors which explores problems he encountered while practising his craft. Have now been listening through several podcasts on Theatre of the Oppressed which gives me a lot of background on him.

Equinox today. About time for a new 'What are you reading?' thread, as per long standing ILB tradition.

Floored by vaccines, I turn to the one thing I feel able to read: Ross Macdonald. THE BARBAROUS COAST in 24 hours and straight on to THE GOODBYE LOOK.

New WAYR thread:

He Can't Just Come Right Out And Say He Likes It Because It's About Four Guys That Starved To Death In An Igloo Or Something: What Are You Reading, Fall '23?