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

Halfway through THE UNTILLED FIELD. It's short stories, some of them quite separate from each other, some continuing and connecting in SHORT CUTS mode.

I read the story of a priest who decides that Ireland will become Protestant unless the Pope rescinds law that priests must be celibate. In the next story he’s back as the creator of ‘a playhouse in the waste’. Moore’s narrative mode is odd, skipping past actions and statements with confusing speed.

This book is sometimes, I think, spoken of as a precursor to DUBLINERS (1914) - perhaps the very idea of a volume of Irish short stories was still quite unusual? - and there is something about the ambiguous endings, the authorial restraint in passing judgment, that seems a connexion. But Joyce was also, as I recall, openly critical of Moore's collection.

(xpost to table: That makes sense; I have forgotten what it feels like to be a teenager. Ideally there would be coherence, consistency, and room for growth across roles and life stages so that the bildungsroman of the future might not be limited to the loss of innocence or rebellion and there would be less reason for dissembling, or dislocation and confusion.)

SKR is not the one rebelling. He is the friend and then I think the father.

barry mazur and william stein - prime numbers and the riemann hypothesis

nice short book that gets you to understand a few different statements of RH which convey only a glimpse of the awesomeness disparate branches of math it connects. had lots of fun it made me want to read some more serious math again

garielle lutz - divorcer

enjoyed this short (90p) short story collection tremendously. it really shines on a sentence and paragraph level; you could pick it open to a random page and read one paragraph in isolation and odds are you'd laugh. one line that stuck with me was

She had taken "brush with death" to mean "apply death smoothly and gently to your life."

there's often a twisty unruliness to the syntax, with lots of unexpected pronouns and adverbs keeping things interesting. eager to read more lutz :)

now reading teenager by bud smith, off to a strong start

Penelope Fitzgerald’s short story book, The Means of Escape - untouchable as usual. A few I would rate as highly as the novels. I wouldn’t want to recommend which ones as the surprise is part of the pleasure. After this I’ve only got The Golden Child left to read from the fiction.

I hope SKR writes about cybersecurity next.

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.

whoa had no idea lutz transitioned omg omg omg

One more story to go in THE UNTILLED FIELD. Stories of rural peasant life shift to some stories of Dublin - all around 1900. Some good concepts and details, eg: a (proto-Keynesian?) public works authority that builds unfinished roads to nowhere in the countryside to give peasants labour, leading to a somewhat surreal landscape.

Long story 'The Wild Goose', about an Irish-American back in Ireland who marries a local woman and aims to become a political leader - is interesting, and contains the moment that James Joyce complained about: the wife looks up the time of a train (though Moore hardly insists on this point). Joyce thinks she wouldn't have had to. I think Joyce was being unreasonable and I don't altogether agree with his complaint even if taken straight on its own terms.

Joyce also said that the book was badly written. I'm unsure but it is perhaps clumsy compared to Joyce's own mature fiction, and, as I think I've said, it regularly makes odd unexpected transitions and narrative leaps - I'm unsure how deliberate these are.

After bouncing around from book to book and not finding anything that clicked, I picked up Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time, about Richard III and raced through the first 130 pages. She writes well, but also writes entertainingly, which is a fabulous combination.

I haven't read Daughter of Time but I'd safelt recommend Miss Pym Disposes too

i enjoyed daughter of time but the methods of deduction were not very convincing

i thought it was rubbish!

i was being circumspect!

Tey's methodology would be very apt for a criminal defense lawyer, but most of the case she makes hinges on the fact that virtually none the evidence has survived, so she's free to draw major inferences from the few remaining scraps. It's entertaining though.

Just finished Edmund White's A Previous Life, a solid raunch of a beach read

. . . most of the case she makes hinges on

basically phrenology

She does a lot of talking about faces, which is bunk, but she presents many better arguments based on suggestive historic facts. Half her arguments are just fanciful, but the real underpinning of hre argument is that Henry VII had every reason to blacken the memory of Richard III, both by erasing exculpatory facts and promoting a false narrative of Richard's treasonous perfidy, and he had sufficient power as king to do a fairly thorough job of it. In answer she highlights every inconsistency in the accepted narrative and then magnifies it to take the foreground, creating as much doubt as she can. Like I said, good defense lawyer technique.

Renee Gladman - Calamities
Tove Jansson - Fair Play
Jeremy M. Davies - Fancy
Isaac Bashevis Singer - A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories

Richard III Society's American branch having a DC blow-out this fall: topics discussed by experts incl. "A Network of Power and Politics: The Family of Richard III,” "Gunpowder Technology during the Wars of the Roses," and "Labor and Leisure in Medieval Old Age." Entertainment: Hesperus Trio Nova. A Special Concert of Music from the Medieval and Early Renaissance. https://r3.org/2022-gmm/

July 10, 2022

Ricardians Represent Richard in Canada

Susan Troxell, chair of the American Branch, and Sheilah O’Connor of the Canadian Branch, were speakers at Canada’s Stratford Festival in the July 7th Meighen Forum panel, titled “Richard III: Discovered & Uncovered”. The forum was a tie-in to the Stratford Festival’s 2022 production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III”, starring Colm Feore in the leading role. Also on the panel was Professor Randall Martin formerly from the University of New Brunswick.

Sheilah spoke about the historical inaccuracies in the play and painted a positive picture of the king using primary sources. Susan talked about the Looking for Richard Project’s amazing work in leading the 2012 discovery of the king’s remains, and what was learned from his bones. Professor Martin put the play in context of its contemporary anxieties about the succession to Elizabeth I, and the fear of tyranny and factionalism. The event was almost sold out and the audience submitted more questions than could be answered. This was the first in a series of Meighen Forum panel talks in the newly-built Tom Patterson theater complex, with Dr Turi King slated to speak in September about her work on Richard III’s DNA.

Where should I start w Patrick Modiano? Saw passing favorable mention of Suspended Sentences, but, based on descriptions I've skimmed think I might do better with something plottier at this point. Atmospheres and conjectures are fine, but also would like a bit of momentum, at least until getting hooked on the vibe. Will go with Suspended Sentences if it's okay that way; I like that it's novellas.

Ai, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
Lewis, The Premonition
Pinkham, Black Square

Chernovetsky was nicknamed Cosmos; cosmonaut is a slang term for someone fond of dissociative drugs like ketamine and PCP. On one occasion, the mayor crawled under his desk in the middle of a television interview. When he emerged, he explained that he'd been asking God for advice, and that God had said the interview was over. His increasingly erratic and authoritarian behavior prompted calls for a psychiatric examination. In response, he jogged and did pull-ups and laps for news cameras, posing in his little bathing suit, puffing up his chest and flexing his muscles. He was like Putin on acid. The babushkas loved him.

In public health work in Ukraine in the twenty-first century, I heard a lot about the former regions of Novorossiya, southern and eastern Ukraine, which became the center of Ukraine's HIV epidemic as unhappy residents sought comfort in hard drugs. In 2007 a study found that a staggering 88 percent of injecting drug users in Kryvyi Rih, a mining town in the Dnipropetrovsk region, were HIV positive. In 2011, 3 percent of the town's total population was registered as HIV positive, a rate comparable to that in West African countries. A Ukrainian colleague told me that the pollution from the mines in Kryvyi Rih was so bad that a white shirt was stained red by the end of the day. A Canadian colleague who did a workshop there felt certain that it was the worst place on earth.

It was true that eastern Ukrainians were doused in Russian propaganda, and it became increasingly clear that Russia was supplying fighters, arms, and instructions to the separatists. But eastern Ukrainians were also culturally and economically isolated from the rest of Ukraine. They were anxious about the shift of political power away from the east and toward the west. They were worried about their economy, which was dependent largely on trade with Russia, and afraid of austerity measures that would follow the new Kiev government's deal with the IMF. They were fearful and angry at the possibility of a "national idea" that would treat Russian speakers, or people who did not reject Soviet history wholesale, as bad Ukrainians. They were upset because they were poor and under-educated and unemployed and sick and despised by their own countrymen.

Many of the separatists I saw in pictures and videos looked familiar: these were the same sullen, sunken-eyed young men I'd encountered at harm reduction centers, partial to homemade amphetamines and opiates brewed from Ukrainian poppies. But now they had guns; now they were heroes.

The New York Times article glossed over an important question: who was in charge of the fighters who were receiving assistance from these plucky volunteers? Homegrown ingenuity was supporting not only Ukrainian soldiers but also the fifteen to twenty thousand fighters in the volunteer battalions: Dnipro, Donbas, Azov, and all the rest. The donations were not simply bolstering an impoverished army and bankrupt government; volunteers were running a war that was largely independent of the state. The Maidan movement, President Poroshenko, and Western politicians and pundits in favor of arming Ukraine referred, over and over, to Ukraine's commitment to "European values." But a country full of volunteer battalions funded by oligarchs, political parties, and donations looked more like pre-modern Europe than like a potential EU member.

I finished George Moore's THE UNTILLED FIELD. It ended with a story called 'Fugitives' (oddly good modern title) that was comprised of two earlier, cancelled stories combined (that is, Moore had altered the book). The story was somewhat ... perhaps the word is 'creepy'. It's about an Irish sculptor, hired to make a statue of the Virgin Mary, who finds a Dublin girl to pose for him and marvels at her naked beauty. It feels like the narrative logic is that he's going to seduce her, which feels bad and 'exploitative' to me when he has previously got her to undress for a different, supposedly wholesome reason.

Fortunately that doesn't happen. Someone smashes up his statue and he leaves the country. But then a very odd section in London closes the story (clearly this was a separate story that was mashed into the new combination). He meets two other people, one of whom is from the previous story (so the intra-textuality gets heavy) and one of whom is, I think, Moore's alter ego from another book, and is on his way to meet a real person Moore knew very well, Edward Martyn. So we are into intratextuality, intertextuality, and real historical reference. But this alter ego character, Harding, reveals that he has also met the girl (who was the Virgin Mary model) and was tempted to take her sailing around the Mediterranean, but instead did the responsible thing and tried to reunite her with her parents. (The girl is only 17!) So, nothing sleazy actually happens, but there is a tone of chortling regret over the fact that it didn't.

I have thought a lot about Moore compared to Joyce, whether this book prefigures Joyce or, as Joyce's own letters imply, doesn't. One thought is that this last story would have been very different from Joyce. Simply, when the three male club-man cronies meet and chat at the end, from (1900s) Joyce it would be heavily distanced; he would present them coolly and subtly make them look bad; we would not be encouraged to treat them as morally serious or to feel complicity with them. Whereas Moore, I think, does not think to take such distance - even though he has worked up this rather interesting intertextual / historical textual mode. To a degree this difference can be called a class difference. That is, at this time, Joyce had a keener sense of privilege, oppression, inequality and so on, whereas Moore seems able to be complacent about it.

Despite these reservations I did find the book as a whole actually curiously enjoyable.

I then started reading ... Ian Pindar's short biography of JOYCE (2004).

You, or even I, might think that a biography of James Joyce is the last thing I need to read. But I had always wanted to read this book (since wrongly having the idea, before it was published, that it was a major new Life), and I was recently given it. And oddly though I have now read Joyce's life so many times, I always forget numerous things by the time I go back and read another version.

Pindar routinely commits the single most basic potential error available to Joyce biographers. He cites events and statements from fiction as if they are from life. Now, it is obvious that these fictional words and events *might* be drawn from life. Or maybe in some cases they might not, or they might be distorted, or we could wonder why they were selected and other things weren't. Even if Joyce's books were memoirs and diaries, not works of art, it would *still* be apt to read them carefully and critically, assuming that they don't reliably represent everything, or that others' view of the same event might have been very different. Given that they *are* works of art, plainly this point is redoubled.

This simple point probably doesn't trouble most of this short book's readers, and I continue to read the book and be usefully reminded of things.

i finished the marbled swarm. wrote a goodreads review about it, which doesn’t happen v often https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4827080781

great review, Brad. i wrote a review of 'I Wished', you can read it here.

While I get through Machine Dreams, I want to read something else, so trying to figure that out atm— have a few books that just arrived, but not sure I want to start with any of them just yet, though one of them is a large art-book on freight train graffiti and hobo monikers with some essays in it and I might just flip through that during idle moments.

Where should I start w Patrick Modiano?

I've only read "Paris Nocturne" but I thought it was a good entry point. It has a plot and some sense of momentum to go along with the atmosphere, and it's fairly short.

Cool, thanks!

I finished Ian Pindar's JOYCE. Agreeable to read.

But Pindar's summary of the plot and characters of Finnegans Wake reawakens my suspicion of those. I have long felt that these large elements of that book are clumsy and lumbering and hobble the book while its extraordinary words go about nimbly. Reading Pindar's account (which is not negative at all) confirms this view and repeatedly makes me feel exasperated at the conceptions of structure and character that Joyce had in this last work.

(Could the plot and characters have been made to lumber and to hobble? Or are you suggesting that Joyce was not up to par, saddened, debilitated?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lumber
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hobble

Bloom was a Jew among the Irish? He carried soap in his pocket (for his wife or himself). That progression (walking) could carry anything ...

KSR not SKR, sorry, and for the general nonsense I post to this thread.)

I finished "The Idiot" by Elif Batuman. It's a long book and I nearly gave up on it because it was still meandering at about 150 pages in, despite the occasionally very funny asides, but it gradually unveils a dramatic conflict that gives it a sense of momentum, a classic "he's just not that into you" kind of conundrum. Currently reading some pieces from a Kurt Tucholsky anthology of short Weimar-era magazine and newspaper pieces called "Berlin! Berlin!".

Youn: it's true that Joyce was debilitated in health by say the mid-1930s, but no, that doesn't explain why he crafted and planned the book as he did much earlier, by say 1925. He believed in FW, thought it was a good idea, and was frustrated by others' inability to get it.

I think that the characters / structure are meant to have a deliberate simplicity - to be 'archetypal' - but no I don't think they're meant to be lumbering in the bad sense that I find them to be.

A basic angle here is the one identified by Wyndham Lewis in 1927: that Joyce typically wrote simple content / structures / stories because it made it easier for him to write complex style. That's not the whole story but there's something in it.

But the FW structures and characters dismay me every time they, yes, lumber into view in an account of the book.

After the Tey book I started a re-read of a Patrick O'Brian naval novel, Treason's Harbor. It's another light entertainment, which seems about all I can handle this week.

I've started Virginia Woolf's JACOB'S ROOM (1922).

So Joyce did most of his work when he was fairly young?
He wanted to start from a known story to experiment with style? In FW the experiment was not successful because ...
I know you admire Flann O'Brien. I've only read At Swim Two Birds but remember being reminded of it when reading Independent People by Halldor Laxness. I wish I were better able to understand what you think is good writing.

have heard of this for years and years---good??

finally finished...wow pic.twitter.com/mnV2Hxcj7g

— julia (@eathedocument) July 15, 2022

julia liked it

grann has a rep for very thoroughly reporting intersting things

haven't read any of it myself

James Joyce wrote DUBLINERS in his 20s, the PORTRAIT around 30. ULYSSES was published on his 40th birthday. FW when he was 57. He died aged 58.

The gap between ULYSSES and FW is the largest and perhaps the longest as experienced. (No answer regarding good writing. Hmmm ...)

FW was always fun to read at random and aloud, but now it's disappeared from local library. If I ever read the whole thing, will also have A Skeleton Key To Finnegan's Wake at hand, or is there something better?

Poster Dow, you could try just reading A SHORTER FW, ed. Anthony Burgess, which contains linking summaries.

That wouldn't be 'reading the whole thing' but it could be a good thing to do first.

As I indicated above, summaries of story are in a sense the problem with FW - they make it seem more banal than it does on the surface.

Poesia Descalza
Vida Rebeldes: Leon Trotski

Early reflections on JACOB'S ROOM:

Lots of material of interest, for interest re Scarborough and its sea front.

VW trying to experiment, to move fiction in a certain direction; to pause and linger over characters, objects, moments; to avoid story in a straightforward way (arguably lots of people had already been doing that - like James? - but VW here is maybe doing it differently.)

The novel seems to be marred, though, by a prevalence of a certain tone that VW nervously had, which can be called: irony, archness, even whimsy. This combines with odd grandiosity and even archaism in eg: her penchant for placing adjectives early in phrases: 'Dim was the evening'. I feel an uncertainty of tone here, or maybe it's just a tone that I don't like or doesn't convince me. It seems to me that this tone remains present in later masterpieces but there is taken up in a whole that is more assured, which allows the irony to do its work without dominating and spoiling the book. Then in ORLANDO the whole book is ironic and comic, which allows the dodgy ironic tone to be ... almost itself ironised, losing all its awkwardness as it becomes simply a comic mode.

I also reflect that the book currently describes a very elite world - Cambridge students and dons - which is fine in itself, but which casts a bad light on eg: VW's (I suppose slightly later) polemics against Arnold Bennett, complaining that one shouldn't describe the clothes and salaries of shopkeepers and so on. VW was making a serious aesthetic critique, but in context of a novel like this it comes across as class exclusion or disdain, which I don't think was what she intended. Put more simply, if you write about Cambridge dons then it doesn't look good to attack people who write about shopkeepers. (But Bennett was a big personality in his own right and doesn't, himself, seriously stand for 'the working classes' or anything like that, here.)

Grant & I Robert Forster
Go-Betweens co founder and co frontman memoir of times leading up to and in the band and after. I've got to a point where the band has split and they've toured as the 2 frontman Forster and the Grant of the title , Mclennan.
Pretty well written and I have been meaning to read this for a while and found it in a charity shop in a pristine copy which my shopping soon put paid to . like bummer.

Killers of the Flower Moon is v good indeed

(It’s the only time me and my partner have bought copies of a book at the same time so we didn’t have to wait for the other person to finish it first.)

Anyway! It’s a v compelling murder mystery that’s also about the Pinkertons and how the FBI started and how white supremacy became ingrained in American policing.

I'm reading Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and not feeling it. The narrators are pompous to beyond absurdity, the gestures towards unspeakable horror are far too vague to be unsettling, and some of the stories are just downright banal.