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

As I said, perhaps long ago, on a Literary Twitter thread, I think the "FW is best on Twitter" claim holds up rather well.

I suppose you can take Twitter itself out of this and just say "it works best in unexpected fragments which pop up cheerfully and without advertising any particular meaning or context".

we shd persuade ilx poster tim to issue it as a ltd edn box of fortune cookie mottos, calling cards, pencils and such

Now that is the best idea you've had ... all day.

(carried to death and oblivion with an umbrella and surgical mask on a table in a pub in North London)

(What voice could she have affected if not for the whimsy of her class?)

I finished "Double Indemnity" by James M. Cain. Apparently he wrote this fairly quickly in the aftermath of the success of "Postman Always Rings Twice", and it reads like he's returning to the same well. The novelty of using the first-person point of view to narrate a crime has worn off, and this reboot lacks the raffish, demotic voice and atmosphere that gave "Postman" much of its louche energy. This one is more about plot velocity and whodunit-style revelations that keep the reader guessing. Certainly worth a read, but I would rank it a notch lower than its predecessor.

i remember spitting out my coffee when i read this howler from Double Indemnity

I thought about Lola, how sweet she was, and the awful thing that I had done to her. I began subtracting her age from my age. She was nineteen, I'm thirty-four. That made a difference of fiteen years. Then I got to thinking that if she was nearly wenty, that would make a difference of only fourteen years. All of a sudden I sat up and turned on the light. I knew what that meant.

I was in love with her.

Haha, yeah, one of many tonally jarring passages.

Reading poet Simone White's 'or, on being the other woman,' her debut on a "larger" press— Duke U put it out. Interesting book about navigating motherhood, Black femininity, performance, the academy, sex, and lots of interesting prosaic bits about hip-hop, such as an extended riff on Future's psychological landscape and Black masculinity.

xpost haven't read the book, but the movie's always seemed off too, characterization-wise, and even when not in comparison to any of the three versions of Postman I've seen.

Maybe I've missed the off elements of the film. I just love Barbara Stanwyck so much, I can't think of much else when I'm watching it.

I thought about Lola, how sweet she was, and the awful thing that I had done to her. I began subtracting her age from my age. She was nineteen, I'm thirty-four. That made a difference of fiteen years. Then I got to thinking that if she was nearly wenty, that would make a difference of only fourteen years. All of a sudden I sat up and turned on the light. I knew what that meant.
I was in love with her.

This sounds like it's from a Kids In The Hall monologue.

Hankering for some Victorian pulp action so I picked up Guy Boothby's Doktor Nikola. So far the writing is atrocious, hoping the plot will gather enough momentum for me to tolerate this.

It's been a few decades since i read the book Double Indemnity which may have been as part of one of those Pulp fiction anthologies 4 in ones in the Black something series. I think I got it from the local library who got in a few of taht series in the mid 80s . From what I can remember the ending is pretty surreal am I remembering this right, may be from a critical text about the thing but does the wife turn into a giant bird woman. Think this is more a psychological quirk on her part but does she convince herself she has become a crane or something and dress accordingly, swim out to a boat and meet her denouement or am I thinking of something else. The film is more realistic and fatalistic Fred MCMurray and barbara Stanwyck and a different ending.

Haha, wow, that is a surreal ending, but that is from a different book (I wonder which?) Some aspects of the ending did stretch my credulity a bit, and also just the general default assumption of lots of noir fiction that any regular person is capable of committing terrible crimes given the right opportunity.

Fortunately (in this case) I'm not much of a film buff and I've seen very few of the classic film noirs so I'm encountering these books without preconceptions.

This is grotesque!

I am an expert at judging age from the physiognomic lines of the brow: he is sixteen years and four months of age. He is as handsome as the retractility of the claws in birds of prey; or, again, as the unpredictability of muscular movement in sores in the soft spot of the posterior cervical region; or, rather, as the perpetual motion rat-trap which is always reset by the trapped animal and which can go on catching rodents indefinitely and works even when it is hidden under straw; and, above all, as the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table!

(The subject of my paraphrase was intended to be "the best idea"; I would treasure finding a ltd edn box.)

I probably shouldn't have mentioned the movie of DE in this case, but will say that The Postman is even more effective as a novel than any of its screen adaptations: in the pages, there's no escape (into visual considerations, other production elements) from that voice---the narrator doesn't seem so much unreliable as just---wrong, misbegotten, almost beyond bad, certainly breaking it, splintering it, sniffing it, chewing it---

DI, rather

> juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table!

where's this from, in kinda lost in all the cross posting...

anyway, it's a nurse with wound album title.

NWW alb title comes from a quote by Lautréamont, who wrote Goth fave Les Chants de Maldoror.

one does not just chant into maldoror

meanwhile i'm reading solzhenitsyn's cancer ward -- i read abt a third of it when i was a student and then got distracted by my wild young life (lol) and never finished it. 40-odd years later i have begun again at the beginning and got further than i did last time

i'm inclined to feel it's a wee bit DO YOU SEE in its approach to certain things but i will finish it before i comment more fully on this

I finished VW's JACOB'S ROOM. By the end, I had softened. After all my complaints, I liked the book more. Maybe the book changed, maybe I did; became used to it or accepted it. At times I felt: yes, this passage *could* be one of the great literary attempts at a description of the contingency of life in modern London.

I was similar with THE WAVES, long ago. It greatly frustrated me (there was no ILX then to record this fact), then by the very end I felt: I am reading an epic account of the nature of life and death. I am moved.

The 1992 Penguin JACOB'S ROOM I am reading contains notes, some of which are impressive and useful gatherings of fact (a long time before Wikipedia), some of which are hugely excessive editorialising - usually hammering home ideas that "Woolf rejects the male sentence" and "Woolf mocks the arrogance of men". That should have been left to the Introduction, which also holds plenty of it. Notes should be defter and more restrained. The novel itself, as it happens, is often as satirical about women - possibly to excess - as it is about men.

The novel is quite strong, though, on the gradual approach of war, briefly describing battleships going to sea, and so on, as punctuations of the main human action.

Again: in the end, I liked and accepted the novel more than I had thought.

I've started William Cooper, SCENES FROM PROVINCIAL LIFE (1950). Breezy, chipper, very lightly / slightly comic, easy to read. A book I've owned for decades, having probably bought it from Ellis Books in Norwich, for 95p - it would have been one of the pretty orange Penguins that they put in the window to attract customers. Reading the books I actually already own occasionally seems a good idea.

The most surprising thing about this book is how sexual it is. The sex is almost all between the lines, yet very heavily implied. I suspect as a young lad - including when I bought the book - most of this would have gone over my head.

I think I brought a Penguin paperback with me to an appointment at UCLA decades ago and the doctor who happened to be English remarked upon it along similar lines (regarding the Penguin and its ability to be recognized).

I own the edition of Maldoror published by Exact Change. I think it was around when Alasdair M. recommended or cited it IIRC and I was reading Denton Welch whose works they also published. I am glad they did.

(One day I will finish/read Maldoror, Infinite Jest, some novels by Thomas Pynchon, Ulysses (with the notes), Aesthetic Theory, and more. It is just a matter of being sufficiently deprived.)

It is worth remarking that SCENES (1950) is set in the past - specifically 1939, on the eve of war, despite being a comedy. It's a curiously strong example of the case that some have made, that while "the historical novel" is meant to be set c. 60+ years in the past, you could write one about more recent times if what you wrote about was a historical crux. It's probably a relatively significant novel about that era, in the way that eg Orwell's COMING UP FOR AIR is.

Perhaps the period setting helps to explain how in the world of the novel, a degree of sexual proscription applies - you can have a woman back to your lodgings during the day, but not do anything untoward with her. Yet the main female character has also started going to mysterious bohemian art school parties where people drink and lie on the floor.

This woman, Myrtle, is insistent on marrying the protagonist, and is deflated or alienated whenever it becomes clear that he wishes to avoid this prospect.

I am reminded of Stan Barstow's A KIND OF LOVING, with the difference that this earlier novel is more middle-class than that (or certainly than others like Sillitoe, anyway). The protagonist is a science teacher after all.

I can find something poignant about the straitened, limited world of characters in works like this - who lack the media of later ages, who are forbidden from certain actions, who must remain respectable (no doubt even in their dress) - though having said that, I'm not sure their lives are experienced as that straitened. There is also a gay, or perhaps bisexual, character who has a 17-year-old boyfriend whom he has to see in secret at a cottage.

Characters are all deliberately, physically described, except for the protagonist, who is not visually described at all.

Finished the Simone White book on Friday, loved the way it ends— no epiphanies!

This afternoon finished Jayne Anne Phillips’ MACHINE DREAMS. Don’t understand why she isn’t better known, love her lyrical prose style that often includes dynamic forays into vernacular language.

The 1619 Project Nicole Hannah-Jones ed.
Collection of essays, poetry and short prose detailing black history in the US.
Have had this out for a few months. Need to get into it .
Am finding it interesting and pretty scathing.
I listened to the related podcast when it was new. So good to read the text too.

After Daybreak The Liberation of Belsen Ben Shephard
Good history of the months after the concentration camp fell into British hands. Seems more to have been handed over due to typhus being rampant than actually captured. This shows how things were initially mishandled due to non-Nazi antisemitism and too much red tape.
Thousands more died after the handover.
Very good read so glad I found it.

Dr Nikola strokes a big black cat, which I think might be the origin of that particular supervillain trope?

Small surprise that it is the baddie that attained iconic status in these books, though - the hero is thick as shit. He meets a young viscount, notices that the monk teaching him seems familiar, sees said monk send a telegram to Dr Nikola (whom he'd previously met, and who had introduced himself as a will-to-power creep); then meets said monk in civilian garb scheming with Nikola in London. Our hero gets recruited to accompany the young viscount on a trip to Australia, travels in a carriage with Dr Nikola, gets poisoned, recovers, manages to catch up with the viscount on a ship in southern Europe...and the viscount immediately falls sick after having been given coffee by the fake monk. Protagonist remarks that in the future he would learn that this was the monk's doing, but that at the time he seemed very attentive to the young lad and that even "The Lord of Lies himself" would have been convinced he only wanted to help. C'mon now!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/ba/A_Bid_for_Fortune_frontispiece.jpg/440px-A_Bid_for_Fortune_frontispiece.jpg

😻

Have you read JAP's BLACK TICKETS, table? That was the book of hers that really set me alight - incredibly powerful, lightening-bolt short fictions. Everything of hers I read after that felt disappointingly conventional to me :(

I'm reading Anne Tyler's The Accidential Tourist - it's fine, not sure why it's so acclaimed. Quite startled to find a minor (male) character called Dana Scully, written 8 years before the X Files.

remind me to ask you something when you've done.

Have you read JAP's BLACK TICKETS, table? That was the book of hers that really set me alight - incredibly powerful, lightening-bolt short fictions. Everything of hers I read after that felt disappointingly conventional to me :(

― Piedie Gimbel, Monday, July 25, 2022 2:52 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

ugh it's SO GOOD, nothing else compares. i've liked everything else i've read, but yeah, it's much more conventional literary fiction.

xxxpost The Accidental Tourist started well, but got too cute for me, but I may not have stayed with it long enough---did enjoy two of her earlier novels,Searching For Caleb and A Slipping-Down Life, esp. got a kick out of the barefoot boondocks indie singer's zen lyrics, like a pre-parody of early Michael Stipe (published in 1970). Also, Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant is supposed to be one of her best, though I haven't read it. If you like her at all, check those out.

said singer is in A Slipping-Down Life.

I must have bought SCENES FROM PROVINCIAL LIFE almost 30 years ago, but I read it in two days. It's enjoyable, light, breezy. It perhaps has the structure of farce, in that the same four central characters keep rotating in and out of scenes:

"I went to the cottage to meet Myrtle. When I arrived I found Tom making tea. 'What on earth are you doing here?' I spluttered. 'I'm waiting for Steve', he calmly explained, offering me a prawn sandwich".

Every other scene is like this (which I invented): protagonist Joe Lunn goes somewhere to meet a character and another character turns up. There are only really these four major characters - though there are supporting characters: the schoolboys in the science class; another, imperious and bombastic teacher; an odd authority figure, Robert in Oxford. The pattern gets so repetitive that I did feel that even over a short novel, Cooper (not his real name) had stretched his material too far.

A major motif is the woman (Myrtle) who wants to marry the male protagonist (Joe) - and his resistance, and the endless back & forth, the tortuous winding-down of their relationship over this. She's sad, he's evasive. It's all too realistic, in a way. Again, it probably doesn't need stretching out this long, with so little variation. It makes me wonder, though: did this pattern, the woman seeking marriage and the evasive male, become more pervasive at this point? I think of LUCKY JIM, A KIND OF LOVING, BILLY LIAR. Was there something driving it - such as a possibility of new freedom for unmarried males who couldn't really have had it before, and would thus have settled for marriage?

The novel is curiously, gently metafictional - very casually referring to what it will and won't include as a novel. The last lines are "I reach for a clean new note-book. I pick up my pen". It's quite confounding how an old book can be so metafictional and so conventional and unchallenging.

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

― flopson, Sunday, July 10, 2022 11:55 AM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol this book is amazing and insane

Meta-fictional and unchallenging because the author was not sufficiently inspired or did not have the reserves of energy to try anything more? or incapable? or unaware?

No, it's just a light, breezy book, not terribly serious.

I've started another attempt on Joseph Conrad, NOSTROMO (1904), which I didn't make it through - two years ago?

The language doesn't seem as thickly difficult to me this time, though the description of place and cast is dense. I feel that the narration is somehow sly. Perhaps the tone is jaded; at least seasoned.

I'm quite interested, again, in how one major character (so far) is a devotee of Garibaldi's revolution. Indeed the place of Italians in South America seems a feature.

koogs at 2:19 25 Jul 22

remind me to ask you something when you've done.

(re: accidental tourist) go on then...

I warmed to it a little by the end, sort of reminded me of olive kitteridge - difficult person has glimmers of self awareness - with the sharp edges smoothed off. The leary family were amusing if scarcely credible. I wouldn't rush to read another but my wife has downloaded a whole bunch so I might, I might.

mention of Conrad's language reminds me that at one point in Lord Jim a character asks "do you find me mad with the funk?".

Nostromo is dense but worth it. LJ's the Conrad I can't penetrate.

re accidental tourist. not sure it's a question with an answer, maybe something i don't understand about humans, or this human specifically. spoiler tags...

in the penultimate chapter he goes back to his wife. in the final chapter he goes back to muriel. why would you?

anyway, i'd recommend the film, the two leads pretty much nail the characters. i saw it almost by accident - i bought season pass for local 'cinema in the town hall' thing in hemel because there were 3 films in the season i wanted to see and it was cheaper to buy a ticket for everything. fried green tomatoes, crossing delancy, accidental tourist i think were the extra films i saw, all of a kind, really. ironically i can't remember the films i specifically wanted to see...

seeing the film prompted buying the book and the book led to quite a few more although i do confuse them somewhat. A Slipping Down Life is a standout. and i remember the one with the puppet theatre. Morgan's Passing i have, Ladder of Years. Tin Can Tree. The Clock Winder of the more recent books (spoiler - contains no actual clock winding). more.

Damn, Teenager looks fantastic.