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

Also I really want to listen to the motorcycle piece again with my mom

Allan Jones Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
Melody Maker scribe then editor and founder of uncut magazine's anthology of anecdotes about dealing with various musicians etc.
Quite good if you like this kind of thing.

I have owned multiple copies of Gavin Lambert's The Slide Area in multiple houses over multiple decades, but never actually read it... perhaps I should

Finished a few books over the past few weeks, including some chaps (most notable being by a young Indigenous writer to watch out for, Hataałiinez Wheeler). These included:

Rabih Alameddine, The Wrong End of the Telescope
Piero Heliczer, a purchase in the white botanica
Steve Malmude, The Bundle: Selected Poems

The Heliczer was super interesting from a poetic and cultural standpoint— he was a schizophrenic who collaborated at times with Warhol, Gerard Malanga, George Whitman, the Schneemans, etc. He fathered children all over the world. And his poetry was often quite good— a fine mix of concrete and abstract language congealing into sort of dream-like, surprising poems. Worth checking out.

Also the Alameddine was great, he is one of our best living novelists as far as I'm concerned— The Wrong End deals with a trans woman doctor who goes to the island of Lesbos during the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015. It's wrenching but also episodic, and thus pretty easy to read.

Oh yeah---had forgotten name & title, but your description of Alameddine's novel reminds me: some intriguing reviews, all favorable.

Been reading Brazilian (Giovana Madalosso), Catalan (Jaume Cabré) and Portuguese (Mário Zambujal) authors, but none of the books I read have been translated into English so have nothing to contribute here.

Just put myself through a re-read of The Information by Martin Amis for reasons I can't quite fathom. It is very bloated and not very good.

Moving on to either Luke Cassidy's Iron Annie or Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan, which comes highly blurbbed by Anne Enright and given that I've spent much of the past few months reading (and pretty much loving) everything Enright has published I might opt for that.

recent reads:

Sarah Schulman - After Delores
Sesshu Foster - World Ball Notebook
Elfriede Jelinek - The Piano Teacher
Adolfo Bioy Casares - The Invention of Morel and Other Stories

& just finishing up Rafael Chirbes' Cremation

I am reading A Good Little School, about Jefferson County (Colorado) Open School. It's an "alternative" school that I had the good fortune to attend back in the 70s. It's still going. Their educational approach is remarkable. The book is written by an educator and takes a professional approach, with lots of input from students, staff and parents (which is very consistent with the school's philosophy). Not for everyone, maybe, but it's an examination of a way of educating the whole person that could/should serve as a model.

zak, did you like the Foster? i think he's incredible

Yes, he's one of my favorites! City of the Future (in particular) is one of the books I am always trying to convince people I know to read.

How is the Chirbes?

I picked up 'World Ball Notebook' in 2017 on a whim at a lovely shop in SF, was completely blown away, and have read a book of his ever year since then, including the novels— I had some trouble stomaching Atomik Aztex but it was worth it in the end, plus my copy was inscribed (twice!) to some old friend of his who taught at Berkeley and passed away.

I read most of Atomik Aztex stuck in an airport -- appropriately claustrophobic and bleak and grotesque. I'm glad I read it, but it's not one I return to like his others. Almost an opposite reading experience.

I have mixed feelings about Chirbes' Cremation. It's the first of his I've read and I may try another. The late-stage capitalism in post-Franco Spain context is not something with which I am familiar, and some of those setting details are engrossing. It's a character study: dense internal monologue chapters alternating between different characters, mostly members of one family, intertwined perspectives, and I ended up liked the ambling, pace ("understated plot," maybe). Has some *underworld* plot elements and stock tropes that I found a little too prestige TV for my tastes.

I finished Black Wings Has My Angel last night. It was like a master class in how to write a crime noir novel. The narration is carefully pared down to a series of vivid, highly concrete details, through which the story takes on a kind of hyper-realism. That approach also allows the story to incorporate lots of (male) fantasy elements about sex, violence and alcohol while retaining its vivid sense of realism. It's a neat trick and this one was of far higher quality than the run of the mill "booze, bullets & broads" crime noir.

Afterwards I read about the first 60 pages of Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz. She is obviously a natural-born sensualist, a self-dramatist and a romantic, but all that fits perfectly with her being a child of Hollywood insiders (on the 'talent' side of the business, not the 'investor' side) and so the overall effect charming rather than annoying.

I finished reading James Rebanks, ENGLISH PASTORAL (2020). It comprises 3 parts: one describing life on his grandfather's old hill farm; one describing new, industrial / agribusiness practices; one describing what the author is now trying to do with the farm - which is focused on creating spaces for wildlife.

The main message is that industrial farming, chemicals, homogenization, efficiency, etc, which have produced more food and made it cheaper, have been bad for the land, for wildlife and plants, and are not sustainable. I am highly sympathetic to this view and glad that this farmer has reached it. However, I am not sure that he squares the circle in terms of marrying sustainability to productivity. That is: if we agree to drop the pesticides etc and become more traditional, diverse and nature-friendly, won't farming be less productive and will it be able to feed people?

Perhaps it will. He talks of the importance of local food. Again I am sympathetic in principle. Perhaps in fact the issue is cost. Perhaps sustainable farming *can* produce enough food, but it would or should be more expensive. Then, of course, many people would say that food is already too expensive - especially the way prices are now going up. It is probably a grim irony that food prices are now rising but not for the good reasons that this farmer would like them to.

I am quite convinced by this farmer's account of how good his new farming is for nature. I support him. I worry that even these good efforts will be overtaken by things far beyond his control, like climate breakdown.

The book is mostly well written, sometimes 'poetic' about nature, and makes its arguments convincingly. The rhetoric can, though, be more repetitive than it needs to be, and the book thus probably could have been slightly shorter than 280 pages.

That is: if we agree to drop the pesticides etc and become more traditional, diverse and nature-friendly, won't farming be less productive and will it be able to feed people?

One possibility is that slow food production could be larger proportion of GDP: more could be devoted to producing essentials carefully.

I am enjoying the mordant gallows humor in The Tsar of Love and Techno. It is strange to think that some part of it takes place in the 1990s and early 2000s, which may sound like ancient history for some posters. There is a time warp to living in Siberia and one related perhaps to COVID and its fallout.

In KSR's Pacific Edge, everyone (in OC) can have a vegetable garden rather than a swimming pool in their backyard.

To address the question of affordability, I think the ideal would be global informed subsistence farming and sociocultural intelligence and government policy to favor local consumption and doing without where temptation is socially constructed. Information on farming practices could come from many sources.

it's also important to remember that as food options have grown in western countries, so has the amount of energy needed to transport those goods to stores. simultaneously, food waste has grown to be an immeasurably large problem.

Related to what youn notes is the fact that the spectacle of *excess* and *abundance* is also socially constructed, and can be changed— what if people began rejecting out-of-season produce as wasteful and shitty, because it is? No one needs strawberries year round!

Representation Stuart Hall.
seems to be a course text book but is filled with comment on the act of Representation from hall and various authors he has selected.
I find the subject pretty interesting, it covers/overlaps several other disciplines I'm interested in Semiotics/linguistics etc etc
I think I may have got myself stuck with too many thick books for the time of year. A bit hot to engage with things as deeply as i would like. But looking forward to get further into this.

finished Michael Lewis the Fifth Risk
Which I have come across other media tied into. I'm remembering the ending subject of working out drift on shipwrecked etc objects/people at sea from a couple of places from a couple of years ago. Listening to so many podcasts etc that I'm not remembering exactly what came from where from a couple of years back. Just that it presumably did tie in to either this book , which came out in the wake of Trump taking over and misusing the government departments, neglecting them, understaffing them etc etc either this book or the person talked about in it.
Adam Conover has used the book as the source for his latest tv series The G-Word which was also pretty interesting.

Think I am either going to read The Book of V: Opening Pandora's Box by Catherine Blackledge which I inherited fro a girlfriend 16 years ago but never finished or go into I Am Damo Suzuki which again I started but didn't finish this time about 2 years ago.

I read Andrew Holleran’s Kingdom of Sand for my book club, and almost everyone hated it when we discussed it (these are all gay men). They thought that he hadn’t progressed psychologically from the adoration of beauty and the homosexual self-hatred he wrote about in 1978’s Dancer From the Dance, his first and most acclaimed novel.

It really seemed to strike a nerve. It was about the slow diminishment of the narrator’s life as a single gay man in his 60s moving to rural Florida to take care of his dying parents, and about his sexual encounters involving bathrooms and adult bookstores in rural locations (which was definitely a thing for gay men in the past), and I think people thought it was too focused on loss of dignity. Well, of course it was, that was what it was about.

“One of the great appeals of Florida has always been the sense that the minute you get here you have permission to collapse.”

“There is a delicate undercurrent beneath get-togethers among singles on holidays that mingles the comfort of having a friend to relieve your isolation with the realization that the two of you have nobody else.”

It was a story that ruminated and circled back so many times to his isolation and sexual frustration that it was hard to get bearings on where you were located in the narrative. But I liked it, it was kind of funny, was very honest about where he was coming from, and was a realistic portrayal of a particular historical subset of gay men

Andrew Holleran is now 79, so pretty old, and I think that this story is about his generation. Edmund White is even older, 82, and writes and talks about the same stuff

I have appreciation for both White and Holleran, but it’s always because of their early achievements

What are their best books?

I think for Andrew Holleran it’s Dancer From the Dance from 1978, and for Edmund White it’s A Boy’s Own Story from 1982 (the first in a trilogy that included The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The farewell Symphony)

they are period pieces, though

I started Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A STUDY IN SCARLET (1887): the first Sherlock Holmes story, in fact a short novel.

A reminder of Dr John Watson's past as a surgeon to the army in the empire; and Holmes also is first encountered at a medical school. In fact for good or ill I've found myself reading this slightly through the lens of the first episode of SHERLOCK, with, yes, Benedict Cumberbatch.

I find the novels generally uncharming and overextended -- it's a shame that Hound of the Baskervilles is so well-known, as the mystery is too obvious and the book as a whole is quite dull. "Sign of Four" is the best -- there's a jaunty penny dreadful vibe and the flashbacks are more fun.

(As such Sign of Four kind of works through the lens of Young Sherlock Holmes)

What are their best books?

― dow, Thursday, August 11, 2022 10:21 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I think for Andrew Holleran it’s Dancer From the Dance from 1978, and for Edmund White it’s A Boy’s Own Story from 1982 (the first in a trilogy that included The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The farewell Symphony)

― Dan S, Thursday, August 11, 2022

I've been on a White kick. His memoir about reading is lovely, and his last few novels, though minor, are delights. I'd say start with Our Young Man.

As for Holleran, he wrote a slim novel about melancholy and Washington DC and Henry Adams called Grief; one of the decade's best.

> A reminder of Dr John Watson's past as a surgeon to the army in the empire

afghanistan as well, which suited the tv updating

must've seen a hundred versions of HoftheBs but i still couldn't tell you the reveal. maybe i should read it and it'll finally click.

Because of its recent mention on ILB I picked up a cheap used copy of Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann and took it on a camping trip. The slice of history it documents is well worth the telling, especially because the history of native american tribes after the wars of extirpation were over and the remnants of the tribes were swept into reservations has been so thoroughly buried and ignored.

My edition is front-loaded with pages full of ecstatic blurbs from reviewers in a couple dozen USA Sunday newspapers about how "taut" and "suspenseful" the book is, which only confirms how such reviewers hand out superlative praise with wild abandon. The prose is good workmanlike journalistic writing, but nothing amazing.

I'm still reading Eve's Hollywood, but piecemeal. It lends itself to that treatment, because it's just a collection of short vignettes.

I finished A STUDY IN SCARLET. The name derives from blood: 'Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon? There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it' (49). Unusually poetic, but oddly inaccurate, as life is not colourless but, most people would say, colourful.

The book is very oddly structured: halfway through it turns from Holmes to a 55-page story, narrated by an omniscient voice (not Dr Watson) with nothing to do with the London events (and often with a prim Victorian style that is, as in the descriptions of the girl Lucy Ferrier, too close to parody), about a feud and murder among Mormons in Utah. This must have seemed very exotic in 1887 (indeed it still does). But it all makes the story rather askew from the Detective Club point of view of being 'fair to the reader', etc - there is no way that a reader could guess at any of this material. There is very little hint even that Holmes has begun to investigate it.

The murderer is taking a righteous revenge for which he has waited many years. It's also absurd, then, that his method is to give his victims a 50/50 chance by giving them a choice of pills, one containing poison, and taking the other himself. Plainly this could completely defeat the project of revenge, except that he believes that the choice of pill is dictated by 'Providence' (p.153).

The earlier pages on the meeting of Holmes and Watson, and the general experience of watching Holmes investigate a crime, are appealing, but past the halfway mark the book's direction is rather unexpected.

i read study in scarlet at school and i think not since: at the time i too was struck and a bit baffled by the long digression into mormon feuds (not sure i'd even heard of mormons at that point), and also (as a schoolchild interested in chemistry) fascinated that there existed a "great alkali plain", which seemed like too much alkali

Maybe life is a colorless skein to the speaker: Holmes, I suspect.

From Oxford Languages:

skein
/skān/
Learn to pronounce
noun
a length of thread or yarn, loosely coiled and knotted.
a tangled or complicated arrangement, state, or situation.
"the skeins of her long hair"
a flock of wild geese or swans in flight, typically in a V-shaped formation

learn to pronounce!!

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra (Chechens and also perhaps Russians around the turn of the century; the intersection of globalism, Stalinism, Islam, nationalism, censorship, and perhaps also this artist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Zakharov-Chechenets; just started so perhaps many things; now the scene is a hospital during wartime)

Oh yeah, reminds me of seeing his latest, Mercury Pictures Presents, about refugees in 1940s Hollywood: local library has it, maybe I'll get it there.

I'm now reading H.G. Wells, THE INVISIBLE MAN (1897).

Two things strike me. One, the anger of the Invisible Man - a figure who seems to be dangerous not because he has a plan for world domination, just because he's furious with everyone. Two, the rural English setting (lots of Sussex village dialect), so typical of Wells - in that each of the major SF narratives (except Dr Moreau? haven't read that yet) seem to start from such a contented (suburban Surrey in THE WAR OF THE WORLDS), respectable (local worthies in THE TIME MACHINE) or bucolic (Kent countryside in THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON) English world into which the new technology or nova violently intrudes.

Remarkable career to have produced 5 foundational SF narratives by about 1901 (time travel, alien invasion, space exploration, superpowers, mad scientist experimenting with genetics), then, I believe, largely left SF behind and gone into other literary modes.

A long time ago a cousin brought a vinyl pressing of the infamous War Of The Worlds radio broadcast to my house and told me the blatant lie that Orson Welles was his son. I believed this to be a fact until I was 13. A humiliation I never really fully recovered from! Was just reading his wiki and struck by how shagging around he did for someone who wasn't in the best of health. And his early years were rougher than I expected.

A bunch of holiday reads.

Lee Child - Tripwire. My second Reacher! It's crap but still.

Harriet Walter - Lady Macbeth. An actor's account of playing the role (alongside Tony Sher). Full of insight.

Edward St. Aubyn - Never Mind/Bad News. The first two Patrick Melrose novels. Literature as revenge? I'd started reading the first before realising these were largely autobiographical. The distilled rage of the first book makes it more effective. The second, a book about the phenomenology of addiction, loses its way a bit.

Ed Guerro - Do The Right Thing. BFI book about the film.

Han Kang - The Vegeterian. This hit me pretty hard. A book about resistance, states of grace. The book it most reminded me of was The Life and Times of Michael K by Coetzee.

Simon Callow - Being An Actor. I sort of expected to hate this. It's full of self-regard (and loathing) but it's hugely insightful in places.

Bohumil Hrabal - I Served the King of England. A garrulous picaresque. Huge fun and increasingly moving. Also, the second book in as many days about decorating women's bodies with flowers (albeit real ones, as compared to the vegeterian, and not exploitative).

Currently reading Cicely Berry's The Actor and the Text and in a weird echo of the pinefox, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

Wow, spelt vegetarian wrongly twice there (and missed a capital).

Speaking of weird echoes, I am reading Ingeborg Bachmann’s collected poems and took a photo of one I particularly liked this morning; twelve hours later, an acquaintance whom I follow on Instagram posted that poem along with some others. We don’t talk on a regular basis, and live in completely different areas. Spooky!

Finished THE INVISIBLE MAN. I might have expected the character's fate to be ingenious and poetically apt, but in fact he just gets beaten up my a mob. The character's level of furious anger is never really explained. Nor does Wells go into the reasons for his seeming turn into madness, as he proclaims a reign of terror in which The Invisible Man will rule.

I think that I might have imagined that this book would contain pathos; that the title character would be a victim - rather as I imagine the Elephant Man to be. But he isn't. He chooses to make himself invisible, then steals from and hurts dozens of people without compunction. At most, I think that Wells implies that invisibility has driven him even madder and angrier than he was before.

Tété-Michel Kpomassie - An African in Greenland
Elizabeth Taylor - The Soul of Kindness.

it's years since i read the invisible man (and for some reason i always think it's by stevenson till i'm reminded, perhaps bcz of similarity to jekyll and hyde?) but my takeaway was certainly always that the IM's inevitable isolation was extremely mentally corrosive, and that this quickly overwhelmed the opportunities for petty crime and revenge and whatever -- and that that's the real subject of the story, that the removal by whatever means of any form of companionship is a psychological catastrophe and so there's no likelihood of him becoming a "superman" or whatever

a detail that i always recall is that the shiny bits at the back of a cat's eyes aren't rendered invisible (which is how we can know the cat is also going mad with terror at its new state, bcz the IM can watch its progress)

A long time ago a cousin brought a vinyl pressing of the infamous War Of The Worlds radio broadcast to my house and told me the blatant lie that Orson Welles was his son. I believed this to be a fact until I was 13. A humiliation I never really fully recovered from! Was just reading his wiki and struck by how shagging around he did for someone who wasn't in the best of health. And his early years were rougher than I expected.

― calzino, Monday, 15 August 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Welles really fucked.

wait was welles the cousin's dad or his son (fibbingly speaking)?

no that Wells beget Welles was the fib! A ridiculous thing to believe. He was a bit of a rudeboy, he goes over to visit Gorky and comes back to England with his gf on his arm.