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

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.

amazing work all round

Next they'll be telling you that the guy who directed Let it Be was Orson Welles' son.

I haven't read The Invisble Man, but Claude Rains is equally FURIOUS in the James Whale film.

Doesn't David Thomson suggest that Welles also sired Peter O'Toole on his teenage ramblings through Ireland?

Sadly just finished Claire-Louise Bennett's CHECKOUT 19 - first book I've read this year which I never wanted to end. I absolutely adored POND a few years ago, but thought it was such a beautifully peculiar one-off that there was little chance of her following it up without diminishing returns. But it's great. Interesting companion to Tove Ditlevsen's COPENHAGEN TRILOGY which I read last month - except in place of Danish tenements, typewriters and tarts, a lot more cheap biros, Marlborough Reds and Brighton guesthouses. Also put me in mind of Kate Briggs' THIS LITTLE ART with its deft, intimate, moving phenomenology of reading and writing.

Have also been reading Joe Moran - his lovely recent books on shyness and failure. I think JM has quietly and diligently turned out to be one of the greatest living English essayists. So many brilliant details in these books - there are a couple of pages in IF YOU SHOULD FAIL where he manages to weave together Johann Cruyff, Virginia Woolf, Huizinga and the Brooklyn Dodgers and somehow manages to be very succinct, modest and wise.

I've started THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1890) for the second time. (The first time was merely a false start when I only read a few pages.) Essentially it's in the category of books that I happen to own, and ought to read before buying or even borrowing anything else.

I hadn't realised how epigrammatic it was - just in the way that we know Wilde was - like one of his plays. I had perhaps thought there would be more novelistic narrative business in it; perhaps there will be, I'm still only in chapter two. Perhaps Wilde really cared more for dialogue than narrative and description. I have a sense that aspects of Wilde are apportioned to Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wooton (not so much to Dorian Gray), ie that they each carry an aspect of their creator.

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.

More recent narratives and modes seem to be about a struggle with nature, that is also about being a part of it, and adaptation, internal and external, to post-apocalyptic circumstances (a slight shift in focus with less forward movement).

I was legitimately confused for a few seconds— in the US, at least, when someone writes INVISIBLE MAN, one immediately thinks of Ellison, not Wells. Or at least I do— I have never given HG Wells a single thought until today.

He wrote a lot of short stories too; local library has a collection of 50 that I sometimes take off the shelf and read in-house, should just check it out and plow through. Here's a .pdf of "The Land Ironclads," published in 1903, set in a near-future European land war (the Science Fiction Encyclopedia site has an very detailed entry about this subgenre: they knew it was coming). I'm struck now by the persistence of "gun culture" imagery: pastoral manly can-do self-defense, also the sporting aspect, in peacetime, where everybody knows the rules--vs. intrusion of pushbutton warfare, AK-47s and drones---the aging war correspondent here picks up on all of that (btw, something in his tone, though not wet, reminds me that average man lived about 45 years at turn of century) http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0604041h.html

*a* very

is pinefox going through all of the league of extraordinary gentlemen?

beardsley next

I finished Killers of the Flower Moon and can recommend it purely on the strength of its stunning portrayal of how pervasively racist and corrupt Oklahoma was in the 1920s, which is not to say the rest of the USA was substantially different, only that the book doesn't try to cover the entire nation.

I then read some more of Eve's Hollywood. I'm a third done and she's still telling tales of her teenage life, and as often happens with collections of short pieces published haphazardly over a period of years, the constant return to the same themes and obsessions is becoming repetitive.

Looking for something more substantial, I began The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand, a history of how the US Civil War catalyzed new intellectual and philosophical approaches to US social problems. It looks to be very interesting. I'll see how that develops.

I liked Dorian Gray, it can feel a bit flimsy at times but it’s by turns joking and serious, like someone laughing with you and then throwing a drink in your face. Are you reading the unredacted version? I think I’ve only ever read the censored versions.

Koogs: yes, I am accidentally rediscovering the fin de siecle.

I have in the past considered reading Aubrey Beardsley's UNDER THE HILL - his one novel I believe.

Gyac: I think the version I am reading is quite scholarly (though merely a Penguin), in that it has endnotes stating where things have been changed from other versions. So quite probably this is an unredacted version.

quartermaine and nemo and nina harker are the others iirc.

(in fact the point of the books is that they are *entirely* populated with fictional characters. including molesworth and gang as the rolling stones analog)

I have an Olympia Press/Traveller's Companion edition of Under the Hill - says 'completed by John Glassco'?

After the Wells discussion here, it was pleasing to see a copy of The Time Machine, with Wells' name on the cover, turn up in the final episode of Better Call Saul.

I had to correct myself when I saw that paperback cos I thought I had it then realised it was a First Men In The Moon apparently from the same series. Bought it in UWO in London Ontario.
Great covers anyway look like pulp sci fi magazine ones.

The Penguin Book Of The British Short Story, Vol.1 - Edited by Philip Hensher. I enjoyed the second volume of this, which goes from Wodehouse to Zadie Smith (I have no opinion on the compiler as an author), so thought I'd backtrack to the first. REALLY rough start - a Defoe sketch of a ghost story that may be of historical interest but is painfully generic; Swift being his usual "I'm saying one thing but mean the opposite DO YOU SEE" self in an essay that's basically just complaining about a servant; a Henry Fielding story about a woman who is - gasp - A LESBIAN which again is historically interesting, certainly for queer studies, but I'm not going to read a 18th century dude on this topic for fun; Hannah Moore and Mary Lamb competing to see who can be the most saccharine incarnation of old timey gentility (a fruit selling girl abused by her landlady gets saved by a cop's wife and taught Christianity and a small child visits her grandmother on a farm, respectively). Things get better starting with a Thackeray story and from thereon it's mostly reliable big names, but boy did I have to do some skipping to get there.

The compiler's contention that the British short story is "probably the richest, most varied and historically extensive in the world" feels a bit citation needed as well.

That's an incredible comment, but no surprise coming from Hensher.

Was reading this short yesterday. I've had more luck with Latin America.

You can read Elisa's translation of "The Flies", which appears in BEYOND, at our website now: https://t.co/JeQB6zWx4x pic.twitter.com/0mzGfbNBKX

— Sublunary Editions (@sublunaryeds) August 16, 2022

Horacio Quiroga is great. See also Felisberto Hernández.

Home Eoin O'Broin
left wing politician's argument for social housing. Looking at the effects of a bill passed in the mid 90s taht has had pretty negative consequences in terms of housing. THough presumably at least supposedly done for the common good.
I caught the local launch of this and have meant to read it ever since.
Pretty interesting anyway.

I Am Damo Suzuki Damo Suzuki, Paul Woods
cowritten memoir pf one time Can frontman. I thought this would be more in his voice but has a lot of 3rd person description as well as oral history from those he was around. It also seems to go through Can a lot faster than I was expecting, only has a couple of chapters with him in the band before he leaves with his Jehovah's Witness wife whose religion he soon leaves behind too.
He went on to be a salaryman in a German branch of a Japanese firm for the next two and a half decades which is where i've got to so far.

finished
Mother of Invention Katrine Marcal.
starts off with some decent ideas and refers to some interesting facts but I think is argued poorly and tries to beat one over the head with too many things that are not as fully supported as the author would like. I think there are other books on the subject which argue the points better and I think the author cites them in her bibliography.
I'll look into those cos I would like to have a well argued version of the basic argument. Does seem a little like something that might be seen as white feminism and could be so much more.

Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory Nancy Fraser, Rahel Jaeggi
The 2 authors dialogue about the history and basic principles of Capitalism.
THink I might have done better not to rush read teh last few chapters in order to get book back and borrow more.
Cos i think what I did tale in was pretty worthwhile, think I am going to try to read more by both authors. & have a bibliography to work through.

& borrowed
Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir
which I think I got pointed to by tie ins with The Northman some of the research for which was done by the author.
Not really looked into this yet but should be pretty interesting. The role of woman in the Viking world which has recently been shown to have been more ethnically diverse than some would like to see it. & IO think most pre Industrial Revolution societies had a different attitude to the breakdown of gender work divide etc so will be good to see what is said here.

&
God is Red: A Native View of Religion Vine Deloria Jr.,
which looks into Native American understandings of religion etc and was something I heard referred to elsewhere. I think it was in the bibliographies of Thomas King's the Inconvenient Indian and the book on Bordertowns by native American authors i read earlier this year

if the defoe is "the apparition of mrs veal", it's also often cited as a precursor to the modern ghost story (not at all the same thing of course as the modern short story): as always with defoe -- who was a professional journalist at a fast-evolving highly conflicted time -- you have to be careful what's intended as fact, what's fable, what's grift and what's crusade (some of his writing is literally all four at once lol, and the ghost stories are i think generally categorised as "true", in the sense that defoe was inventing the weekly world news here rather than tales from the crypt

i checked why hensher is deplored on ilx (mid-level not-great novelist who writes amusingly rude reviews that ppl often don't agree with?) and i can't tell from daniel's summary what his stance as editor is on when the "short story" per se arrived as we understand it (mid-19th century makes sense, it's a product of a specific kind of magazine ecology) and what its actual relationship is to its precursors -- the examples listed are all in a sense of a kind of precursor of course, in that post-arrival the short story presumably picked up some of the readers who'd favoured one of the precursors, but they're also all performing a very different function for an identifiably different primary readership (different from the "short story" but also different from one another), and almost all also flourished before the novel proper (aka the "long story" haha) has settled into an agreed-on role

I met Hensher once. As far as I recall he was not especially pleasant or polite. But that is of no course no comment on his fiction.

"i checked why hensher is deplored on ilx (mid-level not-great novelist who writes amusingly rude reviews that ppl often don't agree with?)"

He is a South London local, see him now and then and will be sure to pass this on.

mark, Hensher goes into the genealogy of the short story in his intro: basically he sets up one camp as placing the short story as a 19th century invention, another as taking a wider view that might take in the Canterbury Tales and Manderville, and himself, I guess, somewhere in the middle (always a comfortable strategy to suggest two warring camps and yourself as the reasonable middle ground ofc).

Some of the more engaging parts of his intro are about the lost ecology of short story magazines and how reading stories in those differs from our current main way of consuming them, i.e. single author collections

The Defoe is indeed the one you cited - I did indeed assume it was included for its pioneering role in the ghost story, and truth be told I had a good enough time with it, tho having read many of those it certainly didn't stand out much

so i finally finished cancer ward, which i first began reading in like 1980 lol

i will post some thoughts at some point

i liked it mostly but the nobel shd have gone to césaire

Did you go back and start over from the 1980 bits?

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.

― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, August 10, 2022

Other themes: friendship between men, rivalry between sisters, the microsocieties that evolve during wartime (I think my mother's family got by doing laundry and making bread (probably steamed not baked) for the U.S. Army; I'm not sure how my father's family survived; I'm guessing it was not an issue so therefore not as memorable or my father just doesn't talk very much)

I'm guessing the medical terminology was deliberately acquired and is not as convincing or moving as the art and history of art.

dow: i restarted tho even then the restart was also a bit bumpy (ie i re-began it two years ago and then there was a hiatus again and this time i didn't go back)

now i am reading little-known obscurity the satanic verses

I had known of some relation between A REBOURS and DORIAN GRAY, but hadn't realised how pivotal it was. It seems that Husymans' novel has a huge influence on the character and determines much of his course in life - though Wilde for whatever reason doesn't name the book or author.

Much of the book is more readable than I'd expected, When Wilde here does get away from dialogue and into more extended 3rd-person narrative, it doesn't always go well. I'm thinking especially of the strangely distended catalogues of historical facts that DG gets interested in, about which king owned which jewel, and so on - in Chapter XI. This particular section is at least as tedious as some people like to say the catalogues in the second half of Ulysses (Cyclops, Circe) are - in fact usually much more tedious, as Joyce is usually being comic.

The question of what DG's 'sins' are remains, thus far, murky. They dare not speak their names. It seems in part to involve drugs; opium dens for instance. One possibly interesting fact is that it doesn't seem to be all homosexual - it is implied that he has corrupted and disgraced women as well, even after his first disastrous romance with Sibyl Vane. That episode surprised me (DG is in love with a woman!?) and reminded me a bit of an old Guardian article headed something like 'James Dean: his secret straight life'.

I sense a relation between Wilde's precious narrative style and a) that of Joyce's Portrait (where that style is arguably ironised) and b) a bit more surprisingly perhaps, that of Virginia Woolf. The link in the latter case (and even, come to think of it, in the former) would probably be Walter Pater, whose sister, as I recall, taught Woolf.

I am only 2/3 through and thus my impression of the book is far from complete.