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

I'm most of the way through my first ever Patricia Highsmith: THE GLASS CELL (1964). It concerns a man wrongfully imprisoned, his attempts to be free, what he does when he gets out. The descriptions of prison life are grim and detailed but the convict somewhat adapts to it.

I have come to find this novel compelling. I keep reading on. I find that PH doesn't engage in anything fancy: she just tells us, in order, what the character does and sees, thinks and feels. His thoughts and feelings change, sometimes quickly, and he thinks about this. She tells us. The directness is so effective, maybe because the situation is quite unusual.

Thinking about directness, I think of Hemingway and Carver and my uncertainty about how good they are. FWIW my sense is that EH was overrated, RC probably better and more intriguing. Highsmith seems to me to outdo these writers, here, not by being any more elaborate, but just by telling a more interesting story. The novel *does* slightly resemble something Carver could have done - the gradual examination of a troubled man's moods - but I am not sure that he would have risen to tell this story, at this length.

Cather also superior to Hemingway.

I hope I'll get time in future to enjoy Ross Macdonald at length, as others have done.

But I note that his work is hard to find in the UK. This week in 3 major, large London bookshops and 2 major university libraries, I found one novel, THE UNDERGROUND MAN. I never see him in any 2nd-hand shop. To be sure, one can buy much online - my one is 2nd-hand that way - but if it's a 2nd-hand book, condition can then be uncertain. And with a writer I like, I'd still like to see them represented a little on the shelves of shops and libraries.

Highsmith on the other hand has been kept in print and colourful new covers to attract browsers. I daresay she deserves it.

I listened to the Better Read Than Dead episode on the Talented Mr Ripley a few weeks ago which was interesting and had a different perspective on a number of factors. Ripley's aspirations, Highsmith's attitude to the world which I think seemed a tad snobbish , and a few other things. The presenters are white American leftists who can be pretty obnoxious but I find them listenable.

I watched the French 60s film of the book last year Plein Soleil/Purple Noon which was quite good too. & the 90s US film of it when it came out and a couple of times since

Slightly surprised to hear about the scarcity of Macdonald in London bookshops, pinefox. Penguin reissued a number of Lew Archer books in a uniform edition not very long ago:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/64658/ross-macdonald

As for secondhand, you used to see the 1980 Allison & Busby paperback editions quite often, and I think they may have even been remaindered at some point. Steve Holland has a nice selection of earlier UK covers on his Bear Alley website:

https://bearalley.blogspot.com/2017/04/ross-macdonald-cover-gallery.html

Sometimes Highsmith's directness is actually serving an indirect purpose - ie the lead character's seemingly straightforward thoughts, feelings etc are slowly revealed to be delusional, even psychopathic, the narrator's perception of the world subtly askew. I haven't read The Glass Cell, so not sure if it's the case with that one. But I wouldn't be surprised if this prisoner actually turned out to be as guilty as hell. We're pretty much all as guilty as hell in Highsmith land.

You can't really go wrong with 50s/60s Highsmith, but there's a definite decline after that - the books become a bit more episodic rather than tightly plotted, and the writing not so good. The Glass Cell is good, but there are plenty better.

Would love to find all those Macdonalds on a shelf!

LRB shop for instance has zero.

What you say about Highsmith, Ward Fowler, rings true even on what I've read so far.

hemingway is like the ramones i think: an extreme expression at a hinge-moment of a collective shift in sensibility, a sweeping out of the attics of the mass literary mind

his contemporaries who were better ( or "better") were no way so evidently associated (let alone congratulated for) with the shift: they had made a different, far less stark, less embattled relationship with the past, where he was the posterboy for the swerve, which was invaluable for journalism among other things, and got a long pass as a consequence… you were just onside with him even when you weren't nodding in agreement at the stances taken (viz re the spanish civil war)

(the exception here being gertrude stein probably, and i'm not sure if anyone today considers her "better" than EH, so) (but his ear is quite like hers -- attuned to everything that chimes in with what's being left unsaid)

(analogy with ramones doesn't entirely work lol as the attics of 70s rock and pop had barely been stacking up their lumber for merely a decade, whereas the hemingway moment clears out something like 60 or 70s of approach to sentences and organisation and deciding what counts as assumed) (but the point is that anyone saying "the ramones are overrated" is alomost always misunderstanding why they meant something when they did)

I think it is something of a matter of record that EH was directly influenced by Stein.

I think most literary people now would say Stein is better than EH. (I expect that responses to your post may confirm this.)

I don't share this view; I don't like her, and am not very impressed by him either.

Unsure how far I agree with the broad Mark S point here. Could be said that Joyce and Pound among others (including Stein of course) had already altered attitudes to sentences, minimalism, etc, before EH really got going. But EH presumably more influential in journalism.

I don't know EH's later work at all, only the 1920s really.

I should add that while talking about EH may always be worthwhile, introducing him was a bit of a red herring in relation to Highsmith. I was just thinking about her directness and why I find it more effective and interesting than others'. I don't think her novel resembles EH much.

Many young men with literary aspirations discover (discovered?) Hemingway in high school, become infatuated, naturally so, since so much of American education consists of teaching students the wrong ideas about What Matters in prose. Few try imitating him with analytical/non-fiction prose, though the intentions at first glance seem antithetical.

i don't feel joyce or pound contributed much to the utilitarian decluttering of prose that i have in mind: yes of course it changed how we hear prose but their modernism is very much a maximalism (you're not being enjoined to cast away the 19th century, more to add it in along with all the other centuries: the many modes that now jostle alongside one another)

as for the issue of things unsaid, the issue isn't that prose before a certain point didn't deal in the resonance of the implied (kipling is little else lol) but more that stein and hemingway were seeing how far you could push the notion of leaving stuff out and letting the reader supply it, and the effects this delivers (of shared assumption and also of the surprises embedded in this): GS of course in an avant-gardy kind of way, but EH in a way that wildly appealed to a new young mass readership (including magazine writers, of fact and fiction, of a certain age)

i'm sure that magazine writers read and enjoyed joyce and (possibly) pound and (maybe) stein but i don't think their various devices were seized on anything like so widely in the new, much sparer kind of reading and writing i have in mind

alfred i'm talking abt the 30s and 40s really, i feel yr comment applies to a much later era (tho of course the feeling pervasive overfamiliarity is the same)

anyway my main point is just that hemingway's tics were so widely adopted that it's very hard to have a sense of their energy when they were new

The overall discussion here is too diverse to have a strong view for or against - different things happening in different decades and genres of writing - but:

i don't feel joyce or pound contributed much to the utilitarian decluttering of prose that i have in mind: yes of course it changed how we hear prose but their modernism is very much a maximalism

FWIW I disagree with this statement: Pound, with a few others but most vocally, did more decluttering in *poetry* (OK, not prose) than most C20 writers, around 1912 (or earlier?). As it's poetry it could be a red herring, but then he did always tend to connect poetry to prose and say one should be as well written as the other. EP in turn it was who highly praised the early Joyce, c.1913, 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, for his 'spare hard prose', as if JJ were writing with Imagist minimalism - most obviously in DUBLINERS.

The later episodes of Ulysses, like the Cantos, are another matter, and correspond to what Mark S says.

But my assumption is always that DUBLINERS did do much to make short-story prose in English starker and cooler, though we may assume that it did this by importing from foreign models - Turgenev, Flaubert, Maupassant - in a way that I have never 100% understood (unsurprising as I don't know a word of Russian) and rarely gets fully articulated.

The idea that the short story is a minimal form, in which you say more by saying less, and end without being clear what's been revealed -- something I would broadly associate with Carver, and a whole idea of the form -- I have long taken to be a legacy of the early Joyce.

Of course there are, in fact, other, very different ways of writing short stories (Barthelme, say), which have little to do with any of this.

Reading Sherwood Anderson's Poor White this summer was an eye-opener: an influence on Hemingway such that H wrote a parody of his prose for the sake of breaking a publishing contract and breaking a friendship. A queerer and more sentimental influence.

pinefox, I do wonder about your claim of Pound ‘decluttering’ poetry— from my vantage, it is the Pisan cantos (inarguably his greatest work imho) that brought forth the parataxis, referentiality, and seeming spontaneity that are hallmarks of Modernism and its afterlives, in poetry at least. Hell, the Language school wouldn’t exist at all without Pound, neither would the late Modernists of the UK like Prynne or Barry McSweeney

The later episodes of Ulysses, like the Cantos, are another matter, and correspond to what Mark S says

^^is pf's argument

i noticed bcz it mentions me

I think the understanding and the relative popularity depend upon where and how much readers can fill in the gaps and who readers are for particular writers for whatever reason but I thought GS was better at what I think she set out to do. Some of the gaps in EH seem lazy and angry not neutral.

I love the old Bantam mass market paperback covers for Macdonald’s books, so I’m happy to buy them online. Also the page font in the Penguin editions, as in LoA, feels mood-killingly classy to me.

https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/lot-vintage-mysteries-ross-macdonald-409642830

the Pisan cantos (inarguably his greatest work imho)

Not very surprisingly, my view is different. I get very little out of them, and prefer early works like CATHAY or, I suppose (like many people), parts of 'Mauberley'.

In general I think I've reached a point of not bothering much further with EP (certainly the later EP) unless I have to, and the later poets he influenced mostly aren't for me either.

I'm glad to note Mark S's agreement with my concurrence with him on a matter.

Chuck Tatum: I think I understand the pulpy taste you're describing, but I think smaller, older editions are practically somewhat harder to read - I'd probably prefer the cleaner, cleaned-up Penguin.

Cathay is what I think of, i.e. Decluttered Pound

(Have you ever had the experience of going back and reading (part of) a short story and finding the writing clumsy? I can't tell if this is because the text is being read out of context, the form has changed, or I have. My examples: Lady with the Lapdog and Soldier's Home. My Old Man is my favorite EH I think.)

But that still doesn’t get at the issue of influence— most poets that I know of have never read Cathay (and rightly so, blech) but many have read all or part of the Pisan Cantos. I just don’t think the thesis about decluttered poetry makes much sense in terms of the arc of EP’s influence, particularly among working poets.

where pinefox and i differ -- tho i believe for a while some years ago we were closer -- is that i know there's no such thing as influence and he has forgotten this

lol okay, whatever

okay, but if there were such a thing as influence, we could say that Highsmith might have been influenced by The Postman Always Rings Twice (novel more than movie) in this key regard:

Sometimes Highsmith's directness is actually serving an indirect purpose - ie the lead character's seemingly straightforward thoughts, feelings etc are slowly revealed to be delusional, even psychopathic, the narrator's perception of the world subtly askew.

pinefox, if you ever care to read more EH, I'd go past the 20s, and try The Collected Stories, which I think might be same as The Complete, with a title change when it became apparent that there wouldn't be any more available, at least in his lifetime: anyway, the one that starts with four of the most recent and then jumps back to the beginning. The jury of me is still out, but I like a fair number of those and most of The Sun Also Rises.
Dubliners might have been an i-word on Cain and Highsmith, in looking through the characters' heads, while never getting bogged down.
It turns out, in posthumously collected correspondence, that Carver was sometimes amazed, and not always pleased, by his editor's cuts---I'd like to read some of the longer versions.
I mostly know Pound via his edit of The Waste Land, which seems like the best/most enjoyable of Eliot.

Mark S: I do strongly remember your assertion and that we discussed it somewhere - not necessarily on ILX. You may have been cheered when I showed you a Roland Barthes interview called 'I don't believe in influences'.

Though I am unsure that I ever understood your argument, it has actually made me slightly wary of the word 'influence' ever since, though plainly I still use it.

But that still doesn’t get at the issue of influence— most poets that I know of have never read Cathay (and rightly so, blech) but many have read all or part of the Pisan Cantos. I just don’t think the thesis about decluttered poetry makes much sense in terms of the arc of EP’s influence, particularly among working poets.

I am not sure it's true that more people (or poets) know the Pisan Cantos than CATHAY. I would tend to say that both of them are reasonably well known to people who have bothered to read modernist poetry - which is of course a minority of people.

'Working poets' would have to include a wide variety of people, the majority (?) of whom would not be Poundians at all.

If there was a point about 'decluttered poetry' (not my phrase) it was, in my case, that Imagism was a significant poetic movement. That is, whether one likes any Imagist poetry or not, it introduced a minimalism, paring-down, etc, to poetry in English, around 1910. It seems arguable that this did have influence. EP was not the only Imagist(e) by any means, but he is still the best-known, and if it comes to it, 'In a Station of the Metro' is probably the best-known Imagist poem.

poster Dow: I read THE SUN ALSO RISES and thought it not very good. This is back to the mid-1920s EH!

I finished THE GLASS CELL. I'm impressed by Highsmith. She seems to understand the world she writes about - prisons, police cells, shady alleyways - as well as a respectable bourgeois world of offices and dinner parties. I think that her high literary repute might have led me to think she would be pretentious or mysterious. But as noted, she just goes ahead and tells the story, and lets that have its impact. I liked this a lot. The best non-spoiler thing I can say about the book is that virtually up to the last page, I didn't know what was going to happen.

I returned to Macdonald's ZEBRA-STRIPED HEARSE, but am also going to read THE GALTON CASE.

Palaces For the People Erik Klinenberg
argument for social infrastructure by US intellectual. I quite enjoyed it. Had seen a webinar with him which prompted me to get hold of this through interlibrary loan. On getting it i discovered that he was cowriter of Aziz Ansara's book on Modern Romance which I hadn't looked at closely enough.
I would hope that the basic idea of social infrastructure should be like town planning 101 ideally, seems like other focuses have come in tat obscure it. & do know that current tenancy etc makes teh idea of community more difficult than it would have been a few decades ago.
Klinenberg talks about the importance of public libraries and decent bookshops as social hubs. I think some of what is written here would benefit people if it can be passed on easily. Just thinking of passing on ideas by osmosis or whatever but definitely as i said this should be 101 in town planning and i think a few other disciplines. people being seen as individuals with more than one dimension rather than statistics which seems to be all too common.
I think I enjoyed this book so hope others do too, have seen it compared to Jane Jacobs so hope it retains a positive influence.

Bridgiet Christie A Book For Her
Book by feminist comedian which reflects somne of her stage work as well as her feminism. She gets pretty absurdist by nature.
She is married to Stewart lee and i'm seeing some elements of the same humour so wondering if one is influencing the other or if it was something they bonded over. Anyway finding it funny in places. But it's a book I've had beside my bed for months and only occasionally being picked up which may have more to do with what other books I have in competition with it .
Anyway do enjoy her work when I've seen or heard it. & this is quite good.

Insurgent empire : anticolonial resistance and British dissent / Priyamvada Gopal.
book on various uprisings against the British Empire etc by colonised people. Quite interesting.
Have been neglecting this too since getting it on interlibrary loan. Had it recommended when i was on some webinars I attended a few months ago in response to some comments I had made I think about how decolonisation had to be a personal internal process and not one imposed by an external enforced plan.
Need to get through this cos it has ben sitting on a backburner for too long and it does seem to be pretty good. I have about 16 books gooing on at the same time which leads to me not paying as much attention to all of tehm as i maybe ought.

I Am Damo Suzuki
cowritten memoir of ex-Can singer. Interesting that Can are seen asa temporary thing, like he did only spend 3 years in the band so it has less central focus than it might for readers who have come to the book from interest in the band. Very interesting on his life though and I do need to look into his later bands Dunkelziffer and the ones more under variations of his name + group.
Currently been reading one of Cul De Sac talking about playing with him . Just read the bit where he was talking about earlier tours having quotes from Can songs turning up. Which the Cul De Sac guy thinks is natural so wonder if Damo0 just consciously stopped following cues. Sounds like he is trying to keep the improvisation as open as possible. Also just talking about the non-language he has been singing in .
Was interesting to read about JAki Liebezeit hating playing with bassists. He talks about preferring playing with a bassist that plays it like an instrument like a saxophone which I would view as wanting a more exploratory one as opposed to somebody who stops improvisations from taking flight. Seemed to imply he prefered one that did not lock a band into a groove in the way that some do. Had me wondering how he would have fared with someone like Phil Lesh who at times is pretty unpredictable in what he played. Or Cris Kirkwood.
Interesting book which it has taken me too long to get to too

Table, I'll bite: what's bleh about Cathay and not-bleh about The Cantos?

(the painting in Anthony Marra's first novel and short stories that are like a novel ... does it exist? ... was it created or perceived in the context of French painters (e.g., Millet)? ... was there something else?)

started to write a long version of my cancer ward notes and realised I was getting enough into the weeds that I’d need to read through it again for confirmation and clarification — and I don’t (at this moment) want to read it again. so here’s a hurried (still long tho not as long) version

here’s what I like: the glum shabby portrait of a well meaning hospital in a glam shabby province of the USSR in the mid-50s (stalin and beria are dead; a thaw is on its way); just the tiresome quotidian of a bunch of ppl from all (most) layers of SovSoc rubbing uncomfortably along with one another as their inner thoughts turn towards the worst (are they going to die?)

it’s grungy and unglamorous and it feels well observed and the setting works for good tension between the main characters (a prissily complacent party suck-up (rusanov) who the thaw makes anxious — what if so-and-so who he denounced dishonestly returns from wherever and confronts him — vs the mary-sue, the prickly dissident kostoglotov given leave to travel to tashkent from inner exile for treatment)

both are solid and convincing characters: or ok the suck-up is maybe a teeny bit cartoonish (has no good features) but the mary-sue is genuinely fun bcz even if we mostly sympathise he will suddenly stubbornly vee off into cantankerous difficult-mindedness at unsympathetic points (re his treatment he is sometimes the 50s russian equivalent of an anti-vaxxer, just completely distrustful of science bcz the state says its good blah blah)

he’s also a low-key horndog, which is p funny: I think the story manages well how tired and disenchanted the sick can be and how it steps all over normal life and also how the medical staff handle this (mostly compassionately, sometimes irritably)

here’s what’s annoying and silly to me: being expected to nod sagely along to the AHA! THE CANCER IS COMMUNISM DO YOU SEE! aspects of the analogy very much pushed by some western reviewers (and by no means swiped away by alexandr himself, tho tbf there’s less of it than i was expecting). ideally in critical discussion you could tidy it alongside the anti-vaxxer stuff, as an observed dimension of the character kostoglotov rather than just an evident fact abt the world — he thinks this and other characters agree and still others disagree and *there’s* yr drama etc. this is how I’d like to read it and tbh I think solzh when he fully has his novelist’s hat on does sometimes tiptoe towards this — except then he wakes up with a shudder and remembers the big political moral he's meant to be pushing. i don't blame him personally for feeling strongly or even necessarily disagree w/his line! i just dislike the blundering goofiness of the metaphor (bcz it messes with the care and detail of the realist observation)

and actually reading it in the 2020s this element is also distracting and exasperating bcz (a) obviously cancer is also present in non-communist societies!* and (b) a glum shabby grungy unglamorous portrait of modern-day non-communist health systems as they tackle it wd deliver a very similar feel, of frustration and broken promises (with this important caveat: nowhere in the UK or US systems are most levels of society forced to share a ward, and tbh the staff described in the cancer ward hospital seem p great considering the constraints of time and place)

the moment that ended up crystallising my frustration: towards the end of the novel when kostoglotov is discharged he wanders around tashkent getting up the nerve to go visit one of his girls and sees a sad little note in one of the cages: "The little monkey that used to live here was blinded because of the senseless cruelty of one of the visitors. An evil man threw tobacco into macaque rhesus's eyes." When I read it I liked the weird abrupt randomness of this story, and the way it seemed somehow to wriggle free of the narrative structure as well as the over-heavy moral structure… but then I was reading around and it turns out this is what solzhenitsyn disliked abt it bcz apparently he added in an appendix (not present in my edition) an explanatory message of the order of “THE EVIL MAN IS STALIN DO YOU SEE!” #ffs

(i've started the satanic verses so im on a roll currently w/novels that crept onto the global stage)

he wanders around tashkent s/b he wanders around tashkent zoo

Blutopia : Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton / Graham Lock.
Interesting, erudite look at 3 figures in teh jazz world from various eras.
Does seem to have a lot of research etc given to the subject. One drag is thht the main text seems to be absolutely peppered with endnote numbers. Never quite know what to do with things like that since it does mess up the flow if one is continually hopping over to the back of a book to check what the notes are, A lot of these are citations but there are also some pretty long explanatory notes.
Anyway interesting book and one i should have got through faster. I see that there is a request out for it so I only have it til nexzt week and it is taking me longer to get through than a number of other texts,
I don't think I've come across much on Anthony Braxton elsewhere but it has been a while since i read Val Wilmer or teh Freedom principle so he may be covered in one of them to some extent.
& I could do with knowing Ellington better. Lock makes some interesting points about what the Cotton Club in Harlem was supposed to represent for the whites it catered to . Gosh, shitload of racism whodathunkit. Whites in the 1920s like

Actually to explain that better Cotton Club is set up as a club with pretty exclusively white patronage that is set up to replicate plantation era Southern negro environment. & the music from there is referred to as Jungle music which Ellington repsonds to by incorporating a level of sophistication supporting his individual players playing styles.
BUt everything is seen through a white moneyed gaze where the negroes can be seen to be happy in their natural environment and bleurgh.
So Lock is highlighting this apparently inevitable racism from the time. & I can mentally tie it into epistemology that I've read in books by people like Nell Irving Painter based on comment on popular theorists of teh time who did seem to hold sway. & the intentionality and reality of white attitudes of patronage to people of colour with recognised talent and so on and so forth and the whole process and structure of valorisation of what should and shouldn't be supported.
& wondering what has really changed since then.
BUt it is infuriating that people do see themselves that superior to others just cos of the colour of their skin or other pathologies along the same lines.

I am puzzled by the end of The Man in the High Castle. The Axis won but lost (according to the Inner Truth)? Or the Allies won (and the societies and characters are deceived)?

Hawthorne and Caroline Abendsen appear to be (deliberate) caricatures of WASPs, and Frank and Juliana of Jews. (Her escape was wonderful. Tagomi ends well.)

Writing about passing was about WASPs and Jews, and blacks and whites; I'm not sure if this happened in any order. IIRC my sister was upset when I invited her to see a Cassavetes film because she thought the actress cast as the black girl did not appear white. Asians cannot pass for white, but I sense differences among mixed siblings and over time as their outward demeanor and appearance, and identification and reception, change.

I had a similar problem with Tessa Thompson being one of the 2 women deemed to be passing in Passing. She seems too black or at best obviously Hispanic which I would have thought would be another ethnicity that would have had trouble from WASPs at the time.

Mark S: what is the book / author you are talking about?

I finished Ross Macdonald's THE ZEBRA-STRIPED HEARSE. Marvellous intricate mystery. Private eye Lew Archer handles every encounter the same way: deadpan, honest, probing, droll. He almost never needs to resort to any kind of violence himself. The plot becomes hard to recall, with surprises to the very end. The sense of intricacy is increased by a blizzard of minor characters, who each turn up one at a time: desk clerks, minor police officers, each briefly described and having their two-page cameo with Archer.

re poster Ward Fowler's comment that Macdonald's books become interchangeable: an amusing note here is that the blurb to my cheap paperbback summarises ... a different Lew Archer story entirely, and the publisher didn't notice.

mark s is taking about this thing

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_Ward

I need to read more Solzhenitsyn I think I read A Da In The Life a few decades ago and have had copies of a coupl eo fother of his books for a while.

I am going to be honest and say I don’t really understand the appeal of Solzhenitsyn— the books have always felt like a slog.

Also his politics were undeniably as bad if not worse than Pound’s— has always amazed me how thoroughly his reputation has been recuperated. The guy was a fascist!

So was Celine and he was pretty good in places.
Even had the Doors writing songs about his book titles. Which is obviously a sign of good taste innit