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

(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

I can see how The Cancer Ward, as described by mark s, could be worth reading if I went into w it looking for the novelist vs. mere asshole old White Russian Slavophile aristo etc. tension, seeing how that works out creative friction-wise, as in some of Dick's last novels, where we get the novelist vs. crackpot, like the split personalities in Valis, one of the main characters of which is Horselover Fat, whose name is a mixed translation of "Philip Dick." Although mark indicates that

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.

Tje first I and most people in America heard of AS was when One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovitch was published over here---good? The first memory I have of his work was getting unexpectedly pulled into some of one of his prison colony chronicles, published here ca. '74 or so: something about a glimpse of how such programs can go on and on regardless of changing faces at the toppermost of Administrations etc---thought of it again re Enemies, Tim Weiner's history of the FBI, all into and past the J.Edgar epoch.

The nostalgia-tinted view of SF and LA in the 1950s in The Man in the High Castle and Crossroads, respectively, seems in a way a precursor of twee in Glasgow in the 1990s. Both are not quite genuine: off-hand, can-do enthusiasm and corniness replaced by shyness and a fondness for toys and permanent childhood.

I wonder if they could have been reactions to Hitler Youth, and to 1980s Brat Pack and eary 1990s grunge culture. They seem strategically or ironically innocent or naive. Soldier's Home by EH was that way, too, I think.

There's a short story by Asali Solomon that tells about how a veteran from the Iraq War, IIRC, adapts after returning home that might build upon stories like Soldier's Home.

I read Dirt Music by Tim Winton, which was, at its best a hallucinatory, beautifully composed love letter to the wilds of western Australia, at its worst an overwrought Nicholas Sparks novel about MEN, loss and reconciliation.

Have been reading Cicely Berry's The Actor and the Text on and off all summer and it's probably the best book I've read in terms of insight into how to approach a Shakesperean text - as a reader, audience member and probably most significantly, as a teacher. A remarkable book.

Also read the second Parker novel. I'm definitely in for the long haul with this series. As per conversations elsewhere, a big yes to Holt McCallany but I honestly can't see Parker as anyone other than Lee Marvin.

xpost to dow - I wonder how much in the grand scheme of things it matters what gets assigned for reading in junior high and high school classes in US public and private schools, presuming that is where how and we read Solzhenitsyn.

If cars and driving were the Far West in the previous century, what will be the Far West now? Please do not say TikTok!

xp

The nostalgia-tinted view of SF and LA in the 1950s in The Man in the High Castle...I wonder if they could have been reactions to Hitler Youth...

About 3/4 through INDEMNITY ONLY. Enjoying this novel more than I was, but something that still grates is the winsome depiction of virtuous women working together - the saintly Austrian (?) doctor and her saintly Latina assistant and the good behaviour they bring out from the girl left (ill-advisedly it would seem) in their care. Somewhere between a legacy of 1970s feminism (which I believe might be treated more thoughtfully in a later scene) and a later bland formula.

The detective refers a lot to the food she eats, and to her exercise regimes (which are impossible for me to contemplate) - which partly, as I noted before, gives it a proto-chick-lit air, ie: Bridget Jones' 'drank 2 glasses of white wine, but did go to gym' calculations.

Ernest Goffman - Interaction Ritual
V good fun in its microanalysis of how interactions of all sorts play out and get negotiated, at the level of the most minor facial expression or gesture. Enjoyable.

Peter L Bernstein - Against the Gods (re-read)
V good, though much of the history covers the same ground that Ian Hacking has covered in The Taming of Chance and The Emergence of Probability, and indeed wrt to Pacioli that Jane Gleeson-White's excellent Double Entry covers (double entry book-keeping). Bernstein has a good way of framing matters though, and is v strong on the later economic, business and trading floor applications.

Helen DeWitt - The English Understand Wool and Some Trick (re-read)
Excellent. See thread.

Dorothy L Sayers - The Nine Tailors, Strong Poison, Gaudy Night
Just really f'ing annoying. Peter Wimsey is a wanker of the first water. The books themselves are staggeringly laboured, just mind-numbing in how long it takes to get around to things and then how long they take. None of John Dickson Carr or Agatha Christie's deftness with a clue or character. That said the Fenland setting of The Nine Tailors is a good call. and there are some good bits. Like when Peter Wimsey wants to smash the mirror he's looking in because he realises he's such an awful person, but realises it would be pointless as people would just come in and clear it up and pretend it never happened. More of this entirely justified self-loathing would have been fine.

Zoe Gilbert - Mischief Acts
Brother's wife bought it for me, which would almost be enough to have me throw it straight in the bin. Surprisingly enough this turned out to be an astute and perceptive buy. It takes a history of Herne the Hunter, told through a history of episodes going back to the 12th century. Susan Cooper had me hooked on Herne from an early age and I was fascinated by him, and even tried to write some *very teenage* stories about him. And this.... this kind of works i think? I interrupted it for other stuff, so haven't made it all the way through. But giving different expressions of Herne through time in the place of the Great North Wood and the Effra (which p much runs under where I live), as a puck-like avatar of mischief, malignancy, chaos and the grotesque, was enough to keep me reading.

Gilbert gives herself two chief challenges, i think. One is stylistic - each period comes with its own period-appropriate form and style (the first is poetic) and frequently this is done badly. They do it well enough to avoid the reader wincing particularly, and the question of whether she does it *well* I'll leave when I've given it a bit more thought. The second challenge is that I feel this whole - waves hand - pastoral psychogeography, is overdone, and I'm tired and bored of it (not their problem maybe), so it needs ZGilbert to be bringing something new. Jury's out. But it's not terrible or irritating, which is good enough for me. I'm not a demanding reader.

Gerald Murnane – Landscape With Landscape
I don't exactly love Murnane, but *goddam* he's a writer. A very good route into Murane is his recent book Last Letter to a Reader where he reads each of his books in turn and prepares a report on each, covering his perceptions and memories of the context, memories of himself as a writer at that time. Landscape With Landscape is a group of short stories, not in the collected because they form a whole work here. In Last Letter to a Reader I think he's probably right that the third story in the book The Battle of Acosta Nu is as good as anything he's written.

All I know is that the connections take place between such disparate matters as the near-death of a child in 1977 and the failure of a utopian colony in a far-away country nearly a century earlier; connections take place, and the connecting medium is the stuff of mental imagery and of feelings; connections take place; surfaces give way to depths; entities combine or divide; revelations of all kinds occur in the place that I call, for want of a better term, *my mind* and the benefits that I derive from these processes and from my knowing that these processes take palce continually and are taking place even now as I write about them – those benefits are my true reward for writing fiction.

That and his writing generally remind me of a Thomas Browne observation in Christian Morals:

Besides, many things are known, as some are seen, that is by Parallaxis, or at some distance from their true and proper beings, the superficial regard of things having a different aspect from their true and central Natures.

'Surfaces give way to depths', resulting in that parallaxis.

Landscape with Freckled Woman is good and technically accomplished as well, and shows well how Murnane uses hypothetical and conditional spaces (rhetorical conditional, as in the 'would have' third conditional – 'would have' *but didn't*), speculative spaces, depth beyond surfaces, and disconnects, to connect across imaginative landscapes, memory and experience. So:

He had a private word for it; he called it his *genestran* mood. The word came from the title of Giacomo Leopardi's poem *La Genestra*, which the young man had not read but whose author he believed to have been the most solitary of all great writers. From the little he had learned of Leopardi, the man imagined the poet all but imprisoned in his parents' house; sitting at his desk in deep shadow but in sight of a distant rectangle of white sunlight that was all he saw all day of some fart-ranging view of Italian hills with somewhere among their tufts of treetops the flowering branches of the broom – *la genestra* – which the poet had probably never touched or smelled but which kept him at his desk in the shadowy room day after day until he had laid out in metre and rhyme a landscape that would outlast by centuries the many-coloured scenery around his window.

Where was I? – dreaming of remembering a dream, I might have interrupted myself just then then to let the freckled woman see I could mock myself as a narrator.

---

Yes, I said, anticipating the question in the face of the freckled woman.

---

But surely, the committee woman would have asked...

---

I had never tried to imagine what was perfect, to work my way through gradually merging variations towards one ideal. I wanted to go in the opposite direction, to wander among the branching capillaries of the changeable world until I found instead of the One the Once-only.

---

But there was more to my dreaming than the search for a woman. I had always noted carefully the background behind each posed body. Usually it was some narrow view of walls or drapes or tree-trunks - nothing that would take the admirer's eyes for too long from the figure in the foreground. What I looked for, but hardly ever found, was a doorway in the wall or a window between the drapes or a gap among the foliage. When I saw such an opening, I thought of it as giving onto a place beyond the crudely imagined dreamlands of the average man. To see into that place might have brought on the same pleasant confusion that came from hearing in a dream the voice saying, "All this so far has been a dream, but what follows is real.'

Would have, might have, anticipating the question, imagined, discovering/creating a landscape which has imaginative legitimacy, has an ontological existence. This is a version of the mechanisms in Coleridge's willing suspension of disbelief, and framing methods in ghost stories. You do not require the reader to suspend disbelief, because you have enabled an imaginative space, a landscape, that has an ontological reality as well as a relationship with the material landscapes in which the author writes.

Finally, and speaking of landscapes, this response in this interview with Svetlana Alexievich is extremely good on what I like about her books:

“In Chernobyl Prayer, there is this story from the wife of a dying liquidator about how he’s dying horribly. When she wants to approach him at the hospital, they don’t let her. They tell her, “Forget that it’s a human being you love; it’s matter that needs to be deactivated.” I was struck by her words—her texts—and captured them. It was on the level of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. The things that people said were unique. These were texts from some new life of another world that is approaching very fast now. We have Chornobyl, coronavirus, the revolution, war. We are approaching a new reality for which we are not prepared.

You get a vivid sense of that 'new reality' from her books – the old landscapes and frameworks do not provide a sense of it.

this interview - sorry forgot to put link

nooo my lovely wimsey

but he IS annoying of course (tho this is also part of his technique-for-detection = he annoys the ppl in the story also) and yes her pacing sometimes sucks (i know ppl who are big fans of gaudy night but i am not really one of them bcz i also find harriet annoying lol)

i think sayers slightly predates christie and carr and is not in fact quite attempting the same thing (she is in dialogue more with chesterton oddly enough, tho not very like him stylistically; viz sketching the changing social landscape around her and its concomitant moral conundra -- wimsey like brown being a fiction who falls "outside" the world at hand)

minor but amusing tidbit which i have never quite decoded: wimsey is thru his mother a de la gardie = related to COUNT MAGNUS

(googling more on this intolerable factoid i find that i am nearly the only person on the internet who actually cares abt it)

it’s gaudy night that really tipped me over the edge with the pacing, and harriet v is annoying ofc but wimsey’s courtship of her is the single most annoying thing in literature.

lol at count magnus titbit.

I like detective fiction a lot, am reading a lot of it, would still like to try Sayers, but ... her books appear to be long, and GAUDY NIGHT, the one that sounds most interesting, appears to be absurdly long. So I go on not reading her.

i would start with:
MURDER MUST ADVERTISE (which has drugs)
THE UNPLEASANTNESS AT THE BELLONA CLUB (which has war-induced PTSD)
and maybe
CLOUDS OF WITNESS (which has a MIRE, but also the rest of wimsey's family, some of whom are a chore)

murder must advertise is tolerable.

Who are the best British mystery writers from the Carr-Christie-Sayers era? Which I think of as first half of 20th Century, but can be earlier-later.

Graham Greene is one who I think of

also Patricia Highsmith

yeah, but was thinking more of whodunits.

I loooove Gaudy Night despite all its flaws, but then I first read it at the age of twelve which I think is a good age for it. I think at that age I read it as a romance - and I agree, Lord Peter's courtship of Harriet is intensely annoying - but now I read it as a pretty portrait of someone gradually recovering from PTSD.

My recommendations for the series are Whose Body --> Clouds of Witness --> Strong Poison --> Murder Must Advertise --> Have His Carcase --> The Nine Tailors --> Gaudy Night. With the caveat that Clouds of Witness is a bit icky, Strong Poison is embarrassing, Murder Must Advertise is smug, and everyone in Have His Carcase is an asshole including both leads. But they're all fun reads anyway, imo.

I also like Lord Peter going all I WANNA CHANGE MY CLOTHES MY HAIR MY FACE at his fancy mirror and then realizing he's an aristocrat and will never even get rid of his stupid monocle. It's a good moment.

Pretty good portrait I meant to say

I finished Paretsky's INDEMNITY ONLY. Basically a good job, maybe flawed by trying too hard to be perky and sassy - I suppose implying or effecting a lightness of tone not so typical in the US crime genre. Maybe that's the intention. I suspect that the later novels in this series (at least 17 or so) get darker, and the character must get considerably older and harder.

I then started on Walter Mosley, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS (1990). Notable how within 3 pages the narrator's WWII background is established. Efficient narrative.

I just realised that it's sweet that poster Lily Dale, the biggest Bruce Springsteen expert on ILX, comments on the work of Dorothy L. Sayers by quoting ... Bruce Springsteen.

Who are the best British mystery writers from the Carr-Christie-Sayers era? Which I think of as first half of 20th Century, but can be earlier-later.

Let me say I am relieved to find someone as resistant to Sayers as I am. Instead I'd like to propose Margery Allingham's Traitor's Purse, an offbrand Campion story that's part Hitchcock man-on-the-run thriller, with some of the uncanny flavour of Chersterton's Man Who Was Thursday, minus the whimsy. Also a great sentence writer, I think.

I would be surprised if Patrick McGoohan hadn't read it before coming up with Danger Man/The Prisoner.

xpost to dow - I wonder how much in the grand scheme of things it matters what gets assigned for reading in junior high and high school classes in US public and private schools, presuming that is where how and we read Solzhenitsyn.

Thanks very much for taking the time to reply. (I was indirectly asking if you read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denosovich as assigned reading in junior high or high school but appreciate your insights on PKD as well. If anyone was assigned PKD, I would be impressed.)

I've read Allingham's first book from c.1927, and it's quite plain and short but enjoyable. It doesn't give the impression that she'll go on to be a notable stylist. (I haven't yet read more.)

I note that the condition of being black in 1948, and the feelings associated with white people (resentment, fear, et al), give Mosley a load of content for his fiction that white writers didn't really have.

good meaty ilx discussion of british golden-age tec fiction easily missed in this thread (starting with this post):
At 10:35 on an early summer's morning, John Lanchester sat down at his study desk, switched on his new Dell computer, opened up the word processing programme that the computer had come with and began

scrolling down contains this classic ledge post:

not that lesbians don't walk dogs.

― ledge, Monday, 19 March 2012 2:12 PM bookmarkflaglink

I've read Allingham's first book from c.1927, and it's quite plain and short but enjoyable. It doesn't give the impression that she'll go on to be a notable stylist. (I haven't yet read more.)

I note that the condition of being black in 1948, and the feelings associated with white people (resentment, fear, et al), give Mosley a load of content for his fiction that white writers didn't really have.

just seen chuck tatum’s post - and it sounds like i want to give that book a go tbh.

Yeah, was thinking that too. Thanks for all the tips yall.
Still mean to check Mosley, but did see the screen version of DWTBD: just every single shot mattered, and the racial aspect came right across, though I'm told there's much more in his books: like you make up your mind, finish your drink, in whatever little place you can afford to drink in, go out to your car, and there's a cop. You deal with him, then you go do what you meant to do: that same night, or whenever you get out of the slammer. And that's...Tuesday, or whenever. The reader learns, or may have already learned, like the character, to factor such possibilities into the timeline.

Hope I'm not (although I probably am) overpraising it, but I found it to be genuinely odd and intriguing book, not at all what I was expecting. Perhaps it helped not having read any other Campions before it.