The (S)word in the Autumn Stone: What Are You Reading, Fall 2022?

I greatly enjoyed _Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov_ when I read it recently. Don't let the title fool you, there are some novellas in there too.

I really liked The Nickel Boys, too— was surprised. My dad gave me the new one for my birthday, the only present he gave me which didn’t go in a little free library.

I have been reading some books I purchased on a recent California trip, including a full length as well as a chap from Norma Cole. Also finished a first read of the annotated version of Prynne’s ‘The Oval Window,’ which was an interesting experience— not sure I wanted it, to be honest. Annotations kind of ruin the poems?!?

Anyway, this morning I decided to take a break from the old folks and began Joshua Wilkerson’s trilogy of short books about malls, contagion, and the sacred, ‘Meadowlands/Xanadu/American Dream.’ Nothing groundbreaking so far, but some interesting connections being made between the “terra nullius” ideology of Manifest Destiny and the development and death of mall culture in the US.

Harmony Holiday on My Pinup, Hilton Als's "conflicted love letter to Prince," which sounds like a must-read---Als can make it work for a whole book if anybody can:
https://www.bookforum.com/print/2904/hilton-als-s-conflicted-love-letter-to-prince-25154

My reading life took a big crash over the past eight weeks. I've been slowly making my way through Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler and I'm about 3/4 through it. It's very grim, deliberately so.

My basic take is that both this and the previous book, Parable of the Sower, form a kind of "how to" manual for BIPOC on surviving the complete social collapse of the USA into chaos, lawlessness and fascist tyranny. In service to this goal Butler chose to depict every form of brutality, torture and social violence she could imagine arising, so as to suggest the best manner of surviving them, both physically and emotionally.

But, damn, it is just a relentless horror show and she walks just as close to bleak hopelessness as was consistent with her deeper purpose of pointing a way through such all-encompassing darkness.

Oh yes, I nearly forgot. Happy Holidays everyone!

I started Leena Krohn's Collected Fiction Part 1: The Novels, having bought it on sale from Google Books several years ago. So far, I think it's lost something in translation.

Harmony Holiday on _My Pinup_, Hilton Als's "conflicted love letter to Prince," which sounds like a must-read---Als can make it work for a whole book if anybody can:
https://www.bookforum.com/print/2904/hilton-als-s-conflicted-love-letter-to-prince-25154🕸🕸

No Ye here, pretty sure, although I only skimmed parts that weren't descriptions of the book itself. Which seemed good: this is not one of those "reviews" that mostly show off the alleged reviewer's own expertise re the subject of the book.

I finished Colson Whitehead, THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD (2016). It looks long but is quite quick to read.

It is a historical novel about US slaves in the 19th century, and especially some who run away from a Georgia plantation and escape, seeing South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee then Indiana. The protagonist is a woman, Cora, who believes that her mother Mabel ran away and escaped in the past. To some extent the novel reprises what are probably quite standard depictions of slavery, plantation life and escape. I feel that this has probably been done before, not to say that Whitehead doesn't do it quite well.

Whitehead has a big innovation, though, in making the metaphorical 'underground railroad' into a real railroad; literalising a figure of speech I suppose. The best things in the book are the descriptions of the railroad. Whitehead has a strong sense that the stations are each different, like a different world, and indeed the above-named states are too. Although in some way this is a realistic (but alternate-history) novel, it also has a fantastical flavour, in the way that SC, NC, TN, IN, each feel like a new realm - a Bakhtinian chronotope, a Foucauldian heterotopia? Maybe like the different chappter-worlds of Cavino's WINTER'S NIGHT, or Lethem's AMNESIA MOON. (Reading background on Whitehead I came to think that he resembles Lethem more than most authors do.)

The writing is more pedestrian than I might have expected - or just more clear, more plain-speaking. CW often writes things like "She could smell the sweet scent of freedom" or "she could still feel the pull of the chains that held her back" and I think, this will be ironised, and it isn't really - he is just happy to deal in these familiar, fairly uncomplicated ideas and figures of speech. I can't complain that the book stays quite simple and straight-talking; maybe more books should. CW does sometimes drift into something more sentimental, like a weaker aspect of Toni Morrison - "He was a sweet-loving man with a sweet smile and he said he would always do the best for their children ..." Maybe CW is deliberate in including the simplicity and positivity. Or maybe he gets lazy at times as a writer.

The novel has an unusual structural feature in alternating chapters named for places with chapters named for characters (like Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING, say, but this novel is 3rd person), but the odd thing is how these characters turn up. Two, 'Ethel' and 'Caesar', turn up after those characters have already died, and they don't add that much to what we already knew. On the other hand the last one 'Mabel', on the mother's fate, does add considerable dramatic irony in that the mother's outcome is not what every other character had been assuming.

I think my hunch is that CW is interesting because he is an ambitious, speculative-fiction writer, grounded in SF and so on, and so he brings that outlook to writing historical fiction. A bit like, once again, Lethem brought a superhero convention to writing the recent-history fiction of THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE.

Whitehead tends to alternate a speculative novel with flat characters with a more psychological novel with round characters. haven't read Harlem Shuffle yet, but Nickel Boys is a beautiful piece of writing. For my money, it's much better than Underground Railroad. I also really recommend Sag Harbor.

I have started Marianne Wiggins' Properties of Thirst. I studied writing with her in the early 90s, and absolutely love her work. This one, which takes place in mid-20th-century Southern California, may be her best. It's all the more remarkable because she suffered a stroke in the middle of it and completed it with the help of her daughter. Highly recommended.

I'm reading The Gate, Natsume Soseki in the NYRB edition. I'm not very far along yet, but I will note here that in his Introduction, Pico Iyer spent at least ten pages finding as many ways as possible to say that in this novel and in Japanese lit generally, "it's the notes they don't play, man".

I read Mark Epstein's *Thoughts With A Thinker*. Epstein is a psychoanalyst by profession but has also spent many years practising Buddhist meditation; the book stands at the confluence of the two disciplines, looking at how the two complement one another.

Epstein's core thesis is that psychoanalysis only goes so far in the healing process: it can bring repressed material into the light but ultimately takes for granted the Buddha's greatest insight: the illusion of a coherent and reified self. Epstein argues that psychoanalysis reinforces narcissistic structures; guided and rigorous meditation can break these structures down.

It's the first book I've read that really integrates meditation practice into everyday life in a way that feels achievable and purposeful. And he's lucid about psychoanalysis and its shortcomings.

I finished Colin MacInnes' ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS (1959).

Mostly I find this a remarkable work: charming, energetic, perceptive, and, above all, propelled by an idiolect, a rhythm and diction of its own. In this particular regard I realised it was a great precursor, unacknowledged I think, to Amis's MONEY. An example is that any given person can be called a 'product', so if the narrator meets, say, a ticket inspector, he can call him 'the inspector product'. This particular rhythm is also one that I sometimes use myself in ordinary communication.

The book has a kind of covert emotional seriousness in the way the narrator is lovelorn over 'Crepe Suzette' despite not acknowledging this when she's first introduced (and he then walks away from her quite readily at the end) and the role of the ailing father with whom the narrator has a fond relation. I sense that THE CATCHER IN THE RYE may be a precursor here; I suppose my sense is that the older author presents the hip alienated youth but also the mature emotional picture that the youth can't quite see.

In its last section the book has a different seriousness in its portrait of 'race riots' in Notting Hill. You could say that the novel is remarkably enlightened and far-sighted. But I also feel that it becomes too earnest here, as the cool narrator gets heavily involved in his multicultural ethical project. Part of my sense would again be that the hand of the older, more socially concerned author is showing, a bit too clearly, behind the youthful narrator.

The good things about the book make it remarkable, significant and well worth knowing.

Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through? Thanks to corrs unplugged for the suggestion. Warm, empathic, thoughtful, conversational. Quite didactic which is fine, great even, I'd like to know if any of her other novels are more plot heavy though, I was in the mood for a good yarn when I started this one. I'll find out either way as I'm definitely reading more by her.

Robert Galbraith - THE INK BLACK HEART
still like the characters well enough, the plot was okay, not sure about the incel stuff. But by God she needs an editor tho I guess she's too successful for that. 1011 pages for any novel let alone a crime novel is preposterous.

Currently switching between the following:

Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard - Richard Brody; a director who never made a film I love (I prefer Rivette, Rohmer, Marker, usually Varda), and a writer whose opinions I often find silly. Yet this is compelling so far and written with an impressive command.
The Philosophy of Modern Song - Bob Dylan. Put this down a couple of weeks ago and haven't been eager to return tbh. I enjoy Bob in full trickster mode but the tricks are getting wearisome.
The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow. I've had a copy for over 20 years but felt like now was a good time to dig in. Good-to-great.

ledge, glad to hear you like it, I also highly recommend The Friend

and The Last of Her Kind, but that's a somewhat dense read in comparison (riyl Ferrante)

Two friends recommended Sigrid Nunez, which was probably quite nice of them. I read the LRB review of, I think, THE FRIEND (one with a dog?).

One of the (real life) friends sent two screenshots from the book and they were both poor. They read like a low quality 'personal essay' making sonorous but actually not particularly convincing statements about writing. But perhaps this was just a character voice within the novel and something that Nunez was manipulating, not something she took seriously. I won't know unless I read the book.

Finished (among other things) Jacob Kahn’s ‘Mine Eclogue,’ the first full book of poems from a Bay Area poet. Enjoyed myself, Kahn has a delightful quality of including mundane details of his own existence into poems that are often abstract or based in deep, lyrical passages.

Now I’m onto David Larsen’s ‘Zeroes Were Hollow.’ Better known for his translations of Arabic poetry and prose, Larsen is also an astonishing poet in English, utilizing parataxis in a way that doesn’t seem ham-handed but is really driven by an openness to form and association. Love this book.

Rereading Jonathan Lethem, THE FERAL DETECTIVE (2018). I likely repeat myself here. The novel is interestingly organised in sections named after places, and in sometimes very short chapters. It deliberately takes on a massive topicality, with cultural references that might feel very oudated in, say, 2028. The novel carries a good sense of place, inland CA; clearly part of its project. It's also keen on animals and an 'animal theorist' type could write about it. So could an 'anthropocene' type.

The novel very much raises that old controversial chestnut, 'male writer writing female character' and its pros and cons. I think that the creation of the protagonist Phoebe is in some ways excellent and impressive, and JL gives her a witty, riffing voice that is sometimes like pastiche Lorrie Moore. Yet I still find I have the same problem with this that I did on first reading: he makes her too sexualised, ie: too obsessed with sex. Thinking about sex is one thing; feeling an actual need for it, while on a complex mission to perform another urgent task unrelated to it, is another. I think this overemphasis is a result of a) the author expressing his own feeling and b) overcompensation for the risk of writing a desexualised, prim female character.

pinefox, you might also like MacInnes's previous City of Spades, set in 1957 London, tracking black and white kids, immigration, low-budget subculture, weed as a link---I liked it better than Absolute Beginners because the narrator of that seemed as earnest all though as you found him toward the end: oversold as a cleaned-up Holden Caulfield (who is nothing if not a real-seeming teen boy, who smokes too much, talks too much, has zits and omg a range of other problems/conditions). But I read those a longgg time ago, might be wrong. Still, I think I was led to City... by Simon Frith's favorable mention, so it might be worth a shot, esp. since you liked most of the other book.

still reading the xpost Dylan book, as I mentioned on Is Bob Dylan overrated? It's a bit frustrating occasionally, but I still haven't gotten tired of it.

poster Dow, is that book separate from ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS or part of a trilogy of some kind?

I'm not DOW but I can tell you that the London Trilogy consists of:

City of Spades
Absolute Beginners
Mr Love and Justice

I wonder whether, if I were to read them again, AB would still be my favourite?

Thanks Tim - and is the trilogy officially connected, with the same characters, or just a set of 3 books that he wrote that all featured London?

Three books all featuring London and addressing similar themes and whatnot but without shared characters as I recall.

I finished rereading THE FERAL DETECTIVE, strongly feeling again the verdict above: that the novel is bizarrely over-sexualised, despite being very good in many ways. The female narrator is also presented as obsessed with the approval and favours of the titular character. I have a suspicion that this is Lethem deliberately trying to write 'how women approach relationships', ie: an idea (true, false or otherwise) that they are keen to take possession of partners, lock them in to relationships, show them off to others, etc. I'm not sure that this rings true for the specific situation described in the novel. I don't find the character's motives, desires and actions altogether plausible.

Feeling very unwell, I then read something easy: the PARIS REVIEW interviews with Peter Carey and Stephen King. Carey was more politically critical and anti-colonial than I expected. King was unbuttoned and entertaining, attacking Kubrick's film of THE SHINING and firing back very strongly at Shirley Hazzard for putting him down. He seems to have lived an extraordinarily productive life as a writer. One of the funny things here is him talking about making money from books and saying 'well, I only make a quarter of what Danielle Steel or John Grisham make' - ie: he's in a different realm of popularity and money from most authors.

Ending the year on a cheery note with Derek Raymond's He Died with His Eyes Open and The Whites by Richard Price.

I am really struggling with Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, which is a puzzle as it’s a very short book, and written in basic sentences that an average eight-year-old could understand. Nonetheless, I’m finding it very boring.

I did have the radical idea (at least for me) that I could stop reading it and pick up something more enjoyable. Once I might try that instead of bending to my usual anxiety about sunken costs.

I am really struggling with Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, which is a puzzle as it’s a very short book, and written in basic sentences that an average eight-year-old could understand. Nonetheless, I’m finding it very boring.

I did have the radical idea (at least for me) that I could stop reading it and pick up something more enjoyable. Once I might try that instead of bending to my usual anxiety about sunken costs.

I shouldn't talk since I just finished Seven Gothic Tales (Blixen) which was really overlong for my taste but as a rule of thumb I find you should always put down a book that's not enjoyable

maybe it will be enjoyable another time

something else will be enjoyable now

reading is joy

Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra, about 100 pages in and feeling it is the rococco period with extra embellishments

side question: How do you process uncertainty in understanding while reading (analogous to not knowing the parse for a sentence but applied to content and being confident, or not, that you'll be able to make sense of it later)?

Chuck Tatum: I read THE THIN MAN when I was about 14 and loved it. Definitely didn't find it boring then!

My spelling is also getting worse. What an atrocity!

Ha yes - it’s got sex and guns and boozing and even cannibalism, it’s basically a perfect 14 year old’s book. But I wasn’t feeling it for reasons I can’t explain. I do love GLASS KEY though.

Good advice Corrs!

Xpost:

Youn - how do I cope? Terribly. Which is why I always fail at David Peace and Steve Erickson books. I think it’s something as I was better at when I was younger and (not to be operatic about it) death seemed much further away.

Derek Raymond is fucking great. That is all.

I believe Ken Bruen is a fan.

I loved The Crust Of Their Uppers in college. I wonder what it would be like to re-read.

Raymond's Factory novels are brutal, ugly indictments of late 80s Britain. Peace's Red Riding novels certainly wouldn't exist without them.

Currently reading "The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims" by Arthur Schopenhauer translated by T. Bailey Saunders.

The Philosophy of Modern Song - Bob Dylan. Put this down a couple of weeks ago and haven't been eager to return tbh. I enjoy Bob in full trickster mode but the tricks are getting wearisome.
― Chris L, Tuesday, December 13,

still reading the xpost Dylan book, as I mentioned on Is Bob Dylan overrated? It's a bit frustrating occasionally, but I still haven't gotten tired of it.

― dow, Tuesday, December 13,

...You're high-principled, chivarlous...but you don't have to pretend with me. You're the spoofer, the playactor, the two-faced fraud---the stool pigeon, the scandalmonger---the prowler and the rat---the human trafficker and car jacker. Take your pick and be selective and be honest about it. You're the hardliner for fair play and a square deal, just as long as you've got your irons in the fire and enough on your plate. Muckraking, chaos and bedlam, you're a party to it all.

At the same time, you find the lack of justic intolerable and the lack of mercy even more so. It sets you off, and you wonder if it's even possible in this world...You like to praise it and put it on a pedestal, but it has no place in your life as long as you're employed. Whatever your racket, your shit job, whatever your routine task is, you never had it so good, so let's leave justice and mercy to the gods of heaven. Better to go to the local movie theater, be a movie goer, sit in the opera---some wacky farce, some silly bull-crap stage show, or better yet stare at a crack moving down the wall. Think about kindness and benevolence, giving people a second chance.

This song says let's be just and honorable to the point of our natural ability.

Let's not make empty gestures, or expect people to let up on us, let up on us, let's not expect to be pardoned or forgiven. Mercy may be a trap for fools.

Re' the song as song, record as record--he often steps back toward the blackboard toward the end of each entry:

The word mercy comes from the same latin root that the word mercantile or merchant comes from...This song could easily be the skeleton of the monster that is "Ball of Confusion."...But where the Temps sang a frenzied jumble of words exploding from the center of the frey, Mose is the detached observer of a few extremely carefully chosen words, resigned to our foolish foibles but unwilling to let them pass without comment.

"perusal < I think every reader-viewer will agree": < was meant to be ---.

He says "fray," I made it "frey," sorry.

Reading Bruce Boone and Robert Glück’s La Fontaine before bed, also finished some shorter works by Kevin Nolan and Prynne (of course) this week.

Today I read the 1986 PARIS REVIEW with William Gaddis, by an enthusiastic Hungarian.

In very Kinbote mode, he spends the last page repeatedly asking Gaddis about Hungarian influences on his work.

He also cites John Alridge's comments on Gaddis's work. An unexpected string to the bow of the Oxford United marksman.

whut

He said the pinefox
I said whut

Or maybe
He said Kinbote
I said wot?

No, the part I didn't get was

An unexpected string to the bow of the Oxford United marksman.