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

Just finished Assembly by Natasha Brown. A short novel - just over 100 pages - if you want a book that gives an idea of the psychological violence of everyday racism (and sexism, but mostly racism) you couldn't do much better.

Chinaski, have you read Calvin Tomkins' Living Well Is The Best Revenge?

I've read it seven or eight times. I go from admiring the casual lope of the Rosemary section to hating the horribly overdone homophobia and being amused by Fitzgerald working overtime to turn Diver into some kind of Magical Presence because he can organize beach parties and minister to his ailing wife.

Yeah, the homophobia, the creepy gaze all over Rosemary. I was reading Diver (in that section at least) as a form of self-aggrandizement but I guess 'magical presences' - particularly men - is Fitzgerald's stock in trade.

I finished MAIGRET SETS A TRAP. It didn't have a huge twist. At the end a particular crime had probably been committed by one of two people and one of them effectively confessed. The other crimes were committed by the one person the police had arrested. Thus there was very little uncertainty, choice of possibilities, pondering of evidence for the reader. The investigation was quite linear and the reader followed along.

This is definitely a case of the 'police procedural'. I have been unsure whether the PP is a very different subgenre from others, but in this particular instance the PP story dispenses with the classical norms of detection. I suppose that the PP is also about teamwork and multiple police, and this novel has that. Probably reading several Maigrets that becomes part of the appeal.

I realised that I own Paul Morley's YOU LOSE YOURSELF, YOU REAPPEAR, on Bob Dylan, and thought I should start reading it. Thus far it is abstract, talking in general terms about all Dylan's work in the same way. I think it would be stronger if it becomes more specific and shows an understanding of how Dylan in 1962, 1972, 1982, 1992 etc are all distinct and belong to cultural moments that can be finely drawn. But I am not particularly hopeful that it will do that. It seems more likely to keep saying 'Dylan showed what he'd been up to, and where he was going, or where we were going, in 2012, as he had done, in fact, in 1962, except that not many people were paying attention then'.

Yeah, the homophobia, the creepy gaze all over Rosemary. I was reading Diver (in that section at least) as a form of self-aggrandizement but I guess 'magical presences' - particularly men - is Fitzgerald's stock in trade.

― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski),

I still admire the thing. It's interesting how it anticipates The Razor's Edge but in reverse: Diver doesn't seek enlightenment, he goes from debauch to debauch.

Must be a female author and preferably someone younger than 50. She loved Moshfeghe's first couple of books but didn't like the last one. Liked Sally Rooney's first couple of books. She did not like Patricia Lockwood at all. Immigrant stories, orphans, and dark humor are areas of interest.

Maybe Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli? It’s got immigrant stories, orphans and some dark themes, though maybe not so much dark humor.

I finished Tender... tonight in the pub. I wonder if going from debauch to debauch is as good a form of enlightenment as any other.

xp thanks for the recommendation

Bora Chung - CURSED BUNNY
short story collection. sci-fi/magic realism. p terrific if sometimes grotesque. in particular found 'the head' ' the embodiment' and 'snare' truly remarkable.

Cursed Bunny! Bad Bunny! Sounds promising, will check thx

I suppose that the PP is also about teamwork and multiple police, and this novel has that. Probably reading several Maigrets that becomes part of the appeal.

Re Simenon - I haven't read any of the Maigrets (police procedurals not really my thing) but have read plenty of his "romans durs" which are mostly magnificent ("Dirty Snow" would be a good one to start with) and I read most of them in French and can confirm that his French is pretty plain and workaday - I think I read he deliberately restricted himself to a vocabulary of 2000 words - so it's not just the translation making him sound plain. Apparently he wrote his novels in 10 days flat!!!

Which means there are some novels that took me longer to read than it took him to write...

Somehow that reminds me of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/10/nyregion/how-to-be-the-fastest-puzzler-in-town.html

Reading Dave Rimmer’a 1985 book on Culture Club and new pop, “Like Punk Never Happened”, just reissued with a Neil Tennant introduction. It’s terrific, like a feature-length gossipy Smash Hits feature, but somewhat more thoughtful. Huge fun. As a Smash Hits writer, Rimmer seems to have had access to every key player from the early 80s uk pop scene.

It's so wonderful.

I remember that book from hours spent in the music aisle at the bookstore, plus the title of another Culture Club biography, When cameras go crazy.

I finished The Gate, Natsume Soseki. It abounds with the kind of wistful melancholy that the Japanese have elevated as the hallmark of their national aesthetic. Even the main character's sojourn in a Zen monastery at the conclusion of the book solves nothing, and leads nowhere. He simply floats through a sorrowful world, getting brief glimpses of beauty, peace and happiness, all of which are transient and leave no lasting traces.

I'm now re-reading Wild Animals I Have Known, Ernest Thompson Seton. It's a series of portraits of various individual animals, a wolf, a crow, a rabbit, a dog, etc. which succeed in conveying them as vivid personalities, with their own characteristic quirks and personal dignity. A kind of proto-animal-rights book, but written in 1898. I first read it when I was about ten years old.

I’d never thought of wistful melancholy as being particularly a Japanese hallmark, but I must admit you made me want to read that book.

Choi Jin-Young - TO THE WARM HORIZON

what an incredible book. loved loved loved it. superficially treading similar ground to 'the road' post apocalyptic world , survivors journey across country etc but the whole tone seems v different.

originally published in Korea in 2017 with the English translation coming in '21 it charts 3 sets of Koreans fleeing across Russia after a worldwide pandemic has resulted in 100,000 deaths in one day in Korea alone with 500,000 on day two. I never cry at literature or while hearing songs but I kinda wished I could while reading parts of this. At times unbelievably sad and at others wonderfully uplifting, the central romance between Jina and Dori is beautifully realised.

1/4 through Paul Morley's YOU LOSE YOURSELF, YOU REAPPEAR. Unsurprisingly PM doesn't have new facts or research about Bob Dylan. He must stake all on his ability as a distinctive writer to respond to Dylan. To a degree he gets away with it. He does still have the ability, here, to generate one surprising twist of phrase per page. But I think he makes a mistake in writing so generally, from his memory of Dylan - the same memory we all have - rather than eg: putting the records on, one by one, and writing a detailed, spontaneous response to them. That would be more worthwhile.

He quotes few of Dylan's words. He would say this is because he is focusing instead on Dylan's voice. That's not a bad idea. But he doesn't really follow through on it. He states that Dylan has many voices, at least 15 or so, but he doesn't always explain clearly how one yields to another or how they differ. How *is* the voice of ANOTHER SIDE OF BOB DYLAN different from the previous LP? Or how is that of BLOOD ON THE TRACKS different from STREET LEGAL? To explain this you'd simply need to ... listen. I think Morley doesn't do enough listening to write this book.

I was thinking, Morley has another 280 pages to fill here and I can't quite see how he can do it, just drifting in the same manner. And yet, c. 1/3 through, he started to redeem it, by doing the one thing that he does better than anyone else: writing about Paul Morley.

He talks about how the fanzine he made c.1975 had Dylan on the front, and how he spent the next 30 years unsure whether it should have. Here at last we touch the Morley world of bathos and clowning and the book comes more alive.

If you wanted to read Paul Morley on 2020 lockdown time, you get that here also, pp.141-151.

He's also some what good on the striking quality of BLOOD ON THE TRACKS, though he again doesn't go into songs much. And he praises the piano playing of Paul Griffin, specifically for his playing on songs that ... don't have any piano on them (p.126).

Out of interest, have you read his Tony Wilson bio, Pinefox?

For a second I thought you were referring to Little Wilson and Big God.

I have not read that book yet, no. I would like to read the hardback which has an attractive cover, not the paperback which has a needlessly horrible cover.

Morley's rate of producing books has accelerated extraordinarily -- what is it, about 5 big books in the last 10 years?

I have to hand it to Morley, somewhat: he has raised the ante in this book and found things to say when it seemed he wouldn't.

He writes at some length about 'murder most foul', 'tempest', then 'I contain multitudes' - and connects them to JFK et al.

He quotes Dylan very little and I just found myself wondering a very simple thing: is he not allowed to quote Dylan? Is that why he just paraphrases lyrics and mentions song titles?

I can see why that could happen in some cases (cf Faber's supposedly fierce copyright protection), but it doesn't seem true of Dylan - who gets quoted at length all over the place (and who Jonathan Lethem once said had never refused a request for a sample).

One other relative virtue with this book: Morley is more literary than usual and does a somewhat creditable job of keeping up with literary references. His comparison of Dylan with Brecht is genuinely good, showing an intuition for Brecht's character and attitude. He also shows his reading of Borges, and cites Whitman, Shakespeare and others. You could call it standard stuff but most of Morley's work hasn't really been as literary as this; I think he's made a slight extra effort on that front and it's worked OK.

R.J Smith - Chuck Berry
Ali Smith - Companion Piece
Dan Jones - The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

Ha you are reminding me that I too read the first third of this book, earlier this year, but I never picked it back up. I was expecting something like the Bowie book where you read it in 2 or 3 big bursts (much as the author wrote it, I suspect) and you just sort of get carried away enjoying the sound of PM’s voice (much as the author &c) — but it did feel a tad more considered, or “literary” or whatever. Might go back to it over the holiday.

I also had much the same thought as you viz making Dylan’s voice the focus is a great hook, someone should actually write that book

Morley has slightly surprisingly gone on to write at length about Duluth, MN.

I suspect that Morley visited MN to write this, but also suspect him of copying lots of facts from Wikipedia and random websites, as he did for THE NORTH.

Morley who can be so canny and cunning a writer also becomes plaintive and naive when trying to write about things like the Great Depression and how it made life hard, for people, which was difficult.

Morley does also refer to the musical GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY (c.2017).

I retain my suspicion that he is not allowed to quote from Dylan's songs.

Surely the 'fair use' doctrine would allow Morley to quote Dylan's lyrics, so long as the quotations were brief and used to illustrate points in his critical appraisal of Dylan's work.

dylan sold his entire catalogue of songs to universal a couple of years back: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/07/arts/music/bob-dylan-universal-music.html

so even if his lyrics were much quoted in the past this may have entirely changed: the permission-giver *was* the artist -- who may indeed have exhibited a great liberality in this area in the past -- but is now merely a large corporation that doesn't give a fvck abt critical examination (except as a profit-making device) (they may have made it impssibly expensive)

the process for clearing samples rests on a difft mode of copyright, so the one being easy (or otherwise) has no real bearing on access to the other: again dylan may well have encouraged it (for reasons of aesthetic politics as regards his own attitude to the availability of song?) but this isn't directly germane to the situation with lyrics quoted on the page

xp -- fair use is not very generous and would be pretty limiting if you really want to dig around

also he sold his entire recorded catalogue to sony a few months after he sold the entire songwriting catalogue to universal, so he presumably can't automatically override sample-clearing either now, unless there's some kind of carve-out

(they may have made it impossibly expensive)

or quite likely given who we're talking abt and the speed with which he writes books these days, morley simply decided against bothering with the newly sluggish bureaucracy of clearance and treated the unfreedom as a kind of spur sideways: "people have talked abt the words on the page enough, i'll discuss other things"

this seems like a plausibly morleyish move, to me

Tend to agree, but maybe Morley should have said explicitly that he was doing this?

But if he had, many Dylan fans would have been doubtful about buying the book?

BTW someone who has Morley's THE AGE OF BOWIE could compare and see whether it ever ... quotes a song by David Bowie.

pinefox, do you know Michael Gray's Song and Dance Man III? Third edition, which only brings it up to 1999, but this was the first one I ever heard of (haven't read it) that really considers. Dylan's writing with performance in mind: voice of the writer and the singer, on record and live. This description is from Google Books, so I'll invoke fair use:

his third edition provides a definitive retrospective appraisal of almost 40 years of work by one of the 20th century's most significant artists. The author provides, in this new edition, fresh material and analysis. The material both updates the book through 1999 and offers major new studies of Dylan's entire oeuvre: notably a vast study of Dylan's use of the huge body of pre-war blues lyric poetry, a major chapter on his adept and knowledgable use of nursery rhyme and a substantial scrutiny of Dylan's prolific use of the Bible. The album-by-album guide has been updated and extended.

Outtakes on Bob Dylan Selected Writings 1967-2021 Hardcover – January 1, 2021
by GRAY Michael (Author)

Michael Gray wrote his first article on Bob Dylan for the counterculture magazine OZ in 1967 when its editor asked him to 'Do an F.R. Leavis on Bob Dylans songs.' Hes been writing about those songs ever since. Alongside his groundbreaking Song & Dance Man trilogy and the massive Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, Gray has been bringing his acuity to Dylan's career for newspapers, magazines and journals from the 1960s to the present day. Here we have eye-witness accounts of concerts: from a mercurial 1966 show in Liverpool through to bulletins from glorious, and not so glorious, shows on the Never-Ending Tour. Dylan's blues roots are explored in train rides through Mississippi. On a trip to Hibbing, Gray gets to play the same piano in the same school hall where Dylan hammered out Little Richard numbers in the 1950s. Throughout, Gray turns his critical attention to Dylan's work as it appears, from his immediate perceptive take on 1975's Blood On The Tracks up to a new, extended essay on 2020's Rough And Rowdy Ways. Ever since the pioneering Song & Dance Man in 1972, Michael Gray has been the go-to critic for Dylan fans in search of serious analysis of this most elusive artist's work. In Outtakes On Bob Dylan, we get Gray the man as well as a unique measure of Dylan's long career as it unfolds, not in retrospect but in real time.

Should at least be good for information, whether or not the authors opinionating/attitude sometimes gets in the way, as happens sometimes with Dylan expert Clayton Heylin.

I don't have those books by Gray but I have Gray's DYLAN ENCYCLOPEDIA and I actually consult it very often. You could reasonably almost say that it is to Dylan what Thomson's BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY is to film. I don't like all its opinions, though.

Bae Myung-Hoon - THE TOWER

sci-fi set in a high rise which is so huge it qualifies as an actual country. set of interconnected stories about life therein. liked it but would probably need a better knowledge of korean society to determine just how hard the satirical elements bite.

Tiffany Tsao - THE MAJESTIES

set among the super wealthy Chinese conglomerate owners of Indonesia. a woman poisons all 300 of her relatives and in laws incl her beloved sister who is the only survivor. from her coma the sister looks back on their lives to figure out why. enjoyed up until the ending which reading reviews after most people seemed to like well enough.

Paul Morley nears the end of his book on Dylan with Dylan having just discovered Woody Guthrie.

I'm reminded of Ian Penman's comments on the disastrous pacing of THE AGE OF BOWIE.

Holy Ghost Richard Koloda
Very interesting to get a coherent history of an artist I've been listening to for the last 4 decades. & I'm finding it an enjoyable read.
Think I'm about to stick Bells /Prophecy on my 3 changer for the next few days too. Enjoy some Albert Ayler.

Thinking Fast & Slow Daniel Kahneman,

Thinking Fast & Slow Daniel Kahneman,
book on 2 modes of thought that looks like its a decent study but I'm seeing the author citing Black Swan so not sure how rigorous that means, also talks about Malcolm Gladwell's Blink .
Subsequently wondering if this as good as I had thought. By an Israeli researcher which also may be a put off.
Anyway going to read a few chapters.

I finished Morley's book. Fair to conclude that the book contains entertaining diversions and some surprises (I didn't expect material on Minnesota or Dylan's family), but it doesn't especially seem to have been planned. It seems like PM just wrote and wrote until he had a certain amount of words, and then sent it in. There is little rationale for starting on Dylan's early background 2/3 in and ending the book when he reaches age 20 or so.

I also read Bob Dylan's THE PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN SONG (2022). You could say it consorts well enough with Morley's book, corroborates Morley's sense of Dylan's ability to be adrift in time and culture.

I commented on that book here:

Is Bob Dylan overrated?

Disgrace by Coetzee was a terrible choice for the holidays, but I was impressed by the prose, if some of his other books are less dark I'd be interested

I read that one on vacation because I found it in the hostel I was staying in. Felt pretty much exactly the same way.

Heh, his bibliography is not exactly replete with giggles.

Currently reading: The Alienist and Other Stories of 19th Century Brazil by Machado de Assis (translated by John Charles Chasteen).

Pretty sure it was his 2018 Collected Stories that I saw a review of advising us to stay with it, despite quite a few early efforts therein being way hothouse Euro-derivative---so please stay with this one, o. nate, and report back (maybe these are carefully selected from his reputedly golden prime).

So far I’m enjoying it.

"Euroderivative" not nec a bad thing anyway - much of my fav 19th century Portuguese writing is aping France - unless you're turning to a Brazilian author specifically to avoid the euro.

I read Nobody Is Talking About This, and agree with the general ILX consensus that it rules. Reading it for a group book, though, and somewhat apprehensive at what the mostly offline group will make of the first half.

Now reading an anthology of essays about swimming at the Women's Pond in Hampstead Heath. Alarming informations about the quantity of sea life in there, including at one point a python someone had set loose! Hope the men's pond is less populated.

Also not sure that Euro-derivative means in this context. To me De Assis reminds me a bit of Balzac and a bit of Mark Twain, but only vaguely.

Here in the waning days of 2022 I am reading The Third Horseman: A Story of Weather, War and the Famine History Forgot, William Rosen. The subtitle is a bit disingenuous because, while the author does pull in various facts about the anomalous Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age that immediately followed it, the vast bulk of the first third of the book is a fairly conventional English history centered on the many battles between Edwards I & II and a motley cast of Scottish aristocracy, among whom was the minimally aristocratic William Wallace (aka Mel Gibson). This is hardly "forgotten history".

The famine part of the book has yet to be developed by page 100, but any historical acknowledgment of the Little Ice Age requires mentioning its catastrophic effects on food crops, so it doesn't quite fit the 'forgotten' label, either. It's good marketing, though, and the book is OK, too. I may finish it before New Year's Day.

I finished Amina Cain's debut novel Indelicacy and R.J. Smith's just fabulous Chuck Berry bio.