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

Actually I forgot to mention someone who seems to me egregious in this field: Tracey Thorn. She's written FOUR books! I don't think the world needed four books from Tracey Thorn. Strong sense of publisher or agent saying 'OK, Tracey, this one's gone well, we need a follow-up!', and Thorn coming out with something quite arbitrary, like a book about living in suburbia (the one thing that literally everyone already knows all about).

Then she gets to go on a fourth promo tour with Q&A sessions with Caitlin Moran and Chris Addison. It doesn't quite seem to be how writing should work.

Ngl, it’s kind of amazing to read someone writing that a book of short stories won’t be of much substance because the stories are “so short,” then in the next breath say they are reading Bono’s memoir.

Actually I forgot to mention someone who seems to me egregious in this field: Tracey Thorn. She's written FOUR books! I don't think the world needed four books from Tracey Thorn.

Tracey Thorn's books are not all the same! You have to be clear what you mean by "four books."

My sense is that the stories are often going to be so short as to lack substance.

Have you read Lydia Davis or Joy Williams?

Has she not written four books?

Those are the ones I mean by 'four books'.

Each one approaches its subject in a different way -- it's not just "Oh, here's Tracey with another memoir."

For example, her book about Lindy Morrison doubles as an account of their friendship but more importantly as an examination of the machismo permeating '80s indie culture. I thought it an invaluable account of a subject often ignored.

That does not sound promising to me.

Nor does a book about that omnipresent fact suburbia.

re your previous post: I don't much like Davis, but could be persuadable. (Last thing by her in the LRB was very dull.) I don't remember reading Williams. I've read some Diane Williams, FWIW, and find her disappointing verging on dire.

Sometimes very short prose can be excellent, effective, powerful. But there is a range of possible scales for the short story - up to 'The Dead', say - and one's sense of what the short story can do can be skewed if all the examples are unusually short.

In this particular volume the editor refers more than once to 'flash fiction' and stories that are 300-400 words long. Those stories might be good. But I don't think that they'd be representative of the potential of the genre.

As I noted, I intend to read this whole volume, and will eventually have a fuller sense of how good or bad it is. It includes some big names (Carver, Le Guin) but omits some others (Moore). I think it's a useful anthology if you're interested in more diversity and inclusivity than some other earlier anthologies.

I guess most music memoirs are not literary events. I mostly see them as raw material for actual writers/biographers to use in the future.
Joe Jackson's A Cure for Gravity from 1999 was a great memoir from someone whose music I don't especially love. Lots of keen observations and scenes, and it basically ends in 1978 as he records his first album.
Ray Davies is a much greater songwriter and musician, but it wasn't until his third book Americana that his writing managed to feel natural instead of awkward.

Still doesn’t really respond to my observation that user pinefox subtly disses an anthology of short stories featuring some of the greats of the form but takes seriously the probably-ghostwritten memoir of a pompous laughingstock like Bono.

Fwiw, I’m not trying to be aggressive, I just don’t get it.

Joe Jackson's A Cure for Gravity from 1999 was a great memoir from someone whose music I don't especially love.

one thing that hit reading penman, that's interesting about dylan, maybe the biggest tribute to him, is that we still EXPECT something from him. like when he puts out an album people will talk about it and debate it and analyze it and call it out as genius or total bullshit (or this book, too) but pretty much every other star of his vintage people just seem happy they are still around...
Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

For example, her book about Lindy Morrison doubles as an account of their friendship but more importantly as an examination of the machismo permeating '80s indie culture. I thought it an invaluable account of a subject often ignored.

Poster table writes:

>>> Still doesn’t really respond to my observation that user pinefox subtly disses an anthology of short stories featuring some of the greats of the form but takes seriously the probably-ghostwritten memoir of a pompous laughingstock like Bono.

I didn't 'subtly diss' a book. I bought it and started reading it - unlike, as far as I know, anyone else on the board. I'll read it all, 400 pages or so - perhaps unlike everyone else on the board. I'll probably keep commenting on it, for good or ill. Maybe much of it will be good. Maybe not. I'm not very far in at all.

On the question of length in short stories, which can be variable, I've said enough above.

The book of short stories has virtually nothing to do with Bono's book. They're two entirely different books which I, personally, am reading for different reasons.

Is Bono's book ghostwritten? I doubt it. Bono is eloquent, in a way that some Irish people are. I don't think he, of all people, needs a ghostwriter.

Probably he had an editor. I get the impression that he is fairly characteristically ready to praise his assistants and guides on this work. As I noted above, I think that the relative success of lots of music memoirs may relate to editors.

Personally I like some of Bono's old records a lot. His later records, not so much. Different people, naturally, will have different feelings about those records. Some like none of them. I'm very content with that.

I think I'll quite like parts, at least, of his book.

yeah I get the sense Bono actually wrote this thing.

I guess maybe a point being made (not to speak for the table...) is that despite their length, each of the short stories in that collection comes with its own separate creative context and universe, worthy of the same gravitas (if not more) that Bono's process has been offered here. Joy Williams is considered a master of short story writing (and different from Diane Williams, despite them being... women with the same common surname), in her own right, as is Grace Paley, and so on. The approaches to concision are different. It feels a bit like grouping Ulysses and Lord of the Rings as 'too long'.

The music memoir question is an interesting one. I read an article recently that suggested that even books by niche artists are now bankers for publishers who can predict the audience who will buy them, a bit like a box set. Sometimes I think prose can suffer but the stories are interesting enough to back it. Often the smaller-scale the musician, the more likely they are to take creative control and have their own go at making something interesting.

Offering people like Tracey Thorn and Viv Albertine a second or third (or fourth) contract has enabled them to keep going with a new form and produce books that are more interesting than the initial recounting of their career, or Brett Anderson, Jarvis Cocker and Miki Berenyi to sell memoirs that dwell on their pre-pop history instead of listing hits. A world where Kristin Hersh's weird use of language can make her some income where her records never did can only be a good one, imo. Big artists like Beastie Boys and Debbie Harry produced lovingly created photo books (and unusual audio book formats) where they might have churned out pure product and sold the same.

In a different climate, 20 years ago, Bono might have pumped out something ghostwritten himself, but there's more respect for the music bio now, and I suspect that's thanks to the smaller names paving the way.

I interviewed Tracey T for a book tour q&a a couple of years ago and I have to say this particular book - Another Planet, about growing up in Hertfordshire - is resolutely, almost comically, inessential. But nevertheless hundreds of people showed up to hear her talk and get their book signed! I guess you can't underestimate the market for this kind of 6 music nostalgia.

Terrific post, verhexen.

Through The Language Glass by Guy Deutscher
book I picked up when perusing the shelves in one of the 2 major bookshops in town which is now convenient to the workshop of teh course I'm on.
I thought it was going to be about linguistic relativity which is part of what is addressed I think but this has other focuses.
It starts with Gladstone talking about Homer's lack of talking about colour when one would expect it to be something which would crop up heavily. Gladstone talking in the middle of the 19th century and prior to Darwin's the Origin of Species among other things read this to mean an actual absence of colour at the time. Deutscher goes on to talk about the Swedish train collision which prompted investigation leading to the beginning of understanding of colourblindness which became a given reason for the absence fo colour in Classical times, previous reason given had been the development of differentiation of colour shades etc over 2000 years of practise. That is to say a general public who had not developed research processes into the subject had a few general agreed beliefs on the matter.

Interesting book which I'm finding quite well written. Only got as far as teh first few chapters so far since i started it a couple of days ago.

Richard Koloda Holy Ghost
Read this through now. Pretty great biography of Albert Ayler.
Very nice to have a coherent narrative for the background on an artist I've listened to for 4 decades.
Have also now just watched My Name is Albert Ayler the documentary from Swedish tv in 2005 though did so without having the Swedish speakers subtitled. & I think I dozed off for a while which is not great. So will need to rewatch. It does contain the only footage I've seen of Ayler playing and singing. Hope the full footage does turn up at some point cos would love to get to see it in full.
Anyway deeply recommended.

Howard Zinn A People's History of The United States of America
Just finished him talking about the Carter, Reagan and Bush Sr eras which has me up to p 600 which I thought I'd reached before.
He is pretty scathing about all of them including Carter who seems to have bneen less than truthful in his campaign promises, presumably just like every other person running for President. But does seem to have gone directly against things one would hope he would have helped. He seems to be seen as a bit of a Saint at the moment. Zinn talks about his support of resource exploiting companies which goes aginst the solar panel loving man of teh people image a bit innit.
He's obviously no Reagan so not creating Contras etc.& this has the invasion of Grenada posited as a distraction for events in the Lebanon which were themselves extremely underhanded. Probably should have already been aware of that. Doesn't ,mention Clint Eastwood making the one film that glorified the invasion of Grenada in Heartbreak Ridge.

Isn't the musician autobio/memoir just a sub-genre of the Celebrity Autobio, which afaict is one of the biggest markets in publishing, in the UK at least? I imagine a lot of it goes as xmas gifts, and I think on that level alone I'd rather get a memoir from a musician I enjoy than that dreaded other option, a book of the published lyrics.

Yes. Some of these books are quite enjoyable.

I agree with poster verhexen that they basically fill a commercial niche which suits author and publisher. They clearly fill a gap lost to record sales, as touring can also do, but in a more sedate and Radio 4 way than working yourself up to play a gig.

I imagine, a guess, that if you work at a publisher than hearing that an editor colleague is working with, say ... Justine Frischmann, Damon Albarn, or whoever, still has a slight frisson of excitement, greater than regular authors, even if you don't really care for the music.

If other people think this book of the US short story is so great and essential and everyone should be talking about it very respectfully, then ... that's good. Maybe some people, other than me, will even ... even ... buy it. I bought it from my favourite independent bookshop.

If they don't want to do that, which is also fine, then it's very funny, in every sense, that the one person who's actually reading it is supposed to be the one giving it insufficient kudos.

I mentioned Diane Williams because poster Arugula was talking about people who write very short stories, microstories perhaps, and I happen to have read her doing that.

It turns out that Joy Williams is in the book, with a story called 'Taking Care'. Is it good? I'll find out in due course.

I commented on what might just about be called 'Bono's process' because another poster challenged my interest in his book and said it was ghostwritten. I'm very happy not to talk more about said process, about which I know little. The book itself is quite good to read. That's enough for me.

The comparison between that book of short stories and Bono's memoir is non-existent. I didn't make it. The two books have virtually nothing in common. But I happen, for a moment, to have some interest in both, for entirely unrelated reasons.

I strongly share poster Gimbel's view of author Thorn, which is very well expressed.

Without any knowledge of the stories, pinefox said he feared they would be ‘so short as to lack substance,’ and then in the next post went on to praise a book by a pop star who is also a pompous asshole, to say the least.

Sorry that such contrast doesn’t wash with me, but it doesn’t.

Everyone on ilb purchase and read this specific anthology challenge 2023

It’s the only way lads

Tastes don't have to square, tabes, and I'm surprised you keep insisting on it. Sort of the point of taste.

Some people have it and some people don't. The table is like Le Bec Fin of ILB.

Bono can only hope that everyone who voted in U2 - Songs of Innocence POLL will go out and buy his book.

While we are on the subject of autobiographies of musicians, I'll put in another plug for Debbie Harry's book, Face It. It's very readable and entertaining, and her voice comes across as authentic. I'm still laughing about her David Bowie anecdote.

Some of the SONGS OF INNOCENCE songs and titles do figure in the very early chapters of SURRENDER (the little I've read), because much of that LP is a deliberate, perhaps strained, attempt to sing about early life, Dublin c.1970s.

I'm also a reading walker! it's pretty unsafe tbh but sometimes it's just the thing. it's funny when I'm reading some giant book but I do it anyway.

here's me this year:

The Last Man, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Home: New Arabic Poems (anthology), Two Lines Press
Tales of Hoffman, ETA Hoffman, tr. Hollindale
Real Easy, Marie Rutkowski
Homecoming, Magda Isanos, forgot to note translator
Post Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, Antoine Volodine, tr. Mahaney
Bardo or Not Bardo, Antoine Volodine, tr. Mahaney
War and Peace, Tolstoy, tr. Briggs
Leeches, David Albahari, tr. Elias-Bursac
Bartleby & Co., Enrique Vila-Matas, tr. Dunne
Obscure Destinies, Willa Cather
Bloodlines, Melissa del Bosque
Go Tell It On the Mountain, James Baldwin
Another Country, James Baldwin
The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy-Casares, tr. Simms
The Good Conscience, Carlos Fuentes, tr. not listed anywhere in early paperback ed.!!
The Union Jack, Imre Kertesz, tr. Wilkinson
The Judgment of Richard Richter, Igor Stiks, tr. Elias-Bursac
After the Banquet, Yukio Mishima. tr. Keene
The Islamist Phoenix, Loretta Napoleoni
Ways of Going Home, Alejandro Zambra, tr. Mcdurell
The Art of Flight, Sergio Pitól, tr. George Henson
Detective Story, Imre Kertesz, tr. Wilkinson
A Brief History of Portable Literature, Enrique Vila-Matas, tr. Bunstead & McLean
The Devil's Home on Leave, Derek Raymond
Destroy, She Said, Marguerite Duras, tr. Bray
The Journey, Sergio Pitól, tr. George Henson
Introduction to Emptiness, Guy Newman
The Autobiography of Phra Ajaan Lee, tr. name illegible in my notebook
The Master of Knots, Massimo Carlotto, tr. Woodall

I'll probably finish By Bus, the truly delightful book by Erica Van Horn I'm presently reading, tonight or tomorrow, and then tomorrow I'll fret about whether to read a super short book in one day to get one more in, or start in on something ambitious.

Wonderful year in reading for me. Music and literature, as magnificent and eternally new to me still as they were when I first discovered them as a child.

otm

A Brief History of Portable Literature sounds intriguing. Was it as charmingly entertaining as the blurbs make it sound?

it's good, and sometimes seems more than good, though Bartleby & Co. is richer, I think

thx

War and Peace, Tolstoy, tr. Briggs

The Good Conscience, Carlos Fuentes, tr. not listed anywhere in early paperback ed.!!

The Last Man, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

at the risk of being all morbs

Please use the receptacle provided: What are you reading as 2023 begins?

I usually post a link to the newest WAYR, but I figured there might be some 'clean up' on this needed for the ongoing discussions on this one before 2022 officially ended so I put it off a bit.

Ursula Le Guin -- S/D, etc.

The Whole New Yorker Raymond Carver Thing

for xmas i was given THE FALL OF NÚMENOR (by various tolkiens and others), written up here: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series

I'd like to be able to comment on that, Mark S, but haven't read this stuff properly since THE SILMARILLION when I was ... 13? I feel that I set myself rather an unnecessarily difficult and dreary challenge in that instance. I did read it all. I should have focused more on just properly reading THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

The comic book (c.1990?) of THE HOBBIT is very good.