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

The technology trap : capital, labor, and power in the age of automation Carl Benedikt Frey,
library book that has been sitting around teh bed waiting for me to continue. Book on why labour saving technology doesn't seem to save much labour in the long run. One idea being that time freed is soon taken up by other tasks.
THis book is looking into the history of the interface between mankind and technology. I've just got up to the point where the author has been looking at the power of the guilds to put off the introduction of labour saving technology. He's looked at Europe and China and come back to look at the UK. Apparently the decline of power of the guilds there meant less opposition to the introduction of labour saving technology and from that the Industrail Revolution ensued.

Rereading can be good, even essential, and I've been rereading certain books for my whole adult life, but at this point I think I'm still keen to read and learn as much as possible of books I haven't already read.

I sympathise with the point about 'reading what's actually on your shelves' rather than going out and seeking even more.

I continue with short stories:
What are your favorite recently published short stories?

With Hope, Farewell, Alexander Baron - One of those writers you run into a lot if you get interested in old East End stuff. So far, very good on the competitiveness of young boys and the awkwardness of trying to suss someone out whom you've just met and aren't going to see for long. The portrayal of anti-semitism is hardly subtle but then I'm sure neither was the experience of it in 1930's Britain.

I recently finished Candy House by Jennifer Egan; she does what she does well; she has experience.
I have a book of short stories and a novel by Claire Louise-Bennett with which I am trying to engage; I think I will read Pond first. Do you think it is important to read short stories in one sitting?

I reread at least one novel a month.

The Westing Game: fun, original, pretty woke (for the 80s)

Do you think it is important to read short stories in one sitting?

No, but if you add a long bath into the mix, then yes

(last bath was: The Garden of Forking Paths)

Alfred, did I dream that you read while walking, and, more to the point, walking at 6.30 in the morning?

Rereading is easily a third of my reading. I don't feel like I have a handle on any kind of complex book after just one reading. There's also just a different feeling to rereading. I'm not as conscious of my progress in the book, the width of the remaining pages, or like I'm running a marathon to get to the end.

Melville - Just started Bartleby, the Scrivener. Also plan to read The Confidence Man, though not sure if I will start that immediately after.

^both amazing works

speaking of rereading, starting on my second go through of christina stead's the man who loved children... been at least 20 years so my memory of it is fuzzy, pretty much just remember the overweening egotism of the father & the misery it causes for the rest of the family. in the collection of her shorter works i've just read there are a couple of autobiographical pieces which put a more positive spin on her relationship with her father/family life, but you can still feel some slight exasperation peeping through.

The Confidence Man

Alfred, did I dream that you read while walking, and, more to the point, walking at 6.30 in the morning?

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

Yep. No one around, sun's coming out.

I think it's great and yet have no idea of the logistics! All power to you, of course.

Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo - clearly an absurd character but I'm not finding it laugh out loud funny, should I be?

I usually have one fiction and one non-fiction book going - right now it is:

Tim Powers - Forced Perspectives: second book in his Vickery and Castine series and, sadly, probably the last I'll read. I love Powers' previous para-historical novels, but the swerve into contemporary urban fantasy is bumming me out. Both this and the previous Alternate Routes feel like they exist solely to be spun off into some other medium: streaming cable, comics, or...

Serhii Plokhy - The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. Outstanding book. Slow going.

Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo - clearly an absurd character but I'm not finding it laugh out loud funny, should I be?

― ledge,

yes!

I'll see if I can rewire my humour circuit...

xpost continuation of my previous post ... The short stories are good; the writing is vivid in the sense that it calls to mind things that are vivid and feel present. Correction on her name ... it is Claire-Louise Bennett.

I could not read in the bath for fear of damaging the book. I hate it when I drop books from the nightstand. I can't bear it when people throw books.

Claire Keegan - Small Things Like These
Darryl Pinckney - Busted in New York and Other Essays

Youn, I feel like Pond is one of the greatest books by a British writer from the last 10 years. Don't really think of it as a short story collection though - more a very ruminative, meandering Beckettian novel...

Yes, it seems like Pond might turn out that way, and I wonder if the lines between the short story and the novel are beginning to blur. I used to think it was a sign of weakness not to be able to control point of view to convey plot with one character, but it seems to be a technique frequently adopted now (cf. Jennifer Egan), and the disjunction in perception is often worth it, but I wonder ...

I really liked Pond.

At the time I said this:

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett. Collection of short stories. Good, I think. Interior monologues in domestic spaces, with a careful awareness of the mechanics of interiority, the circling round a thing, the unusual snags of feeling and recognition by which thought progresses or insight is gained. The elliptical and non-cliched nature of thinking and feeling. Someone said that she was similar to Jen Calleja, but i don't get that at all tbh, in fact Pond reminds me more in some ways of Gerald Murnane, an understanding of how to get to the profound from the repeated mundane and quotidian, and how the unusual or genuinely strange is actually part of that fabric.

The effect to me is a little like trying to catch an elusive thought that seems to have whisked away just before the moment you were aware of it, but which you feel has insight. Sometimes you find it and can look at it, most of the time it flits away without any sense of what meaning or importance it may have had. CLB is adept at catching them.

Your posts are making me want to revisit and see whether I still agree with myself. I think the plural, unachored viewpoint is something that works here, though I’m sure it can be abused or fail quite easily with less skilled writers.

Interesting to consider writers with floating points of perspective - Jon Fosse? Murnane (not character but point of observation), Soobramanien and Williams? - all doing different things but the point of view is protean, not fixed to identity, in some way.

Uwe Johnson - Anniversaries (part 2/4) and loving it so far. Johnson manages this continuously time-shifting novel, where its 1933-45 and 1968 with some skill, and you are constantly on your toes as he shifts time and characters. He is as attentive to space and people as Balzac and he only breaks Gesine's reading of the New York Times once to go over a piece by Hans Magnus Enzenberger (who died a couple of months ago as it happens) in the NYRB to criticise 'intellectual' anti-Americanism, but the novel itself is more diligently going through the same questions, as Gesine reads the goings on in Vietnam-war era America and lightly contrasts with Nazi Germany. Crucially there are no judgements, despite precocious Marie's (Gesine's daughter) protestations that there is innocence and guilt, that a side must be picked. But Gesine (and Johnson) understand that it is in the process of histories re-tellings and livings that something more is happening. What is that? I can't tell, another 800 pages of this novel to go.

In between part II and III I also finished/read the following as a 'break'.

Bei Dao - City Gate, Open Up. This is a poet's memoir of his family, time, country, with lots of rich detail of the food, smells, friendships struck and forgotten. There is a lot of bloody history here, again, as Mao's cultural revolution gathers pace as adulthood is coming. I love the telling of it though, the prose is so good. It has the poet's concentrated speed of telling.
Yoko Tawada - Three Streets
William Shakespeare - King Lear

o jeez: Claire Keegan? Is she good, is she piercingly sad-beautiful as some say? Might be too much for me right now if so---

small things like these is great

so is foster but at the end i put it down with tears in my eyes thinking it was almost a mean trick to write something so heart-rending.

I finished The Third Horseman, Wm Rosen. Can't say I'd recommend it. It's one of those helter-skelter books that can't settle on its subject matter and does a poor job of staying focused. A lot happens, but you never learn much about any of it.

Started reading Le Carré's The Looking Glass War after finishing a couple of heavy reads (Underworld and Sound and the Fury). Really fun. The prologue is thrilling.

Anthony Powell - From a View to a Death
Laird Hunt - Zorrie

I still want to read THE LOOKING GLASS WAR, before any other le Carré.

That prologue (the one in the Baltic airport, right?) is great!

Alfred, what did you think of From a View to a Death? I think it’s prob my favourite of the pre-Dance novels. Unobtrusively tragic and damning at the end as well as being v funny generally.

That prologue (the one in the Baltic airport, right?) is great!

Yeah that's the one!

Alfred, what did you think of From a View to a Death? I think it’s prob my favourite of the pre-Dance novels. Unobtrusively tragic and damning at the end as well as being v funny generally.

― Fizzles, Saturday, January 7, 2023 2:27 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I've only read one of those slim things, but this one's a hoot so far.

sounds right!

New Year has been taken up with the return of Prynne reading group, and I'm about 1/4 of the way through Clark Coolidge's 'SOUND AS THOUGHT,' a collection of poems he wrote in the mid-80s. It's quite good, an oft-overlooked entry in his ever-expanding œuvre, though it does feel a bit less momentous that either 'SOLUTION PASSAGE' or 'THE CRYSTAL TEXT' which came immediately before.

Otherwise, I'm reading a LOT of plays, because I'm teaching an American Playwrights class and need to brush up/reacquaint myself with my syllabus.

The Five Hallie Rubenhold
Feminist author tries to show the lives of teh 5 recognised victims of Jack The Ripper. Attempts to stop them being very limited entities who really only exist around the bloody deaths. Shows that their own lives were pretty messy in doing so. But they did need to have a reason to be in a run down area to meet their ends.
I'm not so hot on the speculation bits where she is saying 'she must have .....' which is a habit throughout the book.
Shame cos I enjoyed bits of this and did like the idea behind this. I may read some more by Rubenhold and see if that is a habit of hers elsewhere. NOt a trope that seems to fit too well in a history book. I thought she was a better writer from what I had heard prior to reading this. Oh well.

Alfred, what did you think of From a View to a Death? I think it’s prob my favourite of the pre-Dance novels. Unobtrusively tragic and damning at the end as well as being v funny generally.

― Fizzles, Saturday, January 7, 2023 2:27 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I've only read one of those slim things, but this one's a hoot so far.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, January 7, 2023 2:38 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

sounds right!

― Fizzles, Saturday, January 7, 2023 2:45 PM (yesterday)

Maybe I should've guessed a key supporting character was a crossdresser.

I'm in one of those funks where I can't quite settle on a book so I'm going with it and re-reading a few bits and pieces.

John Suiter's *Poets on the Peaks*, is a gorgeous thing, tracing the history of Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac in the pacific northwest, specifically their time working as fire lookouts in the Cascades. It's meticulously researched and photographed and further proof that I need more mountains in my life.

Colin Thubron's *In Siberia* is a bleakly beautiful travelogue through the then newly-opened Siberia. Thubron speaks Russian well and throws himself on the mercy of local people, ending up in unlikely places and situations.

Also reading Tarkovsky's *Sculpting in Time* and Seamus Heaney's *Seeing Things*.

Just to get my blood moving I picked up The Outfit a hard-boiled crime novel by Richard Stark. It's good crime noir, very sharp and tightly written action, but the middle section is sort of a medley of miscellaneous 'heist' stories which loosely tie in to the framing story, but don't add much unless you enjoy fantasizing about pulling off a robbery in the same way other people fantasize about winning the lottery. This is part of a series about a superman tough guy named Parker. I think the others in the series stay closer to Parker's adventures and may be a bit less of a tossed salad.

You might like the first Parker, The Hunter (basis of the excellent Lee Marvin flick Point Blank): here he's outta stir and back for revenge, standardly enough, but also, the author says that he doesn't know all that he wants, so things go in different directions---by Dirty Money, (which I think is the last one, but don't care,) he's clearly into the cool of heists as planned and must be into the chaos aspect as lived out, considering how many times he's been through this and put others through it. Some of the other characters are more engaging, I think, but he's an asshole worth watching, in my limited experience (this is # 24 in the series).

tables, what plays are you reading?!

I'm curious too.

In the past few days, I’ve re-read:

Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Curse of the Starving Class
Fences
Body Indian by Hanay Geiogamah
In the Blood by Parks
A Murder of Crows by Mac Wellman
The Ohio State Murders by Adrienne Kennedy

Need to do a few more re-reads but that’s about 2/3 of the semester, more or less.

Oh, I also read for the first time:

Sarah Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone

It’s a course on American Playwrights so had to limit myself somewhat, normally I do a big double-header with family, fading ways of life, and the force of self-destruction in The Cherry Orchard and Curse of the Starving Class.

Nahoko Uehashi - THE BEAST PLAYER

Japanese YA fantasy book. p good, will definitely read the sequel.

Various Authors - MARPLE

12 crime novelists have a go a writing a Miss Marple short story. Only found a couple compelling. Also way too many of them featured nephew Raymond.

Funny, I find Shane McCrae’s poetry insurmountably bad, but have always enjoyed the bits of prose I’ve read. I’m interested in this memoir!

I couldn’t make it to NY to see Bob Glück read this past week, so I am re-reading his Elements, re-issued in 2013 nearly thirty years after its first publication. While not on par with his other book of stories, Denny Smith, there are moments of stunning clarity and insight. I highly rate all of his novels, particularly Jack the Modernist, for those who are interested.

Most interesting about his writing is its ability to make me want to write— a unique and powerful gift for any writer to share with their readership.

Several books back, but this one keeps coming back to the spotlight in memory theater: Karen Joy Fowler's novelBOOTH, which earns its brevity x caps via encompassing mutability of family experience, tree of lives, with BOOTH in the face ov history courtesy little brother John Wilkes re-absorbed, as much as possible, into family context, while changing it, another change, incl. the way stories told by one's memory gradually change over many years.
Fowler, known for her speculative fiction with a strong feminist undercurrent, at least, and often with an uncommon sense of the historical, here boldy reaches through the ever-expanding welter of mid-etc. 19th Century lore & troves, apparently authenticated discoveries and bullshit, esp. regarding all things related to the Civil War, and brings forth Rosalie, the least-known offspring of Junius, among those who made it to adulthood,for the center of the chronicle's first section. On an isolated homestead, she minds her little sibs, living and ead, while also sorting out her sense of her parents, with mother frequently incapacited, father frequently on tour, fairly frequently crazy when he comes back. It's not unstressful and often fairly eerie to watch, but it's a way of life, frequently bringing the news from inner and outer spaces, day to day, night to night: she finds a balance.
Gradually, especially when the family moves back into town, to Baltimore--later, as adults, in New York City and so forth--the outer world grows a lot, with Rosalie taking her turns in the foreground, as the young 'uns grow up, each with a very distinctive personality, variations on a theatrical sensibility. John emerges as, while never the best actor, a born dreamer, and joiner of kid gangs he romanticizes, while gradually losing sense of fair play, also sense, period. Abe starts showing up periodically, likewise other increasingly familiar bits of plot points, but only when necessary, only for a while.

Hester’s book is incredible and while ‘The Marbled Swarm’ is a departure in his oeuvre, it is one of Cooper’s most accomplished books— its structure, syntax, and tonal shape are a real marvel. Just be prepared for some squishing

Just finished the Hester and yes, it is a really great insight into how Cooper's work is informed by/goes onto inform so much interesting, cool stuff. Delighted it exists.

I continue with SUDDEN TIMES. It becomes very much book about "the Irish in England" - in a certain generation, 1980s, 1990s, going through Coventry, Birmingham and London. Much of its world is that of building sites and labourers. Meanwhile it also develops its very menacing plot of crime, murder, vengeance, fear - but does all this through its meandering monologue which could veer anywhere at any time.

finished Notre Dame de Paris. i especially bought the penguin modern classics ebook thinking it'd be a more modern translation and better quality than random PG-based ebook but the translation is 1974 (49 years) and the ocr problems run into the hundreds, even in the chapter titles. i wonder if i can send them my corrections and if they'd care?

anyway, it's early Hugo and i think i prefer later Hugo. 22 pages of the view from Notre Dame, which is bascially a list of buildings, in the 1400s.

also, over a week until the end of the month, too late to start Germinal (which was the plan) so do i just start on April's list?

I finish Dermot Healy's SUDDEN TIMES (1998). I add:

* the book has a very unusual structure. The first half is set in a 'present day', but with flashes of traumatic memory. The second half is about that traumatising past. OK so far. But the odd thing is that the narrative then never returns from the massive 'flashback' or story of earlier events. The point that the 'present' story had reached is just abandoned.

* the book becomes quite dark. The protagonist's friend is burned to death by acid by, probably, protection racket gangsters. Then he gets involved with similar or the same gangsters and they burn his brother to death. Quite horrific. The protagonist gets through it in a state perhaps numbed, also very disturbed and hallucinatory.

* the voice of the book is a main distinction. It's varied, unpredictable, light on its feet. The whole book is narrated in small, sometimes tiny, subsections, within chapters, within 7 large sections. The voice at times is very close to Beckett; this must be conscious. But often the subject matter is too modern (1980s-1990s) to be so Beckettian.

The puzzling structure makes me feel that this book is not wholly satisfactory, though it is somewhat impressive in forging this literary voice.

Why/how does a Beckettian voice work only with earlier subject matter? I hadn't thought of that, not having seen anybody but Beckett trying it.

Dow, I don't think I sought to imply that a Beckettian voice would only *work* with earlier subject matter - hadn't thought of it that way ... More just that much of the time the book is talking about Ireland in, maybe, the mid-1990s and doesn't feel so much like Beckett. But there are numerous specific moments where it does; where the phrasing and diction are so Beckettian that it seems that the author must know this. In those moments, usually, the subject isn't very modern and specific, and phrasing and diction are rather more old-fashioned.

If you're interested in post-Beckettian writing (ie: somewhat 'influenced' by SB) then this is possibly of interest.

Quite likely (I haven't looked) the author doesn't see himself as especially Beckettian and may well think that's only a small part of what he was or is doing.

As for 'not having seen anybody but Beckett trying it' -- I think it would be fair to point to a host of derivatives, in various veins, from Pinter and Stoppard to, definitely, John Banville, who is sometimes so close as to seem like sheer pastiche. Even Eimear McBride has Beckettian traces, as Adam Mars-Jones pointed out c.10 years ago - and now I think of it she went on to write a more deliberately Beckettian book.

Try also:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/since-beckett-9780826491671/

Thanks! Come to think of it, can imagine Pinter, especially, encouraged by Beckett's approach: the playwright developing a sense of heightened aural realism, voices in his head via "street" cadence and found articulation (individualistic and received), for instance---neither writers' characters are anything like professional or classy, Educated speakers.

Of course, that can be tricky---Beckett can come off too predictably Beckettian on the page---

I started Bowen's short stories and Kawabata's Thousand Cranes.

Dow, FWIW, I think it's accurate to say that Pinter revered Beckett, and thus was hardly even embarrassed by the fact that his (early?) work so obviously resembled Beckett's. There was some slight personal contact between them.

I just happened to hear a radio production of Stoppard's play this week and was - predictably - struck by a certain cadence and rhythm that was derivative of Godot -- again, blatantly and famously so. Again the writer reveres Beckett.

One thing I will suggest is that academic reflection on 'Beckettian tradition' has probably too easily forgotten these obvious stage examples by going off into more rarefied examples in prose fiction (even, say, DeLillo!).

I must read that volume of Bowen stories (which must be about 500pp?).

Gerald Murnane - Tamarisk Row
Hermann Bruger - Tractaus Logico-Suicidalis

Murnane's first novel is dense, exhausting, at times exhilarating read. Not since Proust have I felt such power in the rendering of childhood memory -- a lot of times it feels like a writer, in doing things, is attempting to copy Proust -- and while Murnane has read him the sentences don't feel like Proust at all, he ploughs different depths - even if they can both end up exhausting. Its a hell of an effort too, for a first one.

The Bruger is more of an end of life affair, as the writer goes through 1046 pieces (from a line to a paragraph) of 'suicidology' (he would kill himself a short while after). Weirdly enough its lighter than it sounds: a lot on Kleist, Kafka, Bernhard and other German language writers make an appearance (philosophy but mostly literature). Camus. And...Houdini, his passages on him end up being some of the most moving. The escape artist, almost as if Bruger was writing to cheat death for the very briefest of moments.

Finished David Smith’s translation of César Vallejo’s Trilce, an utterly weird but moving reading experience. I had only read stray poems here and there before, and apparently the Eshleman translation is the one I should seek, but I quite enjoyed the somewhat literal element of Smith’s.

I'm reading and loving Calvino's Mr Palomar. Though I greatly enjoyed The Baron in Trees many years ago, and though should be very much up my strada, I always found Invisible Cities and If... a bit too... ethereal?... in their fabulism for me. This is wonderful though - minutely observed and ruminated episodes of everyday life, like a droll companion to Ponge or a phenomenological M Hulot. Particularly liked the horny tortoises and querelous blackbirds.

― Piedie Gimbel, Sunday, March 5, 2023

If we're still operating on a seasonal turnaround for each new WAYR thread, it's time to move to new digs. I'll happily let anyone who wishes decorate the new place with a title and a welcome mat. I'm a bit burned out atm.

Hermann Bruger

*Burger

I've started on Walter Benjamin, RADIO BENJAMIN: a large collection of his writing for radio.

xxp done.

A halo of warmth in the darkness of the year: what are you reading spring 2023?

thx gyac