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

challopsing for team white elephant like there's no tomorrow

I read a chapter or two of Bono's SURRENDER. He describes his wedding in 1982. Adam Clayton was best man. U2 played at the wedding party, presumably quite ramshackle, with guest appearances from other notable musicians like Paul Brady. The honeymoon was in Jamaica. When they arrived the housekeeper said 'Sting, great to see you again!'.

Now reminded of an Alan Clarke film I saw at the same place I went to see Berlin Alexanderplatz, MoMA, only the former didn't require nearly as much sitzfleisch, this being Elephant, which I believe was about The Troubles iirc.

Have mentioned it before on ILX, somewhere, but this is a v well done summary:

https://www.versobooks.com/books/1028-a-short-history-of-cahiers-du-cinema

the one i keep hearing recommendations for is, i think, The Zone, which is someone live-blogging Stalker

(googles...)
"Zona: On Andrei Tarkovsky’s 'Stalker' by Geoff Dyer"

some ppl like geoff dyer but i am not one of them

That Dyer book was not bad, but between insights there were too many winky "can you believe I'm writing a book about this super-obscure, super-difficult movie?!?" asides.

I went to see Dyer read from and talk about the book. This was fine. But I have never seen the film.

re 'live-blogging a film', I can recommend Jonathan Lethem's THEY LIVE (2010), except that it contains too many references to Zizek. Otherwise contains some very good material.

Cool, thanks also for all Cahiers tips, and I'll give Thomson another shot the next time he happens by, won't seek him out. Should seek out my copy of Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber: says it was purchased in 2013 and never read! Oh well, I've got Negative Space on brane.

Stevolende, you might like the listening companion to Love Saves The Day, though it's even more wide-ranging than I expected from reading the book. A time trip across the dance floor, but I got into most of it pretty quickly. Bandcamp has digital (flac or whatever you want, as usual), CD, vinyl, though I got CDs from Amazon (a 2-disc set; BC seems to have them sep?). Amazon had mp3 and vinyl as well (the vinyl's sometimes sold out on BC). The only free BC stream is Charles Earland's "Leaving This Planet," though there may be more on other sites.
(All of the listening companion for the equally excellent second book, Life & Death On A New York Dance Floor (1980 - 1983), can be heard for free on Bandcamp.)

Cool. Thanks. Podcast is quite good too.
Was going to copy the discography in the book to somewhere.

Will try to get to read the 2nd book.

This copy was apparently in a store for some reason. As soon as I get it it has a request lodged so I need to get through it fast.
Surprised it's in a store and therefore not in usual circulation. Would have thought existence of Podcast would mean some demand.
Podcast is Love Is The Message but author is one of 2 hosts.

Second book better than the first, afaic, and gets into the recuperation of underground music culture into capitalist systems of extraction/exploitation in a way that isn’t didactic.

yeah, I loved Life & Death On A New York Dance Floor

After reading over half of NO FRIEND BUT THE MOUNTAINS, and 40-50pp of (tiresomely earnest and reverential) metatext by the translator and others, I'm bailing out on that book. But I can affirm that it improves as it goes, and chapter 8 is actually quite sharp on the management of carceral space, and the way that baffling, shifting regulations confuse and dismay prisoners. An odd detail, typical of this, is that the prisoner can receive half a glass of milk, but if the cook mistakenly pours slightly more than half a glass into the glass, then it becomes invalid and is set aside and wasted. Crazy.

I bought Michael Bracewell's UNFINISHED BUSINESS (2023) and have read the first chapter. Readable, enjoyable, and perhaps the prose is a bit better controlled than earlier Bracewell.

xpost the other volume in TL's NYC triology: Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 Romance of first part of that title well-balanced by research, incl. contending POvs, incl. great quotes.

Also expert social mapping, as Frank Kogan might put it.

I was quite impressed by The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe. Not sure where I heard about this book, but seems like it deserves to be better known. Ofc there's a voyeuristic aspect to a middle-aged married dude like me reading about the romantic lives of 20-something single women in 1950s NYC, but the book is much tougher and smarter than that synopsis might suggest. Its remarkable how well the book anticipates so many themes that continue to resonate down to the present day. Jaffe sets herself a challenge by weaving together 4 independent stories with 4 main characters (though they all know each other through an office where they worked together), but she needs a big canvas to tell the story she's trying to tell, a story as much about society as it is about individual characters, in which resonances and patterns can accrue between different people's experiences.

Is it better than THE GROUP?

A quarter through Gwendoline Riley's SICK NOTES (2004), I realise that though some of the writing is lively, the book is annoying. Its protagonist's ennui seems immensely self-indulgent and obnoxious. Question is, can I bail out of another book? I think I have to stay on and finish it.

^^ My first Riley last year. I'm reading My Phantoms; almost done.

Is it better than THE GROUP?

I haven’t read The Group, though it’s been on my wishlist for a while. I guess that one was written about 10 years later, so would be interesting to compare.

Riley is wonderful. I will say, I had a better appreciation of her debut, Cold Water, having read the later novels first. The voice is there fully-formed from the beginning, but it’s easier to recognise what’s working when you know where she ends up, and the twentysomethinginess of those books is less distracting.

Anyway I think she’s very good at writing about miserable things and obnoxious people without leaning on self-deprecatory jokes to sweeten the prose, but also without turning it into a sadistic experience for the reader.

Not sure anything in recent fiction has made me feel sadder than the bit in My Phantoms where the mum texts "bad haircut :(" to Bridget.

o.nate, I had thought that THE GROUP was earlier! ... But you're right, 1963!

I am over halfway through SICK NOTES. It's mostly been very bad, very irritating, one of the worst novels I have read in a long time.

However, halfway through the book the protagonist meets a random American and begins a relationship of some kind with him. I have no idea yet how it ends. But I will give GR some credit for writing about intimacy: the sensations of being alone with this person for the first time, the tension, speculation, mutual interest. It's something that most people experience some time, but that perhaps I don't see convincingly written in fiction.

Started the second book of Kristin Lavransdatter. I'm not quite in love with it but it's very good. Simple but not overly plain writing, lots of visual descriptions of the landscape and weather, and clothes, and faces - as usual the latter never work with me and just make me picture mr potato head faces but that's on me. The translation means there are no thees or thous or doths to get in the way of picturing them as regular people who just happened to live 700 years ago.

Stayed up late for The Leopard last night on TCM, but bailed after about 90 minutes: even though the characters discussed the Revolution and options right up front, I kept craving more nuance x overall story-sense. Is the novel good? What translation is best?

The whole film is a set-up for the final hour, one of the great extended scenes in film history!

only if you watch it tho

Good to know. I expect the novel will also be centered around the Prince and his circle, but at least his commentary won't be dubbed staccato.

one of the great extended scenes in film history!

is it an hour long slomo of a dog skin rug falling from a window?

I hope not, I liked the dogs!

Perry Anderson (hope Mark S will appreciate that reference) wrote that the novel THE LEOPARD is the greatest historical novel of mid-C20 Europe. I believe he called it 'a glittering jewel on a pile of trash', the trash being other historical fiction.

B-but what about The Bethrothed? Recent translation is good, I've read*. Maybe he meant relatively recent historical novels, not ones that are themselves historical/considered Classics.
*This is appealing, and not paywalled at the moment: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/17/italys-great-historical-novel

Betrothed, yes (even though it sounds wrong)

I watched The Leopard, enthralled, for the third time last Memorial Day weekend.

Actually, the film deepens the novel.

Read Mansfield Park for the first time. A reactionary and humorless text. All the characters you’re supposed to admire seem like prigs Dickens would have had some fun with 40 years later.

There's a certain sad fatalism in The Leopard, relating to some half baked ideas of the "essence" of spirit of southern Italy and its incompatibility with modernity. Get a lot of that in Portuguese fiction as well. It's an insiduous and damaging worldview, but I'll admite quite seductive in fiction.

Guess that's relating what the people around Lampedusa were saying iirc. Proust does something similar in his portraits of both reporting some of these views and making it seem weak, like Anderson's quote, in the way that class of people have the confidence of making pronouncements with little to back it.

Read Waste by Eugene Marten over the weekend - a short and nasty account of a necrophile janitor working in a big office block. Shades of Dennis Cooper in it's affectlessness but not quite as good as any of the Cooper I've read so far.

Having seen it pop up in a few threads on this board, I grabbed Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn from the charity shop for a pound. I've only read The Ecstasy of Influence before and that was years ago. Looking forward to seeing what his fiction is like.

I think it's his best novel, though not his most ambitious. If you mean the whole book THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE I'm impressed. That's long - and contains loads of tremendous, fascinating material as well as some weaker.

I'm pretty certain I finished it, but it was a long time ago now - just seen they have it in my local library so will pick it up today to refresh myself.

Read Mansfield Park for the first time. A reactionary and humorless text. All the characters you’re supposed to admire seem like prigs Dickens would have had some fun with 40 years later.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek),

Curious -- is this your first Austen?

No I’ve read S&S and P&P. long time ago but I don’t remember them being so priggish and I’m pretty sure they had jokes.

I'm not sure which novel would be my least favorite Austen (I haven't read Northanger Abbey). I do remember liking Fanny Price.

I think it’s silly when people don’t like books because they don’t “like” the characters but she was a bit much!

i had some fun thinking of lady bertram as a reductio of the idea that once you've secured a husband you don't need to do anything - even talk, or think!

While still reading other things, on the train home I started, after decades of not reading it, on W.B. Yeats's verse (?) drama THE SHADOWY WATERS (1906, or did it take decades more of uncertain tweaking?). It's about a pirate ship in a strange ocean.

All the characters you’re supposed to admire seem like prigs

I think you may be missing the fact that Austen was writing gentle comedy, not romance. When you see that a character is a prig it was her intention. She wants you to see their folly for what it is, but also their humanity. That may not be strong enough sauce for you, but please don't think she admired prigs.

fwiw I greatly liked NORTHANGER ABBEY, tremendously metafictional and playful, full of resonant passages. (Sounds like an abbey.)