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

i feel like i've been reading diana wynne jones's novel dark lord of derkholm for my whole life but probably a couple of weeks, i'm just slow.
poetry-wise it's been dipping into some elizabeth-jane burnett (her book of sea) and the collected poems of r.f. langley & w.s. graham

Camilo Jose Cela spoke at my commencement! He won an honorary degree. I remember his fierce Sam the Eagle profile and his denouncement of "las vicisitudes de la juventud."

Sorry -- I just consulted my notes. It's worse lol. He denounced "las tonterías de la juventud." His address went down like a kick in the belly.

lol bill bradley spoke at my commencement . . . about the horrors of the national deficit

everyone was like fuck you talk about basketball

I'm going to discuss The World and Everything That It Holds by Aleksander Hemon tomorrow morning with my book club. I'm predicting most of them won't have liked it. It is difficult but is pretty amazing. It is a tale of being a lifelong refugee, starting in 1914 with the assassination of archduke Ferdinand in Bosnia, and continuing from there into a prisoner of war camp in Galicia in western Ukraine, and eventually to Tashkent in Uzbekistan, Turkistan in Kazakhstan, and across the Gobi desert to Shanghai.

It is written in English, but with a lot of Bosnian and Spanjol (the diasporic Spanish sephardic equivalent of yiddish)

I did finish Ball Four earlier this week and wrote about it here.

Anyway, back to fiction! I started and finished Sophie Mackintosh’s new novel, Cursed Bread, within 24 hours. It’s short, but I could have done it faster: I kept going back to reread particular sentences that I loved.

In the room he looked at the rose of damp on my ceiling, took off his brown raincoat.

The book uses this event as a highly fictionalised backdrop: Mackintosh is not theorising on the real life event but draws from the mass hysteria and mystery. The narrator is Elodie, the baker’s wife. In common with some of Mackintosh’s short stories, some characters are named (Elodie, Violet, various Mmes) but mainly others are referred to by their roles (the ambassador, the grocer’s wife). This has the effect of giving it a fable-like feel, and also underlines the small-town setting of everyone. Every day Elodie sells bread to the townspeople and barely hears their secrets, is it a surprise that the names begin to blur and fade after a while?

Mme F had launched into another complaint about Josette, how she would stop talking for days at a time, like an anchoress taking a vow of silence.

Of course the antagonist of this book is Violet, who sometimes feels she should have her name in all caps: VIOLET. She is enigmatic and both desired and despised by the people of the town. There is a scene where the ordinary women are doing their washing at the lavoir, where Violet outsources this labour to older women,
where they exclaim over the luxe and sexual items Violet has stained with her life, until they start trying them on and end up damaging some of the garments in a frenzy. It reminded me a bit of Malèna.

They gather around me with wet cloth in their hands, drowned cloth, marked with blood that won’t wash out.

Sex and longing for it permeates this book like the scent of bread baking weaves its way through a house. It’s there in Elodie’s constant yearning to be touched by her husband, who denies her both calmly and coldly until she is almost screaming. It’s there in Elodie and her husband watching outside the bedroom door. It’s there in Elodie‘s fantasies about Violet and the ambassador both, where it’s never quite clear if she desires them for themselves, or to be them, or both.

I have read other people say that they don’t like the epistolary aspects of this book but I liked the way they are spliced through the present day narrative, so you are plunged from cloudiness and increased confusion into clarity and back again.

I enjoyed this a lot, but it’s not for everyone.

Camilo Jose Cela - The Hive. The just released new translation from NYRB is a must. It's set just after the fascists have won the civil war in Spain and it's composed of a series of 1-2 page character sketches and conversations -- much of it in various bars and cafes in Madrid. Some characters and their fates are followed up on, others are not. Over and over again there are these grotesqueries laid out in a superb style. The pessimism is of the highest order.

Haha yeah I bailed on this a few pages from the ending because the oppressive, sordid misery just came to be too much. Def creates a mood though, and makes me think Franco's Spain was much like Salazar's Portugal - just grey miserable days in cafes nursing petty grievances because expanding your horizons is prohibited so this is all that there is.

In A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, the earliest memory of Harry Crews is of waking up under a tree with his excellent dog Sam, both of them in early morning sunlight: he's a sleepwalker who's hit it lucky, in and out of place. The place, into which he now centered by tobacco farming, is late 30s Bacon County, Georgia, sometimes extending across the St. Mary's River into Jacksonville, Florida's Springfield Section of tiny shotgun row houses and cigar factories, with the youngest children, like himself, left to their own devices.
In Bacon and the Section, he's the mostly the audience, including that of the glossy people in the Sears Roebuck catalog, so fantastically intact, unlike almost every one else he sees, that they must have wounds under their clothes: he and his friend Willalee and Willalee's grandmother, Auntie.a self-proclaimed conjure woman and ex-slave, tell each other stories about the Sears people: the audience continuing through the creative process.
Little Crews also responds and is responded and susceptible to an increasing number of people, becoming "a parade" of vistors to his bedroom, when he's confined with "infantile paralysis" (nice work, Dr. Colombo). Many of these are people he knows or recognizes---though not the faith healer from the next county---in a new context, with him more an audience than ever, but for their attentions. Scary, especially when Auntie
s dropping knowledge, though things were already disturbing enough, hence the sleepwalking, and now he feels in place (for one thing, he can't wake up in a dark field, because he can't get there).
The second session is even better: almost boiled alive, he now qualifies for actual treatment, by drying light and soothing spray (which becomes a protective coating) while he's under a protective shell, which he compares to the top of a carriage, with his Sears Roebuck Catalog and a tablet for his detective novel, about a boy detective who carries fireworks for protection. He's also allowed to keep an attentive baby goat in there---all things for the twice-struck child---
Before, in between, and after these confinements, he can disappear like a tiny Ishmael, one whose reappearances become more self-revealing, traced in and out of place, for keeps---spoiler of sorts: a mind-fuck evangelist appears, an alibi of sorts, but a plausible one, as far as he goes, which is pretty far, in a professional way. Even I, Boomer suburbanite, was singed by one during a brief middle achool encounter, while preschool Crews and his crew get the extended treatment, as isolation's captive audience.
There are what I take to be fictional outcroppings, but not much to stumble over. He learns from the stories of men (character-driven, funny) and women (action, cutting the surface)--the former told while taking a break, the latter not so much.

"Spoiler of sorts" because this kind of person is always likely to turn up/be drawn to this kind of setting (and of course is still very much with us in the Deep-Ass South: on radio, basic cable, antenna TV, the Internet, or otherwise as close as they, usually he, though always with an entourage, can get).

Sorry -- I just consulted my notes. It's worse lol. He denounced "las tonterías de la juventud." His address went down like a kick in the belly.

― the very juice and sperm of kindness. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 1 April 2023 bookmarkflaglink

The man was a bastard. Utterly unpleasant by the sounds of it.

Haha yeah I bailed on this a few pages from the ending because the oppressive, sordid misery just came to be too much. Def creates a mood though, and makes me think Franco's Spain was much like Salazar's Portugal - just grey miserable days in cafes nursing petty grievances because expanding your horizons is prohibited so this is all that there is.

― Daniel_Rf, Sunday, 2 April 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I think a lot of that is to do with the poor/working class characters he is sketching. But yes it's striking how there is nothing like a hope for better, like there could be in a more communist novel of the period where even a character in jail is yearning for something bigger and better.

I continue with Crisell's excellent, lucid, prim INTRODUCTORY HISTORY OF BRITISH BROADCASTING.

What A Plant Knows Daniel Chamovitz
book on the sense experience of plants. Pretty interesting and a quite fast read.
Looks at a lot of stimulus reactions witnessed and experimented on plants.
Looked like it could be interesting when I was walking around the library a couple of weeks ago.
Glad I read it anyway.

Not A Nation of Immigrants Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
her book on the US and settler colonialism which came out last year. Been wanting to read it since it was released. Got it a few weeks ago.

Racism ed Martin Bulmer
book of excerpts and essays from a lot of writers work on various aspects of the subject. Read some very good bits , have been cherrypicking so maybe should try reading it from start to finish or something.
Book turned up in a library iin the next town over as I popped over there last week.

I finished DAMASCUS by Christos Tsiolkas over the weekend. It's the story of Saul (aka Saint Paul), told from multiple perspectives and set in a nasty, violent world. A lot of bodily fluids, a lot of raping, torturing and killing of children (a recurring theme is of parents leaving their unwanted newborns on the side of a mountain where they are eaten by wild animals).
Tsiolkas is not a subtle writer, and keeps hammering in his themes and contrasts. But the book gives a good insight in the different early christian factions competing for dominion.

I finished Tracey Thorn's *Bedsit Disco Queen*. It traces (yes) her life in suburban north London, the time with the Marine Girls and then the years through EBTG and, eventually, her leaving behind songwriting for motherhood. It might be odd to call it comforting, given her (and Watts') profiles, but it was absolutely that. She's great and wise company.
The one thing I can't shake since finishing it is how relatively *easy* everything came to them. Thorn's style is quiet, understated and ironic and she uses understatement as a kind of corrective against smugness, I think; but what gets left out, what never gets examined, is the *talent* - that ineffable thing at the heart of her, that thing without which none of the *life* happens. There are various points in the book where the default line is 'so Ben and I wrote a bunch of songs', as if it was painting a bedroom. Maybe that process is as ineffable to her as to the rest of us and should remain off-stage, as it were, but I would have liked some discussion or acknowledgement of it.

Anyway, that sounds like a moan and it isn't. To speak of the ineffable, my other big takeaway from the book, and from having listened to a few interviews with her since, is that Thorn is *happy*.

I'm reading a Reacher book at the minute, which is as close to not-reading as reading gets and just about bloody perfect, thank you.

I think that with things like a year zero anybody can do it level paradigm shift era like punk which I think the Marine Girls came out of, or certainly came out of teh aftermath of the idea of talent is still deeply present. Like you find that people did not think their talents lay in that direction trying things out and finding they do, but you also find a lot of people who realise it's just not for them. Subsequently not advancing further because they can't really do anything along those lines and their talents do lie elsewhere.
So you will find that people either can actually do something inventive with a lack of technique which will reveal areas of further investigation. Can do something coherent with words and melody or other structure that is worthy of further investigation and will also reveal something worthwhile. & you also get incoherent noise, cliche and lack of rhythm from others. THough conceivably one could do something semi interesting with that if one had talent to do so.
Also you can have over educated players without an iota of creativity making identikit copies of current taste and not finding out what they do and do not actually like or feel really turned onto investigate in a creative way.
So yeah would think talent was relevant even there , it's not as egalitarian as one would really like possibly.
I just think punk and a couple of other scenes did turn things over so one didn't need to be completely schooled in how things 'should' be and allowed a lot more self expression and some of that stands the test of time and some of it was pretty self indulgent.

I think it is also something taht a lot of people see as a point of complaint that punk became a point of orthodoxy in itself and ceased to be a broader church of creativity where everybody wasa really allowed to do their own thing as long as it wasn't being whatever e.g. hippy, prog, mainstream etc etc each of which probably have a number of examples worthy of interest anyway. BUt again that's down to creativity which is down to talent .|
I think the dichotomy may be down to talent vs technique where up to a certain point one would think they were the same thing and a scene like punk or skiffle or whatever showed that they weren't. & overplaying is a negative etc.

I think the broader issue arising from poster Chinaski's post is not re 'talent' as such, but that artists tend not to describe how they actually make the art, even though that's the thing that primarily makes them interesting to us.

Africa is not a country : breaking stereotypes of modern Africa Dipo Faloyin
Book from last year looking into the Western misconception that Africa is a single space not a full continent. Where there has been some thought that Africa is a monolith not a wide array of different cultures, peoples , geography etc. I think there is a related podcast too which is good.
So far read the first 100 odd pages and finding it a really good read. JUst read about the white saviour BS of Bob Geldof concerning Ethiopia and how reductive and racist th songs he wrote in 1985 and 2015 were and how they actually avoided the actuality of the circumstances the songs were supposed to be representing.
He's also looked at the artificiality of th 1895 conference that split up the African continent along totally fictional lines instead of any kind of geographic feature . & how this caused tribes who had been in the areas for centuries a great deal of damage. How the European powers did very little surveying and knew very little of the actual geography they were dividing. So remained with a totally abstract concept of what actually was represented.
Great book.

plus way too many books picked up in charity shops which I hope I will eventually get through a load of . Probably need to organise better to make sure I know what I've got and can plan the to-be-read-next from.

I think, Chinaski, a gap exists between Thorn and Watt's talents and how for almost fifteen years (!) they and/or their record label(s) misread the popular moment.

I'm back to reading Tolkien (The Two Towers).

Previously in the last 40 days:
- Yourcenar - Nouvelles Orientales
- Laxness - Independent People
- Borges/Bioy Casares/Ocampo - Antologia de la literature fantastica

I love everything Yourcenar touches so I'm not surprised she does violent traditional tales well.
The core story of Bjartur the independent farmer in the most desolate valley of Iceland at the worst political time and with pretty bad weather was excellent, but enclosed in a four-part epic that does not really go anywhere. Still enjoyed it.
I ordered the Antologia without thinking and didn't realize it would be a mix of short stories edited by those three giants, including a good deal from Anglo-Saxon authors. Turned out it was an excellent way to explore the fantastic genre, even if the stories are uneven. It's from 1940 so a pretty interesting cutoff, pre-SF, pre-Boom, and I appreciated that it includes all those micro-stories and extracts, some from the Antiquity, a single line from Joyce etc that gave the collection a nice rhythm.

Actually, 1940 is not a strict cutoff but just the first edition I think, I had a doubt and randomly checked and La Casa Tomada by Cortazar for example is 1946.

Is the single line 'What is a ghost?' and its answer - 'One who has faded away through change of manners' etc ?

Yes, and the Spanish sounds pretty good: "Qué es un fantasma ?" "Un hombre que se ha desvanecido hasta ser impalpable, por muerte, por ausencia, por cambio de costumbres".

There's another one immediatelly after which I assume is the apparition of Stephen's dead mother in the longest chapter of Ulysses: "I was once the beautiful May Goulding. I am dead".

It is.

"por cambio de costumbres" - marvellous!

I have it as The Book of Fantasy, with an introduction by Ursula K Le Guin---from Publisher's Weekly. re this 1988 edition:

Originally conceived of by its Argentinian editors in 1937, and now published in English for the first time, this unusual and provocative volume is an omnibus collection. In addition to stories by Ballard, Poe, Saki, Max Beerbohm, Ray Bradbury, May Sinclair, de Maupassant and Julio Cortazar, there are shorter pieces, anecdotes, folkloric fragments, dreamlike moments. Most of the 79 selections are only a paragraph or two long, giving us brief passage into magical visions of the world culled from the work of an international array of authors of the past three centuries, including less well-known authors such as Santiago Dabove, Edwin Morgan and Niu Chiao. The keynote tale may well be Borges's own "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in which an imaginary world, conjured up by manufactured documentation, ends up eroding our reality: reality is malleable, and imagination necessarily subverts and alters it.

Martin Chandler further specifies,in his Amazon reader's review:

...along with the deservedly famous selections such as The Monkey's Paw and The Man Who Likd Dickens, there are many stories even the most erudite fantasy reader may be unacquainted with. Some of the tales, such as The Story of the Foxes by Niu Chiao and the unsettling Guilty Eyes by Ah'med Ech Chiruani, are half page at most, but will implant themselves in the memory as effectively as the longer narrations. ("Guilty Eyes" is as durable as a poison oak seed.) Also present is a fine selection of Latin American fictions, with a focus on Argentine writers. Kafka' Josephine the Singer, Cocteau's The Look of Death, and Beerbohm's Enoch Soames sound straight out of the world of Borges, a tribute to the latter writer who managed to forge a world view at once deeply personal yet universal. Borges's own Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is included as well as a piece by the under-read Casares. All in all an indispensable collection, marred only by an astonishing number of typos. Buy it! (At 92 cents it's a steal.)

slogged through The Scarlet Letter. couldn't face the introduction (which was like 15% of the length of the book)

Gaskell's Ruth next

both were mentioned on the Wikipedia page for the book i had planned to read next, Trollope's An Eye For An Eye

i literally used to read The Custom House as a sleep aid

Still, when travelling, getting through C.M. Kornbluth's densely packed book of short stories.

Always thought of him as being one of the best, although haven't reading anything apart the standard anthology fare in ages.

Frequently bought together
This item: His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C. M. Kornbluth
by C. M. Kornbluth
The Iron Dream
by Norman Spinrad

Stevolende, you might try Paul Zollo's interviews compiled in Songwriters on Songwriting, especially the revised and expanded '03 edition, also More Songwriters on Songwriting Otherwise, in their own books and the general interest media, even most so-called music coverage, artists don't usually say that much about details of the songwriting process, beyond "human interest" (which can be entertaining enough: in Musician Magazine's How I Wrote That Song, the guy in the Hooters said he got tired of his wife going on about Leonard Cohen, so he wrote "One of Us," the Joan Osborne hit.)

But a lot of editors don't seem to want anything that indicates just how hard the work of art (and entertainment) can be, the choices and granular focus required---although they'll take the break-downs, the freak-outs from pressure of Fame etc.--nor, for the most part, do they trust even simple analysis---I had a friend who tried a a brief description of how a piece of "math rock" worked, back when that was a thing, and it was so simple that even math-challenged I understood it--and it was published, but so was a Letter To The Editor, trolling this elitist buzzkill etc., so he never tried that again, even though what he described was just the basis of the music's appeal: how listening worked for most of us, likely enough, whether we verbalized it or not (though I guess it might have been OK in more specialized publications, if expanded for musicology journals or Guitar World, say).

How I Wrote That Song was a series in Musician Magazine.

So, although I haven't read any of Thorn's books, I'm not surprised that she doesn't stick her neck out in talking abiyt that process, esp. with the usual reflexive English (not Brit) wry self-deprecating irony kicking in, protectively and expected, otherwise some would be going, ooooo, look at yooou---even more than goes on anyway (oh that old Tracey Thorn, at it again, who does she think she is)

About to dive into Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton. I don't know much about it--it is the pick of this month's book club host--but the blurbs sound encouraging. The reviews are very positive.

Oh yeah, all that I've seen are v. favorable.
xpost I did think that Jia Tolentino's New Yorker profile of Caroline Polachek, with research, interviews, studio observations, and post-Quarantine adjustments to live performance, provided an unusually good balance of process, motivation, more general concerns, without getting pedantic or soap operatic.

(also rec: JT's collection Trick Mirror, reflecting her adventures in reading and other activities.)

xp with 'talent' I was also thinking not talking about the process of creating may be a combination of a few things including nurtured modesty which seems like a very British stiff upper lip thing or a result of religious influences in upbringing. Or not wanting to talk about work which might have similar roots. As in don't talk about work when not at work and mixing with people who don't work in the same place etc which may be down to politeness but misses part of what the audience is actually interested in.
Alternatively I have also come across various artists not wanting to dissect their working processes in fear that too close inspection mighty frighten off their muses. I think Pete Townshend said something way back about being asked about the creative process being analogous to asking a caterpillar how it walked meaning it looked at the process too closely and lost the ability to do so which is an anthropomorphic fable but illustrated something at the time he may have rejected later.

But I was thinking also that talent did have that connotation of being like a gold star pupil which I think was being rejected at the time of punk. & I thought would be conveyed by my talking about the year zero set up of the time. Talent and technique being thought to be inherently interconnected but may have needed further explanation. Just seemed to be somet6hing that was being intentionally rejected for a while,elitist idea of some people having the ability, eugenically or whatever and others not possessing 'it' being rejected to make things more egalitarian but it actually coming out that not everybody can do all things but more of the rejected having some unrecognised ability etc.
& the idea of talent having a rarified connotation that meant it became a word that was rejected for a while at least and other 6things substituted. Like it being a really middle class notion that one either did or did not have 'talent' tied in with the myth of meritocracy and disguising other pressures and hurdles etc.

Those Zollo books are a must, as is his booklength Tom Petty interview.

I'm reading The Children of Greene Knowe to my 7 year old, it's really beautifully written and a pleasure to read aloud. It's a kind of friendly ghost story with just the right amount of mystery and uncanniness. It reminds me of Tom's Midnight Garden, though that's aimed at slightly older kids and deals a bit more with weighty matters, this has required hardly any redacting or difficult explanations.

Tom's Midnight Garden tv adaptation traumatised a generation

(appaently i am thinking of "The Enchanted Castle")

I think there is a Children of Greene Knowe tv adaptation that I haven't seen. Was one of my first reactions on reading the title. Not sure how it compares but stuck in my head for some reason.

I know there is at least one Tom's Midnight Garden tv adaptation. I think I watched one in the mid 70s and think it has been done again since.

Currently reading: "The Late Mattia Pascal" by Luigi Pirandello. As with some other novels I've read from the first decade or so of the 20th century, you can feel the intellectual ferment of the period pushing against the strictures of the realist novel in different ways, but still predating the modernist revolution that would come in the '20s with its style characterized by radical interiority. These are still third-person plot-driven novels. Cf. "The Man Who Was Thursday" by G.K. Chesterton, "Fog" by Miguel de Unamuno, or "The Golem" by Gustav Meyrink - all novels that ask big questions and push the envelope in different ways. Science had overturned our mental model of the universe and it wasn't clear where it would lead, occultism is a recurrent theme.

i was pleased to read on the previous thread users bain4z and table enjoying diarmuid hester's dennis cooper book. i'm friends with diarmuid, though i've not seen him in a while and i thought the book was exceptional, the stuff on cooper's early career particularly. i was very surprised to read the material about ed dorn in there, not a poet i've spent much time with, but whose work i had enjoyed (his homophobia is mentioned on his wikipedia page but i'm sorry to say that i wasn't aware of it before reading it in this book). i did feel that diarmuid could have gone further in certain areas of cooper's fiction, the more transgressive aspects perhaps, but it's a major work that i'm very glad is finding some traction

i started jen calleja's 'vehicle', which i'm still just finding my feet with, it has quite a complex setup. i read some of evan isoline's 'dead math' and lyn hejinian's 'positions of the sun' in the last week.

i have also read some of joseph darlington's 'the experimentalists', which is about mid-century experimental writing in Britain. i have a few quibbles with it (my phd was in this area) and some of his aesthetic judgements, of the nouveau roman for example, are quite conservative given his subject matter, but it's a good overview and very readable in the main

also been dipping into geraldine kim's 'povel' - one of my favourites and as light and effortless as always

Finally reading POND and digging it---asked this last year on main AQ thread and wondering again

I enjoyed reviews of Claire-Louise Bennett and her story recently in The New Yorker, also see that she's talked about Quin as inspiration and wrote intro for republished Passages, mentioned in passing upthread---how is it?? I'm inclined to start there, given the Bennett connection.

― dow, Wednesday, September 28, 2022 11:48 AM (six months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Quin is a major intertext of Claire Louise Bennett's Checkout 19, which is highly recommended (by me).

― Piedie Gimbel, Wednesday, September 28, 2022 11:51 AM

I’m up to the 11th century Gregorian revolution in Cantor. What a buncha jerks.

berg probably the best place to start with quin. passages is the better novel but a harder nut to crack (claire-louise bennett flatters herself with the comparison; i found pond good in moments but a little flat). tripticks is my favourite ann quin novel, but that's a minority opinion i think. the story collection is good but quite mixed, i'd read the novels first

started 'when we cease to understand the world' by benjamin labatut. the history of science not as linear progress or the best of human endeavour, but as the maniacal laugh of an mad god. I'm told it settles down a bit after the first chapter - we'll see - but what a first chapter.

So far, Pond seems more good-to-amazing than flat, and measures of flatness provide pace, plot updates & effective contrast, also realness cred---thanks for Quin tips, and if she's that much better than Bennett, then I can't hardly wait.

I read Tayeb Salih's *Season of Migration to the North*. Despite the swirling, hallucinatory elements of the narrative, the central message hit hard and pure. Quite an experience.

Having finished Caliban and The Witch this morning and got within a couple of chapters of An Immense World I thought I might just give Theodore Allen The iNvention of The White Race another batch.
Sp I picked up from where i put it down last time I was trying to read it then went back to the beginning of the section. I've just read the beginning of the section on the colonisation of Ireland and the restructuring of the power structure and land ownership.
It is already peppered with reference numbers and i watched a tv appearance or heard a podcast referring to the amount of endnotes. It said 35% but it occurred to me earlier that I wasn't sure what that statistic referred to . I have the first of 2 sections which have more recently been omnibused together by Verso. I couldn't wait another few months to get hold of it when I bought it then left it unread for 2 or 3 years. Have meant to get back to it but it has been a couple of years where I have had several books on the go at almost all times. Hoping I will get through this this time and then read the 2nd Volume when I get a chance to. Not sure if 35% was across the 2 volumes. Seem to be a number of citations but also a couple of things that have been half a page long.
Anyway seems to be a good book that I hope i am going to fully ingest. Have heard quite a bit about it and probably have done a lot of reading that touches on this and will help- flesh out understandings better since I started trying to read it.

I finished RHAPSODY IN STEPHEN'S GREEN. It contains a lot of interesting material, and the voice of the human Tramp is very amusing. The satire of Loyalists and war in the third Act is bold, if crude.

I returned to O'Casey's play COCK-A-DOODLE DANDY. This is truly strange. It has almost no continuity of character, motivation or causality. People keep acting normally, then bonkers things happen, including a massive cock rampaging around the countryside causing havoc. It's played by an actor dressed up in a big cockerel outfit. Characters suddenly grow horns. Drink changes colour. You can't tell what's really going on or why. The most coherent thing to say about the play is that it's a critique of puritanism and misogyny, with a certain logic in all the women leaving at the end for a better life. But the play is mostly less coherent than this sounds.

I then read three TV plays by Flann O'Brien, I think all from 1962: THE TIME FREDDIE RETIRED, FLIGHT and THE MAN WITH FOUR LEGS. To be frank none of them are special. FLIGHT feels unusual in being a comedy about air travel from that long-ago date. I'm not sure how often Flann O'Brien was on an aeroplane.

Monica Heisey's "Really Good Actually", a Toronto romcom thing. It's no Heartburn (the obvious influence) but it's very enjoyable.

Also I picked up the complete Lorrie Moore collection for £1, which I'm quite pleased about.

I would be also!

Her new novel is published on Tuesday. Probably not for £1.

Listening to Phoebe Judge reading Turn of the Screw. I had blessedly forgotten James's turgidity.

After some weeks of hectic goings-on and lack of focus, I’m back in the swing. Finished Comitta’s The Nature Book and highly recommend it, especially to fans of Oulipo strategies.

Also read Coolidge’s Mesh, which was not very interesting to me, perhaps because it consists of rather abstract poems that seem to be referencing traditional cis-hetero coitus, which frankly is just not my cuppa. Finished a Coolidge/Mayer collaboration, The Cave, which began interestingly enough but then sort of departed from its subject— a failed caving expedition— and became increasingly dull, even on Mayer’s end, which surprised me.

Finished a chap by my mentor Kevin Killian on the fourth anniversary of his death, which was a nice way to mark the occasion.

Finally, just completed the short novel SALMON by Sebastian Castillo, a very funny yet affecting fabulist bildungsroman.

Now I’m on to Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine before heading to the bar for my shift. I’ve read Fontamara previously and loved it, excited to dive back into the poverty and socialist rancor of the Italian countryside.

Martin Hayes Shared NOtes
fiddle virtuoso from Clare's memoir. Pretty good read, not sure if this is the style he arrives at absolutely naturally or not. Seems to be a pretty great read and if this is the first thing he's really written it has a nice tone to it.
At the point I've reached he's gone through a few things that have messed him up pretty badly, drinking messing up his academic career, business investments that weren't as thoroughly researched as should have been and wound up backfiring meaning he is in considerable debt, a stupid physical competition backfiring on him badly. He has relocated to Chicago where some things are going right and some others are continuing to go awry which is having a deleterious effect on his state of mind. He has just formed a band with the player he's best known for playing with but the style isn't working as yet.
Anyway pretty good read from an artist I really enjoy. His Peggy's Dream album is really worth hearing

I've started Sean O'Casey's play THE SILVER TASSIE.

A few short books to end Spring:

Dario Fo - Francis, the Holy Jester
Anne Serre - The Fool & Other Moral Tales
Pierre Michon - The Eleven

I remember Dario Fo's plays as turning up a lot in channel 4s early days

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

COMING SOON: An All-New & Improved WAYR thread for Summer 2023! Watch this space for details.

Announcing a new WAYR thread two decades in the making!

Everything is Whirling and Twirling! What Are You Reading this Summer 2023?