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

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.

xxpost oh ha now I see what you mean, dogs: finished Pond last night, pulled along but the last part fizzled a bit, maybe should have ended sooner, just stopped, even---but I'll read at least part of it again, even though not so nec. since I know someone very much like the narrator, understand the thinking/way of life as well as my simple male mind can, but can't so far accept that this book's most compellingly visionary passages go with penultimate or ultimate fizzle, not in the way they seem to now---maybe it doesn't matter so much, considering the best stuff, but certainly demonstrates the hazards of this kind of literary approach (though I like that the narrator seems as criticism-damaged as art-damaged, prob more: "The text is the pretext" and so on).
Seems like I've heard that Checkout-19 is better?

I think Checkout 19 is certainly richer in its texture - weaves together many different modes of memoir, fantasy, litcrit, prose poetry even.

Is Pond the one where she compares the sound of frogs croaking in the night to her vagina or vice versa

I've almost finished the second volume of Simon Callow's Orson Welles bio and at the bookshop yesterday I bought Camilo José Cela's The Hive

the river at green knowe, sequel to the children of... that came in the same volume from the library, starts off unpromisingly with a chinese boy who when asked his name gives a gurgling sigh - apparently it's unpronounceable in english, though it's spelled hsu, so they call him ping instead. he speaks english just fine though and behaves like a normal (i.e. english) polite child. he has almond eyes, obviously, or even worse, slit eyes.

xxpost. Fraid so--but some of it's better!

There is a certain jive, gimmick factor, the more I think about it----

But you could say that about a lot of books, music, visuals that are timeworthy anyway---on to Check-Out 19, at some point---prob after Ann Quin, B.S. Johnson--where should I start with him?

i liked when we cease to understand the world, but i read it pretty soon after reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb, and it suffered in the comparison.

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?