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

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.

^ Read Jonathan Coe's biography of Johnson. It's a work of art.

I'm not exactly charging my way forward through The Leopard, but I am enjoying the author's nod-and-wink attitude that while his pampered aristocrats are real humans with real emotions, they are not to be taken very seriously.

Starting with B S Johnson: Christie Malay’s Own Double Entry is probably the most fun and the zippiest but The Unfortunates is his greatest IMO (it also changed my life but that’s another matter).

Agree that the Coe biog is v good.

work's been very much getting in the way of posting here, annoyingly, so am playing catch up:

finally read the crying of lot 49. a surprising book not to have read, for me, but god it's good to have books to which you suddenly remember you're looking forward look forward reading stored up. read it at the same time as there is no anti-mimetics division by qntm yes qntm no i don't know. silly really.

i can't find the ilx post about the short, crowd-funded film SCP Overlord, but it's good, as is their other film SCP Dollhouse, and so apparently is the recent multiplayer online game, and in general so is the SCP project itself. Lovecraft and Lovecraftian horror updated for the digital media and CSI age, strong elements of PKD.

An open wiki project with crowdfunding for larger projects might not be expected to generate good quality writing, but the management of canon and tone is loose enough and defined enough to allow for creativity and playfulness.

As is often the case, the consideration of books you're reading at the same time shapes your observations about each of them. Here, how to discover and analyse something that is hidden, something that is hidden deliberately, is a motive force across both. TCoL49 like all Pynchon is very much a sentimental, quixotic journey, where the sentimental processes and associations play out not just across interpersonal connections and the acquisitions of direct experience, but substantially around the edges of and at a distance from the objects in play. Discovery and insight are not derived purely from the mechanisms of memory, experience and interaction, but somewhere just beyond, conveyed via esoteric mechanisms and objects (eg the stamp collection itself), including play, jokes and song.

This 'sentimental journey' view was very much brought to the fore by reading TINAMD at the same time, which is the opposite of this: a story where the possibility of sentimental association is weaponised by a malignant alien entity. The historical narrative of the scientific governmental community (the anti-memetics division) set up to battle it. Awareness and discovery of this entity enables it to flourish and memetically reproduce, and in doing strong destroy affect and empathy, it attacks, takes over and ultimately destroys the sentimental capability in society and people. History and learning are erased. The process by which the scientific team manage is forming a memetic cordon sanitaire between contained entities and the outside world, making it impossible for any analysis or memory of the entity to be retained outside the cordon.

The consequences of this are visible on the page, Pynchon's text is dense, rich and allusive, TINAMD's pages are regularly interrupted by blacked out chunks of text, sometimes forming an entire tombstone on the page, representing thoughts that have been deliberately forgotten or erased, leaving the ability to discern what is in them only by the shape of their absence. Of course an entire page blacked out reminds the reader of Sterne, that other quixotic, sentimental writer.

TCoL49 is by far the richer, more humane and enjoyable book, but then TINAMD is not working in that vein and is very good in its own right. Its aesthetic is narrow, and it's a B-movie, an Invasion of the Body Snatchers for the epistemic age.

the structure, which is after all only the compilation of a set of wiki entries, is lopsided, but that's fine tbh. The ending is ludicrously rushed, with a full on deus ex machina staging to weave together to conclusion the impossible threads, but the very final chapter is also charming and quite sweet.

Hey, take it over to the book crying of lot 49

oh lol i did not realise that was there. thank you.

reading it made me want to revisit gravity's rainbow, which i might do next tbh.

No worries. That was more of a Random homework googler memorial thread than a serious discussion.

Dipo Fayolin Africa IS Not A Country
Overview of the continent of Africa historically and over the years since Independence in the late 20th century.
Looks at a lot of Western misnterpretation and misrepresentation and problems internal to Africa
Pretty good I thought, recommended. Pretty lighthearted considering the subject matter.

Bright boulevards, bold dreams : the story of black Hollywood Donald Bogle,
Hisory of Black Hollywood looking at major figures. I just read teh chapter on the 1910s which looks at Madam Sul-Te-Wan who was a travelling actress etc when she turned up in Hollywood with an introduction letter to D.W. Griffith who became a lifelong friend. I thought his major work would have meant he was an out and out racist but he helped her out. She appears in a number of his films and then in a load of other early Hollywood films I think into the talkie era.
Also looked at Noble Johnson who appears to have been a bit of a jack of all trades who wound up as an actor and running his own company in film.
I think I had a different book by the same author recommended in a bibliography, possibly from a Graham Lock book. If his other books are as good as I'm finding this I think I might read through a few more.

Not A Nation of Immigrants Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
her book on settler colonialism. She started pointing out major discrepancies between the popular image of Hamilton in the wake of the broadway show and the actuality of the snobbish, slaver and Federalist society member. NOw gone on to the history of the Ulster Scots who were one of the main groups of settler colonialists in the history of the US.
I like her writing and want to read through the rest of it.

donald bogle's work was often cited approvingly when i was at sight & sound -- i think he's pretty highly regarded

𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek) at 1:24 10 Apr 23

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'll check it out. As a 'non fiction novel' I think wwctutw is incredible. At first I thought, what even is a non fiction novel? It reads like fairly standard history of science, telling a wild but plausible sounding story. But then, unless the writer had access to incredibly detailed diaries, a few creative liberties are taken with showing characters' thoughts and feelings. Now towards the end I don't know what is real and what is just flights of fancy. If you'd told me that before I started I might turned my nose up but it makes for stunning reading. And it's pretty good at getting the basics of quantum theory across without delving into technical detail.

iirc the chapters get increasingly fictional(?) as the book progresses.

I continue to read Crisell on broadcasting. Seems to be taking me a long time but I suppose I'm reading much else also. The book is terrifically lucid, enjoyable. It's up to about 1972 now.

I finished THE BEST OF C.M. KORNBLUTH. 330 dense pages of SF stories. Impressive imagination and stylistic efficiency. The last story, 'Two Dooms', directly anticipates or maybe influences THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE.

I read half of John le Carré's SILVERVIEW. I'll read the second half when I can find a local library open.

And at last, after telling myself I'd do it for years, I've started on a book of French stories with parallel English text, first published 1972. The idea, for me, is to read a para or even a page in French, then check it against the English, which is a very reassuring safety net. On one hand the number of French words I don't know is remarkably vast. On the other, the very Rohmer-esque story I'm currently reading has a simple, almost adolescent sort of style that is much easier than some other written French, and I can read stretches of it without assistance, which makes a change from the first story, whose agricultural idiom made half the paragraphs obscure to this reader.

that history of british broadcasting looks extremely good. will have to read.

i’ve been reading textbooks of broadcast engineering recently (usually written from a US/SMPTE perspective) and this looks like it would be a good complement.

Fizzles, it's 'basic' in a way but that's fine and for most of us, even something basic is revelatory.

It's written in a marvellously old-fashioned way which is precise, fastidious and informative. The author talks about 'rock music' as though peering at it while holding it in a pair of tweezers. Which is odd as he's a baby-boomer himself.

It's refreshing to read a version of cultural history that isn't centred on the present and its ways of seeing, but takes you back to how people were thinking in 1930, 1940, 1950, et al. One other fine aspect of the book is that it's conceptual, for instance on ideas of live vs recording and their implications for what broadcasting really was.

i think i need basic! and also that it’s a good approach generally. questions of live and recorded - as well as numerous other questions like it! - still have a huge impact on commercial models and the shape of the industry.

Caves Of Steel, Isaac Asimov, for a book group - so far I'm not really sure what in this book is supposed to be dystopia and what is for the author utopia that just sounds dystopian to me. but since it's a mystery as well as sci-fi I think things will clear up.

When We Cease to Understand the World was one of my favorite reads of last year. It does get increasingly fanciful as it progresses but possibly best to approach it like one would a Werner Herzog documentary.

fwiw THE CAVES OF STEEL is one of my favourite SF novels.

And I'd say that insofar as it's either utopia or dystopia, it's the latter. (Human beings are no longer able to go outside their dome and walk over grass for an hour?) But more neither, more a sense of 'mundane future'.

Having read I, Robot I assume Asimov's sympathies lie more with the robot-friendly Spacers than the anti-robot Earthers (including bigoted protagonist), but the Spacer's hardline anti-immigration stance seems Not Great, even if there's a very compelling in universe explanation.

Lots of good new posts busting out all of a sudden (also some good 'uns over the years on that xpost Crying of Lot 49 thread).
Thanks for all the B.S. Johnson recs.
Now starting Isaac's Storm, in which 1900 science and politics and biz and other interests encounter a huge-ass hurricane ripping Galveston, a place I knew nothing about---only knew of coastal Texas culture re industrial Port Arthur as homeplace of Janis Joplin---this island city was depicted by boosters as a worker's'family's paradise, but the climate, like other factors, was pretty mavericky all along. Data-rich from the beginning, but also there I was put off by "non-fiction novel" scene-setting, although the world-building takes over as fact and fiction, plus the author, pop history veteran Erik Larsen, had the memoir of meteorologist Isaac Cline to draw from, as well as many other sources frequently sited in endnotes, so looks like it will go OK.

world-building takes over my attention span, that is, and so far it's fact *over* fiction, an impression encouraged by skimming ahead.

Got the new Nicole Flattery out of the library but wasn't doing it for me, so I've started:

William Gaddis - Carpenter's Gothic
Clemens Meyer - While We Were Dreaming
Missouri Williams - The Doloriad

Recently finished Canadian poet Colin Smith’s 8x8x7, a 2008 book that feels written in a mode that is no longer popular but which was very influential to me as a young poet— manic, winking, absolutely withering hard left politics. It was nice to read, tho it offered little in terms of form.

Have also read some other poetry books, and of course, Prynne reading group continues. Not sure what’s next!

Crisell's history of broadcasting takes a slightly unexpected turn into proposing that while TV has done some good, it has also been harmful to people's ways of seeing the world, and has affected how they act. It's very close to what David Thomson has very long argued about film, though I don't think Crisell realises this.

I can go along with much that Crisell says, except when he seems to say that the emotive nature of TV means that direct action and protest groups like CND or Greenpeace get beneficial treatment from it. Those groups have historically been viewed as subversive (have been infiltrated by Mi5, contained by police, etc), and I don't think it's true that such groups do or did get favourable TV coverage. No more, of course, did trade unions.

Read Jean d’Amérique’s No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace this morning, a book translated from French and Haitian creole. Interesting and depressing, full of elemental images (blood, dirt, glass, water, heat, saliva, etc). He has a new book of fiction out that has been getting some decent reviews.

I finished Crisell's book. He goes up to 1997 - Channel 5 has launched! - and is, to my eyes, prescient and bold in his predictions of the multi-channel, interactive future in which TV, radio, telephone, computer - and he adds, fax machine, CD player, VCR - might all converge into one 'apparatus'. For many people you could say that has turned out to be the 'phone'.

It's impressive that someone as cautious as Crisell is also so forward-looking, though the future he sees is not entirely positive. Actually what surprises me is how things have changed less than he expects. He says that the BBC licence fee may well be abolished in 2001! He also implies that in the near future broadcasting channels may be replaced by interactive modes like 'near video on demand'. That would be close to iPlayer or similar services. But compared to what Crisell posits, we still have dozens of broadcast channels beaming out somewhat 'mixed programming' - drama, travel programmes, documentaries. And the audience share for the old 4 channels that we had up to 1997 seems to have held up better than he would have predicted.

Two reflections that came to me were:

1: I am used to an 'era of neoliberalism' in which everything is always privatized and good decisions are never made. But if you look at broadcasting it's then surprising how often such decisions have been averted, and ideas of public service have been maintained. Even at the very start of the BBC, it moved from a more commercial arrangement to a more public one. BBC2 could have been ITV2 instead. ITV was given a much stronger public service remit from the early 1960s. Channel Four might have been ITV2 rather than the bold alternative channel it was. In 1986, the Thatcherite Peacock report proposed privatizing R1 and R2! - and it didn't happen.

2: On the other hand, it also seems to me that every time a new channel is started with high aims, it quite soon gets diluted. BBC2 is one. Channel Four another: after 1993 it has to sell itself more to advertisers and it sheds much of the minority programming / political / independent character that made it such a distinctive part of 1980s culture. Presumably no-one who doesn't remember the 1980s now thinks of C4 in those terms at all? BBC4 then repeats the pattern, supposedly a home for high culture stuff, then turned into an OK channel for documentary and music repeats. Even 6music is going through a like pattern, though it could be said that 6music's original indie-rock identity was too narrow - still, it's now shedding diverse and thoughtful programming to chase audiences. It seems that attempts to maintain locations for 'quality' in traditional broadcasting have never lasted. (Maybe it can be said that cable producers have actually ended up producing higher quality, in drama.)

I'm glad finally to have read Crisell's book. Media is still so pervasive a part of our lives, a historical perspective is good to have.

I wanted to carry on reading something that would be broadly and conceptually enlightening and clarifying on an area of interest to me - so on the shelf I found Wellek and Warren's THEORY OF LITERATURE (1949; third edition 1963). It's dry and stern in a way that would be alien to most critics and teachers now (though I suppose academic literary discourse is still notorious for abstraction and jargon, in a different way).

By page 20 we've reached the great chestnut: 'What is literature?'

David Olusoga The Kaiser's Holocaust
The story of teh German colony in South West Africa and its extremely detrimental effect on the native population.
Just got through the Nama people being sent to an International Fair in Berlin where they had been exp0ected to put on supposedly native dress instead of the Western suits and Boer like military uniforms they were used to. They refused and a lot of teh Berln populatio were pretty smitten. After having had the primitive image of African natives presented as the reality some of them began to quesion things. Shame they weren't the ones who prevailed. Namaland became a hell on earth under German control.

My reading club is going to read 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'. Do I need to know anything beforehand, or should I just dive in?