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

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?

it tolls for thee

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?

― ArchCarrier,

You gotta get used to the thees and thous

would a basic history of the Spanish Civil War be useful?

maybe Geography of Spain too?

would a basic history of the Spanish Civil War be useful?

I'm not sure if I've actually read it. Do know I've seen the Gary Cooper/Ingrid Bergman film version a few times.
Probably have at least one copy of it lying around the flat somewhere.
So not sure exactly what added background you need. Would think overview of the recent history and possibly the geography of the area might be useful.If there are things taht contrast with the wider held understanding of events or anything.

just dive in. if something seems unclear then do a bit of outside reading to situate yourself. wikipedia would prob be good enough. the novel was meant to be popular reading among a general audience.

May depend on the extent of discussion within the reading club as to what extra background you would want. It's mno longer recent history, not sure to what extent the man in the street was aware of events in the Spanish Civil War at the time either.
I know its an area that has a lot written about it from different political perspectives. I have a book by Antony Beevor on the whole war that I've yet to read

Wellek & Warren's THEORY OF LITERATURE is mostly the kind of thing I enjoy. It's surprisingly easy to read. Its style is austere in a way almost unimaginable now. The authors, I'm afraid, often rap other scholars over the knuckles for deviations from correct thought about literature. Of course they have a vast range, from ancient Greece to Goethe and just about up to modern times (though they very rarely mention C20 authors).

On the face of it, they're assembling a unified theory of literature. Sounds good. And yet, as they proceed, one doubt I have is ... how *logical* is their procedure? They seem to *tour* an issue, rather than quite to argue their way through it to a final position. The text is thus rangier than you'd think.

But things get truly odd when we reach PART TWO: PRELIMINARY OPERATIONS. Part Two starts with Chapter Six: 'The Ordering and Establishing of Evidence'. This turns out to be basically about textual editing, making sure you have the right text in front of you, etc. Very important. Proper scholarship. But how does it fit into this particular book? It stands out very strangely. It's not that there aren't 'theoretical' questions about editions. Certainly there are. But W&W's way of talking about editing is often like a bland 'how-to': 'In preparing an edition, one should keep firmly in mind its purpose and its presumed public'. Somehow they have wandered off from their grand project of a THEORY OF LITERATURE into something else, as though mislead by the all-inclusiveness of the project. They might as well start telling us that we can write about literature either with a fountain pen, or a typewriter - different tools will be appropriate to different occasions.

And then you realise that Chapter Six, which is only 12 pages, is the ONLY chapter in PART TWO !! This structure is crazy!

The good news is that overall, the book is fun to read if, like me, you like this kind of thing. Whether I will emerge with a unified THEORY OF LITERATURE, I am less sure.

I'm currently reading The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, continuing my tour of fin-de-siecle fiction. The plot itself seems a bit melodramatic. I guess the book is mainly of interest today as a showcase for Wilde's deft way with an aphorism and the none-too-subtle gay subtext.

The dialogue's cute.

Lots of good lines, but dialog seems a bit one-sided, with everyone else setting up softballs so Lord Wotton can come back with the wicked bon mots.

On the French Revolution thread Vegemitegrrl enthused about A New World Begins, Jeremy Popkin, so I found a library copy and have started it. It clocks in at ~550 pages, so I may not be coming up for air much in the next few weeks.

This promises to be the most comprehensive treatment of that revolution I've yet read. I agree with the idea that the French Revolution not only bequeathed the world with a new and very different era of politics from any seen before, but also swiftly manifested most of the political problems that have emerged throughout that era.

Yay! It’s about as engaging and easy a read as can be made of such a complex & dense period. He does a good job of weaving in pertintent first-hand accounts too here & there, which helps add some immediacy imo

The novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family is an dense and entertaining book. I listened to it on audible once and want to listen to it again.

Wellek & Warren proceed to a section on THE EXTRINSIC APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF LITERATURE, which will be followed by a longer section on INTRINSIC APPROACH. I am starting to sense that what this book is trying to do is whittle away what they consider irrelevances to get to the real core of literary study. I daresay there is a name for this, in ancient Greek dialogues or whatever - a mode of argument in which you keep on considering x,y and x, politely recognising some value in them, while dismissing as much as possible. There is logic here, but I also sense that the method may reductive; that if the mission is to cut down the things we should say about literature, it may prove self-denying and impoverishing.

Simply put, I am also realising that the whole book may be a manifesto for what was called New Criticism, which declared only 'intrinsic study' worthwhile. Yet it is worth adding that when you actually read major New Critics, including W&W, they are striking for the breadth of their knowledge - they do know authors' biographies, letters, literary history, perhaps broader history. They don't exclude out of mere ignorance.

Much of what W&W say appears factual. They make statements that are almost incontrovertible, like 'Literature is a social institution, using as its medium language, a social creation' (p.94). Much of the time, then, the question is, when will they say something that can be argued against? They do break cover enough for this to happen. In 'Literature and Psychology' they spend much time talking about rather irrelevantly extreme ideas of writers / artists as exaggerated psychological types. They print the sentence: 'With the artist, in any medium, every impression is shaped by his art; he accumulates no inchoate experience' (p.86). This is clearly false. Artists are just people. They have roughly the same amount of inchoate experience as everyone else.

The first page of that chapter also brings a moment that quite shocked me. They are talking, rather absurdly, about artists having 'deformities' - 'Byron had a club foot', etc - and this being an influence on their psychology. Some might already dislike this. But then they say: 'Proust was an asthmatic neurotic of partly Jewish descent' (p.81). In context, it is hard not to take 'partly Jewish descent' as another unfortunate deformity. It's incredible that they could write this in 1949, and reprint it in 1963. The best I can say is that the posited problem would lie not with Proust but with other, anti-semitic people; Proust, 'partly Jewish', was 'handicapped' by others' racism. Perhaps. But W&W don't say this, and leave the more obviously bigoted implication standing.

Leaving aside individual moments like this, the book is slightly disappointing me, I suppose in being less focused than I'd hoped; unless the focus is, as I suggested, just on clearing away false ideas. Yet it remains of interest.

^ the critics critiqued. lovely bit of exegesis there pinefox.

The novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family is an dense and entertaining book. I listened to it on audible once and want to listen to it again.

― Dan S,

It's teased me at the bookstore for almost a year, thanks to the typically excellent New York Review Books' striking cover.

New Criticism has always had some appeal for me insofar as the "intrinsic" fallacy insists on the primacy of the art object, of artist's personality, sensibilty, voice, generating and generated by what we perceive in the audience experience, as a reader, listener, viewer---although, while reading, listening, viewing we can't unsee etc. associations from what else we know of the artist's life, of life itself (that's why intrinsic is a fallacy, or just not true to life, and so your authors go on to amateur psychology, as you describe).
But the appeal is in the counter-tendency to letting the art get buried in biographical elements, as so often happens: judging the artist only or primarily in terms of problematic/plain shitty behavior for instance, and dismissing them or playing up the most shocking bits.

That's pretty much what I said last week re frustrations in music journalism, sorry for rehash.

Thanks Aimless - appreciated.

I am coming to think that W&W, despite being so sternly sober, are vulnerable to a quite simple counter-argument, which would be something like: 'Content is not extrinsic to literature'.

Their project of stripping away everything non-essential leads them to wanting to list only purely literary devices - metre, for instance - as the heart of literary study. There is something convincing about this or about all such projects of radical reduction and definition. But we know that literature is suggestive because it uses language, which is referential. Isn't it the case that Middlemarch isn't just 'an 800-page novel divided into 40 [or whatever] chapters', but 'a novel of the English C19, set in the 1820s and published in the 1870s?'. We can't experience Middlemarch *without* its social content - it's 'intrinsic' to what the text is. I sense that W&W don't want to see this.

On the other hand, they are quite good at disposing of 'Zeitgeist' ideas, hulking old German books that argue that every work of art in a given age must express the same spirit. W&W are soberly able to take down such fantasies - and as such, they are not so conceptually far from the Althusser, in LIRE LE CAPITAL (1965), who was arguing for a more differentiated view of social process rather than one where everything at every moment expressed the same thing.

At the start of their section on INTRINSIC STUDY, W&W start on some really wacky ideas. They say: 'We need to work out what a poem actually is. Where is it?', and they say 'You might think a poem is on paper, but actually, if you think about it, you could destroy every paper copy but if someone still remembered it in their head, the poem would still exist!'. It could be a hippy meditation.

It also occurs to me that a creative writer - maybe a poet or an SF author - could turn the tables by writing a literary work somehow containing and reusing all this stuff. I can imagine a Donald Barthelme story, certainly a John Barth one, THEORY OF LITERATURE. I think of the quite striking Lethem story 'The Dytopianist [...]', which takes literary discourse from outside to inside the story.

I read *Time Will Darken It* by William Maxwell. Maxwell was the fiction editor at the New Yorker for the best part of 40 years in the middle of the last century and edited Sylvia Townsend Warner, John Cheever, John Updike and Elizabeth Taylor amongst others. This is to say, he has an extraordinary facility with structure and restraint, holding back, holding back. The book isn't about very much: a nondescript Illinois town in 1912; a central character tortured by manners and reticence with a thin marriage, which is disrupted by a visit from a rambunctious southern family. Maxwell uses multiple viewpoints to tell the story and seems to know each character intimately - almost to the point of voyeurism in places. What unfolds is born of these simple ingredients and feels utterly inevitable.

In a way, the plot Maxwell has chosen, and the particular traits of the characters he draws, are like an analogue for the novel form itself. What is not said lays like sediment, an unconscious layer, thickening like the night waiting to enclose the reader. The final few chapters are pretty shattering.

The Folded Leaf is one of my favorite American novels

I've only read this and *So Long, See You Tomorrow*. I clearly need to read everything. Have you read any of the letters? Am tempted by his correspondence with Elizabeth Taylor.

Also reading *Stepping Stones*, a series of interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O'Driscoll. The interviews were mostly conducted by email, and are organised chronologically. It functions like an autobiography, with Heaney clearly treating it like an excavation, dredging memories from deep in his unconscious. Of what I've read so far, the book is full of beautiful details of his early life in Mossbawn and the Wood, the farm they moved to when Heaney was in his early teens.

It's also full of rich insight into his creative process, which, unsurprisingly, given the nature of his work, he frames with lots of digging and dredging metaphors. He also talks a lot about 'self-forgetting' and hints at the dissolution of the ego. I was surprised to note no mention of Freud in the index. It would be good to ask someone who knows more about Heaney whether this is a deliberate omission, or whether O'Driscoll simply didn't frame any questions that way (perhaps neither are interested!).

I hesitate to use the word (small c) conservative because, given my relative ignorance of Irish history, it feels clumsy and ugly but the picture of Heaney that emerges is kind of *that*. I think a good deal of it is his self-deprecation but, his facility with deep time aside, he seems to me a master of the local - social, cultural, emotional. He is, by his own admittance, completely unmusical, and despite growing up around Dylan and Leonard Cohen etc, felt nothing for them and, for all those riverine and fishing metaphors, has been 'on about a dozen riverbanks' in his whole life. It seems he found what he was good at, and did it like Hercules. Which, thank goodness.

Anyway, it's wholly fascinating.

I love Time Will Darken It! also recommend So Long, See You Tomorrow on a shattering, William Maxwell tip.