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

xpost hegemony as struggle makes me think of an interview I heard this morning with Julia Lee, author of the new Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America. She talks about Asians being invisible, inscrutable, vague, at best, when not responded to with outright hostility or violence---but also "weaponizing invisibility"---she relates this to Ralph Ellison---in a possibly positive way:

Asian Americans might reside in a position of existential invisibility and yet that also makes us incredibly powerful and subversive, because nobody is looking at us, and we are looking at everything.

I love reading poets' prose.

Just finished “And Then There Were None”, which I’ve seen multiple adaptations of, but never read. It’s the best Christie I’ve read, alongside “Cards on the Table”. The writing is unusual and original by Christie standards – all breathless short paragraphs, like James Ellroy but less annoying. The result is extremely paranoid and tense, even if you know the ending.

Now onto “Mixed Up Files of Basil Frankweiler”, based on some previous ILB recommendations…

Wellek & Warren on poetics was pretty abstruse to me. More fresh air arrives in Chapter 16, on 'Narrative Fiction'. These are the kind of critics who think that even talking about that new-fangled form the Novel is a bit dicey. Indeed they start by saying that the novel has not amassed the critical tradition that poetry has. They immediately get in to some quite agreeable statements, eg on p.213:

Realism and naturalism, whether in the drama or the novel, are literary or literary-philosophical movements, conventions, styles, like romanticism or surrealism. The distinction is not between reality and illusion, but between differing conceptions of reality, between differing modes of illusion.

Actually that one's such a chestnut, even a canard, that I think it would be worth revisiting and querying. But it gets better a page later when they talk of the novelist's 'world' as a key concept. This is so broad that no-one in academic writing ever talks about it, yet I agree with them that it's a useful way to talk.

The great novelists all have such a world - recognizable as overlapping the empirical world but different in its self-coherent intelligibility.

The 'overlap' there is interesting. Does fiction really overlap with the real world? I think rather it makes a double of it, which it then varies.

They quote Desmond McCarthy who is brisker than they are, who explains well how a novelist's characters belong in that novelist's world, so it is strange to imagine one novelist's character in another's world: 'If Pecksniff were transplanted into The Golden Bowl he would become extinct' (p.214). Here is, in a way, the (pre-PoMo) basis of a whole aspect of PoMo fiction. You can imagine a PoMo narrative literally about a character from one novel who risks becoming extinct in another - indeed such texts probably exist. It's the sort of thing Coover would do; in a way, it had already been adumbrated in AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS, ten years before W&W's book.

Immanuel Velikovsky Earth iN Upheaval
This does get weirder as we go into his own theories rather than interpretation of historic geologists ideas, or maybe more noticeably when I'm not speed reading as much. He didn't like the existing thought of things developing gradually over millions of years, preferring the idea of several cataclysmic events. Talks a lot about deposits of bones in unlikely places consequentially meaning things prescribed by him. & I need to have another look at where the idea of the holidaying hippopotami swimming up from North Africa to Northern Europe came from, if it was his own or not.
But the later part of teh book looks into things like teh disappearance of Atlantis, several; versions of Troy etc in a way that is a bit adrift.
This book apparently did get a lot of following between its 1955 release and a couple of decades later. I see there are a number of books looking into its popularity and it as pseudoscience. I think I may have come across it in Morning of the Magicians when I read that in my teens or Colin Wilson's work or something along those lines. NOt sure what but have wanted to read it or at least one of his for decades. NOw wound up having to read it faster than I'd expected because there is a request out on it and it's now a couple of days overdue. Finding it weird that I got it from a storage place and somebody is after it directly after me when it would appear it was otherwise retired. Oh well, occult esoterica and the like.
It does seem to argue coherently which may be why it was popular. Think I may have been expecting something a lot more sensationalist or something. Does Von Daniken seem apparently rational in a similar way? I mean despite the racism and whether or not you believe in alien life and all.
Read the last 100 pages last night when I couldn't sleep

David Olusoga & Casper Erichsen The Kaiser's Holocaust
The history of the German colony in South West Africa leading to war and then genocide of the Nama peoples.
I enjoy Olusoga so want to read more. THis was pretty good.
I've just read the main par of the book which is about that era of colonisation. About to start the section on the links with the rise of teh National Socialist Party over the decade after the First World War. There were direct links in as much as Herman Goering's dad was the first Governor of the colony. But some of the other people setting up the party were also involved.

'If Pecksniff were transplanted into The Golden Bowl he would become extinct' (p.214). Here is, in a way, the (pre-PoMo) basis of a whole aspect of PoMo fiction.

Also on a more populist level, the basis of franchise crossover films like Alien Vs. Predator or Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman.

Yes. Good point - though in those instances the crossover doesn't seem to create much ontological disruption? The characters seem to exist OK in the same plane?

W&W's chapter on narrative fiction continues in a vein that makes me realise: this book is something like an *encyclopedia*. It doesn't so much make a developing argument as amass 'things we know so far about literature'.

Thus sentences like:

The simplest form of characterization is naming. (219)

Modes of characterisation are many. (219)

A story can be told through letters and journals. Or it can develop from anecdotes. (221)

Interesting is the question of how the story purports to exist. (222)

(Imagine publishing that last sentence now!)

They undermine the legibility of their theory by introducing confusing terms from other languages: thus: 'What we call the "composition"of the novel is, by the Germans and Russians, called its "motivation"' (217) - and then they take off with this new word. Wait, what do we mean by 'composition' in the first place? Why not establish that before replacing the word with another one which is counter-intuitive? In cases like this, the rationality, certainly the clarity, of W&W goes astray.

A deeper issue, I find, is their attachment to an idea of The Novel that belongs to an earlier time - not in that it's 'realist', quite contrary, in that it involves simplification and caricature. They seem intuitively to think that a novel has a 'rounded' hero surrounded by a lot of 'flat' characters who are 'types' - perhaps servants, clowns, etc. My sense is that this model would work OK for the 18th century; it works less well for Virginia Woolf, or for lots of other novels that you could imagine writing or reading.

The model leads them to say:

There are character-typologies, partly literary tradition, partly folk-anthropology, which are used by novelists. In nineteenth-century English and American fictin, one finds brunettes [...] and blondes [...] The blonde is the home-maker, unexciting but steady and sweet. The brunette - passionate, violent, mysterious, alluring, and untrustworthy - gathers up the characteristics of the Oriental, the Jewish, the Spanish, and the Italian as seen from the point of view of the 'Anglo-Saxon' (219-20).

It is truly hard to know where to begin with this. Well:

1: It looks like simple racism. It's extraordinary that at this point in history they can write so casually of these 'racial types' in this, at best, uncritical way. You could say that they are framing it as a convention, the 'Anglo-Saxon' also a type. But they don't seem to stand far enough back from the frame. How about, at least, considering whether Italian or Spanish literature also 'others' 'Anglo-Saxons' in a parallel way (or if not, why not?), rather than staying with the idea that the white Anglo is the norm? It's a mess.

2: It's also counter-intuitive from the POV even of norms / stereotypes that had developed by the time they were writing (not long before Marilyn Monroe takes off) - when 'Gentlemen prefer blondes', and blondes are the more attractive, brunettes more steady and homely. A reversal of the stereotype? Wouldn't that say something about the artificial nature of the stereotypes?

3: OK, maybe novelists used to write this way. But do they still, by 1949? If not, why not? Why isn't this recourse to stereotype historicised and treated as limited?

4: Apart from the ethical objections you might have to such stereotypes, aren't they also aesthetically limiting?

My general point is: I am baffled re: why W&W are stuck with a view of prose fiction that relies on caricature and simplification. They're in the mid-20th century, they ought to be able to see that prose fiction can do other things.

Depends. Sometimes there's metatextual jokes to highlight the inconsistencies; more self-seriously, often you get the explanation of a multiverse to justify their crossover.

xpost

What's a good example of that, good to read?

I guess this kind of crossover fiction is more legally feasible in the comic book world where most of the intellectual property is owned by a few mega-corporations. Copyright law would make it difficult to do for most recent fiction. I guess this why these mash-ups tend to be done for stuff in the public domain, like Jane Austen. Or else they circulate as unauthorized fan-fiction.

Got the Heaney book, all. Thanks.

I've been inching through Books of Jacob by Olga Tocarczuk. At 1/3 through I'm thinking about abandoning it, it's just too long to keep at something that's... not bad just boring but, y'know, sunk cost fallacy.

Has anyone here finished it and have compelling reasons to keep going (or not)?

I talked about it on the olga tocarczuk thread, I think it does build into something remarkable but if you're a full third in and bored I'm not sure that would change.

currently reading 'the road to en-dor', an autobiographical account of a real life escape from a first world war turkish prison camp, achieved by tricking the captors with ouija boards and conjuring and mentalism. a proper boys own adventure tale, though the action is psychological not physical, and there's the expected casual racism - "johnny turk is a queer mixture of brutality and chivalry" being the worst example so far, morally and aesthetically. I wonder if 'the confidence men' by margalit fox, a more recent telling of the story, would be a better read.

prisoner of war camp, that is.

Joanna Russ How To Suppress Women's Writing
somewhat satirical overview of the various ways in which the patriarchal establishment undermines female authors.
Writer was a sci fi author whose The Female Man which I picked up from a charity shop a while back and have yet to get to. Think I'd only realised this was the same author a couple of days back. Not sure exactly where I saw this recommended but does seem interesting so far. I think I got it from a storage area in the library system, though it seems like something that should be better known or is that just in the Irish library system? Since the Velikovsky I read last week came from a storage space, The Galway Warehouse, and was requested before I wanted to renew it, would be good if the same thing happened here.
Oh well seems quite good so far.

picked up a couple of other library requests this week which I have yet to start
On savage shores : how Indigenous Americans discovered Europe Caroline Dodds Pennock
book about the cultural interchange the other way than is normally reported. Since the first European contact with the Americas there had been some Native American (or whatever term is better used) presence in Europe. Columbus brought people from the Americas back with him including a number of free nobility etc who interacted with European society. I've yet to read this so not fully onboard on what this meant, I did listen to a podcast on the book. Possibly Gone Medieval, though I think the author did do several guest slot appearances.
Sounded really good from that so looking forward to reading it . But am sticking myself with a large pile of books to read immediately.

also
An immense world : how animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us Ed Yong
book on the expanded world that animal senses percieve compared to human. Recently published which may be why I was seeing it turning up as a recommendation. looks good and the couple of podcasts I caught on it made it seem interesting. So again looking forwrd to reading it .
Got a bit more time right now i think but am picking up more books tahn I can read all of right now. Hope I get to them all. But if i pick up an infinite amount of books and only have a finite amount o ftime to read them all may need to prioritise better.
This i will hopefully get through over next few weeks.

picked up copies of a few of the Time Life published World Of Art series on individual artists too which look good. Got Durer, Breugel and Leonardo da Vinci
hoping there may still be a couple of these left where I got these from.

Also got
Angela Saini's new book The Patriarchs arrived yesterday so looking forward to reading that. Do like her writing.

& there's a new edition of Ugly Things out right now. Need to catch up with bits of the last 2 too.

I finish THEORY OF LITERATURE. Summary comments:

* The book is written in a manner that would be unimaginable now. On the whole this for me adds to its charm and interest. Older ways of writing, I find, can be stimulating and can raise the question: why can't we write like this?

* The book is impressively inclusive in the areas of literature, conceptually, that it discusses. It is also immensely learned, notably over multiple languages (something else less common now among Anglosphere authors).

* However, a possible weakness about the book is the way it turns out to be rather a compendium of ideas and pieces of knowledge, assorted together, rather than a developing 'theory'. It often seems as though W&W are basically saying: 'Literary genre? OK, here are all the things we currently know about literary genre'.

* The work belongs to the era of New Criticism and it partakes in the effort to purify the attention to literature, to abstract it from history, biography and so on. As a heuristic device I don't mind this. In W&W it is at least bracing to see someone working out eg: 'What is a literary period, if it isn't determined by the political events of said period?'

* The book was once well known and widely seen, but what was its influenced? Probably greater in the US than the UK. Terry Eagleton in THE EVENT OF LITERATURE (2012) calls it immensely influential but I have seen virtually no evidence of that. I'm not sure I have ever met anyone who has really read it.

I did a pretty 'crit-heavy' English degree and Masters in the early 2000s ('mature' student, doncha know) and W&W were a foundational part of the early critical theory module. They were presented as dated then, or perhaps they were historicised, and that particular kind of criticism parked, as it were, in its time and place.

I don't feel in any way engaged with this field, but I suppose the W&W names have become a kind of invisible metonymy for a notionally clean and objective criticism that concentrates solely on the text (if such a thing were possible). An available style or approach, stored away in some dusty attic of the working critic's mind.

I'm back at work and reading desultorily when I can: continuing with the Heaney interviews (he's in Berkeley about to move to Wicklow); dipping into Edumund White's *The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris*, which is diverting but parts of it - particularly the way he writes about race - put my teeth on edge; and David Macey's *The Lives of Michel Foucault*, which I dug out to add to the 'to read' pile but got caught up in the introduction. I once attended a talk about Foucalt by David Macey, and ended up in the pub with him afterwards. He smoked a *spectacular* amount and it's fair to say I have never in my life seen a man so ravaged by the effects of cigarette smoking.

I have Edmund White's My Lives beside me on a pile of books to be read.Looked at it recently and wasn't sure what had directed me to pick it up but could be it being by the same guy who wrote The Flaneur which I'd also meant to read./
I did attend a talk by a couple of local artists on the act of Flaneurism as tied in with their practise a couple of years ago that ma have directed me to it that and possibly psychogeography. Think I'd read a review of the White book too.

I seem to recall that one of the earliest chapters in Macey's biography is called 'Waiting for Godot', though (as I also seem to recall) it contains disappointingly little about the play or MF's experience of it.

Ovid - The Metamorphisis* (tr. Golding)
Home - The Odysssey (tr. Chapman)

Been delving into old translations of epics. I didn't finish Golding's Metamorphisis as I've lost the book in the pub, but up till then the going could be described as good. With these things you re-wire your brain to old forms of English, as if you are thrust into a double act of having to acquire fluency twice over. Of course it isn't possible to judge what has been lost, but I focus on what has been gained in certain passages where certain things are written about which have been done so many times before by different poets in the past and present. Nature, animals, the sea, loss, love (a son's for his father, a wife's for her husband), violence, killing, and so on.

*Homer, you know what I mean

I almost checked out the Lattimore translation of The Iliad last month.

I liked The Flaneur at the time and I almost always find something worthwhile in Edmund White's stuff, but, yes, his self-absorption is an annoyance and sometimes a menace.

Reading Jason Morris’ Levon Helm, a book of poems that includes the long titular poem named after the Band drummer. Morris is an interesting poet to me because he writes in a casual, talky way that I often find cloying or cute, but he’s able to make it work— I find myself gravitating toward his poems a few times per year.

Here’s something Levon’s troubled stepson wrote about him:

https://richardsmanuel.tumblr.com/post/121183926169

I really enjoyed Brandy Jensen’s piece on Jack Reacher for Defector but I am struggling with my first actual Reacher book, TRIPWIRE. The prose is almost Lanchester-level drab and particular. Child will spend two paragraphs describing a door that has no actual bearing on the action, without ever making the door come to life. And the dialogue is so perfunctorily hard-boiled, the whole thing reads like a fiction class writing exercise.

That's a great piece. I've read four Reacher novels. My capsule review would be 'emptily readable bollocks'.

The emptiness, and the random quotidian detail, makes suspension of disbelief hard for me. More than most things I’ve read, I find it hard to imagine the story is Actually Happening. I just picture an English bloke typing in any office, misremembering an old Mission Impossible episode, thinking “what’s a good sentence about a chair?”

love the reacher books tbh. think I read like 15 in one year and I still never tired of descriptions of reacher elbowing some shithead in the face.

Have read none of those books; enjoyed that piece.

I haven’t got as far as any violence yet. Maybe that’s what I’m missing.

Yeah, I think wait until you see Reacher in action, then I'll think you'll know if these are for you. I've read *Tripwire*; there are some good Reacher arse-kicking scenes, as I recall.

It's fun that when are Jack Reacher novels are discussed, the ultimate measure of how bad their prose could be is ... John Lanchester.

Murphy, Miles to Go
Wolfram, What Is ChatGPT Doing
Sooke, Roy Lichtenstein
Ransmayr, The Last World. This last one was an utter waste of time.

I finished "Portrait of Dorian Gray". The book seems to have strange pacing. It starts out with a typical amount of action concentrated into a few weeks, reaches a sort of climax, and then starts skipping ahead, striding over ever increasing spans of time, until we have a chapter that dispenses with entire decades (although I oddly enjoyed that chapter, a cursory summary of all the interests that occupied Gray over a span of 15 or so years, it reads more like an essay and it reminded me a bit of "Bouvard and Pecuchet" as an inventory of trendy ideas of the period), before finally slowing down and becoming more novelistic again to accomodate some final plot business.

Continuing my fin de siecle theme, I am now reading Volume 2 of William James's Principles of Psychology.

The James bros were so different.

Good description, o.nate. FWIW I only read DORIAN GRAY last September or so and my response will be on that ILB thread. I seem to recall that one of the things that slightly surprised me was how heterosexual Dorian Gray (at least sometimes) was.

Having diverted from it to read some other marvellous books, I remembered that I need to keep on with Bono's SURRENDER. It's still readable, entertaining, stimulating, not even slow to read. Yet I'm still not halfway through. It's long.

The mid-1980s are probably the most interesting time I could read about. There's a page on what a good period it was when they were recording THE JOSHUA TREE, in Malahide I believe. Another couple of good pages on the melancholy 'promenades' around Bray and Greystones (surprisingly far out from the city, if Bono was actually living there - in a Martello Tower! - which he connects slightly to Yeats but not at all to Joyce).

From the LPs in 1984 to 1987 was 2.5 years (with a mini-LP in 1985 if you like). At that time this was a relatively long gap. What happened? Maybe they were just touring, maybe it took time make the LP. But also ... Bono (with wife Ali) was living in Ethiopia for a while in 1985, then Central America for a while in 1986. Maybe not long periods but they would have taken organisation at both ends. I wonder, therefore, if one reason for the slightly long delay between LPs was, *already*, Bono's extra-curricular activities.

He can skip over some things rather quickly - the JOSHUA TREE tour, for instance. The Dublin sessions for RATTLE & HUM are hardly mentioned at all, though they're vivid in the film (and interviews take place there). Now we're almost on to ACHTUNG BABY. But not halfway through the book. Logically that suggests that half the book will be concerned with things like ... Bono's debt campaigning, his controversial meetings with world leaders (which he's already discussed), and the less popular later records?

Bono is intellectually lively, if not deep. I'm happy to see him engage with various ideas and people (Mikhail Gorbachev for instance). But I do worry more when he says 'Douglas Alexander has been advising me for the last 5 years'.

may seem odd me jumping in here to defend terry eagleton (!) abt what constitutes influence (!!) but couldn't he simply mean that
(a) W&W were the first to turn up and say "we all need a THEORY of literature and here it is", and
(b) who was being "influenced" is everyone who then said "well yes we DO need one… just not THAT one"

anyway here's the one *i* favour:

novels are so great. novels are like "i made up a little weirdo. oh no, now he's in trouble!"

— Gabrielle Moss (@Gaby_Moss) April 22, 2023

I hope for a long Mark S article in praise of Terry.

weird question, but figure it’s the right place to ask: anyone have a favorite book on the the great fire of London?

mine is pepys's diary but i suspect that's not what you have in mind

(important detail: he buried his big parmesan cheese in the garden to save it from the flames)

I mean I would too

I like the idea of Pepys’ diary (and also the experimental novel by Roubaud), but yes, looking more for straight history, perhaps from a left leaning perspective

Overstory - Powers

Really into it! Makes me want to re read all the nature writing I read in college

Magda Szabó - The Fawn
A collection of Weldon Kees poems.

I still never tired of descriptions of reacher elbowing some shithead in the face.

Writing action like that is hard. You have to be vivid enough to pull the reader's imagination entirely into the scene and terse enough that the pace feels breathtakingly quick.

Overstory - Powers
Really into it! Makes me want to re read all the nature writing I read in college

Will have to check that--also, I keep coming across killer quotes from Thoreau (latest round started in Kim Stanley Robinson's meganovel Greem Earth, whose author is at his own best involved with East and esp. West Coast Great Outdoors). Turns out my local library has even more HDT than KSR, oh boy---and I'll ask them to borrow or buy Robinson's awesome-looking nonfiction
The High Sierra: A love story.
(He is someone who reportedly combined acid with mountain-climbing early on, much more successfully than young Hank Williams JR.)