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

re up the junction: film is not in my opinion truer to the book

interesting maybe as a rare example of london-based kitchen sink (which tended to be a northern phenom)

"Dot Cotton from early years of Eastenders"

Think she was in late years also !

gyac, I've always been troubled by how well I thought the film of Rosemary's Baby depicts the things you mention - considering Polanski's own history, it felt to me like the sort of twisted compartmentalization of an abuser who has the intelligence and empathy to understand how gaslighting works and what effects it has on its victim while somehow still being able to indulge in it himself. now I'm wondering if I wasn't giving credit to Polanski that actually belongs to Levin.

pinefox, I think in addition to the things you mention it's worth being critical of the initiatives themselves, i.e. how much of the money actually goes where it should, how much profit is being made off the back of it, how much of this is PR and tax evasion, how much of it is top down "here Africans the white man has come to help you" as opposed to engaging with grass roots activists on the ground, etc.. of course I don't expect Bono himself to get into those issues.

The film version of Rosemary's Baby is famously faithful to the novel; iirc Polanski only omits a very minor subplot about Rosemary's sister.

xp I don't watch Eastenders so had assumed she would be long gone. It was funny seeing her as a teen in the late 60s film after seeing her in that though. I think Maureen Lipman is also in the film.

I used to go down to a clothing shop in Clapham in the mid 80s, bought a fringed suede jacket from there. Not really familiar with teh area otherwise. I think it was heavily gentrified since the book/play/film wasn't it?

A funny thing about Bono's account is that he keeps going to see Republican senators who say "why should we give money to these African countries - they're riddled with corruption?". And Bono says "Senator, I appreciate that, but we're working on good governance ..."

The reason I find this funny (not in a very happy way) is that I believe that the Republican party is responsible for massive corruption in the USA.

The CIA's role in this corruption as the US and USSR used much of Africa for proxy wars also worth pointing out (though I grant this would not get republican senators onside).

I tried to get at this months ago, and perhaps caused some damage to my standing here, but will say what I meant then: Bono is a fucking idiot.

Mary Renault - Funeral Rites
Isabel Wilkerson - Caste
Glyn Maxwell - The Boys at Twilight: Poems 1990-1995

entirely agreed :)

xpost

xp re Bongo
I assumed that was well known.
Is anybody stanning for him?
Do hope his days as an automatic talking head are over or at least numbered.

Do remember walking behind him on Temple Bar and realising what a little man he was, not to be sizist or anything. But does make you wonder if the napoleon complex is a thing.

the beginning of the gentrification of clapham is literally what "up the junction" is about (nell dunn moving there from fashionable chelsea in the late 50s)

Mary Renault - Funeral Rites

Funeral Games, innit?

yep

I finished *Stepping Stones* the series of interviews with Seamus Heaney. It's 600 pages long and became oddly hypnotic the further along I got. Despite the Nobel prize, I don't think I'd fully metabolised his standing as a cultural figure (ignorance or provincialism, on my part?). Friends with Lowell and Bishop, Hughes and Brodsky; professorships at Harvard and Oxford; reading at Milosz's funeral. Still, there is a moment, after his stroke, when Clinton comes calling to his hospital bed, that the size of his achievement really dawned on me. I don't know why it should have been that when the work is right *there* but, somehow, the work operates - continues to work - on a different level. It's so thrumming and sinuous that *book* doesn't quite feel like the right word. Artefact, probably.

Now reading David Toop's *Sinister Resonance*. Even for Toop, this is episodic, fractured and abstract. The main threads of it are meditations on paintings and sculptures; the uncanny silences held within the frames, the subjects - particularly of Vermeer, di Chirico, Nicolaes Maes and Juan Muñoz. There are the usual excursions into place, artefacts and hypnagogia though, and he always makes me want to go back to the art - in whatever form it takes.

I took another break from the French Revolution and read The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler. No need to comment. It's a classic.

Only time for dissertation reading at the moment, but David Aitchison's The School Story: Young Adult Narratives in the Age of Neoliberalism is a good read for anyone who is interested in any part of that title.

Meanwhile I have started Nell Dunn's UP THE JUNCTION (1963). I think my vague idea of this book was that it was a 'kitchen sink novel'. But it's really more a series of vignettes, which appear to be quasi-documentary rather than primarily fictional. It contains a lot of dialogue which is unattributed - like hearing the voices on a Free Cinema documentary. It contains some flashes of striking prose.

The book is not very long.

mark s says rare bit of London kitchen sink, pinefox's take makes it seem not dreary, maybe the more textured, restless shades of grey.

The 2 adaptations, Ken Loach play and 68 film with manfred Mann soundtrack are both pretty good. I think BBC had the play on a few months back.
& if the title pun isn't clear it's set in Clapham near the junction and there is a slang term Up The Junction which I thought was about being pregnant but may be more widely similar to up shit creek.

I thought the book was quite good but it has been a long time since I read it. Mark S was saying it was an outsiders view of teh area since teh writer had come from what had been a posher area and was relating her experiences in this place. It was just becoming a place that people were in teh process of gentrifying after I think it had been run down for a while. I think that had been a process in London for a while, to simplify area has cheap rents and somewhat decent property in bad repair so people on a budget move in do up the place they move into and word gets out so other people think its a fashionable area to live in so it gets a different reputation. I think that continues in a cycle until the population of a town becomes too high for it to do so. Possibly until rents are too high for people to be able to move around at all too.
But I think Clapham went from being a pretty working class place to a far less so one.

May also depend on people being able to afford to actually buy the place they're doing up rather than improving things for a 3rd party landlord etc.
Also aware that over last 100 years other populations have been added into the mix to greater degree. probably more recently here where mass Eastern European and African immigration suddenly massively increased in the early 2000s though there are areas of Dublin and elsewhere that had been concentrated points of immigrant living for much much longer.
Europe did have a lot of further afield immigrants for hundreds of years but population in UK and elsewhere increased massively in the 20th century I think. Cosmopolitan population just hadn't been depicted as such until pretty recently, though I did notice that French films of the early 20th century did seem to have one black minor part or extra much more than English ones did. I watched a whole load of European films in a short time a couple of years ago.

my copy wd have been my mum's or my dad's, a classic pan paperback with this (excellent, somewhat misleading) cover:

https://i0.wp.com/maryrizza.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/upthejunction1j.jpg

Ken Loach play has at least one ton up boy in, which would fit in with the fashion of the girl on teh cover.
As would teh semi bohemian ness of the author moving into an area like that possibly.
Look is somewhat hip, somewhat sassy, from the era isn't it, without being mod or something.

Thanks yall! Seems to be current cover of trade pb---similar looking girl on other cover variants I'm seeing, wonder if this one is the author? Good pic anyway

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61gL1ATxTxL.jpg

it's the original cover image from the 1963 hardback first edn and yes, i think it is her

(judging by other photos she enjoys an unexpected hat)

I have the Pan edition that Mark S shows.

As mentioned, the book is quite unusual in not being much of a novel, but more a set of documentary vignettes. It's short, so it wouldn't cost you much time to try reading it if interested.

Mark S was shrewd in suggesting that wealthy Nell Dunn's move to Clapham was the start of gentrification, but I add that in this book she is not transplanting a fancy middle-class lifestyle to a poor area (and thus changing it). Quite the opposite. She's (at least in the text, if not in real life) 'going native' like Orwell in his documentary books, making herself like one of the local women as much as possible - doing the work they do in their workplaces, going to their pubs and chip shops. I haven't quite yet discerned, from the book, the aim of this, unless it's simply to generate material to write about.

Thanks---yeah, looks like it might be her on that cover, since same woman on these covers of The Muse: a memoir of love at first sight and Talking With Women---several books here; what else is good? https://www.amazon.com/stores/Nell-Dunn/author/B001K8EHY6?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true
I'm guessing UTJ is a good place to start.

talking with women is p good iirc, proto-feminist interviews from the mid-60s (content self-explanatory)

reading dad lit in my capacity as a dad this month:

the wager by david grann (as excerpted in the new yorker https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-wager-david-grann-book-excerpt). this is a pretty good adventure story page turner. it aspires to be a cut above by talking about empire and colonialism, but the treatment there is so glib it adds little. i would recommend endurance by alfred lansing before this. good father's day gift if your dad likes master and commander.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands by timothy snyder. iirc i picked up this up shortly after the war in ukraine started, as it was regularly recommended to provide context for that. i learned a lot. it is, as they say, a good synthesis of a huge topic (of which ukraine's history is only part). i am not an expert, but i did find myself as little uncomfortable with one of the goals of the book, which is to compare hitler and stalin. that's a worthwhile goal if taken seriously, but in practice it sometimes (not always) ended up feeling he was ranking genocides like nate silver. good father's day book if your dad likes stalingrad.

Making my way through Penman's Fassbinder book. Lots to like, lots to not like so much.

I only know the screen version, but, in addition to the treatment of xpost Rosemary by her husband and doctor, who didn't even need to be witting accomplices of the Satanists, just in the classic tradition of husbands & doctors---seeingRosemary's Baby resonated on levels just now surfacing in my mind, re manipulation of the young, with females given their own special treatment, by fancy older people ov huge secret enthusiasms. I'm thinking Cold War etc. incl. what Trump later called the Deep State, although no need (beyond alibis) for that with him; he's his own worst enemy. Also what some post-Boomers now call the Gerontocracy: I've read that by 1972, the average American was 23 years old, herded by marketing studies also, well-developed by then.

fancy older people ov huge secret enthusiasms

I finished Grand Hotel, it was really good. It did start out like a carousel of rather unappealing characters but they were all treated sympathetically by Baum and their stories were expertly intertwined. Now on to Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky - I'm so far not finding it quite the winning sibling of kafka and borges that it's trumpeted as. Most of the stories are about literary life - writing, getting published (or not), criticism - and though it's done with a surreal aspect and as a way of criticising soviet repression I'm not really into that kind of ouroborosity. And overall it doesn't have the broad psychological appeal of kafka or borges' pure genius.

Yeah I didn't think much of Krzhizhanovsky either. For some reason NYRB classics chose to put five books out by him.

xpost Grand Hotel the movie is good too: Garbo, young Joan Crawford, John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery (as a tycoon, not in a prole role), and a host of Euro-seeming character actors, refreshingly unfamiliar to me.

Just finished Dr. Wortle's School, the shortest Trollope I've ever read.

Looking forward to reading the new David Grann, but I feel like I need to wait until I have a trip so I can read it as a proper dad airport book.

Recently finished Gogol's Dead Souls, and it's really enjoyable. Sam Bankman-Fried must have taken Chichikov as his model, right?

Here's what I've read so far this year:

Mat Johnson - Pym
Stanislaw Lem - The Futurological Congress
Jonathan Lethem - The Arrest
Hernan Diaz - In the Distance
Katie Kitamura - Intimacies
George Saunders - A Swim in the Pond in the Rain
Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Memory
Jordan Castro - The Novelist
Mezz Mezzrow & Bernard Wolfe - Really the Blues
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls

I'm about halfway through the Leena Krohn collection now. It's got a certain rhythm and obscurity that keep me reading.

I finished UP THE JUNCTION. I add that its vignettes could be reassembled in almost any order, and that it contains a series of line drawings by Susan Benson.

I'm reading a literary critical work: WYNDHAM LEWIS & MODERNISM (2004) by an academic critic called A. Gasiorek. It's very sharply written and well informed. Anyone wanting a short introduction to Lewis could start here.

Does anyone have any feelings about the best translation of Radetsky March?

I think Michael Hoffman takes quite a lot of liberties with his translation, but he seems to be a pithier writer than the other translator, Joachim Neugroschel.

Never read Neugroschel's translation of RM but I like some of his other translations.

Today I began Tom Comitta’s The Nature Book, a “literary supercut” novel that contains none of Comitta’s original work, just his arrangement of depictions of “nature” from other novels. Has been getting good press, and so far, it’s quite good if occasionally a little goofy.

After finishing A New World Begins I feel like I have a much better grasp of the arc of the French Revolution from the crises that led to Louis XVI calling the original États généraux in 1789 up to Bonaparte's coronation as emperor in 1804. Even allowing for the compression necessary to encompass all of it into 560 pages, it sounded exhausting.

I'm going to watch a movie tonight and wait until tomorrow to pick my next book.

Talking about NYRB's books that aren't all that, I have just finished Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy.
To its credit, it was bad enough that I immediately found the motivation to reread The Brothers Karamazov.

Lol I love Krudy.

Granted, he has phenomenal descriptions of seasons and time passing in his Hungarian countryside, his metaphors are wild and fun. The man-woman carnival on the other hand...

I can't remember it's been so long. I think the prose reads wonderfully well in English, all of these great descriptions of life in full colours. He is possibly like Joseph Roth -- in his relationship with a vanished past of Austro-Hungary -- but there aren't enough translations and most that are there aren't easy to find.

I'm struggling with The Traveller of the Century. It was pretty entertaining at first, and it's exceptionally clever, but the '18th century novel written in the 21st century' schtick is wearing thin after 400 pages, and though it's centered on a love story and has lots of theorising about love, it's very much a novel of the head, not of the heart.

Caliban and the Witch Sylvia federici
I have only read the introduction so far. Heard teh The Book ON Fire podcast breakdown over teh last few weeks so thought I'd read teh text. It's one of several I have on teh go though so hoping to get it done by end of month isnce there may be a queue.
I'm going to listen to that Podcast's series on David Graeber's The Dawn Of Everything after having had his book nn Debt recommended by Deforrest Brown last weekend. Or probably would have done so anyway. THink I need to read a few of graeber's have heard other podcasts talking about his posthumous one on Pirate Enlightenment too. Have his Bullshit Jobs around teh bed so will get to that soon hopefully.

Timeleess Adventures Brian J Robb
Thought I'd read a few things on the history of the show. having seen the series through a couple of times.
Pretty brief overview that tries to tie the stories depicted in the show into contemporary cultural events etc. Just about works I think. Talks about the usage of sets etc from historical drama being shot by the BBC and refers to the Victorian style including Jon Pertwee bringing in his grandfather's cape. Like it's visible that there is a style from that rough era late Victorian/early 20th century running through at least the first run of Doctors that should be visible to anybody who knew anything about the history of clothing. Victoriana and Edwardiana had a couple of revivals in the 60s and 70s which is also visible in the show at points.

Martin Hayes Shared Notes
Memoir by Irish fiddle player which came out last year. I've seen him play locally a few times and had heard about his famous pairing with Dennis Cahill much earlier. I think I need to pick up his current cd Peggy's Dream.
So far still in childhood where he is working on his dad's farm and absorbing the influence of people playing traditional music which his dad was also involved in.
Think I have too many thing son teh go at teh same time and maybe should be concentrating on a couple less. But do very much want to read this and like everything else i've picked up recently.

Not A Nation Of Immigrants Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
her book on settler colonialism with a title refuting the one chosen by JFK for his book which set a paradigm of thought.
She's looked through the various minority ethnicities in the US and problems they have had to face.
I've had this as my loo book so it's probably taken me longer to read than it should have done but I think it's really good. Have meant to read this since it was released so glad to have got it mostly done.

Bright boulevards, bold dreams : the story of black Hollywood Donald Bogle
Very interesting book so far looking at teh very early days of Hollywood. I'm still in the 1920s at the moment and should be spending more time with this. It's an enjoyable read. So I'll probably need to follow it up with others by him.