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

Wasn’t Lewis a pretty notorious anti-semite?

Having finally seen the film I take Michael Wood's BELLE DE JOUR (2000) from the library. It starts by quoting singer Richie Havens.

How Racism Survived U.S. History David Roediger
exploration of race in U.S. History. Quite enjoying it , but do wish it had as bibliography.
Filling in more details of some events I'm already largely aware of. But does seem to be good to have this in one place in a shortish book,

400 Years of Fashion Natalie Rothstein
1999 reissue of a classic text on a V&A museum exhibition on fashion history in the UK. I thought i could pick up some more pointers on how things developed over time and I'm not sure this is the right book for that. I did find a book that i had meant to read for a while that is better on the process of how things actually developed so ordered that yesterday.
This is a collection of photos of pretty exquisite clothing though so I will see what i can pick up on and incorporate into my own designs as per usual.

I'm about to finish, at kingfish's rec, Cold War and Civil Rights. I'll start Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room today.

Currently alternating between two rather desultory experiences:

The Exhibitionist, Charlotte Mendelson - Book club pick. Family drama about a sculptor couple and their children. Father is an emotionally abusive and manipulative monster, rest of family brainwashed into putting his needs above their own. No subtelty in the writing whatsoever: father is unpleasant and pathetic in every way at all times, leaving you at a loss for why any of the other characters put up with him. It is mentioned that he can be disarmingly charming at times, but crucially this is told, not shown, so we get no feeling for it. I dunno, it just kinda feels like venting?

The Magic Box, Rob Young - Supposedly a history of the hauntological/folk horror-y aspects of British television, though it starts off by mentioning a bunch of big screen features - Village Of The Damned, The Damned, the Hammer Quatermass films. I'm a bit at a loss to what the book's mission statement is, outside of being a nostalgic trawl through 60's and 70's UK popcult that a certain type (me) enjoys. It doesn0t focus enough on the behind the scenes to get into the structural changes of those times, and while each artefact is given a cursory social history interpretation there doesn't seem to be any kind of overarching theory as to What It All Means either. Totally wrong on The Damned as well, suggesting that the bikers show that the film thinks the greatest threat is americanization, when the film makes it pretty explicit the hooligans are victims of the British establishment as much as the children are.

I read his Electric Eden and quite enjoyed it . It did seem to take off on some wild diversions including I think a longish fictional section. I was surprised by vehement negative reaction against it by some including Richard Morton Jack.
Haven't read anything else book form by him . He did edit the Wire for a while didn't he, or was it just write there?

Looking forward to reading RMJ's book on Nick Drake when I get a chance.

Young edited The Wire. His writing is just not my bag for reasons I forget now.

It's been about a year since my last Barbara Pym novel, so I'm back to get another dose of the vicars in the form of An Unsuitable Attachment.

Pym always manages to generate a goodly amount of wryly bemused comedy out of the scrupulous social hesitations and incessant trivial quandaries faced by the respectable mid-20th century English middle classes, but especially the women. And yes, I did just write a highly congested pile-up of adverbs and adjectives. I only did what had to be done.

This month's book club selection is So Brave, Young and Handsome, by Leif Enger. I'm about a third of the way through. As much as I want to dislike this book as a "fresh" take on the Western, I can't deny the pull of Enger's prose. It's utterly charming. Will report back as the story develops.

Thanks again. Seems like on ILM several readers have reported finding Electric Eden useful for info and recharging enthusiasm, living up to this, apparently:

“Rob Young's ambitious Electric Eden presents a flip side to the well-known story of the evolution of electric rock in Britain in the 1960s, a story of the rediscovery of England's native folk music in the early 20th century by the likes of William Morris and Cecil Sharp, who went from town to town recording and notating the music that would hold great sway with those musicians who became associated with England's less loud, more earthy music--the likes of Vashti Bunyan, Davy Graham, The Incredible String Band, Pentangle, Fairport Convention and Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, John Martyn, John Renbourn, Bert Jansch, Nick Drake, and many others would each deploy traditional folk music to their own ends in various recombinant ways, writing new songs laced with the idealism of the exploding sixties youth culture, while paying homage to the spirit and traditions of old. Eventually the tide of this music swelled to inspire some of the most influential names in electric rock, from the Beatles and Pink Floyd to Led Zeppelin and David Bowie. Thoroughly researched and well written, this book uncovers the secret history of British popular music in the sixties and beyond. Highly recommended.” ―Lee Ranaldo, Sonic Youth

I liked *Electric Eden*, though I think I felt like Daniel does about *The Magic Box*: it's a fantastic work of archaeology but the archival instinct is so all-consuming, it ultimately outruns itself. Or, less politely, it goes on a bit. I've just discovered the long-ass review I wrote about it, which, well, goes on a bit: https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/reviews/book-reviews/the-history-of-british-music-rob-youngs-electric-eden-36400

I finished David Toop's *Sinister Resonance*, which I enjoyed a great deal. It's a book that attempts to locate the uncanny nature of sound - its immaterial nature, its ephemerality, its placelessness. It's an impossible project, but one that allows Toop to explore a range of mediums: paintings, novels, sculpture, autobiographical sketches, but, oddly, barely any music at all. Central texts are *Moby Dick*, lots of MR James, Joyce, Woolf and Proust, and, unsurprisingly, lots of Beckett. He also looks at the implied sound in the Dutch masters, particularly Nicholaes Maes. There are some great passages where he's simply sitting in his back garden in the dark, listening to the sound of snails nibbling his hostas.

I think it was somewhere on here that a link was made between him and Iain Sinclair and that's a good shout. There's something in the way they navigate the library that is completely alien to me (someone once said the same of Foucault), and, like the Young books discussed above, there is a sense that it was only a deadline that stopped Toop, not any attempt at a unifying principle. Ultimately, like Sinclair, I could read him all day, and would happily re-read the book from the start.

Excellent--- and I can see from your Young take, more than ever, that I'm going to have to read the damn book at some point(as well as Toop's)---and you end with the questions that your descriptions led me toward--as far as the possibility of a visionary pushing past-through nostalgia and intimations x certainty of a fraught future (we know the environmental factors as well or better than we care to, but not how and when things will shake out, though the timeline keeps bumping forward in latest projections), since this is ILB, I'll mention a writer who sure tries, if with mixed results, having his own struggles with nostalgia, and that is Kim Stanley Robinson.

I hope that Young cites Richard Thompson as a folk-rock songwriter who has never dealt much in nostalgia, except his occasionally overt conservative-reactionary tendencies could be a form of that, although never really "It used to be better dammit," more just disgust or sere vibe/sound, then on to something else. Occasional roots-work-outs are mainly for fun now, the scenic route to that (with a little mental cosplay if ye like).

Thompson does build from the lyrical-lurid arterial trees of many ancient sources, pop artistry before pop (like Harry Smith turns into liner notes' tabloid headlines drawn from the musical contents of his Smithsonian Anthology). RT's "Beeswing" effectively (whatever his conscious intention) comments on the possible consequences of this kind of appetite, incl. on male collector-questlovers, as the waltzing wild child, now seen as increasingly self-destructive, keeps telling the earnest ex-bf narrator, "You wouldn't have me any other way." (perhaps Thompson does relate this to his own interests, having since used the song's title for that his memoir of youth, which he's said involves not-always-the-right-decisions).

On the negative, reactionary side, when he was offended by Sting's rain forest advocacy, this son of a London cop songfully sneered at the son of a Newcastle area milkman for being a "little Geordie" who didn't know his place (also by being much more $uccessful than Thompson, while rarely being as much an artist: white trash with money)---I wonder if Young's book deals with classism and related matters?

I finish Bono's memoir SURRENDER. It's long, eloquent, wry, warm, informative, amusing, perhaps sometimes wise. If you like Bono, it's the book you might have hoped Bono could write. Its weaknesses are a) a tendency sometimes to lift off toward generality, b) the 'centrist' blandness of its political statements and outlooks, which I've commented on extensively before.

Clarice Lispector - Too much of Life (Complete Chronicles). There is over 700 pages of her columns (mostly written for the main Rio paper Journal do Brasil), mostly from the early 70s (in the afterword her son claims she was sacked from the job due to antisemitism). Clarice Lispector's writing is borne out of a pure knack for it. She started early; I don't know if she was massively well read but what she had was a knack for putting words together that can really pierce into you. She is a bit like a spiritualist in her outlook in the way she goes within and is able to access all things that to us is like a blob, but she is able to make sense of it -- both to her and her readers. In her 'novels' (she is often bored by the form and her books were never exactly novels anyway) that concentration yields often strange, beguiling works that have been mistaken for the modernism of Joyce or Beckett but there was nothing like that kind of program as such. The most interesting stuff as far as the linking these pieces to her novels goes are the relationships with her maids, but otherwise the outside world doesn't get into her works.

In these newspaper pieces however, she is very much aware of readers, and what it is to be writing for a public that will read a page of hers over a coffee. She is often interviewing a singer, a painter, or going to a party with a fellow writer. At the time there was a dictatorship in Brazil, and student protests, so she sided with them in simple solidarity. There is lots here if you are interested in Brazilian culture of that period. Unfortunately the writing here isn't as good as when she uses the page to go within and find something that no one else could. So as a collection its very up and down. For anyone who is a fan is a must but its not a keeper. It probably needs selection, a bit of curation, if you wanted to get pissy about its worth or whatever. Which I don't really want to. If you like what she does you have to read this.

al-Hariri - Impostures. Just near the end of this medieval Arabic work. 50 'Impostures' (in short 5-10 pages), within, where the hero Abu Zayd (and as the title implies) is a confidence trickster who uses his cunning to get out of a 'situation'. Usually by talking his way out of it. The approach for this translation is unique as each of them are translated in a chosen style of English. It could be based on an Anglo writer -- from Austen to Gertrude Stein to Chaucer to someone obscure like Margery Kempe (the last Imposture describes the narrator's supposed change of ways to leading a more ethical life, so Kempe is seen as a fit -- or it could a particular Anglo dialect (so there's Maori English to Caribbean, just many many 'dialects', if you like). If you wanted a short compilation of styles of English this could function as the book for you. But as book of tales to enjoy I am not sure this helps in establishing a fluency. In some ways its trying to play with the conumdrum of translation where accuracy can often impinge on the flow of the target language, so how about imitations? Except that having to go from one style of English to the next is quite jarring on this read. I wonder if you could have a re-telling in one way instead. Anyway, I reckon this is a pretty important book (as far as these things go), in terms of showcasing the approach and getting an Arabic writer -- who sounds unclassifiable -- out there.

What's the best place to start with her? Story collections, novels, nonfiction--like the columns etc--or does she have memoirs presented as such?

The Passion According to G.H.

Overstory has its flaws I guess but it really has opened up the world of trees to me

I finish Michael Wood's BELLE DE JOUR (2000). Brisk, pacy, improvisational in tone, dry, providing some very close readings of film at time, drawing on much learning. MW constantly refers to European art films I've never seen. If you like the film this book is very worthwhile. But not to be read till you've seen the film.

Listening to an audiobook of The Day of the Locust. It's a cracking read, not least because of the reader. I'm a sucker for tales of old decadent Hollywood, and this is the ur-text.

day of the locust feat.homer simpson

Yes, Homer Simpson, the poor slob.

Kincaid, Brian W. Aldiss
Slifkin, The New Monuments and the End of Man
Threadgill, Easily Slip into Another World

I bought Day Of The Locust thinking it was Day Of The Triffids and got very confused.

I know there's at least one film of it that I saw years ago. NOt sure if i read the book or have a copy lying around the flat somewhere. Did hear it was pretty good though.

also have a copy of Otto Friedrich's City of Nets which is about Hollywood in the 40s. Thought I would get to that faster have heard that is really good too. More non-fiction but I think it should relate. Though it may be showing teh town a couple of decades later.

actually more the next decade than a couple of decades later. I was thinking Locust was 20s for some reason.

Day of the Locusts was on tptv in the uk quite a bit at the start of the year

donald sutherland plays homer s -- which for a long while convinced me that groening derived the omnipresent cast in a simpsons character's eyes from sutherland's

except the life in hell characters always already had this same cast so i guess it's a convergent evolution (which is even weirder tbh)

Riku Onda - THE AOSAWA MURDERS. beguiling and fascinating murder mystery with intriguing structure. unfortunately i was completely baffled by the ending in that I don't really understand what happened or whodunnit. perhaps that was the point but give me an agatha christie any day. still at least I enjoyed 280 of the 312 pages.

(did we have a 'spoilers please' thread where we get people to tell us what happened in things we didn't understand? or did i imagine it / mean to start one and not get around to it?)

Hell yes!

The Libertine Louis Aragon
French surrealist book comprising of a series of vignettes. First one is a play in short scenes and snatches of dialogue about a Prince going to Russia. Preface is pretty interesting too.
I've had this out of the library for the last month and a half and not really looked ta it. Hopefully going to get through it rapidly since the individual stories are pretty short. I took a trip out to a satellite town of here and looked through their library and saw a number of titles that I want to read. Was already at the limits of amountof books i could take out or would have a couple of other titles I possibly also wouldn't have looked at properly.
Gt this with anthology of writing on racism by Martin Bulmer which has some really interesting excerpts in. What I read of that was good but been sidetracked by other books for the last while. & amassing a load more taht will hang over me for a while.

ric Yong An Immense World
Have had this sitting beside teh bed with the Introduction partially read for the last month. I think I just finished the introduction and got into the main part of teh book.
Book is about the world taht animal senses create that they live in.So far I've had a thought I had about Thomas Nagel's What iT's Like tO be a Bat confirmed or at least supported by Yong. In that a fleeting visit to a place where one was sensing things in the same way as a given animal does is far from the same thing as actually understanding the world as experienced as that animal. When we did this in Philosophy20 years ago I was thinking of the scene in the Sword in the Stone where the two wizards fleetingly jump from animal form to animal form in comparison . That the wizards would not be experiencing the world in the way their external form would suggest, I was thinking the difference between appearance and immersed experience was like an impermeable membrane one couldn't cross. I think the original author's idea of what it was like for Merlin and Walt to be experiencing what it was like to be an animal had a different understanding though. I don't think that would be right myself, one would be aware of one's double consciousness and fleeting visit etc.
Anyway great thought provoking book on the subject that already looks extremely promising and I haven't got far into it yet. Introduction was good in itself. I think I need to read his other book too, I Contain Multitudes the one on microbes.

Martin Hayes Shared Notes
Irish fiddler virtuoso memoir. So far I've got as far as him learning to play and joining his first band. Also heading outto a high school beyond teh county border .
Pretty great view of a rural childhood in Clare, I'm enjoying this. So would recommend it as well as his latest cd Peggy's Dream where he's put together pretty much a super group and put out a sublime set touching on jazz, possibly minimalism and traditional Irish folk.

Walter Rodney How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Guyanan radical writer's book on history and development of the continent of Africa and how it was mishandled and diverted by Europe. I'm just starting the main book after reading the Introduction which looks into the writer's assassination and background and stuff.
But a book I've been waiting to read for a while. Took an age on order with the library system but never appeared so I bought it a few months back and have since been trying to get to it by reading the rest of books I'd started before it.
Anyway

Re: The Day of the Locust, I've never seen the film. The book was a quick read/listen, and while his prose was stellar I thought the ending was rushed. At the same time, it was suitably apocalyptic. I definitely want to see the film now.

I downloaded it earlier so have it to look forward to.

Tove Jansson: Work And Love, Tuula Karjalainen - Jansson biog by Finnish art historian, thus clearly written for a Finnish audience, not holding your hand over things like the Winter War, the Swedish-Finnish community or the art world of early 20th century Helsinki. Which is fine, I'd rather have stuff go over my head than feel spoken down to. Very early days in this yet, but very cool to see the focus so far on her youthful work as a painter and illustrator, moomins meriting little more than the stray mention so far (I'm sure they'll take over soon enough). Her father, an archetypal Terrible Man, was a sculptor, and the book directs you to where his works can be found (an advantage of this particular art, I guess - once you've got something in the public square inertia means it's likely to stay for a good while). Her mother was Finnland's first great postage stamp artist!

After finishing An Unsuitable Attachment, Barbara Pym I have a hard time understanding what her publisher could have been thinking by rejecting it in 1963. It had to wait for posthumous publication in 1982. It was well up to her standards and made me laugh out loud several times.

Reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's *A Time to Keep Silence*, a short book about various monasteries Fermor visited or stayed at in the 1950s. There's something unreal about Fermor. He lived a bizarre, extraordinary life. One brief section of his Wiki page reads:

He fought in Crete and mainland Greece. During the German occupation, he returned to Crete three times, once by parachute, and was among a small number of Special Operations Executive (SOE) officers posted to organise the island's resistance to the occupation. Disguised as a shepherd and nicknamed Michalis or Filedem, he lived for over two years in the mountains. With Captain Bill Stanley Moss as his second in command, Leigh Fermor led the party that in 1944 captured and evacuated the German commander, Major General Heinrich Kreipe.[14]

For all that, everything carries the taint of privilege; as such, this kind of asceticism though partly born of genuine curiosity can also feel performative. There's something so luxuriant about his prose at times, that I find myself snorting - wanting to tug a forelock in admiration but also wanting to toss the book aside. I'm here for the polyglot virtuosity, the specialist vocabularies, for the lone enraptured male loose in the bowels of a monastery meditating on the transience of life, but I don't know, it feels problematic.

Then something like this happens and I'm gliding along his sentences like a supplicant.

[The monasteries] emerge in the fields like the peaks of a vanished Atlantis drowned four centuries deep. The gutted cloisters stand uselessly among the furrows and only broken pillars mark the former symmetry of aisles and ambulatories. Surrounded by elder-flower, with their bases entangled in bracken and blackberry and bridged at their summits with arches and broken spandrels that fly spinning over the tree tops in slender trajectories, the clustering pillars suspend the great empty circumference of a rose window in the rook-haunted sky. It is as though some tremendous Gregorian chant had been interrupted hundreds of years ago to hang there petrified at its climax ever since.

more of Ed Yong's An Immense World.
got through first chapter where he talks about smell and taste and how they are experienced and differentiated.
Really enjoying this . So yeah recommend it.
Think I'll definitely be looking to read his other one after this.
But maybe I shouldn't keep adding new books to my currently reading active pile.

to which I just added
Linda Nochlin Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists.
the book which is part of the birth of feminist art criticism. & If I had been more on top of things i mjight have got as part of an anthology of her work that I've seen is in the library system. NOt as yet sure if exactly the same edit of the main essay is in that though. So may well order that once I'm through here.
Have listened to a few podcasts on her and interviews with her in the run up to this arriving. Want to know more. Seemed to be a title that should have some interesting discussion behind. I think the one complaint i saw about this was that there was very little reflection on artists of colour in here. I did hear her bring up the lack of recognition of artists of other ethnicities in the interview though.
Oh well, looking forward to this.

Started another audiobook, Lampedusa by Steven Price. I really enjoyed By Gaslight. This is completely different; it's a novel about the last years of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of The Leopard, when he was diagnosed with emphysema and began work on the book. Price was published as a poet before he started writing novels. His prose really sings, and his storytelling is quite intricate and recursive.

A Time to Keep Silence is a great book!

heinrich von kleist - michael kohlhaas

Martin Amis, THE WAR AGAINST CLICHÉ (1981). I won't read or reread it all.

Love Kleist's short stories, great stuff.

You have doubtless seen it, Chinaski, but if not the Archers' Ill Met by Moonlight is a pretty funny 1957 fabulation of PLF's time bamboozling Nazis on Crete, starring Dirk Bogarde in an implausible moustache.

I finished Tanizaki's The Maids, started Amis' The Information.

Kleist is one of my favourite short story writers ever. Michael Kohlhaas is a must as far as novellas go.

The translation on Archipelago collates all of these.

A Wreath for Udomo, Peter Abrahams. A fictionalised account of an African independence movement, written in 1956 before the first tropical african country gained independence. The prose is kind of middle of the road but it's engaging and an interesting glimpse into the optimism of that era.

Killers of the flower moon