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

I've started Sean O'Casey's 1942 play RED ROSES FOR ME.

hell yes

with a slightly different meaning from what I wrote.

J Edgar, do you know the play? That's interesting.

Dow: roughly, yes. Just as it would be if 'but' appeared in the middle of a sentence rather than at the start of a second sentence.

Finished Valis by PKD. I'm not sure I've had my perception of a book turn on a dime so quickly - I disliked the first half, enjoyed it much more after the movie was introduced. Let's just say I feel for this guy's (five) ex-wives.

Started reading Sergio Pitol's The Love Parade based on xyzzzz's recommendation in the Winter thread. I'm only 10 pages in but the writing is so elegant and I'm loving it so far.

J Edgar, do you know the play? That's interesting.

I haven't looked at O'Casey since I was too young to understand him but my stepdad was a communist committed to the cause of a free Ireland -- I would try to read him & Behan & all the other stuff on the shelves, fancying myself very erudite & worldly. these sorts of biting-off-more-than-I-could-reasonably-chew moments in my development as a reader were pretty crucial for me

Started reading Sergio Pitol's The Love Parade based on xyzzzz's recommendation in the Winter thread. I'm only 10 pages in but the writing is so elegant and I'm loving it so far.

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR), Wednesday, 7 June 2023 bookmarkflaglink

ILB poster Tim H has gifted me a copy of his book of short stories. Will let you all know how that is in a month or so.

I listened to a podcast on Theodore Allen's The Invention Of The White Race earlier. A book I tried reading as a bog book last year but gave up om because I couldn't work out how to deal with the copious amount of endnotes which had link numbers peppering the text heavily. &it was actually important significant notes not just citations. So I either had to go and check them at around the time I passed the number or catch up on a few at the end of a page or something. Just not sure how you keep the flow going and you do need the background info.
I'm finding reading Caliban and The Witch very similar, not sure why I didn't mention that yesterday. Like great book I really need/want to read but need to navigate this almost every paragraph.Do I just need to read the book about twice once for sense and again for the context for the notes.

what is a bog book?

I am determined to get through War and Peace. I have to keep referring to the wikipedia page to remember all of the proper names, nicknames, alternate names, bestowed names and childhood names of each of the characters. It's very confounding but it's worth it

The war scenes get me down, but the intimate scenes between members of the 5 families and their relatives and friends and lovers make me want to continue

what is a bog book?

j/k
I believe it is what we might call in the US a Bathroom Book

I bought War and Peace new for $2.99 and it sat unread for at least a decade before I opened it. I found the experience of reading it engrossing even as I knew I wasn't retaining any more than 0.1% of it.
Bondarchuk's films are an excellent adaptation, even the philosophical bits, a lot better than the middlebrow synopsis I feared.

I'm currently reading "The Triumph of Christianity" by Bart Ehrman. Perhaps a bit repetitive and you feel like he is making an effort to spell things out carefully and clearly for a lay audience, but still I'm learning some new things about the first few centuries of Christianity and the Roman empire.

i read like two-thirds of war and peace last summer and it was fantastic but then i just . . . wanted to read something else

the good characters are *so* good and i love them but they have such flights of certainty like 'this is what i was meant to do all along!' and it's awkward because they're almost always wrong

Bog book is one to read on bog. So short periods of time and probably not full concentration. So totally wrong for some books particularly if they need you to keep looking at several paragraph long endnotes.
Endnotes denote scholarship and research not directly placed in narrative flow of main text. So both books mentioned massively researched. So need to be read with more concentration than some others and presumably need time dedicates specifically to them.

Bog= loo = jacks
Which is thankfully not shared so I can read without external interruption.

But some books just don't lend themselves as easily to some environments. I think both books I mentioned are widely read so somebody must have found a good way around continually stopping and starting their narrative flow. It really is at least one endnote number per paragraph, sometimes 2 or 3. In the Federici at least. I've yet to het back to Theodore Allen which I'm still planning to do.

Presumably must be a few other books with a similar endnote or end of chapter note set up. That people do overcome. Just seems like you do need to juggle trying to keep up with endnotes and flow of text or do people just get 2 copies so they can have notes open at same time as text?

Caliban is the one to read by Federici— I would just read through, Stevo.

I have not been reading with any concentration or energy, unfortunately, tho have finished a few books in the past month. The summer break often leaves me quite cash poor so I will have ample time to get to the piles that have accumulated over the school year. I am most looking forward to reading a few novels that have been sitting, as well as diving into William Carlos Williams’ ‘Paterson,’ which I have never read, somehow.

Nabokov - Speak, Memory. A memoir of his covering childhood, family, Russia, revolution, exile in Europe then stopping before he moves to the US. It's fine, lots of fine phrases and sentences. But its also quite boring, the man had these tastes for art that were kind of monotonous, his politics were boring liberal gruel. The one thing I liked a bit more was when he discovered his love of butterflies. But you also know that, were he to explore thi topic in several chapters it would be very taxonomy-heavy, he would kill the interest with unrelenting detail.

No exuberance here, none of Proust's wild flights. No love.

I finished the Natalia Ginzburg book, which maintained its course to the end, but its interest diffused for me as the characters' lives (all of them real people) diverged from Ginzburg's life and the details became more sparse or distantly observed. I'm happy to have read it, but was happy to lay it aside by the end.

After this I read Jar City, a detective fiction by an Icelandic author, Arnaldur Indridason. It fulfilled all the requirements of the genre and was entirely satisfactory, even a bit ambitious and venturesome, but nothing that would challenge any of the conventions its readers would expect it to deliver.

I'm leaning toward my next book being a re-read but haven't settled on anything yet.

I liked Jar City fine but at some point soon after maxed out on Skandinavischen Krimis.

Finished Tom Comitta’s The Nature Book after nearly a month’s effort of reading it only as I eat my breakfast and drink my coffee.

It is a novel without human characters, a book about nature composed entirely of purloined and rearranged descriptions of nature from other books. It took Comitta about nine years to write, and it shows— it’s a deft and dense book in the Oulipian tradition that I truly enjoyed.

Keith Ridgway - A Shock.

As we finish Spring I am reading a book by a living writer. I found him through twitter (Keith is from Dublin but lives in London, and actually South London, which I'm delighted about as this is my part of town and what I know).

'A Shock', then, is a series of interconnected stories of people living their lives in this part of London. They are drinking, living in with housemates, writing emails and texts, having sex, thinking thoughts, reading, working, talking about all sorts, and trying to live as best they are able. Bizarre to read a book that speaks to personally specific experiences. It's all just really well done.

Great book to start the summer.

Ginzburg was my Great 2021 Discovery, thanks to NROB. I don't know which novel you read, Aimless, but I suggest giving Happiness, As Such and Valentino a try.

xyzz -- I also didn't care for Speak, Memory.

I read *Hawthorn and Child* by Keith Ridgway about a decade ago and loved it. I've lost a lot of the detail but remember it was a detective novel that was more elision than plot and very emotionally affecting. There's a running theme associated with the Formula One driver Tom Pryce that has 100% stayed with me. It was a lot like Gordon Burn iirr. Good stuff.

I finished James Woods' *How Fiction Works*. Woods knows his subject inside out clearly and is a good close reader but trying to write a short and 'popular' work of literary criticism is a hell of a task to set oneself.

I enjoyed the range of references, the early chapters on (broadly) the history of the novel, the aforementioned close reading - particularly the stuff on Balzac, Woolf & Lawrence. There's a bit where he compares four 'fire' metaphors (from Hardy, Bellow, Lawrence and Norman Rush) and I would have loved more of the same.

What I struggled with: the book is organised into 123 paragraphs and these fall into what feels like a random selection of chapters: Flaubert gets two; the others are a loose confection of 'Detail' 'Language' & things like 'Truth, Convention & Realism' - all of which gives the feeling of Wood eventually asking the publisher 'will this do?'.

I loved War & Peace so much that I'm reading Karenina now

it's really good. i should read it again. i never read war and peace. my mother raves about it. as others do, i've heard

I’ve gotten about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way through War and Peace. The war scenes in Schöngrabern and Austerlitz so far are somewhat interesting. Pierre Bezukhov, who I guess is the protagonist, seems like a drip to me. I've been liking the story of Nikolai Rostov. He is a hussar and the beloved eldest son on the Rostov family. He comes home from war and his 15 year old cousin Sonya Rostova is in love with him, and Fyodor Ivanovich Dolokhov, who is his "friend" - and who is cold and psychopathic - ruins Rostov by luring him into an outrageous debt in a card game that is fixed, in revenge after Dolokhov is rejected by Sonya in a proposal of marriage

you are completely wrong

always good to know

This is embarrassing. I just realized I've been thinking Michael Wood and James Wood are the same person. Who'd have thought there would be 2 English literary critics with such similar names.

In other news, I just finished "Triumph of Christianity" by Bart Ehrman. Ehrman is balanced and humble, which is a good trait in a historian dealing with controversial topics for which the historical record is limited. He seems to provide a good overview of where the scholarship is, although perhaps for a topic like this, a dash of unrestrained speculation would not always be unwelcome. I think it would perhaps take a different and more speculative book, and one more focused on human psychology, to provide a satisfying answer to the question of how Christianity grew so quickly and so steadily for so many years.

Now I'm reading a biography of William James by Robert Richardson.

Reading The Mirage Men by Mark Pilkington, about UFOs. So far pretty much a potted history of the subject and the major sightings, pushing the idea that most or all of the more extraordinary ones were deliberate fakes by the cia or the nsa or the air force or the navy, either to confuse and misdirect the soviets, or one of the other rival agencies, or the american public - the motivations or purposes aren't entirely clear and it seems a little weird that these agencies would spend so much time and money on what seems like, basically, a lot of dicking around - but probably less weird than the other explanation: not so much that we've been visited, but that the visitors themselves enjoy a good deal of dicking around.

o.nate: MW was born 1936, I think 1965. A similarity is that they both migrated to the US and became rather transatlantic figures.

They are both talented and knowledgeable, but MW has greater range including film and more philosophy. MW is much funnier and defter than JW, who has a more moralising or solemn aspect.

* should have said: JW 1965.

That is interesting about UFOs.

I finish Sean O'Casey's RED ROSES FOR ME (1942). I like it more than WITHIN THE GATES. It describes the build-up to a strike ('sthrike') and battle with police. I had thought maybe this was about the 1913 lockout, but it doesn't really seem to be. At one point it seems like it might be about the 1916 Rising, but it can't be. I think rather it's a more generalised idea of insurrection. Some of this is labour-based, as you would expect from O'Casey, but the rhetoric also becomes very nationalist and republican. Ultimately it's oddly like an inversion of eg THE PLOUGH & THE STARS where insurrection is criticised. Here it's heroic, the one thing you don't expect from O'Casey!

A good deal of the play also involves infighting and / or cooperation between Catholics and Protestants. There is also a quite appealing scene by the Liffey where the colours of sunset transfigure people and Dublin becomes a momentary utopia dreaming of a better future.

War and Peace was one of my first projects when the pandemic started -- took a week to finish. Tolstoy's one of the few writers who can switch from the cosmic in one paragraph to capturing a human nuance in another.

one other thing about the mirage men, i hope i'm not losing it but i find the multitude of names near impossible to follow. e.g. we hear about a sighting by pilot kenneth arnold, who gets employed by sf magazine editor ray palmer to investigate more sightings, in particular one by harold dahl, who tells his story to fred crisman, arnold then gets visited by two air force agents, frank brown and william davidson, decides to call in the help of another pilot e.j. smith... after a few pages of this, when they're all reduced to surnames only, i'm reeling. plus all the acronyms of security agencies and ufo groups, as well as the usual there's atic, apro, csi, afosi, dia...

it seems a little weird that these agencies would spend so much time and money on what seems like, basically, a lot of dicking around

I dunno, much of the history of the CIA in the 20th century seemed to be dicking around - financing abstract art, trying to off Castro with an exploding cigar, etc.

yes coppola's heart of darkness quote springs to mind, adding in 'too few morals' for good measure.

heart of darkness lol, apocalypse now ofc

Mailer's Harlot's Ghost, like your average Le Carré novel, shows 40 years of dicking around.

what if a mole but outer space

I Am Not Ashamed, the lurid, ghostwritten tell-all by troubled 50s actress Barbara Payton. Accidentally reads like a rare mid-century noir written from a female POV.

I Am Not Ashamed, the lurid, ghostwritten tell-all by troubled 50s actress Barbara Payton. Accidentally reads like a rare mid-century noir written from a female POV.

Who was the ghost?

Maybe it wasn't accidental, to have that kind of pulp appeal.

time to catch up on my recent and no not-so-recent reading:

Into the Woods and The Likeness – Tana French

The first two volumes in the Dublin Murder Squad series. Although, as French says in the acknowledgments to the second novel, 'In some places, where the story seemed to require it, I’ve taken liberties with facts (Ireland doesn’t, for example, have a Murder squad)'. Yes, yes, i think it's fair to say that's taking a bit of a liberty, Tana.

These are enjoyable, in fact compelling, to an extent that slightly surprised me. There is in both, but especially the latter, a central near-supernatural element that unravels the minds of the individual detectives, so that they are doing battle not just with a crime and its causes but with their perception of the crime and its scene, of their place in it, of their potential contribution to its causes. They are *implicated*. Their heads get fucked. It puts you on edge as a reader. It's effective.

French manages dialogue and scene building very well indeed. It was a touch and go thing with the initial introductory paragraphs of both, which are quite mannered, but that's got past almost immediately. Apart from a truly dreadful concluding 'action' scene in *The Likeness*, the writing is very accomplished and impressive.

I haven't read the others in the series, apparently not as good, but I might give at least one of them a go.

xxp gossip columnist/pulp writer Leo Guild. I meant "accidental" more as a tell-all so vivid that it crosses over into the world of pulp/noir.

Essays:

The Frontiers of Meaning, Three Informal Lectures on Music – Charles Rosen
Almost magical essay construction and writing. Compare it to the broken footed english civil war history i quote above itt - the quality of the writing is connected to the quality of the thought, or its expression anyway. Poor style cripples difficult or complicated expression and thinking. Charles Rosen's essays are almost delicate in the selection of their elements, the examples, the points of argument, but retain throughout a good humour, resilient and appropriate to talking about art and the attendant arguments and difficulties over differences in taste and performance. As I'm not a musicologist (although can read music), the light but very clear deployment of musical analysis and reading of scores was much appreciated.

The second of these for instance, How to Become Immortal, describe the process by which reputation is constructed from the initial cultural experience of eg Beethoven, and turned over time to Immortality. Rosen's central contention is that 'canonic status is accorded to works not by posterity, or at least not by a posterity as distant in time as is sometimes thought'. He shows why he thinks that and the mechanisms and cultural processes by which immortality is constructed.

The first, The Frontiers of Nonsense, describes the process of initially resisting that which we do not understand, that friction ultimately driving us to try and understand and ultimately love - what are the boundaries of this process.

These are sophisticated essays, light and substantial at the same time, with clear musicological examples and full of anecdote, historical knowledge, and insight. They're also amusing, with pithy aperçus (a phrase that i want to spoonerise immediately now i've written it) and anecdotes:

...Charles Lamb, who in 1821, six years before Beethoven's death, wrote an essay against the appreciation of music entitled "A Chapter on Ears." He has, he says, no ear for music: ".. *sentimentally* I am disposed to harmony. But *organically* I am incapable of a tune." Operas and oratorios are bad enough, he remarks, but even worse are "those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as they are called..." Listening to pure instrumental music for Lamb ("empty instrumental music," as he terms it) was like reading a book that was all punctuation...

or the wise

... we have trouble enough revising our own standards of criticism without having to pretend to reform everyone else's.

Second, the essay Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective, collected in the book of the same name, by Clifford Geertz. Not the first time I've read this, it's an extraordinary essay on how the management of the 'place of fact in a world of judgment' in western jurisprudence is constituted with regard to قّ / ḥaqq, dharma, and adat in other cultures. I think what I admire most about Geertz is the flexibility of his intelligence to manage questions of relation in a framework that allows comparison. To recognise that sometimes you are going to have to manage matters pragmatically, but that you have to retain an ability to distinguish and to relate. As with Rosen, his deep, deep knowledge allows firmness of opinion where it is due, and a relaxed approach to differences of opinion where any such dogma is unhelpful or inappropriate to assert.

It's an essay that would be in my own personal canonical reading list, and perhaps i ought to try and do better justice to it elsewhere. but as with many geertz essays - and i'm no anthropologist and i'm sure he's been superseded or contradicted by mightier authorities - but you feel like you're getting the literary equivalent of that intelligence chip musk wants to put in people's branes (i might be summarising frivolously ofc). Free intelligence, right here, anyway. And again, the quality of the thought, and its expression, is invigorating to read.

Vehicle – Jen Calleja. I really liked her collection of short stories, I'm afraid that's all we've got time for. Man, I struggled with this. I am delighted that it exists though, and I love the fact that prototype publishing is putting this sort of thing out.

It is not, as the subtitle states, a verse novel. It is, I guess a work of metafiction. And again, the theory is quite enticing, a wandering set of islands, colonised by our european nations, suffer a schism from the Mainland colonisers. A group of academics and writers are paid to recover the history of the schism and its aftermath from the fragments of texts and recordings that remain, only to find this is a political attempt at erasure of history. the substance of the texts are centred around the people and events that orbit around the punk/post-punk group Vehicle. Translation, xenophobia, immigration are the themes.

By fuck it's heavy going. I feel bad because I was going through a period of struggling to read and it's more than possible that i just didn't have the energy or mental sharpness to tackle this book – if any ilxor can rescue it for me I'd be delighted because I really wanted it to work. Didn't finish, I'm afraid.

more tomorrow to avoid DoS-ing the books thread.