It's Fall, and the Autumn of the year, and the store of fruit supplants the rose - so what windfall words have you been reading?

whoops, screwed up that first one

Two books started yesterday:

The Island at the Centre of the World, can't remember the author - history of New Holland. Terrific thus far, deft shifts of perspective between personal and collective, social and political, and olde times and modern really keep one interested.

The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. A slightly disconcerting prologue to this one, I had rather assumed that invisibility was going to be a metaphor.

o but it is ~

We shall see. New Netherland, not New Holland by the way - not being good with names today.

I bumped into a colleague outside work and couldn't remember the name of theguy I'd spent all day working with.

Unpacking the Boxes, Donald Hall. A memoir. The man was Poet Laureate of the USA for a year or so circa 2007, was married to Jane Kenyon, and seems to have known or met a high percentage of the noteable poets of the last half of the 20th century. He is now in his 80s.

The main problem is that he seems to have very little to say about any of those poets, or about much of anything. It's a very slight book, but then, a man over 80 should do as he pleases and shouldn't get any shit over it.

still working on my bookshelf. go tell it on the mountain

edgar allan poe

harbl how is go tell it on the mountain? i read another country recently and just wasn't sure about it.

this is the second time i've started it. i'm only on page 50 so i can't really tell at all! haven't read another country though. googling for it it looks like something i wouldn't be into but this is more about him (not really him but semi-autobiographical apparently) as a young kid and i usually like stories told as a young boy so i will probably like it.

i do quite heavily recommend the essay volumes 'notes of a native son' & 'the fire next time'

i just feel like his technique as a novelist is a little too, i don't know, consolidated

Really loved 'Go Tell it on the Mountain' and 'Giovanni's Room' and 'If Beale Street Could Talk'. Haven't tackled his longer novels yet, though.

two girls, one fat one - thin mary gaitskill
She should totally write under that name.

Am now reading Gyula Krudy's 'The Adventures of Sindbad', translated by George Szirtes, which someone recommended on the trusted translators thread, and I'm glad they did, because it's some lovely, dreamy, sexy Austro-Hungarian goodness.

It was Soukesian wot recommended it. Thanks!

thomp - i've been meaning to read his essays for a while but never got around to it. native son (the novel) is one of my favorite books too.

i am reading Fordlandia - it is interesting, if a little overly bureaucratic and slow - altho i still have 150 pgs or so

Based on a mention on ILB, I have started reading Consciousness Explained, by Daniel C. Dennett. It appears to be quite promising. It's a bit verbose, but well-written enough I can follow his thinking, and his thinking is well-developed on this subject, so he has plenty of interesting things to say.

reading the Portable Joseph Conrad...just about to finish The Nigger of the Narcissus, which I for the most part liked.

Aimless, Don Hall has contributed essays to Poetry magazine and I don't think in those one could accuse him of not having anything to say about poets. Maybe he was only trying to restrain himself.

This is memoir, not criticism, so there are some anecdotes about poets, but no appreciations of their work... appropriately. Sadly, these anecdotes seemed to me to be somewhat frail, either as good stories or as revelations of character.

But, as I said, I'm not going to give him grief about this. It is a presentable book and the author's reputation is already secure based on a lifetime's work. This memoir is just a fillip.

together, 'Ecology of Fear' by Mike Davis and 'Absolute Disaster', anthology of short fiction from Los Angeles. There is a common theme here - I just read 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' and the 33 1/3 book on 'Court and Spark.' If I can keep up this LA energy I will read 'Cadillac Desert' next but I think I will probably move on. Maybe to Alice Munro, maybe john Updike, maybe the pile of Canadian Politics memoirs I have been piling up.

My favourite book of the fall so far is Ann Patchett, 'Truth and Beauty.'

Finished: Joseph Roth - The Radestzky March: Plenty to enjoy, especially the image in the last page. Overall I must say this one has helped me harden a dislike for the bigger events, a bit annoying how it told you everything.

Lampedusa - The Leopard - like Roth's book, it engages with similar subjects, but Don Fabrizio is almost more compelling and appealing, even -- despite all of the vile characteristics that come with his almost dead now background. More quietly explosive.

Now: Antal Szerb - Journey by Moonlight.

this one has helped me harden a dislike for the bigger events, a bit annoying how it told you everything

What do you mean?

The bigger events = war, the end of an empire. I liked some of the stuff surrounding the gambling that takes place, the boredom of army life, but Roth was telling you how it was the end of everything from the beginning, pretty much - didn't quite agree with me.

That's sort of what I loved about Updike's Rabbit books - maybe one event of wider note in five books, but totally epic nevertheless.

Sir Christopher Fraying's Sergio Leone: Something To Do With Death

Albert Wendt's Sons for the Return Home, buncha stuff from The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, Man in the High Castle

Robinson - Chris Petit
A Last Sheaf - Denton Welch

a fantasy novel by scott lynch i posted about elsewhere; a book about the role of the prime minister; anthony powell's what's become of waring?

oh, and the borges/bioy-casares collaborations, which are really not all that

gag in waring that's cracking me up, mainly because i was reading in fowler's usage again: one of the dreadful books the publisher in it deals with being called Than Whom What Other

Waring the Powell Waring? I guess it must be, although I don't remember that gag. The two publishers are great though, as is the seance scene. Yet another in the genius collection of writing that is Powell's pre-Dance novels.

Others I've read over the last week.

Leonardo Sciascia - To Each His Own. Thoroughly enjoying his political crime thrillers, pretty great how he mixed crime of passion with politics so much it obscures the motivation. Also its great his politics aren't immediately obvious (even though he was a politician), what is apparent is the lack of, not faith so much as any conviction that a system could come through.

Susan Sontag - Under the Sign of Saturn: consistent, brilliant, consistently brilliant. Actually only read her essays on photography a few years ago, forgetting all about it (not the fault of the essays; I've never had a strong experience from looking at a photograph.) Its good I didn't, as I hadn't read or experienced much of what she talks about here (and she talks and dissects hard about a lot of it.) Anyway, the essay on Elias Canetti is awesome, but also the least representative, whereas her dissection of fascist aesthetics in the essay about Leni Riefenstahl presents more of a connecting thread. xp

Javier Marias: All Souls -- you get a sense of Marias being an incredibly congenial guy from this novel -- SPanish academic spending two years in Oxford has affair, becomes obsessed with Arthur Machen and John Gawsworth, tries to figure out the English, etc

I keep reading short novels because every day I expect the next Richard Stark reprint to show up in the letterbox, and it doesn't, and meanwhile some big thick books I want to read are piling up.

Am also going through the boxes of as-yet-unreads, and discovered that I've managed to buy TWO copies of DeLillo's End Zone and TWO copies of Lewis's The Monk, without yet reading either. This has got to stop.

I'd bought THREE copies of The Big Nowhere by the time I got round to reading it.

havent done this for awhile. how time flies..will try to add commentary later.

Jeanette Walls – The Glass Castle
Robert Polsky – I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon)
Maj Sjowall & Per Wahlog – The Terrorists
Maj Sjowall & Per Wahlog – The Man Who Went Up in Smoke
Maj Sjowall & Per Wahlog – The Abominable Man
Maj Sjowall & Per Wahlog – The Fire Engine that Disappeared
Steven Johnson – The Invention of Air
Julian Barnes – Nothing to be Frightened Of
John Le Carre – A Small Town In Germany
Clive Barnes – Cultural Amnesia
Steig Larson – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Randy Shilts – And The Band Played On

Ah, you did what did with the Martin Beck novels--get near the end and can't help but binge on them to see what happens next!

Are you reading the Martin Beck novels in reverse order?

oh ha xpost

I read all of them in like two months. Roseanna is the best, I fear; the last few represent a kind of attempt at escalation that doesn't really come off, for me?

Also, the current paperbacks spell out M A R T I N B E C K along the tops of the spines: but that kind of annoys me, so every so often I try and spell out something else. right now it's CAT MERKIN B, i think

or possibly BAT MERKIN C, i can't actually remember

Robert Polsky – I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon)

New on one me. Is that the sequel to I Bought Andy Warhol? I've read that one. Guess I have to read this one too.

Never read the first, the sequel is ok. stuff about art dealers is pretty interesting, they're like social-climbing used car salesmen. stuff about the author's lovelife, less so.

I'm reading the Martin Beck series in reverse because I've been buying used paperback copies for a couple bucks each and that's what order they've appeared in the store. Not the best way to proceed, especially in terms of Martin's development. So far so good, pretty consistent though the international there of The Terrorists is a stretch. Can't quite put my finger on what's so compelling about Martin Beck and his chilly milieu. One thing: I like how the other cops all get on each others nerves with their quirks and personalities.

the international there

there = theMe. "the international there" sounds like sarah palin speak/

flanerry o'connor - the violent bear it away

this book is incredible.

Maybe the best thing she wrote.

Dan Chaon, Await Your Reply (creepy, some beautiful true passages alongside some that go clang)
Brian Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree (sci-fi history, pretty okay)
Clarice Lispector, The Apple in the Dark (have the bio on hold from the library, want to read them simultaneously)

Clive Barnes – Cultural Amnesia

oops that's Clive James. Clive Barnes was - or maybe still is - longtime theater critic for the NY Post.

You sure it wasn't Clive Barker, lovebug?

I caught a cold and put aside Consciousness Explained until my brain he works less bad. I've just been randomly browsing on essays and belle lettres.

I read Wilder's 'The Ides of March' a little while ago--it was actually very good, too--political novel about Julius Caesar's downfall.

Own recent reading...

Nevil Shute: Pastoral -- not bad, but no classic

Lore Segal: Lucinella -- had high hopes, was a bit disappointed

Leo Perutz: Little Apple -- now this is the stuff: proud Austrian whose been a POW with the Russians during WW1 is released because of the Russian Revolution, and then spends the next umpteen years in a mad, obsessive quest to find a Russian officer who mildly humiliated him in order to take his revenge--ends up fighting on BOTH sides of the Russian revolution, plus all sorts of other oddness.

Alan Furst: Shadow Trade -- one of his earlier books, which he now keeps out of print -- actually really good, but it was odd reading a Furst book set in the modern world, with TVs and so forth

Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight
Richard Peck, Don't Look and It Won't Hurt
Richard Naughton, My Brother Stealing Second

starting:

Simon Reynolds, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock

What was the Stahl like?

Interesting. It's a memoir of his struggle to kick his heroin habit. Tends to sensationalize the sleaze & assumes (probably correctly) that most of his audience has no firsthand knowledge of drug/street culture, but I liked it.

Sounds promising--I've got his novel about the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, but haven't read it yet: wasn't sure if it would be sleazy trash or good stuff, but maybe it will be both.

'now reading' would be a better Thread title, imo.
That Stahl was filmed; pretty funny, esp where they're looking fo the stolen stash. ' ow, if I was percodan, where would I be?'

Slowly enjoyed 'Against The Day' ( there's no other way, really) and, if the trade paperback ever comes out in the US, will buy 'Inherent Vice.'
'Bardo Thodol', mostly for its contribution to INLAND EMPIRE.

just finished effi briest (surprisingly boring), started closely watched trains

working on 'blood's a rover', the new ellroy. picks up the threads from 'the cold six thousand', a swift read, contemptible characters as per usual, leavened with a little more humor this time imo, and there's a mystery running through this one: who pulled off the brilliant and astonishingly violent armored-car heist that opens the novel and seems to have, at this point, no connection to the proceedings?

Reading that 'tibetan book of the dead'put me in mind of 'The Sea Of Fertility'
quartet by Yukio Mishima. I loved it as a kid, though that was before I realized that translations were so hopelessly useless.
A great bardo work, anyway, although the author probably was reincarnated as a Korean or an American, if not an axolotl or carp.
On topic:no luck on the paperback of 'Inherent Vice', so I bought a $10, beautifully printed and bound Charles Phillips,'Aztec and Maya: The Complete Illustrated History.' Excellent and far-ranging visually, not matched by the careless writing. Actually a work on Mesoamerican in general. Wonderful illustrations, mind. Well worth the sawbuck.

In case anyone hasn't seen it, I'm running a ILX Book of the 00s Poll on the main board. We've got about 250 nominations so far but always room for a few more, and would be good to have the regulars here participating.

i have read approximately 1 book written after 2000 so i'm no help :)

Just read:
Paul Bowles: Up Above the World -- Bowles does a crime thriller, sort of. Rather good, and the ending, though vaguely ridiculous, is an improvement on the way his other novels tend to have endings that are completely ridiculous

Now reading:
Natsume Soseki: Sanshiro -- fabulous. Published 1908 originally. Young man from the country goes to Tokyo university, makes friends, goes girl-watching, gets out of his depth... Beautiful.

I thought the ending to 'The Sheltering Sky' was very effective. Novel, not the movie.
'Up Above The world' as a whole struck me as pretty minor-league. No doubt hash was much cheaper then and there.
Now Reading: 'Leif's Voyage According To Flayeyjarbok' from 'An Introduction to Old Norse'by E.V. Gordon ( which has the most pithy and annoying grammar of a language which I have ever encountered.)

Reading done coming to, in and coming back from Japan:

After The Quake, Haruki Murakami
Books Vs Cigarettes, George Orwell
The Inimitable Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse (probably my fave Wodehouse so far)
The Edogawa Rampo Reader (great, so much more than just a japanese Poe)
The Baron In The Trees, Italo Calvino (rather overtly corny and precious at times - guess I was expecting Calvino to be closer to Eco and Borges)
The Old Capital, Yasunari Kawabata (great)
The Invisible Hand, Adam Smith (extracts from The Wealth Of Nations, just the thing to read at Frankfurt airport with two hours of sleep)

alleged current reading:

margaret atwood, the blind assassin
lorrie moore, birds of america
eric ambler, a passage of arms
george r.r. martin, a storm of swords
christopher priest (ed.), expectations
donald allen and robert creeley (eds.), the new american story
niall ferguson, empire

i think i've started like six books since last i finished one. which was another eric ambler.

I thought the ending to 'The Sheltering Sky' was very effective. Novel, not the movie.
'Up Above The world' as a whole struck me as pretty minor-league. No doubt hash was much cheaper then and there.

Sheltering Sky is definitely a better book--it just seemed to me to lose it in the last 1/10, as did Let it Come Down, which I also loved. Having read that Up Above.. was Bowles doing a crime novel, I probably had lowered expectations, which were pleasantly exceeded.

I checked out a library copy of Ghost Train the the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux and I am about half through it. It is his second whack at the train journey he took in Great Railway Bazaar.

PT's voice as a travel writer is pretty recognizable by now, and he does a workmanlike job with the writing, but he doesn't bring much freshness or energy to this book. I rank it low in his list of travel books, but still readable.

I had no idea the man had written so many books!
The only two I've read( and both of which I liked) are 'Mosquito Coast' ( faithful enough film adaptation)and 'O-Zone.'
OD: Adolfo Bioy Casares, 'The Invention of Morel'
This would be part of my 'Lost' reading list.
I had totally forgotten, btw, that Aldous Huxley 'Island' starts much as the tv series does.

finished recently:
too much happiness - alice munro
in country - bobbie ann mason
netherland - joseph o'neill
good faith - jane smiley
iron and silk - mark salzman

started:
shiloh and other stories - bobbie ann mason

netherland's style and language rang v v familiar of something else i've read recently, but i couldn't put my finger on it. still not sure how i feel about the story itself yet, but such a beautiful, rolling use of english. you could just melt right into the story.

the munro is good, but it's not open secrets. i guess it's hard to top a collection that amazing.

How is the new Munro collection overall? The last couple of things she's published in The NY have been just ok.

hmmm i think most of the collection is probably 'just ok', compared to her other work... but still so much better than a lot of other writers. in other words: worth a look, for sure.

That's the one from NRBQNYRB, is it?

I think that's Mavis Gallant

finished Blissed Out, now it's

Geek Love, Katherine Dunn

paris leary and robert kelly (eds.), a controversy of poets

still haven't finished anything

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - forgotten how much I loved this, just wonderful set pieces (the theatre, the step of the tram) and beautifully flowing inter-relation of memory and verbal echoes. A delight.

Thirty Personalities and a Self-Portrait - Wyndham Lewis. Not strictly reading as such, although there is an introduction with brief Lewisian descriptions of the various subjects of his pencil portraits which form the body of the book, and a look at the status of drawing in Western art (which he suggests is lower than it should be, and lower than in Oriental art).

Still can't get enough of Browning. Caliban upon Setebos; or Natural Theology in the Island is an incredible poem, gouts of coagulated misanthropy, the perfect depiction of a craven, hating psychology, that also manages to be beautiful and moving.

i finished closely watched trains and it was great

Probably Hrabal's best book--'I Served the King of England' and 'Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age', the other ones easy to get in English, are OK but nothing amazing, but 'Closely Watched Trains' is SO GREAT!

bohumil harbl

I have started reading Yellow Dog by Martin Amis. At first I thought it was absolutely appalling, just so inaccurately observed & clumsy & showily pompous. Then I started wondering what I'd make of this if it were by no-one in particular and I thought well dammit there's a good bit of life there and british fiction could do with more stupid caricatures and ott sentences. I'm now about 60pp in and enjoying it. It's not like actual lols, but it rolls along entertainingly. Been a while since I read any Amis (my teen fave) fiction - maybe I've been missing it.

It was the target of this famous review by Tibor Fischer, as you probably already knew. I hadn't read it before, just seen it quoted, but I have to admit that it's pretty great!

While I'm here, get yourselves over to the Book of the 00s Poll - not much Amis on there, I'm afraid.

I do remember it! Such fun. I look back fondly on the days when a news story about Martin Amis guaranteed some lols ("Amis Upset by Bad Review", "Amis has Teeth Done Expensively" "Amis Breaks Friends With Barnes"), rather than anger ("Amis: Bloody Islam").

one of Amis's weaknesses is that he isn't content to be a good writer, he wants to be profound; the drawback to profundity is that it's like being funny, either you are or you aren't, straining doesn't help). This ache for gravitas has led to much of Amis's weaker work: Time's Arrow and his writing on nuclear war (it's horrible, isn't it?).

So, so OTM from Fischer. I was trying to put my finger on it while reading Yellow Dog, but ended up on the parallel problem: he wants to be Bellow or Roth or Updike or some humane giant, but he's absolutely not equipped to be. I think he'd also like to have fled a tyrannical regime at some point.

It's a common phenomenon. Nowadays novelists often want to be taken seriously as intellectuals and thinkers when their talent is for something different and, if they are any good, rarer and more valuable. Bellow, who mentored Amis, had a similar need to feel that he counted as a heavyweight thinker. It's a recurrent weakness in his middle and later period novels. Interestingly, like Amis with Hitchens, he too was in thrall to a self-appointed public intellectual and social commentator (in his case Allan Bloom). I suppose if you convince yourself that you are quite the intellectual yourself and you then meet someone who seems in many ways substantially cleverer, you're liable to think you're in the presence of genius. Kingsley was very good at deflating this kind of nonsense.

judging from his fictional portrayal of Bloom in Ravelstein, I wouldn't say Bellow was "in thrall" to him, unless being friends w/somebody qualifies, also aren't all public intellectuals & social commentators pretty much self-appointed? maybe self-invented is the better term.

one of Amis's weaknesses is that he isn't content to be a good writer, he wants to be profound; the drawback to profundity is that it's like being funny, either you are or you aren't, straining doesn't help).

if Amis was merely "content to be a good writer" he'd be accused of being complacent. perhaps profundity, like humor is a matter of personal taste?

if Amis was merely "content to be a good writer" he'd be accused of being complacent.

Dunno. I'm trying to imagine an alternate universe in which Amis isn't given to those hectoring & melodramatic paragraphs on big topics (often: short sentence rhetoric + facts from his recent reading) that clog up the later novels & the non-fiction, and in which he doesn't have a bent for making pronouncements and... it's hard. I can see one world in which he's been sidelined as a limited entertainer, but another in which he's viewed as one of the British comic greats. But, yeah, I admit it's sort of hard to separate lecturing/soapbox Amis from the ambition, confidence and energy necessary for the good stuff.

I'd have thought the suggestion that Bellow was "in thrall" to Bloom was uncontroversial. It's a few years since I read "Ravelstein", but that's exactly the message I took from it. Taking two minutes to go to the Complete Review site for a memory jog/second opinion and reading a single review pretty much at random (The Guardian) I find: "Ravelstein memorialises his ..... mentor Allan Bloom"; "Bellow's hero (and it is obvious that Bloom truly was Bellow's hero)" and so on. I'm sure there's screeds more of this sort of stuff to be found if you're minded to look. Bellow, who has no mean opinion of his own intellect, repeatedly makes it clear that he feels overmatched by Bloom ("I was not about to get in the ring with this Sumo champion representing Platonic metaphysics").

As for all public intellectuals being self-appointed, you can no doubt improve your chances if you are manically pushy and think you understand nearly everything better than nearly everyone else. But I don't think that a Bloom/Hitchens level of narcissism is necessary for the public to decide you have some interesting ideas. All it probably takes is for a television producer to take a shine to your (perhaps modest and self-doubt filled) book.

Many novelists are self-aware enough to know that their talent or interest lies in writing fiction rather than discussing heavyweight ideas (Wodehouse, Jane Austen, Hemingway, Nabokov, Chandler. Wilde are some who come quickly to mind, but I'm sure it'd be possible to compile a very long list). Kingsley Amis once said, "importance is not important: good writing is". Of course people who think that way will be accused of complacency but those who don't agree. But even if you buy into the accusers' philistinism (art isn't important unless its freighted with concepts that have implications for the real world, bad news for composers and abstract painters) what do we gain if a good and popular comic novelist writes bad, pretentious novels of ideas?

I stopped reading Saul Bellow when I read that one book about that one guy who was still struggling to be an intellectual but was trying to round it out by dating hot tomatoes and hanging out with wise guys.

frankiemachine - I've thought a lot about that Kingsley Amis quote and my initial reaction when I read it was that this was absolutely the right way to look at things and this is something I still feel to a great extent. However, one of the questions that bothers me, as a big fan of Kingsley Amis (I'll get to Martin in a sec with any luck), is why KA isn't considered 'great' and whether that matters or not.

And the reason, I think, (as KA once himself said 'most of this is what I think, so I shall avoid such pseudo-humilities from now on) lies in that question of how important you feel importance is. And I've kind of come to the conclusion that importance is kind of important. It was reading Dostoevsky that made me reconsider Amis' quote. A lot of Dostoevsky's writing is enormously, hysterically slipshod, one-note stuff, and yet there's no denying its greatness (not for me anyway); he's concerned with soul defining issues. And that's a good thing.

My response to myself (sorry, this has been a long-running internal dialogue) is that K Amis is essentially a genre writer in the best sense of the concept. He uses traditional forms (comic novel, ghost story, science fiction) because he senses the excitement and fun to be had in those traditions, but he also uses them to touch, in a completely unpompous way (I'm ignoring his later stuff) soul-defining issues - art v individual in The Alteration, responsibility for ones own philosophical perceptions in The Green Man, language, thought, decay and relationships in Ending Up, to take three.

So I still vacillate between the idea that Kingsley Amis is not seen as great because he doesn't want to be seen as great, and that in fact greatness is a bit misleading anyway (socially and politically determined canons) - which is basically the importance isn't important argument - and the idea that Kingsley Amis isn't seen as great because he isn't great: he works within himself and tradition, and that the reason he isn't great is because he doesn't gesture towards greatness.

Okay, straying well in to tl;dr territory - but I increasingly feel that Martin Amis works in a sub-KA category. No, that isn't fair. He's not sub-KA, but he is better working in a sort of genre fiction world than a bourgeois profundity world (Sunday supplement stuff?). He's great at a flying exciting sentence (like a lot of genre writers), he's a superb literary critic (understanding the rules of the game, as it were), and he's got a nifty line in variations on a masculine theme (tho he's crap at women, something often wrongly leveled at his father).

I think somewhere along the line he got the fictional writer, a Hogarth for the modern age at his best, confused with the critic - so that he comes across as a literary critic of life, almost as bad a type as the scientist critic of literature. M Amis is basically a very very good comic writer (which is a fine thing - the height of philosophy it's possible to argue) but he ain't no philosophic writer.

I've wandered off haven't I? I'm a bit pissed to be honest. I think I've just fruitlessly and less articulately said what frankiemachine said a couple of posts up.

Better press 'submit post' then. It is Christmas after all.

The Baron In The Trees, Italo Calvino (rather overtly corny and precious at times - guess I was expecting Calvino to be closer to Eco and Borges)

Don't forget KA's On Drink

OT: Time for a "winter" thread, I say.

Gamalie I don't consider KA a genre writer. He wrote some genre stuff, sure (although I haven't read much of it) but the stuff that seems core to me - Take A Girl Like You, Stanley and the Women, The Old Devils etc - is social comedy. I don't think that qualifies as genre fiction, unless you're going to call people like Jane Austen, E M Forster and Evelyn Waugh genre writers.

I'm a big fan but for me KA ends up being minor because he didn't manage to write at the top of his game for really sustained periods. There are great things in many of his novels, but there are no great novels. My guess is this was really a failure of will - KA was deeply neurotic, beset by personal problems and phobias and cauterising those - through socialising, women, booze, being a professional gadfly and curmudgeon - too often mattered more than the writing.

Re: the stuff about novelists and their big ideas, there is an interesting article by ILX pariah Gilbert Sorrentino about ILX cult favorite Edward Dahlblerg in his collection of essays Something Said where he says something like: he has no ideas but that's OK, he's a novelist and novelists are not supposed to have ideas, they are supposed to write well, which he does.

Motion's biography of Larkin portrays Kingsley Amis as the dominant male personality in Larkin's life, a sort of enforcer of a shared attitude. I don't have the book with me but there's a passage that states that Amis was always there to search out and destroy any sign of literariness or earnestness. A sort of Two Lads Against the World philosophy.

Another critic wrote of Auden that a posture of adolescence held on into adulthood quickly becomes seedy. Larkin's and Amis's lives seem to have become seedy right away. My feeling is that Larkin was powerful enough to transmute his life circumstance into literature (while keeping the faith in his letters) and Amis never could.

Larkin is profound enough for me within his scope. Maybe the right scale isn't intellectualism or genius, but how ruthless you are with yourself. The two both armored themselves against life, but somehow only Larkin was able or willing to write around that.

Almosina I disagree about the relative success Amis and Larkin has in transmuting life into literature, but that's a difference of taste and temperament.

But wrt Amis being the "dominant male personality in Larkin's life, a sort of enforcer of a shared attitude" - if there was a dominant personality in the relationship it was Larkin. Larkin was less of a social animal than Amis, colder if you like, and Amis's approval mattered less to him than his mattered to Amis. Amis always behaved like the eager-to-please junior partner, something Larkin seems to have accepted as no more than his due, even when Amis achieved much greater worldly success. While Kingsley - who of course had ambitions as a poet himself - continued throughout his life to proselytize enthusiastically for Larkin's reputation as a poet, and seems to have felt nothing other than pleasure and pride in Larkin's successess, Larkin deeply (and not altogether secretly) resented Amis's success and the wealth and celebrity that came with it.

scott, how did you get on with alasdair gray?

Colum Mccann - let the great world spin.

i'm somewhere near the beginning, and it's fine, but somewhat cliched,isn't it?