Like something almost being said, it's the SPRING 2014 "WHAT ARE YOU READING" thread!

from last thread:

> also got a chekhov short story collection for cheap. i've never read him, does anyone have any favorites?

Typhus (from vol 4 of the 13 volumes of short stories. vol4 seems like step up as there were a few that i enjoyed. maybe i'm just in a better mood)

it's here, along with a bunch of others.
http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1213/

From Wall St. Journo, last fall---has anybody read any of the books referenced here? Which Trollope novel has elements of the Norton case?

The Criminal Conversation Of Mrs. Norton
By Diane Atkinson
Chicago Review, 486 pages, $29.95
review By
Alexandra Mullen
Nov. 22, 2013 3:41 p.m. ET
Was there an evil fairy at Caroline Sheridan's christening? Born in 1808 into the theatrical and political family of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, she was graced with beauty, intelligence, wit and industry; her pen poured forth popular songs, poems and novels, which brought her early fame as "the female Byron." Yet all anyone pays attention to is a scandal that happened to her when she was only 27. It left her, as she wryly noted, with a reputation "something between a barn-actress and a Mary Wollstonecraft."
Diane Atkinson begins her biography of Mrs. Norton—as she was known after her marriage to George Norton—with this scandal. In 1836, the Whig prime minister, Lord Melbourne, was sued for £10,000 damages for having "criminal conversation" (adulterous sex) with the wife of an undistinguished barrister from a Tory family. Over the course of the 14-hour trial, the all-male jury and audience enjoyed the sexually suggestive testimony about the high and mighty. Norton's lawyer was disconcerted when their "explosive laughter" greeted his innocently stated fact that Lord Melbourne didn't knock at the front door of the Nortons' house: Instead he "invariably went in . . . by the passage behind."

image: An oil sketch for Daniel Maclise's 1849 mural in the House of Lords. Caroline Norton served as the model for the figure of justice; the painting hangs not far from Westminster Hall, where the trial that made her infamous took place. Mackelvie Trust Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tmaki, gift of James Tannock Mackelvie, 1881.
Melbourne's lawyer cannily exploited the jury's worldly attitude to suggest that the case against the prime minister wasn't one of a cuckolded husband seeking justice, but a political enemy seeking to score a blow. In Ms. Atkinson's words, "the Honourable George Norton had been shown to be a man lacking in honour," exploiting his failed marriage for party-political maneuverings. Melbourne got off. The Whigs were thrilled, while the Tories made the best of it. As one grumbled, he "really couldn't see why Lord Melbourne should be so triumphant at the verdict given, as it had been proved that he had had more opportunities than any man ever had before, and had made no use of them."
But despite being officially proved virtuous, which perhaps she was, Mrs. Norton was now notorious. Even many years later, acid tinged her review of a book that brought up the gossip that always swirled around her famous grandfather: "Obscurity is a thicker shield than virtue."
She wrote her friend Mary Shelley after the trial: "[To count] for nothing, in a trial which decided one's fate for life, is hard." She wasn't exaggerating. Legally, as a married woman, she did count for nothing. Under the laws of coverture, a married couple was considered to be one legal person in which the wife was "covered" by the husband: She had no legal right to enter into contracts or own property, including any income she might earn.
Nor did a wife have any right to her own children. During the trial, George had spirited away the couple's three children—sons aged 7, 5 and 18 months—and forbidden Caroline to see them. Distraught and furious, but with no recourse at law, Caroline turned to her family's standby, the pen: "It is not from choice that I left poetry and pleasant themes,—for defence of the better part of life." To get back her sons, she lobbied, wrote and contrived to change the law. The Custody of Infants Act, granting mothers of good character a right to custody of children under 7—only with the Lord Chancellor's approval!—was passed in 1839.
With cruel irony, the law only applied to England and Wales—and George had taken the boys to his brother's estates in Scotland. Mrs. Norton wasn't reunited with her sons until 1842, under bittersweet circumstances. George notified Caroline too late that their youngest son was ill, and by the time she reached him he was dead. Thereafter George allowed Caroline restricted access to the two other boys. She was only freed from George's influence upon his death more than 30 years later, by which time her older, more responsible son had died of tuberculosis, and the middle son had become both financially dependent on his mother and often violent toward her.
The current fashion that "the personal is the political" was not a Victorian vogue. The reformer Harriet Martineau, for instance, sympathized with Mrs. Norton yet disapproved of her efforts because women "must be clearly seen to speak from conviction of the truth, and not from personal unhappiness." Mrs. Norton reflected some of this sentiment herself in 1855, when she wrote a public letter to the queen to support the Matrimonial Causes Act, which among other things eased procedural restrictions on divorce and began to recognize marriage as a mutual contract: "I do not consider this as my cause," she wrote of the bill that finally passed in 1857, "though it is a cause of which . . . I am an illustration. It is the cause of all women."
Some richly colored refractions of Mrs. Norton can be found in literary works lighted by her case and character. Ms. Atkinson mentions the one that appeared a year after the trial, written by a court reporter there. In "The Pickwick Papers," the young Charles Dickens replayed the case mostly for laughs, partly by switching the adultery trial to a breach-of-promise suit. William Makepeace Thackeray also clearly studied the courtroom shenanigans for "The Newcomes" (1855), while 30 years later, after the deaths of the main actors, George Meredith based the heroine of "Diana of the Crossways" on his friend Caroline and followed the background facts of her marriage very closely.
Ms. Atkinson doesn't mention Dickens's more subtly serious view of themes inspired by the Norton case: In "Hard Times" (1854), which appeared as a weekly serial while Parliament debated the first Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Bill, he depicted the unhappy marriages of both Stephen Blackpool and Louisa Gradgrind. Nor does Ms. Atkinson point out the shades of Caroline Norton that appear in novels by Disraeli and Anthony Trollope, and in Tennyson's long poem on women's education. Mrs. Norton even makes an appearance in John Fowles's 1969 novel, "The French Lieutenant's Woman."
To her credit, Ms. Atkinson's selections from Mrs. Norton's letters allow us to see her private side—whimsical, querulous and sometimes even whiny—but this biography represents a lost opportunity. Much of the material I've drawn from for this review comes not from Ms. Atkinson's book but from Randall Craig's excellent "The Narratives of Caroline Norton" (2009)—a book I discovered in Ms. Atkinson's bibliography. Scholarly studies aren't for everyone, but Ms. Atkinson's popular approach doesn't quite satisfy either. Like Alan Chedzoy's "A Scandalous Woman" of 20 years ago, "The Criminal Conversations of Mrs. Norton" lets the shadow of the scandal obscure the woman herself. The author of five novels and 11 books of poetry, Mrs. Norton considered herself a woman of letters; she once wrote a friend, semi-facetiously, that she hoped that "a hundred years hence," after people had read a biography of "that remarkable woman," literary tourists would be drawn to scenes from her novels.
Are her novels any good? I wish I knew. Her evil fairy must be cackling.
—Ms. Mullen writes for the Hudson
Review and Barnes & Noble Review.

I can see how The Way We Live Now's Mrs. Carbury--a beautiful novelist, wrongly accused by an abusive husband (teddibly respectible, though not very respected once the rumours started flying around) might be a "shade" of Norton, but less dimensional, without the talent or sophistication. She's a desperate underdog, somewhat dangerous as a mother, to an extent like TWWLN's ever-striving con artist, August Melmotte.

The Aesthetics of Resistance -- a 'novel' about a commie cell that have discussions on political and aesthetics questions in route to fight in the Spanish Civil War -- could have been an incredibly dour read, and no doubt it will judged as such. Human emotions don't often make it. But how many novels really express a passion for art (Picasso, Kafka and many other paintings and books that are discussed) and politics and the terrain where both might meet and then proceeds to be equal to its sources by writing: that whole Sebald/Bernhard breezy yet rigorous blocks of writing. He isn't as funny as Bernhard (who is more of a loner and likes it that way), and he has more of a point and direction than Sebald (who talks about him in one of his books). Above all is how he uses his writing to absorb history and criticism and conversation into this black hole. I didn't see a lot of advancement of ideas, just hints, he is careful, and I think that's right but I wonder if this is also a problem.

I took away a few things, thoughts around the importance of self-education in the face of the brutal way in which the world of work wants to annihilate it. The politics of this book has been in retreat for the last 25 years but at points it felt like a book for now. I hope the next two vols get a translation but it might take years for that. Man problem is it truly doesn't feel like a novel at all, yet it is expanding the palette in some way, but I doubt that arg will get a hearing.

At the end I felt like letting friends borrow it..

i'm about to start americanah, by chimamanda ngozi adichie and the flame throwers, by rachel kushner.

no idea what to expect from either one.

I enjoyed The Flamethrowers a great deal, mostly on the basis of Kushner's prose. I heard Kushner give a reading from it last month during which she somewhat disconcertingly performed a character's monologue about his amputation-fetishist friends while her very young son sat (apparently obliviously, thankfully) in the front row of the reading hall....

The reading was useful for reminding me of the novel's comic streak, at least.

Douglas Egerton's The Wars of Reconstruction and Jenny Offill's Last Things

i just mised kushner speaking about (and signing copies of) the flame throwers at our local indie bookstore. some of her writing is really descriptive and sharp; some of it, in the early pages, comes off as a little too precious. i love the descriptions i've read, about her writing being so fiery and alive.

(xp)

finished 'claudine at school' and ordered the collected volume with the other novels in the series. finishing up 'mr lincoln's army' by bruce catton.

I recently finished James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain (fascinating for the way he manipulates biblical discourse while retaining his critical distance from the church), Another Country (appealingly open-ended in terms of plot, but stylistically flatter than his essays), and No Name in the Street (furious and seemingly digressive but more rhetorically controlled and formally intricate than seems usually to be granted), as well as Jean Rhys's After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (lean and desolate but not quite as intense as Good Morning, Midnight). I'm reading a few pages a day of Proust's In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, starting Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex and José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia, and wrapping up 2666 with a reading group.

I haven't read a single good Baldwin novel, and he's an essayist of genius.

I agree that his writing is much more vital in his non-fiction, but I think his first three novels (the only ones I've read so far) are flawed but good enough. Part of me wishes that he had been more willing to deal with queer relationships in his essays (apart from "Preservation of Innocence," "The Male Prison," and "Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood") rather than mostly just in his fiction, but given the climate in which he wrote I can understand why he was relatively circumspect.

Ataturk by Andrew Mango to simultaneously inform my knowledge of the ottoman front in WWI and Turkish history

Made the mistake of following Outlaw Culture by bell hooks (absolutely amazing, like, even the mis-steps were incredibly rich and thought-provoking) with How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran which basically made me want to destroy everything. Basically "how to render complex topics in a clear fashion" vs "how to render complex topics in a hideous cartoon" - like, if the latter had just been sold as a memoir it would have been fine, funny and occasionally pithy. But as selling it as a ~feminist tract~ ... it's been a while since I felt so patronised (not to mention quite simply lied to, for the purposes of self aggrandisement) by a book.

Does Caitlin Moran still write a lot of stuff in BIG CAPS for EMPHASIS like she did at MM?

In her, v funny, column for The Times on Friday she does.

It would seem ironic, for ILX, the land of BIG CAPS for EMPHASIS, to dislike CM for doing the same thing.

I don't think she's a bad writer. There are many passages of the book where her style is perfect, she's both pithy and hilarious, and her mixture of personal experience and conclusions drawn is absolutely bang-on for the subject matter: her chapter on Abortion is one of the best, and most painful and honest depictions of an experience which is very hard to "get right" and she absolutely nails it. It's just frustrating that something which had so many good parts could have been so fatally flawed, for totally avoidable reasons.

I guess I am actually really glad that I read the bell hooks first, because I feel like she gave me the toolkit to actually say "well, parts of this are excellent, and parts of this are really really RONG" in a way that doesn't descend into throwing the whole thing out for "not being perfect", or worse.

That bell hooks book is fantastic because she has the range and the agility to write an essay which can say "Madonna can be great on gender, but she's terrible on race" or "It is possible to criticise Spike Lee for being bad on *class*, and criticise the concessions that he makes in order to be The One African-American Film-maker acceptable to Hollywood, without degenerating into racism or letting down the team" or "Malcolm X: great on race, terrible on gender, but if you actually read his words, his opinions shifted and became more progressive towards the end of his life, as he encountered more female Black thinkers, though that part always gets left out of the official hagiographies, gee I wonder why?" And yet can still dish out a "Camille Paglia: Universally terrible!" without descending into misogynist cliches.

She's just really, really good on capturing the tension between wanting to stick up for marginalised people, but also wanting to temper "this is the only representation we get, we can't criticise it, or we become the enemy" with "you know, there are some real problems here!" That you're allowed to have complicated feelings about things.

I've read individual essays by bell hooks, but never anything more. Would you recommend Outlaw Culture as a starting point?

I finished a couple in the last few days:

Volume 1 of part 1 of Lewisohn's extended Beatles book. This is covered amply elsewhere so I won't say much, other than it is utterly incredible and has the best ending - descriptions of a gig they played at some local council hall on 27 December 1960. It's just local kids being entertained by (admittedly exceptional) local kids, but he makes it it sound like one of those days that shook the world. Now onto volume 2.

The Rocky Road by Eamon Dunphy. Now this was a delight, the autobiography of an Irish footballer-turned-journalist. Pretty angry, resigned stuff, yet obviously motivated by love and passion, it makes for great reading as he rails against whichever overwhelming force is nearest at hand. It's got that weird aura to me of being half-understood stuff from a place that looks a lot like here, and as a result reads something like a plausible alternate universe that you're not quite sure you didn't live through. Very strange to have whole successions of public figures I've never heard of doing familiar things, when you don't know where they came from or what happened before or after.

It ends a bit oddly, with an extended chapter about his suffering pariah status during Italia 90. I'd been expecting to read about him and the country up to the present day, though I guess the title might've alerted me. Great writing at any rate, very direct and honest.

The Man in the High Castle was probably the best of the Dick novels that I've read, but I still like the short stories best.

Starting up on Omeros by Derek Walcott now in honor of my trip to St Lucia later this month.

A relative recently gave me a book by a friend of his, printed in 1979, with the title Wallowas. I'm pretty sure it was printed under a 'vanity' publisher's imprint. Obviously, I was given this book because I've spent more than a dozen weeks over the past decade hiking and camping in the Wallowa Mountains in NE Oregon, where the book is set.

Over the past few nights that was what I was reading. The nicest part was that the place names of the mountains, rivers, valleys and meadows all meant something to me and in most cases were places I'd hiked to.

I'm not sure what comes next, but I recently checked Dostovevsky's Demons out of the public library, so it has cut the queue and will probably get a look in.

Anybody read Chronicles of Bustos Domecq? Describe please. Thinking of getting the Di Giovanni translation.

fuck yeah demons! hope you enjoy aimless. my favorite dusty: the funniest, the scariest.

Anybody read /Chronicles of Bustos Domecq/? Describe please. Thinking of getting the Di Giovanni translation.

Demons is starting out nicely with a bit of a satiric takedown of the provinces in a bit of Gogol-influenced narration. Lookin' good so far.

read it last year for the first time, followed by dead souls (nice one-two punch there). one of the few of his works where i've still felt sympathy for some of the characters by the end. which edition/translation, out of interest?

nearly finished the recognitions, which is great and all but kind of ready to move onto something else...

I have the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation. It reads quite well.

ah, pretty sure i read their trans. of crime & punishment. copy of devils i have is an oxford world's classic which included the stavrogin's confession chapter integrated into the text, which might have worked better as an appendix. also: the portrait of turgenev is absolutely devastating in its mercilessness.

dead souls is so fucking weird and awesome.

best thing about gogol is that his moralistic/religious agenda is not at all apparent in his actual texts. the distance between what he (seems to have) thought he was doing, and what he actually accomplished is more dramatic than any other author i know. dostoevsky is also rad but i can't really handle him. i think i threw up last time i read notes from underground, the part where he offends the prostitute he had offered to rescue by giving her money.

Arthur Schnitzler - La Ronde and a couple of other plays (Anatol is also great). Love the structure and it really captures the frenzy, the madness of love in its first stages, when all you know about someone is that you like them but don't fully trust them. The questioning of motive is as if one of them was placed on a couch. Incisive, at the same time it is two people on a street or a room, they are facing each other, trying to figure each other out and often faililng under the pressure.

Rilke - Lettes on Cezanne. Short volume and its p/great crit. You get a sense of Cezanne's achievement and how deeply Rilke looks at colour.

Now on The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

I've read individual essays by bell hooks, but never anything more. Would you recommend Outlaw Culture as a starting point?

― Inside Lewellyn Sinclair (cryptosicko), Thursday, April 3, 2014 3:16 PM

Sorry, I didn't see this earlier!

Nah, I probably wouldn't *start* with Outlaw Culture, because it's really mostly "bell hook vs the 90s" and you probably do need a grip of what she's about beforehand. The canonical starting point is, more likely "Ain't I a Woman".

i'm rereading dead souls now. the only writer i can think of with comparable similes is wodehouse.

Outlaw Culture sounds fantastic BB. Thanks, I hadn't heard of it before.

For those interested in post-Civil War politics and civil rights, this excellent new book is essential.

Thanks, will take a look. although I still haven't read that New Deal book you recommended

has anyone here read The Undiscovered Country by Julian Mitchell?

I finished INTERVIEWS WITH JONATHAN LETHEM. It's very interesting, very readable; anyone who likes Lethem would probably enjoy it.

I am reading THE STORIES OF PHILIP K. DICK. I read 'Paycheck', about which a 2003 film was made. The story is somewhat different. It is a good concept but the end is the crassest end to a story I have ever read.

oh boy.

Finally finished Knausgaard Volume II, took a palate cleanser of Karen Solie's Selected Poems, abandoned Norman Rush's Subtle Bodies (so poor - can't believe it was written by the same guy who produced the wonderful Mating, can't think of a comparable drop in quality), then picked up Jenny Offil's Dept Of Speculation and read it in an evening. Really terrific novel - interesting contrast with Knausgaard with its microfocus on the mundanity of parenting, married life etc. Everybody's comparing it to Renata Adler's Speedboat, and formally that was my first thought too. But actually reminded me most of the Critique De La Vie Quotidienne/Bishop Barthelme stories (in fact DB makes a guest appearance in DoS)- the mordant endurance and epiphanies of city life. Now on with Knausgaard Vol III.

i'm reading knausgaard one. impressed, so far.

clever comparisons i have are frank harris and the 'i remember' guy

I'd like to read DEPT. OF SPECULATION. At first I thought Stevie might have written DEBT OF SPECULATION. Then I thought the book might be called THE DEPARTMENT OF SPECULATION. But no, it is called DEPT. OF SPECULATION.

In a review that Stevie sent me the other day the book sounded really interesting but I must have missed the fact that it was about 'parenting'. Or perhaps it is not, which would be encouraging.

I still need to read SPEEDBOAT.

I think I need to read the Bishop Barthelme Stories. I thought Stevie might mean a collaboration between Elizabeth Bishop and Donald Barthelme but that seems not plausible. I must read Barthelme again, though I have not liked him.

James Wood naturally has an essay on Norman Rush in THE FUN STUFF. I don't yet know if it talks about the unsubtlety of SUBTLE BODIES.

I don't share in the widespread desire to read Knausgaard, which is lucky for me as a slow reader.

Why are you YELLING

ALL CAPS is his cheap, easy alternative to bbcode italicization

I abandoned Subtle Bodies too, and I Also loved Dept of Speculation. Reminded me a bit of a more minimalist Lorrie Moore at the top of her game.

Still chugging along thru the Breton bio, with frequent breaking-off to immerse in the works under discussion (right now, the poems of L'air du l'eau) or refer back to precursors (Nerval, Baudelaire). But I gave it a rest this week and picked up Melville's Piazza Tales, which were pleasantly minor... magazine Melville. (Obvious exception for "Bartleby", which I previously knew by reputation alone--though I'll be damned if I know what to make of it now that I've read it.)

*L'air de l'eau
jesus now the whole world knows my knowledge of french is a ridiculous front