'I FALL upon the spines of books! I read!' -- Autumn 2014: What Are You Reading?

I have this other Weiss book I haven't yet read, about a Jewish psychologist trying to heal the mind of a shellshocked Adolf Hitler just after WW1. "The writer Walter Mehring claimed in his autobiography that Weiss had access in Paris to Hitler's medical file, which had been sent out of the country for safekeeping by Edmund Forster, the psychiatrist who treated Hitler."

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Friday, 17 October 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In this country Weiss is vaguely known for Marat/Sade. Its an English disease for a writer to be known way more for his plays than for this novels. Whatever sells/puts bums on seats I suppose.

This wasn't a bad article about H!tler's state of mind/whether he was clinically sane.

Yeah, there are sentences in the CRP and TLP that could almost be interchanged. "The subject does not belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world." Similar sense that cognition on the one hand and language on the other are characterized by a kind of tragic necessity to always be going beyond their established limits.

The Critique of Judgment and Philosophical Investigations make another interesting pairing. I've seen papers that discuss the rule-following paradox by talking about free play of imagination and understanding.

I've started William Nordhaus's The Climate Casino. It reads a bit like a textbook, but it's also pretty informative, so I don't mind too much.

He comes up as a sinister figure in climate ethics literature, the guy who advocates for a high discount rate on future losses due to climate change compared with Stern's more virtuous percentage.

Yeah, I kind of like his strenuously even-handed approach, but I'm sure it can rub true believers the wrong way.

Peter Stamm - We're Flying. Raced through these short stories. Stamm captures the mundane to a point where it never looks like being that extraordinary (as the cliche goes) (there is no exclamation mark anywhere), he lets it be - there is something about it that keeps you making turn pages but in the short format you can't spend that long with a character. What makes Seven Years the substantial work it is, is to spend time with Alexander in his actions and thoughts and in the predicament he finds himself in.

Ingeborg Bachmann/Paul Celan - Correspondence. A relationship shot dead at its birth. I'd say anyone who is interested in her novel Malina ought to read this first (I need my own copy of it) as much of it is about this specific relationship (as the commentary somewhat exhaustively details).

Stamm captures the mundane to a point where it never looks like being that extraordinaryKeepin it mundane/real

Even when something happens such as a pregnancy, a death, a suicide, a marriage, a divorce, or whether someone depressed or loving or hating or happy or sad it just doesn't matter. Its like someone switching on a TV to a different channel and watching those events and emotions unfold in a drama or comedy.

Margaret Atwood, THE EDIBLE WOMAN

Veena Das - Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary

About violence in India during the Partition and after Indira Gandhi's death, which was actually thirty years ago next week. She asks questions like: What is the significance of the silence (avoidance) that she sees hovering over these incidents? How does violence of this kind disturb our criteria for humanity and for being alive (like, is it still easy to see a person committing an act like this as human in this moment? as alive (versus as an automaton of some kind)?)? Lots of other questions too. I feel like my reactions so far have been superficial, probably because I'm coming to it with a bit of knowledge of the philosophy she's using, but absolutely no knowledge of contemporary India.

Yeah, for an event of such terrible violence it seems strange how little Partition is talked about in UK/American circles. I don't know enough about contemporary India either, but Saadat Hasan Manto's short stories from the 1950s about Partition are unforgettable--vivid and bitter and terse, like the stories of Isaac Babel.

I feel like I should have more reference points, though, so I'd like to get to Das's book eventually.

I might have picked the wrong book as an introduction to her research. Something more focused on detailed ethnographic description would have been better, whereas I feel like this book, published in 2006, is somewhat of a retrospective rethinking of her own past work, presuming prior familiarity with her ethnographic stuff as well as some of the concepts she's using from Cavell and Wittgenstein - she doesn't always clearly indicate where she's using a technical term from one of them.

Hmm. I suspect Critical Events might take less for granted, but this is just google-abetted idle speculation, since I haven't read Das before.

While Structure and Cognition sounds much more granular and focused more on Hinduism than contemporary Indian politics.

Nigel Hamilton - The Mantle of Leadership. About FDR calling Churchill's shit and leading the war in 1941-1942.

Scott Fitzgerald - The Price was High. Uncollected stories. Rereading it. Most are trash but readable.

I have this odd relation to Fitzgerald where I love his truly throwaway notebook entries in The Crack-Up but much of his magazine writing just feels flimsy--maybe because I know he's capable of something like "May Day."

The way he's anthologized does no justice. Always fuckin' "Winter Dreams" when "The Sensible Thing" and "The Bridal Party" exist.

xp I'm just making excuses for my own failures of comprehension really. ;) This is probably a good book to start on, just not always easy. I do notice that she writes differently (in a way I prefer) about the anti-Sikh massacres of 1984, maybe because she was in fact there on the scene and actively involved politically in trying to expose the collusions of government and police in enabling the rioters. There's a clarity that comes in in these chapters.

Partition seems really under-examined by non-specialists; I've hardly ever seen it mentioned by pundits re ongoing effects on Pakistani political developments. Will check Manto, Das, thanks guys!

I have temporarily (?) suspended progress on the civil war to read Blackwater, about the mercenaries employed by the USA in Iraq. It is hugely dispiriting to revisit the worst crimes of the Bush administration, but I'm pretty sure the dreadful policies he instigated have only been marginally changed, so while there may not be 50,000 mercenaries shooting up a single country today, there still could be tomorrow, courtesy of the US taxpayer.

He comes up as a sinister figure in climate ethics literature, the guy who advocates for a high discount rate on future losses due to climate change compared with Stern's more virtuous percentage

Now that I've actually gotten to the section about discount rates, I have to admit, I find that probably the weakest section of the book so far. Color me unconvinced that his view on the discount rate is correct. It's a complex issue - not sure what to think, but I suspect the best rate to use is somewhere between the "market" rate and Stern's low rate. Not sure how much impact that will have on the rest of the book's argument. I still like the book overall.

Read/loved Roth's Nemesis, just in time for Ebola.

This is the book to give anyone who would appreciate Roth if he just weren't fixated on fucking. I kept waiting for it to delve into some sexy/ist paragraph and it didn't.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes - Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil

Just begun. I have a good feeling about this one. The chapter I've previously read from it was pretty incredible. This book was apparently controversial for suggesting that the women she observed living in slums, who were often giving birth to ten to fifteen children over the course of their lives, often to a succession of transient fathers, with most of their children dying while young, had evolved attitudes towards death which served to take the tragedy out of the deaths of young children, allowing them to view the deaths of babies as happy occasions (the innocent angel-baby rejoining God); and, moreover, that out of a need to ration resources, these women would often act so as to expedite the deaths of children who didn't in any case stand a chance of making it. There's something kind of unavoidably sensationalistic and journalistic about a topic like that, feeding into all sorts of anxieties about motherhood, so the problem of how to do it responsibly strikes me as very interesting.

God, I cannot fucking imagine reading a book on that subject. I am dreading reading the next chapter of my current book*, because I know that it will contain descriptions of the death of an infant cow. I am a huge wuss.

*Sweetland, by Michael Crummey. Apparently I only read Canadian literary fiction now.

It's beautifully written too. This passage for instance:

The strong mandate not to express grief at the death of a baby, and most especially not to shed tears at the wake, is strongly reinforced by a Nordestino folk piety, a belief that for the brief hours that the infant is in the coffin, she is neither human child nor blessed little angel. She is something other: a spirit-child struggling to leave this world and find its way into the next. It must climb. The path is dark. A mother's tears can impede the way, make the road slippery so that the spirit-child will lose her footing, or the tears will fall on her wings and dampen them so that she cannot fly. Dona Amor told of a "silly" neighbor who was weeping freely for the death of her toddler when she was interrupted by the voice of her child calling to her from the coffin: "Mama, don't cry for me because my mortália is very heavy and wet with your tears." "You see," Amor said, "the child had to struggle even after death, and his mother was making it worse for him. The little one wasn't an angel yet because angels never speak. They are mute. But he was no longer a human child either. He was an alma penanda [wretched, wandering soul]."

"What is the fate of such a child?"

"Sometimes they are trapped in their graves. Sometimes when you pass by the cemetery, you can see little bubbles and foam pushing up from the ground where such children are buried. And late at night you can even hear the sound of the lost souls of the child-spirits wailing."

On going beyond desperation and despair---if enough people believe it---Wonder how many people in this country do? Someday it may be not just gospel, but Gospel.

(Ugh.)

Skimming a bunch of Arabian Nights-related material--bits the original text, an Illustrated Junior Library edition, Robert Irwin's companion--in preparation for teaching The Thief of Bagdad (1940) next week.

Robert Irwin's novels look cool. I was looking for his book on the Alhambra, which I'm visiting in a couple weeks(!), but it seemed to be missing from the stacks.

His 'Limits of Vision', about a housewife driven mad by household dust and descending into a microworld was pretty great.

Just read William Gibson's new one, which was clever fun if not mind-blowing, and am now reading Geoff Smith, 'Time of the Beast', about a monk hermit in the English Fenlands in 666AD, and his encounters with SOMETHING NASTY in the marshes. Very good so far, despite the hideously JPG-artifact-ridden cover the book has been saddled with. It's published by Dedalus, whose cover design in general is eye-wreckingly poor.

Just finished Wolf in White Van, wow.

Now back to the Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig, although the two I started with were so devastating ("Letter from an Unknown Woman," "Forgotten Dreams") I'm not sure how many I can take.

Finally read Dubliners. Love the intent observation and the improbable navigation through all the detail: can't call it "omniscient" narration in the lordly sense: early 20-something author knows he's still got a lot to learn about women, for instance/especially, and like some of his male protagonists (generally older and more experienced than he), the sense of surprise, in sometimes possibly teachable moments, is a recurring source of vitality, a key center, maybe. Also, there's a sense of compassion, or fairness---well, justice anyway, 'cause life ain't fair. But art can be, sometimes.
Also, unusually enough, it's making me monitor and question my own behavior, incl the binge of high-class reading: am I really learning from this, or is it just more status-seeking, if very belated? Can't take it with you (not all the way, but how far?)

Dubliners is really good. Perhaps only viewed as 'minor' because of who wrote it and what else he wrote.

My village library has two Colette collections, Gigi, Julie de Carneilha, and Chance Acquaintances: Three Short Novels, translated by Roger Senhouse and Patrick Leigh Fermor, also The Complete Claudine Novels, translated by Antonia White, both books with introductions by Judith Thurman. Worth reading?

I was reading Howard Jacobson's J but got bored. There isn't much tension generated from the clues dropped about what's going on...it seems pretty obvious and the characters aren't really interesting enough to carry it through.

Started the new Fuminori Nakamura book instead, which is way more fun off the bat.

have the day off from work, will probably finish Graham Greene - The Power & The Glory

this is the second of his novels I've read, after Brighton Rock last year, & as much as I worry about the schtick eventually wearing thin, man that's some good schtick

It doesn't wear thin imo. He wrote a few duds but the vast majority of his novels are worth reading.

I mean, if you read a bunch of them in a row I'm sure it'd wear thin pretty fast.

yeah I'm not about to jump right in to another one (already have Kafka's Trial on deck) but do you have any recommendations? Monsignor Quijote sounds interesting, but then I'm a sucker for DQ reimaginings...

My reading has been very undirected of late. I did finish the first volume of Foote, but have not yet picked up volume two. I currently am reading a novella-length story by Muriel Spark, Reality and Dreams. It seems thin in substance compared to her earlier output.

xp That's actually one of the two I haven't read yet, because I told myself I'd finish actual DQ first and stalled out around 1/3 of the way through.

The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair are both great and similar thematically to the ones you mentioned. Also great: England Made Me, The Comedians, Travels with My Aunt, but it's hard for me to make a concise list of recommendations. The quality is remarkably consistent for a body of work that spans most of a century. Basically just about everything up to and including Travels with My Aunt is worth reading.

The Man Within is good but is very much a "first novel", nothing at all like anything else he did.

I didn't like It's a Battlefield or The Captain and the Enemy.

My village library has two Colette collections, Gigi, Julie de Carneilha, and Chance Acquaintances: Three Short Novels, translated by Roger Senhouse and Patrick Leigh Fermor, also The Complete Claudine Novels, translated by Antonia White, both books with introductions by Judith Thurman. Worth reading?

Very much, though probably go with the Gigi/julie/Chance collection first. The Claudines are fun, but written under very odd circumstances (her husband basically locked her up and forced her to write them, including titilatting young-girl-lesbian hints, and then published them as his own work).

The Man Within is good but is very much a "first novel", nothing at all like anything else he did.

Veru much written in the shadow of R L Stevenson, which is not a criticism.

Thanks James, will check it out. Other Greenes I enjoyed (as well as Brighton Rock and Power And The Glory) 21 Stories, and several stories in anthologies, incl. speculative fiction, for lack of a better term (happy weird shit); The Tenth Man (good thriller, written as straight-up movie bait): A Sort of Life, one of his memoirs; Collected Essays (mostly tunneling back through sometimes odd Brit Lit, also Beatrix Potter; just whatever he seizes on while entertaining himself and readers ve. Great Depression and Battle of Britain), Collected Film Reviews (though not the one that got attorneys excited, in which he described Shirley Temple movies as pimped out [I'm paraphrasing]).Monsignor Quixote and a couple other late ones seemed kinda ho-hum at the time.
He's hard to keep up with, but somewhere in all this he parties hard in Batista's/Mafia's Havana (seems right at home), refers to himself in passing as "manic depressive" (believe the manic part), and that he used to pose as Grahame Greene, War Correspondent (only the first part was true), to hang out in war zones without getting hassled(also seems plausible, going by reading).

Grahame Greene, War Correspondent (only the first part was true) True enough when he was misspelling his own name, anyway.

H. Rider Haggard, She

Swinburne's poetry and The President Makers.

Packing books for a 10-day trip involving two 15-hour travel sessions. I'm going to bring the Scheper-Hughes along with

Margaret Mead - Coming of Age in Samoa
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness
Mervyn Peake - Titus Groan

That oughta do. Also in the local library, just noticed: Arnold Bennett's The Old Wive's Tale, with blurbs from HG Wells and John Wain. Keyword: "Masterpiece." True, or anyway worth reading??

Rilke - Letters to a Young Poet. Feel this might be a good xmas present for a friend so I'll need another copy. Rilke really needs a substantial go to selection of collected letters but this particular selection is a marvel by itself -- love the advice and the games he plays with giving that advice, like when he says its kinda worthless (which he doesn't really) but goes onto really say things that seem v deeply felt, yet there is a weighed in humility and genuine good will, quite moving given that I don't think they met -- not sure you'd want to put this particular volume together with his letters on Cezanne and so on.

Thomas Mann - started making my way through some short stories (tr. David Luke). Tristan is reasonable. I can never get excited by Mann (all the supposed irony just doesn't work with me) so not a translation issue but I'll be giving Death in Venice another once over (and I really liked that) so we'll see.