Spring and All 2k16 / what are you reading now?

I'm reading The Banditti of the Plains, A.S. Mercer, a contemporary account of a range war in Wyoming in the early 1890s, where the cattlemen's association decided to terrorize settlers who were fencing what had been open rangeland. They imported a bunch of goons from Texas as a private army who committed murders on command. Apparently the movie Shane was modeled on this range war.

The book describes how complicit the Wyoming governor, senators and wealthiest citizens were in this lawlessness. Consequently, these powers obtained an injunction, seized all copies of the book and suppressed it ruthlessly. Only a few copies survived. It was reprinted in the 1960s from a copy smuggled out and sent to a university library in the east with the admonition not to shelve it, but keep it under lock and key for future generations.

Have recently been re-reading old standbys -- some of Plutarch's Lives (the Gracchi, Cleomenes, Artaxerxes) and R.L. Stevenson's short stories from The Suicide Club. I dabbled a bit in Kipling's American Notes, mostly just the chapter where he fishes for salmon in Oregon. Fun stuff.

I'm just casting around until I land on something new I want to read. I checked out a library copy of Henry Green's Blindness. It may do the trick. Alfred Lord Sotosyn was repping hard for HG in the Greene vs. Green poll thread and that carries weight with me.

balcoиy of europe, a novel by aidan higgins

Finalists as well as winners---especially interested in ones by Dan Ephron, Mary Beard, David Maraniss, and James Hannaham, who just won a PEN also:
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-festival-of-books-winners-20160331-snap-htmlstory.html

Couple more novels by Duras (Destroy and The Afternoon of Monsieur Andesmas). More poetry by Darwish and Enzensberger's The Sinking of the Titanic.

Huh, didn't know about that Enzensberger book at all, and it looks really interesting: more info here https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/hans-magnus-enzensberger-4/the-sinking-of-the-titanic-a-narrative-poem/

Caitlin Moran's How To Build a Girl. A coming of age non-autobiographical story about a precocious mid teen girl from a council estate in Wolverhampton. Author stresses non-autobiographical though several details fit her own life i.e. where she's from, her becoming a music writer and a couple other things.
Picked it up for 25c cos I'd seen author on tv recently and wondered what her writing was like. Am enjoying it.

W.B. Yeats, SELECTED PROSE
Tim Pat Coogan, 1916: THE EASTER RISING
Fritz Senn, INDUCTIVE SCRUTINIES: FOCUS ON JOYCE

I read Voices of Chernobyl this weekend. Astonishing.

First time the Nobel really got it spot on in a few years. We really need to see more widely circulated translations from the quintet of bks about the former USSR and Russia.

re: Enzensberger. Don't have any strength to talk about books at the mo, but I'll say that how much I loved the juxtaposition between the Titanic and his trip to Cuba. At first you don't quite know how that's operating and enjoy it as a distancing device. The Titanic is a weird topic on its own for Enzensberger to capture (such a well known tragedy) but it makes sense to read it alongiside Mausoleum as a failure of progress (or its up-and-down journey when let loose on the world)

Im reading and enjoying TC Boyle's "Drop City". anyone here into TC Boyle? I dont hear his name mentioned much around here but I've always found him an engaging writer. I liked "The Tortilla Curtain" a lot too.

Pat Barker - Toby's Room
William Leuchtenburg - The American Presidents

Books do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell

The Secret History of Wonder Woman - Jill Lepore

I've been put off TC Boyle, personally, by having read "A Women's Restaurant," his extremely creepy and transphobic early story which Janice Raymond cited to bolster her case that trans women were just predatory men trying to invade women's spaces, as though skeevy fiction by straight dudes counted as evidence. I don't want to sound puritanical, since I engage with a lot of texts and writers I find objectionable, but that was a strong deterrent to seeking out more of his work.

(And I'm inconsistent here: I love Angela Carter, DFW, and Gore Vidal, and all of them have used transmisogynistic tropes in ways that make me cringe, so the issue is probably that I haven't had a really compelling reason to keep engaging with other parts of Boyle's work.)

boyle might belong on that unfashionable writers thread. but hey he had a long fashionable run. just feels like you don't hear about him anymore. when was the last time someone read an old madison smartt bell book?

Coogan's EASTER RISING illustrated history is grand. I have always wanted to know more about the military side, as well as the political, and I am getting some from this. It amazes me how for instance Connolly would send out military memos, as 'Commandant', from the GPO.

For a completely unhelpful treatment of same, have you read We Always Treat Women Too Well by Raymond Queneau?

THE PINEFOX: plethora of easter rising documentaries on RTE lately. I thought this one was the best and quite illuminating. Would have liked to know how English schools learn about or discuss (even if they do) the Easter Rising.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/how-the-british-lost-the-easter-rising-1.2579169

extraordinarily unpleasant man in gym gear got on the tube, dumped bags on seats either side of him, spread his legs, has been sniffing every twenty seconds or so, and staring at the young woman opposite him. put in some leaky earbuds now pissing out tinny noise. reading this:

http://www.brf.org.uk/news/new-revelation-youth-ministry

wait. he's put that away. now this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B016USSX5O/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

^Fodder for this thread.

i was thinking of that thread but was just interested in what he was reading. didn't want to dignify him with a rating.

3/10

Speaking of what-am-I-reading, I got a start on Blindness, Henry Green, but then I got distracted by William James' Psychology: Briefer Course, which has, of course, been superseded in many ways by modern research using new tools such as CAT scans, MRIs, and EEGs, but is still fascinating due to the exceptional qualities of James' intellect and his excellent prose. So, now it is a tussle between Green and James and I don't know how it will end.

Recent stuff:

* Wolfgang Hilbig: The Sleep of the Righteous -- East German shellshocked stories, as good and downbeat as everyone says
* Claire Morrall: When the Floods Came -- undemanding post-climate change semi-thriller, pleasant enough but a bit YA in the prose dept
* Javier Marias: Written Lives -- very entertaining essays about oddities in the lives/careers of various writers
* L. S. Hilton: Maestra -- rubbish, didn't finish, if you lie pretentious brand-name dropping thrillers dripping with genital juices this may be for you
* Jo Shapcott: Of Mutability -- poems, liked em
* Patricia Lockwood: Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals -- poems, liked most of em, loved a couple, annoyed by a few
* Carmen Boullose: Before -- very good coming-of-age psychodrama about upper-middle-class Mexican girl in 1960s
* Rein Raud: The Brother -- Estonian sort-of spaghetti western "stranger comes to town and mixes everything up", good except for the very end
* Sacha Mardou: The Sky in Stereo -- very good graphic novel, except on the very last page I find out it's TO BE CONCLUDED in a vol 2 that's not yet published and is not mentioned anywhere on the cover
* Nina Berberova: The Ladies from St. Petersburg -- three novellas, two of which are like a female-centric version of Isaac Babel, and thus very good indeed

I read a bit of Surviving by Harry Green in the library on Monday. Seems interesting. Hadn't read him before.
Read The Bees a short story with a sting in the tail. Manages to set up a lot in 3 pages.

Harry Yorke, thank you

Lucia Berlin, A Manual For Cleaning Women: several stories in. Opens with "Angel's Laundromat," where the narrator sees the reflection of the old Indian sitting next to her, sees the reflection watching her hands in the mirror they're both staring or just lookin' at (both drunk). She describes it better than that, weaving that braid of connected and distanced bits of awareness and habituation and setting in among other accruals and mixtures, drawing from autobiographical materials---if Lydia Davis and collection editor Stephen Emerson didn't confirm this in their intros, would still be likely enough, from connections and recurrences in and between the stories. A musical effect, incl. observation and anecdotal moments, found elements and invented ones (invented from materials related: like she remembers being drunk and seeing this guy doing that, also finds a notebook note about waking up drunk another time and thinking about this guy and how he merges with a dream she partly remembers: she doesn't give that as an example, but I get or project that impression---I've been in similar situations, on the street, with bottles, later with notebooks etc).
The tricky part goes to the "life is like fiction": sometimes--well, mainly in the title story, so far---the observations can incl. social stereotypes, or likely sources---Davis makes a lot of good points about the author's surprising turns of phrase, bullseye le mots juste in the midst of seemingly basic documentary narrative, and not wanting it to seem written, I'd say---which is maybe a reason for including some stereotypical or familiar elements---here we go, drunk forebears, Texas boondocks, Bay Area bus routes, done that---but those elements *and* the word choices--always risking mere cleverness etc---keep finding their own partially emerging through-line of narrative momentum, and the need to make a path through all thisstuff in her head. It's a balancing act; don't look down, play it cool, but can't un-have the periphereal vision, can't forget it all, no matter how much she drinks, how much she turns into grist for tbe mill.
Texas: all that light, so keep it darker inside; Berkeley, Frisco, Oakland: it's gray so often, relax and hang on, while stealing sleeping pills from the ladies whose residences you clean, "saving for a rainy day"---but also saving the daily impressions, the social connections, like she did even back in Texas, in those dimly lit rooms, notebooks, etc. But now, while she's riding to and from her cleaning gigs etc. also thinks of (drunk) boyfriend, who hated buses, but enjoyed approaching and hanging around bus stations (h'mmm---no matter how much she tells you, shows more, leaves room for speculation):
We used to go to the ones in San Francisco and Oakland. Mostly Oakland, on San Pablo Avenue. Once he told me he loved me because I was like San Pablo Avenue.
And she is: she's vast, she contains multitudes, she's found her way into an early 70s Cali Van Morrison-type tribute, via boyfriend's reverie---but from her side:
He was like the Berkeley dump. I wish there was a bus to the dump. Which would be a good punchlime, a heartfelt pin in the memory bubble, like she finds sometimes, but now she can't let it go:
We went there when we got homesick for New Mexico. It is stark and windy and gulls soar like nighthawks in the desert. You can see the sky all around you and above you. Garbage trucks thunder through dust-billowing roads. Gray dinosaurs.
I can't handle you being dead, Ter. But you know that.
And so on. This isn't representative of the whole story, though, much less the book.

"The tricky part goes to 'life is like *bad* fiction'," I meant to say.

Michael B: thank you.
I have watched about 5 documentaries on related areas recently, with great interest. But not that one.
Will I as a UK resident be able to get the RTE one?

I have had little contact with UK schools for a long time, but I am not aware that they do teach much Irish history; have not heard about this over the years anyway.

Stephen Leacock, Arcadian Adventures of the Idle Rich
Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (reread)

Pinefox: Here it is on Youtube. It must be a RTE/BBC co-production

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG6bL-1KPuI

Mods, can we get a Portillo warning there, thanks

I've been rereading Chris Kraus's I Love Dick, starting Wayne Koestenbaum's short book on Warhol, still sorting through my thoughts about Sarah Schulman's The Cosmopolitans, and getting around to the second issue of the trans poetry journal Vetch, which is available here.

I've been reading The Country Road, a book of stories by Regina Ullmann.

is it good? have ummed and ahhed about that one.

finished up reading greg Jackson's 'prodigals' collection of short stories..very dense & thoughtful & compelling. includes the 'wagner in the desert' story that was in the nyer like 18 months ago & made some waves, notably the editor of the paris review saying something like it was the best piece of fiction they've published in 20 yrs

I'm past the halfway mark with Blindness. It's interesting in part because it was his first and was published (and therefore must have been written) when he was an undergrad at Oxford.

It strikes me as having the usual weaknesses of a novel written by a very young person, most notably underdeveloped characters, but what is most impressive to me is how well he strategically writes his way around those weaknesses so you are seldom aware of them. I get the impression it was pasted together from the better bits of his apprentice work, reworked with very cleverly disguised joins that allow it to become a single story. Green matured in his craft very early.

is it good? have ummed and ahhed about that one.

I don't know quite what to think about it. It's weird enough that I'll probably have to read it twice before I can make up my mind whether or not I like it. It does give a weirdly haunted, kind of desperate glimpse of life in the Swiss countryside in pre-modern times, which reminds me more than anything else of the Haneke film "The White Ribbon", if you've ever seen that. Sometimes the writing verges on being kind of heavy handedly portentous.

Michael B -- my response was mistaken: I have watched that Portillo doc, not once but TWICE. The guests and locations are tremendous.

This week: finished Coogan's Easter Rising book.

Yesterday finished rereading Hugh Kenner, JOYCE'S VOICES.

Clarice Lispector - Complete Short Stories is a flawed project. 'Egg and Chicken' might be one of the very great short stories (and there are probably another half dozen others that I'd include) but I wasn't convinced in the argument presented in Benjamin Moser's introduction that you get to see the development of a writer (and a female writer at that) and that in itself is worth nearly 600 pages' worth of stories. It could've done with a strong selection. Her essence as a writer is pretty much there at the beginning, she just becomes better/refines it. This took about 200 pages to get really going. When she does then there's no one quite like her. I then moved on to a selection of short stories by Robert Bolano in The Return, covering what he expands on in his books: poetry, porn, football, politics and violence. At times you think this is kinda mechanistic but there is always a detail that gets to you. And almost as good as Thomas Bernhard with the one-paragraph monologue. Moving on to his late fragments in The Secret of Evil and right now on Juan Carlos Onetti's The Shipyard which is a Latin American existentialism that was very much in the air at the time (Sabato's The Tunnel) where the re-building of a Shipyard stands for all other re-builds. Onetti extracts as much out of the metaphor as its possible.

having finished the higgins novel about to start on cain's book by alexander trocchi in an appropriately trashy seventies paperback edition

Really enjoyed Mieville's new novella while I sat in the rare sun at the pub today. Don't know hat folks opinions are of him, but it was some of his best writing, I think.

would appear that the recent(ish) dalkey edition of balcony of europe has had the opening and closing irish sections excised at aidan higgins' insistence, which is a shame cos i much preferred those to the central portion! may seek out a copy of langrishe, go down now, and his "autobiographical" writings look like they could be interesting.

Deal by Bill Kreutzman. Interesthng read. Think it might be giostwritten but do like the style.
Got as far as Anthem so far.

Just greatly enjoyed reading the first 25 pages of my friend Julia Claiborne Johnson's novel, Be Frank With Me, the ebook of which is on sale for another day or two for a buck ninety-nine /street_team

i appear to be reading a buttload of kierkegaard, who i still find kind of irritating

I'm reading the (mostly not very interesting) celebratory articles* for Charlotte Brontë's 200th birthday which is TODAY. Happy Birthday Charlotte, I love you.

I still need to read several novels by all the sisters, but already read Lucasta Miller's The Bronte Myth, which goes back to Charlotte helping her earliest biographers with hype about the family backstory (doesn't seem to have needed it, but she wanted to highlight certain points, mix down others). We also get interpretations down through the ages, reflecting Victorian, Freudian (or journo glosses), feminists, neo-Romantic etc trends---and the author doesn't just lol canned takes, she considers just how the original texts invite, challenge and reward different readings, to different degrees (that response seems ridiculous now, but this other guy is on to something, even if his own writing hurts the cool contemporary eye).
Also deals with pop cultural aspects, incl. Bronte house (and England) as cutely creepy tourist attraction.

Appropriate reading on Charlotte's 200th birthday.... Vilette is one of the strangest and most powerful 19th c. novels I've read, so I'm v. curious about The Brontë Myth.

...oops, just saw abcfsk's post.

https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51lO1bJParL.jpg

It's in English too

https://www.amazon.fr/Brothers-Karamazov-Illustrated-Platinum-English-ebook/dp/B017YB4AJ4

i believe we have a thread dedicated to those covers somewhere

Cool story bros

I'm still in the grip of a Robert Aickman obsession. He's such a strange writer, oddly out of time and out of place in the wider sense of British writers of his time. His antecedents are Henry and MR James, I suppose, but he most reminds me, albeit obliquely, of Ballard in his obsession with the unconscious and his externalising and extending of inner neuroses into the outer environment. (Aickman's vision of the unconscious as the 'magnetic under-mind' isn't as developed as Ballard's dwelling place of the aeons of pre-history, but it's just as productive.) I also keep thinking of Sebald when I'm reading him, which is probably to do with his style that hearkens back to various European writers and essayists of the late 19th century and that sense of his writing orbiting an absent centre.

I also find him genuinely 'keep me awake at night' creepy. I might have to switch to something a little easier on the mind for a bit.

― Sunn O))) Brother Where Art Thou? (Chinaski), Thursday, September 22, 2016 1:18 AM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i had never heard of aickman but holy moley does this sound like exactly my kind of thing. cheers!

No Simple Highway by Peter Richardson
a Cultural History of the Grateful Dead. Trying to put the band in context.
Though for some reason the author skips Garcia picking up electric guitar when rock'n'roll appears which other band histories have.
Pretty readable I guess.
Was available locally which Jesse Jarrow's Heads hasn't been so far.

Groucho and Me, Groucho Marx's autobio. Interesting read. So far he's a late teen buying cars and picking up women. On tour with his brothers Harpo, Chico and Gummo.

the jesse jarnow book is really enjoyable

I went with 1493. It hasn't covered ground that was as little understood as pre-Columbian civilizations, but it has informed me of some lesser-known global history, such as the degree of trade between Philippines-based Spaniards and Ming China in the 1500s and the very rapid spread of potatos and maize in China.

yeah it doesn't quite have the holy shit factor of the previous book but it's fascinating stuff all the same

finished the villiers de l'isle-adam novel about edison and his android: read much more like a long and wordy play than an actual novel. first hundred or so pages really draaagged.

now onto the complete short stories of andrei bely.

Robert Walser: Girlfriends, Ghosts & Other Writings.... New nyrb collection of very short pieces, mix of excellent, fun and fluff

A Month in the Country by JL Carr. Carr makes world creation seem so easy: 5 pages in and I felt I was a part of the landscape (inner and outer) and understood the implied hierarchies of the community. And his writing is like a warm bath.

Love that book. The perfect example of how a novel doesn't even need to break the 100p mark to have everything in it that it needs.

Reading now a book I reckon most everyone here would enjoy, unless you hate stuff that's fun and clever and sad: 'Let Me Tell You' by Paul Griffiths. It's Ophelia from Hamlet telling her own story, but using ONLY the words given to her in the play by Shakespeare. This Oulipian restriction is actually used to great effect, despite the fact that she can't even say 'Hamlet' or 'Laertes', for example. I'm struggling to imagine the practicalities of actually writing this book under tgese restrictions.

heh, i picked up a copy of 'A Month in the Country' just the other day :)

currently reading Martin Weitzmann - The Share Economy. which is NOT about the 2016 Neologism that ppl use to refer to Uber and Airbnb; it's a book written at the peak of 1970s stagflation by an economist who argues that Keynes had only come half-way in treating the symptoms of the business cycle, and that the true cure was to move a system were workers are paid in shares of revenue or profit, rather than in fixed wages. It's very well written, but as far as i know not very widely-read (judging by the price i paid for a used copy on amazon) so kind of a lost classic. it's the kind of gripping, ambitious, speculative big solution to a big problem you don't see much of anymore in the era of an abundance of technocratic micro-fixes, the kind of stuff that's fun to read whether or not you agree with the conclusions (so far i haven't made up my mind)

bought a month in the country based on the mention here - sounds really interesting!

No endless summer on ILB so: The Decline and Fall 2016 of gILBert the fILBert: What Are You Reading Now?

Oh wait were we supposed to wait out the year? Sorry if so

It's fine by me to re-up for autumn.

Momentarily reviving as i missed this at the time:

iyengar's book light on life is one of the more moving quasi memoirs ive read, it has lots of prescriptions for yoga practice but phrases them a bit gentler than light on yoga and places them in the context of iyengar's interpretation of the yoga sutras. recommended if you're looking to go further with his writings.

xyzzzz__ do you practice at an iyengar studio?

― he mea ole, he kanaka lapuwale (sciatica), Tuesday, July 19, 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks I like to read it sometime.

I do most of my classes at yoga studios (although I've done some in a church space), most of which have ropes and props so get to do inversions and downward dog the Iyengar way sometimes.

because grief is the thing with feathers

― Number None, Wednesday, 31 August 2016 18:42 (eight months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

did anyone else read this btw

^ he says casually, referring obliquely to H IS FOR HAWK

no, 'grief is a thing with feathers' the separate short novel. sorry, unclear

I've read the slender T.H. White book, The Goshawk, if that's any help.

Keen to read that book, deems, not read it yet tho. Got great reviews.

thought it was a phenomenon nb i dont read very much tho. caught me in the gut several times

I'm reading Pascal Meringeau's massive Jean Renoir bio, the first major one in decades.

let's not get side tracked and forget we have this contemporary thread

Confusingly, here's a link to a few posts in the Contemporary Lit thread (not the contemporary lit thread) where I read GITTWF: Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction