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

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.

I picked up a coy of SPQR, Mary Beard, at my library out of curiosity to see how a scholar would revise and update Roman history, based on newer research. After about 150pp of it I'm finding it very diluted and her highly hedged and inconclusive conclusions to be annoyingly obvious, such as (to paraphrase freely) 'early Roman history, as recorded by Livy and others, should be taken as largely myth with only a tenuous connection to history, but hey, it reveals something about how Romans liked to think of themselves, so let's look at that'. I'm pretty sure her publisher projected the audience for this book as people who've watched various television programs about Rome and think, hey, maybe I'm ready to read a real book about all that stuff. Meh.

I'm getting a bit discouraged. The percentage of 'hits' among my book choices is way down so far this year. Nothing much seems fresh. It all seems like minor variations on themes I've encountered too often to find engaging any more. I know there's stuff out there I haven't read that I would enjoy greatly, but my accustomed search criteria are failing to turn them up.

xpost one way street, you're reminding me of a dandy Bronte thread, with some comments on Villette and others as well--started by abcfsk, come to think of it (if I mess this up, it's an ILB thread with Bronte's Shirley in the title)

Charlotte Brontë's Shirley

The Sight of Death by art historian T. J. Clark. It’s a diary of his experience of two paintings by Poussin, written over several months at the Getty. He describes how from day to day the paintings shift aspects and pose new questions. It’s a great way of writing about painting, very intimate and immersive.

I spent three days in the National Gallery observing and drawing a Poussin so that sounds relevant to my interests. Paintings really do change the more time you spend with them, though the inclination and the luxury to do so are very rare.

I'm pretty sure her publisher projected the audience for this book as people who've watched various television programs about Rome

As someone who's presented various television programmes about Rome I'm sure she was fine with it. As someone who's etc. I was fine with it too. I've moved on to Gibbon now, don't worry - yeah he's way more fun to read but he doesn't care about the 99%.

As someone who hasn't got to grips with dangling modifiers I apologise for the above post.

Heh, am visiting London next month and plan to go the Wallace Collection to see the Poussin there, now that I'm just about to finish Dance to the Music of Time

A further connection - Christopher Hitchins, in an old piece about Powell, points out that any sentence in Dance to the Music of Time that begins with 'Although' invariably has a dangler in it

The National Gallery in London has a small room full of Poussins including one of the rudest paintings I've ever seen:

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/nicolas-poussin-nymph-with-satyrs

(sadly the link doesn't include the wall text which iirc coyly says the sleeping nymph is too distracted to notice the satyr disrobing her, while the satyr behind the tree hides his 'excitement'.)

Just had Love Goes to Buildings on Fire drop into the letterbox so will be reading that shortly.
Have mainly been reading Deal by BIll Kreutzmann over the last few days.
Just read 2000AD prog 1977 last night which they're making into an anniversary issue of sorts.

One of the two paintings which are the main subject of this book is in the National Gallery.

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/nicolas-poussin-landscape-with-a-man-killed-by-a-snake

This is the most readily accessible similar piece for me. I may go this weekend.

http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artwork.php?mkey=2059

Aimless, based on a decade of reading your posts here, I think you might like Be Frank With Me, still on sale today for just under two bucks /street_team. But perhaps, in a classic manifestation of the narcissism of small differences, you will hate it, I am not a good judge of these things.

read caroline bergvall's 'meddle english', a short collection of poetry (sort of) and critical/experimental prose that i'd been wanting to read for quite a while. i thought i'd like it but i was really amazed, easily the most sheer excitement i've had reading since, i dunno, brandon brown's weird catullus book. bergvall is trilingualish, norwegian french and english, though the book reads as predominantly english with stuff happening. i am not too up on the experimental poetics of recent years, but it strikes me having read brown, claudia rankine, and bergvall recently that something like 'embodied poetics' must have taken over in a pretty decisive way, because they all work that pretty deliberately in different ways. there's no deleuze in the book, or barely—she says 'lines of flight' a few times—but her frame is kind of a contemporary materialist anti-capitalist geo-whatever that has those kinds of characteristic tropes you get from 'a thousand plateaus' and latter-day enthusiasts for theorizing the anthropocene or whatever. lots of muck, critters, geographical vectors for uncanny becomings, a lot of what would code as body-horror in other contexts if not for the modern variant of epicurean/de rerum we-are-flows-of-atoms sublimity running through it, all serving as the matrix for some stuff about language change and power that is quickly put into practice: some chopped up chaucer juxtaposed to some modern-day tales that slip into riddley walker/anthony burgess/british street slang mixtures, or mash together news reports that are made to stutter in multiple languages. the core is a, i don't even know how to describe it at the moment, but it's a reprint of (part of?) her older 'goan atom', with lots of typographical arrangement and enjambment and portmanteau type techniques mixed in with what she calls bilingual writing techniques in the form of micro code-switches, set into kind of a multi-voiced epic narrative. it will be reminiscent of finnegans wake to a lot of readers just as a point of reference for that sort of controlled re-languaging, but i thought a lot of the opening chapters of gunter grass's 'flounder' because of the sort of pre/proto/trans-historical cast of the narrative events and the bodily focus of the not-always-just-quite-human agents of the narrative. it's fantastic because it's so propulsive, a lot of the techniques that would just code as experimental elsewhere, and demand decoding to make full sense, are used in the service of a primary effort to make weird sense, communicatively, so that you can follow it while constantly picking up on more than you're getting but being willing to take what you get and keep going. also it's FILTHY e.g.

Enter DOLLY
Entered enters
Enters entered
Enter entre
En train en trail
En trav ail aïe
La Bour La bour La bour
wears god on a strap
shares mickey with all your friends

Sgot
a wides lit
down the lily
sgot avide slot
donne a lolly to a head
less cin
dy slots in

to lic

that hardly represents it, but basically because of the techniques all the language or text-fragments are constantly surprising you with their filthiness, in a very funny and visceral way, and it maintains a velocity that never seems to let you settle in, your reading stays on a natural and responsive level, and nothing ever fails to work so badly that the effect is ruined.

she reads some parts of it here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsYykH7qgLw

which is quite good but definitely a different mode, i guess she 'writes' a lot for performance and then works slightly differently for print, so one thing you can only faintly get from hearing her is the way the visible aspects of the words are so caught up in the play of the sounds, the puns, the intra-lingual stuff, the humor, etc.

also started reading 'matches' by s.d. chrostowska, bought spontaneously on the strength of this review -

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-flare-for-criticism/

Matches is not a wholly unprecedented book, of course. In particular, writers such as Schlegel, Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Maurice Blanchot created aphoristic, fragmented, and/or unorthodox works of literary criticism that have been very influential, retaining their intellectual credibility while not classifiable as “academic” per se. In following up on the efforts of such writers, Chrostowska seems implicitly to be contending that the potential of the critical miniature has not been fully realized. However large figures such as Nietzsche and Benjamin loom in modern criticism, it is their ideas that have compelled attention, not the forms in which those ideas were cast, and Chrostowska’s book prompts us to consider the extent to which the ideas proffered by these influential thinkers were conditioned by their mode of presentation. In Matches, the entries that most call attention to their own mediation through form are perhaps those composed of dialogues between “A” and “B” (in a few cases “Q” and “A”). This form inherently puts authorial intent in suspension (is the author A or B?); it seems likely that Chrostowska the novelist has some influence on Chrostowska the critic’s sense of the potentially permeable boundaries between literature and criticism, although Literature on Trial reminds us that this potential has been exploited in criticism all along.

and so far it's great, exactly as promised. my first impression is that it's like reading a contemporary theory/culture-crit blog, but successfully transformed back into the finished literary mode of the books of those small-form antecedents mentioned above. extraneous academic crap excised, with only the natural, incisive, intuitively useful elements retained. yet, unlike the books in those traditions, helpful citations to sources of ideas, links to news stories that occasioned the element of contemporary interest in an entry, etc.

Not sold by the quoted verse, but your vision of the author's vision is very appealing; I'll check out more of her stuff, thanks. Thanks also for the quote and link re Matches---and n "permeable boudaries between literature and criticism" reminds me that I need to read this, recently linked and endorsed on twitter by Luc Sante, who says, “Great essay on the ways poetry has moved through nonfiction":
https://www.graywolfpress.org/blogs/poetry-fact-robert-polito

And the reference to Finnegan's Wake in j's comments on Bergvall reminds me: any suggestions for annotated editions of FW and Ulysses would be welcome.

oh yeah i don't know if i can sell it with a quote, pretty much anything lineated as verse in the book is heavily narrative, on the model of the chaucer, and for that reason it doesn't 'read' right in stanza-length (the above is one page) excerpt so much, it just dashes along. i suppose part of the trick is that it has the word-to-word, and sub-word, texture of lyric (kind of like reading celan in the translations by joris), which the book signals physically by the size and the way the pages are laid out, but it has the prosody of an epic.

if i remember right you're an old-guard music critic, right? i've been reading some more of 'matches', it is SUCH a critics' book.

I dunno what "old-guard" means here, but "old," yeah. As a music reviewer prone to flights, I'm inspired and cautioned all over again by xpost Polito's quote of Manny Farber on "Termite Art," in which swoops etc never lose sight of the specifics, as he zooms in on weathered, primetime John Wayne, still enduring and unimpressed by John Ford's bloated West.
But quotes don't always do it, as you point out, and, despite doubts about quotes from Matches, in the linked review you posted and on Amazon, it seems worth buying, thanks.

Knut Hamsun's Hunger. Finally getting massively into the book. One I've meant to read for decades.
Quite harrowing.

I remember a rather good sitcom about a psychotic book group from the 1990s with two swedes reading 'hunger'. "Why doesnt he just go and get some food? Stupid Norwegian!"

The Book Group with Michelle Gomez and a few others who've turned up elsewhere since? The Swedes were footballers wives I think.

I did not mind SPQR, even if it came off like a Clive James voice over for a Roman history doc.

I've continued to read SPQR. It is a competent summary/overview, but I had hoped that she'd be weaving more information into the narrative that was sourced from archeology and inscriptions, rather than surviving texts, bcz I've read about 85% of those texts and her analysis is along very conventional lines, and so it's not really challenging or enlarging any of Roman history as I already viewed it.

I read it as popular history

Seems like the most accurate way to categorize it.

The Book Group, that's the one. I should have remembered the the title, really. guid on ye, big man.

Catherine Parr Traill, The Backwoods of Canada
L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (re-read)
Alice Munro, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

Just started reading Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper and it is fucking incredible!! It is absolutely crazy and savagely funny. 25 pages in and easily the best thing I've read for the last couple of years.

oliver Harris: The House of Fame -- third of his books about Nick Belsey, a catastrophically self-destructive and corrupt London detective who has excellent detective skills/instincts but no self-control and a bemused, sardonic stance as he watches himself stumble into other people's disasters. He starts the book squatting in the abandoned Hampstead police station while waiting to be arrested for corruption, and things deteriorate from there. Very recommended.

Charlotte Wood: The Natural Way of Things -- deeply unpleasant but well-written novel about misogyny and corporations profiting from human misery, which is currently winning all the awards in Australia

Adolfo Bioy Casares - Asleep in the Sun has the absurdist plot of a man married to a dog (assume his wife was taken over, not that it matters too much). By turns, a spin on unconditional love, bureaucratic (perhaps evil) institutions (the asylum the bitch is confined to) and also - even more so - how people might substitute the need of love for another human being for the love of a pet - all felt underdeveloped. Moravia's Agostino was a masterful novella, especially in its initial scenes of a highly charged eroticism between mother (widowed, beautiful) and a teenage son. Could be read alongside some Musil and Mishima.

Rilke's letters. The Norton volume covers much of his correspondence from 1910 to his death. The lonely, highly literary hobo might appear unattractive but the girls were digging it.

A friend reports:
I'm finishing The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life by Ryszard Kapuscinski, which is one fantastic book: a collection of his shorter pieces from all over sub-Saharan Africa. Among other things it contains the most lucid account of the factors behind the Rwandan genocide, as well as a few of the other neverending armed conflicts on the continent. Extremely highly recommended. Not my usual, but intriguing.

Last night I read the Prologue to Confessio Amantis, John Gower in the verse modernization by Terence Tiller (Penguin Classics). Not sure how far I'll go on with it.

Robertson Davies, The Fifth Business (excellent)
A bunch of Canadian poetry

Now reading The Third Reich, which, if I read the intro correctly, was Roberto Bolano's first novel. He has a keen sense of characterization.