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

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.

I think Antwerp and Monsieur Pain were written earlier, but I like the slowly-mounting atmosphere of dread throughout The Third Reich, even if it feels sketchier than most of Bolaño's 90s novels.

Edna O'Brien - In the Forest
* Marianne Moore - Selected Poems

the fall of kelvin walker: a fable of the sixties by alasdair gray

Love Comes To Buildings On Fire book on 5 years of music in NYC in the 70s. I'm on 75 so far. Pretty good so far.

The Chill by Ross Macdonald >
A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor >
Bill The Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison

the chill is the best macdonald imo. i read it and cry of the owl by patricia highsmith back to back and they're always closely associated in my mind (both from 1962 iirc).

Funnily enough, there's a hard boiled crime thread somewhere on here, where James Redd (under a diff user name) says much the same thing about The Chill (my copy of which cost me twenty pence in a library sale). I haven't really read enough Macdonald to attempt a ranking, but I adore his descriptions of locations and atmosphere, so a mostly fog-bound mystery definitely plays to his strengths.

There's also a funny sequence where Archer rather improbably picks up a book on philosophy to read while waiting on a witness or something, and you know it's there just cos Macdonald wanted to talk about Zeno for a bit

yeah macdonald & philosophy is like pk dick & classical music

PKD had a classical music radio program and a classical music store (worked in one, anyway) before giving it all up to write science fiction full-time (and live on speed and cat food from time to time). Yeah, he shares classical music breaks in some of his fiction like Ross MacDonald does the philosophy (ditto John D. MacDonald, eventually at much greater length).

and macdonald aka kenneth millar had a phi beta kappa phd in literature. didn't mean to suggest he and pkd were fakin' it.

hope this is not too spoilery but the thing that ties the chill and cry of the owl together most in my mind is they both have great abrupt giallo-style endings.

a PK Dick story collection, in fact

Again, spoilery - yes, The Chill definitely has a great last minute twist that casts the entire narrative in a v different light, but it's more Sleepaway Camp than Bird w/ the Crystal Plumage, imho

Think I have Cry of the Owl on a stack somewhere, will check it out thanks

xpost no, I didn't think you were suggesting that they were faking it, I just wanted to add my fyi. btw, I saw that Library of America Ross MacD. recently and wondered, nothing against him, but why not somebody who needs more exposure, like Jean Stafford (but maybe they've done a JS collection as well? Hope so)

Which reminds me: is Katherine Anne Porter good? Used to be a big name, but I never see her mentioned any more.

She's good! Start with 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider', which is a pretty good overview of her short fiction (it's a Penguin UK book), or else the massive Library of America hardcover has all her short fiction.

Though I see the sole Amazon review of Pale Horse is not impressed: "This book has lots of good reviews but I purchased it as it was recomended by John M. Barry in his book 'The Great Influenza- The story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History'. I found it very slow and of no interest to my research on the Pandemic of 1918/19 and must admit I have given up trying to read it."

Dazai's The Setting Sun has the potential to corrode your inner being - this is basically a suicide note as fiction. Very calculated and cool. I then went on to finish a few stories by Joseph Roth where all his themes of displacement due to the collapse of Austro-Hungary makes itself felt to a more or less of an extent.

I finished the Regina Ullmann story collection. I wasn't sure about the dreamlike, disconnected style at first, but I warmed to it by the end. The style seems to fit well with some of the more focused childhood reminiscences. There's a funny aside about halfway through one of these stories: "It's a strange thing about human thoughts. If I told someone this story, he would probably have trouble saying at the point what it was about, since nothing had been thought yet, nothing had been done." This goes for most of the stories in the collection, but yet somehow they mostly work.

thought id put this here for idk book ppl who wouldnt click the ile reddit thread, this serialized story being posted is neat -- info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9

it was bothering me that i couldnt recall & then i did that it reminds me of this book quite a bit, or at least the writing style does def - https://www.amazon.com/Method-Actors-novel-Carl-Shuker-ebook/dp/B005JUOGOM?ie=UTF8&qid=1462844460&ref_=la_B001JP2O7M_1_1&s=books&sr=1-1

Visit to NYC bookshop specializing in French lit. Fave: the finale, staff's takes on their picks:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/may/09/interview-with-a-bookstore-albertine-a-little-paris-in-new-york?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks