ILB Gripped the Steps and Other Stories. What Are You Reading Now, Spring 2017

I've been reading Malgudi Days, a set of short stories by R. K. Narayan, mostly by the light of an LED headlamp, because we've been out of power for the past 3 days. Just got electricity back about an hour ago. There was a windstorm on Friday.

Did you like it? I'm a big Narayan fan. Downloaded a whole bunch of Malgudi episodes from the Indian 1980s TV series a while back, but have never actually got around to watching them yet.

On book 2 of Wolfhound Empire trilogy, which retains its excellence. People who like Alan Furst or Dave Hutchinson and who can handle a bit of fantasy will like this, i think.

I love Narayan, have a bunch of his stuff. His American tour diary is v interesting.

The first 2/3 of Malgudi Days is excerpted from two early short story collections. These stories all tend to be quite short, about 5 pages each, could more accurately be described as brief tales or vignettes than fully-developed stories. Their interest for me lay chiefly in their capturing some small slice of Indian life drawn almost exclusively from the poor or petty middle class, which a contemporary Indian would have instinctively associated with particular castes, but I am not versed enough in the culture to make such distinctions. The latter third seems to contain longer stories of a dozen of more pages, but I haven't read these, yet.

imo, Narayan's great strength is his ability to capture India's bewildering diversity of people and folkways in extremely simple and convincing microcosms. These stories display that strength. It's like a slide show but in full color and 3-D, full of lively detail.

Should I read Mistry's Such a Long Journey?

Reading a trashy paperback I picked up ages ago: Forbbiden Lovers, about lesbianism during the classic Hollywood era. It's a total mess, making no real distinctions between relationships that have actual documentation backing them up, shady rumor based stuff and stars who happened to have a strong gay following (an interesting topic in its own right, of course). It's padded out with lists of gay women on Broadway and 1920's Paris, and chapters on stuff more unrelated still - Fatty Arbuckle's scandal, for one. Also jumps back and forth in time to a frustrating degree - the "Garbo talks!" moment is mentioned after, like, chapters on her talkie career. Still, the first few chapters, which get very detailed about the love triangle between Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and screenwriter/author Mercedes De Acosta, are written with empathy and avoid trying to make things seem sleazy or lurid - could make for a good episode of You Must Remember This.

and - after months on hold from my library and my forgetting about it until it arrived last week - Chris Kraus' I Love Dick

Interested to hear what you think! I read that recently and found it both fascinating and irritating - reading GoodReads reviews of it made me more puzzled still.

Reading Red Shift by Alan Garner. I wasn't sure at first - too dialogue heavy, too riddled with elisions - but it's grown on me. Kitchen sink landscape mysticism? It might just catch on.

I got the BFI DVD of the TV version of this and it comes with an extra on Garner that makes him seem hyper-pretentious in a not entirely unlikeable way.

Ah yes, I've been meaning to ask: anyone have any particular Mathews recommendations?

There is a thread btw.

Oh! Thanks!

Thanks for the Mansfield tips upthread. Has anybody read any Melvin B. Tolson? I randomly found an excerpt of his Libretto for the Republic of Liberia and it looks SO MY THING.

I haven't, really, but I came across him via this book about canonization which is really good and readable.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/916704.Marginal_Forces_Cultural_Centers

^
It explores the idea that 'Tolson urgently needs to be brought into the canon' contradicts 'Pynchon is depoliticized by being canonized', ie divergent ideas of canon relating to writers from different backgrounds / literary spheres.

= "the canon" shd in fact be an argument abt what canons shd be?

"The Death of the Heart", Elizabeth Bowen. I've read a short story or two by her in anthologies but this was my first novel. She's a heavyweight and an original and there's some really wonderful stuff in this but also stuff that must have looked a bit dated even in 1938: a Henry James type preoccupation with subtle moral failings of the cultivated classes, and a wodge of observations of a philosophical and/or psychological sort by an omniscient authorial voice - some perceptive and interesting but others just portentous.

As a complete change I'm reading Anthony Burgess's "Earthly Powers". I've avoided this for ages thinking it might not be my thing at all, all macho intellectual display, but I'm about 120 pages in and it's been great fun so far.

mark s I agree - a lot of discussion of "the canon" treats it as though it were a fixed thing, but I think of it more as a dynamic system constantly re-evaluating itself; also as an aggregation of sub canons, all jockeying for position.

Re: Earthly Powers. Hand it to a Catholic to do a proper job of taking the piss out of the church.

Picked up The Evenings by Gerard Reve. Its a kind of ALWAYS angry and alienated young man novel, pretty witty and at-times fucked for the lolz. Reminded me of Mishima, a novel someone writes in their 20s except the person writing it won't grow out of, a phase that won't pass, its just there for some reason and won't go, and they are bringing the flavour of THAT on the page. Written in '46 so there is no respite from the torment just because a war is over.

As the sun turns up I went back to pre-war middle Europe (where else?) for an account by Gershom Schoelem in Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, a nice enough trawl through the memory of the scholar's time with Benjamin in the intellectual humanist hothouse, and his attempt to claim Benjamin as a superior metaphysical thinker instead of merely a materialist cultural critic that he went on to be painted as. His attempts to get Benjamin to Palestine well ahead of time are tragic although he writes with much distance (actual or otherwise, this book is from '75). Kafka hangs very deeply through much of this. Went back to fiction, firstly via a bunch of micro-stories by Peter Altenberg as collected in Telegrams of the Soul where the translator doesn't mention Walser which is really odd as this is surely the sensibility its tapping up, and went onto more Viennese stories by Joseph Roth in his novella Weights and Measures where it seems to directly draw from his drinking problem and marital disaffections on the one hand. On the other the guy does mood, the pages describing the outbreak of cholera in the town - and where that takes the story - are expertly done in an A+ performance.

As a complete change I'm reading Anthony Burgess's "Earthly Powers". I've avoided this for ages thinking it might not be my thing at all, all macho intellectual display, but I'm about 120 pages in and it's been great fun so far.

It boasts one of the two or three best opening sentences I've ever read in a novel.

I am reading "The Wager" by Machado de Assis.

I really wish that there was more Peter Altenberg in English: that collection (Archipelago-published) is very good

Sueurs Froides by Boileau and Narcejac; the material Vertigo is based on. They also did the original novel of Les Diaboliques.

Both those have been republished in english in the last couple of years, by Pushkin Press

Just started Lanark.

Cool. Are you listening to Belle & Sebastian as you read it?

Hahaha, no, but I could dig some out.

Because I think I know someone who did just that.

*raises hand*

Of course, this was during the Sinister days.

Not that I was on Sinister or knew of its existence, but I must have sensed its presence across the Atlantic.

What's the connection? I don't know b&s too well

I started in on Lanark v skeptical and still think the second part drags a bit but the back half is so so great.

No connection other than being Scottish, as far as I know.

I read Lanark in a malarone fug in a hut in Senegal. No Belle and Sebstian was consumed.

Lanark is way too weird to be compared with B&S. It also has one of my favourite book covers

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/cf/49/cc/cf49cc215e3112125ba79a717e80cf42.jpg

idk there is a shared repressed, artsy Scottish gloom in common

lanark is more the second half of 'the red thread' imo

Shakey otm

Gray is a precursor of B&S as a voice of art school Glasgow, but by about 40 years - he started writing that book in the 1950s.

There was ultimately supposed to be a genuine connection as he was set to do some kind of illustration for them but I can't now find reference to it. Also a member of B&S played in the stage version of LANARK, this decade. There is a general parallel in their becoming West End icons and also, I think, agreeing about Scottish independence (as do Deacon Blue, Hue & Cry, et al).

The Real Glasgow sections of LANARK have some relevance to B&S or any other subsequent vision of Glasgow but I don't think the resemblance in tone is very close.

The SF / Fantasy / Gothic sections, I think there is still less connection.

Overall - of all the things Gray has done, I'm not sure that LANARK is the closest to B&S.

I always wanted to like the book a lot but found it actually very stodgy to read, except the Prologue (?) 3/4 of the way through which I thought the most dazzling section.

Actually the Gray work that IS closest to B&S is his Hillhead mural.

http://www.sadlergreen.com/_images/_versions/l/164.jpg
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-19612581

I wanted to read Lanark because I thought it would be about a wonderful fantasy Scotland where Belle and Sebastian don't exist

I agree that Lanark is kinda stodgy. I loved the section with the mural, but the Kafka/sci-fi bit felt interminable.

Ward Fowler: it is -- a Scotland prior to c.1981.

Thank you Pinefox, I was being a wee bit cheeky, as they say up here.

Actually, I have been trying to think of other Scottish performers who seem closer to A Gray than B&S, and the nearest person I could think of was Ivor Cutler.

I'm reading Darian Leader's Stealing the Mona Lisa, which is a kind of avuncular take on Lacanian views of art. It's taken a while to get going, and there's a LOT of passive/subjunctive mood waffle, but it's hitting it's stride and slowly pulling me in.

Xp Long Fin Killie?

Cutler without doubt! Very close.

But I think there is a tendency for a great swathe of 'Scottish alternative artists' to get rolled together, either by themselves or by others -- so eg: I am sure that B&S will have talked about Cutler (maybe even collaborated with him somewhere), and Edwin Morgan --so it all gets implicitly connected.

For that matter I'm sure that Deacon Blue (who were not so Alternative) repeated Gray's most famous slogan re 'the early days of a better nation' on a record sleeve.

Cutler and B&S both on this record.
Will stop now and remind myself that this is ILB not ILM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colours_Are_Brighter

Thanks for following up so diligently on my derail, the pinefox:) If you want to keep it ILB, you could talk about Gray contrasted with Muriel Spark- TS Glasgow vs. Edinburgh- although perhaps that is a too facile, classic New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure Section-style comparison.

James Redd -- the thing there is: I get how Spark is Edinburgh / Morningside ... but I don't really get how Gray is Glasgow in a directly contrasting way. The big contrast would surely be Spark vs Kelman (or Leonard or Torrington) - the really gritty working-class-tenement writers -- rather than Gray's tendency to fancy, whimsy, Gothic, history, etc.

(this has always been a general point for me - I get that Gray and Kelman and Leonard are pals and have similar politics -- but I don't see the literary, stylistic, generic link between Gray and the others)

In fact this would lead back to the B&S idea in that eg: Kelman = gritty Govan and Gray = whimsical Hillhead -- more the B&S world / era.

Toibin is one of my favorite writers, particularly when he writes short fiction.

Banville is dreary, yeah.

> John Darnielle, Universal Harvester

Kazuo Ishiguro likes it:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/08/hot-books-summer-reads-holiday-writers-recommend

Ishiguro OTM.

Terry Pratchett Pyramids
not sure if first 11 pages of this are missing or not. Library copy that I've had out for months and am only just getting around to reading.
Events in the Assassins guild college.

Memoirs of A Geezer Jah Wobble
think I mainly picked this up because of teh p.I.L. connections but am getting interested in his solo stuff, probably should have been already.

The Philosopher's Stone Peter Marshall
picked this up from a sale years ago. Got about 100 pages into it then started reading something else.
Thought I'd give it another shot.
History of the transforming object, starts with an ancient Chinese tomb being opened and the lady inside still being perfectly preserved. he then looks at similar beliefs across the globe and across history ancient to modern going through alchemy etc etc.
Should be really interesting.

Wholly without warrant or authorization, I have initiated a new WAYR thread: Heavens! Look at the Time: What Are You Reading During This Summer of 2017?.

I am hoping ILB will soon occupy it, like a hermit crab seeking a new shell, and adorn it with our usual literate observations.

And for the people who use www.ilxor.com, not those heathens who use just ilxor.com

Heavens! Look at the Time: What Are You Reading During This Summer of 2017?

And for the people who use www.ilxor.com, not those heathens who use just ilxor.com

Heavens! Look at the Time: What Are You Reading During This Summer of 2017?🕸