Sumer Is Icumen In 2015, What Are You Reading Now?

with a nod to Lord Summerisle himself, the late Christopher Lee. Couldn't wait for the bonfires so starting the thread now.

i'm still reading Space Platform by Murray Leinster. which is not a great book.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/ef/0f/5b/ef0f5bcfae26e40951c00b52a442e6e0.jpg

Is that a novel? Never heard of it

A courtesy link to the previous WAYR thread (Spring 2015). btw, thanks, JRatB.

And thank you, Aimless, as well as other the other ILB regulars who keep me coming back here for interesting and insightful discussions of books I would read if I had the time to.

it is a novel. i'm afraid i don't have a lot of insightful things to say about it though. i'm only halfway through though, so, who knows...

xp

Yes, ILB has a marvelous collection of book lovers. Who needs the NYT Review of Books when we have I Love Books as a lamp unto our feet.

i reread the great gatsby (will reread actually, about a chapter left)

it has been many years. i don't remember understanding it, although i read it several times in my early twenties so i must have understood something about something besides 'ooh pretties'

And thanks to James Morrison for recommending Leaving Orbit, by Margaret Dean, which I just rapidly perused. I am a sucker for anything involving the VAB, although I gave up pretty quickly on Rocket Men, by Craig Nelson, I think, when I read how many hundreds of howlers of basic scientific and engineering were in there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtXuNUEM3vg

tl;dw Can you please prevent a link to print list?

somehow I mistrust whether bill gates' taste in books would align well with my own

From what I saw of the list it was not terrible- think it was all nonfiction, but nowhere near as good as David Bowie's , whose taste was reasonably close to my own.

Murray Leinster wrote some canonical short stories such as A Logic Named Joe" and "First Contact" and did some other interesting things- think in addition to being an sf and science writer he was also a tinkerer/inventor and perhaps came up with the idea of some early version of Front Projection- but I wouldn't be brave enough to risk the great pain of one of his space novels.

Speaking of the VAB, long considered starting a thread particularly for books about spaceflight but could never think of a what to call it.

I finally finished Houellebecq's Soumission. It's a very Parisian novel, not one I see having much of an audience if it's ever translated into English. The narrator's conversion in the end is hilarious for its shallowness: it's only when he sees other new converts drinking choice booze and having marriages with 15 year old girls arranged by madams that he takes the leap. There are discussions of politics and metaphysics (creationism, really) but they play almost no role in the narrator's move toward Islam. The university president who persuades the narrator to convert in exchange for a choice professorial post is a Nietzschean who was active in his youth in Catholic right wing circles, and seems to see Islam as just another means to his ends: the domination of women and more broadly the assumption of power (maybe these are the same for him). There are only two female characters of note, neither of whom is able to sustain any resistance to the Islamic tide, and both of whom are involved in the plot largely as sexual actors. (There are also several prostitutes.) I suppose the novel plays out its personal drama---an aging professor who just wants to eat and fuck well---as resolvable through submission to Islam, and so religiosity is itself simply a manifestation of the will to power.

That sounds ... rebarbative.

I steer well clear of that guy. There is a wide line between meaningful misanthropy and just being a hater.

Okay, as promised, a new thread for y'all gaze at through an unreflective telescope: DSKY-DSKY Him Sad: Official ILB Thread For The Heroic Age of Manned Spaceflight

I have been wanting to read Senselessness by Castellanos Moya for a good long while now.

i've read this. it's awesome
― flopson, Friday, June 19, 2015 2:02 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Just glanced at this and my inner pedant wants to say the title should be translated as "How Insensitive."

Which of course is not quite right, but that is how it often is with inner pedants.

I finished John K Galbraith's The Affluent Society, which I think holds up rather well for a bit of socioeconomic analysis from the last 1950s. As mentioned previously, Galbraith is a seriously suave polemicist. I don't think there's anyone among the current crop of liberal-leaning econo-bloggers, from Krugman on down, who could could match his casually debonair way with an argument. Just one example: in the afterward (written I believe for the '90s reissue, so not necessarily evidence of uncanny prescience) he mentions his fear that an affluent society will breed philosophical doctrines to justify neglect of the less fortunate, and then casually demolishes in passing a prominent strand of libertarian economic argument: "I pass over the oft-mentioned formulation that the rich have not been working because of too little income and the poor have been idling because of too much." I can't imagine this being put any better.

The Old Testament, King James Version. Just started (The Third Book of the) Kings. . . I look forward to learning many things I never knew about the King Solomon character

Still on Wolf Hall, about 1/3rd of the way through. Pretty great.

Got Ford Maddox Ford's history of literature, can't think of title, to read on the bog. Pretty interesting, hope I finish it this time. Have started it at least once before. Think I'm now at ancient China.

Got at least a chapter or 2 of the history of dance music I've been reading on the bus. Think it's called Turn The Beat Around and I'm on post-punk.

Picked up Baker's The Peregrine at the university library I once again have access to -- after going to student stores, passing over H is for Hawk 'current hardcover' @ 25% off & T.H. White's The Goshawk NYRB reissue prominently placed in "Literature" -- only to buy the Ocampo selected stories that was recommended by a guy I know.

#NYRB #DamnYankees

Two hundred pages into the second volume of the well-named My Struggle.

Also: Mark Strand's Blizzard of One.

A partial list of books I touched & thought about buying: Leve's Autoportrait, the recent Ben Marcus short story collection, several things with Dalkey Archive on the spine that I no longer remember, Michael Leiris - Aurora, Peter Mathiessen - The Snow Leopard, Leonora Carrington - The Hearing Trumpet, & Absalom, Absalom!

Novel 11, Book 18 by Dag Solstad. Before that, The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout. Before that, The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora.

I've recently started H is for Hawk.

Dalkey Archive have published some pretty good books with some truly hideous covers recently.

Just started Dickens: American Notes - very funny so far, though he hasn't even reached America yet

The last five days have made that Dickens book germane.

Juan Jose Saer - Scars. Finishing this and loving it. Guy knows how to describe thrash and has a lot of fun explaining games of bacarat, probably knows most of the readership would be unable to follow so its a greta excuse to churn out some automatic writing.

Kevin Schultz - Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties

study in contrasts shows these two publicity fiends had more in common than anyone might imagine. theory is both attacked traditional liberalism from right and left extremes. some revealing minor details unearthed, not earth shattering but that process sheds new light on overly familiar 1960s ground. definitely benefits from Schultz being in his 40s and an acolyte of neither man. biggest disappointment to me was the abrupt ending - nothing on Mailer's debacle with Jack Henry Abbott nor Buckley's relationship with Reagan in the 80s. that was especially frustrating cause Schultz documents how Buckley regraded Reagan warily - at least privately - in the late 60s. far from revelatory overall but recommended for Rick Pearlstein fans.

Nelson George, The Hippest Trip in America: Soul Train and the Evolution of Culture & Style

Still slowly reading Villette, Rat Bohemia (Sarah Schulman's bracingly unsentimental and witty novel of the AIDS crisis), Sarah Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology, and Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider.

currently reading:

atif mian & amir sufi - house of debt

really good popularization of their research, which was basically playing around with an unprecedentedly rich & enormous US-wide micro data set to investigate the role of household debt in the recession. some great identification tricks too. also if you are ever confused while reading macroeconomists debate the crisis it puts a lot of stuff in perspective. after a terrible, overly theoretical and muddled macro sequence last year this got me juiced up on macro again

next up is david mitchell - ghostwritten

Thanks for the Rat Bohemia rec!

No problem! This is the first thing I've read by Schulman, but I'd like to get around to her polemic against heterosexual AIDS narratives, Stagestruck, passages from which have been going around trans twitter of late.

Just finished Enderby Outside, which probably outstayed its welcome by the end but was very good in parts, and am currently half way through Agata Pyzik's Poor But Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West which is about as relevant to my interests as any book is ever likely to get - encompassing Eastern European politics, Soviet architecture, cold wave, Borowczyk, Żuławski, Einsturzende Neubauten, etc, etc. It's excellent.

Not read her wriitngs (and er probably not going to as I don't have the patience for zero books) but you can watch her despair at the Polish elections (later his year iirc?) on twitter.

Novel 11, Book 18 by Dag Solstad. Before that, The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout. Before that, The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora.

― youn, Wednesday, 24 June 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Reading Dag Solstad next. How are you finding it youn?

Very good. I really enjoyed Shyness and Dignity. I will post a quote on the ILX Quotation Time thread.

That's the one I'm reading next!

weird, i was just looking for 'rat bohemia' the other day (and couldn't find it)

Finishing Shyness and Dignity - somewhat similar to Bernhard, like how it situates those ideas about fiction (that section on novels of the 1920s is pretty much something I'd write v badly in my own novel, except I'd probably include a rant about how the irony in Mann never comes off - in English at least) in a particular time where the thirst for fiction/reading is supposedly dying (this is the late-80s). Overall its a digested modernism that never turned into games (which would be called postmod but I'm not calling it that). Lone man at the gates as the barbarians are about to storm it, excepts he is no weirdo and is married to a beauty - but actually as the plot unfolds it is pretty convincing.

youn - if you pull out a sentence it would be interesting to know which one. V tightly knit together.

Hanging on with both mitts to the Richard Wright Express, via the Modern Library omnibus of Lawd Today Uncle Tom's Children Native Son. Social Realism, I guess, but the sustained multi-dimensional focus, esp. of UTC (so far minus any set pieces etc. of Fine Writing) has me thinking of Dubliners, when it allows me time (mostly between readings) for mere comparison. Bloomsday might be the point of departure for Lawd Today's unified framework for that matter (maybe Dos Passos's radio blasts too). Haven't gotten to Native Son yet, but I'm sensing the build and boot camp, duh.

Library of America, not Modern Library.

I recently re-read Steinbeck's Cannery Row. I first read it as a teenager. It has a few interesting perspectives on living in the world, but mostly seemed like a relic, a corrective to attitudes that have long since been buried in the sands of time and change.

I then read Muriel Spark's Abbess of Crewe. It's great virtue that attracted me was that I needed a very short book, which did not weigh much, because I took it on a wilderness trek. As literature, it was not up to Spark's best. It had only one character of any magnitude and even then her magnitude was not immense.

I am now apparently committed to reading Henry James' The Bostonians, being about a third of the way into it. The characters are all somewhat grotesque and the plot hinges on James' insistence that a particular young woman has an astonishing innocent presence, amounting almost to genius, which charms and attracts all who come in contact with her, but he has not the slightest idea how to show this trait in action, and he falls back on repeatedly assuring the reader that her genius exists, despite the complete lack of evidence for its existence. Weak sauce, Henry, very weak sauce.

Yeah I gave up on The Bostonians after about 1/3 of it. It's the only Henry James I've ever read/tried to read and I feel like I should try a different one.

I read Michael Wood's ALFRED HITCHCOCK: THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. To be honest it was not MW's best work.

Now I read Colm Toibin's ON ELIZABETH BISHOP.

The Bostonians has a strange structure: the first third of the novel covers a day and a night! Once the Olive-Verena quasi-romance starts, the book picks up.

franny glass, I always recommend Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady.

It's been a while since I read The Bostonians but IIRC, Verena's innocence and purity is more ambiguous than Aimless allows for, though this possibly doesn't become apparent until quite late in the novel (James also doesn't really make much of an effort to engage with or articulate the feminist politics notionally in play, just as The Princess Casamassima doesn't really engage with radical politics - it's enough to know that these people are 'radicals', or 'feminists', or 'spiritualists' or whatever, and I'm not sure that any more 'evidence' is required than this.) What should be apparent right from this start is that this is James writing in his most ironic mode - it's a cooller version of the comedy of manners already played out in The Europeans - which makes the book's final sentence all the more devastating. This is not really a novel of character.

there's a strong hint in The Bostonians that Verena manipulates her charm and is no ingenue

the portraits of Dr. Prance and Ms. Birdseye are sharp. He was expert at the kinds of portraits you expect from Dickens.

Verena's innocence and purity is more ambiguous than Aimless allows for

You may note that I said that she has an "innocent presence", not that she is an innocent. At this point in the novel she is a complete cipher that others continually pour their aspirations into. James gives almost no hints as to what she is thinking, but generally appraises her actions through the lens of one of the other characters or his narrator hedges its description with terms such as 'apparently'. The fact that she has red hair is touched on so lightly and briefly that it makes me wonder whether this is meant as a foreshadowing of a less demure personality than she currently displays.

xyzzzz__, I could go up to the stacks to get it, but I'm wondering if you might want to post something instead as you are reading, which I think is most of the fun -- holding on to it, so to speak.

I checked out The Wild Duck by Ibsen, Correction by Bernhard, and Senselessness by Castellanos Moya and will probably read them in that order. But with Ibsen, I reverted to my own Bantam paperback because I started to get distracted by the marginalia and underlining in the Michael Meyer translation from the library.

Thanks Alfred, I suspect HJ is really up my alley. I wasn't connecting with The Bostonians, but in large part I just didn't have time to keep up with it, and it was due back at the library so I quit. Life is more conducive to novel-reading lately so I want to give him another try.

finished rory stewart. between that & the anand gopal, that's enough afghanistan for the immediate future, I think. tobias jones' "the dark heart of italy" next.

youn - finished and gave it back to my library the next day. I loved the last few pages, with its writing around decay of beauty. Solstad is not as relentlessly negative as Bernhard - who is doing it as performance, its that v particular voice of his. Correction was my first read by him.

I am reading a collection by Rilke - poems from all periods (tr. Steven Mitchell) which also has excerpts of the more 'poetic' passages of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Not sure what I think of doing so - suppose its as worthwhile a way of coming across that book.

I haven't read much James - tried some of his longer novels & bogged down in them quite quickly - but thought The Turn of the Screw was top-notch.

I always say start with the early novels first.

Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power by Timothy Tyson

I became curious about Williams recently while reading another civil rights-era history. So far I've only read as far as his WW2-era military service:

His contempt for white authority soon earned him a three-month sentence in the stockade for insubordination; at the hearing, Williams said, 'I told them that I was black, and that prison did not scare me because black men are born in prison. All they could do was put me in a smaller prison.'"

(Sorry for fixing on the obvious pull-quote, even if it had become justly famous)

Hadot - The Veil of Isis

On three words of Heraclitus usually translated, "Nature loves to hide," which gets interpreted in different ways down through the ages. I'm trying to read in French and relieved to find that this is pretty clear and straightforward.

keep meaning to read that but

I think you would like it. It strikes me as a really cool perspective on the history of philosophy, or a cool choice of aphorism to serve as kernel to build a synoptic history around.

He's adding to my shame at how much I've neglected the ancients. I only read the Symposium for the first time a few weeks ago. Turns out it's really great.

i've read a lot of him, studied 'what is ancient philosophy?' pretty closely even - just haven't made the time

all of plato is really great! that's why he's plato

oh i like hadot
big influence on late foucault (re ancient philosophy as way of life/ care of the self/ askesis)

picked up #2 in the elena ferrante trilogy to read in cape cod next week B-)

The White Album - Joan Didion. This is fantastic. The alignment of personal psychology and exploration to the geist of the age is exact - tone, insight, humour make reading this feel very direct, very clear-sighted. I loved her observation about the San Francisco State College revolutionary actions:

Perhaps Evelyn Waugh could have gotten it down exactly right: Waugh was good at scenes of industrious self-delusion, scenes of people involved in odd games.

industrious self-delusion - it's a phrase that manages to be illuminating about Waugh, illuminating about her subject, and potentially illuminating for future ages such as ours (in countries like the UK anyway), where that very phrase seems like a characterising and besetting vice.

Enjoyed her piece Holy Water - about the water logistics and politics of the Western States - so much, that I'm going to sit down and watch Chinatown right now. My enjoyment is slightly unexpected (presumably harbouring some filthy unexamined prejudice), but stronger for that.

just started the dalkey archive's european fiction 2015 - a collection of short stories. the first two i read at random both had severed penises in them.

i have already abandoned a few due to them being twee magic realism shite, but there was a good one from france about a man who lives in an apartment block sending severed limbs and threatening notes to the residents association.

I first thought severed limbs would be sufficient threat, but then again he prob wanted to be precise, which is always helpful, or meant to be. Title, author?

Sjon: The Whispering Muse -- Icelandic fish expert/obsessive goes on ride to Turkey on a freighter ship; one of the crew is a former Argonaut (as in the golden fleece Argonauts, not the vintage kids radio show)

i got bored of the murray leinster book i was reading so i started reading john le carre's the night manager because i've never read any of his books! but i'm kinda not into that one either. i kept putting it down and then when i picked it up again i forgot everyone's names and who the flashback anecdotes were about. but i've always wanted to read him. i have a bunch of his later hardcovers. i dunno, guess i'm feeling a little uninspired at the moment. (so now i'm finishing the leinster out of a sense of duty...)

such a boring post. sorry. you guys read cool fancy books. i like the idea of having internet friends who read cool fancy books.

With le Carre I'd start with either The Spy Who Came In From the Cold or else Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy -- if they don't do it for you, I'd doubt the others will. And I tend to enjoy them more as novels about amoral office politics where lives hang on the decisions being made, rather than just amounts of toner that gets ordered, instead of as spy novels. Does that make any sense?

Thomas King, The Back of the Turtle

I finished everything in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. 1 and Vol. 2A. Highlights were Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" and C.L. Moore's "Vintage Season". I read a few from Vol. 2B but I'm taking a break from it.

also read Erik Davis - 33 ⅓: Led Zeppelin IV (2005). Some funny bits from Thomas Friend's crazy book. Didn't care about the journey of "Percy".

currently reading:
2015 Hugo nominees. "The Parliament of Beasts and Birds" may be the worst thing I have ever read.
Thomas Harris - Red Dragon. Because I like the TV show. Low reading grade level -- feels like the only 3-syllable words in the book are "psychopath" and "cannibal".

Are those Hugo nominees the right-wing misogynistic illiterate ones?

the gap between 'red dragon' and 'silence of the lambs' is really remarkable, bookwise

I've only read the second--is it the better or the worse?

xp Right wing and illiterate, yes. Of the ones in the bloc I read, only "Totaled" had female characters, and that one's actually OK.

dow - it's by nicolas bouyssi and it's called an unexpected return

could be in another collection of his own but i read it in this: http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/product/best-european-fiction-2015/

jm i think 'silence' is p close to being a Great Popular Novel, which i think is a difficult thing to do; red dragon is an awkward misfire

Silence is the Harris to start with, for sure. Although the serial killer seemed blurry; can see how Hannibal upstaged him in a lot of reviews, and certainly on screen---but the descriptions from Clarice's point of view have stayed with me more than any other element. When she's examining/contemplating the body of a dead girl, visiting her house (a tall, narrow wooden house near a canal? Or am I putting in a house from somewhere else? The one I picture seems to fit). In her room, reading it like she reads her memories, knowing about that little secret drawer in the valued dime store case, where the snapshots will be. The focus of such scenes and others, with morbidity something to be duly noted, while learning to read and recognize the killer from/in what he's left behind, in his work. Recognizing the kind of girls he chooses, she recognizes the changes he makes. Hannibal edits Clarice with relish, too---not his absolute fave, but he'll take what he can get.
Thinking about Great Novels also as crime fiction, the Dusty I've been trying to catch up with, the restored Native Son I'm reading now.

Thus Were Their Faces, the NYRB collection of Silvina Ocampo's short stories

I'm reading 'The Dispossessed' by UKLG which evidently has a bit of a cult following around these parts, but is the first I've read by her. Pretty great so far.

It took me half a minute of puzzlement to suss that UKLG was Ursula K. LeGuin.

Lately I've been reading Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen, Gertrude Stein's Ida, which is charming and puzzling but doesn't capture the uncanniness of American spectacle quite as vividly as Everybody's Autobiography, Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey, which is satisfyingly acerbic about the callousness and hypocrisy of the gentry but seems a little simplistic next to Charlotte's Vilette (though most bildungsromane would), Kim Hyesoon's book of poems Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream, which is by turns melancholy and feral, and William Gibson's The Peripheral, which as of halfway through has some interesting worldbuilding but surprisingly flat prose so far, though I'll reserve judgment on it for now.

Thanks, LocalGuardia, I'll check that out (publisher's page is somewhat worrying: Best European Fiction brings new names and new work to an international audience, at a time when the United States and Britain are seeing a dearth of translated texts. Makes me wonder what I'm missing.)
I need to check out Ocampo and Link too.

Intrigued by review of this new collection:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/mapping-the-wander-lines-the-quiet-revelations-of-fernand-deligny
Beginning in the 1950s, Deligny conducted a series of collectively run residential programs — he called them “attempts” (or tentatives, in French) — for children and adolescents with autism and other disabilities who would have otherwise spent their lives institutionalized in state-run psychiatric asylums. After settling outside of Monoblet in the shadow of the Cévennes Mountains in southern France, Deligny and his collaborators developed novel methods for living and working with young people determined to be “outside of speech” (hors de parole).

Militantly opposed to institutions of every kind — he occasionally referred to his small group as living like a band of nonlethal guerillas — Deligny was critical of the dominant psychiatric, psychoanalytic, and positivist educational doctrines of the time. He rejected the view that autism and cognitive disability were pathological deviations from a preexisting norm. He did not try to force the mostly nonspeaking autistics who came to live with them to conform to standards of speech. Instead, Deligny and his collaborators were “in search of a mode of being that allowed them to exist even if that meant changing our own mode.” They sought to develop “a practice that would exclude from the outset interpretations referring to some code” — anticipating, by several decades, some of the central tenets of the neurodiversity and autistic self-advocacy movements: “We did not take the children’s ways of being as scrambled, coded messages addressed to us.”
(He traced the paths of autistic youths in daily treks, which influenced his ideas about the development of language, in his own writing and in history (staying away from neurobiology), and the physical movements behind language, thence to working with Truffault and Marker, for inst., as well as making his own films, now on DVD.)
Like a spider’s web, a network is always in formation for Deligny, always in the midst of being built and maintained in compositional responsiveness to its environment. It is a precarious enterprise, in perpetual danger of either falling apart or, alternatively, rigidifying into an institution. (It is not surprising, given all of this, that Deligny was an important influence on Deleuze and Guattari’s later elaboration of the rhizome.)
Sorry, this too, since it's ILB after all:
His writerly voice is hard to locate genre-wise, skirting between philosophy and poetry, anthropological observation and quasi-prophetic (if emphatically secular) aphorism. Deligny seems to have approached the practice of writing with the same spirit of open-ended, improvisatory experimentation that characterized his various attempts at radically anti-institutional communal living...
Yet patient readers will find this book shimmering with quiet revelations. In place of orderly, coherent interpretive systems, Deligny attunes his reader to the lower frequencies of a life lived on the margins. His essays evoke the austere desert terrain of the Cévennes Mountains where he and his collaborators spent much of their time living in relative isolation; his deeply impressionistic writing surveys this landscape for its minor stirrings, and strives to imagine new arrangements of common life.
Not a s spoiler, there's lots more.

patient readers will find this book shimmering with quiet revelations

it's hard to respect the critical opinion of someone who thinks it is good idea to describe revelations as 'shimmering'.

he only did it once

but he read it back to himself approvingly several times before he published it

Reminds of something else here: updike novels poll

I left in a little context but mainly before and after the system bump, especially before.

p hard to respect the reading comp level of someone who thinks in that sentence the adjective 'shimmering' modifies 'revelations' ~

shimmering is not used as an adjective there, bucko

oh, bloody hell! look what you made me go and do.

look, thomp, if you want to defend the use of 'shimmering' in that context, please go ahead and defend it on its merits. I'd be delighted to hear some positive words about the excellence of that word choice. alternatively we could start slanging on another about the grammatical nuances of what is an adjective, what is an adjectival, what modifies what and whether books shimmer or revelations shimmer.

your choice, but I may not come along for that ride.

https://screen.yahoo.com/shimmer-floor-wax-000000185.html

does sound interesting in a way that feels like i might not get to it soon. but psychology-within-landscape is an appealing subject to me and reading Stevenson made the Cévennes a place of permanent interest.

fwiw shimmering seems ok here? fits with both strange effects of book about psychological borderlands and the "austere desert" setting.

am reading Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen by Elizabeth David - a book my mum has been recommending i read for long time. very good of course, full of great anecdotes from the history of eating and cooking and many delightful never-going-to-do-that recipes:

We had for dinner, a fine Cod's Head and Shoulders, boiled, and Oyster Sauce, Peas Soup, Ham and 2 boiled chicken, and a fine Saddle of Mutton roastef, Potatoes, Colli-Flower-Brocoli, and Cucumber. 2nd Course, a rost Duck, Maccaroni, a sweet batter Pudding, & Currant Jelly, Blamange, and Raspberry Puffs. Desert, Oranges, Almonds & Raisins, Nutts, & dried Apples, Beefans. Port & Sherry Wines, Porter, strong Beer & small. After Coffee & Tea, we got to Cards...

snap presumably.

To revert back to what I am reading. Not fifteen minutes ago I finished The Bostonians. It definitely did not shimmer with revelations. It ended grotesquely, as befit the grotesque nature of the main characters. I feel a bit resentful, tbh, at my having trusted Mr. James to have been in possession of some insights worth the expenditure of so many words, which trust he thoroughly failed to justify.

Fizzles: I have mixed feelings about Didion which I believe were discussed (with others') on the Joan Didion thread here, years ago. That thread might interest you.

finished Colm Toibin, ON ELIZABETH BISHOP. Not brilliant, mainly adequate to quite good. Just a couple of daft clangers. A bit too much Toibin. But quite a good sense of a world of the poetry and life, and it picks up human interest when he really goes into the Bishop-Lowell relations. The book also ends very well indeed.

Now I start his novel NORA WEBSTER.

thanks pf - will check out the thread.

I'm on the final stretch of A Brief History of Seven Killings, and it's really picking up in the last 150 or so pages. The middle was a slog, which sort of fits the mood and subject matter.

Does ILB like Ali Smith? I bought The Accidental and How to Be Both on a recommendation, just started digging into the former.

Agree about Seven Killings being a bit of a slog but in the end the effort was well worth it.

Finished Zacahary Leader's The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964 and while I sympathize with the criticism that it was too long, I gobbled it up. Even the early days were fascinating and I usually get bored by childhood tales, as important as they are in the developmental scheme. Russian village life in the late 19th century is so far removed from 20th century America that it's amazing to contemplate those immigrants' experience. (This is my wife's family background too, so that helps. Thought about my late father-in-law and his parents while reading about the Bellow clan). It also helps that I'm a fan of Bellow's novels though I sympathize with anybody who finds him windy and self-involved. Per Leader, Saul really struggled to make his mark pre: Augie March and developed a king-size chip on his shoulder in the process. Utter lack of support, emotional and otherwise, from his family didn't help. Leader resists the urge to simplistically treat the novels as directly sourced from Bellow's life yet deftly explicates the complex autobiographical roots of virtually everything he wrote. Two concluding thoughts: Saul was cruelly demanding of his wives yet maintained a flexible let's say concept of monogamy. It's a 50's guy thing I guess? And not only was he thin-skinned to a fault, a critic-baiter and academic-hater (and later a teacher!), Bellow also surrounded himself with sycophantic sidekicks and seemed pretty delusional about them until he got fucked over. File under fiction writer not necessarily the best judge of character (including his own) in real life.

only lol-ish anecdote comes from Gore Vidal: entering a party of literary types, he overhears Bellow "merrily" welcome the Trillings: "Still peddling the same old horseshit, Lionel?"

Not fifteen minutes ago I finished The Bostonians. It definitely did not shimmer with revelations. It ended grotesquely, as befit the grotesque nature of the main characters. I feel a bit resentful, tbh, at my having trusted Mr. James to have been in possession of some insights worth the expenditure of so many words, which trust he thoroughly failed to justify.

lol this is a bizarre reading

I've read the novel a couple of times and am moved by how James navigates pity and irony. I felt horrible for Olive and worse for Verena. At no point is Ransom sympathetic. At the end of the novel he's reenacting the rape of Europa or something.

finished Colm Toibin, ON ELIZABETH BISHOP. Not brilliant, mainly adequate to quite good. Just a couple of daft clangers. A bit too much Toibin. But quite a good sense of a world of the poetry and life, and it picks up human interest when he really goes into the Bishop-Lowell relations. The book also ends very well indeed.

Now I start his novel NORA WEBSTER.

― the pinefox,

he's one of my favorite novelists. Try The Master and a collection of short stories called Mothers and Sons.

Nora Webster is like 3rd or 4th on my pile of new books to read atm. I haven't read the two Alfred mentioned yet, but I can't recommend Brooklyn high enough.

My difficulty with the characters, which led me to call them grotesque, is that in order for the plot to evolve as it does both Olive and Verena must be firmly established at the far extremity of their type and held there throughout.

Olive is not merely averse to men and committed to her feminist cause, but she is (to use James' own word) extremely morbid, so sensitive at times as to barely stand human contact, underlaid with an extreme righteousness equally incapable of self-doubt or of charity. Her relations with Verena do not contain a trace of real friendship as I understand the word, but rather she ruthlessly uses Verena to fill a void in her life, while blindly rationalizing it as a series of noble deeds and renunciations. She is a kind of monster. I am using this word in its 19th century sense of a terribly misshapen and disproportioned creature; it is a descriptor I am sure James would agree with.

Verena on the other hand is made to be a prodigy of equally extreme proportions. She is an agreeable young woman, but not in any ordinary or proportionate way. She has a will so obliging that it always moves in the same direction as that of whoever is her companion of the moment, and yet she never strikes anyone as being passive or empty, but rather everyone is irresistibly drawn to her and her 'genius'. Except her genius is paradoxically shapeless and vague, apart from her having a pretty face and a lovely speaking voice, and an agreeable nature. She gets along perfectly well with everyone until she becomes the object that two strong personalities, Olive and Ransom, fight over, like two dogs fighting over a bone. Then she can please neither and she falls apart.

You're quite right to compare Ransom's final capture of Verena to the rape of Europa, but you seem to miss the fact that she was just as much abducted from her parents by Olive, who accomplishes this not by grabbing her arm and rushing her off, but by handing them a large sum of money and telling them to get lost.

Ransom is the least monstrous of the three main characters, in that he is merely an egoist who has been misshapen by the peculiar ideas of Mississippian chivalry. This does not make him sympathetic or pleasant, but at least he typifies a personality you might encounter in his day.

Lastly, the reason I say that James had no particular insights to share is that he appears to believe that he was writing a story about "the situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex, and the agitation on their behalf" (as quoted on the book's cover) and yet this story reveals nothing worthwhile about these larger, more general subjects, because his main characters are so extreme and peculiar that they shed far more light on the psychology of monsters than the ideals of the suffrage movement or the position of women.

Call it bizarre if you like, but I think my reading is quite defensible.

Olive is not merely averse to men and committed to her feminist cause, but she is (to use James' own word) extremely morbid, so sensitive at times as to barely stand human contact, underlaid with an extreme righteousness equally incapable of self-doubt or of charity. Her relations with Verena do not contain a trace of real friendship as I understand the word, but rather she ruthlessly uses Verena to fill a void in her life, while blindly rationalizing it as a series of noble deeds and renunciations. She is a kind of monster. I am using this word in its 19th century sense of a terribly misshapen and disproportioned creature; it is a descriptor I am sure James would agree with.

Verena on the other hand is made to be a prodigy of equally extreme proportions. She is an agreeable young woman, but not in any ordinary or proportionate way. She has a will so obliging that it always moves in the same direction as that of whoever is her companion of the moment, and yet she never strikes anyone as being passive or empty, but rather everyone is irresistibly drawn to her and her 'genius'. Except her genius is paradoxically shapeless and vague, apart from her having a pretty face and a lovely speaking voice, and an agreeable nature. She gets along perfectly well with everyone until she becomes the object that two strong personalities, Olive and Ransom, fight over, like two dogs fighting over a bone. Then she can please neither and she falls apart.

These are insights.

You're quite right to compare Ransom's final capture of Verena to the rape of Europa, but you seem to miss the fact that she was just as much abducted from her parents by Olive, who accomplishes this not by grabbing her arm and rushing her off, but by handing them a large sum of money and telling them to get lost.

Yeah! That's fascinating! It makes her situation more pathetic. I couldn't imagine the novel without it. Why is this worth mentioning other than to show how James sets up how Verena, in the eyes of her parents, Olive, and Ransom is a pawn? But she there's a sense in which she likes playing these forces against each other.

Also: the novel's expert at shifting points of view; we never know how exactly we're supposed to react to characters in a scene. The first few chapters are told almost exclusively iirc from Ransom's point of view, so of course Olive would look like a trembling hysteric. The triumph of the novel is how our first impressions aren't wrong but get complicated anyway.

this does not make him sympathetic or pleasant, but at least he typifies a personality you might encounter in his day.

that's how I view Dr. Prance, Ms. Birdseye, Olive, and Verena. Readers of Howells' fiction would've recognized them too.

Lastly, the reason I say that James had no particular insights to share is that he appears to believe that he was writing a story about "the situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex, and the agitation on their behalf" (as quoted on the book's cover) a

You're castigating an author or novel for its intentions and what a blurb says?

idk it sounds like you're recoiling from how unpleasant and adult this novel is.

You're castigating an author or novel for its intentions and what a blurb says?

To be clear, the cover blurb was quoting Henry James speaking about this book and his view of it. Since my edition did not contain James' preface, I don't know if that was the origin of the quote or not.

it sounds like you're recoiling from how unpleasant and adult this novel is.

hmmm. I'm 60 years old, Alfred, and I can assure you my life has contained decades filled with unpleasantness and adult responsibilities which I daresay I have not shrunk from at any time, however oppressive they were. Why you think I would recoil from a mere novel is beyond me and for you to think that "adult" material is too much for me to face is kind of insulting, although I expect you did not actually intend it as meanly as that.

Ilb is normally waaaaaAy more civilised than the rest of ilx, but not surprised it was henry james who got the fisticuffs going

literary ronaldinho bottle opener

I'm sorry, Aimless -- I shouldn't have written that sentence. But your character descriptions are precisely what make the book for me an uneven triumph. It's an erratic, batty book. Unlike Dickens or Eliot, James doesn't side with anybody. Every time I read it and think James has contempt for feminists like Olive, I remember that his narrator is in and out of Ransom's consciousness. Ransom condescends to Dr. Prance and Ms. Birdseye but it's clear he also respects their industry and humorlessness. But it's also clear that James condescends to Ransom too. Our sympathies shift. Like I said yesterday, the book is weirdly structured, and not to its advantage in some places (a problem that afflicts The Tragic Muse[i] and [i]The Princess Cassamassima too, the other novels from this period); but he's got so many zingers and bon mots and bits of psychology that I laugh out loud every time I look at it again.

It comes down to my liking what you'd call its repulsiveness, I suppose.

Yes, I don't have a problem with a novel about repulsive people (especially a comic novel, which the Bostonians is in part) - but I actually don't think Olive is that repulsive, just a difficult, awkward, morally compromised person (ie human like the rest of us), someone trying to establish an identity for herself in an age where her gender and sexuality are constantly opposed, belittled, negated. James, obviously like lots of authors, frequently sprinkled parts of his own personality over his characters, and I think there's much more of him in Olive than there is Ransom - James clearly mistrusts easy charm and vapid bonhomie, both of which Basil has in abundance.

Alongside the comic, the monstrous is never really that far away in James-world; the battle over Verena, the corruption - or acquisition - of her 'innocence' is reconfigured as Quint's possession of the children in Turn of the Screw, or the way that Isobel is cruelly manipulated in Portrait of a Lady. It's a horrible world out there.

otm

Because his publisher didn't have the dough to include The Bostonians in the New York edition, James never revised it to fit his (clearer) intentions like he did the earlier books, we should note.

Yeah, the financial fine print of the history of literature is so insidious---Rampersand's notes for this Library of America omnibus edition of Richard Wright, with the restored edition of Native Son, also include the lousy changes the author made at the behest of the Book Of The Month Club, which was a huge deal in 1940, if you wanted your book to have a decent amount of distribution. Also, the bowdlerized version got him launched abroad, via Gollancz, for instance. The results were still potent enough to get him denounced in Congress and elsewhere. Maybe he would have restored it if he'd outlived a few more politicians, but he died (at 52) in 1960, and all the changes stayed in for another 30 years, according to Rampersand (good thing I didn't read it when I was supposed to).

*Rampersad*, that is. Sorry!

I finished H is for Hawk. Pretty good - I can see why it got a lot of raves. The emotional core of the book (grieving for her father) is not overplayed, instead it is kind of kept in the background and allowed to burst through occasionally, to more powerful effect. I enjoyed all the stuff about falconry, which I didn't know anything about before reading this. I wasn't quite so keen on the parts about T.H. White. Those sections kind of reminded me of Iain Sinclair's chapters in Rodinsky's Room, in the way they interrupted a more linear narrative with highly worked up literary impressions that seemed kind of irrelevant after a while.

T.H. White wrote The Goshawk about his experiences training a goshawk. I read it back in 2008. It was a brief, odd, rather meandering book, but well worth the small amount of time required to read it.

Yes, the T.H. White passages in Macdonald's book are largely about his experiences recounted in The Goshawk, though she reads it through the eyes of an experienced falconer, so the emphasis tends to be more on how he's screwing things rather than the merits of the book itself.

how he's screwing things up, rather

uhm is this thread reserved for fiction? anyway, I read Patrick Cockburn's The Rise of Islamic State yesterday, and it was very informative - I recommend it for anyone who, like me, needs an overview of what happened in Iraq last summer. Cockburn is clearly very knowledgeable and to me he seemed credible.

Now I'm back to My Struggle part 6 where I'm in the middle of a never ending Celan-essay which is a bit boring and I hope Knausgaard will soon revert to descriptions of changing diapers, shopping, preparing shrimp and other thrilling activities. (I know the Hitler-essay is yet to come, but really it can't be as boring as the Celan-reading)

It is absolutely not reserved for anything other than what you are reading now. Excluding ilx to avoid universe-destroying recursion.

i am enjoying "to the lighthouse" but the technicalities of the style are a bit irritating at times - like just a lack of clarity about who is speaking to who, or whether they're speaking. i guess this is a conscious decision?

It'll become less of a problem as you progress.

started Brendon's "Decline and Fall of the British Empire" yesterday, which I can already tell is going to be awesome

Just finished reading Ascent, Jed Mercurio, as mentioned in the DSKY-DSKY Him Sad (aka Space Flight) thread. It was good in the vein of 'summer reading'. If I comment further on it, I'll do it over in DSKY-DSKY.

I finished Us Conductors a few days ago and really liked it. Now I'm trying to decide between The Luminaries (I'm a bad kiwi, haven't read it yet) and starting My Struggle.

nm I decided to start the Patrick St Aubyn series instead

Er, Edward.

Halfway through Dostoevsky's Demons. Love the scaffolding of various levels of anxiety and madness building up. A comment here, conversation there, random punch elsewhere, bizarre duel. Everyone suffocating.

I was reading this in a retreat-like place in Italy for the last week, just totally weird contrast - like I needed an injection of noise and intensity in my life.

xpost I once started To The Lighthouse but could not figure out the language at all - makes sense that it becomes easier along the way (that's my experience with any novel/artist/etc - once you "understand" the style everything flows) but at the time I couldn't see why I should fight my way through something that should be "pleasurable"

highly recommend My Struggle for summer reading, apart from part 6 where I'm now halfway through the apparently +200 pages Hitler-essay, it's pretty action packed

🗻

If I'm understanding correctly, this is a new bear falling from a tree in Boulder, CO today (or recently). Details from fb friend are sketchy.

Halfway through Dostoevsky's /Demons/. Love the scaffolding of various levels of anxiety and madness building up. A comment here, conversation there, random punch elsewhere, bizarre duel. Everyone suffocating.

great description of it. really like demons - character as hysteria.

Cool. Which translation?

it seems i am reading A THOUSAND PLATEAUS

it is fun

but hella technical, i never realized last time i was reading it intensively, > 10 years back, that most of its difficulty is not the weirdoness, it's that the entire thing proceeds in this mysteriously rigorous-sounding framework most of whose terms are constantly opaque to you, apart from that it's starting to seem pretty systematic

I picked up the 440pp abridgement of Outlaws of the Marsh that I bought a few months ago and started it. It is episodic and rambling like a picaresque novel, and is both direct and vivid in its storytelling, without much clutter. No lengthy descriptions of scenery or fine gradations of motive. The action is driven by greed, lust and sheer animals spirits.

One large source of pleasure and fascination for me comes from its setting in Sung Dynasty China, a complex society with a highly developed infrastructure and social hierarchy; it has a flavor that's distinctly different from any western society, but also perfectly familiar in its way.

dow - its the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation.

Thanks! Also considering Magarshack, having enjoyed his version of The Idiot.

read devils in whoever did the recent oxford worlds classic edition and liked it. p/v crime and punishment was much better than the translation i'd read before that (forgotten who that was by).

This one? Looks good

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/512sIUyvkWL._SX310_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

(if image is removed: "a new translation by Michael R. Katz"---published 2-24-2000)

that's the one. only issue i had with it was the insertion of the censored "stavrogin's confession" chapter into the main text. not sure if other editions do the same, but seemed to me it would have better as an appendix.

censored by whom?!

his publisher, i think. was considered lost for a long time but then rediscovered in the twenties or thereabouts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demons_%28Dostoyevsky_novel%29#Censored_chapter

Think I'd like it better in the main text, as Dusty meant it to be, thanks will check it out

Read The Bostonians on holiday, and although I'm already a James convert I have to side with Aimless on this one. Overall, and especially with regards to the central dilemma (which took an age to make itself apparent), it struck me less as an adult novel and more a teenage melodrama. That we are constantly told and not shown Verena's 'genius' didn't bother me so much, but when it's finally revealed her particular talent is merely a superlative inconsistency and suggestibility it makes everything we were told previously seem ridiculous, and the climax and her fate more like farce than tragedy. Of his other novels that I've read (Washington Square, The American, Portrait of a Lady and The Spoils of Poynton), all but the latter have agonies just as acute but rendered with far more subtlety and dignity, and far more plausible. Sure it has its share of bon mots but the only time for me it approached classic James, his exquisite and sympathetic way of rendering a character on the horns of a true dilemma, wrestling both with their conscience and with the vicissitudes of an almost wilfully cruel world, was when Olive had to seriously consider the proposal of the Burrages in order to save Verena from Ransom.

On the other hand it was historically interesting; James I think was not unsympathetic to the cause (inasmuch as he makes it clear where his sympathies lie, Ransom is surely irredeemably repulsive throughout), but uncharitable in his treatment of it. Ransom, though, could almost be a model for a modern fedora-topped men's right's advocate, with his (even then) quaint notions of chivalry and firm belief that "there is a great deal too much [feminism]. The whole generation is womanised; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it's a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don't soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been." Even the name of the periodical that finally champions him is The Rational Review!

Also read H is For Hawk and enjoyed it, thought it was very analytical - of herself, of the hawk, of TH White - and that was just fine. Having read and enjoyed The Once and Future King may have enhanced my appreciation somewhat, especially when she considers White's Merlin as a rather tragically hopeful self portrait.

I just passed the part in Tess where she takes it on herself to baptize her dying baby. This book is cry-inducing.

Jean-Phillippe Toussaint, Bathroom -- Pretty good + light; will be reading more of this guy in the future. Parts of this felt like a direct rejoinder to Perec's A Man Asleep, but the slapstick stuff in the beginning of section II was inspired and amusing. I'll probably read Camera next, but I'm most curious to see what he does in Reticence, which sounds *heavily* indebted to Robbe-Grillet.

I finished NORA WEBSTER. I liked and appreciated it quite a lot. It is a lot better than BROOKLYN which I found largely flat and overrated. This novel is quiet, mysterious, undramatic and in a way conjures a drama and suspense from this lack of drama. It touched me and made me think quite a bit. I recommend it if you like novels that try to represent something like real life.

I couldn't finish Brooklyn it was so flat. I do appreciate a good quiet real life novel though so I'll probably give him another chance.

Jonathan Lethem, LUCKY ALAN (2015)

was: Kawabata's Thousand Cranes
now: Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita

(my reading is not usually so high-faluting)

a collection of stories/novellas chronicling the adventures of that other baker street detective, sexton blake.

I couldn't finish Brooklyn it was so flat. I do appreciate a good quiet real life novel though so I'll probably give him another chance.

Seem to recall a discussion about it, along with David Lodge's James book as well as his Wells book, and some humorous quote from a review involving the Groucho Club.

Bears reposting: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jun/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview27

Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century

I'm giving DRACULA a go for the first time

Just returned from camping, where I read the 1952 classic of mountaineering lit, Annapurna by Maurice Herzog and also pushed ahead with Outlaws of the Marsh (abridged version) which I am about 3/4 through.

The French expedition described in Annapurna was, like most major Himalayan expeditions of that era, rather harrowing. No one died and it accomplished the world's first successful summiting of an 8000 meter peak, but the price in suffering was enormous. In case anyone decides to read the book, it is probably better I don't go into detail other than to say the two climbers who reached the top suffered severe frostbite and lost all their toes and many fingers, too, as a result.

My Brilliant Friend is good. I spent most of yesterday reading it and it was hard to put down. I like how virtually every act and thought in the book contains some kind of jealousy or resentment, large or small. She knows how to write these affects.

LUCKY ALAN: not JL's best.

I went on to reread DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? Not quite sure how good or bad this is. Feel it has some of PKD's cackhandedness as well as his great inventiveness.

Then I read Pynchon's story 'The Secret Integration' which seemed to me better than most other works by Pynchon that I have encountered.

Then I moved on at last to Franz Kafka's THE CASTLE. I have wanted to read this for a long time.

I am quite excited about finally reading THE CASTLE !

Feel it has some of PKD's cackhandedness as well as his great inventiveness

This is almost always the case--PKD is sort of the definition of the writer who is great despite often not being that good

And I say that as a serious fan

yeah i read man in the high castle a while back, the premise was at times brilliant, but the second half of it just dwindled into rubbish.

I think that book (which I like) is often supposed to be his best novel!

I think James M is right about PKD but perhaps it is fair to say that lots of the short stories work fine, as opposed to the novels.

dwindling rather than crescendoing is one of my favourite things in novels including MitHC

i enjoyed it as well - i guess the end disappointed me. i agree in principle nv, that any twist of the hollywood ending is fine, but i didn't think it was particularly good technically as it went on.

it's been a few years since I read it last so I wdn't defend it unreservedly, and it's not my favourite PKD, but I'm always secretly delighted when a story that looks like it should be satisfactorily resolved fizzles away into downbeat entropy

fizzles away
I was wondering why we hadn't heard from Fizzles in the past few days

Has anyone read the Inkblot Record by Dan Farrell? Assuming poetry (or whatever it is) counts for this thread. I got a real kick out of it (and it will supply me with usernames forever)

MitHC -- the odd thing is the actual title content -- the author doesn't live in a castle anymore; isn't protecting himself against anyone; isn't that interesting when met at his cocktail party (though he does, I suppose, reveal that he wrote his book with the I Ching and it is suggested that its contents are true, so that is a kind of important revelation). Odd and, as NV perhaps says above, anti-climactic, but I can't tell how deliberate that would be or to what end.

I feel like there's perhaps a recurring theme in PKD wherein the grandiose, organized social structures of control that hem in and thwart his central characters are gradually revealed to be figments of personal dissolution and paranoia, hence the anti-climacticness.

Yeah, and sometimes it's both, like---well I guess any examples might be called spoilery nowadays. Anyway, the artist grappling with his own crackpot compulsions is one of my faves (several Dylan albums come to mind), and it's why I enjoyed PKD's Valis, for instance. Those who don't get Borges would def be among those who feel let down by The Man In The High Castle, also those expecting a man in a high castle (it's going to be a cable or Web series...?)

Thought that the artist grappling with his own crackpot compulsions (incl. things that might get him arrested again) was a motivation in The Idiot also: put this tirade in the mouth of one character, that brainstorm in the head of another. Also The Brothers Karamazov, but there it's with some implicit humor x cynicism, giving the audience the expected fireworks, in a still-dazzling way (no complaints).

Also, PKD was sometimes on the catfood-and-speed diet, writing "paperback originals" for flat fees or very slow, low royalties----eventually recounted having freaked out from stress, ending up in state facility, treated, somewhat soothed and released, then presented with a large bill, raising the stress level again. Other times, even when he was relatively flush, might for instance incl. having a dream revolving around a wonderful device, waking to detail it, research, take his notes to a consulting engineer who concluded that it would indeed be wonderful, if somebody first invented a part that would do x and another for y. So PKD was out for textbooks, consultant's fees, time spent away from fiction-writing, other things.

Haven't read all the canonical novels or recent PKD posts in this thread, will just say certain of his books seems to resonate more with me, in particular Time Out of Joint and A Scanner Darkly. The first for being the PKD paranoid version/inversion of the Nerdy Everyman Saves The World trope, the second for a genuine deep feeling of sadness and brokenness.

Those who don't get Borges would def be among those who feel let down by The Man In The High Castle, also those expecting a man in a high castle (it's going to be a cable or Web series...?)

i already said i actually like people to subvert the standard heroic ending, but the actual writing in the book dwindles along with the plot. the characters are pretty awful throughout and the ending isn't even true to the foundations of those people.

like it's not like this is some incredible deep work and i was sat there eating popcorn waiting for ninjas to come and smash up the nazi regime - it's a p cheesy book apart from its clever and well-executed premise.

For a genre-busting sui-generous cranker outer of paperback originals where you could smell the potent blend of flop sweat, cigarette odor, ink and glue, he was not nearly the stylist that, say, Jim Thompson was.

I think his style is pretty good on the whole, given the biographical details

yeah i am not trying to slate him - i liked mithc. i guess just find it ridiculous that criticising a popular sci-fi author would equate to some sort of luddite anti-art stance.

hey no argument here

is mithc compared to 1984?

( fwiw was not responding to lg, just x post to self)

ditto for the most part, except that, for me, its clever and well-executed premise overcomes the cheese. His style, in novels especially, is like that old stoner in Carver's "Cathederal" who just seems like a mumblin' rando at first, but gradually reels the listener in. Although I like PKD better than Carver's guy.

Or it *can* be like that, not always, but he requires patience while the story emerges from the grey plodding (in the case of his weaker books, can be like he just started typing, because the meter's running--but could be that Thompson gets more out of this; I haven't read much of him).

Also agree w this, although guess it's mostly about first part
I'm now reading The Man In The High Castle - pretty cleverly done, so overtly post-modern, makes you think about accepted belief systems. Really cool to see one of the Japanese characters asking the American to explain Ms Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West - don't think I've ever seen a shoutout like this, and I just read the latter a few months ago.

― Junior Dictionary (LocalGarda), Monday, March 16, 2015 5:52 AM (4 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Man in the High Castle is the only Dick I've read, and it's been a few years, so I don't remember it that well, but I share the sense of being kind of underwhelmed by the style (or lack thereof), thinking the alternative history premise not terribly original, and not getting at all the ending. I guess I was expecting something a bit more gonzo, rather than the kind of pulpy cardboard prose.

Currently reading: Deborah Eisenberg's third collection, All Around Atlantis. Feel like she's starting to hit her stride again after the somewhat uneven 2nd collection.

I spent most of two summers ago reading Eisenberg's big collection. She's a minor master, I think. I love her rhythms.

Just finished: Raziel Reid, When Everything Feels Like the Movies
Just starting: Colm Toibin, Nora Webster

Loved Deborah Eisenberg's Twilight of the Superheroes, too. I didn't know about All Around Atlantis--I had The Stories So Far and Superheroes, no idea there was a volume in between. And of course it's OOP

Finally got around to reading 'Lee, Myself and I', which I'm enjoying more than I thought it would. I think I was put off because I wanted a full bio, but this is nice.

I enjoyed The Man In The High Castle when I read it a couple of years ago. I cant remember the ending though! i know it didnt piss me off anyway

has anyone read nightwalking: a nocturnal history of london, by matthew beaumont? i read a longread extract from it a few weeks ago, reminded of it as my copy arrived this week. really interesting history of people on the london streets at night.

the extract is here: http://blog.longreads.com/2015/06/29/vagabonds-crafty-bauds-and-the-loyal-huzza-a-history-of-london-at-night/

i love longreads generally but i found this one in particular was enthralling.

I spent most of two summers ago reading Eisenberg's big collection. She's a minor master, I think. I love her rhythms.

Yeah, that's the one I'm slowly working through - the big book of all 4 collections. I took a longish break after the first 2. "Minor master" sounds about right, or "minor-key master". There's a current of sadness that runs through her work, though not in a lugubrious way. She has an unsentimental way of portraying people who are making bad choices, in unhealthy relationships, or just generally failing at life.

man, i remember almost nothing of the one eisenberg thing i read -- do you think she got the title from alan moore or arrived at it independently?

Surely from Moore

Han Kang: The Vegetarian - a Novel. What it says, about a Korean woman who gives up meat -- the precise reason as to why this happens is knocked off as a dream that is never explained. Mostly because anyone around her isn't interested. This takes a detour or three, becoming a really brutal experience by the end.

On the one hand, Kang doesn't try to explain her - you'd think that would make your imagination take flight but its just as likely you'd be dismissive of the main character as an asexual simpleton who cannot be in anyway thought about very much, she is so far from most people - as its made clear when she is viewed from three points. There are a couple of great scenes where she ends making an 'art' piece - and funnier if you know of Yayoi Kusama's work.

I wouldn't even put MitHC in a top 10 PKD list. It's middling work at best, enlivened primarily by the I Ching device and the weird sense of dislocation conveyed in certain sequences. Characters, plotting, and prose, however, are alternate between being slapdash and workmanlike. I am not really sure why it won the Hugo, a process which is certainly as political as it is meretricious, but doubtless the award helped to burnish his reputation and keep the book in print, which meant it inevitably became one of his more widely read books. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? achieved similar ubiquity due to Bladerunner, but that one isn't a particularly outstanding entry in his oeuvre either.

That being said, I am a huge PKD fan and I do think he had an engaging prose style and a capacity to be genuinely moving, surprising, and confounding, sometimes all at once. A Scanner Darkly is a good example of this, where the empathy for the characters really shines through, even when the plot takes extensive detours through drug-babble territory and paranoid conspiracy theories. And he could be very, very funny. Constantly aware of the literary backwater he was toiling under, he gleefully used and abused sci-fi tropes, making up ridiculous words and concepts as a wink-wink way of acknowledging their silliness - and then abruptly inverting his treatment of them by making them central to the emotional or intellectual core of the story. Oh the tragedies of the lowly wub-fur importer, for ex. Or the Denebian slime mold who exhibits more human empathy and spiritual understanding than any of his human neighbors in his conapt. I would say if you're going to dip into PKD's work, don't start with the most famous ones, they aren't famous for the right reasons.

I finished the abridgement of Outlaws of the Marsh, China's answer to the Robin Hood folk lore. I can see many elements in it that got taken up by martial arts movies. Some day I should poll the nicknames of the characters, such as Timely Rain and Ten Feet of Steel, but to be honest I've had a similar urge to poll the names of characters in various Icelandic sagas, too, and have never yet done the work of compiling them, so precedent is not on my side.

I'll be setting out in a couple of days on a lengthy hiking/camping trip (9 days). I'll be equipped with about 6 or 7 titles at my disposal for my evening's entertainment, all fairly short, so I shall probably have a variety of comments to make on my return.

ootis is v accurate on pkd, i think

i am tempted, momentarily, to start an old-ILE style s&d pkd thread

have a fun trip aimes

thanks. almost certainly they'll be some of the most fun days of my year.

yes, likewise - have a lovely trip.

The Faber Book of 20th Century Italian Poems ed. Jamie McKendrick

Maybe more in the poetry thread, but a lot of these didn't really get their hooks into me. I may not be sensitive enough to subtleties, and translation - linguistic and cultural - can be a problem obv, but I thought I detected in more than one poet a hackneyed sentimentality, often wound in with nature and childhood. Some of them didn't seem that far removed from O Sole Mio in some respects. Montale is clearly a mark above many of the others. Ungaretti's poems of belonging, not-belonging and death are very good. And having just had a flick though, I'm seeing a number that I haven't read that on a quick eye-scan seem interesting, so maybe I should hold fire.

Malcolm is a Little Unwell - Malcolm Brabant. Short memoir of the BBC journalist who a few years ago went into a three-year psychotic spiral precipitated by a yellow fever jab. The title is what Brabant's Danish wife would say to people after he'd go on Facebook proclaiming he was the Messiah or the Devil, or get in touch with his highly-positioned contacts at the IMF or in the Greek government to explain the same. It's horrific and bleakly funny at the same time.

On one of the early days in Sinouri [a Greek mental institution], I shed the mantle of Joseph or Jesus and assumed the personality of Winston Churchill .. My wife struggled to get me to go into the spacious garden at the back of the clinic. I insisted on walking in bare feet .. Once outside in the fresh air I was, in Trine's estimation, "out of it, but fairly calm". I started talking about the Second World War, Montgomery's forces in North Africa, and the bravery of the Desert Rats.

"There was no head nor tail to it. I took your hand like a little child and walked around the garden. I was trying to distract you. You suddenly let go of my hand and started strutting. Then I saw you miming, as if you were smoking something. I ran after you and got you to the bench under the big tree. I think you were puffing on a cigar in your imagination."

Some .. fire-fighting planes came over the garden. I stood up and pulled Trine up from the bench. I saluted and commanded her to follow suit. "So I saluted the fire-fighting planes. You had completely lost it. You talked about them being the best boys. You did the V for Victory sign as you started strutting round manically." At that point Trine tried to get me back to the ward. I started to talk.

"I can promise you nothing but blood, sweat and tears," I said. "This is a crucial time for the Battle of Britain."

Trine managed to manhandle me back to the entrace to the clinic. But the nurses took forever to come and let us in. Just as we reached the door, I succeeded in breaking away. "You sprinted away from me. You ran around the garden and as you did so you began to take your clothes off. First the shirt, then the boxers and shorts and you ran stark naked. I was running after you to say 'put some clothes on'. You were running really fast in your birthday suit and doing the V for victory sign. I caught up and tried to put your shirt on."

I kept on ranting in a deep Churchillian voice, "We all have to make sacrifices."

It's also fairly repetitive - psychosis is not interesting apart from a rather awful 'Christ, how much worse can this get?' curiosity - and at times you detect that the prose isn't entirely stable either. He's lapsed several times, back into madness (though recent episodes have been less severe) and it's curious to see someone writing their memoirs with a stick in the sands of the shore on which they've just washed up.

As something that expresses the precariousness of the mental constructs and chemical balances that enable us to function within society it's both effective and alarming.

Æmilia Lanyer's poem The Description of Cooke-ham in The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse - the excellent Topographies section. Ben Jonson's To Penshurst is often seen as the first Country House or Estate poem, but this is the first one - at least that I know of. Given the transactional nature of poetry in the period, with it not necessarily being a thing that is published, but a part of cultural exchange and communication between individuals I'd be surprised if there weren't things like this before, even if only in part. Although I've read it before, I was particularly interested in it again - country house poems are not it should be said generally the most thrilling thing - to read it in light of it being by a woman. This sort of poem, for anyone who doesn't know, isn't really just about country houses, but about the shaping of raw nature into something like an eden, with both biblical and classical emphasis - however, an awful lot of them are explicitly and implicitly about Man shaping Nature-characterised-as-female. The estate stands as a metonymic signifier of the Lord of the estate. It is an imposition of order to bring about fruitfulness.

I'm not sure Lanyer's poem can really be construed as a counterblast to that, but does lack some of the more forceful expressions of it elsewhere - crucially it's to a woman as well - Lady Anne Clifford. It's not an amazing poem, but it is very appealing - the poet is remembering how productive she was at Cookham (the book of poetry to which this is the capstone was written there) - again, edenic fruitfulness, natural bounty, is part of the estate poem.

There is still the idea of Nature willingly giving up to authority, but as it's to a woman, the expression is subtly different:

Oh how me thought each plant, each floure, each tree
Set forth their beauties then to welcome thee!
The very Hills right humbly did descend,
When you to tread upon them did intend.

You can see it more clearly with the oak, characterised as male:

That Oake that did in height his fellowes passe,
As much as lofty trees, low growing grasse:
Much like a comely Cedar streight and tall,
Whose beauteous stature farre exceeded all:
How often did you visite this faire tree,
Which seeming joyfull in receiving thee,
Would like a Palme tree spread his armes abroad,
Desirous that you there should make abode:

This is not a forceful imposition, but a passive welcome.

It is a poem about youth and station as well, since leaving Cookham, she has fallen in station and fortune, so she can no longer naturally (that word again - this time as social constraint) spend time with Lady Anne:

Oh what delight did my weake spirits find
In those pure parts of her well framed mind:

And yet it grieves me that I cannot be
Neere unto her, whose virtues did agree
With those faire ornaments of outward beauty,
which did enforce from all both love and dutie.
Unconstant Fortune, thou art most to blame,
Who casts us downe into lowe a frame:
Where our great friends we cannot dayly see,
So great a diffrence is there in degree.

Towards a Kenotic Vision of Authority in the Catholic Church A selection of essays tracing the history of Kenotic thought in the Catholic Church, and also the derivation and justification of authority in the Church via the Magisterium and the Papacy, explicitly as a response to child abuse. What authority can the church claim in those circumstances - the suggestion being that it can only be through a form of institutional kenosis through understanding's Christ's.

Apologies for the colossal size of this post. At work, but waiting for something to happen. Thought I might as well make use of it.

i think oots, LG and others are probably otm about PKD - TMITHC and DADOES? are not my favourites. but there is a special dreamlike quality to TMITHC, provided by its elements (iching, TMITHC as an image), its dislocation and a sense of global space, that i think makes it distinct in PKD's works.

and whoever it was upthread (NV?) who said PKD's obsession with disintegration creates a similar disintegration in his novels was otm. everything turns to kibble eventually.

also, urgent need to churn stuff out in his freezing beach shack prob was more suited to stories as well.

the eye in the sky particularly comically abbreviated.

The Faber Book of 20th Century Italian Poems ed. Jamie McKendrick

Ungaretti was the highlight of that collection for me, although I liked Pavese as much. I saw there were several copies of FSG's collection on hardback at Henry Pordes btw. Don't usually get along with hardback but was thinking of it as a present.

I think what I like about James is how he knows (accepts) that in (Western) civilization wealth girds (supports, underlies) cultural aspirations (aspirations to immortality). (I think this is also what I liked about Piketty.)

I barely started Bernhard and did not start Castellanos Moya but aspire to return to them and in passing detect this ambition (particular to male European writers) to build (make) the human immortal (outside oneself) even as an affront to nature. I know this sounds like nonsense but on a separate occasion I thought it might make sense.

I am reading Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto. I used my local library's interlibrary loan service for the first time to get it.

I agree that Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream? are not Dick's best, but I'd probably include them in a top ten ... I see there's a POX thread already:

Phillip K Dick POX

nm I decided to start the Patrick St Aubyn series instead

― franny glasshole (franny glass), Friday, July 10, 2015 6:38 PM (2 weeks ago)

So I began this and was super into it, then had to stop due to the child-rape scene that I just couldn't handle. My son is roughly this kid's age which makes it impossible to read without picturing him, plus I am aware that the book is autobiographical and that fact shook me up too. I put it down about a week ago. Honestly not sure if I'll pick it back up, which is a shame because it is obviously quite good.

I barely started Bernhard and did not start Castellanos Moya but aspire to return to them and in passing detect this ambition (particular to male European writers) to build (make) the human immortal (outside oneself) even as an affront to nature. I know this sounds like nonsense but on a separate occasion I thought it might make sense.

There is a 'I am the last of a cultured lot, keeping the barbarians at the gates' thing to Bernhard. That could really grate except he is really funny and I think there is some self-awareness as to how ridiculous he sounds at times.

I am reading Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto. I used my local library's interlibrary loan service for the first time to get it.

Tick! I do this all the time.

Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey, which is satisfyingly acerbic about the callousness and hypocrisy of the gentry but seems a little simplistic next to Charlotte's Vilette (though most bildungsromane would),
― one way street, Monday, July 6, 2015 7:14 PM (2 weeks ago)

Agnes Grey is such a neat and trimmed book, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall such an epic of horrors. Quite the unbelievable one-two.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall moved me as much as Wuthering Heights did at fourteen. I reread it four years ago and was still impressed. I'd love to assign it in a classroom.

My favourite PKD, though I haven't read it for years, is probably Ubik. Confessions of a Crap Artist really struck a chord too, though it's one of the non-SF ones.

Malcolm is a Little Unwell sounds amazing, Fizzles. I will seek that out.

Is 'Malcolm is a Little Unwell' e-book only?

I was amazed by The World Jones Made when I read that, far more than I was by The Transmigration of Timothy Archer which I read at about the same time. Don't think I've ever seen anyone else Stan for the former

Is 'Malcolm is a Little Unwell' e-book only?

― inside, skeletons are always inside, that's obvious. (dowd), Monday, 27 July 2015 08:30 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it might well be - i got the impression it was something designed to recoup some money in the aftermath of his (and his family's) financial collapse.

James, the book it reminded me most of was The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, also reminded me of K Amis's short essay A Peep Round the Twist - writings that I've tended to very loosely define as 'hospital literature' - descriptions of derangement involving medication or medical institutions.

As someone who, high on morphine, once thought some of the nurses were trying to kill me, I sympathise. In fact I'd paranoically garbled a nugget of truth into a structure of insitutional persecution, which was that the morphine drip had been put into a muscle instead of a vein, something which the nurses had ignored despite me drawing attention to it, because so much of what I was saying was bananas. I also thought that the person in the curtained bed next to me was having a huge party one night, that a challenge I had to meet to stay on the ward was to steal a london bus and get some pizza for everybody, and that my entire extended family, dead and alive had come to visit me. I couldn't be arsed to see them, leading me to tell the nurse to tell in fact my mum and brothers that I was busy for the moment and could they come back another day. (Thankfully they ignored this request, whereupon I asked one of my brothers to come on a walk with me to a place we couldn't be heard, and proceeded to tell him that a subset of nurses were trying to kill me.

Wrecked my tv so should be reading more, but so far it seems to be magazine articles largely.
Well, kind of stuck with nothing to do during the race fortnight where getting in and out of town is a pain.

Still going through Ford Madox Ford's March of Literature history of literature.
Also just started Naomi Klein's That Changes everything but not got very far so far.

Finished Scam a book about Irish Travellers family fraud in the US. Was pretty interesting, starting from a writer who was writing articles on them for a specialist mag called Trailer Life since there were a spate of trailer sale rip offs perpetrated. But the book is bookended with the story of a scam one family tried to pull on Disney World following hearing about the laxity of security therein.
A faked rape in a motel in the premises but it was blown before pay off.

The Gear Guide a short book from 1967 about the various places to buy fashionable clothing in London. Interesting and has me wanting to pick up the book Boutique London which loks at the same places in greater depth and written much later. Supposed to have some very nice photos in too.

'Malcolm is Unwell' sounds like it might be interesting to me as I've had similar experiences. I'm bipolar, but I have occasional psychotic episodes, including religious mania - I remember a cop asking me if I 'was blessed by Jesus or if I actually was Jesus' (the former). So I tend to track down stuff that helps me put that stuff in some kind of perspective. I'm just really bad at reading ebooks.

I've started reading The Travels of Marco Polo (Penguin classics edition). Very readable for something written in the 13th century.

Read that Marco Polo and the other obligatory at the time Medieval travelogue The Travels of John Mandeville several years ago. Very interesting stuff. For years, probably centuries it was thought Polo was based on experience and Mandeville was fantasy/allegory. But at some point it was suggested that Polo collected travel stories from other people while not actually travelling himself. He was just living located at a nexus/node point for travel to the East.
I read a book that investigated Mandeville and found descriptions of some places, I think the Crusader town Acre among them, accurate enough to indicate Mandeville had been there. Can't think of book title at moment.

There was also a Muslim travelogue from around the same time by Ibn Battuta which I've been meaning to read for years.

I finished Kafka's THE CASTLE

and started rereading Michael Wood, FRANZ KAFKA.

Also want to have a look at ZZ Packer, DRINKING COFFEE ELSEWHERE.

That's interesting about Mandeville & Marco Polo, Steveolende. I guess there are lots of theories and it's hard to prove anything conclusively from that long ago. I guess even if you accept the tradition that Polo told the stories to Rustichello while they were in prison, I'm guessing he didn't have any written notes to refer to (I don't know if he was even literate), and considering the long span of time, vast distances, and unfamiliarity with what he was seeing at the time, it would be amazing that he was even able to be as factually accurate as he was. If the tradition is right, he must have had a prodigious memory. No doubt Rustichello embroidered the core of the book with lots of borrowings/inventions of his own, in any case.

The controversy is discussed on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Polo#Debate

The Mandeville investigation was called 'The Riddle and the Knight by Giles Milton.
It does say that there is a lot lifted from elsewhere but does trace travel specific to the author.

Ibn Battuta is documented as travelling most of the way around the known muslim world of the time. Including stints of governing a couple of places.

really enjoying to the lighthouse now. the depth of the characters' inner lives and the simple humanity of it is affecting in a very true way. though i did find lily briscoe's revulsion at romantic love turning men into "laggards wielding a crowbar on mile end road" or whatever pretty funny. my version has a needless glossary and mile end road was listed as "a rough area in east London". how perfectly ghastly!

I just remember Mile End as being a station where we changed trains and had to wait when I wasa kid. I know it's on the Central line but not sure what it interchanges with or if it was just that the inner city line only went out that far and you normally had to change to get out to Woodford green and the like. A bityt like the Victoria Line would have trains stop at Seven Sisters or go on all the way to Walthamstow Central.

I'm assuming the Mile in the name is the borders of the City, the financial district.

I remember Mile End as being quite rough. Maybe it is no longer so.

it's not beautiful per se, but it also probably has a lot of millionaires living there. many very fine houses in mile end.

I'm assuming the Mile in the name is the borders of the City, the financial district.

I'd always thought that, and of course it's true, but not in relation to the modern district of Mile End. The original 'mile end' was apparently the turnpike situated at the junction of Whitechapel Road and Cambridge Heath Road. That is exactly one mile from Aldgate. The original hamlet of Mile End ('Mile End Old Town') would appear to have been somewhat to the east of that, in the vicinity of Stepney Green tube station. That's about two miles from Aldgate. Even further away, Mile End tube station is about 3.5 miles from Aldgate.

yeah it's quite a big kind of netherzone around there. even the footpaths aren't particularly well connected.

Josep Pla - Life Embitters. Finally getting into the swing of things and now its sorta unputdownable - a cat gets as much attention as hyperinflation in Wiemar-era Germany. Pla is not only a traveller, but a poor one so he hardly seems to make it to Paris or anywhere with any glamour, so he ends up in backwaters like Calais (and there is much of it being a border town, which is going to feel different today, given the news) or Ostend. Sometimes he meets family but often its other single people, the odd encounter, and very little that is amorous. He is a chronicler with no end to anything in sight, and little interiority or background.

re: Mandeville and Marco Polo - this is similar and awesome

I was amazed by The World Jones Made when I read that, far more than I was by The Transmigration of Timothy Archer which I read at about the same time. Don't think I've ever seen anyone else Stan for the former

v different books, I would stan for both. World Jones Made is one of his better mid-period works.

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY !

Finishing up (and enjoying) John Hawkes' Blood Oranges; virtually impossible to read it and not have the Will Ferrell / Hot Tub Love-ahs in mind for the narrator, Cyril.

"Oh,Lov-ah."

Sorry---love is catching, is it not?

^^^^^ this is basically Cyril's diction fwiw, when he's not talking about the colors he'll weave into his sex tapestry. Fun book.

Should I get this don't have any other CL
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/books/review/the-complete-stories-by-clarice-lispector.html?_r=0

story collections - joyce carol oates - high crime area & ethan coen - gates of eden
&
adam rapp - know your beholder
&
norman mailers marilyn book but i may stop reading this cuz mailer kinda sucks imo

Asking myself similar question, don.

Mailer's best book is Harlot's Ghost. Read that one.

* Peter Handke - Short Letter, Long Farewell
* Shakespeare - Richard II
Nikolaus Wachsmann - KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps
John Dinges - The Condor Years
Robert Browning - Poems

xp maybe sometime

I only started DORIAN GRAY.
I also started REALITY HUNGER.

But most of my reading is still Kafka: an old hardback starting with DESCRIPTION OF A STRUGGLE then a bunch of shorter pieces. The very short ones (like 'the top', 'the helmsman') are new to me.

DESCRIPTION OF A STRUGGLE is a remarkable piece of work - a missing link, if one were needed, between Dostoyevsky and Beckett, or Hamsun and 1960s metafiction.

Ellmann's Joyce
Ulysses
V1 of Roy Foster's Yeats
Bit of Aquinas on the side.

I've had The Apprentice Mage in my closet for years.

I've started it before, but more in the mood this time. Foster's great imo - great marshal of information, thoughtful, subtle, obvs great on context - but he can be a bit of a slog, not often a lively writer.

i would agree with all of that tbh

i think i've had that book literally half my lifetime and not got much beyond p100

I've started it twice!

I admit I have not properly read THE APPRENTICE MAGE either - and I have BOTH VOLUMES a couple of feet from me - but actually by many standards of historical scholarship, I think RFF *is* a lively writer. Maybe less so in this work, but certainly in MODERN IRELAND, LUCK AND THE IRISH, THE IRISH STORY, VIVID FACES. A tremendous historian.

I have read Ellmann's WBY biography in full.

i am reading about morality : (

i am reading the Dispossessed. Did I already mention that?

agree, by the standards of most contemporary historians (low bar maybe) he is a good writer, especially over shorter distances - part of what sent me for another go at MBY V1:TAM was his DNB entry on Yeats. But I remember MODERN IRELAND being a bit of a grind - I have it around more as reference than reading (haven't read his others).

Hrabal - Harlequin's Millions. About half-way through and today was just thinking how good this is. Its very Eastern European (really Hungarian) in the way it handles nostalgia for a past that has been crushed by ugly historical forces, but how Hrabal writes about people and what they do - how they embrace and drink together at a pub over a football match - that says much about how they go on whatever is happening in the background.

The writing shapes up as different from Krudy et al. tho' in the way it unravels and expands, each chapter is one paragraph. Ultimately he likes to show-and-tell in streams and recount other stories and experiences instead of character and dialogues.

Lately, I've been reading Jane Bowles's play In the Summer House and the stories Paul excised from Two Serious Ladies (the narrative thread following Senorita Cordoba, originally the third serious lady), René Crevel's My Body and I (interesting so far for its gracefully winding prose and the vigor of its disgust, as well as its reflections on queer life in 1920s Paris, although so far those are elliptical and couched in much the same perhaps defensive tone of disdain as are the comparable scenes in Sodom and Gomorrah), Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others (remarkable for Chiang's ability to revolve conceptual problems, although so far his prose and his characters are typically blander), Shirley Jackson's late fiction in Come Along With Me, and Lyndall Gordon's biography of Charlotte Brontë.

I am back from the mountains. While there I read The Painter of Signs, R.K. Narayan, and O, Pioneers!, Willa Cather. I'm also partway into King Leopold's Ghost. Because I drove 350 miles today, I think I'll wait and write a few comments on these tomorrow or the next day. I'm tired.

I really like Narayan. Also like that his full name was Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami.
And Cather is usually marvellous. The Neglected Books Page just today mentioned a book of hers I had never heard of: http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=3395

Love narayan! Never met anyone else who's read him tbh

- Jack Spicer - My Vocabulary did this to me (also Peter Riley's essay on The Holy Grail)
- Ovid's Erotic Poems trans Peter Green
- Kierkegaard - Either/Or
- Langland - Piers plowman

I found the Narayan book very engaging. He does not subject his characters to painstaking psychological dissection, but tells a brief but solid story with simplicity and assurance. In the end, you know the characters at least as well as you know most of the real people who surround you, and you have seen them undergo a complex and perplexing life-altering experience -- which is how many life-altering experiences seem to happen. I think I would have appreciated it even more if I were familiar with the Ramayana and the traditional stories of Hinduism, and so could better understand the passing allusions to them. Would recommend.

The Cather was also a fine book. It is one of her earlier novels, written about 1914. She is especially strong in her descriptions of the prairie and succeeds in making it a leading character in her story, since its presence and the need to respond to it drives many of the actions of the people and inescapably shapes them. The plot builds up to what her contemporary readers would have comfortably accepted as a melodrama, but she deftly raises the bar and converts her story into something with more depth and dignity, more on the order of tragedy. The payoff in the final few pages is both subdued and powerful. Would also recommend.

I'm only a quarter of the way into King Leopold's Ghost, and while it is not really necessary to write an expose of colonialism, this book does a great job of digging under the surface of the nineteenth century's pretensions to morality and progress and showing the dirty details of greed, self-preening, and ambition of the powerful, and the hugely ugly consequences for the powerless they took as their targets. The history of the Congo makes an excellent exemplar of colonialism as it really worked.

Cather is wondrous. She should get the kudos and writing lab recs that Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner do.

I think I would have appreciated it even more if I were familiar with the Ramayana and the traditional stories of Hinduism

Narayan actually did a version of the Ramayana in prose--very readable

My own recent reading:

Hafez: Faces of Love -- Medieval Muslim/Persian bisexual love/sex/booze poetry -- delightful, really
Malthus: An Essay on the Principle of Population -- so far so OTM; surprisingly and pleasingly clear prose style, too

Checked, and Penguin publishes the Narayan Ranayana

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0143039679.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

He's def my favorite indian novelist. Understated, subtle and v evocative of and sympathetic towards his subjects.

Best entry point imo is malgudi days.

Malthus' math didn't bear out iirc

that's my impression, but he still makes a persuasive argument

Although not about everything, having read some more. And people were itching for the Singularity even 200 years ago.
"The great and unlooked for discoveries that have taken place of late years in natural philosophy, the increasing diffusion of general knowledge from the extension of the art of printing, the ardent and unshackled spirit of inquiry that prevails throughout the lettered and even unlettered world, the new and extraordinary lights that have been thrown on political subjects which dazzle and astonish the understanding, and particularly that tremendous phenomenon in the political horizon, the French Revolution, which, like a blazing comet, seems destined either to inspire with fresh life and vigour, or to scorch up and destroy the shrinking inhabitants of the earth, have all concurred to lead many able men into the opinion that we were touching on a period big with the most important changes, changes that would in some measure be decisive of the future fate of mankind. It has been said that the great question is now at issue, whether man shall henceforth start forwards with accelerated velocity towards illimitable, and hitherto unconceived improvement..."

I thought King Leopold's Ghost fascinating and need to reread it. Since Joseph Conrad had dealings with the regime as a sea captain it does seem to be a source for Kurtz. The Leopold Congo that is.
&all in the supposed name of eradicating slavery?

I just picked up a book called Season to Taste an autobiographical work by Molly Birnbaum. It's about her dream of being a chef being effected by her losing her sense of smell in brain injury caused by a jogging/car accident.
I've only got as far as her physical recovery from the damage to her legs and torso so don't know what the rest of the story is.
She can't taste and has defered the start date on a culinary college place so could be permanent.
I have a feeling I read an excerpt from this in either Guardian or Observer magazine when the book came out. I just found this ina charity shop so didn't make the connection immediately but do recognise the story.

Also got Simon Reynolds' Energy Flash for 25c. It's the only one by him I'm aware of and haven't read. Story of Rave and Dance Culture.

I also started Alan Clayton's bio of Serge Gainsbourg which I've had for a while without reading.

Nice score on the Reynolds. Reading Maurice Shadbolt's Danger Zone (abt the crew of a boat protesting French nuclear testing on Mururoa atoll),it's good and interesting but so riddled w printing errors I'm having real problems enjoying it

That Reynolds book is probably my favourite music crit book of all time

Currently mired in a crew of books that will take months more to finish:

Capital in the 21st Century - Thomas Piketty
Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening - Joseph Goldstein
The Recognitions - William Gaddis
Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion
The Egoist - George Meredith
Hark! A Vagrant - Kate Beaton

All are great!

Elizabeth Gaskell has been a hugely fun first read.

Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps : the opening essay is the most profound reflection on Dylan I've read.

I think her contribution to Stranded is still my favorite text on the VU.

Mine too.

I read her essay on the VU's third album today in Vinyl Deeps and it was terrific, emphasizing the sadness of Reed's singing/lyrics. I mean, you're thinking, duh, but it's not something I'd focused on before.I don't think I know the Stranded piece.

It's in Vinyl Deeps, I think: it's just titled "The Velvet Underground."

Or, actually, I think that is the essay you read today.

xp Which Gaskell?

Silvana Ocampo: Thus Were Their Faces -- story collection: her stuff from the POV of children is esp good, but this is all wonderful so far

argh, SilvIna

Finishing Grapes of Wrath today, thinking of "Situations arise/because of the weather/And no kinds of love/Are better than others." Of course, in that song and this book, it's also what you bring to the weather: no matter what it takes from you (and sometimes making a crazy swap meet), there's all this stuff inside you can't get rid of, though it may get all shook up, and spill out in new combinations, from unforeseen openings---wounds, sometimes, but lots of others too, as all of the preceding has to do with various kinds of humor, but mainly sardonic.
One example: thought hangdawg Pa Joad, continually showed up by the much more adaptable Ma, was finally rousing hiself to rally a collective effort in which all saved all from being lost in the flood---but a collapsing cottonwood tree spoiled that, and pretty soon a man wanted to see him and complain, But the rain, the rain, the rain beat that fire out too, down into the gray--until it got its second wind, o shit. Expected arcs of melodrama usually end up getting in line, hitching up with the segments of practical considerations, which can be minutely detailed or huge, but either way, just keep banging along, seizing on pleasures when possible, more often than I expected).
There are rhetorical interludes I could live with out, but fewer than expected, and he's got me reading other things about the Dust Bowl now, also just got Burns doc from the library.
Don't yet feel the need to read more Steinbeck, but glad I finally got to this one.

Not that there isn't some deadly nastiness in GoW as well---part of the impression that even the biggest baddies are basically just trying to hang on the course of unforeseen events, which their greed and fear make that much worse. And one of the main goodies gets killed in a business-like sentence, all in a night's work.

Was really struck by how you got the feeling that when people were separated in Grapes of Wrath they may as well have been gone forever--the impossibility of finding someone again in that sort of environment, even though it was 20th-Century America and the people weren't actually in hiding, was a bit gob-smacking

Elizabeth Gaskell - Wives and Daughters.

Boy, she's good.

Her Gothic tales/ghost stories/Salem witch stories are pretty amazing, too

http://www.friedmanmichael.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/martiandawn.jpg

is that Roman wearing saddle shoes

Believe so

still ticking along with to the lighthouse, but also been reading incognito lounge by denis johnson. was on holidays this week and listened to a good few new yorker podcasts. donald barthelme's "the bodyguard" was so amazing that i now have to read more of him. that new robert musil arrived also.

you can't go wrong with Forty Stories/Sixty Stories

and talk about value!

What Robert Musil should I read first, and why?

Young Torless b/c it's short, pungent, and violent.

Cool! Which translation?

reading

daron acemoglu & james robinson - why nations fail

xpost man without qualities imo

if you want a v light taste of him i'd recommend flypaper. if you like that then go man without qualities.

i like torless but if i'd read it first it's a bit more indulgent than mwq i think.

sorry, garbled but you get the idea

Cool! Which translation?

always been tempted to pick it up when i see it in second hand bookshops but never have. only ever seen it as a two volume picador paperback from the seventies, no idea who did that translation.

been reading a bunch of michael innes crime/mystery novels.

YT is short. You'll figure out right quick whether you want to give The Man a try.

Reading Seven Men by Max Beerbohm, recommended on an earlier version of this thread. Good fun so far, I need fun. I gave up on the first St Aubyn book, just couldn't stomach it. Since having a baby and losing a family member to cancer I find I cannot read anything that involves innocent people suffering. It means I barely read anything. I need recommendations for books that are meaty and beautiful and wonderful BUT don't involve anyone getting hurt ever. These obviously don't exist so I am stuck with PG Wodehouse and, like...Dr Seuss. Beerbohm is good value so far though.

always been tempted to pick it up when i see it in second hand bookshops but never have. only ever seen it as a two volume picador paperback from the seventies, no idea who did that translation.

been reading a bunch of michael innes crime/mystery novels.

that's the wilkins & kaiser translation. i think the more recent wilkins (not the same wilkins) and pike translation is generally better respected and also contains extra material but I haven't read it. also haven't read all of the picador ed. find i read it, enjoy it while I'm reading it and then just don't want to be reading it any more. posts itt have prompted me to pick it up again tho.

what's the michael innes like, nlt? I'd've sworn blind I'd read some - there were always plenty on the shelves at home when i was growing up - but I've just looked at his wikipedia bibliography and i dont think i have.

Glad you like the Beerbohm, Franny!

i was wrong about the picador being two volumes...

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VhEZY3C67xQ/Ut5Ud24wFpI/AAAAAAAAG4A/gA69Noa3nH4/s1600/manwithoutqualities.jpg

...thanks for the info about the different translations

finding innes entertaining, if not quite living up to symons' criticism: "...rather in the manner of Peacock strained through or distorted by Aldous Huxley" (if only!). the appleby ones i've read so far are very much in the cosy tradition where everything is put to rights at the end. appleby himself is a bit of a cipher figure, somewhat wimsey-ish. currently reading the first in a series about his other (amateur) detective, the irascible society painter honeybath who's seeking to bring to justice a gang of bank robbers who have duped him into acting as an accessory.

man, those schiele covers are yoga flame all time. they went through a couple of uglier iterations.

i have 'finished' musil, sort of. it took two years, i think.

nice review of musil translation here. useful book!

i have 'finished' musil, sort of. it took two years, i think.

took me about that too. the last bit is a real slog, it definitely loses its way towards the end. my battered copy of it is one of my prized possessions, partly cos of the differences in my life from when i started it to where i finished it. i used to work in the car park of the cement company my dad worked for in the summer, and i was always reading this, i like how grey dust still falls out whenever i open it.

I picked up the 100 Year Old man Who Climbed out The Window and Disappeared in a charity shop yesterday among a bunch of other stuff. Started reading it in bed last night and have read the first couple of chapters. it looks promising .
I do still have the rest of Wolf Hall to read though and my life is a bit disordered as are all the rooms in this place.
So not sure what attention i can pay to any book until I have the place in order.
& do really thi8nk that I should be finishing one thing before I start another, but things get buried and other things are easier to find.

last night i fell asleep on page 240 something of barnaby rudge and woke up on page 360 something... of an ebook...

the last bit is a real slog

i thought it was building up nicely! unless you mean the hundreds of pages of stuff in the new edition after the 'end' of the old volume three, which i just didn't have the strength for

my edition is the big brick new edition from the 70s, is that the one you have? i can't remember where the volumes begin and end, it's prob about 2009 that i finished it, but i read the entire thing, the storyline with his sister only had flashes of worth.

I like the first few chapeters where both Ulrich and Agathe are getting re-acquainted, then it somewhat loses shape.

Really want to read those sketches as translated by Pike, wish those were issued separately.

yeah from memory i'd agree with that, their relationship was interesting in the beginning, i can remember thinking she seemed a sort of narrative device, like a mirror image of him, but i'd need to read again to be sure.

Thanks, guys. Fizzles, I'm seeing Selected Writings--Torless and several short stories etc.---translated by Burton Pike, is that the one you mean? US Amazon doesn't have anything listed as by Pike and Wilkins, only xpost Wilkins and Kaiser.

xps Thanks James! I'd forgotten who it was that recommended it. I'm looking forward to reading Beerbohm's essays after I've finished this one.

i still think starting musil with torless is like starting your shower by towelling yourself off

Thanks, guys. Fizzles, I'm seeing Selected Writings--Torless and several short stories etc.---translated by Burton Pike, is that the one you mean? US Amazon doesn't have anything listed as by Pike and Wilkins, only xpost Wilkins and Kaiser.

― dow, Tuesday, 11 August 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Don't know what's US amazon, but basically.. http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-Without-Qualities-set/dp/0394510526

I think the 2nd vol has some extra material not covered by the old translation.

US Amazon because I thought Fizzles might be looking at UK Amazon; anyway, thx. I'll prob get that and this too:
http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Writings-Torless-Perfecting-writings/dp/0826403042/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1439330541&sr=1-5

Pitol - Art of Flight. Probably the most European-looking Latin American writer I've read, not least because he has spent a lot of time in Europe - as both embassador and translator. This is part I of his Trilogy of Memory but its actually a collage of journals of sometimes abandoned sometimes successfully completed writing, flat-out diaries (his own months of scavenging around Barcelona), some political journalism (the Zapatista uprisings) and then stretches of lit crit. Vila-Matas wrote the intro by saying Pitol is life and literature fused as one, and its sorta true - you get to spend time with him walking the streets of Venice and covering novels that were set there, and its hard to see where one starts and the other ends. All done in a jumbled sequence that actually doesn't make that much of a difference. Read it v fast and I want to get hold of the 2nd volume (not sure when the 3rd is coming out) and see where this is going. Assume 'nowhere' is the answer.

I'd be surprised if this lasts in English. I've read about 70% of what he talks about and only people who have read a similar range might get as much out of it. There isn't enough travel and people decoupled from all that mountain of reading, but maybe that could change in vols. II and III. That is what makes him so different from a travel writer - he has read more, and he is more politically engaged - whereas I often found travel wrietrs to be er, touristy. Caveat that I haven't read much of that in years. xp

hey James how is that Martian Dawn book? Had never heard of Friedman before but looks right up my alley

I am casting about for my next book, following Leopold's Ghost. I may land on some more R.K. Narayan, but I just bought a copy of Dorn's long poem Gunslinger and I may be drawn in that direction.

Too hot around here for another serious book right now.

hey James how is that Martian Dawn book? Had never heard of Friedman before but looks right up my alley

Joshua Mohr: All This Life -- gave up on this. Seemed specious and pseudo-profound, a bit like how I imagine a Franzen book would be, if I ever read one. All the reviewers love it, though.

Edith Templeton: The Darts of Cupid---picked this up in the library shop, where the opening namesake pulled me right through its 65 pages, with some head-snapping turns (simple male mind had to be told again). The setting is a WWII US War Office in Bathgate, later London, staffed by British female civilians, fed up with husbands, and overseen by British and American officers, all male, duh (the boss is also a doctor). More good points about codes of gender, class, professional status, educational background, workplace, etc. than many novels can manage, without lecturing or filler (would advise a few cuts, but just sentences here and there).
The characters' uses of humor---as tools, weapons, armor, gifts, taxes---have me thinking "British Dawn Powell," although Powell fan Gore Vidal's blurb compares this Edith to Wharton, "cool stare" and all. The narrator of this title story does makes a point of being a tough young cookie, but she's honest about the gaps in her armor, and the ones she can't or won't fill in.
Hope the others in this collection are nearly as good.

Started a Narayan novel, Mr. Sampath - The Printer of Malgudi. It's rather nice to start a book that is not a major commitment of time. This one is just under 200 pages.

Through with the first volume of Jane Eyre, finishing Angela Davis's Women, Race, and Class (such an important intervention), reading Ingeborg Bachmann's formally halting but affecting breakdown poems from 1962-63, and starting Bhanu Kapil's Incubation: A Space for Monsters.

Back to the bucket list/books I should have read in school: Their Eyes Were Watching God seems like art-folk-pop---even within musical distance of another belated read, One Hundred Years of Solitude, at times; also seems like an ancestor---a proudly roving auntie---of African-American entertainment's more caffeinated inspirations.Maybe even the better "chick lit," if I knew anything about that first hand--did enjoy the movie and soundtrack of Waiting To Exhale, even though Hurston's tropical heroine leaves those citizens in the urban Sunbelt dust. Some of them aren't unlike the confidante, frenemies, and other audience members she comes back to, however.

Miklos Szentkuthy - Towards the One and Only Metaphor. Like Musil's Diaries at times - composed of 112 sections, this one puts a bunch of reading together with sketches of characters of this never-to-be-written-up novel. Sees himself as a container for thought and feeling and time itself (no wait come back). Written in '35 so in the shadow of Nazism as well (Hitlerism and Proust). I suppose I mention Musil in the sense that he is in the habit of following a thought through thoroughly but they aren't philosophical. The thing is followed through to a nonsensical result - which can be ok as long as it appears to be literature. Also cf. Musil there is an erotics there - thinking around the body.

The analogy in the intro was of someone looking at this as you would the stars in the sky and then all of a sudden you are grouping them towards a constellation. There is a hint that would happen after a few readings.

Proceeding backwards through 20th Century lit(which is also how I spent much of my share of the 20th Century itself, at the time), getting more and more of a sense of the dynamic attraction and danger of the crowd--"the holiday energies of the masses," as a unnamed revolutionist, quoted by Richard Wright, puts it. Hurston's Janie seeks, finds, realigns communities and families in the crowd, and these run their courses---inside a minute, over decades, whatever it takes.

The characters' uses of humor---as tools, weapons, armor, gifts, taxes---have me thinking "British Dawn Powell,"

try her 'gordon' to add weird sex to the mix

edith templeton, that is, not dawn powell

dow have you read canetti's crowds & power? (I haven't, came close to buying it the other day but it was kinda pricy for a 2nd hand book)

Canetti's on the list, but I hadn't thought of that title specifcally; will check it out, thanks. Weird sex in xpost "The Darts of Cupid" too, re the story's complex mapping of gender inter- and intrarelated regulation, compliance, resistance, and/or transactional tensions, erotic friction,sparks (gifts, taxes), but not s&m, more unexpected than that. Also, the narrator's ideal is love as drug, flotation in the self-aware vanishing point.

But I haven't told all of it.

just read, & really enjoyed: https://nplusonemag.com/issue-23/fiction-drama/nine-inherited-disorders/ (DISCLAIMER: not a book)

Finished Towards the One and Only Metaphor. Plenty of thoughts on Powys, Browne (need to read him) and Joyce (he translated Ulysses to Hungarian and he wasn't fazed by FW as it was being published) and much more. Real keeper of a book.

My bourgeois self is currently getting a kick out of Steppenwolf.

on an actual book-reading tip: I find something deeply appealing in the combination of sentimentalism, chemistry, and 19th century Age-of-Progress humanist ideology that is Jules Verne's L'Île mystérieuse (the first part, anyway -- not sure how things will change once the "mystery" rears its head)

I'm finishing Jane Eyre and returning to Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex: the chapter on race has aged extremely poorly, and her use of Freud is unhelpful when she discusses homosexuality, but I totally love the breadth, polemical energy, and woolly utopianism of the work, like a much shrewder and less abstruse Anti-Oedipus.

Spending half of my time transfixed by some of the sentences from Platonov's Chevengur as collected in The Portable Platonov (this has a play, a couple of short stories and a section from The Foundation Pit which has now been fully translated) and the other half on Hjalmar Sodebergh's account of doomed love in A Serious Game, accompanied by all the abrupt expressionisms of the time (1912)

(btw, there is only 50 pages worth of Chevengur, about a tenth of the bk)

Hjalmar Sodeberg is a wonderful writer. i wish more of his stuff was in English--there's only 'Doctor Glass', 'A Serious Game' and a collection of stories available as far as I know.

I just finished a Swedish book of the same vintage (1908), Elin Wagner's 'Men and Other Misfortunes', a startlingly modern novel about four women flatsharing in Stockholm, their job(hunting) and relationships, fighting off sexual approaches from the boss, all that sort of thing. Very lighlty done, but impressive.

Finished "The Travels of Marco Polo". I thought it was pretty enjoyable, whether one believes Marco actually visited all those places or not, and there is clearly lots of second-hand material in there, whether he picked it up on his travels or while hanging out with other merchants in Venice or whether it was interpolated by Rustichello, it's still a pretty incredible collection of material, and fascinating to read as an example of a "bestseller" that predates Gutenberg.

Now I've started "The Stillborn God" by Mark Lilla, which if nothing else has accomplished the unprecedented feat of making me want to read Kant, though I'm fairly sure that will pass.

This forthcoming book makes me want to read Kant:
http://www.adamroberts.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/THE-THING-ITSELF-nick-fiddle.jpg

It's a riff on the John Carpenter 'The Thing' movie with a protagonist who is obsessed with Kant

Just read The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin. A+ stuff, scarcely dated. On a side note: my copy was printed in 1963, $1.65 cover price.

James, Norvik published Soderberg's "Martin Birck's Youth" iirc but that's the only other novel of his I've seen in English.

close to the end of to the lighthouse, i found it really powerful. that chasmic drop from the dinner scene into this grim post-war future is heartbreaking.

James, Norvik published Soderberg's "Martin Birck's Youth" iirc but that's the only other novel of his I've seen in English.

― Tim, Wednesday, 19 August 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

iirc the intro said there were only a couple of other novels bar what's mentioned - and of course Gertrud can't go w/out a mention. Imagine the play is knocking around somewhere although Dreyer's versh makes for one of the best films of the 60s.

close to the end of to the lighthouse, i found it really powerful. that chasmic drop from the dinner scene into this grim post-war future is heartbreaking.

― doing my Objectives, handling some intense stuff (LocalGarda), Wednesday, August 19, 2015 3:51 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, "Time Passes" is maybe the most striking thing in all of Woolf for me.

yeah, the way she just suddenly hurtles through all the deaths is both really wrenching but also technically brilliant.

like for the opening section it's just incredibly slow and meandering, almost cryptic, then all of a sudden it's years later and these children are dead and this engaged couple have a rotten marriage. this was my first woolf so i look forward to more.

Right, am ordering "Martin Birck's Youth"

Bordwell - Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema
Some more 1001 Nights

Some Jack London short stories. He was a clever writer all right.

Yeah good writer, shame he was an ardent racist though. Not sure if I've read him since I saw that outlined.
Guess I still read Lovecraft and he was too.

So was virginia woolf, ditto

Didn't come up in the Library of America editions I read (long ago), or not that I recall---though maybe he ambivalently shaded the obvious baddie, Nietzche-reading, Ozymandian ahole Cap'n of The Sea Wolf. I mainly retain an impression of methodically mesmerizing detail, in "To Build A Fire," and his experiences working in a laundry, finally getting so sick that he ended up in the hospital--briefly, but still it was a rare achievement, and a holiday! Also "The Open Road" and other tales of hoboing, occasionally with time in jails here and there, comparisons of conditions, etc. Even more of a likely influence on Orwell via The Iron Heel, his pre-1984, and People of the Abyss, which seems like it may have led to Down And Out In Paris and London.
Crick's bio mentions that Orwell's story is fiction, which I hadn't thought of, because it's presented with a lot of London-Orwell-type low-key clarity, good camera recording all shades of grey. So then I thought People.. was a novel too, until I worked in a bookstore and sold a limited edition incl. pictures the author took with a camera concealed in his rags: people looking like miners who just emerged from a cave-in, but they're walking around a marketplace, on just another day in London.

Just finished The First Bad Man, Miranda July's first novel. Will have to check her short storiesm considering how involving this is, chapter by chapter, although the seems too carefully, obtrusively contrived--would rather she just through the cards up in the air than keep shuffling and counting--but as a chapter, it does win me over, as the obsesso characters continue on their journeys, in their spells, exploring new-to-me worlds and ages of passive-aggression, paying dues in funny money and other currencies, having real sex while imaging they, not (necessarily, although sometimes also) their partners, are other people--yadda yadda: it starts out like "Portlandia" meets chick lit, and other pop elements appear, but characterization goes deeper, and finds its own surprising plausibility, which reasserts its boundaries, as the floodwaters recede, or settle in.
I found myself caring about, sometimes moved by, even relating to the characters, however obscurely: most of it has nothing at all to do with people, places, or events in my own life, so not much dependence on familiarity (although if I lived in middle-class suburban California ca. 2013, who knows).

the *ending* seems too carefully, obtrusively contrived. Would rather she just *threw* her cards up in the air...

Older and younger people using and used by, sometimes maybe even for the better, while they all keep getting older, of course: yeah, that part's relatable, as the kids say.

using and used by *each other* ffs

I forgot that July has a novel out. I'll have to remember to check that out. I quite enjoyed No One Belongs Here More Than You. Some might find her a little cutesy, but several of her improbable deadpan twists had me laughing out loud.

Jessica Hopper - The First Collection of Criticism From a Living Female Rock Critic
Mary Gaitskill - Bad Behavior

Jessica Hopper - The First Collection of Criticism From a Living Female Rock Critic
Mary Gaitskill - Bad Behavior

thomas Bernhard: My Prizes -- hilariously bad-tempered

That's his thing, no?

Definitely, but this is a collection of recollections of various prizes he was given (plus some of the acceptance speeches) and how for the most part he hated winning them, or the prizegiving went wrong, or the thing he bought with the money got trashed. Rather touchingly, he seems to go everywhere with his aunt.

just started reading "a late dinner - the food and culture of spain" by paul richardson. very interesting. also been flicking through the irish journal, stinging fly, the london issue. bought that new granta anthology yesterday and my in-tray also has the new musil collection and portnoy's complaint.

Ishiguro, THE BURIED GIANT

Chandler, THE BIG SLEEP

then I started on Kafka, AMERIKA

Tony Fletcher All Hopped Up But Got No Place to Go
History of 50 years of music from the streets in NYC. So far I've got as far as Chan Pozo getting murdered over his reaction to a bad weed deal on returning to NYC from a tour where his congas had been stolen. It's good so far. & has me wanting to get hold of some material by Machito who has already been talked about.
I think what negative criticism I've read of the book has been over omissions he has actually consciously made to fit his self designed rubrick which is about that music from the streets thing, so he drops things when they get commercial recognition. it means he looks at Latin music about a decade before Fania nut none of the Nu Yorica era stuff. He also drops hip hop just as its beginning to get really interesting. He cuts off in 1977, so I think he has the birth of that but none of the latter developments which he might dismiss the street level of because of major label involvement, which doesn't sound quite like the reality of the situation but does seem to be his approach.
Anyway looking forward to reading the rest of this and hopefully having the soundtrack as I go. Writing ids pretty good anyway.

Or alternatively actual title is All Hopped Up and Ready To Go. As in the Ramones line,

readin TEH TRACTATUS in german so lese LOGISCH-PHILOSOPHISCHE ABHANDLUNG, it's nifty

Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. In German it rhymes, do u see?

hör

hör auf!

:O

"music from the streets in NYC"

can one really play music in the street?

maybe as a one-man-band or busker or something

but music more often made in a studio or concert venue or similar

interesting

Time was a child could play a kick-drum in the street.

Read some in Cassius Dio's History last night, but I think I will move over to reading Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor.

I last read Roumeli in 1980 and have fond memories of it. I was a bit of a Grecophile back then, which tendency has abated somewhat in the intervening decades, but I would still jump at a chance to return to Greece and spend a few weeks in one of the less-touristy backwater towns, preferably near the sea (and most of Greece qualifies on that head), drinking retsina, eating whatever the taverna served and palavering with the locals.

I think Fletcher's idea is that the music is organically directed rather than shaped by commerce. As in it comes directly from the artist and he gives up on whatever the music scene is when its established enough that labels are directing the music. Anyway its an interesting read. I've just got through doo wop.

Kurt Tucholsky: Berlin! Berlin! -- collection of Weimar Germany-era journalism/poems/satires
Randolph Stow: The Visitants -- Papua New Guinea, Australian ex-pats, madness, colonialism, suicide, aliens?

Nadezhda Mandelstam - Hope Abandoned. One of the great books - with the caveat that you'll get more out of it if you know enough about the Russian poets and literature in general of the 20s and 30s (and then a dollop of Soviet history on top) but its by turns critical, gossipy, chatty, funny, and she never feels sorry for herself. At least in print, she remarkably keeps her cool at what life throws at her. And the Soviet regime of the 30s had thrown a lot at her!

the preceding volume of that i remember being pretty great

i am reading gene wolfe, oyy, and working through the library of america james baldwin

Yeah - have a 'classic' 70s penguin paperbk of both.

reading this. 2nd book in a trilogy. 3rd book hasn't come out yet. i like it. about a weird fussy race of space conquerors. they really love tea, so you know they are evil.

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/vxkfj6hqbqknpmwt7ur9.jpg

The Tailor of Panama and Edmund White's States of Desire: Travels in Gay America.

in the 80's i remember chickening out and not buying states of desire when i saw it in a bookstore after totally loving a boy's own story and the beautiful room is empty. i would read it now!

I've been reading Chris Kraus's Torpor, which is just brutal, the last book in Kraus's "failing marriage to Sylvere Lotringer" trilogy, not as manic and colorful as "I Love Dick" but impressive in its ability to balance the playful flexibility of the narrative voice with the crushing sadness of the subject matter. Also going slowly through Brandon Stosuy's anthology of New York Downtown writing in the seventies and eighties, Up is Up But So is Down, and starting Cynthia Carr's biography of David Wojnarowicz, Fire in the Belly.

in the 80's i remember chickening out and not buying states of desire when i saw it in a bookstore after totally loving a boy's own story and the beautiful room is empty. i would read it now!

― scott seward

As a unknowing time capsule of an era decimated in a couple of years, it's poignant.

yeah, that's one of the reasons i'd be interested in reading it now. forgotten worlds appeal to me.

It's also (iirc) p hot, and I'm p much straight, so that's kinda cool. Reading Daphne du Maurier's The Parasites and up to The Auroras of Autumn in Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems.

finished Kafka, AMERIKA - less sinister and dark than the other novels but can still be distressing the way the innocent hero is abused by others.

odd how it finishes with such a separate chapter which introduces a brand new character (Fanny) we're supposed to have met before but whose previous appearance must not have made the cut at least in the version I have.

then finished another PKD novel.

Also going slowly through Brandon Stosuy's anthology of New York Downtown writing in the seventies and eighties, Up is Up But So is Down

I just spent some time w/this too, researching my own memoir-ish project. Ended up skimming, frankly. Didn't get Kathy Acker then, don't now. Miguel Pinero's poem "scatter my ashes on the lower east side" >>>>> everything else in the book put together, in my not so humble. Cynthia Carr's David Wojnarowicz bio was fascinating if a little overlong and ultimately shattering, tragic. Gives a sharp, detailed inside view of the 80s EV art scene.

Pinero's thing is called A Lower East Side Poem.

That sounds good! I would like to read that poem.

I am going to read Franco Moretti a bit.

A Lower East Side Poem by Miguel Pinero

Just once before I die
I want to climb up on a
tenement sky
to dream my lungs out till
I cry
then scatter my ashes thru
the Lower East Side.

So let me sing my song tonight
let me feel out of sight
and let all eyes be dry
when they scatter my ashes thru
the Lower East Side.

From Houston to 14th Street
from Second Avenue to the mighty D
here the hustlers & suckers meet
the faggots & freaks will all get
high
on the ashes that have been scattered
thru the Lower East Side.

There's no other place for me to be
there's no other place that I can see
there's no other town around that
brings you up or keeps you down
no food little heat sweeps by
fancy cars & pimps' bars & juke saloons
& greasy spoons make my spirits fly
with my ashes scattered thru the
Lower East Side . . .

A thief, a junkie I've been
committed every known sin
Jews and Gentiles . . . Bums & Men
of style . . . run away child
police shooting wild . . .
mother's futile wails . . . pushers
making sales . . . dope wheelers
& cocaine dealers . . . smoking pot
streets are hot & feed off those who bleed to death . . .

all that's true
all that's true
all that is true
but this ain't no lie
when I ask that my ashes be scattered thru
the Lower East Side.

So here I am, look at me
I stand proud as you can see
pleased to be from the Lower East
a street fighting man
a problem of this land
I am the Philosopher of the Criminal Mind
a dweller of prison time
a cancer of Rockefeller's ghettocide
this concrete tomb is my home
to belong to survive you gotta be strong
you can't be shy less without request
someone will scatter your ashes thru
the Lower East Side.

I don't wanna be buried in Puerto Rico
I don't wanna rest in Long Island Cemetery
I wanna be near the stabbing shooting
gambling fighting & unnatural dying
& new birth crying
so please when I die . . .
don't take me far away
keep me near by
take my ashes and scatter them thru out
the Lower East Side . . .

Although it doesn't remotely fit I can't help but read that to the tune of The Magnetic Fields 'I'm The Luckiest Guy on The Lower East Side'.

"A thief, a junkie I've been
committed every known sin
Jews and Gentiles . . . Bums & Men
of style . . . run away child
police shooting wild . . .
mother's futile wails . . . pushers
making sales . . . dope wheelers
& cocaine dealers . . . smoking pot
streets are hot & feed off those who bleed to death . . ."

would have loved for Sinatra to tackle this...

Music by Antonio Carlos Jobim

Imagery and cadence reminds me of at least one Dave Van Ronk song--which comes from a different perspective, and I prefer its original performance on No Dirty Names (available on spotify and iTunes), but still the voice of experience:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylEkfn42hao

Good old Flash--if this doesn't show, it's "Zen Koans Gonna Rise Again," on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylEkfn42hao

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylEkfn42hao

Sorry! The latest Firefox---no, it's my fault.

Speaking of books about lost worlds, I've always loved Geoffrey Stokes' Star Making Machinery, about a time, when emerging mass bohemia x discretionary income, in the wake of Janis Joplin's farewell vision of "Me and Bobby McGhee"---discreetly changed from "Bobbie"; all things were not yet possible---but still a time when conservatives and hippies could come together and make superstars of Commmander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, with a little help from their friends in the studio, the press-publicity meld, their warped label, and lawyers, lawyers, lawyers---o it got heavy, but Stokes' humane, lucid, unsentimental sense of justice and absurdity never slips into Behind The Music soap opera.
And the press junkets! For sub-Grub Streeters, making maybe 10 bucks for 1000 words, in some cases (and 10 bucks for 1000 words was still 10 bucks for 1000 words, even way back then, lemmetellya). From Flushing to Frisco, even. "And hey, doesn't your sister live out there? If you wanna stay a few days into next week, that'd be cool too."

(Spoiler: making superstars of Cody's crew seemed possible, to some...)

Wuthering Heights

(first time)

i read wuthering heights for the first time over a three-month period as part of my english lit a level and still have not recovered

It's been a good summer for getting grounded in the Archaean and Proterozoic:

Robert M. Hazen - The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet (2014)
Paul G. Falkowski - Life’s Engines: How Microbes made Earth Habitable (2015)
Nick Lane - The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life (2015)

The Hazen is the most readable, I've learned most from the first 4 chapters of the Lane. Up next is: Gerard Russell - Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East (2014). I feel I haven't paid proper reverence to Ahura Mazda and Abatur of late.

I finished Mark Lilla's The Stillborn God. It takes up an interesting problem, but it seems a bit unsure about what level to pitch itself at. It seems perhaps like someone trying to write for a more generalist audience than they're used to, and not sure how to be less technical without dumbing things down. Also I didn't always feel comfortable with the way Lilla paraphrased the arguments & ideas of the authors he wrote about. I could understand how they fit into the story he was trying to tell, but I wasn't sure that I understood what they would have understood themselves to be saying. Also, I think I just see the interplay of theology and politics a bit differently than he does. His sweeping talk about the "Great Separation" annoyed me as much as it annoyed some people on the Immanent Frame blog. I'm tempted to say the discussion of the book there is better than the book itself.

reading eileen gunn's first collection. she is a hoot. i need her 2014 collection. might have to buy that online.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41y13CJKkML._SX303_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

some of the 2nd collection is readable online:

http://questionablepractices.net/stories/

her steampunk parodies are fun: http://www.tor.com/2010/11/01/the-perdido-street-project/

I'm most of the way through Roumeli now. The book's biggest fault is his overreaching prose, which seems to equate an exceptional style with an excellent style, but the substance of the book is well worth it. The events, places and people he describes are pretty awesome to read about.

noted this on facebook: in eileen gunn's 1991 story Fellow Americans, about an alternate history Richard Nixon, she totally uses the word "futurama".

Futurama was a ride at the 1939 World's Fair.

AHA! in this story there is a 1990 world's fair. that governor of new york bobby kennedy visits...

huh I remember reading that Gunn book when it came out - it's okay, I think I got rid of it...?

i like it. her.

reading Jane Gardam's A Long Way From Verona and enjoying it a lot. her first book and it's considered a children's book, but i can't imagine any child reading it here. i did have Rufus read the first chapter aloud this morning though. just to hear how it sounded coming from a child.

now i want to find some more of her books. she wrote 25 books after this one! she was in her 40's when she wrote Verona. let's hear it for the late bloomers. (lots of story collections too. i definitely want to find those. probably not that easy. don't think she has really made a name for herself here.)

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

"Gardam gave up work to raise three children—Tim, Kitty, and Tom—in what she has called a “monster of a beat-up house” in the London suburb of Wimbledon. She channelled her creativity into becoming the ideal mother. “I gave myself to my children,” she said, pouring white wine. “It happens to some women.” She invited the neighborhood busybodies to tea. She fed the hordes. “I did all the right things, because I wanted my children to have friends,” she said. The day that Tom went to school, she marched upstairs, sat down at her desk, and began to write. “I ought to tell you at the beginning,” the opening line of her first novel reads, “that I am not quite normal.”

pieces on her in the NYT and the New Yorker last year, so, maybe her time will come in the states. at the age of 85.

I'm finishing Up is Up But So is Down, which I mentioned upthread. For the most part, it's been filling in my sense of the downtown scene (through its breadth of contributors, but also through Stosuy's inclusion of downtown fliers and zine art, which give a vivid idea of the connections between the writing scene and the artworld) rather than radically revising it: I was probably most struck by the texts by Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, Sarah Schulman, and David Wojnarowicz, but I already loved their work. The main discoveries of the anthology for me were probably Tim Dlugos's long AIDS elegy "G-9" and, to a lesser extent, Patrick McGrath's Wilde/Huysmans riff "The Angel", and the anthology reminds me to look more closely at Cookie Mueller and Penny Arcade's writing in particular. I also got the sense that I probably don't need to engage much further with Joe Maynard (who seems to have fallen off the map, anyway), Nick Zedd, or Richard Prince, at least as prose writers, since they don't have much more to offer here than ~edgy~ misogyny and a kind of abstract stab at transgression. I also have to say that the anthology makes the downtown writing scene, aside from the Nuyorican Poets' contributions, seem pretty white-centered: I'm curious to know to what extent that reflects the historical dynamics of the scene and to what extent that impression arises from the anthology's editorial choices.

All I've read of Jane Gardam has been great--haven't read anything she's done for years, though

Ursula K Le Guin: The Wind's Twelve Quarters -- early story collection. not everything in here is doing it for me, but the ones that do are amazing (esp. the one about Winter, later setting of Left Hand of Darkness)

Started The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan, put it down 60 pages in - didn't get appeal of superhero don juan main character, not sure what parts of the plot are not terribly cliche, prose seemed p old school too, didn't enjoy random poetry references (actually I rarely enjoy main characters who think about literature all the time, it gets a bit meta icky for me - like, it's not very believable that all these main characters care so much for lit, writer is just projecting stuff)

Now reading The edge of Europe by Pentti Saarikoski which is a g r e a t read so far, strong poetic energy, lots of non sequituring stream of consciousness thoughts from cats to Stalin, I dunno what to say, unlike most stuff I've ever come across - reading a Danish translation

xxxpost

I forgot about Cookie Mueller, her autobiographical pieces in the East Village Eye and elsewhere were heartfelt and often hilarious. I just finished Brad Gooch's memoir of the period, Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the 70s and the 80s. Reading his account of the tragic, tortuous and all too typical decline and death due to AIDS of his partner Howard Brookner was so vivid and moving I'm at a rare loss for words.

It's been a while,mbut i remember keith haring's autobiography being good in that vein. Never liked his art at all, but he lived in an interesting time and place and mileu

"All I've read of Jane Gardam has been great--haven't read anything she's done for years, though"

i naturally thought of you as the person here who had probably read her stuff. maybe the recent u.s. press will get some sort of stateside reissue series going.

(and her publisher is little, brown in the u.k. so it wouldn't be hard for them to reprint stuff for the u.s.)

enjoying calvin trillin 'travels w/ alice' rn, its v charming

I forgot about Cookie Mueller, her autobiographical pieces in the East Village Eye and elsewhere were heartfelt and often hilarious. I just finished Brad Gooch's memoir of the period, Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the 70s and the 80s. Reading his account of the tragic, tortuous and all too typical decline and death due to AIDS of his partner Howard Brookner was so vivid and moving I'm at a rare loss for words.
― got the club going UP on a tuesday (m coleman), Wednesday, September 2, 2015 5:44 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'll look at Gooch's memoir sometime, m coleman: I like his piece in Up is Up, "TV," and I remember his O'Hara biography as being solid, but I don't think I've read anything by him that sounds as intense as that.

Got three xpost Gardams from the library shop: Old Filth, The People On Privilege Hill, and The Queen of The Tambourine---read any of those, James M? They're trade PBs, from Europa Editions, Ferrante's US publisher. Gave Old Filth to my aunt, haven't heard back about it. Haven't read any yet myself.

I haven't read those, though everyone who has seems to think the Old Filth books are the culmination of her career, for what it's worth. All the ones I've read are tatty old second-hand Abacus paperbacks from the 1980s I got when I worked next door to a used bookshop.

i got purity today and started reading that too

my condolences

orson-welles-clap.gif

By chance I just happened to read Wolf in White Van close on the heels of Steppenwolf. Open for suggestions on how to continue this accidental series of transcendental lupine outcast literature.

wolf hall, i suppose

I believe you have sworn off that one Damon Knight protégé so...

I believe you have sworn off that one Damon Knight protégé so...

Well the title is the most dispensable part of the connection. I suppose one shouldn't try to force these things, anyway.

Speculative searches lead towards Musil, maybe it's time.

Naomi Wolf's "Vagina" also suggested.

Werewolf Problem in Central Russia by v. Pelevin

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/4177pt2OTEL._SX339_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I am reading Jessica Mitford's memoir, Hons and Rebels. It promises to be quite strange and enthralling.

wolf solent for the win!

Wolf In White Van is astonishing.

Using that particular word in partial tribute to ancient, dust-dust-of-far-suns pulp fuel for the narrator, the author, and this reader.

Only one "dust" intended, though.

Wolf of Wall Street is my bus book at the moment. Pretty trashy.

Wolf solent takes the prize! Hadn't heard of it, have not investigated too closely.

after ShariVari mentioned Agata Pyzik's Poor But Sexy I read it and recommend it also; Eastern European politics, communism, gender, film, post-punk; I learned a ton and want to go deeper.

Wolf solent takes the prize! Hadn't heard of it, have not investigated too closely.

Surely you will only get full closure when I've read and reported back. Will try not to keep you all on tenterhooks too long.

Sadly I've given up. Couldn't get behind the odd combination of florid mysticism and the everyday tales of cheerful child-abusing townfolk. Found Wolf an absurd man-child, oblivious to the feelings of others, besotted with a girl half his age before even exchanging a single word with her.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKuJDc-Wmrk

otm

Ian McEwan, SWEET TOOTH (2012)

sadly his weakest book since amsterdam

i'm back to the sci-fi.

https://scontent-ord1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xaf1/v/t1.0-9/11987039_10154213186167137_3409655425967590269_n.jpg?oh=2acaf9bbe0c86e84f082f556341f809a&oe=56788AA1

I finished the Jessica Mitford memoir. It was, as I expected, quite amazing. Her authorial voice has an understated, but wicked, humor and she uses just enough exaggeration to heighten the amusement, but the details of her life were extraordinary without any exaggeration necessary. I would definitely recommend it.

Now I've started into Gore Vidal's Creation, which is different kettle of fish entirely.

between library books so dippin back into Narayan's Malgudi Days

I've only read a couple budrys shorts - how is that, scott?

the cover is quite beautiful, whatever the contents are like

i've only read his short stories as well. this is pretty funny so far. in this book, Pluto is for losers.

i don't think i've ever read any jessica mitford. i know i've never read an american way of death. i would definitely like to read the memoir though. i'm definitely a nancy fan. loved pursuit of love/love in a cold climate so much. in my american way.

The Memoir, american way of death and her essay collection 'Poison Penmanship' are all well worth reading: the memoir's probably the best, as her family and life were so interesting and odd as aimless says

Balzac - The Wild Ass' Skin
Margaret Leech - In the Days of McKinley
Sarah Vowell - Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

little did ms. leech know her book would be rechristened in the days of denali

not sure if SWEET TOOTH is good but it is incredibly readable!

I think it is actually quite interesting and unusual in being such a meta-commentary on the author's own early work. And (less unusual) in inhabiting a genre, with advice from Le Carré. Whatever else about IM, he can produce a page-turner.

quiet at work this week so got through 3 books

Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper I enjoyed a lot and the elements that I didn't really 'get'(etta's journey) were compensated for by the quality of the writing.

Alice and the Fly by James Rice which was p bleak tbh.

Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun which has a terrific premise (the world succumbs to insomnia and almost everyone can't sleep which leads to madness, hallucinations etc the few who can still sleep must be careful because if caught napping they are subject to attack from the sleepless) The first half is excellently realised but it trails off badly imo.

Anybody read MacDonald Harris? First part seems garrulous, but crtl + F name of Borges or title Herma and gets more interesting, I think
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/books/review/michael-chabon-on-macdonald-harris-novel-herma.html?smid=tw-nytbooks&smtyp=cur&_r=0

this guy lives near me. came into my store with his dog for years and i never knew he was a hugo award-winning SF dude. nice guy. i got the whole trilogy. never read him before.

https://scontent-lga1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpl1/v/t1.0-9/11951202_10154220825757137_3576390174085857652_n.jpg?oh=2eeeb5f6af309725193797adf7cb83dd&oe=5664DE97