And The Snow Fell Softly On ILB: What Are You Reading Now Winter 2017/18

Successor to: Fall 2017 Happy Families Are Alike. What Are You Reading Now?

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by le Carre

In the previous WAYR thread (cited above) James Morrison said regarding my reading Voltaire in Love:

Had Voltaire in Love for ages, never read it--will be interested to hear what you think

I've read about 75% of it now. The first 70 or 80 pages are weak. Names are introduced, connected to perhaps a title or an occupation, they do nothing of note, then are never heard from again. The content is more a series of remarks than any kind of developed thesis or narrative history. It's all quite perfunctory and I almost gave up on it. Luckily, the pace picks up as the book continues, anecdotes appear, then more fully developed stories. Names become recurrent and have characters attached to them. It becomes interesting.

Mitford makes no real attempt to discuss Voltaire's thinking or writing, other than to paint him as extremely witty, while rarely citing any witticisms. His wit is taken as read. In her view he was motivated largely by a desire for fame and he achieved it through a gift for audacity and scandal. She grants him both loyalty and generosity and provides evidence of these traits. He was shrewd with money, which she admires.

I have no great opinion of her insight as a historian, but at least she has elevated her book to the level of pleasant entertainment, after a slow start.

That Le Carré is great, unsurprisingly.

it's what put him on the map, so i expect so; crackling start

What did people make of the Cat Person phenomenon? I can't think of a piece of literature that has had that much impact (if that's the right word. Presence?), at least not in recent memory; that could just be my particular Twitter echo pod, though.

My bland opinion: I quite liked it, even if it felt zeitgeisty, and by extension, a bit didactic and earnest. I think some have confused 'affectless prose' for the fact that chunks of it simply didn't sing, but that might just be me.

Oops, just seen the thread.

don’t feel i want to add anything to the cat person thread, but i thought it was good, and great that it’s created widespread conversation, tho much of it does seem to be from people who find it difficult to parse (“most men aren’t really like this so what is its status”, or “who is the bad person here?” sort of thing).

finished This Little Art by Kate Briggs, which was rly good. particularly enjoyed the stuff that wasn’t immediately about translation - her approach to Barthes, the description of the relationship and correspondence between André Gide and his translator was incredible. I don’t want to spoil it for those who may read!

obv reading Chateaubriand’s Memoirs.

Going to start on another book i bought but didn’t get round to this year, Pierre Michon’s Winter Mythologies and Abbots translated by Ann Jefferson.

(I’m going to be assiduous in my acknowledgment of translators from now on after reading Briggs)

This translation got a v good review in the NYRB, which was what put me on to it. in fact translation has ended up being a minor leitmotif to the year.

Winter Mythologies is wonderful.

Thnaks for the Mitford info. I see she wrote a number of histories, all of which look POTENTIALLY interesting.

I'm assisting in a Fantasy course in the coming term and just got my free copies of the books. About to attempt a deep dive into the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which I've never read before (was only an occasional fan of the films).

(Do you guys know where I was going with the title of this thread?)

The Dead?

Yeah, exactly. Not quite the original language, but a paraphrase that I saw somewhere else.

Seems like similar snow falls on the dying James Mason in Odd Man Out.

Hi cryptosicko, when you get time, please post book list from Fantasy course here, or here:ThReads Must Roll: the new, improved rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

Snow was general all over Ireland

Bought the Bag I'm in yesterday since it was cheap in FOPP.
Also the book on Bowie Style cos it was £9.99 if bought with something else in HMV. Of course the 2 are the same company so may have some of the same deals going on. Bank charges have FOPP down as HMV.

& not sure how good the Bowie book is if it has a photo of the Seeds instead of the Nazz who it claims to be.

Think i'm mainly reading linernotes and the latest edition of Flashback! as well as the Bernard Sumner memoir in which he's just got Joy Division going but not yet got Stephen Morris on board.

Enjoying audio version of book recommended by, in no particular order, ilxor mark s and non-ilxor JLG.

> Of course the 2 are the same company so may have some of the same deals going on

the £2.99 early electronic music comp i bought in fopp last week i saw in hmv yesterday for the same price

Last night I picked up Moontrap, the last historic novel in a series of three, set in Oregon and clustered around the years 1848-1852, by Don Berry. I read the first two earlier in 2017 and wanted to finish the set before the year ends, just for the tidiness of it.

It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen

Aimless, you've read Country of the Pointed Firs, right? Is it good?

Nope. Never read it. My mom liked it, though.

and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.

Country of the pointed firs is v good, kind of creepy

damn, mr. joyce, well done, sir

"And the snow fell softly on Lil B"

I'm reading The Demolished Man and Deep Learning With Python, but I'm excited about starting Birds, Beasts, and Relatives, which I picked up because it was mentioned in a movie I liked. I also want to read Wind, Sand, and Stars before my vacation is over, because I'm seeking the headspace I think it'll put me in

Pointed Firs is great!

Gerald Durrell's first stab at this sort of book, My Family and Other Animals was the most enjoyable for me, but Birds, Beasts, and Relatives is fine stuff, too, and I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

Aimless, you've read Country of the Pointed Firs, right? Is it good?

― dow, Sunday, December 24, 2017

I can answer: it's terrific. I read in grad school years ago.

All these endorsements (and now I recall Scott Seward really liked it too, after initially hesitating because of cute title)! Think I'll make it my next early (?) 20th Century mainstream etc. item on the bucket-list-go-round, even though I had almost decided on The Earl of Louisiana--real good too, right? Haven't read much Liebling.

My Family and Other Animals is quite a fest, yeah.

Ah, maybe I should get that one too and read it first.

Michon's Winter Mythologies are good so far. They're very short so you want to savour each one. They're also opaque in meaning, so you want to reflect on each one. The first three were commissioned by The Alliance Française of Ireland, and describe brief anecdotal or sacred moments in the early Irish engagement with Christianity. They're also attempts on the part of the people they describe to understand where Grace resides. Patrick, not yet saint, archbishop of Armagh, 'the founder', converts many of the tribal kings with simple 'conjuring tricks' and a well-rehearsed patter:

And perhaps because he is growing old, and his ardor and his malice are becoming blunted, Patrick regrets this facility as he walks along this road. He would like a real miracle to occur, just once, and for once in his lifetime, matter in all its opacity to be converted to Grace before his eyes.

These short texts mix the style of the fable - precise language in short sentences - and mystical texts, in that they stop short of complete meaning, leaving understand and meaning just out of reach. That seems appropriate to the matter of an early uncertain engagement with Christianity. These are not btw Christian apologetics or anything like them. Michon is cynical within the mysticism. His concern is with the *pagans*, and the uncertainty of the Christians, the He manages to 'cinvert' precise detail (I was going to say realism, but it's not that, not really) into intimations of Grace (to rephrase Patrick's desire).

I was reminded of the Kierkegaard line: Mysticism has not the patience to wait for God's revelation. It seems pertinent to each of the three stories, but they *are* patient and precise in their execution. Very good. Moving on to the Vendée stories now.

Oh and I loved this bit on reading. It's describing Saint Columba of Iona, 'who was still called Columbkill, Columbkill the Wolf':

... this wolf is also a monk in the manner of monks at that time, a manner that is inconceivable to our way of understanding. When he lays down his sword, he rides from monastery to monastery, where he reads: he reads standing up, tensed, moving his lips and frowning, in the violent manner of those times, which we cannot conceive of either. Columbkill the Wolf is a brutal reader.

'inconceivable to our way of understanding' is something that Michon somehow manages to convey throughout this stories. Some job. And that image of the brutal reader, I never would have thought of, but it immediately brought to mind marginal illustrations of monks standing reading at lecterns, and also brought to mind that passage in St Augustine describing Ambrose Bishop of Milan, the first person to read without moving their lips. A tense unnatural (paradoxically) engagement with reading, which when Michon describes it, reflects on the reader themselves, and ties them in a bond of difference.

mistake, this second set of stories in Winter Mythologies are set in the Causses not Brittany - that’s where the stories in Abbots are set.

all translated by Ann Jefferson, as described in the NYRB article, which prompted me to buy it in the first place:

There is, however, excellent news on the Michon translation front: an exceptional translator has, at last, appeared. Ann Jefferson, a former professor of French at Oxford, has delivered Michon’s two books of short stories, Mythologies d’hiver (1997) and Abbés (2002), in a single slim volume. I read Jefferson’s versions in something close to shock: they feel as Michon feels in French. There is the velocity, the precision, the music, the compression, the singularity, the power.

foucault lectures, schopenhauer, allen wood on kant, laszlo foldenyi on melancholy, karen armstrong's history of god, books on cognitive therapy, epictetus' discourses, seneca's letters

seneca is pretty cool

Now read the Nine Passages on the Causses by Pierre Michon, and even more impressed by these than the Three Miracles in Ireland. Nine anecdotal, elliptical stories which include matter about the nature of writing, the nature of transmission of belief and understanding.

The first is about a late 19th Century anthropologist who unearths an ossuary in a Causse.

The second is about an ex-bishop who has retired to a Causse as a hermit. He ventures out of his hermitage one day and feels full of energy and pride and life and then as he reflects is not sure whether this has been something which God or Satan has encouraged.

The third is a very simple vignette about a Merovingian episode where a 15-year-old girl, Éminie, daughter of King Clotaire of Paris, who, for pragmatic reasons, gets made Abbess of a distant abbey she will never visit. At the end the story says 'it is said she died of leprosy'.

The next, the fourth, is the story of monks many years later who decide to revive a ruined abbey, but are opposed by the local barons. One of the monks tells another to go and find a name, that will allow them to create a legal fiction in latin to justify their presence in the abbey. The other monk returns with the name of Eminia, as described in the previous story. Just a name in a ledger in a distant monastery, but they concoct a life about her, much as Michon fills these very peripheral barely detailed lives with his own fictions.

One of the monks sees a leper woman and decides to make Eminia a leper. Suddenly that phrase from the previous story 'she is said to have died from leprosy' recurs to you. Is the previous story true? Or has it been tainted by later interpretation? Just because a thing is said to have occurred early doesn't mean it is true. Later interpretation can provider the truth.

The fifth shows the full story of the Vita sancta Enimia (the life of Saint Enimia). This has elements of the first story and many embellishments such that it's not clear whether the person writing this has by god's grace seen a vision of Énimie's actual life, or whether the earlier story has taken on the aspects of later retellings of it. This feels like a profound enactment of how early modern history was created.

The sixth, again many years later, finds monks once again trying to preserve the legal ownership of the abbey. The bishop decides the Vita sancta Enimia into the vernacular Occitane, so that its story (its false story?) may be used as legal evidence for the local barons and as cultural evidence for the storytellers and jongleurs in the streets, creating a saintly myth.

This tale is full of sly allusions to the nature of writing, of doing what Michon himself is doing and what you as a reader are doing. About lies, translation, truth within lies (fiction) and original creation as a writer.

The seventh is about a warlord prince called Seguin. Much of Michon's stories are about the ambiguous qualities of violence.

The eighth, in 1793, is about a innate Republican, who is got drunk on wine by Monarchists and persuaded to march against the Republic.

The ninth is about the father of speleology, who has doubts, but takes a great pleasure in being a scribe of the wonders of the Underworld. He brings back up to the date of the first story.

Together they create a remarkable analysis of belief, knowledge and the transmission of the same, as well as a sly commentary on the sort of writing that Michon is doing. They're really great.

also sex and desire is an important part of the stories.

I finished At the Existentialist Cafe. It seems like no one talks about the existentialists that much any more, at least the French ones, so maybe it's a good time to think about them again. Interesting to think about how Beauvoir and Sartre became celebrities by simply trying to articulate and live a thoroughly atheist ethical ontology. Hard to think of anyone who makes philosophy sexy like that these days. Contemporary famous atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, etc.) seem light-weights by comparison.

I've read Much Ado About Nothing for the first time. Seen the Branagh film a couple of time, but never read the play. Claudio is an asshole. I've also re-read CA Bayly's The Birth of the Modern World for the first time since uni, which I should have done ages ago. A brilliant description of the 19th Century, wish I knew of more books as good as this on other periods. And I've finished the Quran. Which is really really repetitive, but some of the Surahs are very good.

Today Fresh Air replayed the September interview of John Le Carre, on Legacy of Spies and much else related. What a presence. Will download so can catch some more; as I start to absorb what he's saying, he's on to something else, not that he rattles on, there's just a lot to take in, although I'd heard or read some of it.
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/28/572625559/novelist-john-le-carr-reflects-on-his-own-legacy-of-spying

Atlantic Hotel by João Gilberto Noll, after __xyzzzz’s enticing review in the last thread.

spare, attenuated sentences, moving towards ultimate dissolution. the main character, an ex soap-opera star, lacks affect and agency, drifts around brazil on a cold winter wind, accompanied by paranoia, death, mutilation and sex.

^ aims for 2018

I'm reading The Demolished Man and Deep Learning With Python, but I'm excited about starting Birds, Beasts, and Relatives, which I picked up because it was mentioned in a movie I liked. I also want to read Wind, Sand, and Stars before my vacation is over, because I'm seeking the headspace I think it'll put me in

I begin to see the pattern.

drifts around brazil on a cold winter wind, accompanied by paranoia, death, mutilation and sex.

^ aims for 2018

Godspeed!

Keen, Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? No. Next question.

Chavchavadze, Museum of Matches

Sasha Chavchavadze is an artist living in Brooklyn and Cape Cod. She is the descendant of Georgian princes and a Russian grand duke. Her dad was in the CIA and also translated the memoirs of Stalin's daughter, who became a family friend. Chavchavadze's mom had an affair with JFK while he was in office, and Sasha got to ride on Air Force One as a little girl. Her Romanov grandmother had a romance with Nabokov in their student days in Cambridge. The weight of family history is like something out of Garcia Marquez.

Borges, The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory
Shirley, Turn up the Strobe

Recently started reading Vol. 3 of Knausgaard's My Struggle. It's been over a year since I finished Vol. 2 so I took a bit of a break. I wouldn't say it's exactly gripping so far. The "action" wanders a bit too much for that. But there are frequent moments of brilliance, when Knaugaard seems to open up a wormhole in the space-time continuum and channel directly into the mind of a young boy, enough to keep the reader's interest.

Rosamond Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets. It's wild and inventive, and the centre of consciousness is as captivating as Invitation to the Waltz, but it's not gripping me quite in the same way. Something to do with the sprawl of it, I think, and the more episodic 'and then this happened' nature of it - compared to Waltz's relative hermetically sealed narrative. Intrigued by the title as, again, compared to ITTW, there's remarkably little weather in the book. Which may well be the point.

Grand Hotel Abyss > The Existentialist Cafe

I'm almost done with In the Spirit of Jazz: The Otis Ferguson Reader, which I've enjoyed even more than The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson ... this is the only detailed contemporary criticism I've read of 20s and 30s jazz, and it has put many things in a slightly different perspective for me, especially the transition from sheet music and vaudeville to the phonograph, radio, and film as it affected regional scenes and players.

Interesting.

First became aware of Otis Ferguson as a film critic and then as a sort of hipster mentor to some famous literary critic, Alfred Kazin, I think

He was constantly quoted by Leslie Halliwell, iirc

That's nice, Fizzles! *looks at Lanchester thread* sorry you are reading crap now.

I am ending the year on a couple of memoirs. First up is Simone De Beauvoir's Force of Curcumstance (vol.3 of four), which starts as WWII ends - it ploughs through various intrigues, friendships and relationships and gives an account of the writing around The Second Sex. I started this in September, put it down, now a 1/3 in - reckon I'll finish although who knows when. Its a solid read whenever I pick it up. One of the things I find it amusing (to go back to o. nate's post around At the Existentialist Cafe) as a read on ppl who don't exactly matter to me. Malraux, Koestler, Leiris (whom I sorta want to read but don't think he will be good), Camus (who I think she calls on his bullshit, and is penetrating), Sartre too (can't quite work out how much leeway she is giving him, and how much she leaves out). Its very good on the anit-communist left (Beauvoir and Sartre could not exist within party structures), those old struggles that feel like coming back on the plate again in different forms. I am still thinking a lot of this through. In a similar vein I am finishing Franz Fuhmann's At The Burning Abyss: Experiencing the Georg Trakl Poem which is really good on its subject but also on his relation to it, as much as Nazism and Communism, which Fuhmann more than flirted with at various points - its never simply a confessional, both intellectual biography and crit are interwoven into each other in a way I haven't quite encountered before. I am really interested in reading Heiddeger's book on Holderlin (Fuhmann also draws on Holderlin, Rilke, Goethe and much else in German letters) at some point too - as someone who read and loved the same things as Fuhmann but did not apologise or turn back when those things got ugly.

Finally, Lazlo Krasznahorkai's War and War has those inflated sentences that anyone acuqinted with Germanic/Eastern Euro fiction would know well. Unfortunately I perceive a lack of control - an overabundance of description, taking 3-5 lines longer to say the thing just because you can, as flatly - whereas someone like Thomas Bernhard never feels this superfluous. Here its just not v cutting or funny, there isn't a lot to say and he's saying it, but I don't have to read it, so I stopped it 20 pages from the end.

xp Parts of Ferguson's music writing are startlingly modern, especially some of his record reviews and the behind-the-scenes pieces based on working as a volunteer roadie for the Goodman band. He's also pretty funny about his frenemy John Hammond.

Ferguson's reviews of the first two volumes of Mencken's autobiography made me want to give those a try. He does a nice job of explaining why he still worships Mencken (hardly the flavor of the month in 1940) in spite of their diametrically-opposed politics.

Is The Second Sex the best place to start with Simone de Beauvoir?

Haven't read it, only a few of her novels - none of which stayed with me. These memoirs are v good. I'll probably read The Second Sex one day.

I don't have to read it, so I stopped it 20 pages from the end.

^ demonstrates the correct spirit!

Just noticed that Otis Ferguson is one of the subjects of a potentially interesting recent book that I have yet to read, David Bordwell’s The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Studies

Been about 30 years (or more?), but I got caught up in Man's Fate, the Modern Library edition--was impressed by his back-and-forth between b-movie drive and seemingly astute backstory takes on economic pressures (street and Big Finance) times political infighting/grandstanding and other. B-movie aspects, in fact all of it, might seem pretty dated now, some did then. Pretty striking to read during China's 80s transitions. Also got into Koestler's Darkness At Noon.

Haven't read Sartre's fiction, but seem to recall that A. Alvarez wrote that his novels could be compulsive reading, thrillers.

Happy 2018 ILB.

Is The Second Sex the best place to start with Simone de Beauvoir?

Also haven't read, but the excerpts/breakdowns I've read feel to me like most of her insights in that book have been followed up on and absorbed by those that followed sufficiently to now register as kinda obvious. Read the first volume of her memoirs though and that was great.

Sartre's WW2 trilogy of novels is very good, thrillerish and surprisingly humourous.

Been meaning to chime in here: At the Existentialist Cafe is very good. Sorry to prestige-drop, but I'm a struggling visiting professor with a focus in that area. It's definitely now the first thing I'd recommend for anyone interested in existentialism (primarily Sartre).

As for Sartre: After the classics Nausea and No Exit, the other highlight I'd recommend is the short-story of "Childhood of a Leader" (blegh to the film). The trilogy of novels is alright, but the third one was definitely the most interesting for me to get a perspective on Sartre's relationship to Marxism.

With regard to Beauvoir, The Second Sex is probably the best place to start, but it's quite helpful to have some background in existentialist/Sartrean terminology for portions of it. She herself gets into that terminology in the Ethics of Ambiguity, but I'd recommend some sort of shortish secondary literature (perhaps Steven Crowell's piece on Sartre in The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism). But yeah, The Second Sex is a long read, and I'd recommend skimming large chunks of it because (as noted above) so much of it is obvious now.

Finally, if you're interested in fiction, I'd easily say that Beauvoir is more consistently good. I'm still meaning to finish the memoirs, but the fiction is generally way more reliable and engaging. Sartre had a way of depicting short scenarios, but Beauvoir is generally much better at character studies and engaging writing.

Also, I'm curious about why one would think "Grand Hotel Abyss > The Existentialist Cafe". Just read the first full chapter, and it seemed like some navel-gazing to me.

Thanks for the comments

Probably my favourite Sartre is The Wall. I quite like to see the BBC adaptation of the Roads to Freedom tetralogy. I missed the screening at the BFI a few years ago.

She Came to Stay impressed me when I was twenty; I forced myself to finish The Mandarins. The best Sartre is The Words, maybe "The Wall."

I've been dipping into the Frankfurt School in recent months, so I was probably better prepared to enjoy Grand Hotel Abyss. The author has a definite, snarky point of view, but at least until the final chapters he remains in the background. At the Existentialist Cafe almost lost me in the first chapter for the opposite reason -- I found the author's enthusiasm excessive and the overt autobiography off-putting. I'm glad I persisted because she soon eases up on the hard sell and uses her personal story in a more restrained and constructive way for the rest of the book.

Both do a reasonably good job of delivering what I wanted, which was an overview of the relevant biographies and texts with some historical context and continuity. Both could have been longer. ATEC is better on biography, though it seems a little soft on Sartre's flirtations with Stalinism and is too dismissive of Camus. GHA is better on theory (or maybe those theories are just more interesting to me these days).

the anatomy of melancholy

is too dismissive of Camus

This is true. Book sides with Sartre and Beauvoir pretty explicitly throughout, but tbf few would do that nowadays so it's interesting.

Starting the year off with Dumas's The Three Musketeers. I'm gonna try to read heavily in French this year, and this is an easy and fun start.

I finished Moontrap. It was the weakest of the three Don Berry novels I read in 2017, but still good. Much of it was set within ten miles of my house. Now I am reading A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr and I like it very much so far.

hotel - joanna walsh.

i’ve been meaning to read vertigo by her for a while. a conversation about john lanchester’s characteristic uninterest in his description of a hotel room led to a friend recommending this.

good recommendation. i spend some time each year in hotels for one thing, and a book like this helps educate and tune your eye and experience.

i guess it is, as the series it belongs to categorises it, an “object study”, but it’s interleaved with her recovery from a break-up.

more and more i like this adjacent placing of emotional and abstract spaces.

i’m not sure abstract is the right word. i think i mean “abstract or material” (but with the implication that they are usually denuded of emotional content.

also on hotels, got up this morning and read some rosemary tonks, lent to me by someone who i very much love, but who for a number of reasons i can't be with, but who said this poem reminded her of us, and yes it does, exactly so, and so absolutely kills me. also selected by Philip Larkin for his Faber Book of 20th Century Poetry for those of you more prosaic or squeamish - it's a very Larkin poem. She's ace, tho obv i am partial:

Story of a Hotel Room

Thinking we were safe – insanity!
We went in to make love. All the same
Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom.
Then in the gloom....
... And who does not know that pair of shutters
With the awkward hook on them
All screeching whispers? Very well then, in the gloom
We set about acquiring one another
Urgently! But on a temporary basis
Only as guests – just as guests of one another's senses.

But idiots to feel so safe you hold back nothing
Because the bed of cold, electric linen
Happens to be illicit...
To make love as well as that is ruinous.
Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us
That without permanent intentions
You have absolutely no protection
– If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,
The concurring deep love of the heart
Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.

She disappeared after a series of mental, physical and spiritual traumas. She went after healing of various sorts, including various eastern religions, and acquired an incredible and incredibly valuable set of Asian religious sculptures, mainly on trust from people she knew.

after feeling she was haunted and cursed she smashed and burned them all. later to be found handing out bibles on speaker's corner. died 2014. early in life she had been very chic (and beautiful if the photos are to go by) and mixed in v artistic circles, although already she had been scarred by illness. after her various breakdowns, she was so crippled by fear of other people she often refused to talk to them, handing them notes instead.

however, just before she died, she felt the need for human company again, and was well known and liked in her local hotel in Eastbourne, and even started getting to know other Christians in tea shops and talked about perhaps attending some off their services.

Wow. Knew nothing of Tonks, and must now find more.

That is a weird sentence.

I finished A Month in the Country. It's a sweet little book, the sort of writing that is drawn from a deep well of memory, feeling and understanding that resides beneath the level of conscious thought. The emblematic elements are never crude, never forced into place, never schematic. They speak simply, quietly and lovingly.

I shudder to think of students being forced to write essays about this book for pedagogical purposes. Everything excellent about it happens in the spaces between the sentences, and the very young would have too little to bring into those spaces.

her mother’s maiden name was Verdi tho it’s unclear whether she was Giuseppe Verdi’s granddaughter as Rosemary liked to believe.

her father died before she was born. His first name was Desmond and it was in his memory that she was christened Rosemary Desmond Boswell Tonks.

She used the name Desmond Tonks for some of her novels. (haven’t read any)

(Tonks as in son - i think - of Henry Tonks at the Slade, attacked by Wyndham Lewis in BLAST!)

im reading this collected.

xpost to JM.

Excellent: thank you.

As I understand it Tonks disowned all of her prose work and refused permission to republish it. Consequently any prose work is now hard to find and expensive.

Thanks for your great post Fizzles, I'm def intrigued. The Bloodaxe book looks great.

Fizzles I'm reading vertigo at the moment! Really great, and exactly the kind of book I need at the moment - for its miniaturism (in both senses) and also because it suits my January state of mind; I had to shelve min kampy wamp for now, no shade necessarily I'm just not up for it right now. Vertigo you could read in a day, but I'm taking a lot longer.

that's good to hear wins. there's a sort of non-dogmatic voice that i'm really into at the moment. placing things side by side to let them talk. it's a clear voice, clear in its unwillingness to force things together into synthetic (in both senses) argument, so that things retain a sense of proportion and looseness. you do not have to find rules to apply to all things.

xpost to Tim. She definitely disowned her books, but according to the Bloodaxe intro, her will, 'written many years after she ceased to be Rosemary Tonks', didn't contain anything refusing future publication. to quote: 'her books didn't even exist for her then'.

it sounds like the family were reluctant to allow the publication of the poems. there's a hint in this intro that there was some resentment that she had destroyed so much valuable art / potential heirlooms. or it may just be that they wanted to honour what they perceived to be her wishes, outside of the will.

I just finished another short novel, The Bread of Those Early Years, Heinrich Böll. It is almost the definition of overwrought. Every page seems heavily labored over and in spite of its desire to seem naturalistic, the artifice is glaring and the characters seem only tenuously human.

The best excuse I can make for Böll is that the book was published in 1955, when both he and his audience had been put through the meat grinder of the Nazi regime, the Allied bombing, the occupation, and the dire refugee aftermath of WWII, so it would be pardonable if their sense of reality and proportionality had become totally deranged in the process.

I've only read one Böll but yeah, dude seemed angry as hell.

The disaster artist. Very entertaining

Last night I picked up yet another short novel, A Man's Head, Georges Simenon. It's about the fourth Simenon I've read, but the first one of his Inspector Maigret mysteries. I'm already most of the way through it. His control over his material amounts to complete mastery, but the simplicity of the characters' motives and actions makes it much easier to tell an effortlessly transparent story.

Just coming to the end of the Bernard Sumner memoir which mainly read in the bog over the Xmas holidays. Quite interesting.
Also got through I swear I was there the thing on the Manchester Sex Pistols gigs.
Now gone back to the Jon Ronson book on public shaming.
Also got a copy of Total Chaos the iggy pop interview about the Stooges history.

Intriguing/cringe-making to see the St Aubyn books get the 70s rock fast-cutting-trailer treatment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQh36eStMqk

I love the books, kinda excited to see this but also primed for it being awful.

dipping into Donald McKenzie's Making Meaning: Printers of the Mind and Other Essays - a collection of writings and lectures on bibliography. It's full of fascinating nuggets – found this particularly interesting mainly because it's so succinct about an important moment in the history of the book:

Before the ubiquity of newsboys in the 1640's, the only secular mass medium was the stage. Its setting, the playhouse, was the principal secular forum of public debate. The writers who worked in it – Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson – were news reporters of their day, analysts of personal and social action for a non-literate audience; their ethical duty as Jonson put it, was to

...speake of the intents,
The councells, actions, orders, and events
Of state, and censure them.

Its modes were oral and visual. The expressive instruments of its art were the voices and gestures of actors whose skilled articulacy in performance – when at its best – transformed the written word into a living experience which the audience thereby made its own. It was of course self-evident that print was not the proper medium for plays...

that from the essay Typography and Meaning which treats the publication of Congreves Works of 1710, as the first time plays, overseen by their writer, had care and attention paid to their printed publication.

It was of course self-evident that print was not the proper medium for plays...

As is true today. Print is good for the transmission of the script for future productions and it makes a good fallback medium for people without access to a stage production (i.e. most people in most places), but the proper medium for a play is a cast of talented actors, costumed appropriately, in a staged setting, delivering the lines, with music where indicated.

Finished the Simenon. Now I am reading yet another fairly quick book, a biography of James J. Hill, the railroad magnate who built the Greta Northern RR. It was written by Stewart Holbrook, a mostly overlooked, but very lively and astute author of popular American history. The book was published as part of a series of "brief biographies" and so is only 200 pages. I read 100 pages last night. It is popular narrative history at its finest, streamlined, but lays out everything necessary and drives it home entertainingly.

Great Northern

It was of course self-evident that print was not the proper medium for plays...

As is true today. Print is good for the transmission of the script for future productions and it makes a good fallback medium for people without access to a stage production (i.e. most people in most places), but the proper medium for a play is a cast of talented actors, costumed appropriately, in a staged setting, delivering the lines, with music where indicated.

― A is for (Aimless), Sunday, 7 January 2018 19:50 (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i generally prefer reading plays to seeing them. i know this is daft, and i have seen some great plays. i'm wondering now in fact if this only goes for 16th/17th century – maybe it's the need to pay attention to the language a bit more.

but i don't think it's true either. printed plays are now well-presented, well actually the passage continues with the full reasoning:

It was of course self-evident that print was not the proper medium for plays; most reached the printing house in a fortuitous and often surreptitious manner; and because the London book trade lacked any kind of literary idealism that acknowledged the popular drama as commanding typographic respect, few plays showed any intelligent and sustained editing for press. Later in the century we have only the ossified typography of a trade largely indifferent to the quite specific requirements, in book design, of dramatic text.

the point that is latent in those observations is that this sort of thing can be done better or worse. there is a difference between the prompt book of the stage and a repository of the play for reading and posterity.

the importance of Congreve's Works for McKenzie, was that he 'saw this edition through the press himself, working in the closest possible collaboration with his bookseller and friend Jacob Tonson and with Tonson's printer John Watts'.

Congreve revised the quarto texts, suppressed their indecent expressions, and adopted neoclassical scene division and character groupings.

While i was writing this, and without wishing to muddle the argument, I was wondering about the representation of song lyrics in printed form. There was probably a time when they commanded the same 'lack of respect' as described above.

For a while with CDs and on back/liner notes/gatefold of some LPs became repositories for lyrics. Now we have Genius and various lyrics sites that feed off each other. At the literary end, Dylan will be published carefully in book form, treating lyrics as lyrics as respected poetry (i say that without prejudice).

As most people will know, my own favourite is The Fall. The biggest library yet printed collection of their lyrics has done an excellent job in preserving the collage and pictorial manner of Smith's lyrical approach – as these creative and scrap-book methods dictate the form of his lyrics as much, say, as the sonnet form dictates the shape and cadences of its content.

(personally i tend to dislike pomposity about lyrics, something which the printed form exacerbates - to stress again, there are song lyrics that i would have above poetry, even if its a single shouted line from a jungle track, but that i prefer them in context, which may be another version of the argument that Aimless is making)

reading the periodic table by primo levi, somehow for the first time. everyone always said it was incredible and for some reason this meant i read other things ahead of it.

it's incredible.

When you live where i live, reading plays is the only wAy you will get to experience almost any of them

The Periodic table is, indeed, wonderful

yes - and of course plays, even ones we like or that are well liked, are not performed constantly. there are some nice phrases in this excerpt from the same essay:

My point then is that the form of Congreve's quartos, in striking contrast to the Works, is a direct expression of historical conditions quite unrelated to authorial intention and insensitive to the problems of mediating a theatrical experience in book form. Was there a moment in history when Congreve and Tonson, two inteligent, sensitive and original men, decided to make their pages speak, to edit and design their plays in a way which gave typography a voice in the hand-held theatre of the book?

also re-reading bluets by maggie nelson.

also, translation q. in atlantic hotel the translator refers to the narrator’s “ball cap”. is this a common US way of referring to (i assume) a baseball cap? it seemed odd.

Total Chaos the jeff Gold edited book based around an interview with Iggy pop about the history of teh Stooges and showing a stack of memorabilia.
Good find for £5 in the Rough Trade Boxing Day sale. Do wish i had more money that day though. probably would have grabbed another couple of books.

Also back reading Under The hoodoo Moon by Dr JOhn on buses etc. He's just been shot in the hand.

& Detroit 67 : the Year That Changed Soul by Stuart Cosgrove which I just started as my toilet book. Seems interesting so far.

My copy of Detroit 67 is off to the charity shop this weekend - I look forward to hearing what you think of that one (the material is v interesting!).

xp, I've heard/seen US ref to ball caps, and seems right because of general association: worn by fans of baseball, football, basketball, soccer, beer, other. Also goes with ball cup, caps on ball/bald heads, re tendency of younger (young and early middle-aged) men to shave heads.

thanks dow.

Having finished with James J. Hill, I have embarked upon Women at the Pump, a fairly standard-issue Knut Hamsun novel, wherein we become deeply familiar with the quotidian doings of a particular set of Norwegian villagers.

finally read As I Lay Dying (never assigned any Faulkner in high school), loved it, now reading Anna Kavan's Julia and the Bazooka, a collection of her final short stories published shortly before her death in 1968. Really remarkable- excited to read her novel Sleep Has His House next.

Just finishing The Master and Margarita, expect to be done by mid-next week at my current pace. Thoughts between War & Peace and Anna Karenina for my next book? I know I want to read more Tolstoy but not sure which.

I assume Anna Karenina is funnier than War and Peace

not sure it’s funnier but it’s definitely better.

The usual complaint about War and Peace is that it takes a large schematic diagram to keep track all the characters, who often appear under several different names (patronymics, diminutives, honorifics, etc.), in ways that make sense to Russians, but which tend to baffle non-Russians. That, plus it's really long.

the length doesn't put me off as long as it pays off

War and Peace is on another level, but it has it's own kind of problems. It becomes increasingly essayistic as it develops, and I think a lot of people would say it just loses it's plot. Anna Karenina has one of the most famous endings ever. I don't think anyone remembers exactly how War and Peace ends. Still, I like essayistic novels, and as I said, the whole thing is just on another level.

^ all fair and good comments. i *really* struggles to maintain interest with war and peace, mainly for the reasons both Fred B and Aimless describe.

(sure i’ve told the story about living in a berlin squat with about 20 mills and boon and war and peace and only cracking after about 12 of the mills and boon)

Finished a collection of Osip Mandelstam's Prose: The Collected Critical Prose and Letters. I had read much of his best prose before (his piece on Dante, Fourth Prose, Journey to Armenia), and its some of my favourite writing from the 30s. It was good to read some of the smaller, earlier pieces on figures he loved, such as Villon. And to look at the things he cared about: there is a mostly terrific piece on Soviet poetic culture, where everyone is writing poetry but no one reads any. It often lapses into the cranky but its good to give it a once over. The lasting discovery was a five page piece on Darwin and the letters written at various times to his wife (some of which were written in a prison camp).

Dubravka Ugresic - The Ministry of Pain. This is really good, an account of an academic in exile (fleeing from the Yugoslav civil war) in Amsterdam, teaching at the Slavonic Language school. It might sound dry but she is good on trasmitting a disconnection from the environment and people, its ups and downs. Only a 1/3 of the way through.

I enjoyed War and Peace, but took a long, long break in the middle---wasn't tired of it, just a lot of other things going on---so didn't mind paging back and forth to refresh memory, as I might have if trying to plow straight through. Got eyes on this prize as I work my way back through the current bucket list, if I ever get out of the early 20th Century alive---here's my local library's listing:
Call Numbers: AF TOL 208
The death of Ivan Ilyich and other stories / Leo Tolstoy ; translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky ; with an introduction by Richard Pevear.
by Tolstoy, Leo, - 2009. - Copies: 1 of 1 available
"This book is a new translation of Tolstoy's most important short fiction. Here are eleven stories from the mature author, some autobiographical, others moral parables, and all imaginative, transcendent, and evocatively drawn. They include The Prisoner of the Caucasus, inspired by Tolstoy's experiences as a soldier in the Chechen War, and one of only two of his works that Tolstoy himself considered "good art"; Hadji Murat, the novella Harold Bloom called "the best story in the world," featuring the real-life war hero Hadji Murat, a Chechen rebel who ravaged his Russian occupiers only to defect to the Russian side after a falling-out with his own commander; The Devil, a tale of sexual obsession based on Tolstoy's relationship with a married peasant woman on his estate in the years before his marriage; and the celebrated The Death of Ivan Ilyich, an intense and moving examination of death and the possibilities of redemption."--BOOK JACKET.

death of ivan ilyich is why i want to read more tolstoy. i read it many years ago and it has stayed w/ me since. as much as any literature can it i think changed how i look at the world.

Still, I like essayistic novels, and as I said, the whole thing is just on another level.

A lot of my fave epic 19th century novels have a strong vibe of "THIS MY BLOG" about them. Les Miserables, for one.

Many were originally printed as serials in magazines.

According to someone like Bakhtin, the blending of genre is the whole point of the novelistic style, from Rabelais onwards. It feels so much grander in War & Peace, though.

also reading Death Watch by john dickson carr as my bedtime read. got to do something about my jdc problem. total marshmallow comfort reading by this stage.

I just got to the famous scene of Bergotte's death in Proust's La Prisonnière. I think this was the last passage in the 7 volumes that I knew anything about ahead of time, just from its being often quoted alongside the Vermeer painting. I'm beginning to feel like I may actually finish this thing pretty soon, 16 years after starting Swann's Way for the first time.

I'd like to check out this book when it comes out, about the multiple women on whom Proust modelled the Duchess de Guermantes. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/221118/prousts-duchess-by-caroline-weber/9780307961785/

A lot of my fave epic 19th century novels have a strong vibe of "THIS MY BLOG" about them. Les Miserables, for one.

Moby Dick is like that too, with all the digressions on whaling.

Many many xp: Ugresic's essays are really great, too

mrs. chachi found my copy of Aubrey's Brief Lives under a couch and I started reading it and now I'm all engrossed remembering how much I fucking love old weird English books. I read far more 20/21c lit than I ever figured I would back when I was in college going nuts about old books & the ancient world & all that but when I pick up one of these I'm just transported into wondering what different me I'd be if I'd become the professor I'd intended to become.

I need to check Aubrey. Moby Dick sometimes makes me picture a Dark Ages scholar, reveling in his knowledge, also Scrooge McDuck, diving and sailing through his secret sea of doubloons (bank vault).

Brief Lives is extremely entertaining.

I read Moby Dick for the first time like 2-3 years ago and it legitimately blew me away. Was expecting something more staid but it was such an unusual, multifaceted, kinda post-modern thing before... that was a thing. I think about it a lot and want to read it again soon. If that’s The Great American Novel I’m OK with it.

Currently reading Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time. Maybe 50 pages in, whiffs of (and I probably/absolutely brought this to it myself) “Wise Artist Man Delivering Now Tired ‘Truths‘“ at first, but I quickly got over that. It’s insightful and deeply (life or death) considered and I don’t know why I expected less. Excited for the rest.

I'd like to check out this book when it comes out, about the multiple women on whom Proust modelled the Duchess de Guermantes. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/221118/prousts-duchess-by-caroline-weber/9780307961785/

Nice (and that's not just the results of the google image search).

finished m&m last night and started w&p. i was delighted to find that they immediately addressed my question from i know like dick-all about napoleon but unfortunately not thoroughly enough for my tastes :/

Kawabata, snow country. A slow burn

I'm past the halfway mark with The Women at the Pump by Hamsun. It's OK, but flawed.

The conceit Hamsun is apparently playing with is casting the entire book as a distillation of all the petty gossip a small fishing-and-market town can generate. The narrator is a hybrid between the omniscient voice and the gleeful voice of a village gossip. The characters are unfailingly petty, jealous, vengeful, lusty, obtuse, proud, and scheming. Much is made of questioning who is the real father of half the children in town. No one is noble, but no one is monstrous, either. They are just unredeemed little souls.

The biggest problem this presents is that, while attempting to make fun of this cavalcade of veniality, Hamsun mostly succeeds in the tittering, smirking variety of humor. He doesn't allow the butts of his humor enough humanity. Or, at least, not so far. Maybe at the end he'll swerve into pathos or allow someone a moment of triumph not connected to mean-spiritedness or blind self-love and empty ambition.

I finished Book 3 of Knausgaard's My Struggle. This is the one about his boyhood - basically grade school - unlike the first two it doesn't jump around in time that much, apart from a few interjections from the author writing in the "present". It's quite a feat the way he dredges up his childhood memories in this - and not just the facts of what happened - he somehow manages to convey the texture and emotional contours of these events from a child's perspective. Reading the book I often flashed back to events from my own childhood that I hadn't thought about in ages. On the one hand, you could fairly say that not much happens in the book, on the other hand, these are the kind of events that burn deep into your psyche.

I also finished Lucretius's On The Nature of Things, although I skipped some sections if the going got a bit too heavy. It's amazing how wrong he was about nearly everything, from a modern scientific perspective, yet in a way he was right about the big picture: the world is just the unfolding of impersonal mechanistic processes without intervention of the gods. It also sheds some light on life in ancient Roman times, indirectly through examples he gives and evidence he produces to support his theories.

I finished the Hamsun, less than impressed. Yesterday I started Julian, Gore Vidal. I first read this about 35 years ago, maybe more, but I recall it as a good to very good historical novel about its period (circa 350 - 363 AD). As with Creation, Vidal's other novel about the ancient world, his characters greatly resemble Gore Vidal in terms of wit and sophistication, but this is what makes them fun books.

still moving slowly through the Don McKenzei essay Typography and Meaning. Good addition the category 'good lists' here:

The printer-designer’s own vocabulary developed into an extraordinarily flexible one of types in their different designs as well as different sizes of the same face, paper in diverse weights, colour, quality and size, ink weak and strong, red and black, format, title page, frontispiece, illustrations diagrammatic, hieroglyphic and figurative, bulk, the structural divisions of volumes, “books,” sections, section titles, chapters, paragraphs, verses, verse numbering, line measure, columns, interlinear, marginal and footnotes, running titles, pagination roman and arabic, headings, initial letters, head- and tailpieces, braces, rules, indentations, fleurons, epitomes, indexes and, most important of all, blank white space.

His overall point here being, as he says earlier, 'is that the design and construction of books has always been a sophisticated activity, commanding great talents and expenditure of time and money. There is a growing scholarship of the illustrated book, but the present argument is directed more towards our need to understand the finer intentions which determined its very diverse forms.'

Anyone know any places where the bibliography of modern textual representation takes place? My view, very much in distinction to the '80s and '90s complaints i grew up around that people were becoming illiterate, is that we live in more literate and textually based societies at the moment than at any time in history. If you understand, as McKenzie wd encourage, the book to be the place where the act of reading takes act of reading occurs, a locus that is the consequence of a set of material, historical, social and authorial intentions, how does bibliography work in the present time.

For instance, what can be said to be the *edition* of a kindle work. It's not the image as it is presented on your kindle. Is there some sort of authoritative ur-object, a dated text asset file stored somewhere with relevant editorial metadata? is this different from how it is presented to the reader? (there are certainly user defined aspects to textual presentation now). Taking it outside the kindle, what do approaches to textual design say about theories of perception and the politics of reading? The whole section above comes just after a look at how differences in approach to the image between Protestants and Catholics in the 16th Century meant for the design of the book, the practice of reading, and theories of perception.

I’m still reading Life A User’s Manual

I have had it up to HERE with these fucking OCTAGONS

The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play by Ben Watson, which is a bizarre Marxist/Freudian deconstruction of the life and art of Frank Zappa. England's Hidden Reverse by David Keenan, a look into a certain corner of the Brit U-ground featuring Coil, Nurse with Wound, and Current 93. And last but definitely not least Cosey Fanni Tutti's memoir Art Sex Music. Kinda juggling all 3 at the moment, before I settle into one over the others.

> For instance, what can be said to be the *edition* of a kindle work.

ebooks are versioned pretty much like software is (and yes, there's a uuid in the content.opf file in epubs). i've had updates for things i've previously downloaded (where, when examined, changed only the cover picture for a lower-quality one)

Finished Kawabata’s snow county and thousand cranes, good stuff. Any others of his I should seek out ?

I loved The Old Capital and The Dancing Girl Of Izu

'House of Sleeping Beauties' for a creepier side of him

Master of Go is the only other one i've read and that was a bit repetitive.

I imagine Master Of Go reading like a sports manga.

Which Charles Portis novel should I read first, or only? No collected stories/nonfiction, right?

True Grit might be his best novel as well as his biggest hit, but it is sui generis amongst his work - his only period piece. The Dog of the South is maybe his funniest.

Only read Dog Of The South but that one's great.

Thanks--yeah I heard that about TG and somehow was thinking Dog to start with---he does have a collection, stories and nonfiction: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/books/review/escape-velocity-selected-work-by-charles-portis.html

I would start with Dog or Norwood, which is of similar quality, if not quite as, um, epic.

Also need to post link to excellent story about DotS rediscovery/revival

TOMORROW, Sat. Jan 6, is the last day of COLISEUM BOOKS in NYC

just read

maggie nelson the argonauts

about to read

anne carson autobiography of red

How was The Argonauts? Been curious about that

love maggie nelson. loved the argonauts

Han Kang: The White Book
Max Porter: Grief is the Thing with Feathers

Hoo boy, couple of lighthearted jolly little numbers
They are both really, really good

Finished Kawabata’s snow county and thousand cranes, good stuff. Any others of his I should seek out ?

― calstars, Tuesday, 23 January 2018 11:55 (two days ago) Permalink

Beauty and Sadness

I read Eva Sleeps by Francesca Melandri and I enjoyed it without being bowled over. I know more about the C20th history South Tyrol / Alto Adige than I did, for sure. There's probably not enough tricky bullshit in it for my ridiculous and annoying tastes.

Now I am reading "Geometric Regional Novel" by Gert Jonke and it's right (right-angled) up my street.

Re Kawabata: There's also a new to English one just out, Dandelions, but I haven't read it yet: https://www.ndbooks.com/book/dandelions/

I liked jonke's System of Vienna

Me too but I am liking RGN a whole lot more, it seems more abstract (as you'd expect from a geometric novel I suppose) but seems more unsettling, somehow livelier.

I am going to have a go at describing how this makes me feel.

It's like, there's a load of invisible Oulipian scaffolding (poss. geometric) in the novel which is unknowable but feels like (a) if you studied the novel (and poss. geometry) for long enough all might become clear. Or it might not, and as I'm thinking about this a 1969 Gert Jonke is standing right behind me and laughing at me.

It's pretty strong, in its oblique way, on life in a shitty small town, its suffocations and absurd logic(s).

I read Eva Sleeps by Francesca Melandri and I enjoyed it without being bowled over.

Couldn't finish this, took far too long to get going and I thought the translation was dreadful.

New Year's resolution was to fight against my dilettante ways and fully immerse myself in the works of my favourite artists in different mediums. That's E.M. Forster for literature, who I decided sometime in my late teens is my favourite writer but I don't think I've read even half of his stuff yet. So going through the novels chronologically, I'll start by re-reading Where Angels Fear To Tread.

finishing Fire and Fury today, bought Jane Eyre on a whim and might just go for that next

Which Charles Portis novel should I read first, or only? No collected stories/nonfiction, right?

― dow, Wednesday, January 24, 2018 3:38 PM

Dog of the South is a deserved consensus choice, but Masters of Atlantis is the funniest novel I've ever read.

Re Kawabata: There's also a new to English one just out, Dandelions, but I haven't read it yet: https://www.ndbooks.com/book/dandelions/

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Thursday, 25 January 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This sounds amazing!

anyone read the new maclaverty?

How was The Argonauts? Been curious about that

― Who put all those zings in your thread? (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, January 24, 2018 7:49 PM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i loved it. saying this as someone who would never opt to read either, she nails the mix of academic art criticism and memoir. i anticipated the form might tend to the loose and chatty, but the criticism is Rigorous; a remarkably sustained interrogation of a small number of Big Questions motivated by concerns of queer motherhood, love and family. her voice is incredible, she thinks about everything with enviable equanimity and self-doubt, turning things over, never trusting her impulses. it made me feel lazy in my mental routines, in a good way. and the diary sections pop

Reading David Hawkes's translation of The Dream of the Red Chamber and it's absolutely delicious, albeit a bit hard at first to keep tabs on who most of these people are.

I finished Simone De Beauvoir's Forces of Circumstance. On and off it took my six months. Life got in the way but also a less focused approach got into me. It didn't matter too much, the book had enough episodes that had a beginning, middle and end...so that I could dip in and out of. The two undercurrents were Algeria and her awareness of death. In a sense seeing her account of France (and her group of left-wingers) dealing with the whole matter of Algeria is somewhat akin to Proust's account of Dreyfus. More reportage than novelistic though. She is really sharp on anti-imperialism as the colonies are -- in the case of Algeria -- nearly destroying themselves to get rid of the colonizer. I would love to know what she made of Battle of Algiers and hopefully she notes this down made for the final volume.

Many, many other highlights in her always conversational and engaging thoughts of her two relationships (besides Sartre) with Nelson Algren and Lanzamann, the reaction to the release of The Second Sex (men, and the right-wing reacting to what was unsayable at the time, which isn't so different from someone saying this stuff on twitter...how the form of debate changes but what is said and countered doesn't so much) and finally trips, many trips: Rome, Cuba and a cracking sixty page account of her trip to Brazil. Mostly sensitively handled. Illuminating remarks at the end on how she is just thought as nothing more than Sartre's pupil, and how some people thought he wrote her novels. Parallels with Ferrante.

Easily her best book and I look forward to reading the other volumes as I pick them up.

Otherwise I finished a short volume of Richard Siebirth's translation of Louise Labe (Love Sonnets & Elegies). Crudely describe it as a cross between Sappho and Petrarch. Sieburth's essay is illuminating and centres on the controversy around a theory that Labe could not have written these (Sieburth refutes this btw), that instead it was Maurice Sceve (a man). There is a pattern..

halfway through the maclaverty now. it is masterful

Somehow some german critics made me read seventeenth summer by maureen daly. Wtf. What a bore of a book. I cannot imagine any teenagers enjoying reading it. What i hated most was the missing metaphysical component. When i was 17 i asked myself and the world the tough questions about god, meaning and life. this book prefers to deal with drinking cokes in cafes. The descriptions of nature etc. are pretty tedious. I also found annoying that angie, the main character never admits to anyone that she is in love. How is it possible to write this book about a summer and a boy without confessing it? Or is she just a heartless monster with some literary and observational skills?

I should note here that Siebirth is a great guy: I wrote to him once asking for more info about a privately printed book he had translated, Oswald von Wolkenstein's "Songs from a Single Eye", which was not available anywhere, and he just sent me a copy.

I finished (re)reading Julian. Vidal wrote it soon after he'd written some successful plays and his ability to dramatically delineate his characters through dialogue, and through granting each a distinct 'voice' is quite impressive.

Now I am reading some short stories by de Maupassant.

The Doomed City by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.

We never worked so long and so painstakingly on any of our other works, either before or after. Three years was spent amassing, scrap by scrap, the episodes, the characters' biographies, individual phrases and turns of speech; we invented the City, its peculiarities, and the laws governing its existence, as well as a cosmography, as authentic as we could possibly make it, for this artificial world, and its history. It was genuinely delightful and fascinating work, but everything in this world ends sometime, and in June 1969 we drew up the first detailed plan and adopted the definitive title – The Doomed City. This is the title of a famous painting by Roerich that had once astounded us with its sombre beauty and the sense of hopelessness emanating from it.

The draft of the novel was completed in six sessions (in all, about seventy full working days) over a period of two and a quarter years. On May 27, 1972, we wrote in the final period, heaved a sigh of relief, and stuffed the unusually thick file into the bookcase. Into the archive. For a long time. Forever. It was perfectly obvious to us that the novel had absolutely no prospects.

The City is part of The Experiment, and filled with people from Earth who volunteered, irrevocably, for the social experiment. They keep it going, working at processes because the processes exist, and the book sort of clatters along, not concerned with anything gleaming, but garbage collection, stupidity, gloom, drunkenness. There's a sense of hidden meaning being very imperfectly and wrongly interpreted and discovered, as with Roadside Picnic – like the Sufi story about the blind people touching the elephant. The main character Andrei is a dim-witted, easily angered enthusiast for The Experiment, and gradually rises through the ranks. One of the book's main weaknesses is his imbecility. But its very good. Cynical and throwing absurdity at bureaucracy and planned societies.

Burned through The Left Hand of Darkness yesterday. Weird, sad, a thrill.

Le G.'sThe Dispossessed is pretty amazing too. Ditto the Strugatskys' Hard To A God.

Incidentally there was a Soviet propaganda poster v like that Roerich painting in the current (very good) Tate exhibition Red Star Over Russia. A vicious snake (presumably capitalism) coiled round an industrial city on a mount.

I finished Chocky by John Wyndham. It'd been a while since I'd read any straight science fiction. Probably the last one before this was The City and the City by China Mieville. That one had a more interesting conceit, but this was a bit more focused (and shorter). The prose seemed a bit workmanlike, but I guess that's par for the course. Also, considering the book is narrated by a father, it seems that the other members of the family remain kind of emotional ciphers - maybe that's just the way things were in the old days, but it seems to make the book less dramatic than it could have been.

Now I've started The Making of Zombie Wars by Aleksandar Hemon. For a comic novel, it has one major deficiency, which is that it mostly isn't very funny, though not for lack of trying. There is a constant stream of jokes - pitched high, low, and everywhere in between - some have potential, but there is usually something off with the timing or delivery, or they're just too random and opportunistic. It fares better with scenes of lust, violence and sex, and the plot keeps moving along nicely, but primarily due to the scarcity of yuks, it still feels like a second-rate imitation of something like The Russian Debutante's Handbook.

Rereading Where Angels Fear To Tread is a sobering reminder of how little I retain from a novel a few years after I've read it - einmal ist keinmal. Case in point, I remember this novel as being about a young repressed British woman finding love in sunny Italy but that's actually just where the book starts, not at all where it ends up...

At Christmas I read Guillem Balague's book with Mauricio Pochettino, or vice versa: BRAVE NEW WORLD: INSIDE POCHETTINO'S SPURS (2017).

I am now reading Barbara Kingsolver's FLIGHT BEHAVIOUR (2012) for the second time.

It is well written and earnest though probably a deal longer than it needs to be.

I like the sound of "Geometric Regional Novel".

been reading the Judith rossner novel of looking for mr goodbar, surprising me a bit that it's p well written...has anyone read this or anything by her? search reveals shes never been mentioned on ilx

I read at least the part where she's hanging out with this Johnny Ramone type who always says that drugs are too good for hippies, and he wears army pants instead of jeans so people won't think he's a fuggin' flower Child. Think I'll go see if the library still has that. Also if they still have another Rossner I skimmed, August, about the Dog Days, when everybody's shrink goes off to the Hamptons ("You'll be fine, and you have the numbers, of course.")

Finished Dugresic's Ministry of Pain. Some novels based on recent real events to the writing of the book based on them -- this is from the mid-90s, dealing with the fallout from the Yugoslav civil war -- can read like a bunch of testimonials (look at the title) with little invention and reconstruction. However that wasn't much of a problem, in this particular csse. I liked how there were several unlikeable characters, making something different out of a micro-genre I don't care for (the academic novel).

Now running through Plath's Letters Home. She does tell her mother A LOT (although maybe not everything). Just about to get to the point she goes to England and meets Ted Hughes.

read christopher higgs 'as i stand living' which he describes as a "radical memoir" of a year of his life as he finishes a phd. it's radical in the sense that he writes continually about how much he hates writing, hates academia, doesn't want to get a job - seems honest in a quite stupid way, but then he's an academic now, so who knows

started robbe-grillet 'recollections of the golden triangle' - nobody writes anything like him (jonke mentioned above comes close sometimes, and claude simon, but they're still way off what robbe-grillet does with the reading experience), but what he writes about is so often completely repulsive; not sure i'll finish this one

The half dozen de Maupassant short stories I've read so far (in the Penguin Classic "Selected Short Stories" translated by Roger Colet) all revolve around sexuality, with an emphasis on prostitutes and illicit affairs. This may not be a fair reflection on the ordinary lives of nineteenth century France, but it certainly suggests something along that line.

The other feature I notice is that the social conventions in play are absolutely understood and accepted by everyone. They are accepted without demure because the most restrictive social conventions have equally conventional evasions. This contrasts greatly with current US society which is so balkanized and fluid that no one knows what conventions are in play.

Might also be about literary conventions re certain subjects, in a certain range of magazines, maybe a a certain de facto subgenre--? In The Golden Age of Short Stories, market-wise.

It's a fair reflection of the life of de Maupassant, tbh.

Somebody please tell me about the writing of Mavis Gallant.

A little non-fiction for once: "De Stijl and Dutch Modernism" by Michael White (a thesis-turned-book I assume, with the accompanying lack of zip, but v interesting, esp the chapter on architecture and town planning) and "Hold Tight -Black Masculinity, Millennials and the Meaning of Grime" by Jeffrey Boakye, a book I'll be adding to the "good books about music" thread once I've finished it.

Boakye is a funny surname in Scots

Finished both Fire & Fury and We Were Eight Years in Power. One of those is stunningly powerful and well written. One is not. Also read a couple history things, Martin Rady's The Habsburg Empire, A Very Short Introduction, and Tadao Sato's Currents In Japanese Cinema.

Somebody please tell me about the writing of Mavis Gallant.

There was a New Yorker fiction podcast episode where someone read one of her stories and I thought it was amazing, made me buy the Collected Stories but I haven't read it yet. Not much help, sorry!

Yeah, get the brick-sized Collected Stories, so much good stuff.

Thanks. I know I've seen impressive mentions, but needed the reminder provided by this controversy (recently published Sadia Shephard story based on, "in debt to" Gallant's, for contrast-and-compare social commentary, prob should have been tagged as such in front by New Yorker)https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/22/letters-from-the-january-22-2018-issue"> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/22/letters-from-the-january-22-2018-issue Also covered in The Guardian etc. natch.

I’m currently working my way through a bunch of stuff from the Verso sale.

David Neiwert’s Alt America: The Rise Of The Radical Right is not bad as a whistlestop chronicle of ‘things that have happened’, from the formation of the Tea Party to Gamergate, but it has next to no analytical value.

Anabel Hernández’ Narcoland is full of interesting information about the intersection of political corruption and the drug wars in Mexico but could probably have done with a better editor.

Finished Where Angels.... First time I read it I was surprised at how sunny it was and that there were sympathetic female characters (doesn't happen in a lot of Forster books, sadly); re-reading it turns out there's only really one, and the book's mostly interested in Philip anyway. The "sunniness" fades when thinking of the ending, the return to Kent all the more tragic after having experienced the glory of Italy.

Next up is The Longest Journey, which is the first Forster I read and supposedly my favourite, though I'll have to re-evaluate; I decided this when I was a #teen, and it was at least partially influenced by a BBC doc I saw where Forster mentioned it as his neglected favourite.

As Plath's letters rumble on I am thinking this is her best work - they are very touching, seeing someone trying to make their way in the world like this, trying to just do her best - she is so humble about her talents (which intersect with her depression), sadly cut short. Reading this in conjunction with Anner Carson's The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, who did grow old and whose talent was able to mature to something like this fusion of classical allusion and feminist tract. I am also making my way through Marlen Hauhofer's The Loft, modernism as a mother's mind is inhabited (a mode going back to Molly's Requiem in Ulysses perhaps) and fully mapped out as worries, joys and the painful past all mingle and fight.

*Marlen Haushofer

I had a similar experience with Cheever's letters about twenty years ago.

Just finished Noah Cicero's new poetry book, Nature Documentary. Really funny, moving, and compelling. One of my favorite contemporary authors, very prolific & consistent. I highly recommend it.

'The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos'

man, i like this title a lot

Last night I started Magda Szabo's, The Door. I checked it out of the local library last week to see if it felt congenial. It does, although I am only a few pages in atm and have nothing useful to say beyond that. It could be stunningly great, but it's much too soon to tell.

It is pretty great!

Read The Beauty of The Husband, as described by xyzzzz above: so, so good.

The final third of The Door is when it becomes stunningly great.

paul beatty.

Two stories in to "Rhapsody" by Dorothy Edwards and I'm convinced of her brilliance.

I intend to be convinced of her genius by the end of the volume.

She is brilliant.

I read The Buddah of Suburbia - 28 years after everyone else, and, seemingly 28 years too late. Which is to say, I didn't like it much. Tonally, it was a mess, with characters obeying who-knows-what aspects of motivation, and, as such, it felt as if the whole thing was in the service of satire. Which is fine, but it meant the turn in the final third of the book - a turn towards pathos and mutability - didn't really have any weight. I did laugh out loud often, which is something.

Tom Drury's The End of Vandalism next, I think. Although, having listened to the latest Backlisted, what I really want to do is re-read Beyond Black.

I read at least the part where she's hanging out with this Johnny Ramone type who always says that drugs are too good for hippies, and he wears army pants instead of jeans so people won't think he's a fuggin' flower Child.

― dow, Monday, January 29, 2018 2:16 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

heh I just got to this part. good memory!

Tom Drury is so, so good. I hope he writes another one soon.

I finished Life A User’s Manual. Too many octagons.

Kind of embarrassing to admit, but I read How To Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, a self-help by Dilbert cartoonist and Trump theorist Scott Adams. As such things go, it was fairly okay. I don't think he is actually crazy. He is often charmingly self-deprecating and down-to-earth. Not sure there were any earthshaking tools of success revealed, mostly he just tries to give you more appealing ways of thinking about things you probably know that you should be doing.

Do the happy few who listen to ebooks have favorite readers? I am starting to have a handful I prefer. It is really night and day whether you like or even tolerate the reader or not.

Sean Barrett, Michael Kramer, J. D. Jackson, Coleen Marlo -- most of them have also narrated some very dodgy books, but when they are doing the good stuff they're great

I finished The Door. I found it to be excellent. The characters and story were rigorously human and real, so much so that it verged on myth and archetype, a convergence the author seemed to be well aware of. I did at times grow impatient with the obtuseness of the narrator, but her weaknesses were necessary to the story. Structurally, it was remarkably tight, but it all flowed naturally and was never forced. The few flaws I noticed were not worth my notice. Highly recommended.

Now I intend to read Tropic Moon, Georges Simenon, because my copy is checked out of the library and I wish to return it soon. And because it is probably well worth reading.

Fitzgerald's Offshore. A bit like Human Voices - it's a bit dull for a bit too long, until it's suddenly the opposite of that.

This week I gave up on Journey to Pagany by William Carlos Willians which contained some fair pages on the American in Europe experience (if you can call it that), but I usually expect more velocity from a poet's prose (comparing to Mandelstam's Journey to Armenia or Tsvetaeva or Rilke, for example). There was little to keep me going.

Wolfgang Koeppen's A Sad Affair provided some richer returns, setting the mood of place and event in 1930s Europe, crossing it with what it says on the title. Antonio Tabucchi's Indian Nocturne is also another journey - a skeletal plot is the opportunity for a set of encounters across India - Bomabay, Goa and Madras (two of those places are familiar to me) - thankfully free of the tourism although perhaps its slightly at pains to say so. Pleasing and a bittersweet read at the same time, as it reminded me of time spent with my wonderful father (time that will not be spent again).

Dennis Lim's book on David Lynch, Caroline Blackwood's Great Granny Webster. Robert Lowell had exquisite taste in wives.

i read 'great granny webster' a year or two ago, loved it. i could read portraits of spiteful old bony scottish ladies all day

I started reading Crucible of War by Fred Anderson. It’s about the Seven Years War, aka French and Indian War, as it’s known in North America. It’s a cliche to say that a book makes history come alive. But I can’t think of a better way to phrase it (it’s late here). At 800 pages this should keep me busy during the upcoming week when I should have more than the usual amount of reading time.

Picked up Terry Graham's Punk Like Me and read a few pages. He's currently 12 years old and getting to go to one day festivals to see bands in 1968. Has had a set of drums bought for him to redirect his antisocial energies into.

Stuart Cosgrove Detroit 1967 The Year That Changed Soul I'm about half way through this. Enjoying it so far. Florence Ballard has just been edged out of the Supremes after nerves etc have been leading her to drink excessively.
Has several appearances by the Detroit rock contingent notably MC5 and John Sinclair.
JUst heard yesterday that Wayne Kramer has a memoir due out in August, it's up and advertised on Amazon. Should be good.
Also I'm intrigued about the Memphis 1968 book that is presumably a follow up to this Stuart Cosgrove one.

Under a Hoodoo Moon. Dr John's memoir.
I'm getting closer to the end of teh book, been a good read.
makes me want to check out his work beyond the Atco years which I picked up in boxed form last year.

I finished Tropic Moon, Georges Simenon. It started strong, and continued strong, but completely fell apart at the end, making it a worthwhile book to read, but lacking in satisfaction when it concludes hastily in a trite cliché.

I've a few dozen good choices waiting to be my next book, but I haven't made my choice, yet.

The Inimitable Jeeves
Complete Cosmicomics (Italo Calvino)

Last night I started What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, John Markoff. a book published circa 2004, thus emerging at the apex of the PC era and pre-dating the smartphone era by a few years.

Already in the first 50 pages it is very interesting to note the strong sidelights thrown upon the ideals of the PC pioneers by the evolution from PCs to smartphones. The smartphone is almost exactly the sort of device envisioned by Doug Engelbart in the late 1950s as an ubiquitous handheld tool to augment and extend human minds. Except mega-corporations have co-opted them as tools to manipulate us for their own benefit and staggeringly huge profits, and as part of law-enforcement's surveillance of everyone in society, which is the exact negative image of the ideals promoted by the hippie-inspired computer counterculture of the late sixties to mid-seventies, which the books traces.

taking a break from my slow crawl through the anatomy of melancholy to read/browse a critical study cum anthology of bataille & his document colleagues (made up of a curious mix of academics & renegade surrealists)

The new Julian Barnes, AND I LIKED IT SO THERE

YOU TAKE THAT BACK.

I am reading "The Fountain In The Forest" by Tony White, which I bought because there was a rave about it on the Backlisted podcast, and it's apparently a London-based oulipian police procedural (sounds fun), and it turns out Mr White is going to be at an event I'm going to on Monday. It's good so far, though I'm getting a slightly uncanny feeling from it because it turns out that the life of one of the characters - so far absent - in the book is based to some extent on a fellow I know. (I had no idea this was going to be the case, but I'm not imagining it, my friend is mentioned in the acknowledgements.)

Is it Robin Carmody?

It is not.

is it the pinefox?

How did you guess?

The Door. I checked it out of the library, thanks to you rubes.

As it turns out, What the Dormouse Said is more or less a heap of shallow anecdotes with very little focus, and a cast of dozens of (mostly) engineers, who the author has no gift for portraying as interesting people. Only someone with a very deep interest in the early days of Silicon Valley would bother with it.

Now on the new Hofmann version of Berlin Alexanderplatz, which is very entertaining so far. Never read the old, much criticised translation, but would trust Michael Hofmann to do anything.

Except be nice about Stefan Zweig, obviously.

Around the time Grand Budapest Hotel was released I took a quick look at an article from a German paper that had this puzzled tone of "he is the kitschiest, most old fashioned writer - why is Stefan Zweig so popular all of a sudden?", so I guess Hoffman's in agreement with dude's image in Germany?

I love him to bits anyway, and think probably any bad rep comes from a bias against writers who are openly sentimental.

Hey, take it over to Michael Hofmann: poet, translator, critic

Yeah, i love Zweig and am glad he's getting so much attention in English.

Lol, I'm reading The World of Yesterday for a book project I'm working on, and it really is incredibly kitchy and old fashioned. Quite good, still.

Of Grammatology - ol' jackie Derrida.

Tl;dr: stop being mean to writing

I took out a bunch of books on Jean Renoir and I'm picking out chapters based on the films I've seen. The highlight so far is Alexander Sesonske's chapter on The Rules of the Game (in Jean Renoir: The French Films, 1924-1939). It's beautifully written and gives a deep analysis of all the major characters, as well as the film's influences in French theatre. I have a copy of Marivaux's The Game of Love and Chance, one of Renoir's models for the film - that might be then next thing I read.

Taschen's Renoir coffee table book is cool too.

I liked Buddenbrooks (trade edition tie-in w ancient, handsome international Public TV miniseries), so I might like Zweig, right?

I went through a big phase of those German-speaking authors from the Weimar era (for lack of a better definition): Mann, Remarque, Zweig, Erich Kastner's Fabian, Tucholsky. None of them as experimental as Siegfried Lenz (or, say, Kafka) and all a bit soppy to some degree, but I dunno, you live through two world wars and economic chaos, writing with open-hearted sentimentality is admirable imo. Tucholsky has a lot of awesome sharp satire to balance it out, though I don't know if it translates well. Mann a bit more prone to going philosophical (also posher), but feels of a kind with a lot of big 19th century novelists to me.

I'm also reading Joseph Roth's Radetzky March for the same reason, and I prefer that as a sorta sentimental but also clear eyed look back.

Re Daniel_Rf, I've been on a bit of a Tucholsky binge recently: Castle Gripsholm was amazingly good.

I read a lot of Roth in 2015 -- "cold-eyed look backward" is closer to his approach than nostalgia.

Yeah, Castle Gripsholm is lovely. As I said, there's a component to his poetry - satirical, angry young man stuff, deeply informed by his hatred of authority and experiences in WWI - that doesn't really show up in his other work. Mind you it's also usually written in Berlin dialect, dunno how a translator would tackle it (has anyone? I should check up on that).

I bought a super cheap ebook of his,poetry which I haven't started yet: looks promising.

Just adding my 2p to say how disappointing Weimar-era fiction is. Berlin Alexanderplatz, reissued in a new translation just a couple of weeks ago, is not a thing I am that keen on - found the novel quite hard-going when I read it ten years ago (though that was probably my still small ability to read modernist fiction). I had a look at a couple of (positive) reviews that basically quote some of the slang Hoffmann used and I wasn't rushing to get it. Great TV series so can't complain.

Castle Gripsholm is really great, kinda minor though. I wouldn't count the really great writers like Kafka or Joseph Roth as they were part of Austro-Hungary. Plenty of great great writers from that region.

Ultimately my very favourite Weimar-era Lit was some of the poetry: Brecht and Benn.

I quite like to pick up some Kastner and Jakob Wasserman someday.

Since discussion began with Zweig I think it's okay to include Austro-Hungarian writers ;)

The discussion has now moved on :)

I'm now reading a book that I gave my wife as a gift last summer, at her instigation: The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben, a German forester. Its great interest is in presenting relatively recent research findings about forest ecology and the surprising degree of communication, coordination and cooperation among trees, and their high degree of sophistication in fighting against parasites and insects.

The writing style of the book is odd and a bit off-putting. I strongly suspect the author has spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours speaking to elementary school students and this book is modeled on those talks. This gives the book the tone of an adult telling stories to children, but the information he imparts is genuinely fascinating and makes the childish tone worth tolerating.

read a lot of crime novels that i got from my dad this winter. PAUL DOIRON - KNIFE CREEK. pretty cool. Maine's answer to CJ BOX. 8 novels in 7 years! would read more. i dig game wardens. DON WINSLOW - THE FORCE. epic dirty cop novel. the only problem with dirty cop novels is i rarely care if the cops die or get caught. JOHN SANDFORD - DEEP FREEZE. i love that fuckin' flowers but john sandford is 73 years old and his best crime-writing days are kinda past him. not the best flowers book by a long shot. REED FARREL COLEMAN - WHAT YOU BREAK & WHERE YOU HURT. two by this guy. he certainly knows his way around Long Island - every road and town is accounted for - but it must be said: Long Island is fucking boring. WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER - SULFUR SPRINGS. would read more in this series! very entertaining. did not read the DICK WOLF novel i got from dad though. and didn't read the 4 LISA SCOTTOLINE books he gave me either. a later series of hers about a law firm. maybe if i get laid up with rubella or something i'll get to them. for now i'm back to the sci-fi.

Found a trashy 1991 copy of RED DRAGON. Surprised by how wooden it is, but it's enjoyable enough. Sadly none of the writing beats this plot blurb on the first page:

https://i.imgur.com/peYAS4A.jpg

Berlin Alexanderplatz, reissued in a new translation just a couple of weeks ago, is not a thing I am that keen on - found the novel quite hard-going when I read it ten years ago (though that was probably my still small ability to read modernist fiction).

I would've thought it'd be right up your alley! Experimental, angry, bleak. I'll admit I only got one third in myself.

There's obvious differences between Weimar and Austro-Hungary but in the end I think that, say, Zweig and Thomas Mann have enough in common that it makes sense to group 'em together.

I've changed man! :-) (joking not joking - I am not really into very experimental styles anymore - modernism, roman etc. just want to read 'voices' now.) Much less keener on the city novel as a thing than I used to be, too.

(One other good Weimar type novel is Koeppen's A sad Affair which I finished a couple of weeks ago)

I finished By the Open Sea, an early novel by Strindberg - it has some beautiful descriptions of nature (he is good on ice, enjoy it before it all melts), the story had the hints at the madness and paranoia you encounter on the later ones I've read like Madmen's Defence, but its not in full flow so it relies on a skeletal plot instead. Now ambling along with some stories by Antonio Di Benedetto, as collected in Nest in the Bones, issued last year by Archipelago and to much less aclaim than Zama, but it has many of the themes and his rapid-fire writing. Very journalistic: sets the mood fast and rolls on and on till its over.

The Scots Kitchen - F. Marian McNeill

gillian rose’s love’s work. a book about love and and death, specifically the approach of death through illness and decay, used to explore each other. philosophy as unsparing emotional rigour, thought not at all abstracted from power, love and pain.

it is odd and exhilarating to read love's proliferating language, the language of desire and loss, confined by a good writer, and used as the elements of thought.

Cancer, and the grammar and language of medicine,and iatrogenic power struggles are set alongside the specifics of painful love. it makes this a strange book with strange thoughts, powerful enough to give a sense of hidden truths. This is welcome as both Death and Love are overwhelming concepts and can brush off well-meaning attempts at exploration or description, turning them into bland truisms.

The only other passage i've read that similarly manages to meet and match their force, is the devastating opening passage to *Voices from Chernobyl* by Svetlana Alexeivich. i remember reading the opening words “i don’t know what i should talk about - about death or about love? or are they the same?” and raising a sceptical eyebrow about this observation, one that is a cliche but difficult to fully and fairly reason through. by the end of the short section i was in tears (on public transport ffs) following a horrific demonstration of the interrelation of love and death.

love’s work is v good and this nyrb edition includes an In Memoriam poem by Geoffrey Hill, which i read, and an introduction by michael wood, which i didn’t.

Anyone deprecating 1930s German writing needs to read Irmgard Keun.

Good call. Child of all Nations and After Midnight are great (the former especially so).

I thought "The Fountain In the Forest" was excellent - I don't read many procedurals so a procedurals fan might find it sub-par (maybe? I have no idea) but I romped through it. The fact it referenced a couple of record shops I used to frequent in Exeter, both of which closed more than two decades ago, helped. Briefly met the author last night, seemed like a decent fellow.

Now I'm reading "The Unmapped Country", a recently-issued selection of short stories and fragments by Ann Quin.

Log of the SS The Mrs Unguentine: Stanley Crawford -- enjoying this a lot, but it's very wise to have made it only 100p: suspect it would wear out its welcome at any greater length.

Getting a lot further into thr Terry Hraham memoir Punk Like Me.
He's been involved in the L.A. punk scene for a while hsnging out at the Masque and sharing an apt. With the woman who books the Whisky a gogo.
He's seeing Jane who has just joined the gogos on rhythm guitar. He's just taken up drums witu the Bags. Joining at the same time as Rob Ritter though Patricia Morrison is still playing bass. maybe Ritter only swapped to bass when he joined the Gun Club since Brian Tristan was already on guitar.
Tristan has already appeared a couple of times as someone who is around on the punk scene as has Jeffrey Lee Pierce. I don't think they have a band together yet. & Tristan doesn't become Kid Congo Powers until he joins The Cramps.
Grahams also trekked down to Texas to see the Sex Pistols.
Interesting book nglad it finally arrived after me paying for a kick starter campaign copy 5 years or so ago and being left in limbo for most of that.

Last night I picked up A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor. I first read it decades ago, so this is another re-read of a book that's faded from memory that seems worthy of getting reacquainted with. It may prove to be a tad too youthful and highly wrought for my immediate desires, but I'm going to take a run at it and should know soon enough how its flavor sits in my mouth.

I tried his novel, The Violins of St Jacques, recently, but it was too arch and 'ha, people who don't speak perfect French are such peasants' for me to continue with

I like the idea of a police procedural set in now closed Exeter record shops.

With the Duke of Harringay as a key witness to the theft of a racing bicycle.

love’s work is v good and this nyrb edition includes an In Memoriam poem by Geoffrey Hill, which i read, and an introduction by michael wood, which i didn’t.
― Fizzles, Monday, February 19, 2018

I think this counts as 'trolling the pinefox'.

A Time of Gifts is proving to be uneven for me, but I'm sticking to it. When he is describing interactions with people he met, it is interesting. Unfortunately he has a penchant for lengthy and ornate descriptions of scenery and architecture, and while he succeeds in communicating these enthusiasms, he fails to transfer them. For me, no description of landscapes or buildings should continue past 500 words in a single dose.

lol pf - i assume that's the michael wood slight? the geoffrey hill poem wasn't all that, but i wasn't really interested in hearing what michael wood had to say on a book about which i was feeling quite emotional. or do you not like gillian rose?

really f'ing struggled with the doomed city by the strugatskys. it's p heavy going, though i don't think its bad. there's a sort of brutal and absurdist cynicism behind it, which is enjoyable, and boisterous, almost comic characters, striking poses and shouting around the central not particularly bright character (Andrei Voronin iirc). each chapter involves him in a different social context, with some grotesque and nightmarish upheaval thrown against The Experiment. He is seen to be extremely malleable. Totalitarian absurdity bureaucracy and violence is given free reign. Not really a surprise they put it back on the shelf after completing it.

It's sitting at home unfinished, but i'll pick it up when i get back from my travels.

Tried a John Grisham book – Carmino Island on the flight, but the initial heist section was so fucking awful that i don't think i can carry on. Dying for some George V Higgins. That said it warmed up a bit with some book industry talk in the second section. I guess i might finish it on the flight back if i'm in the mood. The masochistic mood.

Now reading Liu Cixin's The Three Body Problem, which is really excellent. Densely packed with *stuff*, in the way that Philip K Dick novels are – history, mysticism, physics, dreams. I also really like its style, of which this abbreviated imagery, with an appropriate sense of immanence, is one part:

Through her wet clothes, the chill of the Inner Mongolian winter seized Ye like a giant’s fist.

She stared at the antenna and thought it looked like an enormous hand stretched open toward the sky,

The Red Union had been attacking the headquarters of the April Twenty-eighth Brigade for two days. Their red flags fluttered restlessly around the brigade building like flames yearning for firewood.

it's compelling, and great fun to read, and it really moves. it doesn't dick about.

Reminds me, fairly recently over on The New, Improved Rolling Fantasy, Science Fiction, etc:

Been researching Chinese fantasy genres like Wuxia (real historical settings with unreal skills and sometimes supernatural elements), Xianxia (unbelievably huge scale fantasy with immortals in heavenly realms with powers that makes Dragonball look like Ken Loach), Xuanhuan (western influenced fantasy).

There's a few causes for concern.
There's incredibly few translation in print (especially considering these are some of the bestselling books in the world), most of this is read on regular webpages across hundreds of chapters. These books used to be serialized in newspapers but now it seems mostly online. Finding good books and translations will probably be tough. Doesn't help that a lot of the art and fan community has an unpleasantly slick videogame/anime look.

There was a few Oxford books of Jin Yong/Louis Cha but they're mostly too expensive now. Luckily this year just seen the release of Jin Yong's Legend Of Condor Heroes (which has caused controversy with the character name translations but I can deal) and Gu Long's Eleventh Son.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Sunday, February 18, 2018 12:59 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The Big Book of Science Fiction has two very different Chinese stories: Han Song's “Two Small Birds” 1988 in its first English translation by John Chu, is a brave, pained, 1988 allegory; Cixin Liu's “The Poetry Cloud” (translation by Chi-yin Ip and Cheuk Wong) is a majestic confection, from 1997. The only Chinese SF I've read (should check The Three Body Problem, come to think of it).

― dow, Sunday, February 18, 2018 11:26 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.sfintranslation.com usefully and regularly posts links to translated SF from all over the web, and a lot of it is Chinese: some good stuff.

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Monday, February 19, 2018 12:36 AM

thanks dow. i need to get over there don't i.

but yes you really should check The Three Body Problem. It's really good. 'Majestic confection' is a good phrase appropriate to that as well. Delighted there's two more in the series.

just saw those books getting raved about in the LRB. Need to read them too.

Dunno about "raved about" - reviewer seemed less than sympathetic towards the emphasis on technological innovation, the view of human rights as a luxury and (this was the most unfair bit I thought) suggests Liu "hates communism" because the book portrays the Cultural Revolution as a terrifying era (WHICH IT WAS). Did make me want to check it out tho!

But they did say they were gripping and very well written!

I am reading "Clash" by Ellen Wilkinson, late 20s domestic-political literature set during a general strike. Halfway through and I'm loving it, despite (because of) occasional stiltedness.

Finishing the annexes to Forster's The Longest Journey. I watched a BBC doc on the guy when I was a teen and it talked about it as his most difficult and unsuccessful novel, but also the one he appreciated the most, so of course pretentious youngster that I was I had to pick it up. What strikes me about it and Where Angels Fear To Tread now is Forster's hatred for a sort of buttoned up middle class Englishness - he was doing screeds against the suburbs fifty years before that became fashionable. In Where Angels... this is contrasted with Italy and in Longest Journey with a working class character - there's a bit of fetishism involved in both but I'm hardly the best authority to comment. Many years ago I started a thread on Forster on here where I complained about his sexism, and that's still there too - there's likeable female characters but they're few and far in between and don't have the presence of his female villains. Part of it I guess has to have to do with his sexuality and the compulsive heterosexuality of his time - settling down with a wife seen as the burgeois opposite of discussing philosophy with your (all male) friend group and seeking something more. But it's still a bummer. Anyway I dunno if I still think Longest Journey is a masterpiece, or even my fav Forster, but there's some achingly beautiful writing in there and I fully suscribe to dude's "school is terrible, uni is great" worldview.

Taking a break from Forster now to read Jeff VanderMeer's Anhiliation, years after all the cool people have gotten 'round to it and just in time to finish it before I catch the movie.

Finished book 6 of Proust, Albertine disparue, and I feel like the novel is beginning to resolve in a satisfying way. I wasn't sure if Proust was going to be able to tie things together or if it would just keep going until it stopped. I like the symmetry of reintroducing Gilberte and Norpois at just the right point to counterbalance their initial appearances in books 1 and 2, and the other symmetry of the two 'côtés' which are now collapsing together. The Venice excursion is nice after the long and complex psychological sections which preceded it.

oh he keeps (periodically) tying things together (sometimes too reliant on small world etc., although that's life, that's his alibi) right to the end.
In The Captive and The Fugitive, I stuck around for every dusty moment of the narrator's tedious torture of self and other---unlike Albertine, and good for her, but meanwhile I got the point already, of how numbing this sort of obsession can be, got the point early enough that I wasn't surprised to read that he hadn't originally meant to go on at nearly such length about this apartment interlude(but again, that's life...)

Many years ago I started a thread on Forster on here where I complained about his sexism, and that's still there too - there's likeable female characters but they're few and far in between and don't have the presence of his female villains.

so how do you explain Margaret Schlegel?

Finished We Have Always Lived In the Castle. As close to a perfect thing as I have ever read, I think.

Ooh yeah. Jackson is superb. For a very different, funny side of her (but still wonderfully written) try her autobiographical 'Living with Savages', or for a very funny but increasingly super-dark novel, 'The Way Through the Wall'.

so how do you explain Margaret Schlegel?

By pointing out she's not in Where Angels Fear To Tread or The Longest Journey :) I'll ket you know once I get to Howard's End.

just finished bolano's the savage detectives and thoroughly enjoyed every single minute of it. next i picked up javier cercas' soldiers of salamis in which bolano makes an appearance. i had no clue about it, kind of a funny coincidence

Finished Master of the Senate, third volume of Robert Caro's LBJ biography. Probably the best yet, yeah. Also finished reading the Torah, as I work my way through religious texts. I should read the rest of the old testament, but I have a prose retelling of the Ramayana, which does seem a bit more fun right now. And I read Robert Rosenstones 'Visions of the Past' which is a collection of articles about the way History is depicted in movies, which would probably be better if he didn't return to the same five films in every article...

I wasn't surprised to read that he hadn't originally meant to go on at nearly such length about this apartment interlude(but again, that's life...)

That's really interesting. I admire that section a lot, as grueling as it was. I felt like it needed to be difficult. It was important that this wasn't a problem he could self-analyze his way out of. He doesn't ultimately win out over this obsession by active moral self-analysis and acceptance of Albertine's separate being. She changes the dynamic, and then external circumstances intervene, and he gradually stops caring.

I am now reading Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl, set in 1859 Virginia. It was published in 1940, not so very long after Gone with the Wind was a smash sensation best-selling phenomenon. Judging from the opening chapters, this will be a very different novel and much better written, too.

xp yes it needed to be difficult, grueling, and his rule is always, "It takes as long as it takes." But sometimes I get to "Fine, I'll just sit here 'til it's over, hoping the Baron shows up. Where's that waiter."

I read David Peace's 1974. It's been a while since I read any Peace and christ, I need a bath.

Also read Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life. I have the same problems with him I always did and this absolutely lacks cohesion but he was in a pretty unique position I think, and damn I think we'll - increasingly - miss him.

I love pushing Cather on friends. About time she got the devotion that Hemingway did.

^^^^^^^^^ x 1000

next i picked up javier cercas' soldiers of salamis in which bolano makes an appearance. i had no clue about it, kind of a funny coincidence

Same! That's a really dope book imo.

Need to try him again. I read one Cercas book where the ending was basically 'But Betsy's been dead for 10 years!', which was really irritating, but it was good up to then.

bought the big new directions clarice lispector complete short stories collection this weekend and read some of the early ones last night; very sultry

I'm not sure that Hemingway deserves devotion.

pf - i assume that's the michael wood slight? the geoffrey hill poem wasn't all that, but i wasn't really interested in hearing what michael wood had to say on a book about which i was feeling quite emotional. or do you not like gillian rose?

Fizzles - purely about Wood. He is probably my favourite critic ever, when it comes down to it - so from my POV, buying a book with him in it and reading everything except his contribution is a definition of readerly perversity. I don't see him as antithetical to emotion, either: far from it.

I don't know enough Hill to talk about him. Rose I have always felt overrated but again don't know the work as well as you do.

I don't think anyone's been devoted to Hemingway in the last fifty years or so, except Simone DeRochefort and that's just a sex thing iirc.

I can attest that Hemingway's reputation among the young was in deep eclipse by 1970. He did not fit the tenor of the times and he'd been so widely imitated for so long that when people wanted something new and different, he was swept aside in the general flood of crazy. The 1970s feminist revival put the last nail in his coffin.

Recently read The Collected Stories, starting with the most recent (in late 1930s), then jumping back to ther very beginning, zig-zagging through scenes from Nick Adams' life, for instance---incl. experiences in and after Great War, his and other participants'---the hairline fractures in and of continuity could come from Wartime, influencing views of pre-War too, but think it's mostly presented in order of publication?.

The one about American couples at loose ends/endings abroad that stands out (before the late 30s subset) has a guy trying to talk a woman into an abortion, and she deflects, feints (they're having another liquid meal), 'til finally tells him she'll do whatever he wants, *if* he'll just shut up---but it's too high a price, he can't shut up, just loses his nerve when he sees her distress---and starts trying to talk her into believing it'll be okay if she has the baby (despite all the opposite talking points he's just made).

There's also one about a man in the hospital who listens to live and live-seeming) radio shows every night, from all over the continent (AM radio travels further at night), imagining the lives of dancing couples, especially in a particular ballroom---he listens with volume always set at lowest possible level of audibility.

The most recent are most impressive, in some ways---would like to read more stories, though after being absorbed by the ones involving bullfighters, looked through the apparently nonfiction Death In The Afternoon, dunno about that.

Stories re Spanish Civil War were striking, but have read that his journalism from that gets too agitprop. True?

Pity the nation: Lebanon at war by Robert Fisk

Books about Hemingway still get farted out as much as books about Virgiina Woolf.

It is easy enough to guess who might be writing all those Hemingway books (hint: publish or perish), but I am puzzled as to who buys those books?

Dunno but this is one of my all-time favorite Hemingway anecdotes:

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1995-08-13/entertainment/9508130046_1_budd-schulberg-papa-hemingway-screenplay

The first words out of his mouth were short, sharp jabs. `So you're Schulberg? The book writer?'

" `I've written a few books.'

"Now the hard right: `What do you know about prizefighting--for Christ's sweet sake?' "

Finished that Annihilation. It's scary and smart like everyone says, don't have much to add.

Going back to my Forster task now with A Room With A View.

a guy trying to talk a woman into an abortion

is there more than one?!

More than one whut

There are several about American couples in Europe, but I think (although I can't always read between his lines) that only one of these involves an abortion, if that's what you mean. And that's the one of this subset that I remember the best.

That is “Hills Like White Elephants” I believe

Right, thanks, I had already checked the book back in, should have gone back and made sure of titles before posting. It's not The Collected..., but The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway(Scribner's, 1966)--as listed in library catalog:

The short happy life of Francis Macomber -- The capitol of the world -- The snows of Kilimanjaro -- Old man at the bridge -- Up in Michigan -- On the Quai at Smyrna -- Indian camp -- The doctor and the doctor's wife -- The end of something -- The three-day blow -- The battler -- A very short story -- Soldier's home -- The revolutionist -- Mr. and Mrs. Elliot -- Cat in the rain -- Out of season -- Cross-country snow -- My old man -- Big two-hearted river: part I -- Big two-hearted river: part II -- The undefeated -- In another country -- Hills like white elephants -- The killers. Che ti dice la patria? -- Fifty grand -- A simple enquiry -- Ten indians -- A canary for one -- An alpine idyll -- A pursuit race -- Today is friday -- Banal story -- Now I lay me -- After the storm -- A clean, well-lighted place -- The light of the world -- God rest you merry, gentlemen -- The sea change -- A way you'll never be -- The mother of a queen -- One reader writes -- Homage to Switzerland -- A day's wait -- A natural history of the dead -- Wine of Wyoming -- The gambler, the nun, and the radio -- Fathers and sons.

I finished Sapphira and the Slave Girl and it was excellent in many ways, but marred by an unconscious complacence about racism that Cather disguised beneath a complex condemnation of slavery. The strength of the book lies in its sympathetic understanding of its white characters and the ways in which maintaining slavery imposed difficult moral and social problems upon them for which they had no adequate answers.

The weakness of the book is that the black characters are much too simple, too imperfectly explored, and too easily explained. They are not mere stereotypes and foils for the white characters; they do achieve a certain amount of reality and sympathy, but it is a thin and insubstantial reality, just a short step above stereotype.

The book I have now begin to read is A Nervous Splendor, which observes Vienna and some famous Viennese figures, during a ten month period in 1888-89. In order to provide adequate background, the author must of course pull in many facts from outside this period, but the conceit is that this short time encapsulates everything of importance the author wants to examine. My only quarrel so far is the writing style is a bit too overtly stylish for my taste and the details adduced are made to support conclusions they are not always sturdy enough to uphold.

I am 600 pages into Crucible of War by Fred Anderson. I think I lost a bit of interest when the War itself ended and the focus turned to politics, but I am too far in to bail out now.

I'm not sure that Hemingway deserves devotion.

― the pinefox, Wednesday, March 7, 2018

He's still fine as an way to trim excesses in student short story writing.

*a way

nadanadanada

UR Ananthamurthy - Bhava
Carlo Gadda - The Experience of Pain

Loved A Nervous Splendour: heard about it originally from other folks raving about it on ILB several years ago. The sequel, about 1913/14 is excellent too.

I need some good recs for recent gay male lit.

Can it be YA? If so, Vanilla by Billy Merrill is very interesting. Written in blank verse.

sure!

I'm reading "The Hearing Trumpet" by Leonora Carrington. It's very brief and I had been finding it OK but slow going, have just started enjoying it after about 110 of its 150 pages. I could do with more weirdness or more of a romp, some element of both of those may be emerging.

I read this odd thing also: http://probabilitydistributiongroup.bigcartel.com/product/the-injuries-of-time-desmond-wolfe-and-the-mulholland-archive-limited-edition-monochrome-version (in case the link expires, it's "The Injuries of Time - Desmond Wolfe and the Mulholland Archive") which is apparently a study of the archive of a missing academic who appears to have gone mad studying the archive of a missing academic who appears to have gone mad. It manages to achieve a genuinely eerie feeling, I liked it very much.

It's from the same mysterious person / people who made "This Wounded Island" which I mentioned here: ILB Gripped the Steps and Other Stories. What Are You Reading Now, Spring 2017

There seems to be virtually nothing about them on the internet.

Very intriguing. Doesn't even seem to be a Monkbridge University. I'm def going to grab that book, thanks much.

There is no such institution - I think it's a piece of semi-satirical world-building (certainly "This Wounded Island" is taking a (fond?) poke at both "psychogeography" as currently practiced, and at Brexitty Kentlands) but it's all done well enough to achieve an enjoyably spooked atmosphere.

More spooked Kentery to be found in "All The Devils Are Here" by David Seabrook, recently reprinted by Granta - went to a fun event re-launching it last week. It's a woozy and unsettling survey of selected Kentish monsters (and troubled souls) over the course of a few hundred years, from Charles Hawtrey to Lord Haw-Haw. I know I've banged on about that one also in the past, it's dead good although one suspects some of the author's own views may have been scabrous, perhaps sometimes straying into the dodgy. It's the closest I've ever found narrative non-fiction coming to the feeling of one of those hangovers that seems to be a howling tunnel of horror and self-loathing and it's the sort of narrative non-fiction that will hold conversations with ghosts.

I'm reading Ishiguro's Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall. I like the first one, "Crooner," especially this bit:
We went through that song, full of travelling and goodbye. An American man leaving his woman. He keeps thinking of her as he passes through the towns one by one, verse by verse, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Oklahoma, driving down a long road, the way my mother never could. If only we could leave things behind like that---I guess that's what my mother would have thought. If only sadness could be like that.

The second one, "Come Rain Or Come Shine," immediately and for most of it seems even better, or different: a wild/precise dark comedy, going toward farce, then more poignant---but ending up too The Big Chill for me, off-putting and retrospectively reductive in some ways. But I def. get his range and depth, to some extent---other Ishiguro I should read---?

No clear objections to the actual The Big Chill, far as I can recall, but subsequent arts reminders of it seem too auto-generational re middle-ageing etc. (not nec. Boomer).

I finished A Nervous Splendor, Frederic Morton. Maybe it's because I spent 1600 pages living inside The Man Without Qualities last year, but my enjoyment of this was not as keen as that of other ILB'ers who've praised it in the past.

The larger point of the book was that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was faltering due to its habitually burying problems beneath impressive ritual, and distracting itself with superficialities, giving it a seductive gaiety that papered over its stasis, emptiness and futility. Ironically, it felt like the author's style mirrored the style he attributed to Viennese in general. It was just a bit too flashy, a bit too concerned with building up heroes while dismissively pointing at their feet of clay. In a way, this was the perfect style to deftly mirror his subject matter, but for me it embraced too much of the superficiality and emptiness he was trying to convey and it was oddly unsatisfying.

other Ishiguro I should read---?

I totally loved When We Were Orphans, which I don't hear anyone talk about much; I think I strongly identified with the narrator's status as an immigrant who thinks he's assimilated much more than he actually has. Remains Of The Day is good too, as you may have heard. Both feature sad unreliable narrators.

Tired of unreliable narrators, esp. sad, but whaddayagonnado, sigh. Will check, thanks. Also curious about his allegorical fantasy novel or straight-up fantasy novel or whatever it is.

the three body problem

any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a fantasy novel

I am also reading that, and enjoying it immensely, despite some reservations about weird dialogue, but there had best be some good explanations, even if they are handwavy, in the 100p I have left.

i thought its pacing and general appeal slipped quite badly towards the end unfortunately. still think the first half / two thirds was excellent.

reading the second in the trilogy, the dark forest, now. it’s a bit hard going and is more about the grind of preparing for an alien encounter 4.25 light years and multiple generations away, with modelled social implications. i quite like the way liu cixin (劉慈欣) is happy to let societal models play out almost as if they were characters an author allows to make their own decisions rather than forcing them down preconceived plotlines. but it’s not *really* a compelling basis for a novel.

also *lots* of characters who in strugglijg to distinguish.

on the advanced technology / fantasy point thomp, i think i agree. but the retention of scientistic language provides framework linking current day science and plausible future science to “fantasy science”. i’d also ask whether you’d include something that uses a scientific paradigm jump as its basic principle - like teleportation in The Stars My Destination - in that category.

there’s also a consideration, which is also too dull to consider, that much actual physics can feel fantastic, or requiring of a certain amount of faith, if you don’t properly understand the mechanics (as i don’t). tho as i say it’s a pub bore point.

oh different translator too. noticeable i think. and not in a good way. i liked the manner of ken liu’s translation.

Tired of unreliable narrators, esp. sad, but whaddayagonnado, sigh. Will check, thanks. Also curious about his allegorical fantasy novel or straight-up fantasy novel or whatever it is.

I fear unreliable narrators are kinda Ishiguro's thing? I read his fantasy novel - The Buried Giant - recently and thought it was just ok. Reminded me a lot of T.H. White.

Here's my book news:

Glass shelf failure! They’d been good for 15 years... pic.twitter.com/VQlwFcHL1f

— The Half Pint Press (@halfpintpress) March 16, 2018

bleurgh

Jesus Tim I'm sorry.

In my early twenties I had some cheap shelves that I didn't secure too properly and I threw a big party. They collapsed in the middle of a SingStar karaoke session, dozens and dozens of CDs and books flying directly at us.

Calamity! Quite a graceful failure though. Were you home, was it loud?

I keep on meaning to write on the Ishiguro thread about why the Buried Giant is conceptually hugely flawed and bad, and The Unconsoled is a bona fide masterpiece. But not today.

amazing photo!

We weren't home; I wish I'd heard it. It was remarkably civilised of the books to fall downwards rather than outwards. The glass mostly broke very cleanly also, thank goodness.

Not sure what material to use to replace, it's gotta be thin and v strong and not v bendy. Reinforced glass would be perfect but is I think rather expensive.

I'm reading Robert Remini's doorstop bio of Daniel Webster cuz why not. I finished John Kenneth Galbraith's rather forgotten novel A Tenured Professor and hope to start Alan Hollinghurst's latest and Under the Udala Trees, both recommendations after posting my list of my favorite queer fiction.

Carlo Emilio Gadda's The Experience of Pain will be one of the best reads of the year. It's akin to Kafka's America (this pure invention of a place) (which is of course not solely confined to that book, although they were possibly written around at the same time) and, in its misanthropy and general auto-fictional framework brings to mind Celine's Death on the Installment Plan. Its not really written like either and seems like a hodgepodge of styles for its first part, then settles to something more stable and addictive in the second (I do need to go back to part I) and some very powerful pages.

Carrying on the undercover modernism theme I am now giving Tsvetaeva's diaries Earthly Signs - Moscow Diaries: 1917-1922 a once over. I love her prose (Russian prose by poets was a thing) so I am glad to have more of it.

Many xps but the hearing trumpet does indeed take a bit of a swerve toward the end

Starting to notice what could be called a musical effect/approach in some of the xpost Nocturnes: "Crooner"'s (apparently reliable and not too sad)narrator is a young-seeming guitarist from an unnamed, formerly "communist country," as he and other Euros ( def.incl. the trash-talking two-faced gondolier) always refer to it, culturally deprived category being more important than name. He's regarded as an anachronistic but necessary evil by anxious cafe etc. owners around the Venetian plaza: they're afraid the tourists won't see a guitar as traditional enough, even though it's antique-y as possible and the various little folk etc. ensembles sound better with it judging by wine sales etc. One day he spots an American crooner, the one his sad Mom loved from afar, wearing out his records way back in that communist country.

In "Malvern Hills," the narrator is also a young guitarist, who has left school with his little old acoustic, is unable to find work with London band, none of whom want anyone without equipment and pref. transport, especially "one of those wankers who go 'round writing songs, " which he is. He goes to stay with his sister and brother-in-law in their Malvern Hills cafe--they live upstairs, it's actually in the hills, mostly serving locals, they can't afford to pay him, but the idea is he's working for his room and board, the brother-in-law, especially, seems torn between reproaching him for not working harder and feeling guilty for expecting/depending on him to work at all (hey, he's a guest, he's a volunteer, he's family, he's working on songs dammit). Then he meets an older couple from the Continent, who are travelling musicians---pref. experimenting with Swiss folk music, but very often expected by cafe etc.owners to play and dress trad., also to play the Beatles, Carpenters, ABBA (the often loudly positive hubbie looks like Bjorn or Benny might in later middle age). They came after seeing a documentary about Elgar riding these hills on his bicycle (hub loves the look, more mercurial wife later says the area is like a little park).

So the ?musical" part I meant is the way he repeats, varies, recombines elements of characterization and setting and plotting.

Also the phrasing, pacing etc. are fluid enough without every getting gushy.

Finished The Crucible of War, which was an interesting look at a period of history that I haven't read much about since high school. Looking for something a bit lighter now, so I think I'll try Alan Furst's Night Soldiers, which has been lying around the house since my wife bought it, and since I've read some positive things about him on the board.

We went through that song, full of travelling and goodbye. An American man leaving his woman. He keeps thinking of her as he passes through the towns one by one, verse by verse, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Oklahoma, driving down a long road, the way my mother never could. If only we could leave things behind like that---I guess that's what my mother would have thought. If only sadness could be like that.

I hate when novelists do this

"that song"

All night long
We would sing that stupid song

"that song" in reference to a title he had just mentioned, had mentioned several times.
I like the way his narrators never tell me too much. Why, for instance, after the security guard flips the lights on in the hotel ballroom about 3 a.m. to see what the ruckus is, does the LAPD cop not more extensively question the man and woman standing on stage? They tell him they've been looking for munchies, and he does wonder aloud why room service isn't good enough for them, judging by his own experience---he's a guest too; maybe he's off duty and on vacation, just wearing a suit and carrying his badge when the guard calls, but wanting to get back to his plush room (how can a cop afford this ritzy place?) The lady he's interviewing is wearing a very fine bathrobe, the fact that she and the gentleman are wearing bandages that cover their whole heads, except for mouths and eyes, evidently working in there somewhere, are further indications of status, which he may take into account (LAPD prob knows about the context). Better to back off, for now anyway.
And maybe the guy who sees them on another night, and comes up with his own tentative explanation in the form of a question, also knows when to go about his business, in this town of endless business permutations. The co-stars of "Nocturne" mean to stay on point too, but they just have to take the scenic route, especially when they get to the "go back to cover our tracks" fallacy (not so far from "spend money to make money," a given here). But there's much more to it---not too much, just typically spare and graceful and energetically generating textured details all along, for the right number of pages, although I hope the last story won't go to a downtempo ending, as usual----its titled "Cellists," so not expecting fireworks finale.

Finished A Room With A View. It does indeed feature a stronger positive female character than anything in Forster so far; it's also interesting that the book is actually quite affectionate towards the deadly Suburbs that Forster so despised in his previous two novels (all three written more or less at the same time, to be sure); Cecil, with his disdain for the family and high aspirations towards Art, is almost a dark version of Ansel from The Longest Journey. I repped for that book so long that now it's creaking a bit under the weight - and the breezy feeling of A Room With A View feels superior, which I guess lands me back into conventional wisdom. Howards End and A Passage To India should arrive at my local bookshop Monday. My first new purchases - I'd not read Room With A View before but had it laying around for years.

I just read the Life of Alfred the Great by the contemporary monk named Asser. It was hardly scintillating narrative prose, really very flat, barren even, but it has the virtue of brevity and does throw some light on a very unfamiliar period of English history, when the Vikings were about as powerful as the Saxons and ruled a good swath of now-English territory. I read a translation by Simon Keynes that was in a larger Penguin Classics volume about Alfred.

It's hard to commission this shit when you're still alive, and I worried about kids reading it.

Tore through a handful of books the last couple of weeks: lidia yuknavitch the book of Joan, Jennifer Egan look at me, chris petit the butchers of Berlin, trey ellis platitudes - all diverting and interesting and I might work up something half intelligent to say about some of them at some point but not today (I will say that platitudes has some of the funniest bits I've read in awhile); and now I'm on page 8 of correction and I feel like I'm wading through tar

So "Cellists," the last story in xpost Nocturnes, turns out to be a strong finish. Continuing the recombinant flow, we go back to the opening "Crooner"'s setting, the Venetian Piazza San Marco, with the hopeful cafe managers and tourists and pigeons and musos. "The big Czech guy with the alto sax," mentioned by the "Crooner" guitarist-narrator, tells this one, and an American lady appears, with a secret, a talent, a calling, none of them quite the same, keep thinking she's also from a story by Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield, even, vibe-wise, Jane Bowen---but mainly she's another driving, veering, purposeful, impulsive, compulsive, improvising self-projecting muse-agents in the winter of discontent, racing the clock or feeling it, at least, one of the ones in all these stories (one's in two).
Good stuff. Could be quite different from the novels in some ways, at least judging by descriptions in the endpages of this Vintage International trade pb: grafs re An Artist of the Floating World, Never Let Me Go, A Pale View of Hills,The Remains of the Day, The Unconsoled, and When We Were Orphans.

Jane Bowles, not Bowen, of course! Sorry, Jane!

Just to confuse things further - there's an English photographer named Jane Bown. Here's a picture Bown took of Bowen:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/15/elizabeth-bowen-author-fiction

After dipping into James Baldwin's essays on Sunday night, last night I switched over to start one of his novels, Another Country, Lord Alfred's relative estimations of Baldwin as a great essayist and mediocre novelist notwithstanding.

Ooof. That's harsh - Another Country may not cohere, precisely, but goddamn the constituent parts are extraordinary.

Gillian Rose - Love's Work. Reflections on death, medicine (western or otherwise), love, relationships and philosophy as the author approaches the end game in her battle with cancer. I loved the last 10 pages (they were a strange experience - how is she going to end this? It felt like the middle of the book), in the manner which she turned the density of philosophical reflection into an 'ending' that was one and yet didn't feel like one - of life and learning, with the willingness to learn and live and love - and to the last second. You are sure it carried on until the last breath, beyond the last page of the book in which you are holding.

Now more love - onto The Letters of Abelard and Heloise

You'll find the letters are rather more chaste and philosophical than ardent. The infamous consequence of their relationship for Peter Abelard doesn't get much play in the letters. Or at least, it used to be infamous. Lots of these old iconic stories are getting buried under the onslaught of contemporary media.

I know about it cos it was in The Sopranos :)

the sexy version is rousseau's julie

Eudora Welty: The Ponder Heart -- objectively this is pretty good, but not sure that my own tolerance for the endless blather of a folksy racist hasn't been exceeded by p35

I felt the same way - I pressed on and was pleased I did but I haven’t gone back to Welty.

Haven't read the novels or novellas, but much enjoyed what I've read in The Collected Stories(1982 edition); reliable sources have encouraged me to read One Writer's Beginnings and On Writing, also
collection of correspondence w William Maxwell, ditto Kenneth Millar AKA Ross MacDonald (reliables have also endorsed the longer fiction, but I may not get to any that, or any more of hers). Oh and I liked a collection of her photography and an exhibition of same, with some pix not in the book, but related to stories, views of the Natchez Trace etc.

Her short stories and photos are definitely great. I think I just have an allergy to the sort of Southern whimsy 'Ponder Heart' is strong in.

I love this photo she took of Katherine Anne Porter, who i also read some of and loved recently

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/18/1c/1b/181c1b769f2ccd3beaf658448bea8660.jpg

Wow. Reminds me: where should I start with her writing?

'Pale Horse, Pale Rider' is a set of 3 novellas you can't go wrong with. The last one is set during the outbreak of the 1918 'Spanish' flu.

New thread: 2018 Springtime For ILB: My Huggles. What Are You Reading Now?