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

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

I read "A Misalliance" by Anita Brookner. I was busy thinking it was bog-standard Brookner and then it finished brilliantly.

Now I am reading Isabel Waidner's anthology of happening-right-now "innovative literature", "Liberating the Canon". These things are inevitably a mixed bag but it's good.

I am reading Another Country, James Baldwin. Pretty uneven so far. Sometimes it rises to excellence, but just as often he brings his characters together and he doesn't seem to know what they're supposed to do with themselves except make small talk and then wander offstage.

I'm reading 1606: The Year of Lear by James Shapiro. Its absolutely convinced of itself, which makes for a barreling narrative drive, but a little doubt would be good (beyond the frequent 'we can only imagine's and 'it must have been's, that is).

Toni Morrison - Sula
Eduardo Corazinsky - The Bride from Odessa*
Leonardo Sciascia - One Way or Another
J.K. Huysmans - Drifting*
Marguerite Duras - Practicalities

Starting spring with a bunch of short ones. My first by Morrison and I like it a lot - a speedy trawl through time as a friendship goes through...what long friendships go through. The Bride from Odessa had nothing that grabbed me beyond a documentary of a Euro/South American Jewish mind in between the two world wars. Was drifting along with the Huysmans but I lost my copy so that was that. Sciasica's One Wau or Another is the masterpiece of this batch - nobody says 'things are truly fucked and nothing will save you' quite like he can (not bad going for a communist!) Now on Duras' Practicalities which is a bunch of recorded statements that have been re-worked to the page, and there is that relaxed voice of late Duras. Plenty of fireworks with nothing in specific to prove.

About a hundred pages into Howards End and I'm not sure whether it truly is his masterpiece or whether reading this much Forster in a row has enhanced it for me, seeing the writer's themes and style evolve so closely. Despite A Room With A View having a female protagonist I do think this is the one where Forster really gives his upbringing in a female household its due. One wonders if the useless brother is in fact a self-deprecating self-portrait.

John Peel-The Olivetti Chronicles: a collection of articles the great man wrote for various mags and papers over the years. Not all music related either. However, they're nearly all very well written, often funny and perceptive. Also a very good bathroom book, as the pieces are uniformly short.
Andy Warhol-The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B and back again: A classic piece of sub-cultural weirdness. It hasn't aged a day, in all these years.

RECENT READING:

Natural History: Perucho, Joan -- Catalan vampire magic realism from 1960; not as good as that sounds, as it's mostly a welter of proper nouns

Dandelions: Kawabata, Yasunari -- this book could only have been written by a Japanese person; weird in a way very much of that country; enjoyably daft

Viennese Short Stories: Canetti, Veza -- depressing socialist realism, very well written, made me sad

Henrietta's War: Dennys, Joyce -- likable enough, but in a world where Diary of a Provincial Lady/Mollie Panter-Downes/Mrs Miniver already exist, it seems pretty weak stuff

Aftershock: Trahan, Roberta -- SF novella about massive earthquakes, forgettable

Opera Di Cera: Swain, Kelley -- novel/opera in verse about the wax Venus anatomical models and their creation; fun

Sight: Greengrass, Jessie -- genuinely amazingly good novel about motherhood, daughterhood, grief & medical science history

Sound of the Mountain by Kawabata
Maybe my favorite of his, a mix of romantic love and familial relations

The Invention of Morel - Adolfo Bioy Casares: excellent Borgesian type novel, really enjoyed this one

Annihilation - Jeff Vandermeer: liked this less than I thought I would, the writing is pretty pedestrian

The Stranger In The Woods - Michael Finkel: non-fiction telling of the story of a guy who lived as a hermit in the woods for 30 years, during which time he spoke to someone only once, to say "Hi". I liked it.

Fever Dream - Samanta Schweblin: sort of literary horror story by a young Argentinian author, I thought it was good.

The Reflection by Hugo Wilcken: Currently reading this. Enjoyed his previous novels and this one's a real pageturner. Sort of identity noir set in 40s Manhattan.

The Invention of Morel is wonderful, one of my favourite SF novels.

Glad to see another Wilcken enjoyer, too.

I really enjoyed Colony by Wilcken - also a kind of identity noir, albeit more Conradian.

His book on Low wasn't great, however.

the anatomy of melancholy josephine tey's the daughter of time (very good) & to love and be wise (okay so far...) the latter has an amusing satirical aspect concerning the gradual take-over of a small rural village by an influx of literary londoners seeking the simple life. hadn't read her before, nor knew that one of her other works was the source for hitchcock's young & innocent!

Well done on finishing the Burton (if you have :))

Its going to be my major read this year.

Should start a Book Club thread for that. Oh wait.

I'm on a history kick. Finished volume four of Robert Caros LBJ biography, now I'm waiting along with everyone else. Probably several more years to go. And I read American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund S Morgan.

I should read more fiction. I'm turning into that kind of guy who only reads history and biographies :(

I try to keep a roughly 60:40 ratio between fiction and non-fiction, but great non-fiction is rarer than great fiction, so it's hard not to fall down around 70:30 in favor of fiction. A lot of non-fiction is just too drab because exceptional writers tend to get drawn toward fiction in their youth; it's much more glamorous.

Agee On Film: contents def under pressure, incl. life during WWIItime, he's appalled by what he sees as bad-faith, and good-faith but totally inadequate fictional war movies---American educational and other systems are too isolated in the world---though finds documentaries, some commissioned and even kind-of distributed by Uncle Sam, and yet with a remarkably small degree of censorship and slant, as far as he can tell, though most from Over There, incl. ones based on captured footage, often revelatory, though imperfect (once he thinks about it enough, he can find fault with anything, being a true critic-idealist-pre-ilxor).
Bursts of preachy prose poetry and zingers under pressure too; he seizes on minutes, seconds, frames of pleasure wherever he can find them, sometimes admitting/proclaiming thorough enjoyment of flicks which he cannot in good conscience or "by any standard" recommend.
Wish there were more scenes of/from the audience, like when he sees The Curse of the Cat People with "a regular Times Square horror audience...sharply on to its faults and virtues," in and beyond genre considerations.
His and their points, as reported, are sharp and shiny indeed, but he of course can't get it go:
This is, I grant, a specialized audience, unobstreperous, poor, metropolitan, and deeply experienced. The West Times Square movie audience is probably, for that matter, the finest movie audience in the country (yadda yadda certainly superior to the artsy-fartsys yadda)...As long as such an audience exists, no one in Hollywood has the right to use the stupidity of the public as an alibi, and I suspect that a few more films as decent and human as this one would prove that there is a very large and widely distibuted audience indeed for such films.
In sum: his most sustained flight of optimism ever or so far, way out of character re his usual sense of American audience (so culturally deprived, so fucked-with, how else could they settle for so many bad things that he himself is somewhat susceptible too, and knows it, aieeeee). But as a trip and outburst with the best fuel he can find---there is a war on, and not just WWII---it is totally in character.

Bursts of preachy prose poetry and zingers under pressure also bits of astute zoom-lens analysis/forensics.

That is, although I'm certainly no expert, his comments on films, actors, cinematographers, directors, producers, studios etc. that I am somewhat familiar with often seem astute (passing put-downs of other authors, not so much). Comments on the audience/public ehhh to some extent, though I'm no expert there either (put-off by some of the deprecation of women's magazines, women's fare, although that's part of his theme about fucked-withedness, and points about accepting your lot, standing by your man etc. well-taken as far as he takes them, aside from some notes of condescension). He's strong on what all the (All-) American audience "should" properly or possibly ask of the Movie Negro.
Doesn't say that Noel Coward's problem is that he's gay, exactly, but once removed from tropes of normalcy as what-we're-fighting-for in his patriotic war movie; thus NC's view of said tropes-traits are distanced enough for some perspective, good observation of detail, but not the depth of experience---though most other moviemakers/contributors also fall short of conveying/making something coherent and otherwise brave and strong of depth, and anyway Coward's a good actor, despite his handicap (shared in some sense by a lot of other British; Americans aren't the only ones with problematic cultural conditioning).
(Why aren't you in uniform, James? He'll probably indicate something about it at some point.)

He's strong on what all the (All-) American audience "should" properly or possibly ask of the Movie Negro. James has a zingfest here.

And astuteness aside, he's fun to read, if sometimes exhausting (can hear him hammering the manual keys all all day and night, between shows).

Perhaps my favourite-ever film review, by James Agee: pic.twitter.com/tF2Q9AEJuP

— Caustic Cover Critic (@Unwise_Trousers) September 18, 2017

Sorry for posting own tweet, but could not get image to link on this ipad

thanks for the takes on Agee, dow - made me really curious to check that anthology out

fwiw I do think Coward often suffers from an attachment to various normativities - the end of Brief Encounter is understandable, considering the mores of its time, and reminds me of how all those gangster movies from the 30's had to end with the hero's death for moral reasons despite them clearly wanting us to root for the bad guy, but I watched a staging of Relative Values a few years ago, and for all of its supposed satire of snobbishness at the end the artistos are with the artistos and the new money is with the new money and that, it seems, is as it should be.

Less than a hundred pages of Proust left. I may be finished today.

Don't count on it. The last volume is so good though, don't you think? One of the most satisfying, as it certainly should be, after all that.
Oh speaking of xpost Josephine Tey, Daugther of Time is the one people always rec. to me for starters, but also today in the WSJ read a microrave for Miss Pym Disposes, set in a girls school, the title character getting pulled into a complicated garden, esp. re the studious, decorous Miss Innes, with her "Borgia-like face": "Tey's dignified passion for Innes is a strange flame that lights this strangely magical novel," strange strange yeah I'll probably check it out (reviewer is Laura Thompson, whose Agatha Christie bio got some good reviews; despite familiar themes, even got Washington Post reviewer comparing Christie to Ferrante??). Also intrigued by her take on Margery Allingham's The Fashion In Shrouds, which apparently is more deep female chess; my simple male mind will just have to go it (Conclusion: "The book is an elliptical fantasy, yet it has the gift of making one care.")

Sorry for posting own tweet Not at all, didn't know about your account! Good stuff thx

xpost yeah I thought he was pretty fair to Coward. Does low-rate Greene, Waugh, several other British writers, in drive-by swipes, while committing to more space for evaluating Coward.

The last volume is so good though, don't you think? One of the most satisfying, as it certainly should be, after all that.

Yeah, marvellous, though they're all amazing and I'm not sure how I'd rank them. I was in the mood to read something on WWI as well, so this coincided nicely. I love the image of this unlit Paris where bombing raids are actually a relief to the brothel patrons because it means there won't be a police raid for at least a few hours, and where's there's a convenient excuse for bumping up against strangers in the dark.

you should probably go out and get a steak or something after that

thinking about reading THE POWER BROKER

Finally read My Brilliant Friend and grumpily realised it was so good I'd have to read the rest. Now I'm rereading Harry Thompson's fun old Herge biography.

thinking about reading THE POWER BROKER

it badly needs a good ebook so i don't break my back lugging the thing around

^^^

Well done on finishing the Burton (if you have :))

oh, i'm a loooong way from being done with the anatomy. the copy i have is not very reader friendly so have been taking frequent breaks to read some lighter fare. currently onto a third tey which is(xposts) miss pym disposes!

always feel burton is not v linear and more of a branching, delving book anyway. frequent breaks is good.

as noted elsewhere, did two liu cixin - The Three Body Problem is just... very enjoyable, full of concepts and fun-serious *thinking* about society. thomp landed some fairly heavy blows on it in the SF thread, but i think it comes through. The Dark Forest (the sequel) is bloody heavy going and is about the logistics of preparing for a centuries-hence alien invasion, but about halfway through I started enjoying that too, even tho its main narrative force is just *waiting*, and a very amusing and ott told you so at the end.

after that picked up the knowledge we have lost in information: the history of information in modern economics by philip mirowksi and edward nik-khah, which i laid into on the academic writing is often purposeful obfuscated thread, and deservedly, I think, but I've started really getting into *this* as well ffs. The excessive, shit-academic prose, conceptually laying into rational-agent and information-hooked economic theory is suspect, fun, and a good space to be in directly after the liu cixin. the writing really is abysmal at times tho.

idk maybe my taste buds are just fucked.

Reading Robinson by Muriel Spark, her second novel, and seemingly one of her more obscure ones (or maybe I just don't see it as often as second-hand copies of Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). It's a stranded-on-a-desert-island story - curiously reminiscent of The Invention of Morel in some ways! - and so far as funny and clever as all her early books.

I read “Mothers” by Chris Power, recently published
Short stories, and it’s really bloody good. I don’t know what to tell you about it really apart from I loved it.

I finished Another Country, James Baldwin. It had its moments, but I can't say I thought it was particularly illuminating or enjoyable. The characters seemed like lost souls, but once the reader gathers this much, neither they nor the author had much to add to that. Perhaps coincidentally, the amount of booze and cigarettes consumed in this book was staggering. It was ongoing on nearly every page of this 400 page novel. Yet, the author and his characters don't seem to find this remarkable.

Onward to Stefan Zweig's Journey Into the Past!

Getting republished in November, so I know what we'll all be reading then: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZ-ikpuU0AA8A8E.jpg

I finished Night Soldiers by Alan Furst. It was a fun ready, just what I was looking for. Nominally a spy novel, but maybe more of an historical adventure story, as the main character wanders through various colorful episodes of European mid-20th century military conflagration. Furst has done his homework and you can pretty easily imagine yourself in the scenes he draws. His relish at telling a good yarn is also infectious, if some of the plots seem a bit recycled at times.

Next up is Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford.

Furst is wonderful.

As xposted to the cute octopus thread, I'm reading the very very very excellent OTHER MINDS by Peter Godfrey-Smith, about cephalopod intelligence/consciousness

Journey Into the Past was very short and a bit overwrought, even for Zweig, but he is (as ever) extremely astute about the psychology of people in stressful situations.

Last night I dipped a toe into the waters of Chateubriand's Memoirs From Beyond the Grave in the new NYRB edition. I'm not entirely sure if I will stick with it atm. I may skip sideways into something else. What will suit my mood is not easy to guess right now. Some family turmoil on the horizon, but nothing ott.

I read 1977, the second of David Peace's Red Riding quartet. It's almost laughably bleak and brutal - to the point that it stops being human at all, and becomes a horrific dreamstate. I keep returning to aspects of it, like finding bits of sick in one's teeth days after a hangover has passed.

Also re-read the first part of Richard Holmes' Coleridge biography, in preparation for a solo walk across the Quantocks. He's so clearly in love with his subject that critical distance is largely absent, but it does make for a totally immersive experience. It also led me to listen to the Burton reading of the Rime, which is just magnificent (and on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/3omLIUBA47D2ISP3yGE0XN?si=G0JFkBm5St6XptWtgwZ4NA).

like finding bits of sick in one's teeth

up one's nose ime, but yes good analogy. i keep meaning to read him, but everything says that i will need cleansing salts and muscular christianity exercises ready when I do.

Yeah, i read the first one and it was so over the top i couldn't take it seriously enough to go on with book two

You can see he's taken inspiration from Elroy and - particularly - Derek Raymond, but there's no letup, none of the fallow spaces to breathe. It's clearly a strategy, but it's exhausting, and aye, occasionally laughable in its relentless extremity.

I've read some of the later stuff and there's more control, more variety in the field of vision. GB84 has the same grimness, but its scope is wider. It's a brilliant book.

reading Icehenge by Kim Stanley Robinson. from 1984. it has Russians. it has carbonaceous chondrites.

(i actually started to read fred pohl's first solo novel Slave Ship but i couldn't do it. i was kinda forcing myself to read it. which didn't seem like a fun thing to do at all.)

Platonov - The Return. Some of the sentences are all-time, so it was never a question enjoying one of my favourite writers again. The title is great but it can also apply to most of the stories as many are about varieties of return - and whether the loss can be overcome, whether people that are away can reconnect.

Burton reading of the Rime unavailable in US, apparently :(

I'm reading The Glass Castle and some Arthur C. Clarke short stories.

I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and it left me scientifically unfulfilled so I've moved on to The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

Rather than dive into Chateaubriand, I've made a sideways juke into Geoffroy de Villehardouin's chronicle of the Fourth Crusade, which never got around to fighting any infidel Saracens, but did briefly conquer Christian Constantinople and controlled the shrunken rump of the Byzantine Empire for a few years. It is a surprisingly factual and even-handed history for its period.

Flann O'Brien - Myles Away from Dublin*
Philip K Dick - We Can Remember it for You Wholesale

The O'Brien is another nice bunch of reprints of his newspapers columns. 100 pages in and I felt like I wasn't going to get much out of it so I left it. Nice enough.

Its been years since I read any PKD, and I never read his short stories before. I am really loving these. The title story became Total Recall. So far the compressed nature of the format means its a more dizzying experience than the novels.

Still on Howards End, but also started Pride & Prejudice because me and my gf have decided to analyse books together (I got her to read Our Man In Havana).

HAve moved on to different intelligent animals after the octopi: Esther Woolfson's 'Corvus', about living with a rook, magpie, etc. Lovely.

Also read a George RR Martin novella (never having tackled his Fire and Ice and Thrones books), and it was balls.

Will Carruthers Playing Bass With 3 Left Hands which is quite good.

Finishing up Detroit 67 by Stuart Cosgrove which I've enjoyed. Enough to make me want to read his Memphis 68.

mainlining Caro

mainlining Caro

Healthier than mainlining Karo!

James Morrison, what partic Geo RR Martin novella was balls? Only non GOT things I've read by him, long time ago, was the novel Fevre Dream, which as far as i can remember was gd pulpy fun - riverboat gambling vampires, basically - but not much more than that.

That's my memory of Fevre Dream, too. This was Nightflyers, which was over-the-top psycho-killer-in-space stuff with loads of sex described with what was obviously MEANT to be worldly off-handedness, but which came across instead as the ineptly transcribed wet dreams of a teenaged virgin.

SOON TO BE A MAJOR TV SERIES, i believe.

I've started to re-read an autobiography my mother wrote about 25 years ago. It would not interest anyone outside my immediate family, but it's pretty interesting just because she wrote well enough that I can hear her voice in the writing. And although most of the stories are not completely new to me, many of them are not ones she told repeatedly, so I'd forgotten them.

Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization
Jo Walton, Among Others

Finished Howards End. It's probably pretty trite to say it's his masterpiece? But I think correct. I love how it works both as a philosophical meditation and as a straightforward romance novel. I've been thinking a lot lately about my tendency to be judgemental (what else would attract someone to ILX amirite), and going back and forth on the Wilcoxes certainly added to that.

After Howards End, Forster took a break, and so shall I from him. Next up: James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk.

Have finished with The Odyssey, tr. Emily Wilson. A ripping yarn, and a treasure.

Was wondering about that translation

It’s blurbed on the back by no lesser a personage than the former Archbishop of Canterbury. I also really liked it. It’s bloody, funny, suitably familiar and unfamiliar at once. I saw it at the bookstore today next to another brand new translation and I thought “sorry buddy, you’re late”

Oh yeah, Rowan Williams, also a poet. I keep coming across that one he wrote called “Simone Weil at Ashford.”

"Hons and Rebels" was quite enjoyable - an amusing tongue-in-cheek inside glimpse at an eccentric (but aren't they all) English upper crust family and country manor childhood circa 1920s, then an eventful tale of youthful rebellion, first love and bohemian glamour on a shoe-string budget. The roguish and carefree Esmond steals the show in the book's second act (rather by design), and not knowing the ending in advance, I found the final pages almost unbearably poignant.

Was wondering about that translation

I have the T.E.Lawrence translation lying around waiting to be read. I enjoyed 7 Pillars of Wisdom so should give it a better shot. Just always seem to be reading something else.

Also just started reading the Coke Machine a history of Coca Cola from a not very sympathetic perspective.

"I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts" by Mark Dery

Started reading "The Man Who Watched Trains Go By" by Simenon (my first by him).

Fizzles do you have more points of comparison for the Odyssey than I do? Bc I had only my vague memories of whatever I read in high school and I’d love to hear more.

I seem to have committed to reading Alan Watts, Nature, Man and Woman.

I'm only about a quarter of the way in. He rambles a bit, but some of his points on difficult matters of religion and psychology are exceedingly well and clearly presented, in ways that few other writers I've read are capable of. He has a knack of illustrative imagery, fresh metaphor, and drawing verbal distinctions using le mot jus. It makes up for some weaknesses of repeating himself and losing the thread at times.

I read Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13. I was quite surprised by how much I liked it and despite the oblique approach to character, its accumulative emotional impact. It reminded me of Tom Drury in its use of place as narrator and its evocation of the wheel of the years.

Read "Mothers" by Chris Power, a very fine collection of short stories. Not sure I can tease out any particularly distinguishing features but the whole affair seemed made up of very high-quality writing, and I say that as someone who loves a stupid gimmick.

Read "Pure Hollywood" by Christine Schutt, there's something very weird about how Schutt phrases things, something unsettling that I didn't manage to put my finger on (I wondered whether it was that some established syntax was messed about with* but I haven't gone back to look for examples because you don't even care. And ultimately I'm not sure I do because although I enjoyed the strange-feeling texture, none of the stories really got to me.

Read "Hotel Silence" by Audur Ava Olafsdottir, apologies for my failure to deploy the appropriate diacritics, which I enjoyed very much but did not love. A very diverting few hours though.

Now I'm reading "The Antichrist" by Joseph Roth.

*(it's not that she uses the phrase, but the slightly uncanny feeling you get if someone said "green big car" instead of "big green car" - it's not a thing a native English speaker would do, but most (myself included) couldn't tell you why; the feeling of something being off but it not being clear quite what.)

Just got 'Mothers' yesterday, it looked really good.

> green big car

there was a thing a couple of years ago about how there are rules for this... googles:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/sentence-order-adjectives-rule-elements-of-eloquence-dictionary

Yeah I remember the article but there is no way in the world I'd be able to remember (in the abstract) the order things should come in. The point I was making was the off-ness rather than that as a specific technique.

Malcolm Bowie's Proust Among the Stars, probably one of the best and richest lit-crit books I've ever read. I want to devote a lot of time to studying Proust in the future, and suspect I'll be coming back to this book again.

I haven't quite finished Nature, Man & Woman, but I'm close to it. It's much more polemical than the other books I've read by Alan Watts.

It was published in the late 50s. After watching the bad run of the 1930s with Depression + Fascism, the 1940s with WWII, Hiroshima and the start of the Cold War, and the 1950s with the emergence of the era of impending nuclear annihilation, people were pretty shook. There was a spate of books by theologians and by social and religious philosophers trying to diagnose what ailed western civilization. This book fits that trend. Watts takes the side of those whose favorite whipping boy for What's Wrong With Us was christianity.

True to the form of such polemical books, Watts draws a very large number of generalizations about How Westerners Think and Act, and then makes sweeping and absolute statements about How Wrong That Is. Sometimes he hits his target and sometimes not, but he writes as if all his arguments are conclusive, because that is what polemicists do.

He especially goes wide of the mark when he reaches the last part of the book, which psychoanalyzes the sexuality of western societies, a task for which he was no better informed than the average philosopher or theologian, meaning not very informed. He dabbles around in one corner of human sexuality and presumes he is adequately covering the territory.

Conclusion: if you like Alan Watts as an author and thinker, this book should not be near the top of your list of his works to read. It's extremely uneven. He did it better elsewhere.

Malcolm Bowie's book is so good, its one of those where if you don't read the thing its looking at well then at least read this richly detailed study of it.

Roberto Bolano - The Insufferable Gaucho.

The Insufferable Gaucho! Camping tonight in the endless plains of Society, awaiting suitable attentions, while taking it allll in. I'm sure I'll be re-reading the whole thing at some point, now that I know what to expect (many hills all round).

Haven't read it, but that's my vision of B.'s title.

I just finished it. Its a bunch of short stories although the last piece is a nice commentary on Latin American lit and politics (Funnily enough a lot of the people mentioned have now been translated into English.)

Oh, I thought you meant it was another study of Proust, I'm crosseyed projecting somehow (will see the Narrator as Gaucho from now on).

Just read Margaret Killjoy’s brief The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, a weird anarchist/punk/queer fantasy story. Read if you like those things.

"The Antichrist" (Joseph Roth, as mentioned above) is a very strange book indeed. It comes off as the middle point between Pilgrim's Progress and the doomiest of Frankfurt School social criticism, written in the context of the gathering horror of 1934. The narrating character travels the world and notes how "the antichrist" (which is not a person or a character but I suppose some mixture of irreligiousness and some tendency for all human activity to turn rotten and corrupt) infects and ruins everything. The righteous and unrighteous, communist and capitalist are exposed as corrupted and compromised.

Also peculiar is "A Compass Error" by Sybille Bedford, which is a sequel to " A Favourite of the Gods" - I liked the latter very much. "A Compass Error" spends at least a third of its length more-or-less reporting the plot of the previous novel, which is a strange choice, and I didn't think it shed much new light on the story as it was being told from the perspective of the grand-daughter. After all that catching up is done, just at the point when I was about to write it off as no good at all, the book manages to evoke a horrified sinking feeling better than any other book I can think of just now.

I love "The Antchrist" and yes its perhaps Joseph Roth's strangest book. Almost everything he wrote were tales well told and/or historical novels with a journalistic eye. Interesting you mention Frankfurth school in relation to it.

Some poetry at the moment:

Anne Carson - Glass and God
Szilard Borbely - Berlin-Hamlet

Anadolu Psych by Doug Spicer.
Book long expansion from his Wire Turkish psych primer.
Got it yesterday and so far only read the first chapter but seems interesting.

The Coke Machine Michael Blanding
History of the soft drink giant. Not very sympathetic and highlights ethical issues etc.

Kill Em and Leave James McBride
black author retraces steps of James Brown's history. I've got as far as the blind ex- Famous Flame but good book.

stop reading books everyone, i need to bloody catch up.

silby, just seen your q upthread on the odyssey. my experience is in order, latent cultural awareness, a reasonably adult version i can’t remember the name of, ulysseeeeees cartoon, then late teens/university: chapman, pope, some loeb and other dipping. joyce obv.

basically i’m not at all qualified to judge it as a translation. however two things make it stand out.

1) the reduced per line syllable count, and the overall constraints of an equal number of lines to the greek, which i think gives it a spareness. at least i identified the spareness and lucidity (image or utterance uncluttered by verbiage) and the colin burrow review in the lrb pointed out the reduced syllable count, which i felt explained it. this feeling also spuriously attaches to a sense of the sparse mediterranean sea and shore landscape. of lucidity brought by the atmospheric light, of clean lines etc. perhaps, i’m thinking now, like my teenage experience with camus’ algerian solar harshness in the plague and the outsider, in those short spare lines - get it a bit in hemingway as well). as i say that feels spurious but i don’t particularly want to shake it, as it produces a sort of spell.

the second is that despite my little learning, i’m a bit sick of prosaic, heavy vocab, “this morning s complicated” translations. wilson does clearly do some modernising, though largely the lives in her translation feel simple and comprehensible rather than modernised. i dislike the urge to make the past feel “relevant” and feel my irritation wo i’d be triggered far more frequently if this is what she was doing.

really enjoying it. tho haven’t picked it up for a bit because reading product management stuff and that *extremely enjoyable* economics book, which the experts on economics ilx assure me v convincingly is incontrovertible garbage and which is abominable in many aspects of style and yet.

Loved If Beale Street Could Talk. The combination of tough/traumatic subject matter and a highly lyrical tone makes it pretty clear why Barry Jenkins wants to film it.

On A Passage To India now.

I have now begun to read The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy. I think I can handle its prose style this time. Last time the narrator's voice didn't click with me. Probably my mood at the time wasn't receptive enough.

I love that one.

Finished "The Man Who Watched Trains Go By", which was very entertaining and a tour de force of third person limited perspective, keeping you mostly inside the mind of a rather unpleasant person, but giving you just enough distance to be able to enjoy the ride.

Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant
Reed, A Stranger on Earth

how is the kavan bio?

have been reading: highsmith, sayers, allingham, dickson carr, cyril hare, ellery queen

Finally finished Alexander Barron's The Lowlife, which I started in December but somehow managed to lose (found down the back of the bed). It's great for so many reasons: the humour, the tracing of the diasporic move to the north London suburbs, the delicate revealing of the barely buried nature of the Holocaust subtext. Kind of stunned it's not been filmed (though its DNA is apparent in all manner of later films (it made me think of Performance a fair bit) and, god help us, hopefully, Guy Ritchie never reads it).

Also reading Chesterton's book on Stevenson for a thing.

Started reading A Million Windows by Gerard Murnane on a flight recently, and recall enjoying it, though I've just gone back to see what i was enjoying about it, and I barely recall any of it. I'm putting this down to the special conditions of reading on a flight, rather than incipient mental decay. Anyone read any of him?

oh also Weaver and Shannon's The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Information theory just keeps popping up in stuff I'm reading at the moment, so I thought I'd whisk through it. Plus i'm expected to have some knowledge of video compression for my job, so going back to where it all started felt like not a totally unreasonable thing to do.

xp I was intrigued by this encounter, but haven't decided where to start
---from Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction:
Gerald Murnane was given a long profile recently:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/magazine/gerald-murnane-next-nobel-laureate-literature-australia.html

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, April 17, 2018 6:00 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Wow, perfect build, and for once the perfect use of this kind of presentation, thanks.

― dow, Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Ok, hadn't seen this – thanks dow (and xyzzzz__)

Finally finished Alexander Barron's The Lowlife, which I started in December but somehow managed to lose (found down the back of the bed). It's great for so many reasons: the humour, the tracing of the diasporic move to the north London suburbs, the delicate revealing of the barely buried nature of the Holocaust subtext. Kind of stunned it's not been filmed (though its DNA is apparent in all manner of later films (it made me think of Performance a fair bit) and, god help us, hopefully, Guy Ritchie never reads it).

Just listened to an episode of the Backlisted podcast about this book! Must be something in the air. Apparently there's a terrible sequel where he goes to Venice?

Finished A Passage To India.The portrayal of the anglo-indian community is suitably scathing, and reminded me quite a lot of today's respectable white supremacists - there's the same self-righteousnes, the trick of casting the victims of your violence as the perpetrators. It's an India that no longer exists, of course, and it was interesting to see how Aziz, the muslim character, is as baffled by hinduism as the western characters are. The portrayal of Aziz is certainly complex and very loving, but still....a little bit infantilized? Is that unfair?

Anyway, now I reread Maurice and then I decide if my project will go beyond the novels and into short stories, travel writing, the biographies he wrote, etc.

how is the kavan bio?

Bleak.

Just listened to an episode of the Backlisted podcast about this book! Must be something in the air. Apparently there's a terrible sequel where he goes to Venice?

That's what prompted me to look for it! The recent episode on Gayl Jones is excellent, too.

I finished The Dud Avocado and enjoyed it. The bumptious humor of the first two thirds does tail off somewhat as the book progresses, but the character of the narrator stays true and consistent to herself, so the fading of its humorous perspective is more due to where the plot takes her than to a simple change of tone.

Read The Lowlife years ago and it's wonderful. The sequel -- Strip Jack Naked -- is not awful, just not as good. But Baron's other books are mostly excellent, especially FROM THE CITY, FROM THE PLOUGH.

took a break from Caro and studying for prelims and read Denis Johnson - The Name of the World in bed Sunday morning. i don’t think it is a good book yet it was very well written. it seemed written in one sitting and made to be read in one sitting. it’s the first novel of his ive read and i picked it essentially at random from the library, may read Fiskadoro next unless someone itt has a better rec?

TRAIN DREAMS, which is a brilliant one-sitting book

jesus' son is the quintessential denis johnson novel but i think tree of smoke is my favourite of his - way more of an investment of time involved tho and jesus' son is slim and composed of interlinked vignettes so if you're time-poor that might be a better one to go for next

reading Moonseed by Stephen Baxter and enjoying it.

That's one of his better ones, lots of groovy ideas.

tree of smoke is on the long-list, but i'm picking up jesus' son and train dreams from the library, thx james and bizzarro

Prose:
Antonio Tabucchi - Requiem
Hilda Hilst - Letters from a Seducer

That is 2nd best Tabucchi (after Pereira Mantains ofc, highly unlikely he topped that), just love this series of conversations over a day's journey - with some excellent writing on food and manners. Hilda Hilst is actually a modernist writer* from Brazil - in the sense that she engages with a particular tradition fully: Beckett, Joyce, Bataille but also De Sade. A kind of damaged erotics. Nothing in it was too compelling about the encounter (and what I want is the encounter - what is this kind of writing going to reveal/conceal. Another Brazilian - Raduan Nassar this time, in his A Cup of Rage - sets the example here), although I'll revisit (its part of a loose trilogy so it might make more sense) and I wanted to read this for quite a long-time (With My Dog Eyes is more available and pretty great imo).

*(the label of Brazilian modernist is attached to Clarice Lispector - who was more of a sort of one-off spirtiualist visionary (which does form part of that texture of the writing from that time), but the English Language discourse is often wrong)

Poetry:

113 Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems (tr. Richard Zenith, who also translated Pessoa's poetry and prose for Penguin)

John Banville's Mrs Osmond, a sequel to James' The Portrait of a Lady.

The readerly space that the openness of Portrait's ending opens up is one of its glories, imho - a sequel not only seems pointless, but actively against the Jamesian spirit.

I've started Austen's Emma, which I've read before, but it was roughly four decades ago and all but the faintest impressions have been erased from my mind.

One impression that immediately suggests itself within the first 50 pages is that the intricate web of relationships that Austen is weaving for the reader is heavily dependent on the realities of the English class system, which assigned every character a strictly defined place in a very rigid and hierarchical society and everyone accepts that place as completely as they accept the necessity of breathing. Austen is quite alive to these facts of life and her careful dissection of her contemporaries is essentially scientific in spirit.

Yeah, although there is an uneasiness about class in Austen as well. Much of the drama in her novels comes from the difficulty of marrying across class lines, like the central pair in Pride and Prejudice. But I don't think she's exactly denouncing the whole class system. It's more like the norm against which interesting deviations can happen for the sake of plot.

"Denouncing" seems like it would be too strong to me, too, but reading Pride and Prejudice a while ago I certainly felt like the author's loathing was discernible.

Here's this month's haul of newly read books.

I started reading "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age", indulging my inner nerd. I wish there was maybe a bit more about the technical side and maybe a bit less about nerd office politics, but I've got to hand it to Hiltzik for getting all these stories on paper.

Reading my first le Guin- The Left Hand of Darkness. I have no ide where this fits in her canon, but it's magnificent and I can already tell I need to read everything she's written. Is there a typical le Guin sentence? I've noticed a couple with a particular kind of music, almost over balancing themselves in the second half: 'The face that turned towards me, reddened and cratered by firelight and shadow, was as flat and cruel as the moon.'

Also hugely aware of Mieville as I'm reading. Something also to do with rhythm, but the names, too, the bustle of consonants.

It's pretty much at the heart of her canon: that and The Dispossessed are probably the purest expression of many of her concerns.

Yeah was gonna post that.
xp Intrigued by several of Alfred's hot takes: he even makes the Herbert Hoover bio sound exciting. I'm still wondering why To his delight, he saw the party that had uneasily accepted him as its head renounce, for the sake of electoral victory, the Progressivism it had disliked in him.

Yeah. I kind of always want to read every book Alfred posts about, he always make them sound so good.

máirtín ó cadhain, "the dirty dust"
grace paley, "collected stories"

I just read The Scarlet Letter for the first time. It's so good. More of a mythic and fantastical vibe than I was quite expecting.

I couldn’t get through that when I was supposed to read it in 11th grade; I thought it sucked. But I also didn’t have a shred of respect for that teacher.

Yeah. I kind of always want to read every book Alfred posts about, he always make them sound so good.

― Nashville #9 Dream (James Redd and the Blecchs),

aw thanks

Robert Chesley, Jerker
Stephen King, Joyland
Emily Mackay, Homogenic
various, All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages

"The Girl Beneath The Lion" by Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues, which may be a valiant but flawed attempt by a male writer to do a female coming-of-age story but may be a load of old-perv nonsense.

"The Chameleon" by Samuel Fisher; I enjoyed this very much. It has a high-concept thing going on (the narrating character is a book that has the power to change itself into other books to observe the human lives around it) - there were times when I thought the novel struggled to carry the weight of the concept but in the end it was worth it, I think. There's one bit, involving a game of chess, which I thought made the whole enterprise worthwhile on its own.

"The Girl Beneath The Lion" by Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues

Ha, I just spent five minutes googling to find out whether this is 'Le lis de mer', which it is. Odd English title. Doesn't help that the Dutch title is 'The Love Night of Vanina', the edition I read first.

I'd say it's more a valiant but flawed attempt instead of old-perv nonsense, but my judgement can be clouded by the fact that he's a favorite of mine. I can't help but admire his languid, dreamy style, which hits all my right buttons.

I'm willing to bet someone like David Hamilton took a lot clues from and aspired to film like Pieyre de Mandiargues writes, but took it too far: all corny pervy stuff, no substance. Would love to hear what you think of the book!

Second-Hand Time, Svetlana Alexievich's mammoth oral history of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Utterly compelling, totally devastating (one especially grim narrative at the centre of the book, wherein a young Jewish boy crawls out alive from a mass grave of incinerated bodies, instantly brought to mind Klimov's Come and See). Feel like reading some Wodehouse straight afterwards.

I wholly judged it by its cover when I first encountered it in a thrift store. Love this one:

https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1339059518l/15227442.jpg

xp

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/418DuX9k6PL._SX373_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

This is what my copy looks like. Phwoar!

"The Se Lily", "Vanina's Night of Love", "The Girl Beneath The Lion". WTF?

I enjoyed it, I think for the same textural reasons as you, but couldn't help feeling like it was a bit of an old man's fantasy fest by the end. I'd have trouble recommending it to anyone without significant caveats.

Agreed. It's very much "of its time", to put it mildly.

Finished Maurice, and with that my project of going through E.M. Forster's novels. Might tackle the short stories, literary theory, biographies etc. later on. Reading Jeeves In The Offing while I decide.

https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388197724l/22448.jpg

The Neutral - Barthe, late lecture notes.

“Perhaps my reasons, just alibis?” <- i feel like this a lot.

Second-Hand Time, Svetlana Alexievich's mammoth oral history of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Utterly compelling, totally devastating (one especially grim narrative at the centre of the book, wherein a young Jewish boy crawls out alive from a mass grave of incinerated bodies, instantly brought to mind Klimov's Come and See). Feel like reading some Wodehouse straight afterwards.

Yes, in this book many of the different interview subjects frequently break down in tears (so we're told - one of the things Alexievich does really well is to use just a few discrete textual interventions to convey the whole emotional terrain of the interview).

i read the michael finkel hermit book while on vacation ~ p good, knights general indifference to finkel is solid, i enjoy & relate to that 1 of the only? things he asks finkel for is for a video of finkel's bkshelves maybe i shd move into the woods idk

Read some Francoise Sagan short stories, which was a mistake. She's trying to hard to land on both "world-weary libertine" and "gosh, isn't this SHOCKING?!!" that she lands between the two with a loudly audible thud.

Was she any good at all after the first book?

Not on this evidence.

i love bonjour tristesse but i got the sense it was best to stop reading there

Ingeborg Bachmann - Malina.

blold meridian

That title would have made it more fun.

I started reading "Skylark" by Kosztolanyi. Very low-key, but a colorful depiction of small-town Hungarian life around the beginning of the 20th century.

Belated lol at blold meridian

I'm nearing the finish line with Emma. I will be glad to leave Emma Woodhouse and all her friends and enemies behind me. They are somewhat overstaying their welcome, so that their mental ticks and crochets are becoming both predictable and rather tedious.

I had thought that Austen would run through the entire book reserving the privilege of our knowing a character's interior thoughts solely to Emma, while showing the interior of all other characters solely through words and actions, but she's recently stepped outside that convention to rope in Mr. Knightley, Emma's beau ideal (a fact every alert reader figured out 300 pages ago, but Emma remains unaware of as yet at my currently attained stage in her progress toward the ultimate happiness of marriage. That end is so obviously unavoidable that it may as well be an accomplished fact even before she sees it coming.

Anyway, Austen's great strength is not concealing where the plot is trending, but her ability to frame the perfect phrase to describe her precise ideas down to the smallest fraction of a degree, and doing it as regularly as McDonald's spits out burgers. She's a perfect wonder in her ability to sustain that particular perfection over hundreds of pages. I can't think of another author who does it better, perhaps because I cannot read Flaubert in French.

Kosztolanyi is fucking awesome and there's one book by him in English I can't afford because no bugger will reprint it.

Which one's that, James?

I am reading Blue Self-Portrait by Noemi Lefebre - it's a tangled internal monologue and I'm finding it really slow going; when I remember to read it really fast and let my eyes skate over the sentences I'm enjoying it very much, when I slow down I'm getting tangled up and not achieving any greater understanding from the additional attention. But I keep forgetting to speed up!

wiki only lists three more books, one of which is available (Kornel Est which I own a copy of). That leaves:

Anna Edes: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anna-Edes-Revived-Modern-Classic/dp/0811212556
Darker Muses: The Poet Nero: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darker-Muses-Poet-Dezso-Kosztolanyi/dp/9631328414

Yeah I have a copy of Anna Edes ( nice Quartet Encounters edition obv) and it’s great.

I'm fifty pages into The Pursuit of Love and finding it a little slight, or at least slighter than I expected. Quit or soldier on? It's short, I guess.

Darker Muses is the one I can't get. kornel Esti and Anna Edes are both wonderful.

Passing, Nella Larsen. Very impressive so far.

Excellent book, getting this deluxe edition later this year: http://restlessbooks.org/bookstore/passing

Outline by Rachel Cusk - not much happens, narrator goes to teach a writing workshop in greece, has a bunch of conversations, some one-sided with awful people, about relationships, writing, life, we hear some life experiences and anecdotes, and it's phenomenal.

Read Patricia Lockwood in the LRB on Cusk, ledge. Sounded rly interesting. Good to get ilb confirmation.

Speaking of life experiences and anecodtes, the Marguerite Duras selection of conversations/essays collected in Practicalities are fantastic and tearing me up a bit.

xxp

Emma, the character, annoyed me a bit by the end of my first read-through, but when I read the book again I recognised what everyone was saying about the intense complexity of details dovetailing, the formal and technical innovations of the book, and I appreciated it and its wit more, see it now as one of Austen's best and am always ready to re-read it.

In this season, though, Mrs. Eaton's rambling notes on strawberries always pop up in my head

The best fruit in England—every body's favourite—always wholesome.—These the finest beds and finest sorts.—Delightful to gather for one's self—the only way of really enjoying them.—Morning decidedly the best time—never tired—every sort good—hautboy infinitely superior—no comparison—the others hardly eatable—hautboys very scarce—Chili preferred—white wood finest flavour of all—price of strawberries in London—abundance about Bristol—Maple Grove—cultivation—beds when to be renewed—gardeners thinking exactly different—no general rule—gardeners never to be put out of their way—delicious fruit—only too rich to be eaten much of—inferior to cherries—currants more refreshing—only objection to gathering strawberries the stooping—glaring sun—tired to death—could bear it no longer—must go and sit in the shade.

Patricia Lockwood has been a terrific find for the LRB. All you got from reading about Cusk before that was hysteria around what she was doing or the way she conducts her life. Lockwood makes her into something worth checking out.

I agree that "Outline" is phenomenal, although "Transit" is even better - a book I uncharacteristically re-read very soon after first finishing it. But Cusk breaks lots of rules of "good writing", particularly show don't tell, and it's easy to imagine that many readers won't like her at all.

I like the Lockwood review a lot, but there have been plenty of other positive reviews of Cusk's novels, including some heavyweight reviewers. I'm encouraged that she seems to think "Kudos" is of a piece with the first two, because the only other review I've read was by someone who liked the first two but thought "Kudos" was a falling off, or least too much more of the same. I look forward to reading it.

I saw a copy of Charles Mann's The Wizard & The Prophet at my public library, checked it out and have started reading it. Its subject is basically how humankind is going to deal with 10 billion people on earth in the not-so-distant future, or to put it another way, it asks how doomed are we?

In order not to look like any of several dozen other books that approach the same subject matter, he packs the material around two seminal scientists with opposing views. One was the godfather of the "reduce, reuse, shrink our footprint" rather ascetic approach. The other was primarily instrumental in the Green Revolution and solidly in the "science and ceaseless innovation will let us all prosper" camp.

Even before picking up the book, I know which camp I'm in. The earth is finite and a human population crash can be avoided only for so long and will be all the worse for having been postponed. But Mann is a very good researcher and finds especially interesting facts to decorate his books. He also writes clear readable prose. So, I'm in this book for as long as he can tell me new things, or old things in new ways.

Joao Gilberto Noll's Quiet Creature on the Corner is truly trippy, the author has to write a plot twist (its like some sort of ouliaipian constraint, or just wilful attention deficit), you end with so much chop and change at barely 100 pages that it feels like barely anything at all. Obviously not reading it in one sitting didn't help. Now onto Return to Region by Juan Benet and he is a writer to be discovered by, and surely to be re-issued one day. Maybe the Spanish civil war novel - although written in that Proustian block paras (with some ineteresting twists), whose effect is often to take it away from anything historical and specific to something else - its an experience very unique to the act of turning pages. I'll try and type up some more if I have it or to block quote something juicy from it.

On the poetry front I put down Durs Grunbein's Selected. Its kinda ok, just couldn't quite connect with it.

I finished “Skylark” which seemed rather low-key at first, but which by the end seemed instead well-paced and judiciously modulated. It’s a small gem of a book, in which minor yet colorful events are presented with such clarity that they achieve outsized resonance.

^^^^^^^^

JA Baker: The Peregrine -- basically, peregrines are excellent, which I can't argue with

Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story Of Recorded Music, Greg Milner

This is a badly-written review - like a school essay - but it sort of confirms for me that Cusk is Not My Thing. Which is fine, but I feel like I'm missing something. I've tried and failed with her work a few times. It just seems so airless and dull. What am I doing wrong?

https://slate.com/culture/2018/05/rachel-cusks-kudos-reviewed-by-sally-rooney.html

All Gates Open Rob Young

got as far as Tago Mago . Quite enjoying it.
NOt sure why Young didn't interview Damo Suzuki about his childhood/Pre-Can years . Seems to have gone to 2ndary materials for that stuff. Would have thought Suzuki might be open to being interviewed about it. & then i see that he answers a couple of questions on that period in a Mojo interview this month. So not sure what gives there.
Book does give me more information on that early period than I was aware of, but just not sure why not first hand?

Also saw more on Malcolm Mooney's early years and those of the rest of the band.

So would recommend this but i think I need to find my copy of the box set book and see what's said in there too.

reading moving kings by joshua cohen, its comparatively less annoying/showy than book of numbers, im digging it

bluets maggie nelson. good but not as good as argonauts; probably bc the relationship at the centre of it is less interesting? also thematically a bit more shallow. but still the m nelson signature genius on every page so i ant complain. anyone read newest one?

I loved bluets - read it last month ago when my library finally got it - it’s brilliant

I guess I agree argonauts is better

Darker Muses is the one I can't get. kornel Esti and Anna Edes are both wonderful.

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Wednesday, May 16, 2018 5:06 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

James, I was curious about this book and found a copy for $5 today. After I read it and you're still desperate for it, I can send it your way if you care to pay postage.

this edition:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51wAtvLSDDL._SL300_.jpg

I WILL DO THAT THANK YOU YES PLEASE

I’ll let you know when I’m finished!

Introduction to Perfecting Sound Forever already almost hilariously out of date (hadn't noticed the book's from 2009 when I first picked it up); fidelity wars put in terms of vinyl vs SACD, not vs FLAC files or whatever.

First chapter so far annoying to me because of a pretty uncritical stance towards Edison, which grates because he was A Very Bad Man. This objection possibly unreasonable as none of his Badness had much to do with recording technology, afaik.

Anyway, still a very interesting read and I do feel like I'm learning more about what recordings actually are. But I feel it'll be too dry for today's mission - I'm visiting someone in detention near Gatwick, about two hours on public transport - so I'm bringing David Copperfield instead.

I started reading Numbers in the Dark, the story collection by Italo Calvino. Some very enjoyable tales - some of my favorites so far have been the unpublished ones. The only ones I've skipped so far have been the ones that were too clearly aiming at some sort of political allegory.

I read “Egress” a new collection of short pieces on Little Island - rather stellar in the main I thought. Predictably enjoyed Eley Williams and David Hayden.

I read “Killing Time” by Donald E Westlake, partly because I was interested by the typography on the (old green spine Penguin) cover, partly because I’m meeting up with a Westlake-enthusiast friend in Chicago next week and partly to remind myself that I don’t much enjoy hard-boiled stuff (while I do admire it when it’s well-done, as it is here).

Now I’m reading “Young Törless” by Robert Musil and I’m loving every page so far.

The Wizard & the Prophet, as expected, has some nice, out of the common run nuggets of fact in it, but the baseline is all too familiar, even though it is well and clearly summarized. We are solidly wedded to fossil fuels and lack any effective mechanism to change course. We're fast plunging into a very dangerous and doubtful future and the main questions are how fast and how far we will go down the chute.

The biographical stuff on Vogt and Borlaug, the two figures he chose to typify the two sides of the argument, is moderately interesting, but compared to the scope of the main subject matter, descending back down to details about how Vogt got along with Margaret Sanger is too close to triviality.

xp Daniel, you might enjoy David Byrne's opinionated and detailed history of recording in How Music Works, re interaction of technology, environment (what sounds good in arenas, clubs, how and why CBGB became a prestigious and popular Scene but still wondering why similar locales did not)(also a great quote on mutual embarrassment of stumbling upon someone who was listening to music all alone, when recorded music was still new and strange), and his personal experiences over the decades, like having studio professionals convincing him that you had to do it this way, then later what no that sounds horrible have to do it *this* way, also the stages of conceiving writing recording etc (fave in this sequence is the tour on which the dancers had the musos dancing and the musos had the dancers playing instruments).

Now that's what I call reading and writing--from Paris Review staff picks:
On a lark, I decided to climb the highest hill in South Dakota: Black Elk Peak in the Black Hills. Four hours later, doused in sweat and crumpled forward like a folding chair, wheezing and admiring a plaque proclaiming “the highest point east of the Rockies and west of the Pyrenees,” I had reached the vista point of a sacred American landscape. The Black Hills have been held as holy for centuries by the Sioux, an ellipse of green-shadow pine and bald gray rocks like an iceberg floating on the Plains. Shadows, scarce on the Plains, accumulate in the folds of the Black Hills, dense and irregular as a mosaic. From atop Black Elk Peak one can watch the cloud tufts pitch and roll, watch the hills, gone black and heavy in the transient shadows, light up like bulbs ticking on. It is a landscape that has been transformed by centuries of humans who have perceived it as sacred, and by the weight of those expectations. By Sylvan Lake, at a trailhead to Black Elk Peak, Crazy Horse had his great vision, in which he received instructions about the necessary preparations to render him invincible in battle. And it was to the peak that now bears his name that Black Elk, the Lakota Sioux medicine man, was taken in his prophetic experience, and from where, as he says in Black Elk Speaks, his brilliant end of life memoir and sermon, he saw “the whole hoop of the world.” The existence of Black Elk Speaks is a product of extraordinary luck—the result of the meeting of a poet, John Neihardt, and the aging Black Elk, who was unknown beyond the remote part of the Pine Ridge Reservation where he lived. The two understood each other enough for Black Elk to entrust his story to the poet. And it is an extraordinary life—from fighting in the Battle of the Little Bighorn to touring Europe with Buffalo Bill to growing old on the reservation (recounted also in Joe Jackson’s excellent biography Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary). The Black Hills, an ancient American sacred space, are like a cave mouth opening towards the sky, and Black Elk is one of its great voices. —Matt Levin

Fear and His Servant, by Mirjana Novaković: deeply odd, very enjoyable Serbian work that may or may not be fantasy. A man who MIGHT be the Devil is on a quest to track down reports of vampires in 1730s Belgrade: he fears them because they are the dead come back to life, a Biblical sign of the Last Judgment and Satan's final defeat. But he's a strange, timorous, oddly powerless Devil, though he has an odd knowledge of 19th- and 20th-Century literature and song. And the vampires may not even be real, but the rumours part of a power struggle between the Serbs, the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarians.

Interested in that Westlake, Tim. I especially enjoy his non-comedy novels, though I will read anything by him I can get my hands on.

“Young Törless” is brilliant.

I was initially surprised by how explicitly queer Young Torless seemed to me but once you read enough from that era and milieu it becomes apparent that "it's fine to experiment in college" was already a thing.

Daniel, you might enjoy David Byrne's opinionated and detailed history of recording in How Music Works, re interaction of technology, environment (what sounds good in arenas, clubs, how and why CBGB became a prestigious and popular Scene but still wondering why similar locales did not)(also a great quote on mutual embarrassment of stumbling upon someone who was listening to music all alone, when recorded music was still new and strange), and his personal experiences over the decades, like having studio professionals convincing him that you had to do it this way, then later what no that sounds horrible have to do it *this* way, also the stages of conceiving writing recording etc (fave in this sequence is the tour on which the dancers had the musos dancing and the musos had the dancers playing instruments).

Yeah, tbf reading Perfecting Sound Forever a frequent thought I have is "I really should be reading How Music Works instead, shouldn't I?".

partly because I was interested by the typography on the (old green spine Penguin) cover

Penguin UK issued a number of early, non-Parker, non-funny Westlakes round about the same sort of time:

https://pictures.abebooks.com/GDP/md/md16609830317.jpg

https://pictures.abebooks.com/GDP/md/md16609830357.jpg

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41n5jrIUvcL._SX373_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Yeah my “Killing Time” is like that “Killy” there. Three near-perfect typefaces that work really badly together imo. I suppose I bought the book though, so who’s the loser?

got Helen DeWitt, Some Trick on Tuesday, knocked out the first three stories (of 13) yesterday. There's so many exclamation points!!!!!!! It's a delight, I kept cackling.

Then I sent her an email.

John Keats - So Bright and Delicate. Love Letters and POems of John Keats to Fanny Browne. Jane Campion did a film based on their relationship - I should track it down sometime.

My 'Some Trick' is allegedly on its way, am very impatient.

not released here until 26th apparently. <taps foot impatiently for 24 days>

I'm reading a collection of the journalism of Nellie Bly. At the moment she has contrived to be committed to the insane asylum for NYC and is exposing the fecklessness of the doctors, the brutality and cruelty of the nurses, the highly insanitary conditions and the loathsome inedibility of the food. And yes, she names names. Plus, the fact that many of the women were not insane, but merely didn't speak English or had been troublesome to their employers.

btw, Nellie Bly wrote during the last decades of the nineteenth century and early twentieth.

Social Sculpture - The rise of the Glasgow art scene - Sarah Lowndes

I Always kept A Unicorn by Michael Houghton which I picked up a couple fo months ago and have been meaning to read for ages.
Seems pretty good so far. Sandy has left home and is getting solo spots in folk clubs while working in the day asa shorrt term nurse which means she's turning down extra training she's offered and getting stuck with the worst jobs.

Social Sculpture - The rise of the Glasgow art scene - Sarah Lowndes

I read the third in the Red Riding Trilogy. Grim as hell, but increasingly moving towards a mythic reading of place.

Now reading Tim Robinson's Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage. It's been ages since I've had an appetite for the 'enraptured man, abroad in nature' book. I'm ready. I think.

Manchette: Ivory Pearl -- unfinished political/historical thriller, sort of like an ultraviolent Melody Blaise with more serious intent

William Trevor: Last Stories -- great stuff, and now I have no more stories by him to read, which sux

got Helen DeWitt, Some Trick on Tuesday, knocked out the first three stories (of 13) yesterday. There's so many exclamation points!!!!!!! It's a delight, I kept cackling.

― valorous wokelord (silby), Thursday, May 31, 2018 11:31 AM (six days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Then I sent her an email.

― valorous wokelord (silby), Thursday, May 31, 2018 11:31 AM (six days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

post her reply if she does :)

Social Sculpture - The rise of the Glasgow art scene - Sarah Lowndes

The one who was once married to the Nobel Prize winning poet?
― omgneto and ittanium mayne (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, June 5, 2018 2:37 PM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't know. she is married to the artist Richard Wright at the mo

Nellie Bly was an interesting figure, kind of similar to Amelia Earhart, in that her legacy was more to have existed in the public mind and challenged stereotypes than anything she did directly. Her writing was less florid and cliché-filled than other leading journalists of her day, but it was still journalism.

I've picked up Keegan's The Price of Admiralty, which so far is a bit helter-skelter and not well-focused, but has a certain interest in that it tries to address naval history through the lens of global military strategy, starting with the Napoleonic Wars.

Sorry, I was thinking of Sara Lownds. Really.

I finished Sergio Pitol's The Magician of Vienna (the last in the trilogy to be translated) - its effectively a brilliant, sometimes moving and disturbing (both go hand-in-hand), strangely put reading (Pitol was a reader, writer and translator who knew Russian, Polish, English) and travelling (got to do that as part of the Mexican diplomatic service) diary, that zig-zags from one point in his life to another. I can't remember ever encountering someone's passion for literature (which I find it to be a bit boring in comparison to a passion for music, say) in this way - to the detriment of other people (I think he has a wife, and maybe children, his grandmother was a passionate reader of Tolstoy). Here, for this person, books are his way of engaging with the world, of forming friendships - which then dissolve back to the writing desk where you are alone reading, writing or translating. Very little like it.

Wolfgang Hilbig's I is his way of processing the years of surveillance, collaboration and backstabbing within artistic circles in the former East Germany. I often think things like this are best collected via a non-fictional framework as no transformation takes place. This isn't true here, Hilbig is steeped in a Gothic mood spread over these labyrinthine sentences. I've spent much of this late spring day with it. Flipping between this and Joseph Wrinkler's Graveyard of Bitter Oranges. I loved the books of his I've read so far - and they are all very similar. Tableaux like descriptions of what can only be described as Dante-ian hell circles transplanted to the Austrain countryside. The difference is the 400 pages of it (as oposed to the usual 150 pages) so its another type of challenge.

I suppose you mean Joseph Winkler, who writes nightmarish stories about rural Austria.

Josef Winkler, sorry.

lol sorry yes, always make that mistake when I google him.

Here is an excerpt: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/01/01/selections-from-graveyard-of-bitter-oranges-the-torch/

Actually quite a few excerpts available, he is such a singular writer (at a stretch there are snatches of Genet crossed with something like Claude Simon): https://bodyliterature.com/2014/02/15/josef-winkler/

I am going to do the Boston Public Library challenge this summer. It is hokey, but I’m into it.

https://bpl.bibliocms.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/2018/05/BPL-2018-ONE-MILLION-MINUTES_English_Bingo.pdf

I need recommendations for books

A) set in summer
B) audiobook (decent reader)

Reminder: it's getting on time for the quarterly WAYR change of season. think of your clever thread titles now and avoid the rush.

Magpie Murders is a good audiobook

Not everything in Numbers in the Dark completely works, but it's impressive how Calvino never repeats himself - it's almost like each story is also a different idea of what a story can be. It made me want to re-read "If On a Winter's Night a Traveler" and to read some of his other stuff too. But looking over my shelves I realized I hadn't finished part 3 of "3 by Flannery O'Connor" so I think I'll read The Violent Bear it Away now.

Dag Solstad: Armand V -- this is wonderful, though the conceit of it being "footnotes" to another, unwritten text seems entirely redundant

can I elicit recommendations for short story collections that are child-appropriate (but not necessarily "for kids"?) whenever my 8 year old cousin sees me reading on my tablet she asks if she can read to me out loud. it's real cute but the other day it resulted in her reading Robert Caro to me for an hour :-/

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00JTCJER0/

The best book of stories there ever was

Frances Burney: Evelina -- loving this, can exactly see why Jane Austen did too

Oh ho, saw that in the library recently---James, I keep meaning to ask, did you know that a lot of Margaret Millar is back in print now? Very copious omnibus editions, for inst, and attractive stand-alones too. Also a memoir, described as starting with cute stuff about birdwatching and proceeding in a natural way to classic California conflagration.

Ooh yes, I have all the omnibuses. Was worried for a while, as the last 2 vols kept getting postponed for month after month, but now I have them. Really enjoying all the ones I hadn't read.

Paul Celan - Complete Prose. Its only about 60 pages of a poet's prose. The above reads still go on but its the World Cup's fault!

I finished The Violent Bear it Away. I'm kind of bummed that I've already read both of O'Connor's novels and probably half of her published stories. I really enjoy her milieu of doomed hard-luck cases, drunk on fire and brimstone, adrift in a world of grifters, bums and - perhaps worst of all - concerned liberals.

I finished the Keegan book. It was an odd mixture of extremely high level strategic matters and descriptions of four particular sea battles, which included extremely low level details to the point of tedium. He is terrible at describing action so that it comes alive to the imagination, at least he was in this book (1988). Maybe he improved later on.

Not sure what direction I will go next.

I've started reading James Salter's Light Years. I guess he's one of the now-mildly-tarnished generation of 20th-century literary phallocrats, alongside Roth, Updike, Bellow etc. I'm only a few chapters in and the main character's already boinking his secretary. I'm not sure he's the one to interrogate his own privilege, but his writing has a lightness of touch and luminosity that are unusual.

Lucy R. Leppard - Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972

Salter's good. I liked his rock climbing novel too. No secretaries on the mountain.

xp Lippard, damn autocorrect

I'm reading Barbara Pym's Excellent Women for the first time.

Light Years told me some stuff about middle age that turned out to be right, the changing perspectives etc., but not the usual autumn leaves stuff. You'll see. Some of the obsessive sentence-writing took a lot of getting used to; was really intrigued by subsequent reading of his debut, The Hunters, based on his experience as Korean War pilot, the daily rounds, the tautness and bits of lyricism coming out only when absolutely necessary. Became required reading in some sectors of the Air Force. But think he revised it a bit? Would not want it to be more like Light Years, effective as that was, at best. There's a .pdf, but haven't checked it against my memory (the one I read is no longer in the library). A Sport and a Pastime is generally considered the peak of his lapidary (main) phase, I take it. There'a a long New Yorker piece about him, posted a few years before he died.

Haven't read Excellent Women yet, but Pym's The Sweet Dove Died told me some scary shit about middle age! Not all of it has turned out to be true so far, but

All of Salter I found great, except for his last novel, which was a bit tedious and unoriginal. But Hunters, Light Years, Solo Faces, A Sport... All excellent.

Xp yes, Pym is wnderful, though sometimes I just want to yell WHO CARES WHAT THE VICAR IS DOING???

^ a commendable and sensible impulse, especially if one will not unduly startle bystanders through its indulgence.

I always care what vicars are doing! Wodehouse taught me that.

Wodehouse vicars are almost always doing something mild-mannered and ineffectual.

If you don’t keep an eye on your vicar they might cut some crucial pages from their sermon the weekend of the big handicap.

Are you guys referring to The Great Sermon Handicap?

Oh wait sorry. Didn’t read previous post closely enough

Maybe I shouldn’t go there, but I thought Salter got more of a pass than those other guys and wasn’t nearly as tarnished

Maybe just because he wasn't as widely read.

Here's a nice Jhumpa Lahiri tribute to "Light Years" that I just found: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/06/26/spellbound-2/

Maybe I shouldn’t go there, but I thought Salter got more of a pass than those other guys and wasn’t nearly as tarnished

― Uncle Redd in the Zingtime (James Redd and the Blecchs),

Maybe because Salter kept his nose to the ground, concentrating on the failings of his male character instead of using it as a metaphor.

(that's how I remember Light Years)

I'm not sure those other guys deserve all the trouble they get either.

Yeah, not as widely read and not as self-regarding.

I read Patrimony by Philip Roth a few weeks ago, my first Roth book (thanks to Alfred for putting the idea in my head that this should be the first one I checked out). Roth in autobiographical mode, with his father as subject, sounded more inviting to me than any of the novels. I found it moving and, in places, startlingly intimate. The ending made me cry of course. I've lost a parent to cancer, so a lot of it resonated with that experience. Herman Roth is so much like one of my grandfathers that I wound up thinking just as much about what it was like losing him.

xp Evelina is hysterically funny and sharp, and pretty rough. There's real violence, sexual harassment, ogling men around every corner.

Yeah, there are a couple of scenes where she's alone, and drunken men in packs are coming up at her, and the menace is really well captured. For a comic novel it is amazingly good on the feeling of being powerless.

After a week of bloody naval warfare, for my next book I chose something where the battles are more sedate: Barchester Towers, A. Trollope, wherein High Church and Low Church clerics politely vie for social supremacy, unsheathing their well-manicured claws at one another, while the reader is invited to look on in fascinated amusement.

Cesare Pavese: The Beautiful Summer -- wonderful book, lovely cover, but Penguin also fail to give the translator's name and seem to have printed the actual pages on crappy old newsprint and then charged 8 quid for it

HALT! Are you aware that a summer reading thread has begun at 2018 Summer: A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine, and What Are You Reading?, and if not, why not?