Spring 2021: Forging ahead to Bloomsday as we read these books

Inspired by several glowing ILB recommendations I just have dipped a toe into I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith, and the narrator is so gosh darned charming I don't know how I could refuse to accompany her the rest of the way through her adventures.

A successor thread to Winter 2021: ...and you're reading WHAT?!

Thanks Aimless, I’m going to repost my post from the end of the last thread!

Scamp Granada (gyac)
Posted: 20 March 2021 at 15:52:41
Having one of those weekends, so rather than sleeping away the day I found myself rereading The Mystery of Mercy Close (Marian Keyes). I’ve actually read this before, probably about a year after it came out, but had only meant to dip into it today and instead ended up rereading the whole thing with barely a pause.

I think her stuff is very unfairly maligned, mainly by people who’ve never read her and mainly because of the marketing, cos her subjects are dark. There’s addiction (Rachel’s Holiday), bereavement (Anybody Out There?), all the classics. But even the lightest books are tinged heavily with darkness, as the author has experienced these things herself and writes them too.

TMOMC is about depression - something the author talked about a lot - but it’s also as the title says, a mystery. Not just the titular one in the plot but the things that our narrator Helen, a misanthropic post-crash private detective struggling through the ruins of her life - has going on in the background. Why won’t her former best friend speak to her anymore, what happened with her and sleazebag Jay, why has she ended up homeless?

So I really enjoyed it and all its wonderfully detailed characters on reread, particularly the overachieving sister (been there) and the fussy, overinvolved mammy (been there too), but most of all the long slow tightening as Keyes unravels the plot and as Helen falls apart. Even the tertiary characters in this have life and vigour and the short sharp sentences that sometimes fade into spiralling vague thoughts exactly mirror Helen’s personality at different times. Sometimes it is brisk, sometimes it is slow (but not very often, the whole thing takes place over a week with sparingly used flashbacks). Truly a great way to spend a grey Saturday morning/evening.

What Maisie Knew. Outstanding of course but it's a real mental workout trying to figure out exactly what Maisie knew, what she thought she knew, what the grown ups thought she knew, what they wanted her to know, and what they actually knew.

Charm is a much neglected thing in literature, and ICTC has it in spades.

Still reading Lorrie Moore's Collected Stories. I'm up to "Real Estate" (they're arranged alphabetically). I've been swamped with other, work- and dissertation-related reading these last few months, so a giant collection of short stories is actually the ideal thing to be able to dip in and out of right now.

i quit twitter for lent and started finishing a book per week

patricia highsmith - the price of salt

kinda boring and ponderous? i watched Carol the day after i finished it, and while usually i dislike film adaptations after i've read the book because i get too attached to the parts they remove, in this case there was so many dragging that needed to be excised in the novel i was delighted to see it pared down. also, despite not having ever seen the film before (loved it) i knew of its existence and couldn't help visualize carol as cate blanchett the whole time i was reading it (in the novel carol is only in her early thirties). which, i'm not complaining ;)

ottessa moshfegh - death in her hands

this was definitely a throw-away publication (apparently it was shelved over half a decade ago) to tide over the fans until her next Big Important Novel, and while it's noticeably her most "minor" work, it's really not a drop off in quality. most similar to eileen in that it's a bit noir, but similar to everything she writes in that it's all about how well the writing inhabits the inner dialogue of her characters. i know a lot of people think she sucks because she's like an edgy gen x'er but that's kinda what i love about her, even her characters' ugliest thoughts feel relatable. i was at big bookstore chain indigo (like the canadian borders or something) and saw this book on a display called said "ASIAN VOICES" next to Jenny Han and a book about Avatar: The Last Airbender, which made me lol

molly brodak - bandit: a daughter's memoir

excellent but reading if after the author's suicide a year ago makes it much more devastating than it otherwise would have been. a memoir that's nominally about growing up with a father who was a gambling addict and bank-robber, but that's more the sales hook than what it's actually ~about~ imo

i quit twitter for lent and started finishing a book per week

If more people did this the world would be better.

Started re-reading The Woman in White, and wow that novel is such a delight. It starts a little slow, but now I've gotten to the point where the plot has been set in motion and Fosco hasn't appeared yet but we've heard his name, and I'm remembering how much fun this book is.

It is a delight.

after all the discussion of long foreign books, i abandoned mdme bovary after 60 pages, think i might've had a duff copy because it seemed like words were missing. it's not even that long.

read Slade House which i enjoyed. 200 pages.

now reading more Hugo, the last day of a condemned man, or sentenced to death or whatever (it seems to have many names). only 92 pages and like 50 chapters.

Count fosco is the best villain in literature

Thanks Aimless, I’m going to repost my post from the end of the last thread!

I

Being judged by calstars, a new low

Not sure what your problem with me is or why you dissed me on slack, I never you existed until you attacked me

1491 by Charles Mann.
Reading about the tribes at the time the Mayflower arrived. So not exactly sticking to the timeline.talking about Europeans trying to trade with increasingly hostile groups of natives. The more familiar with Europeans the more hostile.
I thought this stuck more to the time before European contact though.

Reading about the tribes at the time the Mayflower arrived.

More like Christopher Columbus w/ the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria.

I finished Robert Christgau's memoir, "Going to the City". The "Dean" is pleasant enough company and you tend to believe he's telling you the truth, at least as he sees it, which is a good baseline requirement for a memoir, I think. I kind of wish he loosened up his trademark compressed and sometimes gnomic style more than he does, but I guess he's set in his writing ways by this point. It's fun reading about bohemian Manhattan in the '70s, and possibly even more fun to read about what kind of underground cultural touchstones hep '50s kids were into, since that stuff seems to be more forgotten these days. Some of Christgau's touchstones are not so underground. It's kind of funny to see Christgau apply his critical lens to "Casey at the Bat" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", kind of like the book report he always dreamed of turning in.

Now I'm reading the "Early Stories" of F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Dover Press edition, stuff that was published in the big national weeklies in the late teens/early '20s.

I like Christgau, and have read his other books, but I'd feel absurd reading a rock critic's memoir.

Not that I regard anyone else reading it as absurd!

Point I was just making about 1491 was that it appears not to stick with that strict timeline. Author is talking about the Powhatan who helped out the pilgrims fathers as well as some other tribes from around the same time who are showing lack of welcome and broadly hinting it's time the Europeans moved on.
I had thought it was a survey of the time at the end of the 15th century. But looks like it extends to other first and early contact. Like Columbus didn’t hit the US mainland anyway. I'm still early in the book so not sure how late Mann goes. There were a lot of different tribes in different areas. While there were trade networks which later helped the spread of disease that decimated the population there were still other points of first contact.
1491 was presumably therefore more of a snappy succinct title with connotations because the Columbus related date from the next year was so well known. Rather than being a point of chronological accuracy/parameter delineation.

Heading towards the end of the Françoise Hardy autobio now. She has such an enormous imposter syndrome - like in the mid 90's she subs in for Marianne Faithful on a duet with Iggy Pop, made for a compilation of current artists doing torch songs (how 90's is that??) and talks so much about her and her producer being terrified of living up to the guy's talent. I mean I don't hate Iggy Pop or anything but if you're recording a fucking crooner track and you're Françoise Hardy I don't think you need to feel too intimidated by the aging punk dude.

She also tells a story of a 20something woman in New York approaching her in a hotel corridor (again, in the 90's) saying "I know who you are! Françoise Sagan!". She assures her she's not and her travel partner shows up going "hey Françoise", so woman goes "I knew it!". Hardy's takeaway from this is "of course she didn't know who I was!" and not the to my mind much more likely scenario that she totally knew who she was but had just gotten her Françoises mixed up.

Xp to Stevolende: I haven't read Mann, so not sure how good or bad he is on the subject – and I'm sure there is plenty of good history in the book – but the mention of disease transmission in the context of first contact means that I have to bring up the excellent work now being done to deconstruct the idea of "virgin soil epidemics." Jeffrey Ostler's doorstopper Surviving Genocide is probably the definitive work (with a second volume still to come!), but my suggested point of entry would be this recent polemical essay by Nick Estes: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-empire-of-all-maladies-estes

ok cool thanks
Did wonder if the Mann was still the best choice of book on the subject since it has been a decade plus since it came out.
if there were any better choices. I have meant to read this since i first heard of it
I just read the bit where Most of New England got wiped out by what appears to be hepatitis A.

So this should be better insight into this.

I mean, there absolutely _were_ entire indigenous populations wiped out by virgin soil epidemics. It's just that the "survival of the fittest" genetic immunity explanation has become so cemented (thanks to authors like Jared Diamond) in our telling of American history, and there are all sorts of other pertinent questions that are evaded by it. How is it possible that populations in the interior of the continent survived their first encounters with epidemic smallpox and measles (via the trade networks you mentioned), only to perish of those diseases in huge numbers 100+ years later? Those are the kinds of questions that Ostler and others are beginning to answer.

Great, will try to get to read that stuff then. Will just fill out my understanding of the era.
I did wonder if there were better native histories written by native writers since they would have a better perspective on things.
I picked up a couple of Jared Diamond books over the years that are still unread and might not have been in a while. I'm now seeing that he is not being looked at as favorably as I'd assumed.

That hepatitis A thing in New England was new to me.

I listen to the This Pod Will kill You podcast when I get a chance and quite enjoy it. Which may be a cue for me to find out i should scrutinise it better. But seems quite good.

Re: the Mann books, one of the things that 1491 does a good job of drilling down on is that Indigenous populations were not living in some sort of vast wilderness, but were actively engaged in land management and forms of agriculture— it's just that the dumbass Europeans didn't recognize it.

o. nate,I think there's also a piece on xgau's site in which he checks for anachronisms in Inside Llewyn Davis, and consults w some of his contemporaries to see if he's remembering right, or missed something. His collection of book reviews is titled Book Report, for the schoolkid associations you mention, and I might get it: the reviews on and linked to his site are often more emjoyable than the later music writing, and good for variety anyway (dioot the Greil Marcus book reviews that I've read, esp. those culled from his olde Rolling Stone column).

*ditto* the Greil

There are a number of reviews of (music) books in Christgau's collection Is It Still Good To Ya?, he seems to relish getting into context-rich topics that way.

Count fosco is the best villain in literature

Rivaled only by Wilkie Collins's other great villain, Lydia Gwilt in Armadale.
I've gotten to the part of the book that Fosco is in, and he's such a perfect Sydney Greenstreet part it's hard to remember that Collins created him well before Greenstreet was even born.

Due to the manuscript workshop I'm running at the moment, most of my non-work reading has and will consist of shorter chapbooks for the next few weeks, though I started keeping Clark Coolidge's 'Solution Passage: Poems 1978-1981' by the bedside, and it's been making for some really lovely reading— I'd never been able to access Coolidge's body of work on previous attempts, but it's sticking this time. He's had such a voluminous output that I kept picking up books of his that are more for the 'true heads,' so to speak.

Anyway, I finally 'get' Coolidge because I picked up this somewhat-rare paperback omnibus of his first few books, and other than some chaps and pamphlets, I'm awash in the manuscripts of of younger poets looking for guidance and feedback. Not a bad place to be!

'

Love Coolidge's verbal drumming. 'Jerome in His Study' is all-time.

It took me so long! I'd read 'The Crystal Text,' of course, but every other book of his I'd get a few pages in and realize I was just not in the right headspace...I'm definitely understanding why friends kept urging me to get this book!

I had my timeline a bit mixed up. The first four of the F. Scott Fitzgerald stories in the Dover edition I'm reading were published in the Princeton student literary magazine. That makes more sense, actually. I can't imagine a mainstream national weekly in those days publishing something as edgy and dark as "Sentiment - And the Use of Rouge", which is basically about how WWI led to the loosening of morals among the young women of Britain.

I read the first half of Ta Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me first thing this morning.
Resonated I Thik. I'm assuming this is mainly his own biography as told to his son supposedly.
NOt read him before but do have some more of him coming.

Also started reading heads by Jesse Jarnow again over the night before the Coates arrived. I read the bit about Keith Haring and his girlfriend which surprised me since I thought he was gay, then got to the end of teh section to find out he was just discovering he probably was. Need to get through this sometime this year.

Our iNner ape by Frans der wal
which has been sitting on a shelf since I picked it up cheap in a local newsagent chain several years ago. Read teh first chapter might go back to it.

& Charles C Mann 1491
He's gone back in time to what I thought was going to be teh timeline and is looking at teh inka empire which connected the peoples along the west coast of South America for several thousand miles for the first time.

I have continued obsessively reading Annie Dillard: FOR THE TIME BEING is almost as good as Tinker Creek, but more... gnostic? Structured on some obscure principle, threading clouds, sand, birth, death, Teilhard de Chardin and Baal Shem Tov. The theodicy of HOLY THE FIRM is even more baffling. AMERICAN CHILDHOOD, which I just started, by contrast feels almost too light - blithe memories of gilded youth? Still think she's the most brilliant writer I've read in the last five years.

LUX THE POET by Martin Millar. Remember picking this up when it came out in the late 80s but never finishing it. Now feels incredibly redolent of that even-then vanishing sCity Limits-squat-GLC era London - a kind of hysterical-realism partner to Geoff Dyer's Colour of Memory. Has some charm, but even at barely 160 pages outstays its welcome.

THE EXPLORER - Katherine Rundell. I have enjoyed Rundell's natural history bits in the LRB, and heard her kids books were good, so started reading as this month's bedtime book with my daughters. Honestly surprised that this kind of poshos-in-peril stuff is still published! Four kids stranded in the Amazon and they're all frightfully earnest public school types (one of whom is wearing a cricket jumper for the first three chapters), obsessed with Percy Fawcett. Take out the incessant references to snot and it might have been published in 1927.

LIGHT PERPETUAL - Francis Spufford. Follows the might-have-been postwar lives of kids killed in the Woolworths New Cross V2 explosion. Quite nicely written on a sentence by sentence basis - certainly compared to similar stuff by Lanno - but doesn't escape the temptation to drop soc-historic DO-YOU-SEEs - eg the character who works as a Fleet St compositor, on strike as the Tories are voted in in 1979 (allows FS to drop lots of lovely but strictly irrelevant science about hotmetal printing), another who makes a killing from ex-rental property after Right to Buy etc etc. This felt like a cliché when eg Tim Lott did it, decades ago - kind of hoped for more from FS. Still have 100 pages to go, so maybe he pulls it around?

SLOW DAYS, FAST COMPANY - Eve Babitz. Have been reading this off and on since last year and as with all the Eve I've read, it's so pleasurable I never want it to end.

For reference, an essay by Willa Cather:
https://cather.unl.edu/writings/nonfiction/nf012

Piedie, many consider HOLY THE FIRM to be a sort of hallucination— many believe Dillard was under the influence of psychedelic drugs while she wrote it, which I wouldn't doubt. Her daughter from her first marriage is a fine poet, C0dy-R0se Clevidence.

finished dennis cooper's guide a few days ago. probably the novel in the george miles cycle i liked the least, but it still felt necessary? it's like the tropes of the series so far are so outrageously exaggerated that they start to disintegrate, leaving the skeleton of the novel exposed, c.f. when "dennis cooper" is breaking the fourth wall and telling you he's arranging these people who may or may not be real into situations of his own contrivance. i also found the return of george's name to the text super heartbreaking. finally i will never not be loling at his choice of pseudonymizing silverchair as "tinselstool"

just started period, about twenty pages into it and it is the best book i've ever read

what should i read next: pnin or 2666?

Youll know when you get there.
Bob Gluck's book on the Mwandishi band.
Only in the first chapter where the band is being introduced but been meaning to read this since it was reviewed in Wire.
Seems to have rather extensive end notes so i need a 2nd bookmark.
But looking forward to knowing more about the band.

1491 Charles Mann
Now in the bit about how disease preceded initial contact in a lot of places. Which is why small groups of Europeans could succeed in conquest. Do now see there is an alternative understanding as to how disease spread could happen but he's looking at white dismissal of population estimates pre Columbus and reasons for that. So I need to read the more recent counter claims and know their context better.
I'm finding this book difficult to stop reading so it's not great as a bog book.
But now I've started it I want to get through it.

Between the World & Me Ta Nahesi Coates
His letter to his teenage son regarding his own context in society etc. Quite eye opening. Possibly would be more so if this was the first thing I'd read on dealing with racism. Still a good read I'd recommend.

We Were 8 Years In Power
Coates look back at several articles he'd written for magazine etc publication in a post Obama world. The title is a reference to a Reconstruction era statement by a black politician who has been stripped of power by changes in government becoming a lot more racist. But it also fits the Obama era having ended and a far more racist and corrupt one starting. This came out in 2017 so not sure exactly how much impact had been felt so far.
I have read the first section which was triggered by Bill Cosby facing trial. Need to read the rest.

I was very confused there for a second when I saw the name Bob Gluck, as there's also my friend Bob Glück, who...uh...wouldn't have written about the Mwandishi band, knowing him lol.

Glad you're enjoying the last of the cycle, Brad.

I'm halfway through HEARING, a collaborative poem written by Lyn Hejinian and the late Leslie Scalapino. It is the sequel to their book, SIGHT, which dealt with that sensory realm. An interesting history behind it— when Scalapino passed away from pancreatic cancer in mid-2010, Lyn shelved the work, thinking that because she was unable to edit it with her friend and collaborator, it wasn't respecting Scalapino's legacy or their friendship.

Then, in 2017 or so, one of the trustees of Scalapino's papers, my friend Michael Cr0ss, was searching through Hejinian's correspondences with Scalapino and came upon a *FAX* that had Scalapino's edits of the collaborative manuscript, and a note that once these were implemented, she thought the book should go to print.

So, more than ten years after her passing, a new work emerges. It's a very cool thing, and a great book.

I'm still reading Siri Hustvedt: MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE. A hybrid form I suppose: memoir, fiction, essay, together. It could just be non-fiction, but she seems to change certain facts and thus complicate that.

I quite like this book: late 1970s NYC, literature. She's serious about memory, time, mortality, looking backward and forward in life.

Less good is the very long and tiresome series of scenes where she listens through the wall to her odd neighbour. SH doesn't seem to have any idea how boring these are.

The book also contains too much whingeing about things, which becomes too generalized. She goes to a lecture by Paul de Man, doesn't like it much (fair enough, I find de Man dull and fiddly too, would genuinely be quite uninterested in listening to him). It then becomes very convenient that de Man is later disgraced (a pretty old story now). But she also extrapolates that any time anyone gives a talk he's a 'Great Man' communicating nothing but his charisma and power to his adoring audience, and thus the same as Donald Trump.

Not very convincing.

But I still, on balance, tend to like the book.

Last night I finished I Capture the Castle, having enjoyed it quite a bit. The plot was updated Austen, but the voice was wholly original.

Unlike horseshoe, who in the Novels of 1948 thread expressed the idea that Dodie Smith found high modernism dubious, I thought Smith produced a very cogent defense of it. She chose to place that defense in the mouth of Simon, a different character than her narrator, Cassandra, whom we the readers are clearly meant to identify with, but in doing so I didn't read that choice as Smith dissing Joycean modernism. It just made more sense to do it that way in terms of the plot and characters she had created and who her likely readership was. Anyway, a greatly engaging book.

Now I have started Gringos, Charles Portis.

you think we're meant to identify with Simon? i...disagree.

i just think Cassandra is an aspiring writer in a Dodie Smith mode. i think Smith acknowledged that there must be merit in high modernism, because some smart people liked it, but personally it left her cold.

you think we're meant to identify with Simon?

uh, no. we're very much meant to identify with Cassandra. sorry if the referent of that clause wasn't clear.

oh sorry, no, i just read carelessly. you're right, she does produce a defense of it, but i think Cassandra's lingering skepticism reflects Smith's own.

laughin my butt off @ Pnin

As I only read books I hear about on here, I'm reading Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?. I'm well and truly caught up in the tumble of her sentences and the way in which she beautifully creates the illusion that her characters are enigmas to themselves, following digressions to the seeds of the past.

I sense I should read everything but where could one go next?

Alice Munro? Pretty much Lorrie Moore's own favourite writer.

i read a lot of de man pre-disgrace and got a lot from it, abt ultra-close readings which reveal that the surface argument is undermined by internal assumed but unarticulated arguments (which is handy practice when yr an editor) -- i shd probably reread allegories of reading, to see how still on-board i am. at the time of the disgrace i convinced myself his US career was him working to make up for who he had been (not atonement bcz that would obviously need public admission and acknowledgment)

the edition i have of blindness and insight does something i've only ever seen in fiction or poetry otherwise: different essays are run in different typefaces, not as far as i can tell for any aesthetic purpose, just bcz they could be bothered to decide on a unified look

like all strong fabulators pdm is potentially someone we could learn a lot from, assuming you believe you know when he is not fabulating -- and would also make a good character in a book, assuming you don't lean too hard on moralistic gotchas (always hard to do when nazis and their collaborators are involved)

s/b could not be bothered

(what abt allegories of writing eh?)

The Penguin Book Of Japanese Short Stories.

>>> the edition i have of blindness and insight does something i've only ever seen in fiction or poetry otherwise: different essays are run in different typefaces, not as far as i can tell for any aesthetic purpose, just bcz they could be bothered to decide on a unified look

Interesting!

>>> and would also make a good character in a book

Surely this happened -- John Banville for instance wrote an odious-sounding book about a version of him, called SHROUD. Sounds very typical Banville.

I'm rereading Stafford's The Mountain Goat and started Robert Elder's new John Calhoun bio.

i will bring B&I to an ILB FAP if such an event ever takes place again!

done well PdM would make a good character, done by banville not so much tbh lol -- but yes, i imagine more than one novelist has already borrowed versions of him for inspiration

THE MOUNTAIN ... LION?

I like how everyone on ILB (except me, I'm afraid) has set about reading that book.

Lion, of course. Can't stop thinking about aerosmith

After a failed attempt 10yrs ago, finished Saramago's Baltasar and Blimunda last night and still feel under its spell this morning. Wish I'd gotten to it sooner, during the scarier days of the pandemic. His macro/micro sense of scale, the sweep of human lives bobbing along the tide of history, was a comforting perspective to be immersed in right now.

That's a great one, all right.

I recently finished Kelly Link's story collection, Get In Trouble, and it wasn't really for me, and am following that up with another story collection by an author that's often compared to K Link, Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, and am kind of loving it. It's kind of funny how a certain kind of stylistic eccentricity can fall flat but a similar one can totally hit the mark when it's weird and absurd in just the right way. Currently I'm in the middle of the story that's composed of Law and Order SVU synopses, which is not a conceit that attracted me, but it's just so engrossing.

Machado is great, I teach 'Especially Heinous' to my students every chance I get...often at the same time as Link's 'Stone Animals.'

It's funny, I've grown to like Link a bit better than Machado, though, if only because Machado's stories are so much more tied together and 'neat,' whereas Link's rely on ambiguity and readerly attention, imho, which is a quality I admire much more.

The PdM issue seems somewhat complicated to me, I actually didn't know anything about it until reading up on it because of this thread. (I've never read him, probably because he fell out of favor for obvious reasons!)

What do we make of philosophers and thinkers whose contributions and insights into literature are invaluable, but who were also inarguably awful? Is it utter shit that I still find parts of Heidegger valuable? What about Black and Jewish writers who still study and quote Carl Schmitt? Mbembe, one of our foremost African scholars and post-colonial thinkers, utilizes ideas from Schmitt extensively in many of his works, alongside Fanon and any number of others— is he wrong to do so? I'm not sure! I know it's an old question, of course, but one that still troubles me.

For example, I read Nick Land before I knew about his turn toward fascism. His early writings, particularly on Kant, gave me insights and understanding into the latter's work that I'd never been able to access before. That said, I keep my copy of 'Fanged Noumena' hidden in a box, alongside my copy of the Pisan Cantos and a few stray Heidegger texts.

Anyway, not trying to derail, but interested in how others think around this issue— point me toward a thread if there is one!

Curiously I was thinking about this perennial question earlier today. I was thinking about how disgusted I am, even many years later, remembering the proto-fascist passages in BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, but how I still probably couldn't write off the author for that (though I think that particular novel is execrable).

I don't think my view would be especially typical, but I think I'd now say something like:

Almost everyone in history can be found to be 'compromised' or bad in some way, so rather than writing them off for any given infraction I'd rather take what's good and leave what's bad.

I wouldn't read de Man, not because of the controversy, but because he seems dull and anaemic to me. Many will say I'm then just bad at seeing how great he is.

I wouldn't read Heidegger either - I don't get anything out of him whatever.

People don't like Philip Larkin for things he said. I would gladly read him. I like lots of his poems and think I understand what he is trying to say and how.

I find that I am now giving a bland and boring answer to a vast and perennial question. But I think I would stand by my starting point: that you should read stuff that you get something out of, and discard what you don't like in it.

In some ways, I agree with you, Pinefox— the idea that artists, philosophers, or anyone else needs be a paragon of virtue and right thinking seems absurd to me. At the same time, I think it's fine to be uninterested in and even rejecting such figures outright if one sees fit to do so. I

One that I've talked about a lot with friends is Althusser— the manner in which we discuss ideology and interpellation would not even exist without his thinking. But he murdered his wife! He was, by many accounts, a vile person! How do we reconcile these facts? We can't just throw away our understandings that arrive from his thinking.

"Interpellation", I agree, he rather inserted (interpolated?) into discussion. I still use the word today for this and that, and might not do without him.

Having said that, I don't think that he has affected my sense of "ideology". I was never able to make much sense of his idea of it. I would say that most of the senses of it that I have found relevant probably existed before his did.

It occurs to me that the dilemma of "I like X, but I shouldn't because they did Y" may be less common than the more convenient formula "I dislike X, which makes sense, because they did Y". This might imply that "ideological disapproval", or whatever, is often happily in tune with what we want to feel about someone or something anyway. Maybe this is a guess.

Althusser's "murder" of his wife - again, oddly I was thinking about that only yesterday or so, and wondering if "murder" was even the word (not that it was good, whatever it was) -- my understanding is that it was spontaneous, almost accidental, in some kind of mania -- not a cold-blooded or premeditated murder; but goodness knows I don't want to look into it any more closely than I may already have done.

In any case I don't think that killing has much to do with the pros and cons of LA's thought -- almost all of which, of course, came earlier. I would suppose that it might be more logical to suspect that he was very mentally unstable during his major years as a philosopher, and that this could conceivably throw doubt on it. Though I suppose many will disagree with that view in turn.

But as I said, his work doesn't really do much for me anyway. Which is, as I said, convenient.

I feel like this is an entirely different conversation when it's about philosophers as opposed to writers of fiction, and that there are even more separate conversations about when an author has sins outside their work and when, as per pinefox and Brideshead Revisited, the evil is right there in the work.

Very true!

Again, didn't mean to derail.

#onethread, but I'd post thoughts on an ILB thread on the topic if you were to make one. I'm sure there's ILE ones already, but have a feeling those are best left unrevived.

yes apologies i am a known #onethread militant aka gemini flibbertigibbet w/o discipline or sense of boundaries

I might! Though might take me a minute.

Stafford's Complete Stories and Other Writings round-up from Library of America fucken finally upon us: in bookstores April 7, but supposedly you can get it sooner if order direct. It's Collected Stories, uncollected stories, and A Mother in History, comprised of visits (and travels, in the mental sense) with Marguerite Oswald. This incl. link to one of her milestones, "Children Are Bored on Sunday," with backstory:
https://loa.org/books/648-complete-stories-other-writings

Also essays.

I spent time with her collected stories three weeks ago, coincidentally, and was consistently underwhelmed.

Haven't read any of her stuff yet, but I found this writeup amusing: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/books/review-jean-stafford-library-america-boston-adventure-mountain-lion-catherine-wheel.html

Shuggie Bain: good but not great melodrama, couldn’t see what the fuss is about

A swim in the pond in the rain: not generally a big short story fan but I do like the Russians so I was optimistic about this. The analysis chapters were kind of sweet but mostly pretty uninteresting or superficial or mechanical. I think mainly I just don’t want to be in a classroom any more and the book is explicitly an adaptation of a class so I’ve only myself to blame.

Klara and the sun: enjoying this a lot so far. Usual Ishiguro unreliable narrator.

period was absolutely my favorite of the george miles cycle, maybe my favorite book i've ever read (been reading a lot of things that qualify for this lately, feels good). it is only 109 pages long and yet builds such a complex inner structure of interpenetrating realities that it feels endless

at a loss for what to read next

i see influx press are having an easter sale. Any recommendations?

starter for ten - i liked the idea of a book on minette de silva and her relationship between le corbusier. but i didn’t get beyond the first few chapters as it was Bad.

Attrib. by Eley Williams is one of my three or four favourite books that i’ve read in the last few years.

xp to the conversation about authors who are morally compromised people: I really liked Teju Cole's (lengthy, thoughtful) remarks about this in his recent appearance on Between the Covers, which I have reproduced here with timestamps:

We're all in the world and there's a very vanishingly small number of miscreants who are deserving of metaphorical or actual deletion. I think that's a small number. I think the much greater number is in a gray zone, and it becomes a question of saying:

1:54:54
"Whose work, at which moment, helps me with my own deeper project of humaning, of repair?" You have to have such a deep respect for that project that you will use whatever helps you do it better. That's my attitude to a lot of artists, including those who have done harm.

It's not a blanket thing and it's not an easily arrived at thing and I'm even wary of getting to name specific people; because the person whose work I think has some aspect that allows me to strengthen my own ethical commitments in the world, even if the person has done some other harm that is not present inside that specific aspect of their work -- that person could be somebody who is actively doing harm to somebody else. Or to somebody else, that person is: "No way, no how, not this guy, not this woman, not this person." Because they don't need it that way. And vice-versa: There are other people whose stuff, it's like, You know what? I like your work well enough, but then on top of all of this...? Actually there's plenty in the world, I don't really need to mess with that, I don't need to be inside that space.

I think these matters invite a great deal of public grandstanding, but ultimately, each person decides for themselves what difficulties they are willing to-- absolutely not overlook, but what difficulties fail to obliterate the VALUE of certain aspects of a person's work.

The world is actually not divided between the innocent and the evil. The world is for the most part people who have gotten lots of things right; and people -- the same people -- have gotten lots of things wrong, for reasons of their own personality, egregious errors they've made, the societies in which they live, their own lack of courage.

1:58:30
That is absolutely true of those of us in our generation as well, particularly from the point of view of coming generations. They are going to ask us how we could sit there complacently, while China incarcerated more than a million people and forced them to labor and killed untold numbers simply because they were suspected of having a faith that the Chinese leadership does not like. The future will look at us and say: "And you guys just filled your houses with Chinese-made goods? That was fine by you, apparently." In comparison to that, Louise Gluck's admittedly bad speech will come to look like a complete trifle, compared to some of our own staggering, staggering blind spots.

Haha, I disagree with A LOT of the excerpted above but best wait for an actual thread.

Finished JLB's the Aleph collection that included The Maker. It was great, though certain stories have more sticking power than others. He's weird because on one hand he's Lovecraft adjacent (though obviously a much finer writer) and on the other he's a pre-postmodernist. You can see how influential he was on a host of authors from the 60s on.

Where would I go next with him? Fictions?

Fictions is awesome, yeah.

I'd say both the Lovecraft adjacency and the pomo are aspects of the same thing: dude was a bit of an autodictact and as such consumed literature without any high-low genre-literary prejudices; that's a pretty cliched stance in 2021 but for his time he was pretty unique.

all the books I’ve read and finished so far this year:

Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library
Stefan Zweig - Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories
Alba de Céspedes - Remorse
Mikhail Lermontov - A Hero of Our Time
Ousmane Sembène - God’s Bits of Wood
Gesualdo Bufalino - Night’s Lies
Amitav Ghosh - River of Smoke
Amitav Ghosh - Flood of Fire

The de Céspedes book might be my favorite so far. Sadly, none of her English-translated books are in print, and her other books are tough to find if you’re trying to avoid the Amazon juggernaut.

Do you use Bookfinder, dr? I know it's owned by Amazon but at least there you get some options that aren't.

I'd say both the Lovecraft adjacency and the pomo are aspects of the same thing: dude was a bit of an autodictact and as such consumed literature without any high-low genre-literary prejudices; that's a pretty cliched stance in 2021 but for his time he was pretty unique.

Yeah, that is one of Pynchon's calling cards, but its interesting seeing a writer doing that in a pre-postmodern time 30 years earlier.

Fizzles: of the ones I’ve read and you havent mentioned I’d recommend Built on Sand by Paul Scraton- expat life in Berlin, rather moving iirc - and the Percival Everitt “I Am Not Sidney Poitier” which is angry and funny. You could probably have my copy of either of those, mind.

I think Hold Tight is the best thing I’ll read about grime. “How The Light Gets In” is slight and fragmentary but cracks that scabby ruin feeling of hung-over self loathing very well, while not really being about hung over self loathing.

I want to read the Scovell with the rose window on the front and I have a feeling that the one about Car Parks might be a laugh.

I finished the collection "Early Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald". These stories are taken from the years 1917-1922, so from his Princeton days to stories he wrote after his initial fame from "This Side of Paradise". There is some overlap with the 1922 collection "Tales of the Jazz Age". It seems he appeared on the scene with precocious style, narrative talent and psychological insight (he wrote all of these in his 20s). Many stories are about fleeting though vivid moments of extreme happiness followed by a long twilight of accumulating disappointments large and small. Interestingly this seems to prefigure the arc of his career. His trademark themes of class, sex, money and the undercurrent of tragedy are already present in many stories, but there is also quite a range here, from screwball comedy to gothic drama, satire and proto-noir.

My local library has or had one you might like,The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald: 1909-1917(Rutgers, 1965): 184 pages, I wanna say 13 stories and 2 short plays, or skits, prep school and college, pretty slight at times but always lively, and he reworked some of it later, and it can be startling, esp. a troubled teen's madcap encounter w priest---read it long ago, but Mark Taylor's Goodreads take seems on track: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/161722.The_Apprentice_Fiction
Collection editor John Kuehl's notes and preface:
http://fitzgerald.narod.ru/critics-eng/kuehl-appfic.html

thanks v much Tim for your recs (and also yr generous offer to lend books - going to send some money influx’s way and if i don’t pick up some stuff you’ve got will take advantage of yr kind offer).

best thing i’ve read in the last day or so, possibly this year, possibly in many years, is anne carson’s intro to tragedy “Tragedy: A Curious Art Form” from her translation - titled Grief Lessons - of Euripides’ plays. the intro is teo two pages and as concise and potent as you could ever want and opens with the following four-liner:

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage? Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

I have numerous problems with Carson, but sometimes she's just *great*. I feel the same way about her as I do about Susan Howe.

The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald

That sounds interesting, thanks. I still need to get to "The Beautiful and Damned" too.

Aztecs: An Interpretation by Inga Clendinnen. Excellent historical anthropology influenced by Geertz and Victor Turner.

'The priests kept their night watches on the dark hills, and the great fire at the palace was never allowed to die. Tenochtlan's guard could never be lowered.'

incidentally the carson quote above as you could probably tell was mistranscribed and lost the catechistic rhythm:

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

I'm 15 pages into the Patricia Lockwood and I've loled 3 times already. It should be required reading for ilxors.

also designing designing by john chris jones. on his initial letter about the car. he was asked to participate in a consultation to manage congestion in London from 1959. his approach is *very* holistic and looks unworkable and RONG (though many aspects of travel awareness that he talks about have come into being). But he says something interesting when he looks at why his suggestions were thrown out:

In this I am presuming that it is the presence of each of us that is accepted as "the real" and that "the system" is taken as variable, a fiction, a story that is being re-written all the time to suit the convenience of everyone. But not the conveniences of the professionals who run it. That was the snag.

later on, he's looking at why he is not longer interested in the practical aspects of industrial design, based on what he considers the limiting definition "design as the initiation of change in man-made things."

he's transcribed a tape a friend sent him, about home, and driving, in response to his own tapes as he went round Wales in the footsteps of Giraldus Cambrensis in 1188.

on my right I've
just passed a

house

that is called a mobile home

and

it's
it doesn't move

and I
used to think about that
and think about how awful it was that that existed

and then

and now

I start thinking about that
only in relationship to what I think could be the case

and what could be the case
is never

nearly never

as interesting
as what is the case

known
in relationship
to what could be the case

Well! I didn't mean to transcribe all that but now I have I can see it's [sic] relevance, to this, to everything. "Future of car", "wilderness", "comfort of seats", "traffic", "accidents", "automation", none of these seems as real as it did. None of them is me, or you, or any of us.

And that is the question. Why are "we" so out of it, so uncentral to what's going on, in this century, this time, this world of objects, systems, goals (but always economic, never for the love of it, the love of ourselves, of each other).

It was that last paragraph that prompted me to post it here, and specifically the phrase "Why are "we" so out of it ...?"

I was also thinking about the Aztecs, whose 'fictional system' was so alien to the Spanish that they had to invent a crazed theodisy to explain it. So much of their system, in one possible reading, is a relationship of crafting - to the gods, to other social groups, to valuable objects like feathers and different animals, in relation to a mythic past. but for all that, you get a sense that "they" were *in* it, in the system, the system was around them, rather than abstracted.

Finished the Hejinian/Scalapino, and between yesterday evening and start of my workday today, I finished another collaborative book of poems. This one is titled AUSTERITY BRUNCH, and was written by Zan de Parry and Matthew Hodgson. Good stuff, laughed out loud and sighed a few times.

I'm taking Lorrie Moore slowly, partly because life but also because she has that quality of rushing you onwards and I want to resist it.

I'm teaching a top set this year and am currently trying to get them to think about their creative writing. It's a thankless task because they resist, and well, teaching writing is bloody hard - particularly when you only have two hours a week or something stupid. I've been thinking about this passage from Frog Hospital and how I might use it to encourage invention and (shudder) style and the more I look at it, the more I look beyond the bones of it, the more I don't think I could use it: the rush and tumble of the central sentence, looking like indiscipline; the weight of similes (SIX 'likes' - are you mental?); that 'show-offy' that looks gawky in isolation; the giant kerbstone adverb 'thwartedly'; the repetition of 'good dog' at the end that takes my breath away but could you honestly suggest it to a student?

Certainly 'safe' is what I am now - or am supposed to be. Safety is in me, holds me straight, like a spine. My blood travels no new routes, simply knows its way, lingers, grows drowsy and fond. Though there are times, even recently, in the small city where we live, when I've left my husband for a late walk, the moon out hanging upside down like some garish, show-offy bird, like some fantastical mistake - what life of offices and dull tasks could have a moon in it, flooding the sky and streets, without its seeming preposterous? - and in my walks, toward the silent corners, the cold mulchy smells, the treetops suddenly waving in a wind, I've felt an old wildness again. Revenant and drunken. It isn't sexual, not really. It has more to do with adventure and escape, like a boy's desire to run away, revving thwartedly like a wish, twisting in me like a bolt, some shadow fastened at the feet and gunning for the rest, though, finally, it has always stayed to one side, as if it were some other impossible life and knew it, like a good dog, good dog, good dog. It has always stayed.

Chinaski, I suppose what you make me think, put very simply, is that good art isn't always a good influence. You and I love this Lorrie Moore book (I hadn't recalled this particular passage), but someone else trying to write like it might not be a good idea.

I agree it's a terrible idea but it's really a wider question about teaching writing and how - particularly - teaching style is difficult approaching impossible. You can teach mechanics and ways to experiment with form but when it comes to sharing good examples of style, you either end up with bland (and they can already do bland) or something that you're desperate to share because it sings and leaps off the page (like Moore) and, in isolation, the idiosyncracies can make it seem clumsy or unreachable.

I asked a writer for some help once and she said she always turns down creative writing teaching opportunities because it's too bloody hard.

Henrik Pontoppidan - Lucky Per.

Finished it just now. Despite some of the 'male gaze' matter around the young, male protagonist that is sorta grating this slots right in what the 19th century novel often does. Its like a bridge between Dostoevsky and Musil, where an enginner from a devout family goes to the city, loves and loses, gets rid of religion but the questions around what remains of the spirit in a godless time abound. Has an interesting portrait of liberal Copenhagen as well (Edvard Munch by Peter Watkins has a similar thing going on too. I mention it as its on MUBI right now)

Agathe = Jakobe as a Musil link, and is actually the element that really pushes this novel on. So I should give it more than a mention.

Chinaski could you just have them read the story or book and be prepared to comment on it, so they know you want to know they've actually read it, and just be, "make of it what you will/fyi"--not nec, go thou and get loose, get more Moore, but, if they do try to loosen up, provide an indicator that you aren't going to ridicule, that risk is something a writer needs at some points, inescapable, really, keeping the creative part of it in there? They should know the possibilties--but yeah also incl. discussion of influence and its perils, unless really assimilated, when it comes to the high-flying stylists, Joyce etc. But they should know about the possibilties.
I mean I see enough (published, paid) "creative writing" that just seems like the stereotype of academic painting at best, wth tour guide at my elbow or on earbuds,providing the smoother, even richer sort of spoon-feeding.

I would probably just have them read the book, or part of it, and then go "Hey, let's dig into this idea of 'style,'" and have them look at that passage - what stands out to them about the choices she made, what effect do those stylistic choices have on you as a reader and why, what part do those stylistic choices play in conveying the meaning of the passage as a whole and its place in the work, and what are potential risks/rewards to writing like that? Basically, I would probably steer them toward recognizing how little "scene" that passage has, and yet how vivid it is, and how much her style contributes to that vividness. And also that every oddity in that passage serves a purpose and is not just there for the sake of "style."

And then maybe assign them a writing exercise where they have to write about a train of thought, a transient feeling, an epiphany or something similarly interior. If that makes sense. Maybe make a list of words that could function in the same way "safe" does in that passage, and have them choose one as a prompt?

I haven't read the book, though, so maybe that's way off base.

It's wild just how little we work with at GCSE (14-16) - even with a top set. We've read longer texts, but even something short like Jekyll & Hyde we read together and it takes more than a month. Which is to say, I like the idea of a more hands-off approach - 'what do you notice and how does it work' - but it would probably be just the passage, maybe a page.

I wonder if I misunderstand style or we're talking about different things? It may have sounded like I was sneering at style when what I meant is that (particularly with someone like Moore) style is inseparable from how a writer creates meaning - and how hard that is to notice and develop your own version of. It might even be the whole deal with developing a voice?

If it's already not abundantly clear, I've really not taught enough pure 'writing' to know what I'm talking about.

That was what I meant too! Sorry if I wasn't clear.

I was just thinking about how to get students to recognize that.

"Hey, let's dig into this idea of 'style,'" and have them look at that passage

In my experience, I have always found it more fruitful to think in terms of "voice" instead of "style". Authors with a style impose that style on every piece of their writing and their writing usually suffers from that. For me, the writer needs to find a voice that connects to the reader and delivers what the writer wants that piece to deliver.

Because no writer will be equally proficient at every kind of voice, their voices will tend to converge on those they best understand how to write. If that voice gets narrowed down to just one consistent unvarying one, then that is what turns it into a "style".

You were clear Lily Dale - it's me being 'end of term' foggy! I have totally derailed the thread; what I actually need is a thread like La Lechera's amazing thread about her music class!

One thing this has certainly cleared up for me: we simply don't (or don't have the time to) discuss the fundamental nature of style as a generator of meaning. Which is kind of staggering, now I think of it.

I agree, Aimless, I usually talk about voice as well. I was thinking it more as myth-busting about style, for students who may have picked up the idea that they are supposed to have a style but don't really know what that means.

Chinaski, you may find some useful thoughts provoked by the wide-ranging discussion in this ILB thread: Creative writing considered as an industry

That looks great - thanks Aimless.

I'm probably guilty of conflating style and voice to some extent.

The best lit courses I took were based on texts discussed in class times required reading lists (books; short stories, essays, topics, themes)---not everything in the list was required, but you had pick some of it for papers due at midterm and end of semester: I'm thinking especially of Modern British Fiction, the one course I ever took that still comes back into my head like literature or music. It didn't have to be anything all that elaborate, but we at least found/had to make the time, out of class, to read whole pieces, not just passages, with some degree of selectivity, which was pleasing, as was just reading, absorbing in a quiet way, w/o thinking about what we were going to say in class.

The only writing class I took, re poetry, had 0 required reading; it was based, as it happened, pretty much on personal experience, just reading each other's latest, then hearing the writer read it aloud (Students: "Oh, now I get it, cool." Teacher "But it has to work on paper!" was a frequent thing)Lots of comments, some rude, some people got better, maybe as a result of those.

That thread is populated with lunatics from what I can make out (YMP and Aimless excepted). I always figured the best use of a creative writing course would be the deadlines.

That and permission to write, think of yourself as a writer, take time away from other things so that you can devote sustained time to writing.

I've never done an MFA program but I hung around a lot of MFA candidates when I was adjuncting, and one thing I noticed was that regardless of the quality of teaching they were getting, they all got way better at writing over the three years.

Forgot about that thread.

xpost Yeah, and great idea to have a La Lechera-type Help Me With My Class thread for reading and writing (and other things): thinking about her questions and how to respond and reading other responses always made for a good learning experience, brane exercise anyway.

(YMP and Aimless excepted)

Nabisco had many cogent observations, too, I thought.

As for Gringos, it is less satiric than the other Portis novels that aren't True Grit. The characters have just enough humanity in their portrayal to give them life and dimension and just enough absurdity to illustrate Portis's worldview. He's pretty hard on the hippies though and it's clear he found them a complete waste.

Re LUCKY PER, that he mistook who his central character should have been and then the book defaltes in its last fifth after she dies is its main problem. Enjoyed it a lot despite that, and despite the anti-anti-semitic author also endlessly needing to point out that various people were Jewish.

That thread is populated with lunatics from what I can make out (YMP and Aimless excepted). I always figured the best use of a creative writing course would be the deadlines.

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski),

Good morning!

Lunatic tic tic

Lol. I didn't make it all the way through - I got sockpuppet fever and bailed. Also a little bit of sockpuppet nostalgia if I'm honest.

Finished AUSTERITY BRUNCH, then read a long poem by Jeremy Hoevenaar, COLD MOUNTAIN MIRROR DISPLACEMENT. Interesting work from him, I am now much more excited about his new book than I was previously.

Then read a short little squib of Stephen Rodefer, FOR MORE LECTURES, which continues where his FOUR LECTURES left off. Only ten or so pages, but nice to read.

I have too many opinions about teaching writing to further detail the thread, but what I will say is this: in the workshops that I facilitate, the goal is always to help the poet (or writer) write the best version of what they want to see in the world.

Am I crazy or is the tone of the first part of No One is Talking About This similar to the tone in the first part of White Noise?

I avoid contemporary literary fiction like the plague...though I wouldn't be surprised if you were right, much has been taken from DeLillo.

I'm currently reading "Brighton Rock" by Graham Greene, the 3rd best novel of 1938, according to this message board.

Love that book. The film, with Dicky Attenborough, also worth seeing - the closest the UK ever came to the kinetic energy of Warner Bros gangster flicks.

The film sounds intriguing. So far the book reminds me of certain movies, specifically Coen brothers movies like "Fargo". You have an implacably ruthless character (ie. Pinkie) kind of standing in for the immanence of evil, drawn into a conflict with a flawed but determined person trying to do a decent thing. The theological undertones seem rather Coen-esque, and the somewhat distant and slightly condescending treatment of the characters, who align perhaps a bit too perfectly with their sociologically-determined stereotypes and flaws.

yeah, but it goes even narrower, like a needle, or a hatpin.

I'm still only halfway through the book, so my opinion could shift. I'm not surprised though to find that Greene had a rather patrician upbringing. The rough side of Brighton depicted in the novel is keenly observed, but doesn't feel lived in. Still that's a nitpick, and maybe my own personal bugbear. I enjoyed this description of Greene's writing method, as described by Michael Korda in this wonderful New Yorker profile (the scene depicted takes place on Korda's uncle's yacht in the Mediterranean):

An early riser, he appeared on deck at first light, found a seat in the shade of an awning, and took from his pocket a small black leather notebook and a black fountain pen, the top of which he unscrewed carefully. Slowly, word by word, without crossing out anything, and in neat, square handwriting, the letters so tiny and cramped that it looked as if he were attempting to write the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin, Graham wrote, over the next hour or so, exactly five hundred words. He counted each word according to some arcane system of his own, and then screwed the cap back onto his pen, stood up and stretched, and, turning to me, said, "That's it, then. Shall we have breakfast?" I did not, of course, know that he was completing "The End of the Affair," the controversial novel based on his own tormenting love affair, nor did I know that the manuscript would end, typically, with an exact word count (63,162) and the time he finished it (August 19th, 7:55 a.m., aboard Elsewhere).

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/03/25/the-third-man-4

I started reading Our Spoons Came from Woolworth's, Barbara Comyns. It is quite a different-feeling first-person narrative voice from that in I Capture the Castle.

Interesting. I just started reading something else that somehow led me to another one of her books, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead.

Isn't the actor who played Mr. Memory in The Thirty-Nine Steps also in Brighton Rock? Wylie something, not Wiggins.

Wylie Watson

The Diary of Anne Frank, incredibly powerful. Would recommend for anyone who didn't read it in school, even male middle aged old farts like me.

Cotter's England by Christina Stead. It's reminding a little of Angel by Elizabeth Taylor, but I can't tell if that's just because I'm reading the Stead in a similar Virago edition to the Taylor

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1497731940l/35453358._SY475_.jpg

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1504698408l/8313057._SY475_.jpg

At last I finish Siri Hustvedt, MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE (2019). I suppose I'd have to say that this ends less well than it begins. It starts like a multi-layered memoir, mainly of NYC in the late 1970s, but with aspects of the present (especially SH's old mother in a home) well rendered. This memoir form works well, with the sense of place and time especially, and the young writer's love of poetry and modernism.

But the book gets rather overwhelmed by the saga of her next door neighbour, who turns out to have various friends who are all in a witches' coven - which sounds dramatic, but these people never become very vivid or interesting, though they take up so much of the book. Other elements include the writer's own attempts to write a (YA?) detective story, which reaches a kind of resolution but not a really satisfactory one; and a very long-running, strong-minded, broad-brush feminist polemic, which might appeal to many people but I'm afraid doesn't appeal to me - it's too undifferentiated and lacking nuance, notably about historical changes which have made such polemic mainstream by now.

There is some real interest and thought in this book, especially about time, memory, narrative - abstract cogitation that is true enough to the legacy of Virginia Woolf, and which sometimes comes off quite well. And as a 'blend of fact and fiction' it's more intriguingly indeterminate than almost any I've ever read - I can't tell what I should take as real, if anything, and what invented. But it doesn't all come together as well as I'd hoped.

XXpostThe Diary of Anne Frankas part of the complete works, tracked here, intriguingly: https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/diary/complete-works-anne-frank/

Giuseppe Ungaretti - Allegria

I started reading Our Spoons Came from Woolworth's, Barbara Comyns. It is quite a different-feeling first-person narrative voice from that in I Capture the Castle.

― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless)

Interesting. I just started reading something else that somehow led me to another one of her books, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead.

― It Is Dangerous to Meme Inside (James Redd and the Blecchs)

big fan of comyns / these novels, although her novels always seem just shy of their full potential to me. in some ways it's the least ambitious but woolworth's seems like the most successful on its own terms to me, with an astonishing childbirth set piece. the vet's daughter as well has a great opening, really nails that faux-naïf tone that seems to loosely echo someone like walser.

reading the wall by john lanchester, which i am hating, and rereading a girl is a half-formed thing, which holds up very well. also going through the short stories in grand union by zadie smith very slowly, some of which are near her best work and some of which i forget before i finish.

Bit of a run...

I finished Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, which I loved and am still making sense of.

John Dickson Carr's Hollow Man, which was the perfect palette cleanser. I could probably have done without the meta stuff but huge fun all the same.

Disclaimer: this is a mate's book, but I also read the Archive of Bernard Taylor, which is presented as an archive of a suburban photographer but is more complicated than that. The photography is beautiful and the presentation of old maps and the sense of the whole thing being a series of vanishings and appearances is right up my street. More info here: https://nowherediary.co/books/the-archive-of-bernard-taylor

Winter by Ali Smith. I feel mixed because the characterisation is quite pat and some of the dialogue is maddening but I found this very moving in the end.

Now reading the The Prince of West End Avenue by Alan Isler. I'm 50 pages in and have belly laughed ten times already.

reading the wall by john lanchester, which i am hating,

taps sign.

_reading the wall by john lanchester, which i am hating, _

taps sign. 🕸

I'm due my six-monthly re-read of that thread. *puts on smoking jacket*

I'm finding it hard to make headway in Our Spoons Came from Woolworth's, not because it is poorly written. The narration is terse, direct and somewhat harrowing in how it unerringly picks out the details that matter most to people living hand-to-mouth on the precarious knife's edge of dire poverty.

Any critic's appraisal of this book that hints it has comic moments should be read as that critic never having lived in poverty. For me it cuts a bit close to the bone in terms of bringing back my own half decade in somewhat similar poverty, although I was not married or trying to raise a child in those circumstances. I keep having to put the book down and soothe myself, which means I can only finish about 25 pages a night.

Kazuo Ishiguro, THE UNCONSOLED (1995).

It's everything you've heard it is: a dream-like story, close to Kafka. It's oddly long - does it need to be this long? - and I'm still not halfway through, so please no spoilers from the more initiated. I like the emphasis on municipal high culture, classical music, gentility; and I like the other running motif of soccer - even Marco van Basten has been implicitly referred to.

strictly speaking it doesn't need to be as long as it is.

i didn't enjoy it much while i was reading it a year ago, but i've thought about it more since than any other book i read last year.

I finished Alan Isler's The Prince of West End Avenue today. It's set in an upmarket Jewish care home in New York, in which the residents are putting on a version of Hamlet. On the surface, it's a very funny look at old age and memory (the first-person narrator is present at the birth of Dada and is keen to reveal his founding role) but it's as much about the story the narrator is avoiding telling as the one he is.

Isler taught Lit at Queen's College for 30 years and didn't finish the book until he was in his late 40s. All that experience and formal knowledge are clearly apparent and the book is immaculately structured; the way the Hamlet script and rehearsals are woven in is perfect - to the point where I want to re-read it as I'm sure I missed a bunch of clues and cues.

I remember enjoying the Backlisted episode on that.

Read Sunday Fall's SUBWAY POEMS, a lovely group of neo-Objectivist (a la Zukofsky and Oppen, not Rand) poems written by a young man from what seems like Queens or Brooklyn. Self-published outsider. Interesting work.

I finished "Brighton Rock". I've read that Greene was partly at least trying to write something that would adapt well to the screen, although of course it ended up being much more that. It's interesting to see how much more clipped, visually-oriented, and physical literary style had already become in this book than in say a random literary work of 20 years prior. I think some of this was probably the influence of film as a medium, also perhaps the rise of the tough and taciturn style epitomized by Hemingway. Greene can write tough and taciturn, although he is also prone to surprising flashes of poetry. Either way words are always carefully chosen and placed. Using a thriller plot to propel an investigation of moral taxonomy seems an influential innovation.

That's a good analysis, O. Nate.

I forge across to the second half of THE UNCONSOLED. It's long.

speaking of which: i finished klara and the sun. it's good but minor ishiguro. almost a pastiche of never let me go.

Speaking of Bloomsday, somebody around here co-wrote a quiz that some of you might be interested in, especially you, teh pinefox:
https://www.learnedleague.com/oneday.php?jamesjoycesulysses

James Redd: I knew 11/12 - the exception being that it was Zero Mostel who played Leopold Bloom in a 1974 production. I'd thought it might be Cyril Cusack. I only know Mostel from his performance in WATERSHIP DOWN.

Wow. I'm reading The Ministry of Fear. Three years ago Brighton Rock also impressed the hell out of me. In January I readThe Comedians. Sometimes the debt to Conrad overwhelms him.

I re-read Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It's a short book but it's huge in scope and argument, and positively levitating with rage at the meagreness of women's lives. It becomes a little didactic amid the rawness of the final act but the narrative arc is still surprising. It seems amazing that it was such a success when it was published in 1926 (particularly in America).

I read it in September. Agree

Joao Cabral de Melo Neto - Education by Stone (Selected Poetry)

20odd pages from the end of Bleak House yet I'm lying here reading crap one the internet

Finished Clark Coolidge's SOLUTION PASSAGE, after some time with it.

Now reading Tan Lin's HEATH COURSE PAK.

Going to try to finish Mary Gaitskill's Veronica today - I'm liking it, but (or rather, because) a lot of the writing is dense in a very poetic way that's always about t]o slip out of my grasp, like a big piece of chocolate cake that is really rich yet bittersweet, in a way that is heady and sad. So, yeah, sad chocolate cake is what it feels like to me. Would like to read Bad Habits, too.

Any thoughts on Norman Rush - I'm intrigued by Mortals but am ambivalent about committing to it a long book right now. Wondering if "Mating" is a better starting point?

I loved both Mating and Mortals. I think I'd go with Mating though I have a sense that he belongs in the previous century. (I mean Mating literally does but thematically and stylistically he feels like a Great American Writer in the old Updike-Roth-Bellow-DeLillo sense of the phrase. I could be doing him a disservice there).

I'm 3/4 of the way through Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay. I am enjoying the subtle humour but I am kind of waiting for it to catch fire.

iirc it catches fire in the last few pages

Juan Carlos Onetti - Complete Short Stories

Onetti is a mood - of whiskey, tobacco, whores, murder, suicide and an inner emptiness that is near-total, he uses tropes from crime and existential mumbo-jumbo to craft this one pure note for these stories that span his entire career of 50 odd-years. The last 100 pages are just sorta small pieces and fragments from his years in Spain (he had to move to Madrid from Montevideo after being imprisoned by the junta for 6 months). He had made it as a writer by then so there is a disinterest here in that he took all this as far as it could go, plus prison and exile.

This collection has about three or so really great stories in it. It should've been those + some fragments though you get to see development though I am sorta ho-hum about having everything translated (do we need the Complete set of stories from Clarice Lispector, its not a trend I welcome). His novels should get a reissue.

I've never read a page of Norman Rush but James Wood loves him, as shown by an essay in THE FUN STUFF.

Mating is one of my all time favorite novels! One of these days I’ll read Mortals

o. nate, you read Dissipatio H.G. a few months ago, yes? I'm hesitating before checking it out of the library. Is it good future s(c)h(l)ock?

Not sure what you mean by future shock/schlock. There's not much that's very futuristic about it. It's set in the '70s, and apart from the central premise (which is never explained) it's fairly realistic. It's interesting as a monologue of an isolated person who spends a lot of time in his own head and in conversation with long-dead philosophers and thinkers. It's also timely I guess as a depiction of the psychological effects of isolation (somewhat like "Malicroix" in that respect). The narrator is someone who has had little use for other people but finds that he misses them when they're gone.

Terrific. Thanks. I got it in front of me.

MATING is much more fun than MORTALS I think, but both are great, and significantly better than SUBTLE BODIES, Rush's last book, which is absolutely terrible. Struggle to think of a sharper drop-off of quality in a writer.

I have been continuing on my Annie Dillard odyssey. LIVING THROUGH FICTION was a curious bit of litcrit, which might have been subtitled WHY I AM NOT A POSTMODERNIST. Will be interesting to turn to her novels after reading it. Right now I'm almost done with AMERICAN CHILDHOOD, which is a hoot. Spendidly lyrical memoir of growing up a gilded blonde in 50s Pittsburgh, that has actually made laugh out loud three times. Can't remember the last book I read that provoked IRL LOLs.

Have dipped a toe into Donna Haraway's STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE. For all her dodgy anti-natalism, I find DH often very charming as an interviewee, talking about her dawgs etc, but not sure I have the stomach for her prose anymore...

I have personally witnessed DH yelling at young people selling vegetables at one of the Santa Cruz farmers markets. She also continuously defended one of her colleagues who was eventually forced out of his position due to substantive sexual assault allegations. I gave away all her books years ago.

Kind of brings it back to the very subjective nature of the answer to the question, "well, can I still find this person's thinking instructive while finding them to be heinous?"

For some reason with living philosophers and theorists, I find it much more difficult to stomach their work if I know they are an awful person; not as much with dead philosophers and theorists.

I pecked at the edges of four different books lately, faling to find one that held me -- and these were recognizably good books, too. I've finally got a bit of traction with a non-fic, The Monkey's Voyage, wherein the author thrashes out the recent scientific in-fighting over the relative importance of plate tectonics vs. individual dispersal events in determining the geographic distribution of species among widely separated land masses.

It's hardly a suspense thriller, but it does model the sorts of arguments scientists engage in and how they differently weigh the evidence that supports their preferred theory. And it is getting me slowly past my unfortunate bout of reader's block.

I just had to look up 'anti-natalism'.

the ethical view that negatively values coming into existence and procreation, and judges procreation as morally wrong. Antinatalists argue that humans should abstain from procreation because it is morally wrong (some also recognize the procreation of other sentient beings as morally wrong).

Does Prof Haraway assert that procreation is morally wrong? I have only ever read (just about) her most famous essay (never my cup of tea), so don't know.

Funnily enough the mere phrase STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE does stay with me, as a relevant thought in life, quite in isolation from whatever she actually says in her book, which I promise never to read.

There was a Jenny Turner essay in the LRB!

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n02/jenny-turner/nothing-natural

S0phie and her wife are execrable humans for too many reasons to name. Talk about theorists and philosophers who are awful people.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain - good, interesting, maybe even important - the culture of Harvard Business School that encourages or even enforces extroversion sounds horrific. But I did raise an eyebrow when she said Moses was an introvert (footnote: "based on my own reading of Exodus") and spent two pages talking about his achievements ("climbing a mountain in search of wisdom and writing down carefully on two stone tablets everything he learned there") thanks to the strengths of introversion.

S0phie who?

Piedie Gimbel: yes, I certainly saw that, but I don't remember it saying that DH had said procreation was inherently bad and no-one should do it.

Perhaps I didn't read it properly, or perhaps I don't remember it properly. I think I didn't enjoy it anyway.

I finished No One is Talking About This. I liked it - the writing is excellent - but I think I liked the first half better than the second half because the latter gave me some of the same conservative undertones as Juno.

Just started Blood Meridian.

Pinefox, S0phie Lewis, whose book 'Full Surrogacy How' is the main subject of that review about DH posted above.

Not sure how Blood Meridian is viewed these days/around here/both PBKR Id only say persist with it if the beginning seems too clouded

Took me three efforts i think

Thanks. It will take me a while, but I basically don't stop once I start a book.

Table: I see. Very coincidentally I have just been invited to attend an online lecture by the person you mention. I am almost intrigued to do it just to see how bad this person is. I have heard of the book but I certainly, again, promise never to read it.

I now think that there were two LRB reviews by Jenny Turner, one of Haraway and one of this other character, and I only read the first one and couldn't bring myself to read the second. Hence my continuing ignorance about the views of Haraway, and everyone else involved, but that's fine, because in truth I'm no more interested in them than they are in me.

fwiw, I was friends with her. We live in the same neighborhood.

Then a dear friend told me some things about S0phie that involve covering up a sexual assault accountability process and other misdeeds, and that was the end of our friendship.

I read, this week, a couple of old Seamus Deane essays on Joyce, in his collection CELTIC REVIVALS.

Deane still has a grand reputation. But the truth is, these weren't good - especially 'Joyce and Stephen: The Provincial Intellectual' (1972), full of high-faluting claims that don't convince.

I've gone on, or back, to the old CASEBOOK on DUBLINERS and the PORTRAIT, and read Joyce's original 1904 Portrait essay; a selection of his epiphanies and the brother's diaries; and essays by Harry Levin, Frank O'Connor, Hugh Kenner, Wayne C. Booth (a terrifically accessible, disarming writer) and Morris Beja.

I've also reread Empson on Donne's poem on weeping; and read Hans Walter Gabler on the composition and publishing history of the Portrait.

I suggest that Wayne C. Booth may now be one of the most underrated literary critics. No one in the UK reads or cites him now (it may still be different in the US), but he talks more well-informed sense about literature than almost any current academic critic.

Euripides - Grief Lessons: Four Plays (tr. Anne Carson)

What makes this collection a keeper as oposed to other translations -- apart from the merits of this translation itself -- are Carson's intros to the plays. They are a bit like Borges' essays on various literatures. It is interesting how she tries to situate the plays among Beckett or Hitchcock, you could say its a play for contemporary relevance if you were feeling ungenerous. Anyway, its nice to get re-acquainted with classical Greek Tragedies again.

I've realised that the best available edition of the PORTRAIT is the Norton Critical Edition of 2007.

The editorial approach and textual history is sound (and brief). The text is well presented (with each chapter number at the top of every page!). The supporting historical documents are terrific - I've just read speeches by Pearse and Hyde and extracts from Synge that I didn't know or hadn't looked at for ages. The critical essays appended at the end are a more eccentric selection (Kenneth Burke?), but still often interesting (Kenner in 1965 I again, I'm sorry to say, didn't even know).

Michael Davitt's use of the phrase 'one thing and one thing only' agreeably reminds me of Ted Hastings.

an utter utter mess of reading at the moment. need to sort it out:

The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History - Alexander Mikaberidze: "Austerlitz, Trafalgar, Leipzig, and Waterloo all hold prominent places in the standard histories of the Napoleonic Wars, but alongside them we must also discuss Bueons Airies, New Orleans, Queenston Heights, Ruse, Aslanduz, Assaye, Macao, Oravaiers, and Alexandria." huge but oddly readable so far, setting global contexts for revolutionary turmoil in France in the 1780s - as the author points out the revolution is often presented as an outcome of purely internal forces, so this is welcome. nothing will not make the balance of power arrangements in 18th century europe complicated, difficult to summarise and difficult to remember in a grand schema, despite remembering the big ticket items - partitions of poland, russian-ottoman war, etc - from school. seemingly prone to contradictions - were revolutionary principles well communicated across europe or not? (two different things seem to be said - though this may just be different moments on a timeline) and there are a couple of other moments like that, though I can't guarantee i didn't just misread. quite well timed in that it arrived at the same time as a recent In Our Time on the Franco-American Alliance. the maps in this book are truly terrible. unforgivable in a history like this - sort it out CUP.

No One Is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood. Very readable, but i'm not sure in the first half (which is where i still am) what it's doing. She doesn't get Twitter, being online wrong, which is frankly an achievement in a book, but the avoidance of wrongness is not enough to actually be doing something. if i didn't recognise every other tweet lockwood's talking about, or wasn't fairly well-versed in twitter, i guess it might perform the function of applying the logic of online to the experienced world, disrupting and adapting its perceptions, how we use and see our body-avatars, the logic of it, the lifecycle of its interpretative and gadfly memes available to us. but i find myself going 'oh yeah i remember that tweet' and feel like i'm basically reading twitter.

Perfumes/Parfums Le Guide - Luca Turin tr. Tania Sanchez. Some lovely forward material to this. I was interested to see that Sanchez used in part google translate, and in part their husband Luca's original intent, which makes for an interesting translation story. I wonder if they used google translate as a way of defamiliarising the language and inventive adjectives and emotions. it's a lovely book. i love the casual, exciting categorisations: avatrice bas-bleu (bluestocking aviator), to be avoided: le style ex-bab de quarante ans (the style of a forty-year-old ageing hippy). "For those who like to go the whole day without knowing what the weather's like outside".

Finite and Inifinite Games - James Carse. Of dubious philosophical robustness, it's main quite enjoyable achievement lies in the definition of the space comprising infinite games. comprises so far abstract 'pensées' on the theme. frivolous but stimulating enough.

John Dickson Carr's early Bencolin mysteries. Largely bad, but it's very interesting seeing an author find their way to their very good later period. Clearly loves the unsubtle drama of ROMANCE (capital everything), and grand guignol murders. The organisation of his material and murders is awful here, and it shows how important an development this was later - clearing much more space, while also managing atmosphere much better.

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right - Atul Gawande. These awful awful books, which are in fact of varying quality of insight, but can effectively be characterised as 'business self-help' or methods for management. i don't find them uninteresting, but they all have a something to them that i'm quite keen to capture, an intrinsic disgusting philosophy. Anyway, the basic material here is good and sensible, and Gawande himself i think worked in medicine and showed how checklists can significantly reduce deaths in hospitals, a principle he applied to other highly complicated or complex environments.

if i didn't recognise every other tweet lockwood's talking about, or wasn't fairly well-versed in twitter, i guess it might perform the function of applying the logic of online to the experienced world, disrupting and adapting its perceptions, how we use and see our body-avatars, the logic of it, the lifecycle of its interpretative and gadfly memes available to us. but i find myself going 'oh yeah i remember that tweet' and feel like i'm basically reading twitter.

What I liked about the first section was (a) the writing, and (b) the way she captured a sort of collective reaction to being online in 2016-2018, which simultaneously reveled in it and punctured/trivialized it. I think the intention is that the second part highlights/contrasts this with the real world, but my feeling was she did a better job capturing the portal than she did "real life."

Oops, sorry, I missed that you were only still in the first part.

that’s ok PBKR - i’ve heard it’s a book of two halves, and it’s good to get that positive response to the first part. i mean don’t hate it, just didn’t find it particularly compelling. tho whenever i find myself thinking about it, i find new interesting things to say about it so maybe i should reappraise.

really bad summary by me, with several confused or meaningless sentences. glad 2b posting again.

Not confused or meaningless at all!

I finished the Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macauley. On reflection I found it moving and powerful. In some ways, it feels a bit like a wish-fulfillment novel, where Macauley gets to live out the 'if only I was able to travel back in time and know then what I know now' - at the end of her life, creating an almost impossibly knowledgeable and aloof character, free, and wise, exploring the Levant and herself, finding, well, what? That God is unknowable, the church is a glorious but rotten edifice, people are maddening and absurd (as are camels and apes).

I'm reading Jane Erye. Most of my life, I really struggled with books and language earlier than, say, early 20th century stuff but even then my tastes were mostly postwar. just the language and way of writing was hard for me to get into.

but late last year I read Rudin by Ivan Turganev, then Crime and Punishment, and now I seem to have found a way into it, I am starting to enjoy the more verbose, formal vibe of older writing.

that's a wonderful corpus of literature to have opened up to you!

yeah I'm excited, for some reason it opened up for me

jane eyre is really impressive, the way she writes about jane's inner life is really striking

Jane eyre is a good book imo

just the language and way of writing was hard for me to get into.

lol i started reading 'the woman in white' last week and was all like why are you using two dozen words where ten would do

denis johnson - angels

Fizzles you need to stop compulsively apologising for your thoughtful, interesting posts :) #leanin #fizzleboss

John Dickson Carr's early Bencolin mysteries. Largely bad, but it's very interesting seeing an author find their way to their very good later period. Clearly loves the unsubtle drama of ROMANCE (capital everything), and grand guignol murders. The organisation of his material and murders is awful here, and it shows how important an development this was later - clearing much more space, while also managing atmosphere much better.

I was thinking the other day that the whole golden age of detective fiction is interesting because with most genre booms - sci-fi, say, or western - it's about trappings that all sorts of different sensibilities can engage with and then there's lots of lesser writers who can still provide some pleasure by delivering on those trappings. But I don't know if a murder mystery can be satisfying if the mystery itself - which feels like a v specific skill to have as a writer - doesn't come off, even if the author is good at describing country houses or coming up with an eccentric detective.

Read Jane Eyre many times but Spotify are testing audiobook waters with some classics and the JE recording is very good, so I'm reading (listening) through it too. I love how good little orphan Jane is at comebacks - honing in on the satisfaction, and described in terms that you can feel on your body, muscle memory from bursts of righteous anger in your past.

"shaking from head to foot, thrilled with ungovernable excitement"

I love Jane Eyre— I believe I was the only sophomore in my high school class who loved it. That was a banner year for me, didn't have many friends but boy did I read and write a lot.

Anyway, I finished Tan Lin's 'Heath Course Pak,' which was unexpectedly moving, then Ian Dreiblatt's new book of poems, 'forget thee,' which made me weep at its ending, and started Jamie Townsend's 'Sex Machines,' a book that seems to take equal parts from Language Poetry and gender theory. I'm also dipping in and out of Harsha Walia's 'Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism.' I think she's one of the most insightful activist-thinkers of our time, grounded as she is in community rather than academia.

I recently finished Geoff Dyer's "But Beautiful", an unusual sort of fiction-criticism hybrid: little vignettes in the lives of famous jazz musicians, inspired by historical sources but giving his imagination free rein. It's kind of a reverie on the tortured genius motif, with almost all of the musicians portrayed dealing with serious drug problems, mental health issues, on top of the struggle to evade the repressive forces of a racist society, yet somehow being able to conjure forth musical brilliance. There's a bit of early '90s junkie chic as well (the book was published in '91). An enjoyable read. Now, I'm reading "Strangers on a Train" by Patricia Highsmith.

Thanks, o. nate, will check Dyer's book! Description reminds me of Ishiguro'sNocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, which I posted about on the KI thread. Despite classy title, it's mostly pleasingly rough-edged, in a fairly musical way at times.

Also, and in much more direct correlation, your description makes me think of Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, a novel about Boddy Bolden.

I think the Ondaatje comparison is a good one. It has that same freewheeling, immersive style. I do mistrust Dyer sometimes (always that sense that his subject is himself) but But Beautiful is mostly great. I think this bit on Monk is pretty magical.

You had to see Monk to hear his music properly. The most important instrument in the group - whatever the format - was his body. He didn't play the piano really. His body was his instrument and the piano was just a means of getting the sound out of his body at the rate and in the quantities he wanted. If you blotted out everything except his body you would think he was playing the drums, foot going up and down on the hi-hat, arms reaching over each other, His body fills in the gaps in the music; without seeing him it always sounds like something's missing but when you see him even piano solos acquire a sound as full as a quartets. The eye hears what the ear misses...

Part of jazz is the illusion of spontaneity and Monk played the piano as though he'd never seen one before. Came at it from all angles, using his elbows, taking chops at it, rippling through the keys like they were a deck of cards, fingers jabbing at them like they were hot to the touch or tottering around them like a woman in heels - playing it all wrong as far as classical piano went. Everything came out crooked, at an angle, not as you expected...Played with his fingers splayed, flattened out over the keys, fingertips almost looking like they were pointed upward when they should have been arched.

He played each note as if astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to. Sometimes the song seemed to have turned itself inside out or to have been entirely constructed from mistakes...

If Monk had built a bridge he'd have taken away the bits that considered essential until all that was left were the decorative parts - but somehow he would have made the ornamentation absorb the strength of the supporting spars so it was like everything was built around what wasn't there. It shouldn't have held together but it did and the excitement came from the way that it looked like it might collapse at any moment...

That is great.

Yes, thanks, Chinaski!
Judging by this and some eyewitness testimonials, I'm sure Monk's music would or could be even better if I could see him make it (not much on film, is there?), but doesn't seem like it's necessary to hear him "properly"--but just go with that, and what a vision. The very end reminds me of xgau's scimpier references to "sprung" music: can use that bottom left search box on his homepage to see how he used it re the Band, Beefheart, Big Star, Gang of Four, the Kinks, Pavement, maybe others. the Band is the only act he complains about, but also the only one with a somewhat Dyeresque description: I've always been put off by the sprung quality of the Band's music--the sense that if someone were to undo the catch its works would be propelled forth in all directions. Pretty appealing to me! (Go4's sprungness as described by xgau is huge compliment and maybe also Dyer-relevant.)

Is that sprung rhythm in the G.M. Hopkins sense of the term? Or does it have a different meaning when it's applied to music as opposed to poetry?

That Monk description reminded me of the story of how, against his wife's protests, he nailed a picture frame to the wall at a diagonal. Eventually, she agreed with him that it had to be that way.

Heh, I thought for a second when I saw G.M. Hopkins it was referring to this trumpeter who teaches at Berklee that they call GHOP. https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/greghopkins #OneThread

I'm sure Monk's music would or could be even better if I could see him make it (not much on film, is there?)

There is the excellent documentary "Straight No Chaser" which is I think Dyer's primary source for his description above.

Thanks, will check that. Hi Lily Dale, I think English major Christgau does take "sprung" from the vernacular justification of Hopkins for sprung rhythm, and also sprung (half, slant etc) rhyme: Real People bending syllables to make them rhyme, as in Realness of some hip-hop and song lyrics, getting away from predictability (Christgau: "bored enough to fuck with it"). And the same can apply to sounds, for instance in harmonies, notes made to fit---I take it that's what his (predominately) passing references usually reference, at least in part (you gotta actually listen to get it, which seems to be his main purpose in using the term, other than using something that's appropriate and real handy).
My favorite of his comments on this, other than the one about the Band, are these on Gang of Four (also archived on his site:
Only when a jazz critic uttered the word "harmolodic" in conjunction with this music did I realize why I admired it so...I admire it, and dig it to the nth, for its tensile contradictions, which are mostly a function of sprung harmony, a perfect model for the asynchronous union at the heart of their political (and rhythmic) message. Which I originally took to mean the inherent stresses of democracy, and other kinds of union. But also (reviewing Entertainment!), he says:
Though the stressful zigzag rhythms sound thinner on record than from the stage where their chanted lyrics/nonmelodies become visible, the progressive atavism of these university Marxists is a formal accomplishment worth attending. By propelling punk's amateur ethos into uncharted musical territory, they pull the kind of trick that's eluded avant-garde primitives since the dawn of romanticism. And if you want to complain that their leftism is received, so's your common sense. No matter how merely liberal their merely critical verbal content, the tension/release dynamics are praxis at its most dialectical. Don't let's boogie--let's flop like fish escaping a line.

(not that this last part doesn't turn out to retain its lures and other triplines, as traced all through here:https://www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?name=Gang+of+Four)

I was thinking the other day that the whole golden age of detective fiction is interesting because with most genre booms - sci-fi, say, or western - it's about trappings that all sorts of different sensibilities can engage with and then there's lots of lesser writers who can still provide some pleasure by delivering on those trappings. But I don't know if a murder mystery can be satisfying if the mystery itself - which feels like a v specific skill to have as a writer - doesn't come off, even if the author is good at describing country houses or coming up with an eccentric detective.

yes, i'll jump off from this point to try and elaborate a bit on the JDC changes that improved his detective story writing.

The first is that the Bencolin mysteries feel *congested*. I think this may be part pacing and part ordering. His later writing was very good in its balance of atmosphere, narrator feeling, the act of detection and clue distribution (by which I mean things that look like clues but aren't and things that don't look like clues but are, plus things in between that feel they might be), as well as multiple people searching hypothesising in roughly the same regions as the reader, but that sense that the order of events isn't quite fitting those hypothesis – the main detective of course seems ahead of it all, even when they are wrong. One of JDC's favourite ploys, which he does actually use with Bencolin, is for the detective to be certain they know the who but not the how, or the reverse, only for that to change at an apparently trivial moment in the narrative. 'What occurred to the detective at this point!' the reader asks.

More generally, the atmosphere in the Bencolin novels is very front and centre, and the machinery has to exist within it - which is another way of expressing that congestion, only this time instead of being 'pacing' (ie on a timeline) it's more a point of layering. (both are actually the same thing when it comes to writing, i think - as VS Pritchett said, all writing is a matter of emphasis). It feels, from a reader point of view, like the mystery is obscured by the atmospherics. Whereas in his later writing, he recognised that as long as he got the mechanics right, the atmosphere could find its natural place with lighter touches. Less slapping it on. He's still absolutely in love with the dramatic and magical, but it's a lot more controlled.

In fact, he was able to write an excellent ghost story with all the shape of his detective stories, perhaps showing in some respects all that matters is the resolution, or not, in his books, to make it one or the other. (The book is The Burning Court - and it is in fact both locked room mystery *and* ghost story and perhaps in this technical respect is one of his greatest achievements).

But I'm interested in *how* he got there. That development, that ability to see clearly how to manage and order the material doesn't seem to me to be an easy thing to discover. Like suddenly being able to find the clarity of expression in a complicated piece of music - the space to operate where before all the elements seemed difficult to manage. I don't see how that works as an analogy for the process of writing. But it's what it looks like when I look at JDC's development.

What this all means in answer to your thought, Daniel, is the importance of finding that alchemy or balance - mysteries without mystery but only a solution, will be rather dry, mysteries with an obscure or unsatisfying solution will seem gimcrack, tricked up with pasteboard and bad lighting. I think somehow this is part of the importance of the eccentric detective: the right detective can 'true it all up', like aligning a diorama correctly, with the true perspective. So that Sherlock Holmes makes his written surroundings coalesce with mystery and solution to the environment located around him, or indeed Miss Marple, say. Their exploration of their environment is both the creation of the environment, the depiction and revelation of the puzzle, and its resolution. So, no, eccentricity is not enough, but perhaps it is necessary to create the necessary *angle* on the mystery. The narrator, proxy narrator and reader are not able to align the environment to make it make sense, but must work the details in the book against the narrative and descriptive modalities (not *quite* ineluctable), but the detective, from a position eccentric to that of the reader/narrator's is able to align it.

there's an excellent geoffrey hill lecture on the nature of 'eccentricity' as a more mechanical metaphor in its early use from the 17th century: ‘Eccentrique to the endes of his Master or State’, and i'm reminded of a quotation Hill reads from Frances Bacon:

"The kind of hireling who crooketh affairs to his own ends, which must needs be eccentric to the ends of his master or state"

eccentricity as "athwart, deviant, thwating, working across or against" to quote from the lecture again.

there's an argument for saying *this* version of eccentric is the criminal. working athwart the 'natural' order of events to create an end via moral crookedness. so that two eccentricities - the criminal's and the detective's - corkscrew with each other to find resolution.

i'm also reminded of a Ben Jonson poem on Masques, who could only be properly viewed, in Inigo Jones' innovation, from the 'true' perspective, by the King or Queen (or main celebrant of the Masque - birthdays etc), and in a rather dry way, this poem is in itself like a tumbler lock with line by line, the elements clicking into place until the true perspective is reached in the final line.

in january 1795 the dutch texel fleet of fourteen ships-of-the-line was trapped in ice and captured by a french squadron of hussars and an infantry company riding pillion behind them — the only example in history of a cavalry capturing a fleet.

yes i am continuing to read my book on the napoleonic wars (still in the pre-napoleonic revolutionary wars phase - he’s about to make a grand appearance commanding the italian campaign).

there's an argument for saying *this* version of eccentric is the criminal. working athwart the 'natural' order of events to create an end via moral crookedness. so that two eccentricities - the criminal's and the detective's - corkscrew with each other to find resolution. The criminal might say that the detective is going against the natural order of things, against the sometimes violent lifeforce, and/or profit motive---I don't know the genre well-enough to think of an example, but in Richard Matheson's I Am Legend(1954),a man left Normal in a post-pandemic world of vampires and surrogates becomes the nightmare terrorist among them. Oh yeah, in Red Harvest, the Continental Op understandably says, "A plague on both your houses," and becomes a corkscrewed criminal-detective, setting two sets of assholes (incl. the ones who hired him to analyze and destroy the other) even more at odds than they already were. My take is that he was already corkscrewed, but as a total professional, but now he realizes he's being hired to go beyond amorality to immorality, which is too close to morality--and, more importantly, his cool hands will be too sullied. too bloody, euwww (but it's been a long time since I read that one, might ne wrong).
A nonfiction-based example would be Serpico, at least in the screen version; I haven't read the book: he's upsetting the whole cop culture of bribery and the "blue wall of silence" etc., going back in its way to the Tammany Hall paradise of honest graft, itself upset, at least on the upper levels, by the goo-goos, the good government virtureheads.

But yeah, two eccentricities, with the rule-breaking good guy being our champion, can be very gratifying (if maybe a bad influence on Oliver North and his ilk, but they probably don't need much encouragement)

Fizzles, I think that Global Napoleonic Wars book had a big LRB review, didn't it?

I venture this as someone who reads 90% of LRB and 0% actual books on Napoleonic Wars.

did it? thanks. missed it first time around - will look.

indeed - december 2020. thanks!

I did eventually finish The Monkey's Voyage. Within its chosen subject matter it was very balanced and informative. Not a book I'd recommend widely, but if you think bio-geography might strike a responsive intellectual chord, it will certainly help you scratch that itch.

Now reading Chinese Rhyme-Prose, translated by Burton Watson, who may justly be said to combine some of the scholarly strengths of Arthur Waley with some of the poetic chops of Kenneth Rexroth. This book falls more in line with his scholarly pursuits, but characteristically he brings the poetic material across.

Dipping into Walia here and there, and reading some poetry publications I received in the mail...

But also reading Alan Davies' 'Odes & Fragments,' a strange book that is really displaying the depth and breadth of Davies' gifts as a poet.

I finished "Strangers on a Train". I thought I basically knew what to expect, but it turns out the plot of the book diverges significantly from that of the movie. The book ends up being a darker meditation on guilt and obsession. Even more impressive considering Highsmith wrote it in her 20s. She does this great thing where the reader finds themselves strangely implicated in the guilt of the characters, getting you to root for them at key moments and then feeling kind of queasy about it afterwards.

lol i gave but beautiful a stinker of a review in the wire when it came out, i haaaaaaaateded it. short version: a group of ppl i think are actually important and worth thinking about with genuine imagination just getting useless same-old-same-old slathered over them who has nothing concrete to say about music, it's not like there isn't already a fvckton of terrible writing about jazz ffs

maybe i shd reread it to see if i missed something or changed my mind. the monk passage is really not changing my mind.

slathered over them by someone who has nothing

It's more about the musicians, and a certain romantic view of the life of a musician. There is an afterword which gives a much more straightforward potted history of jazz and is laced with Dyer's critical judgments, many of which I disagree with.

This week I at last started Jonathan Coe's MIDDLE ENGLAND. It's very readable, and mostly very enjoyable. Something I like about Coe is his cultivation of a very standard, repetitive form of comedy, involving set-pieces or bathetic climaxes. This is, at this point, easy, generic stuff for him; the simplicity and generic quality is somehow part of what I like about it. Meanwhile, the book does *less* than usual of something he's done before, namely textual pastiche, chapters in the form of other kinds of genres, etc. It's quite textually homogeneous.

I'm open to whatever the book's political implications may be - I sense that it is genuinely attempting to explore something about diverse views and lives in England (not the rest of the UK) - except that I've had one worry about this book all along: that as a satire of British politics of the 2010s, it will repeat and repurpose various mendacious attacks on and sneers about Jeremy Corbyn MP and his supporters, for satirical or comic purposes at best. I'm afraid that my ultimate feeling about the book will be heavily dependent on how far this is the case.

Damn Galgut's Arctic Summer, a novel about E.M. Forster's Indian adventures (and loves).

I finished Chinese Rhyme-Prose. Now I am reading The Catherine Wheel, Jean Stafford. Her prose is a marvel of sinuosity.

I love how Jean Stafford has somehow become an ILB favourite!

the first novel I read when lockdown sarted

*started too

Don't remember The Catherine Wheel well at all, but some reviews of her Library of America Collected Noves have mentioned it as weakest of the three---but the others set the bar pretty high. Scenes from Boston Adventure, which I read in the 80s, have come back to me lately: girl's duty is housekeeping after school every day, before her mother comes home and delights in pouncing on seemingly tiny failings---so one day the girl gets an early start, cleans up *every7thing*---mother comes home and is enraged. It still rings a bell---but who but Stafford would come up with that---?

I mean to read TCw again, along w the other two (and maybe get library to spring for new LoA collection).

Who but Stafford would come up with that in fiction, I mean (haven't seen it in nonfiction either, just real life, or too close to it)

I'm currently reading "The Killer Inside Me" by Jim Thompson. The pulp pedigree of the book is readily apparent. I was not surprised to learn that the book originally appeared as a paperback original, probably sold mostly in dime stores and not reviewed in any newspaper of note. Featuring lurid depictions of sex, violence and sexual violence and not terribly believable subordinate characters, especially the women, the book is not subtle. However, Thompson's portrayal of the realpolitik and seamy underside of an American Western small town, with its quasi-feudal power structure and casual racism and sexism is memorable. I was curious about the source of my copy's blurb, ostensibly from the NY Times: "Jim Thompson is the best suspense writer going, bar none." This little bit of copy is reproduced in just about every on-line listing for the book. Thanks to the Times online archive it's easy enough to find the original article. It turns out the quote in context is much more ambivalent:

For my own part, I liked Thompson better before the world decided he was a genius. His books pack more of a punch if you pick them up for two bits and come to them with no expectations. Today, though, his quirky little paperbacks can't measure up to the hype. When a cover blurb calls him 'the best suspense writer going, bar none,' the impulse to strike a revisionist pose is almost overwhelming.

This 1990 article about the revival of interest in Thompson is the only place I can find that phrase appearing in the Times. I guess I shouldn't be surprised at the cynicism of Viking in lifting the sentence out of context and placing it on their book covers, its an amoral twist that I can imagine Thompson savoring with a smile.

Heh, you didn't tell us who wrote that.

I might put the author's name behind spoiler tag.

Lawrence Block

But can you be sure the phrase wasn't already on those prior editions and he was only quoting it from them?

Okay, I guess it is usually attributed to the NYT so you are correct, sir.

If it wasn’t on prior editions then he is complaining about a cover blurb that doesn’t exist and then publishers snipped the non-existent blurb out and used it as a cover blurb. Frankly... that rules

I think he was paraphrasing an actual cover blurb that did exist, but not from the Times, but then publishers took his paraphrase and attributed it to the NY Times, which I guess has more "influencer" value. It would have been odd if the original blurb was from the Times, and he complained about it without mentioning that fact.

Hmm, so I guess I was wrong. I see Black Lizard paperbacks from the '80s with that quote attributed to the Times, so I guess that's what Block was referring to in his 1990 article. So now I'm still puzzled where that quote originally appeared. The only place it shows up in the archives search is that 1990 article. Oh well, mystery unsolved..

The closest thing I can find, at least in terms of the enthusiasm of praise, is a 1985 review of an Elmore Leonard book by Stephen King in which he mentions that Thompson is his favorite crime writer, but the wording is totally different, and that's still too late, since I see that blurb on 1981 Black Lizard reprints.

It must have been by Anthony Boucher. I see he wrote a regular crime fiction column in the Times in the '50s and he seems to have been a big Thompson fan. Also, it appears that most of his columns only exist as image scans in the archive, so they don't support full-text search. I think the mystery has been solved.

finally reading let us now praise famous men. picked it up on a whim the other day and found i couldn’t put it down. kind of in love with this endearingly deranged book, though I admit there are moments when i flip ahead mid-paragraph and go “huh. this part goes on for five more pages?”

Boy On Fire by Mark Mordue.
I think its a pretty decent biography. He seems to have talked to most of the right people, at least those he had a chance to talk to.
Reads quite well as well.
It's been years since i actually read Ian Johnston and i never replaced toe Robert Brokenmouth I sold Cave in the mid 90s. He gave me the cover price for a copy I went to get him to sign. Anyway I don't remember them giving that much about his childhood/teens. i do remember Brokenmouth did have the trousers down at caulfield group photo or taht is sto say nick with trousers down.

Reading 'ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines,' a speculative fiction by one of our finest poets, Sesshu Foster, in collaboration with Arturo Romo. It's excellent so far. More info here: http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100958940

finally reading let us now praise famous men. picked it up on a whim the other day and found i couldn’t put it down. kind of in love with this endearingly deranged book, though I admit there are moments when i flip ahead mid-paragraph and go “huh. this part goes on for five more pages?”

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.)
the chapter on this book in rancière's aesthesis really piqued my interest--curious to hear what you think when you finish it.

finally getting around to tove ditlevsen's childhood/youth/dependency trilogy & enjoying the first work quite a bit. the reception of the work had me expecting something very different, but so far it reminds me a little bit of a nordic anne of green gables. i imagine that tone will shift as the story progresses, though.

Fizzles your post really makes me want to read some John Dickson Carr, and also reminded me of this recent Guardian article about Japanese locked room mysteries, which might be of interest to you:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/27/honkaku-a-century-of-the-japanese-whodunnits-keeping-readers-guessing

Alice Munro, Open Secrets, as good as her reputation suggests. Was a bit surprised to find a picture section at the end with what seemed to be autobiographical photos - parents' wedding day, a baby in a buggy, growing up in ww2 - was she born in london? trekking overland to Afghanistan - inspiration for one of the stories perhaps? The captions seem to refer to extra biographical detail not found elsewhere. Meeting the prime minister of India, pictures of Kim Philby and Antony Blunt, joining MI5 - er quite the background for a Canadian short story writer. Obviously something was up. Being the subject of tabloid stories before becoming the head of MI5. Stella Rimington's biography, it transpires, is called Open Secret.

Also read Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man etc. As accomplished as Munro in what she does but not my cup of tea.

Alice Munro was in MI5 ?

Sorry, I was not explicit. Alice Munro's book is called Open Secrets. Stella Rimington's bio is called Open Secret. Some mix up at the publishers.

Remarkable. Like an incident in a Jonathan Coe novel.

Fizzles your post really makes me want to read some John Dickson Carr, and also reminded me of this recent Guardian article about Japanese locked room mysteries, which might be of interest to you:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/27/honkaku-a-century-of-the-japanese-whodunnits-keeping-readers-guessing🕸

reading my first wodehouse ('code of the woosters'). it is delightful

At the risk of behaving like the cat I' the adage perpetuating a cliche, I envy you, mookie.

quite so

when was that ever not appropriate? I mean he was mookie's kryptonite!

the great minds of the thread are standing in a line watching you go by, mookie

The the whole point about the mookieproofs, as I have had occasion to remark before, is that they are not lesser men. They keep their heads. They think quickly, and they act quickly. Napoleon was the same.

:)

The Code of the Mookies

I don't understand the last 7 posts.

riffing on this: ILX cosmology: the origins of your user name

That's great. I always thought it was somehow a Mookie Wilson reference.

Finally reading let us now praise famous men. picked it up on a whim the other day and found i couldn’t put it down. kind of in love with this endearingly deranged book, though I admit there are moments when i flip ahead mid-paragraph and go “huh. this part goes on for five more pages?” Once you've recovered from that one, maybe you'll dig Agee On Film, which is equally energetic in searching for visionz *and* fault---eventually finding fault with some of his own earlier flights in this same doorstop. Also interesting to compare his bop sermon prosody in the New Republic with relatively restrained reports for Time, when dealing with the same subjects.

Maybe I'll get the local library to spring for this Library of America round-up:
https://www.loa.org/books/228-film-writing-and-selected-journalism
Which also has his screenplay for Night of the Hunter, uncollected film writing, book reviews, and lots more. (Where's the screenplay for African Queen?) Think I'm going to read A Death In The Family pretty soon, and re-read The Morning Watch (LoA's second volume incl. those with "the expanded 1960 edition" of Let Us... and some shorter fiction).

I've now looked at the thread about names, but I still don't understand the posts above on this thread.

pinefox have you read no wodehouse?

Seems to be the case (couldn’t think of how to say in Wodehouse-ese)

when non-wodehouse-reader (me) is calling to non-wodehouse-reader (the pinefox) like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps

Heh, lol

Mark S: No.

If the statement is that the posts above refer to lines of Wodehouse, that's one thing. But then, I still don't see how they connect to the other thread that poster Aimless linked to.

In the case of my post, at least, I can safely say it was a dumb play on the title of the book with zero cleverness behind it.

pinefox, wodehouse is quite good! you should give him a try.

omigod

I envy pinefox, discovering Wodehouse

Pinefox, don't bother trying to arrive at an understanding of the mookieproof bantering. It's trivial stuff and not worth a second thought.

omigod

I envy pinefox, discovering Wodehouse

Thanks, fellow ILB posters, for these generous responses.

Wodehouse seems hugely popular; it seems that I have never quite found time to try him.

I did reread a chapter of David Thomson, NICOLE KIDMAN (2006) yesterday, and more John Donne - currently mostly addressing his god, which I find less convincing than when he addresses a woman.

Joy in the Morning is his most perfect book, I think, if you need somewhere to start.

That and TCooW, I guess.

Sorry, that looks awful. And wrong too, should be TCotW, or even just CotW,

I'm now reading "The Price of Salt" (aka "Carol") by Patricia Highsmith. It's part of a big collection that contains here first 2 novels and a bunch of stories. Should I be surprised that it's also great but in a completely different way than "Strangers on A Train"?

I finished The Catherine Wheel last night. There was something to love about it on almost every page. Her subsidiary characters were outstanding and the book was full of perceptive touches about humans and their relationships.

The ending did not work as well for me as that in The Mountain Lion, possibly because the overall themes of obsession and repression have been explored in literature so frequently and exhaustively that the climactic few pages felt more perfunctory than climactic. Because the book was so full and rich in other ways, this small glitch at the end didn't really impair my enjoyment of the book at all.

Toni Morrison Mouth Full Of Blood
Various non-fiction writings from 90s, 00ies and teens compiled in a book taht ahs different names in other territories.
Quite enjoying it, not really read her before.

Mark Mordue Boy On Fire
Early Nick Cave bio which had initially been supposed to be a fulllife one until Arthur, Cave's son died.
Mordue realised he couldn't continue with the fuller version of teh bio but had the early years researched and it would hang together as a book. So he went with that.
Quite enjoying it, haven't read the other 2 main biographies in a while so not sure how much of this ground got covered. I know he did a lot of his own research but both Ian Johnston and Robert Brokenmouth have been cited quite a bit.
It does hang together really well anyway.
I've just got to the point where Cave is getting into heroin after Rowland S Howard has joined the Boys Next door and the lp has been released. Think i'm about 40 pages from the end.
Wish he'd rethink doing a memoir or Mick Harvey might consider doing one.

Charles C Mann 1491
Finished this earlier this week. Enjoyed it. Am now seeing it cited in the An Indigenous People's History of the UNited States.
& seeing that book mentioned in Exterminate All The brutes and its writer being involved in the production.
Started taht then bought the Nick cave book so will get back to it.

Last night I started and almost finished The Means of Escape, a very slender collection of short stories by Penelope Fitzgerald. The stories are brief, but each is told in her typical voice, which is one I have always enjoyed in her novels. I'll polish off the rest tonight.

Getting to the part in Blood Meridian where the kid and Sproule are walking around the parched hellscape in Mexico with Sproule's arm rotting off and its like Stephen King written by a wannabe Faulkner (ie sign me up).

Yup

I liked some of those stories, Aimless- is there one set in New Zealand?- but I don't know about the whole thing, can't remember.

The title story, Means of Escape, is set in Hobart, NZ when the penal colony was still active. The others aren't in NZ.

Right, that’s the one. Some kind of Magwitch situation, iirc. Maybe I should reread. But have been having trouble reading these days for various reasons, but still enjoy reading about you guys reading, the way some people love to be in love, hope you don’t mind my kibitzing/rubbernecking.

rubberneck away, Mr. Redd!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DART7FA9Krs
Thanks!

I finished the Fitzgerald stories and moved on to Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner. Nicely formed story so far.

Lolly Willowes is magnificent. I read it a month or so ago and haven't been able to stop thinking about it.

I'm reading a few things: Trans by Juliet Jacques (struggling a bit with the narrative voice but learning a huge amount); Authentocrats by Joe Kennedy (written pre-pandemic and already feels like it could with an update. Things move too fast.); Geometry of Shadows, a book of Giorgio de Chirico's poems (still finding my way around these).

I'm rereading Maurice. At twenty-one and closeted, it can be a fussy, silly book. Now I can see the tensions dissolving the velleities of Forster's prose.

How's Anna Kavan's Ice?

First chapter is grebt!

I'll see if the library has Maurice, hadn't thought to look. Way back, Gore Vidal mentioned that he has met Forster, who mentioned that he had, way way way back, written a novel about gays. "What do they do?, " I asked, intrigued. "They---talk," he replied, with some satisfaction. Not actually seeing those exact words now, but pretty sure that was it.

The earlier books by Kavan that I tried to read kept one foot apiece in reality and fantasy. With Ice, she seems to be more confident that she can display the symbols and dreamlike actions without having to explain them. I read it at the same time that I read her biography, so the two bled together a bit. Ice makes me think of Beckett trying to write sci-fi, minus the humour.

I'll see if the library has Maurice, hadn't thought to look. Way back, Gore Vidal mentioned that he has met Forster, who mentioned that he had, way way way back, written a novel about gays. "What do they do?, " I asked, intrigued. "They---talk," he replied, with some satisfaction. Not actually seeing those exact words now, but pretty sure that was it.

I remember him saying that one of the main rules he set for himself when writing it was that it should have a happy ending. I found it very moving especially in the context of Forster's wider work, so much of which is about ppl beating themselves up for who they are and failing to live up to their expectations.

I liked some of those stories, Aimless- is there one set in New Zealand?- but I don't know about the whole thing, can't remember.

― Working in the POLL Mine (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 10 May 2021 18:11 (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

The title story, Means of Escape, is set in Hobart, NZ when the penal colony was still active. The others aren't in NZ.

― sharpening the contraindications (Aimless), Monday, 10 May 2021 20:31 (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

It's set in Tasmania (then known as Van Diemen's Land) rather than New Zealand (don't think NZ was ever used for penal colony purposes)

I'll see if the library has Maurice, hadn't thought to look. Way back, Gore Vidal mentioned that he has met Forster, who mentioned that he had, way way way back, written a novel about gays. "What do they do?, " I asked, intrigued. "They---talk," he replied, with some satisfaction. Not actually seeing those exact words now, but pretty sure that was it.

― dow,

Actually, the novel's clear about Maurice's frustrations: he wants to get laid, not sit around tousling each other's hair.

A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America by Craig Werner
Book I've had out being ignored throughout the pandemic and for a while before. Which is not good since picking it up i find it quite compelling. History of mainly black music over the later half of the 20th century mainly.
Am enjoying it now and hopefully going to get through it before I need to return it. But should have got to it sooner.
Seems to be a bit weird chronologically like he's just been talking about 1969 rock and gone back to look at Coltrane.

Mouth Full Of Blood Toni Morrison
Collection of various non fiction writings over about a 20 year period straddling the millenium. Also quiite compellling in places.
Think I need to read some of her fiction too .

my partner lent me luster so i'm reading it despite my total allergy to contemporary literary fiction, and... i like it! it's very funny

"What do they do?, " I asked, intrigued. "They---talk," he replied, with some satisfaction. That characterization of the reply may be off, but I do remember taking it as, "It's not smut, and not desire under the covers of florid rhetoric: whatever else does or doesn't happen at any time, they talk; they're people."

Which doesn't mean it's all happy talk, of course.

finished Sesshu Foster's ELADATL, then also Taylor Brady's In the Red, a great book of poems, and am not onto 'A Poetics of the Press: Interviews with Poets, Printers, & Publishers.' Great book about, well, books, particularly in the context of printing and distribution to poetry communities.

A Poetics of the Press sounds very intriguing, thanks.
Finished my first reading of Jack, the latest installment to date in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead cycle: kind of a prequel, in the sense that it's set eight years before the prodigal returns to his "hometown"/place of origin, dusty little old Gilead, Iowa (where, as a child, he could hardly find anything worth stealing, but he did it anyway, esp./but not onlu if it at least had sentimental value for the owner).

To be a true prequel to the first book, Gilead this one would have to go back to or before the grandfather of Jack's namesake, the Rev. John Ames, had a vision of Christ in chains, and came West from Maine to get involved with John Brown. Yadda yadda, life with a visionary set young John Ames on a different path, an unpretentiously, carefully self-and-other-observant poetic evolution, as expressed in late-life letters to his very young surprise son, letters as legacy (in the mid-50s, in his own mid-70s, figures he better) which have started turning into a journal, by the time Jack is back, unsolicited and then some, as far as even/especially Rev John is concerned.
Jack is a test, sent by his Creator and creator as a signal: What's wrong with this picture? The light-fingered, cute little devil quickly became as notorious for getting let off as he did for what he got caught for---"Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, " many muttered, hearing his glib apologies, and his father, Rev. Boughton, stretch Scripture like balloon animals to cover the kid again---but also, if the local "authorities" were to try to do something to this one son of the upper middle class, where would it end--? And his seven siblings, certainly reasonably good children, found themselves performing goodness, as they discussed among themselves (but with their parents), all having the family brains.
Later Jack did something really bad, and stayed away for twenty years.
The reason for his unseasonable return is confided to Rev. John, who finds it, well, kinda underwhelming, although readers don't.

The second book, Home picks up the storu of return from the POV of Glory, youngest of the brood, who has come back to take care of their widower father, and for another reason. He and she and Jack become true desperadoes under the eaves.

Lila is the backstory of Rev. John's somewhat mysterious young wife, once a child of the pre-Depression road culture, but also takes her to Gilead and what seems to be a pretty good marriage, judging by the conversations--but then, Robinson always comes up with good, searching conversations (tending to and around the scary in Home)

Jack takes place mainly in St. Louis, with important trips to Chicago, and dread flashbacks to/thoughts of Gilead, like little seizures. From the beginning, (reading an excerpt of this before any of the books), I seemed to be hearing a player piano ranging through several emotional keys, always coming back through the same streets he pounds, also parlors, bars, rooming houses, a dance studio where he instructs (and a graveyard, good for an all-night conversation in an improbable opening tour-de-force). He has and is an ever-more cultivated sense of danger, who still sees vulnerability in all the just-so places, and always took predestination to heart---a kind of theft, maybe--in ways that exasperated his Presbyterian Rev. Dad and Congregationalist Rev. John, and he's "transparent, and an enigma": a tragicomic figure to keep an eye on at all times, as he does---he wants to do right! Kind of an even more alarming descendant of Wodehouse's Uncle Fred.

but *not* with their parents

important trips to Chicago *and Memphis* dammit sorry

*desperados*, if I'm going to be true to the song title I lifted.

Also, Jack has a Better Call Saul Effect: after reading the other books, you may still find yourself thinking, "Awww, this is going nice", then remembering what's ahead (not that you wouldn't get a sense of increasing peril even if you started with this one, and they could be read in any order, with no loss of effect, I think).

I finished "Price of Salt" (aka "Carol"). It's a lovely book. I was a bit disappointed to see in the afterword that Highsmith claims she never wrote another book like it, though that won't stop me from reading more of her work. A classic coming of age theme of falling in love, set against the background of moral panic over homosexuality (as Therese answers Carol in the book, when she asks her to define a classic, "A classic is something with a basic human situation").

I finished Lolly Willowes last night. Her descriptions of the social condition of women in England, as it was still emerging from the stultification of women during Victoria's reign, were quietly eloquent. Warner's use of Satan as a character and her philosophizing about his meaning were fascinating and suggestive, though not very filled in.

Now I'm reading a biography of Murray Gell-Mann, probably the most significant theoretical physicist who failed to achieve any large measure of public fame. Apparently it rankled him that Feynman managed to emerge into the public consciousness as a known figure, while he lagged far behind in that regard. By the end of the book I'll know much more about him, I'm sure.

I finished Jonathan Coe's MIDDLE ENGLAND (2018). It is the third in a trilogy with THE ROTTERS' CLUB (2001) and THE CLOSED CIRCLE (2004). Coe hadn't expected to write a third novel, but explains in a final note how events led him to it.

The novel narrates a fictionalised version of events in the UK between 2010 and 2018. Coe has often done 'ambitious state of the nation novels' but in a way this is more ambitious than ever, as it seems to want to take on every major event in the country over that time - sometimes just through a narration of news events, often through the way its characters experience them. Such events include the 2010 election; austerity (Coe already discussed foodbanks extensively in the novel NUMBER ELEVEN); the 2011 riots; the 2012 Olympics (Coe seems quite close to what is now viewed as the credulous response that the opening ceremony showed the best of Britain); the 2015 election (but very little, I think, on the 2014 Scottish referendum, which now seems quite a pivotal event into a new era of political surprises); the 2016 EU referendum, including the murder of Jo Cox MP and the resignation of PM Cameron; glancing reference to Donald Trump.

The major event in all that that is barely referred to at all is the 2017 election, when the Labour Party greatly increased its vote share and destroyed the government's majority, despite being subjected to false and malicious attacks from all sides. You could say that Coe doesn't refer to this because he doesn't want to give credit to socialists - which is odd, as his early work seemed sympathetic to socialism. But I don't make this objection, as the book is in part satire, and as a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party I'd rather it was kept safely out of the firing line - which is largely the case. The one character who supports JC is a very privileged teenage girl who is largely not a very sympathetic character and who, to an odd extent, rather fades out of the novel as it goes on.

Though ambitious in what it takes on, you could say that this novel is technically less ambitious than other Coe. It's completely linear. It contains few changes of style or format, by his standards - with one exception, an ingenious late section where we read a character's email with parentheses containing what she's really thinking as she writes it, and ditto for her reading of the reply. This amounts to a surprise, as the character, Sophie, seems primed for a new adventure with a US partner, but the idea falls flat. She winds up knocking on the Birmingham door of her estranged but not divorced husband, Ian, and at the novel's end they are reunited. I think this is a good outcome, as it shows compromise, imperfection, the idea that sometimes the best you can do is to try to make the best of what you have (though this might not really be true for Sophie; such a woman probably could find another partner if she wanted to). It also acknowledges that this position itself is limited: Sophie and Ian are both going to work in Hartlepool, she teaching for the husband of her gay friend Sohan, but she isn't sure, as the story ends, how long it will last, whether the compromise can work out. I like this sense of imperfection and uncertainty.

Benjamin Trotter was the central character of THE ROTTERS' CLUB - though certainly part of a larger cast. Is he still the central character here? I think perhaps he is, just about, though the novel is very much an ensemble; as a new chapter you don't know which characters are going to be featuring next. Benjamin is quite an appealing, distinctive character, I find, in being so detached, dreamy, ineffectual, distracted; something of a failure in life, but he has managed to find a kind of happiness on his own, in a house by the River Severn, and when his friend Philip Chase publishes his novel he unexpectedly finds a degree of fame with it. In a way Benjamin still feels close to Coe, a figure for the author and artist, unsure of how far he should be trying to get involved in a wider society he hardly understands - though maybe that would be disingenuous, as Coe's fiction *is* always trying to do that. Another main character who returns is Doug Anderton: as a political columnist who has regular meetings with a Coalition or Conservative spokesman, Nigel Ives, he is a convenient way to keep political discussion going. He is also given the last word in his confrontation with old classmate Ronald Culpepper, now a multimillionaire sponsor of Brexit, at a school reunion which deliberately takes the novel back to the 1970s schooldays roots of the trilogy.

MIDDLE ENGLAND is immensely easy to read. I perhaps forget how readable novels can be - bestsellers, novels on display at railway stations - because I spend more time thinking about slightly more recondite books. But reading this is often very enjoyable, and it's nice to be able to sail through a book. At times it clunks and falls flat in tone, above all on Brexit - perhaps this is Coe's weak point, where he's too committed to a view to be subtle? He quotes a tweet from author Robert Harris and treats it as significant wisdom. Perhaps this novel isn't going to give you great political insight - though what it does try to give is breadth, a range of views, and that may be enough of a challenge for some of us. I think what I appreciate more is just the interest of the story of a character like Sophie as she makes her way through the decade; and Coe's unabashed use of heavy comic devices, notably repetition and bathos. He deliberately seasons the story with a kind of programmatic silliness, that slightly skews it generically, deflects its portentousness, and does much for its entertainment value.

My perception of Coe, after enjoying House of Sleep & What a Carve Up, but generally disliking everything he wrote before or after, is that he’s all craft and no soul, except that sometimes he’s pretty bad at the craft too. I don’t know if it’s his relentless centrism, or the overuse of cheap irony, but something about him definitely curdled in me after Rotter’s Club. And yet I’m genuinely still curious about what he does next, even though the last time I enjoyed a novel of his was... 1999? I’ll be interested to know more about Number 11, I guess.

Curious what ILB thinks of Brookner. I started A Friend From England yesterday and it’s relentlessly drab in exactly the way Brookner gets parodied for... what am I missing?

I suppose the Trotter books look quite nimble compared to their similars though (Sebastian Faulk, Lanchester, someone like that?)

What is Coe's 'relentless centrism'?

If we can agree on what's meant by political centrism nowadays (I think we can), then I would tend to agree that MIDDLE ENGLAND tends that way, and this may be a weakness.

But to be relentless this would presumably have to be true of his other work also. That's a lot less clear to me. WHAT A CARVE UP! was an anti-Thatcherism novel that allowed its imagination to be violent (through comedy). Implicitly you could say it was a novel of the political Left. His first novel THE ACCIDENTAL WOMAN was extreme in a rather different way, in essaying a kind of nihilism (though he didn't retain this mood into later work).

Or maybe 'centrism' here means something else.

I would tend to agree that WACU! and also HOUSE OF SLEEP are technical high points. He showed a lot of craft then - very much agreed. I don't agree that those particular books lack 'soul', assuming that I know what that is. WACU! contains a lot of poignancy and is arguably powered by quite a lot of feeling.

What you call 'cheap irony' I think I would call his deliberate embrace of broad comedy. I suppose I agree that it's cheap, but I feel like it's meant to seem cheap, and that's part of the joke. But there may be other irony in him that is less well judged even by my lights.

I agree also that because Coe is basically a comic writer and satirist, he is, in a certain way, nimbler than Lanchester et al (though I don't really know most of them).

I don't want to defend everything he's done. I think he often has craft (it's a good word) but also sometimes lacks it (true), along with the necessary brio.

Richard Thompson Beeswing
Enjoying this greatly. Glad it is reasonably in depth. I think I'm still in mid 68, they've just put out What We Did On Our Holidays and are touring heavily. So odd that Thompson is broadly hinting about events on the road being foreboding cos I thought the main thing there was after Unhalfbricking. That does still feature Lamble.
Anyway was looking forward to RT writing a memoir and this does seem to have been worth the wait.
I thought I bought the paperback and this is the hardback, so that's cool too

Alexandra Wilson In Black & White
memoir by mixed race Essex raised young barrister. Very interesting so far and she has done some good talks on webinars and podcasts that I've caught.
This is the paperback which is supposed to have a load of bonus material added since the hardback last year.

I enjoyed beeswing, he comes across as a thoughtful guy

The accident was after Unhalfbricking was recorded, but before the cover picture was taken and it was released.

I'd quite like to read Thompson's book ... but I still have Elvis Costello's to get through!

A Long Petal Of The Sea, Isabel Allende - Starts off quite unsatisfyingly, the setting is the Spanish Civil War and there's tons of wikipedia style paragraphs breaking down the conflict. At one point a character's dying and his last words are a geopolitical analysis of the conflict, "I hear Eleanor Roosevelt is trying to get her husband to intervene but public opinion is against him". Now the setting has changed to an upper class Chilean family and Allende feels much more natural describing their customs and neuroses, tho tbf I know next to nothing about Chile so who knows.

interesting coe conversation. my boss keeps insisting i read him so i'll probably do a couple over the summer--he's partial to the rain before it falls, which seems like an uncharacteristic place to start.

just finished by night in chile, which i'd been saving out of a confidence in its quality that it affirmed, and dear cyborgs by eugene lim, which i expected to be slight fun but ended up among my favorite novels from the past few years. has anyone read?

A good friend of mine has his first essay collection out today, I've read all the pieces as they came out in magazines and they're excellent, but looking forward to reading the full published versions:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667701/lost-in-summerland-by-barrett-swanson/

(NYT review today too)

Vivian: yes, THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS is very uncharacteristic indeed, because it doesn't contain a single joke, and Coe is primarily a comic writer. It's quite good, though. And it shares one or two characters with his other novels -- he has become one of those extended-universe writers, sometimes obviously and sometimes less so.

I hadn't heard of Dear Cyborgs, but I was intrigued by the idea of something that sounded like slight fun but ended up better than that, and I was blown away by it. Thanks for the recommendation!

Laurence Sterne - Tristam Shandy
Dasa Drnic - EEG

Sterne was really great, it felt like the first time a writer was applying anarchy as a free for all on page after page and getting away with it. Its so good to read someone who loves Quixote, Rabelais and Burton and end up on their level -- and it was really nice feeling to see the sources you have read and enjoyed over the years coming off the page too, and then wanting to get back to them, re-read so as to find something deeper. Books conversing with one another.

EEG was, in the end, a mixture of Sebald and Bolano. A sorta academic investigator of crimes writes down his travels and research and by doing so sorta flattens all that suffering and pain out on the page. This is better than Sebald's amblings but nowhere near Bolano. The one bit that was different from either was a 30 page section list as a table of apartments and itinerary of books being confiscated from Jewish homes (as well as the people inside of those homes?), and of course there is a lot of Yugoslav history, and she is rude about Knausgaard lol. Its on the give away pile but I will read more by her.

Love Tristam Shandy. Fav bit is when the father talks about how some child living with monks made a great work at the age of two and the uncle replies he hopes they cleaned it up afterwards.

Heh, sounds like an early version of the Groucho Marx line, "My boy, I think you've got something there, and I'll wait outside until you clean it up."

As I had hoped, the Gell-Mann biography, Strange Beauty by George Johnson, devotes the lion's share of its exposition to theoretical partticle physics and its progression during the period of Gell-Mann's major work, and places the facts of his family and social life around the periphery. Therefore, I am learning interesting things.

Northanger Abbey: somewhat slight but more fun (and mercifully briefer) than Mansfield Park. John Thorpe was good for a laugh. I will never read the 1000 odd pages of The Mysteries of Udolpho but one of the other gothic texts mentioned, The Necromancer of the Black Forest, sounded like it might be good for a laugh. It wasn't really.

jfc 'good for a laugh' x2

I finished Joe Kennedy's Authentocrats yesterday. I thought it skewered the centrist 'problem' quite neatly (and certainly eviscerates Starmer and his focus group approach to politics, before the fact) but found a couple of the chapters kinda thin gruel - particularly the analysis of various aspects of 90s culture. Recommended though.

I decided to reread Bellow's "Herzog" since I first read it quite a while back and was curious if I'd still like it. At first I was leaning towards no (the discursive formal experiment seemed an excuse for self-indulgent rumination and thinly-veiled autobiographical settling of personal scores) but now am leaning towards yes (the style doesn't really change but he introduces characters and vignettes that better fulfill the promise of the scattershot approach).

i finished luster. solid debut, the style is really solid and it's so funny. the story and some of the characters (guy in open marriage) were disappointingly typical, and i kept waiting for the book to lift off and it didn't really. still, definitely one of the better contemporary novels i've read in the past decade, and i'm really looking forward to her next one

right now i'm dipping into flaubert's sentimental education (recent translation by helen constantine) and muriel spark's the driver's seat (thanks ilx for that muriel spark poll, it inspired me to finally check her out)

Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

I envy you discovering Sentimental Education.

After finishing Strange Beauty I checked out a public library copy of a book that caek mentioned elsewhere on ilx, Notes From an Apocalypse, Mark O'Connell. It is a 'quick read', and like so many non-fic books these days, it resembles an extended series of loosely connected magazine articles held together by a broad theme, but it's interesting enough to finish. Might finish it tonight.

I envy you discovering Sentimental Education.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, May 24, 2021 9:42 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

flaubert is extremely my dude, i am very excited

finished

second place by rachel cusk - quite different and not as wise/funny as the outline trilogy

notes from an apocalypse by mark o'connell - i've been reading a lot of climate anxiety stuff recently and this was in many ways the best of the bunch. very readable (weirdly almost bill bryson like?).

thinking in systems by donella meadows - lol turns out systems thinking is just undergraduate thermodynamics haha

what are you going through by sigrid nunez - eh fiiiiine.

the overstory by richard powers - more climate anxiety. overlong without having enough to say.

the russia house by john le carre - good fun

now reading

mezzanine by nicholson baker (reading ~1 page a day of this before bed so it's going to take a while)

gotham: a history of new york by edwin burrows - 1500pp introduction to the power broker haha. i'm up to 1765.

jakarta method by vincent bevins - just started, believe this was recommended here (possibly table?)

I'm reading Thomas Mann's Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, the wackiest reactionary tome in history./

I think table and Alfred and I all recommended The Jakarta Method.

Finished The Log of the USS Mrs. Unguentine. Feel like I would have absolutely adored it if i had read it at the right time, still enjoyed it, would be happy to go back to it.

Also read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which is very entertaining, at least one “Christ, what an asshole” moment per page once it gets going.

yes, a chilling read

Finished a book of poems by reclusive hermit poet Liz Waldner, also Gail Scott's 'The Obituary.'

About to start in on my friend Jackie Ess' new book, 'Darryl,' which is getting a fair amount of hype. Looks good!

I'm reading Gail Honeyman's novel ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE (2017).

It's an accessible popular bestseller and feels unusual for me, but then, the last novel I read was one of these too, so perhaps it's more in character than I think.

It's very readable and, in truth, enjoyable. I will report back further in due course.

haven't been keeping up here at *all*, but a quick update:

First on the Bencolin/John Dickson Carr early stuff.

Castle Skull: A Rhineland Mystery; Largely v melodramatic and unconvincing - both detective Bencolin and narrator Jeff Marle are not at all appealing - but there is a truly grotesque scene towards the end of a magician imprisoned for 17 years in the prison of his own skull castle, being consumed by the reek of far advanced cancer and mentally totally senseless apart from decayed monomaniacal remnants of revenge, making an appearance at a hysterical drunken dinner party in a celluloid collar, new suit and garish yellow shoes.
The Lost Gallows: A London Mystery - JDC's second, and pretty juvenile, but *the right stuff* with sentences like: How could a murderer better dispose of his victim than by hanging him on a high gallows, up before the sight of all heaven, but on a street the police couldn’t find? I don't believe the solution will live up to the atmosphere, but i'm enjoying it.

Lorem Ipsum - Oli Hazzard. A single sentence novel (or possibly one where there is a full stop at A Significant Moment, I don't know yet). I mean, fine, and he's able to handle it. The flux of interior life is the subject (afaict at this early stage), and the segmentation of sensation and cognition, all of which (single sentence, sense and sensibility), means like all of these it feels like a very Romantic novel (as in late 18th/early 19th C response to, development of empiricism). And both Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond, which I read recently, and Gerald Murnane, who CLB reminded me of, have done/do that analysis of segmentation and spectrum of experience - quotidian and dramatic - very well and interestingly and with more structured rhythms and. even my god with direct speech in them. Still, I don't mean to be rude, and a) it's enjoyably readable and b) i liked his description of something i haven't seen elsewhere, which is a look at what it feels like to play computer games - in this case Fifa 2013 - and how you feel after, which he in part defines as 'a state of having been away from language'. so one i'm going to finish. Prototype Press' font size and leading does my head in though.

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René Girard. Jumping on the mimetic desire bandwagon. I find something v compelling about Christian apologetics. I haven't quite put my finger on it. It's something aesthetic I think - the mixture of the analytical, the mystical and obtusely, gnostically moral maybe. Girard is clearly a powerful intelligence. This is not in fact true apologetics as it is not his intention to demonstrate the truth of religious faith, as such, but to show the significance of Judaeo Christian tradition and specifically the Gospels for social sciences. Extremely compelling and intelligent.

“moral opacity” is wrong. it’s the tone of moral theology - the working towards a moral framework, that is grounded in a mixture of logic and mysticism, that i find tonally fascinating (and genuinely interesting, but it’s an abstract game and doesn’t often sum up to real world ethical problems. like, theodicy is interesting but it doesn’t much help with the notion of eg genocide afaict. it’s more like genocide critiques religion and even writing that sentence makes me pull a face.

Theodicy as a defence of genocide (and other crimes), interesting, never thought it that way!

imo thoughts were very lazily written and ofc theodicy is not a defence of genocide but at the same time if your response to tangible evil such as genocide is “how do we fix religion so it works here” then well.

I wonder if you might like xpost Gilead, which does have its reveries, but more working toward and in ethical framework of speculative response to experience, incl. of thinking---in a personal history of a pastor, son and grandson of a pastor (who was a radical abolitionist and giver away of his and family's stuff, running back to the ghost of Bleeding Kansas long after/"after" the Civil War)--so, post-visionary, going toward post-dogmatic Christianty, no-frills flights (what CS Lewis meant by Mere Christianity,seemed like, but this is more robust, poetic---also, things keep happening).

"Jumping on the mimetic desire bandwagon"

Was this a joke?

i'm afraid not, pinefox, sorry.

clustering around the dynamics of social media, the vocal presence of the radical right, and heightened by the White House mob, bloggers/commentators have been looking at Girard's theories of scapegoating and mimetic desire as explanatory mechanics for the dynamics of social media:

Who is Rene Girard
Mimetic Desire 101
Preliminary Theory of the In-Group Contrarian

You'll be excited to know I was going to start a thread bucket for structuralist (mainly bricolage) and mimetic desire thinking in this space, and relieved to know I couldn't be arsed.

There's Peter Thiel angle here as well, and I don't think the whole thing is free of... i don't know what to call it? That Silicon Valley/Ycombinator/Astral or Slate Star Codex rationalist progressive theorist? There must be something snappier there. Still, Girard himself is definitely an interesting thinker, though, but at base i'm most sympathetic to Empson's 'mucking about with other people's sex, always a disgusting business of course' view of the desert religions.

The desert religions? Is that Christianity, Judaism and Islam?

Does your comment on Empson mean: these religions interfere with people's private lives, and that's bad, but Girard disagrees?

I don't know Peter Thiel. I haven't heard of "Ycombinator/Astral or Slate Star Codex rationalist progressive theorist" either.

The bandwagon was unknown to me. It's possibly amusing or pleasing that what seemed like a joke from you is actually serious.

yes apologies pf- it’s partly because i’m just doing v rapid posts in short gaps i get at work which i recognise is leading to an unhelpfully compressed or telegraphic style.

the overall area is technology and culture.

ycombinator is a tech start up funding forum, peter thiel is a tech venture capitalist (wholesome companies like paypal, palantir and facebook and bankrupting gawker), slate star codex now astral star codex is a forum for hyperrationalist types who are generally on the neoliberal end of an extremely positivist approach to technology and progress. all of them share something which i find morally and aesthetically unpleasant but which i haven’t put my finger on. they are also not without insight and interesting frameworks for analysing new technology dynamics and the application of notions like epistemology to social media and online spaces.

there are genuine progressives in this area - someone like Adam Elkus, who i’ve mentioned before, includes a knowledge of modern warfare and also a playful sensibility that thwarts and defeats the “silicon valley” progressivism through a fascination with virtual glitching and disruption in the information flow of digital spaces to create a new aesthetic (mainly built around memes).

Geoff Shullenberger is a professor in comparative literature and has been foremost in applying girard to online media.

Would read your desire thread, fizzles.

i saw shullenberger give this talk about thiel and girard (first 15 minutes of this, not the whole thing), which was quite good iirc!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo3DgIX_WL4

ah cheers caek i haven’t seen that. i’m not a *massive* shullenberger stan, but conversations and pieces around the topic have been sufficiently interesting to want to read more. hence the girard.

it’s all got a bit of publicity yesterday after a ross douthat :/ piece in the nyt on foucault which cites shullenberger. who has been tweeting his response.

The risk of Girardianism is that an emphasis on the dangers of the mob becomes an alibi for unjust institutions that claim to protect us from it; the risk of Foucauldianism is the opposite: a systematic anti-institutionalism that underrates the dangers of the mob./8

— Geoff Shullenberger (@daily_barbarian) May 26, 2021

i like his recent coinage "theorycels", although i'm not sure what it means tbqh

Jesus, if I'm going to have to read Girard and Foucault to understand Twitter, I should just cancel my account now.

i’m kind of generally inclined to say as i have no idea what i’m talking about that theory is just a game - fun or not depending on what puts powder in your breech - where you try to find maximum levels of baroque complexity for minimum amounts of explanatory force.

ofc that’s flippant of me, cos there’s plenty of good work that’s gone into anthropology, philosophy, political theory etc that underpins theory buuuuut yeah, it’s largely just a game with categories. that’s not to dismiss it, that playing around with the building blocks in different conceptual ways is a crucial route to generating understanding.

and apologies pinefox, yes, “desert religions”: judaism, christianity, islam and their various wild and wonderful heresies and unorthodoxies. i guess you should probably include zoroastrianism and the druzes but let’s not complicate things further.

and chinaski - thanks! maybe i will cobble together my notes one day, tho i’ve got several threads i *want* to start above this one and equally am not getting round to :(

Fizzles: I think that's a good way to see those religions. People often seem to talk as though Christianity, in particular, is home-grown to my country or even the US, rather than an exotic implant from places with different climate and customs.

Read some shorter things before another big-ish book:

Beowulf (tr.Heaney)
Guillevic - Selected
Fleur Jaeggy - Sweet days of Discipline
Osamu Dazai - No Longer Human

The last two are page after page of suffering of differing varieties. The prose in the Jaeggy is more clinical in its clipped shorter sentences but the Dazai has a bigger timespan and ends up more squalid.

Finished musician Flora Yin-Wong's 'Liturgy,' which was an astonishing and at times frightening book of sensorial exploration of myth, ritual, disease, God, monsters, death, and the limits of knowledge. Highly recommended.

Also finished poet Josef Kaplan's latest, 'Loser,' which is a two-poem book that goes hard in its takedown of both our current sociopolitical situation and our responses to it, but in a way that is original and interesting and *rich*, not at all polemic. Great book.

People often seem to talk as though Christianity, in particular, is home-grown to my country or even the US, rather than an exotic implant from places with different climate and customs.

Well, Christianity as it exists in most of the world today is a product of millennia of symbiotic development with European culture. I don't think either would be recognizably what they are today without the other. This excludes maybe a few small Middle-eastern Christian sects such as the Copts.

Christianity is a sprawling religion, within which one may find everything from Trappist monasteries to Pentecostal snake-handling.

btw, I have begun reading World Light, Halldor Laxness. This one may take me a while.

One useful term I've heard for grouping Christianity, Islam and Judaism is as the "revealed religions". V.S. Naipaul uses the term. It distinguishes the Western religious traditions which trace their founding back to a direct revelation from the Deity to a chosen prophet at a particular time and place, which is considered to be basically complete and infallible, from other Eastern traditions which allow for more of an ongoing process of revelation from observation of nature and study of things as they are.

I hadn't heard of Dear Cyborgs, but I was intrigued by the idea of something that sounded like slight fun but ended up better than that, and I was blown away by it. Thanks for the recommendation!
― toby, Thursday, May 20, 2021 12:24 AM
glad that you enjoyed it--it's still rattling around in my head. and thank you, pinefox, for further coe reflections.

big fan of sweet days of discipline, which seems like the best jaeggy of what's been translated (though i've yet to try proleterka). recently have gone through: outline by rachel cusk, the last resistance by jacqueline rose, & house made of dawn by n. scott momaday, the cusk long overdue and the momaday excellent. not quite sure where to head next.

Love Momaday.

Finished Jackie Ess' "Darryl" today. Recommended for fans of Dennis Cooper and Delany's sexier books. Excellent debut novel, highly recommended.

he risk of Girardianism is that an emphasis on the dangers of the mob becomes an alibi for unjust institutions that claim to protect us from it; the risk of Foucauldianism is the opposite: a systematic anti-institutionalism that underrates the dangers of the mob./8
— Geoff Shullenberger (@daily_barbarian) May 26, 2021 Foucuald himself not too worried about mobs o' pedophiles, for instance, judging by his take on the laws---so, continuing with the neat short formulations, inclined to respond, "Duh."

The points made above about religions are convincing.

But a fact remains: when eg: Europeans or North Americans recount the stories told in the books of Christianity, they are talking about events in a very different part of the world. It's not as though, with all the symbiosis, we now hear "Joseph and Mary came to Newport in South Wales, and could not find room at the inn", or "Jesus created a miraculous amount of food and drink by Lake Erie, in OH". The stories and characters remain unmistakably very foreign.

Eastern religions were mentioned. As far as I can tell, when people in the Far East follow them, they are set in the places where those people live. "The Buddha sat under a banyan tree and ate a bowl of rice", etc.

As far as I can tell, when people in the Far East follow them, they are set in the places where those people live.

Don't think this is quite true - is India really closer to the experience of a Japanese buddhist than the Middle East is to a European?

I don't know enough about those faiths to comment - have no idea where the Buddha is supposed to be from - so your question is probably valid.

I suppose I assume that some people, in some places, have religions that are pretty much from that place. Hindus in India? Inuit with whatever their historic religion is? But perhaps even this assumption is mistaken.

Fair play to Daniel Rf: I now see that Buddha is from Nepal, so yes, that's another foreign implantation when it gets to the Far East.

I read a curious little book: Adventure Lit Their Star by Kenneth Allsop, which fictionalises the fraught years of the first breeding pair of little ringed plovers in the years after WW2. Allsop was an observer at the time and the recreation of a largely vanished space is vivid and beautifully rendered (the area is lightly disguised but is essentially the gravel pits and sewage farms around Wraysbury, Staines and Windsor, near Heathrow). It ends up somewhere between Tarka and JA Baker's The Peregrine, without ever reaching Baker's dizzily transcendental heights or entering Williamson's vivifying zone. A pleasant - if whimsical - read.

Finished Broc Rossell's "Alameda," started a few poetry books but believe I'm going to continue on my Liz Waldner run with a book that arrived in the mail today, "Dark Would (the missing person)"

I'm reading James Salter's Light Years. He's a writer I've heard so much about. He writes beautiful sentences but, despite this being written in the 70s - about the quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - it feels about 100 years old. I want everyone in it to die.

Heh. I like him a lot, but I know what you mean.

Maybe try debut The Hunters, based on his experiences as a fighter pilot in the Korean War: reading it after Light Years, I was struck by the relative tautness, with highflown impressionism appropriately timed, streaming by and through the professionalism (he did this 'til he was thirty-one, pretty old for aerial combat, and the lead is no spring chicken; it's not a boy's initiation etc.). It became required reading in some training programs. There's a second edition, but somebody on a previous WAYR said it's not that different.

Cassada was a significant rewrite of his second novel, The Arm of Flesh and also has to do with flying. But yeah, he did do something to The Hunters as well, not sure what.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/02/11/reviews/010211.11maxlt.html

Thanks! Will have to check the versions of that one too. Here's an appealing take on second ed. The Hunters, and comparison to Light Years in context of his career POV:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/06/23/the-hunters-2/

I like the sound of Chinaski's ADVENTURE LIT THEIR STAR.

Yesterday at last I finished Gail Honeyman: ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE. It was odd for me to read such a popular / bestselling novel, but I realised that I really enjoyed this - maybe if I spent more of my time reading such books, my life would be more enjoyable?

The prose was mostly just serviceable, but with better moments of imagery occasionally. It's all narrated by office worker Eleanor, who is very odd and very isolated. There is an odd combination of a fiction of banality and the mundane ('I do like Tesco's pink wafer biscuits', etc) and a kind of buried Gothic trauma, relating to a tragic past involving her mother. The novel contains a very late twist which I don't think helps. Its celebration of kindness and sympathy for the lonely is welcome, but it can tip too far into sentimentality simply by *too often* repeating statements like 'He reached across and touched my hands. I found it warm and comforting. This must be what it is like, to be comforted by another human being!'.

I suppose the oddity of the book is that the heroine is sensible in so many ways, but also makes bizarre choices of a kind that nobody would - like fixating on a person she's never met and earnestly saying that she's going to marry him. The level of oddity and naivety here doesn't really fit with the character's perceptiveness in other ways, and doesn't exactly seem clearly explained by her tragic past.

I enjoyed it, but it's an incongruous mixture.

I finished "Herzog". Probably a good book to re-read as one ages more into the demographic that Bellow was in when he wrote it. I found the narrator, Herzog, more relatable this time around, not something to be particularly proud of. In some ways, which of course he ruthlessly dissects, he is a pathetic creature. It amazes me that this book was a bestseller in the '60s. There's not much in the way of story, but somehow enough, as Bellow mostly gets over on his splendid style. Herzog is really the only fully fleshed out character, and for all the time spent trying to capture the character of his ex-wife, she remains mostly a cipher. This is not a book that gives you any perspective outside or above that of the narrator. In a sense the book is the narrator's mental life - in some ways closer to something like Robert Lowell's poetry than to a typical novel. I wouldn't be surprised if "Life Studies", published 4 years before "Herzog", wasn't an influence.

rereading stephen dobyns' 'the wrestler's cruel study' because i'm so old that i can't remember anything beyond liking it 25 years ago. it is good; we too should be fighting in the streets over gnostic interpretations

Yesterday I read 3/4 of Ian McEwan's ON CHESIL BEACH. I like it. It's very readable, interesting, poignant. It carries certain elements of enigma and understatement that may or may not be resolved. It seems to contain a few repetitions that might possibly indicate poor editing or that one more draft would have helped to streamline what's already, to be sure, a very slim volume.

i read ed sanders - the party (oof) and relatedly ws merwin - the lice
been reading mathias enard - compass
also robert walser - the assistant

I'm glad I stayed with the Salter (and thanks to JamesRedd and dow for the recommendations). Light Years is a fairytale really, a (mostly) consequence-free fairy tale, full of elisions where everyone floats free of the tides of history. There's a sequence where the main character loses her father; it roots everything, briefly, and is so sparely and beautifully rendered that I almost forgave everyone.

Maybe this is TMI, but if the Macho Men writers of his generation he is one of the few I can (still) stand, there is a kind of a tenderness and grace in his writing I don’t find too much elsewhere. There is something he wrote in Burning the Days about how he felt whilst engaged in a noontime dalliance and watching the Apollo 11 that sort of brings together the two main sides of writing that would be gross coming from pretty much anybody else.

You talk about a loss, one thing he writes about not so often but then very carefully is the loss of his daughter, who might have been electrocuted in a tub or something.

But don’t take my word for it: look for the pull quotes from Michael Ondaatje and Susan Sontag that bedeck Burning the Days.

It's not entirely fair to isolate sections of writing but sometimes, often when he's writing about women, I have to stop and have a quiet 'ffs!' to myself.

She had a fuller figure than Nedra and a somewhat cruel mouth, the lips soft and self-indulgent, the smile irresistible, sly. Her face had the sullen resignation of girls who are studying subjects they see no use for, girls betrayed by circumstance, forced to work on Sundays, girls in foreign brothels. It was a face one could adore.

Salter is the master of prose that shimmers like winter sunlight; he's the closest to Cheever without Cheever's fablist overtones.

Okay, that quote just made me change my mind.

Cheever, Bellow, Salter, Updike -- all terrible creating plausible women.

B-b-but what about Roth?

there is a kind of a tenderness and grace in his writing I don’t find too much elsewhere.

I actually find this kind of thing a lot in old school macho types, Hemingway for instance. It's like establishing their macho credentials gives them an excuse to be sentimental without getting called on it.

Yeah, sometimes I hold against Hemingway some stuff he may have said or done later but might not actually be there in his writing.

I often think about the men in my dad's family in this way. They're a large family, south London, brought up almost entirely by their mum while the old man was down the pub. I'm generalising, but when I look at him and his brothers and their relationships with their wives and daughters, the default mode in life is to be absent, approaching cruel, in conversation to be hugely sentimental and almost hagiographical.

Finished ON CHESIL BEACH. Basically it's excellent. Great precision and detail about the feelings of the two characters (the novel, I realise, is so intensely focused on just these two uncertain people, like a two-hander play), in relation to what they say (which doesn't always express the feelings well). The ending is very poignant, in effectively saying that this one night of misunderstanding, pride and anger meant that the male lead character Edward took a wrong turning and to some degree wasted the rest of his life - though to the author's credit it's less clear than that, and the character does also have some substance and happiness in that life. As when watching the film, I still don't know why he didn't change his mind a bit later (say, a year later) and try to make contact with her again, to find at least some degree of mutual acceptance.

The setting (Chesil Beach, the sea) seems like a bonus, but I'm not sure; wonder if McEwan overdoes it.

It's one of his stronger works, in part b/c it's not so bloody ambitious.

Does The Innocent still hold up?

It's funny, I've never given any of those dudes much of chance because what little I read of them was so gross and macho that I immediately noped out.

Cheever being the big exception, actually. I also LOVED John O'Hara when I was in high school, but I think that's because I was really into tragic drunks.

cheever def my favorite of that crew, really good at writing a devastating paragraph, really good at parsing the inherent surreality of the quiddities of the ruling class and making them register simultaneously as sublime, ridiculous, and profoundly depressingly empty. i also love how he treated his characters like absolute shit

i have liked the little salter i've read tho

Cheever's also closer to a Latin American writer than the others; his fiction has little to do with American 20th century realism.

Speaking of tragic drunks, F. Scott Fitzgerald also somehow less macho than those other guys and perhaps not coincidentally has more interesting female characters.

I finished "Herzog". Probably a good book to re-read as one ages more into the demographic that Bellow was in when he wrote it

was utterly bored by this in college (while I loved loved loved P Roth) so maybe it's time to try again; then again maybe it's better to try things I've never been bored by

Speaking of tragic drunks, F. Scott Fitzgerald also somehow less macho than those other guys and perhaps not coincidentally has more interesting female characters.

― o. nate, Friday, June 4, 2021

otm. He never once condescended to the girls and women he creaed.

My big Cheever experience was and is The Stories of John Cheever. I got the first paperback editon (the mass market, with the scarlet background and the monogram C like a big pewter doorknocker: perfect) which won the National Book Award that year, 1981; the '78 hardback had copped Pulitzer National Book Critics Award, as well it might: a revelatory round-up, going back at least as far as his imaginative breakthough, "The Enormous Radio." The Library of America Collected Stories is even more inclusive (hopefully incl. his publishing debut at 18, about his being kicked out of prep school, POV/attitude also influenced by being from an olde, contentious, somewhat downwardly mobile New England family, with some hifalutin relatives who only approached him when he was sufficiently prestigious), I had read some of Falconer and The Wapshot Scandal, mainly remembering a few episodes or set pieces, and encouraging my notion that the stories are where to start (but may check the novels again some day, think The Wapshot Chronicle is considered the best?_

Pulitzer *and* National Book Critics Circle Award.

Putting off work a minute or two longer, let me add that the first part of Pierre; or, The Ambiguitiesinitially seemed to give Gay a bad name, vays con rococococo effusions that really didn't come down to nuthin, and these were the authorial comments *on* Pierre's own interior decorations (ov brane), not just the latter: so bad on bad adds to the sidewise pile of ecstatic Life With Mama--they address each other as "Sister" and "Brother" while dining in the mansion of their pastoral estate, gloriously established and maintained by a golden chain of Pierres--yadda yadda, he marries his sister--not his Mother, but his self-proclaimed illegitimate half-sister, Isabel or "Isabel," who may be the offspring of his revered father. She is a hauntingly beautiful, also haunted by nebulous memories or whatever they are, also sadly lucid transient, also crazy hot, and he *tells her* they are married, also tells his Mother, who freaks out and vows revenge, also drops in on sweet Lucy his bethrothed, who also freaks out, and in, collapsing. he does this because he instantly resolves that Isabel must be rescued, redeemed, from a life of poorly-paid toil, sufferting the consequences of their (?) father's secret sin and crime against womanhood, also his Mother's vicious Virture: already, without knowing of Isabel, it seems, she, the power in the parish, has gotten the/her pastor to agree on driving a poor seduced and abandoned farm girl and her basterd baby into the the wilderness---and Pierre figures that she will freak out even more if her sainted husband's name etc.

Also he has this vision of how things must proceed, with the illusion-and-lie-bound-world well lost. So the cloying overture was a set-up, and now he starts to seem like a pre-Flannery O'Connor character, only with second thought then mamy more: these are the Ambiguities---also the brain clouds, and the page clouds--increasingly cut through by cold-water details, as he and Isabel, (and Delly, the girl who was scheduled for driving out) start over in the big city--but still, as Pierre becomes immersed in writing--"an immature mind attempting a mature work"--the author's own experiences, in his head and in the biz, diffuse and clarify the reading experiences--so I'm also sometimes reminded of the cracked, glued narrator vs./times novelist that gave us VALIS, by Philip K. Dick, only that (spoiler) turned out to deliberately meta, *as well as* compulsively struggling, while this is more the latter.

Nevertheless, it did pull me along, and I soon learned to jump over or skim the bad stuff, as much as I could manage (at one point, the tougher/more scarred Pierre puts a poison letter under his left boot heel, the other under his right, and says he's gonna skate; right on), and the creator's (like the Creator's) own kind of love and sympathy for his strange young characters (incl. Lucy, who comes to town!)---also shining a funky light on their mystical boho city neighbors, the Apostles)---is powerful, if troubled, and fog-vulnerable, in the Ambiguities, oh yes.

(could do w/o some of the standard and/or stilted melodramatic devices in there from time to time---although---well he's set the bar very high, and I've lived s sheltered life among some of his greatest works.

turned out to (be) deliberately meta, *as well as* compulsively struggling, while this is more the latter.
Maybe Melville wasn't trying for deliberately meta, maybe it was more intuitive, but anyway sometimes it works out well enough. It's worth reading, but watch out.
This Library of America volume opens boldly enough with Pierre, follows with the historical novel Israel Potter (good?), also incl. The Piazza Tales, The Confidence Man, uncollected prose, and Billy Budd, what a finale.

(Gayness per see or as "a degree," as the characters tend to refer to sex as verb-tending, also figures, in that a rich effete cousin with whom Pierre had an early thing, to whatever extent/degree, later moves in on Lucy etc)

per *se*!

Something of a forerunner to Sister Carrie as well.
And Pierre's paranoid view of the Apostles' guru (whose "sleazy rag" of a pamphlet Pierre knows/suppresses knowing has his number, if only by reasonable interpretation, nothing really that personal) reminds me of that billboard in The Great Gatsby.

Pierre will save me!

Sorry, wrong thread

I wrote a lot about Thomas Mann's bat shit political tome, published by New York Review Books.

I'm increasingly resigned to life being about how we deal with being *wrong* about things, which is to say Light Years almost entirely won me over. I'm inclined to say that it's governing tone is sentimental and that it considers life to be too short - and that we must wake up to this, probably too late. I think I felt Salter's mode was collusion early on, but now I think he considers Nedra and Viri emblematic of something flawed and grasping, but forgivably so. The light of the title is, I think, an adjective, as in we miss the simplicity of our early years (their lightness) and are doomed to mourn them from the position of age.

In the interest of balance, here's a passage from towards the end that is like being sung too.

The leaves had come down, it seemed, in a single night. The prodigious arcade of trees in the village gave them up quickly, they fell like rain. They lay like runs of water along the melancholy road. In the turning of seasons they would be green again, these great trees. Their dead branches would be snapped away, their limbs would quicken and fill. They would again, in addition to their beauty, to the roof they made beneath the sky, to their whispering, their slow, inarticulate sounds, the riches they poured down, they would, besides all this, give scale to everything, a true scale, reassuring, wise. We do not live as long, we do not know as much.

Gah, stray 'it's' there. Ugh.

tldr; didn't see it:)

Walter Abish alphabetical Africa an oulipan caper where in the first chapter all the words begin with A, in the second chapter A & B and so on, adding a letter each time, and then after chapter 26 he starts removing a letter until it gets back to all As. The constraint is interesting, I had a go at writing a review with all A-words and it does sort of push you in cool directions, like it’s your hand moving the planchette but not. I found it very neat that even in the middle chapters where abish had recourse to the entire alphabet and could write “normally”, he stuck to an odd idiosyncratic style established in the earlier chapters.

Authors can be circumscribed in other ways tho & it’s funny for as surreal & cerebral as it is it can feel oddly bound by 70s mores: the Africa it explores is avowedly a construct (itself a very late 70s move) but does that excuse the dark continent cliches; the main female character is in some ways a stock femme fatale (luckily “breast” is available two chapters in!) — but then it will get pretty explicitly anti-colonialist and portray a trans character... relatively well for 1978

Anyway it is of course an achievement in itself - but I spotted this in the first J chapter
https://i.imgur.com/FzsXxdR.jpg

& then towards the end https://i.imgur.com/9J4UvDa.jpg
A line of what, Walter? (This in the second S chapter). Then a few pages later I think I’ve cracked the code when I read consequently Jacqueline misses a description of Alva on page forty-nine and on page ninety-nine. The second mistake is on page 99! So I go back and the first mistake is on... page 26. Bah.

The citationless Wikipedia article says there are at least 4 errors and up to 43 (! I do not believe this for a second) & it is disputed as to whether they are intentional; along with the two above I came across two that were so glaring that it was almost impossible to believe they weren’t deliberate, but I can’t think of a single reason for them to be there so who the fuck knows

Chinaksi, that book also told me some things about middle aging, about time, that turned out to be true. I still think of the guy who liked to visit, who thought of himself as a Dickensian uncle (think that was the exact phrase), who gets mugged, and beaten down in the street, badly injured. He's never the same: more reserved, way back there among the characters, occasionally mentioned. A friend of my father's was like that after his heart attack in Vegas---he outlived it by many years, but.

David eagleton Sum another exercise in imagination that sort of bumps up against the authors limits. 40 very short (~2 page) stories each set in a hypothetical afterlife; the first, title, story sets the tone: in the next world you experience again everything that happened in your life but sorted by category, so you spend a day being about to sneeze and two hours pretending to recognise someone or whatever

The writing is good and some of the scenarios are really poignant, funny and sad - the author is a neuroscientist and all the models of the hereafter have an admirable lucidity - but this attitude starts showing through the general cloud of humanism that I keep bristling against. Most egregiously there’s a story that seems to gravely misunderstand MLK and has god commiserating with him & Gandhi about “movements that sweep over the tops of their founders”

I did like it despite all that, but in the spirit of the thing im allowed to imagine a reality where this exact book gets written to the same standard by an author with a more salutary weltanschauung

Just read Alfred's xpost review: yep, Reflections of a Nonpoltical Man, just paring his nails n the tower, reflections incl. good one on irony of art and btw nonironic nod to the pure German spirit-->war, just sayin. Wonder if he ever though better of that, or was it like, "Lenin good, Stalin bad" before Putin's ascendancy (maybe some Russians still say it, not so loudly).

An Indigenous People's History of the United States By Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
Scathing look at America's treatment of its indigenous population from Penguin's Revisioning series. Dunbar-Ortiz helped Howard Zinn with research for his A People's History Of the United States as i found out while watching Exterminate All The Brutes. She pointed out to him that he had left out pretty much all reference to the indigenous population. He said he wouldn't know where to start, why didn't she write one so decades later she came through with this. Or something to that effect with more focus on her own agency.
Anyway I'm still in the 18th century, a couple of years after Independence and there's already a heavy pall of intentional genocide.
Quite great though.
I think I may make my way thorough a few more of this Revisioning series, definitely the one on Black and LatinX US History written by her husband Paul Ortiz,. I saw a good webinar with him on his book. I'm also picking up some more Indigenous focused US history stuff. Bought a couple yesterday.

THe Lies That Bind Kwame Anthony Appiah
Interesting look at identity from a Harvard professor who grew up as a mixed race kid in the UK then Ghana. |I think this may have been a book Angela Saini recommended on a podcast a few months ago.
It has an outline of intersectionality that was similar to the one I had surmised. Like an expansion on the queer feminist focused one taht was due to teh person who devised it originally. I thought it was probably something that was a universal thing but with each person having their own layers. he doesn't quite say that but what he does would lead to that understanding I think. I was looking for a succinct description of the process. I assume that everybody does have different facets and aspects they communicate with different people from and it is something that is just more enhanced in a marginalised person because of different valorisation and leverage etc. & is deeply interlinked with what is also known as codeswitching though that may appear more superficial. I think the reasons for it are far from cosmetic though.
Anyway finding it an easy book to read when I find the time to do so. & it does have a lot more to it than what I have said so far.
I think it and teh Angela Saini are both books i wish some people who are supposed to be progressive but seem to be unaware of tehir own prejudices would benefit from reading which is something that keeps running through my head as i read it and the other decolonisation and anti-racism books I'm reading.

How To be An Antiracist Ibram X. Kendi
Another reasonably easy read other than potentially triggering about racism being faced and exclusion of some individuals being talked about. & i think if that puts you off you're not facing reality
This was the book i managed to get for a Euro a week and a bit ago. I'm really glad that I found it so cheap though would have paid more for it. Again something that I wish people who don't seem to be aware of how racism works and tends to permeate society would read instead of whitewashing things.
Good book anyway. Author talking about his upbringing and what he faced throughout growing up and the things he learnt in the process.
I think I will be looking to read his other work afterwards if I can get my hands on it

I've started Molly Prentiss, TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980 (2016), a book I've owned for about 5 years and not properly read till now.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/07/books/review-tuesday-nights-in-1980-offers-bright-lights-big-strivers.html

It's mainly about the NYC downtown art scene in 1980, I think, with reference also to the Argentinian Junta. It has a good concept in an art critic with synaesthesia, who writes down his unusual sense perceptions. It's not terrifically well-written - I haven't noticed a good image or fine sentence in 50 pages. It partakes of a slack idiom that's happy to be obscene: 'this had fucked up his life', says the 3rd-person narrator. A generation or two earlier, I think that narrators didn't talk that way. (Updike, say, was very sexual but wasn't his approach to descriptive prose more rigorous?) I find the slack obscenity lazy and striving too hard to be cool and mean. It's fairly normal nowadays though - I'm sure that eg: Franzen would do it. If I were a writer, I would try not to.

The novel contains a horrible promiscuous male who casually has sex with women once then ignores them. I find this hateful and it puts me off the novel. However, he is only part of it. I must persist.

I went to grad school with Molly. She is a lovely person, and I actually really loved her poems, which were strange and did a lot of interesting stuff with narrativity; was never really attracted to her prose, and haven't read the novel.

It is worth noting, though, that our profs were people like Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Tom Barbash, and Miranda Mellis— the more abject and experimental side of the fiction spectrum, in other words.

I've started reading "History of Rock and Roll Vol 1: 1920-1963" by Ed Ward. I'm up to 1954. The book focuses a lot on the labels and personalities that released early singles that were influential on the music that would become known as rock and roll. It can turn into just a list of songs with brief descriptions, but that works fine when you can pop open any one that sounds interesting on Youtube and listen to it.

Finished Rindon Johnson's "The Law of Large Numbers." Got a package from my friend Ed in the mail of a collaborative book he did with an artist entitled "The Rose" alongside a chapbook from M. Elizabeth Scott. Going to read the latter when I get off work this evening.

found the copy of Ken Kesey's the Last Roundup that I have to return at the end of the month yesterday/
Quiite enjoying the prose. Read the first few chapters.

bought some more books today cos I didn't think I was reading enough at the same time

Finished both of the books in the package from Ed. Now re-reading Dennis Cooper's "The Sluts," because Jackie Ess' "Darryl" makes explicit reference to its universe, and I am pondering writing a review of the latter.

reading some swedenborg for the first time. was hoping for descriptions of conversations with angels & demons and depictions of heaven & hell... what i got: 300+ pages of biblical exegesis.

I just got Impro by Keith Johnstone, who was a British theatre guy who specialized in improvisation and spontaneity. A friend recommended it for running/playing rpgs.

speaking of dennis cooper i started b.r. yeager's 'negative space' which feels like a post-cooper book: a lot of kids and they're all fucked up on drugs and stuff like that, lots of violence and blankness, the internet is in there too. sadly it just makes me realise again how singular cooper is, because the yeager book seems flat, cliche, even tedious in comparison - there are some alright parts, but a disappointment based on how enthusiastic the reviews and endorsements for it have been

Sill reading this Library of America Melville, and struck by how the third person narration of "Benito Cereno" seems integral, after the struggles with it in Pierre. It's not omnisicent narration: everybody but the POV character is a mystery to him, less to the reader, seeing through the well-meaning American Captain Amasa'a limitations what he keeps trying to explain away, soothing his riled self, with professional observation and filters of courtesy, congeniality, and confidence of status---as a superior, he is even something of a negrophile, as Eddie Murphy used to put it. This almost gets him killed, but the system adjusts. Testimonial documents don't incl. motive for the slaves' revolt---does incl. descriptions of several of the core participants has having been known as smart, talented negroes, good negroes in the community---but it's easily inferred that they were driven to it by having been uprooted from that community, sailing with their master to wherever--even if it were to turn out to be a better place than they've known, could just as or more likely be worse. there is still no agency.The Captain is as much a creature of his own gilded cage as the first-person narrator of "Bartleby, The Scrivener," as tested by the Other, but what the hell, both old privileged white guys are the survivors (spoiler).

Apologies for being lazy, but I'm looking for a recommendation - can anyone recommend a good, short book or article about Yugoslavia in the 80-90s? I'm looking for something that covers culture as well as history and politics. (I have a work thing I need to get up-to-speed for fairly quickly...) At the moment I'm just cribbing bits from Judt's Postwar...

I continue with TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980 - I realise that it would seem rational to abandon it but I have this nice hardback and I want to do it justice.

So far I can't really remember reading a good sentence - though it's better on the synaesthetic colours, its best theme. It's strangely wooden on 1960s Argentina - does the author know much about this world? - it all feels very potboiler-level - but disappointing on the US too. A girl in the Mid-West suddenly realises that she needs to move to NYC - especially when she sees a postcard of it and "Her heart actually stopped". Actually? When she gets to NYC she sees the horrible womaniser artist and experiences, wait for it, "love at first sight".

Meanwhile I returned to a couple of chapters of Hugh Kenner, THE POUND ERA. The magnificence of this book is known. I wonder, though, how easy it is to learn concrete facts and ideas from it, as it's all a montage of suggestions and asides.

I'm closing in on the end of World Light, Halldor Laxness. My major impression is that it is a sort of ambitious anti-epic extended to epic length. But even though Laxness had many things he wanted to say and he says them all, the book never quite settles down or decides what kind of story it wants to be. It sloshes around from spirituality to sentimentality to satire and this dilutes the effect of all of them.

Finally cracked open In the Land of the Cyclops, the Knausgaard essay collection that I received earlier this year via my Archipelago sub. Despite never having read K's fiction, I am pretty squarely in the target audience for this type of thing; and the brief piece I read this morning (a laudatory review of Houellebecq's Submission) was perfect in its length, depth, breadth, and the rhythms of its prose.

I'm also taking a rare excursion into contemporary fantasy with my book club's latest pick, The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune. The first 100 or so pages have been long on setup and short on conflict, but I appreciate that the setup is heavily character-focused, with the world-building happening unobtrusively around the edges.

Another reason to never read Knausgaard is his love of Houellebecq, a vile writer and person.

He said in the review that this was the first book of Houellebecq's he had ever read, after years of ignoring people recommending his work *shrug*

I thought it was a very fair review that didn't turn into a defense of Houellebecq, though I could see others reading it as special pleading (he is keen to downplay the ~contemporary relevance~ of Submission, in favor of its more putatively universal literary virtues)

There is literally nothing that Houellebecq has written that isn't Islamophobic, misogynist trash— perhaps I'm missing something in translation, as I've only <<Les particules élémentaires>> in the original, but he's not a great stylist, just a racist provocateur. Not trying to attack you, bernard snowy, I just find anyone actually liking his books to be a bit suspect because there doesn't seem to be a way to enjoy his books without endorsing his ideology, which is monstrous to say the least.

He's also been writing a variation on the same book for his entire career: depressed middle-aged man with addiction problems has racial anxieties that are confirmed by outlandish, fantastical acts. In the meantime, he has bad sex and ponders the meaninglessness of existence. The end.

Submission had a very funny ending

One funny thing about Submission is that Islamic government is in many ways an improvement over the previous secular French regime, not least for sozzled, aging, sex-obsessed, economically-precarious, bachelor intellectuals.

Yes exactly! I love that the threat of this scary alien religion gets totally neutralized when it comes to power as a pragmatic and venal ruling order, and none of the sharia restrictions really have teeth provided one knows the right people and is willing to at least make a public show of converting. The idea of wealthy Arab princes amassing prestige by generously endowing university chairs of French literature is admittedly farfetched, but it's also a very funny rebuke to neoliberal austerity -- like, "If you're so worried about this culture changing or being lost, why haven't you done anything to help the people whose life's work is preserving and transmitting it?"

Forging ahead to Bloomsday.

Ok

Happy #Bloomsday2021! Introducing my son Daedalus way back when to his namesake. Look at that smile. He knows good literature when he sees it. 😍 pic.twitter.com/tLY09BRqTt

— Nora McGregor (@ndalyrose) June 16, 2021

.

Finished the Penguin Book Of Japanese Short Stories. Loved it, with one main reservation: I like Haruki Murakami well enough, but two (admitidely short) stories and an introduction in which he himself admits to not being big on Japanese literature and not having read many of the stories before is way overkill. Still, gotta move copies I guess.

Some highlights:

"Peaches", Abe Akira - on the unreliability of memory, long deconstruction of a childhood recollection.

"Cambridge Circus", Shibata Motoyuki - deals w/ the infinite possibilities brought up by our everyday choices, great sadboi stuff.

"Kudan", Uchida Hyakken - Narrator wakes up to find himself a cow demon that people demand prophecies from.

"Mr English", Genji Keita - About an office worker whose only skill was speaking English before this became common in the Japanese business world; a cantankerous, insecure jerk, but we end up feeling for him because he's such an underdog. Apparently the author wrote a bunch of salarymen stories, would love to track down.

"American Hijiki", Nosaka Akiyuki - Middle aged middle class dude has to entertain american tourist couple his wife made friends with in Hawaii; meanwhile he's remembering being a pimp in the early days of the US occupation.

"Pink", Hoshino Tomoyuki - A horrible heat wave hits Japan, leading to people spinning for hours on end as a sort of spiritual remedy. Thing quickly escalates into Japan going to war. A description of how a right-wing radical is recruited feels very much akin to the western alt right playbook.

Today is the anniversary of when James Joyce wrote the entirety of Ulysses in a single day. You don't have to like the result to respect the process!!!

— scott manley hadley (@Scott_Hadley) June 16, 2021

*burps*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm51ihfi1p4

Just starting north and south by Gaskell. Early days but must admit I’m finding it a bit of a slog so far. Any thoughts before I tap out?

It's good; it has like two false starts before the story gets going, but it ends up working.

It's her most clunkily written book, though, on a sentence level. And she has a huge crush on her main character so you have to deal with A LOT of her going on endlessly about Margaret's white taper fingers. It's still really good though, somehow.

All the cultural stuff, south vs. north, the pov of mill-owners and the pov of workers, she handles really well.

“False starts” is good enough for me to persist. Thank you!

ha I'm a squinter and was reading that as referring to Kentucky-Cali-Kentucky's own Mary Gaitskill---I love most of her stuff, but could kinda see her going in that direction (but I'm a squinter).
Still reading the library's Library of America Melville, and just finished (for now) The Confidence Man--His Masquerade, which, appropriately, resists any any comfortable stance of interpretation, or at least mine. All I can do is watch, as the con or cons (one guy in many guises, I assumed, but come to think of it, maybe nor: there's a lot of that going around), on a riverboat "bound for the auction blocks of New Orleans, " as the jacket flap copy emphasizes, approaches his or their lastest chosen mark, adapting conversational gambits accordingly. It seems too patterned at first, like a popular Saturday Night Live sketch, methodically working that premise to death, 'til time for the next recycling---in a more longwinded and otherwise complicated-not-complex way.
But the con just has to keep going, in and around the moment and boat (hi ho, lets go though the "poor emigrants" banging against the walls in their shoddy hammocks, didn't know riverboats had steerage too, but why not), changing even before the pushback gets stronger and scarier, with stories from Reality vs. The Man's sweet undertow of reductive optimism-p-eventually, his own pushback even seems honestly, and understandably, indignant, vs. one relentless revelation of financial snares (searing focus evoking the experience of the author's father, who died young, his uncle, who then tried to sort things out, and Herman himself, as compulsively hapless heads of household, at least on contracts)--which gets twisted back, reduced to one point, now seeming the pissiest--the Confidence Man pushes back against such zealous overkill (that he thought he could turn aside), and, in scenes like these, he seems not entirely wrong: we do need some kind of basic lower-case confidence, faith in faith's ability to keep us going, despite all the amputations, beyond-below the limits of rational discourse and all its elaborations---but he/they can't leave it alone, can't be alone, or lower-case for long (and then there's the money, which can sometimes seem like a trophy, but 0 social safety net here, as the reader is often reminded in passing: money and talk about money occupy all tables and pews here).