Now the year is turning and the eeriness comes: what are you reading in autumn 2021?

A reliquary of sodden texts for the turning year.

Replaces Are You There, God? What Are You Reading In The Summer Of 2021?

Diane Middlebrook - Her Husband
Charles Portis - True Grit

Said by fans to be atypical Portis, but not nec. disappointing---I still need to read *something* by him

Finished the Canadian poet Ryan Fitzpatrick's "Fake Math" this morning, and realized from the note at the end that it was written using a sort of conceptual writing practice called flarf which was popular in the aughts. Didn't seem so while reading it, which is much to Fitzpatrick's credit, as much flarf writing is garbage.

Finished Daryl Gregory's The Album of Dr. Moreau (2021) which sputters out once all the conceits have been introduced (boyband of hybrids, murder mystery, apparently set in the 1990s).

Mat Johnson's Pym (2011) was better. Similar big concepts, so many that the Armageddon is a small side plot. Feels like a first novel where the author had to get all their ideas out, although it was the author's third.

Now halfway through Nnedi Okorafor's novella Binti (2015) which is my first encounter with Afrofuturism in writing. I can't say I find the plot engaging yet -- the biggest event so far hinged on a random item the protagonist was holding having magical powers. The portrayal of a future version of Himba culture is interesting enough to keep me going.

I'm still on

R.F. Foster: W.B. YEATS: A LIFE: VOL 1: THE APPRENTICE MAGE

and

James Joyce: POEMS & EXILES.

I've begun Nella Larsen's first novel, Quicksand.

cesar aira - the little buddhist monk

humorous and lighthearted novella. fun to read, but also seems like it was fun to write. and its length and simplicity made me think hey i could write something like this. there is another novella collected in the same book called the proof which ill read soon

Finished a translation of Catalan poet Joan Brossa's poetry, El saltamari (The Tumbler), and also finished a short book of essays on poetry by the sadly departed Leslie Scalapino.

Still on the Maine book, and also reading a long book of Lyn Hejinian's related to nighttime— but the latter I'm only reading before bed/as I fall asleep. Been giving me strange dreams. Fulfills its purpose perfectly!

QUICKSAND is quite ... melodramatic? a lot happens, she travels between continents, it's all at a high pitch. I think it's probably not as good a book as PASSING. But worth reading.

I finished all Joyce's poems, then his play Exiles, and all the drafts and notes to that which I'd never read before.

Then I reread an important critical chapter on Exiles.

In the last week or so I've read or reread most of the 'minor' Joyce: all the non-fiction, all the poems (including fragments from before he'd really started as a writer), the play. It was quicker than I expected, given a more concerted effort than usual. I should perhaps reread his slender volume GIACOMO JOYCE, written in Trieste.

20pp of Foster's Yeats vol 1 to go.

I finished anthony veasna so’s afterparties last night, ended up really loving it

starting anand gopal’s no good men among the living

I finished Paul Beatty's "The Sellout", an absurdist satire about a predominantly Black low-income urban neighborhood in Los Angeles called Dickens which has recently mysteriously disappeared from official city maps and signage. The protagonist, a farmer who lives in the former Dickens and grows highly potent marijuana among other things, tries to re-establish Dickens as an official place and to bring back racial segregation, though its not clear if this is just a prank. Along the way he also reluctantly acquires a slave, which lands him in the Supreme Court. There is a high zaniness quotient here which might be better in small doses, but Beatty has a charming way of tip-toeing up to the line of things you can't say and then just barreling across it.

Reading Hejinian's "Book of a Thousand Eyes" before sleeping, and John Paetsch's nearly impenetrable but strangely propulsive "Ctasy" otherwise. The latter writer is an expert on Deleuze, so the impenetrable weirdness of his prose isn't surprising.

O.Nate: good summary. I think that book is quite outstanding in its outrageousness, the way it instals a voice right from the start and keeps going, burning through sacred cows, shibboleths, whatever other very mixed metaphors I can find ... The phrase "black comedy" would obviously be correct if "Black" wasn't such a keyword in other ways (cf the fascinating discussion very near the end of kinds of blackness, with Godard and Bjork, as I recall, in the final category!).

Reading about Joyce's PORTRAIT in the book THE STRONG SPIRIT.

Junichiro Tanizaki - The Makioka Sisters. Read almost everything by him except what is seen as his masterpiece - probably lazily so, as it happens to be his biggest book. Though I can see it. Four Sisters, two of whom need to get married. What Tanizaki does here is the quiet set of traumas bought upon by the situation and the people around it, the hierarchies they occupy. Two things it does well: 1) to shadow the odd event coming into this chamber (in this case WWII, where the Tanizaki's befriend a German family who go back to Germany just as the war is about to begin, who then send letters now and then) and the use of the telephone - there is a sorta comedic phase of what to/what not to say on the telephone, as oposed to a more formal manner - such as writing a letter, or actually having a face-to-face conversation. These are shifting formalities in the way of what actually happens: marriage as a way of arresting decline in status, marriage in the way of freedom to live in other ways, which are explored in many other novels.

William di Canzio - Alec, a novel about Maurice and Alec Scudder, the couple in E.M. Forster's Maurice.

I read The Makioka Sisters with delight about a decade ago. The 1984 film is a solid adaptation.

Heidegger - the question concerning technology and other essays.

I'm reading it, but am I understanding it? (no)

Just now took a look into Crowds and Power, which confused my totally unfair Random Read Test w excellent anecdote about yet another Roman Emperor I never heard off, *then* explaining it like he was too used to ramming Western Civ into hungover undergrads. Oh well, maybe I'll skip those parts. Are his memoirs good reading?

I loved The Sellout and find myself thinking about it often (the scene with the flooded bus comes to me at odd times).

I've been reading The Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie. It's an account of Diane Perry who became Tenzin Palmo, the first western female to become an ordained Buddhist nun. I'm quite a sucker for spiritual auto/biography, especially with extended accounts of retreat and enlightenment, but this is pretty hagiographic, with mythic elements often presented uncritically as fact.

I have a few pages of appendices etc to finish in Yeats, but I have already commenced Steven Connor: THE MADNESS OF KNOWLEDGE.

A dazzling discussion of the nature of how people feel about knowledge. I'm only about 5pp in to a 300pp book, and it's already said more than many 300pp books might do.

QUICKSAND is quite ... melodramatic?

I would say it was quite ... condensed. Larsen had a specific point she wanted to illustrate about the experience of middle class, educated, American women of mixed race and making her point required her protagonist to sample the spectrum of social niches available to her. That entailed a lot of scenery changes. Since the point was that none of these niches were happy or satisfying choices, it didn't take a lot of exposition to establish that and shuffle her into the next niche.

I'd say Larsen showed great subtlety in her explanations of the source of her protagonist's social discomforts and dissatisfaction, but by constantly whisking her away to new scenery so rapidly it reduced the stature of her main character and made her dilemma be as much about her own immaturity as about her social predicament.

Now I've started Highland Fling, Nancy Mitford's first novel. Not surprisingly, it shares a great deal in common with early Waugh, with just a slight nod in the direction of Wodehouse.

THe Guilty Feminist Deborah Franbces White
The book related to a podcast I listen to weekly. Starts with a history and overview of feminism tied in with the author having spent time in the Jehovah's Witness as a teen which left a lasting mark on her.
Been wanting to read this for a while and I think it gets its point across, may not be the best source on feminism but I think it gives some grounding. Enjoying it so far.

HOw to Rig An Election Nic Cheeseman
Book looking at how elections have been corrupted over time. Its just been talking about Kenya in the section I'm in .
INteresting.

Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities
1963 book on what makes a city work. I was watching a series on Planning For teh Post Pandemic City over the pandemic which had me thinking about town planning etc which this gives soe grounding for.
I saw a documentary on the writer last year which was interesting so finding this in the library was great. ONly got as far as the introduction so far but going to get into this .

I'm totally ignorant of this writer, who sounds very appealing:

Winner of the National Book Award, the Newbery Medal, and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, Virginia Hamilton (1934–2002) wove Black folktales and narratives of African American life and history into a body of work that forever changed American children’s writing and made her its most honored writer.
Join Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and award-winning children’s book author and memoirist Jacqueline Woodson (Brown Girl Dreaming) for a conversation about Hamilton’s life and wildly inventive novels, newly collected in a Library of America volume edited by Hamilton biographer Julie K. Rubini.



Wednesday, October 6
6:00 – 7:00 pm ET

Register For Online Event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virginia-hamilton-and-the-transformation-of-american-childrens-literature-registration-175570535197?aff=campaignmonitor

NOW AVAILABLE

Virginia Hamilton: Five Novels
Hardcover • 907 pages
List price: $35.00
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“We are all so fortunate to have these wonderful and courageous novels to guide us.”—Nikki Giovanni

Virginia Hamilton: Five Novels
Zeely | The House of Dies Drear | The Planet of Junior Brown | M.C. Higgins, The Great | Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush

Edited by Julie K. Rubini

This Library of America volume collects five of Virginia Hamilton’s most beloved works, along with beautifully restored illustrations.

In Zeely (1967), Geeder Perry and her brother, Toeboy, go to their uncle’s farm for the summer and encounter a six-and-a-half-foot-tall Watutsi queen and a mysterious night traveler. In The House of Dies Drear (1968), Thomas Small and his family move to a forbidding former way station on the Underground Railroad—a house whose secrets Thomas must discover before it’s too late. Junior Brown, a 300-lb. musical prodigy, plays a silent piano in The Planet of Junior Brown (1971), while homeless friend Buddy draws on all his New York City wits to protect Junior’s disintegrating mind.

In the National Book Award–winning M. C. Higgins, The Great (1974), Mayo Cornelius Higgins sits atop a forty-foot pole on the side of Sarah’s Mountain and dreams of escape. Poised above his family’s home is a massive spoil heap from strip-mining that could come crashing down at any moment. Can he rescue his family and save his own future? And in Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982), fifteen-year-old Tree’s life revolves around her ailing brother, Dab, until she sees cool, handsome Brother Rush, an enigmatic figure who may hold the key to unlocking her family’s troubled past.

just read The Road (had seen the film but was unprepared for the cannibalism) and am halfway through Things Fall Apart, which is like what i remember of The Famished Road but a quarter of the length so i might actually finish it.

(this month's theme: books less than 200 pages, trying to reduce the backlog)

Any recommendations, I'm after some short books myself (I've read Things Fall Apart). Currently 2/3 done with Ducks, Newburyport - I gave up about halfway through a year or so ago but I no longer no why as it's obviously extraordinary.

the things i have lined up are nothing special: another ed mcbain, some short stories that have been bundled in with kindle edition of American Gods, the rest of the Aeschylus i read a couple of months ago maybe, anything else i can find in my _todo shelf on the kobo. Jacob's Room perhaps. and i have at least 4 short story collections i'm part way through.

(november is female month (Small Isle...), december is dickens)

ledge and koogs:

for fiction, I've been on a Christa Wolf kick, her books "ACCIDENT" and "NO PLACE ON EARTH" are both extraodinary and short...I'm also re-reading (for the first time in a decade!) Maurice Blanchot's "Death Sentence," which is also very short and rather extraordinary in a totally different way.

i lost all ability to focus on reading for weeks at a time so it took me a while to finish sentimental education, which i got pretty bogged down in even though it's obviously a total masterpiece

i just started malina which i am already very taken with and am kinda breezing through, feels great

Ugh, Malina is SO good.

I'd never read Joy Williams! I'm three quarters through The Quick and the Dead.

xps thanks table! they sound good, annoyingly none of them are available as ebooks so I can't read them RIGHT NOW.

I've been reading "The Anthologist" by Nicholson Baker, an amiable, extremely low-key novel about a published poet who has been commissioned to write an introduction to a new poetry anthology but is suffering from a monumental case of writer's block and the lingering effects of a recent break-up.

lol that sounds both dope and extremely nicholson baker

There's a sequel to it, which I expect I'll read also.

I'm reading The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, which has many scholarly essays in it, and Misquoting Jesus by Bart E. Ehrman which is about textual analysis of the New Testament. I'm an atheist but I find this stuff fascinating. One early example from Ehrman is that the passage in John about the adulterous woman, the "let he who is without sin" one, was not by the original author, and that Jesus' response isn't actually a good interpretation of the Hebrew Bible.

I'm still reading Hejinian's "Book of Thousand Eyes" before sleep, but last night finished a re-read of Blanchot's "Death Sentence," and this morning I cracked open my copy of Christa Wolf's "The Quest for Christa T.," her most famous book and one of hers that I've never read! One chapter in and I already know I'm going to love it.

I really liked The Anthologist and yup, it's full Nicholson Baker.

I'm reading William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade. It's fun.

I finished Highland Fling. Pretty good for a first novel, mildly comical but nothing to get excited about.

Last night I got my feet wet in 42nd Parallel, the first part of the Dos Passos trilogy, U.S.A. This work was an obvious influence on writers as diverse as Steinbeck and Thomas Wolfe, but I think I'll lay it aside for now. I have a library copy of the Library of America volume of Octavia Butler that includes Kindred and that seems more inviting at the moment than Dos Passos and his impressionistic kaleidoscopic style, which reads rather crudely to me, a century onward.

I got that LOA on Butler from the library a few months ago. Enjoy.

Starting Dana Spiotta’s Innocents and Others - partly in anticipation of a trip to Los Angeles. Any recommendations for contemporary-ish L.A. lit that isn’t, like, Bret Easton Ellis or Hollywood nostalgia?

starting on freedom by maggie nelson

First Love by Gwendolyn Riley. Halfway through — I always think books like this are going to be cringe and Thought Catalog-y, but it’s pretty good so far.

ghost wars - steve(?) coll
the Italian - Ann Radcliffe

Ed B, I am a big fan of the poet Sesshu Foster, who has written a lot about LA, though his novels tend to be speculative..the most recent being about a dirigible company and local uprisings in the near future.

This may be of interest solely to me here but I just finished The Naturalist On The River Amazons by Henry Walter Bates, from 1863. It’s the first book of natural history I’ve read through, that wasn’t by Peter Matthiessen. Overall quite readable for being a 150 year old science book although there is occasional colonialist bigotry.

The depiction of that environment though is so strikingly unique, it makes me so sad that I can never see what he saw. Of course he also had to eat a lot of really weird stuff which would be a deal-breaker for me. Quite a bit about mass slaughter of turtles too, that was not cool.

The King at the Edge of the World by Arthur Phillips which I picked up hoping, based on the blurb, that it would be more than just straightforward historical fiction (which I have nothing against, just not my cup of tea), and it was and I enjoyed it a great deal. Now on to Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez which is supposedly about gender bias in data but in fact seems to be a systematic description, explanation, and statistical breakdown of gender inequality across the world in every walk of life. Which is fine. (The book, not the inequality.)

Finished 'The Quest for Christa T.,' now onto poet Steve Zultanski's latest, entitled 'Relief.'

Having to rush read Crazy Horse by Mari Sandoz since i just found out that it has a hold on it. Library book which i got out a couple of months ago alongside her Cheyenne Autumn.
Do enjoy her writing I think. Just wish I didn't need to get through this at speed since it would be more comfortable to take more time.

Maybe take an extra day and pay the overdue fine?

contemporary-ish L.A. lit that isn’t, like, Bret Easton Ellis or Hollywood nostalgia

I think Paul Beatty's "The Sellout" fits the bill. Lots of LA atmosphere.

I've been trying to read where I can and today finished Caradog Prichard's One Moonlit Night. It's a slight novel, translated from Welsh and tells the story of a little lad growing up in a remote mining village during WWI (albeit the war is far off, a rumour). The chronology of the narrative isn't always clear and it's written in a mix of vernacular and a kind of hymnal, devotional voice of the land, which is immersive and dislocating at the same time. Obviously it's translated, but it reminded me a bit of Joyce (Dubliners, Portrait) and of Sunset Song in its rhythms and obsessions and it had a real emotional heft.

That sounds good!

I finished Zultanski's 'Relief,' and this morning sort of sped-read through Gabri3lle D4niels' 'Something Else Again.'

The latter was sent to me by a friend who published the US edition of the book, hoping I might write something nice about it on social media. I can't do so, because I don't think the book is very good, but I am going to try my best to write something even-handed nonetheless.

have just read g.b. edwards' the book of ebenezer le page, a rather idiosyncratic portrayal of island life on guernsey circa 1900-1970. very good.

now about to start on dorothy carrington's granite island: a portrait of corsica

Have got through like half of Crazy Horse so doing good time and did decide I might take some extra days. Its like 400+ pp.
Should have paced myself better but didn't really think I needed to until I saw it was wanted elsewhere.

Why I'm NO Longer Talking TO White People About Race Reni Eddo-Lodge
THis seems like avery logical covering of a loto finformation some of which I was already familiar with. Good place to start possibly if one wasn't that familiar with it. I am seeing some negative reviews of it on Goodreads etc which I now think may refelct on the reviewer more than teh book but Maybe that's to be expected.
Got like 2/3s of the way through this when I realised i need to get through Crazy Horse.
& got this when I was a similar length through the Guilty Feminist which is also good.

HOw To Rig An Election Cheeseman
INteresting book on corruption in politics. Finding this particularly so cos he's talking about Kenya quite a bit.
Looking also at how it is more authoritarian regimes taht have to go through teh process of pretending in this way. But maybe taht's already clear.
Anyway good charity shop find I think.

I finished Baker's The Anthologist, which seemed mainly an excuse for Baker to share his thoughts on poetry, and some quite funny riffs on the same.

For example, on Ashbery:

"He was born in 1927. He has won every poetry prize known to man or beast, and he was part of that whole ultracool inhuman unreal absurdist fluorescent world of the sixties and seventies in New York. Once he'd edited an art magazine, Art News. Even his name is coolly, absurdly, missing one of its Rs."

Or on poetry's lasting cultural value:

"One day the English language is going to perish. The easy spokenness of it will perish and go black and crumbly--maybe--and it will become a language like Latin that learned people learn. And scholars will write studies of Larry Sanders and Friends and Will & Grace and Ellen and Designing Women and Mary Tyler Moore, and everyone will see that the sitcom is the great American art form. American poetry will perish with the language; the sitcoms, on the other hand, are new to human evolution and therefore will be less perishable. Some scholar will write, a thousand years from now: Surprisingly very little is known of Monica Mcgowan Johnson and Marilyn Suzanne Miller, who wrote the 'hair bump' episode of Mary Tyler Moore. Or: Surprisingly little can be be gleaned from the available record about Maya Forbes and Peter Tolan, who had so much to do with the greatness of Larry Sanders.

And even so, I want to lie in bed and just read poems sometimes and not watch TV. Regardless of what will or won't perish."

Only about 40% of the way through Kindred, but I want to say how impressed I am by Butler's technical skills, how disciplined her imagination is, and how good her instincts are as a storyteller. In most hands this material would have been structured into a straight-up historical novel, but the whole time travel structure, as she uses it, greatly enhances the story. It took real insight to avoid the easier path.

Additionally, she very rightly doesn't attempt to explain the time travel; she just presents it as part of the story, imposes some 'rules' about how it will operate and gets on with the core of the storyline. The reader is drawn in and the questions of 'how' or 'why' drop aside naturally. Great story telling!

I'm in a covid funk and, feeling a bit better, randomly picked up Margin Released by JB Priestley, which has been by my bed for years now.

Priestley's at great pains to point out that it's not an autobiography and merely a memoir of writing but I felt I learnt a good deal about him from it all the same. He's a stuffy old bugger, socially conservative (if not politically: he's vocally anti-Tory in a few places, though he's also keen to point out he was never a member of a political party), prone to moralising and doom-mongering and clearly carried anxiety about his lack of critical standing to his grave. I'm a few characters from saying it, so: he comes across as a bluff old Yorkshireman: self-confident, resilient, wry. And, I found him good company in the end. The mid-section, where he doesn't write a war memoir, while writing a thoughtful war memoir, is full of barely-suppressed rage and portrays him as an able soldier and probably a good leader. He is adamant he had a lucky war and I suppose he did - to survive physically and mentally intact is a feat in itself.

He's interesting, if not too revealing, about Bennett, Wells and Shaw but the book does trail off in the final third, where he doesn't really say very much at all about the main chunk of his writing career. There was something there, between the lines, that I wanted to know about (his relationship with Jacquetta Hawkes; his fascination with time; his interest in and relationship with Jung - Priestley as mystic?) but it stays in his pocket. I'll have to go find it elsewhere.

Now reading Christopher Priest's The Affirmation which is, ah, odd.

how are you feeling, Chinaski?

Hey Alfred, thank you for asking. Better today, mercifully. I've been in bed for six days, my throat is still bad (hedgehog nesting on the lower eastside of my larynx) and I'm bone-tired, but so much better than earlier this week. I very much don't recommend it!

Have you read any Christopher Priest before, Chinaski?

Have you read any Christopher Priest before, Chinaski?

I read Inverted World a long time ago but don't remember much about it. This is deliberately dislocating, but also has that icy affectlessness I associate with Ballard. It also reminds me of Red Shift by Alan Garner, with its stiff jump cuts and narrative games. It's unsettling but (mostly) in a good way.

That sounds about right, although I still haven't read Red Shift.

Driss Chaibi - The Simple Past
J. Rodolfo Wilcock - The Temple of Iconoclasts

The Simple Past has these angry moods, mostly directed at the father but its just a generally anxious mood that's conjured up. Willcock's book is better than anything the lppl around Borges have ever come up with. Its a fake encyclopedia of scientists, philosophers and makers of a could've been modern world, and I haven't read this much joy in making shit up for a long time.

I got the Chaibi over the summer on a whim but haven't read it; would you say you liked it?

Yeah it's really good though it took me a little while to tune into the voice at first.

Thanks, yeah I think that's what's been keeping me, and a novel is an "investment" in a way that sometimes seems preventive...maybe over the holidays before the year's end.

I'm reading Ruskin for the first time -- the political writing.

MFK Fisher, How To Cook A Wolf. A delight so far.

if not politically: he's vocally anti-Tory in a few places, though he's also keen to point out he was never a member of a political party)

Huh. Saw a staging of An Inspector Calls once and it felt super explicitly socialist.

I'm a chapter away from the end of Crazy Horse Stange Man of teh Lakptas by Mari Sandoz. Been interesting. I think I will try to read afew more by her.

Finished How tO Rig An election by Cheeseman and Raas. So now have a better idea of what to look out for in authoritarian regimes looking to cover up just how authoritarian they are.

Started a book on Class, Caste and stuff which I've had lying around too long.

I've been reading Stafford's "The Mountain Lion", which I associate as an ILB fave, since I've seen it mentioned a few times.

Read Prynne's "Enchanter's Nightshade" and "Efflux Reference," two chapbooks of his from the past year or so. Will certainly read more Prynne this year than any other author, and all of it has been published since 2019! The man is prolific to say the least.

The Mountain Lion is great!

I finished Kindred last night. Butler accomplished no small feat here, vividly showing many distinct strands that were involved in the reality of slavery in the USA, by making each one visible in itself, while showing how deeply entangled they all were.

My library hold on Reign of Terror, Spencer Ackerman, came in, along with the sequel to Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman, called Which Lie Did I Tell. Now I'll read one, then the other, or both at once. Hard to say.

if not politically: he's vocally anti-Tory in a few places, though he's also keen to point out he was never a member of a political party)

Huh. Saw a staging of An Inspector Calls once and it felt super explicitly socialist.

It does seem odd, given his obvious and professed socialist leanings and his involvement with CND and the foundation of the welfare state etc. He professedly disliked the bureaucratic nature of politics and probably pissed too many people off to be useful in any organisational sense.

I admired Christoper Priest's The Affirmation without ever really enjoying it.

To be a bit SPOLIERY about it... It involves a narrator who, in the writing of his autobiography, seems to experience a psychotic break. During that break, he imagines he wins a lotterie (sic), the prize for which is a procedure that effectively grants the winner immortality. However, the procedure means total amnesia, so the winner writes an autobiography from which to 're-learn' oneself after the procedure is over. The two narratives sort of spiral around one another and it ends up being a little like China Mieville's The City and The City, with one reality transposed over the other. It's clever, but I found it maddening. Which may well have been Priest's point.

The not spoilery version: I wondered if the book is really about the writer's life; the act of creation and the over-identifying with the art form - sort of like Flaubert falling in love with Emma Bovary and then some. Weirdly, a quote from the JB Priestley book I read the day before seems to explain it quite well (I didn't realise I needed a priest; turned out I needed two):

One curious by-product of fiction, for those who write it, is worth mentioning. To imagine intensely is to add to experience. We remember scenes we wrote long after we have forgotten our daily life at that time. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that we were not there, except in imagination. When we begin a novel, which is what most of us do only when we have run out of excuses for not beginning it, we are hesitant and have no confidence in ourselves, probably writing the opening paragraph over and over again. We are like small children who creep up to the sea, put a toe in, then scamper to safety. But once we are writing steadily we return in the morning to the dark road, the brilliant crowded room, the ship among the flying fish, whatever scene we left the night before, and in five minutes the sustained fable seems to be life, while all the life surrounding us is as thin and flickering as a dream. Then, years afterwards, as we wander among our memories, we are standing on that dark road again, we are looking down on that brilliant crowded room, leaning over the rail of the upper deck we watch the flying fish once more. Our experience has been enlarged and enriched by the inventions of our trade. Nobody looking at us could guess all that we have seen and known. We have lived more lives than one.

Priest at his best creates, how to say this, multiple levels of reality, where in the beginning one is supposed to be the “real”world, the other clearly fictional and fantastical but eventually the two get tangled up like the DNA strands of an old telephone cord and one can’t pick them apart again. It’s amazing how many times he pulled this trick off, although I haven’t kept up with his latest

30 pages left in malina, the greatest book ever written by anybody. gonna start in a lonely place right after that :)

Oh hell yes, glad you like Malina, Brad. I finished it right before a therapy session a few years ago and really bored my poor shrink to tears just rambling about it lol

That's the elbowing I needed.

Brad, you'll dig IALP.

I tried reading Reign of Terror last night, but it kept telling me about awful, depressing events that I had observed as a contemporary and remembered well. The subtitle promised that it would explain how all this happened, but it mainly boiled down to horrible people like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld in positions of power in a greedy nation that has a multitude of racists and easily manipulated, miseducated fools. This is not a revelation.

Onward I go, to Goldman's Hollywood insider gossip!

I finished The Magician, Colm Toibin's novel about Thomas Mann. Not as revelatory as The Master, but a sharp peek at the nexus of European cosmpolitan intellectuals and the FDR White House. I keep forgetting that (a) Mann's two oldest children were gay and lesbian (b) EriKa Mann married W.H. Auden.

I tried reading Reign of Terror last night, but it kept telling me about awful, depressing events that I had observed as a contemporary and remembered well. The subtitle promised that it would explain how all this happened, but it mainly boiled down to horrible people like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld in positions of power in a greedy nation that has a multitude of racists and easily manipulated, miseducated fools. This is not a revelation.

Onward I go, to Goldman's Hollywood insider gossip!

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Tuesday, October 19, 2021 9:32 AM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I've been running into this problem more and more these days. Tried reading Harsha Walia's "Border & Rule" over the summer, and I got three sections in and put it down because it wasn't telling me much that I didn't already know.

The Mountain Lion is great!

Yes, I've been enjoying it so far. The setting in an early 20th-century Western small town reminded me of Cather's Song of the Lark, but whereas the main character in that book is clearly destined for greater things, its not clear whether the two children in Stafford's book will even survive adolescence. At the beginning of the book, I was worried that having children as the main characters was going to make the book a bit twee. At first their eccentricities seem like the usual Wes Anderson terrain. But as the book progresses you realize that Stafford is not going to flinch from depicting the ugly and disturbing aspects of childhood and adolescence.

Good analogy.

NYRB just reissued Boston Adventure, her debut novel and long out of print. I tried reading it a decade ago and gave up; the edition's print was too small.

I'm reading "Mountain Lion" in the Library of America edition with all 3 of her novels. But I'm not sure I'll have to time to read the others before its due back at the library.

Started Biased by Jennifer Eberhardt this morning. Finding it a compelling read . Talking about confirmation bias and various other forms of unconscious biases. I think this wasa book on a couple of recommended lists I got from people, I think Angela Saini was one of the sources.
BUt yeah great book so far, may have heard teh author interviewed on podcasts last year too.

picked up some good books yesterday. Unfortunately didn't get Song OF Solomon by Toni Morrison cos the card machine was bust in the charity shop I was in and i haven't been carrying cash.

im reading a biography of john o'hara~

Once O'Hara found himself at a bar sitting beside a midget. Somehow they fell into a quarrel and O'Hara got ready to fight. Just then another midget materialized so there was one to his right and one to his left. Finding himself being grabbed from both sides, O'Hara pulled his shoulders back, hoping to throw off the midgets like a pair of gnats. But they pushed him and he fell on his back on the sawdust floor. The two midgets then jumped on him and begun to pummel him. The bartender broke up the fight and threw O'Hara out of the bar. O'Hara was astonished and outraged. Apart from the shame of the defeat, he knew that John Steinbeck was present and had seen the whole episode. By common unspoken consent, neither of them ever mentioned it afterwards.

Wow. I loved O'Hara in high school. As a summer "boy's trip" before I went to university, my dad and I went to Pottsville and did the John O'Hara walking tour and also toured the Yuengling factory, back before we knew the family were a bunch of bigots.

I never thought of an O'Hara walking tour! I too loved him in high school, or at least relished the lowdown on what adults wee up to, esp. in a small town like mine, also the City.
Boston Adventure is another you might think would be xpost twee, from the title, but noooo---what I remember of it is pretty awesome, esp. the injustice-collecting Mom. Don't recall The Catherine Wheel at all: her last novel, and some crits say a let-down, but there are those on ILB who've said it's really good, so I'll have to get back to it.

Anthony Doerr has a new one---is he good?
An appealing take on Laurie Colwin's food writing (picky realness, frequently but not always low budget) and fiction in The New Yorker, and how they dovetail, to the extent that her anxious, ever-aspiring characters tend to be into food and wine and talismanic objects, incl. their arrangement---some passing comparisons to domestic-social life in George Eliot novels etc.--is Colwin good?

Mishima - sun and steel

I read a book of Barry Lopez's essays About This Life, which was levitatingly beautiful in places but lacked the holistic focus of something like Arctic Dreams and drifted in places. One essay, about a community-run anagama (a Japanese-style wood kiln) in an forest in Oregon, was close to perfect and what Lopez does best: a mix of deep learning and precisely rendered close observation. It's online here: https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Before+the+temple+of+fire%3A+in+the+Oregon+woods%2C+tending+the+art+of...-a020121815

Now reading Anthony Penrose's book about his mum The Lives of Lee Miller. Her story is obviously extraordinary and the photography included is beautiful but it's not the place to come for any kind of critical engagement whatsoever (and I'm probably a mug to expect it).

About to finish Joey Yearous-Algozin's 'A Feeling Called Heaven,' which harnesses the cadences of new age meditation records as a way to put forth some ideas about climate destabilization. Really interesting work.

Wm Goldman's Which Lie Did I Tell? is proving to be everything one could ask for in a book of Hollywood-insider anecdotes. It is quite amusing and nothing in it matters in the slightest to anyone not employed in Hollywood. My only remaining doubt is whether I can stick with all 400+ pages of three-to-eight paragraph anecdotes about film industry figures. That's a hell of a lot of amusing and inconsequential anecdotes to try to absorb.

I just read it for the first time in my forties, but was bowled over Harriet the Spy, and by how honest and funny and original it was.

xpost Both Goldman books are in my loo (next to the Tina Brown and Russell T Davies memoirs). They’re fantastic but I can’t imagine reading them straight through! Iirc “Lie” is the funnier, meaner book of the two, but more uneven.

Anthony Doerr has a new one---is he good?

No idea. My wife bought "All the Light We Cannot See" a few years ago and it has sat unread on our shelves ever since.

The natural progression from boiling water to boiling water with something in it can hardly be avoided, and in most cases is heartily to be wished for. As a steady diet, plain water is inclined to make thin fare, and even saints, of which there are an unexpected number these days, will gladly agree that a few herbs and perhaps a carrot or two and maybe a bit of meagre bone on feast days can mightily improve the somewhat monotonous flavour of the hot liquid.

Soup, in other words, is good.

-"How To Cook A Wolf", MFK Fisher

started in a lonely place, totally astonishing writing

the mezzanine by nicholson baker - first read 20 years ago. has not aged well but very good at what it does.

the kingdoms by natasha pulley - alt history (what if napoleon had won). dreadful.

the new sally rooney - not as good as the other two. much less interested in reading her opinions in epistolary than teenage soap opera.

amazon unbound - overly sympathetic look at bezos/amazon since ~2010 (there's a part 1 from 90s-2010, but i haven't read it). despite being overly sympathetic, it's crazy how bad they are for the world when you see it laid out. amoral criminality notwithstanding, some interesting business operations stuff (i work in tech).

a thousand ships by natalie haynes - i read madeline miller last year and this is follow-up from that. enjoyed it!

stubborn archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler - short debut from young brazilian british writer set in london/sao paolo. nothing really happens and i liked it a lot.

looking glass war - minor le carre. not his best obviously. very straightforward plot. i thought i'd like that, because i find some of his plots borderline incomprehensible. it turns out i like being baffled, and this one in particular felt very slight.

Finished Prynne's "None Yet More Willing Told," now onto "Squeezed White Noise." One more Prynne book before I'll have read all of his output from the past 2.5 years or so, nearly 500 pages of poems.

I've been reading When We Cease To Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut. These pieces straddle the line between historical fiction and nonfiction somewhat in the manner of Eric Vuillard's The Order of the Day or Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful, ie. stories about real people and real events but with imagined details added. The subjects of Labatut's book are scientists and mathematicians. He romanticizes the process of scientific discovery in a similar way to how Dyer romanticized the process of musical creation in jazz. It seems that it helps to be a bit crazy in order to glimpse the reality underneath the surface of things, and if you try to see too much you might actually lose your mind.

I finished Which Lie Did I Tell?, which in its final third swerved away from insider gossip into pure shop talk -- of deep interest to aspiring screenwriters, but to few other people.

Now I'm re-reading Albert Camus' The Plague, which I last read nearly 50 years ago, so it will be as new to me as if I'd never read it before.

Finished Prynne's 'Squeezed White Noise,' now onto his 'Of Better Scrap,' his longest book in recent memory. I begin facilitating a poetry manuscript workshop next week, so my time for pleasure reading will be significantly cut until mid-December, but I am hoping I can tackle a few things here and there...and also hoping I can finish the last of the Prynnes before that begins!

I read Soldiers of Salamis after comments on the Best Novels of 2001 (?) thread. It's a novel about a particular event towards the end of the Spanish Civil War and utilises a kind of Rashomon structure to explore the event and its implications. I found the first half kind of maddening, particularly the conceit of the struggling author and the deliberately overcoded unreliable narrator but the second half (final third, I guess) damn near broke me - and, of course, it made Cercas' structural choices all the more dazzling. What a stunning novel.

Now reading Dorothy B. Hughes' The Expendable Man.

Crews - Freud: The Making of an Illusion

Christ what an asshole

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (re-read)
Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

what'd you think of the Greenwell?

Only just started it, but his writing sure is lovely.

Pasnik, Grimley, and Kubo, Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53616862e4b0faf27342e4b3/1535985495273-VZA687KNYTWSGE1ZFMTK/Brutal+corner.jpg?format=500w

Jane Jacobs The Death And Life of Great American Cities
I saw a talk on this American writer last year and possibly another one before. I knew enough to tie her into the film Motherless Brooklyn though I don't think she actually appears the baddy in that is based on her great nemesis anyway.
This book is her looking at what she believes works in terms of what I think would be categorised as Town Planning though it seems more organic here at the turn of the 60s.
I enjoy the writing style and find the points made pretty logical and straightforward once revealed.
Have wound up at a load of town planning related webinars over tyeh course of teh pandemic so finding this which may be a prevalent influence very interesting.

A Brief History of 7 Killings Marlon James
I think I am really getting too many really good books out at the same time so I've been neglecting this though had started with teh first several chapters a while back. Just read another couple.
The book shows the story of teh Bob marley shooting from teh perspective of a load of different characters who were around at the time so has a load of different voices. I think it's done really well so far.
I caught a webinar with teh writer last year so really should have read this earlier and now I have a load of books on the go at the same time. Also have his Black Leopard, Red Wolf sitting on a table here unlooked at.

When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir Patrisse Khan-Cullors
Finding this a really good read, pretty scathing talk about her upbringing. Shge grew up with a one parent family though she was bright and wound up in very white schools where she seemed to be the only BIPOC student, she had to deal with police brutality directed at her brothers as she grew up. Had a mainly gentle older brother taken away to prison and returned as a near zombie because of over and mainly wrong medication for treating his bipolar condition.
I like the writing, it seems to be straight from teh heart though there does seem to be a ghost or co writer

Just finished By Night in Chile.

I didn't like it as much as the Bolaño epics, but it got better and better as it went along. I feel like I would appreciate it even more if I were Chilean or new more about the dictatorship. The house party had that Bolaño everyday creepiness.

love By Night in Chile, my favorite Bolaño, actually!

Steveolende, you'd probably be interested in taking a look at the numerous essays talking about the absolute destruction that Jacobs' philosophies have wrought on major urban landscapes. There are more strident and theory-driven reads out there, but here's a quick and loose primer on her oversights and mis-understandings: https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-jane-jacobs-got-wrong-about-cities

love By Night in Chile, my favorite Bolaño, actually!

― I'm a sovereign jizz citizen (the table is the table),

Mine too.

last of the month of short books is Nightmare Abbey but I'm not up enough on the source material to get any of the jokes. (i presume there are jokes)

Just reading up on By Night in Chile now and I should reread the first half again. I didn't realize the implications of the falconry during the visit to Europe.

xxxpost re Jacobs:
Also a good critique of her strengths and limitations---as an urban observer and philosopher, and as an influence on activists----in Marshall Berman's great All That Is Solid Melts Into Air---at least it's in the edition I read, published in the twilight of the Reagan years, when historian Berman looks back at Jacobs in context of the struggle with Robert Moses, neoliberal, neoconservative, and other urban real estate fever causes/symptoms (he's the ideal guide, starting with the Saint-Simonists' visions of building, and their influence on fan Goethe's Faust Part 2, Peter the Great's uilding of St. Petersburg (petri dish of modern art and revolution, eventually. and Berman tracks all that too), to Hausmann's realignment of Paris, reaction of that from Le Corbusier, critique of both by young Robert Moses, who started out as a benign idealist...Berman also chronicles Moses through longterm effect on Berman's native Bronx, among all the other increasingly bizarre "improvements" around NYC.)
Anyway, an amazing book, and he's sensitive to but firm with Jacobs, is our Prof Berman (I would have loved to audit his class, without risking his grading).

Thanks from me too for that book suggestion. I'm finishing up The Power Broker and I've thought about reading Jacobs.

I think power broker has dated a lot better than jacobs.

Thanks dow

I'm reading Diana Athill's Stet, a memoir of her time as a publisher and editor. Despite Athill being consistently good company, I found the early chapters fairly rote but the second half - concerned with particular writers - is proving more interesting. The chapter on Jean Rhys is actually pretty extraordinary so I'm glad I stuck with it.

Finished 'Of Better Scrap,' which is probably the most accessible of Prynne's recent output— as I think I've mentioned here before, he's probably put close to 500 pages worth of poems out in the past three years.

Now onto a chapbook from German innovative poet Ulf Stolterfoht, 'Nine Drugs'. Seems to be about drugs.

I finished the second novella in the 2 novella collection "Family & Borghesia" by Natalia Ginzburg. I might have slightly preferred the first one, but honestly could pipe these straight into my veins.

she's been my discovery of the year

I don't know how she does it. Seems she doesn't write like anybody else. It shouldn't work.

I discovered Rachel Kushner. The Strange Case of Rachel K didn't feel like an adequate distillation of her. No? Anyway, I missed The Flamethrowers in 2013 and will pick it up tomorrow.

Love that book. More novels should be set during the Years of Lead.

listening to Gary Shteyngart on Fresh Air, talking about new novel and cultural backstory----Our Country Friends is about eight friends riding out the COVID pandemic in the country home of a Russian-born American writer.Mostly immigrants, arts workers from NYC, now upstate. I like some of the comments, and the excerpt about the writer stressing over doing justice, somehow, to the beauty of "the stillness" up and out there. Is he good?

Talking about culture vulture "carpetbaggers" flooding Kingston etc., prices and scarcity of housing driving out locals---seems like "might" be effectively seriocomic, but certainly can't tell from Fresh Air marketplace of expert self-promotion, for so many arts workers.

He had a good piece in the New Yorker recently about a botched circumcision that came back to haunt him much later in life.

My circumcision came back to haunt me, too, but that's because I was circumcized yesterday.

i'm reading 'the price of salt, or carol' and it's a much more enjoyable reading experience than any i've had in a long time--not because of the book itself, but because i finally bought reading glasses, which i've needed for two years.

I have our country friends on my to read list. I liked super sad love story but I haven’t read anything he’s written since and I can’t promise even that’s aged well.

Two-thirds of the way through Camus's The Plague and I think I can completely dismiss the theory that it is an allegory for the Nazi occupation of Europe. My sense is that Camus wanted to use his personal experience of war and his deep interest in how those around him responded to that war, while purposely and strenuously avoiding writing a WWII novel. What seems to interest him most in this book is the psychology of individuals and a society thrown out of their normal habits into a situation where the ordinary habits of 'normal' life must suddenly adjust to an all-pervading sense of danger. iow, I think he deliberately chose to base his book within a city under quarantine with a raging plague in order to disentangle his insights from the particulars of WWII, so as to achieve a greater universality.

The next question is how well does he succeed, or put differently, are his insights valid? Since we're all living in plague times, I'd say he's remarkably successful in describing how his characters and his city in general respond to the bubonic/pneumonic plague (which is a different beast than covid19). Where I have noted discrepancies and inconsistencies, they are technical failures concerning details of no importance, similar to websites that compile lists of 'goofs' in films, like disappearing and reappearing props in the same scene. The psychology seems pretty reliably sound, even if they are sometimes obvious transpositions from wartime that don't quite fit into the plague scenario.

idk, he's pretty clear in the book about the plague being an allegory for something that we are all complicit in just by virtue of being here, which obligates us to either actively fight it at risk to ourselves or accept responsibility for the deaths it causes. That seems to me to line up more with the occupation than with just general observations about wartime and the pervading feeling of danger.

for something that we are all complicit in just by virtue of being here, which obligates us to either actively fight it at risk to ourselves or accept responsibility for the deaths it causes. Also describes the way I'm coming to think of the climate crisis. Acceptance is always easier, at some point (but not all).

obligates us to either actively fight it at risk to ourselves or accept responsibility for the deaths it causes.

I can't quite agree with this summation. the narrator makes it clear that this he does not consider this as an obligation. for example he acknowledges that the journalist from France who wishes to escape the quarantined city in order to reconnect with his lover is entirely justified in attempting to evade the rules and get away. the narrator never frames the decision to combat the plague in moralistic terms of necessary responsibility or guilt by omission. all responses to it are treated as equally human.

It's true, Rieux and Tarrou take slightly different views of it; I was summarizing Tarrou's view, which is the most extreme one. But even Tarrou thinks people have a choice; it's just that doing or not doing something about the plague is baked into the choices you make. And the book recognizes that human connection and our responsibility to people we love are deeply important too; that's why Rieux can't judge Rambert for wanting to choose a relationship over fighting the plague.

yeah, escaping to be with your family sounds like a morally defensible position in occupied France too tbf

Illuminations Walter Benjamin
Mopping up of several shorter pieces that the German man of letters wrote. Quite enjoying it. Been meaning to read him for a while. This comes with a foreword by Hannah Arendt which is also quite interesting.

Cruel Britannia : A Secret History of Torture Ian Cobain
History of state sanctioned torture since the 2nd World War. Starts off quite amusingly with a very ill informed German spy walking into a British pub in the early morning looking to be served and ordering in a European accent. Seems a tad conspicuous really. But looking into the Cage and ts treatment of Fascist supporters. Enjoying this, it's sat in a pile for a few months.

Black Sci-Fi Short Stories
an anthology book I got as an interlibrary loan because it has a complete version of Pauline Hopkins Of One Blood included. I just read W.E.B. Du Bois The Comet which i thought had a different ending. Have read a couple of pages of the Hopkins which looks interesting and dates back to 1902. There are a few other entries that are very vintage too which is intriguing

There has been some decolonial theory honed in on The Plague in recent years, for obvious reasons. One of the most interesting things about that book is that nearly everyone involved is a European colonist, or descended from such.

While Camus's fictional Oran may be set in an unspecified location in North Africa, the reasons for this choice are mostly to create a sense of distance, isolation and dislocation. An author today might choose to set it in a space colony and essentially write the same book.

Distance, isolation, and dislocation of European settlers. No mention is made of the people who live there who aren't European settlers, except a small note in the book's beginning.

For anyone interested in more about Camus and La Peste in some political context: https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/41648

He had a good piece in the New Yorker recently about a botched circumcision that came back to haunt him much later in life.

It's still haunting me, too (ie his penis problems after reading that piece). 'Lake Success' is underrated though, it's come to mind many times since reading it and is very funny.

Yes, I know it's a biased perspective. I like the book, and have read it multiple times in both languages. But it's worth noting its omission of what happens in a city-wide plague to those who were there first.

Finished Garth Greenwell's Cleanness, which I liked in fits and starts. Two of the ugliest (and longest) sex scenes I've ever read, and some of the touristy bits bored me after a while. But the opening and (especially) the closing chapters are strong, and surprisingly sweet. I like that this gay novel ends with its hero, having struck out with his twunky student, cuddling with a dog.

I'm reading The Makioka Sisters, which is wonderful so far. I definitely want to get a bunch more Tanizaki books. The pages just flow by.

Mary Robinson book on Climate Justice
ex-Irish Head of State's introductory book on the subject. Ties in with her UN work in the area which sounds like it might be a tad white saviourish so hope it's being done well. I picked it up cos it wasa pristine copy for a Euro and I thought it might be ok. I wasn't sure it was the same Mary Robinson.
Now taken it into the bathroom to look at the introduction and wound up with it taking over current readig there from Cruel Britannia the book on torture in the UK since the 2nd World War.

Illuminations Walter benjamin
collection of various shorter written work by German Thinker. I read the piece on art in the age of mass production this morning . Interesting. Have been meaning to read him for ages and somehow never come across a cheap copy when I've had money at least. Think I need to keep an eye out still. This was a library copy.

How To Argue With A Racist Mick Rutherford
genealogist shows problems with race science.

for a sec I thought, "The Genesis guitarist writes about race science?"

"How to argue with a racist Genesis guitarist"

right adam and mick same name surely?
I don't think that's the important bit here.

so i wrote quite a long thing on what i've been reading as it's been a while since i posted. then somehow it deleted, fortunately for you all. so now i'm going to do a one line summary for each book:

Fin-de-siècle Vienna - Carl Schorske
Excellent set of essays on the building and failure of the liberal bourgeois Jewish period in Vienna, the face of right wing and socialist populism and anti-semitism, and the vectors of aesthetics, politics and the psyche.

The Ring and the Book - Robert Browning
Often fantastic, often interminable playing around with historical and poetical perspective on a single event in 1698: fake news, epistemic kaleidescopes, browning on a tear.

Cogs and Monsters - Diane Coyle
Excellent assessment on the failures and perceived failures of economics and sifting the two, with specific focus on its terrible failures of diversity and tearing down of straw man arguments agains the value of economics.

All that Foundation Shit - Isaac Asimov
Asimov was a garbage writer, honestly the guy could not write for shit, and the Foundation series is facile as fuck, but as often with him, he did click on a central point of fascination: let's look at epochal history through a series of critical points, dramatised. Three-Body Problem is so much better but wouldn't exist without Asimov. (ok that was two sentences fuck you)

The Secret Life of Money - Tess Read and Dan Davies
V good primer on the practical models of businesses and money.

Virus: The Day of Resurrection - Sakyo Komatsu
no surprise this shit is a favourite of Hideo Kojima, with incredibly long slightly crazy and boring speeches about The World and Society - it's great fun to read this in the light of Covid, also *so much smoking i thought it was a plot device*.

The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and the Forty Years that Shook the World - Patrick Wyman
Really fucked me off with its BBC history documentary style of imaging stuff the writer couldn't know - it may even be good, and i guess i'll finish it at some point.

Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain
Thank god for open kitchens these days imo, but oftten very entertaining.

The Gunman - Jean-Patrick Manchette
He tried to get out but they dragged him back in: fascinated by trying to locate this French gun-for-hire novel in a specific year from its trappings of observed culture and will post more.

The Village That Died for England: Tyneham and the Legend of the Churchill Pledge – Reread of a newly expanded edition, a wonderful insight into pastoral military and its influence on self-perceptions of Englishness.

Universal Methods of Design – Bella Martin and Bruce Hanington: methods for structuring insights into design methodologies. a very useful reference book - so many of them absolutely require people to be in the same space, and i wonder if distributed workforces will require new ways of executing this sort of process.

Max Weber: A Biography - Joachim Radkau
Biographer consumed by subject in a psychological way (haven't finished, because its lol hueg, but great intro imo)

Shibumi - Trevanian
Fascistic-sadistic-misogynistic anti-American ideology combined with highly detailed speleological element and enjoyable Basque independence plot line.

Deep Wheel Orcadia - Harry Josephine Giles
Science fiction poem in Orkney/Scottish dialect, about people on the edge of things, labour, their space station, resources, history, and is surprisingly successful and interesting - will post more.

Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy – Carl Shapiro and Hal R Varian
About the business economics of the internet, published in 1999 and full of wonderful ironies, like the discussion of the battle between Encyclopedia Britannica and Encarta, that adds considerably to what is already a useful and interesting book.

Good Housekeeping Invalid Cookery Book – Florence B Jack
So. much. beef. tea. Fascinating to see such a different relation of food to sickness and health than we have now - a subject worth much more exploration.

Logic: A Complete Introduction – Siu-Fan Lee
Yeah great I should have learned logic at school, and to get the most out of this you probably need to apply it regularly, but doesn't hurt to practice a bit and this seems like a decent primer that takes you up to and includes basic propositional calculus.

In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities – Jean Baudrillard
Love this, so easy to read, and I don't care whether it's *right* or not, which would anyway be an odd standard to apply, it's just great fun and yeah he's playing with some stuff that's clearly applicable today in a way that other people couldn't see

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon
All about being a c'nt at work, this is actually one of the better 'do things better in your company', like work with word documents which you give people time to read, rather than powerpoints. Doesn't cover gross exploitation and fundamental immorality of overall business model sorry.

oh did i do

Lydia and Maynard - the letters of Lydia Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes, I did not. Charming and peculiar in many respects, with JMK shooting between epochal international conferences, and Lopokova dancing and irritating the Bloomsbury set and them both utterly charming each other with affection and intellect.

Awesome, that last looks most appealing of all thx.
Fin-de-siècle Vienna - Carl Schorske
Excellent set of essays on the building and failure of the liberal bourgeois Jewish period in Vienna, the face of right wing and socialist populism and anti-semitism, and the vectors of aesthetics, politics and the psyche. Got this, it's great!

All that Foundation Shit - Isaac Asimov
Asimov was a garbage writer, honestly the guy could not write for shit, and the Foundation series is facile as fuck, but as often with him, he did click on a central point of fascination: let's look at epochal history through a series of critical points, dramatised. Three-Body Problem is so much better but wouldn't exist without Asimov. (ok that was two sentences fuck you) Also otm---although, having gotten The Foundation Trilogy as bonus for joining the Science Fiction Book Club, when I was 9, I''ve always been immune to his notorious prose, though always liked the spare or sparse approach (word is the forthcoming stream will be tarted up with aliens and mysticism and shit). Also always liked history as predictive sci-math-art, and how that went...Also poignant reveal of The Mule.

i read the schorske book earlier in the year & yes fascinating period. found the section on the architecture possibly the most interesting part despite having very little knowledge or interest in the subject generally.

currently reading norman douglas' old calabria describing his sometimes arduous but mostly leisurely traipse through southern italy in the early part of the last century.

I'm reading The Makioka Sisters, which is wonderful so far. I definitely want to get a bunch more Tanizaki books. The pages just flow by.

Try Some Prefer Nettles next, it's quite short with a lot to say about the westernization/modernization of Japan.

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, another of those Greek classics retold by female characters, this one feels like it must have almost written itself. From the perspective of the treatment of woman it's harsher than Madeline Miller's Circe (maybe just because it's more realistic), but less lyrical and the slang ('eat shit', 'fuck's sake', 'gagging for it') does jar somewhat. In Circe Odysseus really does come across as both charming and cunning, not here (he's the one who uses the phrase 'gagging for it').

For whatever reason (idk my personality/sleeping four hours a night), I am all over the place atm and so’s my reading.

A couple of weeks ago a friend linked me this incredible essay about the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly series, which I’ve read on and off since I was a teenager but haven’t read at all since my late twenties. The essay was so great, it just totally got what the series is about and the moral core that’s wound throughout it like a vein, and I ended up buying not just the latest book but also the previous four books and I read them all in the past two weeks along with some of the older ones.

Based on this essay, I also bought the writer’s own White City which I picked up from a bookshop yesterday and will read in the next fortnight. The Guardian review says:

White City synthesises familiar forms into a whole: the rogue’s confession, the young man finding his way, the post-Celtic Tiger satire on puffed-up, self-perpetuating bullshit businesses. Our guide is 27-year-old Ben, son of a disgraced Dublin banker, languishing in rehab and writing an account of his wrong turns as therapy. He’s half-bookish, half-lazy, really just wants to write his terrible-sounding novel (“Decay: A Report”), and only gets a job when his father is charged with embezzling €600m from his bank and the money tap is turned off.

Ben encounters an old schoolfriend, Mullens, who seduces him into joining a dodgy property deal in Serbia via the promise of a few million euro and lashings of meaningless banter (“Shake it handy, and if you can’t shake it handy, shake it hard”). This leads to a certain amount of capering with a bunch of Serbs who are mostly portrayed as sinister: but the Irish characters are mostly stupid or corrupt, so there’s equality of insult.

But an even bigger danger is sex, as a reporter we’ll call Chester found out. Chester doesn’t ride his bike as much as he used to because, about a year ago, he had a bad cycling accident after a romantic interlude. He was writing a story on topless dancers when he struck up a friendship with Lola. Maybe Lola fancied herself a Marilyn Monroe to his Arthur Miller. Who knows. All Chester knows is that one evening she called him up and said she was lying around in her bed at Trump Palace, and could he come over. He hopped on his bike and was there in fifteen minutes. They went at it for three hours. Then she said he had to leave because she lived with someone and the guy was coming home. Any minute.

Chester ran out of the building and jumped on his bike, but there was a problem. His legs were so shaky from having sex they started cramping up just as he was going down Murray Hill, and he crashed over the curb and slid across the pavement. “It really hurt,” he said. “When your skin is scraped off like that, it’s like a first-degree burn.” Luckily, his nipple did eventually grow back.

Yes!

The Silent Woman's still my favorite Malcolm.

I haven't read the Sex and the City columns, but I do like the book, which I think is basically columns strung together. I remember reading the line, "Carrie doesn't like to go home at night, and she doesn't like to go to sleep," and thinking, wow, this is a completely different voice from the show, and it's great.

Though actually the first season of the show is a lot closer in tone to the book than the rest of the show is, which is why I like it better. I wish they'd kept those cynical little parody interviews with random New Yorkers.

Yes I do mean the book that’s the columns- I specified cos the sort of disjointed flow is interesting to me and also iirc she’s since written a couple of tie-in novels more in line with the series which, no.

I think s1 is pretty similar plot wise but the casting and tone are still quite different. New York in the columns is scary, harsh and hard. Even when the show is cutting, it’s never as quite as harsh as

It was just three years ago Christmas that Carrie had been living in a studio apartment where an old lady had died two months before. Carrie had no money. A friend lent her a piece of foam for a bed. All she had was a mink coat and a Louis Vuitton suitcase, both of which were stolen when the apartment was inevitably robbed. But until then, she slept on the piece of foam with the fur coat over her, and she still went out every night. People liked her, and nobody asked questions. One night, she was invited to yet another party at someone’s grand Park Avenue apartment. She knew she didn’t really fit in, and it was always tempting to stuff your face on the free food, but you couldn’t do that. Instead, she met a man who had a name. He asked her to dinner, and she thought, Fuck you, all of you.

Oh yeah for sure. The show toned it way down, even in the first season. But it still had some of that bite, and I wish they'd kept it like that.

It's been a few years since I read the book so I don't remember the details that well, I just remember liking it a lot and being surprised by how much of an edge it had.

The Gossip Girl books are similar - clear-eyed, observant, funny, merciless - they’re the sort of books Harriet the Spy might have grown up to write. The series is more like Dynasty for teens, although like S&TC, it’s enjoyable in its own way.

(Also to tie it in with Janet Malcolm, who wrote a fun column in the New Yorker in praise of the GG books.)

I’d never read this column but have read some of the books, but you know when you start reading a thing and know you’re instantly going to love it?

As Lolita and Humbert drive past a horrible accident, which has left a shoe lying in the ditch beside a blood-spattered car, the nymphet remarks, “That was the exact type of moccasin I was trying to describe to that jerk in the store.” This is the exact type of black comedy that Cecily von Ziegesar, the author of the best-selling “Gossip Girl” novels for teen-age girls, excels in.

Oh also, I found a pdf of the Midwich Cuckoos on an old usb last night and I got three quarters of the way through it yesterday. Will finish tonight. Weirdly funny.

> The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

the new one's out now, Women Of Troy, which is less homer's Iliad and more euripedes' Troades from the reviews i've seen. but it sounds like you weren't that impressed by the previous one so...

currently reading 'Mary Barton', which is dickensian without any of the funny bits. (Hard Times is probably the closest dickins, but this is grimmer. manchester cotton mills in a down period, people starving)

Mary Barton was stern stuff. I haven't picked up another Gaskell.

i am halfway through. however, i did see the chapter titles which contain spoilers - "Not Guilty!"

North and South has a similar setting but fewer people going deaf and/or blind and/or dead, focus more on the romance / industrial iirc.

the only other stuff of hers i've read is her contributions to dickens' christmas editions of his magazines (which were mostly anonymous, at the time)

The Silent Woman is so great - something I'd like to read again. I'd say Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession probably edges it for me but both are amazing.

I'm reading Owen Hatherley's A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. It's a collection of his columns for the Building Design magazine, where he undertook a series of visits to British cities - inspired by no less than JB Priestley - looking at the failures of the New Labour project and the scars left on the urban environment. I'd assumed I'd find this hard going because I lack any specialist knowledge of the subject, but Hatherley is great company and wears his learning lightly. He's naturally pretty scathing about the PFI wastelands he finds in the various cities (Southampton, Manchester, Liverpool, Milton Keynes, Nottingham etc) but there is a sense of it being locked in 2010 due to the 'end of capitalism' feel that permeates the text: everything is held in suspension post-2008 and there's an awful seesaw of hope/despair that from this vantage point feels oddly utopian. Also, because of the gazetteer nature of the visits to the cities, everything feels a bit rushed compared to the astonishing Southampton chapter - a city Hatherley knows best of all having grown up there.

This is an aside, and I know it was messy and fractured and lots of the feeling is retroactive and rose-tinted, but christ do I miss that golden period of blogs and the sense of hope and unity that came with them.

line of the day, at least: "Carrie doesn't like to go home at night, and she doesn't like to go to sleep," and not just because I've known people like that.
mention of Mary Barton reminds me I'd been wondering about Lucy Barton's creator, Elizabeth Strout--local library has a ton of her books---descriptions make it seem like her leading characters might be caustic, layered, Jean Staffordesue (though also remind me of a favorite line of greeting cards)---is she good?

Staffordesque duh sorry

Read Gilda Musa's 'Total Memory,' translated by my friendly acquaintance Nicole Trigg. Interesting stuff.

Now onto a friend's book of poetry, which I love but...well, he needs an editor. There's too much going on.

Might put that down and read either one of the newer Jalal Toufic books or Rabbih Alameddine's "KOOL AIDS" next.

I'm also facilitating a manuscript workshop at the moment, so I read two pretty fascinating manuscripts over the weekend.

descriptions make it seem like her leading characters might be caustic, layered

Caustic and layered is an excellent description of Olive Kitteridge, both of those are good.

Mary Barton was stern stuff. I haven't picked up another Gaskell.

I think you would probably like Wives and Daughters a lot, actually.

Whoops, meant to italicize that first line - that was me quoting Alfred.

ha, that would make a good monthly reading theme alongside that turgenev I've been meaning to read

(turns out I've also read one of her collections, 'curious if true', including the Nurse's Story that's in every Victorian ghost anthology)

KOOLAIDS by Rabih Alameddine is absolutely incredible about 50 pages in, I think many here would appreciate it.

I like Gaskell a lot, but I'll happily acknowledge that all her books are flawed - except for Wives and Daughters, which is perfect except for the tiny minor detail of it not having a last chapter because its writer dropped dead a week or so too soon.

My cousin book club is reading The Catcher in the Rye so I'm re-reading it for the first time since I was twelve, and omg this is a great book; I really did not appreciate it properly as a kid.

Oh also, I found a pdf of the Midwich Cuckoos on an old usb last night and I got three quarters of the way through it yesterday. Will finish tonight. Weirdly funny.

Raymond Queneau Odile
Story about the narrator turning up in a rundown part of a French town and hanging with some ne'erdowells . Continuous thing covers 119 pages in teh version I have. i was looking for an obvious page break and couldn't find one. It has paragraphs but no gaps or chapters or anything. BUt it is pretty sublime, quite funny in places, surreal in others and pretty earthy thorughout.
Glad i got this from the library yesterday. Thought I might be overdoing it . have the full quota of books out with this.
just finished Walter Benjamin's Illuminations to get a new book I thought would come through on order and may turn up at the end of the week. Had looked up Queneau since i have wanted to read whatever translation of Le Chiendent since my mid teens when I saw Rowland S Howard had it in his Portrait of teh Artists as a Consumer in the NME in BIrthday Party Days. I did try reading The Bark Tree from the local library at teh time but didn't finish it. Current version is out as Witch Grass but I couldn't see either on tyhe library system but did see they had 3 things in teh local library which I presumably had not thought to look for when I was in there., THink I tend to go to music, politics, medicine, sci fi , classics and a few other things instead of looking through teh general fiction shelves.
Well got it now and enjoying it but possibly reading too many things at the same time.

Otherwise still reading the Mary Robinson book on Climate Justice and then going to finish off the book on Torture in the UK Cruel britannia and the other half of Adam Rutherford's book on Race. & Ibram X kendi's Stamped From The beginning and whatever Toni Morrison I started & Stephen Barker's books on punk and loads of other things.
JUst picked up the Smartest Guys In the Room and still have IBM In the Third Reich and several books on indigenous people in the Americas I started.

I seem to have been in a conversation recently where someone said something like "nobody should read THE CATCHER IN THE RYE after the age of 14" and people sagely, maturely agreed, though I didn't really.

I see that Lily Dale doesn't either.

catcher in the rye rules

A couple weeks ago I read a terrific Janet Malcolm essay which prodded me into giving Franny and Zooey a shot.

Iain Sinclair - The Last London

really fascinating, pretty dense and also I think, not having lived in London for 40 years, I am probably losing out on a lot of the context but still I like it

Just started Sebald's Rings of Saturn although I think it will be slow going if I reach for Wiki every time I come across a literary reference I don't recognise (most of them)

Catcher in the Rye is great and everyone shiting on about it being for a) teenagers or b) boys can be safely disregarded

I read and passed it around when I was 15, don't remember that much, maybe will re-read. Next was Nine Stories, which has never left my head, but I did revisit sev years ago and thought it held up pretty well, now seeming like an influence or forerunner to Sedaris's better stuff, blending serious x snark, not that it doesn't go past that, as outright fiction can. Ditto "Franny," which I think of as the Tenth Story; "Zooey" built on or around a little too much of her big brother's harangues, but can see where he's coming from (also Salinger seems undestanably worried about kids taday jumping on his agenda x beefs a bit extremely, long before the Summer ov Love!) And of course it's got the hooks, could do w/o The Fat Lady revelation tho.
Rise High.../Seymour...: good? Looked like Buddy's voice, didn't like his letter to Zooey that much.

doesn't go past Sedaris, that is.

Raise High.../Seymour is my favourite Salinger (though is a couple of decades since I read any)

the "you have to read this book by a certain age or it's no good" line has always bothered me. i think that any good book should hold up no matter what age you read it at.

the entire negative discourse directed at catcher in the rye bugs me. especially hate it when people say that holden shouldn't complain so much because he has a pretty good life. i don't think people who say this actually remember the book very well.

Don't know when the negative discourse started, but I have to wonder if it has much to do with an overall boomer backlash--Salinger wasn't a boomer, obviously, but it might be fair to say that they were the first generation of readers to embrace it, and probably the first to canonize it by assigning it on high school reading lists. I know at least one adolescent lit scholar who seems to just reflexively loathe it (I've read it twice and loved it both times).

I was about to write something like 'the great veteran ILX poster "J.D." has always written well about Salinger, you can find him on this Salinger thread' -- then I saw that said great poster had already turned up on this thread.

(The Other) J.D. (Salinger)

I read "Catcher in the Rye" for the first time as an adult and enjoyed it. Though I will admit I found it perhaps slightly underwhelming given the reputation. Maybe the narrator's sarcastic voice felt new and liberating for the time, but for readers weaned on that type of narrator, it might be a little "you had to be there". Another book that is often lumped in as being for younger readers that I read more recently and enjoyed was "A Separate Peace".

I had a copy of Steppenwolf that had an introduction where Hesse says that nobody ought to read the book before a certain age, or maybe amount of experience.

at what age in elementary school should one read The Magic Mountain?

Yes, A Separate Peace is beautifully heartbreaking (and queer).

It's been years, but the sequel Peace Breaks Out is good too.

i haven't read catcher in the rye since i was a teenager but i'm reading franny and zooey now and it's very good!

By coincidence I re-read Steppenwolf in my early 50s and noticed that Hesse said it ought to be read by people that age. When I finished the book I could see his point. It bitterly addresses issues that are far too real at that age, whereas a twenty-something would be prone to view the book through a falsely romanticized lens.

Quite unusually for me, yesterday I started and finished a book in one day. It was Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Richard Wrangham.

The thesis was extremely interesting and well-constructed, namely that humans physically evolved into our modern species because our proto-species, a smaller, tree-dwelling ape who already used crude tools and ate meat, began to use fire to cook its food. This change in diet allowed a massive improvement in the efficiency of their digestion, and triggered a series of physical changes around 1.8 million years ago, leading to Homo Erectus, a taller, heavier, far-ranging, ground-dwelling, nearly modern species that soon spread out of Africa into Europe and Asia.

This thesis occupies about the first 125 pages of a 200 page book and he produces an impressive amount of evidence, especially in the face of a sparse fossil record. The chain of inferences is strengthened by reference to many measurable pieces of evidence about human biology and anatomy, food chemistry, analogies to modern hunter-gatherer diets and such. It's pretty darn convincing.

The final part of the book is much weaker, arguing that cooked food was decisive in the creation of human social structures. Here there is little evidence aside from speculations woven out of imaginative storytelling. It was OK, but not exactly compelling.

I'm currently reading Divorcing by Susan Taubes, which occupies that unfortunate niche of novels that were finished shortly before the author's suicide. I'm enjoying it more than I thought I would (it was sent to me as a book club selection).

many thanks, pinefox!

i recently reread salinger's very strange last story, "hapworth 16 1924," just because i stumbled across the copy i had found somewhere on the internet and printed out as a teenager. i still find it completely baffling (even the title), but it is much funnier than i remembered. it's the only thing in salinger's body of work that i think would benefit from being able to call the author and ask what in the world he was trying to do.

Was maybe "Fuck off, stans" in possible intent/effect? Haven't read it, but that's what I heard.

i didn't like Catcher when i read it 5 years ago,. but my hot take is lost within the vagaries of Facebook's search system.

I've always loved "Catcher," because it captures the spirit of a young person rebelling against what he perceives as the senselessness and cruelty of the world. That is, tonally, it may be whiny, but it is also very *true* in a certain way. People who dislike it obviously can't remember being a teenager.

*SOBS*

(2011 it was when i reread it, but no comments were recorded)

100 pages into Sayaka Morata's Earthlings. Loved her Convenience Store Woman and this is good too so far ,though both weirder and way way more harrowing and heartbreaking.

Yeah Convinience Store Woman is apparently her most accessible, everything else she's done is supposed to be way weirder.

I'm starting on a Clark Ashton Smith short story anthology.

Have been slowly reading all of Sophie Mackintosh’s published short stories, after reading her novels The Water Cure and Blue Ticket last couple of months and loving them both.

Some of the short stories don’t quite work, but then there are others, like The Running Ones, that do:

She thought about kissing the flushed plane of his cheekbone in the morning when he was too hot under the covers. They hummed a soft tune together and she thought briefly, ‘my heart is breaking’, but banished it. No more of that, she told herself. No more.

Really enjoyed Queneau's Odile. Weird strucure. Guess it's just a rambling memeoir of a certain point in a character's life but 119 pp with no page breaks is a long way to go. Still very enjoyable. Musty read the We Always Treat Women too Well that's also in th library.
Have Kehinde Andrew's first book waiting for me when I return thius.

I've started reading My Home is Far Away, Dawn Powell, one of the last two in-print novels of hers I haven't read. So far it seems to have a lot of overlap in character, setting and tone with her earlier novel, Dance Night. I expect the elements that show the most redundancy between the two novels are based strongly in her own life memories, but the sense that at times I'm reading a novel I've already read detract from it a bit.

I just finished a book about my wife's great uncle, who was a WW2 bomber turret gunner who was shot down over Germany, sent to a POW camp, and then spent 80 days under forced march around Germany under horrific conditions. He kept a journal during his time in camp and kept it safe during the march. The book was terribly written (weirdly disorganized and repetitive) but I'm glad I read it.

I think I'm going to start Book of the New Sun and probably order Against the Day.

My misgivings about Erdrich's The Sentence aren't being by good, eerie shifts and scenes, which I would like to be closer together, though I get that seemingly breezy traffic management is set-up for sucker punches and jabs, passing through...
Narrator, in initially jacked-up, on drugs and her life, is set up in crime caper that doesn't quite add up, like the kind of TV writing (even occasionally in Breaking Bad) where getting from plot points A to G is so pressurized that some key details get fudged along the way---oh well, she, being Ind (which I'll use in place of her references to herself and most other characters as Indigenous and Indian), from stereotypically bad origins and with her own lengthy record, gets a somewhat unlikely, unjust (but, as she acknowledges, not entirely either) long-ass, though eventually commuted prison sentence, serving which she eventually gets her shit together, honing talents for observation of self and others, also deep reading and art of memory (has to recall all the books she's ever read to keep from going crazy without them, while in solitary, early on).
Once out, she gets a job in the author's bookstore (real, w good free advertising here, incl. for a lot of other author's books). Most of the workers, like most characters, are Ind women of various ages, mostly younger than narrator Tookie. White newcomers ask whoever they see, even males, "Are you Louise?" and one or more from a list Tookie has made, for instance, "What's a good Indian name for my/self/kid/dog/ancestor?"(trying to nail Indian blood). One of the best customers, Flora, an "Indian wannabee" (term explained at some lenght), the kind of seeming social hub who tries to buy friendship in the community, but never really finds anyone who satisfies her, according to Tookie, is found dead at home--in bed, with a compulsively collected, elaborately covered book book open by her side---but comes in the next morning anyway, picking through the shop stock as always (Tookie recognizes the route and sounds, inc. of fabrics and jewelry).
Powers of close observation, moment-to-moment and in some good overviews, lead proming elements through many details of menu, attire, especially of younger characters, scrolling through their own menus of relationship and reading interest, with work and party and work party repartee, complaints, gossip, occasional reflections, incl backstory (mostly Tookie and her husband, who had always loved her and resigned from Tribal Police after turning her over for prosecution etc)
Starting to remind me of lots of yadda-yadda between outbreaks in 50s monster etc. movies.
(Since the present is between All Souls Days of 2019-20, I'm also speculating that the narrator will pass over, meeting up w the ghost of the wannabee and maybe some of her own, while still talking quite a bit. Eternity)

Dammit! aren't being *dispelled* by

Passing over because Covid

Gave up on pond by Claire Louise bennet about a third of the way in. Very motonous autofiction (I think?).

Monotonous

Jeez Louises

xxp isn’t that the one where she compares the sound of her vagina to frogs? It’s one of the worst published things I’ve ever read

I don’t know! I found it very difficult to pay attention.

Finished Earthlings and wow! So strange and so massively disturbing. I think I enjoyed Convenience Store Woman more but this one will stick with me much much longer. Get the impression that in amongst the weirdness it might be horribly accurate with regards to trauma and it's àfter affects.

Bit about xpost the frogs seems like it might be mischievous, lil parody of cosmic nature books, so hope to take a look at Pond (and others if it's not in there). Even if it's unintentional comedy, that's okay too, sometimes more than okay, but hoping it's more than that.

More Sophie Mackintosh short stories. It’s just my mood this week maybe.

Self-improvement: this is like a lot of her work on familiar themes; body horror, lack of autonomy over same, the constraints of societal expectations on women. Ugly stories about beauty aren’t anything new. But I was reminded, reading this, a bit of Kyoto Okazaki’s startling Helter Skelter, which I loved. The descriptions of the treatments are largely omitted but give you enough to know what’s going on. The silent woman on the game show that all the men are in love with haunted me. I liked this a lot, mainly for the similarities to Helter Skelter I saw, the slow burn horror of the box of accoutrements and the wasting diet, and the last paragraph.

Communion: a woman lies down in a road. If you’re thinking of the music video for Just, you’re not alone. It’s a pretty obvious inspiration for the story, but it reminded me almost more of Lars von Trier’s Dogville. The veneration curdling into expectation into hate was very reminiscent. I’m not sure this one worked as well as some of her other stories but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It’s got a strange dark fable vibe to it. I enjoyed the note at the start that this was inspired by self-care.

We want to lie down too, the townspeople told each other. We want to lie down too, but we run around our lives like the dogs that go in great circles at the scent of the thunderstorms, and are we not also foaming at the mouths, waiting for our prescience to be recognised?

And are the children not infallible and blameless, subject to electricities we cannot see?

Gotta read that/those. Meanwhile, in The Sentence Covid's come through, momentum too, see yall way down the line.

Starter Driss Chraïbi's 'The Simple Past.' Someone else here had read it, yes? Anyway, I think it's phenomenal, will be finishing it before the weekend's out.

The last of these short story reviews.

May Day is, according to the author:

New fiction from me which is a very loose riff on a nightmarish element from the Mabinogion story Lludd a Llefelys! (TW for pregnancy loss) Thank you to @The_Fence_Mag & @John_S_Phipps https://t.co/HzL6YPOA4o

— Sophie Mackintosh (@fairfairisles) November 2, 2020

February, March and April teemed with birthdays. The heat of so many candles raised off the earth.

After the first class, we were allowed a rest break. I gathered with Jane, Lucy and Emily on a bench. Their names were pieces of sugar, and I hated them all but couldn’t admit it.

I could run alone now, any time of day. Men swerved away from my body. The talisman bumped over my heart with every footstep, and the trees lining my running route reminded me of the quiet of that night, of how the man hadn’t made a sound.

I see echoes of myself everywhere, shared mannerisms and hairstyles and laughs, like a video whose images keep freezing and stuttering. They are things that belong to me and yet they don’t. Three redheads in a row; a bracelet I also own on somebody else’s wrist.

finished Mary Barton. lots of people died. any suspense over the trial spoiled by the chapter title. lots happened and not much did.

Finished The Makioka Sisters. One of the best novels I’ve ever read.

line of the day, at least: "Carrie doesn't like to go home at night, and she doesn't like to go to sleep," and not just because I've known people like that.
mention of Mary Barton reminds me I'd been wondering about Lucy Barton's creator, Elizabeth Strout--local library has a ton of her books---descriptions make it seem like her leading characters might be caustic, layered, Jean Staffordesue (though also remind me of a favorite line of greeting cards)---is she good?

― dow, Monday, 8 November 2021 1

She's okay.

Thanks.
I finished xpost The Sentence, maybe too quickly, but momentum of second half seemed to encourage skating along the translucent surface, despite layers just below, and some seemingly baggy first-half elements now snapping together: seemed like some of the big themes and historical events, def incl. George Floyd Days of horror and rage (and shit from opportunistic looters of community, also more copshit, duh) seemed dumped in there and spread out, after being received: v. granular detail, but nothing revelatory (although some of it is startling, w possibilities I hadn't thought of, such as a new mother who is knocked down, spilling her breast milk---quickly pulled up and running again, she discovers that tear gas seeks moisture, including that of her nipples).
Was especially put off to find that a radio documentary I heard last night clarified and cogently expanded backstory of urban Indigenous, incl. how they got that way->what they're doing now, in Minneapolis: v relevant to these characters---doc did this in a few sentences, in ways that Erdrich's weaving and traffic management didn't quite, or sometimes at all.
Also, the whole thing about the ghost came to contrived-seeming, on the nose resolution---but there were good scenes and turns of thought-phrase-plot-life all along the way: it wasn't a bad read, just left me detached, for the most part.

Finished Driss Chraïbi's "The Simple Past" (an incredible and forceful bildungsroman, imho), then quickly read poet Chris Sylvester's "Book Abt Fantasy," a strange book that has more in common with performance art than poetry, to my mind. Still very interesting!

I'm now going to start Dodie Bellamy's "Bee Reaved." You can read more about Dodie and the book here:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/15/american-experimentalisms-best-kept-secret-dodie-bellamy-bee-reaved

She was my thesis advisor, and Kevin Killian was a mentor as well. Going to be a bit of a weeper, as a result.

Loved Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower, I wasn't sure at first about the setting or main character but the supporting cast, Fitzgerald's gentle sardonicism and the general Germanity of it all slowly won me over, I think I rate it higher than The Bookshop or Offshore.

A few stories into that Ashton Smith anthology and so far my takeaways are:

a) he's very good at coming up with weird blobby nightmare creatures

b) ppl point out a lot that Lovecraft was racist even for his time, which is true, but in terms of the actual fiction I think it shines through in Ashton Smith more than it does in HPL; so many stories featuring primitive natives worshipping evil idols. Even the one he sets on Mars is full of orientalism.

wrapped up louis menand's The Free World last night and am sorry to see it go. idk what ilx thinks of menand but i liked it a lot. agree with Raymond Cummings assesment of it in the summer thread: I guess I've aged into a 10-15 pages per day reader for stuff like this. It's just so rich, like a dark chocolate cake. I had to take a couple breaks from it over the months to cleanse my palate & read other things, but was always happy to get back to it.

particularly like how it was structured, not chronologically but as self-contained capsule histories of figures & ideas, often doubling back to the same moments or inflection points to view them from a different angle & spin off in other directions. (also made it easier to dip in & out of it, of course.) i'm sure some of the chapters must have started off as NYer pieces, but didn't feel at all like one of those books of frankensteined-together magazine articles.

I don't remember details of structure, but his The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America was very good for information, some of it startling. But his occasional narrow, small c conservative tendencies turned up in here, like dismissing abolitionists as a bunch of troublemakers, not letting the responsibles gradually find a middle way (yeah like Missouri Compromise, with plenty slavery left in place,'til it was torpedoed by Kansas Nebraska Act, also 'member The Fugitive Slave Act etc etc right through Congress, perfectly legit). But you can veer around such things, keeping an eye out.

(Also: he follows judiciously granular clarity of the New Yorker excerpt from his latest, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War with lament re too groups in wake of Berkeley's Free Speecn Movement so messy and not nicely organized, like [buttoned-down bespectled lining up in their little raincoats: carefully chosen pic here] like FSM etc.)(And I'll read the book anyway.)

too *bad* groups in wake

I had no problems with The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Idea when I reread what is essentially some superb New Yorker profiles. Agassiz and Adams' anti-Semitism is quite clear.

Yeah, he's usually very fair.
Would like to re-read some of AMC, including his mention of Abolitionists among the Transcendentalists.
(Somewhere in ILX, Scott Seward posted a pic of them incl. his ancestor Rufus S. King [related to Secretary of State William Seward, who, though wounded, fought off attacker on the night of Lincoln's assassination]---then an official portrait of Rufus, still looking much the same, as Union Brigadier General.)

Back to Menand: I'm fairly sure he said some of the Ts were very pro-John Brown, even maybe w fundraisers?! Yeah, no doubt a good read and re-read.

It's just that when the New Yorker latched on to these one-stop-shopping polymaths (Gladwell, Gopnik etc etc), their most annoying tendencies turn up again and again also.

dang I took xpost The Sentence back to library and now I'm missing some of those characters and their interactions, despite the frequent detachment of reading experience.

raced through Richard Osman's The Man Who Died Twice in a couple of days. v undemanding but I do really enjoy most of his cast of characters tbh.

a few chapters into Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mitzuki Tsujimura and I am properly hooked so far. 7 early teenagers who for various reasons aren't attending school are transported during school hours each day to a magical fairytale castle.

George Eliot - Middlemarch. Of course this is great, classic and everything though on this one read I think I was a lot more into Dorothea and her journey through the patriarchy than anything else. The universe in an English TOWN does come into full view in the end, and the chapters leading up to the 'persecution' of Balustrode/Lydgate are fantatstic. So much of England in that whole business.

Though the novel it reminded me the most of was Musil's Man Without Qualities, in that both are partly looking back at events in recent history. The main protagonist seems too clever and wasted on what everyone else is up to, they know it and are stuck, and the relationship between Dorothea/Will reminds me a bit of Agathe/Ulrich. These observations don't take account with what they are up to though, they are ambitious novelists who express their art quite differently.

Driss Chraïbi's 'The Simple Past.' Someone else here had read it, yes?

I read it last year. An angry stream-of-consciousness story of a young man with an oppressive, authoritarian, possibly murderous father, living in a conservative, traditional, religious society, ie. mid-20th century Morocco. Hard to follow for me at times, but impressively single-minded in its rage.

Natalia Ginzburg - Family and Borghesia
Sophie Collins - Who is Mary Sue?
Baudelaire - Intimate Journals

So glad there is a focus on Ginzburg as it allows me to fill me in the gaps on stuff I haven't read by her. The novella is where she is at her most powerful, where a universe of character, feeling and need is flattened by her deceptively simple prose that seems to accumulate the spectrum of life.

As for Collins' poetry, its her first collection - I got to know of her by the (now deacivated) presence on twitter, and followed that up with Baudelaire's prose. He is a 'bad boy' as much as Collins is careful and considerate.

a universe of character, feeling and need is flattened by her deceptively simple prose that seems to accumulate the spectrum of life.

Quite well put. As much as I dislike artists of the same gender, I see a similarly elusive simplicity in Elena Ferrante.

🤨

Last night I finished My Home is Far Away, Dawn Powell. It felt like one of her weaker efforts, largely because it was strongly tethered to her own life story and I think the pull of memory interfered with her natural instincts as a satirist and storyteller.

Now I've started The Ten Thousand Things, Maria Dermoût, set in the Moluccas.

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes - Janet Malcolm

If you asked me about what I thought about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, my view was formed at 16 and hasn’t moved on much since. I loved Plato’s poetry intensely for the two years I studied it, but I admittedly haven’t thought of her much since, although I own her collected works and still find great enjoyment in them. So a few weeks back, I was talking about how my entire English class haaaaated Hughes, because of him cheating on Plath and then both Plath and Assia Wevill’s suicides, xyzzzz__ mentioned this book, which I’ve never heard of.

What a book, though. Malcolm picks her way carefully through the stuff we all know; the work, the deaths, the rumours. Somewhere in reading this, I came to feeling almost sympathetic towards Hughes, which Malcolm freely admits is her bias in writing this book.

The book delves a lot into the other biographies about Plath and Hughes. Hughes himself is the great unseen in this; he is never directly interviewed by Malcolm, but instead is glimpsed through letters, stories and most of all through his sister Olwyn’s passionate advocacy. But his presence towers over everything. It is hard to forget his anguish about being treated as though he is dead by biographers, in terms of what they see fit to speculate about. When Malcolm writes about Wevill’s suicide, and in passing says (of Hughes), that his pain must have been unimaginable, it startled me. It’s a totally obvious point to make, of course, but I had been so set in the image of this couple that I’d held more or less untouched for the last 18 years that it shocked me.

Malcolm picks her way through Plath’s own words, in the form of her poetry, letters and journals. Between this and the various coverage of people who knew her, she tries to sift down to some kind of truth, but freely admits at all times the difficulty in doing so. Although she confesses her bias towards the Hugheses, I still felt sympathetic towards Plath. It is clear that she was in a lot of pain in life, pain that perhaps none were equipped to help her handle. Malcolm notes the casual cruelty of even Plath’s supposed defenders in this life towards her memory, and is sharp about what they gain from it. In this, her view is very much aligned with that of the Hughes siblings.

Memory and its failings as a method of establishing some kind of objective truth are a theme visited and done well here. Malcolm is skilled in the way she releases information at key points, so I was surprised when she is surprised, and the ending of the book is sublime.

What did I most like about this? Her portrayal of, and various entanglements with, Olwyn Hughes is up there. The meeting with Jacqueline Rose is a highlight. The careful piecing together of the story - for it is a story, as much as it was also people’s lives - is incredible, and I find myself thinking about certain phrases from Hughes’s various letters excerpted throughout.

A truly amazing book, and one that I will return to time and time again. Thank you so much for recommending me this xyzzzz__!

Lol that Plato is obviously meant to be Plath.

Excellent book. It got me to read Anne Stevenson's (okay) poetry.

👍👍👍 xp

xp I have a lot of thoughts about this book but absolutely zero curiosity about her work. I was more interested in Malcolm’s thoughts about her.

Even from a distance of two years from reading The Silent Woman, Malcolm's stance on Hughes still feels radical to me. As in received opinion is such, and the urge to pathologise Plath and Hughes so strong (and, to a lesser extent, Wevill), that it almost has to be a process of ongoing revision to hold the possibilities Malcolm constructs present in one's mind. If it's at all relevant, I think, if anything, I've come to admire Plath's work more and Hughes' less, though this may not all be entwined with Malcolm's book.

I'm reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's book Gathering Moss. She's a professor of forest biology so it's a specialist text but presented to a lay audience; it's that crossover that I'm struggling with a bit as each chapter is framed with what can be quite pronounced containing metaphors. It's also oddly edited in places, with a frustrating amount of repetition. It's convinced me to get a hand glass though, so there is that.

xp I really liked her repeated characterisation of Plath’s work as extreme - I never thought of it as such but those sharp sentences and zero punches pulled, of course it is. I found the anecdote that the book’s title is from fascinating. Couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Is there a thread for posting random connections between consecutive books that you've read? I just finished Virginia Woolf's Orlando and am about halfway through Jim Thompson's The Kill-Off and both have characters named Marmaduke.

Judging by reviews and excerpts I've read, collected letters of Plath to her mother seem to have incl./consisted of very detailed candor, at least regarding some topics and experiences. Also the diaries. Will try to read all of that before going back to any more biographies, though Malcolm's sounds worth a look. Somehow you're reminding me of A. Alvarez's take on her in The Savage God, his study of suicide and art. He was her and Ted's friend and neighbor, also published some of her poetry or other things, i think. Talks about that, and (says why he) thinks she meant to be found while still alive. Guess that would fit with interpretation of "cry for help," (that's what he seemed to think, as best I recall), and/or "being provocative," difficult," "fuck you."

Dammit, can't find my copy of his book right now---but he's candid here, about how he thinks he failed her, and on context:https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/mar/19/poetry.features

Wow, review by Joyce Carol Oates no less, NYTimes '72, sympathetic to his then-oddball syncretic approach, which she says will get "harsh criticism," also she paraphrases his views on Plath's suicide w far more nuance than I remembered, in NYTimes, '71: says will be controversial because a book like no other, at that point, and
...The most compelling section deals with Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963. Alvarez was acquainted with her and her hus band, the poet Ted Hughes, and was evidently one of the last people to see her alive. Her death is analyzed in terms of her poetry; Alvarez believes she attempted to “exorcize the [subject of] death she had summoned up in her poems,” that her suicide was not absolutely deliberate, not a totally conscious choice. Ted Hughes and others acquainted with Sylvia Plath have objected to Alvarez's writing on this point, but since I have no way of knowing what is fact and what is speculation, I will assume that Alvarez reported the events as honestly as he could. In any case it is his theory about the relationship of certain poetic subjects and the self‐destruction of the poet that is really significant. Alvarez raises some disturbing questions. Is art therapeutic? Is the Aristotelian idea of the cathartic function of art perhaps mistaken? Does the poet instead involve himself more and more deeply, fatally, in the morbidity he tries to expell from his system through a formal construction of images and arguments?

It may be objected that the suicidal artist chooses morbid images be cause he cannot choose others, that he is rehearsing his own suicide, or perhaps feebly postponing it, through his art. Or, what is
more likely, that certain artists project the deathliness within them, which then seems to “predict” their own suicides, and that certain other artists become too involved with their own subject‐matter and perhaps with their own mythological concept of what they (as “artists”) must be, so that it is too late for them to turn back. There are no final answers. But Alvarez's questions are superb, for they cause us to wonder not only about ourselves— not only about isolated individuals— but about our entire culture, which exhibits so proudly and, indeed, so lavishly, public images of violence, death and comic horror in such billion‐dollar industries as the movies. If art has no power to do evil, then it has no power to do good either; it is, then, powerless. And few liberals would want to believe this.
Gotta serve somebody! Did I mention it's by Joyce Carol Oates? Whole thing is worth checking, not paywalled yet:
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/04/16/archives/the-savage-god-a-study-of-suicide-by-a-alvarez-299-pp-new-york.html

Though in the xpost 2000 Guardian quotes, seems like he may be saying that she did seem more conscious of what she was about to do---judging by that last visit, that poem she brought---and that he didn't want to face it back then, incl. while writing about it?

Judging by reviews and excerpts I've read, collected letters of Plath to her mother seem to have incl./consisted of very detailed candor, at least regarding some topics and experiences. Also the diaries. Will try to read all of that before going back to any more biographies, though Malcolm's sounds worth a look. Somehow you're reminding me of A. Alvarez's take on her in _The Savage God_, his study of suicide and art. He was her and Ted's friend and neighbor, also published some of her poetry or other things, i think. Talks about that, and (says why he) thinks she meant to be found while still alive. Guess that would fit with interpretation of "cry for help," (that's what he seemed to think, as best I recall), and/or "being provocative," difficult," "fuck you."

I also recommend Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage.

Just finished African Popular Theatre which I've had out for way too long. Think I got it between lockdowns last year and should have got to it sooner.
It is very interesting i think i just let getting sidetracked by other stuff. Gives a history dating back to precol9nial tradition and up to time of publication in the mid 90s.
Want to read more on the subject and definitely more on African film which it gives one chapter to.

Back to Black Kehinde Andrews
I read his New Age of Empire last year or the start of this and that is supposed to be a prequel to this. I like his writing so got an interlibrary loan of this. I'm reading a lot of anti racism stuff still.

Audrey Lord Compendium
3 books by black lesbian feminist. Mainly seems to be short pieces.
I think I need my own copy since this is a library interloan

Another Tuneless Racket Vol1 Origins.
Steven H Gardner.
American writers history of Punk. Interesting. He's looking into the prepunk bands that influenced things so far. I read about Count Bishops yesterday who I hadn't known the timeline for. Knew the singer from Buffalo was in them at one point as well as the singer from The Cannibals but wasn't sure who replaced who and hadn't listened to them really. Did check out something with each singer on Spotify yesterday. May return to that again.

Ngl, totally uninterested in anything seeking to redeem Ted Hughes. Shitty poet (especially in comparison to Plath) and shitty human, period.

yeah but he sure knew how to bite

you mean bite from Sylvia's poetry?

(Really, it's his editing of the original collected poems that makes him an unforgivable character to me, on top of all the other known horrible things he did— to edit your suicided ex-wife's poems to make yourself look better and not culpable in any way for her desperation is pretty fucked)

No, as in bites! During their first hookup Plath and Hughes bit each other hard enough to draw blood.

I'm mostly indifferent to his poetry; it's D.H. Lawerence's animal poetry but studied and self-conscious. I did like his translation of the Oresteia.

i read malcolm's book many years ago and absolutely loved it. i remember being quite surprised and at least sort of convinced by her more sympathetic take on ted hughes. that said, it came out a few years back that hughes was apparently physically abusive to plath during their marriage, so I’m not sure how i would feel about malcolm’s take on him now.

ftr Malcolm doesn't at al try to redeem Hughes. His presence is defined as absence: he doesn't speak, he has emissaries. Instead, she suggests -- an unassailable point based on the surviving letters and testimony from contemporaries -- Hughes did love Plath and was destroyed by her suicide.

Ngl, totally uninterested in anything seeking to redeem Ted Hughes. Shitty poet (especially in comparison to Plath) and shitty human, period.

Sort of sounds like it is, tho, based on what everyone is saying.

"Oh he loved her"

Then he should have treated her with more dignity and respect, end of story.

The Malcolm book explicitly picks its way through the evidence of what he published and left in, in order to make the case that he was torn between the real two impulses of telling the truth and protecting himself and their kids. It’s a very interesting analysis.

At the time of Malcolm's book the letters in which Plath alleges physical abuse hadn't emerged yet.

ftr Malcolm doesn't at al try to redeem Hughes. His presence is defined as absence: he doesn't speak, he has emissaries. Instead, she suggests -- an unassailable point based on the surviving letters and testimony from contemporaries -- Hughes did love Plath and was destroyed by her suicide.

At the time of Malcolm's book the letters in which Plath alleges physical abuse hadn't emerged yet.

It seems we're not going to agree on this point— the more you describe the book, the more it seems like apologia for Hughes and his atrocious decisions.

(Not you doing the apologia, but Malcolm).

An apologia for Hughes would've been, "He did these terrible things; let me explain why you should bear X, Y, Z."

The Malcolm book is closer to, "He did these terrible things; here's how his sister and her war on biographers has shielded him."

I’m not really interested in going into this further, but there was none of that in this book, and nobody has posted itt alluding to it as such.

Hughes is never directly interviewed in the Malcolm book. He is at turns silent and then torrents of ferocity through his letters to intermediaries or his sister.

She might've titled it The Silent Man.

The title I thought kind of alludes to what the book is really about, the gaps in between what is known, as well as the telling memory of Plath that Olwyn had.

gyac, you yourself mentioned Malcolm's sympathy toward Hughes and his siblings *twice* in your initial post, which is what got me worked up in the first place.

Sympathy isn’t apologism.

A vast biography of Plath appeared last year. Not mentioned here.

Only one sustained discussion on ILB about Hughes as poet, as opposed to 'ogre-husband of Plath'. He got very mixed reviews, a few of his poems admired, but most of his output not. What think you of Ted Hughes?

I finished R.F. Foster's biography of Yeats, vol 1: THE APPRENTICE MAGE. The best biography I've read.

I finished Steven Connor, THE MADNESS OF KNOWLEDGE. Dazzling opening; the rest of the book not quite at the same level; but many hilarious self-referential moments.

I read Daniel Corkery, SYNGE AND ANGLO-IRISH LITERATURE: the most sectarian work of criticism I've ever read, but terrifically entertaining and rich.

I read J.M. Synge, THE ARAN ISLANDS: simply written, but a bit of a slog because, to be honest, rarely exciting. But a pretty good and significant piece of travel writing or exploration.

I've started Jonathan Coe, MR WILDER AND ME: a novel about meeting Billy Wilder. Very readable. I wonder a bit about Coe's tendency to over-emphasise things when it's not necessary.

ay yi yi I don't know if I'm smart, educated or English enough to read Ian Sinclair. Really enjoy his prose but there is probably an average of a reference to something I don't know in every other paragraph

Isn't his whole thing psychogeography? That can be rough going if you're not living where it's written about...

'He could joke very happily in those days when his sentence was a straight young thing that could run where it liked, instead of a delicate creature swathed in relative clauses as an invalid in shawls' - from Rebecca West's acrid little book on Henry James.

finished Small Island (where the Before bits were always more insteresting than the 1948 bits). only heard about it on the Imagine episode, which also acted as an obit given that she died before it aired.

started Accidental Tourist re-read. probably my favourite Tyler. (a slipping down life?)

Yeah, a slipping down life for me (also the novel). Liked Searching For Caleb too.
Life x works of Elizabeth Hardwick in The New Yorker---in this context, I can infer maybe why she committed to the notorious Lowell, despite all warnings and protests---mainly, I'm intrigued by description and quotes of Sleepless Nights---is it good??

(Also, she's described as thinking it could be Lives of the Artists, though she did all business of living so he could write.)

She's a far better critic than fiction writer, but that one had moments

What collections of her criticism should I read?

NYRB has helpfully collected the best stuff.

Finished Louise Fitzhugh's The Long Secret (as discussed on the literary treats thread) and pleased to discover it's just as goddamn wonderful as everyone said it was. Different pleasures from the first book, but just as good. I love

Foiled, Harriet stood in the middle of the group. Everyone looked down at her. She felt like a spilled drink.

Such a perceptive, funny, original writer.

Got all my library books extended to the start of the new year. So can relax and read at my own speed. Got Raymond Queneau book We Always Treat Women Too Well out too. So will read that over next few days and hopefully get bell hooks Ain't I'm A Woman as an interlibrary loan in a few days too.

Enjoying the Steven H Gardner Another Tuneless Racket cos he's covering bands I don't know well.

Also the book Sway on unconscious bias.

Finished Holly Melgard's "Divisions of Labor," a small conceptual poetry abecedarium of language used by people giving birth.

More notably, finished Dodie Bellamy's "Bee Reaved." If you're into Bellamy at all, it's pretty amazing— very moving and thrilling and also frustrating! Here is an excerpt from the jewel of the book, its final essay: https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/we-run-for-our-lives-dodie-bellamy-2021/

Don't know what I'll be on next. Maybe another Rabih Alameddine.

Oh yeah, great TNY essay on Bellamy too, thanks for the link, tables!

xxx[post one thing about EH's criticism I wondered about:
She seems to be projecting a lot in that profile's quotes (again, context invites me to think this, but profiler seems to think so too,though not in a negative way) Also as described, seems that Hardwick was big on author's origins, background: thought Plath suffered from no definite regional identity? The Almanac of American Politics observed that of Poppy Bush in 1980, and did seem to figure into enduring-recurring Conservative suspicions of him as Beltway careerist weasel, lacking "the Vision thing," as he put it---but Plath? Oh well, that's the approach of these New Yorker pieces too, good gateways.

She may have meant that Plath didn't have that aspect of definition to counter, the way Hardwick herself is shown vs. Southern conformity, incl. the usual rules, roles for and of girls and women.

(She may not have had opportunity to see Plath's letters, diaries; I don't know how the publication dates jibe w Hardwick's span as critic)

i read both harriet the spy and the long secret several years ago on alfred's recommendation and adored them both. both harriet and beth ellen are wonderful characters. i dearly wish there were more louise fitzhugh books to read!

something fitzhugh has in common with plath: both wrote novels that somehow disappeared after their deaths. fitzhugh wrote an adult novel called amelia that was rejected by a publisher and apparently got lost, and plath at least started writing two other novels besides the bell jar that haven't survived.

I read The Bell Jar in Febrruary at last. It's solid! She has an acrid wit she should've expended on more prose.

That scene after the clambake where Harriet and Mr. Roque discuss the existence of God is A+. Here's how JFK-era live-and-let-live-ism plays.

Stevolende:

>>> Got Raymond Queneau book We Always Treat Women Too Well out too.

Haven't read it myself, but this is supposed to be fascinating and extraordinary -- a thriller set during the Easter Rising and using characters from Ulysses? I could hardly believe it when I first heard of it.

It is fascinating; "thriller" might be putting it a bit strongly. As often happens with Queneau it sets off with an incredible energy that doesn't quite persist through to the end of the book. Then again, landing a satisfying ending is probably not what he was trying for.

Reading Alameddine's "An Unnecessary Woman." Pretty good so far, only 40 pages in but moving fast. A lot of work and family shit to do over the next two days, but hopefully I'll get some R&R time in.

XP yeah quite interesting but doesn't seem to maintain tension like a thriller/ It was written pseudonymously as Sally Mara and appears to be part of a trilogy. it was intended to be like a penny dreadful or something but atmosphere seems really weird.
I was at a book launch before the pandemic of a book on the trilogy written by an ex lecturer at the local university. Unfortunately because it is an academic book I couldn't afford a copy. have been hoping a cheap one might appear somewhere. Funny also I'd been talking to the writer at something completely not connected to it a few weeks earlier, maybe the anniversary of the an Taibhearc theatre. That was definitely the building we were in when we were talking, just not sure that was the event though.
Have wanted to read more Queneau since discovering him which was probably related to Rowland S Howard having his first novel the Bark Tree on his Portrait of the Artist As A Consumer. Wish i 'd finished the book I had loaned from Walthamstow library in the mid 80s though. Same thing is out asa different translation as Witch grass at the moment.

THis is an interesting book with a few civilians getting pretty casually killed in the name of the revolution and as collateral damage.
Queneau's also invented a Post Office branch that they've taken over. Not sure if Queneau really understands the geography of Dublin since he's got the British forces arriving at a point I'd be surprised was anything like in range

Yeah I can't imagine RQ was much interested in real Dublin geography, or at least not for these purposes.

I’ve read about half his novels, but years ago. I remember really liking Pierrot Mon Ami, Saint Glinglin and The Sunday of Life, though tbh I can’t remember much about any of them. Of course you can’t go wrong with Zazie in the Metro.

As I say a lot of them are great fun as long as you’re alright with novels that just peter out.

Ever seen Matt Madden's comic strip riff on Queneau’s Exercises in Style? It's pretty well done:

https://mattmadden.com/comics/99x/

>>> invented a Post Office branch that they've taken over

Not the GPO? Another post office? What's it called?

he has it at Sackville (later O'Connell) Street/Eden Quay. I was trying to think where the next branch was when i was there. I don't think there is another one anything like that close since O'Connell st isn't really all that long and the GPO is half way up one side of it.

& he has communication between the GPO and the branch that has been taken over in the book

I finished The Ten Thousand Things, Maria Dermoût. Its interest for me was mainly her intimate knowledge of the Moluccas (aka 'Spice Islands') and her ability to convey a strong, living sense of that place and everything that dwells there, and to do it with graceful and economical style. It starts rather slowly and diffusely; it took me a second attempt before I got get past the first several pages. But it gathered steam and soon came into better focus.

finished Lonely Castle in the Mirror, liked it a lot though the ending while fine enough didn't blow me away.

have read everything murakami has ever published but had to draw the line when I saw his latest had arrived in the shop and was about all the t-shirts he has owned!!

Reading sections of a book about Flann O'Brien called PROBLEMS WITH AUTHORITY.

Delving back into reading lately, thanks to back in office lunch times again, so starting with a familiar read from PKD "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said"

then possibly Virtual Light by Gibson

Not exactly in tip-top reading shape but made my way through Iain Sinclair's London Overground. Not top table Sinclair but still full of what I go to him for.

Also read The Sign of Four which was fine but didn't really warrant full novella status.

Now reading Nairn's London. I have no real frame of reference for Nairn, aside from the drinking stories and the almost saint-like bearing he has with people I like (Meades, Hatherley); I wasn't expecting him to be so sentimental - about mythical cockneys, about Britain (he cites Shakespeare, Churchill and Handel in the first 3 pages). No quarrel with the writing though, which is the right side of florid and learned.

Yesterday I started Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. It follows in the tradition of most travel books by English authors, where the author travels through exotic lands full of uncivilized foreigners speaking uncouth and incomprehensible languages, living in squalor, and eating nasty foods, which surroundings the author endures, cheerfully admitting that he must be a hopeless fool for having chosen this adventure, while the lucky reader can sit by the fireside and enjoy all this dirt, discomfort and danger vicariously, while having a good chuckle at the author's expense. I find myself yearning for a few sentences revealing a single honest emotion. Everything real or direct is hidden behind a theatrical scrim.

Sounds good!
Late Thanksgiving night got hooked on my aunt's copy of The Young Romantics, by Daisy Hay: group bio dynamics, how some of the best writing and worst interpersonal damage got done in small interlocking circles of friends, lovers, frenenimies, children, older siblings---all of these people v. young for most of the book---also their struggles in context of outside world, class strictures getting worse in reaction to revolutions and any public dissent/nonconformity---spooked by all the fucked-over girls and young women killing themselves---more publicly unspeakable behavior, of course---incl. via drownings and attempted drowning---making the later-seen-as-UR-Romantique end of classy rebel Percy seem that much more recklessly entitled, in my reading.

(later, of course as also tracked, his radicalism is played down for Victorians: he's this moody spirit, him and Keats, wandering alone, although old associates kept doing their bits for the cottage industries.)

gone back to reading Ibram X kendi Stamped From The Beginning.
Just read about the American Civil war and Lincoln's gradual movement towards recognising that ex-enslaved have a place in the US.
& the cynicism previous to that of the emancipation proclamation like it is only supposed to be effective where Lincoln has no power to enfoirce it and is supposed not to be in effect in the areas where he is going to need the votes of those who are enslaving people.
Gosh, like racism seems to have been an active part of the inconvenient parts of US history as well as the ones where it can be fobbed off by the wrong people being at fault.
I quite enjoy Kendi

Another Tuneless Racket Steven H Gardner
more of his pounk history. I've just been reading about Eddie & The Hot Rods who I was semi aware of but didn't know very well. They were doing stripped down r'n'r at the time things were taking off but didn't see themselves as punk. Enjpyoing this book, have the 2nd volume too. I thought the other 2 were alreaqdy out but they're yet to come. i was turned onto them by a review i Ugly Things and got the books pretty cheap which was great I think they went up in price almost imediately afterwards. Alkso got the first volume of the compiled fanzines of the writer.

East West Street Philippe Sands
I heard teh podcast thsi ties in with and thought it interesting and taht I needed to read teh book if i got the chancel. Found it cheap so getting teh chance to read it. Writing is similar to the presenting voice. Which works for me ok.
Tracing the history of a Nazi who i think was directly responsible for the death of his grandfather

Back to Coe's MR WILDER AND ME. He's still showing a tendency to telegraph too much. The story is interesting though. Don't know quite what's going to happen. And the portrait of Wilder and his collaborator Diamond, I enjoy. Coe could work harder, though, at describing people like William Holden - he doesn't bother doing it at all!

I forgot to mention above that I also read all of John Millington Synge's unpublished and unstaged plays and scenarios, in a scholarly edition from 1968.

Most substantial is the one-act play WHEN THE MOON HAS SET, which also once existed in a more dramatic two-act version. It's set in a Big House where one COLM comes back and woos the nun SISTER EILEEN away from her holy orders and into marriage with him. It also involves shades of the past in an Ibsenesque way. The play becomes increasingly preposterous and ends amid incredible sexism as SISTER EILEEN accepts her true destiny of marriage.

I think it has never been staged.

The edition also contains several scenarios for plays that never get beyond a summary of the idea. Another ludicrous play is LUASNAD, CAPA AND LAINE in which some ancient Spanish people who have discovered Ireland for the first time (but have Irish, not Spanish names) are swamped by a storm on the coast. The ludicrous thing is that the big leader LUASNAD turns in about one page from mourning his wife to wooing someone else's widow, then at the end the storm sweeps them away too. One of the most ridiculous playlets I've ever come across.

A couple of satirical sketches are better. One called DEAF MUTES FOR IRELAND is a satire of the Gaelic League that is almost in Flann O'Brien mode, and NATIONAL DRAMA: A FARCE also goes in that direction, but Synge isn't yet able to develop it.

All these works are from the 1890s and early 1900s.

570 pages into Jerusalem and there's a Beanoesque troupe of ghost kids called the Dead Dead Gang spying on Oliver Cromwell.

enjoyed "the king at the edge of the world", historical spy novel set in elizabethan england/scotland. at no point does it rise to the literary genre level of le carre or hilary mantel, but it was a ripping yarn and you might like it if you like those two.

Arthur Miller Echoes Down The Corridor Essays 1944-2000
have had this sitting around ear teh bed for way too long. Probably out of the library for a year now and neglected it. Cos when i do pick it up and read any of it the writing is really good. Various things on the wake of WWII and the Democratic conference in 1968 and him growing up in Brooklyn and things. I really should have got through this and returned it a while back but now still got it to read through and it is pretty good. Hopefully have it finished by next week and can return it to have space to get something else i've ordered out.
I read his memoir Timebends a couple of decades ago and that was really good too.

Sway Pragya Agarwal
one of a few books about unconscious bias I'm half way through reading

i read both harriet the spy and the long secret several years ago on alfred's recommendation and adored them both. both harriet and beth ellen are wonderful characters. i dearly wish there were more louise fitzhugh books to read!

Has anyone ever read "Nobody's Family Is Going to Change"? It sounds quite different from her other books.

I finished "Divorcing" by Susan Taubes. A lovely, haunting book that skips around in time and occasionally into fantasy, but everything is held together by being about one person's experience and the strong emotions that are never far from the surface. The narrator seems to be inviting the reader to play armchair psychoanalyst, to explain why she seems unhappy and adrift. Its probably not a coincidence that her father is a trained Freudian who analyzes her childhood for her in real time as she's growing up. The book also touches on themes of feminism, the Holocaust, and the Jewish immigrant experience.

I’ve read about half his novels, but years ago. I remember really liking Pierrot Mon Ami, Saint Glinglin and The Sunday of Life, though tbh I can’t remember much about any of them. Of course you can’t go wrong with Zazie in the Metro.

As I say a lot of them are great fun as long as you’re alright with novels that just peter out.

― Tim, Thursday, 25 November 2021 14:56 (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

read the sunday of life in the summer and had a great time - I liked the ending even tho yes it is kind of a non-ending

currently halfway thru amos tutuola my life in the bush of ghosts love it love it love it.

Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner.

I’ve only read Red Shift, but I thought it would be fun to go back and read all his books from the beginning, given they’re all short and there’s not many of them. Anyway - comparing Red Shift to Weirdstone is a bit like comparing Castafiore’s Emerald to Tintin in America. It’s strange reading Garner’s juvenilia when he seems like the sort of person who’s been seventy all his life. And it’s quite a slog - halfway through I was close to giving up - the long, boring sequence where the children escape from a series of caves reminded me of getting stuck in an isometric Spectrum game where every room looks like same. The second half is pacier and I adored the sudden ending. Also loved the bit where the up-until-then characterless Susan is suddenly, like, “you know what, fuck this, I’m out of here”. I think Garner is one of the only tolerable authors with no discernible sense of humour.

O. Nate: "Nobody's Family Is Going to Change" - I don't think I've actually read it, but the book was around when I was a child and the title has always stayed with me.

the moon of gomrath is streets better than weirdstone

I finished Rabih Alameddine's AN UNNECESSARY WOMAN this morning. A great book and character study, and also a surprisingly moving paean to the joys of reading. It made me want to read some of the longer novels I've never taken a stab at...Anna Karenina in 2022? Maybe.

Anyway, Alameddine is clearly a gifted writer, can recommend his books without reserve.

I read Patrick Hamilton's Slaves of Solitude. It's set in a boarding house in Henley-on-Thames in 1942, populated by the aged, the grotesque and the despairing, all struggling with nightly blackouts. Like Hangover Square, world events hover in the background but this is much more a miniature in its study of manners and etiquette - something like a companion to Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, albeit the central character in this is in her late 30s. It's grim and cruel and very funny in places.

Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek by Manu Saadia; was getting quite frustrated trying to understand how gold pressed latinum works in a world with replicators, so thought I'd dig out this book I got sent for supporting a podcast ages ago. Saadia starts by giving the history of the "no money in Star Trek" idea (started as a joke in the fourth film, enthusiastically embraced as canon by TNG, DS9 retcons all the references to it in the original series away) and then expounds on the ST universe having such unlimited resources that all goods and services end up at zero cost. This leads to the first conclusion of his that I can't really get with - he suggests scarce resources such as wine from Picard's vineyard or a spot at Sisko's restaurant also remain free because the Federation has eliminated consumerism; status is acheived through achievement, not posessions, and so demand won't ever outstrip supply. But this to me ignores that someone might want Picard's wine because they like the taste better than of any other wine in the galaxy, or that they might want a spot at Sisko's because they love the atmosphere or think he's the greatest cook. Status surely a big part of why ppl value scarce resources but not ALL of it?

Also reading An English Murder by Cyril Hare for book club which so far is very much hitting the spot.

Status surely a big part of why ppl value scarce resources but not ALL of it?

In one of Banks' post scarcity Culture books the AIs have a good old laugh about people reinventing money when a market develops around tickets for a once in a lifetime concert.

Nairn's London was magnificent - angry and sad and poetic and all those things. I'm desperate for a pint in the Grapes or Ye Old Mitre.

Reading Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight.

Garcia Marquez's Clandestine in Chile, his version of Miguel Littín’s secret return to Pinochet's Chile in the 1980s to film conditions.

Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her long-ass travelogue about Yugoslavia during the years entre les guerres.

Shirley Hazzard's dull The Evening of the Holiday.

Nobody's Family is Going to Change is not bad but not nearly as good as Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret. Great title though.

Ain't I A Woman bell hooks
History of oppression of black women in the United States. From slavery through to her present day which is about 40 years ago. So through Jim Crow and white feminism and so on.
Quite good so far. I think I want to read a lot more of her so shame there seems to be very little in the Irish library system. This took a while to appear as an interlibrary loan.

Another Tuneless Racket Stephen H Gardner
Volume 1 of his history of Punk.
Just been reading about Blondie and The Saints which I think I already agreed with. Not sure to what extent I would have written off Parallel Lines due to the production and I thought it was widely thought of as a classic but do love the 1st 2 lps and haven't gone later. Wonder if he's seen the OGWT Live set from Glasgow where band is firing on all cylinders including the Scottish pipers playing Sunday Girl.

I finished A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. It became a bit less coy toward the end, when the depths of their physical suffering were too grave to paper over with self-deprecating wit.

Now I have begun to read an even more high-testosterone book by an English author, a novel called Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household. It is deeply engaged in a peculiarly English form of hero-mythologizing and the glorification of individual grit, to a degree that is almost pornographic, despite the narrator-hero relentlessly understating everything. What saves the book is how seriously it takes itself and the fact that it is remarkably well-written. And it's short, too, 180 pages.

You're right that it's ridiculous but I love Rogue Male. I'm not sure how far you are into the book but I know Dorset fairly well and have found myself looking for the key location a few times.

I'm within sight of the end of Antal Szerb's Journey By Moonlight. What an extraordinary book.

Finished Carlos Lara's "Subconscious Colossus" and a chap from Jennifer Soong, flitted around between some things before settling on re-reading Genet's "The Criminal Child," which I haven't read in a very long time. I'd forgotten how much I love it.

finished The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino by Hiromi Kawasaki. the ten women recounting their time with the titular character each get a chapter, each of which read like short stories. the 2nd chapter relating to nishino's sister though not told by her was particularly moving.

The BBC version of Rogue Male, with Peter O' Toole, is a good gritty time, tho there is an unacceptable animal death in there.

The Country Life by Rachel Cusk. Nothing like the Outline trilogy, it's an almost Mr Bean-esque farce written in a near 18th century wordy and exacting style where lots of things happen for effect with no explanation or follow up. One spectacular moment where for no reason, after some build up the narrator says to the housekeeper who she's only just met "here's your coffee you cunt" but other than that it was a bit of a chore, and if it had been the first think I'd read by her it wouldn't have tempted me to more.

Now I want to read a Mr.Bean novelisation.

there's a bit about early cusk in this new yorker piece https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/07/rachel-cusk-gut-renovates-the-novel

One way to measure the gifts of a writer, particularly a prolific one like Cusk, who has published twelve books in twenty-four years, is by the distance between her early work and that of her maturity. Cusk made her début in 1993, at the age of twenty-six, with “Saving Agnes,” a down-from-Oxford bildungsroman about a grandiose, tormented girl finding her way in London, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award. Her subsequent novels include “The Country Life,” a parody of a gothic romance between a bratty invalid and his au pair, written in the ornate syntax of a Victorian moralizer; “In the Fold,” set in a bohemian manor house rife with sexual and dynastic intrigue; and “Arlington Park,” interlocking stories of suburban anomie. The chaste prose of her current trilogy seems almost like a reproach to the self-conscious virtuosity that preceded it. Before she wrote “Outline,” Cusk was a wickedly clever stylist, who fired off aphorisms like a French court diarist and made up the sort of metaphors—“cauliflower-haired old ladies”; the “floury haze” of a dry summer—that you flag in the margin. A woman’s gray teeth are “a bouquet of tombstones.” But Cusk sometimes bared her own teeth: her power to dazzle and to condemn.

Cusk judges several of her early books harshly: they were, she said, “bedevilled by a lack of benevolence.” By the time she published “The Bradshaw Variations,” in her early forties, that devil was behind her. Like its predecessors, but more humanely, the novel tells a conventional story of family rivalries and marital ennui (particularly wifely ennui). In retrospect, however, it was the end of a line. The Bradshaws’ real malaise, which wasn’t clear to Cusk yet, is the tyranny of conventional stories: the fates and the characters that we inherit, and to which we surrender our desires, along with our lives in the moment. Cusk was about to upend the plot of her own life—to break up her family, then to lose her house and her bearings. The ensuing turmoil would force her to question an old core principle of the writer’s vocation, to presume authority, and of woman’s vocation, to sacrifice herself for others.

(article also good value for her offering contemptuous descriptions of her family which the fact checkers are forced to check.)

Fascinating interview, thanks. I've been interested in her memoirs but not sure now if getting that close to her won't taint my view of her fiction.

Flew through 'The Criminal Child,' but I skipped the intro etc.

Last night, after drunkenly celebrating it as an object in the world, I began parts of my friend Mark's new book of poems, 'POOR FRIDGE.' I think I'll probably return to that tonight.

xp my wife read "a life's work" and said it was wonderful and is giving it as a gift to three of her parent-of-young-kids friends this christmas. i do plan to read that.

I finished Rogue Male and it was both good and batshit crazy. As noted in my first post about it, the fact that it takes itself completely seriously paradoxically saves it from its batshit craziness.

I've now moved on to Treason By the Book, Jonathan Spence, a recounting of a conspiracy in Qing Dynasty China, formed by failed candidates for the civil service. The author also wrote The Memory Palace of Mateo Ricci and a bunch of other books centered in Chinese history.

Recently I finished "The Caesar's Palace Coup" by Sujeet Indap and Max Frumes. This is a business case study type of book, going deep into the weeds on a mammoth private equity LBO and bankruptcy restructuring case. Only recommended if you have an interest in the subject matter.

Anyone read Hazzard's The Transit of Venus? It's a novel at an almost absurd pitch of exaltation, "literary" to a fault but with lapidary asides on every page. A heady thing, and I think I loved it.

No, but you’ve got me intrigued once again. Damn you, Lord Sotosyn!

completed compton mackenzie's absolutley abysmal yet entertainingly barmy 800 page novel of late victorian childhood, edwardian adolescence & pre-wwi early manhood sinister street

now revisiting ford madox ford's the good soldier

Rather in between books, I have returned to Lorrie Moore's essay collection SEE WHAT CAN BE DONE as a stop-gap.

"The High Window", which is (I'm glad to find out) much closer to The Long Goodbye than to The Big Sleep

Reading my friend's book, POOR FRIDGE, and then also finished another friend's latest chapbook. Will finish POOR FRIDGE in the next day or two...also got some orders today, so will have some more fun things to read over the coming holiday

Starting to read Prior Convictions, the justified and ancient collected short stories of RIP Dave Hickey. one of the first is about a 90-year-old man sitting in a bathtub in his big Victorian house on the plains. His voluptuous nurse is lying dead by the tub, which he can't get out of, because legs and shoulder don't work. His son lives in, but left this morning on a business trip. Eventually, the water gets cold, so he drains it, dozes, but the empty tub rubs on his bony old bod, so he refills. He tries not to look at and think of the nurse, but is troubled in several ways, and he also recalls many things from his past, stirred up also by dreams streaming through the big house (with the screens of routines removed, the memory tapes really get going: relatable) Very visual narrative, though succintly so, published ca. 1969, apparently, and somewhat pre-figuring early Terence Malick.
Visuals (and some conversations)are suddenly in-your-face superkitsch panorama ov Texas Fraternity Row, in "The Passion of Saint Darrell," but it's lovely to this Jesus-seeking vagabond variant of Seymour Glass: looks hideous to put it like that, but not glimpses, flashes, stakes, aces and 0s in the hole, from Life of the Saint, with gaps inviting speculation, fan fiction pipe dreams maybe---

Somehow I don't think I'm going to get used to Hickey pulling the rug out/all around the room, but rides are mostly good bumpy so far---Willie: "It was fun, in a strange kinda way."

Finished bell hooks and bought a stack of new stuff from charity shops.

So need to work out what to prioritise.

Mario Levrero - The Luminous Novel

500 pages worth of 'diaries' detailing the construction of a non-completed novel. The last 100 pages are some chapters of that shot-at-birth novel. Levrero makes it like he is just typing his day-to-day exitence for 20 pages a day (like Knausgaard) but the material is more worked over, and then you get to see a slightly different voice as that stuff is somewhat transformed into a beginning of a novel. There is some misogyny that feels a bit forced, and I'm thinking that he does this to give the novel a more distinct voice to his diary voice, and its a flaw. However the diaries are often really great, a mixture of dreams, meta discourse on the novel he has been given a grant to write, novels he is reading (very interesting on Somerset Maugham), writing about his one true love and their relationship but also newer matter you don't see in diaries -- stuff like internet addiction (this is from the 2000s so you get a discourse on the early internet), anxieties over the change in climate (the heat in the Uruguayan summer and its effect on mental and physical health), lots on mental health (he does yoga, gets his gf to go to therapy). I wouldn't exactly recommend it yet there are things in it that aren't anywhere else, in quite this way.

Sounds good!
OMG xpost Hickey now pre-channeling Gilead, still ca. '69 or so---I promise not to live-blog story by story (maybe)

re Family and Friends

Elena Lazic
@elazic
Wow. Brookner’s acerbic view of human nature never feels exaggerated, but the scale here makes her brutally perceptive remarks seem more grounded. Characters are shaped both by crucial moments, and by habits they mindlessly slip into over time. Brutal and a perverse joy to read. True?

Finished Mark Francis Johnson's 'Poor Fridge,' without a doubt his best and most devastating book of poems yet. Now onto his 'Treatise on Luck,' which is an earlier and much more wildly experimental work. He's a poet who's built a world for his poetry to inhabit, but which we never get a full view of— instead, we're treated to glimpses, suggestions, and hints that we're in a future world very much like our own, but with a lot more water, as well as strange, baroque class relations...as well as a fair amount of 19th c. British poetry. Really weird, really interesting poet... and I'm not just saying that because he's a friend.

Bertolt Brecht: THE BUSINESS AFFAIRS OF MR JULIUS CAESAR.

Would anyone like to recommend a book for me to give my sister? Looking for a female author published in 2020 or 2021. Her tastes skew dark, sardonic humor. Orphans, tragedy and art are areas of interest.

i haven't read a nicola barker since 2007's darkmans but she roughly fits that rubric (and i am sovereign came out in 2019)

plus there's an a.m.homes short story collection from 2018 (which i also haven't read lol): days of awe

Read the first couple of chapters of Sister Carrie by Theodore Dresser last night after having had it sit around the flat for way too long. The prose is delicious and the observations even better

That's interesting -- when I last read him Dreiser's prose struck me as his weakest strength. He excels at cohering a plot around situations as terrible and inevitable as breathing.

i started 'the luminous novel' a while ago, got maybe a third through it. the misogyny is off-putting, there's a casual cruelty about it that i found unappealing. i liked the stuff about early 2000s computers and some other bits and pieces. i'll probably go back and finish it at some point, but i was a little disappointed with how torpid it was after i read some positive reviews of the translation

also read gwendoline riley, 'my phantoms', which i really enjoyed - brilliant portrait of a bloke (the protagonist's dad) who loves puns and bad jokes and nasty, hectoring behaviour in the early part of the novel, v much reminded me of [REDACTED] from my wife's family, and i liked the rest too

and the new sarah hall, 'burntcoat, which was ok. i know a lot of people rate her prose but to me its consistent, enervated luridness means everything hits at the same level and it becomes stew-like, glutinous.

i'm gearing up to read bernadette mayer, 'midwinter day', a true masterpiece. i read her book 'utopia' a while ago, very sad and beautiful

Looking for a female author published in 2020 or 2021. Her tastes skew dark, sardonic humor.

Otessa Moshfegh? I haven't read "Death in Her Hands" but was published in 2020 and seems to fit the bill.

That or... Summerwater by Sarah Moss (sardonic tragedy), Second Place by Rachel Cusk (sardonic art)

Honjin Murders, japanese locked room mystery. told very conversationally. apparently there are 50+ more, almost all of them untranslated. (wikipedia: 77 total, 4 in english)

Anna of The Five Towns, was like gaskell but set in the potteries. would've like more pottery tbh. last page threw me for two separate reasons.

Slaughterhouse V reread.

Thanks for the recommendations on Barker, Homes, Moshfegh, Moss, and Cusk. She's read several of Moshfegh but I don't think she liked the last one. Will check out the others.

Been a while, but I recall thinking the notorious Dreiser style was serviceable enough in xpost Sister Carrie, despite some outbursts of editorializing (and yeah the plotting seems inevitable and "O shit!" in equal measure). He was a newspaperman after all, got a lot of good material that way; also, while he was still on the farm, his older sisters would sometimes visit from Chicago Frontier Babylon, where they were set up by older men of means. Good descriptions of parts of Chicago as they still were 70-odd years later, when I visited, and still were in a Dreiser doc ca/ 2000, prob still are.
I read this, w "shocking" bits restored, also Jennie Gerhardt, about kind of an alt.. bird-in-a-gilded-cage Carrie (not too stationary, a good social tracking device), and 12 Men, portraits: all three in an LoA omnibus. What else should I read by him?

Talking about journalists turned writer I listened to the current Backlisted yesterday which is about pete Dexter's book Deadwood. I listened thinking it had some tie in to the tv series but apparently at least nothing acknowledged. Sounds like something i need to read though.

As to what else you need to read by Dreiser i couldn't tell you it's taken me a few decades plus however long it's sat around teh flat to get this far. I think I may have had him cited as an influence on Kerouac back when I was reading up on things like that, him and Nathaniel West and the early 20th century Thomas Wolfe of Look, Homeward Angel fame. I thik i did read bits of both Nathaniel West and Thomas Wolfe in the late 80s. But probably need to revisist

i'm gearing up to read bernadette mayer, 'midwinter day', a true masterpiece. i read her book 'utopia' a while ago, very sad and beautiful

― dogs, Tuesday, December 14, 2021 7:24 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

She's the absolute best, who are you, let's be friends.

I finished Treason by the Book, Jonathan Spence, about a peculiar set of events that revolved around a conspiracy during Qing dynasty China (ca. 1728-32). The multiplicity of characters and places involved, the level of details recounted, and the inescapable cultural strangeness of late imperial China for modern westerners, taken all together make this a difficult sort of book to read. Yet, its very foreignness is its central attraction.

The author understood how challenged his lay readers would be to enter this world and he did an admirable job of smoothing the difficulties as best he could. This is definitely a niche book that explores a curious byway of history. Not for everyone.

Trying to decide what's next: a newish book by a friend, or a book by the odd experimental poet Hugh Tribbey, who publishes mainly through POD and obscure online journals, and seems to have spent his entire life in smalltown Oklahoma.

the turn of the screw (& other stories)

Several things bought and started.

Soldaten Sonke Neither & Harald Welzer the collection of German POW conversation showing their epistemology etc. Supposed to be pretty harrowing. Casual talk of killing civilians etc. Based on transcriptions made at the time.

Ngugi Weep Not Child
My dad knew him from them lecturing at the University of Nairobi in the late 60s.
Think I need to read a load of his work.
It being good and all.

Also got another bell hooks out of the library.
Sisters of the Yam.

Also Arthur Miller Echoes Down Th e Corridor
a collection of essays spanning about 50 years I'm now in the late 80s/early 90s . he's worried about what teh meaning of German unification post the Berlin Wall coming down is going to mean after living at the time of teh holocaust, been with Harold Pinter at an ambassador's house where Pinter has wound up insulting the ambassador and had to leave and thinks the 2 should pair up to shake things up.
Good collection of essays and it has taken me way too long to get through. I think I borrowed this late summer last year.
I think I've just discovered a much longer set of his essays on the library system which I might look into. That and the rest of his prose, I like his writing.

Audrey lorde Anthology The Cancer Journals
been meaning to read her for a while. Hope i can get hold of a copy of this and another couple of her works cheaply. keeping my eyes peeled while i'm in charity shops and local remaindered ones etc

Still reading Another Tuneless Racket by Steven H Garner
Just read him talking about John Foxx era Ultravox! and interested in picking some up

I've been reading Helen Dewitt's short story collection "Some Trick". I was looking for "Last Samurai" but this was the Dewitt they had at the library. Seems to be a mix of more recent work and some stories from her Oxford student days in the mid-80s. Some stories are more commercial (one was published in Harpers) and some more formally experimental. I generally skim a bit when she delves into post-structuralism, higher calculus, or breaks out the Latin or French, so I'm probably missing a bunch. The more commercial stories are fun - the pace is zippy, the tone knowing but playful. She writes a lot about authors or artists occupying a zone of semi-celebrity not unlike her own, and the gentle absurdities of dealing with publishers, fans, etc. who have a strong relationship to the work but in a very different way than the author.

Went with my friend Ted's book, 'AN ORANGE.' It is sort of an inheritor of the New York School---> New Narrative continuum of gossipy, philosophical work that is disarmingly casual while doing some very heavy lifting. I like it, tho it isn't "my thing" poetically.

Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell

the anomaly, herve le tellier

Anna Kavan - Ice
Gerald Stern's poems.

Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell

― youn, Wednesday, December 15, 2021 4:18 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i love this book!

whats up table. i'm a bit of a poetry dilettante, but i love bernadette mayer. i've been making my way slowly through the complete ted berrigan this year too, spent a few pleasant weekend afternoons with a few beers and his poems

i have also started reading alison rumfitt, 'tell me i'm worthless', which i haven't found too much to like in yet, but it's early days, and i started james baldwin's 'another country', which is wonderful

i've been dipping in and out of 'intersecting lives', a joint biography of deleuze and guattari. i always thought guattari was the 'weird' one, but now i'm starting to think it was the other guy, deleuze

Deleuze? A weirdo? No way!

Ha, anyway dogs, that's cool that you're into Bernadette's work and have been reading Berrigan. Do you dig Notley, Berrigan's wife at the time of his death? She's great, still alive, too. Here's one of her more famous ones: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50834/at-night-the-states

I finished Ted Dodson's 'AN ORANGE,' and think I'm going to go with Hugh Tribbey's "EF Zero" next

My next book is The High Window, Raymond Chandler. It was selected specifically to be easy reading, because I've been agitated and discouraged lately and I need something entertaining and soothing.

I think Backlisted did an episode on that one.

The High Window is the densest Chandler I think. The Backlisted episode is a good one.

I'm reading Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth. Good enough to feel like I've read it before.

Aimless, you might also try John D. MacDonald's The Empty Copper Sea: Travis McGee is trying to defend the good name of a friend or acquaintance, but gets as down on himself as he does the slow destruction of Florida by citizens-denizens, who seem as oblivious its and their own decline, for the most part: may be more neurotic than Marlowe, regarding himself as an over-qualified "beach bum," which can affect his behavior, uh-oh. Pretty entertaining.

as oblivious *to* their own decline (incl. ethical) I meant

can we talk about backlisted

QI is a dismal product... miller really comes across as sort of a blowhard or two, like your nightmare of yourself down the pub (and I can't imagine wanting to look at any of his books)... & there is this clubbiness I can just barely stand, really the opposite of the alleged parasocial value of podcasts (I am glad I am NOT friends w these people!)

and yet I do like it a fair bit

I basically agree with all of that. It's beyond parody - the clubbable enthusiasm, the lack of any sort of critical acumen, the endless line of posh voices presented as diversity - and I battle with myself for listening to it, but I've found lots of great things.

I read The Year of Reading Dangerously so you don't have to.

I'm reading Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth. Good enough to feel like I've read it before.

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Friday, December 17, 2021 1:42 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i bought a copy of this for my girlfriend as a christmas present, it is truly the greatest

xp yeah I think I'm just into hearing genuine enthusiasm about books bc I am somewhere between their critical largesse and the reflexive assumption that everything is shit you see elsewhere. also I've never been to an ilb fap. Just wish one time someone would yell "waterstones is a shit chain that doesnt pay a living wage" during one of their reveries

Tried an EP of backlisted once and couldn't hate it enough but I find book people who just talk books and nothing else hard going.

Chinaski and Brad, have you read The Fourth State of Matter, the essay by Beard?

If not get ready for a big gut punch. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/06/24/the-fourth-state-of-matter

Oh wait, it's in that book. Christ it's good.

If the rest of her writing even approaches that I should probably order a copy.

It's in the book Table and what led me to it. I swear I read about it on here but it might have been somewhere else. An extraordinary essay.

Xp - yep!

i also bought the book bc the fourth state of matter blew my mind. it's all great

Also just finished the high window - quite dense but I find it easier-going than the big sleep (too chaotically plotted) and the long goodbye (one of my favourite books but a hard book to write straight through)

I’m an unqualified fan of backlisted and pay for their patreon (which includes an **even more sel-indulgent** free extra fortnightly podcast). I’m not blind to (or un-annoyed by) their cultural blind spots and chummy self-satisfaction as presenters, but I find them both very entertaining company, and they’ve led me to a lot of good books, just like ILB

"At the end of the hallway are the double doors leading to the rest of my life. I push them open and walk through."

just finished the high window - quite dense

my favorite parts are where Chandler tosses in a brief chit-chat between Marlowe and some totally peripheral character with whom he just happens to talk to as he wends his way through the plot: security guards, elevator operators, bartenders, apartment managers and such like. these conversations are uniformly hilarious.

long-time ilx lurker here, since 2003 or so... (more of a *reader* than someone inclined to share, I guess). anyway, in compiling my list of books I read this year I thought of my debt to these threads' suggestions, & decided to pipe up w/ a little thanks for that and try a post -- from this year eugene lim's dear cyborgs and a couple peter culley books are 2 examples of recommendations I've taken to. other books I've read & loved this year include fanny howe's random love novel collection, john edgar wideman's homewood trilogy, marge piercy's woman on the edge of time, camille roy's honey mine, nikki wallschlaeger's pizza and warfare chapbook, amiri baraka's the system of dante's hell, joyelle mcsweeney's flet, bernadette mayer's sonnets (some mention of her upthread I see), alice notley's noir epic negativity's kiss, jim dickinson's memoir i'm not dead, i'm just gone...etc., many more... and more in keeping w/ the thread theme, at the moment i'm reading harmony holiday's negro league baseball and sesshu foster's atomik aztex. anyway, cheers all --

Hey zak - some interesting things there to check out. Nice one.

I was probably a bit chippy about Backlisted last night. I like it and they seem like good people. I did try the Locklisted episodes - the Beatles obsession gave me hives!

Lily, is that THE BELL JAR?

That's from "The Fourth State of Matter" by Jo Ann Beard.

Nammalvar - Endless Song, a cycle of 1102 stanzas and its my very much jam as far as poetry goes. A voice in the hightest pitch is hit over and over in this set of devotional music. There is an NYRB piece about it here, and its great to be introduced to a tradition (Tamil poetry), history, place and a time by reading an incredible work that survived, at all.

is it end of year time? is there normally a separate thread for that?

40 according to goodreads, although i think that's missing a couple. total was helped by a month of reading a dozen things of <200 pages each, some of them much less (although it still reckons the shortest was The Old Man And The Sea at 90 pages)

back on Stamped From The begiing by Ibram X Kendi
Currently reading about some semiu hypocritical misunderstandings by W.E.B. Du bois and other things contemporary to it. Last chapter had been on the Birth Of A nation. Kendi has been describing ertas since ther 17th century in realtion to one figurehead figure so late 19th & early 20 th century tie in with Webby and KIendi is not afraid to show some serious flaws I think he has shown some reason for his epistemology but it is not a fully balanced one anyway.
I just read about a feud with Marcus Garvey who I have to read . Did try I think in the mid 80s. But do want to know more right now. & now setting myself up with way too much to read in way too short a time. Which is never teh best set up. Just aware taht there is a lot of reading I should have done a lot earlier. Alsdo want to read Ida Welles and Booker T Washington though the latter does seem to be way too wishy washy. Oh & want to read Pan African stuff though not sure if teh focus of what was umbrellaed by that term would still be right.
Du Bois did set up or help set up the initial meetings in the early years of teh 20th century. hope things are way beyond taht now but don't know and probably should do.
Anyway I enjoy Kendi I enjoy learning about what he is saying and it does make me want to read more by the people he is talking about.
I am aware taht he has his own biases and i think he is too. But every human being has biases and it is better to acknowledge and try to show what those are in order to get a more objective perspective. Though taht very idea may be mythic.

Just finishging the appendices to Steven H gardner's first volume of Anothe rTuneless Racket.
just read him talking about the mysoynistic thuggery of teh Stranglers and how he can't get beyond the 1st 3 lps or at least those are the 3 he mainly focuses on. I think he has picked up copies of later Cornwe;; era stuff but doesn't listen to them much.
So have enjoyed reading himn talking about a bunch of bands taht I am semi aware of and a few i know a bit better. So will move onto his next volume some time soon. JUst got so many books taht I want to have already read right now that I want to read. & a stack that I keep buying. & still a fw i regret not having grabbed when I had the chance etc.
this was my bog book for teh last while, is set out in a good way for that purpose I think.
Havea few books set up to replace it. May go back to the history of torture in the Uk since the 1940s or carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World or THinking Fast & slow by Daniel Kahneman

"is it end of year time? is there normally a separate thread for that?"

We make a new thread every year. Here is last year's.

What did you read in 2020?

yeah, thought as much but the ilb board posts didn't scroll back that far

Xpost Hi Stevo, don't know how available Library of America editions are in the UK, but their DuBois collection is incredible---as an analytical scholar, pioneering sociologist, farseeing polemicist, artist---always a magnetic read---he's as strong as any American author I can think of---totally agree w the blurb here: "It is no exaggeration to say that [Du Bois] anticipated, and influenced, many of the events that led to the making of the modern world."---Washington Post
https://loa.org/books/39-writings?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI3J_Csbbw9AIVE4eGCh3qGQ48EAAYASAAEgIPzPD_BwE
Also the collection Blackwater, which incl. his essays, allegories, science fiction, fitting together, back and forth through the "walls" of genre and subgenre.

"Allegories" may not be the right word: no codes, just extensions of his characteristic concerns, thought patterns, stylistic excursions.

That's not an LoA publication, may be more widely available in the UK.

Hi zak m, nice list there. I'm always glad to see someone reading Peter's work :-)

I finished Julia Drescher's 'Disarticulation' as well as Hugh Tribbey's 'EF Zero' between Friday and yesterday evening.

I was in the mood to read an older novel, and so decided to pick up Silas Marner for a re-read. Love this book so much.

i've been working on mailer's the executioner's song for about a month, picking it up and reading a hundred pages or so, then giving it a rest. just reached the midway point and am feeling mildly frustrated that there's still so much of this thing left to read. i did find it very gripping for a while, and there's a genuinely vivid sense of the bleakness of this landscape, the depressing hollowness of so many of these characters' lives, the pointlessness and cruel randomness of the violence...but i can't shake the sinking feeling that the guy at the center of this epic is just not a very interesting person. maybe that's the point, though.

also picked up a collection of melville stories and am making my way through that. bartleby is still a perfect story (funny, too, even if it's also crushingly sad), and the sketches are amusing. reread billy budd for the first time in many years. it's a very strange story, in some ways an off-putting one, despite its greatness; even in such a brief narrative, melville can't stop himself from going on tangent after tangent, circling around what he really wants to say...

I started in on Edith Wharton's House of Mirth. Everyone in it so far is what my dad would have called 'a real piece of work'.

I've wanted to read it a third time but I suspect I might be drawing breaths.

i've been working on mailer's the executioner's song for about a month, picking it up and reading a hundred pages or so, then giving it a rest. just reached the midway point and am feeling mildly frustrated that there's still so much of this thing left to read. i did find it very gripping for a while, and there's a genuinely vivid sense of the bleakness of this landscape, the depressing hollowness of so many of these characters' lives, the pointlessness and cruel randomness of the violence...but i can't shake the sinking feeling that the guy at the center of this epic is just not a very interesting person. maybe that's the point, though.

J.D., I read it around this time 2013 and had a similar response. Harlot's Ghost is it for me.

Frank, Peter Eisenman's House VI: The Client's Response

Finally, the diagrams for House VI are symbiotic with its reality; the house is not an object in the traditional sense -- that is the end result of a process -- but more accurately a record of a process. The house, like the set of diagrammed transformations on which its design is based, is a series of film stills compressed in time and space. Thus, the process itself becomes an object; but not an object as an aesthetic experience or as a series of iconic meanings. Rather, it becomes an exploration into the range of potential manipulations latent in the nature of architecture, unavailable to our consciousness because they are obscured by cultural preconceptions.

-- Peter Eisenman

The coup de grace came more than a decade later, when we had spent all of our savings on the renovation of the house, and had to increase our mortgage to six figures.

-- Suzanne Frank

I'm not very interested in doing any more of these houses. I came to a dead end. I'm very proud of the houses that I've executed and the designs I've executed and they stand as a certain body of work, and that's past. This is a transitional period in my work - a kind of drying out between that, sort of what I call my "cocaine period," and where I'm going to be five years from now.

-- Peter Eisenman

...Instead it nearly turned into a fight of the ordinary kind when Eisenman, in a pattern that I only later learned was utterly commonplace, grew so paranoid at my presence in his office that he accused me of espionage (“How would you like it if I came to your office and spied on you?”) and drove me backward—a well-practiced bully—to the elevator...

-- A magazine article quoted by an ILXor years ago

By 1987, the house was already in a frightful state. The coating of stucco that had been applied was a shambles. There were streaks of stucco over windows, as well as clumps of it on the walls. Will Calhoun's Renovations Specialists had built up a good reputation in Cornwall within a few years, and so we asked that company to remove the stucco. In the process of doing so the workers discovered rotting beneath it. It shortly became clear that House VI needed to be virtually rebuilt; much of it would have to be torn down and carefully reconstructed...

-- Suzanne Frank

Reading Dancer From the Dance, which is fantastic, but progress is slowed tracking down each song mentioned and then getting lost in the music.

otm

J.D., I read it around this time 2013 and had a similar response. Harlot's Ghost is it for me.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, December 20, 2021 10:26 PM (yesterday)

i'm determined to get to that one someday! i also own mailer's lee harvey oswald book which i feel kinda obligated to read eventually.

Don't sleep on Armies of the Night--his very own kind of New Journalism, at its peak, and more satisfying than any of his fiction that I've managed to read---maybe if he'd done his own research, incl. eyewitness reporting and interviews(rather than sifting through Larry Schiller's mounds o' data) for The Executioner's Song, it would have turned out better.
Re-reading Billy Budd in the Library of America edition, I got the impression, from his appended notes and outtakes, that he wanted us to look over the narrator's shoulder and draw our own conclusions--that we could see how trapped in their own times, own heads and lives all the characters were, the narrator too---but also I thought he might be leaving it to us to (possibly) sympathize most of all with Billy, as I suspect Melville, being Melville, probably did---but the gamble was that we might do this more if no DO YOU SEE like just about all other Victorian fiction seems to have done (I haven't read it all, but happens a lot)
Also, some authors did back off, ultimately, from anything that might too sympathetic to rebellion and killing, unless, possibly as very obvious and reductive melodrama of self-defense etc.

House of Mirth should be stocked on the horror shelves

xpost So maybe there was some uncertainty on his part in the way the story was delivered, like stammerin' Billy's fateful outburst, kicking against it all.

Yeah Chuck, and the movie's pretty scary too (starring Gillian Anderson).

Just read Harriet the Spy, didn't take to it straight away and may have stopped if i hadn't remembered a Lily Dale post that mentioned her love of this book in passing.

I'm astonished. It's not at all what I expected and though it has some thin veneer of kid lit, it's probably one of the most complex, unsettling and lifelike novels i've read. There's a ton of stuff to unpack.

I'm mainly posting this in the hope that Lily Dale might be persuaded to share any thoughts on Harriet the Spy.

My favorite book. I read it in...sixth grade.

Ole Golly was right. Sometimes you have to lie.

It seems that I will have to read HARRIET THE SPY.

Liekwise. And add House of Mirth to the re-read pile.

House of Mirth should be stocked on the horror shelves

― Chuck_Tatum, Monday, December 20, 2021 10:13 PM

otm

Louise Fitzhugh taught me how to think like a writer.

lol, I also just read Harriet and The Long Secret (also prompted by the discussions on this board.) They were great. I wonder what I would have of them as a kid. They're very non-condescending.

thanks for that recommendation table, i like that notley poem a lot (perhaps it appeals particularly because i'm not in the US?). i've read bits and pieces of her work, both the poetry and the critical writing, and oddly more of the latter. i would like to get more into the early work

good to hear of someone else reading joyelle mcsweeney. i've followed her career for a while now and her most recent book (i think), 'toxicon and arachne' is astonishing. one of the best poets working today.

Hi Deflatormouse! It was actually The Long Secret that I posted about - I like Harriet the Spy a lot, but The Long Secret was the one I read over and over as a kid. I think what appealed to me was the sense it gave of permission - permission to be angry for no reason, permission to be outraged and in pain when you got your period, instead of wishing for it like a Judy Blume heroine, permission to not like your family very much. That last one wasn't one I had personal application for - my family was/is great. But one of the absolutely essential things about Louise Fitzhugh imo is the way she consistently says, "Hey, a lot of thoughtless, self-involved people have kids and are mediocre parents to them - not abusive, but not good, either. And if you have parents like that, they're not going to get any better, and it's okay to not like them."

I prefer it too. The depiction of the gang of rich kooks descending on Water Mill, that beautiful post-clambake talk about God with her dad, the Jenkins family and their evangelism and acquisitional spirit (Fitzhugh makes the connection) -- beautiful.

lol dogs, I don't know if I posted about it here, but I think 'Toxicon & Arachne' is awful...but I'm not allowed to say that publicly because of the subject matter. oh well.

Thanks, Lily Dale. Great post! I want to read the Long Secret right away, of course, but unbelievably NYPL doesn't seem to have a single circulating copy??? I guess I'll have to buy it...

Harriet does a lot of things you wouldn't expect of a kids' book. wtf did I just read? It doesn't really have any clear point, it demands further inquiry. There's so much mirroring in it, it's practically a funhouse. Most of the characters aren't really good or bad, but the parents suck for sure and Janie Gibbs's mother is the closest thing to a Disney villainess.

Is there enough interest for a Fitzhugh thread?

Alfred, your link is broken :(

> but unbelievably NYPL doesn't seem to have a single circulating copy?

amazon uk only has the first one as an ebook, none of the others. maybe that's why.

Alfred, your link is broken :(

― The 25 Best Songs Ever Ranked In Order (Deflatormouse),

Oops! Here's the link.

Harriet's parents come off significantly better in The Long Secret.

They have 1 copy of the Long Secret as an audio e-book (currently checked out, not that i'd want it) and 2 reference copies at the Schwarzman bldg for in-library use only. Very strange.

xxp. thanks for the new link!

Typical of Louise Fitzhugh’s tact...

Yeah, good example

The only time Fitzhugh almost disappoints me in that regard is where she employs a psychiatrist (obviously where this was going) to bring the story to a swift resolution by explaining everything. But thankfully the shrink only tells us what we already knew, and mainly just reinforces the obliviousness of the parents.

I'm currently reading The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. The titular friend seems at first to be her old friend, a professor of literature and lady's man, who has recently died at his own hand. A bit later it seems the titular friend will be the first friend's Great Dane, which she feels obliged to take in after his non-dog-loving wife has exiled it to a kennel. The book builds up a good head of steam in the first several chapters, but then there is a palpable deflationary hiss as she fritters away the next several chapters with digressions. I'll have to see if the momentum can be regained.

(I am very glad that the pinefox plans to read Harriet the Spy. I might stick to my memory of it in case anything changes. I recommended it to my brother for his daughters this Christmas.)

Flet is the only Joyelle Mcsweeney I've read, besides some translations maybe. It's prose or prose-y, another "poet's sci-fi" - a lot of fun to read imo, especially as a antidote to mundane dystopias. Some great sentences and imagery (my low bar for enjoyment I guess). Haven't read Toxicon and Arachne but I know how fraught subject matter can swallow a conversation... Reading Harmony Holiday's Negro League Baseball slowly. So far I am connecting with it less than some of the more recent books of hers I've read - - but enjoying the looseness -- it's a nice horizontal book with sprawling lines.

revisiting some of the books i've enjoyed this year:

deep wheel orcadia

i was surprised how well this worked. the spareness of the orkney – orkney 'supplemented by a large reserve of Scots' – seems entirely appropriate to people working at a subsistence level on the edge of void. in this space *everything* is on the edge of things, Orcadian, so to speak. the poetic lines connect only the essential elements together – people, their labour, love – so that those things feel connected to each other with no intervening matter (appropriately enough in space), and to the 'haaf' (deep space) around them. in other words people *become* their labour, in the way that subsistence labour is your life. here Olaf and Astrid out sailing/farming for Light (their income):

Thay work the park the station wis biggie
tae wirk, hint the fuel at fuels,
the oyl at owls

a interstellar system o industry,
traed, galactic expansion: Light.
Inga an Olaf is aye a kord
wi voltage differes, atmospheric
dabble, mairjins

...they work the work that the station was built to do, gathergleansnatching the fuel that fuels, the oil that oils
an interstellar system of industry, trade, galactic expansion: Light.
Inga and Olaf are always a chord with voltage differentials, atmospheric ripplesagitationconfusionchoppiness, margins.

v occasionally orkney parallels, english/scots (deep wheel orcadia/mars) and gender/youth/age politics/and the experience of youth returning home, are clumsily mapped, but for the most part the elements combine v effectively. and around and into their lenten space, the pressure of the past/future/other world is pushing in through their computer screens and machinery, and the whole is broken up into songs of the individuals and events taking place in the community.

Sheu snacks the monitors wan by wan,
fer the plant tae idle the sleepan oors.