ILB Gripped the Steps and Other Stories. What Are You Reading Now, Spring 2017

i kinda love harold bloom, but i don't think of the present-day bloom as a real literary critic so much as just a very brilliant eccentric sitting there talking to himself, not really caring if anyone's listening. (not unlike gore vidal in his later years, though harold managed to avoid becoming the conspiracist crank that gore did.) he's definitely not somebody you go to for sustained argument these days. his shakespeare book never really gets around to making the "invention of personality" argument in any depth, apart from talking about some character he loves, like rosalind, and then saying something like "ah, but what real person could compare to the divine rosalind?" but back when i read the book i remember feeling like his genuine and unforced love for shakespeare was contagious and maybe more fun to read than a more serious, less indulgent book might have been. it did bum me out that he apparently thinks all of orson welles's shakespeare films are "dreadful." (i suspect orson's falstaff, sad and alone at the end of life, hit a bit too close to home for harold.)

the collection The Western Canon has what I think is an essential essay on Middlemarch and another on Dickinson.

xp, I watched Chimes at Midnight last week!

Oh, I could read those essays in The Western Canon! The soaring hyperbolic qualities mentioned above definitely have an infectiousness to them. He does have that 'brilliant eccentric talking to himself' quality (I also sometimes feel that way about George Steiner, too). Incidentally, I started reading Frank Kermode's Sense of an Ending which I got second hand on a bit of a whim (I'd wanted to read it a few years ago but never did) and am enjoying it. He seems to have been someone who I think better bridged the academic/popular divide in his time? It's got some good reflections on literary form and its relations to time, endings/figures of The End, and the development of the novel although he comes across as more conservative than I would have thought (this may have largely been a product of the time, to a significant degree - writing in the mid 60s amid the celebrations of the 'nouveau roman' and in the midst of so much other formal experimentation).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sense_of_an_Ending:_Studies_in_the_Theory_of_Fiction

book 2 of Southern Reach Trilogy is really testing my patience... 50 pages in and I haven't learned anything i didn't know at the end of the first book, and i couldn't care less about the new main characters back story, which he insists on building up, along with endless descriptions of scenery (that were cool enough when he was describing The Zone but i don't need to read your pointillistic description of a U shaped office for the fifteenth time, dog! VanderMeers foibles as a writer stick out more when the plot isn't actively making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up -_-

if you finish the whole thing you can add the to the thread:

where lies the strangling fruit...Area X - The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer

still wish it was going to be a long netflix or hulu thing instead of a movie.

i still think about that thing fondly. i think i read it at the EXACT right time in my life. never felt compelled to read anything else by JV.

I enjoyed the trilogy as well, by and large, but more in its initial implications, suggestions and possibilities than the fulfilment of them - i was flagging seriously by the final book.

reading gershom scholem's story of a friendship with walter benjamin which is all good stuff. there's a bit in it that i keep returning to in my mind:

Among the books he [WB] read in connection with this seminar was Daniel Paul Schreber's Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken [Memoirs of a Neuropath], which appealed to him far more than Freud's essay on it. He also induced me to read Schreber's book, which contained very impressive and pregnant formulations. From a salient passage in this book Benjamin derived the designation "flüchtig hingemachte Männer [hastily put-up men]. Schreber, who at the height of his paranoia believed for a time that the world had been destroyed by "rays" hostile to him, gave this as an answer when it was pointed out to him that the doctors, patients, and employees of the insane asylum obviously existed.

I keep thinking about that formulation - there's something compelling about it, although I can't quite work out its extension. There's a temptation to use it for people you just don't like very much or who you consider insubstantial, but it loses force through such imprecise application. And it's not quite indicating a sort of Potemkin Village situation, though working out why is difficult. After all, they are both intended to deceive, both have controlling forces behind them, both are temporary. I think it's because the fhB are closer to fundamentals of perception, there's a sense that the Potemkin Village is in a way benign, but for the fsB the conspiracy has to be a lot deeper than just a studio set - there is of course a touch of the PKD about them. Nor is this a 'we are the hollow men' situation:

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

So i can't work out its application. I'm sure there is a situation or set of people or type of person who when encountered in a type of situation immediately make you go 'fsB!' but I haven't quite worked it out yet.

Also reading Nick Tosche's biog of Sonny Liston. He shoots from the hip with his sentences, and clearly fetishises a period and style of reporting:

The following account comes from the New York Daily News, September 3, 1931, back in the days when journalists could wield a sentence:
"Trapped in a Manhattan hotel with a pretty red-headed night club dancer, Paul Carbo, gang leader and ex-convict, was held last night charged with being the hired assassin who murdered Phil Duffy, Philadelphia and New Jersey beer overlord, in the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City last Saturday.

The portrayal of SL is a little disturbing. He's not a communicative man, is given to violence and drinking, doesn't smile, has fists like hams, and there's a lot of uncertainty in the biographical documentation. But onto this Tosches projects a sort of heart of darkness vibe - dead the day he was born, out of the darkness of the savannah, African religions underlying the Baptist/Methodist overlay, violence comes from within sort of stuff that feels a romantic and in some lights frankly a bit dubious (wrote 'racist', deleted it).

It's an entertaining read, obviously. Enjoyed this excerpt from a senate antitrust subcommittee interviewing mob player John Vitale:

Would you care, on the basis of your general knowledge of boxing, to give the subcommittee some of your own thoughts as to how to eliminate underworld racketeering and monopoly in the field of boxing?"

"I take the fifth amendment." [Pause.] "What a question."

man y'all haven't hyped Edna O'Brien enough. I spent spring and summer '16 reading her short fiction for the first time; now I picked up The Little Red Chairs and I'm staggered by her. An 85-year-old person wrote this novel!

I had the same problems with the Tosches biography, FIzzles, and also throughly enjoyed it for the same reasons. Some dubious essentialising of 'blackness' but I can't deny the power of the representation. I need to read his biography of Dean Martin.

Hastily put-up men typing all over the Web right now (not me tho)

A key thing in the Dino is the Italian for "He Who Does Not Give A Fuck" (as w SL, NT attracted to this kind of negative capability, fuck-you satori)

(beyond fuck-you, of course)

Tosches' Dean Martin and Jerry Lee Lewis biogs are much better than the Liston book, tho' his best book as book is prob Country, still.

Yes, and it's fun to compare the original and somewhat revised editions of Country, thinking about why he might have changed this and that, to what effect.

Hastily put-up men typing all over the Web right now (not me tho)

^ good point. a phrase that has come of age. i wonder what particular application or resonance it had for WB.

Alfred, I agree with you re Edna O'Brien, though thought Red Chairs one of her weaker books.

ilxor reviews new JV by the way...

http://www.wweek.com/uncategorized/2017/05/03/jeff-vandermeers-borne-is-a-psychedelic-dystopia-with-an-evil-levitating-bear/

About 200 pp into Wolf Hall. It has atmosphere aplenty and is deftly written, but somehow I'm not feeling the love for it. If I were to guess about the lack I am feeling, it would be that, while the characters are well-delineated, the world in which they live is never made concrete, so that their encompassing reality is never fully imaginatively formed. This could have been conscious on Mantel's part, since inhabiting a lost reality in one's imagination sufficiently to describe it will always result in historic errors. But, I miss them.

Anyway, I'm having difficulties keeping my interest going, which sin be on my head alone.

Cosign on being underwhelmed (and quitting) Wolf Hall.

Speaking of quitting books, would anyone recommend Foucault's Pendulum for someone who's never managed to get past the first few pages? Does it get easier? I don't know, it *sounds* like a lot of fun, just never succeeded with it.

Usually read a couple of books a week. Wolf Hall is the only one I've quit in the last few years.

I am still reading Johnny Marr, SET THE BOY FREE.

Am in of those periods where I can barely read, apart from skimming non-fiction books

I am still in that period where it takes me weeks to read a paperback designed to appeal to air travelers and people on beaches.

took a break from VanderMeer to read William Hope Hodgson 'The House on the Borderland' now THIS is how you tell a story!!!

I read Foucault's Pendulum many years ago, and burned through it. I suspect if the opening few pages have wound you up, it's not necessarily going to get any easier...

I've started reading Irvin Yalom's 'Staring at the Sun', a book about death anxiety. My wife's old man isn't so good, and I'm wondering if I can do anything. So that's all very cheery.

Love's Executioner is amazing. He's a wonderful writer. I just picked Sun up on Amazon after you mentioned it (similar troubles with my partner, too).

I found Love's Executioner really moving and Yalom's wisdom beguilingly unassuming. Which I guess is the point. Makes me think of that line from Charles Olson about having learned 'the simplest things last'.

I put aside Wolf Hall. Now, 45 years after my first reading of Xenophon's Cyropaedia, I am re-reading it. It is an odd book, a rambling pastiche wherein Xenophon rides all his many hobby horses. It is heavily didactic in purpose, but presents itself as a highly romanticized, piously moralistic novel, claiming to be a true history of Cyrus the Great.

Under the caveat that much early writing has been lost, it appears that no book like it had ever been written before.

It is a bit disappointing how Johnny Marr's critical faculties seem to decline after about 1989. He loves to go on about The The, Electronic and Modest Mouse. What's worse is how much he goes on about The Healers and how in thrall he becomes to Oasis - there is something troubling about this last episode, as though Marr is kidnapped by Gallagher.

If you imagined that Marr post-Smiths lost his sense of style and art and became more into bland 'bloke rock' or something then this book tends to suggest that ... he did.

I still have a little way to go though. Maybe the very late Marr is a bit better.

The other curious thing is the way that to many of us, he seems to have done relatively little post-Smiths (30 years!), but he sees himself as being constantly busy, always making music. Somehow both perspectives must be accurate. He has been busy but given his talent he has done little that breaks through and is truly worthwhile.

I finished my re-read of Unamuno's Tragic Sense of Life. I think the first couple of chapters are the best, it gets a little repetitive in the second half, as Unamuno himself admits. He keeps circling back to the same set of themes. I still find it a very powerful expression of a certain viewpoint on human psychology and motivation, and one of the most clear-eyed books I know on grappling with one's own imminent demise.

I also finished the last story in the Balzac shorter fiction collection The Human Comedy. Actually I think the last couple of stories, which tend more towards what I'd call a typical "Balzacian" milieu, were not as interesting as the ones that came before them.

Shock & Awe by Simon Reynolds.
I've disagreed with this book more than i have with any of his others as far as I can remember.
Just read him saying that Neil Young's music never changes so he's the anti-Bowie which I found ridiculous.

I assume he's heard "Trans" or "Everybodys Rockin'"? I usually read any book SR has out but I havent really been intrigued to check this new one out

I just thought he was trying to fit something to a not very thought out observation. Thought he was better than that.

I'm trying to think of who'd be a better fit for the rootsy North American rockist archetype Reynolds is no doubt trying to evoke - thing is all the big guns (Springsteen, Dylan, Young) are chameleons of a sort and choosing someone like James Taylor wouldn't give him the impact he needs.

Chuck Berry didn't change much!

reading: NLR responses to the new US political situation.

Predictably cool, disparaging of Clinton and Obama, keen to put Trump in a detached perspective and minimize his importance.

Useful different perspective but I'm never wholly sympathetic to it. I mean these are the kind of people who'll say Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn are not radical enough to be taken seriously.

Finished with Edward Timms' study of Karl Kraus' works in Apocalyptic Satirist. I was thinking of doing some kind of map from turn-of-the-century Vienna to today at one point but I wasn't so sure towards the end. Suffice to say there is a lot here around how basically that section of society almost conspire (its a more subtle process than that though) via government and media (artists often go along) to manipulate, distort and misinform a nation into the abyss, except its all thrown in a background of a failing empire (don't almost all empires sleepwalk?) Its a weird process of self-destruction. Timms kinda examines all this from the Kraus angle, how he took many to task while not turning an eye away from his conservative streak, what with his own options veering from one end to another, finally breaking at a late point in proceedings (its what allowed him to evade the kind of censorship others faced on the other hand). To be utterly alone is the hardest thing.

My understanding of satire is a slightly more improved (from a really low base). There is v little biography (it only take us to the end of WWI) and what there is critically engaged with the times he is living in. There is a great little essay on his play The Last Days of Mankind in the penultimate chapter.

Currently more or less on the "plausibly describable as in progress" list

Moby-Dick
My Brilliant Friend (Ferrante)
A Lover's Discourse

Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy

On pause: The Stack by Benjamin Bratton and Ghosts of My Life by Mark Fisher

Additionally, this came in the mail earlier: https://www.urbanomic.com/book/ccru-writings-1997-2003/

Really enjoyed Priestdaddy, though I genuinely wanted to kill her parents

There is a great little essay on his play The Last Days of Mankind in the penultimate chapter

I need to read Last Days--I've had it for ages, and it sounds like just my thing, but it's so ludicrously vast

just read The Sellout, on a sequence of long plane rides. a real howler

damn i should probably resume Moby Dick :-/

I'm only like 40 pages in or so, it's already pretty gay

friend just loaned me this, thinking of starting it since I'm a few pages shy of finishing Kotkin's Stalin bio but idk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHhH

I enjoyed Lesley Nneka Arimah's What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky a lot. The stories all have dark endings, almost to a fault, but the three or so that have more surreal/speculative/folkloric elements really have stuck in my memory. One in particular would make an amazing arty horror movie.

HHhH is very enjoyable in a goofy french postmodern way

Currently reading Max Scheler's Ressentiment, cited by Pankaj Mishra in this essay on the "Age of Anger" in national politics:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/dec/08/welcome-age-anger-brexit-trump

Just finished Stanislaw Lem's 'MORTAL ENGINES', much of which are some of his humourous short stories about robots/AIs. My taste for Lem is much more for his steely, serious side, so luckily this collection ends with 'The Mask', an astonishing, rich and strange novella worth buying the book for alone.