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

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.

x-post I bought Ressentiment last year, but still haven't got around to it yet. I need to have a moratorium on acquiring new books so I can clear the backlog.

Decided not to read Bolano after all (though will try and pick up both Savage Detectives and Last Evenings on Earth later this summer, if I can). Instead, I was talked into reading Middlemarch by my wife and am loving it so far!

Mihail Sebastian: For Two Thousand Years -- very good, and this seems like something xyyzz would like

I mean xyzzzz_

I need to have a moratorium on acquiring new books so I can clear the backlog.

Never!

In one of my many half-read books, a book about Alain Resnais by James Monaco, there is a discussion about exactly this. Wonder if I can find it.

useless information alert: discovered last night that nathalie sarraute's daughter was the editor on a number of resnais (& marker) films!

currently making my way chronologically through the two henry green collections i picked up a few weeks back & wow. have finished the first four and would have to say so far living has been the stand-out for me, but these really are exceptional.

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.

Recommendation accepted.

Maphead by Ken Jennings has become my bogbook. It's pretty fascinating look into cartography. I picked it up from the library sale box for 50c. It talks about a dept in Washington D.C. holding a lot of significant historical rare maps which now has me worrying about the fate fo them under the current administration.

Positively 4th Street is teh book that I carry for transport etc. Been meaning to pick it up for years and it is pretty good. Hadn't known that Richard farina and Thomas Pynchon were close friends until I started reading it.

Finished Shock & Awe and not 100% about it as i said elsewhere. It's the Simon Reynolds book I've disagreed with most as far as I can remember. Maybe I need to reread the Post Punk ones but thought they were better.

May finish off the book i was reading before i started that, Flower Confidential about the international flower trade cos it's nice to have insight into things like that.

useless information alert: discovered last night that nathalie sarraute's daughter was the editor on a number of resnais (& marker) films!

Adjacent: I recently learned from a podcast that Patrick Mondiano helped Catherine Deneuve write a book about her dead sister, and also wrote some lyrics for Françoise Hardy.

Finished Shock & Awe and not 100% about it as i said elsewhere. It's the Simon Reynolds book I've disagreed with most as far as I can remember. Maybe I need to reread the Post Punk ones but thought they were better.

Does it go much into glitter rock? The most interesting, usually unremarked thing about Glam as a genre to me is the disconnect between the small group of critically acclaimed legends (Bowie, Roxy Music, Lou Reed I guess?) and the legions of populist, bubblegum chancers that actually give it the numbers to be a "real" genre.

There are several pages of entries on Legacy of glam after 1975 after Reynolds covers Bowie's Berlin era. I think there may be some input about Poison etc but I think it's dismissive. He does talk about Siouxsie and the Banshees among others as having some legacy qualities too, as well as the Blitz scene.

just finished len deighton's funeral in berlin and now want to read everything he wrote and start fights about how he's MUCH BETTER than john le carre

also just started: beat the devil by claud cockburn (it has an eric ambler feel, perhaps not very surprisingly)

(as a kid i remember my dad reading ambler's death and his brother sleep and thinking that title was just the coolest, deepest, most evocative phrase ever penned) (but i never read it myself, maybe i ought to)

I really love the movie of Funeral In Berlin, enjoyed it much more than Ipcress File.

Dave Cairns has written about Deighton, too - https://dcairns.wordpress.com/2016/10/06/the-secret-diary-of-harry-palmer/

Stevolende, I was more thinking about the Sweet/Hello/Mud types than Hair Metal; feel like they often get conviniently written out of more tasteful histories of the genre.

Last night I finished reading Xenophon's Cyropaedia. I know this sort of stuff isn't really ILB's cup of tea, but it is a pretty remarkable book for its time period (early fourth century B.C.). Xenophon's habits of thought were about as prosaic as it is possible to be. He was not a philosopher, but he had a keen mind and a great breadth of interests and talents. He would have been the perfect 18th century rural English lord of the manor, fox hunting with gusto and tinkering endlessly with improved drains, a couple of millennia before the English invented the type.

Sweet are in there definitely. I think there may be some mention of the Velvet Tinmine type bands too

I need to finish off the book Children of The Revolution which I've had for the last few years which is also on Glam. Just got cheap copies of Barney Hoskyns and Dave Thompsion books on the subject too.

I think Reynolds mentions at least Jet, the band that came out of John's Children and Davy O'List of the Nice and begat Radio Stars.
Can't remember what others he talks about. Think there's something on the Runaways too. Also the art troupe taht tomata du Plenty was in in the late 60s or am I getting that confused with other things i've watched ovber the last month. Other books by Reynolds have had me picking thet hing up and wanting to read as much of it as I can as fast as I can. This had me picking it up intermittently over the course of a month or 2

Reynolds definitely isn't above the less critic-friendly stuff

iirc there are whole chapters on the Chinn/Chapman stable, Gary Glitter and David Essex

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

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Tuesday, 9 May 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well the book certainly made arguments for its full performance (its seen as un-performable and Timms broken that down) well. I got the sense that a few carefully curated episodes would be good to have as a book. Didn't see it as a stand-out work. I quite like to read some of his essays but I'm not sure whether it would need too much local context to appreciate, but he is great in a study like this.

Mihail Sebastian: For Two Thousand Years -- very good, and this seems like something xyyzz would like

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Wednesday, 10 May 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean xyzzzz_

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Wednesday, 10 May 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Its xyzzzz__ :)

Heard of it, did sound like my sorta thing then forgot about it. Hope to see a copy one of these days tx.

I finished Johnny Marr's book!

It's good that Mark is reading and sticking up for LEN DEIGHTON.

Next: COOKSTRIPS ?

Just finished David Keenan's This is Material Device, nicely structured as a collection of personal histories of people connected to a post-punk band, collected by a fanzine editor. Really great, funny, much to love as a music obsessive.

Also: Alexander Trocchi, Young Adam, subtly built a tension that pushed me to finish the (mercifully short) read to escape the lead character's world. And Lavinia Greenlaw, The Importance of Music to Girls, which didn't really grab me until she reaches adolescence/romance/punk rock. Enjoyed it but underwhelmed.

Just got Cosey Fanny Tutti's Art, Sex, Music which should be a perfect follow-up to Material Device. But I'm not up to reading it on the bus, so just started the Grover Lewis Splendor in the Short Grass for that.

I've been reading mostly poetry this week. Alejandra Pizarnik's Extracting the Stone of Madness is a hyper-concentrated blast of all yer modernisms. Weirdly enough there might be something affinity between her and someone like Ann Quin in terms of a distanced mood but I need to do the work on this one. Turned to Sor Juana Ines de La Cruz - she was a Mexican nun who wrote a letter pleading to the Bishop at the time for her right to keep learning, you'd say its kinda proto-feminist however its such a weird pleading, wearing its learning and language on its sleeve that it doesn't necessarily chime in with other types of feminist tract in terms of rhethoric, so it isn't too surprising it was only translated into English in the 80s. We then turn to some of her poetry and sonnets - I think there's a lot there but I don't particularly like the curating in this Penguin paperback - great to finally read her tho'.

I don't enjoy Deighton but maybe i haven't found the right book yet? His cookbook is definitely more fun than Tinker Tailor. I kinda prefer Fleming and Ambler. Less "realistic" but better sentence writers.

Right now I'm reading CONCLAVE by Robert Harris, a thriller about choosing the new Pope. Fancied something easy and middlebrow. It's good, but like Fatherland, it's a bit too quotidian and polite to be first tier.