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

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.

I am currently reading a silly confection by Bill Bryson, The Road to Little Dribbling. One joke in it did entice one very loud guffaw out of me last night, which joke I immediately shared with my wife, who reacted much as I did. So I have established that it is, at least intermittently, Laugh Out Loud funny. That is an admirable virtue.

Never really saw the appeal of bryson. Flicked through his Australia book, and it seemed to be all 'wow, lotsa poisonous spiders and snakes here, lol', so didn't bother with any more

I've got soft spot for Bryson, mainly due to reading Notes From A Small Island when I was in Australia and needed an avuncular arm around the shoulders and a rose-tinted view of home.

Enjoyed what I've read by him so far.
Especially remember him talking about people's behaviour towards wild bears. Putting peanut butter on their kids hands so that tehy can take photos of the bear licking it off.

Have a few of his sitting around waiting to be read though

imo Bryson has two talents, neither of which can be prodded to create high art, but which usually suffice to entertain: he knows how to tell an anecdote with proper pacing and he can write words on cold paper that produce the effect of an individual voice, so his books appear to have a lively personality (although I am sure it is more of a well-crafted persona). iow, his books mimic companionship, and you either like being in the company of his persona or you don't.

just picked up solar bones based on more recommendations than i can easily count

Thread mavens: where should I start with James Salter?

Heath Robinson 2 books I got this week, Travel and Leisure Pursuits.
LOve the guy's convoluted machinery drawings and these were on sale through Postsceript books.
A bit too much overly genteel work included whereas i'd have preferred the cartoony stuff. That is to say there is some very of its time material showing what a decent artist he was doing straighter stuff. But that stuff seems a lot more dated.
Wish the layout included years that things appeared alongside the artwork cos there are some interesting ideas that seem to come from currently outdated notions. Oh & at least one overtly racist image which wouldn't have seemed so at the time.

The Hunters or Light Years both great launching points. His last novel, All That Is, is his weakest. Or f you like mountain climbing, read Solo Faces.

Xpost

Just finished:

Ryan, Remembering How We Stood: Bohemian Dublin at the Mid-Century
Barich, A Pint of Plain

Started Segrave, The Girl from Station X, but will never finish it. It's the history of the author's feelings about her mother, supplemented with facts about her mother's life.

Thread mavens: where should I start with James Salter?

― The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums (Chinaski),

I second the Light Years rec

Like that book but feel like A Sport and a Pastime may be a better -as well as more canonical *ducks*- start.

But, yeah, probably good to read The Hunters early on.

Wading into 'Russian Emigre Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky', which has a not-easy title to remember but is FULL OF THE GOOD STUFF

Picked up Lem's Mortal Engines,at the library. Dunno how I overlooked this one before, might be cuz a few of the stories are collected elsewhere.