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

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.

Yeah, it was put together by one of his English translators, rather than being done by Lem himself

I've definitely read "The Hunt" cuz that's in one of the Pirx the Pilot collections. The other robot fairytale sorta things I thought were in the Cyberiad but not in the copy I've got. They do seem familiar. I may just skip to "The Mask"

Also got Paul Park "All Those Vanished Engines". Never read Park before but Gene Wolfe seems to love him and there was a NY Book Review of him recently that caught my eye. Seems p interesting so far.

Aaand a James Blish collection, "Galactic Cluster". Only Blish I can recall reading previously was the incredible "Surface Tension". Obviously a big name/figure of his era, figured this would go towards plugging that gap in my reading.

have been reading the tana french novels in order. just read broken harbor, and it is one of the most upsetting books i have ever read. also gr8.

I finished with the second (The Likeness) a few weeks ago; trying to space them out a whooooole lot so I don't run out too soon

read them all in two weeks lol

I enjoyed a very old copy of The Hunter, but think that New Yorker profile mentioned that he tweaked it later, and his later approach def. not as taut---it can work, but suspect not for The Hunter(which ain't Pylon: no room for purple clouds of prolixity that I can foresee with any confidence), so I'd check for the first edition. Yeah, the spacier Light Years told me some stuff about life-goes-on that turned out to be true.

Finished Rebecca. DuMaurier sure knew how to write! First chapter is nothing but description and works its magic well. So many dark undercurrents: it's not just the memory of Rebecca that haunts Manderlay, it's the British class system and repressive masculine norms and the protagonist's own deep, crippling neurosis. Top marks.

Now going to read a novel by Augustina Bessa Luís - Manoel de Oliveira adapted it into a movie I'll be tackling for my podcast, so I wanna get a grip on the source material. Doesn't seem to have been translated into English, nor any of her other work either - a shame, she's one of Portugal's finest.

I finished the Bryson, because it was so easy to read that finishing it took almost the same amount of effort as not. I took up with William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity for an hour or so before going to bed Friday, but I'm not sure of my staying power with a book originally written as a post-graduate thesis, with all the stylistic implications of that fact.

I'm about to go away on a brief vacation trip, so whatever I bring with me shall limit my choices of reading material. I haven't made my selections, yet.

Reading Julian Barnes' The Noise of Time. Ach, I dunno. I've read quite a bit of Barnes over the years, but not for a good ten years, and I'd forgotten how bloodless I find him. I can't deny the architecture is superb, and the level of immersion in the research is impressive, but I don't get a genuine sense of Shostakovich's pathology or a true sense of jeopardy.

Andrzej Szczypiorski: The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman -- this is good stuff! About the last 36 hours of life in Warsaw before the burning of the ghetto, jumping in and out of lots of connected stories, with the disconcerting habit of introducing a character and, almost in passing, mentioning how they'll die (burned to death, end up in Russian dissident prison, live to ripe old age as a hypocrite, etc) beyond the end of the book itself. Not sure about the title, though--Polish original translates as 'In the Beginning', and Mrs Seidenman is hardly the central character

I enjoyed a very old copy of /The Hunter/, but think that New Yorker profile mentioned that he tweaked it later, and his later approach def. not as taut---it can work, but suspect not for /The Hunter/(which ain't /Pylon/: no room for purple clouds of prolixity that I can foresee with any confidence), so I'd check for the first edition. Yeah, the spacier /Light Years/ told me some stuff about life-goes-on that turned out to be true.

Len Deighton: Yesterday's Spy
Claud Cockburn: Beat the Devil
Nicola Barker: Darkmans
Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities

all recommended

I've been reading Deborah Lutz's The Brontë Cabinet, which is a series of biographical essays on the Brontë sisters organized around different archival objects: homemade booklets, walking sticks, letters, writing desks, hair bracelets, and so on. It has some interesting details on Victorian material culture and gendered spaces, but I can't really say it's dramatically changed my understanding of the Brontës or their texts. I've also been reading another, more measurable book on everyday life, Bernadette Mayer's long poem Midwinter Day: what I've read of her other work (mostly her later collections) also has a playful, miscellaneous quality, but Midwinter Day braids together observation, fantasy, gossip, local history, and reflections on the conditions of women's writing more compellingly.

*"memorable" in place of "measurable"

I grabbed a library copy of Paul Theroux's book, Deep South, about multiple road trips he took into Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and such. Unless it proves unreadable, it is my current book.

I can't say his introductory chapter has impressed me so far. He spends a dozen pages early on griping about how travel books about America indulge in mock adventures, inventing dangers that do not exist, all the while ignoring the presumed subject of his book. He also spends several pages naming famous writers who owned autos and travelled in them. Basically, him riding his hobby horses.

Finished Pizarnik's Extracting the Stone of Madness and my initial take around 'modernism' is really off, its something else and more. Well there probably is an affinity between her and Ann Quin but its like she is making that space where you are struggling to come up for up for air and its kinda ok to be down there, see what that feels like. I want to read Plath (who I bet she is not at all like but is compared with simply because they both committed suicide).

Roberto Bolano - Skating Rink.

JM Coetzee - Disgrace. Only read his (kinda dry) essays before this. Quite a breezy tale of a Professor having an affair with a student. I hope this is going somewhere more interesting.

Don't think I've posted here since saying I was picking up Lanark. Finished it a while back - I really loved it, basically felt that every section complemented each other and nothing was a waste (lots of reviews I saw only seemed to like one chapter, or one 'set' of chapters).

Have read a couple of shorter things since then as well, lastly Red Rosa, the graphic-novel biography of Rosa Luxembourg. In general I liked it, though it felt a bit too lightweight for my taste - the appendix went some way to rectifying it but perhaps not far enough.

Am waiting on the post bringing me my copy of the Debutante & Other Stories by Leonora Carrington, and a bit stuck for what to read in the meantime. I seem to have misplaced some books that were high on my 'next to read' list (I have too many books for my bookshelves and must have put them in a box somewhere), the only things I fancy on my shelves are too hefty for my mood (was debating Portrait of a Lady or Perdido Street Station), and I've re-read most of my short story collections too recently to fancy them again (I don't have that many). I should probably go visit the library but that involves going outside.

fwiw, found Portrait of a Lady easy-going actually. Especially compared to his later work..

Still, even if the prose is not particularly heavy to wade through, it's probably a bit too much of a time commitment for me to make while I'm excitedly waiting to devour some Carrington shorts.

Also I never bloody get the spelling of Rosa Luxemburg wrong, except up there, where I flagrantly did.

Every time Verso has a sale I um and ah about that Red Rosa book. It's 50% off atm, so I might have to go for it.

I loved 'Disgrace', but I am a very pro-dog person and it seems to have been specifically written to break my heart. You may feel differently.

About to start the short novel by Matthew Weiner, 'Heather, the Totality'

Hi one way street, have you read Lucasta Miller's The Bronte Myth? The process she's tracing could be said to start with the layered books themselves (and the male pseudonyms), but but def. Mrs. Gaskell's bio-alibi (like West Side Story: "He ain't no delinquent, he's misunderstood), with helpfully shaped input from the surviving sisters. This review is maybe too generous with the detail, but isn't really that much of a spoiler, because there's always more, where the still factoid-robust Bronte myth-machine is concerned. Also, the book touches on even more interpretive approaches than mentioned here, and (my sense, though been a while since reading), the author is pretty fair-minded about who's got some piece of the truth, even in LOL dated terminology and thinking. Who *seems* to have a piece of the truth, because the Brontes can't be entirely pinned down even by today's coolest heads.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/29/books/annals-of-the-brontes.html?_r=0

(The book also deals with the Bronte cottage industry in context of England as tourist bait.)

But it's very pro-Bronte too!

The Mexican poets trip to Nicaragua story in the savage detectives is a wonderful bit of writing