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

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

Portrait of Lady and indeed most James before 1897 is rather easygoing.

Yeah its all 'good' up to that point. Agree with Emily is probably too much of a time commitment - and if you start Portrait of a Lady you will not want to stop.

Not that I ever ever ever should buy one more book, but wondering about Great Short Novels of Henry James, a couple of which I've read, but some I've never heard of, and intro by Rahv:
https://www.daedalusbooks.com/Products/Detail.asp?ProductID=131927&Media=Book

(Also, just below that listing, Lawrence's Paul Morel, early version of Sons and Lovers. Looks like it might be better, if description's accurate.)

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

all recommended

read imagined communities recently too and thought it was great.

i loved some of the cosmology > cartography stuff he does around spatial boundaries in Thailand, in fact i loved all of it. it's one of those books where i found myself wanting to highlight everything. tho i picked my way slightly cautiously through his version of Benjamin's messianic time v journalistic or simultaneous time (where we are made to be aware of things happening at the same time as us, as we go forward into a sort of void, rather than towards an apocalypse, revelation or some other cosmic religious realisation). wd need to go back to the book to remember why tho.

it also cleared up a thing that grated in the translation of michel tournier's four wise men - his use of the word négritude, which i felt might have been more appropriately translated, maybe as "blackness", which was because i was completely ignorant of the entire history of the concept of négritude. an embarrassment i'm now fortunately free of thanks to IC.

I read "Good Morning Midnight" by Jean Rhys which I think is the Jean Rhys book I've been waiting to read.

I am reading "Attrib." by Eley Williams, published this year by a London press called Influx and it is ridiculously good; I was expecting it to be good but it's better than that. Small stories that fixate on the language in which the stores are told, but still they just get me every time, wallop. And often just when I think they're going to disappear up themselves. I can't recommend this stuff highly enough, really. HAVING SAID THAT I do wonder whether a book that contains a story which links Bridget Riley and Walt Jabsco might actually have been written specifically for me by some unseen cosmic force, so maybe you won't like it as much as I do?

I think I've read most major Brontë biographies in addition to reading the Bronte Studies journal for years but I've avoided The Bronte Myth because I just hated Lucasta Miller's intro text to 'Shirley' (where she seemed ignorant of pretty significant truths of Charlotte's). I've seen it referenced enough to feel like I know it though, and I'm sure it deserves its reputation. Of course Juliet Barker's The Brontës in 1994 already confronted The Brontë myth and unearthed basically the rest of the records needed to get to where we are today in terms of knowledge of their lives, even though her interpretation of the _characters_ in the family is very much up for debate. With every new Brontë bio sympathy shifts and various family members are reinterpreted. Bought the Brontë Cabinet but haven't read it yet - instead read through Claire Harman's 2016 Charlotte bio. Not much new but perhaps a fairer look at Charlotte than Barker's, with more years passed since major new reveleations allowing for a cooler take on, for example, the relationship between Emily and Charlotte. Enjoyable, breezy read.

Bios aside, the best thing I've ever read on the Brontës is Heather Glen's study "Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History", an eye-opener even if (or especially if) you feel like you've read endless amount of Brontë takes. Out of print I think but used copies on Amazon.

Thanks for the leads, dow and abcfsk - I've been meaning to read The Brontë Myth but haven't yet, and I'm unfamiliar with Heather Glen's work, but it sounds intriguing. I still have some more primary texts to read (Shirley, The Professor, Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and the juvenilia) before I make a deeper dive into the secondary literature, but I'll keep these books (along with Harman's new book on Charlotte) in mind when I do.

I should read more by the Brontes before I read any more about them (but thanks especially for the Heather Glen tip); I was just taken by Lucasta Miller's delving into different POVs: a first for me, though have since come across Ben Ratliff's excellent Coltrane's Legacy: The Story of a Sound

misread that as coltrane's legacy: the sound of steel which is a better title imo

I am reading Tenant of Wildfell Hall for the first time. Havent read either of Anne Bronte's works before but good lord this is gripping stuff. Into it!!

And Anne's preface!

if there were less of this delicate concealment of facts — this whispering, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and misery to the young of both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience.

I have never known what 'The Bronte Myth' (as referred to in the book title) is.

Everyone who reads GOOD MORNING MIDNIGHT seems to love it.

That would be because it is excellent.

I am reading Tenant of Wildfell Hall for the first time. Havent read either of Anne Bronte's works before but good lord this is gripping stuff. Into it!!

― Yoni Loves Chocha (VegemiteGrrl),

In its own way it's as powerful as Wuthering Heigihts and Jane Eyre.

reading Priestdaddy. really good

Found a rave review by Crowley of the Paul Park book Shakey is reading, as well as various used/antiquarian bookstores selling Tom Disch's personal, inscribed copies of Park's books, some with Disch's letter of blurbage inside, in his own hand or from his own typewriter.

Oops, sorry, wrong ILB thread.

I'm about 2/3 through Deep South, in which Paul Theroux provides a procession of portraits of mostly black southerners, whom he often allows to speak for themselves. They provide the real value in the book. Paul Theroux, when he gives voice to his own thoughts and insights, mainly adds either bookish digressions or rather tired and hackneyed commentary, which serve to tie the book together, but add little else. Luckily, the more interesting voices prevail.

Reading Henderson the Rain King. It's making me think of Sabbath, mostly, or Sam Pollit - in the mad ebullience, and the character as embodied desire (I want!). Albeit Bellow doesn't allow Henderson the same perfectibility of vision - his thinking is too erratic and he's too chthonic somehow, always sounding for the dark undertow.

cyril connolly: the rock pool
lawrence durrell: the black book
rayner heppenstall: saturnine

more or less three variations on the same theme: cynical & underachieving young man with literary pretensions navigates the bohemian milieu in hopes of attaining redemption and/or escape (the heppenstall played the superior name-dropping game)

reading Priestdaddy. really good

― flopson, Monday, May 29, 2017 9:49 AM

I did this. And read her two poetry books too; liked the second more than the first.

^^^

cyril connolly: the rock pool

such an odd book

i love honelandsexuals and always wondered about balloon pop outlaw black, love the title for sure

the chapter with the Italian seminarian cracked me up

I started Tree of Smoke. Five hundred pages to go!

I always liked that you could read most of Denis Johnson's novels in a day

never got along with Tree of Smoke

Sorta abusing this thread for a non-what am I reading now post but I love Queirós a lot and am happy to see this NYRB article. The Proust comparsion there almost purely for alliteration tho, he was a 19th century Flaubert/Balzac type realist.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/05/31/the-proust-of-portugal-eca-de-queiros/

Thanks for posting that! Now reading In Search, where every now and then somebody requests the juicy gossip but assured the consultant that it's only needed for "Balzacian reasons". also the swells tend to drop B.'s name occasionally, maybe just in case you need a reminder that they know some books as well as authors(he is one who can be mentioned without considerations of fashion or table manners, so far, though may yet turn up in Lord De Douchefoucalron's family chronicles, blah-blah-blah).

Really got my fill of most of these titled creeps in The Guermantes Way, though of course Swann and omg Charlus keep shaking things up a bit, but after many a summer Swann, my favorite, is dying---oh well still got Charlus, and the prose-poem revelations will also show up again---the convincing ones, that is, after the narrator very eventually sweats them out (back in Balbec for what he tells us is the second and last time, so that should work out okay, eventually).

I'm nearing the end of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur and still on the first trip to Balbec. Marcel has just a meltdown over the "petite bande".

I finished "Ressentiment" by Max Scheler. Basically it's a book length defense of Christianity against Nietzsche's slur of calling it "slave morality". Scheler thinks that Nietzsche should have rightly applied that tag to bourgeois liberal humanitarianism, which is a perversion of the rightly much less egalitarian teachings of Christianity as properly understood (by Scheler and others he cites approvingly).

Brecht's Life of Galileo. Really enjoyed it. Opening scene of friendly, argumentative, chaotic household of Galileo, housekeeper, hk's son, Andrea, and passers by and guests sets tone.

Main theme is obv truth v power, and the role pragmatism has as it shuttles unequally between the two. Also "truth" is variously constructed as knowledge, as philosophical concept, as a practical value (ie. being able to use the stars more accurately to navigate by).

There's also a lot - perhaps unsurprisingly it's the other main theme - about the worth of truth to the labouring classes. G's friend Sagredo warns him against too much candour:

Galileo, I see you embarking on a frightful road. It is a disastrous night when mankind sees the truth. And a delusive hour when it believes in human reason

But Galileo commends the shrewdness of the peasant laying in hay for their horse before a long journey, or the farm boy who puts on a hat because he knows it's going to rain. He believes this means they are open to reason. A scientific monk warns against taking spiritual value away from the poor - G claims they will be liberated. And his daughter's landowning betrothed says that it will cause revolt and destroy obedience.

Ultimately Brecht's G, after his recantation, says that science must always consider how it may assist humankind or the "gap between you and it may one day become so wide that your cry of triumph at some new achievement will be echoed by a universal cry of horror". Towards the end of the play Andrea, who deserted G after he recanted, receives his final great work the Discourses on Two New Sciences, says that it is better for hands to be stained than to be empty, and Galileo agrees.

G treats and is seen to treat his daughter badly, carelessly, with the irony that she later becomes effectively his prison warden.

Pretty much the best bits of this edition though are Brecht talking about his work with Charles Laughton to translate and stage the first English-language LoG:

We usually met in L.'s big house above the Pacific, as the dictionaries of synonyms were too big to lug about... he used to .. fish out the most aired literary texts in order to examine this or that gest, or some particular mode of speech. In my house he gave readings of Shakespeare's works to which he would devote perhaps a fortnight's preparation... If he had to give a reading on the radio he would get me to hammer out the syncopated rhythms of Whitman's poems on a table with my fists, and once he hired a studio where we recorded half a dozen ways of telling the story of the creation, in which he was an African planter telling Negroes how he had created the world, or an English butler ascribing it to his Lordship... The awkward circumstance that one translator knew no German and the other scarcely any English compelled us, as can be seen, from the outset to use acting as our means of translation.

Charles Laughton was also concerned that for the Beverly Hills performance, in a small theatre, that it would be "too hot for the audience to think" so he ordered trucks full of ice to be parked against the walls and fans to circulate the chilled air.

oh and subsequently reread Stephen Jay Gould's essay The Sharp-Eyed Lynx, Outfoxed by Nature in part about Galileo's struggles to perceive the true nature of Saturn - he, unable to conceptualise or properly see its rings, thought it was a "three-part planet". And quite a lot of the play is about G's insistence on the power of observation to prove and so convince of the truth. SJG's point being that this belief, along with a belief in the excellence of your measuring instruments - here obv the telescope - can lead to certainties of truth that will turn out to be incorrect. That there is an element of contingency on our social and intellectual context.

The narrator's Mama now sitting on the beach, dressed in black and reading her own mother's favorite book, Mme de Sévigné's letters to daughter Mme de Grignan. Translator John Sturrock notes that S. was "thought by many to be the greatest of all French letter writers, and admired particularly by Proust for the quick, spirited impressionism of her style." What's a good collection in English? Doesn't have to be just the letters to her daughter.

(just posted this by mistake on purchased lately thread)

Hi Fizzles, really want to read that, and reminds me that my Mom's got Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter, collecting and providing context for letters to her father (his replies have been lost, maybe burned by abbess of daughter's convent, being too hot to handle re his branding as heretic, though some of what he said might be inferred from her side of the conversation). Chapter One here, with link to the NYT review:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sobel-daughter.html

Got my Carrington collection - only read a few but they're beautifully-formed surreal vignettes.