Fall 2017 Happy Families Are Alike. What Are You Reading Now?

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Dan sonned in a fake news beef?

Another lyricist wins the Nobel---where will it end??

I've read everything of Ishi(g)uro - even the short stories - except the Buried Giant. Just doesn't sound like something I'd enjoy at all. But he's the only one of that generation of Booker-type writers - Amis, McEwan, Barnes, Rushdie et al - that I really have any time for.

The Boulez-Cage Correspondence. I'm only at the gushing, you're-so-wonderful, stage in the correspondence - and John really thinks PB is wonderful - it might sour later. PB's écolier anglais is so cute though.

Quite a way into The Buried Giant by REDACTED. LeGuin's criticisms make more sense to me now - I didn't expect this to be quite as straight a fantasy novel! In the interviews I'd read with REDACTED he talked about putting himself into the mindset of a person from that age, and that a belief in say ogres was common, but I expected this to manifest in dialogue and not actual characters. Anyway, I'm enjoying it as these things go, there's not a Chosen One or anything rote like that. Reminds me a lot of T.H. White, also I'm playing the new Zelda and that works well as a companion piece too.

Zelda---an album, a game? Please describe.

I finished Ministry of Fear. It's a more literate than average British thriller that could as easily been the script treatment for a Hitchcock movie from the same era (early 1940s).

It is, as the author directly states on the fly leaf, an entertainment. At one point Greene tips the reader a broad wink, stating that his main character felt 'like a man whose life is being controlled by a larger force with a knack for the surreal'.

It does hint at larger themes than the garden variety spy intrigues at the center of the plot, but doesn't really embrace them. For instance, Greene keeps circling around the role of pity in human life, but his presumed insights are never very clear and verge on self-contradiction. He even includes a dream narrative, with a mother figure speaking from the grave, but however portentous it appears at the time, nothing is made of it. It all amounts to pseudo-meaningful window dressing, designed to lift it above the ordinary pot-boiler, but the quality of the prose would have been sufficient. otoh, it does give a vivid sense of the air bombardment of London.

I finished Farrell's Troubles. Hard to praise it enough without sounding dumb. I want to say something like: it reminded me of what novels can do. Highly recommended.

Nothing Holds Back the Darkness by Delphine de Vigan, a memoir of sorts about her mother's messed up family, mental health problems, and death; also about goes into her doubts, motivations, and problems in writing such a memoir. I thought it was great, far more engaging than My Struggle. Then I read the follow-up, Based on a True Story, also supposedly an account of real events, what happened after the memoir was published - but it becomes more and more like a hollywood thriller, less and less plausible as non fiction. The characters discuss the appeal & validity of fiction vs non fiction, and at one point the narrator says something like "you want me to say [the previous memoir about her mother] was made up? Ok, I made it all up!". Confusing. There's a memorable section where a character reads uninterrupted a list of titles from a bookshelf; it goes on, hypnotically, for almost a whole page, and because it's translated from the french and so I presume most of the titles are french novels, I have no idea whether they are real or invented.

Now reading Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, Georges Simenon.

Joan Didion - The White Album. The style is something you can just eat up, though there is very little I am learning about anything. The kind of thing I might have really loved at 19/20, not sure now.

i felt the same way when i read her at 20. her disses are so cutting and the writing so good you want her to like you, but ultimately that elliptical style, always circling outwards, felt supercilious

Yeah, I think she later admitted some of the early slick magazine Highbrow writing got shticky, but try for instance The Year of Magical Thinking.

Joanna Walsh: Vertigo -- as good as everyone said it was a couple of years ago when everyone was reading it

J.D. Vance - Hillbilly Elegy - This was an (unasked-for) gift from last year that I hadn't gotten around to reading yet. Mostly a fairly sanitized memoir of a hard-luck childhood (with a happy ending), it also dips into amateur sociology, with uplifting bromides masquerading as political hardheadedness. Not sure why someone would write a book like this in their early 30s unless they're thinking about running for office someday. Having said that, it's well-paced and hits some emotional notes that feel authentic.

weird to read a measured review of that book, which I only know from everyone on twitter making a big deal out of hating

i think the ppl i follow hated it because the wrong people liked it, or something

didion's deep topic is anxiety -- that's what she marks in herself and hence registers always very acutely in others

her political coverage, which didn't really begin till the late 70s, was as astute as anyone's: you'd think (all things considered) that she'd be quite bad at new york race politics in the 80s, for example, but (rereading recently w/hindsight, thru lens of ta-nehisi etc) this isn't so

my sister and i both read year of magical thinking after my mum's death and got a lot out of it -- i've reread it several times - but i lent it to a close friend after her dad died and she more or less threw it across the room

(a book it unexpectedly reminds me of: paul morley's ±nothing, in which mannerism -- albeit not a very similar mannerism, all those lists -- is a manifestation of the underpinning feelings* PM can't or daren't talk about)

*this word is too weak: i mean anxieties about overwhelming emotions, like grief or anger, and the ways you set controls on those)

Didion managed that change from delineating anxiety instigated by vague correspondences to delineating how vague correspondences among political elites can instigate anxiety. It's a neat trick. Miami and Political Fictions are among my favorite boks.

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Valiant.

this is the kind of page-turning non-fiction thing that i like to read but so rarely do

I finished Simenon's Three Bedrooms in Manhattan. Apparently it was based on his meeting his second wife, whom he met less than a year before writing this novel.

The story really only contains two characters, the man and the woman, who meet and fall deeply in love. What struck me most about the book was the degree to which the narrator, who writes in the third person with a kind of omniscience, spends all of his effort examining the internal thoughts, feelings and reactions of the man. The woman's character is described solely through externalities. So, in a way, it is a book with just one character.

The second thing that struck me was that in spite of the narrator's obvious affinity with and sympathy for the man, the man came off as very egoistic, almost a narcissist, and hence very unlikable. The woman was neither likeable nor unlikeable, in that she never fully came alive to me; she only existed as a catalyst for the man's feelings and her declarations of her own feelings were never given an independent basis upon which to stand.

As a a result of the above-mentioned problems, the book lacked the one element I most enjoyed in the previous Simenon's I've read, a discerning and accurate portrayal of the psychology of the main characters. The numerous, rather hectic attempts by the narrator to explain the man's motives are merely confused rather than penetrating. For me, the book was an unexpected failure, interesting mainly as an artifact, not as art.

Anna Kavan: Ice -- mad as a cut snake, but enjoyable. Can see why Ballard loved it.

About to start a book with the best title ever, Alexander Kluge's 'Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome'.

I read a big anthology of Didion called Live And Learn last year and - challop alert - found The White Album to be kind of the weakest link in it: Slouching Towards Bethlehem has that great piece on John Wayne, "Goodbey To All That" and a long thing on Haight-Ashbury that kinda puts the lie to to the narrative of the 60's that a lot of ppl paint (with The White Album as a canonical text!) where things were nice and groovy and then suddenly Manson and Altamont threw everyone into a spiral of paranoia - Didion herself seemed to view the whole scene as pretty paranoid and fucked up even at its flower power height. Of the later stuff, the piece on the Central Park jogger case (which I assume mark is refering to) is essential reading.

Finished The Buried Giant - it's a nice enough fantasy novel. Found the relationship at the centre of it quite touching. Now I'm reading John Buchan's Greenmantle, which is one of those books that signals what you're in for from the very first paragraph:

"I had just finished breakfast and was filling my pipe when I got Bullivant's telegram. It was at Furling, the big country house in Hampshire where I had come to convalesce after Loos, and Sandy, who was in the same case, was hunting for the marmalade. I flung him the flimsy with the blue strip pasted down on it, and he whistled."

currently reading

Captain Cook: Master of the Seas by Frank McLynn, re-reading Game of Death by PKD, and am about to start Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson. The Cook bio is p fascinating but sad lolz @ me for being lost when all the nautical terminology gets brought in.

Finishing The White Album. I think the essay on Feminism is something quite sharp -- as someone who observes this stuff from afar -- Didion is certainly mapping out some of the issues that are very much live and being worked out.

I think w/the title-essay and first section I found myself thinking that the music has pretty much covered this. So I huffed a bit on my one-liner above.

My favourite piece (as I finish) is called In Bed, a 3/4 pager on migraines that is just a marvel, Walser-like Feuilleton piece that is strenghtened by the factual matter she brings in crossed with that anxiety too.

I will definitely read more from her next year.

view the whole scene as pretty paranoid and fucked up even at its flower power height

the flower power moment was a reaction to and an attempt to break out of the horrors of the time, by rejecting it in total and inventing a new society ab ovo. of course, it failed miserably because the horrors of the time were far too powerful and entrenched and the counterculture was too rudderless and full of nonsense.

the greatest successes of the sixties and seventies came out of politically organizing around stark and simple ideas, like equality under the law, that were within the purview of politics. that included civil rights, feminism and gay rights.

oh, and things were so bad under the existing U.S. anti-communist and apartheid regime, that paranoia is not the right term. the pervasive dread was justified.

the flower power moment was a reaction to and an attempt to break out of the horrors of the time

Well yeah, no shit :) What I'm saying is Didion (as an outsider to the scene) saw new horrors there, far earlier than what it looks like in common mythology.

common mythology as media cliches--before that, even to us young and restless, it seemed fairly likely that the problems of known bohemian culture would take some crazy turns via sudden massification (not that aome of my classmates didn't hitchhike across country to the teen-tourist-runaway-exploiter-swamped and rainy Haight during the Summer of Love, bur they enjoyed the travel more than the destination).

Nothing against Didion or her readers, then or now. She could be pretty sharp about all that, also see Ellen Willis's early "Lessons of Chicago," about the '68 Democratic Convention and debacle.

Anna Kavan: Ice -- mad as a cut snake, but enjoyable. Can see why Ballard loved it.

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Wednesday, November 15, 2017 10:41 PM (yesterday)

I love the books I've read by Kavan but iirc Ice is not one of them. Wholeheartedly recommend her in general, though.

Finished David Toop's Ocean of Sound. And a couple Neruda collections, The Heights of Machu Pichu and 20 Love Poems. I definitely need to reread those, though.

weird to read a measured review of that book, which I only know from everyone on twitter making a big deal out of hating

I guess I missed the backlash. It seemed to get mildly positive notices. I can see people developing a strong aversion to the author's persona or maybe the book wasn't what they were expecting. I guess it does express a point of view which is timely in light of the election results of last year, in terms of helping coastal liberals to understand why poor hillbillies tend to vote conservative. I thought it was just okay.

in terms of helping coastal liberals to understand why poor hillbillies tend to vote conservative.

This is the reason it got such a strong backlash I think. A lot of liberals and ppl on the left were not up for hearing any justifications for voting Trump, or just frustrated with the cottage industry of pieces following Trump voters in this othering, anthropological manner.

J.D. Vance - Hillbilly Elegy

o.nate is on the money bout this one. I wasn't planning to read it until seeing it in the library. Interested me in part because I grew up in southern Ohio, my dad worked in Hamilton where Vance lived for awhile. I went to elementary school w/many people of Appalachian descent. But for me Hillbilly Elegy was far more effective as memoir than political tract. Better at psychology than sociology. Vance might have made the book solely about surviving his family disfunction and come up with something like The Glass Key. Even before he extends his (fuzzy) analysis to the white working class/Trump voters he runs aground IMHO by suggesting his relatives' specific insanities are traits shared by all hillbillies. While he's observant and sharp about hillbilly culture he glosses over or even leaves out one aspect that always stuck me as a kid: hillbillies tend to be virulent racists. Still first half or so is brisk and readable. Like many bestselling nonfiction books from M Gladwell on down, however, it gets repetitious in the second half. Wonder how many people who buy this skim the post-Ohio chapters. Still it reveals some important and uncomfortable truths.

Started this week on Isaac Deutscher's "The Prophet", only another 1500 pages to go.

danielle mclaughlin - dinosaurs on other planets (p good classic literary short fiction, mostly set in ireland)
elizabeth taylor - collected stories

i'm doing a masters right now and my college reading has included a bunch of short fiction i've read already (johnson, kevin barry, colin barrett, lorrie moore, zz packer, amy hempel etc) but some stuff i haven't like john updike, alice munro, wells tower etc. it's interesting finding out how specific my taste is, i didn't think i had a taste but there's definitely been some stuff i really disliked, and a pattern to that.

What is the pattern, to the extent that you feel like laying it out? (Since it's also part of your workaday routines.)

i think i'm just more traditionalist than i knew, with short stories. i get p annoyed when the plot goes missing. i mean all the stuff i like is literary i suppose but it bothers me when there are too many characters or whatever. some of my favourite novels are experimental enough i think, or difficult going, but the great short stories seem to make the reader feel in safe hands. it's not a question of "easy to read" though great short stories imo usually are, it's more like the writer effortlessly puts you in the place they want you to be.

with some stuff like maybe the updike, a little, and v much the alice munro, i could tell it was great writing but it was also unevenly written, had big chunks of exposition, forced you to work extremely hard to care at certain points, just like, not what i expect from a short story.

also a lot of more modern american short stories by your classic "i live in brooklyn" writer have these passive main characters - no action, somebody checking instagram while their housemate has a breakdown or whatever - i realise there's a duty to talk about modern life but things can still happen.

(and i feel weird criticising stuff with "nothing happens" given that usually when people say this about music, or movies, or novels, it's piqued my interest. my opinion could be changing because i'm writing my own stuff every day also.)

Vance might have made the book solely about surviving his family disfunction and come up with something like The Glass Key.

meant to say The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. apparently The Glass Key is a novel by Dashiell Hammett that I've never read

it's the miller's crossing book, v good

This interview gives a flavor of Vance’s political views including his views on Trump:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-us-politics-poor-whites/

I wrote above about Delphine de Vigan's Based on a True Story, also supposedly an account of real events, what happened after the memoir was published - but it becomes more and more like a hollywood thriller - I've just discovered it is now a film directed by Polanski. Luckily behind all the thriller flim-flam it is a novel largely about novels, novelists, and readers, so my curiosity needle only registered a slight flicker.

My current book is by an author named Laurence Bergreen, Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu.

It is easy to read and fairly well-researched. It's organized and written in bite-sized chunks to the point where I could almost recreate the author's pile of index cards from which he wrote. I don't mind this, because I have a bad head cold right now and am incapable of absorbing anything more elaborate than this - including the original Travels of Marco Polo, which I also own, but haven't the energy for. Fortunately, Bergreen has only a few annoying ticks, which I am mentally tired enough to overlook. It passes the time and that makes it worthwhile.

Kate Briggs - This Little Art. Really good, book length essay on translation, the in-and-outs, using her own experience (translations of a series of lecture given by Roland Barthes) as a jumping off point.

I like how it doesn't mention Benjamin's essay on it, for one thing.

That sounds like my thing

It is.

Melville - Bartleby.

Simone De Beauvoir - Force of Circumstance. All that French ppl are good for is memoirs and that is that #ironLaw

On this day I am thankful that you guys have never really given me too much grief for the terrible thread titles I have foisted on you over the years.