2018 Summer: A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine, and What Are You Reading?

Maybe it's like, "What if Camp Grenada/Grenade-a were military---?"

Masters of Atlantis was wildly inventive, veering between satire and pure farce. I found myself wishing for more satire and less farce, tbh.

Now I have started a popular-science book, with the twist that it was written by a scientist rather than a journalist, titled (I kid you not)-- Gorgon: The Monsters That Ruled the Planet Before Dinosaurs and How They Died in the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth's History. That's a sweet 19 word subtitle for those interested in advanced statistics.

The book centers on research concerning the causes of the Permian mass extinction, when approx. 90% of the species on earth went extinct, which is the biggest known mass extinction event. For comparison the K/T asteroid impact event that killed off the dinosaurs is estimated at about 50% of species disappearing. The central question is whether it was an abrupt event, or a fairly gradual one, as was believed for many decades by paleontologists.

The less-sciencey content is about the day-to-day anecdotes that surround field work, the shoestring funding, the politics of sorting out conflicting theories, etc. It is all supposed to make the book 'more human' and accessible. It does. I'll let you all know how it ends.

Haven't posted here in a while, but trying to get back into it :)

This weekend, I started reading "Mumbo Jumbo" by Ishmael Reed which is very funny and enjoyable (and which I recommend to anyone who liked Paul Beatty's The Sellout). Great biting satire on race in the US, though depressingly still relevant (was published in '73). It reminds me quite a bit of Pynchon - it's the first of his books I've read. I think the less of the plot revealed beforehand the better, so I'll refrain from more detail, but if any of the above appeals to you, it's worth taking a look at.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Crashed, Fizzles. I'm looking forward to getting to it. I picked up his older book 'The Deluge' from the library (as Crashed was unavailable). It's very good, so far. It looks at WWI and the interwar period, layering in an economic history that had been largely absent from the accounts of the period I'd read. It looks at how diplomacy during this period was influenced by the rise of the US' industrial and financial power and hegemony (the book's subtitle is "The Great War, America, and The Remaking of the Global Order" which kind of says it all). It avoids being too reductive and Tooze does a good job of grounding the narrative of the war/post WWI period in tons of research.

I also read Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone - about a retired professor in Berlin whose life is affected by the migrant crisis - and which is very moving, unexpectedly funny in places, and elsewhere quite savage (it reminded me of Coetzee a couple of times).

pynchon explicit cites reed as an inspiration in gravity's rainbow

explicitLY

inherent vice, pynchon.

got about 30 pages in doing the laundry. enjoying it. I've seen the movie 3 times so doc sportello is joaquin phoenix in my head (which i find unfortunate, not because i don't like joaquin phoenix). of pynchon's books I've only read gravity's rainbow, which i found about the hardest novel I ever read, and I'm not in the mood for anything abstruse this weather, so the breeziness is welcome

Crying of Lot 49 is also breezy and even shorter than Inherent Vice!

Nixonland is too much to plow through quickly; I started reading The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down which is definitely gonna be a bummer also, because I’m stupid.

xp. good to know, will get to that after this

Cool, I didn't know he explicitly cited him (I haven't read GR - but can definitely see the influence on The Crying of Lot 49). Will one day work myself up to GR and Mason & Dixon...

I'm going through the Bonds in sequential order and just finished Thunderball; it's a huge improvement on Dr No and Goldfinger, which are prob the only two books improved by the movies.

Thomas Mann's Reflections of a Non-Political Man.

The Apex Book Of World SF

I can add to the Pynchon flavour by noting that I'm continuing to reread DISSIDENT GARDENS whose bad Pynchon elements continue to come through consistently.

Thomas Mann's Reflections of a Non-Political Man.

― The Silky Veils of Alfred (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 28 August 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Bet this one is a barrel of laughs..

re early TP also check V and Slow Learner. And re early Ishmael Reed, also try Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and The Freelance Pallbearers.

Bet this one is a barrel of laughs..

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, August 28, 2018

I caught myself laughing at pg. 61!

If I come across a copy that is the only page of it I'll read.

Thanks for the other Reed recs, I just finished Mumbo Jumbo and will double down on the high recommendation for anyone who liked Paul Beatty's The Sellout and The Crying of Lot 49. Will definitely keep an eye out for those other two.

Though I mostly don't like Pynchon, I also somewhat admired THE SELLOUT! The first 20pp or so I thought a virtuoso outrageous riff, a bit like (in that sense though not the actual content) Amis's MONEY.

Oh I missed reed talk! +1 on early reed, I would add the last days of Louisiana red - I’ve also been wanting to reread them this year since reading the sellout and (possible missing link) platitudes by trey Ellis, which pushes a lot of the same buttons & is v funny

I finished Gorgon. Aside from learning far more about the author's personal life than I cared to, I learned that at the time of publication in 2004, scientists were coming around to the belief that the Permian mass extinction was not due to a collision with a large extra-terrestrial object (asteroid, comet) but was indeed rather swift in geological terms (under 100,000 years) and that the mechanism was a rise in global temperatures by as much as 6C (11F) due to a dramatic increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide coupled with a drop in atmospheric oxygen from about 20% to 10%. The source of the carbon dioxide is likely to have been volcanic, as one of earth's ancient supercontinents was ripped apart.

I started Stoner, by John Williams (one of the non-musical variety). Although the book is very much about academic life in a Midwestern state university, a subject full of tedium, the writing style is interesting enough I intend to read more of it, until it either hooks me properly, or the tedium overpowers me.

Oh right I plowed through Bad Blood (the sordid tale of Theranos) on audiobook in a couple days over the weekend. A hell of a yarn.

I am going to fly in the face of the accumulated wisdom of ILB and set aside Stoner as a book I do not wish to read any further than the first 80 pages (about 25% of it). There are reasons for this and I shall tell them, but recognizing that a fully developed critique is impossible for a book based on its first quarter.

The first problem I noticed, somewhat subliminally at the beginning and more so as I continued, is that both the characters themselves and the author's handling of them, are completely humorless. Not the slightest glimmer of humor is allowed to seep through anywhere. This not only renders the characters inhuman in my evaluation, but makes me distrust the author's intent. Such a choice is highly artificial and very unrealistic, and if the intent is to draw Stoner as a tragic figure, it is precisely the wrong choice in my view.

Next, I noticed that, although the character of Stoner makes at least three profoundly life-altering decisions in this part of the book, the author makes no attempt to justify, explain, or illuminate them from the perspective of his character. He is a cypher, a nullity in this regard.

Then, Stoner falls in love. The woman he falls in love with is described as somewhat pretty, but every other detail the author delivers about her makes it obvious she is emotionally stunted, vacuous, completely empty of human warmth. There is so little life in her she is not even capable of rising to the level of vapidity. Yet we are to believe Stoner falls in love with her at once and quickly decides he cannot spend the rest of his life without her. This is unfathomable.

Then comes some painfully clichéd scenes of their honeymoon and her frigidity. Then, with almost no transition, she becomes semi-hysterical in the first months of their marriage.

I recall how, a year or two ago I read O! Pioneers! and remarked admiringly how material that a lesser author would handle as melodrama, Cather handled with depth, grace and dignity. Stoner seems just opposite to me. It delivers melodrama and feigns depth, grace and dignity, using unusually well-crafted, grave and reticent sentences. But behind the dignified and reticent prose style is... nothing much.

Now, hit me in the stomach as hard as you can. I can take it. I've been working ou....OWWW!

Aimless, you’re not the only one who feels this way about that book. There’s ledge, I think, and myself, to name two. I managed to make it to the end and don’t recall it getting better. It’s no Ethan Frome, that’s for sure.

feel like the consensus on here was that people didn't like stoner

Before writing that I did a search on "stoner" confined to ILB and found far more admiration expressed than not.

Haha, this is just going to add further weight to my contrarian reluctance to read Stoner despite being a total NYRB stan. Speaking of which, I just finished The Gallery, by John Horne Burns, which is composed of vignettes of soldiers and citizens in a Neapolitan arcade in 1944. Some questionable depictions of black soldiers, though there’s a very interesting portrait of a gay bar (written in 1947). I think I’d only read about this particular part of the war in Catch-22, and this is a much warmer and more thoughtful exploration of what Americans and Italians were doing to get through it.

Butcher's Crossing is humourless too. Fwiw, I think Stoner's 'silence', or his affectlessness, can be seen as structural - something he inherits from his parents. Or it's modelled to him. I struggled with the book to some extent, but did find the end beautiful in its way; if anything, that's where the affect manifests itself, where he's finally allowed to breathe.

reading Aimless’ post just reminds me of how much i loved it. not that anything you say is off point; it *is* humourless, he *is* a void, his wife *is* zero-dimensional. it succeeded in spite of all those things, somehow. you gave up before my favourite scene (the dissertation defence) but it doesn’t really matter

Before writing that I did a search on "stoner" confined to ILB and found far more admiration expressed than not.

― A is for (Aimless), Thursday, August 30, 2018 12:09 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hmm, think i might have selective memory maybe based on some favored posters' opinion

I preferred Williams' novel about Augustus. First-person POV helps.

Aimless's description is intriguing, reminds me I still need to try that one, and Augustus too.
JoeStork, you might also like From Here To Eternity, maybe especially the edition (first ebook-only, but now in print, judging by some descriptions on Amazon) with restored/even more detail on interface of certain older white male gay circles in eve-of-Pear Harbor Honolulu w soldiers stationed at Schofield Barracks etc., most(?) of whom supposedly only do it for the drinks and pocket money. There's also a central character who only a few years ago was ateen hobo of the Great Depression (there were quite a few of these, apparently, though I've never seen their way of life dealt with at much length, and never anywhere else in fiction). Got raped by an older guy, knocked the guy out of the boxcar.
Whole thing is dense, layered, warm, pulpy, thoughtful, tending to the fatalistic, but driven and driving as hell, even more amazing to read as a bestseller of the early Korean War,the Cold War and McCarthyism--def in the same lineage as Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy and Catch-22 (prob The Gallery as well, but still haven't read it).

The gay element is only one of many in the cut version, and doubt that it dominates the restored, but certainly roils around in there with the overall "Whut Fools Us Mortals Be!"

Last day of Women in Translation month, which I have been observing this year. Best books of the month I read were:

Ricarda Huch: The Last Summer (German) - really clever and stylish short epistolatry espionage/assassination thriller from 1910 about a student embedding himself in a White Russian family as a tutor/helpmeet who is really there to kill the family father, a local Governor who has upheld the law sending a bunch of anarchist students to prison

Lidiya Ginzburg: Blockade Diary (Russian) - as grim and as fascinating as you'd expect, lightly fictionalised memoirs of life during the Siege of Leningrad

Barbara Yelin: Irmina (German) - really nicely done graphic novel about a German woman in the UK in the 1930s who falls in love with one of the first black students to attend Oxford, but then runs out of money, returns home and becomes a good Nazi wife and mother; could have been very heavy and programmatic, but dodges all the potential pitfalls

Madame Nielsen: The Endless Summer (Danish) - modernist, beautifully done group portrait of a family and various hangers-on over the course of a rural Danish summer

Emma Reyes: The Book of Emma Reyes (Colombian) - artist's memoir-in-letters of life as effective child slave in Catholic convent in Bogota

Regarding Madame Nielsen, she has said she hero worships Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen as a model, and she's not kidding: (Nielsen on left, Blixen on right)
https://www.kiwi-verlag.de/ifiles/autor/large/autor_1939.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--DoQP3TZCF8/TmjjaYmFrWI/AAAAAAAAESQ/h59nxKTGkns/s1600/isak-dinesen-67.jpg

woah, big blixen, sorry about that

My feeling is that Stoner is a guy who loves literature and the inner life but just doesn’t get other people or even have very much perspective on himself. The way the book is told is true to his limitations.

Maybe all this becomes clear later in the book, but I failed to detect much evidence he loved literature or the inner life in the first quarter of the book, other than Sloane, the English prof, declaring that Stoner was in with love literature. The reader is given no direct proof of this.

But I am being unnecessarily querulous. I'm glad you liked the book.

I've had a disrupted reading month but I am please to note that I enjoyed "People In The Room" by Norah Lange very much, even if (because?) I mostly wasn't sure what was happening.

In place of Stoner, I've started reading Troilus and Criseyde, Geoffrey Chaucer.

The Everyman edition I have has marginal glossary notes which help to quickly disentangle some of the more obscure Middle English words, so it reads somewhat smoothly with the occasional glance to the margin when matters are unclear. Reading Pandare's, or Pandarus's (Chaucer uses both spellings) lengthy arguments to Troilus about why he ought to divulge the name of the object of his affections makes it obvious why Chaucer was given some diplomatic assignments.

lizzy goodman - meet me in the bathroom

God I hate Madame Nielsen. Her latest stunt was a show based on Rachel Dolezal called 'White N*****r / Black Madonna' done partly in blackface. And yeah, I've censored the title.

It got your attention. Now you've spread it around. Gee, thanks.

It was one of the biggest cultural news stories in Denmark, and James Morrison just wrote admiringly about her.

James Morrison just wrote admiringly about a particular book she wrote. I'm guessing the book did not contain any minstrel shows or throw the 'N' word around. I trust his judgment that it was a beautifully done group portrait of a family and various hangers-on over the course of a rural Danish summer.

It was.
And I'd not heard about that show, which does indeed sound incredibly stupid.

I'm not attacking you! Just explaining who she is, and saying that if you go to Denmark and say you like Madame Nielsen, people will either get really uncomfortable or beat you up.

look, they'd have their reasons even if i said nothing

Fair enough. We're a shitty people.

Finally got back to the Malamud collection, Rembrandt's Hat, finished it: the title story actually has the viewpoint character, an artist, sneaking into his colleague's studio, sitting down and figuring out the other guy's point of view, and something about his own, coming to see how and why they are so at odds---there's a little Borgesian logic leap via imagery there too---this instead of the usual melodramatic finale. And the last story, "Talking Horse," though something like literary special effects, is fun and makes use of the mythological aspect other posters have mentioned, re stories from his prime. This is obv. not the one to start with, but stimulating even when wearing thin (which is appropriate to his stubborn characters).