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

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).

Been thinking of the Malamud story about the dad who advises his daughter to marry an artist and the mom who advises her to marry a professional or businessman but can’t remember the title, it’s been a while.

I finished Imagining Robert - an affecting look at what it's like to love someone with mental illness - with all the frustrations, anger, guilt, shattered hopes, and fleeting joys that go with it. Now I'm reading Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton.

Slaves is one of my favourite books, with one of Hamilton's most monstrous bore characters.

Stewart O'Nan: A Prayer for the Dying -- very well done and deeply grim; main character is currently living with the corpses of his wife and child, kidding himself they're still alive, in the middle of a C19th diptheria outbreak

Now 2/3rds of the way through Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Reading through the section on Love Melancholy and wondering if Freud has read it. It seems like a similar sort of project to mine the literature of antiquity for insights into the working of the mind and body. I only have a sketchy knowledge of Freud (and of course he developed more of a theory from all that).

Doubling that up with Dante's La Vota Nuova and sorta enjoying its lack of immediate pleasure in Dante's dry, technical commentary to the poetry/balladry.

I'm roughly halfway through Troilus and Criseyde.

Random thoughts: Chaucer takes pains to cast the story into the mold of earlier tales of romantic chivalry, such as the dozens of Arthurian romances, or Tristan and Iseult. He mostly succeeds in pasting the correct sentiments into the mouths of his characters, but the basic story rather resists his efforts.

So far, Troilus is a pasteboard parfait knight, a lion in battle, completely lovesick, honorable to the last scruple, and boring as hell. No indications yet that this will change. Criseyde is more interesting in that her concerns seem far better grounded in reality and her judgment of the situation is cool under fire. Pandarus is the only character given variety and interest, but he hovers in an indistinct territory where he does lip service to noble ideals, but his actions just don't synch up with his sentiments and Chaucer doesn't seem to know what to make of him, yet.

Of course, Chaucer may well pull a few rabbits out of his hat and all the above may be turned on its head before the end. He was nobody's fool.

Been thinking of the Malamud story about the dad who advises his daughter to marry an artist and the mom who advises her to marry a professional or businessman

Reminds me of the Langdon Jones story about "Ludwig van Beethoven II." The boy dreamed of going into law, but his father forced him to compose music. Late at night the boy would sneak up to the attic and pore through law books.

Robin (Williams bio) by Dave Itzkoff

finished céline's london bridge (continuation of guignol's band) & now started on ee cummings' eimi: a journey through soviet russia... a sort of novel based on the journal he kept during his 1931 visit to moscow/kiev/odessa

far too much work has meant I haven't really been able to keep up with this thread. putting down a few things i've been reading recently for the record.

Will Eaves – Murmur, this on a James M recommendation from the Nothing is happening in British literature thread.

This was a good recommendation (I didn't doubt it would be).

My rather stenographic summary that I put up on goodreads:

Mirror worlds, divided selves, replicated selves, and of course fictionalised selves all wondering at their definition, and the bounds and autonomy of their selves. bodies 'disenchanted' from their inhabiting selves, programmatic routines occupying past figures from the life of 'Alec Pryor' (a fictional proxy for Turing). inability to humans to understand how, or *that* they are thinking or that it is distinguishable from hyper-efficiency, similar to machines who also do not know they are thinking. pryor's hallucinogenic passing from one world to another.

desire and intention, cause and effect, as reversible equations, death as a dissolution of a contextual framework, a passing through of the context. An intensity of 'I'-ness, when you are have been chemically altered to no longer be the person who you were.

the writing is often good, sometimes poetic (whether that is good or bad i'll leave) ..

eaves also uses the natural ecology of england to both provide context and the setting of some of the material transformations that take place in the book. this produces a pleasing sense of being linked to the seasons, frosts, mists, water, trees, and an obsession with birds, their thought process, their intentions.

the writing doesn't always avoid a sense of having a touch of the writing school about it. though that is mainly a feature of the initial chapter / short story (in itself with a number of good bits).

So that's stenographic but it's also lazy in another way, in that it doesn't really examine the interplay of the elements it lists, which is fairly vital to engaging with the book. I say that, but I'm not entirely sure whether the interplay is indicative of a schema or structure in Eaves' head (I *think* it is, that it must be), or whether he just scumbles the elements to provide a sense of relation, which perhaps lacks structure. As I say I think it's the former.

The comment on the writing style is worth unpacking a bit, because I don't really understand it properly myself. I can give examples of both the poetic, and other places where it thickens into something that is neither of the writing school or of poetic diction:

So, an example of the poetic – June, Alec Pryor's former wife and correspondent, is described as follows, on a walk on the South Downs:

She smiles through hair. Clouds flee the ridge. The red flash of a goldfinch darts up from a thistle clump. It is an art to be fearless. June's like a guelder rose, the dogwood's umbels and the bark of the elder, all plants that mark these hills with centuries of growth and form. Unpretty, strong.

That 'unpretty' seems to me to be a word of poetic diction. And though it's very good here, and I wouldn't want it not here, it is also noticeable, with its Larkin final line like cadence as well. The writing school method – what I call the writing school method! – bit is harder to define, but is perhaps a flip side of the poetic, in that there is something self-conscious to it. Perhaps in that sentence it's expressed with the specificity of the iteration of flora. The *writer* has noticed something, found out the words for it and put them into Pryor's internal speech. I was just flicking through the book to find more convincing examples, but I'm not sure it's that easy to cite. I think one way it finds its way in is where you find the author heavily mediating some of the messages of the book around AI and other modern implications – there is a sense of that awful thing relevance at play. The following example captures something of that, though I would say my issue is more one of tone than this passage conveys:

Two people at a table, together, each on the phone to someone else. The physically present companion incidental to the real contact. The sign, you see, is contradictory: those people on the phone are saying, 'Yes, I know exactly what you mean', but there is no do distinction between you and you, between an electronic echo and the occupant of space. And that is what it will look like, to begin with – a sort of ecstatic, immediate empathy (I know exactly what you mean) increasingly detached from any one person's presence. You will see more and more people perplexed, distressed, distracted by the men and women they are with, people they love, prefering to take calls or messages from friends or strangers who are elsewhere, and so full of potential.

It's fair to say that this 'future reaching' and 'authorial bleed' are both completely valid in the terms of the book. Its reference to field awareness and of controlling entities outside of the immediate frame of reference (which may nevertheless be available through mirrors and that field awareness) (author, future, the ability of characters to reach outside the frame as well) these things are present as concepts in the book.

He frowns. 'But no one thinks a character inside a book has actually written it?'

'And yet the author is a part of his material. It's paradoxical, that's all.'

That which is outside, is also inside, and as it is inside may be considered elements in our computational processes. We are not fully aware of this operation. And of machines: 'If part of how you think is inaccessible to you, perhaps a sham, and theirs is totally, then where's the point of severance?'

The bits of writing that got me most excited here were sentences and images that prosaically combined the natural and the subject matter:

The room is dark, the window bright, and through the glass the stricken researcher sees deep into a complex green: the beeches from another vantage point, shifting dynamically, hidden birds' eyes taxed with their subroutines of grooming, sex and predation.

Is that a magpie or a jay? Its puppet head confronts the scientist. It looks without seeing, alert. Its vision is a corvid mystery of weak interpretation and associated forms.

The joint of the mechanical and the natural. It is what the prosaic does best - that flexible and flat co-existence of disparate ideas with explanatory and descriptive force. The awareness and description of a 'corvid mystery' to computation both explicit here and implicit at other points is where the book is at its strongest. The paradox of state preservation and persistence.

One remarkably section takes the Snow White story, and uses it to create a hallucinogenic depiction of a family confrontation, with a paranoid sense that these family members are computational processes designed to elicit information, and which hallucinogenic characteristics are later 'explained' by the depiction of the whole scene in a concave mirror.

It's good.

While trying to nail down what it was distracted me about the tone in certain places, I thought I'd pick something very different off the shelves to see if the distinction made it easier to frame the tone. This was a penguin classics collection of Cervantes' Exemplary Stories, and I read The Jealous Extremaduran.

An exemplar is not a great counterweight tonally, as its tone is didactic and fabulistic – the formality of it isn't required to achieve nuances of naturalism and voice. That said it's worth pointing out that Cervantes is witty and present, despite the form he's chosen. Slightly more surprisingly, I realised I was reading a story on closed systems, exactly the same as the book I'd just put down. The Jealous Extremaduran of the title – Filipo de Carrizales, wealthy, 80 – marries a 15 year old he has spotted leaning out of a window while on a stroll. He takes every precaution of locking her up, not even male animals are allowed in, and the door is guarded by a Moorish eunuch... this is described in a fascinating line:

...never was monastery more enclosed, nor nuns more withdrawn nor golden apples more strictly guarded; but for all this it was impossible to avoid falling into the danger he feared, or at least thinking he had fallen into it.

That seems also the heart of the argument presented in Murmur via Turing. The crucial bit is the thinking of the thing you are thinking about, not the thing you are thinking about itself - that is here what has undone the de Carrizales, it is what creates the possibility of an sealed system's undoing, since to be able to think about it is to have created a way into it.

The Jealous Extremaduran is generous in the face of the inevitable, and recognises his folly. this tale is also a circle, as he has been a young nobleman dicking about europe and frittering away his cash, and his young bride's virtue is attempted by the same, who also goes off to the Indies tho it is his heart and head that has been beggared rather than his purse.

Also read:

An essay on James Merrill by Edmund White in a book of his essays that i picked up in a second-hand bookshop for £2.99 on a work lunchtime foray. He has that mandarin certainty that brings lucidity:

These are books of ideas (as well as of feelings, visions, people and personages), and the ideas are comprehensible. Whereas Eliot's ideas about tradition or Pound's economic theories are stated in clear, no-nonsense formulations only in their essays, the poetry acting as a dramatiziation (sometimes a fragmentation) of thought, Merrill's epics are as straightforward as Pope's Essays. Nor are the cultural or scientific allusions in Merrill obscure .. Of course Merrill is playful in the way we might say Mozart is playful – alternately noble and funny, disarmingly unrhetorical but never afraid of true grandeur.

Looking forward to dipping into the rest of the essays.

Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart by Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M Todd and the ABC Research Group. Not, I should point out, a self-help book, but a proposal for how humans use heuristics successfully and what the characteristics of those heuristics are.

iThe Belle Sauvage – Philip Pullman. A patrician old-school approach to fantasy, which happens to be one i like. this is a voyage of the dawn treader / odyssey like connection of incidents on a single thread of a river journey. He is capable of some exceptional images and description which i'm sure will stick in the mind of a child:

But then he did see something at the base of the wall: just a shadow slightly darker than the building. Something man-sized but not man-shaped – a massive bulk where the shoulders should be and no head – and it moved with a crabwise shuffle.

..

The shadow appeared around the side of the building again. And then the man staggered, and the burden on his shoulders seemed to squirm away and fall to the ground; and then they heard a hideous high-pitched cry of laughter.

The man and the dæmon seemed to be spinning around in a mad dance. That uncanny laughter tormented Malcolm's ears; it sounded like a high hiccuping yell of agony.

'He's hitting her...' whispered Asta, unable to believe it.

When she said that, it became clear to Malcolm too. The man had a stick in his hand and he had forced the hyena-dæmon back against the wall, and he was thrashing and thrashing her with fury, and she couldn't escape.'

Quoted for that central image of the dancing shadows and the high-pitched cry of laughter.

The ending of Belle Sauvage is such a puzzler - it's hard to tell how much is deliberate anticlimax, or if it's just clumsy writing (or both).

I just finished Wodehouse's Uncle Fred in the Springtime - it's very good but not quite up there with Joy in the Morning or Leave it to Psmith.

An unusual amount of repressed violence - there's a death fantasy in almost every chapter - references to skinning someone alive, setting them on fire, or bashing them in the head with a break... it's all very lightly handled as you'd expect, but there's such a **lot** of it.

*with a brick

on Belle Sauvage, I think it's a common problem with high episodic narratives – one thing happens then another thing happens then another thing happens and then it stops. the fact they don't get anywhere or complete anything is peculiar I agree. very hurried.

the book has been very insistently trailed as a part of a trilogy, including the cover where the title of the book is confusingly beneath the 'Book of Dust' wider work, and with the heavy-handed 'to be continued' at the end, that I wonder whether this was something that was also noted by the publisher. or whether the publisher insisted a larger work be chopped up and released in more books. or something like that anyway.

There's something so unsettling about the way it fails to provide resolution to many of the plot strands (especially the part about Malcolm being used as a honeytrap) that it's hard not to think it's deliberate. But then we get that very rushed final chapter that's all a bit "[throws up shoulders] fuck, here's some plot to finish it off". So I came out unsure whether I'd felt unsettled by the deliberate, Aickman-esque choice to avoid resolution, or if, like you say, it was just clumsy packaging.

Mostly I found it very engrossing and relievedly easy work after Amber Spyglass.

Not sure if I'm completely remembering, but I think in an NYTimes interview around the publication he said that the next book was already finished, but the third one wasn't. Ah, here we go:

"Now he is rejuvenated, though there remains more work to do. Before it can be published, the second volume of “The Book of Dust” requires what he calls “carpentry.” The structure needs to be sawed up and reassembled, the sentences sanded smooth. The third book then needs to find its way out of his head and onto his two-holed paper. He warned there would be a delay, just as there was before the last volume of “His Dark Materials.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/magazine/philip-pullman-returns-to-his-fantasy-world.html

new shteyngart

there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.

I finished CHRONIC CITY again.

[SPOILERS re: Belle Sauvage]

The thing that really bothered me was the total lack of follow-up to the implied sexual assault of a major character right near the end - for a book that was so deliberate, and that took into account the more commonplace work that was foisted on the female characters, it seemed really off.

I’ve had Patrick O’Brien’s Master & Commander on my shelf for a few years. I did not suspect that the wholly delightful first chapter would be followed by 400+ pages of impenetrable naval architecture porn, inc. long discussions of the relative merits of grommets to pulleys in sail maintenance. I’ve read easier pages of Gravity’s Rainbow.

I still dug it though. Has anyone read the sequels? Do they get any more plotty and less, er, shippy?

The fanfic is all shippy

You don't need to understand much, if any, of the nautical jargoning to read the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O'Brien. Just skate past it and you won't lose a thing.

All that shippy stuff mostly gives you a sense of how complex a sailing ship was and how important it was for the crew to 'know the ropes'. The characters who spend a lot of time gabbing about this nautical minutiae have worked on ships for the great majority of their lives, and by contrast, know almost nothing about life on land. They are just as lost and "at sea" when ashore as the landsmen are when aboard ship.

If you read many of the novels, you'll start to see many of the same jokes reappear multiple times, but that, too, is probably authentic. Old jokes get handed down in small isolated communities, just as playground games get passed down by children.