2019 Autumn: What Are You Reading as the Light Drifts Southward?

I'm reading Sleepless Nights right now!

Kingsley Amis - Ending Up

The last four pages = wow

such a happy ending

read it again recently. extraordinarily compressed, technically skilful book. the writing is at the very highest level.

The ending was savage but I need to read it again, was on *what are these things on the page?!* stage

I'm listening to Dracula on Audible. Started reading it about 10 years ago but kind of got bored after the nth blood transfusion. Managed to get past some of the more tedious mid-section parts and back to the action but it's interesting to hear about how the Icelandic 'translation' ended up being an almost total re-write

It's a shitload shorter, too, if that helps you.

Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' -- the 2009 translation (J.A. Underwood) which is more direct and colloquial

Virginia Woolf, 'Street Haunting: A London Adventure' - struck more now by the Edwardian formality of VW's voice than by the adventurousness of her ideas. Some lovely stuff but the way she writes about dwarfs, blind people, beggars etc would not go down well now.

my aunt applied to do a masters and while processing her application they told her, to her great surprise, that they could not accept her because she never completed her English Lit BA; she has one credit remaining, a course on Milton. so my mother and i are reading Paradise Lost with her in solidarity

aw!

I took a course on Milton in college. I groaned, but the first few books of PL are surprisingly brisk, and Satan earns the rave reviews (Adam and Eve are joyless).

i have never listened to audio books but during a particularly bad bout of insomnia the other night i started a free audible trial and lined up willie rushton (thankfully fairly little of him) reading Father Brown - they’re mainly dramatised rather than an audio book.

i’ve never really got on with the blue cross as a story but the queer feet is *grebt* for a radio dramatisation!

it didn’t send me to sleep but it did stop my brane ripping itself to pieces as it likes to do in the wakeful wee hours.

I picked up Sleepless Nights yesterday on the recommendation that ‘everyone in book club hated it’.

I’m reading Supper Club by Lara Williams. I wasn’t sure at first because it begins with a first term at university, but the conceit is starting to carry it along nicely. It’s enjoyable to read about queer hedonism anyway.

Not really sure why I’m reading under the skin for the third time in as many weeks, but going to just go with it

Sleepless Nights is grebt, what is up with your book club?

It's not my book club. I'll report back when I've read it, but I'm excited.

xp Lol at reading Under the Skin so often! It bore little resemblance to the film, but it was hard for me to separate the two at the time. On reflection, a lot of its unique disturbances have stayed with me. The description of the original bodies of the creatures in particular.

I didn’t finish the film but I was intrigued by the book descriptions. They’re quite different but I liked the book much more for the level of detail and description of their world. I loved all the scenes with the hitchers where the perspective suddenly flips and the sense of gradual unraveling. Idk, it just appeals to me a lot.

Virginia Woolf, 'Street Haunting: A London Adventure' - struck more now by the Edwardian formality of VW's voice than by the adventurousness of her ideas. Some lovely stuff but the way she writes about dwarfs, blind people, beggars etc would not go down well now.

Not sure if this is the one where she also goes on and on about "filthy" Jews, etc

There is one of those.

Theodor W. Adorno, 'Trying to Understand ENDGAME'

Longer and more difficult than I remembered. Paragraphs of Beckettian length over 3 pages.

"Ok, so when Doctor Strange comes back, what you have to remember about the infinity gems is...."

I don't think I mentioned here that I had finished THE GOLDEN BOWL.

Henry James: Search and Destroy

Joseph Conrad, 'An Outpost of Progress' (c.1897). A kind of trial run for HEART OF DARKNESS, or a tale that anticipates that one anyway: trading station in Africa, Belgian settlers going crazy in the heat, absurdity of the degraded colonial situation. Much cruder and simpler than HoD, and more simply racist in its language also.

I notice JC's adjectival tendencies that Leavis complained about - sentences with multiple nouns each with their own adjective crowding the prose up. I don't mind this though.

Just finished White by Deni Ellis Béchard, which attempts to turn Heart of Darkness on its head: the Kurtz in this case being a pseudo-conservationist, casting some light on the persistence/inexorability of the colonial dynamic—how postcolonial guilt and the best stated intentions can be leveraged/exploited. I thought it got unnecessarily clever twd the end but was interesting and well plotted.

I've finally finished Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out: What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies. It's been a slog but worth it. I'll admit to a fatigue at the 'capsule biography, visit to important site on a hot August day' pattern of things but it's incredibly well researched and comprehensive.

This, from the epilogue, has me wondering however (it was published in 2008): "these days Britons no longer mourn their empire. They are more comfortably European. They are more relaxed about race, sexuality and gender. Their government is no longer fighting a war in Ulster... The feel of life is more feverish than entropic. The look of things is gaudy and skin-deep, rather than heavy, worn out and grey."

Even then that must have read like bullshit but fuck, 2008 seems like a long time ago.

Deborah Eisenberg! Read v. appealing profile a while back, but now I'm blanking on where that was and on favored titles---which of her collections should I start with?

Chinaski: yes that is very much Beckett's MO - as in his PROMISED YOU A MIRACLE: 'Now, meeting me in his office on an unseasonably warm March afternoon, Geoffrey Howe was courteous, neat, yet seemed naturally worn down by the two decades that had passed since his devastating attack on the Prime Minister' - et al.

Joseph Conrad: 'Karain: A Memory'. 25pp to go in this. Some of Conrad's wild descriptive luridness - Malay places, natives, etc - yet still what strikes me is how much simpler a writer he is than James. I had vaguely imagined them as stylistically a bit closer together.

This story also evidently has implications on 'race', savages, empire, etc, which I won't get till I've finished it.

Deborah Eisenberg! Read v. appealing profile a while back, but now I'm blanking on where that was and on favored titles---which of her collections should I start with?

― dow, Saturday, October 12, 2019 1

Her collected stories doesn't feel bulky, but her latest book Your Duck Is My Duck is the way to go.

I forgotten to mention: I also started Anita Loos, GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES.

I got the James Baldwin collected essays from Library of America a while ago and started it this week, beginning with Notes of a Native Son. James Baldwin is all he’s cracked up to be it turns out: sad, beautiful, wry, relevant.

I finished Eichmann in Jerusalem a couple of nights ago. It was very informative regarding all the main elements of the trial and Eichmann's crimes. Arendt's command of the facts and her powers of observation and penetration were quite impressive. Apparently her reportage on the trial and the resulting book were attacked in a variety of ways, but those attacks and subsequent controversy have faded away, leaving the book to speak for itself. It does so with great clarity and persuasiveness.

I would say her central point was that Eichmann was not so much a monster of hateful criminal depravity, but a very small man who earned his position in the Nazi hierarchy through his hard work, his petty ambition for advancement, his bland self-absorption, a remarkable capacity for self-delusion, a fondness for adopting slogans in place of thoughts, and a grotesque lack of compassion. He had so little human definition that he easily warped himself into the required shape to fit into the Nazi's genocidal enterprise.

Been reading William Vollmann’s Last Stories and Other Stories, which a friend gifted me recently. I’ve read a lot of his stuff over the years but haven’t touched any of his books in abt a decade. I was worried I wouldn’t have the patience anymore for his style and affectations, but I’ve been enjoying it so far. All the baroquely-told tales of death and decay are kind of perfect for these grey mid-October afternoons.

... how much simpler a writer (Conrad) is than James. I had vaguely imagined them as stylistically a bit closer together.

Conrad is stylistically simpler, but thematically the reverse might be true. I don't think James attempted anything on the scale of Nostromo.

The Princess Casamassima vs. The Secret Agent would be a good apples-to-apples comparison.

I'm contemplating whether or not to make another run at reading The Divine Comedy - I've faltered in the past midway through the Purgatorio. I picked up Mandelbaum's translation last night and read the first three cantos of the Inferno, but if I am going to succeed, I think I had better start in the Purgatorio and move on from there. Or I might just bag it and go another direction. I may not be up to the mark for 500 pages of dense allegorical theological poetry right now.

Apparently her reportage on the trial and the resulting book were attacked in a variety of ways, but those attacks and subsequent controversy have faded away, leaving the book to speak for itself. It does so with great clarity and persuasiveness.

agree that in hindsight the "controversy" seems sorta ridiculous, essentially her getting taken to task for maintaining a critical eye rather than just parroting emerging orthodoxy.

to me one of the other really striking things was realizing just how convoluted and dysfunctional the Nazi hierarchy was. As a kid I only heard the more notorious names - Hitler, Goerring, Goebbels, Eichmann, Himmler, Mengele - and had this picture of them all being at the top of a tightly controlled pyramid, when in reality there were layers and layers of both more powerful and less famous functionaries really running the machine.

xp

Another book I read earlier this year, Stalingrad by Antony Beevor, also exposed the essential dysfunction of the Nazi regime. It seems like they managed OK when all they had to do was control Germany, but as soon as the war started and they had to manage two-thirds of Europe and multiple battle fronts, the whole jury-rigged apparatus became increasingly chaotic.

Her collected stories doesn't feel bulky, but her latest book Your Duck Is My Duck is the way to go.

I picked this up recently and thought it improved with each story. I wasn't convinced at the start (the politics felt a bit forced), but the stories built on each other in a way that gave new meaning to the earlier ones. Ultimately it felt deeply personal and was a captivating introduction to Eisenberg.

Brad C, yes I entirely agree. That's part of what I was saying on the Henry James thread: that the immensity of his novel was in excess of its content. And yes, Conrad can deal in plots of greater scale and more obvious import.

I agree that that particular comparison of novels would be worth making.

I finished 'Karain: A Memory' and think Cedric Watts correct to find it Kipling-esque -- even though I don't know much Kipling. Tone of irony around the white men's persuasion of the native to accept their fake magic, based on Queen Victoria.

Then 'Youth: A Narrative': the first appearance of Marlow. This entire story is about things going wrong with a ship: weather, leaks, fire, explosion. It's like a cartoon, WACKY RACES or ROAD RUNNER or the like. It is also packed to the gunwales with unexplained nautical terms and slang.

Two thirds into The Sandcastle : an almost stereotypical English Novel, domesticity and repression and headmasters. It's the story of an affair, usually something that bores and/or exasperates me (baggage from being a child of divorce, probably), but I have to say that the moment where the cheating couple gets caught really HIT me in an almost horror-novel kind of way, despite not being particularly sympathetic to them in the first place (the wronged party is also such a one dimensional shrew that...probably not my place to accuse Murdoch of internalized misogyny...). Very strange that this is by the same author who wrote the knockabout, bohemian, almost Wodehousian at times Under The Net

I couldn't face the immensity of The Divine Comedy and set it aside. To save face with myself I'm reading Plato's Theatatus in a Penguin edition that has an attached, lengthy essay upon the niceties of the arguments that I shall also read. Then it's back to lighter, more entertaining fare, which means 'almost anything but Dante and Plato'.

If one wanted to read a book by JEAN RHYS, what would be the best choice?

Still reading GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES in odd moments - is it supposed to be hilarious? It's lightly droll but given its lack of substance otherwise, the lack of real comic heft is a bit disappointing.

I finished Conrad's 'Youth' and as an insomniac returned to Chris Baldick's THE MODERN MOVEMENT. Ingenious how he puts WOMEN IN LOVE into the (useful, a good idea) category of 'romance / fantasy' and hardly conceals his disdain for it (refreshing: what a dreadful, horrible book). Then he describes Powys's GLASTONBURY book and makes it sound absolutely nuts.

For Rhys I can vouch for Voyage In The Dark. That’s the only one I’ve read so far. Cold eyed and gripping.

I'd say Good Morning, Midnight for Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea is remarkable but I'm not sure I'd suggest it as emblematic.

Voyage In The Dark is indeed a stunner.

Next up for me: Riding For Deliveroo: Resistance In The New Economy by Callum Cant. I've a friend who used to work for them - participated in trying to get Deliveroo unionized - so it'll be interesting to see how experiences match up.

Should I give Patrick White's Voss a go? If so, why?