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

have that, must read that

I have started reading Clare Hutton's SERIAL ENCOUNTERS: 'ULYSSES' AND THE LITTLE REVIEW.

250pp+ of small print, publishing-history minutiae, charts and tables from Oxford University Press.

I may be some time.

Why Love Matters, Susan Gerhardt. Homework assignment from my therapist.

The past few nights I've been reading Henry Adams' 1300 page history of the two administrations of James Madison, but I'm hesitant to say I'm fully committed to it. I'm only a bit past 100 pages into it.

About five years ago I read his equally long and detailed history of Thomas Jefferson's two terms and it was pretty fascinating. Adams' main fault is his desire to be exhaustive, to uncloak all the evidence he sifted and correspondence he studied and to quote each relevant paragraph that substantiates his account of what every major participant thought or desired at each step along the way. He leaves no room to doubt his narrative, but being exhaustive is also exhausting. Luckily, the period he covers is hugely formative in the nation's history and extremely complex to grasp, so that having such a reliable guide is paramount to understanding what was happening.

If I do read it all, expect to see me come up for air some time in three or four weeks. I won't attempt to synopsize it, but I may offer some tidbits that I find especially tasty, if I run across any.

A great day for Danish literature yesterday as Jonas Eika won the Nordic Council Literature Prize for his book 'Efter Solen'. He gave an extremely political speech calling out Danish state racism, calling out prime minister Mette Frederiksens policies, even as he said he realized she was 'somewhere in the room' (she was in the front row, looking a bit uncomfortable). It's a great short story collection, btw, do seek it out when it gets translated.

I read Coetzees Disgrace, really powerful and condensed. I don't think I've seen this situation depicted this way before, the powerful becoming the powerless, and knowing full well that it's inevitable, that it's fair, that it's as it should be, but still not accepting it, of course not.

Now I'm reading Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk, the good one of the two Nobel winners this year.

The past few nights I've been reading Henry Adams' 1300 page history of the two administrations of James Madison, but I'm hesitant to say I'm fully committed to it. I'm only a bit past 100 pages into it.

About five years ago I read his equally long and detailed history of Thomas Jefferson's two terms and it was pretty fascinating. Adams' main fault is his desire to be exhaustive, to uncloak all the evidence he sifted and correspondence he studied and to quote each relevant paragraph that substantiates his account of what every major participant thought or desired at each step along the way. He leaves no room to doubt his narrative, but being exhaustive is also exhausting. Luckily, the period he covers is hugely formative in the nation's history and extremely complex to grasp, so that having such a reliable guide is paramount to understanding what was happening.

If I do read it all, expect to see me come up for air some time in three or four weeks. I won't attempt to synopsize it, but I may offer some tidbits that I find especially tasty, if I run across any.

― A is for (Aimless)

This volume fascinates less because Madison ain't Jefferson as personage and president.

I soaked up the first volume about nine years like a rich meal with subtle colors. Madison doesn't require irony; Jefferson does. And Adams' irony is among the subtlest and (quietly) funniest in American prose.

*about nine years ago

Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

I finished Jean Rhys, GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT.

I can't say this is really great writing. Maybe its main value is its sense of Paris c.1930s, and the poignancy of the vulnerable, despairing protagonist.

Midway through Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers. I think I would be enjoying it more if it weren't so damn long.

Started again on Ronald Firbank, VALMOUTH. Possibly the campest prose fiction I've ever read.

I liked The Flamethrowers, the end didn’t leave a big impression but I’m a sucker for stories of woman artists being misunderstood and disappointed

I read Stefan Zweig's novella Journey into the Past in the Anthea Bell translation. Bell was the major selling point for me, since I found out she translated two books whose prose style I admired (in the translation): All for Nothing and Austerliz. Sadly I now see that she has passed, but fortunately she has lots of other works I have yet to read. As for the novella, it was a pleasant and short read, a finely-observed melancholy quasi-romance.

Bell was great. She also translated the Asterix books into English.

Just read Melissa Harrison's All Among The Barley. Wonderful. Written in a slightly clipped arcane 1930s vernacular without seeming forced, and dealing with contemporary issues of English identity in a slyly murderous way. FFO The Falling, Ben Wheatley and the gothic pastoral in general. May contain scenes of harvesting.

Didn't have that modern-writer voice. Was moved to think 'they still make 'em like this!' - but of course the book is as much a critique of such thoughts, of nature-writing, of too-fervently celebrating tradition and history, as it is guided by them

Finished Rachel Cusk's Coventry (first half personal essays is good, second half book reviews is much less interesting). Also Karen Russell's Orange World. I know it's hard to end short stories, but most of these just...end, in a way that probably feels hip or sophisticated to writers (like ending on a jazzy unresolved chord), but also unsatisfying. Still a lot of images that will stick with me. The one about the ferrywoman living in a flooded post-apocalyptic Miami could have been a novel.

I'm reading the new Zadie Smith collection of short stories now, so far so good.

Never read a good Zadie Smith short story, so intrigued that people seem to like the new collection.

I hated White Teeth and the one or two random opinion-type pieces I've read of hers.

Yeah, I don’t get her. Another, similar author I can quite warm to is Helen Oyeyemi. In an interview I found her smarmy, and her fiction makes my eyes roll to clacking.

zadie smith is bad imo

So Zadie Smith is cancelled on here in a mere three posts? "Never read a good Zadie Smith short story", "hated White Teeth", "I don't get her." Really? Get the fuck outtahere.

"I don't get her" is the prize quote, from Remy Bean. Yeah, suppose you do in fact do not *get* her: who might be to blame for that? Her, of you? Sheesh. The worst of times etc :-/

xp lol and another one, "zadie smith is bad imo". Care to explain?

Hostility is fine, "Zadie Smith is bad" is fine, but for god's sake, back up these preposterous claims ppl

Okay: she’s boring.

I think it was over 20 years ago that I started (and put down) White Teeth so I'd be hard-pressed for details. I recall just hating the style and tone of it, overly precious and contrived.

I wouldn't say she's "cancelled" (ie, you shouldn't patronize her because of some loathsome views/actions), go ahead and read her what do I care. I will not.

I've only read on beauty and found it arch and unfunny and a bit "do you see?"

xxxp We're all boring, iirc.

I wouldn't say she's "cancelled" (ie, you shouldn't patronize her because of some loathsome views/actions), go ahead and read her what do I care. I will not.

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, November 5, 2019 1:24 AM (fifty-nine seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

I didn't patrronize her, I used the word 'cancelled' after a three-bullets-fired string of posts abt how she is supposedly the worst of the worst. Which strikes me as wrong, or exaggerated at the very least. But yall mmv.

I love her. As I understand it, short stories are a newer thing for her and they're not all amazing, but I'm always happy to spend time inside her brain.
Xp

NW is her best. She was so young when she started getting published.

Yeah, suppose you do in fact do not *get* her: who might be to blame for that? Her, of you? Sheesh.

Chill, LBI. Remy made a statement where the subject of the sentence is "I", not "she". Admitting that you do not *get* an author is intrinsically a statement about the speaker's inability to connect, not about the author's value.

Srsly. Nobody canceled anybody, pls. knock off the hyperbole. Nothing wrong with casually disliking authors, or falling outside of their appeal. For the archives, here’s an unindexed, off-the-cuff list of well-regarded authors I’ve recently read but don’t get:

George Eliot
Henry James
Thomas Mann
Ken Follett
Steven Pinker
Henning Mankell
George Simenon
Elizabeth Gilbert
Marlon James (But I keep trying?)
Lionel Schriver
Ostefa Moshfegh
Neil Gaiman
Elizabeth Strout
Tomi Adeyami
Celeste Ng
Ocean Vuong
Russell Banks
Frank O’Hara

I read White Teeth around when it came out. I was kind of ambivalent on it. I do like her nonfiction writing in the NY Review of Books. She has an interesting piece on Celia Paul and Lucian Freud in the current issue:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/11/21/muse-easel-celia-paul-lucian-freud/

I've recently started Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss. So far it's funnier than I expected.

Actually, I read White Teeth in 2007! My review is in the archives of this very board. Apparently my view of the book was remained consistent.

Thomas Mann

booooooooooooo

the George Eliot mention is the real boo

as I get older, her attention to the nuances of weird personalities interacting with small town conventions is almost cosmic in its acuity idk

The Mill on the Floss was my introduction to the Victorian novel way back when. I've been meaning to give it a reread.

Remy, apologies for my misguided posts.

Re Zadie Smith, her first novel was a big baggy flawed fun clever debut novel, promising but not a masterpiece. Her second novel was genuinely awful. Her third was pretty good, but not as good as the EM Forster book it was explicitly based in, and so a bit pointless. Her essays can be very good indeed, but even when not get treated like the pronouncements of genius. Her earlier short stories were rubbish; the newer ones in the new book may be great, as may her most recent novel, but at this point I don't care enough to find out. There, can i go now?

Only after you read her fourth novel!

Middlemarch is tha bomb---altho your challops awaits, Squire:
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-truth-about-casaubon-a-great-intellect-destroyed-by-a-silly-woman-1395385.html

But, furtively sounding out friends - male, middle-aged friends - I have discovered that some of us share a grudge. Mr Casaubon is hard done by.

Isn't Lydgate's story enough consolation for all the male middle-aged thwarted geniuses?

I thought On Beauty was great and even as a major EM Forster stan I don't think it's "pointless"; the plot machinations may be the same but the environments they take place in are radically different, the characters are different, the roadmap to only connect in the early 21st century isn't the same as it was in the early 20th. Loved the description of Hampstead Heath and the heartbreaking bit where the academic goes to visit his dad in a shitty part of West London and they just can't relate.

I've started The Flamethrowers , Rachel Kushner.

I was pleased to see Henry Adams, writing in the 1880s, make such a clear and unambiguous condemnation of the treatment of native Americans by the US government and racist white settlers. His condemnation was severe, but it mainly consisted of accurately describing how they acted, which was sufficient to comprise a withering critique.

I finished Firbank's VALMOUTH - rather inconclusive ending. Much to say about race in this author I think. I didn't quite feel up to reading more Firbank immediately, so went on to ...

Stan Barstow, A KIND OF LOVING. Absolutely exemplary post-war working-class regional writing sub-genre item -- like SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING but perhaps more fun and entertaining. Very into the minutiae of clothes, workplace, bus fares, etc. The language 'racy' and actually slightly bluer than I'd have expected from a 1960 novel. Strong sense of passion for the woman the hero desires, but the idiom also rather comes unstuck around this - 'Oh, she was just such a marvellous bint', etc - losing its poise and becoming awkward.

I like reading this novel. There is also a page where the protagonist discovers ULYSSES and it's described pretty accurately.

I've read Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy. It depicts girls at border schools, very minimalistic, with a sense of claustrophobia, sexuality and even insanity just below the surface. Robert Walser is namechecked on page one, Young Törless seems an obvious inspiration.

Now I don't really know what to read. Am going away for the weekend, so will get a lot of time to read, will start a couple of new books. Which ones? That will be revealed this sunday, this place. Stay tuned!

I'm intermittently reading Robert Richardson's intellectual biography of Emerson, The Mind on Fire (I know it was recommended on here, but I can't remember where). Richardson's method is to take Coleridge's dictum - quantum scimus sumus - we are what we know - and see how it becomes flesh. It's pretty extraordinary - both as a feat of research and immersion in subject matter and in how it brings Emerson into the present.