Summer 2020: What Are You Reading as the Sun Bakes the Arctic Ocean?

Someone - was it o.nate? - praised Jean Stafford's THE MOUNTAIN LION on here.

It wasn't me - this is the first I've heard of it, but it does sound like an interesting book. I just finished Song of the Lark by Willa Cather. It's a more interesting tale of the development of an ambitious young artist than Dr Faustus, which I abandoned earlier this year. It's a big canvas novel, in terms of settings, character development, and the range of time it covers, although the cast of characters remains fairly small and focused around the main character of Thea Kronborg. I guess it's on the cusp of the 19th and 20th century novel (it was published in 1915). The scenes of small--town, frontier Colorado are particularly memorable, and the development of the main character through childhood, adolescence and maturity is psychologically perceptive. I found it quite enjoyable. Now I'm reading a collection of 2 novellas by Natalia Ginzburg Valentino and Sagittarius.

he scenes of small--town, frontier Colorado are particularly memorable, and the development of the main character through childhood, adolescence and maturity is psychologically perceptive. The central character of The Mountain Lion, some shorter works, and Stafford herself came out of that setting, maybe more and certainly to an extent differently influenced by the remoteness and the terrain and the times than some other characters.

Cather's The Professor's House, which I went on about upthread, unless it was
the previous WAYR, is---not just like The Song of the Lark, but compatible.

"Stafford is in my literary punk pantheon, along with Flannery O'Connor and Kelly Link."

I find that interesting, Dow! Have read about Link, but not actually read the work.

I can't praise Cather enough.

She's amazing. Come to think of it, now I'm wondering if The Heart is a Lonely Hunter came in part from absorbing My Antonia and O Pioneers!---recurring characters through the years, in and out of the foreground, but w a sense of axis pov, of protagonist and/or author---and later Cather, like The Professor's House, following a more interior somewhat vs. exterior line of development---could apply also from going to The Heart... to Member of the Wedding and some of McCuller's shorter fiction.

xpost Pinefox, maybe start with Link's latest collection, Get In Trouble.
Others in the pantheon: Highsmith, Tiptree, maybe Jane Bowles, Plath---oh, and what I know of Anna Akhmatova, in the translations of Babette Deutsch and Lyn Coffin, set to music by Iris DeMent, on The Trackless Woods. But mainly punks on the page. that's about it. Standards are very strict.

Haven't read enough Cather. I teach "Paul's Case" quite often, and many students hate it, to my utmost horror. I think it's brilliant!

At the moment toggling between poetry and philosophy, a practice I had earlier in the pandemic but gave up as the heat got to my brain. Diving back in:

Carlos Lara- Like Bismuth When I Enter= a protege of LA-based Surrealist Black experimentalist Will Alexander, Lara's work is clearly in the mold of Alexander's, but parts from Alexander's in interesting ways, most notably in the length and momentum of Lara's line— long, propulsive, and dense, rather than more ponderous and porphyric, as Alexander's tend to be. At first I was unable to detect as much "political" content in the work, but as I move forward, more themes seem to emerge, and I'm finding myself excited by it in ways that I wasn't when I first began.

Jean-Luc Nancy- Being Singular Plural= I love what little I've read of Nancy, and this is no exception. Only about 20 pages in, but totally invested in his thought.

Replace Hemingway with Cather on the middle school canon imo

I love what little I've read of Nancy, and this is no exception.

Make sure you read Expectation, which collects many of his most important writings on literature over several decades. The Literary Absolute (with the late Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe) is also a classic, if you care about Early German Romanticism.

I praised The Mountain Lion! It was good and sad and challenging. I would never want to meet the author.

I put a hold on it at my library. I want to see what all the fuss is about.

i finished the unconsoled. it was exactly like having someone describe a dream to me, which is not a good thing imo.

golden gates - somewhat gossipy journalistic book about the rise of yimbyism the housing crisis, and local politics in the bay area. good writing and analysis as far as it goes, but the focus (and sympathies) are clearly on the yimby side of a ~five-sided debate.

now reading riddley walker (slow going because i'm reading it and my brain is mush, but it seems great) and listening to the right stuff (obviously interesting subject matter, but oy vey tom wolfe prose).

James Acaster, Perfect Sound Whatever

caek, you might like the screen version, minus Wolfe prose, but, like the book at its best, w Wild Blue Yonder sardonic plot shading, esp. later on---won't spoil.
Alfred, which Hemingway would you suggest for middle school? We had to read The Old Man and The Sea, among shorties by various authors, but did seem tedious at times. My copy was inscribed by a previous reader: "I hate the old man. Get him, sea!"

I read The Sun Also Rises in eighth grade, missing nuance, of course, but it was intelligible. The short stories too.

Yeah, I got to the short stories in ninth grade: I had a sense of missing something, but 'ppreciated that he wasn't taking pains to explain each and every thing, like most of my teachers and other grown-ups. The stories were intriguing, evocative--- despite early-teen concerns, don't remember picking up on the anxieties behind detailed descriptions, ditto even/especially some of the good times in the Great Outdoors---but I hadn't gotten to the war stories yet, the way they kept turning up in the midst of a big collection, when I came back to him much later.
In several ways, he seems to have been his own worst enemy--incl.proud displays of shittiness re his American friends in A Movable Feast---but the stories are still worth reading (never have tried the novels).

Raymond Chandler - Playback
Jacques Ellul - The Technological Society

Loved him for a bit in 8th-9th grade...now, not so much. For Whom The Bell Tolls is his best novel, imho, and 'Hills' his best story by a mile.

cather is the freaking best, even her lesser novels are singular experiences. i read o pioneers! last year-ish and it quickly became my favorite; also love death comes for the archbishop especially the hallucinatory shimmer that her descriptions of the desert give off

wow i also read the sun also rises in eighth grade alfred

i reread it in college and don't think i'll get much more out of it or hemingway himself. he was great with dialogue. there is a sadness always aching in the space he left in his sentences. idk maybe i should give for whom the bell tolls a shot one day

not to steer the conversation toward fitzgerald, also they were fundamentally very different writers, but i go back to fitzgerald way more bc i have a very different experience with his work every time i revisit it, there's a denseness and a richness of perspective always at play, especially in tender is the night (but even in the novels i think sorta suck like beautiful and damned)

I've always had a fairly blank reaction to Hemingway. In a way, my favourite of his, despite it being fairly demented, is A Moveable Feast. Fitzgerald is more nourishing.

I only read my first Cather this year (O Pioneers!) and it continues to bloom in my imagination. It shares much of the Hemingway ethic of 'what should I leave out?' but her work bleeds in a way Hemingway could only claw at. O Pioneers! feels like an epic; it's astonishing that it's only 100-odd pages.

not to steer the conversation toward fitzgerald, also they were fundamentally very different writers, but i go back to fitzgerald way more bc i have a very different experience with his work every time i revisit it, there's a denseness and a richness of perspective always at play, especially in tender is the night (but even in the novels i think sorta suck like beautiful and damned)

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson)

otm -- Fitzgerald's stories are lodestars for me. Like Hemingway, he's a storywriter in essence marooned as a novelist; their work often collapses into gleaming fragments, though The Great Gatsby is a perfect novel for those who care about such things -- the culmination of the Conrad method.

I wish more anthologies included stories besides goddamn "Winter Dreams" (e.g. "The Bridal Party," "One Trip Abroad").

How do people feel about The Crack Up or even “The Crack Up”?

Sorry, The Crack-Up or “The Crack-Up”

A Movable Feast is painterly and entertaining, though many of the hooks are shithooks. Did like the description of Wyndham Lewis as having "the eyes of a disappointed rapist," though might like it less if I were more familiar with Lewis.

there's a denseness and a richness of perspective always at play,
That's in my reading or Fitzgerald too, and you can get to it in unexpected ways, like in The Last Tycoon there's a ride down the Southern California Coast, with glimpses of the ecological problems to come, aggravated by construction---the kind of thing that he and his characters wouldn't live to see, not nearly the big time. Come to think of it, this may also tie in some way with Stahr's unfinished dream house.

My sister wrote a grad paper on The Crack Up of Crack-Up, with acerbically self-observant quotes, but I haven't read the whole thing. The Pat Conroy stories are otm, wryly and maybe ryely based on later Fitz, incl. Did you hear about Pat dropping dead in the studio cafeteria, oops.

Crack Up *or* Crack-Up

There's more self-pity in The Crack-Up than I want to read, and he's not rigorous a thinker enough to sustain the concept.

I'm so excited to still have a stack of unread Cather to go through after reading a few earlier this year. Death Comes for the Archbishop is probably next up.

Right now I'm reading my first P.G. Wodehouse (The Inimitable Jeeves), it's pretty good. I can see myself blowing through a bunch of these pretty quickly.

There's more self-pity in The Crack-Up than I want to read, and he's not rigorous a thinker enough to sustain the concept.

Uh, Pat *Hobby*, that is: perfect name, and apologies to the talented Mr. Conroy, also RIP.

i always enjoy a good story of someone fucking up in Hollywood screenwriting, and the Pat Hobby stories are brilliant.

I did read a load of Fitzgerald stories in the past so for once I've not been left behind here.

I don't think THE SUN ALSO RISES is very good at all.

I like the way we have a swell of intrigue about THE MOUNTAIN LION !

How's Riddley Walker going, caek?

My wife just read I'm Still Here, Austin Channing Brown, which she borrowed from a friend. Now I'm reading it.

I've started reading: B.S. Johnson, CAN I COME IN AND TALK ABOUT THESE AND OTHER IDEAS?

It's a slim collection of facsimiles of his proposals that weren't used by the BBC and publishers.

If you like BSJ, you might enjoy it.

It includes, in mildly Half Pint Press fashion, a postcard which is also a fascimile of something that BSJ wrote.

http://texteundtone.com/

I have various BS Johnson things around the house, none of which I've read. I need to sort that. Is the Coe biography the/a place to start?

I finished Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (first book I've actually finished in about six weeks). It was lurid and ugly and sad: so many shattered lives, so much bullshit.

As I'm listening to so much ambient stuff at the moment, I've picked up David Toop's Ocean of Sound again. Three pages of reading and I was sucked right back in. I need to read some of his later books.

Biskind is as much a misogynist as the directors he reveres.

I was about to ask about that, I’ve been put off reading that book for this reason

He takes as much delight, for example, as those he-men directors in taking Pauline Kael down a peg in the basest of terms.

Biskind is vile about Kael and is nakedly voyeuristic about any number of the female actors and (to him) bit-part players he profiles. It plays as a dispassionate, objective look at the 70s but really, he's way too invested in the lurid details and clearly revels in it.

Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983 is exactly like the continuation of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire I wanted it to be. Thanks to table (I think) for the recommendation.

How's Riddley Walker going, caek?

I think it was me! Such a good book, Lawrence is a great writer.

You guys otm about Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. I enjoyed it at the time but in retrospect feel unclean.

Diarmid Ferriter: A NATION NOT A RABBLE.

Odder than I thought. It doesn't announce a very clear argument or theme; it has a very odd structure, much of which is about retrospects on the revolution; it has very short chapters, about some of which I wonder if they came from newspaper articles.

I was the one who carried on so much about Lawrence's books, but no doubt the table knows like the Shadow knows, as always!

Also, you can stream all of a listening companion for one of the books: https://reappearingrecords.bandcamp.com/album/life-death-on-a-new-york-dance-floor-1980-1983 and a few more freebies from Love Saves The Day, I've got 'em both on double CD sets as well, so far seems like Life and Death is a bit more consistent, but both are amazing, with Lawrence's notes providing even more context.

By gum, this thread's natural lifespan of one season will be up in a couple of days.

After struggling with reading maybe three pages of Gravity's Rainbow a night for so long, I am really, really enjoying knocking out 10-20 pages of the Lawrence book at a clip with no stress.

When I get the chance I plan on putting together a playlist of all the discographies Lawrence includes in Life and Death.