Bonfires In The Sky: What Are You Reading, Winter 2021-22?

All The Marvels, Douglas Wolk.

Mona by Pola Oloixarac - "like Rachel Cusk's Kudos on drugs" according The Atlantic which a) lol and ii) would only be true if the drugs were to turn Kudos' somewhat humble narrator into a monster of self-obsession.

Seems like a thing drugs do to people (some drugs; some people).

Indeed! And Mona does in fact seem to depend on a modest cocktail of weed and valium.

Halfway through Maurice Bourgeois, who declares (p.101):

Irish history, for a considerable number of years, was itself the most poignant of tragedies. Ireland, living through real drama, had no time nor desire for dramas of imagination. The 'play-activity', which is the essence of all art, and which extracts literary fiction from actual life, could not possibly exist in Ireland as long as drama and life were one and the same thing.

I'm frankly not quite sure whether that's somewhat insightful, or patent nonsense.

It reminds me in turn of the later claims eg: of Sean O'Faolain that Ireland couldn't develop the novel, only short stories, because it was a fractured and underdeveloped society -- claims that when you first encounter them can look authoritative and stimulating, but may actually be absurdly deterministic cobblers that have little to do with the practice of writing. (Though O'Faolain should have known something about the practice of writing.)

Theatrical production is a far more communal and social art form than the writing, publication and reading of prose fiction, so it is more plausible at least that it would be more strongly affected by social conditions. But if during those "considerable number of years" plays were staged in Ireland, just ones that hadn't been specifically written by and for the Irish, then that plausibility vanishes.

And Mona does in fact seem to depend on a modest cocktail of weed and valium.

People who have figured out how to live.

Ireland, living through real drama, had no time nor desire for dramas of imagination.

Lmao what?! The Gaeity was founded about twenty years after the end of the Famine, a greater period of tragedy in Irish history than pretty much any I’d care to name. Smock Alley was knocking around for centuries before independence in various guises. Also, it says a lot about the author if he loftily assumes that was the reason and not, idk, the lack of theatres and the majority of the country living at or near subsistence level? The long oral tradition suggests there’s always been an appetite for storytelling as entertainment as well as education.

re the Gaiety, founded in 1871 I see: yes - 'in fairness' to this venerable author I think he was talking about much longer ago - maybe more like the Middle Ages and Renaissance. But I do think that his claims are so large as to seem daft.

I agree that poverty / subsistence agricultural economy would be a bigger factor than political turbulence in any case.

I mainly like this book as an instance of how people used to write, rather different from how most critics write now.

Chris Sylvester's "Gain of Function," a strange book that seems like an ode to the strange surreal ennui of suburban parenthood. Very weird and interesting.

Finished Mona, now on to Maigret Travels South. I'm not normally one for detective fiction but Maigret seems to be a board favourite and Tim was happy to donate the one he'd just finished.

I was happy to donate it, I had found it OK and diverting enough, not to the point of wanting to keep it around. It has an excellent green cover.

Detective fiction isn't generally my thing either - I take this to be a failing of some kind in me, rather than a problem with detective fiction.

https://pictures.abebooks.com/inventory/md/md31066500794.jpg

I read "The Sweet Indifference of the World" by Peter Stamm, Swiss, translated by Michael Hoffmann, it was fine in a current litfic kind of way, man comes across his younger self living his life, tells story of life to younger man's girlfriend who's a younger version of his own great lost love, you get it. Nice quick read, manages to touch on the eerie feeling I think it aims for in a few spots. Happy I read it, won't hang on to it, that manner of book.

I read "Guestbook" by Leanne Shapton. Billed as a book of ghost stories it's a set of stories, spooky and otherwise, mostly told through a combination of word and image; I don't know that Leanne Shapton is a particularly good writer - I'm pretty sure that "good writing" is not what she is getting at here, but as someone who thinks about how to tell stories with books, she is a total inspiration to me and has moments of total genius IMO. There are a good handful of those moments in this one.

February was Hardy month

Mayor of Casterbridge
Wessex Tales
Life's Little Ironies

was gripped from the first chapter of Mayor man sells his wife to a sailor for five guineas. it turned into the usual Hardy flim-flam but was entertaining.

the two books of short stories were almost 'what if Hardy wrote Tales of the Unexpected?'. again, lots of flim-flam, and another drowning in a weir (that's 3 that i know of)

Excellent report from Tim, and impressive reading from Koogs.

that's all of Hardy's "Novels Of Character And Environment" i've read now, but still have all but two of the others to go. i notice tomalin's biography is in the monthly deals this month as well, so maybe i'l grab that, find out what did for new year's eve in 1899 (her dickens biog was full of stupid details)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy#Novels_of_character_and_environment

The bit where Henchard's wife dies of shame is like Bleak-House-spontaneous-combustion daft. I guess it always feels, in Hardy's tragedies, that he's putting his thumb on the "doom" side of the scale a bit too transparently.

High school English lit legit killed Hardy for me; I ended by up doing Casterbridge and Wessex Tales for GCSE **and** A-Level (and then at Uni too). It's good but it's not that good!

Heh, well, I have less problem with Mayor (certainly the most integrated and cohesive of his major novels) than with Father Time hanging the kids in Jude.

I read Far from the Madding Crowd two weeks ago, the last of the major ones; I'd saved it. My least favorite, seems like The Woodlanders covers this territory with more pathos and skill.

I had to do Return of the Native for my A level; definitely killed Hardy as an author for me, such a dull choice for teenagers.

It's such an exciting-sounding book title too!

The Egdon Heath section is leisurely in the most indulgent way.

As You Were by Elaine Feeney (What does "soz" mean?)

Short for "sorry", I expect.

(If it's in the context of something like"soz, but I haven't got a clue")

great just got the Mark Lanegan memoir from the library.

I have almost finished my review of 'I Wished.' It took me a while to figure out how to structure it, and now I just have to conclude it in a satisfactory manner– final sentences are always hair-pullers for me. It's about 500 words longer than they want, but I think I've figured out a way that they can publish an abridged version in the print magazine and the full version online.

In any case, I think I'm going to swerve toward Prynne's latest chapbook next. I'm waiting on hearing about enrollment for a high school elective course I might teach, so I might become quickly sidetracked into prepping for that, but a nice Prynne chap to distract is always good.

Thanks, Tim. That sounds right. I've figured out that press means something like cupboard or pantry or cabinet.

in a similar vein, the thing that i hadn't noticed before but which has come up a lot in the last year is 'deal' as a type of cheap wood. i must've read 6 things recently where people had deal tables or other furniture.

Best of luck on both fronts, tables.
Maigret In The South? He hates the South: Maigret and the Informer takes him there on duty, and the Sun makes a beeline for his nose as soon as he gets off the train, and he has to make his way through a disgustingly tawdry, carnivalesque vector to drink and drink and drink his way through hick tourist bars, on stake-out (a murdered Parisian restaurateur is returning to his hometown of Bandol for grand funeral, whoopee). Maigret does make it back to good grey Paris rain and Madame M.'s food service, but hard to imagine him spending much more time down there. I'll have to read it.

i must've read 6 things recently where people had deal tables or other furniture.

Even more frequently I read mentions of baize (most often green) as a cheap cloth covering on various items, including doors. I have never encountered the term outside a book and have no idea if I have ever laid eyes on it

pool and snooker tables and card tables are covered with baize, is just that felt stuff.

I have heard of deal tables many times, but don't think I knew this was a kind of wood.

I cannot play snooker at all, but I think that most people in the UK automatically know that 'green baize' is what covers those tables.

Read Mark Lanegan up to Roskilde and finding it a really good read.
He is pretty scathing. I know Gary Lee Conner disputed this version so wonder what the reality was.
Also wasn't aware to what extent Lanegan disliked the near authentic garape psych cloning thing of the early records. Or where he started having more control. Did enjoy what I had heard of that early stuff.

I love the pinefox's Synge biographer so much

as for me, I'm reading Radiant Terminus by Antoine Volodine, a writer with whom I am completely smitten -- this'll be my fourth of his (among two of his several heteronyms; my first was Eleven Sooty Dreams by Manuela Draeger, who is a personage within his career-long fiction of the post-exotic), and I almost never do the "just reading as much of this author's stuff as I can" thing, though in the past few years I've been more inclined to stick with a name for a few books. Radiant Terminus approaches trad-novel at points -- there's a revenge narrative that's easy to follow, but Volodine complicates it as much as he can, which is a lot, within the overarching conceit of post-exoticism -- as I understand it, all?? of his works are to be understood as texts recited by prisoners in a vast complex who have themselves invented a number of names and situations by way of memorializing themselves & their movement, which was crushed by an authoritarian state. that framing is precedent within Radiant Terminus, which references post-exoticism as a by-now-ancient phenomenon, and several of its authors and texts are, here, old names in dusty books...anyhow Volodine's whole deal is very complex and the books are WONDERFUL, even when you feel completely lost they're just an utter treat. I've even gotten to the point where, when the narrative does seem to be veering trad, I'm a little disappointed -- I've come to relish the prismatic complexity of the several states of being you have to hold as you read this stuff. Still, it's pretty clear why this is a big book -- the notion of realties-within-realities is so foregrounded here that it sets the stage for what Volodine will continue to do. (This one was written in 2014, it took three years to get to the English edition.)

ELEVEN SOOTY DREAMS sounds like a new UK children's TV series featuring famous glove-puppet bear.

Maigret In The South? He hates the South

In this one (or Liberty Bar, the first of two in the same volume), he keeps on wanting to sit drinking in bars and enjoying the sunshine instead of solving the case.

I don't really enjoy the Maigret books - I find their mysteries a little facile - but I always enjoy the "Maigret timewastes" portions of the books, where he goes home to bed instead of working on the case, or pretends to do nothing but is really waiting for the murderer to make a mistake and out themselves (although this never happens - someone new always gets murdered instead).

There's a chapter in one where he takes the train to Cannes or Nice to do some background research and has a completely miserable time.

It all adds up to the sense that "Maigret always gets his man (or woman)" but perhaps he could just be a bit fucking quicker about it

Wow---he's come a long way, baby. In the one I read, he fucken hated Southern white trash sunshine radiation and not solving the case---drinking in bars was a means to that end/at least it kept him going.

Joan, you had me at Eleven Sooty Dreams by Manuela Draeger, who is a personage within his career-long fiction of the post-exotic).

tomalin's biography is in the monthly deals this month as well, so maybe i'l grab that, find out what did for new year's eve in 1899 (her dickens biog was full of stupid details) This can be useful, for carving out your own take on the subject, and anyway appeals to me, kind of reassuring, like recent New Yorker essay on Elizabeth Hardwick mentioned, unfavorably, recent bio's mention, for instance, that Hardwick got cable to follow big tennis tournament, think it was Billie Jean King: if I'm going to read about a novelist, I like the range of activity a novel night involve, also good to know that she didn't actually spend all her mind pining for Lou I mean Lowell.
But mainly I like the totalism grab bag as raw material for my own speculations.

"December [1838] brought a great round of social activities, including the forming of the Trio Club with Forster and Ainsworth, which meant more dinners together. He dined with Elliotson on 27 December, Ainsworth on the 29th, Talfourd on the 30th and gave a dinner at home for New Year’s Eve with Forster, Ainsworth and Cruikshank."

Zzzzzzz

Thank for sharing that, Joan Crawford Lives Chachi. I will be looking into these heteronyms

as wood (for tables etc) deal is pine, so-named after a now archaic unit of measure (which the pine was traded in): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal_(unit)

Maigret In The South? He hates the South

Absurdly, this made the end of Absalom, Absalom! jump into my head:

"Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?"
"I dont hate it," Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately. "I dont hate it," he said. I dont hate it, he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!"

I feel like there's some kind of Columbo-meets-Maigret joke here that doesn't work at all.

I recently finished the new Sally Rooney, Beatiful World Where Are You. The story runs on two parallel tracks, mostly through letters exchanged between friends: one a writer (seemingly a stand-in for Rooney) staying at a rented house in the west of Ireland, and the other her friend who works for some artsy organization in Dublin. Both are a few years out of college but still fairly young. Not surprisingly, there are also parallel romances (or perhaps just hook-ups? we must read on to find out): the writer with a young man she just met on Tinder who works at an Amazon warehouse and is, shall we say, not a big reader, and the Dublin friend with a friend she's known since they were kids (he a few years older than she). The sex scenes alone are probably worth the price of admission: the awkward first time with someone you don't know that well, phone sex between "friends", etc. I can't think of another contemporary author who writes sex scenes as well, where the intimacy reveals and propels the characters and the dynamic of their relationship. Now I'm reading Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin, which imagines sexual relations on a distant planet, between humanoid creatures who are asexual most of the time but go through a fertile period when they can assume either sex.

I properly finished Maurice Bourgeois's biography of Synge. A marvellously old-fashioned experience. In 1913 he's still writing 'we would fain...', and 'Nay, we would even say ...'

On p.235 he states of Synge on his deathbed: 'Sometimes he was full of fun and in good spirits would converse for hours at a time, speaking on woman suffrage and other modern subjects'. The implication from context is that this is to the nurses at the nursing home.

This is a good case of the elusiveness of biographical fact. In INVENTING IRELAND (1995) Declan Kiberd wrote 'he repeatedly sought to engage the nurses on the topic of feminism' (p.175). Very interesting! But no footnote, no source for this. Years after reading that, I read W.J. McCormack's FOOL OF THE FAMILY: A LIFE OF J.M. SYNGE (2000) which repeated the claim, with a footnote citing ... citing ... Declan Kiberd, INVENTING IRELAND, p.175. Oh dear. So what was the original evidence?

Well, here's Bourgeois, giving some credence to the basic claim, in 1913 - only 4 years after Synge died. Still, he doesn't say that Synge 'repeatedly' talked on the topic, nor that it was he, not the nurses, who insisted on it.

There may well be an ur-text, another memoir behind this, from which Bourgeois has drawn the claim. After all, he probably didn't talk to the nurses himself - though his research is tremendous.

Finally, another corkingly daft and insensitive line from Bourgeois, having just written an impressive 250-page about Synge, and recorded the pathos of his death at 38:

it seems unlikely that his writings, which form such a complete, self-consistent body of work, would have admitted of such further developments as might have brought out fresh aspects of his art. Had he lived longer he might have repeated himself and wearied his admirers.

That's OK then. Probably a good thing cancer took him!