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

just started The Self Awakened by Roberto Managabeira Unger. Enjoying the brio.

Institutions and ideologies are not like natural objects, forcing themselves on our consciousness with insistent
force and reminding us that we have been born into a world that is not our own. They are nothing but frozen will and interrupted conflict: the residue crystallized out of the suspension or containment of our struggles.

also reading A Guardian Angel Recalls (trans from the Dutch Herinneringen van een engelbewaarder) by Willem Frederik Hermans, which is an interesting book and i’ll post a bit more about it when i’ve finished.

Finished Collobert's journals. For those interested, her work is peculiar and affecting, and while the journals aren't too interesting on their own, they're insightful in that they give context to her other works. For example, the halting phrases and fragments that mark her book 'It Then' are very much in evidence in the journals, so much so that one could become confused about which book one was reading. Fans of Beckett, particularly his monologues, will find her work fascinating.

Read an early bit of Robert Welch's THE ABBEY THEATRE 1899-1999. Won't read it all. I'm reminded for the umpteenth time that I should read George Moore. Has anyone read George Moore?

triggercut, thanks so much for your description of Lydia Smith's Essays 2. I hadn't thought to look for such collections, though greatly enjoyed her Swann's Way intro re why she translated it the way she did, in contrast to the Moncrieff etc., which she greatly respects, also other thoughts on Proust, especially her overview of In Search Of Lost Time. She was editor, whatever that entailed, of the ISOLT translation series, which some consider a letdown after her own version of Swann's Way: by far my own favorite volume, but I have no idea whether some subsequent dry areas were more the translators' fault or Proust's.
Will have to check the Moncrieff-Kilmartin-Enright, but doubt I'll ever get all that interested in all those Fin Doo Sickly high society leftovers--though of course Charlus is always worth waiting for, also "the gang of girls" and the painter and the narrator's musical theme and other elements, incl. influence of painting and readings in science and accruing effects of technology and the Dreyfus Affair and militarism---anyway, since you enjoyed her essays, I think the same would be true of Davis's Swann's Way, which sure seems like peak Proust, anyway you cut it, though it's hard to imagine a more enjoyable translation.

I can't read Lydia Davis for long because the envy gnaws at me.

conversations with friends is a very funny title

I don't know that much about sally rooney (i don't pay as much attention to what's on the bestsellers list as table!) but i did read some statement she made about her decision to boycott an israeli publisher that felt nuanced and principled in a way that felt quite rare in public life where those kinds of statements often feel didactic and haphazard

Has anyone read George Moore?

My first attempts were all quite brief. Then I gave up.

could you not read any moore?

I could stand no moore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG3VUXBcyt0

Collobert is a new name to me, sounds good

same, thanks table.

Her book of thematically linked short stories, 'Murder' (trans. Nathanael), is also really something -- every personage within its pages is marked or doomed in some way. Sometimes specifics are given, and sometimes Collobert really amps up her descriptions to a swell of overwhelming dread. Here's an interview that translator Kit Schluter did with Nathanael about the book.
http://htmlgiant.com/author-spotlight/kit-schluter-nathanael-on-danielle-colloberts-murder/

I paused the Algerian war for a short trip to the beach, where I read one of Walter Mosley's 'Easy Rawlins Mysteries', A Little Yellow Dog from the mid-90s. Mosley knows exactly what his target audience wants, lots of action and some sex scenes for spice, and he gives it to them, but surprisingly well-written and with plenty of lessons about how hard it is to wake up every day as a Black American. He makes it work. Now I'll go back to Algeria and a different take on racism.

To what does James Redd's video refer?

Plax: I forgot to mention Rooney's boycott decision. Personally I thought it admirably brave, as such decisions tend to bring massive opprobrium and abuse - perhaps even physical danger - and could well damage her income and other concrete aspects of her career.

To Eleanor Bron saying “I can say no more” over and over again in Help! which is quoted in the lyric of that song. Sorry, I’m as the 12ft Lizards made me.

Read a short pamphlet containing a previously unpublished poem by Jean Daive, translated by Miri Davidson. Continuing with Killian's "Little Men," and a friend also sent me the PDF of Guyotat's "Eden Eden Eden," which is certainly the most vile book I've ever read in my life, and I'm only 15 or so pages in.

I think what's moving and motivating about the poverty in Rooney is that it is tied to a disappearing way of life that makes sense in and of itself but is displaced and out of time. WHen this comes up in Western European contexts (Ireland, France) I think of Korea before and after the war (as an outsider). I think this is what it is appealing at the end of Clem's story in Crossroads (however unfamiliar the story may be to the people of Central and South America). This is in contrast to the frustrating state of poverty as depicted in the United States now. I apologize for anything insensitive and wrong in this post.

I think part of it is no one else is that much better off and the other part is that you accept and resign yourself to certain kinds of hardship but not others.

Read the start of
Brian Klaas Corruptible
investigation into what factors determine corruptibility after having heardMueller she Write go over the book in their book club and am currently listening to the last episode of that where the author is being interviewed by the host AG.
Very interesting but realised I might as well try to finish

Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria by Beverley Daniel Tatum
which is about factors determining person undrstandings of race focusing on young people.
& is pretty good.
I should be concentrating on getting t finsihed but got the Corruptible from the library yesterday. & slept badly last night.
Anyway it is pretty interesting. Did have me wondering if i had somehow read an earlier version since I think I was recognising some of it and it does date back to an earlier version being published in the late 90s. This version is the 2017 update though. which is pretty thorough.
I like it when I can concentrate on it anyway.

I love the Lydia Davis "translation" of Bob, Son of Battle -- I'll have to seek out that essay about its translation.

Recently read Marie Darrieussecq's Being Here is Everything: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker. This great Dodie Bellamy essay about the book inspired me to read it: https://lithub.com/on-finding-the-book-rhat-returns-you-to-your-body/.

Currently reading Andrei Bely's Petersburg, which has been on my library "to read" queue forever. Just inching through it so far, loving the texture of the prose. The dated and snarky 1970s annotations in this edition are (just slightly) diminishing my enjoyment -- it's funny how that can alter a reading experience. (the fact of Russia's ubiquity in currents events water cooler discourse is an odd coincidence ~ perhaps seems a little on-the-nose to read a serious-looking Russian tome in the break room or on the bus these days...)

I'm feeling that about Stalingrad. chapter 22 and Russia has just been forced into ww2 by surprise German attacks and there are lines and lines of displaced people.

Read my first Lauren Groff story recently: seemed unusual, good, and unusually good for The New Yorker. How are her books?

Some elements could have been fabulistic, but were realistic, though not on the nose. Leading characters v. practical, even acute, in some ways, other ways not so much: relatable.

i liked the two i've read. fates and furies is well done conventional bourgeois lit fic (actually deserves some of the criticism table imagines sally rooney deserves, but i think it's fine). the matrix is brilliant but a bit of an outlier. i liked this line from https://dirt.substack.com/p/dirt-nuns-having-fun: "A bildungsroman tracking Marie’s entire life, Groff’s novel is somehow a mixture of slice-of-life anime, tower defense game, and home decorating / farming sim."

The stories in Florida were fine, don't remember a thing about them.

Do y'all get down with Kelly Link?

Love Kelly Link: she's such a punk.
fine, but I don't remember anything about them.
Reminds me of Frank Kogan's high school yearbook caption:

The What Thing is how you feel when you feel fine...
"How are you?"..."Fine."

Students are always either turned off completely or totally enraptured by her writing when I teach her...I often do "Stone Animals" the same week I do Cheever's "The Swimmer" :-)

Never read "Stone Animals," doing so now

Greatly enjoyedGet In Trouble, and some subsequent magazine and anthology stories that I don't think have been in a Link collection yet.

From what I have heard about Kelly Link, I would like to read her. Really should have got round to it by now.

I love "Stone Animals" so much, Alfred. I wonder what you'll think.

Did ms Link use to publish stories a lot in ... INTERZONE? and similar magazines?

I believe so, pinefox.

i stumbled across this interview with an artist i'm not familiar with at all, bonnie crawford, and ended up really enjoying it.

https://bmoreart.com/2022/03/art-and-bonnie-crawford.html

as always i need something to read on screen at work but am having trouble pulling the trigger on kindle purchases.

Spoiler tagging this even though I’m sure only Oscar bravo was interested lol

Again, Rachel - Marian Keyes

Rachel’s Holiday is one of those books for me. I’ve read it multiple times over the years. Like a lot of people, I understand the background of the book a little too well; both for myself and in my family.

It’s always interesting when an author does a sequel this long after the original. You always wonder “where could the story go?” Rachel’s Holiday ends with Rachel clean, and reconciling with Luke in a happy ending. If you know there’s a sequel, you know that sequels are never about “…so they continued living happily…”, and this one is very painful to read at times.

A favourite thing Keyes does is to reveal the key events of a story in shreds and pieces, like opening a parcel one tear at a time. This is partly to illustrate the concept of denial - addicts will hide the truth from themselves - and for story considerations ofc. So we find out, revealed to us as the background gets painted in, that Luke and Rachel did marry, and they did live happily ever after. And then, like many other couples, they had a baby, and the baby died.

And then, inevitably, Rachel relapses.

It’s a lot.

Rachel in the present is head counsellor at the Cloisters, the rehab facility where she stayed in Rachel’s Holiday. She still attends meetings, she lives with her sister Claire’s daughter (who in 2018 Ireland has been forced out of Dublin due to a crushing commute), and all the old characters from the previous Walsh books are here: Claire, Anna, the parents, Margaret and my favourite Helen (😍).

A disturbance at the door heralded the arrival of Helen, in a dark form-fitting tracksuit, her hair up in a high pony. ‘You look like an assassin!’ Mum was all admiration. ‘Fecken wish I was.’ Helen scanned the room and focused on me. ‘You, girl! Report on Luke Costello. How was his crotch?’ ‘It was his mother’s funeral,’ Mum said, her tone sharp. ‘Have some respect.’

Adore her!

Anyway, the past unspools as it does and it’s all laid out. No dark thought unspared. I found, as I have before, the level of personal understanding (Keyes herself is an alcoholic, and I use the present tense as she correctly says that it’s something that never leaves you).

I enjoyed this sequel very much, it’s a difficult game to follow something as great as Rachel’s Holiday but I’m extremely glad she did.

Oh ok, ballsed that up ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I keep reading Robert Welch's THE ABBEY THEATRE. In recording the constant controversies, it's noticeably pro-W.B. Yeats - to a fault, I'd guess. I can't help thinking that the Fays - William and Frank - who were true theatre people, actors, directors et al, get a raw deal in Abbey histories. Having made the whole thing work, it seems that they were forced out, by about 1910.

I started thinking about Lady Gregory also and thinking eg: how old she must have been by this time - well, eg: over 50 by the time the Abbey opened on Abbey Street - and how being that old, back then, must have been wearisome and tiring. Crikey, it's hard enough now. I also can't help feeling that Gregory somehow gets sexist, slighting treatment, being a woman in her position, as a male (Lord Gregory?!) would not ... Or maybe I'm wrong; Edward Martyn is never treated with much respect by historians after all.

It all leads back to George Moore, who, as noted before, I need to read.

BTW also on the 'possibly sexist history' front, Annie Horniman is always rather ridiculed by historians of this stuff, but she put up the money to make it happen, and wrote most of it off ... Maybe if you could hear it from her side, it would look different. She was of the family that made the celebrated Horniman Museum, and she is celebrated in the nearby Wetherspoon pub (apologies if mention of that chain causes offence) in this connexion - there is, I believe, a picture of Yeats on the wall to this effect.

thx for that gyac. v reassuring as I was unsure about her revisiting characters after so long, and wasn't sure how okay I would be for things getting really bad for Rachel esp. as Keyes never sugarcoats the bad although she also doesn' t glory in it either.
Is Helen the P.I.? If so, yes she is ace. Eager to read this now.

Yes she is! I would love to know what you think. And yes, agree the lack of sugar coating is a real strength. It’s very matter of fact.

I finished Killian's 'Little Men,' a real delight. Ramping up for some re-reads for lesson planning, but might take a night to look at something new.

I love "Stone Animals" so much, Alfred. I wonder what you'll think.

― we need outrage! we need dicks!! (the table is the table),

Weird and wonderful. Read it in one sitting.

RV Raman, A Will To Kill - Indian mystery novel that is rather shoddily written, a lot of noun verbed adverbially. A page on the Nilgiri Mountain railways train reads like a tourist brochure - we are told the railways are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, that the train is "much acclaimed" and, twice, that it looks like a toy train.

Nevertheless - I'm having fun! It's an old fashioned murder mystery with a far flung mansion and multiple wills and family intrigue.

I'm glad, Alfred. I love the paint swatch names best, it's a lovely device.

Finished Jerusalem, all 1174 pages of it. Some voices work better than others, and some sections are somewhat tedious (the afterword with a character looking through a gallery of scenes from the book really feels like something that'd work better in a comic), but there's also some cracking stuff, between the second half entirely dedicated to a group of ghost urchins having time travel adventures, the play featuring a dialogue between the ghosts of John Bunyan, Samuel Beckett, John Clare and Thomas Beckett, the old man and baby travelling to the end of time and the stream of consciousness chapter from the pov of a new labour councillor. Besides Moore's usual mystic notions of time and space, what really comes through is the working class rage.

Speaking of which, since I need a new doorstop for in bed reading, I'm now moving on to E.P. Thompson's The Making Of The English Working Class.

Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye
I seem to have picked up the bulk of her work from charity shops over the last 6 months and not taken the time to read it. I listened to a couple of webinars and podcasts where this book was talked about and the effect it had on black women readers re their understanding of their own identities shaped by understandings they got from it. Which prompted me to start reading it. Now got it as my bog book. Which means I don't give it the concentrated reading periods that it may lure one into. It is pretty delicious prose.
I think this will prompt me to try to get through the rest of what I have soon after too.
Plus i need to get down and read Angela Davis's Autobiography which she edited. Have seen taht there is a new edition of that work being released which had a Guardian interview tied into it
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/05/angela-davis-on-the-power-of-protest-we-cant-do-anything-without-optimism

Brian Klaas Corruptible.
I listened through a MSW book club series on this and caught a live webinar with the author before i realised he was one of teh writers of How To Rig An Election which I reada few months ago. Or at least somehow missed it was teh same authorl
I'm finding it an interesting read, though am noticing him citing Jared Diamond at one point which has me wondering if taht is a negative sign. Since this does seem to resonate as right for the most part.
Looking at corruption, who is likely to be affected by it, be prone to it and how much it can be replicated by and through systems etc.
Quite readable and I'm enjoying it.

Beverly Daniel Tatum Why Are All The Black Kids sitting together in the Cafeteria?
Book on personal identity and how it pertains to race etc. What factors go into defining it. Focus largely on high school ages children and college students though more widespread.
I found it pretty interesting. Probably should have read the earlier version of it if i didn't. & did find some of this rang a bell, buit since it was originally released in 1997 it may have permeated other work by influence etc.
Massive bibliography which I hope i get a chance to look further into.

I finished the Algerian War history. The white minority in Algeria was easily as racist and violent as the white Rhodesians and South Africans. I hadn't understood just how often the French military had tried to overthrow the French government, just to protect those fuckers from giving up a single privilege or granting any agency to the Muslim population.

When not working, I continue to read Welch's history of the Abbey Theatre, for fun and enlightenment. It has now reached about 1924, and passed Sean O'Casey's first Abbey production THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN.

It was, I think, a small theatre back then, unlike the Abbey now. And it seems to have been a chaotic history - drunken managers being hired and fired; actors, from a certain point, doing their own thing; Yeats and Gregory maintaining a vast majority of shares despite not really having been theatre people (until they decided to become such people).

The book gives the stories or scenarios of a lot of now forgotten plays. Some could be interesting to discover and read now.