Spring 2021: Forging ahead to Bloomsday as we read these books

Read Jane Eyre many times but Spotify are testing audiobook waters with some classics and the JE recording is very good, so I'm reading (listening) through it too. I love how good little orphan Jane is at comebacks - honing in on the satisfaction, and described in terms that you can feel on your body, muscle memory from bursts of righteous anger in your past.

"shaking from head to foot, thrilled with ungovernable excitement"

I love Jane Eyre— I believe I was the only sophomore in my high school class who loved it. That was a banner year for me, didn't have many friends but boy did I read and write a lot.

Anyway, I finished Tan Lin's 'Heath Course Pak,' which was unexpectedly moving, then Ian Dreiblatt's new book of poems, 'forget thee,' which made me weep at its ending, and started Jamie Townsend's 'Sex Machines,' a book that seems to take equal parts from Language Poetry and gender theory. I'm also dipping in and out of Harsha Walia's 'Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism.' I think she's one of the most insightful activist-thinkers of our time, grounded as she is in community rather than academia.

I recently finished Geoff Dyer's "But Beautiful", an unusual sort of fiction-criticism hybrid: little vignettes in the lives of famous jazz musicians, inspired by historical sources but giving his imagination free rein. It's kind of a reverie on the tortured genius motif, with almost all of the musicians portrayed dealing with serious drug problems, mental health issues, on top of the struggle to evade the repressive forces of a racist society, yet somehow being able to conjure forth musical brilliance. There's a bit of early '90s junkie chic as well (the book was published in '91). An enjoyable read. Now, I'm reading "Strangers on a Train" by Patricia Highsmith.

Thanks, o. nate, will check Dyer's book! Description reminds me of Ishiguro'sNocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, which I posted about on the KI thread. Despite classy title, it's mostly pleasingly rough-edged, in a fairly musical way at times.

Also, and in much more direct correlation, your description makes me think of Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, a novel about Boddy Bolden.

I think the Ondaatje comparison is a good one. It has that same freewheeling, immersive style. I do mistrust Dyer sometimes (always that sense that his subject is himself) but But Beautiful is mostly great. I think this bit on Monk is pretty magical.

You had to see Monk to hear his music properly. The most important instrument in the group - whatever the format - was his body. He didn't play the piano really. His body was his instrument and the piano was just a means of getting the sound out of his body at the rate and in the quantities he wanted. If you blotted out everything except his body you would think he was playing the drums, foot going up and down on the hi-hat, arms reaching over each other, His body fills in the gaps in the music; without seeing him it always sounds like something's missing but when you see him even piano solos acquire a sound as full as a quartets. The eye hears what the ear misses...

Part of jazz is the illusion of spontaneity and Monk played the piano as though he'd never seen one before. Came at it from all angles, using his elbows, taking chops at it, rippling through the keys like they were a deck of cards, fingers jabbing at them like they were hot to the touch or tottering around them like a woman in heels - playing it all wrong as far as classical piano went. Everything came out crooked, at an angle, not as you expected...Played with his fingers splayed, flattened out over the keys, fingertips almost looking like they were pointed upward when they should have been arched.

He played each note as if astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to. Sometimes the song seemed to have turned itself inside out or to have been entirely constructed from mistakes...

If Monk had built a bridge he'd have taken away the bits that considered essential until all that was left were the decorative parts - but somehow he would have made the ornamentation absorb the strength of the supporting spars so it was like everything was built around what wasn't there. It shouldn't have held together but it did and the excitement came from the way that it looked like it might collapse at any moment...

That is great.

Yes, thanks, Chinaski!
Judging by this and some eyewitness testimonials, I'm sure Monk's music would or could be even better if I could see him make it (not much on film, is there?), but doesn't seem like it's necessary to hear him "properly"--but just go with that, and what a vision. The very end reminds me of xgau's scimpier references to "sprung" music: can use that bottom left search box on his homepage to see how he used it re the Band, Beefheart, Big Star, Gang of Four, the Kinks, Pavement, maybe others. the Band is the only act he complains about, but also the only one with a somewhat Dyeresque description: I've always been put off by the sprung quality of the Band's music--the sense that if someone were to undo the catch its works would be propelled forth in all directions. Pretty appealing to me! (Go4's sprungness as described by xgau is huge compliment and maybe also Dyer-relevant.)

Is that sprung rhythm in the G.M. Hopkins sense of the term? Or does it have a different meaning when it's applied to music as opposed to poetry?

That Monk description reminded me of the story of how, against his wife's protests, he nailed a picture frame to the wall at a diagonal. Eventually, she agreed with him that it had to be that way.

Heh, I thought for a second when I saw G.M. Hopkins it was referring to this trumpeter who teaches at Berklee that they call GHOP. https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/greghopkins #OneThread

I'm sure Monk's music would or could be even better if I could see him make it (not much on film, is there?)

There is the excellent documentary "Straight No Chaser" which is I think Dyer's primary source for his description above.

Thanks, will check that. Hi Lily Dale, I think English major Christgau does take "sprung" from the vernacular justification of Hopkins for sprung rhythm, and also sprung (half, slant etc) rhyme: Real People bending syllables to make them rhyme, as in Realness of some hip-hop and song lyrics, getting away from predictability (Christgau: "bored enough to fuck with it"). And the same can apply to sounds, for instance in harmonies, notes made to fit---I take it that's what his (predominately) passing references usually reference, at least in part (you gotta actually listen to get it, which seems to be his main purpose in using the term, other than using something that's appropriate and real handy).
My favorite of his comments on this, other than the one about the Band, are these on Gang of Four (also archived on his site:
Only when a jazz critic uttered the word "harmolodic" in conjunction with this music did I realize why I admired it so...I admire it, and dig it to the nth, for its tensile contradictions, which are mostly a function of sprung harmony, a perfect model for the asynchronous union at the heart of their political (and rhythmic) message. Which I originally took to mean the inherent stresses of democracy, and other kinds of union. But also (reviewing Entertainment!), he says:
Though the stressful zigzag rhythms sound thinner on record than from the stage where their chanted lyrics/nonmelodies become visible, the progressive atavism of these university Marxists is a formal accomplishment worth attending. By propelling punk's amateur ethos into uncharted musical territory, they pull the kind of trick that's eluded avant-garde primitives since the dawn of romanticism. And if you want to complain that their leftism is received, so's your common sense. No matter how merely liberal their merely critical verbal content, the tension/release dynamics are praxis at its most dialectical. Don't let's boogie--let's flop like fish escaping a line.

(not that this last part doesn't turn out to retain its lures and other triplines, as traced all through here:https://www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?name=Gang+of+Four)

I was thinking the other day that the whole golden age of detective fiction is interesting because with most genre booms - sci-fi, say, or western - it's about trappings that all sorts of different sensibilities can engage with and then there's lots of lesser writers who can still provide some pleasure by delivering on those trappings. But I don't know if a murder mystery can be satisfying if the mystery itself - which feels like a v specific skill to have as a writer - doesn't come off, even if the author is good at describing country houses or coming up with an eccentric detective.

yes, i'll jump off from this point to try and elaborate a bit on the JDC changes that improved his detective story writing.

The first is that the Bencolin mysteries feel *congested*. I think this may be part pacing and part ordering. His later writing was very good in its balance of atmosphere, narrator feeling, the act of detection and clue distribution (by which I mean things that look like clues but aren't and things that don't look like clues but are, plus things in between that feel they might be), as well as multiple people searching hypothesising in roughly the same regions as the reader, but that sense that the order of events isn't quite fitting those hypothesis – the main detective of course seems ahead of it all, even when they are wrong. One of JDC's favourite ploys, which he does actually use with Bencolin, is for the detective to be certain they know the who but not the how, or the reverse, only for that to change at an apparently trivial moment in the narrative. 'What occurred to the detective at this point!' the reader asks.

More generally, the atmosphere in the Bencolin novels is very front and centre, and the machinery has to exist within it - which is another way of expressing that congestion, only this time instead of being 'pacing' (ie on a timeline) it's more a point of layering. (both are actually the same thing when it comes to writing, i think - as VS Pritchett said, all writing is a matter of emphasis). It feels, from a reader point of view, like the mystery is obscured by the atmospherics. Whereas in his later writing, he recognised that as long as he got the mechanics right, the atmosphere could find its natural place with lighter touches. Less slapping it on. He's still absolutely in love with the dramatic and magical, but it's a lot more controlled.

In fact, he was able to write an excellent ghost story with all the shape of his detective stories, perhaps showing in some respects all that matters is the resolution, or not, in his books, to make it one or the other. (The book is The Burning Court - and it is in fact both locked room mystery *and* ghost story and perhaps in this technical respect is one of his greatest achievements).

But I'm interested in *how* he got there. That development, that ability to see clearly how to manage and order the material doesn't seem to me to be an easy thing to discover. Like suddenly being able to find the clarity of expression in a complicated piece of music - the space to operate where before all the elements seemed difficult to manage. I don't see how that works as an analogy for the process of writing. But it's what it looks like when I look at JDC's development.

What this all means in answer to your thought, Daniel, is the importance of finding that alchemy or balance - mysteries without mystery but only a solution, will be rather dry, mysteries with an obscure or unsatisfying solution will seem gimcrack, tricked up with pasteboard and bad lighting. I think somehow this is part of the importance of the eccentric detective: the right detective can 'true it all up', like aligning a diorama correctly, with the true perspective. So that Sherlock Holmes makes his written surroundings coalesce with mystery and solution to the environment located around him, or indeed Miss Marple, say. Their exploration of their environment is both the creation of the environment, the depiction and revelation of the puzzle, and its resolution. So, no, eccentricity is not enough, but perhaps it is necessary to create the necessary *angle* on the mystery. The narrator, proxy narrator and reader are not able to align the environment to make it make sense, but must work the details in the book against the narrative and descriptive modalities (not *quite* ineluctable), but the detective, from a position eccentric to that of the reader/narrator's is able to align it.

there's an excellent geoffrey hill lecture on the nature of 'eccentricity' as a more mechanical metaphor in its early use from the 17th century: ‘Eccentrique to the endes of his Master or State’, and i'm reminded of a quotation Hill reads from Frances Bacon:

"The kind of hireling who crooketh affairs to his own ends, which must needs be eccentric to the ends of his master or state"

eccentricity as "athwart, deviant, thwating, working across or against" to quote from the lecture again.

there's an argument for saying *this* version of eccentric is the criminal. working athwart the 'natural' order of events to create an end via moral crookedness. so that two eccentricities - the criminal's and the detective's - corkscrew with each other to find resolution.

i'm also reminded of a Ben Jonson poem on Masques, who could only be properly viewed, in Inigo Jones' innovation, from the 'true' perspective, by the King or Queen (or main celebrant of the Masque - birthdays etc), and in a rather dry way, this poem is in itself like a tumbler lock with line by line, the elements clicking into place until the true perspective is reached in the final line.

in january 1795 the dutch texel fleet of fourteen ships-of-the-line was trapped in ice and captured by a french squadron of hussars and an infantry company riding pillion behind them — the only example in history of a cavalry capturing a fleet.

yes i am continuing to read my book on the napoleonic wars (still in the pre-napoleonic revolutionary wars phase - he’s about to make a grand appearance commanding the italian campaign).

there's an argument for saying *this* version of eccentric is the criminal. working athwart the 'natural' order of events to create an end via moral crookedness. so that two eccentricities - the criminal's and the detective's - corkscrew with each other to find resolution. The criminal might say that the detective is going against the natural order of things, against the sometimes violent lifeforce, and/or profit motive---I don't know the genre well-enough to think of an example, but in Richard Matheson's I Am Legend(1954),a man left Normal in a post-pandemic world of vampires and surrogates becomes the nightmare terrorist among them. Oh yeah, in Red Harvest, the Continental Op understandably says, "A plague on both your houses," and becomes a corkscrewed criminal-detective, setting two sets of assholes (incl. the ones who hired him to analyze and destroy the other) even more at odds than they already were. My take is that he was already corkscrewed, but as a total professional, but now he realizes he's being hired to go beyond amorality to immorality, which is too close to morality--and, more importantly, his cool hands will be too sullied. too bloody, euwww (but it's been a long time since I read that one, might ne wrong).
A nonfiction-based example would be Serpico, at least in the screen version; I haven't read the book: he's upsetting the whole cop culture of bribery and the "blue wall of silence" etc., going back in its way to the Tammany Hall paradise of honest graft, itself upset, at least on the upper levels, by the goo-goos, the good government virtureheads.

But yeah, two eccentricities, with the rule-breaking good guy being our champion, can be very gratifying (if maybe a bad influence on Oliver North and his ilk, but they probably don't need much encouragement)

Fizzles, I think that Global Napoleonic Wars book had a big LRB review, didn't it?

I venture this as someone who reads 90% of LRB and 0% actual books on Napoleonic Wars.

did it? thanks. missed it first time around - will look.

indeed - december 2020. thanks!

I did eventually finish The Monkey's Voyage. Within its chosen subject matter it was very balanced and informative. Not a book I'd recommend widely, but if you think bio-geography might strike a responsive intellectual chord, it will certainly help you scratch that itch.

Now reading Chinese Rhyme-Prose, translated by Burton Watson, who may justly be said to combine some of the scholarly strengths of Arthur Waley with some of the poetic chops of Kenneth Rexroth. This book falls more in line with his scholarly pursuits, but characteristically he brings the poetic material across.

Dipping into Walia here and there, and reading some poetry publications I received in the mail...

But also reading Alan Davies' 'Odes & Fragments,' a strange book that is really displaying the depth and breadth of Davies' gifts as a poet.

I finished "Strangers on a Train". I thought I basically knew what to expect, but it turns out the plot of the book diverges significantly from that of the movie. The book ends up being a darker meditation on guilt and obsession. Even more impressive considering Highsmith wrote it in her 20s. She does this great thing where the reader finds themselves strangely implicated in the guilt of the characters, getting you to root for them at key moments and then feeling kind of queasy about it afterwards.

lol i gave but beautiful a stinker of a review in the wire when it came out, i haaaaaaaateded it. short version: a group of ppl i think are actually important and worth thinking about with genuine imagination just getting useless same-old-same-old slathered over them who has nothing concrete to say about music, it's not like there isn't already a fvckton of terrible writing about jazz ffs

maybe i shd reread it to see if i missed something or changed my mind. the monk passage is really not changing my mind.

slathered over them by someone who has nothing

It's more about the musicians, and a certain romantic view of the life of a musician. There is an afterword which gives a much more straightforward potted history of jazz and is laced with Dyer's critical judgments, many of which I disagree with.

This week I at last started Jonathan Coe's MIDDLE ENGLAND. It's very readable, and mostly very enjoyable. Something I like about Coe is his cultivation of a very standard, repetitive form of comedy, involving set-pieces or bathetic climaxes. This is, at this point, easy, generic stuff for him; the simplicity and generic quality is somehow part of what I like about it. Meanwhile, the book does *less* than usual of something he's done before, namely textual pastiche, chapters in the form of other kinds of genres, etc. It's quite textually homogeneous.

I'm open to whatever the book's political implications may be - I sense that it is genuinely attempting to explore something about diverse views and lives in England (not the rest of the UK) - except that I've had one worry about this book all along: that as a satire of British politics of the 2010s, it will repeat and repurpose various mendacious attacks on and sneers about Jeremy Corbyn MP and his supporters, for satirical or comic purposes at best. I'm afraid that my ultimate feeling about the book will be heavily dependent on how far this is the case.

Damn Galgut's Arctic Summer, a novel about E.M. Forster's Indian adventures (and loves).

I finished Chinese Rhyme-Prose. Now I am reading The Catherine Wheel, Jean Stafford. Her prose is a marvel of sinuosity.

I love how Jean Stafford has somehow become an ILB favourite!

the first novel I read when lockdown sarted

*started too

Don't remember The Catherine Wheel well at all, but some reviews of her Library of America Collected Noves have mentioned it as weakest of the three---but the others set the bar pretty high. Scenes from Boston Adventure, which I read in the 80s, have come back to me lately: girl's duty is housekeeping after school every day, before her mother comes home and delights in pouncing on seemingly tiny failings---so one day the girl gets an early start, cleans up *every7thing*---mother comes home and is enraged. It still rings a bell---but who but Stafford would come up with that---?

I mean to read TCw again, along w the other two (and maybe get library to spring for new LoA collection).

Who but Stafford would come up with that in fiction, I mean (haven't seen it in nonfiction either, just real life, or too close to it)

I'm currently reading "The Killer Inside Me" by Jim Thompson. The pulp pedigree of the book is readily apparent. I was not surprised to learn that the book originally appeared as a paperback original, probably sold mostly in dime stores and not reviewed in any newspaper of note. Featuring lurid depictions of sex, violence and sexual violence and not terribly believable subordinate characters, especially the women, the book is not subtle. However, Thompson's portrayal of the realpolitik and seamy underside of an American Western small town, with its quasi-feudal power structure and casual racism and sexism is memorable. I was curious about the source of my copy's blurb, ostensibly from the NY Times: "Jim Thompson is the best suspense writer going, bar none." This little bit of copy is reproduced in just about every on-line listing for the book. Thanks to the Times online archive it's easy enough to find the original article. It turns out the quote in context is much more ambivalent:

For my own part, I liked Thompson better before the world decided he was a genius. His books pack more of a punch if you pick them up for two bits and come to them with no expectations. Today, though, his quirky little paperbacks can't measure up to the hype. When a cover blurb calls him 'the best suspense writer going, bar none,' the impulse to strike a revisionist pose is almost overwhelming.

This 1990 article about the revival of interest in Thompson is the only place I can find that phrase appearing in the Times. I guess I shouldn't be surprised at the cynicism of Viking in lifting the sentence out of context and placing it on their book covers, its an amoral twist that I can imagine Thompson savoring with a smile.

Heh, you didn't tell us who wrote that.

I might put the author's name behind spoiler tag.

Lawrence Block

But can you be sure the phrase wasn't already on those prior editions and he was only quoting it from them?

Okay, I guess it is usually attributed to the NYT so you are correct, sir.

If it wasn’t on prior editions then he is complaining about a cover blurb that doesn’t exist and then publishers snipped the non-existent blurb out and used it as a cover blurb. Frankly... that rules

I think he was paraphrasing an actual cover blurb that did exist, but not from the Times, but then publishers took his paraphrase and attributed it to the NY Times, which I guess has more "influencer" value. It would have been odd if the original blurb was from the Times, and he complained about it without mentioning that fact.

Hmm, so I guess I was wrong. I see Black Lizard paperbacks from the '80s with that quote attributed to the Times, so I guess that's what Block was referring to in his 1990 article. So now I'm still puzzled where that quote originally appeared. The only place it shows up in the archives search is that 1990 article. Oh well, mystery unsolved..

The closest thing I can find, at least in terms of the enthusiasm of praise, is a 1985 review of an Elmore Leonard book by Stephen King in which he mentions that Thompson is his favorite crime writer, but the wording is totally different, and that's still too late, since I see that blurb on 1981 Black Lizard reprints.

It must have been by Anthony Boucher. I see he wrote a regular crime fiction column in the Times in the '50s and he seems to have been a big Thompson fan. Also, it appears that most of his columns only exist as image scans in the archive, so they don't support full-text search. I think the mystery has been solved.

finally reading let us now praise famous men. picked it up on a whim the other day and found i couldn’t put it down. kind of in love with this endearingly deranged book, though I admit there are moments when i flip ahead mid-paragraph and go “huh. this part goes on for five more pages?”

Boy On Fire by Mark Mordue.
I think its a pretty decent biography. He seems to have talked to most of the right people, at least those he had a chance to talk to.
Reads quite well as well.
It's been years since i actually read Ian Johnston and i never replaced toe Robert Brokenmouth I sold Cave in the mid 90s. He gave me the cover price for a copy I went to get him to sign. Anyway I don't remember them giving that much about his childhood/teens. i do remember Brokenmouth did have the trousers down at caulfield group photo or taht is sto say nick with trousers down.