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

It's one of his stronger works, in part b/c it's not so bloody ambitious.

Does The Innocent still hold up?

It's funny, I've never given any of those dudes much of chance because what little I read of them was so gross and macho that I immediately noped out.

Cheever being the big exception, actually. I also LOVED John O'Hara when I was in high school, but I think that's because I was really into tragic drunks.

cheever def my favorite of that crew, really good at writing a devastating paragraph, really good at parsing the inherent surreality of the quiddities of the ruling class and making them register simultaneously as sublime, ridiculous, and profoundly depressingly empty. i also love how he treated his characters like absolute shit

i have liked the little salter i've read tho

Cheever's also closer to a Latin American writer than the others; his fiction has little to do with American 20th century realism.

Speaking of tragic drunks, F. Scott Fitzgerald also somehow less macho than those other guys and perhaps not coincidentally has more interesting female characters.

I finished "Herzog". Probably a good book to re-read as one ages more into the demographic that Bellow was in when he wrote it

was utterly bored by this in college (while I loved loved loved P Roth) so maybe it's time to try again; then again maybe it's better to try things I've never been bored by

Speaking of tragic drunks, F. Scott Fitzgerald also somehow less macho than those other guys and perhaps not coincidentally has more interesting female characters.

― o. nate, Friday, June 4, 2021

otm. He never once condescended to the girls and women he creaed.

My big Cheever experience was and is The Stories of John Cheever. I got the first paperback editon (the mass market, with the scarlet background and the monogram C like a big pewter doorknocker: perfect) which won the National Book Award that year, 1981; the '78 hardback had copped Pulitzer National Book Critics Award, as well it might: a revelatory round-up, going back at least as far as his imaginative breakthough, "The Enormous Radio." The Library of America Collected Stories is even more inclusive (hopefully incl. his publishing debut at 18, about his being kicked out of prep school, POV/attitude also influenced by being from an olde, contentious, somewhat downwardly mobile New England family, with some hifalutin relatives who only approached him when he was sufficiently prestigious), I had read some of Falconer and The Wapshot Scandal, mainly remembering a few episodes or set pieces, and encouraging my notion that the stories are where to start (but may check the novels again some day, think The Wapshot Chronicle is considered the best?_

Pulitzer *and* National Book Critics Circle Award.

Putting off work a minute or two longer, let me add that the first part of Pierre; or, The Ambiguitiesinitially seemed to give Gay a bad name, vays con rococococo effusions that really didn't come down to nuthin, and these were the authorial comments *on* Pierre's own interior decorations (ov brane), not just the latter: so bad on bad adds to the sidewise pile of ecstatic Life With Mama--they address each other as "Sister" and "Brother" while dining in the mansion of their pastoral estate, gloriously established and maintained by a golden chain of Pierres--yadda yadda, he marries his sister--not his Mother, but his self-proclaimed illegitimate half-sister, Isabel or "Isabel," who may be the offspring of his revered father. She is a hauntingly beautiful, also haunted by nebulous memories or whatever they are, also sadly lucid transient, also crazy hot, and he *tells her* they are married, also tells his Mother, who freaks out and vows revenge, also drops in on sweet Lucy his bethrothed, who also freaks out, and in, collapsing. he does this because he instantly resolves that Isabel must be rescued, redeemed, from a life of poorly-paid toil, sufferting the consequences of their (?) father's secret sin and crime against womanhood, also his Mother's vicious Virture: already, without knowing of Isabel, it seems, she, the power in the parish, has gotten the/her pastor to agree on driving a poor seduced and abandoned farm girl and her basterd baby into the the wilderness---and Pierre figures that she will freak out even more if her sainted husband's name etc.

Also he has this vision of how things must proceed, with the illusion-and-lie-bound-world well lost. So the cloying overture was a set-up, and now he starts to seem like a pre-Flannery O'Connor character, only with second thought then mamy more: these are the Ambiguities---also the brain clouds, and the page clouds--increasingly cut through by cold-water details, as he and Isabel, (and Delly, the girl who was scheduled for driving out) start over in the big city--but still, as Pierre becomes immersed in writing--"an immature mind attempting a mature work"--the author's own experiences, in his head and in the biz, diffuse and clarify the reading experiences--so I'm also sometimes reminded of the cracked, glued narrator vs./times novelist that gave us VALIS, by Philip K. Dick, only that (spoiler) turned out to deliberately meta, *as well as* compulsively struggling, while this is more the latter.

Nevertheless, it did pull me along, and I soon learned to jump over or skim the bad stuff, as much as I could manage (at one point, the tougher/more scarred Pierre puts a poison letter under his left boot heel, the other under his right, and says he's gonna skate; right on), and the creator's (like the Creator's) own kind of love and sympathy for his strange young characters (incl. Lucy, who comes to town!)---also shining a funky light on their mystical boho city neighbors, the Apostles)---is powerful, if troubled, and fog-vulnerable, in the Ambiguities, oh yes.

(could do w/o some of the standard and/or stilted melodramatic devices in there from time to time---although---well he's set the bar very high, and I've lived s sheltered life among some of his greatest works.

turned out to (be) deliberately meta, *as well as* compulsively struggling, while this is more the latter.
Maybe Melville wasn't trying for deliberately meta, maybe it was more intuitive, but anyway sometimes it works out well enough. It's worth reading, but watch out.
This Library of America volume opens boldly enough with Pierre, follows with the historical novel Israel Potter (good?), also incl. The Piazza Tales, The Confidence Man, uncollected prose, and Billy Budd, what a finale.

(Gayness per see or as "a degree," as the characters tend to refer to sex as verb-tending, also figures, in that a rich effete cousin with whom Pierre had an early thing, to whatever extent/degree, later moves in on Lucy etc)

per *se*!

Something of a forerunner to Sister Carrie as well.
And Pierre's paranoid view of the Apostles' guru (whose "sleazy rag" of a pamphlet Pierre knows/suppresses knowing has his number, if only by reasonable interpretation, nothing really that personal) reminds me of that billboard in The Great Gatsby.

Pierre will save me!

Sorry, wrong thread

I wrote a lot about Thomas Mann's bat shit political tome, published by New York Review Books.

I'm increasingly resigned to life being about how we deal with being *wrong* about things, which is to say Light Years almost entirely won me over. I'm inclined to say that it's governing tone is sentimental and that it considers life to be too short - and that we must wake up to this, probably too late. I think I felt Salter's mode was collusion early on, but now I think he considers Nedra and Viri emblematic of something flawed and grasping, but forgivably so. The light of the title is, I think, an adjective, as in we miss the simplicity of our early years (their lightness) and are doomed to mourn them from the position of age.

In the interest of balance, here's a passage from towards the end that is like being sung too.

The leaves had come down, it seemed, in a single night. The prodigious arcade of trees in the village gave them up quickly, they fell like rain. They lay like runs of water along the melancholy road. In the turning of seasons they would be green again, these great trees. Their dead branches would be snapped away, their limbs would quicken and fill. They would again, in addition to their beauty, to the roof they made beneath the sky, to their whispering, their slow, inarticulate sounds, the riches they poured down, they would, besides all this, give scale to everything, a true scale, reassuring, wise. We do not live as long, we do not know as much.

Gah, stray 'it's' there. Ugh.

tldr; didn't see it:)

Walter Abish alphabetical Africa an oulipan caper where in the first chapter all the words begin with A, in the second chapter A & B and so on, adding a letter each time, and then after chapter 26 he starts removing a letter until it gets back to all As. The constraint is interesting, I had a go at writing a review with all A-words and it does sort of push you in cool directions, like it’s your hand moving the planchette but not. I found it very neat that even in the middle chapters where abish had recourse to the entire alphabet and could write “normally”, he stuck to an odd idiosyncratic style established in the earlier chapters.

Authors can be circumscribed in other ways tho & it’s funny for as surreal & cerebral as it is it can feel oddly bound by 70s mores: the Africa it explores is avowedly a construct (itself a very late 70s move) but does that excuse the dark continent cliches; the main female character is in some ways a stock femme fatale (luckily “breast” is available two chapters in!) — but then it will get pretty explicitly anti-colonialist and portray a trans character... relatively well for 1978

Anyway it is of course an achievement in itself - but I spotted this in the first J chapter
https://i.imgur.com/FzsXxdR.jpg

& then towards the end https://i.imgur.com/9J4UvDa.jpg
A line of what, Walter? (This in the second S chapter). Then a few pages later I think I’ve cracked the code when I read consequently Jacqueline misses a description of Alva on page forty-nine and on page ninety-nine. The second mistake is on page 99! So I go back and the first mistake is on... page 26. Bah.

The citationless Wikipedia article says there are at least 4 errors and up to 43 (! I do not believe this for a second) & it is disputed as to whether they are intentional; along with the two above I came across two that were so glaring that it was almost impossible to believe they weren’t deliberate, but I can’t think of a single reason for them to be there so who the fuck knows

Chinaksi, that book also told me some things about middle aging, about time, that turned out to be true. I still think of the guy who liked to visit, who thought of himself as a Dickensian uncle (think that was the exact phrase), who gets mugged, and beaten down in the street, badly injured. He's never the same: more reserved, way back there among the characters, occasionally mentioned. A friend of my father's was like that after his heart attack in Vegas---he outlived it by many years, but.

David eagleton Sum another exercise in imagination that sort of bumps up against the authors limits. 40 very short (~2 page) stories each set in a hypothetical afterlife; the first, title, story sets the tone: in the next world you experience again everything that happened in your life but sorted by category, so you spend a day being about to sneeze and two hours pretending to recognise someone or whatever

The writing is good and some of the scenarios are really poignant, funny and sad - the author is a neuroscientist and all the models of the hereafter have an admirable lucidity - but this attitude starts showing through the general cloud of humanism that I keep bristling against. Most egregiously there’s a story that seems to gravely misunderstand MLK and has god commiserating with him & Gandhi about “movements that sweep over the tops of their founders”

I did like it despite all that, but in the spirit of the thing im allowed to imagine a reality where this exact book gets written to the same standard by an author with a more salutary weltanschauung

Just read Alfred's xpost review: yep, Reflections of a Nonpoltical Man, just paring his nails n the tower, reflections incl. good one on irony of art and btw nonironic nod to the pure German spirit-->war, just sayin. Wonder if he ever though better of that, or was it like, "Lenin good, Stalin bad" before Putin's ascendancy (maybe some Russians still say it, not so loudly).

An Indigenous People's History of the United States By Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
Scathing look at America's treatment of its indigenous population from Penguin's Revisioning series. Dunbar-Ortiz helped Howard Zinn with research for his A People's History Of the United States as i found out while watching Exterminate All The Brutes. She pointed out to him that he had left out pretty much all reference to the indigenous population. He said he wouldn't know where to start, why didn't she write one so decades later she came through with this. Or something to that effect with more focus on her own agency.
Anyway I'm still in the 18th century, a couple of years after Independence and there's already a heavy pall of intentional genocide.
Quite great though.
I think I may make my way thorough a few more of this Revisioning series, definitely the one on Black and LatinX US History written by her husband Paul Ortiz,. I saw a good webinar with him on his book. I'm also picking up some more Indigenous focused US history stuff. Bought a couple yesterday.

THe Lies That Bind Kwame Anthony Appiah
Interesting look at identity from a Harvard professor who grew up as a mixed race kid in the UK then Ghana. |I think this may have been a book Angela Saini recommended on a podcast a few months ago.
It has an outline of intersectionality that was similar to the one I had surmised. Like an expansion on the queer feminist focused one taht was due to teh person who devised it originally. I thought it was probably something that was a universal thing but with each person having their own layers. he doesn't quite say that but what he does would lead to that understanding I think. I was looking for a succinct description of the process. I assume that everybody does have different facets and aspects they communicate with different people from and it is something that is just more enhanced in a marginalised person because of different valorisation and leverage etc. & is deeply interlinked with what is also known as codeswitching though that may appear more superficial. I think the reasons for it are far from cosmetic though.
Anyway finding it an easy book to read when I find the time to do so. & it does have a lot more to it than what I have said so far.
I think it and teh Angela Saini are both books i wish some people who are supposed to be progressive but seem to be unaware of tehir own prejudices would benefit from reading which is something that keeps running through my head as i read it and the other decolonisation and anti-racism books I'm reading.

How To be An Antiracist Ibram X. Kendi
Another reasonably easy read other than potentially triggering about racism being faced and exclusion of some individuals being talked about. & i think if that puts you off you're not facing reality
This was the book i managed to get for a Euro a week and a bit ago. I'm really glad that I found it so cheap though would have paid more for it. Again something that I wish people who don't seem to be aware of how racism works and tends to permeate society would read instead of whitewashing things.
Good book anyway. Author talking about his upbringing and what he faced throughout growing up and the things he learnt in the process.
I think I will be looking to read his other work afterwards if I can get my hands on it

I've started Molly Prentiss, TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980 (2016), a book I've owned for about 5 years and not properly read till now.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/07/books/review-tuesday-nights-in-1980-offers-bright-lights-big-strivers.html

It's mainly about the NYC downtown art scene in 1980, I think, with reference also to the Argentinian Junta. It has a good concept in an art critic with synaesthesia, who writes down his unusual sense perceptions. It's not terrifically well-written - I haven't noticed a good image or fine sentence in 50 pages. It partakes of a slack idiom that's happy to be obscene: 'this had fucked up his life', says the 3rd-person narrator. A generation or two earlier, I think that narrators didn't talk that way. (Updike, say, was very sexual but wasn't his approach to descriptive prose more rigorous?) I find the slack obscenity lazy and striving too hard to be cool and mean. It's fairly normal nowadays though - I'm sure that eg: Franzen would do it. If I were a writer, I would try not to.

The novel contains a horrible promiscuous male who casually has sex with women once then ignores them. I find this hateful and it puts me off the novel. However, he is only part of it. I must persist.

I went to grad school with Molly. She is a lovely person, and I actually really loved her poems, which were strange and did a lot of interesting stuff with narrativity; was never really attracted to her prose, and haven't read the novel.

It is worth noting, though, that our profs were people like Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Tom Barbash, and Miranda Mellis— the more abject and experimental side of the fiction spectrum, in other words.

I've started reading "History of Rock and Roll Vol 1: 1920-1963" by Ed Ward. I'm up to 1954. The book focuses a lot on the labels and personalities that released early singles that were influential on the music that would become known as rock and roll. It can turn into just a list of songs with brief descriptions, but that works fine when you can pop open any one that sounds interesting on Youtube and listen to it.

Finished Rindon Johnson's "The Law of Large Numbers." Got a package from my friend Ed in the mail of a collaborative book he did with an artist entitled "The Rose" alongside a chapbook from M. Elizabeth Scott. Going to read the latter when I get off work this evening.

found the copy of Ken Kesey's the Last Roundup that I have to return at the end of the month yesterday/
Quiite enjoying the prose. Read the first few chapters.

bought some more books today cos I didn't think I was reading enough at the same time

Finished both of the books in the package from Ed. Now re-reading Dennis Cooper's "The Sluts," because Jackie Ess' "Darryl" makes explicit reference to its universe, and I am pondering writing a review of the latter.

reading some swedenborg for the first time. was hoping for descriptions of conversations with angels & demons and depictions of heaven & hell... what i got: 300+ pages of biblical exegesis.

I just got Impro by Keith Johnstone, who was a British theatre guy who specialized in improvisation and spontaneity. A friend recommended it for running/playing rpgs.

speaking of dennis cooper i started b.r. yeager's 'negative space' which feels like a post-cooper book: a lot of kids and they're all fucked up on drugs and stuff like that, lots of violence and blankness, the internet is in there too. sadly it just makes me realise again how singular cooper is, because the yeager book seems flat, cliche, even tedious in comparison - there are some alright parts, but a disappointment based on how enthusiastic the reviews and endorsements for it have been

Sill reading this Library of America Melville, and struck by how the third person narration of "Benito Cereno" seems integral, after the struggles with it in Pierre. It's not omnisicent narration: everybody but the POV character is a mystery to him, less to the reader, seeing through the well-meaning American Captain Amasa'a limitations what he keeps trying to explain away, soothing his riled self, with professional observation and filters of courtesy, congeniality, and confidence of status---as a superior, he is even something of a negrophile, as Eddie Murphy used to put it. This almost gets him killed, but the system adjusts. Testimonial documents don't incl. motive for the slaves' revolt---does incl. descriptions of several of the core participants has having been known as smart, talented negroes, good negroes in the community---but it's easily inferred that they were driven to it by having been uprooted from that community, sailing with their master to wherever--even if it were to turn out to be a better place than they've known, could just as or more likely be worse. there is still no agency.The Captain is as much a creature of his own gilded cage as the first-person narrator of "Bartleby, The Scrivener," as tested by the Other, but what the hell, both old privileged white guys are the survivors (spoiler).

Apologies for being lazy, but I'm looking for a recommendation - can anyone recommend a good, short book or article about Yugoslavia in the 80-90s? I'm looking for something that covers culture as well as history and politics. (I have a work thing I need to get up-to-speed for fairly quickly...) At the moment I'm just cribbing bits from Judt's Postwar...

I continue with TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980 - I realise that it would seem rational to abandon it but I have this nice hardback and I want to do it justice.

So far I can't really remember reading a good sentence - though it's better on the synaesthetic colours, its best theme. It's strangely wooden on 1960s Argentina - does the author know much about this world? - it all feels very potboiler-level - but disappointing on the US too. A girl in the Mid-West suddenly realises that she needs to move to NYC - especially when she sees a postcard of it and "Her heart actually stopped". Actually? When she gets to NYC she sees the horrible womaniser artist and experiences, wait for it, "love at first sight".

Meanwhile I returned to a couple of chapters of Hugh Kenner, THE POUND ERA. The magnificence of this book is known. I wonder, though, how easy it is to learn concrete facts and ideas from it, as it's all a montage of suggestions and asides.

I'm closing in on the end of World Light, Halldor Laxness. My major impression is that it is a sort of ambitious anti-epic extended to epic length. But even though Laxness had many things he wanted to say and he says them all, the book never quite settles down or decides what kind of story it wants to be. It sloshes around from spirituality to sentimentality to satire and this dilutes the effect of all of them.

Finally cracked open In the Land of the Cyclops, the Knausgaard essay collection that I received earlier this year via my Archipelago sub. Despite never having read K's fiction, I am pretty squarely in the target audience for this type of thing; and the brief piece I read this morning (a laudatory review of Houellebecq's Submission) was perfect in its length, depth, breadth, and the rhythms of its prose.

I'm also taking a rare excursion into contemporary fantasy with my book club's latest pick, The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune. The first 100 or so pages have been long on setup and short on conflict, but I appreciate that the setup is heavily character-focused, with the world-building happening unobtrusively around the edges.

Another reason to never read Knausgaard is his love of Houellebecq, a vile writer and person.

He said in the review that this was the first book of Houellebecq's he had ever read, after years of ignoring people recommending his work *shrug*

I thought it was a very fair review that didn't turn into a defense of Houellebecq, though I could see others reading it as special pleading (he is keen to downplay the ~contemporary relevance~ of Submission, in favor of its more putatively universal literary virtues)

There is literally nothing that Houellebecq has written that isn't Islamophobic, misogynist trash— perhaps I'm missing something in translation, as I've only <<Les particules élémentaires>> in the original, but he's not a great stylist, just a racist provocateur. Not trying to attack you, bernard snowy, I just find anyone actually liking his books to be a bit suspect because there doesn't seem to be a way to enjoy his books without endorsing his ideology, which is monstrous to say the least.

He's also been writing a variation on the same book for his entire career: depressed middle-aged man with addiction problems has racial anxieties that are confirmed by outlandish, fantastical acts. In the meantime, he has bad sex and ponders the meaninglessness of existence. The end.

Submission had a very funny ending

One funny thing about Submission is that Islamic government is in many ways an improvement over the previous secular French regime, not least for sozzled, aging, sex-obsessed, economically-precarious, bachelor intellectuals.

Yes exactly! I love that the threat of this scary alien religion gets totally neutralized when it comes to power as a pragmatic and venal ruling order, and none of the sharia restrictions really have teeth provided one knows the right people and is willing to at least make a public show of converting. The idea of wealthy Arab princes amassing prestige by generously endowing university chairs of French literature is admittedly farfetched, but it's also a very funny rebuke to neoliberal austerity -- like, "If you're so worried about this culture changing or being lost, why haven't you done anything to help the people whose life's work is preserving and transmitting it?"

Forging ahead to Bloomsday.