Sumer Is Icumen In 2015, What Are You Reading Now?

Kevin Schultz - Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties

study in contrasts shows these two publicity fiends had more in common than anyone might imagine. theory is both attacked traditional liberalism from right and left extremes. some revealing minor details unearthed, not earth shattering but that process sheds new light on overly familiar 1960s ground. definitely benefits from Schultz being in his 40s and an acolyte of neither man. biggest disappointment to me was the abrupt ending - nothing on Mailer's debacle with Jack Henry Abbott nor Buckley's relationship with Reagan in the 80s. that was especially frustrating cause Schultz documents how Buckley regraded Reagan warily - at least privately - in the late 60s. far from revelatory overall but recommended for Rick Pearlstein fans.

Nelson George, The Hippest Trip in America: Soul Train and the Evolution of Culture & Style

Still slowly reading Villette, Rat Bohemia (Sarah Schulman's bracingly unsentimental and witty novel of the AIDS crisis), Sarah Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology, and Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider.

currently reading:

atif mian & amir sufi - house of debt

really good popularization of their research, which was basically playing around with an unprecedentedly rich & enormous US-wide micro data set to investigate the role of household debt in the recession. some great identification tricks too. also if you are ever confused while reading macroeconomists debate the crisis it puts a lot of stuff in perspective. after a terrible, overly theoretical and muddled macro sequence last year this got me juiced up on macro again

next up is david mitchell - ghostwritten

Thanks for the Rat Bohemia rec!

No problem! This is the first thing I've read by Schulman, but I'd like to get around to her polemic against heterosexual AIDS narratives, Stagestruck, passages from which have been going around trans twitter of late.

Just finished Enderby Outside, which probably outstayed its welcome by the end but was very good in parts, and am currently half way through Agata Pyzik's Poor But Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West which is about as relevant to my interests as any book is ever likely to get - encompassing Eastern European politics, Soviet architecture, cold wave, Borowczyk, Żuławski, Einsturzende Neubauten, etc, etc. It's excellent.

Not read her wriitngs (and er probably not going to as I don't have the patience for zero books) but you can watch her despair at the Polish elections (later his year iirc?) on twitter.

Novel 11, Book 18 by Dag Solstad. Before that, The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout. Before that, The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora.

― youn, Wednesday, 24 June 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Reading Dag Solstad next. How are you finding it youn?

Very good. I really enjoyed Shyness and Dignity. I will post a quote on the ILX Quotation Time thread.

That's the one I'm reading next!

weird, i was just looking for 'rat bohemia' the other day (and couldn't find it)

Finishing Shyness and Dignity - somewhat similar to Bernhard, like how it situates those ideas about fiction (that section on novels of the 1920s is pretty much something I'd write v badly in my own novel, except I'd probably include a rant about how the irony in Mann never comes off - in English at least) in a particular time where the thirst for fiction/reading is supposedly dying (this is the late-80s). Overall its a digested modernism that never turned into games (which would be called postmod but I'm not calling it that). Lone man at the gates as the barbarians are about to storm it, excepts he is no weirdo and is married to a beauty - but actually as the plot unfolds it is pretty convincing.

youn - if you pull out a sentence it would be interesting to know which one. V tightly knit together.

Hanging on with both mitts to the Richard Wright Express, via the Modern Library omnibus of Lawd Today Uncle Tom's Children Native Son. Social Realism, I guess, but the sustained multi-dimensional focus, esp. of UTC (so far minus any set pieces etc. of Fine Writing) has me thinking of Dubliners, when it allows me time (mostly between readings) for mere comparison. Bloomsday might be the point of departure for Lawd Today's unified framework for that matter (maybe Dos Passos's radio blasts too). Haven't gotten to Native Son yet, but I'm sensing the build and boot camp, duh.

Library of America, not Modern Library.

I recently re-read Steinbeck's Cannery Row. I first read it as a teenager. It has a few interesting perspectives on living in the world, but mostly seemed like a relic, a corrective to attitudes that have long since been buried in the sands of time and change.

I then read Muriel Spark's Abbess of Crewe. It's great virtue that attracted me was that I needed a very short book, which did not weigh much, because I took it on a wilderness trek. As literature, it was not up to Spark's best. It had only one character of any magnitude and even then her magnitude was not immense.

I am now apparently committed to reading Henry James' The Bostonians, being about a third of the way into it. The characters are all somewhat grotesque and the plot hinges on James' insistence that a particular young woman has an astonishing innocent presence, amounting almost to genius, which charms and attracts all who come in contact with her, but he has not the slightest idea how to show this trait in action, and he falls back on repeatedly assuring the reader that her genius exists, despite the complete lack of evidence for its existence. Weak sauce, Henry, very weak sauce.

Yeah I gave up on The Bostonians after about 1/3 of it. It's the only Henry James I've ever read/tried to read and I feel like I should try a different one.

I read Michael Wood's ALFRED HITCHCOCK: THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. To be honest it was not MW's best work.

Now I read Colm Toibin's ON ELIZABETH BISHOP.

The Bostonians has a strange structure: the first third of the novel covers a day and a night! Once the Olive-Verena quasi-romance starts, the book picks up.

franny glass, I always recommend Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady.

It's been a while since I read The Bostonians but IIRC, Verena's innocence and purity is more ambiguous than Aimless allows for, though this possibly doesn't become apparent until quite late in the novel (James also doesn't really make much of an effort to engage with or articulate the feminist politics notionally in play, just as The Princess Casamassima doesn't really engage with radical politics - it's enough to know that these people are 'radicals', or 'feminists', or 'spiritualists' or whatever, and I'm not sure that any more 'evidence' is required than this.) What should be apparent right from this start is that this is James writing in his most ironic mode - it's a cooller version of the comedy of manners already played out in The Europeans - which makes the book's final sentence all the more devastating. This is not really a novel of character.

there's a strong hint in The Bostonians that Verena manipulates her charm and is no ingenue

the portraits of Dr. Prance and Ms. Birdseye are sharp. He was expert at the kinds of portraits you expect from Dickens.

Verena's innocence and purity is more ambiguous than Aimless allows for

You may note that I said that she has an "innocent presence", not that she is an innocent. At this point in the novel she is a complete cipher that others continually pour their aspirations into. James gives almost no hints as to what she is thinking, but generally appraises her actions through the lens of one of the other characters or his narrator hedges its description with terms such as 'apparently'. The fact that she has red hair is touched on so lightly and briefly that it makes me wonder whether this is meant as a foreshadowing of a less demure personality than she currently displays.

xyzzzz__, I could go up to the stacks to get it, but I'm wondering if you might want to post something instead as you are reading, which I think is most of the fun -- holding on to it, so to speak.

I checked out The Wild Duck by Ibsen, Correction by Bernhard, and Senselessness by Castellanos Moya and will probably read them in that order. But with Ibsen, I reverted to my own Bantam paperback because I started to get distracted by the marginalia and underlining in the Michael Meyer translation from the library.

Thanks Alfred, I suspect HJ is really up my alley. I wasn't connecting with The Bostonians, but in large part I just didn't have time to keep up with it, and it was due back at the library so I quit. Life is more conducive to novel-reading lately so I want to give him another try.

finished rory stewart. between that & the anand gopal, that's enough afghanistan for the immediate future, I think. tobias jones' "the dark heart of italy" next.

youn - finished and gave it back to my library the next day. I loved the last few pages, with its writing around decay of beauty. Solstad is not as relentlessly negative as Bernhard - who is doing it as performance, its that v particular voice of his. Correction was my first read by him.

I am reading a collection by Rilke - poems from all periods (tr. Steven Mitchell) which also has excerpts of the more 'poetic' passages of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Not sure what I think of doing so - suppose its as worthwhile a way of coming across that book.

I haven't read much James - tried some of his longer novels & bogged down in them quite quickly - but thought The Turn of the Screw was top-notch.

I always say start with the early novels first.

Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power by Timothy Tyson

I became curious about Williams recently while reading another civil rights-era history. So far I've only read as far as his WW2-era military service:

His contempt for white authority soon earned him a three-month sentence in the stockade for insubordination; at the hearing, Williams said, 'I told them that I was black, and that prison did not scare me because black men are born in prison. All they could do was put me in a smaller prison.'"

(Sorry for fixing on the obvious pull-quote, even if it had become justly famous)

Hadot - The Veil of Isis

On three words of Heraclitus usually translated, "Nature loves to hide," which gets interpreted in different ways down through the ages. I'm trying to read in French and relieved to find that this is pretty clear and straightforward.

keep meaning to read that but

I think you would like it. It strikes me as a really cool perspective on the history of philosophy, or a cool choice of aphorism to serve as kernel to build a synoptic history around.

He's adding to my shame at how much I've neglected the ancients. I only read the Symposium for the first time a few weeks ago. Turns out it's really great.

i've read a lot of him, studied 'what is ancient philosophy?' pretty closely even - just haven't made the time

all of plato is really great! that's why he's plato

oh i like hadot
big influence on late foucault (re ancient philosophy as way of life/ care of the self/ askesis)

picked up #2 in the elena ferrante trilogy to read in cape cod next week B-)

The White Album - Joan Didion. This is fantastic. The alignment of personal psychology and exploration to the geist of the age is exact - tone, insight, humour make reading this feel very direct, very clear-sighted. I loved her observation about the San Francisco State College revolutionary actions:

Perhaps Evelyn Waugh could have gotten it down exactly right: Waugh was good at scenes of industrious self-delusion, scenes of people involved in odd games.

industrious self-delusion - it's a phrase that manages to be illuminating about Waugh, illuminating about her subject, and potentially illuminating for future ages such as ours (in countries like the UK anyway), where that very phrase seems like a characterising and besetting vice.

Enjoyed her piece Holy Water - about the water logistics and politics of the Western States - so much, that I'm going to sit down and watch Chinatown right now. My enjoyment is slightly unexpected (presumably harbouring some filthy unexamined prejudice), but stronger for that.

just started the dalkey archive's european fiction 2015 - a collection of short stories. the first two i read at random both had severed penises in them.

i have already abandoned a few due to them being twee magic realism shite, but there was a good one from france about a man who lives in an apartment block sending severed limbs and threatening notes to the residents association.

I first thought severed limbs would be sufficient threat, but then again he prob wanted to be precise, which is always helpful, or meant to be. Title, author?

Sjon: The Whispering Muse -- Icelandic fish expert/obsessive goes on ride to Turkey on a freighter ship; one of the crew is a former Argonaut (as in the golden fleece Argonauts, not the vintage kids radio show)

i got bored of the murray leinster book i was reading so i started reading john le carre's the night manager because i've never read any of his books! but i'm kinda not into that one either. i kept putting it down and then when i picked it up again i forgot everyone's names and who the flashback anecdotes were about. but i've always wanted to read him. i have a bunch of his later hardcovers. i dunno, guess i'm feeling a little uninspired at the moment. (so now i'm finishing the leinster out of a sense of duty...)

such a boring post. sorry. you guys read cool fancy books. i like the idea of having internet friends who read cool fancy books.

With le Carre I'd start with either The Spy Who Came In From the Cold or else Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy -- if they don't do it for you, I'd doubt the others will. And I tend to enjoy them more as novels about amoral office politics where lives hang on the decisions being made, rather than just amounts of toner that gets ordered, instead of as spy novels. Does that make any sense?

Thomas King, The Back of the Turtle

I finished everything in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. 1 and Vol. 2A. Highlights were Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" and C.L. Moore's "Vintage Season". I read a few from Vol. 2B but I'm taking a break from it.

also read Erik Davis - 33 ⅓: Led Zeppelin IV (2005). Some funny bits from Thomas Friend's crazy book. Didn't care about the journey of "Percy".

currently reading:
2015 Hugo nominees. "The Parliament of Beasts and Birds" may be the worst thing I have ever read.
Thomas Harris - Red Dragon. Because I like the TV show. Low reading grade level -- feels like the only 3-syllable words in the book are "psychopath" and "cannibal".

Are those Hugo nominees the right-wing misogynistic illiterate ones?

the gap between 'red dragon' and 'silence of the lambs' is really remarkable, bookwise

I've only read the second--is it the better or the worse?

xp Right wing and illiterate, yes. Of the ones in the bloc I read, only "Totaled" had female characters, and that one's actually OK.

this guy lives near me. came into my store with his dog for years and i never knew he was a hugo award-winning SF dude. nice guy. i got the whole trilogy. never read him before.

https://scontent-lga1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpl1/v/t1.0-9/11951202_10154220825757137_3576390174085857652_n.jpg?oh=2eeeb5f6af309725193797adf7cb83dd&oe=5664DE97

I'm only a couple of hundred pages into Creation, but I have the gist of it. Vidal frames the book as the memoir of Zoroaster's grandson in old age, who has been everywhere from Greece to China and met every important philosophical or religious figure of the time. As such it has no actual plot other than his travels, observations and conversations, but it crams in an enormous amount of well-researched history from a very formative period in 'world civilization'.

As is inevitable in historical novels, the speech and habits of thought of all the characters are those of modern people, slightly adapted to the fit the milieu and material of the book. In this case, they are modeled upon wealthy and politically powerful americans and europeans. Luckily, Vidal was both witty and sophisticated and he transferred these traits to his major characters in abundance, so Creation is unfailingly entertaining and occasionally illuminating.

Clarice Lispector: Collected Stories -- this is amazing, but so rich and strange that there's no way i can take on the 650p of it in one go. Might need to break it up, read slabs of it between other books

Reading Willa Cather's My Mortal Enemy for the first time and finished my second reading of The Professor's House. I've said here before that Cather should be revered as much as Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

She's great. I'm sad that the only book by her, besides some short stories, that I haven't yet read is an autobiography she ghost-wrote for the publisher S S McClure.

I'm impressed (most of the way through) with Sarah Gerard's brief first novel, Binary Star. It's lightly plotted and tightly focused on the relationship between the anorexic narrator and her unstable, probably alcoholic boyfriend (the social contexts of eating disorders are sketched out, though the novel never becomes as essayistic as Chris Kraus's Aliens and Anorexia), but Gerard's prose is effective at evoking the claustrophobic experience of hostile, ongoing self-scrutiny.

Speaking of Willa Cather, I'm now reading My Antonia. It's my first Cather. So far it's definitely my kind of thing. I love that story-within-a-story kind of framing device. Jack London often used it as well. The decision to narrate it from the perspective of a young boy seems particularly inspired - helps to create the right amount of distance to what could be rather grim events.

You'll love A Lost Lady and TPH then.

today i started

barry eichengreen - the european economy since 1945

already learned something new: that post-war european growth can't be explained by destruction of capital during ww2: capital was already back at 1937 levels within two years of the end of the war (and at level implied by prewar trend within a few more) scarcely enough to explain 3decades of >4% growth

"Clarice Lispector: Collected Stories -- this is amazing, but so rich and strange that there's no way i can take on the 650p of it in one go"

even one story by her can make me dizzy.

Finished Hope Abandoned by Nadeszha Mandelstam. Incredible writing, under awful circumstances. In one of its last pages she is ruminating on whether the book she is finishing will be destroyed by the censors, but that maybe bcz they'll get a notion that "she fears nothing" the enterprise "will not have been entirely in vain". In his N. Mandelstam obituary Brodsky reported someone tell him that, on reading this book, "she had shat on an entire generation". Very true. Really strikes you how Soviet silent cinema - which is celebrated for its techniques etc. - is totally dumped on as propaganda, and that's that (later on she sais how much she hates Pasolini's The Gospel According to St.Matthew - she might have made an interesting film critic). Her literary judgements are things we are catching up on - singles out Platonov for resisting, and loved her digression on Dostoevsky's Demons, which I read earlier in the summer.

Now reading Sergio Pitol's The Journey - this is awesome, best new writer I've come across this year. The 2nd volume in his (clumsily titled) "Trilogy of Memory", describing his travels around Prague and The Soviet Union in the 80s, but he travels by reading. No distance between the physical and the page. There are always twists, so he says at the beginning how he laments the fact he hasn't written that much about Prague in his diaries at the time. You'd think this will be an intro to Prague and Rilke and Kafka, to a correction of a wrong - but then all you get anyway are a few pages of Prague and Kafka before the Soviet Union comes along anyway and dominates the narrative. Finishing so might say more if I have anything but hanging on for the 3rd and final vol to be published next year.

ok fine i'll read hope abandoned

I finished The Luminaries. As a straightforward mystery it works beautifully, I wasn't so convinved by the astrological structure/themes, but perhaps that's because I mostly ignored them...the story was involving and beautifully done, enough that I didn't really focus on the astrology stuff. Lovely to read fiction set in Hokitika/the West Coast, land of several of my childhood Easter-weekend family holidays. We used to go to a goldrush-themed 'heritage park' called Shantytown which was funny to remember when reading about the gold fields, etc.

New thread: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall 2015 ist. What Are You Reading Now?

Tausenddank

Its that time of year when I find used copies of Penguin Modern European Poets: Zbigniew Herbert, Sandor Weores/Ferenc Juhasz and Vasko Popa

(Note to Londoners - there are quite a few others of this series and Penguin Modern Poets in Any Amount of Books)

Sorry should've been posted in the 'what have you purchased' thread. As it contains such a great tip I will copy across.

Just finished Enderby Outside, which probably outstayed its welcome by the end but was very good in parts, and am currently half way through Agata Pyzik's Poor But Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West which is about as relevant to my interests as any book is ever likely to get - encompassing Eastern European politics, Soviet architecture, cold wave, Borowczyk, Żuławski, Einsturzende Neubauten, etc, etc. It's excellent.

― who epitomises beta better than (ShariVari), Thursday, June 25, 2015 7:25 AM (two years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I just picked this up in an Oxfam like second hand store! This was the only search hit on ilx for it. Stoked!