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

I'm giving DRACULA a go for the first time

Just returned from camping, where I read the 1952 classic of mountaineering lit, Annapurna by Maurice Herzog and also pushed ahead with Outlaws of the Marsh (abridged version) which I am about 3/4 through.

The French expedition described in Annapurna was, like most major Himalayan expeditions of that era, rather harrowing. No one died and it accomplished the world's first successful summiting of an 8000 meter peak, but the price in suffering was enormous. In case anyone decides to read the book, it is probably better I don't go into detail other than to say the two climbers who reached the top suffered severe frostbite and lost all their toes and many fingers, too, as a result.

My Brilliant Friend is good. I spent most of yesterday reading it and it was hard to put down. I like how virtually every act and thought in the book contains some kind of jealousy or resentment, large or small. She knows how to write these affects.

LUCKY ALAN: not JL's best.

I went on to reread DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? Not quite sure how good or bad this is. Feel it has some of PKD's cackhandedness as well as his great inventiveness.

Then I read Pynchon's story 'The Secret Integration' which seemed to me better than most other works by Pynchon that I have encountered.

Then I moved on at last to Franz Kafka's THE CASTLE. I have wanted to read this for a long time.

I am quite excited about finally reading THE CASTLE !

Feel it has some of PKD's cackhandedness as well as his great inventiveness

This is almost always the case--PKD is sort of the definition of the writer who is great despite often not being that good

And I say that as a serious fan

yeah i read man in the high castle a while back, the premise was at times brilliant, but the second half of it just dwindled into rubbish.

I think that book (which I like) is often supposed to be his best novel!

I think James M is right about PKD but perhaps it is fair to say that lots of the short stories work fine, as opposed to the novels.

dwindling rather than crescendoing is one of my favourite things in novels including MitHC

i enjoyed it as well - i guess the end disappointed me. i agree in principle nv, that any twist of the hollywood ending is fine, but i didn't think it was particularly good technically as it went on.

it's been a few years since I read it last so I wdn't defend it unreservedly, and it's not my favourite PKD, but I'm always secretly delighted when a story that looks like it should be satisfactorily resolved fizzles away into downbeat entropy

fizzles away
I was wondering why we hadn't heard from Fizzles in the past few days

Has anyone read the Inkblot Record by Dan Farrell? Assuming poetry (or whatever it is) counts for this thread. I got a real kick out of it (and it will supply me with usernames forever)

MitHC -- the odd thing is the actual title content -- the author doesn't live in a castle anymore; isn't protecting himself against anyone; isn't that interesting when met at his cocktail party (though he does, I suppose, reveal that he wrote his book with the I Ching and it is suggested that its contents are true, so that is a kind of important revelation). Odd and, as NV perhaps says above, anti-climactic, but I can't tell how deliberate that would be or to what end.

I feel like there's perhaps a recurring theme in PKD wherein the grandiose, organized social structures of control that hem in and thwart his central characters are gradually revealed to be figments of personal dissolution and paranoia, hence the anti-climacticness.

Yeah, and sometimes it's both, like---well I guess any examples might be called spoilery nowadays. Anyway, the artist grappling with his own crackpot compulsions is one of my faves (several Dylan albums come to mind), and it's why I enjoyed PKD's Valis, for instance. Those who don't get Borges would def be among those who feel let down by The Man In The High Castle, also those expecting a man in a high castle (it's going to be a cable or Web series...?)

Thought that the artist grappling with his own crackpot compulsions (incl. things that might get him arrested again) was a motivation in The Idiot also: put this tirade in the mouth of one character, that brainstorm in the head of another. Also The Brothers Karamazov, but there it's with some implicit humor x cynicism, giving the audience the expected fireworks, in a still-dazzling way (no complaints).

Also, PKD was sometimes on the catfood-and-speed diet, writing "paperback originals" for flat fees or very slow, low royalties----eventually recounted having freaked out from stress, ending up in state facility, treated, somewhat soothed and released, then presented with a large bill, raising the stress level again. Other times, even when he was relatively flush, might for instance incl. having a dream revolving around a wonderful device, waking to detail it, research, take his notes to a consulting engineer who concluded that it would indeed be wonderful, if somebody first invented a part that would do x and another for y. So PKD was out for textbooks, consultant's fees, time spent away from fiction-writing, other things.

Haven't read all the canonical novels or recent PKD posts in this thread, will just say certain of his books seems to resonate more with me, in particular Time Out of Joint and A Scanner Darkly. The first for being the PKD paranoid version/inversion of the Nerdy Everyman Saves The World trope, the second for a genuine deep feeling of sadness and brokenness.

Those who don't get Borges would def be among those who feel let down by The Man In The High Castle, also those expecting a man in a high castle (it's going to be a cable or Web series...?)

i already said i actually like people to subvert the standard heroic ending, but the actual writing in the book dwindles along with the plot. the characters are pretty awful throughout and the ending isn't even true to the foundations of those people.

like it's not like this is some incredible deep work and i was sat there eating popcorn waiting for ninjas to come and smash up the nazi regime - it's a p cheesy book apart from its clever and well-executed premise.

For a genre-busting sui-generous cranker outer of paperback originals where you could smell the potent blend of flop sweat, cigarette odor, ink and glue, he was not nearly the stylist that, say, Jim Thompson was.

I think his style is pretty good on the whole, given the biographical details

yeah i am not trying to slate him - i liked mithc. i guess just find it ridiculous that criticising a popular sci-fi author would equate to some sort of luddite anti-art stance.

hey no argument here

is mithc compared to 1984?

( fwiw was not responding to lg, just x post to self)

ditto for the most part, except that, for me, its clever and well-executed premise overcomes the cheese. His style, in novels especially, is like that old stoner in Carver's "Cathederal" who just seems like a mumblin' rando at first, but gradually reels the listener in. Although I like PKD better than Carver's guy.

Or it *can* be like that, not always, but he requires patience while the story emerges from the grey plodding (in the case of his weaker books, can be like he just started typing, because the meter's running--but could be that Thompson gets more out of this; I haven't read much of him).

Also agree w this, although guess it's mostly about first part
I'm now reading The Man In The High Castle - pretty cleverly done, so overtly post-modern, makes you think about accepted belief systems. Really cool to see one of the Japanese characters asking the American to explain Ms Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West - don't think I've ever seen a shoutout like this, and I just read the latter a few months ago.

― Junior Dictionary (LocalGarda), Monday, March 16, 2015 5:52 AM (4 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Man in the High Castle is the only Dick I've read, and it's been a few years, so I don't remember it that well, but I share the sense of being kind of underwhelmed by the style (or lack thereof), thinking the alternative history premise not terribly original, and not getting at all the ending. I guess I was expecting something a bit more gonzo, rather than the kind of pulpy cardboard prose.

Currently reading: Deborah Eisenberg's third collection, All Around Atlantis. Feel like she's starting to hit her stride again after the somewhat uneven 2nd collection.

I spent most of two summers ago reading Eisenberg's big collection. She's a minor master, I think. I love her rhythms.

Just finished: Raziel Reid, When Everything Feels Like the Movies
Just starting: Colm Toibin, Nora Webster

Loved Deborah Eisenberg's Twilight of the Superheroes, too. I didn't know about All Around Atlantis--I had The Stories So Far and Superheroes, no idea there was a volume in between. And of course it's OOP

Finally got around to reading 'Lee, Myself and I', which I'm enjoying more than I thought it would. I think I was put off because I wanted a full bio, but this is nice.

I enjoyed The Man In The High Castle when I read it a couple of years ago. I cant remember the ending though! i know it didnt piss me off anyway

has anyone read nightwalking: a nocturnal history of london, by matthew beaumont? i read a longread extract from it a few weeks ago, reminded of it as my copy arrived this week. really interesting history of people on the london streets at night.

the extract is here: http://blog.longreads.com/2015/06/29/vagabonds-crafty-bauds-and-the-loyal-huzza-a-history-of-london-at-night/

i love longreads generally but i found this one in particular was enthralling.

I spent most of two summers ago reading Eisenberg's big collection. She's a minor master, I think. I love her rhythms.

Yeah, that's the one I'm slowly working through - the big book of all 4 collections. I took a longish break after the first 2. "Minor master" sounds about right, or "minor-key master". There's a current of sadness that runs through her work, though not in a lugubrious way. She has an unsentimental way of portraying people who are making bad choices, in unhealthy relationships, or just generally failing at life.

man, i remember almost nothing of the one eisenberg thing i read -- do you think she got the title from alan moore or arrived at it independently?

Surely from Moore

Han Kang: The Vegetarian - a Novel. What it says, about a Korean woman who gives up meat -- the precise reason as to why this happens is knocked off as a dream that is never explained. Mostly because anyone around her isn't interested. This takes a detour or three, becoming a really brutal experience by the end.

On the one hand, Kang doesn't try to explain her - you'd think that would make your imagination take flight but its just as likely you'd be dismissive of the main character as an asexual simpleton who cannot be in anyway thought about very much, she is so far from most people - as its made clear when she is viewed from three points. There are a couple of great scenes where she ends making an 'art' piece - and funnier if you know of Yayoi Kusama's work.

I wouldn't even put MitHC in a top 10 PKD list. It's middling work at best, enlivened primarily by the I Ching device and the weird sense of dislocation conveyed in certain sequences. Characters, plotting, and prose, however, are alternate between being slapdash and workmanlike. I am not really sure why it won the Hugo, a process which is certainly as political as it is meretricious, but doubtless the award helped to burnish his reputation and keep the book in print, which meant it inevitably became one of his more widely read books. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? achieved similar ubiquity due to Bladerunner, but that one isn't a particularly outstanding entry in his oeuvre either.

That being said, I am a huge PKD fan and I do think he had an engaging prose style and a capacity to be genuinely moving, surprising, and confounding, sometimes all at once. A Scanner Darkly is a good example of this, where the empathy for the characters really shines through, even when the plot takes extensive detours through drug-babble territory and paranoid conspiracy theories. And he could be very, very funny. Constantly aware of the literary backwater he was toiling under, he gleefully used and abused sci-fi tropes, making up ridiculous words and concepts as a wink-wink way of acknowledging their silliness - and then abruptly inverting his treatment of them by making them central to the emotional or intellectual core of the story. Oh the tragedies of the lowly wub-fur importer, for ex. Or the Denebian slime mold who exhibits more human empathy and spiritual understanding than any of his human neighbors in his conapt. I would say if you're going to dip into PKD's work, don't start with the most famous ones, they aren't famous for the right reasons.

I finished the abridgement of Outlaws of the Marsh, China's answer to the Robin Hood folk lore. I can see many elements in it that got taken up by martial arts movies. Some day I should poll the nicknames of the characters, such as Timely Rain and Ten Feet of Steel, but to be honest I've had a similar urge to poll the names of characters in various Icelandic sagas, too, and have never yet done the work of compiling them, so precedent is not on my side.

I'll be setting out in a couple of days on a lengthy hiking/camping trip (9 days). I'll be equipped with about 6 or 7 titles at my disposal for my evening's entertainment, all fairly short, so I shall probably have a variety of comments to make on my return.

ootis is v accurate on pkd, i think

i am tempted, momentarily, to start an old-ILE style s&d pkd thread

have a fun trip aimes

thanks. almost certainly they'll be some of the most fun days of my year.

yes, likewise - have a lovely trip.

The Faber Book of 20th Century Italian Poems ed. Jamie McKendrick

Maybe more in the poetry thread, but a lot of these didn't really get their hooks into me. I may not be sensitive enough to subtleties, and translation - linguistic and cultural - can be a problem obv, but I thought I detected in more than one poet a hackneyed sentimentality, often wound in with nature and childhood. Some of them didn't seem that far removed from O Sole Mio in some respects. Montale is clearly a mark above many of the others. Ungaretti's poems of belonging, not-belonging and death are very good. And having just had a flick though, I'm seeing a number that I haven't read that on a quick eye-scan seem interesting, so maybe I should hold fire.

Malcolm is a Little Unwell - Malcolm Brabant. Short memoir of the BBC journalist who a few years ago went into a three-year psychotic spiral precipitated by a yellow fever jab. The title is what Brabant's Danish wife would say to people after he'd go on Facebook proclaiming he was the Messiah or the Devil, or get in touch with his highly-positioned contacts at the IMF or in the Greek government to explain the same. It's horrific and bleakly funny at the same time.

On one of the early days in Sinouri [a Greek mental institution], I shed the mantle of Joseph or Jesus and assumed the personality of Winston Churchill .. My wife struggled to get me to go into the spacious garden at the back of the clinic. I insisted on walking in bare feet .. Once outside in the fresh air I was, in Trine's estimation, "out of it, but fairly calm". I started talking about the Second World War, Montgomery's forces in North Africa, and the bravery of the Desert Rats.

"There was no head nor tail to it. I took your hand like a little child and walked around the garden. I was trying to distract you. You suddenly let go of my hand and started strutting. Then I saw you miming, as if you were smoking something. I ran after you and got you to the bench under the big tree. I think you were puffing on a cigar in your imagination."

Some .. fire-fighting planes came over the garden. I stood up and pulled Trine up from the bench. I saluted and commanded her to follow suit. "So I saluted the fire-fighting planes. You had completely lost it. You talked about them being the best boys. You did the V for Victory sign as you started strutting round manically." At that point Trine tried to get me back to the ward. I started to talk.

"I can promise you nothing but blood, sweat and tears," I said. "This is a crucial time for the Battle of Britain."

Trine managed to manhandle me back to the entrace to the clinic. But the nurses took forever to come and let us in. Just as we reached the door, I succeeded in breaking away. "You sprinted away from me. You ran around the garden and as you did so you began to take your clothes off. First the shirt, then the boxers and shorts and you ran stark naked. I was running after you to say 'put some clothes on'. You were running really fast in your birthday suit and doing the V for victory sign. I caught up and tried to put your shirt on."

I kept on ranting in a deep Churchillian voice, "We all have to make sacrifices."

It's also fairly repetitive - psychosis is not interesting apart from a rather awful 'Christ, how much worse can this get?' curiosity - and at times you detect that the prose isn't entirely stable either. He's lapsed several times, back into madness (though recent episodes have been less severe) and it's curious to see someone writing their memoirs with a stick in the sands of the shore on which they've just washed up.

As something that expresses the precariousness of the mental constructs and chemical balances that enable us to function within society it's both effective and alarming.

Æmilia Lanyer's poem The Description of Cooke-ham in The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse - the excellent Topographies section. Ben Jonson's To Penshurst is often seen as the first Country House or Estate poem, but this is the first one - at least that I know of. Given the transactional nature of poetry in the period, with it not necessarily being a thing that is published, but a part of cultural exchange and communication between individuals I'd be surprised if there weren't things like this before, even if only in part. Although I've read it before, I was particularly interested in it again - country house poems are not it should be said generally the most thrilling thing - to read it in light of it being by a woman. This sort of poem, for anyone who doesn't know, isn't really just about country houses, but about the shaping of raw nature into something like an eden, with both biblical and classical emphasis - however, an awful lot of them are explicitly and implicitly about Man shaping Nature-characterised-as-female. The estate stands as a metonymic signifier of the Lord of the estate. It is an imposition of order to bring about fruitfulness.

I'm not sure Lanyer's poem can really be construed as a counterblast to that, but does lack some of the more forceful expressions of it elsewhere - crucially it's to a woman as well - Lady Anne Clifford. It's not an amazing poem, but it is very appealing - the poet is remembering how productive she was at Cookham (the book of poetry to which this is the capstone was written there) - again, edenic fruitfulness, natural bounty, is part of the estate poem.

There is still the idea of Nature willingly giving up to authority, but as it's to a woman, the expression is subtly different:

Oh how me thought each plant, each floure, each tree
Set forth their beauties then to welcome thee!
The very Hills right humbly did descend,
When you to tread upon them did intend.

You can see it more clearly with the oak, characterised as male:

That Oake that did in height his fellowes passe,
As much as lofty trees, low growing grasse:
Much like a comely Cedar streight and tall,
Whose beauteous stature farre exceeded all:
How often did you visite this faire tree,
Which seeming joyfull in receiving thee,
Would like a Palme tree spread his armes abroad,
Desirous that you there should make abode:

This is not a forceful imposition, but a passive welcome.

It is a poem about youth and station as well, since leaving Cookham, she has fallen in station and fortune, so she can no longer naturally (that word again - this time as social constraint) spend time with Lady Anne:

Oh what delight did my weake spirits find
In those pure parts of her well framed mind:

And yet it grieves me that I cannot be
Neere unto her, whose virtues did agree
With those faire ornaments of outward beauty,
which did enforce from all both love and dutie.
Unconstant Fortune, thou art most to blame,
Who casts us downe into lowe a frame:
Where our great friends we cannot dayly see,
So great a diffrence is there in degree.

Towards a Kenotic Vision of Authority in the Catholic Church A selection of essays tracing the history of Kenotic thought in the Catholic Church, and also the derivation and justification of authority in the Church via the Magisterium and the Papacy, explicitly as a response to child abuse. What authority can the church claim in those circumstances - the suggestion being that it can only be through a form of institutional kenosis through understanding's Christ's.

Apologies for the colossal size of this post. At work, but waiting for something to happen. Thought I might as well make use of it.

i think oots, LG and others are probably otm about PKD - TMITHC and DADOES? are not my favourites. but there is a special dreamlike quality to TMITHC, provided by its elements (iching, TMITHC as an image), its dislocation and a sense of global space, that i think makes it distinct in PKD's works.

and whoever it was upthread (NV?) who said PKD's obsession with disintegration creates a similar disintegration in his novels was otm. everything turns to kibble eventually.

also, urgent need to churn stuff out in his freezing beach shack prob was more suited to stories as well.

the eye in the sky particularly comically abbreviated.