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

Imagery and cadence reminds me of at least one Dave Van Ronk song--which comes from a different perspective, and I prefer its original performance on No Dirty Names (available on spotify and iTunes), but still the voice of experience:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylEkfn42hao

Good old Flash--if this doesn't show, it's "Zen Koans Gonna Rise Again," on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylEkfn42hao

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylEkfn42hao

Sorry! The latest Firefox---no, it's my fault.

Speaking of books about lost worlds, I've always loved Geoffrey Stokes' Star Making Machinery, about a time, when emerging mass bohemia x discretionary income, in the wake of Janis Joplin's farewell vision of "Me and Bobby McGhee"---discreetly changed from "Bobbie"; all things were not yet possible---but still a time when conservatives and hippies could come together and make superstars of Commmander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, with a little help from their friends in the studio, the press-publicity meld, their warped label, and lawyers, lawyers, lawyers---o it got heavy, but Stokes' humane, lucid, unsentimental sense of justice and absurdity never slips into Behind The Music soap opera.
And the press junkets! For sub-Grub Streeters, making maybe 10 bucks for 1000 words, in some cases (and 10 bucks for 1000 words was still 10 bucks for 1000 words, even way back then, lemmetellya). From Flushing to Frisco, even. "And hey, doesn't your sister live out there? If you wanna stay a few days into next week, that'd be cool too."

(Spoiler: making superstars of Cody's crew seemed possible, to some...)

Wuthering Heights

(first time)

i read wuthering heights for the first time over a three-month period as part of my english lit a level and still have not recovered

It's been a good summer for getting grounded in the Archaean and Proterozoic:

Robert M. Hazen - The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet (2014)
Paul G. Falkowski - Life’s Engines: How Microbes made Earth Habitable (2015)
Nick Lane - The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life (2015)

The Hazen is the most readable, I've learned most from the first 4 chapters of the Lane. Up next is: Gerard Russell - Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East (2014). I feel I haven't paid proper reverence to Ahura Mazda and Abatur of late.

I finished Mark Lilla's The Stillborn God. It takes up an interesting problem, but it seems a bit unsure about what level to pitch itself at. It seems perhaps like someone trying to write for a more generalist audience than they're used to, and not sure how to be less technical without dumbing things down. Also I didn't always feel comfortable with the way Lilla paraphrased the arguments & ideas of the authors he wrote about. I could understand how they fit into the story he was trying to tell, but I wasn't sure that I understood what they would have understood themselves to be saying. Also, I think I just see the interplay of theology and politics a bit differently than he does. His sweeping talk about the "Great Separation" annoyed me as much as it annoyed some people on the Immanent Frame blog. I'm tempted to say the discussion of the book there is better than the book itself.

reading eileen gunn's first collection. she is a hoot. i need her 2014 collection. might have to buy that online.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41y13CJKkML._SX303_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

some of the 2nd collection is readable online:

http://questionablepractices.net/stories/

her steampunk parodies are fun: http://www.tor.com/2010/11/01/the-perdido-street-project/

I'm most of the way through Roumeli now. The book's biggest fault is his overreaching prose, which seems to equate an exceptional style with an excellent style, but the substance of the book is well worth it. The events, places and people he describes are pretty awesome to read about.

noted this on facebook: in eileen gunn's 1991 story Fellow Americans, about an alternate history Richard Nixon, she totally uses the word "futurama".

Futurama was a ride at the 1939 World's Fair.

AHA! in this story there is a 1990 world's fair. that governor of new york bobby kennedy visits...

huh I remember reading that Gunn book when it came out - it's okay, I think I got rid of it...?

i like it. her.

reading Jane Gardam's A Long Way From Verona and enjoying it a lot. her first book and it's considered a children's book, but i can't imagine any child reading it here. i did have Rufus read the first chapter aloud this morning though. just to hear how it sounded coming from a child.

now i want to find some more of her books. she wrote 25 books after this one! she was in her 40's when she wrote Verona. let's hear it for the late bloomers. (lots of story collections too. i definitely want to find those. probably not that easy. don't think she has really made a name for herself here.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Gardam

"Gardam gave up work to raise three children—Tim, Kitty, and Tom—in what she has called a “monster of a beat-up house” in the London suburb of Wimbledon. She channelled her creativity into becoming the ideal mother. “I gave myself to my children,” she said, pouring white wine. “It happens to some women.” She invited the neighborhood busybodies to tea. She fed the hordes. “I did all the right things, because I wanted my children to have friends,” she said. The day that Tom went to school, she marched upstairs, sat down at her desk, and began to write. “I ought to tell you at the beginning,” the opening line of her first novel reads, “that I am not quite normal.”

pieces on her in the NYT and the New Yorker last year, so, maybe her time will come in the states. at the age of 85.

I'm finishing Up is Up But So is Down, which I mentioned upthread. For the most part, it's been filling in my sense of the downtown scene (through its breadth of contributors, but also through Stosuy's inclusion of downtown fliers and zine art, which give a vivid idea of the connections between the writing scene and the artworld) rather than radically revising it: I was probably most struck by the texts by Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, Sarah Schulman, and David Wojnarowicz, but I already loved their work. The main discoveries of the anthology for me were probably Tim Dlugos's long AIDS elegy "G-9" and, to a lesser extent, Patrick McGrath's Wilde/Huysmans riff "The Angel", and the anthology reminds me to look more closely at Cookie Mueller and Penny Arcade's writing in particular. I also got the sense that I probably don't need to engage much further with Joe Maynard (who seems to have fallen off the map, anyway), Nick Zedd, or Richard Prince, at least as prose writers, since they don't have much more to offer here than ~edgy~ misogyny and a kind of abstract stab at transgression. I also have to say that the anthology makes the downtown writing scene, aside from the Nuyorican Poets' contributions, seem pretty white-centered: I'm curious to know to what extent that reflects the historical dynamics of the scene and to what extent that impression arises from the anthology's editorial choices.

All I've read of Jane Gardam has been great--haven't read anything she's done for years, though

Ursula K Le Guin: The Wind's Twelve Quarters -- early story collection. not everything in here is doing it for me, but the ones that do are amazing (esp. the one about Winter, later setting of Left Hand of Darkness)

Started The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan, put it down 60 pages in - didn't get appeal of superhero don juan main character, not sure what parts of the plot are not terribly cliche, prose seemed p old school too, didn't enjoy random poetry references (actually I rarely enjoy main characters who think about literature all the time, it gets a bit meta icky for me - like, it's not very believable that all these main characters care so much for lit, writer is just projecting stuff)

Now reading The edge of Europe by Pentti Saarikoski which is a g r e a t read so far, strong poetic energy, lots of non sequituring stream of consciousness thoughts from cats to Stalin, I dunno what to say, unlike most stuff I've ever come across - reading a Danish translation

xxxpost

I forgot about Cookie Mueller, her autobiographical pieces in the East Village Eye and elsewhere were heartfelt and often hilarious. I just finished Brad Gooch's memoir of the period, Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the 70s and the 80s. Reading his account of the tragic, tortuous and all too typical decline and death due to AIDS of his partner Howard Brookner was so vivid and moving I'm at a rare loss for words.

It's been a while,mbut i remember keith haring's autobiography being good in that vein. Never liked his art at all, but he lived in an interesting time and place and mileu

"All I've read of Jane Gardam has been great--haven't read anything she's done for years, though"

i naturally thought of you as the person here who had probably read her stuff. maybe the recent u.s. press will get some sort of stateside reissue series going.

(and her publisher is little, brown in the u.k. so it wouldn't be hard for them to reprint stuff for the u.s.)

enjoying calvin trillin 'travels w/ alice' rn, its v charming

I forgot about Cookie Mueller, her autobiographical pieces in the East Village Eye and elsewhere were heartfelt and often hilarious. I just finished Brad Gooch's memoir of the period, Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the 70s and the 80s. Reading his account of the tragic, tortuous and all too typical decline and death due to AIDS of his partner Howard Brookner was so vivid and moving I'm at a rare loss for words.
― got the club going UP on a tuesday (m coleman), Wednesday, September 2, 2015 5:44 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'll look at Gooch's memoir sometime, m coleman: I like his piece in Up is Up, "TV," and I remember his O'Hara biography as being solid, but I don't think I've read anything by him that sounds as intense as that.

Got three xpost Gardams from the library shop: Old Filth, The People On Privilege Hill, and The Queen of The Tambourine---read any of those, James M? They're trade PBs, from Europa Editions, Ferrante's US publisher. Gave Old Filth to my aunt, haven't heard back about it. Haven't read any yet myself.

I haven't read those, though everyone who has seems to think the Old Filth books are the culmination of her career, for what it's worth. All the ones I've read are tatty old second-hand Abacus paperbacks from the 1980s I got when I worked next door to a used bookshop.

i got purity today and started reading that too

my condolences

orson-welles-clap.gif

By chance I just happened to read Wolf in White Van close on the heels of Steppenwolf. Open for suggestions on how to continue this accidental series of transcendental lupine outcast literature.

wolf hall, i suppose

I believe you have sworn off that one Damon Knight protégé so...

I believe you have sworn off that one Damon Knight protégé so...

Well the title is the most dispensable part of the connection. I suppose one shouldn't try to force these things, anyway.

Speculative searches lead towards Musil, maybe it's time.

Naomi Wolf's "Vagina" also suggested.

Werewolf Problem in Central Russia by v. Pelevin

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/4177pt2OTEL._SX339_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I am reading Jessica Mitford's memoir, Hons and Rebels. It promises to be quite strange and enthralling.

wolf solent for the win!

Wolf In White Van is astonishing.

Using that particular word in partial tribute to ancient, dust-dust-of-far-suns pulp fuel for the narrator, the author, and this reader.

Only one "dust" intended, though.

Wolf of Wall Street is my bus book at the moment. Pretty trashy.