The Decline and Fall 2016 of gILBert the fILBert: What Are You Reading Now?

Yeah, been curious about that

reread we & now reading zamyatin's short stories for what must be the 3rd time.

The Dragon collection? That's good stuff.

Looking online for cover of the old Penguin ed of The Dragon I have http://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9780140037852-uk-300.jpg, I came across this weird We cover http://thumbs.ebaystatic.com/images/g/QdAAAOSw~oFXKuWM/s-l225.jpg, which makes it look a bit like a scifi sex comedy.

yep, the penguin as above. first read it quite sometime before finding a copy of we, which after the stories was somewhat underwhelming. decided to revisit after the khlebnikov collection as was wondering if zamyatin was maybe responding to some of khlebnikov's visions of the future (including glass dwellings/flying transportation!) and time/space theories (confusing as they are).

now need to find a copy of zamyatin's satire of england which i didn't know had been translated!

How'd you like the Moore?

― rhymes with "blondie blast" (cryptosicko),

I loved it.

now need to find a copy of zamyatin's satire of england which i didn't know had been translated!

I didn't even know this existed!

finishing up the time of illusion. this is the best book i've ever read about... what? the nixon administration? vietnam-era foreign policy? power? hell? idk.

i've never picked up anything else by schell but that book sticks in my mind. can't quite describe the tone, but it feels so different from anything else i've read about politics.

something like nixonland works hard to vividly recreate the feeling of living through the period, but its "thesis", not that this is everything, is pretty basic: the southern strategy created the political world we live in now (obvious); the national mood that accompanied the southern strategy created the culture we live in now (works fine).

schell book on the other hand looks modest -- just one more analysis of the usual documents -- but is audacious. starts as a lucid, dry book of political analysis -- mostly just quotes from speeches -- and step by well-reasoned step passes into metaphysics. by the time you get to the description of nixon at his fanatically stage-managed convention, every applause line and cheer scripted and timed, standing at the center of this three-dimensional projection of mass praise for a projection of a president, unable to actually deliver a speech or a presence worthy of the projection -- The image had eclipsed its object. The script had swallowed up its author. -- you are basically reading a horror story. a horror-comedy tho: at one point the watergate coverup/investigation is described as the spectacle of a man following his own footsteps in circles while taking care never to discover where they lead. and then this paragraph which i am amazed felt earned:

The Nixon men used the language of the theatre--"scenario," "script," "players," "orchestration"--to describe the way they ran the country, but perhaps the most apt analogy would be to the state of dreaming... A waking person confronts a world that is given, but a dreamer confronts a world that is of his own creation. He is the author not only of his own actions but of the world in which he acts. In him are united subject and object. It is he who arranges to be attacked from behind and he who jumps in surprise. The beast that chases after and the "I" who runs away are the products of a single mind. President Nixon, using the great powers of his office, organized his waking life on the same principle... The President was becoming the author of his own environment. He manufactured events and then he "responded" to them. He invented enemies and then he went to war against them. He gave the speeches and then he applauded them. He threw the rocks and then he ducked. He invented crises and then he made "great decisions" to resolve them. As for the rest of us, it became our fate to live for half a decade inside the head of a waking dreamer.

A+ would trip again. made me wonder if the best nixon movie is 2001.

(was also impressed that the psychological analysis is not just of nixon but of cold war thinking, which it portrays nixon's sickness as an expression of even as the early-70s version of cold war thinking becomes an expression of nixon's sickness. so eerie and satisfying.)

(like a well-argued adam curtis. if you can imagine such a thing.)

If we had waited a bit to roll this thread it could have had a whole different title.

I've waded into the dark waters of Caro's fourth LBJ volume, Passage of Power. Thus far, the most interesting pieces are his descriptions of John and Bobby Kennedy, pre-1960 campaign.

Southern Strategy was also taking back the country, via the contingent of Southern Democrats, descendants of those who came to commerical etc turf agreements with Repubs as Renconstruction was halted/rolled back---re Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Some Southern Dem voters (also some Mayor Dailey Democrates and others) were there to be welcomed and nurtured as they fled alliance w post-New Deal Dems after Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights,crossing over in '66 midterms. Yadda yadda Trump as Repubs' Frankenstein monster, this election as slo-mo version of '68 Dem Convention, bad publicity-wise.
Schell quote reminds me of Forbidden Planet(1956), where ideal spectacle generated by the Mercutio figure's rational process is eventually undermined by creatures from his depths (spoiler).

Has anyone read Cortazar's Hopscotch? After four years of postponing, I've decided to give it a go. It's fun and anticipates much of the literary experimentation running through the rest of the 60s/70s. Interestingly contemporaneous with Nabokov's Pale Fire. Both weirder and more fun than I expected so far.

Reads better in Spanish imo. Not that I've ever finished it, mind you.

finishing up the time of illusion. this is the best book i've ever read about... what? the nixon administration? vietnam-era foreign policy? power? hell? idk.

I read it at clemenza's recommendation several years ago and loved it. I appreciate its contemporaneity -- what good reporters knew the Nixon administration was already doing before Pentagon Papers + Watergate that made it risible.

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neill

I appreciate its contemporaneity -- what good reporters knew the Nixon administration was already doing before Pentagon Papers + Watergate that made it risible.

yes -- the realization that you don't actually need much beyond the early-70s public record (tho the book has certainly absorbed the pentagon papers and the early tape disclosures) to make a clear argument that nuclear strategy brought 1) the u.s. to the as-they-say "brink" of dictatorship; and in downright literary analogy 2) richard nixon to the brink of madness

Until [the Watergate investigation] intruded, the President lived in a closed world in which he rarely had any experiences he had not arranged for himself. As in a dream, some of these experiences were pleasant and some were gratifying and some were frightening. What he could not endure were unplanned experiences that came from without, and it was these that his television set brought before his eyes.

Had he remained in power much longer, he would surely have put an end to such disruptions once and for all. Then no unexpected sights would have offended his gaze... His communion with himself would have continued uninterrupted, and the world he saw would have become co-extensive with his thought processes. There would have been only the sound of the programmed enemies and the sound of the surrogates praising him in words of his own devising. And, at the center, a perfect closed circle, in which he talked to his tapes and his tapes talked to him.

since i'm on something of an early soviet lit kick, decided to finally start on the complete isaac babel (this may take a while)

finished the groucho and Me and One Way Out Allman Brothers Oral history so have moved onto couple of other things.
I got as far as page 558 of Wolf Hall before mislaying the book and getting into something else so will finish that and possibly read Bring Out The Bodies to follow it up.

Want to read that Gangleader For A day book by the iNdian sociologist who has a chapter in Freakonomics. It's about his time spent with the Chicago gang the Black kings.

wish I could osmose through a pile of books that I've been accumulating. Keep picking things up in charity shops thinking they look fascinating and then getting into other things.But don't want to miss things either.

xpost The Selling of The President 1968 is another Nixonlandmark---from the Associated Press obit for Joe: McGinniss:

McGinniss was a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1968 when an advertising man told him he was joining Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign. Intrigued that candidates had advertising teams, McGinniss was inspired to write a book and tried to get access to Humphrey.

The Democrat turned him down, but, according to McGinniss, Nixon aide Leonard Garment allowed him in, one of the last times the ever-suspicious Nixon would permit a journalist so much time around him. Garment and other Nixon aides were apparently unaware, or unconcerned, that McGinniss’s heart was very much with the anti-war agitators the candidate so despised.

The Republican’s victory that fall capped a once-unthinkable comeback for the former vice president, who had declared six years earlier that he was through with politics. Having lost the 1960 election in part because of his pale, sweaty appearance during his first debate with John F. Kennedy and aware of his reputation as a partisan willing to play dirty, Nixon had restricted his public outings and presented himself as a new and more mature candidate.

McGinniss was far from the only writer to notice Nixon’s reinvention, but few offered such raw and unflattering details. “The Selling of the President” was a sneering rebuttal to Theodore H. White’s stately “Making of the President” campaign books. It revealed Nixon aides, including a young Roger Ailes, disparaging vice presidential candidate Spiro Agnew; drafting memos on how to fix Nixon’s “cold” image; and debating which black man — only one would be permitted — was right for participating in a televised panel discussion.

“If White was the voice of the liberal consensus, with its sonorous even-keeled wisdom, McGinniss was an emissary from the New Journalism, with his countercultural accents, youthful iconoclasm, and nonchalant willingness to bare his left-leaning political views,” historian David Greenberg wrote in “Nixon’s Shadow,” published in 2003. “McGinniss sneaked in under the radar screen, presenting himself to Nixon’s men as such an insignificant fly on the wall that they never thought to swat him away.”

“The Selling of the President” was published in 1969, spent months on The New York Times’ best-seller list and made McGinniss an eager media star.

Big cortazar fan over here - hopscotch is good fun and really feels like a mid-60s Dylan mise-en-scene to me (been awhile since i read it, maybe it was just all the bohemians sitting around drinking wine/mate and having melodramatic arguments). I prefer his short story collections and poetry though, something about brevity brings out the best in his writing.

Xxp

Yeah, I prefer the short stories as well.

Am interested to read one of these extensively researched novels about the settlement of Texas by Paulette Jiles.

In the Woods, Tana French. So far, an involving crime procedural slash character study with lots of tactile detail and jokes.

started A Month in the Country today

As in the old joke, "last week I spent a month in the country"?

Jiles wrote an SF novel which looked interesting, bur i have not read it yet: Lighthouse Island.

She's apparently a huge Jack Vance fan.

Cool, thanks Οὖτις, I'll have to check out the stories - I knew he wrote Blow-Up, but aside from that have no idea what the rest of his work is like. 1/4 into Hopscotch, I can see how the constraints of a short story/poem would be a good thing.

My fave short story of his us probably Axolotl (sp?). Fave collections are Cronopios et Famas and Around the Day in 80 Worlds. As far as poetry goes Save Twilight is excellent. He also did some comic book in the 70s that i would v much like to read an english translation of, i forget the title.

He was IN a comic in the 70s, unauthorised, an experience which he turned into this: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/fantomas-versus-multinational-vampires

Did not know he had written them too

"Axolotl" is a good one. The main English collection which is called something like Blow Up and Other Stories is full of good stories. I like the Spanish collections Bestiario, Las Armas Secretas and Ceremonias. I guess the last one is just a combination of the first two. He has a great story about Charlie Parker called "The Pursuer," told by a clueless music critic narrator.

Much as I like his short stories, I've never actually made it through a single one of his novels.

i think i even read hopscotch both ways? possibly?

yet all i remember is mate

I read that first as the English word "mate" and not the Spanish word for the herb beloved by the Argentines. /bilingual puns that you had missed

every story in the Blow-Up short story collection, er, blew my mind. my favourite was the one about the family that live in a big house with a tiger. also the newest edition is very pretty imo
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/612R7sXddlL.jpg

it's only a hundred and some pages so i'm trying to savour every page of A Month In The Country as long as possible. such a dream

ah yes sorry James yes the Fantomas thing is what I was thinking of

The Cortázar story you are referring to is Casa Tomada/House Taken Over and yes, it's a good one. Think the English collection is comprised of the collections I mentioned already plus those from Final del Fuego.

Truth be told, I know he is the poster boy of Boom translators, but Gregory Rabassa's work leaves me kind of cold and I don't have the skill and stamina to read a long novel in Spanish. Maybe I should look for which Cortázar novels were translated by Paul Blackburn and read one of those.

Cool, thanks all! Will seek out the Blow-Up collection, perhaps after finishing Hopscotch. I'm enjoying it - all of the jazz is a pleasant surprise (apparently Cortazar played trumpet himself), although the Latin-Franco machismo and La Maga as a manic-pixie-dreamgirl avant la lettre grates a bit (I guess it could be read parodically? but that seems quite charitable. . .)

I do wish my Spanish were good enough to read in the OG. Maybe one day.

Every time I read Balzac I wonder why we read Dickens.

You and Joyce.

That reminds me, I need to read more Balzac. I enjoyed the two I've read: "Cousin Bette" and "Pere Goriot". I've yet to read any Dickens novels. I started "Bleak House" once.

I recently finished Nicholson Baker's "Vox". A pretty fun, smutty and occasionally sexy novel. Of course the concept of a phone sex chat line is very dated, but in some ways it seems ahead of its time - Internet, mainstreaming of porn, yadda yadda.

I finished Franco Moretti, THE BOURGEOIS

then Muriel Spark, THE DRIVER'S SEAT

Flann O'Brien - The Best of Myles

That reminds me, I need to read more Balzac. I enjoyed the two I've read: "Cousin Bette" and "Pere Goriot". I've yet to read any Dickens novels. I started "Bleak House" once.

― o. nate

I'm reading Cousin Pons and laughing almost every page.