And The Snow Fell Softly On ILB: What Are You Reading Now Winter 2017/18

Interesting.

First became aware of Otis Ferguson as a film critic and then as a sort of hipster mentor to some famous literary critic, Alfred Kazin, I think

He was constantly quoted by Leslie Halliwell, iirc

That's nice, Fizzles! *looks at Lanchester thread* sorry you are reading crap now.

I am ending the year on a couple of memoirs. First up is Simone De Beauvoir's Force of Curcumstance (vol.3 of four), which starts as WWII ends - it ploughs through various intrigues, friendships and relationships and gives an account of the writing around The Second Sex. I started this in September, put it down, now a 1/3 in - reckon I'll finish although who knows when. Its a solid read whenever I pick it up. One of the things I find it amusing (to go back to o. nate's post around At the Existentialist Cafe) as a read on ppl who don't exactly matter to me. Malraux, Koestler, Leiris (whom I sorta want to read but don't think he will be good), Camus (who I think she calls on his bullshit, and is penetrating), Sartre too (can't quite work out how much leeway she is giving him, and how much she leaves out). Its very good on the anit-communist left (Beauvoir and Sartre could not exist within party structures), those old struggles that feel like coming back on the plate again in different forms. I am still thinking a lot of this through. In a similar vein I am finishing Franz Fuhmann's At The Burning Abyss: Experiencing the Georg Trakl Poem which is really good on its subject but also on his relation to it, as much as Nazism and Communism, which Fuhmann more than flirted with at various points - its never simply a confessional, both intellectual biography and crit are interwoven into each other in a way I haven't quite encountered before. I am really interested in reading Heiddeger's book on Holderlin (Fuhmann also draws on Holderlin, Rilke, Goethe and much else in German letters) at some point too - as someone who read and loved the same things as Fuhmann but did not apologise or turn back when those things got ugly.

Finally, Lazlo Krasznahorkai's War and War has those inflated sentences that anyone acuqinted with Germanic/Eastern Euro fiction would know well. Unfortunately I perceive a lack of control - an overabundance of description, taking 3-5 lines longer to say the thing just because you can, as flatly - whereas someone like Thomas Bernhard never feels this superfluous. Here its just not v cutting or funny, there isn't a lot to say and he's saying it, but I don't have to read it, so I stopped it 20 pages from the end.

xp Parts of Ferguson's music writing are startlingly modern, especially some of his record reviews and the behind-the-scenes pieces based on working as a volunteer roadie for the Goodman band. He's also pretty funny about his frenemy John Hammond.

Ferguson's reviews of the first two volumes of Mencken's autobiography made me want to give those a try. He does a nice job of explaining why he still worships Mencken (hardly the flavor of the month in 1940) in spite of their diametrically-opposed politics.

Is The Second Sex the best place to start with Simone de Beauvoir?

Haven't read it, only a few of her novels - none of which stayed with me. These memoirs are v good. I'll probably read The Second Sex one day.

I don't have to read it, so I stopped it 20 pages from the end.

^ demonstrates the correct spirit!

Just noticed that Otis Ferguson is one of the subjects of a potentially interesting recent book that I have yet to read, David Bordwell’s The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Studies

Been about 30 years (or more?), but I got caught up in Man's Fate, the Modern Library edition--was impressed by his back-and-forth between b-movie drive and seemingly astute backstory takes on economic pressures (street and Big Finance) times political infighting/grandstanding and other. B-movie aspects, in fact all of it, might seem pretty dated now, some did then. Pretty striking to read during China's 80s transitions. Also got into Koestler's Darkness At Noon.

Haven't read Sartre's fiction, but seem to recall that A. Alvarez wrote that his novels could be compulsive reading, thrillers.

Happy 2018 ILB.

Is The Second Sex the best place to start with Simone de Beauvoir?

Also haven't read, but the excerpts/breakdowns I've read feel to me like most of her insights in that book have been followed up on and absorbed by those that followed sufficiently to now register as kinda obvious. Read the first volume of her memoirs though and that was great.

Sartre's WW2 trilogy of novels is very good, thrillerish and surprisingly humourous.

Been meaning to chime in here: At the Existentialist Cafe is very good. Sorry to prestige-drop, but I'm a struggling visiting professor with a focus in that area. It's definitely now the first thing I'd recommend for anyone interested in existentialism (primarily Sartre).

As for Sartre: After the classics Nausea and No Exit, the other highlight I'd recommend is the short-story of "Childhood of a Leader" (blegh to the film). The trilogy of novels is alright, but the third one was definitely the most interesting for me to get a perspective on Sartre's relationship to Marxism.

With regard to Beauvoir, The Second Sex is probably the best place to start, but it's quite helpful to have some background in existentialist/Sartrean terminology for portions of it. She herself gets into that terminology in the Ethics of Ambiguity, but I'd recommend some sort of shortish secondary literature (perhaps Steven Crowell's piece on Sartre in The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism). But yeah, The Second Sex is a long read, and I'd recommend skimming large chunks of it because (as noted above) so much of it is obvious now.

Finally, if you're interested in fiction, I'd easily say that Beauvoir is more consistently good. I'm still meaning to finish the memoirs, but the fiction is generally way more reliable and engaging. Sartre had a way of depicting short scenarios, but Beauvoir is generally much better at character studies and engaging writing.

Also, I'm curious about why one would think "Grand Hotel Abyss > The Existentialist Cafe". Just read the first full chapter, and it seemed like some navel-gazing to me.

Thanks for the comments

Probably my favourite Sartre is The Wall. I quite like to see the BBC adaptation of the Roads to Freedom tetralogy. I missed the screening at the BFI a few years ago.

She Came to Stay impressed me when I was twenty; I forced myself to finish The Mandarins. The best Sartre is The Words, maybe "The Wall."

I've been dipping into the Frankfurt School in recent months, so I was probably better prepared to enjoy Grand Hotel Abyss. The author has a definite, snarky point of view, but at least until the final chapters he remains in the background. At the Existentialist Cafe almost lost me in the first chapter for the opposite reason -- I found the author's enthusiasm excessive and the overt autobiography off-putting. I'm glad I persisted because she soon eases up on the hard sell and uses her personal story in a more restrained and constructive way for the rest of the book.

Both do a reasonably good job of delivering what I wanted, which was an overview of the relevant biographies and texts with some historical context and continuity. Both could have been longer. ATEC is better on biography, though it seems a little soft on Sartre's flirtations with Stalinism and is too dismissive of Camus. GHA is better on theory (or maybe those theories are just more interesting to me these days).

the anatomy of melancholy

is too dismissive of Camus

This is true. Book sides with Sartre and Beauvoir pretty explicitly throughout, but tbf few would do that nowadays so it's interesting.

Starting the year off with Dumas's The Three Musketeers. I'm gonna try to read heavily in French this year, and this is an easy and fun start.

I finished Moontrap. It was the weakest of the three Don Berry novels I read in 2017, but still good. Much of it was set within ten miles of my house. Now I am reading A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr and I like it very much so far.

hotel - joanna walsh.

i’ve been meaning to read vertigo by her for a while. a conversation about john lanchester’s characteristic uninterest in his description of a hotel room led to a friend recommending this.

good recommendation. i spend some time each year in hotels for one thing, and a book like this helps educate and tune your eye and experience.

i guess it is, as the series it belongs to categorises it, an “object study”, but it’s interleaved with her recovery from a break-up.

more and more i like this adjacent placing of emotional and abstract spaces.

i’m not sure abstract is the right word. i think i mean “abstract or material” (but with the implication that they are usually denuded of emotional content.

also on hotels, got up this morning and read some rosemary tonks, lent to me by someone who i very much love, but who for a number of reasons i can't be with, but who said this poem reminded her of us, and yes it does, exactly so, and so absolutely kills me. also selected by Philip Larkin for his Faber Book of 20th Century Poetry for those of you more prosaic or squeamish - it's a very Larkin poem. She's ace, tho obv i am partial:

Story of a Hotel Room

Thinking we were safe – insanity!
We went in to make love. All the same
Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom.
Then in the gloom....
... And who does not know that pair of shutters
With the awkward hook on them
All screeching whispers? Very well then, in the gloom
We set about acquiring one another
Urgently! But on a temporary basis
Only as guests – just as guests of one another's senses.

But idiots to feel so safe you hold back nothing
Because the bed of cold, electric linen
Happens to be illicit...
To make love as well as that is ruinous.
Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us
That without permanent intentions
You have absolutely no protection
– If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,
The concurring deep love of the heart
Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.

She disappeared after a series of mental, physical and spiritual traumas. She went after healing of various sorts, including various eastern religions, and acquired an incredible and incredibly valuable set of Asian religious sculptures, mainly on trust from people she knew.

after feeling she was haunted and cursed she smashed and burned them all. later to be found handing out bibles on speaker's corner. died 2014. early in life she had been very chic (and beautiful if the photos are to go by) and mixed in v artistic circles, although already she had been scarred by illness. after her various breakdowns, she was so crippled by fear of other people she often refused to talk to them, handing them notes instead.

however, just before she died, she felt the need for human company again, and was well known and liked in her local hotel in Eastbourne, and even started getting to know other Christians in tea shops and talked about perhaps attending some off their services.

Wow. Knew nothing of Tonks, and must now find more.

That is a weird sentence.

I finished A Month in the Country. It's a sweet little book, the sort of writing that is drawn from a deep well of memory, feeling and understanding that resides beneath the level of conscious thought. The emblematic elements are never crude, never forced into place, never schematic. They speak simply, quietly and lovingly.

I shudder to think of students being forced to write essays about this book for pedagogical purposes. Everything excellent about it happens in the spaces between the sentences, and the very young would have too little to bring into those spaces.

her mother’s maiden name was Verdi tho it’s unclear whether she was Giuseppe Verdi’s granddaughter as Rosemary liked to believe.

her father died before she was born. His first name was Desmond and it was in his memory that she was christened Rosemary Desmond Boswell Tonks.

She used the name Desmond Tonks for some of her novels. (haven’t read any)

(Tonks as in son - i think - of Henry Tonks at the Slade, attacked by Wyndham Lewis in BLAST!)

im reading this collected.

xpost to JM.

Excellent: thank you.

As I understand it Tonks disowned all of her prose work and refused permission to republish it. Consequently any prose work is now hard to find and expensive.

Thanks for your great post Fizzles, I'm def intrigued. The Bloodaxe book looks great.

Fizzles I'm reading vertigo at the moment! Really great, and exactly the kind of book I need at the moment - for its miniaturism (in both senses) and also because it suits my January state of mind; I had to shelve min kampy wamp for now, no shade necessarily I'm just not up for it right now. Vertigo you could read in a day, but I'm taking a lot longer.

that's good to hear wins. there's a sort of non-dogmatic voice that i'm really into at the moment. placing things side by side to let them talk. it's a clear voice, clear in its unwillingness to force things together into synthetic (in both senses) argument, so that things retain a sense of proportion and looseness. you do not have to find rules to apply to all things.

xpost to Tim. She definitely disowned her books, but according to the Bloodaxe intro, her will, 'written many years after she ceased to be Rosemary Tonks', didn't contain anything refusing future publication. to quote: 'her books didn't even exist for her then'.

it sounds like the family were reluctant to allow the publication of the poems. there's a hint in this intro that there was some resentment that she had destroyed so much valuable art / potential heirlooms. or it may just be that they wanted to honour what they perceived to be her wishes, outside of the will.

I just finished another short novel, The Bread of Those Early Years, Heinrich Böll. It is almost the definition of overwrought. Every page seems heavily labored over and in spite of its desire to seem naturalistic, the artifice is glaring and the characters seem only tenuously human.

The best excuse I can make for Böll is that the book was published in 1955, when both he and his audience had been put through the meat grinder of the Nazi regime, the Allied bombing, the occupation, and the dire refugee aftermath of WWII, so it would be pardonable if their sense of reality and proportionality had become totally deranged in the process.

I've only read one Böll but yeah, dude seemed angry as hell.

The disaster artist. Very entertaining

Last night I picked up yet another short novel, A Man's Head, Georges Simenon. It's about the fourth Simenon I've read, but the first one of his Inspector Maigret mysteries. I'm already most of the way through it. His control over his material amounts to complete mastery, but the simplicity of the characters' motives and actions makes it much easier to tell an effortlessly transparent story.

Just coming to the end of the Bernard Sumner memoir which mainly read in the bog over the Xmas holidays. Quite interesting.
Also got through I swear I was there the thing on the Manchester Sex Pistols gigs.
Now gone back to the Jon Ronson book on public shaming.
Also got a copy of Total Chaos the iggy pop interview about the Stooges history.

Intriguing/cringe-making to see the St Aubyn books get the 70s rock fast-cutting-trailer treatment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQh36eStMqk

I love the books, kinda excited to see this but also primed for it being awful.

dipping into Donald McKenzie's Making Meaning: Printers of the Mind and Other Essays - a collection of writings and lectures on bibliography. It's full of fascinating nuggets – found this particularly interesting mainly because it's so succinct about an important moment in the history of the book:

Before the ubiquity of newsboys in the 1640's, the only secular mass medium was the stage. Its setting, the playhouse, was the principal secular forum of public debate. The writers who worked in it – Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson – were news reporters of their day, analysts of personal and social action for a non-literate audience; their ethical duty as Jonson put it, was to

...speake of the intents,
The councells, actions, orders, and events
Of state, and censure them.

Its modes were oral and visual. The expressive instruments of its art were the voices and gestures of actors whose skilled articulacy in performance – when at its best – transformed the written word into a living experience which the audience thereby made its own. It was of course self-evident that print was not the proper medium for plays...

that from the essay Typography and Meaning which treats the publication of Congreves Works of 1710, as the first time plays, overseen by their writer, had care and attention paid to their printed publication.

It was of course self-evident that print was not the proper medium for plays...

As is true today. Print is good for the transmission of the script for future productions and it makes a good fallback medium for people without access to a stage production (i.e. most people in most places), but the proper medium for a play is a cast of talented actors, costumed appropriately, in a staged setting, delivering the lines, with music where indicated.

Finished the Simenon. Now I am reading yet another fairly quick book, a biography of James J. Hill, the railroad magnate who built the Greta Northern RR. It was written by Stewart Holbrook, a mostly overlooked, but very lively and astute author of popular American history. The book was published as part of a series of "brief biographies" and so is only 200 pages. I read 100 pages last night. It is popular narrative history at its finest, streamlined, but lays out everything necessary and drives it home entertainingly.

Great Northern

It was of course self-evident that print was not the proper medium for plays...

As is true today. Print is good for the transmission of the script for future productions and it makes a good fallback medium for people without access to a stage production (i.e. most people in most places), but the proper medium for a play is a cast of talented actors, costumed appropriately, in a staged setting, delivering the lines, with music where indicated.

― A is for (Aimless), Sunday, 7 January 2018 19:50 (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i generally prefer reading plays to seeing them. i know this is daft, and i have seen some great plays. i'm wondering now in fact if this only goes for 16th/17th century – maybe it's the need to pay attention to the language a bit more.

but i don't think it's true either. printed plays are now well-presented, well actually the passage continues with the full reasoning:

It was of course self-evident that print was not the proper medium for plays; most reached the printing house in a fortuitous and often surreptitious manner; and because the London book trade lacked any kind of literary idealism that acknowledged the popular drama as commanding typographic respect, few plays showed any intelligent and sustained editing for press. Later in the century we have only the ossified typography of a trade largely indifferent to the quite specific requirements, in book design, of dramatic text.

the point that is latent in those observations is that this sort of thing can be done better or worse. there is a difference between the prompt book of the stage and a repository of the play for reading and posterity.

the importance of Congreve's Works for McKenzie, was that he 'saw this edition through the press himself, working in the closest possible collaboration with his bookseller and friend Jacob Tonson and with Tonson's printer John Watts'.

Congreve revised the quarto texts, suppressed their indecent expressions, and adopted neoclassical scene division and character groupings.

While i was writing this, and without wishing to muddle the argument, I was wondering about the representation of song lyrics in printed form. There was probably a time when they commanded the same 'lack of respect' as described above.

For a while with CDs and on back/liner notes/gatefold of some LPs became repositories for lyrics. Now we have Genius and various lyrics sites that feed off each other. At the literary end, Dylan will be published carefully in book form, treating lyrics as lyrics as respected poetry (i say that without prejudice).

As most people will know, my own favourite is The Fall. The biggest library yet printed collection of their lyrics has done an excellent job in preserving the collage and pictorial manner of Smith's lyrical approach – as these creative and scrap-book methods dictate the form of his lyrics as much, say, as the sonnet form dictates the shape and cadences of its content.

(personally i tend to dislike pomposity about lyrics, something which the printed form exacerbates - to stress again, there are song lyrics that i would have above poetry, even if its a single shouted line from a jungle track, but that i prefer them in context, which may be another version of the argument that Aimless is making)

reading the periodic table by primo levi, somehow for the first time. everyone always said it was incredible and for some reason this meant i read other things ahead of it.

it's incredible.

When you live where i live, reading plays is the only wAy you will get to experience almost any of them

The Periodic table is, indeed, wonderful

yes - and of course plays, even ones we like or that are well liked, are not performed constantly. there are some nice phrases in this excerpt from the same essay:

My point then is that the form of Congreve's quartos, in striking contrast to the Works, is a direct expression of historical conditions quite unrelated to authorial intention and insensitive to the problems of mediating a theatrical experience in book form. Was there a moment in history when Congreve and Tonson, two inteligent, sensitive and original men, decided to make their pages speak, to edit and design their plays in a way which gave typography a voice in the hand-held theatre of the book?

also re-reading bluets by maggie nelson.

also, translation q. in atlantic hotel the translator refers to the narrator’s “ball cap”. is this a common US way of referring to (i assume) a baseball cap? it seemed odd.

Total Chaos the jeff Gold edited book based around an interview with Iggy pop about the history of teh Stooges and showing a stack of memorabilia.
Good find for £5 in the Rough Trade Boxing Day sale. Do wish i had more money that day though. probably would have grabbed another couple of books.

Also back reading Under The hoodoo Moon by Dr JOhn on buses etc. He's just been shot in the hand.

& Detroit 67 : the Year That Changed Soul by Stuart Cosgrove which I just started as my toilet book. Seems interesting so far.

My copy of Detroit 67 is off to the charity shop this weekend - I look forward to hearing what you think of that one (the material is v interesting!).

xp, I've heard/seen US ref to ball caps, and seems right because of general association: worn by fans of baseball, football, basketball, soccer, beer, other. Also goes with ball cup, caps on ball/bald heads, re tendency of younger (young and early middle-aged) men to shave heads.

Wow. Reminds me: where should I start with her writing?

'Pale Horse, Pale Rider' is a set of 3 novellas you can't go wrong with. The last one is set during the outbreak of the 1918 'Spanish' flu.

New thread: 2018 Springtime For ILB: My Huggles. What Are You Reading Now?