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

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.

thanks dow.

Having finished with James J. Hill, I have embarked upon Women at the Pump, a fairly standard-issue Knut Hamsun novel, wherein we become deeply familiar with the quotidian doings of a particular set of Norwegian villagers.

finally read As I Lay Dying (never assigned any Faulkner in high school), loved it, now reading Anna Kavan's Julia and the Bazooka, a collection of her final short stories published shortly before her death in 1968. Really remarkable- excited to read her novel Sleep Has His House next.

Just finishing The Master and Margarita, expect to be done by mid-next week at my current pace. Thoughts between War & Peace and Anna Karenina for my next book? I know I want to read more Tolstoy but not sure which.

I assume Anna Karenina is funnier than War and Peace

not sure it’s funnier but it’s definitely better.

The usual complaint about War and Peace is that it takes a large schematic diagram to keep track all the characters, who often appear under several different names (patronymics, diminutives, honorifics, etc.), in ways that make sense to Russians, but which tend to baffle non-Russians. That, plus it's really long.

the length doesn't put me off as long as it pays off

War and Peace is on another level, but it has it's own kind of problems. It becomes increasingly essayistic as it develops, and I think a lot of people would say it just loses it's plot. Anna Karenina has one of the most famous endings ever. I don't think anyone remembers exactly how War and Peace ends. Still, I like essayistic novels, and as I said, the whole thing is just on another level.

^ all fair and good comments. i *really* struggles to maintain interest with war and peace, mainly for the reasons both Fred B and Aimless describe.

(sure i’ve told the story about living in a berlin squat with about 20 mills and boon and war and peace and only cracking after about 12 of the mills and boon)

Finished a collection of Osip Mandelstam's Prose: The Collected Critical Prose and Letters. I had read much of his best prose before (his piece on Dante, Fourth Prose, Journey to Armenia), and its some of my favourite writing from the 30s. It was good to read some of the smaller, earlier pieces on figures he loved, such as Villon. And to look at the things he cared about: there is a mostly terrific piece on Soviet poetic culture, where everyone is writing poetry but no one reads any. It often lapses into the cranky but its good to give it a once over. The lasting discovery was a five page piece on Darwin and the letters written at various times to his wife (some of which were written in a prison camp).

Dubravka Ugresic - The Ministry of Pain. This is really good, an account of an academic in exile (fleeing from the Yugoslav civil war) in Amsterdam, teaching at the Slavonic Language school. It might sound dry but she is good on trasmitting a disconnection from the environment and people, its ups and downs. Only a 1/3 of the way through.

I enjoyed War and Peace, but took a long, long break in the middle---wasn't tired of it, just a lot of other things going on---so didn't mind paging back and forth to refresh memory, as I might have if trying to plow straight through. Got eyes on this prize as I work my way back through the current bucket list, if I ever get out of the early 20th Century alive---here's my local library's listing:
Call Numbers: AF TOL 208
The death of Ivan Ilyich and other stories / Leo Tolstoy ; translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky ; with an introduction by Richard Pevear.
by Tolstoy, Leo, - 2009. - Copies: 1 of 1 available
"This book is a new translation of Tolstoy's most important short fiction. Here are eleven stories from the mature author, some autobiographical, others moral parables, and all imaginative, transcendent, and evocatively drawn. They include The Prisoner of the Caucasus, inspired by Tolstoy's experiences as a soldier in the Chechen War, and one of only two of his works that Tolstoy himself considered "good art"; Hadji Murat, the novella Harold Bloom called "the best story in the world," featuring the real-life war hero Hadji Murat, a Chechen rebel who ravaged his Russian occupiers only to defect to the Russian side after a falling-out with his own commander; The Devil, a tale of sexual obsession based on Tolstoy's relationship with a married peasant woman on his estate in the years before his marriage; and the celebrated The Death of Ivan Ilyich, an intense and moving examination of death and the possibilities of redemption."--BOOK JACKET.

death of ivan ilyich is why i want to read more tolstoy. i read it many years ago and it has stayed w/ me since. as much as any literature can it i think changed how i look at the world.

Still, I like essayistic novels, and as I said, the whole thing is just on another level.

A lot of my fave epic 19th century novels have a strong vibe of "THIS MY BLOG" about them. Les Miserables, for one.

Many were originally printed as serials in magazines.

According to someone like Bakhtin, the blending of genre is the whole point of the novelistic style, from Rabelais onwards. It feels so much grander in War & Peace, though.

also reading Death Watch by john dickson carr as my bedtime read. got to do something about my jdc problem. total marshmallow comfort reading by this stage.

I just got to the famous scene of Bergotte's death in Proust's La Prisonnière. I think this was the last passage in the 7 volumes that I knew anything about ahead of time, just from its being often quoted alongside the Vermeer painting. I'm beginning to feel like I may actually finish this thing pretty soon, 16 years after starting Swann's Way for the first time.

I'd like to check out this book when it comes out, about the multiple women on whom Proust modelled the Duchess de Guermantes. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/221118/prousts-duchess-by-caroline-weber/9780307961785/

A lot of my fave epic 19th century novels have a strong vibe of "THIS MY BLOG" about them. Les Miserables, for one.

Moby Dick is like that too, with all the digressions on whaling.

Many many xp: Ugresic's essays are really great, too

mrs. chachi found my copy of Aubrey's Brief Lives under a couch and I started reading it and now I'm all engrossed remembering how much I fucking love old weird English books. I read far more 20/21c lit than I ever figured I would back when I was in college going nuts about old books & the ancient world & all that but when I pick up one of these I'm just transported into wondering what different me I'd be if I'd become the professor I'd intended to become.

I need to check Aubrey. Moby Dick sometimes makes me picture a Dark Ages scholar, reveling in his knowledge, also Scrooge McDuck, diving and sailing through his secret sea of doubloons (bank vault).

Brief Lives is extremely entertaining.

I read Moby Dick for the first time like 2-3 years ago and it legitimately blew me away. Was expecting something more staid but it was such an unusual, multifaceted, kinda post-modern thing before... that was a thing. I think about it a lot and want to read it again soon. If that’s The Great American Novel I’m OK with it.

Currently reading Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time. Maybe 50 pages in, whiffs of (and I probably/absolutely brought this to it myself) “Wise Artist Man Delivering Now Tired ‘Truths‘“ at first, but I quickly got over that. It’s insightful and deeply (life or death) considered and I don’t know why I expected less. Excited for the rest.

I'd like to check out this book when it comes out, about the multiple women on whom Proust modelled the Duchess de Guermantes. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/221118/prousts-duchess-by-caroline-weber/9780307961785/

Nice (and that's not just the results of the google image search).

finished m&m last night and started w&p. i was delighted to find that they immediately addressed my question from i know like dick-all about napoleon but unfortunately not thoroughly enough for my tastes :/

Kawabata, snow country. A slow burn

I'm past the halfway mark with The Women at the Pump by Hamsun. It's OK, but flawed.

The conceit Hamsun is apparently playing with is casting the entire book as a distillation of all the petty gossip a small fishing-and-market town can generate. The narrator is a hybrid between the omniscient voice and the gleeful voice of a village gossip. The characters are unfailingly petty, jealous, vengeful, lusty, obtuse, proud, and scheming. Much is made of questioning who is the real father of half the children in town. No one is noble, but no one is monstrous, either. They are just unredeemed little souls.

The biggest problem this presents is that, while attempting to make fun of this cavalcade of veniality, Hamsun mostly succeeds in the tittering, smirking variety of humor. He doesn't allow the butts of his humor enough humanity. Or, at least, not so far. Maybe at the end he'll swerve into pathos or allow someone a moment of triumph not connected to mean-spiritedness or blind self-love and empty ambition.

I finished Book 3 of Knausgaard's My Struggle. This is the one about his boyhood - basically grade school - unlike the first two it doesn't jump around in time that much, apart from a few interjections from the author writing in the "present". It's quite a feat the way he dredges up his childhood memories in this - and not just the facts of what happened - he somehow manages to convey the texture and emotional contours of these events from a child's perspective. Reading the book I often flashed back to events from my own childhood that I hadn't thought about in ages. On the one hand, you could fairly say that not much happens in the book, on the other hand, these are the kind of events that burn deep into your psyche.

I also finished Lucretius's On The Nature of Things, although I skipped some sections if the going got a bit too heavy. It's amazing how wrong he was about nearly everything, from a modern scientific perspective, yet in a way he was right about the big picture: the world is just the unfolding of impersonal mechanistic processes without intervention of the gods. It also sheds some light on life in ancient Roman times, indirectly through examples he gives and evidence he produces to support his theories.

I finished the Hamsun, less than impressed. Yesterday I started Julian, Gore Vidal. I first read this about 35 years ago, maybe more, but I recall it as a good to very good historical novel about its period (circa 350 - 363 AD). As with Creation, Vidal's other novel about the ancient world, his characters greatly resemble Gore Vidal in terms of wit and sophistication, but this is what makes them fun books.

still moving slowly through the Don McKenzei essay Typography and Meaning. Good addition the category 'good lists' here:

The printer-designer’s own vocabulary developed into an extraordinarily flexible one of types in their different designs as well as different sizes of the same face, paper in diverse weights, colour, quality and size, ink weak and strong, red and black, format, title page, frontispiece, illustrations diagrammatic, hieroglyphic and figurative, bulk, the structural divisions of volumes, “books,” sections, section titles, chapters, paragraphs, verses, verse numbering, line measure, columns, interlinear, marginal and footnotes, running titles, pagination roman and arabic, headings, initial letters, head- and tailpieces, braces, rules, indentations, fleurons, epitomes, indexes and, most important of all, blank white space.

His overall point here being, as he says earlier, 'is that the design and construction of books has always been a sophisticated activity, commanding great talents and expenditure of time and money. There is a growing scholarship of the illustrated book, but the present argument is directed more towards our need to understand the finer intentions which determined its very diverse forms.'

Anyone know any places where the bibliography of modern textual representation takes place? My view, very much in distinction to the '80s and '90s complaints i grew up around that people were becoming illiterate, is that we live in more literate and textually based societies at the moment than at any time in history. If you understand, as McKenzie wd encourage, the book to be the place where the act of reading takes act of reading occurs, a locus that is the consequence of a set of material, historical, social and authorial intentions, how does bibliography work in the present time.

For instance, what can be said to be the *edition* of a kindle work. It's not the image as it is presented on your kindle. Is there some sort of authoritative ur-object, a dated text asset file stored somewhere with relevant editorial metadata? is this different from how it is presented to the reader? (there are certainly user defined aspects to textual presentation now). Taking it outside the kindle, what do approaches to textual design say about theories of perception and the politics of reading? The whole section above comes just after a look at how differences in approach to the image between Protestants and Catholics in the 16th Century meant for the design of the book, the practice of reading, and theories of perception.

I’m still reading Life A User’s Manual

I have had it up to HERE with these fucking OCTAGONS

The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play by Ben Watson, which is a bizarre Marxist/Freudian deconstruction of the life and art of Frank Zappa. England's Hidden Reverse by David Keenan, a look into a certain corner of the Brit U-ground featuring Coil, Nurse with Wound, and Current 93. And last but definitely not least Cosey Fanni Tutti's memoir Art Sex Music. Kinda juggling all 3 at the moment, before I settle into one over the others.

> For instance, what can be said to be the *edition* of a kindle work.

ebooks are versioned pretty much like software is (and yes, there's a uuid in the content.opf file in epubs). i've had updates for things i've previously downloaded (where, when examined, changed only the cover picture for a lower-quality one)

Finished Kawabata’s snow county and thousand cranes, good stuff. Any others of his I should seek out ?

I loved The Old Capital and The Dancing Girl Of Izu

'House of Sleeping Beauties' for a creepier side of him

Master of Go is the only other one i've read and that was a bit repetitive.