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

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.

I imagine Master Of Go reading like a sports manga.

Which Charles Portis novel should I read first, or only? No collected stories/nonfiction, right?

True Grit might be his best novel as well as his biggest hit, but it is sui generis amongst his work - his only period piece. The Dog of the South is maybe his funniest.

Only read Dog Of The South but that one's great.

Thanks--yeah I heard that about TG and somehow was thinking Dog to start with---he does have a collection, stories and nonfiction: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/books/review/escape-velocity-selected-work-by-charles-portis.html

I would start with Dog or Norwood, which is of similar quality, if not quite as, um, epic.

Also need to post link to excellent story about DotS rediscovery/revival

TOMORROW, Sat. Jan 6, is the last day of COLISEUM BOOKS in NYC

just read

maggie nelson the argonauts

about to read

anne carson autobiography of red

How was The Argonauts? Been curious about that

love maggie nelson. loved the argonauts

Han Kang: The White Book
Max Porter: Grief is the Thing with Feathers

Hoo boy, couple of lighthearted jolly little numbers
They are both really, really good

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

― calstars, Tuesday, 23 January 2018 11:55 (two days ago) Permalink

Beauty and Sadness

I read Eva Sleeps by Francesca Melandri and I enjoyed it without being bowled over. I know more about the C20th history South Tyrol / Alto Adige than I did, for sure. There's probably not enough tricky bullshit in it for my ridiculous and annoying tastes.

Now I am reading "Geometric Regional Novel" by Gert Jonke and it's right (right-angled) up my street.

Re Kawabata: There's also a new to English one just out, Dandelions, but I haven't read it yet: https://www.ndbooks.com/book/dandelions/

I liked jonke's System of Vienna

Me too but I am liking RGN a whole lot more, it seems more abstract (as you'd expect from a geometric novel I suppose) but seems more unsettling, somehow livelier.

I am going to have a go at describing how this makes me feel.

It's like, there's a load of invisible Oulipian scaffolding (poss. geometric) in the novel which is unknowable but feels like (a) if you studied the novel (and poss. geometry) for long enough all might become clear. Or it might not, and as I'm thinking about this a 1969 Gert Jonke is standing right behind me and laughing at me.

It's pretty strong, in its oblique way, on life in a shitty small town, its suffocations and absurd logic(s).

I read Eva Sleeps by Francesca Melandri and I enjoyed it without being bowled over.

Couldn't finish this, took far too long to get going and I thought the translation was dreadful.

New Year's resolution was to fight against my dilettante ways and fully immerse myself in the works of my favourite artists in different mediums. That's E.M. Forster for literature, who I decided sometime in my late teens is my favourite writer but I don't think I've read even half of his stuff yet. So going through the novels chronologically, I'll start by re-reading Where Angels Fear To Tread.