2019 Autumn: What Are You Reading as the Light Drifts Southward?

Haven't been reading anything for a while for... reasons, but forced myself back to it on the back of the last herne hill FAP (thanks Tim).

Attrib. by Eley Williams. Williams has enormous fun with the sound and look of language, and the heft of words and their relation to perception and memory. Normally I'm a little wary of the poeticisation of prose, but I don't think that's what's happening here. It reminds me more of Robert Louis Stevenson's approach to sentence construction, where he recommends an awareness of the patterns of sound across sentences. Love and loss are specifically realised through this prism of language and thought, which makes their representation more elliptical than more conventional representations of those emotions, but more pointed, more tender, with a bursting sense of things felt but not directly expressed so that, to quote Isaac Rosenberg, they are 'understandable but still ungraspable'.

I've started reading Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt. I hardly need to say that it prompts a great many thoughts about present day events.

Reading The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial by Maggie Nelson, recommended by my girlfriend. It's pretty incredible, though also very very dark.

I read that recently too! I agree, it's fantastic. I felt a bit ambivalent reading it and was glad when she starts formulating about her own right (or perceived lack of) to be telling the story, but that some things just need to be told irrespective of response or moral ambiguity. I love the way she manipulates time in her books and rounds back to earlier themes within themes.

I'd really recommend reading The Argonauts afterwards too if you've not read it.

I've started reading Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt. I hardly need to say that it prompts a great many thoughts about present day events.

must be in the air, you're like the third person I know to have read this in the past year

still slogging my way through Life of Johnson, but also picked up the following (both short fiction collections) in the meantime:

Brian Aldiss "Canopy of Time"
Joanna Russ "The Hidden Side of the Moon"

also apparently Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan" is waiting for me at the library

Reading Eichmann in Jerusalem at the beginning of the 2000s was one of those watershed moments; it sent me into an Arendt frenzy for the better part of a year. On Revolution was an even bigger influence on my political development.

yeah I've never read On Revolution, that's on my list

Wow Rebecca is really somethin’ else.

Finished the poetry chapter of Baldick's THE MODERN MOVEMENT. Useful and accurate on Georgians and Auden generation. In general the book is something of a polemic against overstating the centrality of modernism, as such, to the era -- and it's thus quite useful and informative. Now on the chapter about modern drama, which says that modernism didn't arrive on the UK stage till the 1950s.

About 30pp to go in THE GOLDEN BOWL.

I read Autumn by Ali Smith. By its very nature (written quickly; including currents of news and world events), it's a ragged, propulsive thing - for good and ill. The central relationship is well rendered but it felt like a well-trodden path (aspects of Sophie's World and the Little Prince) and the framing device of exploring Pauline Boty's Pop Art isn't entirely successful. Smith's writing sings, though and I'll definitely carry on with the series.

Been a bloody difficult year, reading-wise, to such an extent that I am trying to get that muscle in the brain that can absorb words again. I have a pile of mostly short-ish fiction to help, here is the first batch for the autumn. No time to talk about it and I can't bear to do ratings so I'll just post them in like a cunt lol. But I have a feeling I am connecting...words...they are good again.

Noemi Lefbvre - Self-Portrait in Blue
Lewis Carroll - Alice in Wonderland
Colette - Gigi and The Cat
Paul Bowles - The Sheltering Sky
Carson McCullers - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Elizabeth Hardwick - Sleepless Nights
Kingsley Amis - Ending Up
Antonio Tabucchi - Tristano Dies
Marie Darrieussecq - My Phantom Husband

Jacques Camatte - This World We Must Leave and Other Essays

really into reading about left communism lately, this is a delightfully loony former bordigist's 70s turn away from marxism and towards some of anti-capitalist primitivism

I'm reading Sleepless Nights right now!

Kingsley Amis - Ending Up

The last four pages = wow

such a happy ending

read it again recently. extraordinarily compressed, technically skilful book. the writing is at the very highest level.

The ending was savage but I need to read it again, was on *what are these things on the page?!* stage

I'm listening to Dracula on Audible. Started reading it about 10 years ago but kind of got bored after the nth blood transfusion. Managed to get past some of the more tedious mid-section parts and back to the action but it's interesting to hear about how the Icelandic 'translation' ended up being an almost total re-write

It's a shitload shorter, too, if that helps you.

Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' -- the 2009 translation (J.A. Underwood) which is more direct and colloquial

Virginia Woolf, 'Street Haunting: A London Adventure' - struck more now by the Edwardian formality of VW's voice than by the adventurousness of her ideas. Some lovely stuff but the way she writes about dwarfs, blind people, beggars etc would not go down well now.

my aunt applied to do a masters and while processing her application they told her, to her great surprise, that they could not accept her because she never completed her English Lit BA; she has one credit remaining, a course on Milton. so my mother and i are reading Paradise Lost with her in solidarity

aw!

I took a course on Milton in college. I groaned, but the first few books of PL are surprisingly brisk, and Satan earns the rave reviews (Adam and Eve are joyless).

i have never listened to audio books but during a particularly bad bout of insomnia the other night i started a free audible trial and lined up willie rushton (thankfully fairly little of him) reading Father Brown - they’re mainly dramatised rather than an audio book.

i’ve never really got on with the blue cross as a story but the queer feet is *grebt* for a radio dramatisation!

it didn’t send me to sleep but it did stop my brane ripping itself to pieces as it likes to do in the wakeful wee hours.

I picked up Sleepless Nights yesterday on the recommendation that ‘everyone in book club hated it’.

I’m reading Supper Club by Lara Williams. I wasn’t sure at first because it begins with a first term at university, but the conceit is starting to carry it along nicely. It’s enjoyable to read about queer hedonism anyway.

Not really sure why I’m reading under the skin for the third time in as many weeks, but going to just go with it

Sleepless Nights is grebt, what is up with your book club?

It's not my book club. I'll report back when I've read it, but I'm excited.

xp Lol at reading Under the Skin so often! It bore little resemblance to the film, but it was hard for me to separate the two at the time. On reflection, a lot of its unique disturbances have stayed with me. The description of the original bodies of the creatures in particular.

I didn’t finish the film but I was intrigued by the book descriptions. They’re quite different but I liked the book much more for the level of detail and description of their world. I loved all the scenes with the hitchers where the perspective suddenly flips and the sense of gradual unraveling. Idk, it just appeals to me a lot.

Virginia Woolf, 'Street Haunting: A London Adventure' - struck more now by the Edwardian formality of VW's voice than by the adventurousness of her ideas. Some lovely stuff but the way she writes about dwarfs, blind people, beggars etc would not go down well now.

Not sure if this is the one where she also goes on and on about "filthy" Jews, etc

There is one of those.

Theodor W. Adorno, 'Trying to Understand ENDGAME'

Longer and more difficult than I remembered. Paragraphs of Beckettian length over 3 pages.

"Ok, so when Doctor Strange comes back, what you have to remember about the infinity gems is...."

I don't think I mentioned here that I had finished THE GOLDEN BOWL.

Henry James: Search and Destroy

Joseph Conrad, 'An Outpost of Progress' (c.1897). A kind of trial run for HEART OF DARKNESS, or a tale that anticipates that one anyway: trading station in Africa, Belgian settlers going crazy in the heat, absurdity of the degraded colonial situation. Much cruder and simpler than HoD, and more simply racist in its language also.

I notice JC's adjectival tendencies that Leavis complained about - sentences with multiple nouns each with their own adjective crowding the prose up. I don't mind this though.

Just finished White by Deni Ellis Béchard, which attempts to turn Heart of Darkness on its head: the Kurtz in this case being a pseudo-conservationist, casting some light on the persistence/inexorability of the colonial dynamic—how postcolonial guilt and the best stated intentions can be leveraged/exploited. I thought it got unnecessarily clever twd the end but was interesting and well plotted.

I've finally finished Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out: What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies. It's been a slog but worth it. I'll admit to a fatigue at the 'capsule biography, visit to important site on a hot August day' pattern of things but it's incredibly well researched and comprehensive.

This, from the epilogue, has me wondering however (it was published in 2008): "these days Britons no longer mourn their empire. They are more comfortably European. They are more relaxed about race, sexuality and gender. Their government is no longer fighting a war in Ulster... The feel of life is more feverish than entropic. The look of things is gaudy and skin-deep, rather than heavy, worn out and grey."

Even then that must have read like bullshit but fuck, 2008 seems like a long time ago.

Deborah Eisenberg! Read v. appealing profile a while back, but now I'm blanking on where that was and on favored titles---which of her collections should I start with?

Chinaski: yes that is very much Beckett's MO - as in his PROMISED YOU A MIRACLE: 'Now, meeting me in his office on an unseasonably warm March afternoon, Geoffrey Howe was courteous, neat, yet seemed naturally worn down by the two decades that had passed since his devastating attack on the Prime Minister' - et al.

Joseph Conrad: 'Karain: A Memory'. 25pp to go in this. Some of Conrad's wild descriptive luridness - Malay places, natives, etc - yet still what strikes me is how much simpler a writer he is than James. I had vaguely imagined them as stylistically a bit closer together.

This story also evidently has implications on 'race', savages, empire, etc, which I won't get till I've finished it.

Deborah Eisenberg! Read v. appealing profile a while back, but now I'm blanking on where that was and on favored titles---which of her collections should I start with?

― dow, Saturday, October 12, 2019 1

Her collected stories doesn't feel bulky, but her latest book Your Duck Is My Duck is the way to go.

I forgotten to mention: I also started Anita Loos, GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES.

I got the James Baldwin collected essays from Library of America a while ago and started it this week, beginning with Notes of a Native Son. James Baldwin is all he’s cracked up to be it turns out: sad, beautiful, wry, relevant.

I finished Eichmann in Jerusalem a couple of nights ago. It was very informative regarding all the main elements of the trial and Eichmann's crimes. Arendt's command of the facts and her powers of observation and penetration were quite impressive. Apparently her reportage on the trial and the resulting book were attacked in a variety of ways, but those attacks and subsequent controversy have faded away, leaving the book to speak for itself. It does so with great clarity and persuasiveness.

I would say her central point was that Eichmann was not so much a monster of hateful criminal depravity, but a very small man who earned his position in the Nazi hierarchy through his hard work, his petty ambition for advancement, his bland self-absorption, a remarkable capacity for self-delusion, a fondness for adopting slogans in place of thoughts, and a grotesque lack of compassion. He had so little human definition that he easily warped himself into the required shape to fit into the Nazi's genocidal enterprise.

Been reading William Vollmann’s Last Stories and Other Stories, which a friend gifted me recently. I’ve read a lot of his stuff over the years but haven’t touched any of his books in abt a decade. I was worried I wouldn’t have the patience anymore for his style and affectations, but I’ve been enjoying it so far. All the baroquely-told tales of death and decay are kind of perfect for these grey mid-October afternoons.

... how much simpler a writer (Conrad) is than James. I had vaguely imagined them as stylistically a bit closer together.

Conrad is stylistically simpler, but thematically the reverse might be true. I don't think James attempted anything on the scale of Nostromo.

The Princess Casamassima vs. The Secret Agent would be a good apples-to-apples comparison.

I'm contemplating whether or not to make another run at reading The Divine Comedy - I've faltered in the past midway through the Purgatorio. I picked up Mandelbaum's translation last night and read the first three cantos of the Inferno, but if I am going to succeed, I think I had better start in the Purgatorio and move on from there. Or I might just bag it and go another direction. I may not be up to the mark for 500 pages of dense allegorical theological poetry right now.

Apparently her reportage on the trial and the resulting book were attacked in a variety of ways, but those attacks and subsequent controversy have faded away, leaving the book to speak for itself. It does so with great clarity and persuasiveness.

agree that in hindsight the "controversy" seems sorta ridiculous, essentially her getting taken to task for maintaining a critical eye rather than just parroting emerging orthodoxy.

to me one of the other really striking things was realizing just how convoluted and dysfunctional the Nazi hierarchy was. As a kid I only heard the more notorious names - Hitler, Goerring, Goebbels, Eichmann, Himmler, Mengele - and had this picture of them all being at the top of a tightly controlled pyramid, when in reality there were layers and layers of both more powerful and less famous functionaries really running the machine.

xp