Summer 2020: What Are You Reading as the Sun Bakes the Arctic Ocean?

xp Aimless, any chance the French film you're describing could have been the 1961 documentary, Chronicle of a Summer?

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-extraordinary-chronicle-of-a-summer

Not a documentary and some time post-2000.

My present book is a translation of Ovid's Heroides. It is the Penguin Classics paperback edition with (as the saying goes) copious notes, most of which are fairly rudimentary and aimed at college students unfamiliar with Greek and Latin classics. The translator is Harold Isbell. It is quite readable and moderately enjoyable.

Reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Black Swan, years after everyone else probably. Only a short way through but it's shaping up to be highly idiosyncratic, loosely argued (full of anecdote and autobiography), entertaining, and persuasive. I'm cantering through, I'm sure a close reading would throw up lots of questions and criticisms - e.g. at one point to demonstrate the deceptiveness of categories he suggests trying to explain to a martian how most pro-choicers are also anti capital punishment, as well as pro high taxes (i.e. in favour of personal but not economic liberty). Not that hard imo. But I don't doubt he'd have answers for those criticisms too.

Took the thread's advice and took a break from Dr Faustus and return to Nagel's The View From Nowhere, which is kind of a model of clarity for a contemporary (well 1980s) philosophy book. Nagel almost always strikes me as eminently sensible. The book's theme is roughly about the incommensurability of the first- and third-person perspectives and how this can inform philosophical topics ranging from the mind-body problem, to epistemology and ethics.

Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet (tr. Margaret Jull Costa)

Its one of the great books for me, read it before in the Richard Zenith translation. The book is written as the Soares heteronym whereas this version has entries from Vicente Guedes that are translated here for the first time, which he wrote about 10 years earlier. One of the later entries talks about a bit of writing found from years ago, and he goes on to roughly say how little he has changed, however these earlier entries feel on the immature side. The misogyny and misanthropy is a tad more apparent, whereas later with Soares this a bit more under control as his conception of a thinking feeling dreaming individual is more fully hashed out. iirc Musil cast MwQ (or his writing) as a kind of lab, and while I can see that its Pessoa that fully carries this out here to an almost sinister extent. This is basically someone who sacrificed everything for his art: look at how his 1-2 relationship events with another person (it appears he broke it off before it became anything that would basically interfere with the way he wanted to live his life) scars him somewhat -- he experiences something outside of himself rather than dreaming it, say -- he works at what he was up to in 2-3 entries, as he often does with other matter, so he can write 2-3 entries about things such as oh, men and animals are not so different, for example. But you see there is an additional charge of seeing someone so humiliated that is just striking, someone who wanted to become pure thought seen, for once, as flesh and blood. (btw, it looks like he is revisitng and adding a thought he hadn't done so earlier and I'd guess that's because it never got to be an actual book in his lifetime. One of the great things (though perhaps accidental) about this book is watching the process of revisiting and re-working a take obsessively years apart, but I wonder if it would've ended up as one entry in an edited final version.)

Anyway, I'll revisit the Zenith one day again.

Finishing Anna Gurton-Wachter's 'Utopia Pipe Dream Memory' today and finding it is a slow burn-- expands in its range and feeling as the poems, mostly longer sequences, move forward. Whether this qyality is due to the referentiality of later sections to previous sections or whether it is because the sense of the project's stakes are raised in later sections is difficult to decide. Either way, recommended for those who enjoy Bernadette Mayer, Lisa Robertson, and Julianna Spahr's earlier books...

Now in the homestretch of A.J. Liebling's The Earl of Louisiana, first published in 1960; this is the 1970 edition, with an introduction by Southern historian T. Harry Williams, who says that the author got a few facts wrong, but he clearly relishes the book. As well he might: I could hardly believe how painlessly, how infotainingly, how Marshall Bermanly, AJL inserted my head into arcane intricacies peculiar to Louisiana (yet in context of outside world!), and turned on the light bulb. And that's during work hours; we also get some struttin' with the barbecue and all manner of aleatory chin music as he makes the NOLA rounds---necessarily going much further afield, where the motorway food is as bad as anywhere else, but always with an ear for passing relevance (so far, I've counted exactly 1 of the expected cute barroom set pieces, good enough to count for lagniappe).AJ
AJL loves Governor Earl Long for his motoriffic gift of gab, strong enough, amidst so much stiff competition---Liebling says that W.T. Cash's classic The Mind of the South should have a companion volume, The Mouth of the South, and that in part is what this---as said gift is in the service of (among other things) his and long-gone brother Huey's vision of a decent living for the poor---including the poorest of the poor, mostly black, necessarily disparaged in public speaking, but rewarded more privately--as are a lot of other voters, and pols, but he, like Huey before him, has kept the whole thing going basically by "soaking the oil companies."
But the oil companies and other commercial interests now see Earl faltering as another election comes close, and they're ready to rise with trending racists---Louisiana's finally getting in the swing of things, with the rest of the Deep South. So the narrative's lucidity, vivid as ever, becomes chilling, as author and reader watch and feel the initially occluded dye spread through the system, as it still is spreading, of course.
Damn, I gotta study this. It's exemplary writing.
(PS: Liebling doesn't present previous Long time as Edenic, it's all the things in the system, all the wheels and deals and other volatile elements in a precarious balance, previously enforced---Louisiana reminds him of Lebanon---that are now finding new purchase, for a while. As Malcolm X said a few years later, when asked about the death of JFK, "Some chickens came home to roost.")

Richard Usborne's Clubland Heroes. Happened upon this in a stray line of a LRB review of a John Buchan biography and decided to track it down - it's an affectionate study of Buchan, Sapper and Dornford Yates, the author's favourite writers in adolescence. Even on first publication in 1953 Usborne views these writers as old fashioned and problematic, and the book seems to doa. good job of pointing out all the privilege and bigotry that underlines them while still being sort of in love with them, which I can relate to, if not necessairily for these particular authors - I find Buchan tedious as well as unpleasant, Sapper gives better pulp thrills while being foaming-at-the-mouth bigoted; I'd never heard of Yates, though, and the idea of an author who does comedy as well as spy yarns appeals. The Berry stories seem a bit Wodehouse but w/o Wodehouse's subversion of the class system - the butlers aren't wiser than their masters here - and it's funny how changes in the UK tax system make the family move from England to France to Portugal. These people are The Enemy, no doubt, but there's something entertaining nonetheless about seeing people enjoy the good life - Usborne describes the characters as "idlers but not wasters". Apparently Yates was the only author still alive when the book was published and very hostile to Usborne whom he saw as a radical leftist.

I finish Curtis Sittenfield, PREP (2005) at last. It's very appealing, but long at 400 pages. I should have made myself read it much faster: it was best when I was reading in what by my standards are substantial bursts - like 60 pages or so yesterday.

It's good enough that I would now like to read more by this author.

There is something enigmatic, even disturbing about the protagonist. You're with her for 400 pages, yet never know what she looks like; and barely what she likes (books, music, films? hardly at all). Her whole identity seems to centre on being undistinguished, and she seems to have few good feelings for anyone. She is watchful but also negative, morose, self-obsessed. Maybe she troubles me because she's recognisable.

I must crack on with David Thomson's BIG SCREEN but might take a diversion through another book first.

Started reading the Derek Bailey biography after having had it sitting around for 2 or 3 years.
Finding it an easy read. So much oral testimony.

Also got Japanoise most of the way through. Have enjoyed that.

Started Conor Cruise O'Brien's The Great Melody, his Edmund Burke. Thanks to a week at the beach, I was able to finish:

Georges Simenon - Maigret at the Coroner's
Elizabeth Taylor - A Game of Hide and Seek
Wendy Moffat - A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster
Ottessa Moshfesgh - Death in Her Hands

A week at the beach reading Simenon sounds perfect right now.

Still plugging on w/ Earthly Powers, which I am enjoying/not enjoying.

which I am enjoying/not enjoying

I hear Anthony Burgess was like that in real life, too.

Dissertation reading: Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories
Non-dissertation reading: Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films Revisited

Ben Lerner Leaving the Atocha Station - Great read. It really had to win me over; I though the constant use of hash/weed was an unnecessarily on-the-nose way of expressing there was a veil over perception; or if it wasn't to express that, I just don't care about an American in Madrid being high all the time and saying so. In the end it didn't matter a lot though: he very much succeeds in describing the sense of loneliness in a foreign world, alone with your thoughts and insecurities you are ashamed of. Slacking it, questioning talent, poetry, and everything else. There are highly original passages on the fraudulous, the struggle. His passages on Ashbery were a highlight for me. I saw someone else saying invoking the train bombing was too unimaginative, but I thinked it worked in showing he knew History was being made but he couldn't find a way (or desire) to be part of it. And yes, it's pacy and at times very funny.

(File under minor quips to get worked up about: I totally would have ditched the definite article in the title. It's felt like a stumbling block every time I pronounce the title, or think about it even. 'Leaving the Heathrow Airport', 'Leaving the Berlin Hauptbahnhof' sounds just as lame. Unless I'm missing some genius use of the article to express his alienation or lost-in-translationness, which is entirely possible, but for now I'm not buying it?)

I hadn't really considered the article in the title, but I wonder if it's part of the ostentatious need to create meaning - to make it sound more meaningful? There might also be something to say about his inability to leave the station.

I read this a couple of months back and am still in two minds about it. Fundamentally, I didn't really need another novel about a struggling writer, no matter how ironically and cleverly that central conceit was staged. That said, it has grown in my imagination, and like LBI says, the Ashbery section - although only a couple of pages - absolutely sings and elevates the whole text. The ending is problematic in a way I can't quite put my finger on. It's wrapped up in the unreliability of the narrator, who undercuts all attempts at typical gestures at meaning and structure, but that redemptive closure was neither earned nor needed.

I admit that after learning about his person from a number of colleagues and students who worked with him, I have been unable to read Lerner.

I remember his 'Angle of Yaw' to be a nice book of prose poems, tho.

I'm finishing up Lawrence Giffin's 'Untitled, 2004,' a book-length long poem addressed to the author's infant daughter that dwells on questions of art, agency, fate, and how we make a life. Beautiful and rather moving, it's certainly Giffin's most accessible book. It was reviewed favorably over at Hyperallergic if yr interested in reading more: https://hyperallergic.com/?p=573032

Somehow (power of suggestion, after reading your description of the novel) Having "the" in there, the cadence of the full title, with pronunciation of "the" at that point in the phrase (I hear "th" as clunky, "ee" as slight loss of air, mocking very idea of escape from clunk) as dead middle dragging down, making a drone of (as insect, not Velvet Underground) the potential crispness of, for instance, "Now leaving Atocha Staion." Thus emphasing the weary and/or spooked irony: no matter where he may roam, no matter how big the ticket, he's still just barely peeling himself away from the station. Been there.

Walking past a box on the sidewalk, found a copy of Fifth Business. Narrator's habitual disdain and tendency to punch down grated, but an enjoyable read. Some scenes, like his vision of the Madonna, were excellent. Also the phrase "night plungers".

Is the definite article in 'Leaving The Atocha Station' not a typically Lerner-ironised allusion to 'To The Finland Station'?

Good point!

Delaying Thomson's BIG SCREEN by starting Terry Eagleton's MATERIALISM.

Naturally enjoyable but it seems to skip past the difficult questions of what matter is anyway, and what is its other - spirit? ideas? - and how far these things actually exist. It goes straight on to more specific sparring with people like Deleuze, which is fun but not a great way into the real heart of the concept. TE says in the foreword that he cut the first 40,000 words in response to a peer reviewer. Maybe he shouldn't have.

xposts I haven't read the Lerner so maybe I'm missing some kinda joke that y'all are in on, but... "Leaving the Atocha Station" is the title of a poem in The Tennis Court Oath (1962) by John Ashbery, and I always assumed that was a good enough reason for the book to be named that.

Reading Borges' (Labyrinths) for what feels like the first time but isn't. Found him too impenetrable about eight years ago, and it's hardly something I can speed through now, but it contextualises so much! Why didn't I try harder before? In the process of realising how many artists are deeply indebted to him.

For some reason I wasn't prepared for it to be as experimental as it is. Those mid-sentence u-turns in logic... It is the best time.

Borges is god.

Xp of course! It might even say so in the book. I'm blaming lockdown senility.

Here's a Borges doc that I haven't finished watching but ... I dunno why I'm surprised that there's a film in color with him being interviewed (in English), he died in the 80s. But I am surprised.

http://ubu.com/film/borges_portrait.html

Stanisław Lems somewhat famously wrote a kind of takedown of Borges, dismissing those u-turns as a cheap logician's trick, but the charge doesn't stick. It's a classic case of narcissism of small differences.

My friend (who is a former ilxor) really loves Lem...but I just can't get into him.

xpost Thanks for the doc link, lukas. You might also enjoy transcripts of student cassettes, collected as Professor Borges: A Course in English Literature, his own 1966 fanverse.
I long ago enjoyed Lem's Solaris, and Tarkovsky's Russian As Fuck screen vision, but somehow those were enough, so far.
Good thread: Borges translation?
And maybe this one, which I don't remember:
Labyrinhts (1962) - Jorge Luis Borges POLL

From the publisher, New Directions:
Writing for Harper’s Magazine, Edgardo Krebs describes Professor Borges:

“A compilation of the twenty-five lectures Borges gave in 1966 at the University of Buenos Aires, where he taught English literature. Starting with the Vikings’ kennings and Beowulf and ending with Stevenson and Oscar Wilde, the book traverses a landscape of ‘precursors,’ cross-cultural borrowings, and genres of expression, all connected by Borges into a vast interpretive web. This is the most surprising and useful of Borges’s works to have appeared posthumously.”

Borges takes us on a startling, idiosyncratic, fresh, and highly opinionated tour of English literature, weaving together countless cultural traditions of the last three thousand years. Borges’s lectures — delivered extempore by a man of extraordinary erudition — bring the canon to remarkably vivid life.

Now translated into English for the first time, these lectures are accompanied by extensive and informative notes by the Borges scholars Martín Arias and Martín Hadis.

I should have incl. translator, Katherine Silver.

I’m finally at the epilogue of War & Peace (Maude/Mandelker translation), a book which I’ve been reading slowly and with long breaks over the last six months. It’s quite a journey. I did hit a few lulls, particularly in the middle third, but everything from 1812 onwards is really exciting. I probably need to read an actual history of these wars at some point. There's so much that Tolstoy's contemporaneous Russian readers would know like the back of their hands but which was totally unfamiliar to me. I spent quite a bit of time on Wikipedia reading about the battles to try to make them more vivid for myself.

The first long novel I read when quarantine began. It's pretty good.

I feel that Eagleton's MATERIALISM somewhat missed an opportunity - he's too interested in 'the body and the soul', but those are not the only kinds of matter and non-matter. He really should have gone deeper into the question of just what matter is, and what is not matter. And what difference it makes.

Thank you Bernard for pointing out it's the title of an Ashbery poem. I can't remember if I knew that and then forgot about it. Will now have to read it to see why that definite article is in the poem's title!

It's probably just Ashbery being cheeky, as most things Ashbery are

Pinefox's comments on "Materialism" remind me that I've had Bertrand Russell's "The Analysis of Matter" on my to-read list for a long time. Some day I will read it. I've been casting about for what to read next, searching through my old books to see what's due for a re-read. I first tried Beckett's "Molloy", which I remember having liked when I first read it in my college days, though I think I forgot how much of it I had just skimmed. It does have some pretty funny jokes, but it's too much work to get to them, so I set that one aside. I tried "Malone Dies" next, which is more readable, though less funny. I'm trying to decide whether to stick with it, or give Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles" a whirl.

The Beckett books are masterpieces, but I think not things to approach casually. You really need to feel ready to encounter them - probably reading in a very sustained way - would be my own view.

I don't agree actually that MALONE DIES is less funny that MOLLOY. I recall it as among the most comic of all Beckett books.

But that Bradbury idea is a great one, O.Nate - let us know if you do make the trip to Mars.

MATERIALISM: stimulating on Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, more than on Marx. A lot of the old Marxian claims - eg that the era of capitalism abstracts objects, dulls the senses - are just repeated again, though there seems no empirical evidence for them.

Overall the title should really be something like SUBJECTIVITY. It's more an account of TE's view of that than of matter as such.

Nearly done with Black Swan (in the middle of the second edition's postscript essay). It is very entertaining, Taleb is not afraid to sing his own praises or to rubbish other people - directly or indirectly, he takes a swipe at "a well respected Harvard professor" but also calls people out by name (one poor guy is described as "abject") - whole professions get taken down as well. His thesis is original (or I'm prepared to believe him when he trumpets its originality) but lots of supporting arguments borrowed (with acknowledgement) from others, especially Kahneman and Tversky (former of Thinking Fast and Slow fame). It jumps around a lot ("As we shall see in Chapter 17", "As we saw in Chapter 6", "As you will recall from my conversation with Daniel Nebbish in Chapter 3" - er, nope) and often leans heavily on jargon ("The Fourth Quadrant") that doesn't get explained till later. I was reminded of The Origin of Species, another book about a simple idea packed with supporting evidence - there one is impressed with the steady accumulation of a moutain of reliable evidence, this seems more like one of those walls in a crime thriller with photos and newspaper clippings and scribbled names all linked with a maze of red string.

Oh, and somewhat hearteningly he is not immune (none of us are) from the psychological errors he warns against, in the second edition postscript essay the section on personal fitness (which seems out of place even in a book full of somewhat irrelevant personal anecdotes) is reliant on confirmation bias and the narrative fallacy.

o. nate: There are some really fantastic E.C. Comics versions of Bradbury stories. Million Year Picnic is the best, IMHO, but if you've got a way to look up the graphic versions, they're worth your time. (Some info here... https://marswillsendnomore.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/ec-comics-ray-bradbury-the-handler/)

The best way to read Bradbury is to consume a slew of his short stories in one sitting. His tics – the midwestern cadence of his language, his use of color (red, green, metallic/silver) and consistent symbolism (balloons, grass, rockets, shoes, sports, rain) – seem more intentional when they're allowed to play out across a number of stories.

Most Ray Bradbury Theater episodes are on Youtube. Most episodes are well done. Mars is Heaven is a genuinely fun hour of TV.

For me, the Bradbury Rosetta Stone is a gorgeous little essay that ran in the New Yorker on the week that he died: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/04/take-me-home

It's like, at the last minute of his life, he wanted to pull back the curtain and say 'look! here's what I was doing this whole time!'

That sounds excellent, Soda. Good post.

The most lyrical and sentimental major SF writer I can think of - and the motif of fire as well as Mars.

Also, the wages of compulsive sentimentalizing in some of his stories, like the one I mention below:
Also read Farenheit 451 for the first time (which, a couple of short stories aside, is my first Bradbury). I mean he wrote the bastard in 9 days (albeit built around a framework of other short stories he'd already written) and it stands and falls on that fact: it's in a hurry, is clunky and overwritten (the adjectives, Raymond!) but it belts along, is full of conviction and he never writes at anything less than the top of his lungs.

Just started Magda Szabó's The Door.

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Thursday, April 23, 2020 10:28 AM (three months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't remember Bradbury's novels, unless you count some others built from sequential stories, like The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles: most recently, I encountered the anthologized account of a stray Martian child, the last of his kind in an area that includes a battered colony of Earthlings: he's seeking company, but he's had no training in how to control his shape-shifting-reflective abilities, and the colonists project images of their lost loved ones onto him, into him---it gets horrifying pretty quickly, and then it's over, in a way that's even worse. His short stories are worth seeking out, if you liked him at all.

― dow, Thursday, April 23, 2020 10:55 AM (three months ago) bookmarkflaglink

there are two huge (900pp each) volumes of his short stories (which aren't even everything)

my favourites of those i've read so far (just over half way through volume 1, but have read 3 of the collections elsewhere)

There Will Come Soft Rains (pdf - https://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf)

The Emissary (pdf - http://www.newforestcentre.info/uploads/7/5/7/2/7572906/the_emissary.pdf)

The Scythe (html - https://talesofmytery.blogspot.com/2013/11/ray-bradbury-scythe.html)

― koogs, Thursday, April 23, 2020

I teach There Will Come Soft Rains on occasion, always gets very despairing reactions.

Here are my favorites. I couldn't tell you how they've been re-anthologized, but by original volume:

From "Collected Stories": Pumpernickel, The Witch Door, Toynbee Convector
From "Dark Carnival": The Night
From "Golden Apple of the Sun": The Murderer, The April Witch
From "I Sing the Body Electric": I Sing the Body Electric, Night Call Collect
From "The Illustrated Man": The Long Rain, The Rocket, The City, The Other Foot, The Highway, Marionettes, Inc., Kaleidoscope, The Fox and the Forest
From: "The Martian Chronicles": The Long Years, There Will Come Soft Rains, The Million Year Picnic, Mars is Heaven,
From: "The October Country": The Scythe, The Jar, Skeleton (dumb...), (Uncle Einar, Homecoming, The Traveler... these three are all part of an abortive novel Bradbury started about a family of monsters. I wish he'd finished.)

Of these...
My sentimental and endearing favorite: "The Rocket"
My favorite non sci-fi: "The Night"
My spooky one-shot favorite: "The Witch Door"
My favorite for 'experimental' Bradbury (not actually experimental, but fun): "The City"