Autumn 2020: Is Everything Getting Dimmer or Is It Just Me?

Recently read 2 miserable bastard French novels back-to-back: Journey to the End of the Night and Atomised. I liked them, but their misanthropy rubbed off on me a little too much and put me in a foul mood for the few weeks I was reading them. Now reading Vineland. It feels like a welcome change of tone in comparison. I know it's considered lesser Pynchon, but I'm having fun with it so far. Not looking forward to the day when I have no new (to me) Pynchon to read. Saving the biggest ones for last with Mason & Dixon and Against the Day.

Began Nicole Brossard's 'Picture Theory' this morning, for the second time.. found myself entering it from a different perspective and being able to adjust to its oddness a lot more readily.

I can't imagine reading Céline right now. Or Heidegger for that matter.

I've resumed reading Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams. I can't remember why but I put it down six months ago. I need the escape into the frozen north, even if it is littered with the bodies of muskoxen and Beluga whales.

You might like The Reivers

That one looks interesting. I'm also curious about "A Fable" a late novel set in the trenches of WWI. I liked the war stories by him I've read.

kind of an odd reading time for me -- i'm finding it hard to stick with anything. i did reread mary shelley's frankenstein for the first time since my teens. went right through it in a few nights. it's a very strange book, especially the periodic long stretches where victor f. just goes on vacation and describes the pretty scenery at length and seems to forget all about the terrifying results of his mad experiment, and this seems to happen for months and even years at a time. still pretty good, though! kinda tempted to look at some of shelley's other novels, which i know nothing about.

I really enjoyed The Last Man In Europe which starts as this big bustling future-historical steampunk pageant, romance and intrigue rippling into bloodwaves ov battle---then gradually it becomes like it says in the title and like what you're describing (which I won't spoil) Also liked a collection of shorter fiction, blanking on title, think it's from University of Nebraska Press. There's also this novella about a girl, maybe too smart for her own good, also in fraught relationship w her likewise father--kindle only, last time I checked, bundled with a story by her mother----here tis as stand-alone now (along w a whole lot more Mary now in the Kindle Store, which I hadn't seen all that):
...-unlike her first book, Frankenstein, written a year earlier, Mathilda uses fantasy to study a far more personal reality. It tells the story of a young woman whose mother died in her childbirth--just as Shelly's own mother died after hers--and whose relationship with her bereaved father becomes sexually charged as he conflates her with his lost wife, while she becomes involved with a handsome poet. Yet despite characters clearly based on herself, her father, and her husband, the narrator's emotional and relentlessly self-examining voice lifts the story beyond autobiographical resonance into something more transcendent: a driven tale of a brave woman's search for love, atonement, and redemption. It took more than a century before the manuscript Mary Shelley gave her father was rediscovered.
The stories tend to try to be more normwave Golden Age Victorian ladies' fiction, but still her, still pretty powerful in their way, best I remember.
Haven't read any other novels.

Might get around to this one:
THE FORTUNES OF PERKIN WARBECK is an historical novel concerning the life and exploits of Perkin Warbeck, a pretender to the throne of King Henry VII. In the novel, Warbeck claims to be Richard, Duke of York, the second son of King Edward IV who was unjustly imprisoned in the Tower of London.

The sections where he's chasing the monster around the Arctic are permanently embedded in my brain, God I love that book.

J.D., I agree, from (long-ago) memory that FRANKENSTEIN is not very much what one would expect it to be.

I started rereading Nella Larsen's PASSING.

been really enjoying janet malcolm’s the silent woman: sylvia plath and ted hughes. this in some senses is surprising, because i have never really had any interest in either (which is bad and incurious of me, tho i give myself more of a free pass in the case of hughes, whose poetry i’ve never been much taken with).

but this is a great and incisive description of among other things, the psychic challenges of biography, the relationship of the living to the dead, what it meant to be an american woman in the UK, depression, and the horrid escapes and traps of the self-defined romantic artist, and contains a truly malignant anti-creative character/force in the form of Olwyn Hughes, Ted’s sister.

A+ one of the best books i’ve read this year. a keeper.

does also make me want to revisit *some* of hughes’ poetry, and give plath another go.

loved that book despite also having little-to-no interest in its subjects

oh cool!

i was just thinking as well as this:

the relationship of the living to the dead

it’s really good on the relationships of those people whose point of connection is some who’s died, traumatically in this case.

Plath is I suppose a cliché for young women to like but I loved her work a lot when I was much younger and I still like how she wrote, the clarity and frankness of her expression really gets to me. This has also reminded me that I lent a collection of her poems to someone I subsequently fell out catastrophically with, so time to reorder it I think.

Also now remembering that Plath was so beloved by my English class that Ted Hughes was a boo-hiss total hate figure, lol.

t’s really good on the relationships of those people whose point of connection is some who’s died, traumatically in this case. Thanks, Fizzles! Just realize this is what I was trying to pinpoint re Cather's The Professor's House, which I raved about on prev. WAYR? Most of those characters are in the same family, but their relationship to dead guy x his legacy is becoming key, esp. in POV of the Professor.
Have only read a little of The Bell Jar, need to get back to that, and got why it would be such a YA fave of girls, also the poetry can still startle, while going toward xpost romantic traps, and must have inspired many many song lyrics. Also enjoyed & need to get back to emerging diaries and letters over the years.
The only thing like an extended biographical account that I've read is by her colleague and neighbor A. Alvarez, in his book about suicide, The Savage God.

practicing self-care by reading uncle fred in the springtime by pg wodehouse

Started reading Exhalation by Ted Chiang, a collection of short stories of which I'd already read The Lifecycle of Software Objects, which was good. First story, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is good, but it's in close enough proximity to Borges to feel a bit 'miss is as good as a mile.'

Also in my pile, Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg, which looks good, but no book has tried harder with its blurb quotes to make me never want to read it: 'A Zingy Romp' Guardian, 'A Mind-Bending Romp' NYT, 'Rollicking' (that from Maggie Nelson, so we'll call that a score-draw). 'A bawdy, dazzling triumph of a book' etc.

Seriously. do not use the word romp plz. It puts me off my tea.

I've always loved THE BELL JAR (and said so at length in an article that was never published) but clarity is what I've rarely found in Plath's poetry (save the most famous and broad-brush pieces). I wonder if, though she was young when she wrote it, I was never old enough to understand it when I read it, and could do better now.

romp is a horrible word

The only thing like an extended biographical account that I've read is by her colleague and neighbor A. Alvarez, in his book about suicide, The Savage God.

― dow,

Janet Malcom's The Silent Woman is terrific.

I used to bullseye romp wats in my T-16 back home

Luc Sante's new Maybe The People Could Be The Times is proving to be quite the variegated unity, but I want to peel away some of the framework from an early segment, "E.S.P.":
1.
Very late that night, riding home on the train as it shoots past the graffiti-washed vacant stations on the local track, they stare straight ahead, unable to explain or articulate the sense of dread that fills them both except by reference to the lateness of the hour, or the ebbing of the drugs, or the onset of a cold.
....The air is heavy with the weight of an earlier week, it was still summer in the streets above...The song is "Florence, " by the Paragons.
....The song wants to be a ballad but keeps turning into a dirge...But then doo-wop is a spectral genre. It actually happened on street corners; what transpired in the recording studio, afterward, might sound posthumous.
...But "Florence" cuts through the format with its breathtaking weirdness. The piano, the groans, the keening falsetto..."Oh, FLorence, you're an angel, from a world up above," raves the singer in a dog-whistle register that symbolically indicated the purity and intensity of his passion, while an Artic Wind blows through any room where the song is played.
Naturally our couple don't know that each has "Florence" playing on the internal soundtrack, not that either would be surprised. The hour, the chill, the sticky yellow light, the vertical plunge from a high---all call down "Florence." The moment could feel merely depressed, small-time, pathetic, but "Florence" in its strangeness lends it magnificence. "Florence" places the moment in the corridor of history, makes it an episode, emphasizes its proximity to heartbreak, suggests that a contrasting scene will follow directly.
(A lot of stuff happens, mostly to and in other people, but) ...Now they've stopped talking, from fatigue and futility. They're drained, and that in concert with the cold air makes them feel as though they're drifting, carried by breezes far from their rooftop amd over the city...They sit, or float, atop a dead city, mired in a darkness that does not even manage to be satisfyingly black. Just then the sun's first rays point up over the horizon...Silently they regard this phenomenon. It seems cruelly and pointlessly ill-timed, purely gratuitous and designed to mock them. It is the earth epic ritual enactment of beginning, and they are at an end. They become aware once again of the song, hovering over the rooftops, emanating from some unseen radio. Sally goes round the roses and keeps going round them: it is a circle. It has no point of entry or exit. They have no purchase on it, no more than they have power over the sun.
Not quite the ending, but close enough.

(Some typos in there, sorry: it's "Arctic wind," not "Wind," a few things like that.)

"the earth's," not "the earth"---shit, I shouldn't have taken this out of context; just try reading the whole thing.

Recurring segments of non-linear groove: a nine-year-old Belgian transplant to a "leafy suburb" in New Jersey tries to understand Americans, with words in print as primary sources---authorities examine a picture he draws of his mother in the supermarket, which mostly displays a variant of the common immigrant response to our abundance ((known to result in "eighteen types of aphasia", for instance): here, gigantic bags are labelled "Chock o' Full Nuts" and so on---also, re: the monster "Tetley's," subject, native of coffee-drinking nation, has been heard to s"ay that family-size teabags look like "pants on a hanger." Fascination with said abundance "may result in his working three jobs---or may lead to a series of service station robberies; however, deportation is not currently recommended."
(A later drawing involves a very groovy Catholic-Aztec-Atlantean temple with a welcoming mouth; this illustrates a natural history lesson: "The stoner, like the grasshopper, is on drugs.")
he also tries and fails, always to get five bucks from the Reader's Digest for his jokes, but this teaches him a lot about humor (for inst. while once again comparing his offering with those accepted). He doesn't joke outright in writing so much as slip a phrase in while carefully moving his flashlight over the latest goods (though my sense of his voice comes from as many years of correspondence as print).
Gets a scholarship to a Jesuit-run day school in Manhattan, commutes, cuts classes, but even when he doesn't, gets an earful of the sound of the city, incl. music as structure, as much or more than texture. But it's not enough: gobbles up every mention of bands etc. in the underground papers he reads on the train home, knowing he can't take them there; Mom searches his room too well. The papers also incl. advice on cheap medical care, housing, food, which are not what he neeeds. Later, living on the Lower East Side and CBGB yadda yadda yadda, the hip papers are full of musical superfluity, and not the food etc. low-downs he needs.
Great descriptions of music in life and vice-versa, incl. the kind that drives your girlfriend to drive your dancing beyond any skinny boy endurance, though not finesse, but hey.
There are also segments of lifelines to the end etc.

Pinefox, I remember the Larsen only vaguely since I haven't read it in 20 years, but I remember it staying with me at the time. There's something strange and woozy about Larsen's style that I adored, at least in my memory of reading it

I picked up Fong and the Indians, Paul Theroux. It dates from 1968, so I think it was his first published novel, set in East Africa of the mid-1960s. It aims at humor and sometimes it delivers humor, but it relies a lot on racial and cultural stereotyping for that humor, so I'm not going to recommend it to other ILBers. It's OK to let this one sink into deserved obscurity.

Xxp Maybe the People Could Be The Times is the first part of the Love song title Between Clark and Hillsdale is that significant?

David Olusoga The World's War.
Book on the unsung input of ethnic populations across the globe in the first World War. I think this covers both coloured soldiers from the then empires of various nations involved and fighting in non Western European fronts.
I had attended a webinar on a similar subject a few days before finding the book on a shelf in the sale section of a local chain newsagent.& then left it on the shelf as I went around shopping but went back for it that day instead of leaving it til my next trip. Now glad I went back for it then since can't get into shop during lockdown.

Dipping onto way too many other things. Just read Ned Ragget's piece on MBV'S Loveless in the book Marooned that turned up as I tidied piles of stuff beside my bed.

I finished the collection of Faulkner stories (the Modern Library one to be precise) and now I've started on Nell Zink's Doxology. I believe Scott S. was praising it somewhere on this board. I'm digging it so far, definitely hitting my Gen-X nostalgia vibes hard.

Part III of xpost Sante's Maybe The People Could Be The Times (right, Stevolende, he thanks RIP Arthur Lee for the title, the point of which becomes easier to sense) is a sequence of profiles->critical essays->narratives, a sequence with its own overall narrative continuity, its own thematic thought train, linking all the profiles etc, but not too tightly.
"The Source (Barbara Epstein)" is about the editor who made a writer out of him, when he was mainly drinking and working-lurking in the NYRB mail room. She (this is my way of looking at it) set him free, as something of her own creative shaping, that way that editing and writing merge and recombine---though I'm thinking this way after the next stop, "The Freelancer (Richard Stark)": Stark himself is a kind of offshoot of his creator/main ID, Donald Westlake, who gives Stark license to single-mindedly pursue the pursuits of a crook, a total, self-taught and self-disciplined pro, himself a kind of writer, in Sante's take, because the pro crook must always size up, trace, track "only connect" all the factors of the next heist, incl. character studies of his accomplices---but something always goes wrong, people and things never stay under his thumb (if they did, it would be tough-guy cozies, the more mechanical caper tales of the 60s etc.)

(Jumping ahead to his Simenon piece, Maigret's Memoirs has the cop obv. flattered by the usual author's attention, but feeling crowded by, breathed upon, just wanting to get on with his work, and so he tells it his way dammit.)

The one about Rivette--first of the Cahiers du Cinema crit-->director gang incl. Godard etc, to actually make a film. but the last to find his own voice", becomes the story of "the auteur as anti-auteur," setting his characters free/making them characters via increasingly wide, shaped spaces of improvisation---countered by the inclusion of Jean-Pierre Leaud, an actor since the age of 13, who *cannot* improvise, and there are many other tensions in the accrural of momentum, the challenges to all concerned, incl. viewer as editor, writer, participant---in the relationship of Out 1: Spectre, which encourages paranoid thinking, which "colors matters that are more flatfootedly explicable in the serial," the serial being Noli me tangere:
Spectre was a cult film for decades. It was the film we saw again and again on those rare occasions when it came to town, its abiding mystery forever drawing us back in, and Noli me tangere was perhaps the solution to the mystery, though no one really expected it to one day materialize.
Did not expect HP Lovevcraft to be an inspirational figure for Houellebecq, but as LS tells it, makes all too much sense, ugh.
We also get Lynd Ward, who Sante desribes aa maybe the first American graphic novelist per se starting in the 1920s, way before the term was generally used) though there are also intriguing glimpses of a French role model/preceding woodcuts artist.
Then "The Carpenter (Manny Farber), woodworker by trade, supporting the movie critic and painter, who later went full-time to this last (if only went he could draw Social Security?), then "The Collector (Sophie Calle)" the conceptual artist who could be considered as offering "a parody of a parody," building from the offerings of information science's assurances, polling etc., which Sante sees as in a direct line of descent from reading entrails etc. to reassure leaders ov campaigns (also goes into Surrealists' fascination with such facting).
Then "The Portraitist (Richard Prince" and "The Avenger (David Wojnarowicz)" conclude Part III---Patti Smith was in Part I, Vivian Maier will be in Part IV, Glenn O'Brian and Rene Ricard in Part V, along with many other topics.

Glenn *O'Brien*, duh, sorry Glenn fans.

I was too hard on Exhalation, it is a very good collection of conceptual science-fiction, and that first story, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate manages to create a metaphysical braid of fate and moral reward. The title story neatly brings together consciousness, entropy, and environmental sustainability into a fable. The pieces are weighted more to the style of philosophical exemplars or fables than the dramatic, but doesn't affect their goodness, only perhaps the mood in which you would choose to pick them up.

Also, the first volume of Bataille's The Accursed Share. A hilarious introduction where he basically says 'if this book fails for you, through a lack of strength or cogency, then that's success and you've just missed the point.' I'm not sure how much this holds up as a work of political economy, but as a quasi-mystical tract, it's quite appealing to me (i basically agree with his view, while feeling that too little is rigorously defined, and really just sitting back and enjoying lines like 'Beyond out immediate ends, man's activity in fact pursues the useless and infinite fulfilment of the universe' (which he then explains in a footnote is a paradox).

tbrr I'm fairly convinced that you could get all the same philosophical info you need out of The Fall's Your Future

Need that Sante book.
Houellebecq wrote a whole book about Lovecraft.

My mother gave me the new Houellebecq for Christmas or my birthday, can't remember which, and I got it out of my house as fast as I could.

"I am old and fat and a french pervert, also I hate Muslims, isn't that interesting" does not make for good novels. Boring writer.

Yeh, I agree w whoever said they aint no Houellebecq gull

I mean, I just don't get what someone is doing reading Houellebecq when they could be reading so many other much more interesting French writers who work with identity, Nationalism, and the abject quite a bit. Blanchot and Bataille alone would take a lifetime to read. Why Houellebecq over them?

Yesterday I finished Elizabeth Bowen, THE LAST SEPTEMBER. A major piece of the literature of the Irish revolutionary period. The ending is crazily abrupt.

Need that Sante book.
Houellebecq wrote a whole book about Lovecraft.

It goes without saying that Blanchot and Bataille should be infinitely ahead of Houellebecq on just about anyone's reading list, but it's a bit of a weird comparison. If anything, Sérotonine features explicitly disparaging passages about Blanchot, and Houellebecq is a noted hater of all things Nouveau Roman-adjacent. But if you want to know more about the state of French mainstream culture in the 21st century, Houellebecq makes for far more informative reading than either of the two Bs. Plenty of people who deem his persona despicable (which it quite obviously is) pay attention to his novels anyway for precisely that reason.

Even if Houellebecq were an interesting proposition (he isn't) his novels are a chore to read and not at all enlivening or enlightening. He's not even interestingly poisonous - his worst crime is being boring.

Note that I didn't make a comparison, I just said that if one wanted to read work *around certain subjects,* they could do better.

Houellebecq sucks, and anyone who takes him seriously is a dope afaic. I told this to a friend who was reading the new one, and he was really shocked at how straightforward my insult was. No room for Islamophobic trash in my world.

Been thinking about reading NYRB edition of In the Café of Lost Youth---is it good?

I am now reading The Fish Can Sing, Halldor Laxness. It is starting out very enjoyably.

I read Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees last year and enjoyed it enough to check out more of her work, but I'm reading Prodigal Summer now and...I've struggled with this with other contemporary writers in the past, but I have a very hard time getting into fiction where the author fails to allow the research that they did for the novel to seamlessly flow into the text. I swear every other descriptive paragraph in this thing is *clunky facts about plants/animals* and it's making it pretty slow going.

(nb I love Moby Dick lol)

Prodigal Summer has that problem that The Poisonwood Bible also does, where it's a multi-strand narrative but only one of the strands has any actual character development. If she'd just stuck to Lusa's story, it would be a much better book.

A hilarious fact about Prodigal Summer, known to everyone in Alaskan literary circles, is that Kingsolver (allegedly) had an affair with Alaskan writer Seth Kantner and then wrote him into the book as the coyote hunter dude. Which is how you get a Southern coyote hunter who knows how to carve walrus ivory.

Had to read 'The Bean Trees' as summer reading before 9th grade. Maybe it was because I was 14, but while I admired some of the politics of the book, I was not too impressed with the style itself. Should probably pick up something by her one of these days, but I'm so deep long my own path...

Speaking of which, I finished Brossard's 'Picture Theory,' and am now halfway through one of her more recent and noticeably less experimental novels, 'Fences in Breathing.' She's truly something else, love her work. Also slowly working through Lisa Lowe's 'Intimacies of Four Continents,' which someone recommended to me on ILE. Holding up so far!

Just received a load of stuff in the mail, and am also leading a manuscript development workshop at the moment, so it looks like I'm really set for a while.

Yeah don't get me wrong, I wouldn't give The Bean Trees a glowing recommendation, but it was enjoyable enough for a first novel that I figured she was worth exploring further. Also, in my recent attempt to focus on late 20th/early 21st century fiction I also read Tartt's The Secret History so the bar is set pretty low.

I mean, she is doing something right, and unlike many (ahem male) authors of her popularity and renown, I actually think the work has some good parts.