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

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.

Well I haven't given up on Prodigal Summer yet, just needed to vent a little. :)

For some reason I always put her and Anne Lamott together in my head, and I really dislike Anne Lamott. I should probably give Kingsolver another chance!

Was inspired to see if the library had that Luc Sante, instead checked out Peter Doyle’s The Big Whatever, which he wrote the introduction to. The first half is the narrator reading a trashy sex/drugs/rock’n’roll/armed robbery novel in which he appears, mildly disguised; the second half is him tracking down the presumed-dead author. Great runaround fun set in the seedier parts of late-60’s/early 70’s Australia. Apparently there are several earlier novels in the same series.

Also slowly working though Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary.

Pessoa: where should I start? Want to get hit w as many voices as possible in one book, as long as it's good.

Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos "wrote" the most interesting poetry.

The Book of Disquiet isn't meant to be read front to back, at least I didn't. Open it at random.

I'm...not much of a fan of Pessoa, but Alfred has it right, yes.

I'm not a fan either, but, as my comparative lit professor said long ago, read it so you can toss it into your cultural knapsack.

'we are two abysses-- a well staring at the sky' is really all that I remember of him.

I enjoyed the poetry collection A Little Larger Thant The Entire Universe which has selections from his 3 main alter egos.

William Shakespeare - Hamlet

Good?

Yes. Hated this stuff in school but I am little bit more in tune with language and themes plus I've read quite a lot of the classical sources.

I've seen stans of Shirley Hazzard online: The Transit of Venus seems consid her masterpiece, also The Collected Stories is said to be v. great. My local library has The Great Fire. I like some quotes from various stories and novels when her characters comment on love and literature. Highly heated plot elements, evidently. Should I check her out?

I read most of the literary essays in Joseph Conrad's NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS.

Also an essay about the first (and last?) time he flew, in an RAF plane in 1917. He also wrote at least two essays about the loss of the Titanic.

Finished Brossard's Fences in Breathing, now starting on Kimberley Alidio's ":once teeth bones coral:". She's got two books out this year, and I've been tasked with reviewing this one...and I think I like the other one a lot better. But only 1/3 into it, so that might change!

Watching a filmed stage production of Synge's PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD. Good but the speed of delivery tends to obscure the greatest thing about Synge, the richness of the language. I wonder if his speeches really need stretching out and slowing down just to let that come through.

xxxp I read The Great Fire many years ago and enjoyed it. The Transit of Venus has been on my list for a while now but still haven't got around to it. My advisor in college, who had pretty good taste (e.g. once taught a course called Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald that was 95% Penelope and like 1 or 2 F. Scott short stories), used to rave about it fwiw.

Will give it a look at the library, thanks!
xp Yeah, that's my experience w Synge as well; for me, he and Shakespeare are best read, w all due props to various productions, incl. on film. (Have seen xxxpost Hamlet[s] of Olivier, Burton, Gibson, Williamson: fave was the pissed-off last, w Anthony Hopkins as Claudius, Marianne Faithfull as Ophelia).

He would seem to be better suited for Richard III than Hamlet, and yet, whining, perverse, sinuous, and sardonic, he is right at the center of Tony Richardson's "Hamlet," itself a mirror of the cosmically bereft times we live in...The tragic framework has been eliminated...likewise the religious references and Christian context...which makes it even more powerful, in for inst a 1970 way, I say! Molly Haskell's perceptive, if somewhat academically funereal (also v 1970) Voice review (open full screen to get whole page) https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=qVQQAAAAIBAJ&sjid=N4wDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6366,535517

I finished The Fish Can Sing last night. Generally speaking, this novel fits into the coming-of-age category, but Halldor Laxness seemed to have been incapable of writing a novel that fit snugly into any category. It is pleasantly askew and mirthful, while touching more mysterious depths now and again. Would recommend.

I'm now reading The Doctor is Sick an Anthony Burgess novel from 1960. Its tone is miles different than the Laxness. I attribute this to Burgess having grown up saturated in the classism and reflexive snobbery of England, while Laxness was a socialist who grew up on a remote island where even the petty bourgeois were comparatively poor and uneducated.

Finished Happily, a 40-page long poem/short book by Lyn Hejinian.

Almost done with Nell Zink's Doxology. Seems to be aiming for a big sprawling canvas kind of like White Teeth. It starts out like a Gen-X hipster nostalgia novel but then widens the zoom to take in the previous and next generation as well (so I guess the Boomers and Millennials). On the surface it might be taken for a contrasting tale of Gen X irony and cynicism and Millennial idealism, but its more complex than that. A theme is how each idealistic person ends up striking their own bargain with reality. Zink keeps the story moving along at a sprightly pace which is good in a book of this length, but by not dwelling on any one thing for very long and treating everything with the same kind of quick ironic tone, you end up feeling like she doesn't have a good sense of what the most compelling parts of her story are, where perhaps we would have wished to spend more time and dig a bit deeper.

I am for some reason reading my third traumatic upbringing memoir in a year. First was Patricia Lockwood's Priestdaddy - less traumatic (mostly), more bonkers, parents religious and insane but not dangerously so. Then Mary Karr's The Liar's club, parents not religious but dangerously insane. Now Tara Westover's Educated, parents religious and dangerously, criminally, near lethally insane. They've all been eye opening and worthwhile but I think I'm done with this genre now.

Oryx and Crake, about 20% in, and i want to sack off work until the flashbacks get around to finally describing the terrible thing that happened.

(Although something is screwed about the page numbers, chapters will finish on page "10 of 16". I think the main count is fine but the per chapter numbers are wrong)

Moving between Conversations With Losey by Michel Ciment (director gives good chat) and Dubliners by James Joyce (author gives good craic)

xp I liked Oryx and Crake, deeply weird book, I’ve got the rest of the trilogy but haven’t read them yet. Feel like there’s not much love for them on ILB?