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

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?

I'm still slowly making my way through Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams. I'm going to end up with cliches but it's luminously beautiful. The Arctic feels a spare enough environment - in its human habitation, its fauna and flora - and Lopez has clearly spent so much time there, that he seems to have a total grasp of it, and is able to hold each piece in his hand and examine it minutely. He also has an ability to bring the austere, ringing cold into his prose, sections of which are beautiful meditations on the cycles of the seasons, migration cycles, our position on the planet. (He uses 'Eskimo' as a marker of ethnicity, which feels horribly dated but it's 35 years old so I guess of its time.)

The movement of animals in the Arctic is especially compelling because the events are compressed into but a few short months… They come north in staggering numbers, travel hundreds even thousands of miles to be here during those few weeks when life swirls in the water and on the tundra and in the balmy air. Standing there on the ground, you can feel the land filling up, something physical rising in it under the influence of the light, an embrace or exultation. Watching the animals come and go, and feeling the land swell up to meet them and then feeling it grow still at their departure, I came to think of the migrations as breath, as the land breating. In spring a great inhalation of light and animals. The long-bated breath of summer. And an exhalation that propelled them all south in the fall.

I met him once. He said he didn't like THE DARK KNIGHT because it endorsed a fascist Batman.

He hadn't actually seen the film.

Popping in two weeks late to say China Mieville OTM (and good on him for not bothering to watch it first).

Book club read: The Adventures Of Maud West, Lady Detective. Investigation of an early 20th century figure used as a springboard for all sorts of social history - WWI, the suffraggetes, divorce laws. Fun and frothy, tho I sometimes lost patience with the author's good faith towards her clearly self-mythologizing subject (DID Maud West truly bust a cocaine ring in Brazil? Well, it's POSSIBLE...).

Now gonna start Francoise Hardy's autobio.

Cool, please tell us about that one for sure.

"It is not a barren wall, it's living sweetness pressed into a wall, bunches of grapes pressed together."---"I don't believe it."---"Taste it."---"I'm too incredulous to lift a hand."---"I'll put a grape to your mouth, then."---"I won't be able to taste it from incredulity."---"Then drop!---"Didn't I tell you that the barrenness of this wall is enough to lay a man out?"
That's from Kafka's The Lost Writings, recently published by New Directions, translated by Michael Hofmann, and selected by Reiner Stach, who also wrote the afterword.
More uses of humor than expected, to a range of effects, incl. at least one that turns out like a sketch from Yiddish theater, if not a Mel Brooks movie. Also one that involves a power figure's much younger wife, uh-oh: more about sex and gender than expected as well---been a long time since I've read him, though. (Those last two are almost as long as it gets in here, like a couple pages each.)
Don't worry, it's also Kafkaesque:
A delicate matter, this tiptoeing across a crumbling board set down as a bridge, nothing underfoot, having to scrape together with your feet the ground you are treading on, walking on nothing but your reflection down in the water below, holding the world together with your feet, your hands cramping at the air to survive this ordeal.
Those are among my favorites so far, but some don't seem to work as well, though even here, he sets the bar fairly high.

Walter Mosley just won the National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, which reminds me to ask: where should I start with him? Mysteries, science fiction, mainstream literary---so prolific, and my local library has so many.

I read half of John Blades' introduction to Joyce's PORTRAIT.

I am about 10% into rereading Kate O'Brien's THE LAND OF SPICES (1941). It's all about Irish Catholic nuns and in some cases their European roots. Not really the most familiar milieu to me, even though ec20 Ireland in general is a history I know comparatively well.

Now reading The Order of the Day by Eric Vuillard. One could stock a medium-sized library with books about the Nazis so he gets credit right off the bat for finding a different angle.

I did a disservice to Tara Westover's Educated upthread by calling it a traumatic upbringing memoir. I mean it is, but a very good one - at once hard to read and hard to put down. But it's also very insightful on the insidious nature of mental abuse, how it feeds into self doubt and makes it hard to escape even when the opportunity is there. Even with that insight it's kind of astonishing how many times she goes back even when to do so is to put herself in physical danger, how reluctant she is to break ties with her family and even with just her father, who any disinterested observer would write off as an irredeemable monster; and how long her guilt at doing so persists, even after she's free and has weathered the subsequent mental breakdowns.

20 more pages into Oryx and Crake and the snuff videos and child exploitation started 8(

I finished The Doctor is Sick last night. Burgess tried to make it entertaining in several different ways that were rather cleverly yoked together, but the unifying element is Burgess' obvious fascination with and revulsion from human squalor of all varieties. He decorates this central theme with some streamers of linguistical trivia and much painfully crude spelling that attempted to reproduce 'funny' dialects, but it is relentless human squalor that dominates all else.

He does his best to make it all amusing. The fact that he often succeeds generated my main interest in finishing the book. I can justly state that it's a somewhat likeable book, if one likes that sort of thing.

Aimless, I know you and I don't get along in many respects, but I do appreciate hearing about what you're reading, among other things. I'll have to pick this one up, sounds right up my alley.

He wrote way too many books to bother to keep up with, but that one is worth reading for various reasons.

I've never read Burgess. I should probably remedy that.

I've read about a half dozen of his books. A Dead Man in Deptford is an interesting recreation of Kit Marlowe's shadowy life and death. Inside Enderby was a rather fun send-up of poets and their highly equivocal position in society. I've never read A Clockwork Orange, but glancing through it, it strikes me as a very sneering and sour book, an epitome of an old man yelling at the world to get off his lawn.

Ha, don’t think he was too old when he wrote that one, but yeah.

The thought of wading through all the made-up slang was enough to deter me any time I picked that one up.

I thought it was pretty good, as was his reason for making it up.

I think it was a clever idea, it's just my laziness.

Progress report on the Hardy autobio: early years marred by grandmother instilling body image issues on her, which she still struggles with - somewhat upsetting (tho I guess shouldn't be surprising) to think that the sort of melancholic, sorrowful style that made her such an icon of gallic chic came down to her being a person deeply unhappy in her own skin. She's critical of her early work too, and how quickly the book turns from her being a regular kid to a superstar really shows how young she was. She's smart and scathing on journalists who tried to humiliate yé yé singers with political/literary questions and of "intellectual" directors like Jean-Daniel Pollet (who directed her) who used cinema as a vehicle for their ideas without checking if those idea's visual translations had aesthetic value.

Also the very begining of the book is a story her mum tells of her crying every night the first month of her life but, because the mum never went to her, finally stopping. This is told by her mum as a "that's how you treat children!" story.

I've begun By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolano. 130 pages of pure monologue, no chapters, no paragraphing.

Read that one in summer 2009 when I was deadly ill with strep throat, don't remember anything about it except I liked it enough to spend what little money I had on 2666 afterwards.

I've started Gail Scott's 'Heroine.' Guess I'm on an experimental lesbian novelists from Montreal kick this year, given my Brossard obsession of the past few months.

Anyway, Scott mixes in a lot more French than I was expecting, which is fine because I can read the language relatively well, but was surprising nonetheless.

Misread 'Gail Scott's 'Heroine' as Gil Scott-Heron, was startled by lesbian references.

i'm (re)reading Blood Meridian by listening to the audiobook, and i do love the book, and the guy reading the audiobook is good, but the experience is reminding me of "you can type this shit, but you can't say it".

Finished Aubyn's A Clue to the Exit, his worst novel by some distance, with prose purpler than a Swamp Thing caption, and yet... some great one-liners as usual, and a few pages are cut-out-and-keep-in-your-wallet good.

I finished By Night in Chile. It was what normally gets described as a tour de force, a display of the author's sheer power over their material. In this case, Bolano's material was the intellectual and literary community of Chile, just prior to and during the Pinochet junta. It was filled with references to specific authors, as touchstones for specific points Bolano wished to make about that community, none of whom did I recognize apart from Pablo Neruda.

But, even though I am an ignoramus about Chile's literary canon, it was a compelling and astonishing book. It was not a book with a plot or a plan, so much as a pure, ceaseless artesian spring of imagination, memory and language, the overflow of his personal vision of Chile. Like ttitt, I'll promptly forget every detail of it, but it was a remarkable experience anyway.

Yes, your description in your second 'graph there matches my experience to a 't.' Will never forget how much I enjoyed reading it— I actually believe I've given it as a gift once or twice since!

By Night in Chile was my intro to Bolanos too -- I was carried away. The Savage Detectives disappointed me. 2666 won me back.

Bolaño obv

Yeah, understood, but I don't have an easy way to include the ñ, unless there's one nearby that I can c&p.

That's what I usually do

I finally figured that out, on an all devices. Bolaño, Buñuel, etc.

éåߥ øñ måçböök

I used the hell out of this old win 7 and its predecessors for a total of 15 years, at least, before I read a kid's mention of character maps, which this one sure has---thanks, kid!
Good old thread: Roberto Bolano

thx. i just found the character map utility on my win7 desktop. will use.

If one is using a phone, it's also pretty simple these days: Glück, Bolaño, s'arrêter, etc