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

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

Right. And on my Mac laptop, I just use alt-something for the magic signs, so alt-u for umlaut, alt-n for the tilde, alt-I for the circomflex: Glück, Bolaño, s'arrêter, etc.

I'm now on to The Curse of Bigness: Anti-Trust in the New Gilded Age, Tim Wu, based on a comment by caek on another thread. Seems very readable, but after 50 pages of laying the historical groundwork I'm waiting for it to get to the modern era. I'm already fully in agreement with the premise that the USA and the world in general is beset by a heavy burden of monopolies and near-monopolies, funneling vast sums of money into fewer and fewer hands and this must be reversed.

Yeah that was more of a legal history than the manifesto (with historical context) I was expecting

see also https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed-their-populist-soul/504710

Yeah he wrote a book on the same subject. I read the wu one because it was 150pp instead of 600.

Finished Oryx and Crake, which turned out to be a pandemic novel. The one bit I don't understand is why he killed oryx.

And I enjoyed it but am not clamouring to read parts 2 and 3. Same happened with Wool a few years ago. They sit fine as a single book with a mystery ending.

Is Fat City any good? Saw the NYROB edition at Barnes & Noble of all places. I'm in the area again today, so I may pick it up if y'all approve.

iirc the John Huston movie is a faithful adaptation, I liked them both

I am reading "Master and Margarita". Crazy magic realism larks tend to irritate me but I'm enjoying it so far.

Fat City is very good indeed.

Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century by Mark Sedgwick

big thumbs up for ‘fat city’ from me

saw a nice used copy of The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book at the shop today. i flipped through it and it looked totally nuts, in a good way but also i have a hard time imagining myself actually reading it. i didn't end up buying it but kinda tempted to go back and grab it

If you ever do, flopson, I'll gladly talk about it with you. That stuff is my bread and butter.

that's a great incentive :-)

This Kate O'Brien novel is going to take a while to finish ... again.

I'm about 50 pages into a public library copy of Reaganland. Now I need to decide if I am enthusiastic enough to read the remaining 850 pages. I'll dip in again tonight and decide if it's just too depressing.