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

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.

Is Kate O'Brien any good? She's about the only Virago Modern Classics-revitalised writer who never really appeared, but I don't know why. Had an impression of religiosity and Mills & Boonishness which is probably very incorrect.

appeaLed, not appeaRed

I finished Vuillard's The Order of the Day. More people should write books like this, and I don't just mean the length. Find a few minor characters and less-well-known moments that illuminate a well-known historical event; apply some literary techniques and drop some philosophical-poetical asides; allude to other interesting rabbit holes that the reader can follow or not, given time, interest and access to Google and/or Wikipedia; don't overstay your welcome.

Now alternating between Nikolai Leskov stories and a 1950s SF anthology.

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.

― Respectfully Yours, (Aimless)

I couldn't stop reading, my depression was too advanced.

James M: massive interest in Catholicism, yes. Mills & Boon, from what I've read: no. She's much more serious than that.

In this novel a senior nun writes to another senior nun in French, and the novel just presents the 3 pages of French. That wouldn't be allowed now.

Reaganland is too much like torture. It's going back to the library. If Perlstein's detailed dig into the electoral history of the modern conservative movement has any core message it's that organizing is the muscle, brains, heart and soul of electoral politics, just as it has always been. All that changes are the tools.

The War of the Poor by Eric Vuillard, as it happens.

i enjoyed The Order of the Day, though i wasn't entirely sure *why*. probably along the lines generally of nate's post. it felt *selective* in a... good way, but also to an end i couldn't really pin down. just found my original post on it here. that's fairly harsh tbh. i enjoyed it more than that and felt it had an impact beyond my immediate interpretation of it. in truth i read it fairly carelessly and shd probably read again.

anyway, The War of the Poor is very slight, and takes a slightly serpentine route following Thomas Müntzer's millenarian career - he'll be familiar to anyone who's read The Pursuit of the Millennium. The tone is very hither and thither, no real sense of focus, leading to a similar feeling of... 'what is this?' i got with the order of the day. the short chapter on the peasant's revolt is good, but i found myself wondering about the blend of anecdote and history in there. also - someone else on ilx will be able to put me right -

'Today, the lowliest user's guide is in English; they speak English everywhere: in train stations, business offices, airports; English is the language of merchandise, and these days, merch is God. But back then Latin was used for public announcements, while English remained the lingo of ragmen and roughnecks.'

This all feels wildly suspect, as always in that space between translation and the translated. French was the language of the court, 'English' feels like an extremely equivocal term here, also 'business offices'?

Elsewhere tone is suspect but it's not clear whether because of translation or original. As with The Order of the Day, I can't quite make up my mind about it, which is interesting in itself.

ugh, tho now i'm not sure, because i was checking against norman davies' the isles for this period, and he's just said in this chapter 'Richard II was said to have addressed Jack Cade's rebels in their native tongue.' well that would be weird as Richard II was deposed as is well known, thanks Shakespeare, in 1399 and died a year later. Cade's rebellion wasn't until 1450ish. wat tyler, sure. but not jack cade.

Again from Davies

"In 1363, for example, the Lord Chancellor was said to have opened a parliamentary session for the first time in English. That same session passed the so-called Statue of Pleadings: ‘The King has ordained . . . that all pleas which shall be pleaded in any court whatsoever . . . shall be pleaded, shown, defended, answered, debated and judged in the English tongue, and that they shall be entered and enrolled in Latin.’"

idk, Vuilldard's point feels forced for *reasons*, and given the looseness of his approach, in itself quite appealing, you expect that cloth of looseness to sit on a framework of rigour imo. that is the only excuse for looseness, that you have hidden constraints.

by god this davies book on the isles is serious garbage. it has ONE (1) passing reference to the peasant's revolts, which it gets wrong, by half a century (see above). it has only THREE (3) references to Richard II.

ONE of those is cited in a quote from a medievalist bemoaning the influence of shakespeare on a student perception of history:

I have lately begun to realise that the great majority, even of those who claim to be educated, are very hazy ... about everything that happened before 1485. To the brighter schoolboy, the reign of Richard II suggests (with luck) the Peasants Revolt...

to the brighter schoolboy, *not including Norman f'ing Davies in his history of the British Isles. gah. that's really annoyed me.

i've literally picked this book up to pick into and refer when i need it, not to read from cover to cover. and literally the only times i've picked it up, it's proved itself to be egregiously shit.

literally literally.

i genuinely would have been better informed reading 1066 And All That.

My present book is Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Döblin, in the NYRB edition. The narration and prose style are idiosyncratic, but interesting and it comes off fairly well in the Michael Hofman translation.

Then watch Fassbinder's film!

TV series, really.

(I know this is the most annoying argument but I saw that damn thing in the cinema and when a "film" gets broken up in regular intervals for opening credits...)

yeah I remember catching a great chunk of taht tv show when it was on was it Channel 4 in the early 80s.
I know taht Chris Bohn loved it so much he adopted the name Biba kopf from the name of teh main protagonist which he may still go by.
THink I tried to d/ld it a few years ago but couldn't get the subtitles to sync or something.

Saw some of it but managed to miss most of it. I wonder what I was doing instead? Probably rehearsing with some band or something stupid.

i think it’s all here. the subs look all right apart from some formatting issues.

In the Françoise Hardy bio: she did a TV special with German schlager star Udo Jurgens, where the concept was they were dating. They allowed her to pick anyone as a guest, so she chose Ionesco, who proceeded to get sloshed on the occasion. The special never aired because there was a scene with them in bed (not Ionesco).

Hardy was also friends with Patrick Mondiano and played him a Stockhausen record, which caused him to collapse in laughter.

Really got to check that, thanks for keeping us with it.
I remembered our good Borges discussion upthread, but not particulars of this kick-off, totally jazzed by re-read---are the Professor Borges talks in here too?
Jorge Luis Borges - The Total Library Non-Fiction 1922-1986

500 pages worth of essays and (later in life, due to what seems like a mixture of further fame and blindness) transcried talks. The essays up to 1955 or so (pre-blindness) are a series of optical illusions. He has an incredible ability to convey the essence of a whatever he is reading or seeing (about a dozen film reviews here) in about 3/4 highly satisfying pages that also manage to display the sense that he has read about half a dozen books on that book or author (this could be another optical illusion but maybe if you spend all your life reading or writing that might be true, either that or he has good skim-reading ability). That's whether he is writing for a journal, the desk, or a woman's magazine. Throughout, we have a series of slightly longer essays that seem like 3/4 pages stitched together, as he talks about the translators of The Arabian Nights (v interesting discussion of Orientalism as a thing before Said?) Benjamin's essay on it gets far more hits than Borges and while there isn't a take on it per se that isn't fused with the books he discusses it feels a little unfair. I love his 20 pages on Dante, just different aspects of the book, on Icelandic Sagas, on Fitzgerald's Rubáiyát (this was a marvel, his account of Fitzgerald felt like a short story!), Flaubert, Gibbon, Coleridge, and first reads of Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner as being published for the first time - his reckoning with modernism and sharp judgment (the way he is so open to what Joyce does on Ulysses while at the same time struggling through Finnegans Wake, compare this to Woolf's dismissal based on snobbery and jealousy in her diaries), plus his Refutation of Time (which has won out in discussion of literature) over space is something to go back to. The range of reading on a level I have not seen since Auerbach's Mimesis (Auerbach ofc also published his own separate account of Dante) that feels like reading has taken place (unlike George Steiner lol, no name dropping). Both are as light and exhausting as they try to give as open a read as their faculties will allow them (at the edge!), and for the Borges there is no better demonstration of how a writer of fiction worth reading is always a reader first and foremost.

In the end its clear how I took Borges for granted too. I reckon Labyrinths is a possibly flawed collection. The power of the stories doesn't put the essays in perspective. Also brings to mind how people like Eco and Manguel really feel like bad copies of him. It can't be empahsized how much of a one-off Borges was.

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, September 30, 2020

You know all those Poll threads on here: 'List our favourite book of 1922', etc?

Now I'm logged in to ILB I can't see them. Where are they?

Strange, I can see them. The thread titles all begin with "wherein" if that helps with searching.

I searched, and, I think, voted, but now I still can't see them on New Answers!

Have you hidden ilb from site new answers? https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/CustomiseSiteNewPostsControllerServlet (link available under preferences)

There is also a “hide polls” option iirc

I only look at ILB New Answers - hadn't ever occurred to me to look at whole site New Answers!

I don't think I've hidden polls but will check that.

An excerpt of Jack, the latest novel in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead series, quickly hooked me like good piano music, going back and forth through different keys, subthemes, shadings, narrative clarity and momentum, just emphatic enough, no overselling. Local library doesn't have it yet, so I've started with the first, Gilead, which continues the effect, and the narrator mentions that he often writes with the radio on, so maybe that's an influence, the flow of detail in and among shows, programming, stations, marking, coloring time and vice-versa (at one point mentions that during a maybe long-past dark period, he sat up 'til all stations were off the air).
So he's sitting there on the prairie, in his house, this old pastor who is disconcerted to realize that he's written "more than Saint Augustine," with not nearly the quality, and mainly every sermon he ever preached, now bagged up in the attic, fire hazards in this dry land, and he's always written all kinds of things and now he's writing a letter to his five-year-old son, to be read when he's gone, because he's dying, while still walking around, even feeling pretty good, considering. and he spent all his money on books, incl. the ones he won't live long enough to read, long before the kid's future mother walked into his church while he was preaching---now he's got the loves of his life, and he can't leave the kid anything much, except this letter.
Which, since he's a writin' fool, goes back and forth, from and to self-explanation and other possibly useful observations of human nature, adventures and other speculative memories of and with bis own father, grandfather, mother, neighbors, and their own lore--- also becoming a diary, in a way that just seems natural for this guy (also that it will go on for 242 hardback pages---happy reading, kid).

Trying to decide what to start next— another Gail Scott novel, my friend Mark's latest book of poems, or a book that I'm supposed to review sometime before the year is up. I'm currently done teaching and have no grading for the next week, so I'm a bit...free up to start whatever. Might begin with my friend's book, since it's so short and I'll be able to finish it before the day is out.

i’ve read a *lot* of garbage pop factual books this year, but one that isn’t garbage is Because Internet: Understanding How Language is Changing by Gretchen McCulloch. That’s doubly good, because it’s a subject that could be done *very badly* and glibly imo. But this is thoughtful, clear and exceptionally well annotated, and contains structured thinking and analysis. It’s slightly overfriendly in places for my taste but that works because of the subject matter.

anyway, in a year where i read a load of shite, this is... ok-to-good.

no, it’s good. it’s christmas. enough with the parsimonious.

Seeing with Fresh Eyes: Meaning, Space, Data, Truth - Edward Tufte, big fan of his earlier books on data visualisation, with amazing things like indonesian timetable representation etc, and this is also v good. but man i cannot quite get away from a nagging feeling 'you know, edward, your pages are kind of a hot mess to read?' and frankly seem to work against some of his statements on space. i'm surprised, because his wife and co-designer is Inge Druckrey, subject of this lovely short documentary on design.

also enough about your f'ing park already please.

Read Mark Francis Johnson's '800 JKS,' an exercise in world-building poetry that will inevitably be slept upon by the majority, who can't stand poetry that challenges rather than confirms.

Also read Denise Riley's 'Selected Poems,' which mostly consists of her most famous book, 'Mop Mop Georgette,' and of course love her to pieces still.

Flipped around a bunch in Tom Raworth's collected poems.

Read a lovely pamphlet on literary influence, criticism, and death by Claudia La Rocco.

Finally, and perhaps most excitingly, I picked up a book I've been carrying around with me for almost a decade but could never access...but I had an intuition that the day would come when I could. And so, the other evening I began Taylor Brady's 'Microclimates,' which is a bizarre and majestic hybrid novel that treats each sentence as its own little climate, playing around with syntax, subject/object, and so on. Really amazing work.

that sounds good, will add to my infinity pile (which as always i say 'i'll aim to make a good dent in it at christmas')

Yes to those and yr own latest recs., Fizzles. Thanks guys!

Which of Edward Tufte's previous books is your favorite?

I found a copy of Visual Explanations on a coffee table in a lobby when I was in uni, with a big COLLEGE REPUBLICANS sticker on the back of it. I contacted the woman whose name was written in it, and she never wrote back, so I kept it. Nice come-up, also my favorite.

I now only have 85 pages of THE LAND OF SPICES to read.

Oddly indulgent, very long description of a Catholic schoolgirls' school play for the priests. Unsure that the tone is as well judged as Kate O'Brien's admirers would assert.

I finished Berlin Alexanderplatz last night. First, I must applaud the translator Michael Hofman for carrying this off so beautifully. The book succeeds just as much on its stylized tone and authorial voice as upon any interest generated by the plot and characters and it is obvious that the translator had to patiently invent an English near-analog to Döblin's highly idiosyncratic German, while conveying the essential tone and feel of the original. The loving care he took was very evident.

The Afterword quotes Musil to the effect that it is not an intellectual book, but full of interest, and I wholly agree. Döblin incorporates a great many ideas, religious, mythic, scientific, psychological, but they do not add up to anything coherent. They are jumbled together in a grab bag, just as they are experienced in life.

NB: It was published in 1929, so we should soon see it making an appearance in the "Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of..." threads, assuming Daniel Rf perseveres that far.

I read the previous translation about 25 years ago and loved it, I should investigate this one. I agree that the book is full of stuff that doesn't necessarily add up, but details are fuzzy at this point.

Will have to check that. Recent publication of Kafka's prev, mentioned The Lost Writings shows Hoffman keeping up his standards w quite a range of material.

So, I checked out three P.K. Dick novels from the library and on advice of ilxors started reading A Scanner Darkly. Right away, from the first three sentences I can tell PKD had started writing the book by just throwing out a vaguely 'promising' sentence off the top of his head, not having the slightest clue what story he would connect to it. All his books I've read seem to start this way, with the possible exception of Man in the High Castle.

He rambled around for a few pages, just riffing on the first sentence, until he darts sideways into a new riff, then another, until there's a tiny bit of solid ground established, barely enough to stand on. Then he builds out from there, but haphazardly. For example, early in the second chapter he starts riffing on the amazing 'scramble suit' worn by some cop named Fred. PKD tells me how the identity of the wearer of the suit becomes blur and their voice is filtered to be toneless, flat and mechanical, bereft of personality. Wow. Very imaginative stuff!

Then, just a few paragraphs later, PKD describes Fred (wearing the suit) and speaking to a Lions Club audience. But PKD has already forgotten about the toneless flat mechanical voice. He now has Fred giving a speech full of scripted dramatic pauses and changes of tone. These totally contradictory details are printed on fucking consecutive pages! Why? Because PKD apparently never went back and read what he wrote five minutes earlier, or gave it a second thought once it got blurted out on the page. It makes me want to slap him retroactively and shout "You're just blabbering complete nonsense, Phil! Give me a fucking break!"

This is not encouraging. If PKD couldn't be bothered to pay the slightest bit of attention to what he wrote, then why should I? Did he take his readers for such fools or did he just not give a damn at all?

you should stop!

i should also breathe while I'm at it, but I don't care for an author who carelessly doles out intellectual wedgies to his readers.

my understanding is that he was drugged out of his mind most of the time? anyway i've read a couple and there is absolutely no prize at the end if you hate the first three sentences that much