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

Reading J. Gordon Faylor's 'The Antoecians,' which seems to be something of a published daybooks. At turns evocative and hermetic. Actually having a great time with it!

Having noted Fizzles' kindly comments on it, I'm now reading Because Internet: Understanding How Language is Changing by Gretchen McCulloch. I'll admit that some of the details of internet usage she is fascinated by are a bit too fine-grained to fascinate me, but I am gleaning some good information and gaining enjoyment from it.

pleased you like it! i think it’s a book that probably could have been done very badly, but it’s done well, with thought about what framework you need to make sense of the territory.

bartleby the scrivener - very good!

made men: the story of goodfellas - i don't think kenny quite had enough to say to sustain a longish book.

the guns of august by barbara tuchman - the buildup and first weeks of WW1. i very much enjoyed her social/political history of the 14th century, a distant mirror. this felt like not quite her strong suit. and she really doesn't like germany! the narrative reminded me of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFrcl6VGrDQ

Bleak House. It's been long enough that I remember vague plot points but none of the writing, which I'm enjoying, but it's still early yet and he probably wrote these parts ahead of time and wasn't making things up month by month (my memory is that the last 25% is ropey)

(is also good to get back into the actual novels after about 3 years of reading the Christmas editions (admittedly not all by him) and journalism)

Hi Alfred, what was that Sherwood Anderson collection you were reading, and what did you end up thinking about it?

while you're at it, how was the warhol bio?

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

― dow, Sunday, 13 December 2020 20:52 bookmarkflaglink

apologies dow, i never answered this, mainly because i couldn't remember the titles and the books, but i think it was actually Envisioning Information!

― Fizzles, Monday, December 21, 2020 4:52 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

ive never checked out his books but i went to his sculpture park this year, it was cool - https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/hogpen-hill-farms

Hi Alfred, what was that Sherwood Anderson collection you were reading, and what did you end up thinking about it?

― dow,

The Library of America edition. Got it at the library.

Mordew by Alex Pheby

thought i’d try it for christmas seeing an eley williams capsule recommendation on the foyles blog

As the nights start drawing in and frosts weave new chills into the evening air, what could be better than a descent into a catacombed city, full of unseen scuttling and theological travesties, where the frailties of human hopefulness are examined and writ large on an epic, sprawling scale? Welcome to the snarling, sludgy and shifting world of Mordew. The first instalment of a trilogy by Wellcome Book Prize-winning author Alex Pheby, the scope and sophistication of Mordew has earned deserved comparisons to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels and the stories set in M. John Harrison’s city Viriconium. Tense and thrilling, and a fully immersive vision of decadence and decay – the provocative and beguiling Mordew awaits.

it sounded right up my alley, i remain a firm fan of the gormnghast trilogy. and yet i’m finding mordew oddly unsatisfying. something about the way the topography of the place is depicted, or the way i feel i’m reading the written rendition of a mental cartoon, even a computer game. i should dig down into why i’m feeling this and i’m not ready to give up on it yet, but i’d struggle to recommend it. rather like the city itself he seems to throw up characters will-i nil-i and dispose of them as carelessly, and there’s little sense of warmth and comfort in the book anywhere.

also, it’s got children in having an adventure, but it’s a pretty grisly children’s book. there is nothing to say that adult books cannot concern children, but the point of children going through a fantastic adventure, the finding of power out of innocence in the fact of an adult world, seems to me to belong to children’s literature. that may be my problem. even so i’m not sure what pheby is about here.

Jonathan Lethem, THE ARREST (2020).

I keep telling myself it's OK to give up on a book if you're not enjoying it, it's not productive to hate read, but I found myself enjoying one and tolerating a second of the three intertwining narratives in Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer enough to crawl through and finally finish last night, but man was that "Old Chestnuts" thread bad. Like freshman creative writing assignment hackneyed garbage, totally sinking an otherwise more or less tolerable novel.

Anyway, going to read a couple Muriel Spark short stories and wait and see if I get the new Mantel or Ferrante for Christmas.

How is The Arrest? (xpost)

Just started the new wilderness by Diane cook (pastoral post environmental collapse sci-fi? thing)

Michael Alig finally died, which reminded me that the son of Paul Auster and Lydia Davis was "in the same apartment" when Alig and roomie killed Angel M., and that his stepmother Siri Hustvedt included something related to this in one of her novels. I've recently been reading several profiles of her and Auster, though mainly her, as the Guardian checks in over the years---what should I read by Hustvedt and Auster?

Stared Ali Smith's Autumn yesterday morn to see what the fuss is about.

I finished Because Internet: Understanding How Language is Changing by Gretchen McCulloch. Like most non-fic books about contemporary subjects, it was a bit padded out and the internet linguistics content gave way more and more to internet sociology as it progressed, but it all fit comfortably under the general heading of 'communications', so it's not like the subject matter drift was unwarranted.

The most surprising part of my reaction to the book was how much it drove home how different my mindset is when it comes to informal written communication, when compared to full participants in the world of chat rooms, texting, and social media. It was enough to induce a few hours of despair.

As any ilxor who has noticed me soon learns, my posts are wordy. I like to think they are also shapely, nuanced, informative and sometimes witty, because I value those qualities in writing and I've spent a lifetime honing my ability to manipulate language to deliver those values. The author of this book, Gretchen McCulluch, hammers away at the view that almost no one on the internet has the slightest interest in using language to that degree of skill; in fact, they are suspicious, bewildered or contemptuous when they encounter it outside of books, journalism, or professional writing. That's when the despair hit me.

On the plus side, it helped explain to me some of the hostility I get from some ilxors. Their expectations of ilx are more fully framed by all their other social media participation, where the social aspect is (roughly speaking) the be-all and end-all, and all communication is flattened down to just hanging out and chatting with yer chums. I have zero talent for small talk. Or mall talk. I avoid situations where I will be trapped into such conversations for more than a few minutes, because I can barely tolerate more than that.

After some bad hours wondering whether ilx would soon morph itself into yet another snapchat, facebook, instagram or chatroom, leaving me at last homeless on the internet, I pulled out of my dive and realized that, even as shrunken as it has become in the past five years or so, ilx is still home to enough freaks like me that I can look forward to at least a few more years of pleasure in spending time here. Especially here in I Love Books!

Thank you, bookish ilxors for congregating here. Your company means a lot to me. We are kin.

Huge fan ur longwinded erudite posting style aimless. also always enjoy reading your book reviews itt :)

The author of this book, Gretchen McCulluch, hammers away at the view that almost no one on the internet has the slightest interest in using language to that degree of skill; in fact, they are suspicious, bewildered or contemptuous when they encounter it outside of books, journalism, or professional writing. That's when the despair hit me.

pleased you got rewarding stuff out of it aimless. i have to say, from my reading anyway, i don’t think the above is right at all - mculluch suggests throughout that people have are very interested in how best to communicate and show high levels of inventiveness and linguistic skill adapting to different online environments. where miscommunication or bewilderment can exist is communicating across the periods or platforms belonging to those periods.

show high levels of inventiveness and linguistic skill adapting to different online environments

but, according to Ms. McCulloch's thesis and her examples, none of their strategies involve crafting sentences with subordinate clauses, but rather such abstruse tactics as deliberately removing periods imposed by grammar-nanny software, because periods suggest too harsh a finality and an unfriendly tone of voice. Such inventiveness only bewilders me.

I like reading a good sentence whatever the circumstances, so crack on!

I finished Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams (finally). It's beautiful and luminous and made me think about how a lot of my favourite books are travel-related and how this is a dying/dead genre - something I've seen change and pretty much disappear in my lifetime. It's a hyperbolic statement but what does travel even mean in our current context?

Anyway, speaking of good (and earnest - I like earnest) sentences, Lopez has the chops: No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of the conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life when one finds darkness not only in one's own culture but within oneself. If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the middle of such a paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of a leaning into the light.

I was a bit *shrug* about Autumn, Alfred. Intrigued as to what you make of it.

Chinaski, have you 'Coming into the Country' by John McPhee? I always pair that with 'Arctic Dreams' in my head. Both are excellent.

Obviously meant 'have you READ....'

Anyway, I am pausing on the daybooks-esque work of Faylor mentioned upthread to consider my holiday gifts.

I finished Denise Riley's 'Say Something Back/ Time Lived, Without it's Flow,' and I must say that it might be one of the better books about grief and mourning I've ever encountered. The first section is poetry, and then the second is a sort of essay and notes around the subject of losing her son. Might be one of the more extraordinary books I've ever read, to be honest. Anyway, here is a link: https://www.nyrb.com/products/say-something-back

Now, after some deliberation, I'm going to start Jeff Vandermeer's 'Annihilation,' because a dear friend recommended it. I always ask for one book outside of my usual genre interests, and this is the one for this year.

Hope some of you might have also had good books delivered to you in recent days.

Ah damn---good quotes from Lopez and others on All Things Considered just now, audio not up yet, but here's a (partial?) transcript:
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/26/948863127/barry-lopez-acclaimed-author-and-traveler-beyond-many-horizons-dies-at-75

No, I think it is the whole segment on him.

December reads:

Dickens - Great Expectations
Dickens - Hard Times
Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
Salinger - Nine Stories
Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four

The Salingers and Orwell were rereads, books I loved as a teenager to kick start my reading routine. I've failed with Dickens before so I'm glad to say I greatly enjoyed GE and HT

currently reading:

Dickens - Our Mutual Friend

about to start:

Salinger - Franny & Zooey

Grebt Expectations probably my choice of introduction to Dickens as there's a lot of good stuff in it. OMF was my first and possibly my favourite.

Bogged down slightly with Bleak House at the moment, probably just because I'm not at parents for Christmas and therefore not looking to escape by reading Victorian novels.

I finished Happiness, As Such. I think I will have to get my hands on more Ginzburg books. It was good, but in a different way than Valentino and Sagittarius. Her inimitable voice is there of course, but this book is more formally unconventional and oblique, and she's working with material that might not seem automatically promising for a novel. It still hangs together remarkably well. Now I'm reading Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli. The last-man-on-earth premise seems a bit tired (I recently read a Bradbury story with a similar premise) but the book is short enough I will stay with it to see if he puts some unique spin on it.

I love John McPhee, table - need to read more. I hadn't even realised Lopez had died when I posted about Arctic Dreams. Damn. RIP.

Angela Saini Inferior
Her book on the science of gender trying to dismiss the tradition that men are superior etc. I found Superior her book on Race Science very good which is why I was thinking i needed to get this too, I ordered it and was told it wouldn't arrive before Xmas but got here on Xmas Eve which some things I had due didn't.
So far only read the introduction but it seems to be pretty clearly written and I'm looking forward to reading the rest.

THere are probably other books along these lines that I also need to read. May be in the bibliography here so may be what I read next year at least in part.
Also really want to get the 2nd part of the BBC series on Eugenics that she was one of the people presenting, thought first part was great but missed the 2nds showing. Now potential d/lds aren't moving.

THE ARREST: I'm halfway through. It's a kind of post-mild-apocalypse, describing rural Maine after the world's technology has suddenly all stopped working. That could be enough of a premise in itself, but Lethem combines it with a dangerous old friend arriving from across the USA in a nuclear-powered 'supercar'.

The chapters are very short - say, two pages. In this it resembles much of the previous novel, THE FERAL DETECTIVE (2018).

It carries echoes of other novels: a character name from GUN, WITH OCCASIONAL MUSIC; motifs and to some extent overall set-up from AMNESIA MOON.

I'm not sure how it will pan out. It's very readable.

I read a book I received for Christmas: R.F. Foster, ON SEAMUS HEANEY (2020).

I revere Foster as stylist and encyclopedically knowledeable historian. And I'm fond of Heaney, with a slight scepticism. This should have been a perfect book for me. It was very readable, fluent, smooth. It's a chronological account of Heaney's life and work. It contains almost no really new opinion or critical angle. It replicates what you already knew about Heaney. If you wanted a new introduction to Heaney, you could use this.

Two flaws: one, it's reverential - praising Heaney highly for almost everything he does or says. The only real exception is the volume ELECTRIC LIGHT (2001), which Foster echoes others in finding unsatisfactory. Foster agrees with all critics - except when they criticize Heaney. Then he attacks them, and defends him. Second, it's not really analytical. It uses critical terms (tercets, terza rima, quatrains), but almost never gets into quotation and analysis of small phrases, as against quotation of large chunks or whole poems.

The book has one real novelty and distinction: it draws on the Heaney archive, the Friel papers, letters and drafts that most of us have never seen. Repeatedly Foster drops such material in - it's by far his strongest suit. But he doesn't exactly do it systematically, or indicate a general way that the archive would change our view of Heaney. Perhaps, on the whole, it wouldn't.

The thing that I have always thought about Heaney, which I never found anyone else to think, is:

He is quite obscure! I mean, lots of his lines drift off into saying something that I can't make out. Quite often he does this with a last line, thus leaving me with a sense of obscurity about a whole poem. Or he says something but I can't tell why. The poem has ended, but what was it for?

I'm unsure how much this is deliberate: a wish not to be easy and understood. Or how far it's just intuitive, the way he writes and thinks.

The contrast with Larkin, whose work Heaney liked a lot, would be the most instructive. By the end of a Larkin poem you almost always know what he's said, or why. That's what I don't, so much, with Heaney.

Pinefox, I am really intrigued by this book, but could you flesh out a bit what you mean by Heaney trailing off? I’ve always thought it is the way he writes, but if you have any specific examples, it’s a cold morning in tier 4 and I’d love to talk about them.

I find Heaney nigh-unreadable, but I think for totally different reasons than either of you!

I love Heaney up through 1987; what a coincidence I was rereading him on Christmas Eve morn.

xp I don’t find him unreadable at all, the opposite in fact.

table, maybe I'm asking the question because you also disagree on the merits of Merrill, but are there any 20th century so-called formalists you read with pleasure?

I think I'll make a run at reading Froissart's Chronicles next. Not sure if I can stick to it, but it's an interesting period.

Year's end is always tricky for figuring out when to start a new WAYR thread. Winter solstice was a week ago, but 2021 is still five days away. Dear me! Decisions, decisions, decisions.

(procrastinates)

Alfred— no, not really. I love some poets who use formal techniques, and I've often found such techniques quite invigorating— my last book was written entirely in haiku, as I think I've mentioned before, and I've written a crown of sonnets. I should say that I find a few poems by Merrill and Heaney rather lovely, but don't really understand the immense praise heaped upon their work.

thanks!

It is interesting, though, because I revere Hopkins and Donne and Keats, for example, and think that some of the poets who are currently utilizing or repurposing older formal strategies are making brilliant work. Wendy Trevino and Nikki Wallschlaeger are doing immense work with the sonnet, for example.

With Heaney in particular, I admire his command of form, but find the actual poetry leaves me feeling rather bored.

Whereas I'd consider Donne's Holy Sonnets or Hopkins' collected poems to be desert island books, no joke.

Thankfully we’ll never end up sharing the same desert island, I hope.

impulse bought the kindle edition of the only good indians by stephen graham jones to kill time at work today and i'm glad i did - it's real good so far.

One of the most useful things my teenage self did was memorize a whole bunch of Hopkins, so I'll have him with me on my desert island no matter what.

I know it's not an arms race but while I like Heaney a good deal, and accept his project didn't necessarily require it (if that's the right verb?), he doesn't come close to Hopkins' heights (cliffs of fall, frightful). Xp

He's also a deal easier to remember than Heaney!

Totally with you on the Holy Sonnets and Hopkins.

I like the way his rhythms and absolute command over assonance still produce these verses that murmur like brooks. Like many poets in old age, he relied on technique to get him past an empty larder, but I'll always love Field Work.

When I taught poetry 18 (!) years ago, "The Otter" often made my syllabus:

When you plunged
The light of Tuscany wavered
And swung through the pool
From top to bottom.

I loved your wet head and smashing crawl,
Your fine swimmer's back and shoulders
Surfacing and surfacing again
This year and every year since.

I sat dry-throated on the warm stones.
You were beyond me.
The mellowed clarities, the grape-deep air
Thinned and disappointed.

Thank God for the slow loadening,
When I hold you now
We are close and deep
As the atmosphere on water.

My two hands are plumbed water.
You are my palpable, lithe
Otter of memory
In the pool of the moment,

Turning to swim on your back,
Each silent, thigh-shaking kick
Re-tilting the light,
Heaving the cool at your neck