Spring 2021: Forging ahead to Bloomsday as we read these books

i will bring B&I to an ILB FAP if such an event ever takes place again!

done well PdM would make a good character, done by banville not so much tbh lol -- but yes, i imagine more than one novelist has already borrowed versions of him for inspiration

THE MOUNTAIN ... LION?

I like how everyone on ILB (except me, I'm afraid) has set about reading that book.

Lion, of course. Can't stop thinking about aerosmith

After a failed attempt 10yrs ago, finished Saramago's Baltasar and Blimunda last night and still feel under its spell this morning. Wish I'd gotten to it sooner, during the scarier days of the pandemic. His macro/micro sense of scale, the sweep of human lives bobbing along the tide of history, was a comforting perspective to be immersed in right now.

That's a great one, all right.

I recently finished Kelly Link's story collection, Get In Trouble, and it wasn't really for me, and am following that up with another story collection by an author that's often compared to K Link, Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, and am kind of loving it. It's kind of funny how a certain kind of stylistic eccentricity can fall flat but a similar one can totally hit the mark when it's weird and absurd in just the right way. Currently I'm in the middle of the story that's composed of Law and Order SVU synopses, which is not a conceit that attracted me, but it's just so engrossing.

Machado is great, I teach 'Especially Heinous' to my students every chance I get...often at the same time as Link's 'Stone Animals.'

It's funny, I've grown to like Link a bit better than Machado, though, if only because Machado's stories are so much more tied together and 'neat,' whereas Link's rely on ambiguity and readerly attention, imho, which is a quality I admire much more.

The PdM issue seems somewhat complicated to me, I actually didn't know anything about it until reading up on it because of this thread. (I've never read him, probably because he fell out of favor for obvious reasons!)

What do we make of philosophers and thinkers whose contributions and insights into literature are invaluable, but who were also inarguably awful? Is it utter shit that I still find parts of Heidegger valuable? What about Black and Jewish writers who still study and quote Carl Schmitt? Mbembe, one of our foremost African scholars and post-colonial thinkers, utilizes ideas from Schmitt extensively in many of his works, alongside Fanon and any number of others— is he wrong to do so? I'm not sure! I know it's an old question, of course, but one that still troubles me.

For example, I read Nick Land before I knew about his turn toward fascism. His early writings, particularly on Kant, gave me insights and understanding into the latter's work that I'd never been able to access before. That said, I keep my copy of 'Fanged Noumena' hidden in a box, alongside my copy of the Pisan Cantos and a few stray Heidegger texts.

Anyway, not trying to derail, but interested in how others think around this issue— point me toward a thread if there is one!

Curiously I was thinking about this perennial question earlier today. I was thinking about how disgusted I am, even many years later, remembering the proto-fascist passages in BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, but how I still probably couldn't write off the author for that (though I think that particular novel is execrable).

I don't think my view would be especially typical, but I think I'd now say something like:

Almost everyone in history can be found to be 'compromised' or bad in some way, so rather than writing them off for any given infraction I'd rather take what's good and leave what's bad.

I wouldn't read de Man, not because of the controversy, but because he seems dull and anaemic to me. Many will say I'm then just bad at seeing how great he is.

I wouldn't read Heidegger either - I don't get anything out of him whatever.

People don't like Philip Larkin for things he said. I would gladly read him. I like lots of his poems and think I understand what he is trying to say and how.

I find that I am now giving a bland and boring answer to a vast and perennial question. But I think I would stand by my starting point: that you should read stuff that you get something out of, and discard what you don't like in it.

In some ways, I agree with you, Pinefox— the idea that artists, philosophers, or anyone else needs be a paragon of virtue and right thinking seems absurd to me. At the same time, I think it's fine to be uninterested in and even rejecting such figures outright if one sees fit to do so. I

One that I've talked about a lot with friends is Althusser— the manner in which we discuss ideology and interpellation would not even exist without his thinking. But he murdered his wife! He was, by many accounts, a vile person! How do we reconcile these facts? We can't just throw away our understandings that arrive from his thinking.

"Interpellation", I agree, he rather inserted (interpolated?) into discussion. I still use the word today for this and that, and might not do without him.

Having said that, I don't think that he has affected my sense of "ideology". I was never able to make much sense of his idea of it. I would say that most of the senses of it that I have found relevant probably existed before his did.

It occurs to me that the dilemma of "I like X, but I shouldn't because they did Y" may be less common than the more convenient formula "I dislike X, which makes sense, because they did Y". This might imply that "ideological disapproval", or whatever, is often happily in tune with what we want to feel about someone or something anyway. Maybe this is a guess.

Althusser's "murder" of his wife - again, oddly I was thinking about that only yesterday or so, and wondering if "murder" was even the word (not that it was good, whatever it was) -- my understanding is that it was spontaneous, almost accidental, in some kind of mania -- not a cold-blooded or premeditated murder; but goodness knows I don't want to look into it any more closely than I may already have done.

In any case I don't think that killing has much to do with the pros and cons of LA's thought -- almost all of which, of course, came earlier. I would suppose that it might be more logical to suspect that he was very mentally unstable during his major years as a philosopher, and that this could conceivably throw doubt on it. Though I suppose many will disagree with that view in turn.

But as I said, his work doesn't really do much for me anyway. Which is, as I said, convenient.

I feel like this is an entirely different conversation when it's about philosophers as opposed to writers of fiction, and that there are even more separate conversations about when an author has sins outside their work and when, as per pinefox and Brideshead Revisited, the evil is right there in the work.

Very true!

Again, didn't mean to derail.

#onethread, but I'd post thoughts on an ILB thread on the topic if you were to make one. I'm sure there's ILE ones already, but have a feeling those are best left unrevived.

yes apologies i am a known #onethread militant aka gemini flibbertigibbet w/o discipline or sense of boundaries

I might! Though might take me a minute.

Stafford's Complete Stories and Other Writings round-up from Library of America fucken finally upon us: in bookstores April 7, but supposedly you can get it sooner if order direct. It's Collected Stories, uncollected stories, and A Mother in History, comprised of visits (and travels, in the mental sense) with Marguerite Oswald. This incl. link to one of her milestones, "Children Are Bored on Sunday," with backstory:
https://loa.org/books/648-complete-stories-other-writings

Also essays.

I spent time with her collected stories three weeks ago, coincidentally, and was consistently underwhelmed.

Haven't read any of her stuff yet, but I found this writeup amusing: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/books/review-jean-stafford-library-america-boston-adventure-mountain-lion-catherine-wheel.html

Shuggie Bain: good but not great melodrama, couldn’t see what the fuss is about

A swim in the pond in the rain: not generally a big short story fan but I do like the Russians so I was optimistic about this. The analysis chapters were kind of sweet but mostly pretty uninteresting or superficial or mechanical. I think mainly I just don’t want to be in a classroom any more and the book is explicitly an adaptation of a class so I’ve only myself to blame.

Klara and the sun: enjoying this a lot so far. Usual Ishiguro unreliable narrator.

period was absolutely my favorite of the george miles cycle, maybe my favorite book i've ever read (been reading a lot of things that qualify for this lately, feels good). it is only 109 pages long and yet builds such a complex inner structure of interpenetrating realities that it feels endless

at a loss for what to read next

i see influx press are having an easter sale. Any recommendations?

starter for ten - i liked the idea of a book on minette de silva and her relationship between le corbusier. but i didn’t get beyond the first few chapters as it was Bad.

Attrib. by Eley Williams is one of my three or four favourite books that i’ve read in the last few years.

xp to the conversation about authors who are morally compromised people: I really liked Teju Cole's (lengthy, thoughtful) remarks about this in his recent appearance on Between the Covers, which I have reproduced here with timestamps:

We're all in the world and there's a very vanishingly small number of miscreants who are deserving of metaphorical or actual deletion. I think that's a small number. I think the much greater number is in a gray zone, and it becomes a question of saying:

1:54:54
"Whose work, at which moment, helps me with my own deeper project of humaning, of repair?" You have to have such a deep respect for that project that you will use whatever helps you do it better. That's my attitude to a lot of artists, including those who have done harm.

It's not a blanket thing and it's not an easily arrived at thing and I'm even wary of getting to name specific people; because the person whose work I think has some aspect that allows me to strengthen my own ethical commitments in the world, even if the person has done some other harm that is not present inside that specific aspect of their work -- that person could be somebody who is actively doing harm to somebody else. Or to somebody else, that person is: "No way, no how, not this guy, not this woman, not this person." Because they don't need it that way. And vice-versa: There are other people whose stuff, it's like, You know what? I like your work well enough, but then on top of all of this...? Actually there's plenty in the world, I don't really need to mess with that, I don't need to be inside that space.

I think these matters invite a great deal of public grandstanding, but ultimately, each person decides for themselves what difficulties they are willing to-- absolutely not overlook, but what difficulties fail to obliterate the VALUE of certain aspects of a person's work.

The world is actually not divided between the innocent and the evil. The world is for the most part people who have gotten lots of things right; and people -- the same people -- have gotten lots of things wrong, for reasons of their own personality, egregious errors they've made, the societies in which they live, their own lack of courage.

1:58:30
That is absolutely true of those of us in our generation as well, particularly from the point of view of coming generations. They are going to ask us how we could sit there complacently, while China incarcerated more than a million people and forced them to labor and killed untold numbers simply because they were suspected of having a faith that the Chinese leadership does not like. The future will look at us and say: "And you guys just filled your houses with Chinese-made goods? That was fine by you, apparently." In comparison to that, Louise Gluck's admittedly bad speech will come to look like a complete trifle, compared to some of our own staggering, staggering blind spots.

Haha, I disagree with A LOT of the excerpted above but best wait for an actual thread.

Finished JLB's the Aleph collection that included The Maker. It was great, though certain stories have more sticking power than others. He's weird because on one hand he's Lovecraft adjacent (though obviously a much finer writer) and on the other he's a pre-postmodernist. You can see how influential he was on a host of authors from the 60s on.

Where would I go next with him? Fictions?

Fictions is awesome, yeah.

I'd say both the Lovecraft adjacency and the pomo are aspects of the same thing: dude was a bit of an autodictact and as such consumed literature without any high-low genre-literary prejudices; that's a pretty cliched stance in 2021 but for his time he was pretty unique.

all the books I’ve read and finished so far this year:

Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library
Stefan Zweig - Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories
Alba de Céspedes - Remorse
Mikhail Lermontov - A Hero of Our Time
Ousmane Sembène - God’s Bits of Wood
Gesualdo Bufalino - Night’s Lies
Amitav Ghosh - River of Smoke
Amitav Ghosh - Flood of Fire

The de Céspedes book might be my favorite so far. Sadly, none of her English-translated books are in print, and her other books are tough to find if you’re trying to avoid the Amazon juggernaut.

Do you use Bookfinder, dr? I know it's owned by Amazon but at least there you get some options that aren't.

I'd say both the Lovecraft adjacency and the pomo are aspects of the same thing: dude was a bit of an autodictact and as such consumed literature without any high-low genre-literary prejudices; that's a pretty cliched stance in 2021 but for his time he was pretty unique.

Yeah, that is one of Pynchon's calling cards, but its interesting seeing a writer doing that in a pre-postmodern time 30 years earlier.

Fizzles: of the ones I’ve read and you havent mentioned I’d recommend Built on Sand by Paul Scraton- expat life in Berlin, rather moving iirc - and the Percival Everitt “I Am Not Sidney Poitier” which is angry and funny. You could probably have my copy of either of those, mind.

I think Hold Tight is the best thing I’ll read about grime. “How The Light Gets In” is slight and fragmentary but cracks that scabby ruin feeling of hung-over self loathing very well, while not really being about hung over self loathing.

I want to read the Scovell with the rose window on the front and I have a feeling that the one about Car Parks might be a laugh.

I finished the collection "Early Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald". These stories are taken from the years 1917-1922, so from his Princeton days to stories he wrote after his initial fame from "This Side of Paradise". There is some overlap with the 1922 collection "Tales of the Jazz Age". It seems he appeared on the scene with precocious style, narrative talent and psychological insight (he wrote all of these in his 20s). Many stories are about fleeting though vivid moments of extreme happiness followed by a long twilight of accumulating disappointments large and small. Interestingly this seems to prefigure the arc of his career. His trademark themes of class, sex, money and the undercurrent of tragedy are already present in many stories, but there is also quite a range here, from screwball comedy to gothic drama, satire and proto-noir.

My local library has or had one you might like,The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald: 1909-1917(Rutgers, 1965): 184 pages, I wanna say 13 stories and 2 short plays, or skits, prep school and college, pretty slight at times but always lively, and he reworked some of it later, and it can be startling, esp. a troubled teen's madcap encounter w priest---read it long ago, but Mark Taylor's Goodreads take seems on track: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/161722.The_Apprentice_Fiction
Collection editor John Kuehl's notes and preface:
http://fitzgerald.narod.ru/critics-eng/kuehl-appfic.html

thanks v much Tim for your recs (and also yr generous offer to lend books - going to send some money influx’s way and if i don’t pick up some stuff you’ve got will take advantage of yr kind offer).

best thing i’ve read in the last day or so, possibly this year, possibly in many years, is anne carson’s intro to tragedy “Tragedy: A Curious Art Form” from her translation - titled Grief Lessons - of Euripides’ plays. the intro is teo two pages and as concise and potent as you could ever want and opens with the following four-liner:

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage? Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

I have numerous problems with Carson, but sometimes she's just *great*. I feel the same way about her as I do about Susan Howe.

The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald

That sounds interesting, thanks. I still need to get to "The Beautiful and Damned" too.

Aztecs: An Interpretation by Inga Clendinnen. Excellent historical anthropology influenced by Geertz and Victor Turner.

'The priests kept their night watches on the dark hills, and the great fire at the palace was never allowed to die. Tenochtlan's guard could never be lowered.'

incidentally the carson quote above as you could probably tell was mistranscribed and lost the catechistic rhythm:

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

I'm 15 pages into the Patricia Lockwood and I've loled 3 times already. It should be required reading for ilxors.

also designing designing by john chris jones. on his initial letter about the car. he was asked to participate in a consultation to manage congestion in London from 1959. his approach is *very* holistic and looks unworkable and RONG (though many aspects of travel awareness that he talks about have come into being). But he says something interesting when he looks at why his suggestions were thrown out:

In this I am presuming that it is the presence of each of us that is accepted as "the real" and that "the system" is taken as variable, a fiction, a story that is being re-written all the time to suit the convenience of everyone. But not the conveniences of the professionals who run it. That was the snag.

later on, he's looking at why he is not longer interested in the practical aspects of industrial design, based on what he considers the limiting definition "design as the initiation of change in man-made things."

he's transcribed a tape a friend sent him, about home, and driving, in response to his own tapes as he went round Wales in the footsteps of Giraldus Cambrensis in 1188.

on my right I've
just passed a

house

that is called a mobile home

and

it's
it doesn't move

and I
used to think about that
and think about how awful it was that that existed

and then

and now

I start thinking about that
only in relationship to what I think could be the case

and what could be the case
is never

nearly never

as interesting
as what is the case

known
in relationship
to what could be the case

Well! I didn't mean to transcribe all that but now I have I can see it's [sic] relevance, to this, to everything. "Future of car", "wilderness", "comfort of seats", "traffic", "accidents", "automation", none of these seems as real as it did. None of them is me, or you, or any of us.

And that is the question. Why are "we" so out of it, so uncentral to what's going on, in this century, this time, this world of objects, systems, goals (but always economic, never for the love of it, the love of ourselves, of each other).

It was that last paragraph that prompted me to post it here, and specifically the phrase "Why are "we" so out of it ...?"

I was also thinking about the Aztecs, whose 'fictional system' was so alien to the Spanish that they had to invent a crazed theodisy to explain it. So much of their system, in one possible reading, is a relationship of crafting - to the gods, to other social groups, to valuable objects like feathers and different animals, in relation to a mythic past. but for all that, you get a sense that "they" were *in* it, in the system, the system was around them, rather than abstracted.

Finished the Hejinian/Scalapino, and between yesterday evening and start of my workday today, I finished another collaborative book of poems. This one is titled AUSTERITY BRUNCH, and was written by Zan de Parry and Matthew Hodgson. Good stuff, laughed out loud and sighed a few times.

I'm taking Lorrie Moore slowly, partly because life but also because she has that quality of rushing you onwards and I want to resist it.

I'm teaching a top set this year and am currently trying to get them to think about their creative writing. It's a thankless task because they resist, and well, teaching writing is bloody hard - particularly when you only have two hours a week or something stupid. I've been thinking about this passage from Frog Hospital and how I might use it to encourage invention and (shudder) style and the more I look at it, the more I look beyond the bones of it, the more I don't think I could use it: the rush and tumble of the central sentence, looking like indiscipline; the weight of similes (SIX 'likes' - are you mental?); that 'show-offy' that looks gawky in isolation; the giant kerbstone adverb 'thwartedly'; the repetition of 'good dog' at the end that takes my breath away but could you honestly suggest it to a student?

Certainly 'safe' is what I am now - or am supposed to be. Safety is in me, holds me straight, like a spine. My blood travels no new routes, simply knows its way, lingers, grows drowsy and fond. Though there are times, even recently, in the small city where we live, when I've left my husband for a late walk, the moon out hanging upside down like some garish, show-offy bird, like some fantastical mistake - what life of offices and dull tasks could have a moon in it, flooding the sky and streets, without its seeming preposterous? - and in my walks, toward the silent corners, the cold mulchy smells, the treetops suddenly waving in a wind, I've felt an old wildness again. Revenant and drunken. It isn't sexual, not really. It has more to do with adventure and escape, like a boy's desire to run away, revving thwartedly like a wish, twisting in me like a bolt, some shadow fastened at the feet and gunning for the rest, though, finally, it has always stayed to one side, as if it were some other impossible life and knew it, like a good dog, good dog, good dog. It has always stayed.

Chinaski, I suppose what you make me think, put very simply, is that good art isn't always a good influence. You and I love this Lorrie Moore book (I hadn't recalled this particular passage), but someone else trying to write like it might not be a good idea.

I agree it's a terrible idea but it's really a wider question about teaching writing and how - particularly - teaching style is difficult approaching impossible. You can teach mechanics and ways to experiment with form but when it comes to sharing good examples of style, you either end up with bland (and they can already do bland) or something that you're desperate to share because it sings and leaps off the page (like Moore) and, in isolation, the idiosyncracies can make it seem clumsy or unreachable.

I asked a writer for some help once and she said she always turns down creative writing teaching opportunities because it's too bloody hard.

Henrik Pontoppidan - Lucky Per.

Finished it just now. Despite some of the 'male gaze' matter around the young, male protagonist that is sorta grating this slots right in what the 19th century novel often does. Its like a bridge between Dostoevsky and Musil, where an enginner from a devout family goes to the city, loves and loses, gets rid of religion but the questions around what remains of the spirit in a godless time abound. Has an interesting portrait of liberal Copenhagen as well (Edvard Munch by Peter Watkins has a similar thing going on too. I mention it as its on MUBI right now)

Agathe = Jakobe as a Musil link, and is actually the element that really pushes this novel on. So I should give it more than a mention.

Chinaski could you just have them read the story or book and be prepared to comment on it, so they know you want to know they've actually read it, and just be, "make of it what you will/fyi"--not nec, go thou and get loose, get more Moore, but, if they do try to loosen up, provide an indicator that you aren't going to ridicule, that risk is something a writer needs at some points, inescapable, really, keeping the creative part of it in there? They should know the possibilties--but yeah also incl. discussion of influence and its perils, unless really assimilated, when it comes to the high-flying stylists, Joyce etc. But they should know about the possibilties.
I mean I see enough (published, paid) "creative writing" that just seems like the stereotype of academic painting at best, wth tour guide at my elbow or on earbuds,providing the smoother, even richer sort of spoon-feeding.

I would probably just have them read the book, or part of it, and then go "Hey, let's dig into this idea of 'style,'" and have them look at that passage - what stands out to them about the choices she made, what effect do those stylistic choices have on you as a reader and why, what part do those stylistic choices play in conveying the meaning of the passage as a whole and its place in the work, and what are potential risks/rewards to writing like that? Basically, I would probably steer them toward recognizing how little "scene" that passage has, and yet how vivid it is, and how much her style contributes to that vividness. And also that every oddity in that passage serves a purpose and is not just there for the sake of "style."

And then maybe assign them a writing exercise where they have to write about a train of thought, a transient feeling, an epiphany or something similarly interior. If that makes sense. Maybe make a list of words that could function in the same way "safe" does in that passage, and have them choose one as a prompt?

I haven't read the book, though, so maybe that's way off base.