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

slathered over them by someone who has nothing

It's more about the musicians, and a certain romantic view of the life of a musician. There is an afterword which gives a much more straightforward potted history of jazz and is laced with Dyer's critical judgments, many of which I disagree with.

This week I at last started Jonathan Coe's MIDDLE ENGLAND. It's very readable, and mostly very enjoyable. Something I like about Coe is his cultivation of a very standard, repetitive form of comedy, involving set-pieces or bathetic climaxes. This is, at this point, easy, generic stuff for him; the simplicity and generic quality is somehow part of what I like about it. Meanwhile, the book does *less* than usual of something he's done before, namely textual pastiche, chapters in the form of other kinds of genres, etc. It's quite textually homogeneous.

I'm open to whatever the book's political implications may be - I sense that it is genuinely attempting to explore something about diverse views and lives in England (not the rest of the UK) - except that I've had one worry about this book all along: that as a satire of British politics of the 2010s, it will repeat and repurpose various mendacious attacks on and sneers about Jeremy Corbyn MP and his supporters, for satirical or comic purposes at best. I'm afraid that my ultimate feeling about the book will be heavily dependent on how far this is the case.

Damn Galgut's Arctic Summer, a novel about E.M. Forster's Indian adventures (and loves).

I finished Chinese Rhyme-Prose. Now I am reading The Catherine Wheel, Jean Stafford. Her prose is a marvel of sinuosity.

I love how Jean Stafford has somehow become an ILB favourite!

the first novel I read when lockdown sarted

*started too

Don't remember The Catherine Wheel well at all, but some reviews of her Library of America Collected Noves have mentioned it as weakest of the three---but the others set the bar pretty high. Scenes from Boston Adventure, which I read in the 80s, have come back to me lately: girl's duty is housekeeping after school every day, before her mother comes home and delights in pouncing on seemingly tiny failings---so one day the girl gets an early start, cleans up *every7thing*---mother comes home and is enraged. It still rings a bell---but who but Stafford would come up with that---?

I mean to read TCw again, along w the other two (and maybe get library to spring for new LoA collection).

Who but Stafford would come up with that in fiction, I mean (haven't seen it in nonfiction either, just real life, or too close to it)

I'm currently reading "The Killer Inside Me" by Jim Thompson. The pulp pedigree of the book is readily apparent. I was not surprised to learn that the book originally appeared as a paperback original, probably sold mostly in dime stores and not reviewed in any newspaper of note. Featuring lurid depictions of sex, violence and sexual violence and not terribly believable subordinate characters, especially the women, the book is not subtle. However, Thompson's portrayal of the realpolitik and seamy underside of an American Western small town, with its quasi-feudal power structure and casual racism and sexism is memorable. I was curious about the source of my copy's blurb, ostensibly from the NY Times: "Jim Thompson is the best suspense writer going, bar none." This little bit of copy is reproduced in just about every on-line listing for the book. Thanks to the Times online archive it's easy enough to find the original article. It turns out the quote in context is much more ambivalent:

For my own part, I liked Thompson better before the world decided he was a genius. His books pack more of a punch if you pick them up for two bits and come to them with no expectations. Today, though, his quirky little paperbacks can't measure up to the hype. When a cover blurb calls him 'the best suspense writer going, bar none,' the impulse to strike a revisionist pose is almost overwhelming.

This 1990 article about the revival of interest in Thompson is the only place I can find that phrase appearing in the Times. I guess I shouldn't be surprised at the cynicism of Viking in lifting the sentence out of context and placing it on their book covers, its an amoral twist that I can imagine Thompson savoring with a smile.

Heh, you didn't tell us who wrote that.

I might put the author's name behind spoiler tag.

Lawrence Block

But can you be sure the phrase wasn't already on those prior editions and he was only quoting it from them?

Okay, I guess it is usually attributed to the NYT so you are correct, sir.

If it wasn’t on prior editions then he is complaining about a cover blurb that doesn’t exist and then publishers snipped the non-existent blurb out and used it as a cover blurb. Frankly... that rules

I think he was paraphrasing an actual cover blurb that did exist, but not from the Times, but then publishers took his paraphrase and attributed it to the NY Times, which I guess has more "influencer" value. It would have been odd if the original blurb was from the Times, and he complained about it without mentioning that fact.

Hmm, so I guess I was wrong. I see Black Lizard paperbacks from the '80s with that quote attributed to the Times, so I guess that's what Block was referring to in his 1990 article. So now I'm still puzzled where that quote originally appeared. The only place it shows up in the archives search is that 1990 article. Oh well, mystery unsolved..

The closest thing I can find, at least in terms of the enthusiasm of praise, is a 1985 review of an Elmore Leonard book by Stephen King in which he mentions that Thompson is his favorite crime writer, but the wording is totally different, and that's still too late, since I see that blurb on 1981 Black Lizard reprints.

It must have been by Anthony Boucher. I see he wrote a regular crime fiction column in the Times in the '50s and he seems to have been a big Thompson fan. Also, it appears that most of his columns only exist as image scans in the archive, so they don't support full-text search. I think the mystery has been solved.

finally reading let us now praise famous men. picked it up on a whim the other day and found i couldn’t put it down. kind of in love with this endearingly deranged book, though I admit there are moments when i flip ahead mid-paragraph and go “huh. this part goes on for five more pages?”

Boy On Fire by Mark Mordue.
I think its a pretty decent biography. He seems to have talked to most of the right people, at least those he had a chance to talk to.
Reads quite well as well.
It's been years since i actually read Ian Johnston and i never replaced toe Robert Brokenmouth I sold Cave in the mid 90s. He gave me the cover price for a copy I went to get him to sign. Anyway I don't remember them giving that much about his childhood/teens. i do remember Brokenmouth did have the trousers down at caulfield group photo or taht is sto say nick with trousers down.

Reading 'ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines,' a speculative fiction by one of our finest poets, Sesshu Foster, in collaboration with Arturo Romo. It's excellent so far. More info here: http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100958940

finally reading let us now praise famous men. picked it up on a whim the other day and found i couldn’t put it down. kind of in love with this endearingly deranged book, though I admit there are moments when i flip ahead mid-paragraph and go “huh. this part goes on for five more pages?”

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.)
the chapter on this book in rancière's aesthesis really piqued my interest--curious to hear what you think when you finish it.

finally getting around to tove ditlevsen's childhood/youth/dependency trilogy & enjoying the first work quite a bit. the reception of the work had me expecting something very different, but so far it reminds me a little bit of a nordic anne of green gables. i imagine that tone will shift as the story progresses, though.

Fizzles your post really makes me want to read some John Dickson Carr, and also reminded me of this recent Guardian article about Japanese locked room mysteries, which might be of interest to you:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/27/honkaku-a-century-of-the-japanese-whodunnits-keeping-readers-guessing

Alice Munro, Open Secrets, as good as her reputation suggests. Was a bit surprised to find a picture section at the end with what seemed to be autobiographical photos - parents' wedding day, a baby in a buggy, growing up in ww2 - was she born in london? trekking overland to Afghanistan - inspiration for one of the stories perhaps? The captions seem to refer to extra biographical detail not found elsewhere. Meeting the prime minister of India, pictures of Kim Philby and Antony Blunt, joining MI5 - er quite the background for a Canadian short story writer. Obviously something was up. Being the subject of tabloid stories before becoming the head of MI5. Stella Rimington's biography, it transpires, is called Open Secret.

Also read Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man etc. As accomplished as Munro in what she does but not my cup of tea.

Alice Munro was in MI5 ?

Sorry, I was not explicit. Alice Munro's book is called Open Secrets. Stella Rimington's bio is called Open Secret. Some mix up at the publishers.

Remarkable. Like an incident in a Jonathan Coe novel.

Fizzles your post really makes me want to read some John Dickson Carr, and also reminded me of this recent Guardian article about Japanese locked room mysteries, which might be of interest to you:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/27/honkaku-a-century-of-the-japanese-whodunnits-keeping-readers-guessing🕸

reading my first wodehouse ('code of the woosters'). it is delightful

At the risk of behaving like the cat I' the adage perpetuating a cliche, I envy you, mookie.

quite so

when was that ever not appropriate? I mean he was mookie's kryptonite!

the great minds of the thread are standing in a line watching you go by, mookie

The the whole point about the mookieproofs, as I have had occasion to remark before, is that they are not lesser men. They keep their heads. They think quickly, and they act quickly. Napoleon was the same.

:)

The Code of the Mookies

I don't understand the last 7 posts.

riffing on this: ILX cosmology: the origins of your user name

That's great. I always thought it was somehow a Mookie Wilson reference.

Finally reading let us now praise famous men. picked it up on a whim the other day and found i couldn’t put it down. kind of in love with this endearingly deranged book, though I admit there are moments when i flip ahead mid-paragraph and go “huh. this part goes on for five more pages?” Once you've recovered from that one, maybe you'll dig Agee On Film, which is equally energetic in searching for visionz *and* fault---eventually finding fault with some of his own earlier flights in this same doorstop. Also interesting to compare his bop sermon prosody in the New Republic with relatively restrained reports for Time, when dealing with the same subjects.

Maybe I'll get the local library to spring for this Library of America round-up:
https://www.loa.org/books/228-film-writing-and-selected-journalism
Which also has his screenplay for Night of the Hunter, uncollected film writing, book reviews, and lots more. (Where's the screenplay for African Queen?) Think I'm going to read A Death In The Family pretty soon, and re-read The Morning Watch (LoA's second volume incl. those with "the expanded 1960 edition" of Let Us... and some shorter fiction).

I've now looked at the thread about names, but I still don't understand the posts above on this thread.

pinefox have you read no wodehouse?

Seems to be the case (couldn’t think of how to say in Wodehouse-ese)

when non-wodehouse-reader (me) is calling to non-wodehouse-reader (the pinefox) like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps

Heh, lol