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

Which doesn't mean it's all happy talk, of course.

finished Sesshu Foster's ELADATL, then also Taylor Brady's In the Red, a great book of poems, and am not onto 'A Poetics of the Press: Interviews with Poets, Printers, & Publishers.' Great book about, well, books, particularly in the context of printing and distribution to poetry communities.

A Poetics of the Press sounds very intriguing, thanks.
Finished my first reading of Jack, the latest installment to date in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead cycle: kind of a prequel, in the sense that it's set eight years before the prodigal returns to his "hometown"/place of origin, dusty little old Gilead, Iowa (where, as a child, he could hardly find anything worth stealing, but he did it anyway, esp./but not onlu if it at least had sentimental value for the owner).

To be a true prequel to the first book, Gilead this one would have to go back to or before the grandfather of Jack's namesake, the Rev. John Ames, had a vision of Christ in chains, and came West from Maine to get involved with John Brown. Yadda yadda, life with a visionary set young John Ames on a different path, an unpretentiously, carefully self-and-other-observant poetic evolution, as expressed in late-life letters to his very young surprise son, letters as legacy (in the mid-50s, in his own mid-70s, figures he better) which have started turning into a journal, by the time Jack is back, unsolicited and then some, as far as even/especially Rev John is concerned.
Jack is a test, sent by his Creator and creator as a signal: What's wrong with this picture? The light-fingered, cute little devil quickly became as notorious for getting let off as he did for what he got caught for---"Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, " many muttered, hearing his glib apologies, and his father, Rev. Boughton, stretch Scripture like balloon animals to cover the kid again---but also, if the local "authorities" were to try to do something to this one son of the upper middle class, where would it end--? And his seven siblings, certainly reasonably good children, found themselves performing goodness, as they discussed among themselves (but with their parents), all having the family brains.
Later Jack did something really bad, and stayed away for twenty years.
The reason for his unseasonable return is confided to Rev. John, who finds it, well, kinda underwhelming, although readers don't.

The second book, Home picks up the storu of return from the POV of Glory, youngest of the brood, who has come back to take care of their widower father, and for another reason. He and she and Jack become true desperadoes under the eaves.

Lila is the backstory of Rev. John's somewhat mysterious young wife, once a child of the pre-Depression road culture, but also takes her to Gilead and what seems to be a pretty good marriage, judging by the conversations--but then, Robinson always comes up with good, searching conversations (tending to and around the scary in Home)

Jack takes place mainly in St. Louis, with important trips to Chicago, and dread flashbacks to/thoughts of Gilead, like little seizures. From the beginning, (reading an excerpt of this before any of the books), I seemed to be hearing a player piano ranging through several emotional keys, always coming back through the same streets he pounds, also parlors, bars, rooming houses, a dance studio where he instructs (and a graveyard, good for an all-night conversation in an improbable opening tour-de-force). He has and is an ever-more cultivated sense of danger, who still sees vulnerability in all the just-so places, and always took predestination to heart---a kind of theft, maybe--in ways that exasperated his Presbyterian Rev. Dad and Congregationalist Rev. John, and he's "transparent, and an enigma": a tragicomic figure to keep an eye on at all times, as he does---he wants to do right! Kind of an even more alarming descendant of Wodehouse's Uncle Fred.

but *not* with their parents

important trips to Chicago *and Memphis* dammit sorry

*desperados*, if I'm going to be true to the song title I lifted.

Also, Jack has a Better Call Saul Effect: after reading the other books, you may still find yourself thinking, "Awww, this is going nice", then remembering what's ahead (not that you wouldn't get a sense of increasing peril even if you started with this one, and they could be read in any order, with no loss of effect, I think).

I finished "Price of Salt" (aka "Carol"). It's a lovely book. I was a bit disappointed to see in the afterword that Highsmith claims she never wrote another book like it, though that won't stop me from reading more of her work. A classic coming of age theme of falling in love, set against the background of moral panic over homosexuality (as Therese answers Carol in the book, when she asks her to define a classic, "A classic is something with a basic human situation").

I finished Lolly Willowes last night. Her descriptions of the social condition of women in England, as it was still emerging from the stultification of women during Victoria's reign, were quietly eloquent. Warner's use of Satan as a character and her philosophizing about his meaning were fascinating and suggestive, though not very filled in.

Now I'm reading a biography of Murray Gell-Mann, probably the most significant theoretical physicist who failed to achieve any large measure of public fame. Apparently it rankled him that Feynman managed to emerge into the public consciousness as a known figure, while he lagged far behind in that regard. By the end of the book I'll know much more about him, I'm sure.

I finished Jonathan Coe's MIDDLE ENGLAND (2018). It is the third in a trilogy with THE ROTTERS' CLUB (2001) and THE CLOSED CIRCLE (2004). Coe hadn't expected to write a third novel, but explains in a final note how events led him to it.

The novel narrates a fictionalised version of events in the UK between 2010 and 2018. Coe has often done 'ambitious state of the nation novels' but in a way this is more ambitious than ever, as it seems to want to take on every major event in the country over that time - sometimes just through a narration of news events, often through the way its characters experience them. Such events include the 2010 election; austerity (Coe already discussed foodbanks extensively in the novel NUMBER ELEVEN); the 2011 riots; the 2012 Olympics (Coe seems quite close to what is now viewed as the credulous response that the opening ceremony showed the best of Britain); the 2015 election (but very little, I think, on the 2014 Scottish referendum, which now seems quite a pivotal event into a new era of political surprises); the 2016 EU referendum, including the murder of Jo Cox MP and the resignation of PM Cameron; glancing reference to Donald Trump.

The major event in all that that is barely referred to at all is the 2017 election, when the Labour Party greatly increased its vote share and destroyed the government's majority, despite being subjected to false and malicious attacks from all sides. You could say that Coe doesn't refer to this because he doesn't want to give credit to socialists - which is odd, as his early work seemed sympathetic to socialism. But I don't make this objection, as the book is in part satire, and as a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party I'd rather it was kept safely out of the firing line - which is largely the case. The one character who supports JC is a very privileged teenage girl who is largely not a very sympathetic character and who, to an odd extent, rather fades out of the novel as it goes on.

Though ambitious in what it takes on, you could say that this novel is technically less ambitious than other Coe. It's completely linear. It contains few changes of style or format, by his standards - with one exception, an ingenious late section where we read a character's email with parentheses containing what she's really thinking as she writes it, and ditto for her reading of the reply. This amounts to a surprise, as the character, Sophie, seems primed for a new adventure with a US partner, but the idea falls flat. She winds up knocking on the Birmingham door of her estranged but not divorced husband, Ian, and at the novel's end they are reunited. I think this is a good outcome, as it shows compromise, imperfection, the idea that sometimes the best you can do is to try to make the best of what you have (though this might not really be true for Sophie; such a woman probably could find another partner if she wanted to). It also acknowledges that this position itself is limited: Sophie and Ian are both going to work in Hartlepool, she teaching for the husband of her gay friend Sohan, but she isn't sure, as the story ends, how long it will last, whether the compromise can work out. I like this sense of imperfection and uncertainty.

Benjamin Trotter was the central character of THE ROTTERS' CLUB - though certainly part of a larger cast. Is he still the central character here? I think perhaps he is, just about, though the novel is very much an ensemble; as a new chapter you don't know which characters are going to be featuring next. Benjamin is quite an appealing, distinctive character, I find, in being so detached, dreamy, ineffectual, distracted; something of a failure in life, but he has managed to find a kind of happiness on his own, in a house by the River Severn, and when his friend Philip Chase publishes his novel he unexpectedly finds a degree of fame with it. In a way Benjamin still feels close to Coe, a figure for the author and artist, unsure of how far he should be trying to get involved in a wider society he hardly understands - though maybe that would be disingenuous, as Coe's fiction *is* always trying to do that. Another main character who returns is Doug Anderton: as a political columnist who has regular meetings with a Coalition or Conservative spokesman, Nigel Ives, he is a convenient way to keep political discussion going. He is also given the last word in his confrontation with old classmate Ronald Culpepper, now a multimillionaire sponsor of Brexit, at a school reunion which deliberately takes the novel back to the 1970s schooldays roots of the trilogy.

MIDDLE ENGLAND is immensely easy to read. I perhaps forget how readable novels can be - bestsellers, novels on display at railway stations - because I spend more time thinking about slightly more recondite books. But reading this is often very enjoyable, and it's nice to be able to sail through a book. At times it clunks and falls flat in tone, above all on Brexit - perhaps this is Coe's weak point, where he's too committed to a view to be subtle? He quotes a tweet from author Robert Harris and treats it as significant wisdom. Perhaps this novel isn't going to give you great political insight - though what it does try to give is breadth, a range of views, and that may be enough of a challenge for some of us. I think what I appreciate more is just the interest of the story of a character like Sophie as she makes her way through the decade; and Coe's unabashed use of heavy comic devices, notably repetition and bathos. He deliberately seasons the story with a kind of programmatic silliness, that slightly skews it generically, deflects its portentousness, and does much for its entertainment value.

My perception of Coe, after enjoying House of Sleep & What a Carve Up, but generally disliking everything he wrote before or after, is that he’s all craft and no soul, except that sometimes he’s pretty bad at the craft too. I don’t know if it’s his relentless centrism, or the overuse of cheap irony, but something about him definitely curdled in me after Rotter’s Club. And yet I’m genuinely still curious about what he does next, even though the last time I enjoyed a novel of his was... 1999? I’ll be interested to know more about Number 11, I guess.

Curious what ILB thinks of Brookner. I started A Friend From England yesterday and it’s relentlessly drab in exactly the way Brookner gets parodied for... what am I missing?

I suppose the Trotter books look quite nimble compared to their similars though (Sebastian Faulk, Lanchester, someone like that?)

What is Coe's 'relentless centrism'?

If we can agree on what's meant by political centrism nowadays (I think we can), then I would tend to agree that MIDDLE ENGLAND tends that way, and this may be a weakness.

But to be relentless this would presumably have to be true of his other work also. That's a lot less clear to me. WHAT A CARVE UP! was an anti-Thatcherism novel that allowed its imagination to be violent (through comedy). Implicitly you could say it was a novel of the political Left. His first novel THE ACCIDENTAL WOMAN was extreme in a rather different way, in essaying a kind of nihilism (though he didn't retain this mood into later work).

Or maybe 'centrism' here means something else.

I would tend to agree that WACU! and also HOUSE OF SLEEP are technical high points. He showed a lot of craft then - very much agreed. I don't agree that those particular books lack 'soul', assuming that I know what that is. WACU! contains a lot of poignancy and is arguably powered by quite a lot of feeling.

What you call 'cheap irony' I think I would call his deliberate embrace of broad comedy. I suppose I agree that it's cheap, but I feel like it's meant to seem cheap, and that's part of the joke. But there may be other irony in him that is less well judged even by my lights.

I agree also that because Coe is basically a comic writer and satirist, he is, in a certain way, nimbler than Lanchester et al (though I don't really know most of them).

I don't want to defend everything he's done. I think he often has craft (it's a good word) but also sometimes lacks it (true), along with the necessary brio.

Richard Thompson Beeswing
Enjoying this greatly. Glad it is reasonably in depth. I think I'm still in mid 68, they've just put out What We Did On Our Holidays and are touring heavily. So odd that Thompson is broadly hinting about events on the road being foreboding cos I thought the main thing there was after Unhalfbricking. That does still feature Lamble.
Anyway was looking forward to RT writing a memoir and this does seem to have been worth the wait.
I thought I bought the paperback and this is the hardback, so that's cool too

Alexandra Wilson In Black & White
memoir by mixed race Essex raised young barrister. Very interesting so far and she has done some good talks on webinars and podcasts that I've caught.
This is the paperback which is supposed to have a load of bonus material added since the hardback last year.

I enjoyed beeswing, he comes across as a thoughtful guy

The accident was after Unhalfbricking was recorded, but before the cover picture was taken and it was released.

I'd quite like to read Thompson's book ... but I still have Elvis Costello's to get through!

A Long Petal Of The Sea, Isabel Allende - Starts off quite unsatisfyingly, the setting is the Spanish Civil War and there's tons of wikipedia style paragraphs breaking down the conflict. At one point a character's dying and his last words are a geopolitical analysis of the conflict, "I hear Eleanor Roosevelt is trying to get her husband to intervene but public opinion is against him". Now the setting has changed to an upper class Chilean family and Allende feels much more natural describing their customs and neuroses, tho tbf I know next to nothing about Chile so who knows.

interesting coe conversation. my boss keeps insisting i read him so i'll probably do a couple over the summer--he's partial to the rain before it falls, which seems like an uncharacteristic place to start.

just finished by night in chile, which i'd been saving out of a confidence in its quality that it affirmed, and dear cyborgs by eugene lim, which i expected to be slight fun but ended up among my favorite novels from the past few years. has anyone read?

A good friend of mine has his first essay collection out today, I've read all the pieces as they came out in magazines and they're excellent, but looking forward to reading the full published versions:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667701/lost-in-summerland-by-barrett-swanson/

(NYT review today too)

Vivian: yes, THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS is very uncharacteristic indeed, because it doesn't contain a single joke, and Coe is primarily a comic writer. It's quite good, though. And it shares one or two characters with his other novels -- he has become one of those extended-universe writers, sometimes obviously and sometimes less so.

I hadn't heard of Dear Cyborgs, but I was intrigued by the idea of something that sounded like slight fun but ended up better than that, and I was blown away by it. Thanks for the recommendation!

Laurence Sterne - Tristam Shandy
Dasa Drnic - EEG

Sterne was really great, it felt like the first time a writer was applying anarchy as a free for all on page after page and getting away with it. Its so good to read someone who loves Quixote, Rabelais and Burton and end up on their level -- and it was really nice feeling to see the sources you have read and enjoyed over the years coming off the page too, and then wanting to get back to them, re-read so as to find something deeper. Books conversing with one another.

EEG was, in the end, a mixture of Sebald and Bolano. A sorta academic investigator of crimes writes down his travels and research and by doing so sorta flattens all that suffering and pain out on the page. This is better than Sebald's amblings but nowhere near Bolano. The one bit that was different from either was a 30 page section list as a table of apartments and itinerary of books being confiscated from Jewish homes (as well as the people inside of those homes?), and of course there is a lot of Yugoslav history, and she is rude about Knausgaard lol. Its on the give away pile but I will read more by her.

Love Tristam Shandy. Fav bit is when the father talks about how some child living with monks made a great work at the age of two and the uncle replies he hopes they cleaned it up afterwards.

Heh, sounds like an early version of the Groucho Marx line, "My boy, I think you've got something there, and I'll wait outside until you clean it up."

As I had hoped, the Gell-Mann biography, Strange Beauty by George Johnson, devotes the lion's share of its exposition to theoretical partticle physics and its progression during the period of Gell-Mann's major work, and places the facts of his family and social life around the periphery. Therefore, I am learning interesting things.

Northanger Abbey: somewhat slight but more fun (and mercifully briefer) than Mansfield Park. John Thorpe was good for a laugh. I will never read the 1000 odd pages of The Mysteries of Udolpho but one of the other gothic texts mentioned, The Necromancer of the Black Forest, sounded like it might be good for a laugh. It wasn't really.

jfc 'good for a laugh' x2

I finished Joe Kennedy's Authentocrats yesterday. I thought it skewered the centrist 'problem' quite neatly (and certainly eviscerates Starmer and his focus group approach to politics, before the fact) but found a couple of the chapters kinda thin gruel - particularly the analysis of various aspects of 90s culture. Recommended though.

I decided to reread Bellow's "Herzog" since I first read it quite a while back and was curious if I'd still like it. At first I was leaning towards no (the discursive formal experiment seemed an excuse for self-indulgent rumination and thinly-veiled autobiographical settling of personal scores) but now am leaning towards yes (the style doesn't really change but he introduces characters and vignettes that better fulfill the promise of the scattershot approach).

i finished luster. solid debut, the style is really solid and it's so funny. the story and some of the characters (guy in open marriage) were disappointingly typical, and i kept waiting for the book to lift off and it didn't really. still, definitely one of the better contemporary novels i've read in the past decade, and i'm really looking forward to her next one

right now i'm dipping into flaubert's sentimental education (recent translation by helen constantine) and muriel spark's the driver's seat (thanks ilx for that muriel spark poll, it inspired me to finally check her out)

Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

I envy you discovering Sentimental Education.

After finishing Strange Beauty I checked out a public library copy of a book that caek mentioned elsewhere on ilx, Notes From an Apocalypse, Mark O'Connell. It is a 'quick read', and like so many non-fic books these days, it resembles an extended series of loosely connected magazine articles held together by a broad theme, but it's interesting enough to finish. Might finish it tonight.

I envy you discovering Sentimental Education.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, May 24, 2021 9:42 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

flaubert is extremely my dude, i am very excited

finished

second place by rachel cusk - quite different and not as wise/funny as the outline trilogy

notes from an apocalypse by mark o'connell - i've been reading a lot of climate anxiety stuff recently and this was in many ways the best of the bunch. very readable (weirdly almost bill bryson like?).

thinking in systems by donella meadows - lol turns out systems thinking is just undergraduate thermodynamics haha

what are you going through by sigrid nunez - eh fiiiiine.

the overstory by richard powers - more climate anxiety. overlong without having enough to say.

the russia house by john le carre - good fun

now reading

mezzanine by nicholson baker (reading ~1 page a day of this before bed so it's going to take a while)

gotham: a history of new york by edwin burrows - 1500pp introduction to the power broker haha. i'm up to 1765.

jakarta method by vincent bevins - just started, believe this was recommended here (possibly table?)

I'm reading Thomas Mann's Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, the wackiest reactionary tome in history./

I think table and Alfred and I all recommended The Jakarta Method.

Finished The Log of the USS Mrs. Unguentine. Feel like I would have absolutely adored it if i had read it at the right time, still enjoyed it, would be happy to go back to it.

Also read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which is very entertaining, at least one “Christ, what an asshole” moment per page once it gets going.

yes, a chilling read

Finished a book of poems by reclusive hermit poet Liz Waldner, also Gail Scott's 'The Obituary.'

About to start in on my friend Jackie Ess' new book, 'Darryl,' which is getting a fair amount of hype. Looks good!

I'm reading Gail Honeyman's novel ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE (2017).

It's an accessible popular bestseller and feels unusual for me, but then, the last novel I read was one of these too, so perhaps it's more in character than I think.

It's very readable and, in truth, enjoyable. I will report back further in due course.

haven't been keeping up here at *all*, but a quick update:

First on the Bencolin/John Dickson Carr early stuff.

Castle Skull: A Rhineland Mystery; Largely v melodramatic and unconvincing - both detective Bencolin and narrator Jeff Marle are not at all appealing - but there is a truly grotesque scene towards the end of a magician imprisoned for 17 years in the prison of his own skull castle, being consumed by the reek of far advanced cancer and mentally totally senseless apart from decayed monomaniacal remnants of revenge, making an appearance at a hysterical drunken dinner party in a celluloid collar, new suit and garish yellow shoes.
The Lost Gallows: A London Mystery - JDC's second, and pretty juvenile, but *the right stuff* with sentences like: How could a murderer better dispose of his victim than by hanging him on a high gallows, up before the sight of all heaven, but on a street the police couldn’t find? I don't believe the solution will live up to the atmosphere, but i'm enjoying it.

Lorem Ipsum - Oli Hazzard. A single sentence novel (or possibly one where there is a full stop at A Significant Moment, I don't know yet). I mean, fine, and he's able to handle it. The flux of interior life is the subject (afaict at this early stage), and the segmentation of sensation and cognition, all of which (single sentence, sense and sensibility), means like all of these it feels like a very Romantic novel (as in late 18th/early 19th C response to, development of empiricism). And both Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond, which I read recently, and Gerald Murnane, who CLB reminded me of, have done/do that analysis of segmentation and spectrum of experience - quotidian and dramatic - very well and interestingly and with more structured rhythms and. even my god with direct speech in them. Still, I don't mean to be rude, and a) it's enjoyably readable and b) i liked his description of something i haven't seen elsewhere, which is a look at what it feels like to play computer games - in this case Fifa 2013 - and how you feel after, which he in part defines as 'a state of having been away from language'. so one i'm going to finish. Prototype Press' font size and leading does my head in though.

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René Girard. Jumping on the mimetic desire bandwagon. I find something v compelling about Christian apologetics. I haven't quite put my finger on it. It's something aesthetic I think - the mixture of the analytical, the mystical and obtusely, gnostically moral maybe. Girard is clearly a powerful intelligence. This is not in fact true apologetics as it is not his intention to demonstrate the truth of religious faith, as such, but to show the significance of Judaeo Christian tradition and specifically the Gospels for social sciences. Extremely compelling and intelligent.

“moral opacity” is wrong. it’s the tone of moral theology - the working towards a moral framework, that is grounded in a mixture of logic and mysticism, that i find tonally fascinating (and genuinely interesting, but it’s an abstract game and doesn’t often sum up to real world ethical problems. like, theodicy is interesting but it doesn’t much help with the notion of eg genocide afaict. it’s more like genocide critiques religion and even writing that sentence makes me pull a face.

Theodicy as a defence of genocide (and other crimes), interesting, never thought it that way!

imo thoughts were very lazily written and ofc theodicy is not a defence of genocide but at the same time if your response to tangible evil such as genocide is “how do we fix religion so it works here” then well.

I wonder if you might like xpost Gilead, which does have its reveries, but more working toward and in ethical framework of speculative response to experience, incl. of thinking---in a personal history of a pastor, son and grandson of a pastor (who was a radical abolitionist and giver away of his and family's stuff, running back to the ghost of Bleeding Kansas long after/"after" the Civil War)--so, post-visionary, going toward post-dogmatic Christianty, no-frills flights (what CS Lewis meant by Mere Christianity,seemed like, but this is more robust, poetic---also, things keep happening).

"Jumping on the mimetic desire bandwagon"

Was this a joke?

i'm afraid not, pinefox, sorry.

clustering around the dynamics of social media, the vocal presence of the radical right, and heightened by the White House mob, bloggers/commentators have been looking at Girard's theories of scapegoating and mimetic desire as explanatory mechanics for the dynamics of social media:

Who is Rene Girard
Mimetic Desire 101
Preliminary Theory of the In-Group Contrarian

You'll be excited to know I was going to start a thread bucket for structuralist (mainly bricolage) and mimetic desire thinking in this space, and relieved to know I couldn't be arsed.

There's Peter Thiel angle here as well, and I don't think the whole thing is free of... i don't know what to call it? That Silicon Valley/Ycombinator/Astral or Slate Star Codex rationalist progressive theorist? There must be something snappier there. Still, Girard himself is definitely an interesting thinker, though, but at base i'm most sympathetic to Empson's 'mucking about with other people's sex, always a disgusting business of course' view of the desert religions.

The desert religions? Is that Christianity, Judaism and Islam?

Does your comment on Empson mean: these religions interfere with people's private lives, and that's bad, but Girard disagrees?

I don't know Peter Thiel. I haven't heard of "Ycombinator/Astral or Slate Star Codex rationalist progressive theorist" either.

The bandwagon was unknown to me. It's possibly amusing or pleasing that what seemed like a joke from you is actually serious.

yes apologies pf- it’s partly because i’m just doing v rapid posts in short gaps i get at work which i recognise is leading to an unhelpfully compressed or telegraphic style.

the overall area is technology and culture.

ycombinator is a tech start up funding forum, peter thiel is a tech venture capitalist (wholesome companies like paypal, palantir and facebook and bankrupting gawker), slate star codex now astral star codex is a forum for hyperrationalist types who are generally on the neoliberal end of an extremely positivist approach to technology and progress. all of them share something which i find morally and aesthetically unpleasant but which i haven’t put my finger on. they are also not without insight and interesting frameworks for analysing new technology dynamics and the application of notions like epistemology to social media and online spaces.

there are genuine progressives in this area - someone like Adam Elkus, who i’ve mentioned before, includes a knowledge of modern warfare and also a playful sensibility that thwarts and defeats the “silicon valley” progressivism through a fascination with virtual glitching and disruption in the information flow of digital spaces to create a new aesthetic (mainly built around memes).

Geoff Shullenberger is a professor in comparative literature and has been foremost in applying girard to online media.