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

People often seem to talk as though Christianity, in particular, is home-grown to my country or even the US, rather than an exotic implant from places with different climate and customs.

Well, Christianity as it exists in most of the world today is a product of millennia of symbiotic development with European culture. I don't think either would be recognizably what they are today without the other. This excludes maybe a few small Middle-eastern Christian sects such as the Copts.

Christianity is a sprawling religion, within which one may find everything from Trappist monasteries to Pentecostal snake-handling.

btw, I have begun reading World Light, Halldor Laxness. This one may take me a while.

One useful term I've heard for grouping Christianity, Islam and Judaism is as the "revealed religions". V.S. Naipaul uses the term. It distinguishes the Western religious traditions which trace their founding back to a direct revelation from the Deity to a chosen prophet at a particular time and place, which is considered to be basically complete and infallible, from other Eastern traditions which allow for more of an ongoing process of revelation from observation of nature and study of things as they are.

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!
― toby, Thursday, May 20, 2021 12:24 AM
glad that you enjoyed it--it's still rattling around in my head. and thank you, pinefox, for further coe reflections.

big fan of sweet days of discipline, which seems like the best jaeggy of what's been translated (though i've yet to try proleterka). recently have gone through: outline by rachel cusk, the last resistance by jacqueline rose, & house made of dawn by n. scott momaday, the cusk long overdue and the momaday excellent. not quite sure where to head next.

Love Momaday.

Finished Jackie Ess' "Darryl" today. Recommended for fans of Dennis Cooper and Delany's sexier books. Excellent debut novel, highly recommended.

he risk of Girardianism is that an emphasis on the dangers of the mob becomes an alibi for unjust institutions that claim to protect us from it; the risk of Foucauldianism is the opposite: a systematic anti-institutionalism that underrates the dangers of the mob./8
— Geoff Shullenberger (@daily_barbarian) May 26, 2021 Foucuald himself not too worried about mobs o' pedophiles, for instance, judging by his take on the laws---so, continuing with the neat short formulations, inclined to respond, "Duh."

The points made above about religions are convincing.

But a fact remains: when eg: Europeans or North Americans recount the stories told in the books of Christianity, they are talking about events in a very different part of the world. It's not as though, with all the symbiosis, we now hear "Joseph and Mary came to Newport in South Wales, and could not find room at the inn", or "Jesus created a miraculous amount of food and drink by Lake Erie, in OH". The stories and characters remain unmistakably very foreign.

Eastern religions were mentioned. As far as I can tell, when people in the Far East follow them, they are set in the places where those people live. "The Buddha sat under a banyan tree and ate a bowl of rice", etc.

As far as I can tell, when people in the Far East follow them, they are set in the places where those people live.

Don't think this is quite true - is India really closer to the experience of a Japanese buddhist than the Middle East is to a European?

I don't know enough about those faiths to comment - have no idea where the Buddha is supposed to be from - so your question is probably valid.

I suppose I assume that some people, in some places, have religions that are pretty much from that place. Hindus in India? Inuit with whatever their historic religion is? But perhaps even this assumption is mistaken.

Fair play to Daniel Rf: I now see that Buddha is from Nepal, so yes, that's another foreign implantation when it gets to the Far East.

I read a curious little book: Adventure Lit Their Star by Kenneth Allsop, which fictionalises the fraught years of the first breeding pair of little ringed plovers in the years after WW2. Allsop was an observer at the time and the recreation of a largely vanished space is vivid and beautifully rendered (the area is lightly disguised but is essentially the gravel pits and sewage farms around Wraysbury, Staines and Windsor, near Heathrow). It ends up somewhere between Tarka and JA Baker's The Peregrine, without ever reaching Baker's dizzily transcendental heights or entering Williamson's vivifying zone. A pleasant - if whimsical - read.

Finished Broc Rossell's "Alameda," started a few poetry books but believe I'm going to continue on my Liz Waldner run with a book that arrived in the mail today, "Dark Would (the missing person)"

I'm reading James Salter's Light Years. He's a writer I've heard so much about. He writes beautiful sentences but, despite this being written in the 70s - about the quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - it feels about 100 years old. I want everyone in it to die.

Heh. I like him a lot, but I know what you mean.

Maybe try debut The Hunters, based on his experiences as a fighter pilot in the Korean War: reading it after Light Years, I was struck by the relative tautness, with highflown impressionism appropriately timed, streaming by and through the professionalism (he did this 'til he was thirty-one, pretty old for aerial combat, and the lead is no spring chicken; it's not a boy's initiation etc.). It became required reading in some training programs. There's a second edition, but somebody on a previous WAYR said it's not that different.

Cassada was a significant rewrite of his second novel, The Arm of Flesh and also has to do with flying. But yeah, he did do something to The Hunters as well, not sure what.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/02/11/reviews/010211.11maxlt.html

Thanks! Will have to check the versions of that one too. Here's an appealing take on second ed. The Hunters, and comparison to Light Years in context of his career POV:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/06/23/the-hunters-2/

I like the sound of Chinaski's ADVENTURE LIT THEIR STAR.

Yesterday at last I finished Gail Honeyman: ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE. It was odd for me to read such a popular / bestselling novel, but I realised that I really enjoyed this - maybe if I spent more of my time reading such books, my life would be more enjoyable?

The prose was mostly just serviceable, but with better moments of imagery occasionally. It's all narrated by office worker Eleanor, who is very odd and very isolated. There is an odd combination of a fiction of banality and the mundane ('I do like Tesco's pink wafer biscuits', etc) and a kind of buried Gothic trauma, relating to a tragic past involving her mother. The novel contains a very late twist which I don't think helps. Its celebration of kindness and sympathy for the lonely is welcome, but it can tip too far into sentimentality simply by *too often* repeating statements like 'He reached across and touched my hands. I found it warm and comforting. This must be what it is like, to be comforted by another human being!'.

I suppose the oddity of the book is that the heroine is sensible in so many ways, but also makes bizarre choices of a kind that nobody would - like fixating on a person she's never met and earnestly saying that she's going to marry him. The level of oddity and naivety here doesn't really fit with the character's perceptiveness in other ways, and doesn't exactly seem clearly explained by her tragic past.

I enjoyed it, but it's an incongruous mixture.

I finished "Herzog". Probably a good book to re-read as one ages more into the demographic that Bellow was in when he wrote it. I found the narrator, Herzog, more relatable this time around, not something to be particularly proud of. In some ways, which of course he ruthlessly dissects, he is a pathetic creature. It amazes me that this book was a bestseller in the '60s. There's not much in the way of story, but somehow enough, as Bellow mostly gets over on his splendid style. Herzog is really the only fully fleshed out character, and for all the time spent trying to capture the character of his ex-wife, she remains mostly a cipher. This is not a book that gives you any perspective outside or above that of the narrator. In a sense the book is the narrator's mental life - in some ways closer to something like Robert Lowell's poetry than to a typical novel. I wouldn't be surprised if "Life Studies", published 4 years before "Herzog", wasn't an influence.

rereading stephen dobyns' 'the wrestler's cruel study' because i'm so old that i can't remember anything beyond liking it 25 years ago. it is good; we too should be fighting in the streets over gnostic interpretations

Yesterday I read 3/4 of Ian McEwan's ON CHESIL BEACH. I like it. It's very readable, interesting, poignant. It carries certain elements of enigma and understatement that may or may not be resolved. It seems to contain a few repetitions that might possibly indicate poor editing or that one more draft would have helped to streamline what's already, to be sure, a very slim volume.

i read ed sanders - the party (oof) and relatedly ws merwin - the lice
been reading mathias enard - compass
also robert walser - the assistant

I'm glad I stayed with the Salter (and thanks to JamesRedd and dow for the recommendations). Light Years is a fairytale really, a (mostly) consequence-free fairy tale, full of elisions where everyone floats free of the tides of history. There's a sequence where the main character loses her father; it roots everything, briefly, and is so sparely and beautifully rendered that I almost forgave everyone.

Maybe this is TMI, but if the Macho Men writers of his generation he is one of the few I can (still) stand, there is a kind of a tenderness and grace in his writing I don’t find too much elsewhere. There is something he wrote in Burning the Days about how he felt whilst engaged in a noontime dalliance and watching the Apollo 11 that sort of brings together the two main sides of writing that would be gross coming from pretty much anybody else.

You talk about a loss, one thing he writes about not so often but then very carefully is the loss of his daughter, who might have been electrocuted in a tub or something.

But don’t take my word for it: look for the pull quotes from Michael Ondaatje and Susan Sontag that bedeck Burning the Days.

It's not entirely fair to isolate sections of writing but sometimes, often when he's writing about women, I have to stop and have a quiet 'ffs!' to myself.

She had a fuller figure than Nedra and a somewhat cruel mouth, the lips soft and self-indulgent, the smile irresistible, sly. Her face had the sullen resignation of girls who are studying subjects they see no use for, girls betrayed by circumstance, forced to work on Sundays, girls in foreign brothels. It was a face one could adore.

Salter is the master of prose that shimmers like winter sunlight; he's the closest to Cheever without Cheever's fablist overtones.

Okay, that quote just made me change my mind.

Cheever, Bellow, Salter, Updike -- all terrible creating plausible women.

B-b-but what about Roth?

there is a kind of a tenderness and grace in his writing I don’t find too much elsewhere.

I actually find this kind of thing a lot in old school macho types, Hemingway for instance. It's like establishing their macho credentials gives them an excuse to be sentimental without getting called on it.

Yeah, sometimes I hold against Hemingway some stuff he may have said or done later but might not actually be there in his writing.

I often think about the men in my dad's family in this way. They're a large family, south London, brought up almost entirely by their mum while the old man was down the pub. I'm generalising, but when I look at him and his brothers and their relationships with their wives and daughters, the default mode in life is to be absent, approaching cruel, in conversation to be hugely sentimental and almost hagiographical.

Finished ON CHESIL BEACH. Basically it's excellent. Great precision and detail about the feelings of the two characters (the novel, I realise, is so intensely focused on just these two uncertain people, like a two-hander play), in relation to what they say (which doesn't always express the feelings well). The ending is very poignant, in effectively saying that this one night of misunderstanding, pride and anger meant that the male lead character Edward took a wrong turning and to some degree wasted the rest of his life - though to the author's credit it's less clear than that, and the character does also have some substance and happiness in that life. As when watching the film, I still don't know why he didn't change his mind a bit later (say, a year later) and try to make contact with her again, to find at least some degree of mutual acceptance.

The setting (Chesil Beach, the sea) seems like a bonus, but I'm not sure; wonder if McEwan overdoes it.

It's one of his stronger works, in part b/c it's not so bloody ambitious.

Does The Innocent still hold up?

It's funny, I've never given any of those dudes much of chance because what little I read of them was so gross and macho that I immediately noped out.

Cheever being the big exception, actually. I also LOVED John O'Hara when I was in high school, but I think that's because I was really into tragic drunks.

cheever def my favorite of that crew, really good at writing a devastating paragraph, really good at parsing the inherent surreality of the quiddities of the ruling class and making them register simultaneously as sublime, ridiculous, and profoundly depressingly empty. i also love how he treated his characters like absolute shit

i have liked the little salter i've read tho

Cheever's also closer to a Latin American writer than the others; his fiction has little to do with American 20th century realism.

Speaking of tragic drunks, F. Scott Fitzgerald also somehow less macho than those other guys and perhaps not coincidentally has more interesting female characters.

I finished "Herzog". Probably a good book to re-read as one ages more into the demographic that Bellow was in when he wrote it

was utterly bored by this in college (while I loved loved loved P Roth) so maybe it's time to try again; then again maybe it's better to try things I've never been bored by

Speaking of tragic drunks, F. Scott Fitzgerald also somehow less macho than those other guys and perhaps not coincidentally has more interesting female characters.

― o. nate, Friday, June 4, 2021

otm. He never once condescended to the girls and women he creaed.

My big Cheever experience was and is The Stories of John Cheever. I got the first paperback editon (the mass market, with the scarlet background and the monogram C like a big pewter doorknocker: perfect) which won the National Book Award that year, 1981; the '78 hardback had copped Pulitzer National Book Critics Award, as well it might: a revelatory round-up, going back at least as far as his imaginative breakthough, "The Enormous Radio." The Library of America Collected Stories is even more inclusive (hopefully incl. his publishing debut at 18, about his being kicked out of prep school, POV/attitude also influenced by being from an olde, contentious, somewhat downwardly mobile New England family, with some hifalutin relatives who only approached him when he was sufficiently prestigious), I had read some of Falconer and The Wapshot Scandal, mainly remembering a few episodes or set pieces, and encouraging my notion that the stories are where to start (but may check the novels again some day, think The Wapshot Chronicle is considered the best?_

Pulitzer *and* National Book Critics Circle Award.

Putting off work a minute or two longer, let me add that the first part of Pierre; or, The Ambiguitiesinitially seemed to give Gay a bad name, vays con rococococo effusions that really didn't come down to nuthin, and these were the authorial comments *on* Pierre's own interior decorations (ov brane), not just the latter: so bad on bad adds to the sidewise pile of ecstatic Life With Mama--they address each other as "Sister" and "Brother" while dining in the mansion of their pastoral estate, gloriously established and maintained by a golden chain of Pierres--yadda yadda, he marries his sister--not his Mother, but his self-proclaimed illegitimate half-sister, Isabel or "Isabel," who may be the offspring of his revered father. She is a hauntingly beautiful, also haunted by nebulous memories or whatever they are, also sadly lucid transient, also crazy hot, and he *tells her* they are married, also tells his Mother, who freaks out and vows revenge, also drops in on sweet Lucy his bethrothed, who also freaks out, and in, collapsing. he does this because he instantly resolves that Isabel must be rescued, redeemed, from a life of poorly-paid toil, sufferting the consequences of their (?) father's secret sin and crime against womanhood, also his Mother's vicious Virture: already, without knowing of Isabel, it seems, she, the power in the parish, has gotten the/her pastor to agree on driving a poor seduced and abandoned farm girl and her basterd baby into the the wilderness---and Pierre figures that she will freak out even more if her sainted husband's name etc.

Also he has this vision of how things must proceed, with the illusion-and-lie-bound-world well lost. So the cloying overture was a set-up, and now he starts to seem like a pre-Flannery O'Connor character, only with second thought then mamy more: these are the Ambiguities---also the brain clouds, and the page clouds--increasingly cut through by cold-water details, as he and Isabel, (and Delly, the girl who was scheduled for driving out) start over in the big city--but still, as Pierre becomes immersed in writing--"an immature mind attempting a mature work"--the author's own experiences, in his head and in the biz, diffuse and clarify the reading experiences--so I'm also sometimes reminded of the cracked, glued narrator vs./times novelist that gave us VALIS, by Philip K. Dick, only that (spoiler) turned out to deliberately meta, *as well as* compulsively struggling, while this is more the latter.

Nevertheless, it did pull me along, and I soon learned to jump over or skim the bad stuff, as much as I could manage (at one point, the tougher/more scarred Pierre puts a poison letter under his left boot heel, the other under his right, and says he's gonna skate; right on), and the creator's (like the Creator's) own kind of love and sympathy for his strange young characters (incl. Lucy, who comes to town!)---also shining a funky light on their mystical boho city neighbors, the Apostles)---is powerful, if troubled, and fog-vulnerable, in the Ambiguities, oh yes.

(could do w/o some of the standard and/or stilted melodramatic devices in there from time to time---although---well he's set the bar very high, and I've lived s sheltered life among some of his greatest works.

turned out to (be) deliberately meta, *as well as* compulsively struggling, while this is more the latter.
Maybe Melville wasn't trying for deliberately meta, maybe it was more intuitive, but anyway sometimes it works out well enough. It's worth reading, but watch out.
This Library of America volume opens boldly enough with Pierre, follows with the historical novel Israel Potter (good?), also incl. The Piazza Tales, The Confidence Man, uncollected prose, and Billy Budd, what a finale.

(Gayness per see or as "a degree," as the characters tend to refer to sex as verb-tending, also figures, in that a rich effete cousin with whom Pierre had an early thing, to whatever extent/degree, later moves in on Lucy etc)