Now the year is turning and the eeriness comes: what are you reading in autumn 2021?

Steveolende, you'd probably be interested in taking a look at the numerous essays talking about the absolute destruction that Jacobs' philosophies have wrought on major urban landscapes. There are more strident and theory-driven reads out there, but here's a quick and loose primer on her oversights and mis-understandings: https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-jane-jacobs-got-wrong-about-cities

love By Night in Chile, my favorite Bolaño, actually!

― I'm a sovereign jizz citizen (the table is the table),

Mine too.

last of the month of short books is Nightmare Abbey but I'm not up enough on the source material to get any of the jokes. (i presume there are jokes)

Just reading up on By Night in Chile now and I should reread the first half again. I didn't realize the implications of the falconry during the visit to Europe.

xxxpost re Jacobs:
Also a good critique of her strengths and limitations---as an urban observer and philosopher, and as an influence on activists----in Marshall Berman's great All That Is Solid Melts Into Air---at least it's in the edition I read, published in the twilight of the Reagan years, when historian Berman looks back at Jacobs in context of the struggle with Robert Moses, neoliberal, neoconservative, and other urban real estate fever causes/symptoms (he's the ideal guide, starting with the Saint-Simonists' visions of building, and their influence on fan Goethe's Faust Part 2, Peter the Great's uilding of St. Petersburg (petri dish of modern art and revolution, eventually. and Berman tracks all that too), to Hausmann's realignment of Paris, reaction of that from Le Corbusier, critique of both by young Robert Moses, who started out as a benign idealist...Berman also chronicles Moses through longterm effect on Berman's native Bronx, among all the other increasingly bizarre "improvements" around NYC.)
Anyway, an amazing book, and he's sensitive to but firm with Jacobs, is our Prof Berman (I would have loved to audit his class, without risking his grading).

Thanks from me too for that book suggestion. I'm finishing up The Power Broker and I've thought about reading Jacobs.

I think power broker has dated a lot better than jacobs.

Thanks dow

I'm reading Diana Athill's Stet, a memoir of her time as a publisher and editor. Despite Athill being consistently good company, I found the early chapters fairly rote but the second half - concerned with particular writers - is proving more interesting. The chapter on Jean Rhys is actually pretty extraordinary so I'm glad I stuck with it.

Finished 'Of Better Scrap,' which is probably the most accessible of Prynne's recent output— as I think I've mentioned here before, he's probably put close to 500 pages worth of poems out in the past three years.

Now onto a chapbook from German innovative poet Ulf Stolterfoht, 'Nine Drugs'. Seems to be about drugs.

I finished the second novella in the 2 novella collection "Family & Borghesia" by Natalia Ginzburg. I might have slightly preferred the first one, but honestly could pipe these straight into my veins.

she's been my discovery of the year

I don't know how she does it. Seems she doesn't write like anybody else. It shouldn't work.

I discovered Rachel Kushner. The Strange Case of Rachel K didn't feel like an adequate distillation of her. No? Anyway, I missed The Flamethrowers in 2013 and will pick it up tomorrow.

Love that book. More novels should be set during the Years of Lead.

listening to Gary Shteyngart on Fresh Air, talking about new novel and cultural backstory----Our Country Friends is about eight friends riding out the COVID pandemic in the country home of a Russian-born American writer.Mostly immigrants, arts workers from NYC, now upstate. I like some of the comments, and the excerpt about the writer stressing over doing justice, somehow, to the beauty of "the stillness" up and out there. Is he good?

Talking about culture vulture "carpetbaggers" flooding Kingston etc., prices and scarcity of housing driving out locals---seems like "might" be effectively seriocomic, but certainly can't tell from Fresh Air marketplace of expert self-promotion, for so many arts workers.

He had a good piece in the New Yorker recently about a botched circumcision that came back to haunt him much later in life.

My circumcision came back to haunt me, too, but that's because I was circumcized yesterday.

i'm reading 'the price of salt, or carol' and it's a much more enjoyable reading experience than any i've had in a long time--not because of the book itself, but because i finally bought reading glasses, which i've needed for two years.

I have our country friends on my to read list. I liked super sad love story but I haven’t read anything he’s written since and I can’t promise even that’s aged well.

Two-thirds of the way through Camus's The Plague and I think I can completely dismiss the theory that it is an allegory for the Nazi occupation of Europe. My sense is that Camus wanted to use his personal experience of war and his deep interest in how those around him responded to that war, while purposely and strenuously avoiding writing a WWII novel. What seems to interest him most in this book is the psychology of individuals and a society thrown out of their normal habits into a situation where the ordinary habits of 'normal' life must suddenly adjust to an all-pervading sense of danger. iow, I think he deliberately chose to base his book within a city under quarantine with a raging plague in order to disentangle his insights from the particulars of WWII, so as to achieve a greater universality.

The next question is how well does he succeed, or put differently, are his insights valid? Since we're all living in plague times, I'd say he's remarkably successful in describing how his characters and his city in general respond to the bubonic/pneumonic plague (which is a different beast than covid19). Where I have noted discrepancies and inconsistencies, they are technical failures concerning details of no importance, similar to websites that compile lists of 'goofs' in films, like disappearing and reappearing props in the same scene. The psychology seems pretty reliably sound, even if they are sometimes obvious transpositions from wartime that don't quite fit into the plague scenario.

idk, he's pretty clear in the book about the plague being an allegory for something that we are all complicit in just by virtue of being here, which obligates us to either actively fight it at risk to ourselves or accept responsibility for the deaths it causes. That seems to me to line up more with the occupation than with just general observations about wartime and the pervading feeling of danger.

for something that we are all complicit in just by virtue of being here, which obligates us to either actively fight it at risk to ourselves or accept responsibility for the deaths it causes. Also describes the way I'm coming to think of the climate crisis. Acceptance is always easier, at some point (but not all).

obligates us to either actively fight it at risk to ourselves or accept responsibility for the deaths it causes.

I can't quite agree with this summation. the narrator makes it clear that this he does not consider this as an obligation. for example he acknowledges that the journalist from France who wishes to escape the quarantined city in order to reconnect with his lover is entirely justified in attempting to evade the rules and get away. the narrator never frames the decision to combat the plague in moralistic terms of necessary responsibility or guilt by omission. all responses to it are treated as equally human.

It's true, Rieux and Tarrou take slightly different views of it; I was summarizing Tarrou's view, which is the most extreme one. But even Tarrou thinks people have a choice; it's just that doing or not doing something about the plague is baked into the choices you make. And the book recognizes that human connection and our responsibility to people we love are deeply important too; that's why Rieux can't judge Rambert for wanting to choose a relationship over fighting the plague.

yeah, escaping to be with your family sounds like a morally defensible position in occupied France too tbf

Illuminations Walter Benjamin
Mopping up of several shorter pieces that the German man of letters wrote. Quite enjoying it. Been meaning to read him for a while. This comes with a foreword by Hannah Arendt which is also quite interesting.

Cruel Britannia : A Secret History of Torture Ian Cobain
History of state sanctioned torture since the 2nd World War. Starts off quite amusingly with a very ill informed German spy walking into a British pub in the early morning looking to be served and ordering in a European accent. Seems a tad conspicuous really. But looking into the Cage and ts treatment of Fascist supporters. Enjoying this, it's sat in a pile for a few months.

Black Sci-Fi Short Stories
an anthology book I got as an interlibrary loan because it has a complete version of Pauline Hopkins Of One Blood included. I just read W.E.B. Du Bois The Comet which i thought had a different ending. Have read a couple of pages of the Hopkins which looks interesting and dates back to 1902. There are a few other entries that are very vintage too which is intriguing

There has been some decolonial theory honed in on The Plague in recent years, for obvious reasons. One of the most interesting things about that book is that nearly everyone involved is a European colonist, or descended from such.

While Camus's fictional Oran may be set in an unspecified location in North Africa, the reasons for this choice are mostly to create a sense of distance, isolation and dislocation. An author today might choose to set it in a space colony and essentially write the same book.

Distance, isolation, and dislocation of European settlers. No mention is made of the people who live there who aren't European settlers, except a small note in the book's beginning.

For anyone interested in more about Camus and La Peste in some political context: https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/41648

He had a good piece in the New Yorker recently about a botched circumcision that came back to haunt him much later in life.

It's still haunting me, too (ie his penis problems after reading that piece). 'Lake Success' is underrated though, it's come to mind many times since reading it and is very funny.

Yes, I know it's a biased perspective. I like the book, and have read it multiple times in both languages. But it's worth noting its omission of what happens in a city-wide plague to those who were there first.

Finished Garth Greenwell's Cleanness, which I liked in fits and starts. Two of the ugliest (and longest) sex scenes I've ever read, and some of the touristy bits bored me after a while. But the opening and (especially) the closing chapters are strong, and surprisingly sweet. I like that this gay novel ends with its hero, having struck out with his twunky student, cuddling with a dog.

I'm reading The Makioka Sisters, which is wonderful so far. I definitely want to get a bunch more Tanizaki books. The pages just flow by.

Mary Robinson book on Climate Justice
ex-Irish Head of State's introductory book on the subject. Ties in with her UN work in the area which sounds like it might be a tad white saviourish so hope it's being done well. I picked it up cos it wasa pristine copy for a Euro and I thought it might be ok. I wasn't sure it was the same Mary Robinson.
Now taken it into the bathroom to look at the introduction and wound up with it taking over current readig there from Cruel Britannia the book on torture in the UK since the 2nd World War.

Illuminations Walter benjamin
collection of various shorter written work by German Thinker. I read the piece on art in the age of mass production this morning . Interesting. Have been meaning to read him for ages and somehow never come across a cheap copy when I've had money at least. Think I need to keep an eye out still. This was a library copy.

How To Argue With A Racist Mick Rutherford
genealogist shows problems with race science.

for a sec I thought, "The Genesis guitarist writes about race science?"

"How to argue with a racist Genesis guitarist"

right adam and mick same name surely?
I don't think that's the important bit here.

so i wrote quite a long thing on what i've been reading as it's been a while since i posted. then somehow it deleted, fortunately for you all. so now i'm going to do a one line summary for each book:

Fin-de-siècle Vienna - Carl Schorske
Excellent set of essays on the building and failure of the liberal bourgeois Jewish period in Vienna, the face of right wing and socialist populism and anti-semitism, and the vectors of aesthetics, politics and the psyche.

The Ring and the Book - Robert Browning
Often fantastic, often interminable playing around with historical and poetical perspective on a single event in 1698: fake news, epistemic kaleidescopes, browning on a tear.

Cogs and Monsters - Diane Coyle
Excellent assessment on the failures and perceived failures of economics and sifting the two, with specific focus on its terrible failures of diversity and tearing down of straw man arguments agains the value of economics.

All that Foundation Shit - Isaac Asimov
Asimov was a garbage writer, honestly the guy could not write for shit, and the Foundation series is facile as fuck, but as often with him, he did click on a central point of fascination: let's look at epochal history through a series of critical points, dramatised. Three-Body Problem is so much better but wouldn't exist without Asimov. (ok that was two sentences fuck you)

The Secret Life of Money - Tess Read and Dan Davies
V good primer on the practical models of businesses and money.

Virus: The Day of Resurrection - Sakyo Komatsu
no surprise this shit is a favourite of Hideo Kojima, with incredibly long slightly crazy and boring speeches about The World and Society - it's great fun to read this in the light of Covid, also *so much smoking i thought it was a plot device*.

The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and the Forty Years that Shook the World - Patrick Wyman
Really fucked me off with its BBC history documentary style of imaging stuff the writer couldn't know - it may even be good, and i guess i'll finish it at some point.

Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain
Thank god for open kitchens these days imo, but oftten very entertaining.

The Gunman - Jean-Patrick Manchette
He tried to get out but they dragged him back in: fascinated by trying to locate this French gun-for-hire novel in a specific year from its trappings of observed culture and will post more.

The Village That Died for England: Tyneham and the Legend of the Churchill Pledge – Reread of a newly expanded edition, a wonderful insight into pastoral military and its influence on self-perceptions of Englishness.

Universal Methods of Design – Bella Martin and Bruce Hanington: methods for structuring insights into design methodologies. a very useful reference book - so many of them absolutely require people to be in the same space, and i wonder if distributed workforces will require new ways of executing this sort of process.

Max Weber: A Biography - Joachim Radkau
Biographer consumed by subject in a psychological way (haven't finished, because its lol hueg, but great intro imo)

Shibumi - Trevanian
Fascistic-sadistic-misogynistic anti-American ideology combined with highly detailed speleological element and enjoyable Basque independence plot line.

Deep Wheel Orcadia - Harry Josephine Giles
Science fiction poem in Orkney/Scottish dialect, about people on the edge of things, labour, their space station, resources, history, and is surprisingly successful and interesting - will post more.

Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy – Carl Shapiro and Hal R Varian
About the business economics of the internet, published in 1999 and full of wonderful ironies, like the discussion of the battle between Encyclopedia Britannica and Encarta, that adds considerably to what is already a useful and interesting book.

Good Housekeeping Invalid Cookery Book – Florence B Jack
So. much. beef. tea. Fascinating to see such a different relation of food to sickness and health than we have now - a subject worth much more exploration.

Logic: A Complete Introduction – Siu-Fan Lee
Yeah great I should have learned logic at school, and to get the most out of this you probably need to apply it regularly, but doesn't hurt to practice a bit and this seems like a decent primer that takes you up to and includes basic propositional calculus.

In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities – Jean Baudrillard
Love this, so easy to read, and I don't care whether it's *right* or not, which would anyway be an odd standard to apply, it's just great fun and yeah he's playing with some stuff that's clearly applicable today in a way that other people couldn't see

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon
All about being a c'nt at work, this is actually one of the better 'do things better in your company', like work with word documents which you give people time to read, rather than powerpoints. Doesn't cover gross exploitation and fundamental immorality of overall business model sorry.

oh did i do

Lydia and Maynard - the letters of Lydia Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes, I did not. Charming and peculiar in many respects, with JMK shooting between epochal international conferences, and Lopokova dancing and irritating the Bloomsbury set and them both utterly charming each other with affection and intellect.

Awesome, that last looks most appealing of all thx.
Fin-de-siècle Vienna - Carl Schorske
Excellent set of essays on the building and failure of the liberal bourgeois Jewish period in Vienna, the face of right wing and socialist populism and anti-semitism, and the vectors of aesthetics, politics and the psyche. Got this, it's great!

All that Foundation Shit - Isaac Asimov
Asimov was a garbage writer, honestly the guy could not write for shit, and the Foundation series is facile as fuck, but as often with him, he did click on a central point of fascination: let's look at epochal history through a series of critical points, dramatised. Three-Body Problem is so much better but wouldn't exist without Asimov. (ok that was two sentences fuck you) Also otm---although, having gotten The Foundation Trilogy as bonus for joining the Science Fiction Book Club, when I was 9, I''ve always been immune to his notorious prose, though always liked the spare or sparse approach (word is the forthcoming stream will be tarted up with aliens and mysticism and shit). Also always liked history as predictive sci-math-art, and how that went...Also poignant reveal of The Mule.

i read the schorske book earlier in the year & yes fascinating period. found the section on the architecture possibly the most interesting part despite having very little knowledge or interest in the subject generally.

currently reading norman douglas' old calabria describing his sometimes arduous but mostly leisurely traipse through southern italy in the early part of the last century.

I'm reading The Makioka Sisters, which is wonderful so far. I definitely want to get a bunch more Tanizaki books. The pages just flow by.

Try Some Prefer Nettles next, it's quite short with a lot to say about the westernization/modernization of Japan.

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, another of those Greek classics retold by female characters, this one feels like it must have almost written itself. From the perspective of the treatment of woman it's harsher than Madeline Miller's Circe (maybe just because it's more realistic), but less lyrical and the slang ('eat shit', 'fuck's sake', 'gagging for it') does jar somewhat. In Circe Odysseus really does come across as both charming and cunning, not here (he's the one who uses the phrase 'gagging for it').

For whatever reason (idk my personality/sleeping four hours a night), I am all over the place atm and so’s my reading.

A couple of weeks ago a friend linked me this incredible essay about the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly series, which I’ve read on and off since I was a teenager but haven’t read at all since my late twenties. The essay was so great, it just totally got what the series is about and the moral core that’s wound throughout it like a vein, and I ended up buying not just the latest book but also the previous four books and I read them all in the past two weeks along with some of the older ones.

Based on this essay, I also bought the writer’s own White City which I picked up from a bookshop yesterday and will read in the next fortnight. The Guardian review says:

White City synthesises familiar forms into a whole: the rogue’s confession, the young man finding his way, the post-Celtic Tiger satire on puffed-up, self-perpetuating bullshit businesses. Our guide is 27-year-old Ben, son of a disgraced Dublin banker, languishing in rehab and writing an account of his wrong turns as therapy. He’s half-bookish, half-lazy, really just wants to write his terrible-sounding novel (“Decay: A Report”), and only gets a job when his father is charged with embezzling €600m from his bank and the money tap is turned off.

Ben encounters an old schoolfriend, Mullens, who seduces him into joining a dodgy property deal in Serbia via the promise of a few million euro and lashings of meaningless banter (“Shake it handy, and if you can’t shake it handy, shake it hard”). This leads to a certain amount of capering with a bunch of Serbs who are mostly portrayed as sinister: but the Irish characters are mostly stupid or corrupt, so there’s equality of insult.

But an even bigger danger is sex, as a reporter we’ll call Chester found out. Chester doesn’t ride his bike as much as he used to because, about a year ago, he had a bad cycling accident after a romantic interlude. He was writing a story on topless dancers when he struck up a friendship with Lola. Maybe Lola fancied herself a Marilyn Monroe to his Arthur Miller. Who knows. All Chester knows is that one evening she called him up and said she was lying around in her bed at Trump Palace, and could he come over. He hopped on his bike and was there in fifteen minutes. They went at it for three hours. Then she said he had to leave because she lived with someone and the guy was coming home. Any minute.

Chester ran out of the building and jumped on his bike, but there was a problem. His legs were so shaky from having sex they started cramping up just as he was going down Murray Hill, and he crashed over the curb and slid across the pavement. “It really hurt,” he said. “When your skin is scraped off like that, it’s like a first-degree burn.” Luckily, his nipple did eventually grow back.

Yes!

The Silent Woman's still my favorite Malcolm.

I haven't read the Sex and the City columns, but I do like the book, which I think is basically columns strung together. I remember reading the line, "Carrie doesn't like to go home at night, and she doesn't like to go to sleep," and thinking, wow, this is a completely different voice from the show, and it's great.

Though actually the first season of the show is a lot closer in tone to the book than the rest of the show is, which is why I like it better. I wish they'd kept those cynical little parody interviews with random New Yorkers.

Yes I do mean the book that’s the columns- I specified cos the sort of disjointed flow is interesting to me and also iirc she’s since written a couple of tie-in novels more in line with the series which, no.

I think s1 is pretty similar plot wise but the casting and tone are still quite different. New York in the columns is scary, harsh and hard. Even when the show is cutting, it’s never as quite as harsh as

It was just three years ago Christmas that Carrie had been living in a studio apartment where an old lady had died two months before. Carrie had no money. A friend lent her a piece of foam for a bed. All she had was a mink coat and a Louis Vuitton suitcase, both of which were stolen when the apartment was inevitably robbed. But until then, she slept on the piece of foam with the fur coat over her, and she still went out every night. People liked her, and nobody asked questions. One night, she was invited to yet another party at someone’s grand Park Avenue apartment. She knew she didn’t really fit in, and it was always tempting to stuff your face on the free food, but you couldn’t do that. Instead, she met a man who had a name. He asked her to dinner, and she thought, Fuck you, all of you.