Dammit! aren't being *dispelled* by
― dow, Friday, 12 November 2021 19:55 (two years ago) link
Passing over because Covid
― dow, Friday, 12 November 2021 19:58 (two years ago) link
Gave up on pond by Claire Louise bennet about a third of the way in. Very motonous autofiction (I think?).
― đ đđ˘đ¨ (caek), Friday, 12 November 2021 20:24 (two years ago) link
Monotonous
Jeez Louises
― dow, Friday, 12 November 2021 20:27 (two years ago) link
xxp isnât that the one where she compares the sound of her vagina to frogs? Itâs one of the worst published things Iâve ever read
― suggest bainne (gyac), Friday, 12 November 2021 20:30 (two years ago) link
I donât know! I found it very difficult to pay attention.
― đ đđ˘đ¨ (caek), Friday, 12 November 2021 20:45 (two years ago) link
Finished Earthlings and wow! So strange and so massively disturbing. I think I enjoyed Convenience Store Woman more but this one will stick with me much much longer. Get the impression that in amongst the weirdness it might be horribly accurate with regards to trauma and it's Ă fter affects.
― oscar bravo, Friday, 12 November 2021 21:39 (two years ago) link
Bit about xpost the frogs seems like it might be mischievous, lil parody of cosmic nature books, so hope to take a look at Pond (and others if it's not in there). Even if it's unintentional comedy, that's okay too, sometimes more than okay, but hoping it's more than that.
― dow, Saturday, 13 November 2021 01:34 (two years ago) link
More Sophie Mackintosh short stories. Itâs just my mood this week maybe.Self-improvement: this is like a lot of her work on familiar themes; body horror, lack of autonomy over same, the constraints of societal expectations on women. Ugly stories about beauty arenât anything new. But I was reminded, reading this, a bit of Kyoto Okazakiâs startling Helter Skelter, which I loved. The descriptions of the treatments are largely omitted but give you enough to know whatâs going on. The silent woman on the game show that all the men are in love with haunted me. I liked this a lot, mainly for the similarities to Helter Skelter I saw, the slow burn horror of the box of accoutrements and the wasting diet, and the last paragraph. Communion: a woman lies down in a road. If youâre thinking of the music video for Just, youâre not alone. Itâs a pretty obvious inspiration for the story, but it reminded me almost more of Lars von Trierâs Dogville. The veneration curdling into expectation into hate was very reminiscent. Iâm not sure this one worked as well as some of her other stories but I couldnât stop thinking about it. Itâs got a strange dark fable vibe to it. I enjoyed the note at the start that this was inspired by self-care.
We want to lie down too, the townspeople told each other. We want to lie down too, but we run around our lives like the dogs that go in great circles at the scent of the thunderstorms, and are we not also foaming at the mouths, waiting for our prescience to be recognised?And are the children not infallible and blameless, subject to electricities we cannot see?
― suggest bainne (gyac), Saturday, 13 November 2021 13:38 (two years ago) link
Gotta read that/those. Meanwhile, in The Sentence Covid's come through, momentum too, see yall way down the line.
― dow, Saturday, 13 November 2021 20:14 (two years ago) link
Starter Driss ChraĂŻbi's 'The Simple Past.' Someone else here had read it, yes? Anyway, I think it's phenomenal, will be finishing it before the weekend's out.
― I'm a sovereign jizz citizen (the table is the table), Saturday, 13 November 2021 23:14 (two years ago) link
The last of these short story reviews.May Day is, according to the author:
New fiction from me which is a very loose riff on a nightmarish element from the Mabinogion story Lludd a Llefelys! (TW for pregnancy loss) Thank you to @The_Fence_Mag & @John_S_Phipps https://t.co/HzL6YPOA4o— Sophie Mackintosh (@fairfairisles) November 2, 2020
February, March and April teemed with birthdays. The heat of so many candles raised off the earth.
After the first class, we were allowed a rest break. I gathered with Jane, Lucy and Emily on a bench. Their names were pieces of sugar, and I hated them all but couldnât admit it.
I could run alone now, any time of day. Men swerved away from my body. The talisman bumped over my heart with every footstep, and the trees lining my running route reminded me of the quiet of that night, of how the man hadnât made a sound.
I see echoes of myself everywhere, shared mannerisms and hairstyles and laughs, like a video whose images keep freezing and stuttering. They are things that belong to me and yet they donât. Three redheads in a row; a bracelet I also own on somebody elseâs wrist.
― suggest bainne (gyac), Monday, 15 November 2021 11:03 (two years ago) link
finished Mary Barton. lots of people died. any suspense over the trial spoiled by the chapter title. lots happened and not much did.
― koogs, Monday, 15 November 2021 11:11 (two years ago) link
Finished The Makioka Sisters. One of the best novels Iâve ever read.
― jmm, Monday, 15 November 2021 16:07 (two years ago) link
line of the day, at least: "Carrie doesn't like to go home at night, and she doesn't like to go to sleep," and not just because I've known people like that.mention of Mary Barton reminds me I'd been wondering about Lucy Barton's creator, Elizabeth Strout--local library has a ton of her books---descriptions make it seem like her leading characters might be caustic, layered, Jean Staffordesue (though also remind me of a favorite line of greeting cards)---is she good?
â dow, Monday, 8 November 2021 1
She's okay.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 15 November 2021 18:22 (two years ago) link
Thanks.I finished xpost The Sentence, maybe too quickly, but momentum of second half seemed to encourage skating along the translucent surface, despite layers just below, and some seemingly baggy first-half elements now snapping together: seemed like some of the big themes and historical events, def incl. George Floyd Days of horror and rage (and shit from opportunistic looters of community, also more copshit, duh) seemed dumped in there and spread out, after being received: v. granular detail, but nothing revelatory (although some of it is startling, w possibilities I hadn't thought of, such as a new mother who is knocked down, spilling her breast milk---quickly pulled up and running again, she discovers that tear gas seeks moisture, including that of her nipples).Was especially put off to find that a radio documentary I heard last night clarified and cogently expanded backstory of urban Indigenous, incl. how they got that way->what they're doing now, in Minneapolis: v relevant to these characters---doc did this in a few sentences, in ways that Erdrich's weaving and traffic management didn't quite, or sometimes at all.Also, the whole thing about the ghost came to contrived-seeming, on the nose resolution---but there were good scenes and turns of thought-phrase-plot-life all along the way: it wasn't a bad read, just left me detached, for the most part.
― dow, Tuesday, 16 November 2021 17:49 (two years ago) link
Finished Driss ChraĂŻbi's "The Simple Past" (an incredible and forceful bildungsroman, imho), then quickly read poet Chris Sylvester's "Book Abt Fantasy," a strange book that has more in common with performance art than poetry, to my mind. Still very interesting!
I'm now going to start Dodie Bellamy's "Bee Reaved." You can read more about Dodie and the book here:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/15/american-experimentalisms-best-kept-secret-dodie-bellamy-bee-reaved
She was my thesis advisor, and Kevin Killian was a mentor as well. Going to be a bit of a weeper, as a result.
― I'm a sovereign jizz citizen (the table is the table), Tuesday, 16 November 2021 19:17 (two years ago) link
Loved Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower, I wasn't sure at first about the setting or main character but the supporting cast, Fitzgerald's gentle sardonicism and the general Germanity of it all slowly won me over, I think I rate it higher than The Bookshop or Offshore.
― namaste darkness my old friend (ledge), Wednesday, 17 November 2021 10:26 (two years ago) link
A few stories into that Ashton Smith anthology and so far my takeaways are:
a) he's very good at coming up with weird blobby nightmare creatures
b) ppl point out a lot that Lovecraft was racist even for his time, which is true, but in terms of the actual fiction I think it shines through in Ashton Smith more than it does in HPL; so many stories featuring primitive natives worshipping evil idols. Even the one he sets on Mars is full of orientalism.
― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, 17 November 2021 10:27 (two years ago) link
wrapped up louis menand's The Free World last night and am sorry to see it go. idk what ilx thinks of menand but i liked it a lot. agree with Raymond Cummings assesment of it in the summer thread: I guess I've aged into a 10-15 pages per day reader for stuff like this. It's just so rich, like a dark chocolate cake. I had to take a couple breaks from it over the months to cleanse my palate & read other things, but was always happy to get back to it.
particularly like how it was structured, not chronologically but as self-contained capsule histories of figures & ideas, often doubling back to the same moments or inflection points to view them from a different angle & spin off in other directions. (also made it easier to dip in & out of it, of course.) i'm sure some of the chapters must have started off as NYer pieces, but didn't feel at all like one of those books of frankensteined-together magazine articles.
― nobody like my rap (One Eye Open), Thursday, 18 November 2021 15:29 (two years ago) link
I don't remember details of structure, but his The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America was very good for information, some of it startling. But his occasional narrow, small c conservative tendencies turned up in here, like dismissing abolitionists as a bunch of troublemakers, not letting the responsibles gradually find a middle way (yeah like Missouri Compromise, with plenty slavery left in place,'til it was torpedoed by Kansas Nebraska Act, also 'member The Fugitive Slave Act etc etc right through Congress, perfectly legit). But you can veer around such things, keeping an eye out.
(Also: he follows judiciously granular clarity of the New Yorker excerpt from his latest, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War with lament re too groups in wake of Berkeley's Free Speecn Movement so messy and not nicely organized, like [buttoned-down bespectled lining up in their little raincoats: carefully chosen pic here] like FSM etc.)(And I'll read the book anyway.)
― dow, Thursday, 18 November 2021 18:47 (two years ago) link
too *bad* groups in wake
― dow, Thursday, 18 November 2021 18:49 (two years ago) link
I had no problems with The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Idea when I reread what is essentially some superb New Yorker profiles. Agassiz and Adams' anti-Semitism is quite clear.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 18 November 2021 18:56 (two years ago) link
Yeah, he's usually very fair.Would like to re-read some of AMC, including his mention of Abolitionists among the Transcendentalists. (Somewhere in ILX, Scott Seward posted a pic of them incl. his ancestor Rufus S. King [related to Secretary of State William Seward, who, though wounded, fought off attacker on the night of Lincoln's assassination]---then an official portrait of Rufus, still looking much the same, as Union Brigadier General.)
― dow, Thursday, 18 November 2021 19:02 (two years ago) link
Back to Menand: I'm fairly sure he said some of the Ts were very pro-John Brown, even maybe w fundraisers?! Yeah, no doubt a good read and re-read.
― dow, Thursday, 18 November 2021 19:06 (two years ago) link
It's just that when the New Yorker latched on to these one-stop-shopping polymaths (Gladwell, Gopnik etc etc), their most annoying tendencies turn up again and again also.
― dow, Thursday, 18 November 2021 19:08 (two years ago) link
dang I took xpost The Sentence back to library and now I'm missing some of those characters and their interactions, despite the frequent detachment of reading experience.
― dow, Thursday, 18 November 2021 20:53 (two years ago) link
raced through Richard Osman's The Man Who Died Twice in a couple of days. v undemanding but I do really enjoy most of his cast of characters tbh.a few chapters into Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mitzuki Tsujimura and I am properly hooked so far. 7 early teenagers who for various reasons aren't attending school are transported during school hours each day to a magical fairytale castle.
― oscar bravo, Thursday, 18 November 2021 22:02 (two years ago) link
George Eliot - Middlemarch. Of course this is great, classic and everything though on this one read I think I was a lot more into Dorothea and her journey through the patriarchy than anything else. The universe in an English TOWN does come into full view in the end, and the chapters leading up to the 'persecution' of Balustrode/Lydgate are fantatstic. So much of England in that whole business.
Though the novel it reminded me the most of was Musil's Man Without Qualities, in that both are partly looking back at events in recent history. The main protagonist seems too clever and wasted on what everyone else is up to, they know it and are stuck, and the relationship between Dorothea/Will reminds me a bit of Agathe/Ulrich. These observations don't take account with what they are up to though, they are ambitious novelists who express their art quite differently.
― xyzzzz__, Thursday, 18 November 2021 22:32 (two years ago) link
Driss ChraĂŻbi's 'The Simple Past.' Someone else here had read it, yes?
I read it last year. An angry stream-of-consciousness story of a young man with an oppressive, authoritarian, possibly murderous father, living in a conservative, traditional, religious society, ie. mid-20th century Morocco. Hard to follow for me at times, but impressively single-minded in its rage.
― o. nate, Saturday, 20 November 2021 02:21 (two years ago) link
Natalia Ginzburg - Family and Borghesia Sophie Collins - Who is Mary Sue?Baudelaire - Intimate Journals
So glad there is a focus on Ginzburg as it allows me to fill me in the gaps on stuff I haven't read by her. The novella is where she is at her most powerful, where a universe of character, feeling and need is flattened by her deceptively simple prose that seems to accumulate the spectrum of life.
As for Collins' poetry, its her first collection - I got to know of her by the (now deacivated) presence on twitter, and followed that up with Baudelaire's prose. He is a 'bad boy' as much as Collins is careful and considerate.
― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 20 November 2021 14:54 (two years ago) link
a universe of character, feeling and need is flattened by her deceptively simple prose that seems to accumulate the spectrum of life.
Quite well put. As much as I dislike artists of the same gender, I see a similarly elusive simplicity in Elena Ferrante.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 20 November 2021 15:05 (two years ago) link
đ¤¨
― siffleurâs mom (wins), Saturday, 20 November 2021 15:45 (two years ago) link
Last night I finished My Home is Far Away, Dawn Powell. It felt like one of her weaker efforts, largely because it was strongly tethered to her own life story and I think the pull of memory interfered with her natural instincts as a satirist and storyteller.
Now I've started The Ten Thousand Things, Maria DermoĂťt, set in the Moluccas.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Saturday, 20 November 2021 17:35 (two years ago) link
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes - Janet MalcolmIf you asked me about what I thought about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, my view was formed at 16 and hasnât moved on much since. I loved Platoâs poetry intensely for the two years I studied it, but I admittedly havenât thought of her much since, although I own her collected works and still find great enjoyment in them. So a few weeks back, I was talking about how my entire English class haaaaated Hughes, because of him cheating on Plath and then both Plath and Assia Wevillâs suicides, xyzzzz__ mentioned this book, which Iâve never heard of.What a book, though. Malcolm picks her way carefully through the stuff we all know; the work, the deaths, the rumours. Somewhere in reading this, I came to feeling almost sympathetic towards Hughes, which Malcolm freely admits is her bias in writing this book.The book delves a lot into the other biographies about Plath and Hughes. Hughes himself is the great unseen in this; he is never directly interviewed by Malcolm, but instead is glimpsed through letters, stories and most of all through his sister Olwynâs passionate advocacy. But his presence towers over everything. It is hard to forget his anguish about being treated as though he is dead by biographers, in terms of what they see fit to speculate about. When Malcolm writes about Wevillâs suicide, and in passing says (of Hughes), that his pain must have been unimaginable, it startled me. Itâs a totally obvious point to make, of course, but I had been so set in the image of this couple that Iâd held more or less untouched for the last 18 years that it shocked me.Malcolm picks her way through Plathâs own words, in the form of her poetry, letters and journals. Between this and the various coverage of people who knew her, she tries to sift down to some kind of truth, but freely admits at all times the difficulty in doing so. Although she confesses her bias towards the Hugheses, I still felt sympathetic towards Plath. It is clear that she was in a lot of pain in life, pain that perhaps none were equipped to help her handle. Malcolm notes the casual cruelty of even Plathâs supposed defenders in this life towards her memory, and is sharp about what they gain from it. In this, her view is very much aligned with that of the Hughes siblings.Memory and its failings as a method of establishing some kind of objective truth are a theme visited and done well here. Malcolm is skilled in the way she releases information at key points, so I was surprised when she is surprised, and the ending of the book is sublime. What did I most like about this? Her portrayal of, and various entanglements with, Olwyn Hughes is up there. The meeting with Jacqueline Rose is a highlight. The careful piecing together of the story - for it is a story, as much as it was also peopleâs lives - is incredible, and I find myself thinking about certain phrases from Hughesâs various letters excerpted throughout. A truly amazing book, and one that I will return to time and time again. Thank you so much for recommending me this xyzzzz__!
― suggest bainne (gyac), Monday, 22 November 2021 08:57 (two years ago) link
Lol that Plato is obviously meant to be Plath.
― suggest bainne (gyac), Monday, 22 November 2021 08:58 (two years ago) link
Excellent book. It got me to read Anne Stevenson's (okay) poetry.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 22 November 2021 10:28 (two years ago) link
đđđ xp
― xyzzzz__, Monday, 22 November 2021 10:29 (two years ago) link
xp I have a lot of thoughts about this book but absolutely zero curiosity about her work. I was more interested in Malcolmâs thoughts about her.
― suggest bainne (gyac), Monday, 22 November 2021 10:53 (two years ago) link
Even from a distance of two years from reading The Silent Woman, Malcolm's stance on Hughes still feels radical to me. As in received opinion is such, and the urge to pathologise Plath and Hughes so strong (and, to a lesser extent, Wevill), that it almost has to be a process of ongoing revision to hold the possibilities Malcolm constructs present in one's mind. If it's at all relevant, I think, if anything, I've come to admire Plath's work more and Hughes' less, though this may not all be entwined with Malcolm's book.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Monday, 22 November 2021 12:07 (two years ago) link
I'm reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's book Gathering Moss. She's a professor of forest biology so it's a specialist text but presented to a lay audience; it's that crossover that I'm struggling with a bit as each chapter is framed with what can be quite pronounced containing metaphors. It's also oddly edited in places, with a frustrating amount of repetition. It's convinced me to get a hand glass though, so there is that.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Monday, 22 November 2021 12:11 (two years ago) link
xp I really liked her repeated characterisation of Plathâs work as extreme - I never thought of it as such but those sharp sentences and zero punches pulled, of course it is. I found the anecdote that the bookâs title is from fascinating. Couldnât stop thinking about it.
― suggest bainne (gyac), Monday, 22 November 2021 12:35 (two years ago) link
Is there a thread for posting random connections between consecutive books that you've read? I just finished Virginia Woolf's Orlando and am about halfway through Jim Thompson's The Kill-Off and both have characters named Marmaduke.
― cwkiii, Monday, 22 November 2021 14:16 (two years ago) link
Judging by reviews and excerpts I've read, collected letters of Plath to her mother seem to have incl./consisted of very detailed candor, at least regarding some topics and experiences. Also the diaries. Will try to read all of that before going back to any more biographies, though Malcolm's sounds worth a look. Somehow you're reminding me of A. Alvarez's take on her in The Savage God, his study of suicide and art. He was her and Ted's friend and neighbor, also published some of her poetry or other things, i think. Talks about that, and (says why he) thinks she meant to be found while still alive. Guess that would fit with interpretation of "cry for help," (that's what he seemed to think, as best I recall), and/or "being provocative," difficult," "fuck you."
― dow, Monday, 22 November 2021 19:56 (two years ago) link
Dammit, can't find my copy of his book right now---but he's candid here, about how he thinks he failed her, and on context:https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/mar/19/poetry.features
― dow, Monday, 22 November 2021 20:03 (two years ago) link
Wow, review by Joyce Carol Oates no less, NYTimes '72, sympathetic to his then-oddball syncretic approach, which she says will get "harsh criticism," also she paraphrases his views on Plath's suicide w far more nuance than I remembered, in NYTimes, '71: says will be controversial because a book like no other, at that point, and...The most compelling section deals with Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963. Alvarez was acquainted with her and her hus band, the poet Ted Hughes, and was evidently one of the last people to see her alive. Her death is analyzed in terms of her poetry; Alvarez believes she attempted to âexorcize the [subject of] death she had summoned up in her poems,â that her suicide was not absolutely deliberate, not a totally conscious choice. Ted Hughes and others acquainted with Sylvia Plath have objected to Alvarez's writing on this point, but since I have no way of knowing what is fact and what is speculation, I will assume that Alvarez reported the events as honestly as he could. In any case it is his theory about the relationship of certain poetic subjects and the selfâdestruction of the poet that is really significant. Alvarez raises some disturbing questions. Is art therapeutic? Is the Aristotelian idea of the cathartic function of art perhaps mistaken? Does the poet instead involve himself more and more deeply, fatally, in the morbidity he tries to expell from his system through a formal construction of images and arguments?
It may be objected that the suicidal artist chooses morbid images be cause he cannot choose others, that he is rehearsing his own suicide, or perhaps feebly postponing it, through his art. Or, what ismore likely, that certain artists project the deathliness within them, which then seems to âpredictâ their own suicides, and that certain other artists become too involved with their own subjectâmatter and perhaps with their own mythological concept of what they (as âartistsâ) must be, so that it is too late for them to turn back. There are no final answers. But Alvarez's questions are superb, for they cause us to wonder not only about ourselvesâ not only about isolated individualsâ but about our entire culture, which exhibits so proudly and, indeed, so lavishly, public images of violence, death and comic horror in such billionâdollar industries as the movies. If art has no power to do evil, then it has no power to do good either; it is, then, powerless. And few liberals would want to believe this. Gotta serve somebody! Did I mention it's by Joyce Carol Oates? Whole thing is worth checking, not paywalled yet:https://www.nytimes.com/1972/04/16/archives/the-savage-god-a-study-of-suicide-by-a-alvarez-299-pp-new-york.html
― dow, Monday, 22 November 2021 20:22 (two years ago) link
Though in the xpost 2000 Guardian quotes, seems like he may be saying that she did seem more conscious of what she was about to do---judging by that last visit, that poem she brought---and that he didn't want to face it back then, incl. while writing about it?
― dow, Monday, 22 November 2021 20:28 (two years ago) link
Judging by reviews and excerpts I've read, collected letters of Plath to her mother seem to have incl./consisted of very detailed candor, at least regarding some topics and experiences. Also the diaries. Will try to read all of that before going back to any more biographies, though Malcolm's sounds worth a look. Somehow you're reminding me of A. Alvarez's take on her in _The Savage God_, his study of suicide and art. He was her and Ted's friend and neighbor, also published some of her poetry or other things, i think. Talks about that, and (says why he) thinks she meant to be found while still alive. Guess that would fit with interpretation of "cry for help," (that's what he seemed to think, as best I recall), and/or "being provocative," difficult," "fuck you."
― suggest bainne (gyac), Monday, 22 November 2021 20:46 (two years ago) link
I also recommend Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband: Hughes and Plath â A Marriage.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 22 November 2021 20:56 (two years ago) link