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

Fascinating interview, thanks. I've been interested in her memoirs but not sure now if getting that close to her won't taint my view of her fiction.

Flew through 'The Criminal Child,' but I skipped the intro etc.

Last night, after drunkenly celebrating it as an object in the world, I began parts of my friend Mark's new book of poems, 'POOR FRIDGE.' I think I'll probably return to that tonight.

xp my wife read "a life's work" and said it was wonderful and is giving it as a gift to three of her parent-of-young-kids friends this christmas. i do plan to read that.

I finished Rogue Male and it was both good and batshit crazy. As noted in my first post about it, the fact that it takes itself completely seriously paradoxically saves it from its batshit craziness.

I've now moved on to Treason By the Book, Jonathan Spence, a recounting of a conspiracy in Qing Dynasty China, formed by failed candidates for the civil service. The author also wrote The Memory Palace of Mateo Ricci and a bunch of other books centered in Chinese history.

Recently I finished "The Caesar's Palace Coup" by Sujeet Indap and Max Frumes. This is a business case study type of book, going deep into the weeds on a mammoth private equity LBO and bankruptcy restructuring case. Only recommended if you have an interest in the subject matter.

Anyone read Hazzard's The Transit of Venus? It's a novel at an almost absurd pitch of exaltation, "literary" to a fault but with lapidary asides on every page. A heady thing, and I think I loved it.

No, but you’ve got me intrigued once again. Damn you, Lord Sotosyn!

completed compton mackenzie's absolutley abysmal yet entertainingly barmy 800 page novel of late victorian childhood, edwardian adolescence & pre-wwi early manhood sinister street

now revisiting ford madox ford's the good soldier

Rather in between books, I have returned to Lorrie Moore's essay collection SEE WHAT CAN BE DONE as a stop-gap.

"The High Window", which is (I'm glad to find out) much closer to The Long Goodbye than to The Big Sleep

Reading my friend's book, POOR FRIDGE, and then also finished another friend's latest chapbook. Will finish POOR FRIDGE in the next day or two...also got some orders today, so will have some more fun things to read over the coming holiday

Starting to read Prior Convictions, the justified and ancient collected short stories of RIP Dave Hickey. one of the first is about a 90-year-old man sitting in a bathtub in his big Victorian house on the plains. His voluptuous nurse is lying dead by the tub, which he can't get out of, because legs and shoulder don't work. His son lives in, but left this morning on a business trip. Eventually, the water gets cold, so he drains it, dozes, but the empty tub rubs on his bony old bod, so he refills. He tries not to look at and think of the nurse, but is troubled in several ways, and he also recalls many things from his past, stirred up also by dreams streaming through the big house (with the screens of routines removed, the memory tapes really get going: relatable) Very visual narrative, though succintly so, published ca. 1969, apparently, and somewhat pre-figuring early Terence Malick.
Visuals (and some conversations)are suddenly in-your-face superkitsch panorama ov Texas Fraternity Row, in "The Passion of Saint Darrell," but it's lovely to this Jesus-seeking vagabond variant of Seymour Glass: looks hideous to put it like that, but not glimpses, flashes, stakes, aces and 0s in the hole, from Life of the Saint, with gaps inviting speculation, fan fiction pipe dreams maybe---

Somehow I don't think I'm going to get used to Hickey pulling the rug out/all around the room, but rides are mostly good bumpy so far---Willie: "It was fun, in a strange kinda way."

Finished bell hooks and bought a stack of new stuff from charity shops.

So need to work out what to prioritise.

Mario Levrero - The Luminous Novel

500 pages worth of 'diaries' detailing the construction of a non-completed novel. The last 100 pages are some chapters of that shot-at-birth novel. Levrero makes it like he is just typing his day-to-day exitence for 20 pages a day (like Knausgaard) but the material is more worked over, and then you get to see a slightly different voice as that stuff is somewhat transformed into a beginning of a novel. There is some misogyny that feels a bit forced, and I'm thinking that he does this to give the novel a more distinct voice to his diary voice, and its a flaw. However the diaries are often really great, a mixture of dreams, meta discourse on the novel he has been given a grant to write, novels he is reading (very interesting on Somerset Maugham), writing about his one true love and their relationship but also newer matter you don't see in diaries -- stuff like internet addiction (this is from the 2000s so you get a discourse on the early internet), anxieties over the change in climate (the heat in the Uruguayan summer and its effect on mental and physical health), lots on mental health (he does yoga, gets his gf to go to therapy). I wouldn't exactly recommend it yet there are things in it that aren't anywhere else, in quite this way.

Sounds good!
OMG xpost Hickey now pre-channeling Gilead, still ca. '69 or so---I promise not to live-blog story by story (maybe)

re Family and Friends

Elena Lazic
@elazic
Wow. Brookner’s acerbic view of human nature never feels exaggerated, but the scale here makes her brutally perceptive remarks seem more grounded. Characters are shaped both by crucial moments, and by habits they mindlessly slip into over time. Brutal and a perverse joy to read. True?

Finished Mark Francis Johnson's 'Poor Fridge,' without a doubt his best and most devastating book of poems yet. Now onto his 'Treatise on Luck,' which is an earlier and much more wildly experimental work. He's a poet who's built a world for his poetry to inhabit, but which we never get a full view of— instead, we're treated to glimpses, suggestions, and hints that we're in a future world very much like our own, but with a lot more water, as well as strange, baroque class relations...as well as a fair amount of 19th c. British poetry. Really weird, really interesting poet... and I'm not just saying that because he's a friend.

Bertolt Brecht: THE BUSINESS AFFAIRS OF MR JULIUS CAESAR.

Would anyone like to recommend a book for me to give my sister? Looking for a female author published in 2020 or 2021. Her tastes skew dark, sardonic humor. Orphans, tragedy and art are areas of interest.

i haven't read a nicola barker since 2007's darkmans but she roughly fits that rubric (and i am sovereign came out in 2019)

plus there's an a.m.homes short story collection from 2018 (which i also haven't read lol): days of awe

Read the first couple of chapters of Sister Carrie by Theodore Dresser last night after having had it sit around the flat for way too long. The prose is delicious and the observations even better

That's interesting -- when I last read him Dreiser's prose struck me as his weakest strength. He excels at cohering a plot around situations as terrible and inevitable as breathing.

i started 'the luminous novel' a while ago, got maybe a third through it. the misogyny is off-putting, there's a casual cruelty about it that i found unappealing. i liked the stuff about early 2000s computers and some other bits and pieces. i'll probably go back and finish it at some point, but i was a little disappointed with how torpid it was after i read some positive reviews of the translation

also read gwendoline riley, 'my phantoms', which i really enjoyed - brilliant portrait of a bloke (the protagonist's dad) who loves puns and bad jokes and nasty, hectoring behaviour in the early part of the novel, v much reminded me of [REDACTED] from my wife's family, and i liked the rest too

and the new sarah hall, 'burntcoat, which was ok. i know a lot of people rate her prose but to me its consistent, enervated luridness means everything hits at the same level and it becomes stew-like, glutinous.

i'm gearing up to read bernadette mayer, 'midwinter day', a true masterpiece. i read her book 'utopia' a while ago, very sad and beautiful

Looking for a female author published in 2020 or 2021. Her tastes skew dark, sardonic humor.

Otessa Moshfegh? I haven't read "Death in Her Hands" but was published in 2020 and seems to fit the bill.

That or... Summerwater by Sarah Moss (sardonic tragedy), Second Place by Rachel Cusk (sardonic art)

Honjin Murders, japanese locked room mystery. told very conversationally. apparently there are 50+ more, almost all of them untranslated. (wikipedia: 77 total, 4 in english)

Anna of The Five Towns, was like gaskell but set in the potteries. would've like more pottery tbh. last page threw me for two separate reasons.

Slaughterhouse V reread.

Thanks for the recommendations on Barker, Homes, Moshfegh, Moss, and Cusk. She's read several of Moshfegh but I don't think she liked the last one. Will check out the others.

Been a while, but I recall thinking the notorious Dreiser style was serviceable enough in xpost Sister Carrie, despite some outbursts of editorializing (and yeah the plotting seems inevitable and "O shit!" in equal measure). He was a newspaperman after all, got a lot of good material that way; also, while he was still on the farm, his older sisters would sometimes visit from Chicago Frontier Babylon, where they were set up by older men of means. Good descriptions of parts of Chicago as they still were 70-odd years later, when I visited, and still were in a Dreiser doc ca/ 2000, prob still are.
I read this, w "shocking" bits restored, also Jennie Gerhardt, about kind of an alt.. bird-in-a-gilded-cage Carrie (not too stationary, a good social tracking device), and 12 Men, portraits: all three in an LoA omnibus. What else should I read by him?

Talking about journalists turned writer I listened to the current Backlisted yesterday which is about pete Dexter's book Deadwood. I listened thinking it had some tie in to the tv series but apparently at least nothing acknowledged. Sounds like something i need to read though.

As to what else you need to read by Dreiser i couldn't tell you it's taken me a few decades plus however long it's sat around teh flat to get this far. I think I may have had him cited as an influence on Kerouac back when I was reading up on things like that, him and Nathaniel West and the early 20th century Thomas Wolfe of Look, Homeward Angel fame. I thik i did read bits of both Nathaniel West and Thomas Wolfe in the late 80s. But probably need to revisist

i'm gearing up to read bernadette mayer, 'midwinter day', a true masterpiece. i read her book 'utopia' a while ago, very sad and beautiful

― dogs, Tuesday, December 14, 2021 7:24 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

She's the absolute best, who are you, let's be friends.

I finished Treason by the Book, Jonathan Spence, about a peculiar set of events that revolved around a conspiracy during Qing dynasty China (ca. 1728-32). The multiplicity of characters and places involved, the level of details recounted, and the inescapable cultural strangeness of late imperial China for modern westerners, taken all together make this a difficult sort of book to read. Yet, its very foreignness is its central attraction.

The author understood how challenged his lay readers would be to enter this world and he did an admirable job of smoothing the difficulties as best he could. This is definitely a niche book that explores a curious byway of history. Not for everyone.

Trying to decide what's next: a newish book by a friend, or a book by the odd experimental poet Hugh Tribbey, who publishes mainly through POD and obscure online journals, and seems to have spent his entire life in smalltown Oklahoma.

the turn of the screw (& other stories)

Several things bought and started.

Soldaten Sonke Neither & Harald Welzer the collection of German POW conversation showing their epistemology etc. Supposed to be pretty harrowing. Casual talk of killing civilians etc. Based on transcriptions made at the time.

Ngugi Weep Not Child
My dad knew him from them lecturing at the University of Nairobi in the late 60s.
Think I need to read a load of his work.
It being good and all.

Also got another bell hooks out of the library.
Sisters of the Yam.

Also Arthur Miller Echoes Down Th e Corridor
a collection of essays spanning about 50 years I'm now in the late 80s/early 90s . he's worried about what teh meaning of German unification post the Berlin Wall coming down is going to mean after living at the time of teh holocaust, been with Harold Pinter at an ambassador's house where Pinter has wound up insulting the ambassador and had to leave and thinks the 2 should pair up to shake things up.
Good collection of essays and it has taken me way too long to get through. I think I borrowed this late summer last year.
I think I've just discovered a much longer set of his essays on the library system which I might look into. That and the rest of his prose, I like his writing.

Audrey lorde Anthology The Cancer Journals
been meaning to read her for a while. Hope i can get hold of a copy of this and another couple of her works cheaply. keeping my eyes peeled while i'm in charity shops and local remaindered ones etc

Still reading Another Tuneless Racket by Steven H Garner
Just read him talking about John Foxx era Ultravox! and interested in picking some up

I've been reading Helen Dewitt's short story collection "Some Trick". I was looking for "Last Samurai" but this was the Dewitt they had at the library. Seems to be a mix of more recent work and some stories from her Oxford student days in the mid-80s. Some stories are more commercial (one was published in Harpers) and some more formally experimental. I generally skim a bit when she delves into post-structuralism, higher calculus, or breaks out the Latin or French, so I'm probably missing a bunch. The more commercial stories are fun - the pace is zippy, the tone knowing but playful. She writes a lot about authors or artists occupying a zone of semi-celebrity not unlike her own, and the gentle absurdities of dealing with publishers, fans, etc. who have a strong relationship to the work but in a very different way than the author.

Went with my friend Ted's book, 'AN ORANGE.' It is sort of an inheritor of the New York School---> New Narrative continuum of gossipy, philosophical work that is disarmingly casual while doing some very heavy lifting. I like it, tho it isn't "my thing" poetically.

Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell

the anomaly, herve le tellier

Anna Kavan - Ice
Gerald Stern's poems.

Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell

― youn, Wednesday, December 15, 2021 4:18 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i love this book!

whats up table. i'm a bit of a poetry dilettante, but i love bernadette mayer. i've been making my way slowly through the complete ted berrigan this year too, spent a few pleasant weekend afternoons with a few beers and his poems

i have also started reading alison rumfitt, 'tell me i'm worthless', which i haven't found too much to like in yet, but it's early days, and i started james baldwin's 'another country', which is wonderful

i've been dipping in and out of 'intersecting lives', a joint biography of deleuze and guattari. i always thought guattari was the 'weird' one, but now i'm starting to think it was the other guy, deleuze

Deleuze? A weirdo? No way!

Ha, anyway dogs, that's cool that you're into Bernadette's work and have been reading Berrigan. Do you dig Notley, Berrigan's wife at the time of his death? She's great, still alive, too. Here's one of her more famous ones: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50834/at-night-the-states

I finished Ted Dodson's 'AN ORANGE,' and think I'm going to go with Hugh Tribbey's "EF Zero" next

My next book is The High Window, Raymond Chandler. It was selected specifically to be easy reading, because I've been agitated and discouraged lately and I need something entertaining and soothing.

I think Backlisted did an episode on that one.

The High Window is the densest Chandler I think. The Backlisted episode is a good one.

I'm reading Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth. Good enough to feel like I've read it before.

Aimless, you might also try John D. MacDonald's The Empty Copper Sea: Travis McGee is trying to defend the good name of a friend or acquaintance, but gets as down on himself as he does the slow destruction of Florida by citizens-denizens, who seem as oblivious its and their own decline, for the most part: may be more neurotic than Marlowe, regarding himself as an over-qualified "beach bum," which can affect his behavior, uh-oh. Pretty entertaining.