'I FALL upon the spines of books! I read!' -- Autumn 2014: What Are You Reading?

(Now that a heavy weight of posts has chained and bowed the Summer WAYR thread...)

I just finished part 1 of Richard Jeffries' After London; not sure if I'll go any farther with this one--I kinda feel like introducing characters+plot will just ruin the setting? But the prose in the first couple of chapters is lovely, even if he starts to lose me with the complex hydrological speculations.

I'm also just now getting around to enjoying the Master of Reality 33 1/3 book by NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS NOMINEE John Darnielle, whose jokes are always very good, and really what more do you need?? Heavy (groan) subject matter, handled with the greatest sensitivity.

I have a bunch of anthropology books out that I'm sampling somewhat carelessly, trying to decide what I want to read in full. The Japanese undertaking industry, Greek funeral laments, and "compassionate cannibalism" in the Amazon are viable options. This anthology has been a useful guide:

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Mourning-Burial-Cross-Cultural-Reader/dp/1405114711

The Blood of Angels by Johanna Sinisalo: Finnish science-fiction about grief, bee colony collapse and animal rights. Pretty good so far.

"The Japanese undertaking industry"

Read THIS!

Think I'll try compassionate cannibalism first.

if I had a dollar for every time someone said that to me

Just picked up a bunch of books from a charity shop as I do too frequently. Got 9 yesterday, loads for my expanding backlog but started William Goldman's Princess Bride.
Ostensibly an abridgement of a longer historical satire WG was read by his father while down with pneumonia in late childhood and the main impetus that got him into reading. The truth is a little different.
It was adapted by him into the screenplay of a good film version in the 80s (I think) which I haven't seen in a while. So was wondering if it kept the real world prelude. Think it does keep some of the asides though ascribing them to characters.

Also reading Chickenhawk. Bob Mason's memoir of flying helicopters in pre escalation Vietnam in the mid 60s.

Also near the end of 2nd book of the 1st Thomas Covenant trilogy.
Plus various sewing books.

hmmm, recently been reading mostly shortish works: a robert louis stevenson collection (pretty hit or miss, first time reading of jekyll/hyde, some of the later south seas stories almost proto-conrad), collection of hp lovecraft's short novels and (somewhat) related stories, followed that up by random readings in a peter haining ed. collection of nightmare tales which goes from the sublime (bierce, machen, le fanu) to the ridiculous (crowley), and a not bad story by madame blavatsky on the paganini theme. currently, on my second ever wilkie collins: basil; a story of modern life from 1852. so far, not finding it much of a page turner and the hero is totally insufferable.

re: after london, from memory the middle section is pretty weak (limp characters/dialogue and i don't even remember the plot) but his canoe journey into the toxic swamp that was london near the end is every bit as good as the descriptions of rampant revegetation at the beginning.

Ezra Pound - A Serious Character. A serious biography. Turns out the greatest enabler in 20th century lit history read little and cared about other people less. Quite good on the legal limbo in which he resided after those infamous Italian broadcasts during WWII: it's clear they weren't treasonous but the Italian govt did pay for them. The book suggests that Pound wanted to be in St Elizabeth's Hospital all those years b/c it kept him away from other people and let him cobble away at ever more incomprehensible Cantos.

John Berryman - "Homage to Mrs Broadstreet"

Knausgaard - struggle 3
Shambhala way of the warrior
Murakami - Colorless
Shafer - Whiskey tango foxtrot
George-warren - man called destruction (Chilton bio)

i think there are doubts about the scholarship of that pound bio? or a story about the manuscript being unreadable and worked on for months by a faber editor? i forget. i only ever flicked through it in parts; it was readable, gossipy, i guess. isn't the second volume of moody's possibly definitive but not very interesting one out now?

Not really! If there's gossip I would've remembered. Pound's life was dull.

Alfred, what did you think of The Small House at Allington and Call It Sleep?

my favorite pound bio is eustace mullins' _this difficult individual, ezra pound_ which is a bonkers right-wing apologia written in a hilarious bitchy buttoned-up proto-buckley style.

I was lukewarm on Call It Sleep. The pages and pages of dialogue wore me out. He's excellent at depicting emotional violence though.

Adam, that sounds .. kind of fantastic

as for The Small House at Allington, it was one of my least favorite Trollopes.

Clark Ashton Smith, The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies - New penguin classics collection so I thought I'd check him out. About six stories in and wishing there was more of this type of stuff, from the back cover: "Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams; I crown me with the million-colored sun/ of Secret worlds incredible, and take/ their trailing skies for vestment when I soar." So far there's been a few too many stories that take place in realistic settings. I think its a chronological survey so maybe he wrote the more cosmic strange stuff when was older?

Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun - Really happily surprised by this so far, tried 1q84 earlier this year but only could get through book 1. I think this was written in the same period he wrote Norwegian Wood/wind up bird, prose is definitely of that quality so far.

Anindita Banerjee, We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity - Bit of a slog through the first 30 pages of methodology/theory review, but its starting to pick up, excited to hear more about electric trains connecting st. petersburg and beijing, underground through the himalayas and caspian sea, as imagined by random russians in the mid 19th century.

I recommend Death and the Afterlife by Samuel Scheffler if anyone's looking for fun, accessible new philosophy that philosophers have apparently taken seriously as something original in the field. It's about doomsday scenarios like in Children of Men, where knowledge of mankind's imminent extinction has a widespread dampening impact on people's capacity to find joy and meaning in life, to form plans and have meaningful projects. He tries to draw out the implications of this conclusion, showing that a big part of what holds us together as purposive agents is this assumption that mankind will live on significantly after our deaths, and that this belief is actually much more psychologically crucial than beliefs about personal survival after death.

It also goes into immortality (would immortality be tedious?) and fear of death (is it rational to fear death?). This would be fun stuff to teach.

What I wondered while reading was whether mere thought experiments about our attitudes towards imminent extinction can effectively take into account the workings of the human emotional immune system. The period in which the reader is thinking about their possible reactions is probably only a few hours, whereas a real person in that situation might have enough time to become acclimated to mankind's new horizon and learn to accept it. That would fit with how people deal with their own individual mortality.

Reading the accumulating evidence, like this http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/29/earth-lost-50-wildlife-in-40-years-wwf, can only hope the Earth can eventually replenish, somehow, and that the next dominant species is wiser, or has no clue re any re-accumulating fossil-to-oil deposits---not for another good long while, anyway (but how many times has this happened).

reading wuthering heights. finding it impossible to do so without getting the song stuck in my head.

going back to the guardian article though, the comments are so infuriating. people seem so smug -- almost giddy -- about humanity's imminent extinction due to our greed or selfishness or other moralistic terms. they act like they're not implicated in it at all and also never ask the question if the risks of trying to develop an industrial civilization were worth it considering the potential it allows (never fully realized) for many people to live very well.

it's not that the grim analysis is wrong, but george carlin-esque cynicism seems so stupid and pointless to me. like, we are humans. if our species has an unsustainable way of life, let's try to fix that. even if it's impossible and industrialization -- or even agriculture -- was the beginning of the end, we should be looking at solutions. tsk tsking is dumb because these issues have nothing to do with people being "greedy" and everything to do with systemic issues like population growth and capitalist economies focused on growth at all costs.

Not referring to you dow, necessarily, but I don't personally really care about the "next species" to dominate earth any more than i do the hypothetical life forms in distant galaxies. Human extinction, even mass- scale traumatic population depletion through starvation or displacement, should still be thought of as preventable

Yeah, I had a bit of a minor meltdown in the global warming thread over that report. It's amazing to me that species like tigers can be so iconic in the human imagination, when in reality we've almost completely wiped them out. Some love of nature.

Didn't read the comments, know what to expect there, but prevention seems increasingly unlikely, esp. considering the price, in several senses, incl. the gamble of efficacy---no, we shouldn't give up, but
a big part of what holds us together as purposive agents is this assumption that mankind will live on significantly after our deaths, and that this belief is actually much more psychologically crucial than beliefs about personal survival after death. seems to require whatever recycling of hope, wherever it can be found (and to each his own)

Quite a lot of Blake, also Erdman's Prophet Against Empire
Feel a bit zombified in bursts, so a little Jim Thompson for switch-off (after dark, my sweet).
Biography of Nicholas Van Hoogstraten also worked for switch-off.
Never finished the Good Soldier Švejk so started that again. So funny!

My ILX posting has gone from a trickle to a narrower, slower trickle since my computer crashed this summer, but I'll resist the temptation to write a longer roundup post. I'm finished with In Search of Lost Time, which I'd been reading for most of the year. I think I want to let a decade or so elapse before I reread it in sequence, so I can see how my perspective on the text will have shifted, and I think I want to spend a couple of months reading mostly novellas for contrast. I have mixed feelings about Lynne Tillman on the basis of her essays and stories, but I'm impressed with the terseness of Haunted Houses so far. Casey Plett's first book of stories, A Safe Girl to Love, deals with the messiness of trans women's experience, and particularly their relationships with one another, in a way I haven't really seen outside of Imogen Binnie's Nevada and the work of a few other trans writers. Stylistically (and formally in a couple of stories narrated in the second-person), it probably owes something to Lorrie Moore, but it never feels safe or excessively workshopped.

i shd be done with proust this evening, thank god

don't spoil the ending for us

You will all begin again from page one, I can tell.

Elena Ferrante - The Story of a New Name. So so amazing.

Now onto Elio Vittorini - Women of Messina.

Big Flannery score:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/books/university-acquires-flannery-oconnors-papers-and-effects.html?_r=0

Cool, thanks. Feel like the physical building those things end up in should be guarded by peacocks. If not live ones then at least artistic renditions thereof.

Didn't read the comments, know what to expect there, but prevention seems increasingly unlikely, esp. considering the price, in several senses, incl. the gamble of efficacy---no, we shouldn't give up, but
/a big part of what holds us together as purposive agents is this assumption that mankind will live on significantly after our deaths, and that this belief is actually much more psychologically crucial than beliefs about personal survival after death./ seems to require whatever recycling of hope, wherever it can be found (and to each his own)

going back to the guardian article though, the comments are so infuriating. people seem so smug -- almost giddy -- about humanity's imminent extinction due to our greed or selfishness or other moralistic terms. they act like they're not implicated in it at all and also never ask the question if the risks of trying to develop an industrial civilization were worth it considering the potential it allows (never fully realized) for many people to live very well.

I know what you mean, but I've done everything I can do as an individual, and frankly I have o% confidence any governments are going to do the right thing, so giddy joy at the inevitable demise of all the fuckwits who have actively fought against doing anything to save the pklanet is all I have left

Dutch government is trying to do the right thing, for obvious reasons.

fair point. i live in Australia, however, which no longer even has a climate change policy, due to being run by genuinely evil fuckheads. anyway, back to books...

just finished portugal in european and world history by malyn newitt

for a small country portugal has had some interesting leaders

i was v much not into the last idk how many pages of proust

I am continuing with Foote's Civil War history. His Confederate sympathies are emerging more distinctly as Robert E. Lee enters the scene and the south begins to win more battles. Now that we're deeper into the campaigns of 1862, he tends to lionize the Confederate generals and army rather unabashedly. :(

Buddenbrooks -- at last.

Even the "masked ball" passage, Thomp?

Couple of jazz books I picked up yesterday. Jazz People by Val Wilner where I read the Babs Gonzales piece and a book of interviews from around 1970 called Note by Note or something

Even the "masked ball" passage, Thomp?

― one way street, Saturday, 11 October 2014 20:30 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the masked ball is good but still maybe the third best party of the parties. the one at the end is the worst party.

i have been reading SHORT BOOKS: clive bell's 'art', richard hughes' weird docu-novel 'in hazard', lars iyers's 'spurious'

Making a bit of progress in The Arabian Nights. I always really enjoy it but can't ever seem to keep up a steady pace.

I read one night a night for 2½ years.

Maybe I'll do that. The way I read, if Shahriyar had my attention span, Scheherazade wouldn't have lasted long.

no xbox in olden days

Elena Ferrante - Days of Abandonment.

I loved Vittorini's Conversation in Sicily but found Women of Messina tough going wrt writing, and Days of Abandonment was sitting there. Picked that up, loved it from the first sentence on page one (so connect with her voice) that I couldn't go back to Vittorini. Gave that back to the library.

I just picked up a copy of Capital in the Twenty-First Century on a 14 day loan from the library. I will not be able to renew it, because of the high demand. I will certainly not finish it in 14 days. But I do intend to interrupt my civil war odyssey long enough to evaluate whether or not to invest in my own copy of this.

I often drift toward fiction about complicated friendships between women, so I've been meaning to read Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend series. I've started the revised American edition of Sheila Heti's How Should A Person Be?, and I'm not sure yet whether I can simply find "Sheila" and her friends smug and vacuous or whether I should admire Heti's verve in fictionalizing herself as smug and vacuous even in her soul-searching (after all, any number of male novelists have been lionized for dramatizing their abrasive qualities). In either case, so far it seems flimsy in comparison to Chris Kraus's I Love Dick--maybe that's an unfair comparison, but both novels seem to explore similar questions. I've also started Bolaño's Little Lumpen Novelita, which seems more promising. I've recently finished Jeanne Thornton's The Dream of Doctor Bantam, which is mordantly funny, vivid in evoking mid-2000s Austin, and incisive about mourning and doomed relationships.

revised how?

Apparently Heti smoothed out some of the novel's transitions and elaborated on the circumstances leading up to Sheila's divorce:
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/07/27/two-versions-one-heti/
http://www.themillions.com/2012/06/how-should-a-writer-be-an-interview-with-sheila-heti.html

hunh. guess that's the version i read! who knew!

read 'the graveyard' by marek hlasko last night in one sitting. a classic polish novel, something i picked up on a whim at elliott bay books in seattle last month. wonderful read, will definitely seek out more of his stuff.

Making a bit of progress in The Arabian Nights. I always really enjoy it but can't ever seem to keep up a steady pace.

― jmm, Sunday, October 12, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I read one night a night for 2½ years.

― Frederik B, Sunday, October 12, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Maybe I'll do that. The way I read, if Shahriyar had my attention span, Scheherazade wouldn't have lasted long.

― jmm, Sunday, October 12, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The one I've read is the Haddawy translation (as you can see from the link its a reconstruction from the earliest text, sounds like a fool's game) but for me it gave the flavour for that spider web of a prose. In my mind you could see what both Boccaccio and Proust got out of it.

I'm reading a recent Penguin Classics edition translated by Malcolm C. Lyon, and trying not to think about what a textual nightmare this book must be. I don't want to start shopping for translations. As long as it's clear and the humour transfers, I'm happy.

The storyteller herself is such a tantalizing and romantic character that I keep wishing for a hiatus where we could see more of her immediate story. Only a minor disappointment with the 1001 Nights that the bits of framing at every chapter break are pretty much the same.

Currently reading Therese by Francois Mauriac. It's fine but mixes the traditional novel and traditional themes with a hint of modernism in a way that reads very dated today.
Also Women of Algiers In Their Apartment by Assia Djebar, which I am honestly finding pretty boring.

lol i thought frederik was xping to tom's 'short books', i was like damn son good job

i am reading… g.e. moore. sometimes, it seems worthwhile and interesting despite my belief that it cannot go anywhere. other times, i just wanna take dude aside and tell him to get real.

i spent about twenty minutes reading the principia ethica about an hour ago. i just

i've never read that, i'm reading 'main problems', where he spends 50 (100, 200) pages working up to proving that material objects exist

also that space exists

probably that existence exists

At one point I felt vaguely obligated to read Principia Ethica for the Bloomsbury connection, but for now I'm content to let Moore's books exist without my participation.

words exist, but can we use words to prove words refer to something else. seems circular to me

I can't begin to guess what is a reasonable number of pages for proving that material objects exist. You could tell me that that's a big proposition or a trivial proposition or an incoherent proposition and I'd have no idea what to say.

"Check out my hand yo", can't remember how he manages to spin that into 100 pages.

that's actually a different proof, here he's workin on 'we all see the same envelope here probably fer sure'

http://www.openculture.com/2012/02/23_free_essays_stories_by_david_foster_wallace_available_on_the_web.html

lol ows bell's fawning refs to moore were what reminded me i wanted to read him

interesting that so much of that dfw stuff is around. it's funny, it used to be the offcuttish stuff that ended up in 'flesh and not' that were the easy things to find

short stories by conrad and balzac. conrad is kind of a boss. balzac feels like reading asimov in the real world.

I hope you mean the younger better Asimov, though I haven't read any short stories by B (when did he find time)

i haven't read the novels, when does one find the time

the introduction is some bullshit. when one comes to sum up the output of h de b, "short" is not the word that comes to mind!!!! yeah thx for that, wish i'd bought the reduced goncourts collection instead

Pere Goriot, director of Huis-Clos University, , thrust out a belligerent lower lip and glared at the young sans-culotte in a hot fury.

By "he," I meant Honore, not you, thomp, so you see my paren is actually brill. Has Vautrin showed up yet? Always like him, so far.

no i got that it was a feeble attempt at witticism

Just flippant, but also had never occurred to me that he wrote short stories. Now I'm seeing very mixed comments on his plays, incl. Vautrin.

i started by following this:

http://balzacbooks.wordpress.com/suggested-reading-order-of-the-human-comedy/

which mixes everything together - 300 page books next to 18 page short stories.

Thanks! Looks very handy.

oh god no

This NYRB pb was probably the first thing I read from them, and I'd probably say its my go to Balzac. Like this pairing quite a bit.

Peter Handke - A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. I think there is something to the coldness and distance that Handke sets up. And jeez I am ratcheting up on the number of novels/books about suicide.

Peter Stamm - Seven Years.

Ya Unknown Masterpiece is great

I recently started Bouvard & Pecuchet (the edition from ILB's other favorite publishing house, Dalkey Archive) & it is seriously just the most charming thing ever

What I am NOT reading, having attempted the muysteriously much-praised Gone Girl. What an awfully-written thing it is. This is the hero waking up in chapter 1:

"My eyes flipped open at exactly six A.M. This was no avian fluttering of the lashes, no gentle blink toward consciousness. The awakening was mechanical. A spooky ventriloquist-dummy click of the lids: The world is black and then, showtime! 6-0-0 the clock said—in my face, first thing I saw. 6-0-0. It felt different. I rarely woke at such a rounded time. I was a man of jagged risings: 8:43, 11:51, 9:26. My life was alarmless. At that exact moment, 6-0-0, the sun climbed over the skyline of oaks..."

How fucking padded can you get? It's the John Lanchester's Capital school of writing.

I'm always grateful for comments like this, because it makes me feel like less of an asshole for having zero interest in the latest airport-novel trend.

Don't think of it as the author's padding, but the character's: look out, here comes the Unreliable Narrator As Self-Obsessed Asshole (sure are a lot of those). May never make it though the book, esp. after coming across Mary Gaitskill's autopsy report:
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/020_03/12173 Mind you, a usually reliable source who is a great fan of Gaitskill and the novel told me that she thinks this review is bonkers (and friends who got MG to read it were "baffled" by her reaction, she says here).

I have to agree with Gaitskill, though i didn't make it far into the book. "That the emotional violence is rendered in smarty-pants chirping makes it more grating than painful." is spot-on to me--the two main character voices were intensely irritating.

The story, which has served as an inspiration to artists as various as Cézanne, Henry James, Picasso, and New Wave director Jacques Rivette, is, in critic Dore Ashton’s words, a “fable of modern art.”

Obv knew that History of the Thirteen is threaded through Out One, but didn't realise - until I looked it up, just now - that La Belle Noiseuse is derived from this short story. And Celine and Julie was partly inspired by an early James story - hey, everything's connected, just as Out One suggests.

Oh yes when I first read I had already watched the film and was thinking 'er is this the plot for...'

So was reading Seven years and Peter Stamm is someone I need to read more of. One thing he does in this chamber drama is take anything in life that is common to us: a wedding, a party or xmas party, family gathering, a meet of your gfs parents for the first time, and from all that zone in on moments of awkwardness, alienation, conflict. Still have half of it left, but nothing that was worthwhile was every told.

In turn this provides a very convincing portrayal of: (1) his ultimately hollow desire for a woman that looks the part on paper, and who seems to love him, and also (2) his actual love (a feeling he does not name) for the unattractive uneducated catholic Polish girl who crucially loves him unconditionally, who does and tells him by the end of the first day they meet.

Just posted, all categories:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2014/10/14/national-book-award-finalists-announced/17267937/

Wuthering Heights, I am embarrassed to admit, for the first time.

On a similar note, ambitiously starting up Tess of the D'Ubervilles to tonight.

Ernst Weiss: Jarmila

Travelling businessman in 1930s Bohemia is annoyed by shitty cheap-arse watch, gets talking to local clockwork toy/watch-maker, learns of his violent and complicated love life - 85 pages, very good, author committed suicide in 1940 when Nazis invaded Paris

I have this other Weiss book I haven't yet read, about a Jewish psychologist trying to heal the mind of a shellshocked Adolf Hitler just after WW1. "The writer Walter Mehring claimed in his autobiography that Weiss had access in Paris to Hitler's medical file, which had been sent out of the country for safekeeping by Edmund Forster, the psychiatrist who treated Hitler."

ok it seems i am really reading the critique of pure reason (first ed.)

there should be support groups for getting through books like that.

i've been reading 'the twenty-five years of philosophy' with some ole grad school people, this has somehow stimulated me to go back to the sources - THE source

strangely, intensive reading of the tractatus this year has made all kinds of fascinating things light up in the critique that i really would have had to muddle through before

those moments are what make reading philosophy so deeply pleasurable--not least because it's often won with such difficulty!

thanks for mentioning the Forster, btw. Gonna check that out!

yeah it's helped too, the leading note of his reading is very effective at brushing aside any obscuring overemphasis on the prolegomena that might wrongfoot your reading of the critique

i wouldn't say… deeply pleasurable—i mean, it's still kant. it's funny, being and time is hella not readable, at least prior to the months of perplexity and obscurity you have to put up with, but it's a very -elegant- book, by comparison. i feel bad for kant now, he's just obviously trying so hard, but as a thing to be read, the book is just this inelegant monstrosity (i think i finally understand the table of contents now too, ha). and even though i'm ok on the jargon, it still makes me anxious to read, because it's like every other sentence re-raises the risk of your losing track of what every single made-up word means.

I have this other Weiss book I haven't yet read, about a Jewish psychologist trying to heal the mind of a shellshocked Adolf Hitler just after WW1. "The writer Walter Mehring claimed in his autobiography that Weiss had access in Paris to Hitler's medical file, which had been sent out of the country for safekeeping by Edmund Forster, the psychiatrist who treated Hitler."

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Friday, 17 October 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In this country Weiss is vaguely known for Marat/Sade. Its an English disease for a writer to be known way more for his plays than for this novels. Whatever sells/puts bums on seats I suppose.

This wasn't a bad article about H!tler's state of mind/whether he was clinically sane.

Yeah, there are sentences in the CRP and TLP that could almost be interchanged. "The subject does not belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world." Similar sense that cognition on the one hand and language on the other are characterized by a kind of tragic necessity to always be going beyond their established limits.

The Critique of Judgment and Philosophical Investigations make another interesting pairing. I've seen papers that discuss the rule-following paradox by talking about free play of imagination and understanding.

I've started William Nordhaus's The Climate Casino. It reads a bit like a textbook, but it's also pretty informative, so I don't mind too much.

He comes up as a sinister figure in climate ethics literature, the guy who advocates for a high discount rate on future losses due to climate change compared with Stern's more virtuous percentage.

Yeah, I kind of like his strenuously even-handed approach, but I'm sure it can rub true believers the wrong way.

Peter Stamm - We're Flying. Raced through these short stories. Stamm captures the mundane to a point where it never looks like being that extraordinary (as the cliche goes) (there is no exclamation mark anywhere), he lets it be - there is something about it that keeps you making turn pages but in the short format you can't spend that long with a character. What makes Seven Years the substantial work it is, is to spend time with Alexander in his actions and thoughts and in the predicament he finds himself in.

Ingeborg Bachmann/Paul Celan - Correspondence. A relationship shot dead at its birth. I'd say anyone who is interested in her novel Malina ought to read this first (I need my own copy of it) as much of it is about this specific relationship (as the commentary somewhat exhaustively details).

Stamm captures the mundane to a point where it never looks like being that extraordinaryKeepin it mundane/real

Even when something happens such as a pregnancy, a death, a suicide, a marriage, a divorce, or whether someone depressed or loving or hating or happy or sad it just doesn't matter. Its like someone switching on a TV to a different channel and watching those events and emotions unfold in a drama or comedy.

Margaret Atwood, THE EDIBLE WOMAN

Veena Das - Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary

About violence in India during the Partition and after Indira Gandhi's death, which was actually thirty years ago next week. She asks questions like: What is the significance of the silence (avoidance) that she sees hovering over these incidents? How does violence of this kind disturb our criteria for humanity and for being alive (like, is it still easy to see a person committing an act like this as human in this moment? as alive (versus as an automaton of some kind)?)? Lots of other questions too. I feel like my reactions so far have been superficial, probably because I'm coming to it with a bit of knowledge of the philosophy she's using, but absolutely no knowledge of contemporary India.

Yeah, for an event of such terrible violence it seems strange how little Partition is talked about in UK/American circles. I don't know enough about contemporary India either, but Saadat Hasan Manto's short stories from the 1950s about Partition are unforgettable--vivid and bitter and terse, like the stories of Isaac Babel.

I feel like I should have more reference points, though, so I'd like to get to Das's book eventually.

I might have picked the wrong book as an introduction to her research. Something more focused on detailed ethnographic description would have been better, whereas I feel like this book, published in 2006, is somewhat of a retrospective rethinking of her own past work, presuming prior familiarity with her ethnographic stuff as well as some of the concepts she's using from Cavell and Wittgenstein - she doesn't always clearly indicate where she's using a technical term from one of them.

Hmm. I suspect Critical Events might take less for granted, but this is just google-abetted idle speculation, since I haven't read Das before.

While Structure and Cognition sounds much more granular and focused more on Hinduism than contemporary Indian politics.

Nigel Hamilton - The Mantle of Leadership. About FDR calling Churchill's shit and leading the war in 1941-1942.

Scott Fitzgerald - The Price was High. Uncollected stories. Rereading it. Most are trash but readable.

I have this odd relation to Fitzgerald where I love his truly throwaway notebook entries in The Crack-Up but much of his magazine writing just feels flimsy--maybe because I know he's capable of something like "May Day."

The way he's anthologized does no justice. Always fuckin' "Winter Dreams" when "The Sensible Thing" and "The Bridal Party" exist.

xp I'm just making excuses for my own failures of comprehension really. ;) This is probably a good book to start on, just not always easy. I do notice that she writes differently (in a way I prefer) about the anti-Sikh massacres of 1984, maybe because she was in fact there on the scene and actively involved politically in trying to expose the collusions of government and police in enabling the rioters. There's a clarity that comes in in these chapters.

Partition seems really under-examined by non-specialists; I've hardly ever seen it mentioned by pundits re ongoing effects on Pakistani political developments. Will check Manto, Das, thanks guys!

I have temporarily (?) suspended progress on the civil war to read Blackwater, about the mercenaries employed by the USA in Iraq. It is hugely dispiriting to revisit the worst crimes of the Bush administration, but I'm pretty sure the dreadful policies he instigated have only been marginally changed, so while there may not be 50,000 mercenaries shooting up a single country today, there still could be tomorrow, courtesy of the US taxpayer.

He comes up as a sinister figure in climate ethics literature, the guy who advocates for a high discount rate on future losses due to climate change compared with Stern's more virtuous percentage

Now that I've actually gotten to the section about discount rates, I have to admit, I find that probably the weakest section of the book so far. Color me unconvinced that his view on the discount rate is correct. It's a complex issue - not sure what to think, but I suspect the best rate to use is somewhere between the "market" rate and Stern's low rate. Not sure how much impact that will have on the rest of the book's argument. I still like the book overall.

Read/loved Roth's Nemesis, just in time for Ebola.

This is the book to give anyone who would appreciate Roth if he just weren't fixated on fucking. I kept waiting for it to delve into some sexy/ist paragraph and it didn't.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes - Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil

Just begun. I have a good feeling about this one. The chapter I've previously read from it was pretty incredible. This book was apparently controversial for suggesting that the women she observed living in slums, who were often giving birth to ten to fifteen children over the course of their lives, often to a succession of transient fathers, with most of their children dying while young, had evolved attitudes towards death which served to take the tragedy out of the deaths of young children, allowing them to view the deaths of babies as happy occasions (the innocent angel-baby rejoining God); and, moreover, that out of a need to ration resources, these women would often act so as to expedite the deaths of children who didn't in any case stand a chance of making it. There's something kind of unavoidably sensationalistic and journalistic about a topic like that, feeding into all sorts of anxieties about motherhood, so the problem of how to do it responsibly strikes me as very interesting.

God, I cannot fucking imagine reading a book on that subject. I am dreading reading the next chapter of my current book*, because I know that it will contain descriptions of the death of an infant cow. I am a huge wuss.

*Sweetland, by Michael Crummey. Apparently I only read Canadian literary fiction now.

It's beautifully written too. This passage for instance:

The strong mandate not to express grief at the death of a baby, and most especially not to shed tears at the wake, is strongly reinforced by a Nordestino folk piety, a belief that for the brief hours that the infant is in the coffin, she is neither human child nor blessed little angel. She is something other: a spirit-child struggling to leave this world and find its way into the next. It must climb. The path is dark. A mother's tears can impede the way, make the road slippery so that the spirit-child will lose her footing, or the tears will fall on her wings and dampen them so that she cannot fly. Dona Amor told of a "silly" neighbor who was weeping freely for the death of her toddler when she was interrupted by the voice of her child calling to her from the coffin: "Mama, don't cry for me because my mortália is very heavy and wet with your tears." "You see," Amor said, "the child had to struggle even after death, and his mother was making it worse for him. The little one wasn't an angel yet because angels never speak. They are mute. But he was no longer a human child either. He was an alma penanda [wretched, wandering soul]."

"What is the fate of such a child?"

"Sometimes they are trapped in their graves. Sometimes when you pass by the cemetery, you can see little bubbles and foam pushing up from the ground where such children are buried. And late at night you can even hear the sound of the lost souls of the child-spirits wailing."

On going beyond desperation and despair---if enough people believe it---Wonder how many people in this country do? Someday it may be not just gospel, but Gospel.

(Ugh.)

Skimming a bunch of Arabian Nights-related material--bits the original text, an Illustrated Junior Library edition, Robert Irwin's companion--in preparation for teaching The Thief of Bagdad (1940) next week.

Robert Irwin's novels look cool. I was looking for his book on the Alhambra, which I'm visiting in a couple weeks(!), but it seemed to be missing from the stacks.

His 'Limits of Vision', about a housewife driven mad by household dust and descending into a microworld was pretty great.

Just read William Gibson's new one, which was clever fun if not mind-blowing, and am now reading Geoff Smith, 'Time of the Beast', about a monk hermit in the English Fenlands in 666AD, and his encounters with SOMETHING NASTY in the marshes. Very good so far, despite the hideously JPG-artifact-ridden cover the book has been saddled with. It's published by Dedalus, whose cover design in general is eye-wreckingly poor.

Just finished Wolf in White Van, wow.

Now back to the Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig, although the two I started with were so devastating ("Letter from an Unknown Woman," "Forgotten Dreams") I'm not sure how many I can take.

Finally read Dubliners. Love the intent observation and the improbable navigation through all the detail: can't call it "omniscient" narration in the lordly sense: early 20-something author knows he's still got a lot to learn about women, for instance/especially, and like some of his male protagonists (generally older and more experienced than he), the sense of surprise, in sometimes possibly teachable moments, is a recurring source of vitality, a key center, maybe. Also, there's a sense of compassion, or fairness---well, justice anyway, 'cause life ain't fair. But art can be, sometimes.
Also, unusually enough, it's making me monitor and question my own behavior, incl the binge of high-class reading: am I really learning from this, or is it just more status-seeking, if very belated? Can't take it with you (not all the way, but how far?)

Dubliners is really good. Perhaps only viewed as 'minor' because of who wrote it and what else he wrote.

My village library has two Colette collections, Gigi, Julie de Carneilha, and Chance Acquaintances: Three Short Novels, translated by Roger Senhouse and Patrick Leigh Fermor, also The Complete Claudine Novels, translated by Antonia White, both books with introductions by Judith Thurman. Worth reading?

I was reading Howard Jacobson's J but got bored. There isn't much tension generated from the clues dropped about what's going on...it seems pretty obvious and the characters aren't really interesting enough to carry it through.

Started the new Fuminori Nakamura book instead, which is way more fun off the bat.

have the day off from work, will probably finish Graham Greene - The Power & The Glory

this is the second of his novels I've read, after Brighton Rock last year, & as much as I worry about the schtick eventually wearing thin, man that's some good schtick

It doesn't wear thin imo. He wrote a few duds but the vast majority of his novels are worth reading.

I mean, if you read a bunch of them in a row I'm sure it'd wear thin pretty fast.

yeah I'm not about to jump right in to another one (already have Kafka's Trial on deck) but do you have any recommendations? Monsignor Quijote sounds interesting, but then I'm a sucker for DQ reimaginings...

My reading has been very undirected of late. I did finish the first volume of Foote, but have not yet picked up volume two. I currently am reading a novella-length story by Muriel Spark, Reality and Dreams. It seems thin in substance compared to her earlier output.

xp That's actually one of the two I haven't read yet, because I told myself I'd finish actual DQ first and stalled out around 1/3 of the way through.

The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair are both great and similar thematically to the ones you mentioned. Also great: England Made Me, The Comedians, Travels with My Aunt, but it's hard for me to make a concise list of recommendations. The quality is remarkably consistent for a body of work that spans most of a century. Basically just about everything up to and including Travels with My Aunt is worth reading.

The Man Within is good but is very much a "first novel", nothing at all like anything else he did.

I didn't like It's a Battlefield or The Captain and the Enemy.

My village library has two Colette collections, Gigi, Julie de Carneilha, and Chance Acquaintances: Three Short Novels, translated by Roger Senhouse and Patrick Leigh Fermor, also The Complete Claudine Novels, translated by Antonia White, both books with introductions by Judith Thurman. Worth reading?

Very much, though probably go with the Gigi/julie/Chance collection first. The Claudines are fun, but written under very odd circumstances (her husband basically locked her up and forced her to write them, including titilatting young-girl-lesbian hints, and then published them as his own work).

The Man Within is good but is very much a "first novel", nothing at all like anything else he did.

Veru much written in the shadow of R L Stevenson, which is not a criticism.

Thanks James, will check it out. Other Greenes I enjoyed (as well as Brighton Rock and Power And The Glory) 21 Stories, and several stories in anthologies, incl. speculative fiction, for lack of a better term (happy weird shit); The Tenth Man (good thriller, written as straight-up movie bait): A Sort of Life, one of his memoirs; Collected Essays (mostly tunneling back through sometimes odd Brit Lit, also Beatrix Potter; just whatever he seizes on while entertaining himself and readers ve. Great Depression and Battle of Britain), Collected Film Reviews (though not the one that got attorneys excited, in which he described Shirley Temple movies as pimped out [I'm paraphrasing]).Monsignor Quixote and a couple other late ones seemed kinda ho-hum at the time.
He's hard to keep up with, but somewhere in all this he parties hard in Batista's/Mafia's Havana (seems right at home), refers to himself in passing as "manic depressive" (believe the manic part), and that he used to pose as Grahame Greene, War Correspondent (only the first part was true), to hang out in war zones without getting hassled(also seems plausible, going by reading).

Grahame Greene, War Correspondent (only the first part was true) True enough when he was misspelling his own name, anyway.

H. Rider Haggard, She

Swinburne's poetry and The President Makers.

Packing books for a 10-day trip involving two 15-hour travel sessions. I'm going to bring the Scheper-Hughes along with

Margaret Mead - Coming of Age in Samoa
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness
Mervyn Peake - Titus Groan

That oughta do. Also in the local library, just noticed: Arnold Bennett's The Old Wive's Tale, with blurbs from HG Wells and John Wain. Keyword: "Masterpiece." True, or anyway worth reading??

Rilke - Letters to a Young Poet. Feel this might be a good xmas present for a friend so I'll need another copy. Rilke really needs a substantial go to selection of collected letters but this particular selection is a marvel by itself -- love the advice and the games he plays with giving that advice, like when he says its kinda worthless (which he doesn't really) but goes onto really say things that seem v deeply felt, yet there is a weighed in humility and genuine good will, quite moving given that I don't think they met -- not sure you'd want to put this particular volume together with his letters on Cezanne and so on.

Thomas Mann - started making my way through some short stories (tr. David Luke). Tristan is reasonable. I can never get excited by Mann (all the supposed irony just doesn't work with me) so not a translation issue but I'll be giving Death in Venice another once over (and I really liked that) so we'll see.

"Tonio Kroger" was an immense influence on young me, and not just thanks to its straightforward depiction of youthful homosexuality; I loved the shift in time and tone.

I read Buddenbrooks finally last month and was surprised by how, well, almost breezy it seems. And The Magic Mountain is not breezy.

Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper: really good and bleak and funny, like early Lorrie Moore plus extra sleaze

i read a bit of 'to the finland station', it WAS breezy

That and Buddenbrooks could be beach-breeze-friendly reads (mind yer thin-page editions), but actually breezy their own selves? Seems reductive.

I finished my first Penelope Fitzgerald! The Blue Flower was just OK though. Will try The Bookshop next.

What took you so long?

ww1 novice starting basically from scratch, and just finished Sleepwalkers. It was great but a bit dizzying in its detail of diplomatic machinations. Tempted to complement it with Guns of August

like dow I read the whole of DUBLINERS (in my case again). I liked it and I think dow has a point (implicit) re: maturity, reading it with an experience eye, etc.

I also watched the film THE DEAD (1987) again and liked that too.

Ernest Hemingway, IN OUR TIME

Seems like EH tried to make literature as plain as possible and hence risked making it as dull as possible.

Ernest Hemingway, A MOVEABLE FEAST

more fun than usual cos about real people one is interested in.

Hugh Kenner, A HOMEMADE WORLD

brilliant critic but to be honest, not his best book; a lot of questionable stuff and, it seems to me, wheels spinning through empty air.

It's difficult for me to reread "A Little Cloud," for when I was seventeen I misread it and thought it was the last word on the difference b/w the guy who goes away for college and the guy who stays.

trying to juggle a few at the moment:

Gilead, finally.
The Peregrine, which I'm really excited about.
Miles, by Miles Davis.
The Cultural Turn, Fredric Jameson

Finished William Nordhaus's Climate Casino. Was a bit drier than it needed to be, but informative and, for the most part, persuasive. Now reading some of Isaac Babel's Collected Stories for a change of pace.

Xp let me know how The Peregrine is, I've been eyeing it for a while

o. nate, if you get back to climate, might try Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warmingby McKenzie Funk, about fwd-thinking moguls, incl. some who back denyin' pols. Also read appealing reviews of Naomi Klein's new This Changes Everything.

Recently: All the King's Horses, Michèle Bernstein's brief but witty YA novel about gender roles among the Situationists (Bernstein's sequel La Nuit, which hasn't been translated, sounds more interesting for its protracted narration of a dérive); Kathy Acker's Don Quixote, which I loved, which reads like Burroughs with considerably better politics, and which I need to think more about; Caitlin Kiernan's The Drowning Girl, which makes the most of its unreliable narrator in terms of flexible treatment of narrative time, and seems eerier because less florid in style than the early stories I'd read by Kiernan (whom I started to read because I'm interested in how trans women writers think about community, displacement, and embodiment); Julie Delporte's minimal but touching sketchbook Journal and some of Annie Mok's memoir-comics; Lynne Tillman's episodic traveler's novel Motion Sickness, which does interesting things with the accretion of minor characters and the late-80s waning of the Eastern Bloc but which ultimately seemed slighter than Haunted Houses (although I think I'm probably more interested in gender than in questions of national identity); Simon Hanselmann's collection of depressive stoner comix, Megahex, whose contents are much more claustrophobic in bulk; Benjamin's late essays on Baudelaire yet again; and the essays in Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness I hadn't read before (in the past I kept circling back to the essay on reification).

I'm starting Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina, Radio Benjamin (the recent collection of Walter Benjamin's radio scripts), and the first volume of Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life--so far it's interesting to see how heavily Lefebvre relies on the 1844 Manuscripts, and the way he veers between the lyrical and the polemical.

I read The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark last night. It seemed like an exercise more than a story, but it was impressively better than anything else I've read in that vein.

I've just picked up the Screech translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel from the public library and am curious to see how he manages the trick of bringing Rabelais into modern English. How much I read of it will depend on how it measures up.

One self-correction: apparently La Nuit was translated by Book Works in 2013, but is between printings.

YA novel about gender roles among the Situationists YA?! Cool, take that, dystopian teen vampires.
P. sick of unreliable narrators tho.

I'm plagiarizing "YA" as a descriptor from the friend who lent me All the King's Horses, but it seems apt, since Bernstein was self-consciously writing in the mode of Françoise Sagan's Bonjour tristesse (La Nuit apparently has a similar relationship to the narrative methods of the nouveau roman) and both exploiting and implicitly commenting upon the commercial mobilization of youth.

Will have to read that and the Sagan, thanks. (Perhaps related: just starting that Colette collection of three short novels mentioned upthread, since it comes with good references from Ornamental Cabbage.)

Ian McEwan - The Children Act
Penelope Fitzgerald - The Bookshop

I am reading <i>Billiards at Half-Past Nine</i> and <i>The Shock of the New</i>. So far <i>Shock of the New</i> has been very informative

Really liked ´The Children Act', thankfully without the irony of ´Solar´. Valeria Luiselli´s ´Sidewalks' was a revelation, combining fiction and essays but sometimes reads like a diary (a very well-written diary that is). Now 100 pages into ´The Bone Clocks' by David Mitchell. The first part seemed a mashup between ´Black Swan Green´ and ´Ghostwritten´. Familiar territory.

Outsider in Amsterdam by Janwillem Van De Wetering.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janwillem_van_de_Wetering#/image/File:Janwillem_van_de_Wetering.jpg

it's a fucking peculiar book, I tell you. or rather it's not so much the book but the translation... well, Wikipedia:

He usually wrote in Dutch and then in English; the two versions often differ considerably.

"Beg your pardon?" said Grijpstra.
"Imagery from the East," said de Gier. "Comes from my reading and it fits the case for this is a Hindist Society."

Grijpstra scratched the stubbles of his beard.

"If the civilians knew how silly their police, are they would commit more crimes"

in basic sentence construction it's a bit like reading john lanchester. mundane things and notions need to be carefully unencrypted. but the effect isn't totally displeasing - it's an oddly effective way of conveying foreignness.

the bald policier racial stereotyping (1975 if it matters) is harder to swallow.

"What makes this series so engaging is that the policemen are as quirky and complicated as the criminals."
Washington Post

because they speak as if hastily parsed by Google translate.

Initially, I was put off by The City And The City because of what seemed like an attempt at this kind of garbled gravel, which suggested those old animated PSAs starring MacGruff The Crime Dog, as parodied by sock puppet dog Triumph The Insult Comedian: "It was a dark und stormy nightski---for me to poop on!" But either CM later dropped/downplayed the "East Euro" shtick later, or the book got good enough that I didn't notice anymore (or both).

Christopher Paul Curtis, The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963

kind of garbled gravel, which suggested those old animated PSAs starring MacGruff The Crime Dog, as parodied by sock puppet dog Triumph The Insult Comedian: "It was a dark und stormy nightski---for me to poop on!

would read

I enjoyed The City & the City but strangely don't remember the "garbled gravel," maybe because the prose seemed breezier than I expect from Mieville. The Outsider in Amsterdam quotes oddly remind me of English as She is Spoke: http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/english-as-she-is-spoke-1884/

I love English as She is Spoke. "To craunch the marmoset" is a phrase which haunts me still.

Some of the lists read like Gertrude Stein portraits decades before the fact (which I don't mean as an insult to Stein):

Put your confidence at my.
At what o'clock dine him?
Apply you at the study during that you are young.
Dress your hairs.
Sing an area.
These apricots and these peaches make me and to come water in mouth.
How do you can it to deny?

Jane Eyre's backstory is very similar to Agnes Grey's (mother gets disowned for marrying poor clergyman), you'd almost think they are related...

The Outsider in Amsterdam quotes oddly remind me of English as She is Spoke: http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/english-as-she-is-spoke-1884/

I'd forgotten about this! I think it was reissued as a copy of the original imprint back when I worked in a bookshop, and it was handy to read in idle moments.

An Outsider in Amsterdam isn't quite as bad as that, but the sentences do feel fairly consistently off. I'm not sure whether that has a charm in itself but you do get used to it for the most part, even if the total effect only contributes to a general lumpiness.

like dow I read the whole of DUBLINERS (in my case again). I liked it and I think dow has a point (implicit) re: maturity, reading it with an experience eye, etc.

I also watched the film THE DEAD (1987) again and liked that too.

― the pinefox, Monday, November 10, 2014 5:12 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks, yeah that's what I meant. It was like Dylan used to be my bold young uncle, and when I finally listened to Blonde On Blonde. I was struck by his being so much younger than that now--but still dropping science on me. Re Joyce, I read Portrait and Ulysses so long ago, in school, so was really amazed by his youthful voice here, more vulnerable in a way, for the lack of constantly-risking-absurdity literary acrobatics---if he failed in this kind of deep social commentary, via focus on individuals, especially with less outspoken well-wishers and guardians of the status quo watching so intently---you want an audience, you got it kid---would have been much worse than just going off into stylistic doodledom for the nonce. Not worse than court actions vs. obscenity maybe, but bad enough.

The movie is very worthwhile; Huston always does right by his literary sources.

"finally listened to Blonde On Blonde" *again*, I meant to say.

"Tonio Kroger" was an immense influence on young me, and not just thanks to its straightforward depiction of youthful homosexuality; I loved the shift in time and tone.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, November 7, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I liked Tonio Kroger, still felt like preparation work for Death in Venice. The shift is interesting (when he loses both of the people he loved). Reading both back-to-back is interesting, and it illuminates a (somewhat shallow) reason for liking Death in Venice: there is almost no dialogue. At one point Kroger says his age is 30 but Mann has always seemed v 'old' to me. Life dealt its blows (whatever they were; Mann was dutiful and married, that could be the cost). I'd love to get round to Doctor Faustus. Not sure about Buddenbrooks, he wrote this in 1901, after Death in Venice when he...might NOT have known enough.

Be interested to read the review of this book on the story.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n18/tj-reed/impossible-conception

Interested in the book too: http://www.cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-16264-7/deaths-in-venice/

started ZN Hurston, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD
it seems quite good!

and Jim Crace, THE GIFT OF STONES
a novel about the STONE AGE

how is THE GIFT OF STONES. this is something I am currently interested in.

My reading pace has slacked off the past few weeks, but I can say I am genuinely happy with Screech's handling of Rabelais. I plan to stick with it, but slowly.

Talk about new Penelope Fitzgerald bio tonight: http://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2014/11/19/penelope-fitzgerald-hermion-lee-and-wendy-lesser?hspace=279619

Tomorrow night, sorry.

Peter Lorre bio The Lost One

Haphazard months, needy periods of waiting. Does all this, then, happen in a woman's life because of certain definite infractions and disobediences, through individual omissions, the breach of a companionship with one man, the choice of another, and then the fact of being chosen by yet a third? The long sequence of household cares, of toil with the needle, of turned skirts---"My dear, I swear it's better than right-side out!"---of ingenuities which one pretends are little triumphs, are not, then, the result of pure hazard, but of a hostile, almost fatalistic power? She thought without gratitude of old Becker's gratuitous alms-giving. She called to mind those little festivities of the flesh, swiftly conducted and swiftly forgotten, exasperated moments from which a broken masculine voice seemed to rise up to Julie's ears. 'It's not their real voice,' thought Julie, 'but the voice of an instant.'
..."Julie, you're not feeling ill, are you?"
She shook her head and smiled patiently. 'No,' she answered within herself. 'I'm just waiting for the moment when you are no longer there...You read through me into another man, and you treat him as an enemy. One would really think that Herbert has no secrets for you. You hate him and understand him. When I think of Esquivant you ask me if I'm feeling ill. What good advice you give me from the height of your twenty-eight years! An honest little counsellor, one of those plebeian marvels that chance sometimes places at the elbows of queens. But the bitches of queens go to bed with the marvel and turn him into a trumpery duke, an embittered lover and a misunderstood statesman. With you as my advisor I'd never do "anything silly," as you so nicely put it.'
She emptied her glass of brandy at a gulp, though it was a very old brandy, and worth serious attention, a smooth and civilized brandy.
"Alley-oop!" said Julie, putting her glass down.
"Bravo!" said Coco Vatard.
'If he only knew what he was applauding! Nothing silly any more---that's tantamount to saying I'll never be any use to anyone anymore---not even to myself. He'll keep me from ruing myself, or from being taken in. People can always ruin themselves, even when they've got nothing.'

Ornamental Cabbage, thanks so much for encouraging me to read this collection of short novels by Colette! So many scary speed bumps for the simple male mind---I want to trot around Paris with Julie de Carneilhan 4ever, and sometimes feel that I have, with her American frienemies (can't really keep up, of course, but)

reading margaret drabble's 'a summer bird-cage' when i'm in a fiction mood and edmund morris's 'dutch' (an odd duck of a book) when i'm not.

I'm dying to know what you think of Dutch! It's still my go-to Reagan bio, despite its, ah, experiments. The insights and Morris' way with a metaphor help.

so i just completed the third oryx and crake book – madd addam. strange, good conclusion (maybe?) but something of a slog.

have only reached 1980, but it's definitely a page-turner. the fictional bits verge on the ridiculous, but the writing and the portrait of reagan's personality are exemplary. there's a passage comparing reagan's personality to a glacier that's probably as good a piece of writing as i've ever read in any biography.

now the fun begins! Wait till you get to the descriptions of a typical day, William Clark, David Stockman, and Bitburg.

Ornamental Cabbage, thanks so much for encouraging me to read this collection of short novels by Colette!

Yay, dow! Glad you like her. She wrote a LOT of books, and they're all pleasingly short (I don't think any of them break 200 pages). If you can find some of her short stories, especially the ones based on her time as an actor in Paris, they're also great.

After finishing MaddAddam (anybody else read it? I need to have a post-op discussion) I'm moving onto Murakami – Colorless. Then, I'm gonna give another go to something traditional I've disliked. Something inspired by the 'authors you hate poll.' I might try Moveable Feast again.

xpost I'll check those out too, OC. And somebody just sent me Colette's advice columm--it's from a new collection of her previously untranslated stuff
http://logger.believermag.com/post/102890463209/colettes-advice-column

http://media.tumblr.com/d95cf76eabb70fe75ed91739ec386371/tumblr_inline_neh036ly0T1rglck1.png

Rick Perlstein The Invisible Bridge

magisterial imo, only quibble is my desire for more on the rise of religious right but perhaps that will surface in the Carter/Reagan era follow-up. perhaps Perlstein is better at summary than synthesis but this is still a treasure trove for anyone interested in the transitional mid-70s. reading was an intensely *personal* experience because it triggered so many formative memories of politics and culture when i was a teenager, now clarified by middle-age perspective.

John Le Carre A Perfect Spy

maybe not the epic/grand finale he intended but a fitting end to the cold war spy saga and probably the last book of his I need to read.

Haruki Murukami Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

My first Murukami and probably not the place to start. 75% fascinating and then my interest flagged, felt like a YA novel w/youthful perspective on adult life.

Dennis Lehane The Drop

short story stretched to novella length for movie tie-in and wouldn't you know, it's the inconsistent Lehane's best work since Mystic River and his scripts for The Wire

Ian McEwan The Children Act

don't know if this novella is a short story stretched but it feels slight somehow and I actually liked Saturday and Solar. Those novels captured arrogant a-holeish main characters but the judge here is just dull despite the thorny dilemma she's faced w/. first time I've thought McEwan was going thru motions.

James Hamilton-Patterson Rancid Pansies

funnier and less self-consciously "well written" than Cooking With Fernet Branca at least on my literary laugh meter.

Tim O’Brien The Things They Carried

Vietnam War live and in after-the-fact flashback and just as horrific/moving as you'd expect. why don't we (amerikans) learn from the past?

Jo Nesbo The Redcoat

author maybe bites off more than he can chew by tying WW2 era Norwegian Nazis into contemporary crime wave but fairly interesting nevertheless. Not sure how much Nesbo's book-to-book variation in quality (he's all over the place in the half-dozen I've read) is due to translation.

Martin Amis The Zone Of Interest

He's such a lightening rod in these quarters I'll just say this is arguably his best novel and surely best since Money and be done w/it. #copout

James Elroy Perfidia
Marlon James A Brief History of Seven Killings

two long crime novels using historical events as departure points for sweeping epic tales and social commentary. Elroy is imitating himself at this point, veering toward self-parody at times. James otoh stakes his claim as a fresh voice of the Jamaican diaspora and a riveting storyteller. Best new author I've read this year.

currently wading through Richard Norton Smith's On His Own Terms: A Life Of Nelson Rockefeller and looking forward to the new Michael Connelly and William Gibson's The Peripheral plus George Clinton's memoir. The librarian gave me a funny look when I checked out Rocky and Dr. Funkenstein at the same time.

He's such a lightening rod in these quarters I'll just say this is arguably his best novel and surely best since Money and be done w/it. #copout

I bought this after thinking I'd given up on Amis after Yellow Dog--haven't yet started it, but more because not feeling strong enough for genocide rather than Amis leariness

Ghost stories week for my Victorian lit class:

Elizabeth Gaskell, "The Old Nurse's Story" (essential)
R.L. Stevenson, "The Body Snatcher" (probably essential, but unfairly tainted by my love the Val Lewton film adaptation)
Charles Dickens, "To Be Taken With a Grain of Salt" (a trifle)
Margaret Oliphant, "Old Lady Mary" (curious...)
William Harrison Ainsworth, "The Spectre Bride" (harsh!)
George MacDonald, "Uncle Cornelius, His Story" (awful)

Got confused for a second and thought this last was by the author of the Flashman series.

that Gaskell story is part of this: "Curious, if True" - http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24879

On an ILB recommendation, I started Richard Brautigan's 'Hawkline Monster'. Interestingly and frugally written, I can imagine finishing this very quickly.

Ian McEwan The Children Act

don't know if this novella is a short story stretched but it feels slight somehow and I actually liked Saturday and Solar. Those novels captured arrogant a-holeish main characters but the judge here is just dull despite the thorny dilemma she's faced w/. first time I've thought McEwan was going thru motions.

I'm trying to figure out how to write about it. For a while its slightness felt like a relief.

yeah I didn't nail it in that post, something fuzzy about the judge makes her hard to process. didn't know what to think about her failing marriage. guess the husband's somewhat legalistic declaration about having an affair was meant to be uh ironic.

Alfred you might be interested in the Rockefeller bio. Kind of a companion piece to The Invisible Bridge, less riveting/well-written but the good bits are copious. I didn't know that Kissinger began as advisor to Nelson in the 50s, some of Henry's sycophantic arias could have been lifted verbatim from Nixonland.

speaking of Invisible Bridge, I also didn't remember, or know, just what a diehard Tricky Dick defender Reagan was right up until the bitter end of Watergate. Was he cynical, delusional, oblivious or all three? The latter is my choice.

I read the Rockefeller: https://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2014/11/09/if-you-dont-like-the-effect-dont-produce-the-cause-nelson-rockefeller/

Just finished reading Robert B. Ray's "A Certian Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema 1930-1980". One of the best books on Hollywood ideology I've ever read.

Geertz's "Notes on the Balinese Cockfight"... so good.

Was he cynical, delusional, oblivious or all three? The latter is my choice.

Also, stupid.

Well there's that too

hey evr i just read the luiselli book too. she's really neat. i am gonna try the novel.

Last couple of weeks reading - all of which I loved apart from Meadowland perhaps, which was a bit of a chore:

F Tennyson Jesse - A Pin To See The Peepshow
Anonymous - A Woman in Berlin
Ivan Turgenev - On The Eve
Ian MacDonald - Revolution in the Head (why did it take me two decades to get around to reading this?)
Derek Marlowe - A Single Summer With L.B. (loveable Byron and his doctor in Switzerland)
Ivan Turgenev - Spring Torrents
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa - The Leopard (started this a few years ago and gave up. This time I devoured it.)
John Lewis-Stempel - Meadowland
William Shakespeare - Macbeth

finished THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD
I was impressed

now reading a book about the author and annoyingly it makes her out to be less likeable than the novel did
maybe best to 'trust the tale'?

finished morris's 'dutch' a couple nights ago. it won me over completely once it got to reagan's presidency; i think it's one of the best biographies i've read in years. he managed to humanize reagan and make sense of his personality in a way that rang true for me. the eyewitness account of the first meeting with gorbachev was a highlight. thinking of going back and plowing through all of morris's roosevelt books now (read the first one about 10 years ago but never got around to the others).

YES

My favorite bits: Reagan presenting Morris with his laboriously written legal pad paper history of Ickes' purported Fascist education; Morris' evocation of the Slough of Despond into which RR sank after Iran-Contra (which coincides with the official history: Howard Baker momentarily thought he'd have to invoke the 25th Amendment); and, yeah, Helsinki.

im reading tender is the night & bech at bay and night-side, which are JCO short stories

getting v into Arno Schmidt. Finishing volume 2 of the Dalkey Archive collection – Scenes from the Life of a Faun, Brand's Heath and Dark Mirrors – and starting on volume 1, the novellas. Thick prose, landscapes and learning, germanic-romantic-fabular patchworks, some misanthropy, nazis, jokes, apocalypse, misanthropy, surviving. I love him.

Just started A Wizard of Earthsea since it was lying around the bed. Bought it in omnibus form last month & now its author turns out to be topical.
I just found it browsing a charity shop.

i just read that! it's strangely haunting.

now reading Oakley Hall's Warlock. was inspired by it to watch Tombstone for the first time in 15 years and that movie hasn't held up well at all.

Warlock seems to be considered his best---haven't read it, but The Bad Lands feat. character development via action x sufficiently shaded/shady historical settings.

FAO Fizzles I am still reading THE GIFT OF STONES
it is getting more compelling!
as I mentioned, it is only a short book so I will actually finish it some time.

I am still plugging along slowly with Screech's Rabelais. I am thankful it is the sort of book that does not suffer much from being read in small increments.

Dracula. Another one I'm only now reading for the first time.

Kafka, The Castle

I am still plugging along slowly with Screech's Rabelais. I am thankful it is the sort of book that does not suffer much from being read in small increments

otm, I've got it ticking along on Kindle and read a few pages between other things – in fact I'm in this dipping mess on Kindle where I've got Screech's Rabelais and Montaigne (both were surprisingly cheap for Kindle on uk amazon), but I'm also looking at the same chunks in Urquhart's Rabelais and Florio's Montaigne.

(I think Screech's Rabelais is a lot better than his Montaigne, which was the first version I read, years ago – his love of arcane and archaic vocabulary & learning suits it better imo. I find him a bit wooden when he isn't dictionary-digging)

ion a train, but I think screech's Rabelais is excellent with Urquhart good in a diff way obv. Seem to recall either the introduction, notes or some sort of other sch apparatus by screech is also v good and a necessary counterweight to a critical over reliance on bakhtin in this area.

cockend next to me on the train is trading Legacy - 15 Lessons in Leadership. What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life.

wd love to read sthn good on the models that business devours. sportsthink is surely becoming yesterday's mode - feel that model was in itself inherited by sport from the army. boot camps and paintball. all that fuckin shit.

reading not trading tho

what's replacing jonny_wilkinson_kick_world_cup.jpg in the nu-management ppt deck? Breaking Bad?

maybe time for a 'faster you fuckers' revive.

There must be some top notch fascism in that.

iirc when I read Screech's Rabelais I dug the notes and scholarship. I think if he had annotated the Urquhart that would be best.

Tales of the German Imagination - from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann

Initial thoughts: no Thomas Mann seems like the right decision, although I would've wanted to see Lenz in here. So far I am not so much into Brothers Grimm, Von Chamisso's Peter Sclemiel is a much better idea than execution (the appearing and disappearing devil gets tiresome then it breaks off into a kind of finish). Von Kleist's St Cecilia is straight up awesome, need to read more of him. Onto ETA Hoffmann's Sandman next. xp

lol breaking bad am half expecting to see this now.

half-baked theory: there's a sector divide here.

corporate management and finance: sports and army theory. agro-bro bollocks.

corporate tech: agile, scrum etc (feeding into tech and dev heavy areas). all-areas incompetence. feel this is main mode for non-director types. (guy next to me shouting out some recruitment firm saying u got me a deliverer when I needed a business winner trouble is he costs 15K more and tbh I have a prob with that).

start-up tech: still some open-plan, out of box, free your mind hippy philosophy?

need to hit up the fuf thread again yes. wut are u readin no place for this.

I reread Bechdel's FUN HOME.
I didn't think I liked it much and was trying to articulate why, to myself.
But later I felt I liked it a bit more after all.

Do NOT read her follow-up about her mum. One of the most half-baked nitwitty books I've read in a long time.

I LOVED Fun Home. Should I still avoid the follow-up?

Avoid! Avoid! I loved Fun Home too, but the follow-up is a ludicrous thing.

that is interesting to hear.
can you say more about why it is bad?

Fizzles, I have just finished THE GIFT OF STONES. It's only a short novel - you'd knock it off in a day. I think it is quite good. It is about the TWILIGHT OF THE STONE AGE.

corporate management and finance: sports and army theory. agro-bro bollocks.

― Fizzles, Thursday, 27 November 2014 17:41 (2 days ago)

http://www.militaryspeakers.co.uk/speakers/simon-mann.aspx

just starting the new marlon james and chris bohjalian novels (a brief history of seven killings and close your eyes, hold hands, respectively). still occasionally returning to americanah.

i want to try some different types of novels. any good sites that review indie/small-press books?

Michael Orthofer's site Complete Review covers a great deal of books in translation (and sometimes untranslated European fiction) that are often otherwise neglected , and its sister site, Literary Saloon, is useful for collecting international literary news:
http://www.complete-review.com/new/new.html
http://www.complete-review.com/saloon/index.htm

both of these sites seem great; i'm exploring them now. thanks.

There's also Rain Taxi, Bookslut, Three Percent, HTMLGIANT before it fell apart....

i saw a bookslut reviewer's twitter feed. looked interesting, but can't locate it -- or a bookslut twitter feed -- to follow.

don't need twitter, but it makes things easier to find these days.

I don't think Bookslut has a Twitter feed, but the editor, Jessa Crispin, has one here: https://twitter.com/thebookslut

finished infinite jest, my advice would be, dont bother.

yes! thank you. crispin's the feed i saw, then lost.

Rad!

generally found some interesting twitter feeds from authors i love and had kind of set-aside/forgotten about, like stephen elliott (@S___Elliott), author of happy baby. interesting feed. i went to see who he follows, and it's all basically dominatrix types, which shouldn't be surprising considering what he writes about. did find out he did a kickstarter campaign to make a (totally low-budget) movie based on happy baby! could be interesting.

Depending how slow work is tonight, I may be able to finish The Castle (about 90 pages left to get thru)

At the same time, I've been returning to Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature, which has some good insights into Kafka's, er... worldview? (outlook? significance?? 'whole deal'???)

Blanchot is also making me want to read K's diaries, which I didn't really anticipate, but if they're good...

What are your favorite criticisms/discussions of Kafka?

Read The Diaries (a real showcase of his intellect, a must), The Letters to Felice and Milena this year (as well as re-reading of his fiction although not The Castle) and its been really great.

I came across this review of the three volume biography.

As discussion there is the often cited Benjamin essay but I also like Canetti's Kafka's Other Trial a lot.

This looks quite interesting. I was also recommended this book by Deleuze and Guttari on here by woof but I haven't got around to any of it.

i want to try some different types of novels. any good sites that review indie/small-press books?

― Daniel, Esq 2, Saturday, November 29, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.bookforum.com/

^ If you look at the Daily Review on the right hand side it pulls reviews from other places.

I scan the In Tanslation site now and then.

thanks, xyz. i like both those sites (and intranslation's parent site, brooklynrail.org; led me to discover there's a sister-site called miamirail.org).

I am still reading A GIRL IS A HALF FORMED THING.

The prose is original in being derivative of Joyce to an unusual degree (and also different from Joyce).
I think that the author has talent.
But I don't find that I like this book much. It is vulgar, repetitive, self-indulgent and perhaps tedious.

^^^posts very much in character. A+

(xp to xyz) I actually have the D&G book, though I've never made much headway with it, perhaps due to lack of familiarity with K's oeuvre (had only read short stories up until last month, when I decided to do all the novels at one go)

& I'll make sure to pick up the diaries ifbit's still at the used book store tomorrow

I'm reading Simenon's The Yellow Dog, which may turn out to be my favourite Maigret story so far. Very tense and atmospheric, and Maigret is extra grumpy and barely speaking. I read Night at the Crossroads last week and it was great, but not as taut or bad-tempered. I didn't realise Penguin was reissuing all of the Maigret novels. May have to collect em all.

pinefox otm for once

thomp otm for once

Sorry, that was perhaps unfair. It just that you take the contrarianism to the point where it is hard to know exactly what you are on about.

I've been reading Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's debut novel. So far I'm impressed that she doesn't bother providing any likable, or even sane, characters.

True. Good movie too.

Awesome description

I didn't realise Penguin was reissuing all of the Maigret novels. May have to collect em all.

I saw that they're putting out a non-Maigret Simenon in January, too, not sure if they have any more planned beyond that but between them and NYRB it's exciting to have all this stuff in print.

Just read Alberto Moravia's terrific Two Women. This book should be better known I think.

just read John Fowles' 'notes on an unfinished novel' (1969). Striking in a way how he, in Existentialist vein, seems far from us - alien and different in a way eg Tom McCarthy would like to be? (A tentative thought.)

On my hazy recollection of The Magus, The Collector, and The French Lieutenant's Woman he does seem of his time (though not derivative) in a way that I don't think is true of, say, Ann Quin--but I think that's a different kind of distance than you suggest.

james please remind me of an interesting thing you've ever said about anything

Let me get back to you on that

*crickets*

*wind through the trees*

*lonesome whistle whine*

plowing through every Penelope Fitzgerald novel.

*paint dries*

*grass grows*

I'm afraid I can't think of anything, thomp. I guess you win.

Please place your next aperçu here:_______________________________________________________

Ah, forget it.

Alfred, which have you read so far?

Also, do you know about her book The Knox Brothers, about her father and uncles?

Picked up the Archipelago translation of Blinding by Mircea Cărtărescu on the recommendation of friend recently. Up there with the best things I've read this year.

Archipelago is one of the small presses I'm most inclined to trust; I still need to read Blinding.

thinking also, if A GIRL etc was written straightforwardly it would seem banal
but written as it is, it seems literary and impressive

trying to figure that out, I mean is it that the style lifts the banal subject matter?
is the style really enough?
is the style that good anyway? It's derivative, of Joyce, but not identical to him and more relentless than anything in Ulysses because longer as a whole than any episode of Ulysses.
It is as much like Finnegans Wake at times, in its rhythm and flavour, though more evidently referential I suppose.

Picked up the Archipelago translation of Blinding by Mircea Cărtărescu on the recommendation of friend recently. Up there with the best things I've read this year.

― finn_the_scot, Monday, 1 December 2014 21:30 (26 minutes ago) Permalink

Archipelago is one of the small presses I'm most inclined to trust; I still need to read Blinding.

― one way street, Monday, 1 December 2014 21:34 (23 minutes ago) Permalink

I am just about to start on the Von Kleist volume on that same press! I was looking through a list of what's on it and googling some authors, gotta say its a solid collection of German authors and did notice they have people from countries that are poorly represented in other presses (like Romania) although I don't know, reviews of Blinding didn't make it sound too appealing. The one thing I felt like hunting down was Diaries of Exile and the Duras novel.

The Bookshop, Human Voices, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower. I don't get the fuss about the last; I preferred the first two titles.

Appealing take on Fitzgerald's life & works, as he reads new bio, maybe re-reads her books:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/late-bloom

Hollinghurst wrote a nice review in the NYROB too.

I am just about to start on the Von Kleist volume on that same press! I was looking through a list of what's on it and googling some authors, gotta say its a solid collection of German authors and did notice they have people from countries that are poorly represented in other presses (like Romania) although I don't know, reviews of Blinding didn't make it sound too appealing. The one thing I felt like hunting down was Diaries of Exile and the Duras novel.

I love their edition of Büchner's Lenz (a bilingual edition including source materials by Goethe and Pastor Oberlin) and enjoyed their recent collection of Tsevetaena's poetry; they also have some solid Mahmoud Darwish translations, and I like Knausgaard's My Struggle more than most of the ILB regulars (at least judging from the dedicated Knausgaard thread).

The Kleist volume also has a judicious selection of texts, from what I recall--you may be more sensitive to the nuances of that particular set of translations.

Damn yes I forgot that ed. of Tsvetaeva's poetry. Got to read her prose and love it. w/Mandelstam (both of them) they come across so expressively in English.

Not too sold on Knausgaard, but I'll read it when the whole thing is translated (after all its v easy and won't take long).

I love Lenz as well (different translation, sure Sieburth is superior). iirc Rilke's essay on Rodin was wonderful too.

I'll look out for Darwish.

Anyone read Matthew Josephson? I finished his magisterial account of the Gilded Age. Minus: he doesn't discuss the plight of the freedmen much.

Amazing, will have to check. Also, think I'll re-read Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow.

great book, that1

Fizzles, I have just finished THE GIFT OF STONES. It's only a short novel - you'd knock it off in a day. I think it is quite good. It is about the TWILIGHT OF THE STONE AGE.

― the pinefox, Friday, November 28, 2014 7:31 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thanks pinefox. i looked it up in the library the other day and nearly got it out. instead got The Golden Strangers by Henry Treece (was that mentioned in the FAP?). More neolithic imaginary - a good and strong depiction of the realism of magic. of its time - the invader model of barrow > henge and stone circle culture is currently not a popular one. also in this vein:

The Image of Antiquity - Sam Smiles. A survey of Romantic interpretations and constructions of ancient britain.
The Beaker Folk : copper age archaeology in Western Europe - Richard Harrison. Authoritative and fairly up-to-date - gets regularly cited in other works, terrific amount of detail about patterns on pottery. i stare and nod and do not remember an hour beyond closing the book any detail whatsoever. interesting generally watching archaeologists construct a world, an entire cosmos, from the most attenuated sets of evidence.
The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland - Richard Bradley. A modern and clear survey of the period.

will do THE GIFT OF STONES next, tho could do with a bit of a break from this world fairly soon.

in addition:

Nobodaddy's Children - Arno Schmidt. getting v into Arno Schmidt. Finishing volume 2 of the Dalkey Archive collection – Scenes from the Life of a Faun, Brand's Heath and Dark Mirrors – and starting on volume 1, the novellas. Thick prose, landscapes and learning, germanic-romantic-fabular patchworks, some misanthropy, nazis, jokes, apocalypse, misanthropy, surviving. I love him.

― woof, Tuesday, November 25, 2014 4:01 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This, and also the variety in tone - balancing on either side of the congested misanthropy and fractured observations, there are extended visions, dreams and literary excerpts, and on the other side, a laconic mordancy that is often very amusing. there's also something of a gentle kindness that separates him from Céline, tho the style is often close. one of the best things I've read in a very long time, and like woof, I'm loving and lingering over it. (reading in composition order rather than trilogy order - so Brand's Heath, Dark Mirrors and Scenes from the Life of a Faun)

Cogs and Hieroglyphs - David Thomas. The lyrics work surprisingly well on the page. His theorising... I'm not sure. In a way it's too performative to take seriously as if he's nervous that his profundities aren't profound. I think he's right, but this intellectual doggerel is useful and interesting with regard to Pere Ubu, and also often quite entertaining.

The Big Midweek - Steve Hanley - ex Fall bassist. A giant among men in all sorts of ways, and one of my favourite musicians, and i found this book curiously irritating. It reminded me in some ways of Tom D's description of the John French book at the recent FAP - it's a narrative moan about the day-to-day mundanities of being in The Fall, with very little exploration about what might have made them good (apart from when the musicians are left alone by Smith). But then he'll say as an aside that individual musicians often had one-on-one songwriting sessions with Smith round at his house and those often produced the best work. He seems like a nice man, but a congenital shyness seems to make him unwilling to essay aesthetic or intellectual opinions about anything he ever worked on.

Enjoyed the Rivka Galchen review of the multi-volume Kakfa biography in the LRB. Some good kafka lolz in there.

"When he goes to the countryside to write, he finds it ‘extraordinarily beautiful’ at first, but by the second day he can’t work because he’s troubled by a child practising the French horn"

"‘Often I doubt that I am a human being,’ Kafka writes in a note to his first fiancée, Felice Bauer, as he is trying to get out of the engagement but doesn’t want to break it off himself and instead wants her to take the action. ‘You can marry if you put on sufficient weight,’ a doctor later tells a tuberculous Kafka, who doesn’t want to marry anyhow, or even really to eat."

"Kafka sends his sister a spoof article about how Einstein’s theory of relativity is pointing the way to a cure for TB; his whole family celebrates the good news, of which he then has to disabuse them."

Finished the last of Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann last night. If I had read this at the beginning of the year it would've been more surprising. As it is I've read Bachmann's marvelous Malina earlier this year (couldn't Peter Wortsmann translated one of her actual short stories instead of an excerpt of that novel, as powerful as that extract is, and now that I know a lot more about her affair with Paul Celan this takes on a somewhat different reading). Its one thing reading writers, but another reading them as short stories, and the ones I could connect with the most are the ones by writers I've already spent a long time thinking and reading (this year in partic): Kafka (In the Penal Colony is such as punch to the gut), Musil, Rilke's sketch is powerful if you know his writings (letters in partic). The prose piece by Celan is totally unclassifiable and an inspired inclusion (it is no short story). The exception was Heine's sketch, although in his documentary type piece (a few remarks on the origins of the German fairy tale) you get a sorta backbone to the whole vol. It sorta passed me by. I am ok with what I've seen of Heym's poetry but his story seemed Buchner by numbers.

Von Kleist (as I say above) was my major discovery. I may read something by ETA Hofmann but as good as The Sandman was I'm in no hurry.

Didn't really care for Chamisso’s Peter Schlemiel (once you get over the novelty), Grimm (just a bunch of effects). The other Romantics I had a skim, sorta bored by the forest scenes etc. The other bit that came out was how good Robert Walser really is at the Feuilleton-tale. The Kiss was easily the best of those but similar pieces by writers who write-as-entertainment (Tucholsky, Klabund, Lichtenstein, Kaiser, Mynona, Altenberg, Zuhn) in 3-5 pages just...didn't make enough of an impression.

Probably just me. I don't want to waste my time w/laughter and Romance as I clearly hate life, give me blocky paragraphs of prose, pitch black humour, intensity to the point of madness yadda yadda.

I'll investigate Ulrica Zurm (Fassbinder was working on an adaptation of her last book when she died). Tucholsky's Castle Gripsholm is a short novel my library happens to have a copy of (wtf?) so I'll look.

xp

Sorry when Fassbiner died I should say, and I totally misspelled Unica's name - wiki is here.

Fizzles do you like Golding's THE INHERITORS? Surely a truly pre-historic narrative?

I managed to misspell Fassbinder too.

Apart from Kleist the other surprise was how good the story by Kurt Schwitters was! Thinking about this now it would be the best reason to have my own copy of this (rather excellent) collection. I doubt he has that many published about but I don't really know.

Got a used copy of Kleist's The Marquise of O and Other Stories recently, haven't read yet---is it good? Contents etc here: http://www.amazon.com/Marquise-Other-Stories-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140443592#reader_0140443592

Has anyone read Chaplin's autobiography? Is it worth checking out? I have vague memories of seeing the biopic when I was a kid and in love with Chaplin.

Read it long ago, liked it very much.
I've come across HVK in several anthologies, where he's always at least one of the best. Also several amazing satirical fantasies by ETA Hoffman.

that von kleist is the edition i read a few years ago after discovering him via kafka. some were totally amazing: earthquake in chile, st. cecilia, kohlhaas (didn't fassbinder or someone make an adaptation of this? or maybe i'm just imagining it) and others i have absolutely no recollection of. also discovered a sort of contemporary of von kleist's through kafka at the same time who is worth a read: hebel author of the treasure chest. total opposite to von kleist in his artful artlessness.

currently reading some thomas hardy short stories for the first time: drunken farmers entertaining hangmen and prison escapees, blasted heaths, witching and withered arms. enjoying so far.

"Kafka sends his sister a spoof article about how Einstein’s theory of relativity is pointing the way to a cure for TB; his whole family celebrates the good news, of which he then has to disabuse them."

couldn't help loling at that when i read the article. also kind of curious to read the metamorphosis sequel that was mentioned somewhere in there.

got The Golden Strangers by Henry Treece (was that mentioned in the FAP?). More neolithic imaginary - a good and strong depiction of the realism of magic. of its time - the invader model of barrow > henge and stone circle culture is currently not a popular one.

Love it when ILBers make synchronous purchases - picked up a copy of this just the other day, a Savoy books reissue with an introduction by Michael Moorcock.

Got a used copy of Kleist's The Marquise of O and Other Stories recently, haven't read yet---is it good? Contents etc here: http://www.amazon.com/Marquise-Other-Stories-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140443592#reader_0140443592

― dow, Wednesday, 3 December 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He wrote a few stories (less than ten) and about 2/3 plays (not performed) in his short life. The translation I have is by Peter Wortsman (who also translated The Tales...), and this was the volume I thought I was going to find before I saw a cheap copy of the ed. on Archipelago.

kohlhaas (didn't fassbinder or someone make an adaptation of this? or maybe i'm just imagining it)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_Horseback

finished A GIRL IS A HALF FORMED THING.
I think to me it became less boring and more compelling.
It actually does become moving, to me, in the last quarter or third.
I quite like the ending.

dipping in to Terry Eagleton THE TASK OF THE CRITIC for sheer joy of it.

buying that Kleist volume on reputation alone & diving into "Kohlhaas" unprepared one evening was among my favorite reading experiences of recent years

got The Golden Strangers by Henry Treece (was that mentioned in the FAP?). More neolithic imaginary - a good and strong depiction of the realism of magic. of its time - the invader model of barrow > henge and stone circle culture is currently not a popular one.

Love it when ILBers make synchronous purchases - picked up a copy of this just the other day, a Savoy books reissue with an introduction by Michael Moorcock.

― sʌxihɔːl (Ward Fowler), Wednesday, 3 December 2014 08:54 (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it was a sort of ILB hivemind choice: woof thought I'd mentioned it in the FAP (and possibly someone had. but I don't think it was me), I looked it up and thought I liked the look of it, and picked it up.

trying Sarah Waters, TIPPING THE VELVET
not very convinced. feels modish and sophomoric, if that is the word.

it reads like it was written to be a TV series.

Avoid! Avoid! I loved Fun Home too, but the follow-up is a ludicrous thing.

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Friday, November 28, 2014 2:21 PM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that is interesting to hear.
can you say more about why it is bad?

― the pinefox, Saturday, November 29, 2014 5:28 AM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sorry for slow response.

It's staggeringly self-indulgent and very silly. Full of Bechdel talking to her psychotherapist and drawing the most ludicrous of long bows in order to drag in enough associated ideas/thoughts/memories to desperately pad out the thing to book length. It's a fundamentally misconceived book on almost every level, starting with the lack of any strong material to write the damn book about in the first place.

Thank you JM!

I think the inclusion of a lot of the material in FH is already a stretch!

it was a sort of ILB hivemind choice: woof thought I'd mentioned it in the FAP (and possibly someone had. but I don't think it was me), I looked it up and thought I liked the look of it, and picked it up.

historical recontruction of hivemind action: I think you mentioned someone else and I couldn't remember treece's name so i thought it might be him. I've never read him myself – came across him while reading about Savoy Books.

buying that Kleist volume on reputation alone & diving into "Kohlhaas" unprepared one evening was among my favorite reading experiences of recent years

― I can just, like, YOLO with Uber (bernard snowy), Wednesday, December 3, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^ this! Just finished it now and you can totally see what Kafka took from it - the need for justice and how to get it, how state bureaucracy deters one from doing so - and then by the way it is written. There are many differences: the crazy/completely random plotting, the up-and-down (sometimes within a page or two) fortunes of the characters, so much so you have no idea where it will ultimately end up, even if you can guess where it might go in the next page.

Mad, mad book.

One thing though Von Kleist is making me want to read Pushkin - don't have much to hand right now but I've been meaning to chase down The Captain's Daughter

So Dracula is actually pretty great for the first 200 or so pages; genuinely creepy (particularly during the opening "Jonathan Harker's Journal" chapters) with a fair number of hysterically awesome WTF moments (the scene with the dogs and the rats), but it really started to feel like a slog once the hunt for Dracula got underway. I really wanted Van Helsing to STFU already.

TE's book of interviews is the most readable book I have ever opened.

I have learned that the first thing he ever published was the 4-page article 'New Bearings: The Beatles', 1964.

xposts: seem to recall there are parallels between kohlhaas and pushkin's novel fragment dubrovsky (which usually gets collected together with his stories)

Just read the plot summary - good call!

Collected Short Stories by Paul Bowles - 'A Distant Episode' might be my favourite short story of all time, am quite happy to read countless varations of same

I love his short fiction.

Don't miss Jane Bowles!
Pinefox, who is TE?
More pre-Kafka: been a long long time since I read it, but got that vibe from William Godwin's Caleb Williams: a guy takes obscure offense at a younger guy, and takes legal action so the y.g. can't leave the island of England, Scotland, and Wales, which gradually starts to seem like this sweaty little boarding house. The younger guy wants to make amends, wants to be faithful to the system, incl the squirearchy, but is baffled.
Godwin is not a man of few words, but it's not that long a book, and, as in his daughter's best-known novel, the degree of verbosity adds to the sense of feverish struggle, of suspense---like I said, it's been a while, but it seemed really good at the time.

TE=Terry Eagleton, no?

I'll second dow's praise of Jane Bowles. Paul's work receives more attention, but Jane's Two Serious Ladies is just staggering.

Like, as unsettling as Bataille's fiction in a much quieter way, but also very archly funny.

The Bookshop, Human Voices, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower. I don't get the fuss about the last; I preferred the first two titles.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, December 1, 2014 5:05 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

All of my Fitzgerald reading was confined to the semester in college when I took a course on her, so they all sorta blur together in my mind, but I kinda remember At Freddie's being particularly great.

J Redd / dow -- yes, that is TE in this instance.

Two Serious Ladies sounds really up my alley. Thankfully its been reissued so my library has it.

That's often considered her masterpiece, but once you're hooked, can often find a good used trade paperback copy of My Sister's Hand in Mine: An Expanded Edition of the Collected Works of Jane Bowles online for a nice price. She didn't publish that much, alas. Letters have also been collected, but I haven't read them. Really an unusual voice, urgent and distanced, sometimes too distant, but more often compelling, though she should've written more, should've been less paranoid, shouldn't have drunk that potion, whattayagonnado.

I've never gotten very far with Paul, esp. since reading ahead in The Sheltering Sky makes it seem like a violent revenge fantasy about an inconvenient wife, in what was supposed to be a marriage of convenience.

Don't do online buying of books but if I see it I'll have a look.

Elena Ferrante - Those who Leave and Those who Stay.

I laid Rabelais aside temporarily and inserted two other books into the hiatus.

Ranch Under the Rimrock is a memoir published in 1968 mainly covering the years from 1910 to 1940 and was written by the mother of Tom McCall, who grew up to be governor of Oregon. She and her husband were New Englanders who grew up in wealthy families and moved to central Oregon soon after they married, where they took up ranching. The country was still pretty rough, but their parents bought the land, built a mansion for them and gave them livestock and machinery, so it was not exactly hardscrabble homesteading.

The Montefeltro Conspiracy is a history of Italian Renaissance politics leading up to the assassination attempt on Lorenzo de Medici and his brother, when they were young men. The brother was stabbed to death, but Lorenzo survived. It then follows the war that was the aftermath. The author struggles valiantly to make the intrigues and personalities exciting, while also keeping the narrative clear, but those two impulses do not mesh well and it's a bit of a mess. But then, so was Renaissance Italy.

I recently finished Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina, which was slow going for a while and then devastating. I need to think more about the relationship between the "unknown woman" narrator and her partner and ambiguous male double Malina, and I feel like I should know more about Viennese history beyond the broad strokes, but the novel was really haunting in the way its evocation of everyday longing and asymmetrical desire splintered into fantastical images of historical trauma and patriarchal violence. I'll probably get more out of the novel on a second reading, and after having read Bachmann's poetry, but in some ways my reading experience might have been more powerful for having been approached with few expectations. I do wish the translation had kept the text originally intended for the German cover, since it seems like a pretty crucial paratext in the way it sets up the final sentence of the novel, as Karen Achberger pointed out:

Murder or suicide?
There are no witnesses.
A woman between two men.
A last great passion.
The wall in the room, with an imperceptible crack.
A corpse that is not found.
The last will and testament missing.
A pair of glasses, broken to bits, a missing coffee cup.
The wastepaper basket, unnoticed,
not searched through by anyone.
Covered tracks, footsteps.
Someone then who still paces back and forth,
in this apartment--for hours on end:
MALINA.

I recently finished Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina, which was slow going for a while and then devastating.

I had a similar experience with it. You may want to chase her correspodance with Paul Celan as well. I'll certainly chase a copy of Malina for a re-read.

Thanks, xyzzzz__! I've been meaning to read that correspondence (and will when I don't have to worry about accumulating books before a cross-country move); Bachmann's relationship with Celan was one of the few things I knew about her when I started her novel, although I tried not to assume that Ivan was meant as a Celan-figure in any simple way.

I didn't know anything about their affair actually so that led me to investigate the letters and the poetry from both. (I was interested in her by watching Malina by Werner Schroeter, its a bit annoying in some of its art-house mannerisms (Schroeter was capable of so much more) but it has Isabelle Huppert as Bachmann which is p/good)

The letters are mostly about their relationship but there is lots of interesting bits on Heidegger, the German literary scene of the time.

That's cool--I'm interested to see what they wrote about the latter topics, especially since Bachmann studied Heidegger, and Heidegger's fascism made Celan's dialogue with his thinking so painful and complicated. Since much of what makes Malina compelling is bound up with the narrator's voice, the novel seems unfilmable in important ways, so I'm curious to see what choices Schroeter made.

Do Walter Scott's Waverley novels need to be read in a particular order? They seem to jump all over the place in history.

Herman Melville - The Confidence Man. This is simply great.

Although I am not sure whether I will finish. Got a lot on this week, could easily get knocked off course and even a bit of that could be disastrous. Hope not.

How good is Galsworthy? Yo Ornamental Cabbage, or somebody around here must have read him. Also, my local library has Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street, with good blurb by Evelyn Waugh (something you or at least I don't see everyday).

I totally love The Confidence Man, which reminds me oddly of Gravity's Rainbow at times: the dizzying accumulation of minor characters, the sense of the duplicity of official language and the hollow places in the vernacular, the way hilarity vies with gathering dread.

I've been splitting time between Rabelais and other books. I'm now as far as the start of Book 4 of Gargantua and Pantagruel. The first three books had a boatload of misogyny in them, which made them rather uncompelling at times. Book 4 supposedly is more soberly philosophical than the first three books, so I will test that assertion by continuing on with it. Book 5 is now considered to be by another hand than Rabelais.

In the meantime, I read The Archimedes Codex, a 2007 non-fic about the restoration of a palimpsest which is the oldest surviving copy of Archimedean material and which contains the only extant copies of several Archimedean manuscripts. After a somewhat breezy opening chapter, it was actually quite informative and interesting.

Deleuze : The Clamor of Being - Alain Badiou. huh, i'm actually following this.

one way street - I have the Dalkey edition of this book and the intro talks this up as a kind of proto-postmodern. I picked it up because of the ilx thread on it.

How good is Galsworthy? Yo Ornamental Cabbage, or somebody around here must have read him. Also, my local library has Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street, with good blurb by Evelyn Waugh (something you or at least I don't see everyday).

Only read the very first galsworthy forsyte book, plus some shorts. It was quite good, and i intended to go on, but other thongs got in the way, and now its been so long i,d have to ewad vol one again to remember who everyone was. Classy potboiler level as i remember it.

Never read sinister street, but other - shorter - mackenzies are good. Thin Ice is about spies and their moral problems, Whiskey Galore is lightweight but fun. Read some gay-themed short stories by him in some anthology, though i cant remembervwhat it was.

Other THINGS ffa

Ffs ffs

xposts: the confidence man was definitely a highlight of my reading this year. that along with the recognitions. the oxford worlds classic intro uses the proto-pynchon/pomo angle too, also quite a bit of detail about its satirical intent with regard to emerson, thoreau, hawthorne & co.

just finished hardy's life's little ironies collection. other than jude think this is the first hardy fiction i've read with late nineteenth century settings (some of them anyway) also features urban environments, 'the new woman' & class conflict. almost into gissing territory!

now reading a collection of tales by some of the pre-raphaelites and associates.

Really enjoyed this, esp. after recently reading James Wood and others on the Penelope Fitzgerald bio and skimming her own bio of her father and uncles, didn't catch that one of them worked with (and tried to supervise/aid) Turing. This gets to their literary inspirations (talk about quality over quantity)
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/12/18/inigo-thomas/unreliable-people/

As the author says, the real-life material was so rich, don't get why the moviemakers had to fuck with it so.

Thanks for teh link. Think I met the author once. Believe his father is the historian Hugh Thomas.

BLEEDING EDGE !

more readable than I sometimes find TP
amiable, garrulous, sort of friendly narration
strikes me what a conventional novelist TP is - you could hardly guess from this that he was considered formally groundbreaking.
remarkably close to CL49 at times - to the point where it seems deliberate
also a ton of Neuromancer hip-hacker cobblers - a bit painful in adolescent tone

Been reading Isaac Babel collected stories. Think I prefer the autobiographical and early stories to the Red Cavalry stuff, since it's not as disturbing.

ai, d.

BLEEDING EDGE !

more readable than I sometimes find TP
amiable, garrulous, sort of friendly narration
strikes me what a conventional novelist TP is - you could hardly guess from this that he was considered formally groundbreaking.
remarkably close to CL49 at times - to the point where it seems deliberate
also a ton of Neuromancer hip-hacker cobblers - a bit painful in adolescent tone

PF otm. i think the main TP characteristic these days isn't formal experimentation but writing books that create nebulous spaces where whimsical connections, psychic comprehension and colourful juxtapositions of language can meaningfully, sort of meaningfully, exist.

here it's the deep net which isn't really understood in any way as a technical thing - "Neuromancer hh cobblers" :) - but as an imaginary space for him to conduct his really quite enjoyable writing jam session.

not sure what that ai, d is doing there. think it was a discarded post where I was saying hello to deems perhaps.

The Confidence Man is good but I have only read 50 pages. I need a few hours of concentration and no worries to break the back of it.

Meantime I have finished:

Jane Bowles - Two Serious Ladies

About to finish:

Kurt Tucholsky - Castle Gripsholm. This is a good find. Like Robert Walser he seems to have written short stories for Feuilletons of the day and this begins like a bunch of those stories expertly put together. Starts with a back-and-forth between the author and publisher on the stories he is looking to buy (love stories, natch) and royalties that he'll get. Then we dive in: a couple, train journey, holiday. Then they come across a girl, she is crying and in distress and run away from a boarding school because the headmistress is up to no good. Because this was written in '32 as the Nazis were to take over this takes on those tones. You read the author has committed suicide a few years after this. It wears its lightness darkly and all but I wonder whether the biography surrounding this will take over. It is funny, and slight on purpose too and that is more than ok.

enjoyable writing jam session. Fans of this approach should def check Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace, which works a time-space groove like no other, but does remind me of TP's more enjoyable transitions, minus the murk (says me, but there were some complaints from some fans, as there always are, no matter what he does). NY recently produced a second memoir and announced that he's working on a science fiction novel.
My local library's only copy of The Brothers Karamazov is the Constance Garnett translation, but I finally picked it up and went right through the first 30 pages, then had to peel it way because Xmas chores. But soon and very soon, the rest will be another gift to self.
Recently finished My Brilliant Friend and need to cool off a little lest I babble "spoilers," but---do believe the hype.

Cool. Are you going to start the second one?

"Deejay activities alternate with live local bachata groups, a bright, twangly mandolin / bottleneck sound, an impossible-not-to-want-to-dance-to beat"
-- BLEEDING EDGE

"an impossible-not-to-want-to-dance-to beat"

"why, my six year old could talk gooder than that..."

just read Merritt Tierce's debut novel, Love Me Back, and immediately wanted to read the whole thing over again from the beginning. it's horrifying and excellent.

Susan Fast, Dangerous - A new entry in the 33 1/3 series, every bit as good, I think, as the justifiably acclaimed Carl Wilson and John Darnielle volumes.

Having done with Rabelais, I have just picked up Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer's book about the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon. The writing style is ferociously overwritten and grossly self-involved, but this is offered to the reader as if it were all a sly joke.

It actually works as humor for a while, but after 50 or so relentless pages of this the humor is wearing thin and the self-aggrandizing poses begin to seem far too threadbare not to be Mailer's normal state of mind. Unless something happens soon that is not grotesquely Mailer-centric, I will throw this book at the wall.

ha i love that book!

Welp---Robert Lowell, William Sloane Coffin, Doctor & Mrs. Spock, Ed Sanders, Paul Goodman, a Nazi, a Capitol cop, and a lot of people trying to levitate the Pentagon are among those who show up, and he's interested---he's also Mailer of course, but when he gets interested, can be a pretty good describer (though more in his reportage from conventions).

Colm Toibin - Nora Webster

He might be, quietly and persistently, our best conventional realist novelist.

Oh yeah, heard interesting Fresh Air interview re the one about Mary, not too thrilled about being boosted from mother to Mother. Thought about reading that one (& NM). Is it good?

I think THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT is really good!

I think Toibin as a journalist is an incredibly slack writer. I was not very impressed by BROOKLYN. But perhaps his other novels are better.

BLEEDING EDGE seems to be the second best Pynchon novel I have read yet.

Brooklyn was one novel I didn't finish this year. There may have been others. I read the first half of Howard Jacobson's J, skimmed the second out of bored curiosity.

David Lodge's novel about Henry James is far superior to Toibin's

reassuringly awful

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n24/tom-mccarthy/writing-machines

Brooklyn isn't a great novel but it offered consistent pleasure; I practically read it in one sitting in summer '09.

He's never written one outstanding novel. He reminds of William Trevor in that way: consistent pleasure.

reassuringly awful
tl;dr

But lol at taking Ballard at face value in the part I did read.

xpost James, I hope to read the second Neapolitan Novels fairly soon; will say more on dedicated NN thread when get some homework done.

I loved Brooklyn but not sure what to read by him next.

His first story collection boasts a couple of stunners.

A 1/3 of the way through Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida on Penguin (selected and partly translated by Robert Chandler). So far I loved Pushkin's The Queen of Spades and the surprise of the collection is The Greatcoat by Gogol. Never held him in to much affection when I tried him years ago. My fault then. Certainly like to pick up more by him.

Turgenev and Tolstoy's stories are nothingy. Dostoevsky's Bobok is amusing and I can't wait to give a couple of his novels another go next year.

Sounds interesting. I read a Pushkin short story collection I really liked a long time ago called The Captain's Daughter, looks like it is still in print, although some complain about the translation. Search: the story "Snowstorm." Also Search: Thorold Dickinson's underseen, underrated film version of The Queen of Spades. May be Anton Walbrook's best performance. Search also, although not Russian, the same actor-director team and the superior if suppressed, original film of Gaslight.

I am borrowing The Captain's Daughter from the library (same translator) (NYRB bought out a paperbk of it last year) and the film looks good too.

I'm also reading Pushkin!

Will check out the NYRB version, thanks. One I had was old Vintage edition. Cover art teh awesome, though:
http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n6/n34100.jpg

David Lodge's novel about Henry James is far superior to Toibin's

― sʌxihɔːl (Ward Fowler), Tuesday, December 23, 2014 6:00 AM (Yesterday)

Has anyone read his H.G. Wells book?

Hm. When are they going to retranslate the Other Stories?

the best James in fiction is the one who pops up in Gore Vidal's Empire, intrigued by Teddy Roosevelt's noise.

Hm. Apparently he shows up in Lodge's Wells book as well.

Halfway through Armies of the Night and thank god the past 60pp have deemphasized Mailer's constant monitoring of his every fluctuation of mood and he has noticed some of what was happening outside of his woolly cow-sized head.

I finished the third volume of My Struggle. It seemed less carefully written than the others (or, for me, the writing did not magically cross time and space). I've just started The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber and am enjoying it so far.

Season's greetings, incl. "Out Demons Out!" for all yall Armies of the Night readers, and everybody else, of course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ0RkMcPbQA

wonder what became of the footage from the bbc crew following mailer about

I finished the third volume of My Struggle.

Hitler's not a good writer imo

Rejected ILB Thread TItle: It's Springtime for Knausgard, What Are Your Reading Now?

Reposting link to Eagleton review of Lodge and Toibin books about James, along with amusing quote:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jun/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview27

Though he is impressively candid about his rancorous feelings about The Master, a book he still can't bring himself to read, the whole coincidence, minor enough in itself, begins to sound as momentous as Joyce and Lenin landing up in Zurich at the same time. He couldn't have been more agitated if he'd learnt that Tóibín had nicked his credit cards or was impersonating him every night in the Groucho Club.

Hahah!

C. Vann Woodward - The Strange Career of Jim Crow
Pushkin - The Captain's Daughter
Elizabeth Drew - Whatever It Takes

Origins of The New South: more CVW enlightenment re my neck of the woods

And what came back out of it

Started Argonauts of the Western Pacific. I also found an interesting book of Malinowski's photography in this period, which I'm gonna read concurrently.

T.H. White, The Sword in the Stone - Absolutely loving this, savoring a chapter every few days. T.H. White just seems like he would have been the coolest grandpa.

Jeff Vanermeer, Annihilation - Had my expectations up but the prose is often awkward and characterizations kind of laughable. Its hard to sell me on the believability of this strange "other" world when you can't establish "normal" human nature convincingly. Like the setting seems cool but the narration just keeps taking me out of it. Roadside Picnic handled this "weird zone that needs to be explored" scenario much better.
But I'll probably still buy the sequels to see how it all turns out...

I finished Armies of the Night and I am glad to say that Mailer did redeem his very wobbly start by the time the book ends.

I will remark that, although it is apparent by the end why Mailer chose to make this book is so Mailer-intensive, I would still rate this book as highly flawed. The meat of the book is contained in maybe 40 of the 300 pages and he only pulls this mess together loosely, by virtue of some low-grade intellectual tap dancing. Still, it was worth reading all 300 to get at those 40 and the book is a valuable period piece.

The third volume explains why twee love is best: that is when boys and girls are more or less equal and can still get along doing things like skipping rope or playing long lost wanderer returns to island home. After that, they grow apart and perhaps are not reunited until old age. This assumes best means compatible and sympathetic, but if you want tension, look to middle age.

I have now started Speedboat. I started State of Grace last year but did not finish. I read Dept. of Speculation last year and gave it to my sister.

The timing of the end of the Book of Strange New Things was perfect -- before the descent, in time to see the Manhattan skyline.

It definitely seems like it's time to spawn the next WAYR thread, now that January is here. I'll see what I can do about a clever title, but I am not feeling particularly clever atm.

To quote a famous rabbi: "It is done."