Mulling isn't just for cider: What are you reading at the dawn of 2015?

The prior WAYR thread needs to be put to bed. I offer you this slightly dull-colored replacement as the repository for the next three months of ILB critical profundity, wit and gleeful repartee.

At present I am between books, but by later this evening I hope to have my attention focused on a remedy for that. I will keep ILB informed as more details become available. In the meantime, play up! play up! and play the game!

Now taking a walk with The Brothers Karamazov. I may be gone some time.

Finished The Bone Clocks yesterday, reading Inimitable Jeeves now, (Alfred alert!), Pietr the Latvian in the queue, and Ancillary Justice on deck.

completed an early wilkie collins novel i put down a few months ago out of boredom, now onto maigret and the enigmatic lett (a.k.a. pietr the latvian^). hoping to find the six or so missing pages that have become detached before i get to the end :-/

that collins novel (basil: a story of modern life) did become much more interesting once the villain entered the story. seemed to be more or less an expression of the hero's repressed dark side returned and amplified (all very victorian), and the scene where he gets his "just desserts" by being sucked into a chasm on the cornish coast was nicely done... though basil himself remained a tiresome, sanctimonious prig right to the end.

I am reading my first novel in French! though it is a Harlequin romance translated from English, because it was the most interesting looking book in the apartment in which we found ourselves unwittingly spending a few nights. plus La fleur de la honte at least sounds more worthwhile than Forbidden Fruit.

I think after this I will try to read a more substantive novel in French. open to ideas of what if any contemporary French fiction might be compelling (obv I could read something classique but that sounds like more work than I want or am able to give right now)

How contemporary do you need? Is mid-twentieth century good enough?

yes that would be great! probably I should just read Céline but I am open to anything.

I'm a bit reluctant to ask people here what to read because their tastes seem to run toward classics and american books more than I'd like. I'm not much for police procedurals either which are a big deal here as well. I kinda like...deranged stories. could read The Kindly Ones in the original I suppose.

Things I liked and didn't find overwhelmingly difficult:
Raymond Queneau, esp Zazie dans le metro
Marguerite Duras, esp L'Amant
Nathalie Sarraute, Enfance

Just realized that I had first read the lattter in English, though. Question: what dictionary do you have?

I use the TLFi on the net (on lexilogos).

though I've been reading this Harlequin romance without a dictionary, just figuring out words I don't know from context.

Get yourself Le Robert micro if you van. I finally wore out my first copy and had to get another one in Montreal a few years ago.

so you've learned the french for 'manhood'!!!

pénis turgescent has been a fav

we have Le Robert collège for les enfants, since they need it for school

I blew through Greg Sestero's The Disaster Artist in a few days. I'm trying for the common new year's resolution of reading 50 books this year. Last year's resolution of reading more non-fiction was a total flop -- I read very few books last year.

David Leavitt's The Man Who Knew Too Much, Turing bio that focuses more on his written work than on his life - Bletchley gets a few dozen pages, his relationship with the woman that was the core of the Kiera Knightley film a scanty paragraph. That's fine with me, although I fancy reading a book just about Bletchley.

(Rereading) Lampedusa's The Leopard. Not short on sly lols despite its melancholic core: "In reality the Princess too had been subject to Tancredi’s charm, she still loved him; but the pleasures of shouting 'It’s your fault' being the strongest any human being can enjoy, all truth and feelings were swept along in its wake."

I started 'The Affirmation' by Christopher Priest the other day and so far I'm hooked.

I read some French on Kindle (or rather the iPad app) - if you add the French dictionary you can just poke words you don't understand and a definition pops up (in French). But I mostly read older stuff, so am not really great to recommend anything more modern. Houellebecq maybe? I remember Plateforme not being too hard when I read it a while ago.

xpost speaking of Turing and Bletchley, in case you didn't see it, ledge, there's good reading in this link I posted on the Winter 2014 thread:
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 get that one of them worked with (and tried to supervise/aid) Turing. This gets to T.'s literary inspirations (talk about quality over quantity)
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/12/18/inigo-thomas/unreliable-people/

― dow, Thursday, 18 December 2014 23:56 (2 weeks ago) Permalink

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

― dow, Thursday, 18 December 2014 23:58 (2 weeks ago) Permalink

the spy who came in from the cold. pumped for it

Chandler, The Long Goodbye

The past coupe of evenings I've been reading in the second volume of Shelby Foote's Civil War history. His homerism for the confederacy is getting more irksome, and many of his stylistic tropes are getting worn out, but I am interested in the events of that war, and I own all three volumes of Foote, so his is the version of history I shall be reading.

150 pp. into Perec's Life: A User's Manual (which could just as easily have been called An Attempt At Exhausting A Place Between The Reader's Ears, given how often I find myself flipping back through what I've read to remind myself whose estranged daughter resurfaced in the 1950s, or where I saw the cheese box with the four monks on its label depicted sitting around a table enjoying the same cheese that they appear on...)

I've been reading Merritt Tierce's Love Me Back, which is sharply written and unsentimental; its episodic, meandering plotting can be frustrating (I often feel bored with the form of the post-MFA "novel in stories") but it also seems appropriate in suggesting the narrowness and repetition of the protagonist's experience. It's also acute in dealing with the gender dynamics of service labor (I'm surprised more hasn't been written about waiting tables). I also finished Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, which is impressive for the impassiveness of its prose and its ambition to (impossibly) render dying consciousness. There's a sadism in the coda's treatment of the wife, Kit, that I found unsettling (while Kit's depersonalization resembles that of the abductee in "A Distant Episode", here Bowles seemed on a first reading to be working dangerously closely to the topos of the maddened woman seized with obsessive desire for her rapist), although maybe it works as a way of figuring Kit's shock. I'm moving on to Bowles's Let it Come Down, which I'm enjoying for the vivid disorder of its version of Tangiers despite finding the protagonist a boring cipher so far, and also, out of a fondness of fragmentary forms of writing, starting to read George Oppen's daybooks and Daniil Kharms's bizarrely slapstick impossible anecdotes or prose poems in Today I Wrote Nothing.

I blew through Greg Sestero's The Disaster Artist in a few days.

How was it? I want to read it at some point.

Think I would have found the treatment of Kit off-putting even if I weren't a Jane Bowles fan, but it didn't help. Will get back to it some day (or not).

Can anyone recommend a Georges Simenon book?

xpost speaking of Turing and Bletchley, in case you didn't see it, ledge, there's good reading in this link I posted on the Winter 2014 thread:

Cheers, yeah I vaguely knew the film's portrayal of Turing as a lone maverick single-handedly inventing his machine against stiff opposition was basically bullshit. Infuriating really, and bizarre how it was so well reviewed.

finished Jim Crace's HARVEST - which I found tremendous. (Curiously close in a way to THE GIFT OF STONES, as discussed with Fizzles, but better and more appealing.)

read a bit more of THE TASK OF THE CRITIC.

Next going to turn to SF, certainly including FARENHEIT 451.

frank harris

The Sheltering Sky, which is impressive for the impassiveness of its prose and its ambition to (impossibly) render dying consciousness

I can't vouch for its accuracy, but the last chapter of The Leopard seems awfully good at this.

Can anyone recommend a Georges Simenon book?

Maigret - 'My Friend Maigret' (the mystery isn't terribly complex, but it has impeccable great atmosphere and 'local colour' - it's often singled out as the best in the series)
Non-Maigret - 'The Man Who Watched Trains Go By' (a terrific, utterly unpredictable romp with a wonderfully unhinged lead character) - http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/the-man-who-watched-trains-go-by/

late to Michael Lewis' "The Big Short," alongside Giovanni Arrighi's "The Long Twentieth Century." didn't do this intentionally, but they are a fascinating pair to read together.

further thoughts on Perec: the bit about the contents of the different tenants' cellars, the description of an apartment where a party had just taken place, and plenty of other places throughout the book are littered with these... lists of things. I don't know what else to call 'em

and a lot of the lists make for really fun reading
(cf the ones mentioned above)

but then every once in a while there crops up within the book's strange arbitrary sequence of plot-not-plot, depending on the context, or the reader's mood, a list that seems interminable & unfun
(this was the list of wines from Famous Houses with Capital Letters, for me)
which of course you can easily skim thru or skip

so to repeat what I just said: for the most part, the lists are really wonderful
even the long lists of just nothing but proper nouns
(cf places Johnny Cash has been)
these lists can be really overwhelmingly evocative, if you get sucked into them
but if not they just sorta lie there on the page

there are echoes of, and callbacks to, all Perec's earlier work (at least the ones that I've read); + is it just me or does his whole super-dry objective descriptions steeze owe a lot to Robbe-Grillet's?

Judith Merril, 'Stormy Weather'.

places Johnny Cash has been

the way I heard it, that guy's been everywhere, man

Yay lists. Could we also have more email, texts, ads, spam, cold calls, malware mutations, intriguingly coded phone bills in our fiction? Pleeeze

O and death threats? Cause I like me some existential thrillers, oo oui.

I'm on book two of The Once and Future King. It's less funny and more direct than the first book, which tended to address topics like war allegorically through the various animal transformations. In this one war is the main theme, which I'm thinking has obvious reference to the publication date. The unicorn chapter is really dark.

donal ryan, "the thing about december"

I got Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy for Christmas, and finished it in about a week, which is fast for me. It seems like it was very smartly edited - the attempt to prove McMillian innocence with its detective-story pacing pulls the reader through the alternating chapters that step back for the bigger picture of dysfunctional American justice.

Staring into an abyss and going straight into it (although its they that do the latter for me):

Elsa Morante - Arturo's Island
Jean Rhys - Good Morning, Midnight

In the Morante the story feels utterly bizarre - despite having an actual penitentiary inside the island, it feels like a hell. Another of its circles is life in itself - for the fourteen year old male protagonist also feels trapped by the situation he finds himself in the sexual loves for his stepmother and then **spoiler** which you will have to read (and the wiki doesn't properly explain it). It feels far more brutal and ambitious than her later History where the big themes are attached to a big canvas that in retrospect feel off to me, and the ending is horrifying and yet these things happen. In this there is a death, although there isn't one, and it feels charged and powerful. Similarly in the Rhys we have someone who is blankly living (after the utter horror of her past) - but at least its main narrator has reached drinking age, and the false comforts a stiff drink provides are many. Was the affirmative ending a play on Joyce? I assume so.

Elsewhere I am still finishing the volume of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and finding v little to chase up apart from Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal and especially Yury Buida, who wrote a remarkable three pages on love - where loss follows closely behind. Unlike the volume of German stories the best ones in here are in the 19th century: Pushkin, Gogol, Leskov, Chehkov. Shamolov, Platonov for the 20th but I knew of those already. The Gogol was an excellent re-discovery for me and ought to try and read more of his stories. I am not sure why Lermontov was re-published as it is already in Hero of our Time. Dostoevsky was useful for me as I hadn't read any of his shorter work. I've read Krzhizhanowsky's Quadraturin and sorry I am not feeling. Babel and Kharms aims for effects that don't come off. Its hilarious that Bunin won a Nobel with such pretty nothings. Bulgakov and Solzhenistsyn will always be boring as hell to me.

I've seen Morante compared to Ferrante, so will have to read her. Barely recovered from My Brilliant Friend before taking off onThe Brothers of Karamazov Express--nearing home stretch, and wondering what Dusty Dusty novel I should read after this (and Crime and Punishment)? The Idiot was my delight.

Kick-starting the year with John Fowles' The Magus, which is proving to be very emotionally rewarding so far. I always forget how psychoanalytically engaged Fowles is and how that is embedded into his novels with these concurrent invisible narratives that dwell beneath everything and begin to surface the further you fall. And if an author can make me cry hopelessly within the first 40 pages then something special is happening.

dow - How is your progress through The Brothers Karamazov? Would love to hear what you make of The Grand Inquisitor and The Devil.

Nick Kotz - Judgment Days
Kingsley Amis - One Fat Englishman
E.M. Forster - A Room with a View (reread)

Wil have to get back to you on that, but so far the GI seems like an ancestor of O'Brien in Orwell's 1984, also Ivan's framework of parody makes it seem proto-mmodern

I really did have to get back to you on that, was being strongly urged out the door---still do, but also note that the grain of plausible grievance in the Grand Inquistor's indictment of his Prisoner is what makes it so dangerous, of course.
Also, I did intuit the likely perimeters of the whodunnit, as sketched and implied, then was distracted by the magician author, until I'm prompted to realize, "Oh yeah, I knew that!" Just as a character throws the other one's (resisted)gut glint back at him, wrapped in guilt, when pressed and pressed and pressed again...

Bob Stanley's Yeah Yeah Yeah which I got the new edition for my birthday. I'm finding it pretty readable if heavily opinionated to points of contention in places. I've come across a number of inaccuracies. But it is an interesting read at least. Wonder if everybody is reading it cover to cover. & how many are taking it as gospel?

Sonic Boom by Peter Blecha. A history of r'n'b/rock&roll/rock in the Northwest U.S. Very interesting. Covers the popularisation of Louie Louie; the history of The Wailers, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Sonics etc; acid rock/FM radio; 70s &goes on to some stuff on grunge. Great find in that shop at the end of the alley from Berwick st in Soho. I think that place is a gay/sex bookshop but it also tends to have somewhat random discount rock books so is worth a peruse.
Been reading that on buses so taking longer than it might otherwise.

Still got about 100pp of the last Thomas Covenant book in the 1st trilogy omnibus to finish. That's my loo book which is why it's taking time.

Read the Robert Wyatt bio Different Every Time over Xmas. Really enjoyed. Makes me want to check out what I'm not familiar with, mainly his later solo work. I need to pick up the companion compilation 2cd.

What is an example of inaccuracy in the Bob Stanley book?

I looked at it and maybe was surprised at how straightforward / chronological it appeared to be.

reading: FAHRENHEIT 451

I restarted Clarissa and I'm back up to the point about a hundred pages in where I left off last time. As before, I'm impressed by the minuteness and density of detail while also feeling that the range of topics is somewhat narrow, so far being entirely focused on Clarissa's crisis and the business of her handling it. We don't see any of what her friend Anna describes as the regular substance of their correspondence:

That you and I, my dear, should love to write is no wonder. We have always from the time we could each hold a pen delighted in epistolary correspondencies. Our employments are domestic and sedentary, and we can scribble upon twenty innocent subjects and take delight in them because they are innocent; though were they to be seen, they might not much profit or please others.

I can understand why, given the plot so far, their letters haven't been of that kind, but I wonder why the plot had to be restrictive in that way in the first place, so that we hardly get to hear anything about what Clarissa and Anna actually enjoy doing with their time.

Waking up each day to go back back into the courtroom pages of The Brothers Karamazov. (xpost speaking of the devil, the lower-case seedy sandman, he sometimes resembles my shadow, and is proving to be a huge, if currently unseen factor, duh).
Stevo, have you seen this thread? It's pretty good:
Good books about music
The Wyatt anthology, Different Every Time, is really good, I think; some discussion of it on ILM's Wyatt thread. Looking fwd to the bio.

about halfway through John Williams's Stoner, which I picked up because of all the recent attention Williams has gotten. It's quite good, moody and often gorgeous in its despair, but halfway through i find myself really put off by Edith, who seems almost comically evil. i do think there is perhaps some small measure of humor running throughout the book but her character is just this persistent uncomprehensible ugliness.

I read Butterflies in November by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, which is the sort of thing I read, one day I will do an unreadably massive round-up of all my nordic reading on the Scandinavian literature thread. But not today.

Then I read "Venusberg" by Anthony Powell, also the sort of thing I read. First non-ADTTMOT I've read by him and I enjoyed it very much (NB this is a mild let-down after having LOVED A Dance To The Music Of Time. Why less good? Hard to read the thing without thinking how things would have been different in ADTTMOT, the grotesque characters a tweak more human (for example).

Now I am reading "Happy Moscow" by Andrey Platonov, which I am so far loving unreservedly. It's the sort of thing I read. I got very excited because some copies turned up at the Waterstones in Piccadilly, in the Maclehose-era Harvill edition which I collect - it seems to me that was the last time I'll buy one of those from the shelves of a non-secondhand bookshop.

Bob Stanley's Yeah Yeah Yeah which I got the new edition for my birthday. I'm finding it pretty readable if heavily opinionated to points of contention in places. I've come across a number of inaccuracies. But it is an interesting read at least. Wonder if everybody is reading it cover to cover. & how

I've had this a long time and it's a great read, but also quite slow going, if only because I keep wanting to google the songs he talks about.

The thing that strikes me about Tim is, he always seems to read certain sorts of things.

Whatever gave you that idea?

Karamazov: Prosecution: "Psychology!" Defense: "Psychology cuts both ways." "Ladies & gents, his narrative of the events sounds like The Mysteries of Udolfo." "Does his take not reek of the Byronic knock-off??" And if I were to stand up and read to them what really happened, they both might say, "Oh ho, Dostoyeskyean! Constance Garnett-style, at that!" And what could I say? The author's description wouldn't seem more plausible, in the hard light of another day in court, than the narratives of either side (and each one incl big chunks of the truth, as both attorneys agree). The author shores up his authority by flaunting its limits? Alibi Fyodor as pre-post-modernist? Both?
Anyway, we definitely get men and women going through contortions in their confining/defining sense and nonsense of realness, pieces and segments of awareness as The Truth. People who want to live in simpler times pick your calendar) and be done with it. But you knew that. Anyway, I had to come here and exclaim, for another moment.

Now I am reading "Happy Moscow" by Andrey Platonov, which I am so far loving unreservedly.

Its fantastic isn't it - read Platonov's The Return over the weekend and it has some sentences that just...do things.

Yes they ... do.

Just looked at the NYRB edition of Happy Mosco - has additional material I've not seen before.

http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/happy-moscow/

Gah! Extra stuff! That'll teach me not to buy stinking old Harvill editions, even if they are prettier.

Can't remember exactly what the inaccuracies were in Bob Stanley just remember noting on a number of occasions that histories of events and band histories were being reported contrary to sources I'd heard them from and thought more accurate. Would have to go back over several chapters to remember. But didn't take notes.

Certainly seemed to leave a lot of things out that I thought contributed greatly to certain eras etc. A personal history is likely to be somewhat selective I guess but in some cases he seemed to be attempting to voice certain opinions by omitting things that would throw other light on things. & I think there were several points where what I knew about things directly conflicted with what he was saying.
But book is pretty readable and hopefully might lead to further investigation of areas touched on, at which point other facts might emerge for the reader.

finished the lecarré, super good although the moral dimension felt kinda whatever. although maybe that's just due to its influence?

just took out 'hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy' by gabriella coleman (anthropologist who studied Anonymous) and 'party going' by henry green (an ilx rec from nrq iirc) from the library. semester is slow ramping up so i'm hoping i can plow through these

final comments probably on Karamazov:
re author "flaunting the limits of his authority," I finally recalled that the whole thing is first-person narration by a citizen of the little town where the great tabloid sensation takes place, and, while he cites ample evidence, the eager testimony of many neighbors, who have been following, sometimes participating in this thing for years and years, ultimately it's a wistful fiction, as he fervently describes scenes he couldn't have seen, def. incl. some inside heads and and hearts. So yeah, it's a sweet takeoff on the omniscient narrator, the favored mode of many a Great Novelist in the 19th Century, though also good use of the unreliable narrator (which I'm sick of, and sick of most first-person narrators in contemporary fiction, but Dostoyevsky managed it well).

dow have u read devils

No, and haven't read much about it. What do you think of it? I need something to follow Crime and Punishment.

Josef Winkler's Natura Morta has a violent eroticism that is certainly Genet-like but also works in an obsession with Southern Italian colour and the operatics of the street. Written as if he is looking at a series of still-like photographs of normal and then horrible events, something like the (recently viewed so they morphed into each other for me) Straub-Huillet's Sicilia!. I think those piled on descriptions combined with those high peaks of emotion are much more to my liking than a Noveau Roman like detachment. I followed this with Michele Bernstein's The Night and its fine - she clearly states that this was written for the money. She says she was trying to copy the Noveau Roman style that I suppose was fashionable (and remarkably) sold books at the time. People have an impact on each other by their very presence but this is obscure and unknowable, so it settles for a drifting kind of motion, but it isn't as shut out as Grillet's fictions. Still, there is a cynicism that doesn't come from any particular place. In my younger days I would've been far more positive about this. Clarice Lispector's Agua Viva is unclassifiable. The closest I parallel I can think of is Rilke: in the attempt to grasp the unknowable by writing unknowably, and also how that hasn't stopped Lispector in addressing the reader in a way that establishes this strange intimacy.

Started on Gerard de Nerval's fictions as translated by Richard Sieburth and I feel like I am establishing my own personal canon of 19th century fiction (instead of ignoring it). Also reading a few poems by Wallace Stevens in the Faber Selected.

Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise
Nicholas Wapshott - The Sphinx: Franklin Roosevelt, the Isolationists, and the Road to World War I

xyzzz, have you read Elena Ferrante? Your take on Winkler etc. reminds me: I associated My Brilliant Friend with the best Italian Neo-Realist films, obviously enough. Trying to avoid series, but now hooked on the Neapolitan Novels.
Alfred, what did you think of A Flag For Sunrise? That was where I got off the bus (after being fascinated by Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers, and some shorter fiction in New American Review etc), but now wondering if I should give it another chance. At the time, seemed like Stone was imitating Graham Greene x himself---not that any other novelist, as far as I knew in the 80s (or know now), seemed to provide an adequate response to US x Central America. Though what would I have deemed "adequate"?

I have not only read Elena Ferrante but I also set that thread up :-) Both books have similar settings and the spectre of violence looms large but its written very differently so I didn't think of these books in parallel.

Of course you set it up, and cogently commented! Damn, so sorry! I really should wear my glasses, among other things.

I hope to go to THE ROYAL OAK tonight!

(still rereading Ray Bradbury and next back to DeLillo.)

I am still reading Shelby Foote's enormous US Civil War history, presently in volume 2 of 3. I am midstream in 1863. Stonewall Jackson is stone dead. Vicksburg has just fallen to Grant. Lee has just been ass-kicked at Gettysburg. The Confederacy is running out of officers, enlisted men, and war materials and can't replace any of them because of the naval blockade. Jeff Davis is still pouring out high-minded rhetoric like a perpetual fountain. Objectively, they've just lost the war.

The damn fools will continue to burn through men and materials for two more years until the south is an utter wasteland, just because they've framed the war as a sacred mission, in pursuit of which defeat is unthinkable. Davis and the southern politicians were purely contemptible. They sent multitudes to their graves because they were too proud to face up to what a disaster they had wrought.

party going is fantastic so far

I went to THE ROYAL OAK and drank 4 pints Harveys Pale Ale though an ILB FAP was not taking place.

revisiting erskine childers' the riddle of the sands.

dow 'devils' is probably my favourite of the big four/five, benefits from reading brothers k. first and knowing a bit about how they were spun off from the same ur-narrative

it's the one where d. is most honest / most blatant about what he's doing with the status of the narrator and the text's relation to realism. but i feel like explaining reasons why would deprive some of the book's nicest "oh, huh." moments

*deprive the book of some of it's

or *deprive you of some of the book's, i guess

yeah second that about the Devils - it's my favourite, over karamazov I think (tho I wd only have said that recently).

reading gérard de nerval who is amazing, just brilliant - thanks to ILB for recommending him. bibliography, identity confusion, sexual obsession, recollection, constant noises off and textual digression and interruption.

Guy next to me on the train is reading Rodrigo Fresán, which is p neat.

I remember reading a Blixa Bargeld interview where he was talking about some really hallucinatory activity in a de Nerval book. I think he said something about mental illness on de Nerval's part. Not sure how accurate that would be.
I've meant to read some of de Nerval for about 30 years and just don't come across him. With the exception of his novel on Solomon and the building of the great temple which I think I just stumbled on. Not read that in years so don't have details very clear. May be more about the head mason and therefore roots of Freemasonry.

there's some mental illness, yes, that has a very 19th century construction or expression. delusions of grandeur and relation to the monarch etc. suicide in rue de vieux lanternes.

he treats with mental illness and delusions in his writing as well. v interesting writer.

he was very interested in freemasonry and Rosicrucians - secret societies, secret power - that sort of thing.

it means one of his remarkable qualities is his ability to stand apart from his obsessions and treat them playfully, sardonically almost.

Alfred, what did you think of A Flag For Sunrise?

Fifteen pages from the end, I'm riveted whenever violence glints off the exchanges between the semi-quiet American and authoritarians, but the plot hopscotching tired me and doesn't cohere in a satisfying way.

wow, de Nerval sounds great ; any recommendations in particular?

I read what was recommended elsewhere - I think by woof and xyzzzz__ - the relatively recent penguin selected writings.

it's nicely put together - a good general introduction and introductions for each of the sections.

I was talking to a french colleague recently and he suggested not many french read him these days, but - you live in France, right, Euler? - sure there must be some good french editions of his work inc untranslated stuff.

There are only two vols currently available in English I think (iirc he didn't write a lot, there are no novels as such): The Selected Writings on Penguin (halfway through that now) and The Salt Smugglers on Archipelago. Much of the material for Angelique in the Selected forms the basis for much of the latter.

I like de Nerval's storytelling a lot - like he is taken the weird path via The Arabian Nights, maybe. There is so much density here.

Reading Sylvie and maybe following that with Proust's The Prisoner could be something to do...one day.

xp

yes I would be reading in French

I see that Les illuminés would be right up my alley. & it's on Gallica! but I'd prefer a paper copy I think.

I wanted to read Duras' L'Amant after a recommendation on this thread but I mistakenly took out the Pleiades volume IV which has L'Amant de la Chine du Nord, a rewriting of sorts of L'Amant after the film adaptation and it doesn't sound as interesting to me. so I'll go back and get the right one. I also took out L'Art français de la guerre by Alexis Jenni and will give it a try.

Finished 3 books this week, so trying to work out what i'm replacing them with.

Started Game of Thrones the first book of a Game of Ice and Fire since I enjoyed the tv series. I assume this is roughly the same material. & that this is the first book in the sequence, the tv thing didn't start a t a weird point did it?

Looking at A history Of tHe Arab Peoples which has been sitting on the bookshelf in my loo for a while. Looks like it would be an interesting book to have read.

Bought The Mayor of Macdougal Street the memoir by Dave Ronk yesterday and again it looks like something I really should read.

Got a stack of books out of the library last week including the Game of Thrones thing.
& do have pretty literal stacks of literature to read that i've picked up over the years from various sources. So really not sure what next thing will be.

think the exact change edition of nerval is still in print: mix of three or so translators, including robert duncan's version of chimeras.

... his novel on Solomon and the building of the great temple which I think I just stumbled on. Not read that in years so don't have details very clear. May be more about the head mason and therefore roots of Freemasonry.

that's actually the third part of journey to the orient... in my edition at least which is a bastardised seventies version of the nerval original which i think went through various permutations itself as he kept adding to it.

one of his remarkable qualities is his ability to stand apart from his obsessions and treat them playfully, sardonically almost. This was close to my impression of Philip K. Dick's Valis, though I remember it as more, um, wry and rueful than playful etc. Read it in the 80s; wonder how it would hold up?
Thanks guys, will check The Demons, that's my village library;s translation.
Alfred, no matter where you end up with the wobbly AFFS, check Hall of Mirrors and Dog Soldiers (the collected short fiction and memoir too, judging by magazine pieces).

That 70s edition might be the same thing I have. i remember a semi psychedelic cover but not much more. It's got pinks and oranges in the colouring and some trippy image of a parade or something on the cover.
I probably still have it somewhere but my books are not very well organised so not sure where it would be if it is still in here.

Actually just found it online and it's the Panther version from 1973. It's actually just 2 people on horseback approaching a walled minareted city.
http://www.amazon.de/Journey-Orient-Gerard-Nerval/dp/0586036962/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

probably is time I found it and reread it. Possibly got that Penguin anthology too.

yep, that's it. bigger picture & unimpressed amazon customer review: http://www.amazon.com/Journey-Orient-G%C3%A9rard-Nerval/dp/0918825091

panther also put out a fairly wide ranging nerval selection trans. by geoffrey wagner that i have, though i think his translations aren't considered that great (also includes an essay by proust on sylvie).

also interesting is theophile gautier's collection of stories translated as my fantoms which includes a portrait of nerval as 'the poet'. he seems to be the first to promulgate the (maybe apocryphal) lobster promenading/queen of sheba's garter vision of nerval. and speaking of these guys, anyone ever come across petrus borel (the self-syled le lycanthrope)? not sure how much is available, but i'm yet to find any in translation. apparently enid starkie wrote a biography of him before her rimbaud volume.

Love that cover.

I've been reading, among other things, a few of Tiqqun's books: This is Not a Program, Introduction to Civil War, and Theory of Bloom. I'm impressed with their synthesis of a wide range of post-structuralists for the sake of an anarchist project (Agamben's not easy to weaponize), but I have reservations about their aestheticism of the gesture, which seems to take precedence over any nuanced discussion of the challenges of non-hierarchical organizing, their call to avoid the snares of power by multiplying one's predicates as a subject doesn't seem to lead them to talk about intersecting modes of oppression, and I haven't found any concrete analyses of concrete situations in their work to compete, say, with the Situationist essays on the Cultural Revolution or the Watts riots. (I'm not really in a good position to judge Tiqqun's account of the dynamics of the Italian movement of 1977.) When I get around to reading, in a focused way, their supplementary text to Theory of Bloom on neoliberal subjectivity, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, I have a feeling that I'm going to be gritting my teeth: the few chapters I've looked at so far don't give me much confidence that they can develop the Young-Girl as a non-gendered concept, when so much of their rhetoric so far tends to fall back on tired misogynist tropes about women's relation to consumer society. On the whole, I tend to find the work of the LIES editorial group more useful.

I finished FAHRENHEIT 451.

Now DeLillo.

Which DeLillo?

(Or 'what by', rather.)

FALLING MAN !

Recent good stuff:
Han Kang - The Vegetarian
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5019421184ae7e81bd01bf4e/507eb3a084ae4cfb9e23da07/529e8584e4b05941a0ad8e9a/?format=1000w

Marek Haslo - Killing the Second Dog
http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386350313l/19235964.jpg

Ken Kalfus - Equilateral
http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1350952851l/15793638.jpg

Oh, and Oliver Harris - Deep Shelter, which, at the risk of overselling it, is kind of like Patricia Highsmith refracted through 1980s BBC miniseries Edge of Darkness (it's the 2nd in a series, though, and definitely benefits from having read book 1)

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/c4/61/cc/c461cc01c407a2faec4a5b5e0ae54320.jpg

switching off between william lee miller's "two americans" (dual biography of truman and ike) and frances fitzgerald's "fire in the lake: the vietnamese and the americans in vietnam."

Oh yeah, another good 'un by Fitzgerald is pretty well-described by Amazon reviewer EL:

It is a nuanced book based on Fitzgerald's New Yorker articles in the late 1970s, drawing on her extensive, thoughtful reading of the broad collection of historic textbooks at Columbia Teacher's College. Fitzgerald offers a surprising historiography about the range of textbooks in the 1930s, the cracks in the supposedly-consensus history of the 1950s, and the 1960s and 70s shifts from social movements of the right as well as left, as well as the business pressures of textbook publishing. Smart and incredibly well-written, this book is better than more recently-written books about America's textbook controversies. Anyone interested in the teaching of U.S. history or public memory in America should read this book.
This summary doesn't indicate the author's focus on just how far back some controversies go, such as the split in the high school movement of the late 19th/early 20th Century, between those who wanted to emphasize vocational (mainly mechanical and agricultural) vs advocates of a broader curriculum.
Also, speaking "business pressures of textbook publishing," Fitzgerald delves into the way Texas dominated the market, when all Texas history texts had to be approved by this one married couple of experts, with some very spacey results.

Also pretty lively: her study of (incl. close encounters with)late-20th Century American utopias,Cities on a Hill: A Journey Through Contemporary American Cultures.
Take it away, CS Monitor:
...carefully crafted portraits of four contemporary communities, all different from Winthrop's 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony, but all having certain qualitatively similar features: a faith in radical renewal and a fervor of special commitment to those who have also been rejected, reborn, rejuvenated, or redeemed.

Sorry! The title of the first one is America Revised.

yes! i read the textbook one in college -- excellent stuff.

Joseph Boyden, The Orenda. Mulling picking up Bernard Bailyn's The Barbarous Yearsas like a thematic companion read.

Need to read that Boyden someday. Really liked Through Black Spruce.

I couldn't finish the Orenda. I am a huge wuss and the violence was just no fun for me, also it was unflinchingly describing a hugely depressing subject/historical reality. I barely have time to read any more and just was not enjoying it, so I gave up trying to force myself through it. That's not to say it wasn't very good; I am a Boyden fan.

Stephen Kotkin - Stalin (so far excellent)
Muriel Spark - The Informed Life: Essays

Apparently, the publisher's 'synopsis' of the Spark book reads: "Together for the first time in one sparkling, delicious volume, here are the greatest essays of Muriel Spark."

That sentence makes me want to slap someone.

Fire And Rain a book about various musical artists in 1970, covers CSNY, James Taylor, Simon And Garfunkel and the Beatles activity during the year.
Interesting read, not overly familiar with what any of them were up to at that point.

I did start the History of The Arab Peoples as my bog book. It's been sitting on the bookshelf in there for ages. It's a subject I should probably know more about.

I bought Memoirs of A Foxhunting man by Siegfried Sassoon from a charity shop but not started it yet.
Did finish the book I was reading on buses Guitar Zero which traces a 40 year old cognitive scientist's attempt to teach himself guitar and goes into philosophy of music appreciation among other things. Enjoyed it.

found Christopher ISherwood's Goodbye t Berlin ontop of a pile and realised it was a book I'd bought the Xmas before last after meaning to read it for years. & i still haven't got very far into it so may start it again soon.

I want to read taht Thomas Pynchon detective nopvel that the new Joaquin Phoenix film is based on since its been sitting by my bed for the last couple of years.

I just finished Amy Poehler's book which was a Christmas gift. Now reading George Saunders' Tenth of December. I've never read him before, besides the title story which was in a magazine last year and was excellent.

Had no idea Kotkin had a new book/was doing three volumer on stalin!!!! Magnetic Mountain changed my world, gonna pick that one up asap! Woohooo

Recently read Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos which someone gave me as a gift. Kind of a strange mix of self-help/spirituality, a la a more Catholic Alan Watts, and some fun little sci-fi stories. Now I'm reading Vol.2 of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle.

Started reading Jarhead as my transport book. I've enjoyed reading other war memoirs before and this is pretty good.

I've been reading Valeria Luiselli's playful and eventually haunting first novel, Faces in the Crowd, which sets up intricate resonances between the life of a translator/literary forger and Gilberto Owen's exile in New York and Philadelphia. (I was amused to see that Louis Zukofsky, who plays a significant role in the novel, was renamed Joshua Zvorsky in the English translation, presumably to avoid the wrath of Paul Z.) What little I've read of Luiselli's non-fiction in Sidewalks explores the liminal and unplanned spaces in cities with a lightness of approach similar to Perec, and Faces in the Crowd has a similar interest in the spectral dimensions of reading, translating, and memory.

I've also just finished, with some ambivalence, Jeanette Winterson's Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, which has the vividness and some of the narrowness of a first novel: the allegorical passages are effective at suggesting the narrator Jeanette's febrile imagination but underline Winterson's points too patly, and the struggle between the narrator and her mother seems to keep most of the other characters from acquiring much complexity beyond functioning as colorful grotesques or, in the case of Jeanette's lovers, narrative tokens to illustrate the force of conformity. I enjoyed the novel, but I think I would have gotten more out of it as a teenager. It's probably an unfair comparison, but I think of Go Tell it on the Mountain as a novel that handled a similar tension between religious community and burgeoning queer sexuality generally with more complexity and intensity than Oranges, although also with more indirection. I'd be curious to eventually read Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? to see how Winterson's approach to very similar material has changed in the intervening decades.

I'm also finally reading Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera and starting to reread Gravity's Rainbow with some of my friends.

I enjoyed Faces in the Crowd a lot. I love the bit where her boss gets angry with her for being the only South American who never met Roberto Bolano.

Winterson definitely has not got better as she goes along. Tonnes of early praise and a ludicrous ego have, imo, made her editor-resistant for decades, and thus capable of proudly publishing a lot of utter tosh.

Yeah, I've heard that about her, and I'm ambivalent enough about Oranges that I probably won't get around to her memoir for quite some time.

Bernard Fall's Hell In a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu

Just finished Anthony Powell's Afternoon Men

Reading Lawrence Wright's new book, Thirteen Days in September about the negotiation of Camp David -- so far very engaging as one would expect from Wright.

just finished 13 Days myself, riveting in the day-by-day (minute-by-minute) negotiating and brinksmanship. capsule background sections were useful & edifying to me, might be reductive for somebody who's closely followed last 75 years in the middle east. ultimately depressing, of course.

otherwise I've binged on scando crime novels so far this year. must be the weather.

Jo Nesbo The Bat
Jo Nesbo The Redeemer
Hakan Nesser The Inspector and Silence
Lars Kepler The Nightmare
Arnaldur Indridason Black Skies
Asa Larsson The Second Deadly Sin currently

also read The Last Magazine by Michael Hastings. clever roman a clef about working at Newsweek during the Iraq war, retrieved from author's desk drawer after he died. entertaining and mildly revealing, the inside-baseball stuff works better than the scenes in Iraq (where Hastings reported).

I just finished Under The Volcano - comes close to Man Without Qualities as my favourite thing I've ever read. It goes from red hot to cold in quick successions but the good bits are amazing.

I also recently read Donald Antrim's short story collection, The Emerald Light In The Air, and really enjoyed that. Bit like Cheever.

Just starting Michel Tournier's The Erl-King. Seems fairly grim. Already reminds me a bit of The Confusions Of Young Torless, philosophical dissection of homoerotic violence among schoolboys, very pleasant.

TV series finally pushed me to read Wolf Hall. Thought i'd try to go into the Tudors generally, bounce around the C16th a bit - gone back to the Woudhuysen/Norbrook Penguin Book of Renaissance verse, and I might try to read through Spenser (started on the shorter poems). He's not a poet I really get on with, but maybe my resistance or discomfort is sort of a way in in itself idk. Got some things like diarmaid macculloch's biography of Cranmer lying around too, probably time to read that.

Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter was a lot of fun on the one hand, then on the other you'd immediately like to re-read it as there is blink-and-you-miss it compression of event and thought and feeling. But I had to give it back to my library. With von Kleist, Nerval, Poe, Buchner and maybe Melville's The Confidence Man a canon of 19th century prose that works for me is emerging.

I've also finished Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H. where an encounter with a cockroach at the maid's room in the narrator's empty house proves to be not so much as life-changing so much as a feeling transmitted to the reader that the narrator is actually dissolving into pure thought particles that join the air to disappear before your very eyes. Lispector is one hell of a performer in prose, and in that sense it was a bit like when I discovered Bernhard or Pavese for the first time.

i found the events pushkin based that story on really fascinating (was totally unaware of them before reading it awhile back)

Yes, the intro (and footnotes) discuss this in quite a bit of detail.

like OWS I know JW's ORANGES and must also read that memoir! I am not sure or aware that JW has written a better novel than ORANGES.

I am reading PKD's UBIK (1969) which is remarkable, virtually in the HIGH CASTLE class with some related themes (the history of everyday objects and 'material culture').

I watch WOLF HALL on TV and I loved episode 2.

Irving Howe - Selected Essays: 1950-1990
Marilynne Robinson - Lilla

what I finished reading in January

O’Neill - Long Day’s Journey Into Night (written 1942, published 1956)
Otomo - Akira (1982-1990) fizzles out at the end, with big message hoo hah and unexplained abilities. pretty sure Final Fantasy VII copied the ending.
Skloot - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010)
D4rnielle - Wolf in White Van (2014)
Morrison - JLA vol. 1 (1997-1998)

Currently reading Mark Harris's Five Came Back.

Read half of Elias Canetti's 'Auto Da Fe'. Urgh, what a horrible, horrible book. Like the patients in a German psychiatric institution trying to do Monty Python sketches for hours and hours and hours. If only it had been funny.

Also read Curzio Malaparte's strange and wonderful 'Skin'. Just started reading Marcel Aymé's 'The Man Who Walked Through Walls'.

I didn't get Monty Python vibes out of Auto Da Fe, obviously its not a nice book but its not trying to be that, or to be even that funny.

Still haven't read that one but I did thoroughly enjoy Canetti's Agony of Flies: Notes and Notations, bi-lingual edition. Can't find it on my shelves right this second, but believe it survived a few purges.

Read half of Elias Canetti's 'Auto Da Fe'. Urgh, what a horrible, horrible book. Like the patients in a German psychiatric institution trying to do Monty Python sketches for hours and hours and hours. If only it had been funny.

one of my favourite books. the way he builds the insular minds of the characters is amazing. it is pretty funny in my view, sometimes in a dry kind of way, other times in a madcap way - but really it's about the grotty world and the incredible levels of detailed thought he finds for the characters.

it's not unusually grim either - i mean it's kind of cartoonish in a way compared to more brutal books - i just started the erl-king by michel tournier and after a few pages i was bracing myself for real ugliness throughout.

Canetti's Agony of Flies: Notes and Notations

is this sociology?

Not heard of it before, described as 'reflections'

I read his book on Marrakesh and his study of Kafka's Letters last year so there are other options if you don't like his novel.

just finished 13 Days myself, riveting in the day-by-day (minute-by-minute) negotiating and brinksmanship. capsule background sections were useful & edifying to me, might be reductive for somebody who's closely followed last 75 years in the middle east.

Definitely finding some of the pop-biography and history capsule stuff a little reductive, I mean it's kind of inevitable if you're doing a book like this, you can't explain the whole history of the late British Empire and pan-Arabism and Zionism and Palestine/Israel from the mandate through the 70s adequately as "background" for a quick read on the negotiations.

one of my favourite books. the way he builds the insular minds of the characters is amazing.

That is the main thing I took from the book: the way everyone is locked into their own little worlds not really communicating or interacting with anyone else. The first hundred pages or so I quite 'enjoyed', but in the end the sheer density of it just ground me down. It did feel like comedy to me, or at least the death of comedy, and the death of much else. A hellish kind of solipsism. Is Beckett like this?

I have read Canetti's Kafka thing and his reminiscences about life in London, but the novel is something else.

I think Beckett and Canetti write quite differently. The former is way funnier and Canetti is writing about the dangers of too much knowledge in Auto Da Fe, which I'm not sure Beckett would ever discuss. I should re-read it tho'.

Canetti wrote in many different genres and is v successful in most of them, which is unusual. I dread reading his sociology tho'.

I also liked his reminiscences of life in Vienna where he talks about writing Auto Da Fe and its initial reception. Could've come off as self-indulgence of a Nobel prize winner talking about meeting the many artists and writers, but he fully sketches out how he meets and often falls out with people, i.e. how he starts thinking he was wrong about how good Karl Kraus was -- and this was someone he invested a lot of time in -- or the moment Musil shut him out, and then he also writes about people that meant a lot to him and were not so famous.

I have almost finished "American Pastoral" by Philip Roth. It's the first Roth book I've ever read and I have to admit, he's an incredible writer. He doesn't think much of the counter-culture though, does he?

Clarice Lispector - A Breath of Life.
Paul Valery - Monsieur Triste.

Both are bare novels, more like prose works that are sceptical of the form (more on the Clarice Lispector thread).

Muriel Spark - Memento Mori.
Muriel Spark - Ballad of Peckham Rye.

Finished the first and its pretty funny, classic British comedy of cruelty served with a smirk behind a curtain, all set in nice Hampstead surroundings of course. Just started on the latter.

Paul Valery - Monsieur Triste
You mean Monsieur Teste, don't you? Didn't even think of it as a novel. More like journal entries with a theme to them.

Whole point of title is that teste is old spelling of tête, he lives in his head.

Sorry aargh yeah Monsieur Teste. The intro on the edition I'm reading describes this as Valery's novel. Agree its a stretch. xp

Just read The Martian by Andy Weir. The writing was actually really bad but the story was engaging enough to make it worthwhile.

Now starting up Stephen King's Revival and Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

TV series finally pushed me to read Wolf Hall. Thought i'd try to go into the Tudors generally, bounce around the C16th a bit - gone back to the Woudhuysen/Norbrook Penguin Book of Renaissance verse, and I might try to read through Spenser (started on the shorter poems). He's not a poet I really get on with, but maybe my resistance or discomfort is sort of a way in in itself idk. Got some things like diarmaid macculloch's biography of Cranmer lying around too, probably time to read that.

― woof, Friday, 30 January 2015 12:41 (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol oh god i just checked to see if this is the same penguin book of etc i've been carrying around with me FUCKING FOREVER and of course it is

I've recently finished Sibyl Lamb's first novel I've Got a Time Bomb, a surreal picaresque about scavenging, squatting, sex work, and wandering through the wastelands and margins of Bush- and Katrina-era North America before and after suffering a severe trans bashing and subsequent brain damage. It's messy and episodic as a novel--it was stitched together from a number of semi-autobiographical zines Lamb wrote over the course of the oughts--but also kind of exhilarating in its unruly energy, stylistic playfulness, and refusal to moralize.

Is Thomas Wyatt in that Penguin anthology? I have a big book of his poems I need to get back to--found them really good but seem to have lost track of it somewhere

everyone's in that penguin anthology. it is a book of terrifying proportions.

Wow, yes, just looking at the contents pages on Amazon, it's a monster. A very appealing one, though.

It's really really good imo, the best verse anthology for the period – doesn't get stuck in a pretty lyrics-> metaphysicals narrative (though they're in there), translates Historicism into something worth reading. Intro is really good - it's a shame that David Norbrook's faded away lately, comparatively (but I should look properly at that first volume of his Lucy Hutchinson edition that's out)

I've misplaced my Wyatt too - the old Muse's Library one, original spelling (prefer that generally). I think it's in a box somewhere.

I mostly wasn't mad keen on Bring Up the Bodies, but there was a nice passage where Cromwell is thinking about Wyatt's poems - things scribbled on bits of paper and passed around, a word changed here or there when he gives it to different people, unprinted. Enjoyable (and unusual? idk) attempt to get at coterie poetry imaginatively. (I had a bit of a reservation that it was basically a very smart, well-informed version of having someone say "Wyatt! Why he's the finest poet in the kingdom!" but shit why not)

i wish that anthology held my hand a tiny bit more and then I get annoyed at myself for wanting it to do so, is my problem.

a friend of mine had previously described the mantels to me as "romps" which I think put me in a good and non judgemental space from which to read them, i had previously avoided them because they were not romps but Booker-Winning Historical Fiction

I've been reading merce rodoreda's "death in spring" & I'm not quite sure what to make of it. it has some of the disquieting, unsettling affect of someone like e.g. barbara comyns in that it's beautiful and horrible at the same time and very darkly comic in places, though the story is far less conventional. gives me a similar feeling as some poetry (like berryman or lowell) where it can feel at times like the key's missing

next up is either lorrie moore's "bark" or can xue's "vertical motion".

i've been rereading bouvard and pecuchet from the beginning, never did finish it yet, but going back is always a pleasure. every paragraph and every sentence is so perfect and funny that it's hard to just breeze through it (also gets a little harsh w/ the constant failure and frustration).

also read a little PLOTINUS the other day, feelin ~~spiritual~~

man j how many years you been reading that

& in whose translation is every paragraph and every sentence so perfect that etc.?

Recently read the Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, which I loved, and The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark which I really enjoyed. Before that was Party Going by Henry Green, which was incredible, and Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner, which had some great moments but didn't quite hold together I thought.

Currently reading Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano, which I'm really enjoying, and Rabbit,Run by John Updike, which is kind of annoying me but I'm going to try and stick with it for now, its the first of his that I've tried and I have a feeling I might like some of the others better but I'll give it a chance anyway.

Brookner's really frustrating--she can write well, but the general criticism that all of her books are the same seems pretty fair.

But Peckham Rye and Party Going are both amazing books. I've only read the photographer novella in Suspended Sentences--need to go back for the other 2.

t h om it hasn't been that long! but it's the recent dalkey ed.

oh I was reading a bit of Plotinus (and Proclus) the other day! I was trying again to get my head round neoplatonism.

ILB Enneads book club let's go!

"Brookner's really frustrating--she can write well, but the general criticism that all of her books are the same seems pretty fair.

― as verbose and purple as a Peter Ustinov made of plums (James Morrison), Saturday, February 7, 2015 9:39 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink"

Hotel Du Lac is the only one I've read, but I can imagine that it would get old if they're all much the same. I did really enjoy the setting of the scene but it felt like it ran out of steam a bit after that. She writes very well though.

haha i don't really have TIME to read plotinus now, i just… did it anyway

So far this year:

Simeonon - my friend Maigret
- 3 rooms in manhattan
- pietr the Latvian
Hoskyns - Hotel California
Didion - white album

Recently read and enjoyed The Devil's Own Work, by Alan Judd. From the title and the fact that it concerns a writer whose star shines extremely brightly perhaps you can guess what it is about. Short and to the point, if not quite The Driver's Seat, well maybe within hailing distance. Inspired by Ford Madox Ford and Graham Greene, as you will find out in detail from the afterword in the new Valancourt edition. The author has some kind of dual career as a diplomat/intelligence agent and writer. Among other things, he wrote a biography of Ford Madox Ford. Guess I should finally get around to reading The Good Soldier.

Frank Norris' The Octopus has some of the awkwardest writing I've read in a minted classic.

Norris died young, before he really got his shit together (too much time spent on maybe financially necessary hackwork, for one thing). The Octopus might be especially erratic because his father actually was a railroad tycoon, and the personal connection could throw him off (even more), but there is a jolting locomotive momentum at times. What did you think of McTeague?

i can't get over finding mcteague hilarious

i have had this poem open in a tab since the renaissance book came up because i wanted to try and think of something clever to say about it but just, yeah:

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A10251.0001.001/1:9.66?rgn=div2;view=fulltext

Guess I should finally get around to reading The Good Soldier.

The first half is very good, surprisingly funny, then it takes a bit of a turn to melodrama, but it's pretty short, so definitely worth a read.

One reviewer didn't like the way it was written

I see. My copy of Monsieur Teste also describes it as a novel but then has additional material in the second half, which is described as SNAPSHOTS OF MONSIEUR TESTE: From The Notebooks.

What they think about him in Bath

Mon testicles in bath (ahhhh)(oui they needed washing)

In the latest news from the American Civil War, 1864 is ending. The Union Army of Tennessee has just whupped the Confederate Army of Tennessee outside of Nashville and Sherman's Army has recently marched through Georgia gobbling up the locals' hams and yams all the way to the sea. This puts me roughly 2700pp from the South's opening giddy delusions and 450pp away from their final enshrinement as The Lost Cause.

btw, Shelby Foote's favorite phrase, repeated at least 20 times so far, is that some or other Confederate battlefield victory earned them "the admiration of the world".

Andre Schiffrin: Words & Money

next up is either lorrie moore's "bark" or can xue's "vertical motion".

I started Bark but wasn't wild about it. It was okay but maybe was telling stories I didn't really relate to - which wouldn't be a problem per se - I guess it just felt very specific to an American of a certain age in a kind of banal way.

I bought Donald Antrim's Emerald Light In The Air around the same time and felt it was a much better contemporary collection of shorts. I might go back to Bark though. I only read the first two stories.

Finally getting around to John Williams - Stoner. Overall liking it a lot, wonderful prose, although something a little too neatly drawn and thin about the titular character, like he's more of an archetype than a man. I almost wept on the subway at the description of the mother realizing her son wasn't coming home.

^^ yep

Something about how he still speaks few and simple words after years of immersion in literature doesn't ring true to me entirely.

on the contrary: this shows (a) the kind of mastery that simplifies (e.g. Marcus Aurelius) (b) he was a mediocrity. I lean towards the latter.

Mediocrities who choose to immerse themselves in literature are generally under the impression that there is prestige on this activity and few such people could resist claiming that prestige through a public show of their familiarity with big words and hard ideas.

I meant he couldn't transform what he read into interesting interpretations or ways of living, which is true of many of us.

You can be a shy mediocrity

I stopped reading Stoner after about a third of it - it was already irritating me with cliches then they were at a party talking about their friend who died in the war like "he's probably somewhere up there drinking a beer and laughing at us all mopey down here" or whatever - so I just stopped. I can't remember the other things but it was probably the beginning of the end once I began tweeting screengrabs of terrible lines - there were plenty.

Finished Ballad of Peckham Rye and as much as I'd like to join everyone above in saying how wonderful it is (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was great when I read it a couple of yars ago) I just couldn't quite get into it (even when passing Peckham by when I read it on public transport too!) Something about the mundanity/melnacholia of office life and the games we play to enliven it (reminded me a bit of Johnson's Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry??)...is just something I am not that into. Sure there is a ton of nuance and stuff hidden inside I missed. Margerite Duras' The Ravishment of Lol. V Stein otoh is more of what I'm looking for. Duras was such a great artist (v few truly great novelists and filmmakers ever). She takes a few risks with so much POV switching, but its necessary to transmit the feeling of being consumed and consuming the other. The emotional ride and ultimately the flatlining of emotion. What is born will perish away. There is no physical violence but plenty of emotional, quiet psychological torment, often at points that at first seem unsubstantial. I will be reading as much as I can from her this year. Natalia Ginzburg's Valentino and Sagittarius offer similar kinds of destruction except there is a clear narrator and little to no dialogue (Duras often writes as if she has a film in mind, I have ordered the script to Hiroshima Mon Amour from the library to check). Ginzburg really pulls something off in the level of detachment, as if she is writing about writing the story she is teling, with such quiet and matter-of-factness, but these are people that fail at things after spending their lives trying to get them. Its not just a lack of exclamation marks here. NYRB classics are republishing Family Sayings later this year.

Also finished Rene Dumal's A Serious Night of Drnking. Psychedelic but idk its not something I am really looking for. I really hate fun.

or A Night of Serious Drinking

Have you read enrique vila-matas's Never Any End to Paris? Fun stuff about having Duras as his landlady. (It's a fictionalised memoir)

I have not read any of his stuff James - looks great. I'll try and source a copy.

Only one I have read so far is Bartleby & Co.Looking forward to reading more.

ha, i picked that up cheap years ago after giving it a quick flick through left me thinking it was lit crit.

Read half of Elias Canetti's 'Auto Da Fe'. Urgh, what a horrible, horrible book. Like the patients in a German psychiatric institution trying to do Monty Python sketches for hours and hours and hours. If only it had been funny.

I finished it and yeah it's hard going but xyzzzz otm, this book is not trying to make you laff

some of it is obviously meant to be funny - fischerle fantasising about being a famous chess player, the housekeeper's delusion about the salesman - even the doorman guy is funny in a sort of dark way.

not sure how it could be taken any other way - of course some of it is meant to be funny.

Been a long time, but enjoyed Duras' The Lover.

xposts: still haven't read the copy of a night of serious drinking i have sitting in my shelves, but from what i understand he's attempting to combine pataphysics with gurdjieff's teachings? recommended it elsewhere, but his non-fiction is well worth a read (also helps to explicate what he's doing in his fiction to some extent).

re: Daumal. I think its the first time I've come across pataphysics in fiction. It struck me as very surrealist, all of which I tend to think as proto-psychedelic. A lot of energy to the night's travel. When you read a book like this its when you realise that it wasn't all modernism, but in some ways this is a kind of modernism. A kind of confusion.

re: Duras. The Lover is almost the first thing anyone will read by her. It sold a lot of books (a mil in France I think) but then if you read North China Lover you realise there is even more going in that sequel of sorts -- like a novel as film script. A lot of her books are to be re-issued and even translated for the first time. Such as Agatha (no subs, but you can look at the sea instead). I just like to read the text to that. She has such a great way with repetition, but also an ease with it - most people will think its either poetic or self-indulgent, but she is looking at certain emotions in a way no one else has.

Luc Sante recalls cops, crims, pitchas, other: very cool, and my kind of ending. Reminds me of the awesome Most Wanted portrait of Patti Hearst, reborn as Tonya. Finally left my village post office, then went back after walking several blocks, and of course it was gone.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/gallery/2015/feb/14/thirteen-most/

Sante replies: Hey thanks! It was sparked by my acquiring a 1957 Thirteen Most Wanted booklet on ebay and recognizing some of the Warhol pix in there (even though his were based on the booklet from 6 or 7 years later). The title construction also informed the Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys and suchlike.

His blog was so good. Got me reading Richard Stark.

just read patrick cockburn's isis book in an evening, very good quick read if you like blackly comic accounts of the failure of any political aspiration other than the most venal or psychopathic, delivered in that lapidary patrician voice of doom

terribly edited though, clearly assembled and delivered to press in haste

then onto the hassan/weiss book on the same subject when it is out in a couple of days

his lrb pieces on isis were good. voice of doom kind of silly (i think one of them ended with "A new, terrifying state has been created. Be afraid." lmao) but atvl entertaining

Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter. Probably raced through this faster than I should have once I tuned to her voice -- and what a voice -- detailing the struggles of the SA communist party to overthrow Apartheid in late 70s South Africa. At times it reads like reports from the front line, with a few passages detailing the confused wanderings among the thrash that people were forced to live in. That aspect + the work the SACP did/activism both in townships and among the establishment (main character's father is a lawyer for ANC members). Needs a few readings.

Apologies for liveblogging Stoner, but the portrait of the marriage is just so harrowing. I also credit the novel for a fairly sympathetic and sensitive, if distant, portrayal of a very repressed and underdeveloped woman who seems to marry solely out of desperation and lack of a sense of agency.

I'm reading a bit of Chuang Tzu. My favourite inscrutable remark so far:

It was when judgements were made that the Tao was damaged, and because the Tao was damaged, love became complete.

Merill D. Peterson - The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun
Louis Gluck - Wild Iris
Lawrence Wright - Thirteen Days in September

*Louise

Hitchens - The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Not all of his charges against Kissinger are proven, but damn, was the Nixon organization ever evil.
Salinger - Franny and Zooey. More "phonies" and self-improvement. "Franny" is nicely compact, at least.

the kissinger book is probably hitch's best.

The Clinton demolition job was very entertaining too

the best part in the Clinton book: the story of the welfare "reform" bill.

Savoring the sensation of freedom after finally disposing of Jefferson Davis, that insufferable prig. The pile of candidates for my next book that must occupy a good two feet of shelf atm. Riches galore.

Apologies for liveblogging Stoner, but the portrait of the marriage is just so harrowing. I also credit the novel for a fairly sympathetic and sensitive, if distant, portrayal of a very repressed and underdeveloped woman who seems to marry solely out of desperation and lack of a sense of agency.

― walid foster dulles (man alive), Tuesday, February 17, 2015 6:38 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I guess it gets less sympathetic as it goes on...

Liveblogging it is fine with me

Finally reading Moby Dick, and struck by the droll, rangy descriptions, with sweeping gestures and organized observations, from individual/emblematic to social systemic (well, the etiquette at captain's table for inst). Reminding me of early Twain, but also the darker, searching urges of later Twain, already foregrounded (but in ways that Twain may not have done).
Plus, of course, the largely self-educated verbosity, the artistic and other urge to speak truth---not totally different from the terroristic pilot-preacher---and the way he starts out (after all the quotes) by saying that he knows he needs to go to sea when he finds himself loitering in front of coffin warehouses, joining random funeral processions, and at least considering the knocking-off of hats. Also everything said about this book on pre threads, inc; "He really thought that this was going to be a hit!" and "Every time I think it can't get any gayer..."

Not saying that Melville himself was necessarily "largely self-educated," but Ishmael seems like he might be.

I'm finding it a little hard to discern what I am supposed to be reading between the lines about Edith and her marriage to Stoner -- is she supposed to suffer from what contemporary people would term a mental illness? Did her parents agree to her "marrying down" because of this, seeing her as damaged and unlikely to do better? Am I reading a sloppy and dated portrayal of what was seen as some kind of generalized female hysteria at the time?

Plus, of course, the largely self-educated verbosity, the artistic and other urge to speak truth

Halfway through The Confidence Man now, the verbosity is something (first book where I think 'damn I am missing out by not reading the old testament!'), but I wondered whether he abandons the urge to speak the truth, so much of the book might be about its pitfalls (its quite dense, therefore to speak of what it is about is not something I will feel comfortable in doing anytime soon) xxp

"pitfalls" yeah, I'm thinking the author knew very well (or the text does) that Ishmael shares some qualities with Ahab and the pilot-preacher. I'm also getting the alientation, if not social revulsion, of some of Twains later work already connecting to the zings and asides: a very sociable illin' re social ills, although I excuse myself from his company every few pages.

I had trouble with Stoner because I read it as if he was supposed to be some sort of tragic figure, like Ethan Frome or something. I felt insufficient sympathy for him and blamed the author. But Alfred's take, as I have understood it, makes me think I misread it.

Going crazy makes Ahab twice as smart! OK, can see why readers of 1851 weren't nec. thrilled with by-then very familiar gothic tendencies. Although he also whips up some succinct, plausible psych profiles, as if to say,"Don't worry folks, something's gonna happen after all! And it'll be awesome!" But could do without *all* of those examples of white being a really scary color, in some cases (did like the one about the pallor of the dead face reflecting the shock of the beholder)

just been dipping into Augustine's Commentary on the Psalms. Ho man, the crazy numerology - this on psalm 150:

Further too, the number fifty in itself also containeth a great mystery. For it consisteth of a week of weeks, with the addition of one as an eighth to complete the number fifty. For seven times seven make forty-nine, whereto one is added to make fifty

*augustine looks round in triumph*

decided to finish wolf hall:

I mostly wasn't mad keen on Bring Up the Bodies, but there was a nice passage where Cromwell is thinking about Wyatt's poems - things scribbled on bits of paper and passed around, a word changed here or there when he gives it to different people, unprinted. Enjoyable (and unusual? idk) attempt to get at coterie poetry imaginatively. (I had a bit of a reservation that it was basically a very smart, well-informed version of having someone say "Wyatt! Why he's the finest poet in the kingdom!" but shit why not)

favourite line in wolf hall is wyatt in response to cromwell on HVIII's poetry:

I should think you write the best poems. You can comfort yourself there. His Majesty’s verses can be a little repetitive, not to say self-centred.’ ‘That song of his, “Pastime With Good Company.” When I hear it there is something inside me, like a little dog, that wants to howl.'

So roiling all thee colours of Gothic darkness vs. what scares him most about whiteness: blankness of white light. Also seeks grim relief via charting the method on Ahab's madness: Cap'n figuring out where Moby Dick is most likely to turn up, computing all established patterns. Ish also takes consolation in tunneling through xoological observations of whalemen and received x made-up items from ancient sources (Borges to thread)

"zoological" I meant---there should be a xoological though

i am reading diogenes and epictetus, and a little gadamer.

also i bought a kindle, because there are some books i wanted to buy that i couldn't justify the cost of, so i figured, why not compromise and get them free/stolen but in portable, hand-held form. it better be good.

Is there a good edition of Diogenes? I've only read Guy Davenport's translations in Herakleitos and Diogenes.

i've never seen that to compare. robin hard trans. with oxford came out a few years ago, seems fairly solid for what little he has to work with. includes successors, anonymous diogenes-tradition material. not as far as the latin-tradition satirists (some of whom have large amounts of work extant, by comparison).

Thanks! The Davenport translations (which are elegant but only contextualized by a biographical headnote) are available as a PDF here, incidentally: http://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/authenticityandastonishment2/files/2013/02/Guy-Davenport-The-Fragments-of-Heraclitus-and-Diogenes.pdf

xp

afaik, Diogenes left no extant writings. There are a variety of anecdotal biographies, such as in Diogenes Laertius, plus the usual miscellania from epitomists and ancient belles lettres.

that is correct; the 'writings' are apophthegms, sayings, anecdotes, etc. many are sourced from diogenes laertius. some works are ascribed to diogenes (of sinope) but none are extant, and anyway a lot of those ascriptions are not believable, since he was largely an oral figure and seems to have had no interest in extended intellectual productions. sometimes a satirical 'republic' is mentioned.

also i found a reference to a work which i think in modern form would have to be called 'farts'. too bad such a fine collection is not to be had.

o.w.s., davenport's are a lot more aphorismy. hard's can be kind of flat; maybe because they're translated fairly literally, but also because the anecdotal context is usually given, which tends to reveal some of the unfunniness (the same kind that i find when i read, i don't know, ancient comedy).

Lynn Coady's collection Play the Monster Blind, whose stories mostly range from very good to amazing.

Eh? Describe please. Nice title.

Somewhat Carver-esque short story writer (though she also writes novels, none of which I've read), lots of regional (Eastern Canada) detail, but not to any crazily esoteric degree. The origin of that title, when revealed in the title story, is indeed pretty awesome.

"In Disguise as the Sky" is the one to read if you want to a one-story sample her and can easily find it, though.

Sounds good, will check. Thanks.

Last night I finished Points for a Compass Rose, the long poem by Evan S. Connell. For a 230 pp poem, it was surprisingly easy to read and reasonably engaging. That in itself is a feat in this day and a noteworthy accomplishment. In part, it achieves this by not trying to be a masterwork of imposing proportions.

When I put that one down, I picked up Just Kids, Patti Smith. It's too early to make sweeping summations, but in the first 50 pp or so I detect a very strong current of romantic self-mythologizing. This doesn't hurt it as a story, but it does throw a heavy cloak over the protagonists. I'll see how it continues.

Wondering about this! From WSJ:

A Bigger, Better Trollope
A restored version of Anthony Trollope’s ‘The Duke’s Children’ more deeply explores characters and emotions, and has a surprising new ending.
By
Melanie Kirkpatrick
Feb. 25, 2015 5:27 p.m. ET
3 COMMENTS

The bicentennial of the birth of the great Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope takes place this year, and there is no better way to celebrate than with the release of a nearly new Trollope novel. “The Duke’s Children” is being published for the first time in the form that the author intended. At 290,000 words—702 pages in the new Folio Society edition—the restored novel is 22% longer than the abridged version that was first serialized in 1879-80 and was the only known text until now.
Detail of an 1875 Vanity Fair illustration of Anthony Trollope. ENLARGE
Detail of an 1875 Vanity Fair illustration of Anthony Trollope. Photo: Corbis

For Trollope fans, the reconstruction of the original text of “The Duke’s Children” is the literary equivalent of being able to view Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” as it originally appeared. In the restored version, Trollope’s characters and themes come into sharper focus. Passages of beautiful prose are revealed for the first time. “It is an immensely better book,” said editor Steven Amarnick in an interview. Mr. Amarnick, who is a professor at Kingsborough Community College in New York City, reconstructed the original text over the course of 10 years with the assistance of Robert F. Wiseman and Susan Lowell Humphreys. Trollope’s handwritten manuscript of “The Duke’s Children,” showing the strikeouts he made as he was cutting the text, resides at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

“The Duke’s Children” is the final volume of Trollope’s Palliser series of six political novels. In the Pallisers—as in his earlier Barchester series of cathedral-town novels—Trollope wove an intricate tapestry of dozens of characters, interlocking story lines and grand themes. Writing in a pre-Freudian age, he offered psychological insights into the human heart that are as relevant today as they were when they were written. Virginia Woolf said readers believe in the reality of Trollope’s characters “as we do in the reality of our weekly bills.”

Michael G. Williamson, chairman of the London-based Trollope Society—who wrote the notes for the new edition of the book—concurs. “Much of Trollope’s reputation as a writer rests on his ability to create strong and believable characters,” he said in an email. Trollope’s drastic abridgment of “The Duke’s Children” “meant that, although most of the plot was retained and the book has been rightly admired in his shortened form, much of the in-depth characterization has been lost.” In cutting “The Duke’s Children,” Trollope did not eliminate any of the book’s 80 chapters. Instead, he deleted numerous passages and individual words. In doing so, he excised thousands of details about his characters.

The richer characterizations found in the restored version include that of the eponymous hero, the duke of Omnium, who is a former prime minister also known as Plantagenet Palliser. The duke is an aloof, enigmatic figure who plays key roles in the preceding Palliser novels. But it is only in “The Duke’s Children” that his inner life is explored in depth. That is part of the book’s appeal—to see a familiar character, a man readers thought they knew—emerge as a more fully formed person.

As the book opens, the duke’s wife—the vivacious Lady Glencora—has died, and the duke is left to deal with his three nearly grown children, their unsuitable suitors and their youthful peccadilloes. The duke, who has always been better at political maneuvering than at managing personal relationships, is at sea. The duke’s three children—Lord Silverbridge, Lord Gerald and Lady Mary—seem beyond his understanding or control. Trollope’s subject is the joys and sorrows of fatherhood.

“The Duke’s Children” is also about grief, about which Trollope’s descriptions may be unsurpassed in English literature. The book’s moving opening line is the same in both versions: “No one, probably, ever felt himself to be more alone in the world than our old friend, the Duke of Omnium, when the Duchess died.”

The restored version explores the duke’s grief in greater depth than in the abridged version. There is a poignant passage in which Trollope describes the duke’s guilt at having taken his wife for granted: “In those former days many a long evening he had passed all alone in his library, satisfied with blue-books, newspapers, and speculations on political economy, and had never crossed the threshold of his wife’s drawing-room; but now, when there was no longer a threshold that he could cross, he felt himself to be deserted.”

Silverbridge, the duke’s elder son and heir, emerges as a far more likable and sympathetic character in the restored version. “He comes alive,” said Mr. Amarnick, in a way he doesn’t in the cut version. Silverbridge starts out as a boy but becomes a man by the end of the book “and you see the steps along the way” to his maturity. It’s the “accumulation of subtle details that makes the difference.” Trollope is sometimes criticized for not devoting enough attention to his male characters, who often pale against the vibrant women who walk through his pages. In the extended version of “The Duke’s Children,” Trollope’s young men are as complex and credible as his women.

Both versions end happily, with the duke finally agreeing to accept Silverbridge’s and Mary’s choices of whom to marry. In the abridged text, the book’s final lines have to do with the duke’s grudging acceptance of Mary’s new husband. The concluding words of the restored version, however, set a different tone. Gerald, the younger son, gets the last word: “‘It will be my turn next,’ said Gerald, as he was smoking with his brother that evening. ‘After what you and Mary have done, I think he must let me have my own way whatever it is.’”

This ending raises the intriguing possibility that Trollope didn’t intend to end the Palliser series with “The Duke’s Children.” Did he have another Palliser book in mind? Did he plan to carry on with the story of Silverbridge, Gerald and Mary? We’ll never know. The author died two years after “The Duke’s Children” was published.

During his lifetime, Trollope was a prolific and popular writer, the author of 47 novels. His literary reputation, however, never soared quite to the heights of that of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and the Brontë sisters. His ranking has been on the rise in recent years, though, and the publication of “The Duke’s Children” in its original text should help keep that momentum going.

In the 1970s, the BBC’s lavish miniseries of “The Pallisers” built popular interest in Trollope. So, too, did the formation, in 1987, of the Trollope Society, which published the first complete edition of his work. Several biographies, out in the 1990s, enhanced the author’s academic standing.

“The Duke’s Children” is being published by the Folio Society in association with the Trollope Society. It deserves to be the new standard text of the novel. The expanded version is superior to the previously published one—richer, more expansive, subtler, wiser. In other words, to use a term of high literary praise, it is more Trollopian.

Ms. Kirkpatrick, a former deputy editor of the Journal’s editorial page, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a member of the Trollope Society.

Unfortunately, this reminds me of the hype over the latest edition of Twain's Autobiography. The article dow quotes appears to be lifted largely from a press release. From its contents, it would appear that the Trollope Society has a financial stake in the edition being touted. This wouldn't render worthless the information or opinions put forth, but it does provide a reason for skepticism. It is also noteworthy that the abridgement of the original text was done by the author, not an editor.

Graham Greene - The Quiet American

William T. Vollmann's Seven Dreams pomo historical-fiction uncompleted cycle... I dig it so far (1.5 books in; not quite in order)

I finished Just Kids last night. The tone of romantic mythologizing was consistent throughout, but as the story progressed I settled into complete acceptance of that approach and it didn't bother me any more than it would in, for example, Daphnis and Chloe by Longus. It was a romance -- and a pretty damn good one, too.

I loved Just Kids, but I have to admit that a lot of that was just that it was the closest I'll ever get to just hanging out with Patti and Robert.

I enjoyed it, too. There are a ton and a half of celebrity autobiographies and memoirs out there and most of them are name-dropping, self-promoting tripe. This one plays in a completely different league. I have no bones to pick with either romanticism or mythology, if the author respects her tools and knows how to use them.

i read zanjon de la aguada by pedro lemebel, because he recently passed away. great little book of short pieces, not really stories or essays, something in between generally. great piece on the social origins of chilean barras bravas (football hooligans), lots of good, disillusioned and bitter pieces about the transition to democracy, the centrist governments, and the process of "reconciliation".

Broken my new years resolution to only read one novel at a time, so I'm in the middle of Under the Net by Iris Murdoch, Where the Air is Clear by Iris Murdoch, and Concrete by Thomas Bernhardt. Hoping to get them finished off and go back to one at a time, it really is much better that way. Also dipping into Selected W.H. Auden and Collected Philip Larkin, the first two poetry books I've ever bought.

i ve been reading trollope the past 6-9 months but i don't think i ve finished any of them and gone 'that book deserved to be longer'

slowly making my way through a reread of erskine childers' the riddle of the sands which transcends the likes of buchan and his ilk to a ridiculous degree... also mostly free of the more unpleasant aspects you get in buchan, and when the rule britannia-ism and his didactic aims do get more pronounced childers' fate becomes all the more ironic (guess he's a good illustration of orwell's 'transferred nationalism')

Patricia Highsmith's Little Tales of Misogyny gives her misanthropy and all its facets full flight, slowly accumulating across the tales (they have a zip of a tale rather than short story). Duras' Emily L. comes from someone utterly in control of her craft. The way the book closes as she addresses you - the reader - by saying that she is automatically writing with no revision is scary. Although her notions of who is desiring who and at what moment (makes it better than the literally game of who is speaking what), those little (but by no means any less momentous) ups-and-downs on the road to a (ultimately destroyed, tortured) love, which actually give you everything you need in life...is something she pretty much had been working since the late 50s (this book is written towards the end of her life). Its great to see her working it over again and again, burning the midnight oil to refine it. Its a shame this book isn't spoken alongside some of the others, she got even better at it.

the riddle of the sands was one of the first novels i read circa the age of 10 or so and i have been mindful of rereading it

sloterdijk!

did 'little tales' get a re-ish? someone else mentioned it to me the other day

I'm three quarters through my rereading of Sodom and Gomorrah. Charlus has said he prefers strawberry lemonade, leading the narrator to think, "Aha! He's given himself away as an invert!"

thomp, yeah (rev link within the thread): patricia highsmith, animal lover

for only 3.99 too huh

52p for me as I got the hardback on an interlibrary loan.

About 2/3rds of the way through the 2nd book of Knausgaard's "My Struggle". It's starting to seem a little bit like "This happened, then this happened..." although I'm sure there was lots of artful pruning. Also, the fact he's writing about his current wife and family increases the ick factor a bit. Still like it, but not sure I'll have the energy to keep going in the series.

For my next book I picked up a novel by a local Oregon author from the mid-20th century, Winds of Morning, H.L. Davis. This book is set in Oregon, a few decades earlier than its publication date of 1952, in a semi-frontier small town atmosphere. Cars are competing with horses and the horses still have the upper hand. I've read a couple of his novels already and enjoyed them.

his birthplace has a nice name

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonpareil,_Oregon

He's an interesting and worthwhile minor novelist. Try Honey in the Horn, if you can locate a copy.

Jane Gardam's Old Filth just gutted me. I suspect that I'll look back on my strong and immediate reaction with some embarrassment, and probably compare her to some Oprah's Reading Club picks a la Barbara Kingsolver, but at the moment I am just a little in love.

Those Who Walk Away - Patricia Highsmith

Just read the synopsis. The plot sounds insane, i.e. good.

One thing that really strikes me in The Quiet American is how much the war scenes (and narrative attitudes toward them) remind me of later films about the Vietnam War (the American one). I kind of visualize them by taking scenes from Apocalypse Now and just putting the soldiers in Korean War era military gear.

Finished a couple of more books by Natalia Ginzburg, this is a writer 4 lyfe. The prose is (as I said way above after reading Valentino and Sagittarius) virtually like nobody else, so matter of fact about events that are so destructive for its characters. Little Virtues is a book of essays but contains what seem to be short-fictions (the title piece is a piece of advice to parents?!)...whatever she is setting its very clinically done. Her piece on Pavese (probably the only author she could be compared with I think, although they write differently, but just in terms of where they come from and similarity of trauma) is one of the best tributes you could read from one writer to another. Its not at all emotional about Pavese's suicide -- she understands no one could've done anything for him, clearly implied though she doesn't outright say it -- but the main thing is she never thinks to write differently (in a different manner) from anything else or any other subject. No room for emotion, like she know her art is robust and at her service, to do what she wishes. There are two pieces on London which would totally be a 'London realness' thing. She despised the place. Again though its done in such a calm and collected manner, the observations tick along before it amounts to pure hatred. Family Sayings is from a translation published in the late 60s (Little Virtues was published around the same time but the translation is from the 80s), her account of growing up, marriage, escape from the Nazis, her work in publishing. So much is left out here. Her husband was killed by the Nazis but there is no big show or tears (you could be forgiven for missing it when the news comes in), plenty about the publishing scene, more on Pavese. There is no big love story, the main focus is the early years where certain 'sayings' by family members are recorded as landmarks of childhood, a Proustian application. I don't think this is as sharply translated, so it'll be interesting to see what happens when the new translation comes out on NYRB later this year. Got another book of hers to read later this week.

Frank Wedekind - The Lulu Plays.

the observations tick along before it amounts to pure hatred no room for emotion Limited appeal so far. Quotes?

Charlus has said he prefers strawberry lemonade, leading the narrator to think, "Aha! He's given himself away as an invert!"

I have got to read that.

Have been lucky, having hit a few really wonderful books in a row:

Petri Tamminen’s 'Crime Novel': Finnish not-really-crime-novel-at-all about a congenial detective seeking a not-really-a-criminal who makes people question their whole lives via humiliation, full of beautifully wry descriptions and writing. This here is a better review than I can manage: http://www.typographicalera.com/crime-novel-petri-tamminen/

Max Blecher: Adventures in Immediate Unreality - fictionalised memoir of growing up with odd hallucinations in Romania in the 1910s/20s, from an amazing writer who died of TB at age 28. I read his 'Scarred Hearts' a couple of years ago, about the weirdly upbeat febrile world of a TB sanitorium (euphoria often being a symptom of end-stage TB), and this may be even better

Richard Beard: Acts of the Assassins -- Roman counter-insurgency agent in parallel-world 21st-Century Jerusalem executes a terrorist/rabble-rouser called Jesus, loses the body, tries to work out what the hell is going on by tracking down Jesus' 12 disciples, but they keep dying in hideous ways (shot full of arrows, crucified, skinned alive, etc), under huge pressure from Roman CIA-equivalent superiors

those all sound awesome

the observations tick along before it amounts to pure hatred no room for emotion Limited appeal so far. Quotes?

― dow, Thursday, 5 March 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think the hatred sorta creeps up on you...can't provide quotes right now, what I'll say is that its appeal is indeed limited.

Finished Moby-Dick by surprise, a couple days ago: just rolled right into it, after all the slow close reading required for so long, somehow he led me right to the inevitable, but still startling end, with the realness clicking in again, "And this was by no means unheard-of," given certain physical circumstances of a situation at sea," and once you take it this far, this is the reaction you'll probably get.
But still in contrast with the DO YOU SEE bits, piling up now, esp. what this Library of America edition's jacket flap calls "Shakespearean hyperbole," though this gets better when the images of lost boys start piling up, def incl Pip, and how he and Ahab move into something suggesting (but not too derivative of) Lear and the Fool. "God's gone a-blackberrying among the stars," my God. The way all the nautical realism and purple etc go mulching into poetry (though not as set pieces, ultimately the creative compression is true to the whole process and experience, as we go rolling through ups and downs, in terms of quality as well as emotion etc)
So, that makes me wonder: anybody read Clarel? A book-length poem, right?

a situation at sea (didn't mean to make quotation marks after that; it's my phrase, not his)

shit, never even heard of Clarel. It's frigging HUGE!

I'm nearing the end of Michel Tournier's The Erl King. I have to say I'm blown away by it. Just the way it sets you up with this vile narrator, who has his own deeply warped system for how he views the world, a paedophile - then as the action moves into Germany during WW2 - you get to see his richly developed and bizarre views as compared with theirs - it's just this sea of depravity, violence and homoeroticism. The whole book feels kind of corrupting - like you're being coaxed into empathising with madness all the way through.

Incidentally it's also the first time I've felt genuine concern that someone might read a book over my shoulder - I'm assuming I got put on some kind of register for buying this.

I am reading my first Ursula LeGuin novel, which is strange considering she is the most honored and renowned author ever to live in my home town. I checked out The Lathe of Heaven from the library and started it last night.

Haven't read it, but the PBS version seemed pretty amazing at the time (late 70s). Ditto the ones I did read, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.

Henry Green - Party Going
Reinaldo Arenas - Before Night Falls
Robert Christgau - Going to the City
James Merrill - Selected Poems (nth time)

Robert Anderson - Tea and Sympathy
Finally got curious enough to read this. The homosuspicious hero turns out to be hetero. The villain--well, the main villain--turns out to be a repressed homo. The status quo survives.

The movie is hilarious.

The Lathe of Heaven is a lot of fun, though it doesn't really seem like a typical Le Guin, more like her writing a solid PKD novel.

Just started reading Open City, also in the middle of Kelly Link's Magic For Beginners

The movie is hilarious.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, March 8, 2015 1:51 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not on purpose, I'm guessing.

reading josipovici's book on modernism

bit thin innit

Rereading select essays in Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends, which will inevitably turn into rereading *all* of the essays in Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends.

Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality, by S. J. Tambiah. It seems like a nice overview of a lot of different writers I've started getting interested in, from Malinowski to Keith Thomas. These people are giving me a damn lot to read though.

read elena ferrante's "my brilliant friend". now reading "days of abandonment" and anticipating dayna tortorici's apparently-imminent takedown in n+1.

Would be interesting to read any takedowns, just because I haven't read a single one - her writing around female friendship hasn't been interrogated enough.

I finished Lathe of Heaven a few days ago. The most fun of it was knowing all the real places that went with the local place names. It was enough fun and a quick 200pp romp, but I am reminded again that the appeals of sci-fi are rarely all that enticing to me, no matter how ingenious the ideas being put through their paces. There's something about the genre that I am indifferent to. Its joys are not my joys.

Picked up the Duff Mckagan memoir It's So Easy and Other Lies in a charity shop a couple of weeks ago. So been reading that when I'm in bed. Quite interesting i guess. Have wondered to what extent it was ghosted.

QI book of General Ignorance as my toilet book. Loads of interesting factoids presented in a very entertaining way. Another charity shop find.

& got Cloud Atlas as my travelling book. Saw the film cos it was on cheap at a local cinema last year so have wanted to read the book. But I guess everybody else did that a few years back?

Also have the flu, is that an excuse?

I think if i read through the backlog of books that are on my shelves I might come up with something a bit more nourishing than a couple of those. Wonder if I ever will get though everything I have here. & I'm still walking into charity shops and leaving with a couploe of things on a pretty regular basis. Flu making me maudlin.

Natalia Ginzburg - Voices in the Evening.

Marlen Haushofer - The Wall. Know there is a film but if Bela Tarr ever fancies coming out of retirement..

Assia Djebar - Seven Stories. Reading a couple of these: feminism, islam and the West...her works would be interesting for thinking about those usual conflicting forces except the prose is not doing anything. Given I have my studio head hat on the last story is very much like The Patience Stone, a similar kind of idea.

I am now halfway through Muriel Spark's Loitering With Intent and am finding it typically enjoyable. It is satiric, which is to say that one easily identifies the characters without identifying with them.

may not be a takedown of ferrante, after all. seen it described as "coruscating", though understand that doesn't necessarily mean it's negative.

Having read only her first two Neapolitan Novels,I wonder what a takedown would consist of? "Oh no, that's not the way we 'hood girls rolled in '53"? Suppose somebody could say it seems too much like neorealist chick-flicks. So far so very good, far as I'm concerned.

There's a sort of takedown of reviews of Ferrante here: http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/peer-review-elena-ferrantes-hunger-rebellion-and-rage/

Good piece except I think there is space for:

It’s easy to ask too much of book reviewers, of course: space constraints, audience expectations, and reviewing conventions alike make it a category mistake, in most cases, to go looking for really sustained analysis beyond plot, character, and some general orientation of the ‘life and times’ variety.

This is what Rohan should do so I'm looking forward to that.

Some good comments on the Neapolitan Novels thread too.

I can't finish that Assia Djebar book. When you read Literature in translation from areas in the third world you are often reading tragedies that seem so limited by the political situation they are surrounded by. Riffing off on ideas from Brodsky's essay on Platonov but its certainly something you feel after a good stretch of reading lots of dour-ish novels from South America where there all those dictator novels which I quite liked at the time but that you equally wouldn't go back to, instead you stick Juan Rulfo and Bolano.

Virginia Woolf - Mrs Dalloway. Loved this, the party (and a lot of interactions pre-) is Proust in microcosm (parties are lame, as is fun), except there is no smart protagonist so to make Clarissa interesting is a challenge - which Woolf is equal to in her prose. I'd like to double check on her geography of London, mostly fine but I wonder about a couple of streets she was describing...its a great London novel tho'.

Claude Magris - Danube. Giving this an inattentive read this morning. Journeys to x place -- talks about Musil -- then y -- quotes Canetti -- and z -- Holderlin. Doing a lot of ticking of people I've read, and checking whether I've been right all along (dislikes Junger but likes Hamsun and Celine. v good, tick...the reason seems to be a class so double tick).

Not sure exactly as to the thesis in this meandering literary travelogue that is nice for me as it puts so much stuff I have read over the last 12-15 months in one place.

Claudio Magris, apols to fans for misspelling.

Maurice Blanchot - The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me. Substantial writing about, well, nothing in particular.

I just finished The Erl-King, which I was shitting on about upthread. I can't recommend it enough - it goes from this one loner's depravity in France deep into Nazi Germany - actually some of the most interesting comment I've read on the Nazis within that story. Reminds me a bit of the Jonathan Meades doc about Nazi buildings. There's a fire and brimstone feel to it as the war ends - some amazing writing.

I'm now reading The Man In The High Castle - pretty cleverly done, so overtly post-modern, makes you think about accepted belief systems. Really cool to see one of the Japanese characters asking the American to explain Ms Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West - don't think I've ever seen a shoutout like this, and I just read the latter a few months ago.

Next up will be one of, Don DeLillo's White Noise, Dalkey Archives Best European Stories 2015, or Carson McCuller's Collected Stories.

I am dipping into a book of short stories by Dorthe Nors every now and again too - the first two were pretty sharp.

As I'm a masochist I'm reading yet more Peter Hamilton books. Part way through his Nights Dawn trilogy

i find myself reading Return Of The Native as someone mentioned that there's an eclipse in it, so, topical. 13% in but it looks as is all 380 pages happens in one night.

i also think that we were given it as a bit of pre-o-level (we did Madding Crowd as a set text for the exam, this was a year or two before) but i don't think we ever read the whole thing. some of the prose is challenging to me now, 30+ years later. and there are a lot of dialect words - vlankers for instance - words that only return google hits for Hardy novels.

Lately I've mostly been rereading the Situationists; Samuel Delany's early fiction in Aye, and Gomorrah and The Einstein Intersection and his memoir of his beginnings as a writer, The Motion of Light in Water, which is one of the most vivid texts I've read on queer life in New York before Stonewall, although Delany's characterization of his then-wife Marilyn Hacker is often strangely elliptical or opaque; also finishing Chris Kraus's second hybrid of fiction, memoir, and art criticism, Aliens and Anorexia, which seems more fragmentary than I Love Dick despite continuing many of the same lines of thought but is still rewarding and paradoxically satisfying in its exploration of artistic failure, though I was hoping Kraus would develop the thread of Simone Weil's life further; and Ingeborg Bachmann's short stories in The Thirtieth Year, which anticipate the ferocity of Malina and Bernhard's fiction in their sense of the violent incommensurability of utopian longings with actually existing relationships.

hey ows, if i wanted a quick course in what benjamin thought about modernism (pref. literary, but any), is there any way to cut to the core (given the way he worked)?

i was thinking of going through one of those brecht collections, and the baudelaire collection (which sticks early stuff together with parts/outtakes from the arcades proj). annoyingly i have not really read any brecht or baudelaire, but what are ya gonna do.

You could read some Brecht or Baudelaire?

There is no decent collection of Walter B's lit crit is there, other than a few essays in Illuminations.

Love The Motion of Light and Water, although there is a tinge of sadness that I like it more than much of Delaney's actual fiction.

Ingeborg Bachmann's short stories in The Thirtieth Year, which anticipate the ferocity of Malina and Bernhard's fiction in their sense of the violent incommensurability of utopian longings with actually existing relationships.

My library doesn't have a copy :-(

fair amount of literary criticism in the first belknap volume of his selected writings, from memory. need to read his essay on surrealism.

xyzzz there's a slim volume of Ingeborg Bachmann short stories in an Oxfam near my work, if you want me to grab it for you (assuming it's still there tomorrow). It looked good, I would have bought it but I am finding myself never getting round to reading short stories.

If you could try Tim that would be great!

xxxp there are now plenty of collections, and also i have all of the belknap volumes, it's just that there's a lot to sort through

hey ows, if i wanted a quick course in what benjamin thought about modernism (pref. literary, but any), is there any way to cut to the core (given the way he worked)?

i was thinking of going through one of those brecht collections, and the baudelaire collection (which sticks early stuff together with parts/outtakes from the arcades proj). annoyingly i have not really read any brecht or baudelaire, but what are ya gonna do.

Great question, j.! Benjamin's engagement with modernism is so extensive that it's difficult to narrow it down to a few representative texts, but the Baudelaire collection would indeed be the best place to start. Its central essays represent a very late crystallization of Benjamin's broader thought about capitalist modernity in The Arcades Project, even if it only represents one way among many possible others of fitting that vast collection of fragments together. After you've gone through the Baudelaire and Brecht collections (the most relevant essays in the latter are probably "The Author as Producer" and "What is Epic Theatre?"), you could supplement those texts with "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility" (which is not really focused on literature, and which I'm almost certain you've already read, but it's nonetheless crucial to Benjamin's thinking about aesthetics and modernity), "Surrealism", "Crisis of the Novel" (on Döblin and Berlin Alexanderplatz), "Franz Kafka", "On the Image of Proust", and "The Storyteller" (which is in part an implicit response to Lukács's Theory of the Novel, iirc). You shouldn't need to have read much Baudelaire or Brecht to follow the thread of Benjamin's analysis, although it's obviously always worth reading them on their own.

thanks, ows. i've read many of these over the years, it's just piecing it together that has recently become more needful. 'crisis' should be good, i had recently had an independent hankering to fit döblin into my crazy schemes somehow.

Getting into the first Game Of Thrones book.
Also got a cop memoir called Blue Blood as my toilet book which seems pretty interesting.

& Cloud Atlas for reading on transport and wherever. Am enjoying bits of this.

Robert Lapsey - Introducing Film Theory
Alan Partridge - We Need To Talk About Alan (on audiobook while walking)
JM Coetzee - Disgrace

Coetzee is a huge tool. I was a student in a workshop he ran ca. '99. I was a typical undergraduate, eager and undisciplined, and full of better ideas than writing chops. As part of the program, I brought him a manuscript I'd prepared. Even though I'd worked hard for the honor/privilege of his eyes, JMC refused to look at it beyond the first sentence. He pulled out some lame-o Jedi teacher 'this is too long, bring it to me when it's half the length' bologna. But I didn't know better. I worked like a dog for a few days to cut it down by like 60%, at which point I gave it to Coetzee who read the reworked first page and ––actually –– scoffed. 'Too short,' he said, 'bring this back to me when you've expanded by, even, two or three times its current length.'

hahahaha

You can call your memoir Disgrace too!

Did he ever end up reading it?

i had a teacher who did that with me, not in the same way. 'let's just talk about the first paragraph…'. it was actually effective, if frustrating.

A savvy professor took pity on me and clued me in to JMC's bogosity. I never showed him anything. Funny story, though, that the next writer-in-residence was given my manuscript, professed to LOVE IT, and offered to help me edit it for submission to some magazines in which he had hooks. I was done being burned, and I turned him down. I figured he'd been asked to puff me up by the professors who knew I'd been burned by JMC. I didn't want to get played again. Something like eight years later I was working in the Borders in downtown Seattle when this second, friendly, author came in to sign copies of his newest title. He saw me, recognized me, and remembered basically the entire story I'd written, and told me (again) how much he loved it.

screw you, pompous nobel prize winner

Hassan Blasim: The Iraqi Christ - this was published with another book in the US as 'The Corpse Exhibition'. Very visceral stuff, full of suicide bombings and murders and knifings and rape. Not sure if it's actually GOOD, but it's certainly vivid.

Hey xyzz, here's what you scored today: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0841910715

Drop me a line, let me know when we can catch up to hand it over (I might try to make it to the FAP later in the month; if that's the right choice it might have to be a flying FAP visit on my part.

Alan Partridge - We Need To Talk About Alan (on audiobook while walking)

this is partridge's best work. absolutely hilarious.

Thanks Tim!! I'll drop you a text later in the week, think I can drop into Hangover L this Sunday. Otherwise the FAP is scheduled for the 26th.

(We go from 5-9 on a Sunday these days, just in case you didn't know.)

(I didn't, thanks.)

Alan Partridge - We Need To Talk About Alan (on audiobook while walking)

this is partridge's best work. absolutely hilarious.

I'm guessing the audiobook version is the preferred version?

Yep. I can't praise it enough - worth about four consecutive listens at the start.

ah yeah this was made for audiobook really

litbore in pub came up to me and came up with the an all-time acme litbore exchange:

"I personally find Dombey and Son a very difficult book"
"Why?"
"That's a very good question without you knowing why."

10/10 for bore technique there.

the an bore.

I recently finished a book of essays by David Quammen, Natural Acts. They were all originally magazine pieces, but somewhat above average for style and content. This was the 'expanded and revised' edition of 2008.

I then picked up volume one of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard and I'm about 90pp into it. I can't say it has hooked me. It is a contrast to the Patti Smith memoir, Just Kids, that I recently read, in that instead of being classified as non-fiction while taking a mythologizing approach, My Struggle is classified as a novel, but pushes its stories forward by sweeping together the sorts of humdrum details one could almost call life's dust.

Although it is clearly starting out as an autobiographical bildungsroman, filled with family and friends from the author's young life, I notice a glaring lack of empathy for any of the characters described in it. Knausgaard doesn't endow a single one of them with a trace of inner life or even show curiosity about what his characters might think or feel. Even his descriptions of his own thoughts and feelings are cursory and mainly concern his immediate goals and barest motives. I find the result sterile and rather barren, as if he were trying to follow Beckett's lead without grasping any of Beckett's subtlety.

I may not finish this, especially since he continues to pile on further volumes I might feel it necessary to read if I get through this one.

Finished Victor Serge's Midnight in the Century which -- given the chronology -- is where he actually pares down all the experimental fiction he has been reading and is about to embark in the greatest writing of his life, to be found in The Unforgiving years and Comrade Tulayev, as the purges become inescapable, and Serge's fiction could not be an escape ("Writer as witness", as Richard Greenman put it in his intro). Serge is so good at marshaling together quotidian detail of Soviet life, he is so alert - which works for any novelist of course, but also has implications for that Bolshevik project of proletarian fiction. Here his writing is taking a turn towards something more lyrical, and at times strangely Platonov-like with lines such as:

Men existed here in sharp relief, the accumulated hours crushed them, but time per se did not exist

or later with this:

Life was passing out of them, visibly, in bloody stools, all day, all night

Further on the historical front I've also finished Yourcenar's Memories of Hadrian. Reading the novel cold, without any knowledge of the historical Hadrian I liked how he was cast as this liberal in his interior life who could be a brutal, calculating tyrant when he needed to (typical liberal huh?) My edition had reflections on the composition of the book, and that is really worth a read. On one page Yourcenar talks about her novel as not about time, but space:

time itself has nothing to do with the matter. It is always surprising that my contemporaries, masters as they consider themselves to be over space, apparently remain unaware that one can contract the distance between spaces at will

I chose to abandon My Struggle. It was not right for me.

I just read Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. It was an unabashed romance, but unlike most modern romances it was celibate. I would call it an updated take on the medieval genre of hagiography, but using all the naturalistic conventions of the novel. Taken on these terms, it was a pleasant book, incorporating a very sweet and pure vision of humanity, based strongly in the catholic tradition of worship of the Virgin Mary.

Cather should be imitated and discussed like Hemingway is. She's the best American novelist of that era.

Started and finished a bunch of books this week:

Julian E. Zelizer - The Fierce Urgency of Now
Mario Vargas Llosa - The Discreet Hero
Marilynne Robinson - The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

i got to the part in 'of experience' where montaigne details life with his kidney stones AT LENGTH. so i have been reading that, and i am still reading that.

and still sloterdijk.

which one?

same, critique of cynical reason (it's long!)

ah i thought maybe you were tackling the "Bubbles" thing...i haven't really seen much/any talk about that.

yeesh that's > 600 pages too

better get on it!

Mulling can't last much longer; flights of fancy must be coming soon: good time to post.

Past reading: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber (Whiteflower must be cauliflower; I think I read that it can be used to make pizza crust; and there is an Indian dish with potato served at the Indian Oven in Columbus, OH.)
Current reading: Satin Island by Tom McCarthy (Euro accents -- contemporary!)
Interim reading (Please do not judge ... the combined influence of the NYT Book Review and my lending library's approval plan and ILX reading lists!): Hall of Small Mammals by Thomas Pierce; Single, Carefree, Mellow by Katherine Heiny; The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Future reading (books on coffee table (borrowed) for now; books on shelves (bought) not included): The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt; C by Tom McCarthy

Mario Vargas Llosa - Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
James Harvey - Watching Them Be: Star Presence on the Screen From Garbo to Balthazar

just started Andew Scull's "Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine"

Interim reading (addendum): (you were wrong) by Matthew Sharpe

die fröhliche wissenschaft

Been reading "Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer. Pre-Revolutionary War US history is something I haven't read much of before, and this book makes it pretty interesting, despite being fairly systematic and academic in its approach.

Mulling can't last much longer; flights of fancy must be coming soon

Obviously youn is not an ambitious, go-getter and self-starter type of poster!

I'm almost finished George Saunders' Tenth of December which is so fucking good. Read slowly over a couple of months because it was hitting so close to home, I had to keep stopping to give myself a break. I've never read Saunders before and some of these stories are totally devastating.

I'm glad to hear that Coetzee is a huge tool.

Righteous Dopefiend, by Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg, about a community of heroin users living under a freeway interchange in San Francisco. It's bleak but immensely engaging. Schonberg's photography is really excellent.

I have just inaugurated a new WAYR thread for springtime 2015. I opened all the windows and it is well-aired and ready for customers.