Spring is sprung in 2015: What Are You Reading, Vernally Speaking?

The wintertime 2015 WAYR thread has worn itself out in the service of ILB. It is time for a new one, as youn helpfully pointed out. Welcome. Both coffee and tea are available on a self-serve basis on the table at the back wall of the forum.

Last night I polished off Cocktail Time by P.G. Wodehouse. It was up to his average.

I am also about 2/3rds of the way through Alan Watts' first book: The Meaning of Happiness. It is more prolix than his subsequent books, but shows where his thinking was more rooted in Jungian and Anglican ideas as he began his career.

i'm reading Secret Prey by John Sandford. because i can't stop reading his books. and because i have read all the Jack Reacher books. all my fancy books are crying in the corner. although i prefer Sandford's Virgil Flowers books to his Lucas Davenport books. but only by a little. they all kinda blend together after awhile. kinda like Wodehouse kinda!

Re-reading Alexander MacLeod's fine short story collection Light Lifting.

I read Tom McCarthy's Satin Island and it was ok. Sort of nothing-y. Now I'm reading the new Richard Price (or whatever his nom de plume is for this one), The Whites. It's super Richard Price-y, in a good way.

Continuing to alternate contemporary lit, science fiction, canon. So most recently: Moby Dick, Dune, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Madame Bovary, Wolf In White Van, and just started Dune Messiah. Next subset (getting away from 19th Century for the moment): prob. either Invisible Man or On The Road, Redeployment, and Children of Dune fer shure. Then prob back to Melville, most likely Pierre Or The Ambiguities. What new/new-ish contemporary lit should I read then?

In lieu of a more useful or focused recommendation: some of my favorite recently-published books have been Casey Plett's A Safe Girl to Love, Imogen Binnie's Nevada, Luiselli Valeria's Faces in the Crowd (fiction), CA Conrad's A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (amalgams of essays and poetry), Leslie Jamison's Empathy Exams (essays), Kiese Laymon's How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's The End of San Francisco (political critique in an autobiographical mode).

Er, Valeria Luiselli, I mean.

Thanks, I've been meaning to read Citizen, will check the others too. In contemporary lit I tend to look for what might be called magic realism, or what science fiction etc. fans call slipstream, with sf, fantasy-associated influences, so, in recent years, I've enjoyed Zone One (which works as lit x genre), Vampires In The Lemon Grove, A Visit From The Goon Squad, No One Is Here Except All of Us, and the previously mentioned novels by Karen Joy Fowler and John Darnielle. Didn't get into The Tenth of December and Life After Life as much as expected. Also waiting for vol. 3 of The Neapolitan Novels, ordered by my local library.

Read/heard good things about Kelly Link too.

Oh yeah, I really liked The Leftovers too.

Started spring with a bunch of essay collections by fiction writers: Woolf's Street Haunting and Other Essays collects quite a range in the 'other'. Essays on people -- where she shows a Hazlitt like handling, from the lightly ironic to more acidic tones towards her subjects -- and then class (natch), with "The Leaning Tower" being a highlight (two page stretch of her speculations around what the novel would look like in a world free of inequality is akin to Trotsky doing something similar in his own essays on lit if I very dimly recall). The way it ends is how I feel I am as someone who reads -- it could almost be an ILB manifesto. As a collection its a good sample of her essays though I think it needs more concentration in perhaps a specific area for me. Really like to read her on Joyce (says w/trepidation). Bolano's Between Parenthesis, mostly collecting a bunch of his columns written for newspapers - two-to-three pages at most. Only a 1/3 of the way through so I'd say that he is in no way a critic, a lot of his remarks are on Spanish-language writers he knows and likes and just says 'buy this k tx bye' (or it comes off that way). Its put together as book-after-book, giving it a delirious quality -- lived life as an orgy of reading -- functioning as a biography of sorts. There are few writers that I didn't know about that I want to go on and read though. One thing that is coming out is how I feel a lot about boom writers these days - that ambition on the one and unevenness on the other, cf. his remarks on Donoso. Now in the final stretch of Yourcenar's Mishima: A Vision of the Void. I think I've read nearly everything of his (bar the pays) translated and published in English a few years ago now - but never any commentary, so its good on that level (though I wish I had re-read a bunch before tackling this). She is right that a big stumbling block proves to be a lack of knowledge around Buddhism when it comes to reading The Sea of Fertility, where you really don't where to go with the drama a lot of the time given underpinned it all is by reincarnation. Yourcenar is v weak on what caused his suicide. She said she wouldn't use psychology, but then she tries to use a few facts -- the Nobel prize going to Kabawata, that he was a star in Japan but nowhere else, isolation in Western trips, which is slim as soon as I say it, but she sort of leaves it there for you to sort out. Anyway I'm on the last 1/3rd of that so hopefully it will go somewhere but for the moment its a v needed piece of commentary on the works, and what we need is a rescuing of the works from the author.

I finished the Watts book. It was a good refresher.

I have a public library copy of DFW's posthumous essay collection Both Flesh and Not Flesh. I may open it next and read a few. I'm not expecting anything great, since these are partly the sweepings that were left uncollected during his lifetime.

read some cioran, many years after having last read him

i know there were plenty of nouveau roman-istes or whatever but it's funny to read him hammering on the nature of the novelistic art and feel like every single thing is about beckett, he sure did a number on mid 20th-c criticism huh

In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile by Dan Davies (not great. the savile book is yet to be written)
Peter Brown's The Rise of Western Christendom
Plato's Crito, very very slowly

very very greekly?

Thanks, I've been meaning to read Citizen, will check the others too. In contemporary lit I tend to look for what might be called magic realism, or what science fiction etc. fans call slipstream, with sf, fantasy-associated influences,

dow, did you ever read Bolaño's Amulet? It seems to be one of his more-neglected short novels, but it has a fractured, hallucinatory quality you might like. Out of those fiction recommendations, Faces in the Crowd probably has the closest relation to what you're looking for--the Binnie and Plett books are mostly realist, and important to me in part for how they distance themselves from the sentimental and dehumanizing conventions for writing about trans lives.

Thanks for the tips, will check. 2666 still passes through my head fairly often. I like realism too, especially Ferrante and The Way We Live Now Really want to check this novel by a young Vietnamese-American; amazing description here (very thorough too--those who worry about spoilers might want to stop reading before the last couple of grafs):
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/books/review/the-sympathizer-by-viet-thanh-nguyen.html?_r=0

Winding down on my Scando crime binge as winter finally recedes here in the northeast US. I'll spare the gory details other than to say from the second level of authors, Iceland's Arnaldur Indridason is best in class. Currently finishing his Outrage then going all-in w/non-fiction until the new Richard Price arrives in my library queue. Last month or two I've also read two by Alfred's buddy Christopher Hitchens. Blood Class & Empire is a breezy stand-alone on the "special relationship" between US/UK, certainly diverting & informative but leaves me wondering about its historical points. Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers In The Public Sphere is a collection of reviews and essays, an appropriately mixed bag where I enjoyed the pieces on contemporaries far more than classics but you may well think the opposite. Also read Robert Christgau's memoir Going To The City which I will address in length soon, perhaps on ILM. Currently reading David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb as well and liking it much more than expected.

just finished the man in the high castle - was decent but a bit stupid in the end i thought. the last chapters were fairly disappointing. good concept tho and mostly well delivered.

just started a collection of carson mccullers short stories - really good stuff so far.

gave up on a couple alice munro story collections (runaway & dear life), idk wasn't feeling them @ all

reading joyce carol oates 'blonde' & also Stanley kaufman's 'figures of light' collected film crit

very very greekly?

ha, yeah, with a lot of hand-holding

The Paris ReviewVerified account ‏@parisreview

Our Spring issue is in bloom! Interviews with Elena Ferrante, Lydia Davis, and Hilary Mantel… http://bit.ly/17KP6pV

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CBsDKTrUoAE8XcX.jpg

Belle and Sebastian - The Paris Review

it's really really hard for me to find lydia davis books. in the real life real world. i look when i go to bookstores. gotta go to a chain store if i can find one. actually amherst books probably has her stuff. i should have bought them all when i lived in philadelphia.

o ive also been reading 'brief encounters with the enemy' a story collection by said sayrafiezadeh, its really good

Has anyone read Maria Dermout’s The Ten Thousand Things, as discussed in this interview with Robert Creeley? http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-robert-creeley-by-bruce-comens/
Looks intriguing.

I have! It was a few years ago and I'm away from home so I can't remind myself but as I recall I enjoyed it a lot in a kind of woozy / misty not-sure-what's-happening-but-enjoying-the-process way.

God, Righteous Dopefiend is one of the most painful books I've ever read. Just unbelievable descriptions of prolonged suffering abetted by inhumane or ineffectual institutions.

I'm about to start The Children of Sánchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family by Oscar Lewis.

reading Trophy Hunt by C.J. Box. i've moved my crime to Wyoming from Sandford's Minnesota. from muskie fishing to moose mutilation.

I'd like to read Hilary Mantel's interview in the PR. I think she is great.

I'm about to start The Children of Sánchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family by Oscar Lewis.

― jmm, domingo 5 de abril de 2015 18:13 (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I just bought this the other day! Haven't started it but it definitely looks interesting.

halfway through Mark Grief's "The Age of the Crisis of Man"--it's fine but very much in that style of middlebrow scholarship that Princeton UP likes to churn out.

xp Yeah, I think it looks interesting too. I've read the prologue and first chapter now and it's what I was hoping for, an odd kind of unbroken first-person novelistic ethnography. I'll have to read the supplementary stuff afterwards because I'm curious how much editing it took to turn what I assume were interview notes into something with the form of a novel.

I read Random Family by Adrian Nicole Blanc years ago and loved it, sounds like its very much along the same lines.

John Williams' Stoner, should have read some of the opinions here before purchasing as its unremitting grey grind is not doing anything for me right now. Coming on the back of Good Morning Midnight (which at least had some garish colour to its misery) and a poor Ackroyd (The House of Doctor Dee, meandering and arbitrary), I feel like I need some cheerful uncomplicated whimsy.

It isn't cheerful.

Append "instead" to my post.

I dabbled briefly with The Stones of Florence, Mary McCarthy. She wrote it in 1958, so all the contemporary details are from that era, but I set it aside after one evening. She was name dropping Renaissance artists and political figures with whom I was unfamiliar, in great profusion. I found I was unwilling to stop every minute to educate my ignorance of these figures and of Florentine politics, geography, noteworthy chapels, museums and other landmarks in general, and without such an effort it seemed like every paragraph was filled with gaping holes in the form of proper nouns.

In its place I started reading The Lady and the Monk, Pico Iyer, about his 4 years living in Kyoto at the end of the 80s. It doesn't presume the reader has an education in depth on the history of the city and all its more famous inhabitants of the past 1000 years.

Wonder how Vidal In Venice reads? (Also a mini-series doc, posted on YouTube.) He lived there for quite a while, I think. Some full-length essays, excerpts of others (and fiction) on his site: http://www.gorevidalpages.com/gore-vidal-about-gore-vidal/
Random Family! Yeah, I endorsed that on ILE's True Crime thread: time & changes in the projects, also prison for some, incl. Boy George, a prodigy and local legend, who greets his 20s serving life with 0 parole for drug dealing. (Part of the Nelson Rockefeller legacy--wonder how that's going?) It's a fairly metamorphic panorama, without being "geological" in the slow-ass sense. Reminds me of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter. RF was a highlight of my self-assigned reading program, New York On Two Books a Month.

i started reading The Drop by Michael Connelly. thus continuing my epic quest to become my father.

I'm going out of town and about to start Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings, anyone read it?

his 4 years living in Kyoto

Correction: 4 seasons, iow one year. The management regrets the error.

Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (amalgams of essays and poetry),

Seen much raving for this. Would non-American get much out of it, or do you need to be up on minutiae of american race/racism/culture?

you do not

in fact there is a passage on a brit which americans will be vague/clueless on and a passage on the futbol

Dicekns - Bleak House - hard for me to finish it.

Acheba - Man Of The People - masterpiece.

Look Homeward Angel - mmm...

I'm going out of town and about to start Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings, anyone read it?

yes, heartily recommend. contains both epic sweep and grain of everyday life. patois a little tough at first, but I soon got w/rhythms, so to speak.

"Look Homeward Angel - mmm..."

reading thomas wolfe in 2015 is a bold move! i think if you look up the word unfashionable in the dictionary...

Forget it, skot, it's ILBtown

Thomas Wolfe and Tom Wolfe (60s pieces) my high school freshman salvation

JAMES MORRISON! thought you might enjoy this:

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/10/anatomy-of-a-cover-the-complete-works-of-flannery-oconnor/

Finished a few shorts works. With My Dog's Eyes by Hilda Hilst is what people think Clarice Lispector think she is doing, i.e. someone who truly seems to have absorbed Irish modernism of Joyce and Beckett by its motifs, state of mind, prose-via-poetry (this is more directly applied to Joyce). My read couldn't be as attentive (life etc.) however I can say I liked how it would switch from prose, to a poem, and how that would trade back-and-forth. It pursues the occult (perhaps in a Crowley sense) (whereas Lispector is quite spiritual). There are a couple more works in translation that I want to chase. The onto Perlefter by Joseph Roth. Something else, an unfinished 100 pages on the main character's life, family, business, as told his nephew/distant family member. The unfinished tone doesn't mean too much, they feel like at times beautifully drawn sketches of people and places, the imagination would run into overdrive to invent the most random things to colour in a character, before discarding the same and moving on - its so fast.., and Roth is vampiric in his devouring of characters and scenes.

Celine's Normance was great: revels in hallucination and delirium. As all round him went off to experiment in the Roman Celine was the one who really kept the Rabelaisian fire alive in French writing.

I got waylaid by something called The Infinite Book by some guy named John Barrow, which chats about the mathematics of infinity, but popularized into terms simple enough for the general public to understand. You could put it in the bathroom and read it as you shit, if that appeals to you. And yet, here I am reading the thing anyway.

what is the difference between what people think clarice lispector thinks she's doing and what clarice lispector thinks she's doing

and what clarice lispector is doing

aargh sorry that was garbled.

The odd review I've seen of Lispector = this is the Brazilian Joyce and Beckett.

What I've read of Clarice != Joyce or anything like that.

idk what Lispector's own view of her work was.

Fran Lebowitz Reader
You Can't Win - Black

damn i was really hoping for something there

Scott, thanks for that link. Some of those O'Connor covers are beautiful.

i'm finally into dahlgren by samuel delaney and it's partially responsible for cheering me up after a few dour months. i thought i didn't like it at first but i've warmed up to its enthusiastic weirdness. i'm still left cold by some of the more opaque tricky writerly who-is-even-speaking-here bits but that's down to my own impatience and density i think.

sorry, dhalgren by samuel delany!

I enjoyed most of it well enough as a sequence of set pieces, incl. sex, although not the keep-an-open-mind-about-rapiness and yeah opaque leisureliness, like wasn't surprised later when reading that he tweaked it off and on for years, between many other projects. Recall that Philip K. Dick and other out-there colleagues panned it. Will re-read it someday maybe, but that's where I got off the bus, so lots of catching up with SD to do.

This book has its own ILB Reading Club thread, and you might find some good feedback there.

oh right, i forgot about that thread, weirdly, because now i remember being enthused in it

Happily, The Infinite Book came to an end. The author's enthusiasm for digressions into theology and science fictional scenarios did not aid my enjoyment.

Now I am reading a Laurens Van Der Post book, The Heart of the Hunter, one of his many books about the Bushmen and the Kalahari desert - in this case it's a non-fiction personal account. He is a romantic at heart and it shows in his many verbal flights, but he is also a craftsman, so his flights succeed in conveying you precisely where he wants you to go, more often than not, even when describing so hackneyed a subject as a sunset. That feat requires exceptional talent.

I want to read that, also Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines. Anybody here familiar with his writing?
Just finished Invisible Man. It immediately lights up its own place on my map, which still has a lot of gaps, as one of those antic epics, fearlessly idealistic and absurdist, soul-searching and crowd-pleasing, somewhere in the vicinity of other post-WWII pre-Beat bangers like From Here To Eternity and The Adventures of Augie March, also the pre-War experiments with imagery x observation, like USA and Day of the Locust. The folk and blues elements keep showing up, often unsolicited and then some, with old and new effects on the narrator's headspin. The range of "Alabama" and A Love Supreme seem prefigured here, among other jazz; also the disturbances of John Wesley Harding and The Complete Basement Tapes---we even get to "HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE FREE OF ILLUSION," with appropriately inappropriate responses along the way.

I just finished Invisible Man last night!

I really envy anyone reading that for the first time. It strikes me as a much more unsettling picaresque than Augie March, but you're right, Dylan and Ellison have a similar sense of the strange lower frequencies of the vernacular.

Oh for sure this is more unsettling, which is why I started hearing "Alabama" in my head while reading. Coltrane and Ellison make their own uses of the blues, and vice versa.

A book that in my mind seems to follow in the surreal, madcap picaresque vein of Invisible Man is Thomas Pynchon's V. For instance, the opening fight scene in the bar in V reminds me a lot of the riot scene in the bordello in Invisible Man.

Bruce Chatwin is pretty good. I have an omnibus of most of his novels. I haven't read Songlines in about 20 years though but do remember things like the old aborigine sitting on the back seat of a car travelling along the route of one of these lines and making a guttural sound that whoever else is in the car can't understand. it's then revealed that he is singing the songline at the speed the car is moving. Songlines being central to the aborigine creation myth, in which who ever the first creature is travelled across the land singing up the country, describing what was where. & the aborigines recreated this as they moved around on walkabouts or whatever, singing the song of what goes where. It could all be bunk for what I know and I would need to read some aboriginal anthropology, preferably by an aborigine author to confirm the veracity of it. It is pretty well written though.

I think I have a good biography of Chatwin too, though it could have been a library borrowing. CAn't think of the author but it could be the Nicholas Shakespeare one. I'm half remembering something about Chatwin having been an auctioneer for somebody like Sotheby's but giving it up early on to travel.
I think I still need to read a few of the contents of that omnibus including In Patagonia, but i have a to-read list of a couple of hundred things. & have something like that as physical books around the flat amongst all the ones i have actually read. I can't resist charity shop bookshelves.

That songlines theology summary is pretty accurate to real life

Wasnt van der post found to have faked a lot of stuff?

Can anyone recommend a good, accessible history dealing with citrus cultivation?

Bruce Chatwin -I'm a big fan (with significant reservations) and a completist, which isn't that difficult considering his slender oeuvre. An 80s figure who's barely remembered now. Songlines and In Patagonia are probably his best books, sold as travel writing but slippery and hard to categorize. On The Black Hill is a short psychological novel about twin brothers that also evokes the English countryside in lush prose. Utz is a novella about a mad collector that's undoubtedly inspired by Chatwin's experience as a curator at Sotheby's in the 1960s. The Viceroy of Ouidah, a novel set in Africa, I read but can't remember much about. Welcome to middle age! What Am I Doing Here is a collection of short pieces, hit or miss. His letters are worth a look if you like the published work, as is his editor Susannah Clapp's reminiscence With Chatwin: Portrait of A Writer The Nicholas Shakespeare biography is good. And finally here's a thing about the letters that I put on Huffpost a few years back and the world ignored. boohoo.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-coleman/the-cosmopolitan-nomad_b_845277.html"> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-coleman/the-cosmopolitan-nomad_b_845277.html

the east coast of the united states is littered with bruce chatwin books. in case that was geographical information anyone needed. there are multiple copies in every used book store in massachusetts alone. so, he definitely struck a chord here. i really liked the books i read by him, but that was years ago. poetic. entertaining. he had a poet's eye for people and things. i think i just read the non-novels though.

The entry for Van Der Post in Wikipedia simply reveals that he apparently impregnated a 14 year old girl in 1952, then states:

"His reputation as a "modern sage" and "guru" was questioned, journalists opened a floodgate of examples of how van der Post had sometimes embellished the truth in his memoirs and travel books."

If the word "embellished" was correctly chosen and accurately reflects the controversy, then it is not a grievous charge against him. Anyone who reads his books as anthropology is sadly misguided. It is obvious to me that his account is highly colored and rhetorically structured to elicit the desired emotional impact. He's a novelist and instinctive romantic who would not scruple to slant his material, if it served his artistic goal.

Finished "Albion's Seed" (probably enough of a recommendation to mention in passing that it was 900 pages long, definitely changed my way of thinking about early American history) and am now reading "The Great Railway Bazaar" by Paul Theroux.

reading knausgaard <3

I finished Italo Calvino's INVISIBLE CITIES (1972).

for a while I worried that this book felt too much like a pastiche (of Kafka and Borges, mainly; perhaps by extension of the Arabian Nights and the like). To put it harshly, I worried that it could be kitsch -- as in Orientalist / fabulist / whimsical kitsch. I don't know if it felt at all this way when it came out. More likely, I think it has been a victim of its own success: Rushdie, Carter, Winterson, et al (even David Mitchell perhaps - and I can easily imagine a Will Self, Sarah Waters, Robert MacFarlane or anyone else today trying their hand at it) have written so much that feels in this vein, the vein no longer feels very creditable.

Against that, simply, the imagination of the cities. I really like their diversity, their different names (do the names have any relation to the content? I could never see that they did), the way that they work as parables of ideas, and to an extent even parables of real urban tendencies (eg suburban sprawl in Penthesilea). The longer the book went on, the more I felt reassured that these imaginative ideas were what it was about, and the mannerisms can be bracketed off. In fact the longer it goes on, the more profound I think the ideas of the imagined cities become. By the end I felt Calvino was really saying a few things.

Finished Steve Connor's book BECKETT, MODERNISM AND THE MATERIAL IMAGINATION (2014).

Brilliant, by default, as he always is.

Otherwise: the theory stuff doesn't usually do so much for me at this point. A chapter on Sartre I could hardly bring myself to get through. Much sparring with Badiou which feels rather superfluous to me - I mean, in 10 or 20 years' time I doubt that Badiou will seem crucial to understanding Beckett.

Work on media (radio, tape) and their effects on art and thought - I respect this aspect of Steve's work. He has more good ideas about it than most.

The last section on Worlds seemed to me to pick things up. Fine and enjoyable things in the essay on universities, though he gets into a polemic about academics today which I am not sure is well judged. As an academic I could not accept his characterization of me (not that it matters). It would take a while to explain this in detail.

I can share his idea that Beckett is about finitude, in that everything is. I think he could have said it more plainly without bothering with J-L Nancy's theory talk. But I was a bit bamboozled by the last para where he seemed to lose track of finitude and risk turning it into infinitude again.

I am not sure that the governing idea of 'the material imagination' is fully worked out here (maybe elsewhere). And the book is only partially about 'modernism'. Nonetheless I find it doubtful that many people will have published better books about Beckett this decade, because none of them are Steve Connor.

FITE

Finally started My Struggle – a whole lot of OK at this point.

Also: the new James Merrill biography. The ONLY James Merill bio.

http://conversationalreading.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/bernhard-correction.jpg

saw this in bookstore recently & thought what the heck, it's been too long since I read Bernhard... so far (first ~100pp) I think I'd rank it even above The Loser, my previous favorite of his novels (though I've only read about half of 'em, & not always to completion)

I am currently failing at finishing Independent People By Halldor Laxness - liking some bits a heck of a lot, other bits feel like too much of a struggle. I do want to know what happens to Bjartur and daughter but I am not sure I care for what is around them.

The last half of Van Der Post's book turned into a lengthy padding-out, where he ran out of memoir material too soon to make a full length book. He recounts a basketful of Bushman myths that he mostly cribs from other sources and then breathlessly interprets them to the reader.

Not surprisingly, every myth is a masterpiece and every symbol the best possible choice, revealing the Bushmen culture as pure, innocent genius. That is, if you accept Van Der Post's modest claim to have a unique insight no other westerner could provide. Obviously, he'd discovered through his first book, BBC film, and lecture tour that the Bushman was a valuable property and he was determined to become their impresario and ride them for all they were worth. By the end, his naked self-promotion became tedious. Too bad. Romanticism and ego so often seem to be joined at the hip.

Now I'm reading Her Majesty's Spymaster, by Stephen Budiansky, about Sir Francis Walsingham. So far it is brisk, competent and interesting.

Invisible Cities sounds great.

Glad to hear that dutch_justice!

Yesterday I read Richard Ellmann's FOUR DUBLINERS (1985) - in full, as it's only 100pp or so. It seems like vieux chapeau but I learned things! For instance that Oscar Wilde met the Pope in 1877.

What did he say to him?
Have you read Beckett's monograph on Proust? I read the New Directions (?) pb many years ago and found it really appealing, wothout having read much Proust; especially liked discussion of how we experience memory, trying to delve deeper/make up better stories (getting past the nth replay of Tape B-4, how Auntie did me wrong that Christmas and the next etc etc)

The Pope encouraged Wilde to join the Catholic Church. Funny, that. I mean - is the Pope Catholic?

"Wilde found the meeting awesome; he said not a word, closeted himself in his hotel room, and emerged with a sonnet".

But later that day he prostrated himself before Keats's grave: "It was a humbler obeisance than he had given to the Pope".

... And he did not convert (until c.1900).

Enrique Vila-Matas - Bartleby & Co. Sheesh, this is too much like my life, didn't like what I was reading ;-) But really I don't want to google the people I didn't know just in case they are all made up. Otherwise idk enough about Melville but in Vila-Matas' own terms I am not sure he should be as central to 'No' writing as he thinks, as in Melville stopped writing novels after Confidence Man but not writing altogether and he was writing Billy Budd in any case? Not negating as much as perhaps others. Gives way too much space to Kafka who was writing and correcting proofs to stories till the end.

Reading it as a parody of literature fandom/LOL amateur lit crit etc. Still kept thinking its not as inventive as Bolano's Nazi Literatures...

Didn't think of it as a parody and as far as I know pretty much everyone mentioned in it is real.

Note I don't think whether they actually wrote at all or not is quite the criterion, the nature of what they wrote counts as well.

Just saw an intriguing book with a forward by him, The Art of Flight, by Sergio Pitol.

I am currently failing at finishing Independent People By Halldor Laxness - liking some bits a heck of a lot, other bits feel like too much of a struggle. I do want to know what happens to Bjartur and daughter but I am not sure I care for what is around them.

i guess it drags a little in places but i thought this book was fascinating - great wit and insight woven into such a bloody-minded world.

Langdon Hall - James Merrill: His Life and Art
Karl Ove Knausgaard - My Struggle Book 1

i don't know if i could do the karl ove books. he's certainly interesting and i enjoyed that NYT thing a lot.

LG - 'bloody-minded' is a good description. It is totally my thing. I'll re-retry next year.

Note I don't think whether they actually wrote at all or not is quite the criterion, the nature of what they wrote counts as well.

Just saw an intriguing book with a forward by him, The Art of Flight, by Sergio Pitol.

― The Stan-Reckoner (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, April 25, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

re: Vila-Matas. Know what you mean but a lot of weight is put into whether they gave up writing at some point. Kafka's diary entry despairing he can't write that wk because he is in awe of Goethe. Or there are shadowy figures like Goethe's companion (?) (mentioned in Magris' Danube) who writes a dozen poems which is published as Goethe and she doesn't take credit.

re: Pitol. Posted a .jpg in the Spanish books thread. That comes from a small press that I am not sure gets good distribution over here but I am hopeful I can score a copy.

bjartur is one of the great literature's greatest bollockses

one of literature's greatest bollockses*

(thought i'd sent this at the weekend, clearly not)

Tim Powers - Last Call. An enjoyable piece of Nevada hokum - the power struggles of Las Vegas as battle for souls with the tarot. There's too many characters and it goes on for too long, but it has some real strengths. There are one or two genuinely unnerving images and scenes. The main character's older brother just perching on the roof all day long staring to the east after the father has assumed his soul, his wife's ghost lurking in the wardrobe, before later capering around in the desert like a monkey in the form of Death. I don't think I'm going to forget those.

The mental deterioration and slipping between different consciousnesses and realities is done far better than I've come across before. There's a good general sense of paranoia and dislocated fear.

The desert/Lake Mead/casino landscape is clearly relished as well - luridness amidst the barrenness. All in all it was a bit like a sloppy burger of Burroughs and Pynchon, and it was perfect reading while I was there.

Also Frederic Prokosch's The Seven Who Fled, but i'll go over to the thread for that.

Oh and a quick re-read of bits of Ballard's The Kindness of Women, which, outside of the short stories, feels in lots of ways one of my favourite JGB's. Not really a sequel to Empire of the Sun, which is what it seems to get touted as.

david commins - the wahhabi mission and saudi arabia
clive coates - the wines of burgundy
martin wiener - english culture and the decline of the industrial spirit
perry anderson - english questions
tom mccarthy - satin island
janet halley - split decisions
george jackson - soledad brother
richard evans - cosmopolitan islanders

The texts with which I've been most impressed lately are Samuel Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (novum after novum after novum, one of the most conceptually and affectively rich SF novels I've read: I loved the way the disorientation of Delany's world-building never let up but strangely never detracted from the poignancy of the encounter between Marq and Rat Korga, and Delany would still deserve a privileged place in SF history if he had only ever written Stars's prologue and the scene of the dragon hunt), Clarice Lispector's Near to the Wild Heart (barely plotted, but Lispector's intensity holds it together: it's amazing to me how quickly her style coalesced), David Markson's collage of anecdotes around art and contingency, This is Not a Novel, and Leslie Silko's Ceremony (the protagonist's war trauma and alienation from a brutally racist society seem more convincingly imagined than his recovery of Laguna Pueblo culture, but the patchwork of realism and myth is effective). I'm also starting Kate Zambreno's Green Girl and Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed.

Cool, be sure to read LeG.'s The Left Hand of Darkness too.

Yeah, I want to come around to that and Delany's "To Read The Dispossessed." (I've read his other response to Le Guin, Trouble on Triton, so that text is framing my reading of The Dispossessed in certain ways.) I tend to follow out enthusiasms for individual writers (lately Delany among SF authors) in an unsystematic way, so I still have great swathes of the SF canon to look forward to.

HL Mencken's 'Happy Days' and 'Newspaper Days'

Turn the Beat Around an alternative history of Disco have had this lying around the bed for the last age with me meaning to start reading it so finally have. Got it in a charity shop a couple of years ago.
Pretty interesting so far. Just been talking about elongating grooves and early extended mixes of records.

Picked up bringing Out The Bodies teh 2nd part of Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell biographical novels. Surprised to find that cheap in a charity shop since i thought the recent series would mean it would get snapped up rapidly. maybe I was the first person to see it.
Anyway looking forward to reading it, but wondering if I should have tried to read the first part first. Would I be missing anything by not doing so now that I have watched the tv series? I assume I know the basic story even if I miss some of the internal dialogue and therefore insight into reaction.

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas currently coming to the ends of sections, just finished Timothy Cavendish on the bus last night. I think it has been a well done book but not 100% sure what to compare it to to see.

Blue Blood Edward Conlon's NYC cop memoir which is pretty interesting., Came out in 2012 so covers his career for 20 years also looks into some history including late 50s and Serpico. Currently talking about corruption in I think the 60s.

got as far as finishing the intro to strindberg's novel by the open sea (read it years ago... all i can remember of it now was the main character's breakdown leading to him hallucinating homunculi), but have been waylaid by a sherlock holmes collection with the original strand illustrations.

I've been reading Shadow of the Silk Road, Colin Thubron, a 2006 travel book wherein the author travels (where else?) the general route of the silk road through central asia. It is good enough that I shall continue on with it, but Mr. Thubron's authorial voice is not especially distinctive and like most travel books, his narrative is just a string of fragments linked together by the author's voice. This shortcoming is somewhat compensated by the exoticism of the locale and pungency of its history, which he uses to good effect.

im reading jorge luis borges' "labyrinths" for the first time. im a bit underwhelmed tbh, then again im not someone with a overly philosophical/theological mind. sorry borges.

There are few, if any, books so amazingly great that everyone enjoys them. No, not even Harold and the Purple Crayon.

Might be the wrong translation, although I haven't yet come across one that seemed too bad.

"A Vulgar Neighborhood" by John Plummer, originally published in October of 1862. Come take a tour of Whitechapel, while quivering with contemptuous titillation:
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2012/05/penny-dreadfuls-in-whitechapel.html

i'm getting my first taste of joy williams in taking care and it's a doozy.

"She was an exact child, afraid of a great many things."

im reading jorge luis borges' "labyrinths" for the first time. im a bit underwhelmed tbh, then again im not someone with a overly philosophical/theological mind. sorry borges.

― tayto fan (Michael B), Wednesday, April 29, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Borges is more like a game? Frankly I think games are shit so don't mind me.

reading karate chop, a collection of short stories by a danish writer, dorthe nors, at the moment. really good stuff, a little like carver in that blunt and bleak way - very good stuff.

i get why someone would be underwhelmed by borges as a lot of the most famous stuff is closer to thought problem than story. (forking paths has characters but they are joke pulp characters; the narrator in library def has pathos but it is the pathos of his entire civilization and by extension ours so he is not exactly personally vivid. tlon uqbar and pierre menard are ideas.) labyrinths deep cuts i would recommend whose pleasures are less dry: the secret miracle, the house of asterion, the circular ruins maybe?, the thing near the end about the leopard.

i am reading 2666 and robert jordan although a few days ago i could have sworn i was reading the left hand of darkness; i think it fell under the bed.

also i got to port royal/fort beauregard a few weeks ago in a couple days of heavy shelby foote, but i was on planes.

civilization was the wrong word up there, his condition is more fundamental than that.

Some of those stories are like literary essays, which is surely no one's expectations. Possibly reading and thinking about him as a librarian in parallel might help.

Thinking about this now, and it could be what bugged me about Vila-Matas.

Anyway I am reading 120 Days of Sodom. I'll take it to the De Sade thread but so far I'd say boredom is useful.

Another spring, another Trollope novel (Phineas Redux).

Adam Mars-Jones, BLIND BITTER HAPPINESS.

Tremendous writer of criticism.

C by Tom McCarthy. Promises to be good. Present tense and contracted verbs to counter Victorianism but conservative nonetheless as I believe English culture to be even when transported to the other side of the globe, as close as I could get on the train from Brisbane to Surfers Paradise years ago (and the cream scones!). But the highrises felt like Hawaii, although I've never been there. (Does no one like Nick Clegg?)

Was not impressed with Satin Island. Had to return before starting The Blazing World because it was recalled. Same goes for Family Life by Akhil Sharma but managed to finish -- reading lazily (not attentively). The Ten Thousand Things still on coffee table. Multiple copies; should be safe. (Also promises to be good.)

Finished "The Great Railway Bazaar" by Paul Theroux. I guess a train travelogue through Asia written in the '70s is kind of a minefield for potentially un-PC observations and characterizations, what with the need to quickly limn a character or bottle the atmosphere of an exotic locale in a knowing way, but Theroux comes out of it mostly unscathed, although some of his characterizations do seem a bit cliched at times. Quite readable as a picture of a unique time and place (or I should say, of many unique places at a particular time). That moment (1975) was probably just about the last point in time that a trip like that could still feel like a real adventure. Passing through the tail end of the Vietnam war helps a bit.

Now reading "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.

I have been reading Didion's Blue Nights. I'm not sure what to make of it, yet. It consists of Didion bouncing around in her memories and often regretful emotions concerning her adopted daughter who died in young adulthood. Its primary value is exposing the thought processes of someone in grief who is struggling to find meaning in a welter of memories, so as to regain some sort of mental balance in their presence.

It is a very exposing exercise and it is difficult not to engage in a certain amount of criticism of the author, not as an author, but as a person. Didion herself invites this reaction, in part because she also engages in frequent bouts of self-doubting and self-criticism. One wants to shake her from time to time and talk some sense into her. Of course, that would do no good and that is not 'the point'.

All one can do is participate silently as a witness to this parade of memories, griefs, doubts, apologies, self-excusing, and assorted revelations, which ceremony of confessing and witnessing ultimately is the only real point of the book. It makes it very hard to be the reader, though, even if it was cathartic for the author.

About 90 pages into On The Road, and more than pleasantly surprised so far by Kerouac's version of polish. It's cast as a memoir, with the shining train moving out of the shadows---the author/narrator's early real-life troubles, minimally alluded to here, a proto-Beat scene already seeming stagnant, Neil/Dean's mentioned childhood with his wino father, whom he begged for in the streets and courtrooms--and passing through more: in Chicago, he notes the the "tired" bop of the late 40s, between Bird's creative peaks and Miles' recasting, the "old" and "sad" people and places (more the latter) along the way---and he's already mentioning that he and Dean fell out later, that the rejuvenation of young jades in Denver didn't last. But he remembers the excitement of discovery too, and the details are vivid and lucid, like Jack London's railroad and backstreet chronicles (although JK's more excitable, duh).

Also the vitality and resourcefulness of other people on the road, such as the guy in "a toolbox on wheels... driving it standing up, like a milkman."

"shining train," yeesh--thinking of "train of thought"---so far he's mostly hitchhiking, occasionally hopping a bus.

what if your gut reaction is these people are immature and they are getting away with it? does that make you old (even if you are only 17 or 18 -- from what I can remember -- maybe I've got it all wrong and I'm misremembering or it would be different now)? why can some people get away with it? are they just optimists? are they just open?!

I'm about 2/3 of the way through Nobody Knows My Name by (according to the book's cover blurb) "America's angry young man", James Baldwin. Some of the topical details are outdated, but it is still full of observations and analysis relevant to what was called "the race question" back in the day.

When I finish this, I have checked out a copy of Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin, to see if it suits my mood. If it doesn't, I've got plenty more where that came from.

Almost at the end of Cloud Atlas, which has been pretty good. Been reading it mainly on buses or might have had it finished sooner.

Started Wolf Hall as my bedtime book though it might just wind up being my travel book once i get through the next 20 pages of Cloud Atlas.
Anyway am enjoying it greatly. Have read first few chapters.

Still reading Edward Conlon's Blue blood which is pretty great too. Cop memoir about end of the last millennium/beginning of this one.

Also just grabbed Senor Nice in a charity shop buy.
& a set of Aleister Crowley short stories including The Drug though I'm not overly impressed so far. But they had it for €5 in the local 2nd hand/remainder bookshop and I thought I'd give it a chance since I might not see it again. I'd had it pointed out by a friend who bought a set of his Simon Iff stories. The idea of a psychic detective sounds interesting so I might grab a copy of that iff it turns up again.

On chapter twelve of the most recent winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award,Station Eleven, which seems to be the story of a post-pandemic traveling theater troupe. So far so good.

Been wondering about that one. Might have to get it.

About a week ago read Zazen by Vanessa Veselka, which is going to be one of these books that I start recommending to certain friends ad nauseum. Very sharp, sad, funny, and it could so very easily become a mean-spirited slog but never does. It's available free on the Red Lemonade site. I read a few of Veselka's essays afterwards, also very good.

read tom mccarthy remainder last week, loved it. now reading elena ferrante my brilliant friend & so far it's killer

Cool, you might like the Elena Ferrante--The Neapolitan Novels thread too.

I have been reading Didion's Blue Nights. I'm not sure what to make of it, yet. It consists of Didion bouncing around in her memories and often regretful emotions concerning her adopted daughter who died in young adulthood. Its primary value is exposing the thought processes of someone in grief who is struggling to find meaning in a welter of memories, so as to regain some sort of mental balance in their presence.

It's thin compared to its predecessor. What I remember most were the constant allusions to fried chicken.

Eric Larson - Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
Dennis Altman - The Death of the Homosexual?
*C.S. Lewis - The Magician's Nephew

Cool, you might like the Elena Ferrante--The Neapolitan Novels thread too.

― dow, Thursday, May 14, 2015 9:20 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think i posted on it after reading days of abandonment. so far brilliant friend isn't as intense but still completely killer. i mean it's still pretty intense, 100 pages in and about 5 people have died, shed blood or split their skulls open. in a bildungsroman about 2 girls growing up in italy? lol

Italy: where the word vendetta was coined

thin compared to its predecessorhaven't read the latest, but The Year of Magical Thinking was pretty involving, and would have been even if I didn't already know what happened after she finished it (pretty sure, because I'd never been a big Didion follower at all, but this hooked me; still think about it sometimes).

Okay, read a little further into the third section which flashes back. Now I see how this is going to work.

Nearly done w/De Sade's 120 Years of Sodom. The thing to pick up post-UK election. Lighten the mood. More on the De Sade thread if I can be, ahem, arsed.

Raced through a bunch of Leskov's stories. Picaresques involving gypsies, artisans, princes, counts, monks, ghosts and whatever else. 19th century canon worthy. I'm calling it!

Just got to the part of On The Road in which narrator steals a copy of the following while leaving LA for the East Coast, but so far he's too wired/busy "reading landscapes" instead. Then I saw this. Good book?
https://booksyo.wordpress.com/2015/05/15/le-grand-meaulnes-by-alain-fournier/

like the cover, anyway

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51RB%2B9wVAtL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

my fuzzy memory of it: good if rather slight. seems to have a lot of writer fans, though.

I agree with Youn about ON THE ROAD. I think the main characters are terribly obnoxious.

I don't like Tom McCarthy at all.

I greatly admire CLOUD ATLAS and WOLF HALL.

I am reading Simon Reynolds' RETROMANIA. I have been quite pleased to see how it opens up and explores past versions of retro. But I turn off when SR says 'I had got into acid house ... I wanted to embrace the phuture'. I find this attitude incomprehensible.

I've read well into Left Hand of Darkness. I'm not sure how it will end, but then I am not very invested in the characters or their problems, so any ending would be equal to any other from my present pov.

It is interesting to see how LeGuin has assembled her other world as a pastiche or mosaic of various bits of human cultures and earth's geography, but it is also worth noting that the most original features of her created world are often the least convincing. For my money, the few interspersed 'folk tales' she wrote are easily the best feature of the book. They have the right tone, pacing and details to be very convincing and they shed a more interesting light on the culture she imagined than any other part of the story. They are very like Scandinavian folk tales.

The least gratifying part for me is that, although LeGuin has assembled a decent set of insights into human (nb: she is very clear that her world is inhabited by humans) culture and politics, these insights are all available in a better and more complete form to anyone who has read widely in literature and history. So, her novel is going to be of much more interest to someone just beginning to explore life and literature than to a creaking old literary geek like me.

(re finding main characters in On The Road to be xpost obnoxious etc.)
Just got to the beginning of OTR's Part Two, where the narrator rates Dean and treasured buddy Ed as "mindless cads" for their exploitation of women, and, after driving from Frisco to Virginia in four days, Dean is in a full-blown mania and still rising. At this point, narrator Sal seems to agree with you.
Dean doesn't really show up that much in Part One. When Sal finally gets to Denver, he finds that Dean and Carlo Marx/Allen Ginsberg have fallen out with other returned natives and NYC expats. Sal watches D and C in overnight mind-meld, interrogating and answering each other re recent behavior, burning through the veils of illusion, with an occasional break for stealing a car and helling 'round the mountains.
But he spends more time with other old and new acquaintances, including Roland Major, who writes and lives Hemingway-wannabee stories about real artists who can't get away from arty types. He's best dealt with in Hemingway fashion: "Don't bother to go over there, Jake, you can probably hit him from here."
The best part so far is Sal going to Mill City. California, which he says is the only community in America where whites and blacks live side by side (true? This is the late 40s). Everybody seems very happy, including his host, the merry Remi, a friend from prep school. The author was a scholarship student at Horace Mann; I don't know how Remi, real or imagined, got to such a place, since he supposedly was shuttled from one bad school to another in the boondocks of France, which is why, Sal explains, he now tends to stagger ant-like under a load of stolen groceries, in the barracks where desperadoes drink & wait to go do cut-rate construction work in Okinawa (Sal & Remy's fellow rent-a-cops, though very cop-like in a showy way, don't catch on this kind of heist).
Remi and Lee Ann, his "honey-colored" girl friend (whose shack Remi and Sal are staying in, of course) scrounge all week so they can go into San Francisco, dressed to the nines and burning through a hundred 1947 dollars in three hours, on a typical Saturday night. Things get even more bipolar, and then eminent Dr. Remi pere and latest hot young wife arrive in America; Remi is desperate to impress his father with swanky dining in San Fran, but Roland Major (now a journo, still living the Life of Hem) shows up and Sal's drunkenly talking wine and roses to Remy's new not-Mom.
The pathos and comedy of this section (and a later part of Part One) pulled me in, although the dialogue can seem two-dimensional, possibly because the author really is relying mostly on memory. Description is his thing, and there's a lot more of it.

The least gratifying part for me is that, although LeGuin has assembled a decent set of insights into human (nb: she is very clear that her world is inhabited by humans) culture and politics, these insights are all available in a better and more complete form to anyone who has read widely in literature and history. So, her novel is going to be of much more interest to someone just beginning to explore life and literature than to a creaking old literary geek like me.

I don't follow you. You're separating TLHD from lit and history?

No, I'm saying that everything LeGuin offers the reader in TLHoD that is new and original is kind of second rate, while the less original or borrowed parts of TLHoD are available in better and more complete forms elsewhere, either in other works of literature, or else in history. You have to read a lot of books to get at those better sources, but by now I've read a lot of those better books, so all I am left with that's new to me are the parts that don't excite much interest in me. For someone less well read, this would not be so true.

Clearer?

What I remember from the book after twenty years most vividly is its treatment of gender and sexuality.

Yeah, think the consensus has always been that its treatment of gender and sexuality=core of its appeal.

Just started Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You, which isn't a Smiths song but rather a queer YA book (by a writer named Peter Cameron) that my prof insists that I read.

i _loved_ on the road

Patricia Highsmith - The Price of Salt

Brent Armendinger - The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying (poems)

Renata Adler - After The Tall Timber

long winded essays & reportage from an old school New Yorker writer. her infamous takedown of Pauline Kael is by far the "best" or in my mind the only thing here w/passion and flow.

Saul Bellow - There Is Simply Too Much To Think About

title works as a succinct review of the old braniac's collected non fiction. early pieces got me hungry only to quickly fill up and push the remainder aside undigested as it were.

I own Adler's early 2000s collection, the one with the Rehnquist, Bork, and Lewinsky essays. I wish they were better known.

she certainly has insight and reach in those pieces and it was interesting to read about watergate from the 1976 perspective but idk, something about the pacing and a certain loftiness of tone left me unsatisfied (and i expected to love this collection, maybe too much). haven't read her novels. yet.

I'm about one-third of the way into Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers -- both literally and figuratively. I like parts of it, especially the descriptions of mid-'70s New York bohemia, but the characters are pretty unconvincing, and the writing is so ... written. I was trying to describe my reaction to the prose to my wife, and she said, "Was she an MFA?" Yeah -- exactly. (She was -- Columbia, 2001.)

I like Kushner's essays on Lispector and her intro to Malaparte's The Skin well enough but yeah dreading to pick that novel up.

dreading! oh come on it's not that bad. i enjoyed it a lot at the time but it didn't leave a huge impression. the second half or last third is pretty slow, she doesn't do anything remotely interesting with any of the fun plot stuff she sets up. but i enjoyed the way it was written, just insanely observationally on-point? like it nailed all the details hesitations half thoughts of awkward quiet person's social interaction. is that what "written" refers to? and i loved the two artist bros' shaggy dog stories. also the first scene was the perfect deployment of violence in an otherwise polite arty novel

Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, which is a lot better than I'd been expecting

Last night I finished Left hand of Darkness and began to read Mao Tse Tung and I Were Beggars, a memoir by Siao-Yu published in 1961. My only observation so far is that the writing style clearly reflects that English was not the author's native language; it is written in an odd style, both simple and stilted at the same time, vaguely reminiscent of children's books from the late 19th century, which makes it an awkward thing to read, but not painfully so.

I read Kushner's new ludicrously thin collection of stories recently (3 stories, ~90 pages of biggish type), and was pretty impressed. Wasn't sure her skills would work as well at novel length, but am interested to see. I avoided Flamethrowers when it came out because it seemed to be getting raves from all the same publications that think silly old Donna Tartt or Jonathan Franzen are great.

Skimmed it, some early flying-across-the-desert etc impressions pulled me right along, but then she seems to be at an art party or three, listening to monologues, and this combo of effects reminds me of early DeLillo--Delillo: "The less I think about my early books, the happier I am." Oh, they're not that bad, Don (he alternates action with set pieces, though the see-=saw can get slow), but I don't want to read any more like that, not any time soon.

"seesaw," I meant, not trying for any punctuation-play there.

Meanwhile, in On The Road, Sal finally has money, and a certain degree of power over Dean that neither of them understand yet; they're both getting a bit spooked and even cautious, veering a little (and even trying to make it kinda right with a few people, mostly those complicated females) in headlong flight--when they finally get back to New York one more time, they're going to Italy on Sal's dime---OMG, a plan!

Sometimes in Part 3, Sal seems to be egging Dean on while trying to protect him and some of those around him, around them both, but justifying and enabling (Dean and bis own increasing need to feed on Dean's visions-to-blankness)---all while barely keeping up, on a long, long leash, which can get wrapped around him.

Weird synchronicity: Read Gore Vidal's "lost" pulp novel, Thieves Fall Out (better-written than most pulp, but very much of the "Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!" school of dialogue), set during the Egyptian overthrow of King Farouk in 1952; then I started Alexandrian Summer by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren, and find it's set just before the Egyptian overthrow of King Farouk in 1952.

I finished Mao Tse Tung and I Were Beggars. It was interesting in both positive and negative ways. The author was very close to Mao for about 6 or 8 years, up to roughly 1925 or 1926, whichever year it was that the Chinese Communist Party officially was formed. Each considered himself a revolutionary of a sort, and a number of their early friends and associates were shot or hanged as dangerous radicals.

The book contains interesting glimpses of Mao's formative years and a few anecdotes that reveal bits of his young adult personality, but it was written long afterward, when the author was over 60, had become deeply respectable in the way elderly Confucian scholars are respectable, and their respective politics had long since diverged. He'd thrown his lot in with the Kuomintang.

It was clear to me the author's major purpose in writing was didactic and this purpose was firmly in control of the narrative. This made the book interesting in a negative sense, in that I found myself frequently discarding, rearranging and reinterpreting in order to decide what kind of surface was under the varnish. What stood out was seldom what the author intended to highlight, which can be kind of fun, if the book isn't too long or tedious. This one was 206 pp. I didn't wish it longer.

Joseph McBride - Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?
C.S. Lewis - The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (my hundredth reread, prob my favorite in the series)

brendan behan -- borstal boy
gerald posner -- case closed

reading wcw 'kora in hell'

also some gillian rose on adorno

melancholy science! been wanting to read that for a while. hegel contra sociology is a real touchstone for me.

about halfway through the flamethrowers and pretty bored but feel like im past the point i can quit.

Michel Houellebecq - Soumission

it's my first Houellebecq & a pleasure so far. the drama is between a barely there narrator carrying out empty-feeling French academic rituals (publishing, teaching, dreaming of sex) and an Islam that offers to imbue those same rituals with just a little bit more meaning by means of money and more sex. I don't know if those rituals will mean much outside of France though.

reading witches of eastwick - it's fun! and well written obv, theres a great ~2-3 page passage on alexandras depression & some other great observations from the introduction of the male/devil character abt rebirth & nature that synced up perfectly w/ spring blooming strongly irl for me

ryan the rose is a bit schematic in that britishes writing-summaries-like-i-learnt-in-skool style, but she's knowledgeable and i think helpful

I picked up Muriel Spark's A far Cry From Kensington and read about 50 pp last night. I'm not especially feeling it, but it is short so I'll probably finish anyway. I think I need an engrossing non-fic next.

Not my usual cup of tea, but started glancing through Penelope Fitzgerald's The Knox Brothers, and peeled myself away about 40 minutes later. A biography of her father and his three complicated brothers, incl. the spook apparently short-changed on recent Turing biopic, plus predecessors: amazingly detailed and clear, with no strain. Judging by reviews, a recent bio of Fitzgerald herself indicates that she left out some hard Knox life, but still.

last bit about On The Road: they don't go to Italy; Dean's making too many East Coast, West Coast babies, and has to get a job. They do go to Mexico, beyond East, West, pop culture, literature, accumulating memories of traveler's sights and insights: something of a transcontinental rut starting to appear. They're pulled out of themselves, and further in, to the strength and peace of mind they're looking for, trying, in twisty ways, to settle into---projecting and searching the eyes of the people they're passing by, at various speeds.
Sal, driving, thinks of brown people all around (and around) the world, moving and building between the pieces of "history" (quotes his) (brown not black, because Negroes have their own tragic American magic).
Dean's seen it all now and is still going, back up in El Norte, but somehow abashed, and losing his words sometimes, regarded as a child by friends outgrowing him or settling down. He will soon be seen the same way by his own children, most likely.
Not enough about the women here, but some of them wrote their own books.

With a few months of a break from academia, I'm suddenly compelled to read some of the 33 1/3's I've been collecting. First up: Sam Inglis on Neil Young's Harvest.

Granta just put a whole bunch of Sciascia back in print so I'm devouring those

Kazuo Ishiguro - The Buried Giant was calling out to me at the bookstore the other day... never read him before, nor did I realize he had a new book out, but I'm enjoying it so far (~100pp)

xps to j. -- Kora in Hell is good stuff; have you read In The American Grain? it's roughly contemporary with Kora & the other works collected in the Imaginations volume from NDP

Been a long time, but I really enjoyed The Portable William Carlos Williams, incl. an eerie scene from his novel White Mule.

Has anyone else read any Robert Bringhurst besides The Elements of Typographic Style? I've been immersed in The Tree of Meaning all spring, and have now moved onto its seemingly hippie-dippily-titled companion volume, Everywhere Being is Dancing. I think this guy is my favourite thinker; his paragraphs are just packed with incredible strength, both in style and content. He's like if Gary Snyder was a more rigorous thinker and rhetorician, really mind-blowing interdisciplinary stuff about literature, art, linguistic ecology, and our place in the world, both natural and cultural. I wonder if part of his low profile is because he has (and seems interested in) zero online presence. Anyhow, if you're at all interested in stuff, I'd recommend hunting down The Tree of Meaning.

And if anyone has read him, is there anything else you can recommend in this vein?

Philip Larkin - A Girl in Winter
C.S Lewis - Prince Caspian
George Simenon - Maigret and the Mad Woman

a bit long ago, bernard, but i seem to have misplaced my copy, through several years when i would have liked to take another look at it. williams' prose has always seemed a little inscrutable to me.

I finished A Far Cry from Kensington. This was not her best. It was probably the least engaging of any of her works I've read so far. But Dame Spark is a good enough writer that even her misses are not regrettable.

I'm not at all sure what I'll read next. Under such circumstances I often turn to essays or poetry for a short time.

ryan gattis, "all involved"

Phil Klay, Redeployment: short stories about life during wartime, mostly in Iraq, sometimes in the States. How to think about and not think about all kinds of shit, often bad, sometimes good, while not coming apart before you have to. How some people do all that, anyway. More on this book later, maybe.

I got involved with a 'popular science' non-fic book on neurology called How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer. It has some of the usual weaknesses of science dumbed down for the general population, but it does give some high level overview and ventures to mention a few of the details; I'd say it's okay as far as it goes and moderately interesting.

Lehrer is a young guy and he sometimes uses an annoying tone of "oh gosh, we never knew any of this until just recently!!" when he's only drawing some fairly banal conclusions about human behavior that were already staple observations in folk tales and wisdom lit from millennia ago.

. . .

Lehrer featured a lot on the new and very good Jon Ronson book on shame--he was the famous plagiarist fired by the NYT

Has a very good bit on Lehrer's mea-culpa comeback speech that goes disastrously wrong. He gives it in front of a huger screen full of live tweets explaining what an arsehole he is.

Finished: Tanizaki - The Reed Cutter and Captain Shigemoto's Mother. Great storyteling spun in The Reed Cutter, where three-way 'arrangement' happens very gradually against the watching eyes of a very conservative turn of the century Japan. V well paced. The latter needs more careful re-reading, switching POVs of seemingly first person narration to found diary, from straight realism to ghost stories, and a healthy dose of references to older Japanese literature and classical Chinese poetry I am not that familiar with.

Leskov's Tales: Lady Macbeth of mtsensk and Enchanted Wanderer are great. The 19th century personal canon grows a bit. He's thought of as fairly minor Russian writer but that is other people's problem.

The Existential Imagination - from de Sade to Sartre is fairly unique paperback. Stories that illustrate an approach to a codified philosophy (the first ed is from '63). Short stories and excerpts from Musil's MwQ and Brothers Karamazov. From the standpoint of arriving at this into the 21st cent its curious to see what has 'aged' and what has 'lasted'. The stories from Malraux and Sartre are weak and the stronger and fully in control ones are from the likes of Moravia and Pavese. Nice to read a short story by Brecht and Beckett although I think I'd need a collected set from either, especially the former. Kafka's story and control is bad news for Aichinger's The Bound Man which reads derivative of him despite being quite good.

Zielinski's story is the one jump to a surrealist mode that doesn't get enough of a hearing.

Which leads me to Ingeborg Bachmann's Three Paths to the Lake, which I am finishing. This is a different flavour of existentialism, taking place against the backdrop of hotels and Airports, where nature isn't thought of as anything much, where the job you end up looks good on the outside but is just another form of alienation and men - well, the least said about them the better, except that one person you need and want and no one else is enough - another source of pain. There is also bizarre jump off to history (the story of old Vienna), a lot of plates are spun.

After reading deeper into Lehrer's book, my suspicion is that Lehrer was smart to plagiarize, because he's not a very sharp thinker or talented writer. Still "plagiarized" doesn't equate to "factually wrong", so I may press on and derive what I can from what is still an interesting subject.

i am reading DIVISION TWO of BEING AND TIME, brb gonna temporalize some shit

i need to read a novel, maybe bookmarking this thread will motivate me

hello! i am not reading. i am with forks on bookmarking. but i would like to read nonfiction.

Nonfiction's a pretty wide category. I'm gonna recommend Robert Bringhurst's The Tree of Meaning, just so I can have someone else's take on it.

In xpost Phil Klay's Redeployment, a Marine speaks goes to see the chaplain, and strongly implies that his company is doing bad shit. The priest reports it (this isn't confession, so no confidentiality) and is told by the most responsive and responsible person in the chain of command to forget implications, and anyway this company is having its opportunities to do bad shit reduced, and that the dangerously traumatized company commander will be shipped, just as soon as the company's deployment ends. Meanwhile, it is a war, after all, so such a company isn't the worst thing to have handy.

The Marine comes back to talk to the chaplain several times. After one such visit,
The conversation stayed with me well after Rodriguez had gone. "You're a priest," he'd said. "What can you do?" I didn't know.
As a young priest, I'd had a father scream at me once. I was working in a hospital. He'd just lost his son. I thought my collar gave me the right to speak, so right after the doctors called time of death, I went and assured him his infant son was in paradise. Stupid...But platitudes are most appealing when they're least appropriate...It was disgusting. It was vile.
....The father had despaired, but at least he was looking at life head-on, stripped of the illusion that faith, or prayer, or goodness, or decency, or the divine order of the cosmos, would allow the cup to pass. It's a prerequisite, in my thinking, to any serious consideration of religion. What, like St. Augustine, can we say after Rome has been sacked? Except Augustine's answer, the City of God, is a comfort designed for the aftermath of a tragedy. Rodriguez, that lance corporal, Charlie Company, the whole battalion, they were a different matter. How do you spiritually to men who are still being assaulted? So that they will stop murdering Iraqis, for instance? If that is what they are in fact doing. The priest keeps trying to talk himself into giving them the benefit of a doubt, but the effort has the opposite effect: he knows himself too well.

spiritually *minister*, that is; sorry.

Leskov's Tales: Lady Macbeth of mtsensk and Enchanted Wanderer are great. The 19th century personal canon grows a bit. He's thought of as fairly minor Russian writer but that is other people's problem.

i think, after some initial wariness with Lady Macbeth, Leskov is amazing - the one about the icon painters is amazing as well. but yes, The Enchanted Wanderer is something else - wonderful mixture of weird mysticism, eastern christianity and documentary realism. the hypnotism bit is remarkable iirr as is when he has thorns sewn into the heels of his feet to stop him escaping.

basically i read the first three stories plus a couple of others in the selection I've got, then felt mildly overwhelmed with the intensity of my thoughts about them, gave myself a break (felt a bit like when you don't listen to an album all at once because you're enjoying the experience of discovering it so much) and haven't returned. need to do so.

Has anyone else read any Robert Bringhurst besides The Elements of Typographic Style?

i have read it, yes. not sure I've read anything in exactly the same vein, but there must be all sorts of textbooks on typography out there, plus a few decent websites (ion a train atm so can't find details).

You might want to try Simon Loxley's Type: The Secret History of Letters. which had a lot of interesting stuff in, though I'm not an expert so can't tell you how frighteningly authoritative it is.

still reading the seven who fled but been travelling a lot recently so tend to take my ipad and read kindle stuff.

picked William Gibson's the peripheral off my queued books - i really liked Pattern Recognition.

But f' me he really makes you work to orient yourself. book immerses you right in a load of future impedimenta immediately without any gloss. defamiliarisation is clearly the point but the settings are tuned way up high so you spend much of your time trying to work out what the words refer to and then what the things they refer to are and if they're important or just domestic items he wanted to drop some future defamiliarity on.

x2 as well, as these are two futures he's writing.

i think there's something else here as well, which is his focus on present day cutting edge (drones, oculus rift etc) makes his vision a bit encumbered. i give not one fuck about how predictive SF is - a curiously persistent low-level critical assumption of worth - but it can jolt the aesthetic of reading about a speculated future when the author's angling too much on Mashable new product reports.

Xpost: After reading Elements, I don't think I need any more typography in my life. I've been reading his essays and speeches, collected in The Tree of Meaning and Everywhere Being is Dancing, which treat pretty big questions of linguistic and cultural ecology, the place of oral literature in the broader literary ecosystem, and how things mean whether we perceive it or not. Pretty heady stuff, and I'm really digging it. (The introduction to A Story as Sharp as a Knife deals with a lot of the same questions.)

The only other writer I've read who takes a similar tack (though as a farmer and not an ethnolinguist he has a different focus) is Wendell Berry. I read a lot of that stuff some years ago & remember being turned off by how cranky he became in his later books.

Bringhurst seems like the kind of writer that if you read him, you'd become a better human, whether you agree with any of his conclusions or not. I've forced it on some friends and it hasn't grabbed any of them significantly, so it's probably just a quirk of my brain that makes me think he's so damn great.

I'm reading the new Neal Stephenson.

I've forced it on some friends and it hasn't grabbed any of them significantly, so it's probably just a quirk of my brain that makes me think he's so damn great.

they're probably just bad humans and you shd cut them out of your life without explanation.

The Enchanted Wanderer is something else - wonderful mixture of weird mysticism, eastern christianity and documentary realism. the hypnotism bit is remarkable iirr as is when he has thorns sewn into the heels of his feet to stop him escaping.

One thing about #19thcentcanon is I'm trying to put together a list of novellas for ILB poll. Have found some great ones like Enchanted Wanderer in the last six months. Others were: Lenz, Michael Kohlhaas, Sylvie. Want to re-read some Poe to select one from him.

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Are you only polling novellas from the 19th century, xyzzz___, or can it be more unwieldy than that?

finishing up Brothers And Sisters by Ivy Compton-Burnett. which i've already read before. and which i wouldn't recommend to anyone other than another Ivy Compton-Burnett fan. which means you would have probably had to have read this book already for me to recommend it to you.

then i'm gonna read The Game-Players Of Titan. which i have never read.

this is my favorite part of the review joyce carol oates wrote in 1984 of an ICB bio:

"She never married, had no love affairs or children, kept no diary or journal, wrote surprisingly few letters throughout her long life , belonged to no political organizations, ventured no public pronouncements, wrote no literary criticism and was involved in no scandals, literary or otherwise. When she died at the age of 85, in 1969, her personal papers filled only half a shoebox - and were not very personal at that."

not read any compton-burnett but have been meaning to read that, which i have lying around... somewhere.

ICB is a trip: perfectly clipped phrases,,tossed or dropped in passing. What they add up to can involve double-takes, but there it is, you got it. *Maybe* like Henry Green, a bit, but she seems to specialize in family life? Judging by what I've read; it's at least one of her great subjects, anyway.

I like this essay on Compton-Burnett's style, although since it was written by a friend of mine, I can't pretend to be objective about it: http://www.academia.edu/4769684/Ivy_Compton-Burnetts_Small_Economies

I've been meaning to read Compton-Burnett for a while now, mostly on the basis of that friend's enthusiasm and because I tend to be impressed with writers (such as Gaddis and Green) who are able to foreground dialogue as radically as she's reputed to.

Donna Tartt - The Secret History
Donna Tartt - The Little Friend
Ben McIntyre - A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby And The Great Betrayal
Zachary Leader- The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame And Fortune 1915-1964

anna karenina!

Are you only polling novellas from the 19th century, xyzzz___, or can it be more unwieldy than that?

― one way street, Tuesday, 2 June 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It can be but I wonder if I put in Kafka's Metamorphosis that would just walk it wouldn't it?

I had a German only sideline that would be feature Kafka, Von Kleist, Mann's Death In Venice and Lenz. Maybe its just me but Kafka would also walk that so I switched to 19th century.

What else were you thinking of? Anything from earlier periods would be good too.

love this line from ICB's Brothers And Sisters. sums her up pretty good:

"What is it? What are you all talking about?" said Sophia, coming into the room, her eyes at once apprehensive lest the talk might be about herself, and holding resentment ready in case it were not."

5.There’s an essay where [John Waters] writes about his favourite books, or, as he calls it, Five Books You Should Read to Live a Happy Life if Something is Basically the Matter With You. They are Denton Welch’s In Youth is Pleasure, Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies, and Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Darkness and Day.

In Youth is Pleasure is great, but p esoteric. Interesting to draw a line through those. ICB and DW are a good pairing.

i really don't know what kind of nonfiction i want to read. not necessarily a bio. maybe something about a certain industry. i really need to give it some thought.

feel bad sometimes that i love The Man Who Loved Children so much that no other Stead comes close for me. feel the same way kinda about Paula Fox. once you read Desperate Characters everything else gets measured against it. (i'm also waiting to read the Penelope Fitzgerald book that can compare to The Bookshop...haven't read them all yet.) man, there is a bleak Lit class for you. have everyone read those and throw in The Easter Parade by Richard Yates while you're at it. major bummer...

tomás gonzález, "in the beginning was the sea"

Are you only polling novellas from the 19th century, xyzzz___, or can it be more unwieldy than that?
― one way street, Tuesday, 2 June 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It can be but I wonder if I put in Kafka's Metamorphosis that would just walk it wouldn't it?
I had a German only sideline that would be feature Kafka, Von Kleist, Mann's Death In Venice and Lenz. Maybe its just me but Kafka would also walk that so I switched to 19th century.
What else were you thinking of? Anything from earlier periods would be good too.
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, June 3, 2015 5:57 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A few earlier works that come to mind are Behn's Oronooko, Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveler, Candide, Cervantes's Dialogue of the Dogs, Rameau's Nephew, Philosophy in the Boudoir, and Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, although maybe that assumes too flexible a definition of the novella. I was mostly thinking of twentieth century texts (e.g. The Beast in the Jungle, Heart of Darkness, Miss Lonelyhearts), Rulfo's Pedro Paramo, Hedayat's The Blind Owl, Platonov's Soul, Fitzgerald's May Day, Stein's Melanctha, Delany's The Star Pit, David Foster Wallace's The Sufferering Channel, Faulkner's Old Man, or Gass's The Pedersen Kid, among others), but I'd be fine with sticking to the nineteenth century and earlier.

Becoming Richard Pryor by Scott Saul

i seem to be reading 'negative dialectics', we'll see if that's true next week still

i found it surprisingly easy to get through (if not always easy to understand)--i may have been in a weird mental space.

yeah i've read lots of it, just seeming like the time for a serious read now. it seems to be the least unreadable of all his later work. i think the main source of difficulty is the allusiveness and the constant irony. but the conceptual space is smaller and the work is less substantive (like he admits at the outset), so familiarity w/ the philosophical tradition alleviates a lot of that difficulty. in contrast to 'aesthetic theory', which has just got way too much shit goin on for the prose to be the same kind of breeze.

I finished How We Decide. It had some interesting and suggestive tidbits to share, but as with many recent books on neuroscience, it far oversold the idea that a pile of suggestive tidbits could be coherently applied to ordinary and practical use, as a guide to behavior.

Its greatest value was to emphasize first that human brains are far more active and complex below the level of consciousness than we are ever consciously aware of, and secondly that emotions are as much a form of thought as our interior monologue and are generally accomplishing very useful work.

I am reading Shyness and Dignity by Dag Solstad. I returned C by Tom McCarthy. I got through the part that was sort of like Magic Mountain but not through the Great War. It was too much of a slog. I couldn't finish.

reading going clear by lawrence wright, which for the record is much better/more nuanced than the documentary although the doc is def good

Philip Roth - "I Married A Communist"
Gilles Deleuze - "The Time-Image"

i really don't know what kind of nonfiction i want to read. not necessarily a bio. maybe something about a certain industry. i really need to give it some thought.

Don't know if this appeals, but I just read Margaret Lazarus Dean's 'Leaving Orbit: The Last Days of AMerican Spaceflight', a wonderful look at the effective end of the US manned space program.

Weirdly, the last 3 books I read all featured NASA's stunning Vehicle Assembly Building (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_Assembly_Building)

The other two books were Ian Sales 'All that Outer Space Allows', an alternate=history SF novel about feminist SF writing and the Apollo program, and The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering by Jeffrey Rotter, a decaying US satire with some lovely writing but which didn't quite cohere fully

Don't know if this appeals, but I just read Margaret Lazarus Dean's 'Leaving Orbit: The Last Days of AMerican Spaceflight', a wonderful look at the effective end of the US manned space program.
This sounds great, thanks!

The other two books were Ian Sales 'All that Outer Space Allows'
Wait, is this the final Apollo Quartet book? Did it just come out?

Oh I see, April 27. I slept on it for a month. Now he's starting a new Space Opera thingie. We'll see.

Toying with idea of starting standalone thread for Station Eleven but wonder how far it will get, what with the cold equations of ILB.

just read it, so

Finished Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow", a bit dry in style but thought-provoking. Now reading John K. Galbraith's "The Affluent Society" - if nothing else, he's a much more stylish writer.

Galbraith was easily the best stylist economics ever produced. Not too shabby as a thinker, either.

one way street - I love lost of those 20th century recommends but it'll probbaly be spreading it too thin (anything more than 5-10 will do that due to the small size of ILB, and even then depends on whether it interests anybody.)

A few earlier works that come to mind are Behn's Oronooko, Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveler, Candide, Cervantes's Dialogue of the Dogs, Rameau's Nephew, Philosophy in the Boudoir, and Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, although maybe that assumes too flexible a definition of the novella.

gotta say I totally forgot Rasselas and Candide, as I don't like either of them. Haven't read any of the others although no doubt I'd add De Sade (whom I've been reading recently).

More great recommends I'll add everything here whenever I get round to doing it.

Okay, went ahead and started Station Eleven, By Emily St. John Mandel, a Standalone ILB Thread. Not much to it yet.

i will always read odd stories published in the 60's by women i have never heard of. as a rule. zero information on her on the web. though its nice to know all these years later that you can still buy first - and only - editions of this book from the eakins press website.

https://scontent-atl1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xta1/v/t1.0-9/11133745_10153847899852137_124843256554506580_n.jpg?oh=e3b1b8e1cc12c778cbde298733b89f1a&oe=5605E892

so I've now finished the Ishiguro, but before I move on to Satantango I'm going on a Cesar Aira mini-binge.

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter made for a pleasant single-sitting read at a cafe over the weekend (special thanks to my telepathic mother, who phoned me two minutes after I had closed the book), & I think I'll try to repeat the experience next weekend with a reread of The Literary Conference (emboldened by the fact that lightning literally strikes the same place twice in one of these novels)

meanwhile, I'm savoring every new plot development in his comparatively sprawling (140 pp!) noir novel Shantytown

Georges Simenon - Dirty Snow
Michaelangelo Matos - The Underground is Massive
Barney Frank - Frank
John Ashbery - Your Name Here

shouldn't that be

John Ashbery - Alfred, Lord Sotosyn

then

Tom Spanbauer, I Loved You More

shouldn't that be

John Ashbery - Alfred, Lord Sotosyn

then

― j., Thursday, June 4, 2015 12:40 PM

DON: Well, yeah.

Sei Shōnagon is so good. I love all of the list entries.

126. Things That Should Be Large

Priests. Fruit. Houses. Provision bags. Inksticks for inkstones.

Men's eyes: when they are too narrow, they look feminine. On the other hand, if they were as large as metal bowls, I should find them rather frightening.

Round braziers. Winter cherries. Pine trees. The petals of yellow roses.

Horses as well as oxen should be large.

127. Things That Should Be Short

A piece of thread when one wants to sew something in a hurry.

A lamp stand.

The hair of a woman of the lower classes should be neat and short.

The speech of a young girl.

So, speaking of novels in dialogue, like Burnett and Green, the library shop suddenly has a big shiny hard copy of A Frolic of His Own, but seems like some ILBers found it disappointing, compared to Gaddis' previous. The Times reviewer, despite caveats, has just the opposite take. Almost all of its many blurbs either reference his earlier works or just generally praise his style etc. On the other hand, it did win the 1994 National Book Award.
I would just buy the damn thing, since it's very cheap, but running out of room, so have to picky. What do yall think of it?

I haven't read any other Gaddis fiction.

It's definitely worth reading, but I wouldn't start with it--the pacing seems slacker and the satire more monotonous than was the case with his earlier work. If you're put off by the length and difficulty of the earlier novels, try Carpenter's Gothic.

how's matos' book

Seconding A Frolic of His Own as definitely worth reading.

how's matos' book

really really really good imo

So Shantytown was amazingly fun; I give it my highest recommendation, although of course with the caveat (for those new to Aira's work) that there is nothing like a conventionally satisfying ending.

Satantango took a little while to get its hooks in me, with its relentlessly dense single-paragraph chapters (I thought my Thomas Bernhard experience might help but their common ground is basically zero); three chapters in, I've started to pick up on the rhythms of the prose & I'm finding my way a little easier. Probably good that I recently stopped smoking weed, as there's a lot to keep track of.

I am now reading a translation of Callirhoe, one of the first novels still extant, written in Greek, probably in the first century AD, but possibly earlier. It is a potboiler about the most beautiful woman in the world and her many tribulations.

One thing that makes it interesting is that it is written for an audience who took for granted an entire world that has since disappeared. Another is that, although it has an operatic plot and uses crude narrative devices no modern novelist would consider, it has enough psychological nuance and sophistication to strike many notes of enduring truth. Which definitely makes it literature, despite the melodrama. I'm enjoying it.

i'm reading The Game-Players Of Titan. which is also kinda melodramatic in a Greek way.

hey who's the other person reading satantango/how are you liking it

& is it just me or has the film become really hard to find

I finally started Us Conductors, by ILXor and award-winning novelist sean gramophone :) I got it for Christmas and last night I read the first two chapters. It is by turns gripping and really lovely, and such a fantastic unusual story that I can't believe it's never been fictionalised before.

Region 2 DVD of Satantango still cheap and available:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/S%C3%A1t%C3%A1ntang%C3%B3-DVD-Peter-Berling/dp/B000HRLWQM/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1434113653&sr=1-1&keywords=satantango+dvd

just finished karate chop, by dorthe nors. really enjoyed it.

just started white noise by don delillo - i already like this a lot more than other delillo i've read - a co-worker recommended to me - very funny so far.

I've been rereading Hamsun's Hunger. I read it for the first time in 1972. It is difficult to believe this was published in 1890. It was unlike any book ever published up to then and still seems like a singular achievement, even if you put it up against any book written since then. The same material in the hands of anyone else writing at the time (or in any other era, tbf) would have turned toward pathos in the first two pages and stayed there relentlessly, but Hamsun manages to avoid it entirely. It's like watching a magician at work. Great book!

have you read any other Hamsun? I never went beyond Hunger (which is a fascinating book) due to leeriness of fascist tendencies

I've read four or five other Hamsun novels. None of them are as groundbreaking as Hunger was, or even resemble it much. His other novels tell much more conventional stories. I learned a lot about life in Norwegian coastal villages at the turn of the twentieth century from them and enjoyed many of his characters, but Hunger stands alone as his great work of creative genius.

His fascism isn't evident in his work up to 1930 and I've never read his work beyond that period. He was very much a mythologizer and a Scando-romantic, so that aspect of fascism is probably what captured him, not the violent anti-Semitism.

I started counting up the Hamsun I've read. Came to eight. Mostly read them before 1976, but I've reread a few since then.

Hunger
Pan
Mysteries
Victoria
Growth of the Soil
Wayfarers
Wanderers
The Women at the Pump

JUst went out and bought a stack of things from charity shops again while looking for copies of Game of Thrones which I'd had to take back to the library largely unread.
THese include John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces which I read a few decades back but don't think I have acopy of apart from this one.
Also Philip K Dick's Lies Inc which I'm not familiar with but may be the last thing he was writing when he died.
Also got the book Wolf Of Wall St, wondering what's in the book that's different to the film.
You're Entitled tO an Opinion a biography of Tony Wilson
THe Way of tHe Rat a book on office politics.

Plus 2 .library books
Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything on climate change
& Scam! Inside America's Con Artist clans
so loads of more new stuff to read. I'd already done a search for the Game of thrones around charity shops on Tuesday and picked up a few then too.

Finished the book Blue blood by eddie conlon which was very interesting.

Just been getting into that Nikolaus Wachsmann book; KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, a from the outset study of the Nazi Concentration camps system that has been adding to my nightmares lately.

George Simenon - Maigret on the Riviera
Thomas Hardy - A Pair of Blue Eyes
Anne Enright - The Forgotten Waltz

Unusually for me, I have crept a short distance into three books: Aristotle's Politics, Henry James' Washington Square, & Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Not sure which one I will return to this evening.

the last two you can read in an evening

Perhaps the last two you can read in an evening. I am not an especially fast reader. I tend to amble along.

Lately, I've been going slowly through Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, Carla Speed McNeil's Finder comics, Charles Burns's X'ed Out trilogy, the last couple of books of poetry by Fred Moten, Feel Trio and The Little Edges, and Charlotte Bronte's Villette, which has (as of about halfway through) one of the most fascinatingly self-divided and acerbic narrators I've come across.

Good discussion of Villette, Shirley, and (I think) The Professor here:

Charlotte Brontë's Shirley

Thanks, dow.

I guess I should read Octavia Butler. Where to start?

Good question; I'm impressed with Sower so far (among other things, SF or not, it's probably the most memorable literary response I've seen to the '92 LA riots and the political climate that made them possible), but it's the first novel by Butler I've read. The Xenogenesis/Lilith's Brood trilogy is supposed to have her most ambitious work, but I'll defer to the SF thread regulars for recommendations.

the first part of brideshead revisited (the friendship/romance with the son) was one of the best things i had ever read, but i got super bored when it moved on to the rest of the family and never finished it. i was probably too young for it at the time though

It's his worst novel by some distance.

Even including Helena?

Just started Max Berbohm essay collection, The Prince of Minor Writers (a NYRB book). Only read his fiction before, but these are mostly pretty great and funny so far.

I guess I should read Octavia Butler. Where to start?

"Kindred" is good.

Short story collection 'Bloodchild' is pretty representative of her themes and strengths.

xxp I read that NYRB article on him. That collection sounds good, is his fiction good?

So with Butler we get her take on how human/humanoid organisms can change and be changed, veering through the walls of identity, in a seemingly random way---for instance, a young black woman, married to a white man, ricochets back and forth between late 20th Century America (LA, I think) and the Antebellum South, where she encounters her white male ancestor and her black female ancestor, one the slaveowner, one the slave: that's Kindred The slaveowner is quite the erratic charmer at times, and things get even more complicated than they might otherwise. Clay's Ark has to do with a highly infectious disease brought back from outer space, and the mutant children that result.
But Clay's Ark is also part of the Patternmaster series, which is Science Gone Too Far, with Butler's development from implications of Frankenstein, also her variation on (and maybe response to) the critique of mystiques, incl the power fanasties leading to and frompurposeful evolution in Frank Herbert's Dune trilogies.
I don't remember the Xenogenesis trilogy very well, but this is a pretty good basic description of the Patternmaster books (but see the main Wiki on Butler for more details, incl. the order in which they should be read. also, I seem to recall thinking that she kept what she may have perceived as her tendencies to melodrama on a very short leash, wnich could add to the tension, but make her seem a bit self-doubtful, tentative at times)(then again, the Patternmaster is an aeons-old African vampire parapsychologist, intent on breeding a new race of telepaths.)
The Patternist series (also known as the Patternmaster series or Seed to Harvest) is a group of science fiction novels by Octavia E. Butler that detail a secret history continuing from the Ancient Egyptian period to the far future that involves telepathic mind control and an extraterrestrial plague. A profile of Butler in Black Women in America notes that the themes of the series include "racial and gender-based animosity, the ethical implications of biological engineering, the question of what it means to be human, ethical and unethical uses of power, and how the assumption of power changes people."[1]

Butler's first published novel, 1976's Patternmaster, was the first book in this series to appear. From 1977 until 1984, she published four more Patternist novels: Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980) and Clay's Ark (1984). Until Butler began publishing the Xenogenesis trilogy in 1987, all but one of her published books were Patternist novels (1979's Kindred was the exception)

Of Beerbohm's fiction I've read Zuleika Dobson, which was fun, and Seven Men and Two Others, which is excellent, esp. if you like piss-takes of literary types.

read "no good men among the living", which was astonishing. before that patrick cockburn's book on ISIS, which was good but sorely needing a good edit. now onto rory stewart's book about walking from herat to kabul

Thomas Hardy - A Pair of Blue Eyes

esp. if you like piss-takes of literary types

Oh yes. Ta.

hi everyone -

can anyone recommend some good fiction that is set in Guatemala?

thanks in advance,

gr8080

and yes i found this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Novels_set_in_Guatemala

looking for a pr0-tip

I have been wanting to read Senselessness by Castellanos Moya for a good long while now.

Finished Saer's La Grande last weekend. Probably the best writer to have ever emulated those naturalistic Proustian sentences (I doubt many have tried tbh) and there is a weird effect of having explicit sexual encounters written about in those Proustian paragraphs (where Proust used those blocks of writing to hide himself Saer's characters are naked physically and emotionally too). Equally though Bolano isn't such a lone-ish figure (La Grande is Saer's last bk from 2005), both talk about dictatorships and their meddling in literary circles (via shadowy 'failed' poets), there is no magical realism to disguise anything either. Although Saer doesn't make use of pulp-ish writing in the way Bolano might. At times I would like to read less about lives destroyed by those dictatorships but it is such a part of those writerly lives that as soon as I write this it becomes a rubbish thing to say.

All Dogs are Blue by Rodrigo de Souza Leão is short but inevitably intense and comical sets of scenes in an asylum (where Rodrigo was confined by his family). No issues like those in Wild Man Fischer (say). It is touching how literature is almost his only, best friend - Rimbaud especially. So I turned to reading him this week.

|||||||| u may also like 'an unexpected light' (unless you've had enough afghanistan)

I just returned from a brief camping trip, during which I finished reading Washington Square. It was very much like a Jane Austen novel condensed to novella length and pretty damned brilliant in its execution. Now I am reading Cannery Row.

I have been wanting to read Senselessness by Castellanos Moya for a good long while now.

i've read this. it's awesome

Solstice getting near. About time for ILB to break out its ice cream suit and start a new summer reading thread.

for a little while when i was a kid i would reread the susan cooper books at every solstice

Do your final dance around the maypole because Sumer Is Icumen In 2015, What Are You Reading Now?