Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall 2015 ist. What Are You Reading Now?

Adieu Sommer, willkommen Herbst, hallo liebe Buchliebhaber!

A courtesy link to the prior WAYR thread for Summer 2015.

Boileau-Narcejac: Vertigo -- basis for the Hitchcock film; enjoyable but a bit of a dated translation: Opening lines set the flavour:

"Look here!" said Gevigne. "I want you to keep an eye on my wife."
"The devil! Running off the rails, is she?"

But it is improved by being set in Paris just as WW2 kicks in, adding a layer of dread and complication missing from the film.

been slightly umoored in recent months and fallen out of touch with friends, and lost regular habits - like posting to ilx. it don't seem right.

so

read the first two of Jake Vandemeer's Southern Reach trilogy. Enjoyed them by and large. The writing's a bit rocky occasionally - involved in some silent competition to see how many times he can use the word 'brackish' in the first book, not always in entirely convincing contexts, eg 'brackish light'. I'm not entirely sure how much I actually mind this sort of thing - there's something slightly hypnotic about this sort of badness, which is appropriate to the subject matter.

i enjoyed the claustrophobic and alarming atmosphere of the first one - the total insinuation of an environment and its organisms into ours reminded me a bit of ballard, the vivid and cthonic grotesquery is indebted to Lovecraft. much of the second is seemed devoted problems of not getting on with your colleagues and not being great at your job, but manages maintain a sense of dread and unease throughout, with some genuinely alarming moments.

Starting the third already because i have a bad tendency to binge read.

Also read Oliver Harris's Inspector Belsey novels, which I thought were very well written. Belsey is noirish police detective who, rather than just generally being a cynical drinkner, is actually under immediate danger of having his life collapse, which leads to enjoyable double plots as solving the crime becomes entwined with trying to escape his own retribution. harris has got some cheek calling his first The Hollow Man, and that one becomes hugely and enjoyably implausible by the end. Deep Shelter, the second, is very good - as with The Hollow Man, I really liked his London topography, which in this case is largely based round its WWII deep bomb shelters. That one becomes even more implausible by the end but nm. Minus points for unwholesome whiffs of laddism.

Dart by Alice Oswald. Poem that follows the river Dart from source to sea and incorporates her interviews with local people who live around or off the river. Couple of very good bits, but I haven't got it to hand right now.

Read Robert Musil's short story The Blackbird, which contained these lines:

The dining rooms are likewise piled up floor on floor, as are the white-tiled baths and the balconies with their red awnings. Love, sleep, birth, digestion, unexpected reunions, troubled and restful nights are all vertically aligned in these buildings like the columns of sandwiches at a vending machine. In middle-class apartments like these your destiny is already waiting for you the moment you move in. You will admit that human freedom consists essentially of where and when we do what we do, for what we do is almost always the same – thus the sinister implications of one uniform blueprint for all.

Which in turn, along with seeing stuff about the film, sent me to High Rise, which I hadn't read before. really liked it - will try and expand later.

Also Renaissance Self-Fashioning by Stephen Greenblatt, which I'd only really dipped into bits of before, at university, and hadn't held any strong feelings about at the time. reading parts of it now it seemed like a bit of a dog's dinner, but that's prob one for the academic language thread.

Available Light by Clifford Geertz, a late-career review of some areas. Started reading after watching The Act of Killing (in itself partly a consequence of the Vandemeer books, and their obsession with the permeable boundaries between observer and observed). Not an awful lot on Indonesia in there, and anyway, that was before the revolution. Still, he's always a pleasure to read, and Greenblatt in RSF traduces Geertz by claiming himself a pupil. Geertz's pragmatic and nuanced hermeneutic approach (almost feel maieutic is the best word) is far removed from Greenblatt's heavy-handed intellectual manner.

Also, picked up The Road to Xanadu: The Paths of the Imagination by Jonathan Livingston Lowes second hand and read some of it. I might read some more at some point. It seemed fine, and as a container for all sorts of coleridgian artefacts has a quaint or quixotic appeal, but i'm not so deep in coleridge lore that I need that right now.

I'm going thru a Wila Cather phase. I reread The Professor's House and One of Ours (mediocre Great War story w/mild homoerotic undertones) and My Mortal Enemy for the first time. Gonna try an obscure Edith Wharton best-seller called Twilight Sleep. Those '20s blockbusters are getting their own Library of America edition, due next week.

fizzzzzless feel free to contribute to this thread:

where lies the strangling fruit...Area X - The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer

i like hearing what people think of that thing.

i think i've just gotten really good at ignoring some of the clunkiness in SF/fantasy. for the most part, i thought southern reach read like a dream. i was certainly impressed by some of the writing in a big way. i liked how he sustained the tone for so long. but i guess that's part and parcel with the "new weird" lovecraft thing. you are supposed to keep the dread and fear dripping slowly like water from a tap. the thing i like the most about that kind of world is how even real life becomes something alien and unrecognizable. which is the dream thing again. it's certainly unnerving when done well.

Ferrante - The Story of a New Name
Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings

I'm going to Istanbul in week 42 - anyone recommend me a good Orhan Pamuk?

I love My Name Is Red, but that's all I've read by him.

I recently read three Ali Smith novels...The Accidental was really good, How to Be Both was pretty good, and There But For The was fine. They're all well-written and sort of refreshingly low-stakes.

Now I'm on the new Patrick deWitt and Rushdie novels, both of which are hugely enjoyable so far.

Patrick deWitt is one of those writers on my endless "i need to read" list. If I'm prioritizing, is the new one better than The Sisters Brothers?

continuing to delve into british crime/detective fiction of the early/mid-twentieth century: more michael innes (mostly excellent), nicholas blake, margery allingham (surprising elements of ruritanianism in some of her work) & edmund crispin. the latter is okay but strikes me as a cut-price innes from what i've read of him so far... interestingly (or not), except for allingham, appears they all very consciously approached their crime fiction as a secondary occupation/money earner.

think i'm more or less done with this stuff for the moment.

i am reading ARISTOTLE

he can be pretty funny

If I'm prioritizing, is the new one better than The Sisters Brothers?

Too early to say, but I think The Sisters Brothers is some kind of classic.

essential for istanbul - http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1848851545?keywords=istanbul&qid=1443212383&ref_=sr_1_10&sr=8-10

This week I read Chéri by Colette, not really my thing (I wanted a dirtier French novel) and This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, whose lightness reminded me of chamber music, the sort you might hear played live in a setting where no one is really paying attention and you're indulging the free wine while largely keeping to yourself.

I am reading andy beckett's "promised you a miracle: UK 80-82" & am off to lyon/nice in a couple of weeks with the last two ferrantes

Finished Pitol's The Journey - has a flavour drawn from Mandelstam's Journey to Armenia - which Pitol himself mentions as a book that doesn't mentions Armenia that much. And here Pitol (as I put it in my prev post on this in the summer thread) travels by reading as much as he does in the actual spaces he walks around in. Josep Pla - who I thought was ok if a bit disappointing, at least in Life Embitters) - prefers to tell the stories of his encounters w/people as he travels and drifts around, letting the quirky nature of these encounters speak, as anybody would. Pitol also has that true sense of drift and yet attentive enough to focus on a moment, but its like he uses these digressions on literature as a way to understand where he is at, and to ultimately further out the drift. Later on he'll use the visual: Pirosnami's unknowing art to look at a corner of Georgia, for example. Pitol goes to these places as a cultural attache to Mexico (so there is some comedy to be gained too) and just reads and sees and then wants to understand something but not come out with something conclusive, just a way to live it out.

Can't wait for the final volume.

Deszo Kosztolanyi - Kornel Esti: A Novel

Also read Oliver Harris's Inspector Belsey novels

These are amazingly good, I thought, and quite unusual; the second was especially good, and made me think of Patricia Highsmith writing 1980s UK nuclear paranoia/conspiracy TV series 'Edge of Darkness'

And Kornel Esti is great. All of Kosztolanyi is wonderful, really.

nicholas blake/cecil day-lewis's 'The Private Wound' is probably his masterpiece: not one of his series novels, it's self-contained and very atmospheric and bleak

Too early to say, but I think The Sisters Brothers is some kind of classic.

Seconded

xp Aristotle is heaps fun, Poetics has lots of punchlines but Ethics is great to iirc:

Similarly the excellence of the horse makes a horse both good in itself and good at running and at carrying its rider and at awaiting the attack of the enemy.

Thanks for the Istanbul tips, just ordered My Name is Red at library and found an ebook-version of Strolling - looks good!

at the moment: thomas morris - we don't know what we're doing and barthelme - 60 stories.

And Kornel Esti is great. All of Kosztolanyi is wonderful, really.

Apart from Skylark (read) and Anna Edes (not), is there anything else?

I'm reading ilxor John D's "Wolf In White Van" (loving it) and also reading Richard Rushton's book on film theory.

I was surprised to find that tractate was in the google keyboard dictionary.

Anyway, More Ghost Stories. Just finished 'tractate middoth', next up is 'casting the runes'. It's in the trees... It's coming...

Started reading Michael Lewis's The Blind Side, in tribute to the start of brain-injury season.

Starting Alejandro Zambra's My Documents and wading into Samuel Delany's omnibus of his early fiction A, B, C: Three Short Novels (Jewels of Aptor, Ballad of Beta-2, and They Fly at Ciron)--none of which is as dazzling as his fiction of the later sixties, but it's interesting to see him start to sketch out his themes as an extremely precocious young writer, even if the earliest novels seem at times rushed or structurally awkward.

nicholas blake/cecil day-lewis's 'The Private Wound' is probably his masterpiece: not one of his series novels, it's self-contained and very atmospheric and bleak

thanks for the tip! only read a couple of later blakes so far... would also like to read the early one(s?) where strangeways is reputably based much more on auden's characteristics than those ones are.

found a copy of e.c. bentley's trent's last case, so going on with that now.

Jewels of aptor was the delaney i read second after the wonderful babel-17, and it really cooled my enthusiasm for a long time, until i got a collection of delaneys short stories which revved me up again.

finished 'the last chronicle of barchester'

read 'a theory of fun for games design' which is, well, i guess you wouldn't expect the guy who ran ultima online to be an intellectual as such

starting murakami's 'hear the wind sing' -- did not realise that the omnibus of those two had come back out, so they made an enjoyable impulse buy -- as some sort of entr'acte between interminable victorians and fantasy novels

aren't you going to tell us what his theory of fun is

Jewels of aptor was the delaney i read second after the wonderful babel-17, and it really cooled my enthusiasm for a long time, until i got a collection of delaneys short stories which revved me up again.

― as verbose and purple as a Peter Ustinov made of plums (James Morrison), Sunday, September 27, 2015 6:21 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, Jewels is definitely meandering and awkward at times: I think my enjoyment was largely predicated on watching Delany in the process of teaching himself to write SF. The whole "seemingly magical world filled with genetic anomalies and built on the ashes of our civilization" conceit is certainly more successfully deployed in The Einstein Intersection, but it's interesting to think about Jewels as in some ways providing material to be reworked in that later novel.

Yeah, and wasn't it his first novel, first published anyway, written when he was maybe 19, published when he was 20? As 1962 spaceboy debuts go, it's not Bob Dylan, but promising and entertaining enough.

Also, Bobby D. didn't write much of his debut, Chip D. did.

(I might feel less charitable if I'd payed for his writing lessons, but I got it from the library.)

i have incredible little memory of all the early delanys, for some reason. just no idea what happened in any of them.

also idk if ralph koster has a theory of fun really

Also, Bobby D. didn't write much of his debut, Chip D. did.

think i'm more or less done with this stuff for the moment.

― no lime tangier, Friday, September 25, 2015 6:38 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Never read any michael innes for some reason, but edmund crispin/bruce montgomery felt fairly sketchy. curious comment - his books feel full of self-loathing. A sort of facetious imitation of golden age crime novels, which he clearly loved, but which he maybe also felt he was above. I've got a 1st ed. copy of Wyndham Lewis' Paleface which is signed by a Bruce Montgomery from the period he would have been up at Oxford and I like think it's him - it certainly seems possible. maybe i'm just misreading deep cynicism for that strained farcical humour that damages mid-late period john dickson carr do badly. BM notable also for being identified as an alcoholic bore by kingsley amis of all people, only just before he became pretty much the same sort of thing, and that may be where I'm picking up the self-loathing from. Seems everyone who knew him when he was young felt he was enormously talented but was unable to find any real outlet for it other than Carry On film music and the only partially successful crime novels.

the women writers were undoubtedly the best along of them, with peak period jdc, and with agatha christie being something of an outlier in terms of method and even success of execution. Though the idiosyncrasies in methodology must be what distinguished her and accounted for her success. i went on a miss marple binge earlier this year and what struck me was how they're almost always about the pre-war world attempting to cope with the post-war world. immigration, people returning from the war changed in personality and motivations, relations unknown or uncertain:

And that, thought Craddock, was exactly what was oppressing him. He didn’t know. There were just faces and personalities and they were backed up by ration books and identity cards—nice neat identity cards with numbers on them, without photographs or fingerprints. Anybody who took the trouble could have a suitable identity card—and partly because of that, the subtler links that had held together English social rural life had fallen apart. In a town nobody expected to know his neighbour. In the country now nobody knew his neighbour either, though possibly he still thought he did

That's crucial in multiple novels and short stories. There's another quite nice quote that illustrates it differently, in almost science-fiction terms:

And ever since the war quite half our clocks haven’t gone at all, and the ones that do go are often either fast or slow or stop because we haven’t wound them up.’ Mrs Swettenham paused to let this picture of confused time sink in

Miss Marple's main detection method is repeatedly stated to be finding analogues for the current cast from her total knowledge of the village she lives in. In a world where identity is uncertain, Miss Marple is successful by doing what no one else can, and allows everyone is a cipher, and then finding the platonic type from her store of knowledge. It's an extremely odd thing to do really - very far from the avowed deductive methods of Sherlock Holmes from whom in theory the golden age novelists derived their rules. Quite sinister.

Also read Oliver Harris's Inspector Belsey novels

These are amazingly good, I thought, and quite unusual; the second was especially good, and made me think of Patricia Highsmith writing 1980s UK nuclear paranoia/conspiracy TV series 'Edge of Darkness'

― as verbose and purple as a Peter Ustinov made of plums (James Morrison), Saturday, September 26, 2015 8:20 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yep, this is a really good call. Feel I underplayed their virtues in my comment, and you've hit the nail on the head about the paranoia/conspiracy feeling, in fact it almost fits in to the '70s tech/nature/government conspiracy science fiction genre.

The indications in the titles of the type of personality crises belsey has (Hollow Man and Deep Shelter) are exploited very successfully too as well.

In this respect it reminded me of Chris Petit's The Passenger where there is (iirc -it's been a while) a complete lack of assumptions about how character is constructed. I've never read a piece of popular fiction that so brutal in its method - here that no one in the entire book has anything that could be said to be an identity or inner life, and that being its whole point and approach.

My 'whiff of laddism' was mainly due to the female characters and the slight villain/car chase aura, but i think this is a misreading, or at least gets it wrong.

Looking forward to the next one anyway.

Now reading Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations - the short paragraphs are handy, and allow you to treat each as a useful and provoking thought game. going walking for the rest of the week though, so it's getting dumped in favour of the kindle. going to be walking offa's dyke. any suggestions for suitable reading? mercian hymns felt like it might be good, but i read it earlier this year, and wouldn't be able to get a copy that i'd feel happy jamming into a rucksack.

definitely got the sense of an underlying/lurking smirk (if not a sneer) while reading crispin. ha, at the pale face thing. if i'm remembering right, pale face is his anti-lawrence, anti-primitivist screed? only ever read an extract from it. lewis very much the type of writer who would appeal to a certain very up-to-date young intellectual type of the period.

one crispin piece that struck me is the story 'we know you're busy writing, but we thought you wouldn't mind if we just dropped in for a moment'. nice misanthropic roald dahlish quality to it.

there are similarities between crispin and innes (not least the incessant literary allusions they're both addicted to), but innes is much more playful and enjoyable.

if i'm remembering right, pale face is his anti-lawrence, anti-primitivist screed?

that's the one.

i like the sound of that story, and will try innes at some point that is not right now, because i'm undergoing one of my boomerang aphelian moments wrt detective fiction, and hankering after chewy intellectualism. it won't last.

Shirley Hazzard - The Bay of Noon. Just plays on the post-WWII city/society/people in flux as Jenny adventures around Naples - finding ruins, friendships, encounters. Only one comment about her on ILB ever, anyone else? I am enjoying it but I don't have a whole deal to say at the min - she name checks a couple of the neo-realist films at the beginning so plugged into that and now using it to read faster than I should instead of savouring the flow of the writing.

Reading more second tier Edith Wharton: The Mother's Recompense.

Graham Greene credited Innes with encouraging, maybe even inspiring him---by example---to write thrillers minus value of Empire as a given, for a post-WWI audience. I don't know about any similarities of approach, departure, quality etc.

starting in on Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" - been awhile since I've read anything like this

I'm about 2/3 into The Blind Side and I'm loving it. Michael Lewis seems capable of telling any kind of story knowingly and humorously.

in a hotel in ruthin and they had tom baker's autobiography on the shelves. v amusing. i liked this quote:

the theatre couldn't match what was going on in a court of law or at football grounds. the theatre has never been able to match what goes on anywhere, that's why so few people go.

Neil Smith 'Boo' -Enjoyed it but I think it's supposed to be for Young Adults which I am not.

Morrissey List of the Lost - No chapters, barely any paragraphs, scant characterization (with the exception of the athletics coach who was great) and a surprising wealth of detail about the TV show 'Bonanza'. Strangely enjoyable.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince - Had never read this before. Not sure whether it went over, or under, my head.

Haha your take on little prince is dead on

What's up with that mozzer thing, recently saw a piece from it mocked and had to admit it looked dreadful at first glance

Gotten to page 206 of 561 in Modern Library edition of Dos Passos' USA This first section. which will go on to page 369, alternates straightforward chapters of narrative with the deadpan garble of Newsreels and The Camera Eye---can see how this structure latter might have influenced, for instance, Richard Wright's Lawd Today, and the solemn, lurid information injections may have gotten William Burroughs and the Firesign Theatre going (or just great minds thinking alike).
The narrative takes crisp, photorealistic naturalism into pungent pathos, with some poetic turns, when appropriate. The first chapters take an urchin named Mac across the country, often riding the rails or working his ass off and wanting to live up to his Irish revolutionary heritage in these Wobbly times. Always very readable, but can seem like wandering/slogging way between the road stories of Jack London and Jack Kerouac. Mac's attitudes re women seems especially arrested, if plausibly so, but then we get chapters from the point of view of a female--also plausible!---growing up in the very very very pre-gentrified Georgetown section of Washington DC. A third subset of narrative sections presents another working boy, but one who gets schooled by an older woman, a society gal (who marries him so he can be her heterosexual beard, or that's what he decides---she does seem to be attracted to him, but she needs variety---points to Dos for room to let readers make up their own minds, if they care that much).

"latter" wasn't supposed to stay in there, sorry. Sorry for other typos too.

"This first section": The 42nd Parallel.

I like the narrative chapters' jumpcuts too: slog, pace, reach, slog, then, "Ten years later..." Or run, drink, work, whore, run, run, run together, then, "That was the last time he ever saw Mac."

"heterosexual beard": sorry for that---they fuck sometimes, but she runs around with other guys too, on the downlow (society, 1909)

Also, she understands finance better than her young Horatio Alger Jr.-wannabee ex-hubby, so far.

That Who On Earth is Tom Baker autobio is great if it is the same one Fizzles just stumbled on. Found it cheap a while back and it is really funny.

Trying to work out which of several books to read. Found a cheap complete Rudyard Kipling Children's Short Stories with the Jungle Book which I've never read but seen several film versions of.
Also got Stieg Larson Dragon Tattoo, Simon Reynolds Energy Flash, a Woody Allen bio by John Baxter, David Attenborough's Living Planet and a number of others drifting around the bed.
Still going through Ford Madox Ford's March of Literature elsewhere and about half way through.
&about half way through Wolf of Wall St as a bus book.

The Therapy of Desire, by Martha Nussbaum, about therapeutic models of ethics in Hellenistic philosophy. Good so far. It's the first book of hers I've read. Also still reading a collection of Buddhist philosophy, which I'm finding to be difficult reading.

that's the one Stevolende. i had to put it back on the shelf before i left but have now dl'd it to my kindle and looking forward to continuing it.

next place I stayed had the midnight folk by john masefield so i read that as the sun set over clwydian hills, which was perfect. the absolute fluidity of time and space in it is quite strange. i tend to see magical worlds in children's books as either accessible through mundane portals (ie a wardrobe) or at transitional times (tom's midnight garden). the dark is rising sequence is a really good set of examples about different ways a magical world might be accessed and how manichean battles can find their way into the apparently mundane world of the reader. but in masefield it's pretty much immediately a case that everything is accessible from everywhere.

Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find
Flannery O'Connor, Everything that Rises Must Converge
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

xxxp i've never been able to finish that, jmm, despite it ostensibly being in my sweet spot. she's just so nnnnnnnnnnnn as a writer : /

haha that sums up my experience reading nussbaum perfectly

I really love The Fragility of Goodness and Love's Knowledge.

I was having fun reading the Strugatsky brothers' The Dead Mountaineer's Inn -- it's sort of like the movie Clue, with the density of the mill machinations in Twin Peaks -- until the ending discarded everything and brought in space aliens and robots. The introduction says the bros. didn't like mystery solutions -- "your interest inevitably declines as soon as whos and whys are revealed". Their ending is a worse alternative in my opinion.

Now I'm reading John Dickson Carr's The Man Who Could Not Shudder. Carr's mysteries usually have satisfying solutions. The Three Coffins in particular has an amazing solution that wowed me.

I recently read three Ali Smith novels...The Accidental was really good, How to Be Both was pretty good, and There But For The was fine. They're all well-written and sort of refreshingly low-stakes.

Just read How to Be Both, was pretty disappointed. The Georgia section was ok but felt like exactly what it was - half of a novel. It finished just as it was getting interesting. The other section just didn't hold my attention at all, although the character and subject could have been right up my alley. SMDH at the reviews that pegged it as some kind of extraordinary game-changing experimental novel.

barthelme - sixty stories.

particularly enjoyed "a manual for sons".

I am reading The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. Then I will read Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, in keeping with the late 80s film theme (I've never seen either though).

I hated Bonfire and iirc I never finished it. I just think Tom Wolfe is terrible. I'd be interested in other opinions who've read more of his stuff, as I was pretty young and didn't have much of a frame of reference for the subject matter. But Les Liaisons Dangereuses is absorbingly nasty and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I never saw either film, but couldn't help picturing Glenn Close and John Malkovich as the characters while reading.

That version is one of my favorite adaptations.

The Close+Malkovich film version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses is indeed excellent.

JUst found the charity shop copy of Game of Thrones I've been hoping to turn up for months so might start into that. had just read the beginning of the Stieg Larson over the last few nights.

Strugatsky brothers' The Dead Mountaineer's Inn

I've only read a couple Strugatsky Bros (and not this one in particular), I have a really hard time wrapping my head around them tbh, their approach to plot construction and characterization and just their prose is so idiosyncratic. And then even getting a good sense of their overall ouevre is difficult given the random availability of much of their output.

Ha ha all that's what I liked about their Roadside Picnic and Hard To Be A God. the latter seemed like it might have some nonsensically-festooned/filtered socio-political allusions enjoyed by USSR readers at the time.
Bonfires was a notorious big name, maybe big budget box office bomb before being forgotten altogether. Never saw it, read some of the original serial in Rolling Stone, revised for the nook, but seemed pretty snotty, in in that juvenile geezer way he became known for pretty quickly, but did enjoy his early fascination with emerging 60s pop culture in collected magazine and Times pieces, also The Electric Koolaid Acid Test. Don't think I read all of The Right Stuff, but his sardonic take on the epic propaganda of the American space program (astronauts, though very sympathetically and admiringly presented, were mostly along for the ride and the symbolism), made for a gloriously absurd big screen celebration, Sam Shepherd's profile, Dennis Quaid's flattop, Ed Harris's "We want a window!" and all.

revised for the *book* (prob wouldn't hurt to revise it for the Nook too, if the ereader still is being made)(or either way)

but seemed pretty snotty

Yeah that's a good word for it I think.

Yeah I like the snottiness here because I am inclined against many of the types of characters here. I am reading it mostly for setting and schadenfreude.

I used to enjoy Tom Wolfe, especially the 60s stuff. Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and I think another couple of compilations of his work from then. I read Bonfire of the Vanities a few years after it came out and I think I enjoyed it, but yeah the characters in it for the main part tipify people I wouldn't really like anyway.
Not sure what I'd think of it now but I do tend to enjoy reading him.

In the 60s Wolfe wrote about interesting people. Now he writes about the people he dislikes.

Otm

omg he shd do a millenials novel

or maybe that's too close to charlotte simmons, which I have read and did enjoy tbh

taking a break from Peter Gay's magisterial Freud: A Life For Our Time by reading Philip Glass' memoir Words Without Music which half way through is brisk, accessible and fascinating on music, theatre, travel, NYC in the 60s. reading about Freud sends me back to college, realizing I'm far better equipped at this point in my life to understand psychoanalytic theory. education is wasted on the young! appropriately, despite being workaholic and plenty egotistical, Freud is also well, well-adjusted: a loving father and husband who doesn't neglect his family. reassuring, somehow. also in recent months:

Brad Gooch - Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard and Art in the 70s and 80s
Brandon Stusoy – Up Is Up But So Is Down
Steven Hager – Art After Midnight
Camilla Lackberg – The Stranger, The Hidden Child
Jill Leovy – Ghettoside
Erik Larson - Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of The Lusitania
Donna Tartt – The Goldfinch
Oliver Sacks – On The Move

It's hard for me to type this, but all I feel like reading these days is... L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. Apart from that... maybe some stuff in Spanish? Juan Rulfo - El llano en llamas, for one, because I already own it. I might go the library and try to find a good contemporary Spanish translation of Hemingway, or Camus. Detective novels? I want the language at its sparest, and its least 'literary'... Maybe what I really want is to read Borges in Spanish; or maybe I only wish that I already had. But what am I asking you for

Joseph Roth - What I Saw. Bunch of Feuilletons from the late 20s and early 30s on Berlin (Weimar). Reading this in Manchester nearby the Tory conference and the parts about homelessness and what the world was like before social safeguards kicked in coming through a bit more although its much more varied.

xxxp i've never been able to finish that, jmm, despite it ostensibly being in my sweet spot. she's just so nnnnnnnnnnnn as a writer : /

I stalled out in chapter 5, mainly because I haven't read De Rerum Natura and it's boring to read a 50-page analysis of something I haven't read. I should revisit Sextus and read Seneca too. So, I will come back to this one, eventually (hopefully), after checking out some primary texts. I was getting pretty interested in the themes of the book, which in addition to therapy and the emotions have something to do with issues of power in pedagogy, the Epicurean model being presented as simultaneously more inclusive and more coercive than the Aristotelian model.

Just starting ...
Eugenie Grandet by Balzac -- great opening description of a provincial town and so much about wine as a part of life, from Saumur, no less!
Recent reading ...
"Emma Zunz" from a New Directions printing of Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings by Borges -- I ran out of borrowed books and was inspired to look for unread things on my meager shelves.
Purity by Franzen -- no comment, lest I get mown down ... eep ... only maybe note to self to compare rendering of major incident to above and to Crime and Punishment (affinity for the frantic out of mind state noted)
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber -- helped me get through my stasiscation

Good stuff about Tom Wolfe to look up ...

xp lol if 'i gotta read de rerum natura first' is the kind of principle you regulate your life by nothing is ever gonna get done

take it from someone who has gotta read hegel etc etc : /

It's hard for me to type this

lol literally right!! oh wait was that the joke you were making

Haha yeah, the pun was most intended. Astonishingly the book I'm reading right now just devoted a couple of pages to 'reading' the name L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (side note: GAH, IT'S EVEN HARDER TO TYPE ON A PHONE) & parsing out its myriad possible 'senses', but never once mentioned the difficulty of (re-)inscribing it.

maybe they had stamps made, it was the old times, ppl were always endorsing stuff w/ those custom stamps

is the astonishing bit the latter part? because i feel like i've read at least three 2+ page accounts of what l=a=etc can mean

i am reading rochefoucauld's maxims and renata adler's collected journalism and liking the former more than the latter

still plowing through Piketty, got Mitchell's "The Bone Clocks" from the library as an antidote - looks like everyone here hated it tho :(

which versh did you end up having on hand, thomp?

the penguin classic. it's kinda maximally appeallingly penguin classic looking.

I'm having difficulty settling down to a book this past week. I keep book hopping and not getting enough satisfaction to stick it out. Maybe I ought to check World War Z out of the library.

Yeah. Started taking WWZ as my bus book and it does seem very good.
Pretty cynical about how a virus could spread.

still plowing through Piketty, got Mitchell's "The Bone Clocks" from the library as an antidote - looks like everyone here hated it tho :(

i bought it because i thought i wanted to read it, then once I'd bought it realised i really didn't want to read it at all. it's still sitting on my kindle though and in the past couple weeks I've been thinking it make make a goid autumn/winter book. esp as left philosophical investigations on the tube :/

the ending of The Bonfire of the Vanities was really bad, bleh. The court riot is pretty psychedelic, but then it just ends with a dumb "here's how things were a year later". Sherman McCoy's transformation feels contrived, like he's two different characters. the end tries to establish him as a 60s radical gone richie rich who rescinds that as his troubles compile; but there's no radical within reach for the first half of the book. Wolfe repeats this dumb line as the book progresses, "a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested", but that doesn't ring true at all ! doesn't it depend on the arrest ? Are the Enron folks liberals now? etc. so I'm bummed out, I got into the story and then the bottom dropped out.

Been ages since I read the book but hadn't one of the central yippies just come out with a pro yuppie manifesto or article when Bonfire of The Vanities was published? I think that struck me at the time I read it.

yeah I gather he's contrasting it with neocons, former liberals who have "woken up", but the character in the novel doesn't arrive at his rebirth in a believable way. I mean, he spends an hour in a jail cell getting menaced by mice and "threatened" by other prisoners (it's all pretty mild). But he's so humiliated by this that he "dies" and is "reborn". Ugh, just writing this makes it sound like it's believable, but the novel doesn't make it work.

the whole thing is lacks any organic sense of plot or character, as far as i recall, even if it was entertaining at times. a real journalist's novel.

yeah that seems otm to me. I wanted a trashy novel about nouveau riche capitalists (but not like the mafia or drug dealers) and their scumbag ways, where their pleasures are catalogued lovingly enough that I can take pleasure in them too, but then I want to see them destroyed also. this seems like a pretty easy kind of novel to write, probably there are lots of them, I'd be happy to hear suggestions.

this seems like a pretty easy kind of novel to write

ikr!!

lol if 'i gotta read de rerum natura first' is the kind of principle you regulate your life by nothing is ever gonna get done

Aw, it's not so bad as all that! I thoroughly enjoyed it in the Stallings translation.

the whole thing is lacks any organic sense of plot or character, as far as i recall, even if it was entertaining at times. a real journalist's novel.

Yep I remember thinking "this man can write a nice sentence but he is a TERRIBLE novelist."

Who is a good journalist-novelist? Must be somebody(maybe Mailer, but I haven't read much of his fiction)...

James Agee? If his highly stylized movie reviews and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men count as journalism (Proto-New Journalism?)

(Got a stack of Jimmy Breslin novels I haven't had the nerve to check [afraid of "Say it ain't so, Jimmy!"])

xxxxp don't get me wrong reading lucretius would be great it's just, everything would be great

Finishing: Tarjei Vesaas - Spring Night. Not going in :-( Must be on a reader's block.

When in doubt, I read short stories or essays. I've been reading the early short stories of Edith Wharton until something in a longer form takes my interest.

edith wharton stories of any era are always fantastic; good move

A couple weeks ago I read two of her minor best sellers: The Mother's Recompense and Twilight Sleep.

Who is a good journalist-novelist? Must be somebody(maybe Mailer, but I haven't read much of his fiction)...

― dow, Sunday, October 11, 2015 12:48 AM (Yesterday)

joan didion? i guess hemingway, but his journalism isn't much read anymore.

Orwell? Victor Serge?

I'd second Orwell as a "good journalist-novelist".

Stephen Crane.

Did you read Berryman's book about him, Alfred?

I guess I should. Berryman's poetry is a problem.

Can't remember if asked if you or anybody else has read August Kleinzahler.

Haven't read journalism by Crane or Hem (suggestions?) But Orwell, of course!! One of my faves, although...well, I hadn't thought of Down And Out... as a novel 'til biographer Bernard Crick mentioned it (pretty much along the lines of Jack London's People of the Abyss, which may be pretty much journalism; it did have quite a few arresting JL-taken photos in an edition I sold for somebody else) and there might Orwell be more like that.

might be more Orwell like Down and Out in Paris and London, I mean.

Ambrose Bierce, though as a story writer rather than novelist

He was a noted journalist too, is what I mean

"Who is a good journalist-novelist? Must be somebody(maybe Mailer, but I haven't read much of his fiction)..."

Pete Dexter has written some fine novels.

also, Steve Lopez, speaking of former ink-stained philadelphians.

did anyone read joshua cohen's PCKWCK ~~~as he wrote it~~~ last night? sadly it is not on a good time zone for me but there appears to have been some amusing real-time critique happening in the chat box

AYY LMAO: skimscan AND glancing?
AYY LMAO: classic problems of this glancing, skimscan world
AYY LMAO: ah yes, two more adjectives
AYY LMAO: that solves it

robin hyde was a nz poet/novelist/journalist of the thirties. only ever read one of her novels as far as i can remember but mean to explore her work further.

I guess I should. Berryman's poetry is a problem.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, October 12, 2015 7:12 PM (4 hours ago)

YOU'RE A PROBLEM

Will Self? I used to read his material in the Guardian/ Observer but haven't read his novels.

Truman Capote? In Cold Blood was one of the most influential of the New Journalism novels wasn't it?

Jon Ronson? Not sure if he's written much fiction though.

Upton Sinclair.

I was wondering whether this was a distinctly US way of phrasing the question - certainly it's US writers who come to mind (Orwell apart). But then of course there's people in the Dickensian-journalist manner - Dickens, Chesterton, Machen (reporting at the siege of Sidney Street for the Evening News from the top of a pub, eating horse-flesh sandwiche). Pathetic, or maybe sympathetic is a better word, essays, observational writing etc.

was not aware of the machen sidney street piece. is that available anywhere?

guess he's more famous as a nature writer than a novelist, but richard jefferies started his career working for his local paper & continued writing articles about the social/economic conditions of rural england throughout his life (& becoming increasingly radicalised as time went by).

not that I know of, nlt. also i think this may well have been straight reporting, hack work to make ends meet. his later essays, which are extremely light but quite appealing, are available in various places though. (There's a selection of very very light seasonal and occasional bagatelles collected in Dog and Duck here.)

Thanks, will check out some more of those authors, and more works by the authors I've already read in one category or the other, mostly fiction. I'm wondering who is good at both?
Re"journalist," I was thinking mostly of work based on original interviews, eyewitness reporting, the legwork, see? Although Harper Lee did some of Capote's legwork, Lawrence Schiller did some of Mailer's. But so what, somebody did it and it shows. Of course, New Journalism wasn't nec so new, in terms of creative writing, creative accounting, editorial mandates, etc. but if it's a good read, and provides some points I hadn't thought of (not just reinforcing preconceptions), I'll take it. A grain of salt's tasty, Oi say.

one of my fave crime writers, john sandford, was a pulitzer-winning journalist before he took to a life of crime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sandford_(novelist)

(pete dexter also really good at both. a great newspaper columnist, and his novel Paris Trout won the National Book Award. his book of his newspaper writing, Paper Trails, is well worth seeking out.)

my old-time fave used to be Ben Hecht. nobody really reads his novels anymore, but his collected stories are great. and 1001 Afternoons In Chicago - his book of columns - is essential.

I started Lucretius. I like this burn on Heraclitus early in:

Therefore those that have thought that the substance of things
Is fire, and the universe consists of fire alone
Have fallen far from valid reasoning.
Of these the champion, first to open the fray,
Is Heraclitus, famed for his dark sayings
Among the more empty-headed of the Greeks
Rather than those grave minds that seek the truth.
For fools admire and love those things they see
Hidden in verses turned all upside down,
And take for truth what sweetly strokes the ears
And comes with sound of phrases fine imbued.

more author journos - Carl Hiassen, Michael Frayn

robin hyde was a nz poet/novelist/journalist of the thirties. only ever read one of her novels as far as i can remember but mean to explore her work further.

― no lime tangier, Tuesday, 13 October 2015 02:15 (Yesterday)

Co-sign on the Robin Hyde; there's a new edition of WWI account Passport To Hell out this year, & this is a really good piece on Dragon Rampant, her account of being in China during the anti-Japanese War in 1938. The Godwits Fly has as much a claim as anything as the great NZ novel.
(eesh, previous ILx mention of her was me ten years and a week ago ... )

ha! really need to finally read dragon rampant (but then i still haven't read the book of nadath which i picked up soon after it was first published). there's also a sizable collection of her journalism and newspaper articles whose title i'm currently blanking on. also: journalese available here

Ooh, cheers!

Now all the Pretty Boys who've been to England once, come home not precisely entrenched in literary positions, sternly insist that it wasn't a light at all. We must, they say, develop a purely Colonial style, no family or Windsor ghosts, local colour laid on as thick as a chorine's grease-paint. Sit about singing to tuis and babbling of bellbirds for the term of your natural life, but if you happen to think of something that might have occurred just anywhere in the world of man, woman and child, keep it dark. I hate these aggressively insular New Zealanders. I think they menace journalism in our perfectly decent little country with something corresponding to appalling Australian complaint of the four big B's—bullockies, bluegums, Bradman, and you know the other one.

beer?

Thanks! I should also have thought of Rebecca West and Martha Gellhorn. Pete Dexter, yeah, need to check him out too, and speaking of John Sanford, there's also Edna Buchanan, Pultizer-winning reporter and Godmother of what's now called Florida Gothic, ehich also incl. journo-novelists xpost Hiassan, Thomas Silence of the Lambs Harris, Dave Barry, Tim Dorsey, probably a bunch more I haven't heard of. Think columnists Hiassen, Barry, and Dorsey usually emphasize the entertainment value of social commentary, often implicit in the form of lurid hijinks, sort of noir farce or satire, apparently, while Buchanan and Harris, veterans of police beats, stay closoer to the jugular.

It's fun to read Lucretius's explanations for different phenomena, based on a simple atomism where the atoms are basically microscopic analogues of hard mid-sized objects, so that theories about their interactions are conceived by analogy with how visible objects interact. Why are some things sweet and some things bitter? Because sweet things are made from smooth round atoms that roll gently across the tongue whereas the atoms that make up bitter things have tiny hooks.

Getting back to the problems with xpost Bonfire of the Vanities, as overly contrived and in that sense a real journalist's novel, got the same problem with Dos Passos in USA, though it's still pulling me along, but the teeming surface can so often come off like a virtuoso variant of hard-boiled sentimentality---painterly socio-political determinism, something like that. He might have been better off as an actual painter of his time, somewhat like Edward Hopper, or better yet, a muralist---Thomas Hart Benton with a bloody bone to pick.

But muralists have to negotiate; he was just fuck it, get it all down, in what seems like massive ancestry of the teletype manuscript version of On The Road.

i loved USA when i was a teen and really it was the structure of the thing that made me swoon. the newsreel and camera eye portions were beautiful to me as well. as pomo poetry or whatever. a very inspirational book to me back then. you should give Manhattan Transfer a try if you haven't read it. it's better as a novel. though i haven't read it in 30 years...

Oh yeah, I would have loved it in high school, and it's still pulling me along, as prev. reported (meant to take a Winesburg, Ohio break, but it hasn't happened yet). But, for instance, he eventually brings the young public relations wizard, who invented this whole approach to labor and capital "reconciliation," so as to head off revolution, and becomes Woodrow Wilson's propraganda ace, now that America's finally entered the Great War, and he and his beautiful platonic best friend, the equally self-made designer Eleanor Stoddard, have landed in Paris---but we have to start over with other characters, from very early childhood, and it's good on the stages of perceptual development, but jeeez--and if we're back to a previously known, relatively developed character, it's somebody else like this sailor who keeps getting torpedoed and going ashore and getting drunk and laid and having unsatisfactory encounters (like with a former shipmate who is now involved in some surveillance/blackmail/bribery and other re suspected pro-Germans; interesting but)sailor's back to sea and blah blah.
A pocket bio of Theodore Roosevelt upstages the dues-paying but (soooo far) still fairly callow kiddie principals; the poetic moments are mostly set pieces, interjected (but I'll take 'em; they are moments of refreshment, and the Camera Eye segments are getting more powerful, catching glints and aftershocks of war in passing). Back to reading.

adam bede

i tried to read dos passos in sixth form and didn't have the patience

Dos Passos is one of those people who I look up on Wikipedia and think, wow dude wrote a LOT of books - wonder how many of 'em are read these days, outside of the acknowledged classics

i don't know if people even read USA or Manhattan Transfer anymore let alone his other stuff. outside of a classroom. i loved all those sinclair lewis books that nobody reads now too when i was a teen. my town library had ancient copies of those.

i've been meaning to read winesburg again. i really want to find these. never read them. don't know if any of them are in print:

The Triumph of the Egg: A Book of Impressions From American Life in Tales and Poems (1921)
Horses and Men (1923)
Death in the Woods and Other Stories (1933)

it gets harder and harder for me to find old editions of early 20th century stuff in used book stores. they used to be everywhere. now i see a lit section in a used book store and its all trade paperbacks.

All those story collections are in print through the Library of America as Anderson's Collected Stories, but I don't think I've seen any of them individually in bookstores.

i should just get that thing.

it's weird but i never get the LoA editions because i don't like holding them. they are too dense or something. plus, i don't like the covers. but they are doing a great job!

at my uni library I'll sometimes pick up books to see the last time they were checked out. I try to imagine a professor assigning Dark Laughter and fail.

scott otm re collected editions (I avoid them for poetry, not when the volumes are so cheap used), but I own a few.

For some reason I asked for USA for Xmas or my birthday one year, probably in the late 80s. Could have been because I'd just read Memory Babe the Jack Kerouac biography and it had been mentioned as an influence or it had come up as one on him somewhere else.
I definitely think I'd come across it mentioned as an influence on somebody else's work, could it have been Dylan's otherwise?

So yeah wonder how many people do read things like taht. Are they in print still?
I started reading Three Soldiers last year but think I only got about half way through it, probably through disoraganisation and general mess here, meant it got into a pile of other stuff.

Yeah, the road-quest-work-party vs. official order of things seems pre-Kerouac, the insolent deadpan garble of the Newsreel interjections more specifically pre-Burroughs and Dylan (maybe especially his liner notes and the postcards in Tarantula), the roving Camera Eye maybe pre-Dylan at times.

Can also imagine Henry Miller getting a kick out of the attitude X drive here.

seem to remember mailer mentioning dos passos as being an avowed influence on portions of the naked and the dead.

vidal's take on naked and the dead: Yet every time I got going in the narrative I would find myself stopped cold by a set of made-up, predictable characters taken not from life, but from the same novels all of us had read, and informed by a naïveté which was at its worst when Mailer went into his Time-Machine and wrote those passages which resemble nothing so much as smudged carbons of a Dos Passos work.

Chris Kraus has also talked (in some interviews online, though not in print, as far as I know) about Dos Passos's camera eye and newsreel interludes as an influence on the method of Torpor and Summer of Hate.

Also John Brunner's Scifi classic Stand on Zanzibar uses the same techniques to give an overview of the fucked up world the characters live in

re: Journalist/Novelist. Reminded (upon reviving the Italian thread) of Malaparte: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curzio_Malaparte

reading Dave Hutchinson: Europe in Autumn

All the Alan Furst fans here need to read this book. Its as though Furst wrote a novel set in a near-future balkanized Europe, but retaining all his subtlety, charm and wit. genuinely and deeply enjoyable stuff.

James, anyone, can you rec reading supplements to Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake? Thinking maybe some edition of Bloomsday for the former, A Skeleton's Keyfor the latter?

old school maybe, but: stuart gilbert's ulysses: a study. he was involved in the first translation into french as well as being acquainted with the man himself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_schema_for_Ulysses

Joseph Roth - Job (re-read)

Woolf - To the Lighthouse. Just started.

I like Anthony Burgess's Re Joyce as a brief commentary on Joyce's fiction, though it doesn't try to be exhaustive.

xp

i've quite enjoyed reading this declan kiberd book so far this year

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/31/james-joyce-ulysses-and-us-declan-kiberd

not a commentary, more of a general introduction, but w/ an argument (joyce is for the people), and good on sensibility

(cue pinefox to say 'that book is terrible')

likewise, I enjoyed Burgess' Here Comes Everybody back when I was reading Joyce, but have no idea how well-respected or useful it's seen to be among experts.

Thanks for all the comments. I notice that some Amazon reviewers complain about Gilbert not dealing with (or at least not translating) Joyce's Greek etc bits, though even they concede that his ("short") book is useful, as far as it goes. Others say that Harry Blamires' The New Bloomsday Book is silent on the sexual aspects. An earlier edition of this is what I was supposed to read with Ulysses, in a late 70s course. I did alright grade-wise without it, but I'm sure I missed a lot. I want to delve deeper, while backing up and taking a running leap at Finnegan's Wake. I might re-read everything before it, except never have seen Exiles. How is it?

yeah, have only dipped into the gilbert book having picked it up years after my initial ulysses read, but there is a lot of untranslated text + voluminous direct quotation. planning on reading it before i give ulysses another go. speaking of which is there an edition i should be looking out for? my old penguin copy fell apart while being read. oxford world's classic looks nice and they usually have decent intros/annotation.

have exiles in that essential jj collection but never read it!

It's OK. It's a prose poem with people talking basically.

someone should put out an annotated Ulysses that is all wrong. just make up wrong meanings for every line. that would be fun.

i could never read the whole thing in a million years. i look at it every once in a while. read a page or two. or look at a pdf of it online. but i could never read it start to finish. i would go mad.

Try reading Ulysses in the voice of the Lucky Charms leprechaun. It may assist you in seeing the humor in it. Or else drive you mad that much quicker.

^the loveliest voice I know - liquid and soft with undercurrents of gurgle

Started Murikami's 1Q84 books 1 and 2 on the bus home after picking it up in a charity shop in town. looks like it should be pretty great. 1st chapter seems promising. Not read him before beyond a short story and the beginning of a novel I picked up about 5 years ago and lost into the pile of books on the floor. have heard good things about his work though.

^the loveliest voice I know - liquid and soft with undercurrents of gurgle

― hasid matzos temple (wins)

you know Aimless that well?

Still reading USA, startled by how the xpost dues-paying but [sooo far] still callow kiddies, who mostly had a "it's a great life if you don't weaken" around the periphery of WWI, find themselves in an excruciating 1919, around the periphery of Woodrow Wilson, whom some of them work for, and his fellow Negotiators. There's too much time to think and/or hear about the ongoing devastation of Europe, out there beyond the work-party route. Some secondary characters rail about the Big Pay-off from the left (civilian blowhard correspondant gets arrested by Army of the Occupation) and Right, over what Wilson's giving up---"But don't we already have enough oil?" "There's never enough anything! Standard Oil never gets enough oil, I never get enough whiskey! You're a young man, do you ever get enough tail?" Bad question for this suave but secretly passive/clueless courier-cocksman-Captain, who got mentored and promoted as the sexy waif grandson of a long-dead, geezer-revered General. His big revelation is: "We're the new Romans! And I always wanted to be a Greek." He's got just enough of the poet in him to be even more dangerous to women---"I sure wouldn't wanta be a girl, " thinks our guilty youg Dick, but as a free white American man, he does a lot of damage, because he can---the sexism and racism are---pervasive, as much as the sensory bounty-to-overload.
"It's worse to be a red after the war than a wobbly or pacifist before it." But the finale of 1919 curves back to the wobbly-peacehead wars, bloodier and far more up close than ever, no more peripheries.
Now we're in The Big Money, thence very eventually to the Crash.
Mainly this makes me want to read more about the Great War (I know something about how the aftermath, what treatment of Germany and the Middle East led to). Wonder what was really at stake, how much worse could it have been if Germany won??

sexism x ro-mance, fairly often, when not with hookers---lots of sub-Gatsbyizm floating around.

This past couple of weeks in randomly happening to read a cluster of queer coming-of-age novels: Sarah Jaffe's first novel, Dryland is kind of the Gone Home of swimming novels (in which a self-effacing teenager in the Portland suburbs during the early 90s learns about her absent sibling's queer identity and puzzles out the fissures in her family). Jaffe's style has few flourishes, but she's assured at capturing her narrator's voice and subtle in the way she handles the narrator's exploration of her own gender and sexuality (as a side note, the novel's language bursts into color when the narrator hears "Country Feedback," Loveless, and "100%" for the first time). Justin Torres's We the Animals is lyrical and heartfelt but a little structurally trite as yet another semiautobiographical MFA thesis in linked stories, workshopped to a oppressive degree of polish but frustratingly elliptical about the emergence of the narrator from the brothers' choral "we" and his sudden expulsion from his family. (The acknowledgements suggest that the narrator's institutionalization near the end of the novel follows Torres's experiences, but it remains awkward and melodramatic in the narrative as written.) Finally, and most strikingly, the essayist and games critic Aevee Bee's first visual novel, We Know the Devil, despite taking place at a religious summer camp with strange exorcism rituals and crystal radio-based defense systems, captures the claustrophobia of being trapped among Midwestern straight people, the varieties of teenage self-loathing, and the casual cruelty of exclusion among the marginalized with great vividness and wit.

I've also been reading D.A. Powell's Chronic, and Theodore Sturgeon and Elena Ferrante for the first time: My Brilliant Friend is staggering, but I'll need to think more about it.

From the Ferrante thread---had forgotten that Austen originally published herself anonymously---although the way Ferrante sees her, "a lady" turns out to be an amazing identity and voice, other than what we can know of Jane's fairly short, hemmed-in life outside of writing (my take on EF's take). Amazingly described---novelist and translator are one hell of a team, as usual:
On Austen http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/16/sense-and-sensibility-jane-austen-elena-ferrante-anonymity

― abcfsk, Tuesday, October 20, 2015 4:06 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

On a slight post-apocalyptic kick
finished The Last Policeman last night - a detective doing detective things with the world ending in six months or so; not really memorable, but did make me wish someone were writing Richard Yates-y realism set in a soon to be apocalyptic situation
started Claire Vaye Watkins 'Gold Fame Citrus' but haven't gotten far enough to form any opinions

reading Dave Hutchinson: Europe in Autumn

All the Alan Furst fans here need to read this book. Its as though Furst wrote a novel set in a near-future balkanized Europe, but retaining all his subtlety, charm and wit. genuinely and deeply enjoyable stuff.

this sounded up my street but struggling with it a bit. only a third of the way through tho so a but early to say.

it feels a bit laboured. three failed or apparently inconsequential missions, interspersed with exposition about the near future balkanised europe and main character's past results in a pacing that's slightly off. the writing is definitely competent tho.

to try and work out why it wasn't hitting the spot was comparing, probably slightly unfairly, to ambler. one of the things that always strikes me about his writing is its compression - a lot happens and is established over not many pages.

sense of place is an interesting one as well. ambler manages it well even in transition. hutchison has given himself an interesting job here with a near future europe. it feels like there's a bit of a perspective gap somewhere between the political map stuff, room interiors, and immediate scene context. feels like there's some middle-distance glue that's missing. travel between places is a little too frictionless in its practice.

will carry on tho as i think it's a book/series that requires the perspective of a completed arc.

Does it deal with onslaughts of immigrants?

not as such. the movement of people across borders without standard documentation is largely managed by a shady group of couriers or smugglers. this is not an onslaught really. more a case of ill-defined individuals (infrared heat map, shadow against the snow, silhouette on a street) slipping or not between zones of bureaucracy, fencing, polities.

it's a good point, this balkanisation is very atomised socially. there isn't really social sweep.

So might be past the current perceived onslaught/rising tide of economic anxieties, EU infighting, xenophobic tendencies etc.

Between such waves, maybe.

ows - have you read any Maggie Nelson? Was reading this review and thinking its really up your erm street.

Do keep us posted on Ferrante.

I haven't moved much on Woolf (will do so this w/end) so switched to some Eastern Euro poetry (Zbigniew Herbert and Vasko Popa)

Been getting really into Girl With The dragon tattoo but am now thinking that I must have read it before. Bits of it really ringing a bell, wonder if I read it on the Solidarity Camp back around 9 years ago.
Well enjoying it anyway and may get through the trilogy now. I think I just picked it up to complete a number of books for an offer in a charity shop.

xyzzzz__ - I've read some of Nelson's work (Bluets, Art of Cruelty, and Argonauts), and I have a lot of respect for her: Argonauts avoids most of the pitfalls of cis people's narratives about other people's transitions (a genre that tends to be condescending at best, openly hostile and invalidating at worst), and the passages on childbirth and Eve Sedgwick's pedagogy are remarkable. Her interventions into queer debates about normativity are not quite as exciting (though I agree that those debates often get crudely structured around false oppositions), and I have considerably more qualms about Preciado's Testo Junkie than she shows in using it as a model, but at her best she reminds me of Sedgwick in the sensitivity of her prose.

Sorry Hutchinson isn't working so well for you, Fizzles. I loved it, and am very pleased the 2nd book is coming out in a couple of weeks.

Have begun A Man Without Qualities, so will be wibbling on about it on the dedicated thread I guess.

have recently finished graham greene's stamboul train and our man in havana & am now about halfway through repetition, a late period robbe-grillet novel set in a post-wwii divided & bomb-ruined berlin abounding in doppelgangers and an all pervading ambiguity. is good, but blurb on the back comparing it to ORSON WELLES'S the third man is bugging me.

thanks ows, I can't wait to get a copy and read it now.

Spending the rest of day off with To The Lighthouse.

i'm v sorry for you

haha I deleted a 'Lucky me' to my prev post. Not sure what the rest of my day will bring.

finished the robbe-grillet which took a decidedly sadeian turn in the second half. lots of blatant allusions to oedipus (embarrassed to say i didn't pick up on the significance of the jo kast character till the end though)... supposed to be parallels between this and the erasers, which i've never read. started on the first volume of his "autobiography" ghosts in the mirror (dunno if the other two volumes have been translated?)

with marks made by several hands, incl. cross-out of Invisible Man (hope it signifies "Okay, read that 'un at least."):
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/donald_barthelmes_syllabus_highlights_81_books_essential_for_a_literary_education_.html

Sorry Hutchinson isn't working so well for you, Fizzles. I loved it, and am very pleased the 2nd book is coming out in a couple of weeks.

― as verbose and purple as a Peter Ustinov made of plums (James Morrison), Wednesday, 21 October 2015 23:25 (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I ended up enjoying this a lot more once it had hit the second section. The structure still feels quite odd though. The first section alternates between apparently inconsequential mission/exposition and background, and as I said upthread, that felt pretty laboured to me. The second section will regularly start with a completely new context - new location and new characters - and intersect the main character from the first section into each them. I'm not sure whether the whole convinces entirely, but the whole is quite pleasing. The section on the alternate reality ordnance survey maps as basis for hidden Europe is excellent, and there's a lot of retrospective power given to events within the book by the end.

I'm never quite sure about this - I feel reasonably strongly that revelations or perspectives at the end of a book don't redeem sections which the lack of that perspective meant were confusing or dull. Or put another way, I tend to think that everything should be present at the beginning of a piece of writing. This is partly a golden-age detective 'don't deceive the reader' urge, and partly a classical feeling that there should be a single action and single set of materials conserved throughout a work, that Chekhovian 'gun on the mantelpiece' observation.

However, I enjoyed this a lot more than The City and the City, which has similar themes (but then I can't get on with Mieville at all). and although I still have some reservations, I have pre-ordered the next one. Because basically I'm a sucker for this sort of thing.

yay! and agreed about the ordnance survey section, which was beautifully done.

Gave up on "My Name is Red" 300 pages in - found it very reptitive, a bit boring, and remembered that ime not much is ever gained by wrestling with books. If I don't like them, I should just move on - reading is sposed to be nice. (reason it took a while with this one is it was the only one I brought with me to Istanbul) Instead read Woody Allen on Woody Allen, interview book by Stig Björklund, great stuff for fans.

Going to pick up Napoli novel# 4 at bookstore today, hyped!

Killer ending, even more than the first three (and it does make the whole thing work like one multi-volume novel, as the author's said she sees it.) Once the level of trust is established, that all these incidents are going to matter--once the seeming boilerplate and set pieces start coming back to bite the characters in the ass---then I don't worry about anecdotal filler, salesmanship etc. But I'd rather it doesn't get too mechanical, so that every gun on every mantelpiece is going to be fired---maybe it turns out to be empty, maybe it gets pawned, maybe it disappears, disturbing somebody's sense of order---maybe none of the above. Cool, as long as enough other connections are made--should be a sense of suspense about this process.

Of course some of the seeming etc. can work mainly to establish mood etc

I've read about 400pp of short stories by Edith Wharton now and will move on. On the whole I've found her to be a nuanced psychologist and a gifted phrase maker who frequently surprises me by putting an unexpected twist on a thought or image.

However, the last story of hers that I read was more of a novella in length, called Sanctuary, and my view of the female protagonist and the author's portrayal could not have been more out of synch. She is portrayed rather approvingly as a super-mother whose tender concern for the moral fiber of her son is delicately self-effacing. But a less charitable construction would be to say she had devoured her son.

If this last point of view was Edith's real intent (a possibility that can't be entirely dismissed), she throws such a veil over it that I doubt most of her contemporary readers could have penetrated it.

Reading Game for Real, loving the prose. Not sure where its going yet, and its probably going nowhere - not that I particularly mind.

I've been reading stories by M. John Harrison's collection, Things That Never Happen. I am stopping after four stories and will move on. My thoughts on a couple of his later stories from that collection are buried in this thread.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
Lorrie Moore, Like Life
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

This schoolmarm has started reading Hocus Pocus, Kurt Vonnegut, because I desired something along those lines and it was handy.

vonnegut wrote lots of SF!

Found my copy of Wolf hall so finishing that. Hilary mantel is a great writer.

bought Underworld by Delillo last week and Postcards from the edge by Carrie Fisher which I've meant to read forages, will probably be the next travelling book after World War Z.

Been reading the Steve Tribe Dalek Handbook in the bog, and still half way through Ford Maddox Ford's March of Literature

Mean to get back to Ford. Best Vonnegut I read was Slaughterhouse Five; been a long time, but seemed good (movie too). It was almost enough, but favorably remember some of Cat's Cradle, especially the group recital, "God made mud!...I got so much, and most mud got so little."
Finally started reading Winesburg, Ohio, immediately buttonholed into the bizarre Buckeye boondocks backstreets, at best/worst (dread-wise) Borgesian, when something I never ever want to touch, especially directly, gets casually compressed into double-take implications: did I get that or not, and if so, what? But think so, yes. More please. Wonder if Dylan read this; has for instance a furtive, truculent John Wesley Harding quality at times (Anderson and Dylan in both works sometimes reminding me of later Mark Twain). Thanks for mentioning Anderson's Collected Stories, Scott. May take me a while to brace for all of those.

Completer Basement Tapes too, incl moments of almost-baffled but steady, (and sometimes rude, humorous) gazing at the pathos.

Sherwood Anderson's 'The Egg' still one of my favourite stories

a pretty rich appetizer from Luc Sante's The Other Paris , which may become controversial in some quarters:
http://us.macmillan.com/excerpt?isbn=9780374299323

(voice of Uncle Sherwood Anderson: soothing and disturbing and unstinting)

reading that there Sante chunk on the heels of Dos Passos' USA, which I just now finally finished: re wheeling around the Paris periphery of the Great War, with cluster bombs of beauty over and between conference rooms and other chambers of negotiation, incl. hermetic party scenes, boudoirs and bar crawls, in all kinds of weather (mostly a teeming surface, but Paris wow). Also recalls last year's reading of several short novels by Collette, with Paris across various decades and circumstances of characters. And some movie of Malle's, from the early-mid-70s I think, in which he interviews people on the streets of Paris, who look alright---mostly middle-aged, stable, middle class maybe; but they soon if not immediately express anxiety re price of health care, rent, food---no fancy French intellectual conditions, just the basics. Not that Sante doesn't go a lot further.

Re permutations and wild curves of the basics, for instance.

Finished rereading THE TRIAL. It shouldn't have taken me so long.

Next: Asimov.

Night falls on the pinefox

Finished Re Jane by Patricia Park. Starting Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano.

Finished xpost Winesburg, Ohio on a restless day of ongoing domestic conditions, sticky fog x mud, ecstatic flying insects, strangely compatible with the book (and Ryan Culwell's spooked, equally restless album Flatlands). Introduction by Malcolm Cowley points out most of the stronger-stand-alone stories, but says not even these are up to the best of later ones, says it's more about the overall effect here. And I agree about that part (must check the xpost Collected Stories, mentioned upthread by Scott). Some of the lesser ones repeat effects, or go off into distracting soap opera bliss, like bad Edward Hopper, though only for a while (advantage of fiction over painting, sometimes).

Sure wish I hadn't waited so long to read it! Risky.

think it was anderson who was the satiric target (along with some potshots directed at lawrence) of hemingway's torrents of spring?

finished reading queneau's descarte informed first novel le chiendent, a.k.a. the bark tree, a.k.a. witch grass. now: jarry's exploits & opinions of dr. faustroll, pataphysician.

I want to get that Queneau. Have wanted to read it since seeing it in Rowland S Howard's Portrait of the Artist as Consumer from the early 80s.
Had a copy of Bark Tree or was it an English translation still called Le Chiendent in the mid 80s but only partially read it.
Is Witchgrass the best translation?

i have an old new directions edition with the barbara wright translation titled the bark tree. may be wrong, but i think her translation is also the version latterly put out as witchgrass (not sure of any other translations available). witchgrass is closer to the original french title as they're both common names for very difficult to eradicate weed elymus repens (which i know as coach grass, pronounced cooch). i did have a theory while i was finishing it that involved the rhizomatous nature of that weed and the structure of the novel, but then i fell asleep and it's all fled from my mind. the wright translation = very readable!

anderson who was the satiric target Yes, and Cowley's introduction describes Anderson's strengths and limitations, his dependence on intuition in writing fiction (despite being a very cunning, sometimes conning writer of periodical copy and brochures), his dayjob). Can see how he might be ripe for parody and satire at times.
This could use some edits, but relevant re fraught relationships of Stein, Anderson, Hemingway (Stein's Three Lives acknowledged by the other two as important influence)http://www.staythirstymedia.com/201410-086/html/201410-wolf-stein-hemingway-anderson-part2.html

I finished the Vonnegut. It was much like his other later books in terms of his tone and material. The only semi-interesting thought I had upon laying it down was how much Vonnegut shares a similar temperament with Swift. Swift, of course, had by far the greater fluency and verbal facility, but in terms of their fluctuation between barely controlled anger at humanity's failings and their deep sadness and disappointment over the same failings, they could be twins.

Each time I looked at the blurbs on the book jacket about how uproariously hilarious this novel was all I could imagine was Vonnegut reading the same blurbs and feeling completely hollowed out in the face of their utter lack of understanding.

I finished My Antonia a while back. It didn't really go the way I was expecting from the first part, since after he leaves the farm and moves to the town, things change a lot - new characters, new setting - and then they change again when he goes off to college. It turns out the book covers a lot of ground. I guess it's kind of about growing up, how people change and grow apart. Highly recommended.

Next I read Junkyard Planet by Adam Minter. I've always had kind of a soft spot for junkyards, old machinery and scrap and this book is kind of a behind-the-scenes tour of what happens to junk after it hits the recycling bin or sidewalk. Minter is an affable enough guide with a good eye for the human side of the business.

That Minter sounds interesting. I was eyeing up this. http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/waste-9781472527578.
But the Minter sounds better

IN stitches by Dr Nick Edwards a set of NHS/hospital; related anecdotes categorised as a pseudonymous autobiography, partially because the author was worried for his job should it have been put out under his real name.
I'm finding it pretty interesting but hate to think how utopian the levels that things had sunk to in 2007 might look now.
So, I need to see if there is any comment about the book that's been made from a current perspective.
This was another charity shop purchase, one of many made over the last week. One I'm quite enjoying though a significant number of the others probably would be.
Do wish you could osmose books, so I could fly through stacks.

I meant to put in that I had been hoping to find other oral histories of things like hospitals etc after reading Mark Baker's 'Cops' and 'Nam years ago. Not really seen them around in charity shops taht I noticed and this In Stitches was picked up hoping it might be along the same lines. It differs in being based on more of a single 1st person perspective, though I think it is actually combining the author and at least one other colleague's input.

Would like a Hospital by Mark Baker, possibly a Hotel one too.
Wonder if there are other services that would be as immediately interesting as 'Cops' was.

You might like the memoirs of a doctor at Bellevue, a New York City hospital mainly known over here for intake of mental, drug etc. cases (think it's where Billie Holiday was arrested on her deathbed for internal possession of heroin; Norman Mailer was confined there after stabbing his wife while on speed, etc.) Author interviews I remember were even more harrowing than this description, but it will give you the idea (whether working through her own issues or shaping the material---note that she sold the film rights pretty early---take over, dunno, haven't read it)
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/from-bellevues-psychiatric-er-a-doctors-memoir/?_r=0

Looks interesting, will keep an eye out for it.

Much less grueling/more appealing to me (no terminal junkies etc., far as I've read) is this thread which surfaces on ILE occasionally, about being a night desk clerk at a hotel in Canada--would not mind seeing it turned into a book:
i just got a job working overnight at a hotel front desk

if you were escaping a burning house and you could only take that thread or the porn clerk one, which one would you

yeah, i love that thread -- wasn't nathanael west holding down a similar job when he wrote "miss lonelyhearts"?

Right and he watched Dashiell Hammett sneak out wearing several layers of his clothing so as not to be seen carrying a suitcase.

Last night I read my first Delany novella, The Ballad of Beta-2, based on Casuistry's recommendation that I read Delany. It was OK. I have a copy of Dhalgren in the hopper. I hear it's supposed to be his best, so it will be a better test.

Wow, if you even make it as far as Harlan Ellison did I will be impressed.

I wouldn't jump right to Dhalgren,(which I enjoyed as a leisurely read, except for the rationalized rapesplaining; sure hope it's not his best). Try these earlier, nice-priced stories first: http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Nebula-Award-Winning-Fiction-Samuel/dp/0553256106/ref=la_B000APQ0D6_1_36?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1446935745&sr=1-36&refinements=p_82%3AB000APQ0D6

Oh wait, I thought he read Babel-17. Maybe he should read that next, but on the other hand I am actually looking forward to hearing Aimless report

on Dhalgren

They say the neon lights are bright

I'm not sure you can rely on me to do more than open Dhalgren and look at the first few pages.

Go with Nova! Dhalgren is fascinating in a messy, sprawling way, but Nova is probably the most concise and immediately pleasurable SF novel Delany's written.

Also, the first few pages of Dhalgren are not all that representative of the style of the rest of the novel: it's structured as a Möbius strip (like Finnegans Wake), and its beginning and end are unusually dense and discontinuous.

I'm taking off soon for a few days at the Oregon coast. It's my birthday and our anniversary (31st) comes very soon afterward, so this trip has become a tradition. Any road, I will bring Dhalgren, World War Z, and at least one failsafe book, in case neither of these work out for me.

I appreciate all the advice. It shows that you all care and I am touched. But there comes a point where it is impossible to follow all of it, so I'll just follow my nose, as usual. It rarely deceives me and the consequences of attempting to read a middling poor choice of book are seldom fatal.

So, I've read about 100 pages of Dhalgren and I've seen enough of it to see what Delany finds interesting about his story and hopes to put across to the reader, me.

The overall effect Delany appears to want is a kind of texture. By this I mean he pays loving attention to the surfaces of things and describes them at length and with many convolutions. Surfaces of objects, buildings, landscapes, people, seem to occupy a good 90% of every paragraph. Actions are described in terms of surfaces, too.

The prose is furiously stylized in most of the book so far, so that all these surfaces are deliberately detached from one another and form no mental picture other than a confused jumble. Delany also seems to subscribe to the school of thought that if you pepper your prose with enough highly colored verbs, you'll impress your reader with your dynamism, even if they can't puzzle out what imagery your verbs are meant to convey, and your dynamism is in the service of little discernable activity.

By contrast, his protagonist is extremely blurry. He has almost no thoughts and his few thoughts are vague and disconnected. He is a drifter and his entire persona is so effaced and vagrant as to be nearly nonexistant. No one he meets is more than a crayon drawing of a person.

I 'get it' that this effect is what Delany was seeking. I am meant to be adrift in this book. He is dropping hints like breadcrumbs, one every half dozen pages, sprinkled in among the long disjointed descriptions of a chaotic, drifting world, that may eventually assemble themselves into some kind of a story. But story is not what interests Delany. It is the texture of this world adrift and how to write it into the reader's mind.

The one thing this book has done admirably so far has been to remind me strongly of my own drifting years, in poverty, not quite homeless, but living on the very edges of organized society, among equally poor, confused and undirected drifters, in the waning days of the hippie era, the era when this book was written. Delany nails it. This book is what that hippie-bohemian backwater twilight world felt like.

It's not enough. The texture is right, but everything else has been subsumed to the demands of that single effect. My mass market paperback copy is almost 900 pages long. In 100 pages so little has happened (other than some overwritten sex scenes, which like all sex scenes that extend beyond two paragraphs, are just head-shakingly awful) that I have no patience for assembling whatever tiny scraps of story Delany buries amid his endless textural and stylistic effects.

I wouldn't say Dhalgren is badly written. More that it is written specifically to do a couple of things very well, but unless you are the rare reader who can't get enough of this sort of highly impressionistic and paradoxically static prose, those couple of things do not justify my reading 900 pages of it. He should have stuck with a short story or novella -- or found a more congenial reader. I'm leaping out.

I started World War Z last night. It is interesting in the early going. It is much better written than, say, The Da Vinci Code, which I did gallop through with a certain pleasure.

I am struggling a bit with zombie behavior. I know the only correct answer is 'zombies behave according to nightmare logic, not according to physics or biology - so deal with it'. I need to direct all my attention to the behavior of the non-zombies and simply shut down the part of my brain that asks literalist questions about the zombies. Otherwise I'll just undermine whatever pleasure is to be had here. But it's hard to ignore that niggling voice.

Different subsets of zombies, different behavior patterns in Colson Whitehead's Zone One: for instance, one group is intent on running, catching, gorging, as expected, but another keeps coming back to places that once meant something---the zombie psychiatrist who continues to keep office hours, although patients no longer show up (does she expect them to pay for not cancelling?), the more typical zombie who keeps coming back to a certain area in the Park, certain store, cafeteria. The observant narrator is a zombie hunter, one of many hired to clean out prime Manhattan real estate, with zombies currently at a manageable level. The hunter finds himself loitering in areas that once meant something to him as well. Jacket flap copy promises pulp x lit gratifications, and delivers in timely fashion.

lol Aimless picked up Delany = sucker

I have been slogging my way through Piketty's "Capital", as a palliative/contrast I've started in on Marlon James' "A Brief History of Seven Killings" (after finishing Mitchell's "Bone Clocks") and so far this is pretty rewarding. The effusive praise for it seems a bit over the top - so far (150 pages in) I do not find it "mythic" or "colossal" or "dizzyingly complex", it's more like a good thriller with a fairly old school multiple-narrator approach. If I were to draw a trad lit fic connection it would be to Faulkner (although nothing in this is as difficult as Faulkner could be imo, it's always clear what's going on and who's speaking and what they're saying etc.), although a better point of comparison (for me anyway) is John Brunner, who loved to do this kind of "here's two dozen people who are all completely different, telling their own stories, which are all going to dovetail and intersect at this one specific crisis point". Having a longstanding interest in this period of Jamaica and the related musical culture hasn't hurt, definitely a subject that piques my interest.

I'm reading James McPherson's new bio on Jefferson Davis as commander in chief and finished Thomas Mallon's Finale, a novel of the Reagan years that's almost on the level of Gore Vidal's historical fictions.

He can go off on these schoolmaster tirades when reviewing, but I dimly recall really liking Henry and Clara, long ago. What do you think of that one?

Leonard Gardner: Fat City -- a NYRB rediscovery. I couldn't give 2 shits about boxing, and the 2 main characters in this novel are boxers, but it's really good. Short, to-the-point Denis Johnson intro basically says that he (Johnson) has been inadvertently trying to write Gardner his whole life.

it's a wonderful book. as is the movie.

"lol Aimless picked up Delany = sucker"

it's the PARTICULAR book that he picked up. plenty of easy breezy delany out there.

Somehow, despite 'Fat City' being a John Huston, I had never heard of the movie either.

definitely see it when you can. it's great.

this xxpost semi-mistakenly just now posted on Rolling SF Etc.:
\Yeah, besides the ones that one way street and I mention, Triton is worth checking, and Driftglass--yep, more drifty, but also, he knew what a short story requires, and tried to follow suit, without being too dutiful about it (never a tendency of his).
I think Aimless's take on the drifting sands in thee hourglass of Dahlgren is fair, far as it goes, but past the 100-page point, some stuff happens, appears, reappears---clues, enigmatic opportunities, set pieces, incl. some of the porn, maybe (not a complaint). There is a quest, however entrophic (compare The Kid and Slothrop, for instance), and, as one way street says, it's also a loop---with meta implications along the way, if you want 'em. See also the very self-confident wikipedia article on this novel (no, really). And the ILX thread{s?) about it too.
I admit it's where I got off the bus, but I might go back (did dig Heavenly Breakfast, presented as a memoir--was that a real band, did they really make that record, is it somewhere? Hope so).

I finished World War Z. Imitating Studs Terkel's oral history format was brilliant and the dozens of vignettes were often remarkably deft and imaginative set pieces. It was pretty clear that the author, Max Brooks, is something of a war geek as well as a zombie geek and these served him well most of the time.

The only drawbacks I would identify were his tendency to fill his story with invented future mil-speak, which sometimes gave off too much of an air of "oh, look at clever me", the other was that the story was divided up into so many diverse voices, briefly describing far flung and remotely connected events, that it was a bit like making a huge meal out of nothing but appetizers.

These are mere quibbles, though. For a zombie apocalypse novel, it was masterly.

Have been wondering when the zombie as a group threat thing started. Was that Romero or before?
I think the threat was from individual zombies until somebody came up with the idea of making the zombies the larger group, to the extent that it was much rarer not to be one.

But yeah, WWZ is great. Pretty well done.
I like oral history anyway but this is a clever use.
I'm nearing the end, about 20 or 30pp to go.

Alvaro Mutis - The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. Books have their time - haven't done lots of reading in the last month but just having such magic in my hands for a few pages of a time has kept me sane.

That one is on my list.

But then again, what isn't?

i keep starting that every six months ago, seem like a great idea, never get past the boatride

I've read the first three stories. "Ilona Comes with the Rain" was most memorable, where Maqroll opens a stewardess-themed brothel.

Maqroll is great. Is that the NYRB edition, with all 6 books together?

Yes, its seven books - one of the best things NYRB have ever done imo.

Really like to read his poetry.

i keep starting that every six months ago, seem like a great idea, never get past the boatride

― j., Sunday, November 15, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sounds like a modern day Decameron (can't exactly compare to Cervantes, whom I've not read so..), but Mutis' is the kind of voice that I think could take a while to plug into, but when you do its not the kind of thing you are going to stop reading.

But yes, 'modern' as in (although its not the kind of thing that could've been written before 1900) the sheer number of places (mostly local places dotted around the world - Recife etc.), situations and people trotted off, in a way that could only be written after 1975 (Mathews' Singular pleasures is more of a piece of course but it has a similar quality). These are things that you think is literally pouring out of him as you are reading it which the intro talks about, but in such a calculated way, that undercuts the romanticism of adventure and encounter it is promising.

I'm reading Thomas Ligotti. Not feeling it, so far.

I had fhe same reaction. The elaborate, ornate, somewhat affectless prose couldn't overcome the fundamental silliness of the plots for me

there's a lot of chat on him and no thread, i would start one but i feel like it would be 'convince me there's something i'm missing in thomas ligotti'

Gone back to 'A Brief History of Seven Killings', with some reluctance but it was niggling away in a corner of my brain. One chapter in particular has really crystallised my feelings (first expressed here fwiw). It's first person as with all the rest but divided between present tense, with the character waking up and terrified to find a stranger in his room, and past tense as he recollects what happened during the day. The past tense sections are perfectly, unremarkably readable, clearly convey the distinct voice of the character without laying it on too thick, and expand on some of the more interesting plot points. The present tense sections are claustrophobic, introverted, frenetic, they make me feel like I'm stuck in the brain of a paranoid hyperactive narcissist, and unfortunately that's the style and the impression I get from most of the book.

At present I am floating along with the stream instead of swimming against the current, as evidenced by my reading Spy Hook by Len Deighton. I also own the rest of the trilogy, Spy Line and Spy Sinker. I think the whole set cost me $2.

I admit that with Ligotti, I don't think he's bad at all, just not to my taste. it's not like reading Stephen King, where I'm thinking, "This is just really shit."

Haven't read much Deighton, but his 'SS-GB' (yet another Nazis-win-WW2 book) was actually very good

aww, not all stephen king is shit...

not that i've read any of his books in years. but i'll always be fond of him. i actually bought that shining sequel and never read it. i tried to make myself excited about it. guess i wasn't that excited.

lol i love stephen king

i believe there's a thread where i discuss him more or less at length. the shining sequel is really not a good'un, though, it feels like a welded-together version of two different concepts. also jack torrance has a brief redemption in spirit form which felt like king continuing to protest the kubrick version--he wasn't a bad man really!! on the inside!!

i do want to get that new short story collection. i liked the NYT review of it. and i like that he writes long-ass introductions to his stories a la my fave sci-fi writers. i really like reading him on writing and how he writes. he's so good at that. danse macabre is such a great book. and the on writing one too.

it kinda makes me sad that james morrison doesn't like The Stand. :(

I wish I did! Lots of people I respect think King is great. I just loathe his folksiness, his unfunny jokes, his random pulled-out-of-his-arse endings, his lack of rigour in thinking through his sometimes great initial ideas, his hideous paddedness, and his pseudo-profundity.

Every now and then, in my role as an apocalypse obsessive, I consider trying the Stand, and then reading about all the supernatural bollocks it devolves into puts me off. I once actually started it--it was, unwisely, the extended uncut revised version--and got to chapter 2(?), full of folksy down-home trademark King-style white trash unfunnily shooting the King-style breeze, and I just thought "fuck it".

Having said that, a few of his earlier short stories are good, like 'The Mist'. Far from flawless, but pretty good. But his novels, Misery aside, can go fuck themselves. And I suspect if I went back to reread that one, as a no-longer-18-yo, I wouldn't like it either.

recently made an early new year's resolution to read more.
starting here: The Extreme Life of the Sea by Stephen R. Palumbi & Anthony R. Palumbi
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10178.html
the writing is sorta poor and prone to weird and unnecessary hyperbole but the topic is endlessly interesting to me. Some stuff I didn't know!

Goodbye to Berlin, a Christopher Isherwood paperback I picked up a couple of years back as part of a 2 for £5. It has just introduced Sally Bowles. Seems pretty interesting and i should have read it ages ago. Has become my bus book since I fiinished World WAr Z, but being in non waterproof bags has meant that the cover got wet and hasd to be dried out.

Touched bY Grace Gary Lucas' book about his time with jeff Buckley. Just piked that up in the remainder book shop last week.

I think I'm in the 16th or 7th century with Ford Maddox Ford's march of Literature.

& of course I've just picked up a load of paperbacks from the Charity shop yesterday including the 2nd book of Game of thrones and several other must reads.

Oh yeah one of the charity shop books I meant to mention was Fludd by Hilary Mantel. I haven't come across any of her fiction outside of the Wolf Hall series so glad to find this for 25c.

im reading the new biography of joan didion by tracy Daugherty. didion didn't cooperate but its v well researched. Isherwood comes up a few times as a regular Hollywood party attendee in those years. fun description of the first house didion and jg dunne rent in cali having peacocks regularly in their yard, and soon after they adopt their daughter, joan wakes to see john @ dawn throwing rotten peaches at the peacocks in the yard trying to get them to shut up

Throwing rotten peaches at peacocks that won't shut up at dawn is a perfectly normal human reaction. They're ear-splitting.

they make me feel like I'm stuck in the brain of a paranoid hyperactive narcissist, and unfortunately that's the style and the impression I get from most of the book.

I don't have much problem distinguishing between the main narrators (I'm not done yet btw), but it's true that at least four of them (Josey, Nina/Kim/Dorcas, Alex Pierce, and the CIA guy) are all paranoid narcissists, just deeply unpleasant people for the most part. which does make it kind of a grind - if I wasn't already fascinated by the period/culture idk how much patience I would have with this.

Alexandra Schwartz provides a good thematic overview of Gaitskill, incl. her latest, The Mare, which I must read:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/09/uneasy-rider

That isherwood is so good, dont know why i never read more of him, his tone is just perfect for me

'A Single Man' is maybe my favourite of his. Pretty near perfect novel, sweet and wise and dark.

Daugherty's barthelme bio is v good, I remember abish's description of the "postmodern dinner party": "you don't tell Coover where to sit"

huh

Voice over in the single man movie made me think I'd be very into the novel - If I see it in a bookstore I'm getting it!

As brief takes go, promising (maybe esp. the Dibbell and Mieville, but prob pred by prior knowledge of, unlike w other authors here). I'll give 'em all the random read test asap:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-best-science-fiction-and-fantasy-books-of-2015/2015/11/18/4d65d9e8-7902-11e5-b9c1-f03c48c96ac2_story.html?postshare=3451447900927579&tid=ss_tw

Daugherty's barthelme bio is v good, I remember abish's description of the "postmodern dinner party": "you don't tell Coover where to sit"

― Amblyomma_americanum_tick.jpg (wins), Wednesday, November 18, 2015 7:01 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea agreed. the didion 1 is p killer too @ least so far

I'm just a few pages shy of finishing the middle book of Deighton's Spy Hook, Spy Line, and Spy Sinker trilogy. It's an interesting feat. He manages to occupy nearly the exact center of the middlebrow sweet spot.

It is plotty. It is chatty. The women are invariably brainy, seductive and peripheral. The men are flawed, blemished, and never seductive, but always move at the center of attention. Everyone is moody, but the moods pass rapidly and are mainly decorative. Office politics loom VERY LARGE in the foreground, while the KGB and Stasi play a role similar to Hamlet's father's ghost, being merely there to get the machinery started. Clothes, liquor and cars are given plenty of description. It really is a marvel.

The best thing about these books is the prose. It is economical and precise in the service of all this folderol. It moves swiftly. Effects are achieved with admirable efficiency. It is trashy, but exceedingly well written trash.

I started On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics by Sheila Fitzpatrick the other day. It is focused on the dynamic of Team Stalin and he is still tight with "stone arse" Molotov at the moment. I have got to my favourite Stalin period; The Great Terror or as it is headlined in this book; The Great Purges. This book so far has made a credible case that he didn't have Kirov done in as he wasn't clever or politically strong enough to be a threat despite the efforts of others, and he had genuine affection for him. I won't be gasping when Bhukarin meets his end, but there is such theatre and complex intrigue to The Great Terror that I can't get enough of it.

I've been reading Flannery O'Connor short stories from A Good Man is Hard to Find. Tonally there's something about them that reminds me of some of Quentin Tarantino's better movies. I guess the grotesque characters, cruelty and violence are an obvious link. Everyone is flawed, and the action tends to move towards some awful climax with a fatalistic urgency that would seem tragic, except her gimlet-eye for the absurdity of human pretention makes it instead seem kind of tawdry and small.

haven't read her lately, but struck by occasional moments of something more gentle---never seem like sweetening, but briefly earned by characters, only via/ usually in midst of much suffering (thanks, God-Author)

a furtive/reluctant empathy, at times (she was young)

Taking a course this semester in which I read both A Good Man is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge in quick succession (and taught by a clearly passionate fan) has led me to finally conclude that I just don't like Flannery O'Connor. I imagine that this has much to do with my inability to locate these moments of "reluctant empathy" (or perhaps what my instructor kept identifying as "grace"--I'm assuming that you are both referring to the same moments in ascribing these qualities to her work) in the midst of the all the ugliness, something that I do find, to pick the convenient example of another author on the syllabus, the short fiction of Mary Gaitskill.

*in the short fiction...

Oh I don't like her either, but I get pulled in, speaking of reluctant empathy for something (not the harshness, or the religion, or what it might be justifying). For the sound of her voice, I guess---in other words, she's a hell of a storyteller (ditto Gaitskill).

I do think there's something gentle at times in her treatment of her characters - I like "a furtive/reluctant empathy" - but if anything it makes the sting of the inevitable cruelty even more jarring. She's a hard writer to like - I don't really Tarantino either, for much the same reasons. There's something almost a bit smug about the relentless bleakness.

gave up on "Capital" about halfway through, felt like I got the general thrust but I really just don't have the patience for that kind of thing in a non-academic context apparently.

Finished A Brief History of Seven Killings, pretty good, no surprise James cites Faulkner as a big inspiration. Nearly everyone in it is pretty unlikable, but at least it ended well (and not really how I would have predicted). I can get why various people/places were fictionalized, except for Marley. Constantly referring to him as "the Singer" got to feel pretty forced after awhile.

breezing through Gary Kamiya's "Cool Grey City of Love", which is awesome. Had no idea who he was before but really digging it, making me appreciative of local history.

Marek Hlasko: The Graveyard -- awesome, bleak

rereading Strangers on a Train: Highsmith was excellent right from the start

Also finished ABHoSK, won't be making my end of year list but glad I stuck with it. Now on to The Influencing Machine, picked up on a whim in a charity shop, a moderately diverting pop history about the first recorded case of someone believing their thoughts to be controlled by a diabolical machine.

Is that the air loom one?

yup.

I read a great book about that, written by the doctor who treated him at the time, full of freaky illustrations of the loom and its workers. Amazingly odd stuff.

Would definitely recommend this then. Rather puts the boot into the doctor and is very sympathetic to the patient, uncovers the real yet almost as crazy story behind his neuroses - he had been involved in government business and arguably was the victim of an actual conspiracy, kept in Bedlam for over ten years despite being calm, lucid, with a family willing and able to look after him.

Wow--okay, I am seeking that out.

Checking back, I find that the book I read had the marvellous title of 'Illustrations of Madness: Exhibiting a Singular Case of Insanity, And a No Less Remarkable Difference in Medical Opinions: Developing the Nature of An Assailment, And the Manner of Working Events; with a Description of Tortures Experienced by Bomb-Bursting, Lobster-Cracking and Lengthening the Brain. Embellished with a Curious Plate'.

I started On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics by Sheila Fitzpatrick the other day. It is focused on the dynamic of Team Stalin and he is still tight with "stone arse" Molotov at the moment. I have got to my favourite Stalin period; The Great Terror or as it is headlined in this book; The Great Purges. This book so far has made a credible case that he didn't have Kirov done in as he wasn't clever or politically strong enough to be a threat despite the efforts of others, and he had genuine affection for him. I won't be gasping when Bhukarin meets his end, but there is such theatre and complex intrigue to The Great Terror that I can't get enough of it.

― xelab, Sunday, 22 November 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Love Sheila - reading the archives at the LRB (when I used to have a subscription) is one of the best lessons on that period you could take. One of the few people I trust to write on this stuff w/out the usual moralities (Applebaum and the like)

xp how was the plate

back to ferrante

mmmh I wanna go back to ferrante, look forward to Danish version of Lost Child come spring

currently reading "The Big Sleep" for the 1st time, great fun

A Plan for Escape by Adolfo Bioy-Casares, curiously unreissued by NYRB, surprising for a writer who i suppose could begin to be seen as hipster-canon cf etc.

Anyway, the first few pages were so excellent that I had to put it down so as to return to it at a time when I could devote more attention to it, a stupid mistake I made with Leskov as well. Returning to it now.

It's got a lovely call and response rhythm to it, through the mechanism of having a rather sceptical uncle as the main narrative voice, with the actual narrative put together from his nephew's unstable letters reporting from a saison d'infer on Devil's Island, at the time of Alfred Dreyfus's banishment.

'Pressured by the fear that they would question him, or perhaps by a diabolic need for symmetry, he studied the article on prisons in the big Larousse'

Much of the flavour is contained there - the nephew seems hypersensitive and paranoic, destabilised by rather abstract concerns (here 'symmetry' - a regular Borges or ABC obsession, heretical to sanity), and what appears to be one of the main concerns of the book - who is prisoner and who is not.

Also been going through Tufte's stuff on information design, though as instruction it's p much water off a duck's back as my visual imagination is terrible.

still on nightwalking: a nocturnal history of london, which is really entertaining. makes me sad to walk around some of the parts of london it references and it's wall to wall offices/itsu/pret/eat/bad pubs.

other than that am making occasional forays into short story collections, got the first edition of a new anthology called freeman's, which i am enjoying a lot.

― xyzzzz

Have you read the Kotkin book on Stalin yet? i can't wait for volume 2.

A Plan for Escape by Adolfo Bioy-Casares

This sounds fascinating! Unfortunately, even the cheapest 2nd-hand copy is requesting US$25 for postage :(

Reading Mary Karr: The Liar's Club

Wasn't sure about this at first, as my tolerance for Eccentrics And Grotesques Of The American South is pretty limited outside of McCullers and O'Connor, but it has really grabbed me now. I ignored it when it first came out because I was working in a bookshop at the time and in general the sort of people who bought it did not make it seem appealing, as they were the types who also bought Dave Pelzer-style misery memoirs. But this is clever and funny.

Liars' Club, I mean; my apostrophe is misplaced

A Plan For Escape is awesome. Maybe almost about as good as The Invention of Morel but not as well-known.

Morel is probably one of my favourite books--I think I voted for it and Riddley Walker when we did a best sci-fi poll round these parts a couple of years ago--so maybe that $25 isn't so much to ask after all

the immoralist - gide

Hey hey! Just checked on OpenLib, and a PDF copy can be borrowed from there, so I am downloading as we speak! https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2416802M/A_plan_for_escape

xp: Ooo, The Immoralist is good stuff.

That was the English language edition I had. Enjoy!

― xyzzzz

Have you read the Kotkin book on Stalin yet? i can't wait for volume 2.

― xelab, Thursday, 26 November 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I hardly ever read non-fiction unless its in essay form these days. I encounter these things via the fiction published at the time (Grossman, Shamalov, Platonov, Serge and many of the poets)

Hi James, I've been reading Mary Karr too: Lit, in which she finally gets the hell out of Texas, teenhood, runaway Californina, and grows up (spoiler). Much turmoil, but although I get the sense that prose is her second language (wanted and tried to be a poet since childhood, eventually succeeding, judging by the few verses I've read), the back-and-forth between road-flattened Texas slang/rattling spools of narrative/concise insights, certainly keeps me on my toes (plus, the slang drops away as she gets deeper into her thirties and life in Cambridge Mass). Also deeper into therapy and AA, but so far no leakage of therapyspeak etc.
Will read her new The Art of Memoir next (skimming it, can see she really likes Speak, Memory).

Planet Texas does keep swinging back into the picture; reminds me of The Neapolitan Novels in some ways.

Dow, that's a very good point re her slangy writing--there's a lot of that in Liars' Club, but much of it from the viewpoint of her as a child, and listening to her rough-as-guts oil-worker father.

Looking up 'Lit', I found and love this photo of Kerr and her son
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/books/hmh-ems/MaryandDev_celebrating800.jpg

Wow! Especially appropriate re Lit, which starts as conversations with her son the budding documentarian, and part of the legacy: if she can tell the rest of her story, he can tell his (? Mama says, so---) As I meant to indicate with those slashes, the slang is there about a third of the time, at most. I like the way her humor, overt or implicit, seems organic (mentions in passing that she's in the shower, feels something on her leg, turns out to be her ass---which even fits the context of the chapter, by crackey). Mentioned on Fresh Air that she deleted the final draft of this book when it was almost finished, because she couldn't stand the contrived, reflexively evasive jokiness of it ( which may relate to another thing about prose as a second language: she does a *lot* of public speaking, incl. professional socializing, pretty up front about that)

I finished the trilogy-concluding Len Deighton book. It suffered terribly the instant I disengaged from speeding along with it and reflected on whether it made any sense. It was not constructed to bear such scrutiny.

Now I am reading A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood. I've enjoyed several of his books in the past and this is one I never picked up before.

I picked up a copy of Henry Miller's Air Conditioned Nightmare froma charity shop yesterday. Might have picked up a P.G. Wodehouse at the same time but didn't have the change.
Trying to think if I've read the Miller before.

Otherwise still reading the isherwood, the Ford Maddox Ford, the Carrie fisher and possibly a couople of others.

Got a david icke that summarrises his beliefs earlie in the week. have only heard about things 2nd hand up to now. & since it is indubitable that every royal is a talking lizard it might help to know the actual facts, innit?

Oh yeah, picked up a copy of Londonstani in a cheap shop a couple of weeks ago, innit?

Another thing I forgot to mention about O'Connor is her great comic chops. The first half of the story "Good Country People", with the odd-couple pairing of the sarcastic philosophy PhD daughter and her perplexed long-suffering mother reminded me of Confederacy of Dunces. Great story, by the way.

That story is an all-time classic.

Just finished "The Big Sleep". That was a fun book, cool too, very funny.

I am still reading and v much enjoying Alvaro Mutis' Maqroll w/out entirely following the minutiae of what's happening, letting the rhythm of the sentences fiercely flow along (he truly conjures a tidal wave of the stuff).

But I've taken a break to read and finish L'Amour by Marguerite Duras. Its a v poetic. Three characters, less than a 100 pages, and basically a script for one of her amazing features from the 70s. Said on twitter that this could've been built from tweets (built on short sentences, repetition). Has an incredible pull. I want to use my twitter to quote lots of it but I'll probably annoy my few followers.

sounds good - gonna try pick that up...

Evan Thompson - Waking, Dreaming, Being
About the neuroscience and phenomenology of meditation, dreaming/lucid dreaming, hypnagogia, deep sleep, out of body experiences, near death experiences, etc., and also what Yogic and Buddhist traditions say about them. Pretty interesting. What's funny for an academic book is that he cites his father a lot, who ran the Lindisfarne Association.

Also Epictetus's Discourses, and a book on Islamic architecture where I'm mainly looking at the pictures.

man

read a little heidegger

if you really wanna have a blast, the sections of 'being and time' on anticipatory resoluteness will thrill and delight

Finishing up Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin for class tomorrow. I've never actually had a book make me miserable for days on end before.

^this was the advantage of the film adap -- it appalled me for 30 mins before i hit eject

starting The Martian. It's fun cryptotech lingo and a quick page turner, feel like i could knock this out in a single sitting if i felt like it.

jus t finished A Plan for Escape, by Bioy-Casares. thanks so much for the recommendation, Fizzles and James, this was a wonderful book! the style, with the uncle reporting the nephew's observations, was compelling, and I loved the stealth nature of the sci-fi conceit; very unexpected, even knwoing B-C's previous form. (I recently watched Fortitude and enjoyed the same way that a weird version of one sort of genre fiction turned out to be entirely another genre)

I wonder if this was an inspiration for Hugo Wilcken's 'Colony', the atmosphere of which this vey much reminded me: https://theasylum.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/hugo-wilcken-colony/

Also, more books should end with a dry, offhand 'Et cetera'.

I finished A Single Man, by Christopher Isherwood. It was brief, but rewarding. Next I am thinking of reading Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion. I've never read her fiction, so I am not certain how it will appeal to me. It seems worth my taking a run at.

i thought it was the bomb when i was 19. haven't read it since though. you should get copies of death kit and speedboat and pop some valium and make a day of it.

A good review of the Didion biog

still need to read Play It As It Lays, but when I was 19, I thought the movie was the bomb: at least, Tuesday Weld and Tony Perkins seemed perfectly cast, as the Didionesque young and restless valium icons of the 50s-60s-early-70s. Frank Perry of compatible David and Lisa fame directed Didion and JG Dunne co-wrote the screemplay, Dominick Dunne co-produced (with Paul Newman), so I hope she was satisfied. Pretty good reviews, especially re Weld & Perkins. Whole thing is currently on YouTube (this is from another post on there):
https://encrypted.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjq15W6mLvJAhVJWCYKHdIAAfkQjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DfRKKE5U2bFU&psig=AFQjCNG7R-2CwCa50tkeJUriZBrkOwWi4w&ust=1449077475395593

That didn't show the image I was trying to link---anyway, here's the whole movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfRkecpJ9Ew

Weld and Perkins also great in the murder comedy 'Pretty Poison', to stray off-topic

In the middle of Žižek’s Sublime Object.

I’ve read a lot of books this year.

After the 'Tinker, Tailor' thread on ile spurred me to watch the bbc tv series i've been reading le carre for the first time -Call for the Dead, Smiley's People, The Honourable Schoolboy, A Perfect Spyand The Night Manager. Smiley remains my favourite character but I enjoyed The Night Manager a lot even though I was completely unconvinced as to why the protagonist would be interested in the woman Jed at all, same case with Westerby and the girl in The Honourable Schoolboy as well tbh.

Also Ta-Nehisi Coates - Between the World and Me found the first 50 pages p uninteresting then it gained some momentum and was really rather good for 60 pages then faded into repetition and lost me again.

last night I finished Max Frisch - I'm Not Stiller
great book, but I'm not sure I understood the "prosecutor's postscript" at all

man i have been wanting to read that for a long ass time

finished bks 2,3 of ferrante, should find that thread again

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xap1/v/t1.0-9/12299261_10154374662792137_8762986743952946991_n.jpg?oh=a3e10238f1058ccaf18ea97f67b3cf7a&oe=56EFA81C

Don't know that one, though I quite enjoyed Glimpses way back when.

Slam is great, had a huge impact on me at the time

I don't think he ever wrote anything as good, unfortunately

I finished Play It As It Lays. I thought it was very sharply written and displayed a remarkable familiarity with the symptoms and manifestations of acedia and anhedonia. Every phrase and carefully chosen detail in the book is there to indirectly reflect these states of mind. Her success in this aim is remarkable and makes the book succeed.

Unfortunately, Didion inserted some weak-assed external explanations for her main character's behavior, in the much too convenient forms of an incoherently described medically fragile child who has been put into an institution, and a coerced abortion. Neither of these explanations explains anything. These two contrivances could have ruined the book, but it was saved by Didion's own evident lack of conviction in their explanatory power and by her greater concentration on capturing her character's state of mind, not the whys and wherefores.

btw, Valium is never mentioned by name in the book and "barbiturates", though mentioned three or four times, play a very subdued role, so the screenplay seems to have played up this aspect more than the book does.

Read Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo last weekend. It's quite something - mildly hallucinatory and totally nightmarish. I feel like I should read it again, the constantly shifting narration made it tough to reconstruct what actually happens.

Also read a couple of short NYRB novels - The Death of Napoleon by Simon Leys and The Mad and the Bad by Manchette. The Manchette has a paper-thin plot with ludicrous levels of violence, left me a bit nonplussed.

i think i actually bought Slam because i thought it was sci-fi? in any case, i'm enjoying it. i don't really read a lot of books like this anymore. i think the last book i read that reminds me of this was painted desert by fred barthelme. that same kinda shaggy dog kmart realism/surrealism post-portis american thing. a thing that i was a very staunch supporter of for many years. beats most po-faced writing program lit by a mile. mark twain could be goofy as fuck.

it's of a piece with some other "those crazy kids these days"/bildungsroman sort of stuff that I was reading at the time (Russell Banks' "Rule of the Bone" springs to mind), stories about slacker/stoner/gen x kids getting out from under the boomer/yuppie thumb. Although iirc the protagonist in Slam is actually an older dude, right? But the skater culture aspect of it appealed to me. That "you don't cry about concrete, you skate on it" has stuck in my mind for decades now.

the argonauts by maggie nelson,
still pacing through philosophical investigations, walter de la mare short stories, and tufte data visualisations.

I got Wittgenstein's 'Remarks on Color' (c.1950?) from the library & read it with so much enjoyment, it's made me want to give the Philosophical Investigations another go -- think I may have sold my copy, though =/

you can never have too many copies of the investigations

http://www.city-journal.org/2015/bc1127ip.html
― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, December 1, 2015 12:10 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea this is reasonably perceptive down to and including the last para referencing lana del rey. i just finished that biog, hes right abt the eve babitz quotes being m/l the best direct attributions in the entire book

In an effort to avoid reading anything that taxes my brain during the run up to the new year, I have begun to read 1876 by Gore Vidal.

Haven't read the bio, but enjoyed the piece, thanks. Although think he's wrong about Thompson's best work, esp. Hell's Angels, which though not re-read recently, always *seemed* plausibly, closely observed, tersely reported, from a time when no other journo had taken such an extended field trip Maybe because he was actually riding (and partying) with the rowdies, had to stay more alert than on the endless plane-train-hotel pressgang work-drink cycle of Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trail, although that had its moments too.
Yeah, JD does seem to be a more cited influence these days, like St. Vicent says she's going for a "Joan Didionesque middle-aged woman on the verge" persona, sometimes at least (a supple, energetic young woman playing an Older woman, like in many ancient cinematic classics).
Significant if JD changed the Play It antiheroine's main drug from barbituates to valium, going from novel to screenplay: barbs were slow, thick, totalist, true downs, the death of Marilyn Monroe. JD's Marie seems like a younger (valium came along in the 60s), alternate (who never got out of B-movies) or successor to Marilyn, the former Norma Jean Baker, whose birth mother was locked away, whose first husband was the young son of her foster parents (promised his mom he'd "take care of Norman Jean"--later a cop, when interviewed). Maybe Didion had something like that in mind.

Maria, not Marie, sorry. "Antiheroine" might not be the right term, but Didion's perspective on her characters seems carefully distanced, turning them this way and that, before setting them back among the plants, at least in terms of apparent intentions. Of course in this case my own "perspective" is via hazy memories of the movie only, not the book.

I've been reading Chaturanga by Rabindranath Tagore, which I picked it up somewhat at random without being at all familiar with the author. Apparently he was the first non-European to win the Nobel prize in literature, though he seems mostly forgotten these days, remembered, if at all, for his spiritual poetry. But this novel is surprisingly peppy - a tautly-written, character-driven study. I also like the fact that it's only about 100 pages long.

not sure what to read next. things currently staring at me from the shelf

julio cortazar - hopscotch

i fully anticipate that this will be fantastic. but for some reason i'm hesitant to start it. i read the short story collection blow-up a summer ago and really enjoyed it.

philip k dick - collection containing ubik, man in the high castle, palmer aldritch

read do androids dream of electric sheep, my first dick, the other week. loved it, but i'm not sure if i wanna go back just yet

tom mccarthy - c

read remainder this summer and completely loved it. read ilx posts about this one, seemed to have gotten more mixed reviews.

crime and punishment

somehow never read this. my friend lent me a copy, urging me to read it ASAP

maaaan c&p is kinda turgid! i wanna reread it now i've reread the other big ones but it's kinda stylistically and structurally anti-fun

really? he stressed that it was extremely fun

xp re Rabindranath Tagore - I'm no expert, but I've seen a lot of his work in Indian museums, believe he played a very important role in Indian modernism and is in no way forgotten

not familiar with his prose though

Read one of his bks - now it might be sorta interesting to read in the light of the BJP but the prose doesn't quite come off in English.

Would like to read his poetry someday.

lol tell bengalis that tagore is 'forgotten' and see how far you get. afaict he sucks tho

Couple of his bks point at the whole Partition literature business that I haven't read or thought about v much.

This, translated this year, looked interesting but idk if I'll ever have the patience tbh.

put down The Martian, quite a nerdy and predictable page turner there. Kind of a perfect airplane flight book.
Starting Atul Gawande's 'Being Mortal'; very much liked the New Yorker excerpts I read two years ago.

julio cortazar - hopscotch

oh man I *love* Cortazar. Cronopios et Famas is the best.

Really enjoyed Magarshack's translations of The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, have you tried his C&P? Think I will.

Hopscotch is fascinating structurally and for the playfulness of Cortazar's style, and I'm highly susceptible to fractured narratives about urban drifting, but I do remember it as being pretty repellent in its misogyny at times.

This review is good on its strenghts and weaknesses.

At the time I didn't really think that much of the (as described) choose your own adventure type structure.

I admire Hopscotch more than I enjoy it. Cortazar's writing is always a joy to read, whether its prose or poetry, and his fascination with structural games is also attractive to me, but Hopscotch's themes don't engage me as much as some of his other works like Around the Day in 80 Worlds or Cronopios et Famas or Axolotl or Save Twilight. I think he's at his best at his most playful, and Hopscotch's kinda morbid/neurotic center is less appealing.

That review is a good assessment (though I think La Maga's "simple, joyful transcendence" still rests on patriarchal assumptions about female mystery, akin to the way, say, Breton represents Nadja's ambiguous transcendence through madness). I think when I read Hopscotch, which I've only done once, about five years ago, I was interested in the way Cortazar handled digression and the incorporation of Morelli's essay-fragments (although some of those theoretical reflections can be trite, especially when Morelli denounces the "female-reader"), but I did wish that the different paths of reading, well, made more of a difference.
xp

Since I haven't really posted much in a while, I've been reading Rae Spoon and Ivan E. Coyote's essays on nonbinary and butch identity in Gender Failure (Coyote is the defter storyteller of the two, and the only one to really spend any time talking about transmisogyny, but Spoon's treatment of their childhood on the Canadian prairies is affecting, and most of the book's essays, despite having been originally written for performance, avoid lingering on Trans 101), along with Elena Ferrante's Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (which is characteristically seething so far, but I'm not really far enough into it to comment otherwise), Richard McKane's translation of Akhmatova's selected poems, and Jean Rhys's early sketches in The Left Bank (which don't deal with race and colonialism with the relative nuance of her later fiction or match the sustained intensity of Rhys's novels, though it's interesting to see how she works her way toward them, especially in "Vienne").

Never quite gotten into Akhmatova so I'll have a look at those versions if I can.

ows - are you planning to read some Pizarnik btw?

this is v otm:

the novel recalls Henry Miller in its glorification of a particularly self-indulgent brand of Parisian disorder. With his jazz, his soggy cigarettes, his incessant womanizing, and his unassailable sense of self-importance, Olivera is all too recognizable. We can picture him in some filthy garret, poorly shaven, planning his next sexual conquest, thinking what he deems Big Thoughts, Appreciating Jazz, issuing laughable pronouncements like “only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.” Oliveira wallows in a bog of self-pity, and for all its formal innovation, Hopscotch suffers for its indulgence of the man.

this is v otm:

ows - are you planning to read some Pizarnik btw?

Yup, really excited too. There is an interview with the translator #321 if you haven't seen it.

i'm curious if there ever was a book that depicts a self-pitying misogynist but did not "suffer for its indulgence" as that quote so beautifully puts it. i've heard that as a critique of miller, who i also haven't read. some of the books by castellanos moya that i read a couple years ago had that tendency, as well as lots of other books i've read but don't remember now. writing makes you feel empathy for its subjects, can a writer allow you to feel empathy for that kind of character without veering into indulgence?

I can think of a comic book that does it (Joe Matt's "Peepshow"), novel-wise though I'm not sure. There must be something.

It sounds like Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children works in that line, but as I haven't read it yet, I can't confirm that hunch. Maybe Delany's Trouble on Triton?

(Oh, and thanks for the PennSound link, xyzzzz__.)

re Rabindranath Tagore - I'm no expert, but I've seen a lot of his work in Indian museums, believe he played a very important role in Indian modernism and is in no way forgotten

Sorry maybe "forgotten" wasn't the right word. I guess he is kind of a national hero in India. Perhaps it would have been better to say he is not a very buzzworthy touchstone these days in non-Indian literary circles.

I'm currently pretty broke and struggling against my book-buying drives

RESIST

Here is an interesting article about Tagore's reputation in the West that I just found:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/30/modern-magus

This line better expresses what I was trying to say: "Today, his name evokes only a vague recognition in most English-language readers."

"Chaturanga" was not included in the collection under review there ("The Essential Tagore"), but some of the comments about the stories in that volume seem applicable, particularly his concern with the plight of women in the conservative Bengali society of his day and the "subtlety and psychological realism" of his best stories.

Correction: an excerpt of "Chaturanga" is included (under the translated title "Four Chapters").

i remember yeats (& maybe pound?) were very involved with tagore at one point. i see his books around occasionally, but can't say i've ever been tempted to pick any up.

Yeah, me neither, until now. Definitely the poetry doesn't seem like my kind of thing, but if I wasn't a native English speaker I probably wouldn't give Walt Whitman the time of day either.

Agreed on Hopscotch. Don't think that the Stead is quite what flopson is after - it's an extended look at a self-important misogynist but a special case, not at all that identifiable Miller type, and seen largely from the outside (v. worth reading and v. creepy in a hard-to-pin-down way).

I like tagore :(

He can be long-winded at times, and i have only read a fraction of his vast output. A novella like Farewell Song is a good intro to his style and concerns

xps to nate, no excuses necessary, just wanted to share my very limited exp w/ tagore

Miller's misogynist persona in his Paris books is much more cheerful than Cortazar's Hopscotch protagonist, and (to hear him tell it) is as much a victim of abuse as an abuser. I wasn't successful in a recent attempt to re-read Hopscotch. I'd like to think I'd have better luck re-reading Miller, but maybe not, it's been a long time.

Same here, been way too long to describe Tropic of Cancer in any detail, but the cheerful voice of the raconteur, showing off his observant, oh-so-worldly experience, was what made it enjoyable, like "If I have to sit next to some talky old goat while we're both killing time and getting loaded, I could do far worse than this guy." Doesn't mean I buy all his bullshit. Or will ever read any more of his books, so far, though I may be missing something.

I wish i could remember where I read this, but i fondly recall in another memoir someone talking about how they had a completely normal, if a bit drunken, lunch with Miller, and when the waitress would ask things like 'Would you like more water?', Miller turn to his lunch companion and act as though he had just been asked to perform anal sex. Then, later, the memoirist read Miller's version of this lunch in a book where Miller was talking about all these waitresses and other women coming up and propositioning him, and how it descended into this orgiastic free-for-all.

The memoirist's conclusion was that Miller was so drunk and deaf he had no idea what anyone ever said to him, so he chose to interpret and then mis-remember every human interaction as wildly sexual.

pretty sure that was orwell relating his meeting with miller in paris while on his way to spain?

can a writer allow you to feel empathy for that kind of character without veering into indulgence?

feel like alasdair gray achieves this in 1982, janine

& xposts: the man who loved children devastating portrait of the all-encompassing and suffocating egotism of a certain type of paterfamilias. been awhile, but looking back on it the step-mother has my residual sympathy more than anyone else (add to list books i need to reread).

Heard something in a drama class I sat in on about how there had to be something sympathetic about characters portrayed as evil. Otherwise the audience just wouldn't care about them.
So assume it must apply across other media.
So the writer must provide some means of identifying with the bad character for it to have meaning. Otherwise its just a negative force occupying space or something.

See also: Milton's Satan.

See also: The Sopranos

"i'm curious if there ever was a book that depicts a self-pitying misogynist but did not "suffer for its indulgence"

there must be a good bellow or roth example.

i read this article today. it's all about how mean current academic literary critics are.

http://thepointmag.com/2015/criticism/when-nothing-is-cool

read the introduction to crime & punishment today, this is nuts

Then in November, even though he was deeply in debt, sick with epilepsy and haemmorrhoids, and even though the first issue of the novel was due to be serialised in January 1866, he burned and abandoned his novella in an act of extraordinary artistic integrity because 'a new form, a new plan excited me, and I started work all over again'

Meanwhile, here I am whining because a touch of the flu is keeping me from finishing my term paper.

Muriel Spark - The Mandelbaum Gate
Ari Berman - Give Us The Ballot: The Modern Struggle for the Voting Rights Act
Rosemary Sullivan - Stalin's Daughter

Still reading Mary Karr's xpostThe Art of Memoirand she makes points about Speak, Memorysupported by quotes, but the latter also make me wonder if a whole book of this would be too rich for my blood/annoying, the way he's waving his butterfly net around memories/objets d'art of his parents etc. I loved The Defense in high school and enjoyed Transparent Things later, but---how is S, M?

'Speak, Memory' is really good, but from memory I think it's best enjoyed if you've read a fair few of his novels, since you get more of an understanding of his recurrent obsessions and rants

Beautiful prose throughout, of course, which is what you pay your Nabokov money for

In that case I want my money back for Ada.

But yeah, in general I agree.

my uncle just told me at thanksgiving that nabz was his professor at cornell!

for a second i read that as 'nabisco'

Was he a good teacher?

Didn't mean the Eliot etc bit as a lecture, just thinking loud x caffeine, sorry

shit and now wrong thread, sorry, sorry

my uncle just told me at thanksgiving that nabz was his professor at cornell!

was Justice Ginsberg in his class?

Was he a good teacher?
What do mean is he a good teacher?
Well, how does he read?
Close. Very, very close.

he said he was cool. he didn't know him as a writer when he took the class. i mean he had never read his writing.

my uncle more business-y than artsy.

this is great.

http://harpers.org/archive/2016/01/there-are-other-forces-at-work/?single=1

Just started Svetlana Alexievich's 'Voices from Chernobyl': really good, but incredibly bleak--all these people well-meaning people who didn't know what they were getting into/had no choice being sacrificed to cover up and clean up such a hideous fuck-up. Some of the descriptions come as close to hell on earth as I suspect you could find. But occasional moments of beauty, too.

xp nice, didn't notice the author till i'd finished!

Apparently during one of Cage's infamous performances his wife or a close friend was compelled to stand up and shout "I love you John but this is intolerable!"

i have those moments on ilx fairly regularly

in the blurbs this book is compared to mervyn peake, edward gorey, ray bradbury, shirley jackson, franz kafka, stephen king, and edgar allan poe. okay! not too much to live up to...

https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/12346431_10154388790627137_7600098211344240692_n.jpg?oh=51aaa6be9a365d47cb2426da3d11efce&oe=56DBAD2D

After my last exam on Monday, I blew thru Submission, Houellebecq's latest, which was quite the page-turner. Anybody else read it? Feels like a reach to call it a "novel of ideas", but I've found it fun to think/talk about...

I wanna read that, after the Knausgaard, but I suspect the book I would encounter is much worse than the one KOK read, somehow.

Hah, I just read the KOK piece... hard to see much of Houellebecq's text through the schtick.
I thought this was a good review essay, anyway: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/next-thing

re Soumission I wrote on another thread :

I finally finished Houellebecq's Soumission. It's a very Parisian novel, not one I see having much of an audience if it's ever translated into English. The narrator's conversion in the end is hilarious for its shallowness: it's only when he sees other new converts drinking choice booze and having marriages with 15 year old girls arranged by madams that he takes the leap. There are discussions of politics and metaphysics (creationism, really) but they play almost no role in the narrator's move toward Islam. The university president who persuades the narrator to convert in exchange for a choice professorial post is a Nietzschean who was active in his youth in Catholic right wing circles, and seems to see Islam as just another means to his ends: the domination of women and more broadly the assumption of power (maybe these are the same for him). There are only two female characters of note, neither of whom is able to sustain any resistance to the Islamic tide, and both of whom are involved in the plot largely as sexual actors. (There are also several prostitutes.) I suppose the novel plays out its personal drama---an aging professor who just wants to eat and fuck well---as resolvable through submission to Islam, and so religiosity is itself simply a manifestation of the will to power.

after 13 november I've thought a lot about the events surrounding the party at the musée de la vie romantique, the fighting near the Place de Clichy that the media won't report. I don't know.

city on fire
hope to read more modiano (not everything bad that could be caricatured) and the first bad man (if it is returned on or before Jan 13) and the book my sister let me borrow that is in the dresser drawer at my parent's house that I need to return to her
happy for fat modern novels even if they are in memoriam

per the "recommend me a book on the history of labor/organized labor in the US" thread i've been reading Stayin' Alive: The 1970's and the Last Days of the Working Class and it's boss

At work today I'm readin Chine Mieville's new collection, while putting off Dreyfus' Being in the World. Pretty good so far, if you like his stuff.

xp- awesome!

currently blasting through michelle alexander - the new jim crow. it's kicking my ass. kind of a masterpiece of exposition and persuasive social justice writing.

Chico Buarque: Budapest --- novel about a Brazilian ghost writer who becomes inadvertently obsessed with Hungarian after an unplanned plane landing in Budapest - really lovely so far.

Voices from Chernobyl was a tough book to finish--it was excellent but hard to pick up; some of the stories were genuinely heartbreaking, especially those involving the children of Chernobylites.

Weird stuff, too, like the fact that the massive Chernobyl sarcophagus covering the reactor (400,000 m3 of concrete and 7,300 tonnes of metal framework) is this vast tomb for the body of one man, Valery Khodemchuk, who was killed by the reactor explosion and whose body wasn't able to be removed.
http://static2.stuff.co.nz/1360791308/853/8302853_600x400.jpg

Appealing selections---especially intrigued by this description of Reptile House:
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/12/11/our-contributors-pick-their-favorite-books-of-the-year/#.Vm7rIlSioD4.twitter

the Berlin book made the NYT list too. 7 women on the Times top ten.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/02/books/review/best-books-of-2015.html?hpw&rref=books&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

oh man the kitty cat chapter in this Tem book whooooooweee! a tour de force of kitty dread. yikes! i've been watching my cats suspiciously all night....

worth reading just for that. i guess. it's really something else.

John Le Carre - The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

David Baldacci - The Innocent, Hit, Simple Genius, The Escape, Zero Day v formulaic but p easy to whip through quickly. The ones featuring John Puller are very Lee Child Jack Reacher. Quite enjoyed the Will Robie series.

Michael Lewis - The Big Short, mostly horrifying but also darkly hilarious.

I finished off 1876 last night. I think next I'm going to give Rick Perlstein's Reagan book, The Invisible Bridge, a whirl. Based on my recent choices, I must be into political horror shows atm.

I put in a couple of hours with Invisible Bridge last night. I'm not sure I'll stick it out for 800 pages. The crap he will be describing was my daily fodder during what were probably the most formative years of my young adulthood (ages 18-21), so other than some insider tidbits (his specialty) I can't see myself learning much. It would just be reviving a multitude of bleak memories and ghastly old heartaches.

Chico Buarque: Budapest I had no idea the Brazilian pop-star Chico Buarque was a novelist, though I did remember reading that he was from some prominent literary family (a dictionary dynasty iirc).

I'm reading My Struggle Book 3.

Read the first few chapters of that Chico Buarque book a few years back and they were great. Made me want to learn both Hungarian and Portuguese,

so that actually is by the musician? huh

No it is by the WRONG DUDE

the chico buarque did write that book tho

Definitely THE chico buarque. There are two other books by him in English atm - 'Spilt Milk' (which seems to be a dynastic family story in under 200 pages) and an OP novel called 'Turbulence', both of which look really promising too

Thought it was by Kósta Szose.

Okay, have to come clean: I actually own this book in Portuguese, it is a beautiful object.

I'm intrigued! Any pictures online?

Sure, just search Budapeste Buarque.

do u see?

Look for the one with both the front and back covers.

Also, one of the images hit seems to be the star of O Clone, whose is appearing in the filmed version.

Nicely done!

We should have a winter thread? Finishing a few shorts:

Adolfo Bioy Casares - The Invention of Morel. I think the idea for the story is so strong yet I wasn't exactly caught into how it was told. For me it could be overshadowed by what I think Borges might've done with it. Kind of afraid Casares (and Ocampo and Arlt whenever I get to them) will all fall short. I'll be reading Asleep in the Sun shortly. In tandem I also finished Thomas Bernhard's The Voice Imitator, which I liked a lot once I got over the shortness of everything. I love In Rome, his 'tribute' to Ingeborg Bachmann, how he uses a dead friend as a means of continuing his pathological hatred of Austria and the culture he made so well out of. Yves Bonnefoy's Rue Travesiere is a series of linked micro-essays, ranging from Renaissance art to memories of his poor neighbourhood (the Rue of the title), I veered from a feeling of too concentrated a bunch of thoughts to parse, to others that were so slight, demanding an abrupt end. His poetry is great so hopefully I can hunt down some more next year. Joanna Walsh's Hotel is another bunch of micro-essays more novelistically linked by her times in Hotels (as reviewer) and as a window to naked emotions - her marriage has just fallen apart, so hotels become a substitute, or do they? One cold thing for another. Walsh is aware (or maybe scared) that this could (kitchen)sink into a British melodrama so uses plenty of continental theory (Heidegger, Freud's 'Uncanny') to theorize on the spaces she encounters and to use it as a distancing device. The personal is never far away though - and rightly so.

Here you go: Now Is The Winter Of Our Dusty-dusty 2015/2016, What Are You Reading Now?

Thanks - good to see TRADITION is still upheld at this time of year.