Spring and All 2k16 / what are you reading now?

Proceeding from Now Is The Winter Of Our Dusty-dusty 2015/2016, What Are You Reading Now?: have at it!

rereading

J.J. Lee, IRELAND 1912-1985
R.F. Foster, MODERN IRELAND 1600-1972
R.F. Foster, VIVID FACES
Terry Eagleton, HEATHCLIFF AND THE GREAT HUNGER

reading mainly for the first time

Edna Longley, THE LIVING STREAM

Had some luck with finding Quartet Encounters lately.

Just finished "The Garden Where The Brass Band Played" by Simon Vestdijk and started "On The Mountain", my first ever Thomas Bernhard.

Laura by Vera Caspary

mostly poetry. Wordsworth, Hopkins, Bunting, Prynne.

Slowly finishing Sarah Schulman's The Cosmopolitans and going through the essays in Wayne Koestenbaum's My 1980s; at times, his style seems more glib than playful, but his enthusiasm about his subjects can be winning, especially in his long essay on James Schuyler, "Epitaph on Twenty-Third Street."

Roy Foster, THE IRISH STORY - an essay on Yeats and WWI that is basically identical material to the equivalent chapter in

R.F. Foster, W.B. YEATS: A LIFE which I forgot to say I was reading last weekend.

boy you sure got burned

Yay, tim, i found a secondhand bookshop and bought a cluster of quartet encounters a couple of weeks ago on a business trip too

They're pretty reliably interesting, aren't they?

It's even more surprising how good they are when you learn what a loon the publisher was, though most of the actual work seems to have been done by Jennie Erdal (who ghosted said loon's own books)

I saw this shop had a couple of them, so I was flicking through the backs of those looking for more 'Other Titles in this Series' to scan the shelves for, all with about 10mins to go before I had to get a taxi to the airport and never see the bookshop again. this is what passes for stressful in my world.

I finished The Big Short. I think I'll stand by my summary in the previous WAYR thread. Lewis drops numerous hints that he thinks no one could possibly be cynical or distrustful enough about Wall Street banking or bond trading. He places accusations of outright fraud in the mouths of his characters rather than his own, but the hints are very clear and point all one way.

He seems to think that the stock market has been regulated to the extent that outright fraud is much harder to accomplish there, but the honesty of stock trading mostly depends on promoting the belief that the SEC will notice insider trading or other fraud and hammer you. If the SEC weren't there, I'm sure he'd predict the stock market would soon be completely rigged, too.

"On The Mountain", my first ever Thomas Bernhard.

― Tim, Thursday, March 31, 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

One sentence!!

Saer's The Witness:

They could not get any grasp on reality because they knew deep in their hearts that, whatever object of desire they chose, however unreal and lacking in individuality the people they ate seemed to them, the only point of reference they had by which to recognize the taste of alien flesh was the memory of their own. The Indians knew, as surely as night follows day, that the force they drove them out towards the far horizon in search of human flesh was not the desire to devour the inexistent but the more ancient, more rooted desire to eat one another. They were thus the cause and object of that anxiety. They knew themselves without knowing it and they carried out acts whose meaning, they knew, was not what it appeared to be. The true aim of those acts was rather the pursuit of what was apparently the least likely and furthest removed object of their desire: themselves.

onto my next Hrabal: Too Loud A Solitude, about a man who works at a paper compactor and who collects rare books that arrive in his queue

I'm also reading Hrabal! The Little Town Where Time Stood Still at the moment, having read Closely Observed Trains recently.

Also reading Debatable Land by Candia Mc William, I'd never heard of her until the other day but I picked it up on the strength of a blurb from Penelope Fitzgerald. Its excellent so far.

Closely Observed Trains really stayed with me. Keep meaning to read more Hrabal. Where's best to go next?

I've picked up The Rest is Noise after a break of about three years. It's as good, and as maddening, as I remember it being.

I Served The King of England - only because both this and Closely Observed... were made into films.

I know there was a short story collection issued recently - not sure that this works for someone like Hrabal (the narratives need length to involve you) but I'll pick up if I see it.

If that story collection is MR Kafka, i just read that! Some lovely descriptions and ideas, but not all the stories worked. Trains and Solitude are my favourites of his books that i have read so far.

Yeah that's the one James.

Jean Rhys - Tigers are Better Looking. So good. Often feel with short stories that, unless you are a Borges or Kafka, its a lot of development work with few really standing on their own but I find these are for the most part are potent and have all the best qualities of her few novels from the 30s. The general air of this woman lost in the haze of drink, mistrust and misanthropy is worked over as expertly. These never feel like sketches that were left over:

There's a lot of drink left, and I'm glad I tell you. Because can't bear the way I feel. Not any more. I mix gin and vermouth and drink it quick, then I mix another and drink it slow by the window. The garden looks different, like I never see it before. I know quite well what I must do, but its late now - tomorrow. I have one more drink, of wine this time, and then a song comes into my head, I sing it and I dance it, and more I sing, more I am sure this is the best tune that has ever come to me in all my life

The stories have these songs mentioned, tunes hummed, matter to dance to, to forget all the unkindness of the world.

This is appended by a bunch of stories from The Left Bank, her first book. Sketches of artists and just the general scene and hangers-on - in general Rhys loved Paris, Dominica as a place where she comes from and London as a fucking shit hole she somehow tends to end up in.

Now reading more Rhys - Sleep it Off Lady. Not working as well, most of the stories are set in Dominica and I find the change a bit abrupt - but I can't exactly stop reading, so I'll finish.

I'm also reading Hrabal! The Little Town Where Time Stood Still at the moment, having read Closely Observed Trains recently.

― .robin., Friday, April 1, 2016 3:54 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nice, read that one a couple weeks ago and loved it. haven't watched the film yet. i have king of england out from the library too

200 pages into the last chaos walking book (following emil.y's recommendation.) right mix of enjoyable & interested, if a little repetitive in places

I'm reading The Banditti of the Plains, A.S. Mercer, a contemporary account of a range war in Wyoming in the early 1890s, where the cattlemen's association decided to terrorize settlers who were fencing what had been open rangeland. They imported a bunch of goons from Texas as a private army who committed murders on command. Apparently the movie Shane was modeled on this range war.

The book describes how complicit the Wyoming governor, senators and wealthiest citizens were in this lawlessness. Consequently, these powers obtained an injunction, seized all copies of the book and suppressed it ruthlessly. Only a few copies survived. It was reprinted in the 1960s from a copy smuggled out and sent to a university library in the east with the admonition not to shelve it, but keep it under lock and key for future generations.

Have recently been re-reading old standbys -- some of Plutarch's Lives (the Gracchi, Cleomenes, Artaxerxes) and R.L. Stevenson's short stories from The Suicide Club. I dabbled a bit in Kipling's American Notes, mostly just the chapter where he fishes for salmon in Oregon. Fun stuff.

I'm just casting around until I land on something new I want to read. I checked out a library copy of Henry Green's Blindness. It may do the trick. Alfred Lord Sotosyn was repping hard for HG in the Greene vs. Green poll thread and that carries weight with me.

balcoиy of europe, a novel by aidan higgins

Finalists as well as winners---especially interested in ones by Dan Ephron, Mary Beard, David Maraniss, and James Hannaham, who just won a PEN also:
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-festival-of-books-winners-20160331-snap-htmlstory.html

Couple more novels by Duras (Destroy and The Afternoon of Monsieur Andesmas). More poetry by Darwish and Enzensberger's The Sinking of the Titanic.

Huh, didn't know about that Enzensberger book at all, and it looks really interesting: more info here https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/hans-magnus-enzensberger-4/the-sinking-of-the-titanic-a-narrative-poem/

Caitlin Moran's How To Build a Girl. A coming of age non-autobiographical story about a precocious mid teen girl from a council estate in Wolverhampton. Author stresses non-autobiographical though several details fit her own life i.e. where she's from, her becoming a music writer and a couple other things.
Picked it up for 25c cos I'd seen author on tv recently and wondered what her writing was like. Am enjoying it.

W.B. Yeats, SELECTED PROSE
Tim Pat Coogan, 1916: THE EASTER RISING
Fritz Senn, INDUCTIVE SCRUTINIES: FOCUS ON JOYCE

I read Voices of Chernobyl this weekend. Astonishing.

First time the Nobel really got it spot on in a few years. We really need to see more widely circulated translations from the quintet of bks about the former USSR and Russia.

re: Enzensberger. Don't have any strength to talk about books at the mo, but I'll say that how much I loved the juxtaposition between the Titanic and his trip to Cuba. At first you don't quite know how that's operating and enjoy it as a distancing device. The Titanic is a weird topic on its own for Enzensberger to capture (such a well known tragedy) but it makes sense to read it alongiside Mausoleum as a failure of progress (or its up-and-down journey when let loose on the world)

Im reading and enjoying TC Boyle's "Drop City". anyone here into TC Boyle? I dont hear his name mentioned much around here but I've always found him an engaging writer. I liked "The Tortilla Curtain" a lot too.

Pat Barker - Toby's Room
William Leuchtenburg - The American Presidents

Books do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell

The Secret History of Wonder Woman - Jill Lepore

I've been put off TC Boyle, personally, by having read "A Women's Restaurant," his extremely creepy and transphobic early story which Janice Raymond cited to bolster her case that trans women were just predatory men trying to invade women's spaces, as though skeevy fiction by straight dudes counted as evidence. I don't want to sound puritanical, since I engage with a lot of texts and writers I find objectionable, but that was a strong deterrent to seeking out more of his work.

(And I'm inconsistent here: I love Angela Carter, DFW, and Gore Vidal, and all of them have used transmisogynistic tropes in ways that make me cringe, so the issue is probably that I haven't had a really compelling reason to keep engaging with other parts of Boyle's work.)

boyle might belong on that unfashionable writers thread. but hey he had a long fashionable run. just feels like you don't hear about him anymore. when was the last time someone read an old madison smartt bell book?

Coogan's EASTER RISING illustrated history is grand. I have always wanted to know more about the military side, as well as the political, and I am getting some from this. It amazes me how for instance Connolly would send out military memos, as 'Commandant', from the GPO.

For a completely unhelpful treatment of same, have you read We Always Treat Women Too Well by Raymond Queneau?

THE PINEFOX: plethora of easter rising documentaries on RTE lately. I thought this one was the best and quite illuminating. Would have liked to know how English schools learn about or discuss (even if they do) the Easter Rising.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/how-the-british-lost-the-easter-rising-1.2579169

extraordinarily unpleasant man in gym gear got on the tube, dumped bags on seats either side of him, spread his legs, has been sniffing every twenty seconds or so, and staring at the young woman opposite him. put in some leaky earbuds now pissing out tinny noise. reading this:

http://www.brf.org.uk/news/new-revelation-youth-ministry

wait. he's put that away. now this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B016USSX5O/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

^Fodder for this thread.

i was thinking of that thread but was just interested in what he was reading. didn't want to dignify him with a rating.

3/10

Speaking of what-am-I-reading, I got a start on Blindness, Henry Green, but then I got distracted by William James' Psychology: Briefer Course, which has, of course, been superseded in many ways by modern research using new tools such as CAT scans, MRIs, and EEGs, but is still fascinating due to the exceptional qualities of James' intellect and his excellent prose. So, now it is a tussle between Green and James and I don't know how it will end.

Recent stuff:

* Wolfgang Hilbig: The Sleep of the Righteous -- East German shellshocked stories, as good and downbeat as everyone says
* Claire Morrall: When the Floods Came -- undemanding post-climate change semi-thriller, pleasant enough but a bit YA in the prose dept
* Javier Marias: Written Lives -- very entertaining essays about oddities in the lives/careers of various writers
* L. S. Hilton: Maestra -- rubbish, didn't finish, if you lie pretentious brand-name dropping thrillers dripping with genital juices this may be for you
* Jo Shapcott: Of Mutability -- poems, liked em
* Patricia Lockwood: Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals -- poems, liked most of em, loved a couple, annoyed by a few
* Carmen Boullose: Before -- very good coming-of-age psychodrama about upper-middle-class Mexican girl in 1960s
* Rein Raud: The Brother -- Estonian sort-of spaghetti western "stranger comes to town and mixes everything up", good except for the very end
* Sacha Mardou: The Sky in Stereo -- very good graphic novel, except on the very last page I find out it's TO BE CONCLUDED in a vol 2 that's not yet published and is not mentioned anywhere on the cover
* Nina Berberova: The Ladies from St. Petersburg -- three novellas, two of which are like a female-centric version of Isaac Babel, and thus very good indeed

I read a bit of Surviving by Harry Green in the library on Monday. Seems interesting. Hadn't read him before.
Read The Bees a short story with a sting in the tail. Manages to set up a lot in 3 pages.

Harry Yorke, thank you

Lucia Berlin, A Manual For Cleaning Women: several stories in. Opens with "Angel's Laundromat," where the narrator sees the reflection of the old Indian sitting next to her, sees the reflection watching her hands in the mirror they're both staring or just lookin' at (both drunk). She describes it better than that, weaving that braid of connected and distanced bits of awareness and habituation and setting in among other accruals and mixtures, drawing from autobiographical materials---if Lydia Davis and collection editor Stephen Emerson didn't confirm this in their intros, would still be likely enough, from connections and recurrences in and between the stories. A musical effect, incl. observation and anecdotal moments, found elements and invented ones (invented from materials related: like she remembers being drunk and seeing this guy doing that, also finds a notebook note about waking up drunk another time and thinking about this guy and how he merges with a dream she partly remembers: she doesn't give that as an example, but I get or project that impression---I've been in similar situations, on the street, with bottles, later with notebooks etc).
The tricky part goes to the "life is like fiction": sometimes--well, mainly in the title story, so far---the observations can incl. social stereotypes, or likely sources---Davis makes a lot of good points about the author's surprising turns of phrase, bullseye le mots juste in the midst of seemingly basic documentary narrative, and not wanting it to seem written, I'd say---which is maybe a reason for including some stereotypical or familiar elements---here we go, drunk forebears, Texas boondocks, Bay Area bus routes, done that---but those elements *and* the word choices--always risking mere cleverness etc---keep finding their own partially emerging through-line of narrative momentum, and the need to make a path through all thisstuff in her head. It's a balancing act; don't look down, play it cool, but can't un-have the periphereal vision, can't forget it all, no matter how much she drinks, how much she turns into grist for tbe mill.
Texas: all that light, so keep it darker inside; Berkeley, Frisco, Oakland: it's gray so often, relax and hang on, while stealing sleeping pills from the ladies whose residences you clean, "saving for a rainy day"---but also saving the daily impressions, the social connections, like she did even back in Texas, in those dimly lit rooms, notebooks, etc. But now, while she's riding to and from her cleaning gigs etc. also thinks of (drunk) boyfriend, who hated buses, but enjoyed approaching and hanging around bus stations (h'mmm---no matter how much she tells you, shows more, leaves room for speculation):
We used to go to the ones in San Francisco and Oakland. Mostly Oakland, on San Pablo Avenue. Once he told me he loved me because I was like San Pablo Avenue.
And she is: she's vast, she contains multitudes, she's found her way into an early 70s Cali Van Morrison-type tribute, via boyfriend's reverie---but from her side:
He was like the Berkeley dump. I wish there was a bus to the dump. Which would be a good punchlime, a heartfelt pin in the memory bubble, like she finds sometimes, but now she can't let it go:
We went there when we got homesick for New Mexico. It is stark and windy and gulls soar like nighthawks in the desert. You can see the sky all around you and above you. Garbage trucks thunder through dust-billowing roads. Gray dinosaurs.
I can't handle you being dead, Ter. But you know that.
And so on. This isn't representative of the whole story, though, much less the book.

"The tricky part goes to 'life is like *bad* fiction'," I meant to say.

Michael B: thank you.
I have watched about 5 documentaries on related areas recently, with great interest. But not that one.
Will I as a UK resident be able to get the RTE one?

I have had little contact with UK schools for a long time, but I am not aware that they do teach much Irish history; have not heard about this over the years anyway.

Stephen Leacock, Arcadian Adventures of the Idle Rich
Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (reread)

Pinefox: Here it is on Youtube. It must be a RTE/BBC co-production

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG6bL-1KPuI

Mods, can we get a Portillo warning there, thanks

I've been rereading Chris Kraus's I Love Dick, starting Wayne Koestenbaum's short book on Warhol, still sorting through my thoughts about Sarah Schulman's The Cosmopolitans, and getting around to the second issue of the trans poetry journal Vetch, which is available here.

I've been reading The Country Road, a book of stories by Regina Ullmann.

is it good? have ummed and ahhed about that one.

finished up reading greg Jackson's 'prodigals' collection of short stories..very dense & thoughtful & compelling. includes the 'wagner in the desert' story that was in the nyer like 18 months ago & made some waves, notably the editor of the paris review saying something like it was the best piece of fiction they've published in 20 yrs

I'm past the halfway mark with Blindness. It's interesting in part because it was his first and was published (and therefore must have been written) when he was an undergrad at Oxford.

It strikes me as having the usual weaknesses of a novel written by a very young person, most notably underdeveloped characters, but what is most impressive to me is how well he strategically writes his way around those weaknesses so you are seldom aware of them. I get the impression it was pasted together from the better bits of his apprentice work, reworked with very cleverly disguised joins that allow it to become a single story. Green matured in his craft very early.

is it good? have ummed and ahhed about that one.

I don't know quite what to think about it. It's weird enough that I'll probably have to read it twice before I can make up my mind whether or not I like it. It does give a weirdly haunted, kind of desperate glimpse of life in the Swiss countryside in pre-modern times, which reminds me more than anything else of the Haneke film "The White Ribbon", if you've ever seen that. Sometimes the writing verges on being kind of heavy handedly portentous.

Michael B -- my response was mistaken: I have watched that Portillo doc, not once but TWICE. The guests and locations are tremendous.

This week: finished Coogan's Easter Rising book.

Yesterday finished rereading Hugh Kenner, JOYCE'S VOICES.

Clarice Lispector - Complete Short Stories is a flawed project. 'Egg and Chicken' might be one of the very great short stories (and there are probably another half dozen others that I'd include) but I wasn't convinced in the argument presented in Benjamin Moser's introduction that you get to see the development of a writer (and a female writer at that) and that in itself is worth nearly 600 pages' worth of stories. It could've done with a strong selection. Her essence as a writer is pretty much there at the beginning, she just becomes better/refines it. This took about 200 pages to get really going. When she does then there's no one quite like her. I then moved on to a selection of short stories by Robert Bolano in The Return, covering what he expands on in his books: poetry, porn, football, politics and violence. At times you think this is kinda mechanistic but there is always a detail that gets to you. And almost as good as Thomas Bernhard with the one-paragraph monologue. Moving on to his late fragments in The Secret of Evil and right now on Juan Carlos Onetti's The Shipyard which is a Latin American existentialism that was very much in the air at the time (Sabato's The Tunnel) where the re-building of a Shipyard stands for all other re-builds. Onetti extracts as much out of the metaphor as its possible.

having finished the higgins novel about to start on cain's book by alexander trocchi in an appropriately trashy seventies paperback edition

Really enjoyed Mieville's new novella while I sat in the rare sun at the pub today. Don't know hat folks opinions are of him, but it was some of his best writing, I think.

would appear that the recent(ish) dalkey edition of balcony of europe has had the opening and closing irish sections excised at aidan higgins' insistence, which is a shame cos i much preferred those to the central portion! may seek out a copy of langrishe, go down now, and his "autobiographical" writings look like they could be interesting.

Deal by Bill Kreutzman. Interesthng read. Think it might be giostwritten but do like the style.
Got as far as Anthem so far.

Just greatly enjoyed reading the first 25 pages of my friend Julia Claiborne Johnson's novel, Be Frank With Me, the ebook of which is on sale for another day or two for a buck ninety-nine /street_team

i appear to be reading a buttload of kierkegaard, who i still find kind of irritating

I'm reading the (mostly not very interesting) celebratory articles* for Charlotte Brontë's 200th birthday which is TODAY. Happy Birthday Charlotte, I love you.

I still need to read several novels by all the sisters, but already read Lucasta Miller's The Bronte Myth, which goes back to Charlotte helping her earliest biographers with hype about the family backstory (doesn't seem to have needed it, but she wanted to highlight certain points, mix down others). We also get interpretations down through the ages, reflecting Victorian, Freudian (or journo glosses), feminists, neo-Romantic etc trends---and the author doesn't just lol canned takes, she considers just how the original texts invite, challenge and reward different readings, to different degrees (that response seems ridiculous now, but this other guy is on to something, even if his own writing hurts the cool contemporary eye).
Also deals with pop cultural aspects, incl. Bronte house (and England) as cutely creepy tourist attraction.

Appropriate reading on Charlotte's 200th birthday.... Vilette is one of the strangest and most powerful 19th c. novels I've read, so I'm v. curious about The Brontë Myth.

...oops, just saw abcfsk's post.

I picked up a coy of SPQR, Mary Beard, at my library out of curiosity to see how a scholar would revise and update Roman history, based on newer research. After about 150pp of it I'm finding it very diluted and her highly hedged and inconclusive conclusions to be annoyingly obvious, such as (to paraphrase freely) 'early Roman history, as recorded by Livy and others, should be taken as largely myth with only a tenuous connection to history, but hey, it reveals something about how Romans liked to think of themselves, so let's look at that'. I'm pretty sure her publisher projected the audience for this book as people who've watched various television programs about Rome and think, hey, maybe I'm ready to read a real book about all that stuff. Meh.

I'm getting a bit discouraged. The percentage of 'hits' among my book choices is way down so far this year. Nothing much seems fresh. It all seems like minor variations on themes I've encountered too often to find engaging any more. I know there's stuff out there I haven't read that I would enjoy greatly, but my accustomed search criteria are failing to turn them up.

xpost one way street, you're reminding me of a dandy Bronte thread, with some comments on Villette and others as well--started by abcfsk, come to think of it (if I mess this up, it's an ILB thread with Bronte's Shirley in the title)

Charlotte Brontë's Shirley

The Sight of Death by art historian T. J. Clark. It’s a diary of his experience of two paintings by Poussin, written over several months at the Getty. He describes how from day to day the paintings shift aspects and pose new questions. It’s a great way of writing about painting, very intimate and immersive.

I spent three days in the National Gallery observing and drawing a Poussin so that sounds relevant to my interests. Paintings really do change the more time you spend with them, though the inclination and the luxury to do so are very rare.

I'm pretty sure her publisher projected the audience for this book as people who've watched various television programs about Rome

As someone who's presented various television programmes about Rome I'm sure she was fine with it. As someone who's etc. I was fine with it too. I've moved on to Gibbon now, don't worry - yeah he's way more fun to read but he doesn't care about the 99%.

As someone who hasn't got to grips with dangling modifiers I apologise for the above post.

Heh, am visiting London next month and plan to go the Wallace Collection to see the Poussin there, now that I'm just about to finish Dance to the Music of Time

A further connection - Christopher Hitchins, in an old piece about Powell, points out that any sentence in Dance to the Music of Time that begins with 'Although' invariably has a dangler in it

The National Gallery in London has a small room full of Poussins including one of the rudest paintings I've ever seen:

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/nicolas-poussin-nymph-with-satyrs

(sadly the link doesn't include the wall text which iirc coyly says the sleeping nymph is too distracted to notice the satyr disrobing her, while the satyr behind the tree hides his 'excitement'.)

Just had Love Goes to Buildings on Fire drop into the letterbox so will be reading that shortly.
Have mainly been reading Deal by BIll Kreutzmann over the last few days.
Just read 2000AD prog 1977 last night which they're making into an anniversary issue of sorts.

One of the two paintings which are the main subject of this book is in the National Gallery.

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/nicolas-poussin-landscape-with-a-man-killed-by-a-snake

This is the most readily accessible similar piece for me. I may go this weekend.

http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artwork.php?mkey=2059

Aimless, based on a decade of reading your posts here, I think you might like Be Frank With Me, still on sale today for just under two bucks /street_team. But perhaps, in a classic manifestation of the narcissism of small differences, you will hate it, I am not a good judge of these things.

read caroline bergvall's 'meddle english', a short collection of poetry (sort of) and critical/experimental prose that i'd been wanting to read for quite a while. i thought i'd like it but i was really amazed, easily the most sheer excitement i've had reading since, i dunno, brandon brown's weird catullus book. bergvall is trilingualish, norwegian french and english, though the book reads as predominantly english with stuff happening. i am not too up on the experimental poetics of recent years, but it strikes me having read brown, claudia rankine, and bergvall recently that something like 'embodied poetics' must have taken over in a pretty decisive way, because they all work that pretty deliberately in different ways. there's no deleuze in the book, or barely—she says 'lines of flight' a few times—but her frame is kind of a contemporary materialist anti-capitalist geo-whatever that has those kinds of characteristic tropes you get from 'a thousand plateaus' and latter-day enthusiasts for theorizing the anthropocene or whatever. lots of muck, critters, geographical vectors for uncanny becomings, a lot of what would code as body-horror in other contexts if not for the modern variant of epicurean/de rerum we-are-flows-of-atoms sublimity running through it, all serving as the matrix for some stuff about language change and power that is quickly put into practice: some chopped up chaucer juxtaposed to some modern-day tales that slip into riddley walker/anthony burgess/british street slang mixtures, or mash together news reports that are made to stutter in multiple languages. the core is a, i don't even know how to describe it at the moment, but it's a reprint of (part of?) her older 'goan atom', with lots of typographical arrangement and enjambment and portmanteau type techniques mixed in with what she calls bilingual writing techniques in the form of micro code-switches, set into kind of a multi-voiced epic narrative. it will be reminiscent of finnegans wake to a lot of readers just as a point of reference for that sort of controlled re-languaging, but i thought a lot of the opening chapters of gunter grass's 'flounder' because of the sort of pre/proto/trans-historical cast of the narrative events and the bodily focus of the not-always-just-quite-human agents of the narrative. it's fantastic because it's so propulsive, a lot of the techniques that would just code as experimental elsewhere, and demand decoding to make full sense, are used in the service of a primary effort to make weird sense, communicatively, so that you can follow it while constantly picking up on more than you're getting but being willing to take what you get and keep going. also it's FILTHY e.g.

Enter DOLLY
Entered enters
Enters entered
Enter entre
En train en trail
En trav ail aïe
La Bour La bour La bour
wears god on a strap
shares mickey with all your friends

Sgot
a wides lit
down the lily
sgot avide slot
donne a lolly to a head
less cin
dy slots in

to lic

that hardly represents it, but basically because of the techniques all the language or text-fragments are constantly surprising you with their filthiness, in a very funny and visceral way, and it maintains a velocity that never seems to let you settle in, your reading stays on a natural and responsive level, and nothing ever fails to work so badly that the effect is ruined.

she reads some parts of it here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsYykH7qgLw

which is quite good but definitely a different mode, i guess she 'writes' a lot for performance and then works slightly differently for print, so one thing you can only faintly get from hearing her is the way the visible aspects of the words are so caught up in the play of the sounds, the puns, the intra-lingual stuff, the humor, etc.

also started reading 'matches' by s.d. chrostowska, bought spontaneously on the strength of this review -

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-flare-for-criticism/

Matches is not a wholly unprecedented book, of course. In particular, writers such as Schlegel, Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Maurice Blanchot created aphoristic, fragmented, and/or unorthodox works of literary criticism that have been very influential, retaining their intellectual credibility while not classifiable as “academic” per se. In following up on the efforts of such writers, Chrostowska seems implicitly to be contending that the potential of the critical miniature has not been fully realized. However large figures such as Nietzsche and Benjamin loom in modern criticism, it is their ideas that have compelled attention, not the forms in which those ideas were cast, and Chrostowska’s book prompts us to consider the extent to which the ideas proffered by these influential thinkers were conditioned by their mode of presentation. In Matches, the entries that most call attention to their own mediation through form are perhaps those composed of dialogues between “A” and “B” (in a few cases “Q” and “A”). This form inherently puts authorial intent in suspension (is the author A or B?); it seems likely that Chrostowska the novelist has some influence on Chrostowska the critic’s sense of the potentially permeable boundaries between literature and criticism, although Literature on Trial reminds us that this potential has been exploited in criticism all along.

and so far it's great, exactly as promised. my first impression is that it's like reading a contemporary theory/culture-crit blog, but successfully transformed back into the finished literary mode of the books of those small-form antecedents mentioned above. extraneous academic crap excised, with only the natural, incisive, intuitively useful elements retained. yet, unlike the books in those traditions, helpful citations to sources of ideas, links to news stories that occasioned the element of contemporary interest in an entry, etc.

Not sold by the quoted verse, but your vision of the author's vision is very appealing; I'll check out more of her stuff, thanks. Thanks also for the quote and link re Matches---and n "permeable boudaries between literature and criticism" reminds me that I need to read this, recently linked and endorsed on twitter by Luc Sante, who says, “Great essay on the ways poetry has moved through nonfiction":
https://www.graywolfpress.org/blogs/poetry-fact-robert-polito

And the reference to Finnegan's Wake in j's comments on Bergvall reminds me: any suggestions for annotated editions of FW and Ulysses would be welcome.

oh yeah i don't know if i can sell it with a quote, pretty much anything lineated as verse in the book is heavily narrative, on the model of the chaucer, and for that reason it doesn't 'read' right in stanza-length (the above is one page) excerpt so much, it just dashes along. i suppose part of the trick is that it has the word-to-word, and sub-word, texture of lyric (kind of like reading celan in the translations by joris), which the book signals physically by the size and the way the pages are laid out, but it has the prosody of an epic.

if i remember right you're an old-guard music critic, right? i've been reading some more of 'matches', it is SUCH a critics' book.

I dunno what "old-guard" means here, but "old," yeah. As a music reviewer prone to flights, I'm inspired and cautioned all over again by xpost Polito's quote of Manny Farber on "Termite Art," in which swoops etc never lose sight of the specifics, as he zooms in on weathered, primetime John Wayne, still enduring and unimpressed by John Ford's bloated West.
But quotes don't always do it, as you point out, and, despite doubts about quotes from Matches, in the linked review you posted and on Amazon, it seems worth buying, thanks.

Knut Hamsun's Hunger. Finally getting massively into the book. One I've meant to read for decades.
Quite harrowing.

I remember a rather good sitcom about a psychotic book group from the 1990s with two swedes reading 'hunger'. "Why doesnt he just go and get some food? Stupid Norwegian!"

The Book Group with Michelle Gomez and a few others who've turned up elsewhere since? The Swedes were footballers wives I think.

I did not mind SPQR, even if it came off like a Clive James voice over for a Roman history doc.

I've continued to read SPQR. It is a competent summary/overview, but I had hoped that she'd be weaving more information into the narrative that was sourced from archeology and inscriptions, rather than surviving texts, bcz I've read about 85% of those texts and her analysis is along very conventional lines, and so it's not really challenging or enlarging any of Roman history as I already viewed it.

I read it as popular history

Seems like the most accurate way to categorize it.

The Book Group, that's the one. I should have remembered the the title, really. guid on ye, big man.

Catherine Parr Traill, The Backwoods of Canada
L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (re-read)
Alice Munro, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

Just started reading Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper and it is fucking incredible!! It is absolutely crazy and savagely funny. 25 pages in and easily the best thing I've read for the last couple of years.

oliver Harris: The House of Fame -- third of his books about Nick Belsey, a catastrophically self-destructive and corrupt London detective who has excellent detective skills/instincts but no self-control and a bemused, sardonic stance as he watches himself stumble into other people's disasters. He starts the book squatting in the abandoned Hampstead police station while waiting to be arrested for corruption, and things deteriorate from there. Very recommended.

Charlotte Wood: The Natural Way of Things -- deeply unpleasant but well-written novel about misogyny and corporations profiting from human misery, which is currently winning all the awards in Australia

Adolfo Bioy Casares - Asleep in the Sun has the absurdist plot of a man married to a dog (assume his wife was taken over, not that it matters too much). By turns, a spin on unconditional love, bureaucratic (perhaps evil) institutions (the asylum the bitch is confined to) and also - even more so - how people might substitute the need of love for another human being for the love of a pet - all felt underdeveloped. Moravia's Agostino was a masterful novella, especially in its initial scenes of a highly charged eroticism between mother (widowed, beautiful) and a teenage son. Could be read alongside some Musil and Mishima.

Rilke's letters. The Norton volume covers much of his correspondence from 1910 to his death. The lonely, highly literary hobo might appear unattractive but the girls were digging it.

A friend reports:
I'm finishing The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life by Ryszard Kapuscinski, which is one fantastic book: a collection of his shorter pieces from all over sub-Saharan Africa. Among other things it contains the most lucid account of the factors behind the Rwandan genocide, as well as a few of the other neverending armed conflicts on the continent. Extremely highly recommended. Not my usual, but intriguing.

Last night I read the Prologue to Confessio Amantis, John Gower in the verse modernization by Terence Tiller (Penguin Classics). Not sure how far I'll go on with it.

Robertson Davies, The Fifth Business (excellent)
A bunch of Canadian poetry

Now reading The Third Reich, which, if I read the intro correctly, was Roberto Bolano's first novel. He has a keen sense of characterization.

I think Antwerp and Monsieur Pain were written earlier, but I like the slowly-mounting atmosphere of dread throughout The Third Reich, even if it feels sketchier than most of Bolaño's 90s novels.

Edna O'Brien - In the Forest
* Marianne Moore - Selected Poems

the fall of kelvin walker: a fable of the sixties by alasdair gray

Love Comes To Buildings On Fire book on 5 years of music in NYC in the 70s. I'm on 75 so far. Pretty good so far.

The Chill by Ross Macdonald >
A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor >
Bill The Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison

the chill is the best macdonald imo. i read it and cry of the owl by patricia highsmith back to back and they're always closely associated in my mind (both from 1962 iirc).

Funnily enough, there's a hard boiled crime thread somewhere on here, where James Redd (under a diff user name) says much the same thing about The Chill (my copy of which cost me twenty pence in a library sale). I haven't really read enough Macdonald to attempt a ranking, but I adore his descriptions of locations and atmosphere, so a mostly fog-bound mystery definitely plays to his strengths.

There's also a funny sequence where Archer rather improbably picks up a book on philosophy to read while waiting on a witness or something, and you know it's there just cos Macdonald wanted to talk about Zeno for a bit

yeah macdonald & philosophy is like pk dick & classical music

PKD had a classical music radio program and a classical music store (worked in one, anyway) before giving it all up to write science fiction full-time (and live on speed and cat food from time to time). Yeah, he shares classical music breaks in some of his fiction like Ross MacDonald does the philosophy (ditto John D. MacDonald, eventually at much greater length).

and macdonald aka kenneth millar had a phi beta kappa phd in literature. didn't mean to suggest he and pkd were fakin' it.

hope this is not too spoilery but the thing that ties the chill and cry of the owl together most in my mind is they both have great abrupt giallo-style endings.

a PK Dick story collection, in fact

Again, spoilery - yes, The Chill definitely has a great last minute twist that casts the entire narrative in a v different light, but it's more Sleepaway Camp than Bird w/ the Crystal Plumage, imho

Think I have Cry of the Owl on a stack somewhere, will check it out thanks

xpost no, I didn't think you were suggesting that they were faking it, I just wanted to add my fyi. btw, I saw that Library of America Ross MacD. recently and wondered, nothing against him, but why not somebody who needs more exposure, like Jean Stafford (but maybe they've done a JS collection as well? Hope so)

Which reminds me: is Katherine Anne Porter good? Used to be a big name, but I never see her mentioned any more.

She's good! Start with 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider', which is a pretty good overview of her short fiction (it's a Penguin UK book), or else the massive Library of America hardcover has all her short fiction.

Though I see the sole Amazon review of Pale Horse is not impressed: "This book has lots of good reviews but I purchased it as it was recomended by John M. Barry in his book 'The Great Influenza- The story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History'. I found it very slow and of no interest to my research on the Pandemic of 1918/19 and must admit I have given up trying to read it."

Dazai's The Setting Sun has the potential to corrode your inner being - this is basically a suicide note as fiction. Very calculated and cool. I then went on to finish a few stories by Joseph Roth where all his themes of displacement due to the collapse of Austro-Hungary makes itself felt to a more or less of an extent.

I finished the Regina Ullmann story collection. I wasn't sure about the dreamlike, disconnected style at first, but I warmed to it by the end. The style seems to fit well with some of the more focused childhood reminiscences. There's a funny aside about halfway through one of these stories: "It's a strange thing about human thoughts. If I told someone this story, he would probably have trouble saying at the point what it was about, since nothing had been thought yet, nothing had been done." This goes for most of the stories in the collection, but yet somehow they mostly work.

thought id put this here for idk book ppl who wouldnt click the ile reddit thread, this serialized story being posted is neat -- info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9

it was bothering me that i couldnt recall & then i did that it reminds me of this book quite a bit, or at least the writing style does def - https://www.amazon.com/Method-Actors-novel-Carl-Shuker-ebook/dp/B005JUOGOM?ie=UTF8&qid=1462844460&ref_=la_B001JP2O7M_1_1&s=books&sr=1-1

Visit to NYC bookshop specializing in French lit. Fave: the finale, staff's takes on their picks:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/may/09/interview-with-a-bookstore-albertine-a-little-paris-in-new-york?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks

The Tom Roberge in that article is half of the very entertaining Three Percent Podcast, which is mostly about books translated into English, and has lots of good recommendations

Might be B.Traven's The General From The Jungle which I found for €3 yesterday.
I was surprised to see it was a translation. Hadn't realised he was a non-English speaker. Does seem to have been an interesting character. Think it may have been in John Huston's autobio that I read about him pretending to be somebody else during the research or making of Treasure of Sierra Madre. &Huston only realising it was him afterward.

I say may be cos I just finished Hunger by Knut Hamsun on the bus yesterday. I have a large number of possible alternatives.

consensus is that traven was an exiled austrian anarchist or something along those lines i think?

rereading j.p. donleavy's the ginger man

just started gary indiana - three month fever. i'm p impressed even after the acknowledgements and the opening chapter.

Which reminds me: is Katherine Anne Porter good? Used to be a big name, but I never see her mentioned any more.

― dow, Thursday, May 5, 2016 7:46 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

She's good! Start with 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider', which is a pretty good overview of her short fiction (it's a Penguin UK book), or else the massive Library of America hardcover has all her short fiction.

― 🐸a hairy howling toad torments a man whose wife is deathly ill (James Morrison)

I learned a lot from her about tonal control. You can start with Flowering Judas, but, yes, PHPR has two her best short novels.

Are you writing your own stuff, Alfred?

yeah

Ah cool. I often want to talk about fiction writing on ILX but dunno if we have enough people doing it to sustain a thread.

KAP short stories the best. you can kinda begin and end with flowering judas and pale horse which might sound mean but she did more in those books than most people ever do and she never really topped them. though the collected stories is easy enough to find and catches all the short stuff pretty much.

picked up I'm Dying Laughing: The Humourist by Christina Stead and now i'm swirling in the craziness.

OK, you guys have me intrigued. But to gauge my own likelihood of enjoying her work, would you say Porter is more Alice Munro, or Flannery O'Connor? Or something else entirely?

^^^that's one of the stead's i still need to read... went on a massive binge a decade and a half ago but not really revisited her since, though i keep picking up her books when i see them (lots of secondhand stead around here!)

would you say Porter is more Alice Munro, or Flannery O'Connor? Or something else entirely?

Something else entirely. Porter is taut; she's closer to Thomas Mann or even Tolstoy. A steely self-control. It's true that when I was in elementary and high school she was always taught and has somewhat disappeared. `

I read her only novel Ship of Fools in high school and I can understand why it was a huge success but it could be by anybody who isn't sentimental.

I discovered that Stead novel when Christgau read it a couple years ago. I thought it a mixed success, but I can't recommend Stead enough.

the dialogue in the Stead book is just capital B Bonkers! which i love.

i would not recommend Ship of Fools to anyone...life is short and there are other long-ass epics that i would recommend first.

started The Chrysalids by John Wynhdam this morning after a coupe weeks of being too depressed to read. a really delight so far

Chrysalids one of my favourite books. Delightful, creepy, clever, exciting.

Started Lucia Berlin's 'A Manual for Cleaning Women', which seems pretty good so far. The effect is of artlessness, but when you stop to analyse it you realise what an illusion that is.

what

The Chill by Ross Macdonald >
A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor >
Bill The Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison

what was your opinion of the taylor, ward? I thought the beginning was extraordinary, and then it veered between slightly dull novelettishness and excellent scenes of domestic back and forth - comic and tragic.

back from some time in rome: reading ray monk's biog of wittgenstein - first class bore to the point of comedy (sulking for days when a companion he's invited on holiday takes a photo of the scenery). biog's good tho.

and the days of abandonment by elena ferrante (finally), which is extraordinary - I can't remember the last time i was so immediately entranced by a voice.

oh and also voices from chernobyl, which is harrowing and remarkable - kind of a must read, sthn I'd normally leave off saying.

Hi Fizzles, I agree that Taylor doesn't quite pay off that amazing opening chapter in the rest of the novel - feels as if she never totally resolves just how sinister/damaged she wants to make her male lead, and throughout there are slightly odd moments of 'fine writing' inserted directly into people's unvoiced thoughts - consciousness as not so much a stream, more an artificial lake. In fact, the treatment of dialogue veers between the naturalistic and, yes, the more self-consciously 'novelettish', throughout.t I get the impression that this was still in some ways a beginner's novel, and certainly the only other Taylor that I've read - In a Summer Season - was the better, more fully realised work. But I did enjoy a lot of the social/domestic comedy, with the vicar-husband an especially stinging portrait - to say nothing of the dog.

it makes me so happy that you guys are reading elizabeth taylor!

I finished The Third Reich only last night (for I've been unreasonably distracted by the NBA playoffs, cutting into my reading hours). In 1989 Bolano already sounded very much like Bolano (or should I say Natasha Wimmer?), but the surprise for me was that, from a certain point of view, the atmosphere and some of the tropes of the novel are rather in the gothic tradition. Neither 2666 nor The Savage Detectives struck me that way.

Thanks for the KAP tips, guys. I messed myself up lugging a big bag of books across town, incl. up a couple of hills, so typing with one hand now, no more for a while

btw, I've now started reading A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov, in the Nabokov translation.

Reading Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue - saw it 2nd hand last week but nothing sticks right now, probably because its too zany, based around medieval tennis and politics. Sorta lost it with the digressions consisting of emails between the author and publisher on the manuscript of the bk we are reading. Just don't care.

oh and also voices from chernobyl, which is harrowing and remarkable - kind of a must read, sthn I'd normally leave off saying.

Coincidentally my local library has finally come up with a copy of Zinky Boys. Also Second hand Time is published so looking forward to more from Svetlana.

I finished the Regina Ullmann story collection.

Been at this on/off reading of Rilke's letters and there is a very encouraging letter from Rilke to Ullmann.

A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov, in the Nabokov translation

What's it like? General opinion of his Pushkin translations is not good.

yeah, Secondhand Time is out this month: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0399588809.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

What's it like?

Seems readable enough so far. The copious end notes are a bit of a hoot and Nabokov's Preface is typically cranky, but the translation comes across fine - at least in the first section, 'Bela', which is as far as I've read.

read the first novella of patrick modiano's collected in 'suspended sentences', 'afterimage'.

it was nice. seems like a good one to read and then have in your pocket for 20 years later when your own past hits you, or doesn't.

Just finished John Dos Passos' The 42nd Parallel, will probably begrudgingly read the next one at some point just to see what happens. Starting up The Magician King by Lev Grossman for now.

Brecht - Collected Short Stories. On approach you wonder where this is going to go - is it toward the politically charged theatre or something more inner as found in a lot of his poetry and there is nothing of that. Some stories do function as newspaper cuttings with a brand of historical reflection (these are chronologically ordered) coming in later (as history turns against his politics). Socrates Wounded where the philosopher is lauded for his wound in battle, not his thoughts away from it, is too on the bone. Found v little pay-off in a lot of them although my patience for clear and clean narrative is on short supply. Pere Gimferrer's Fortuny is more like it: possibly the most bizarre translation to come out this year, its a series of tableaus on this guy Think its almost the closes equivalent to something like Colour of Pomegranates on the page (its also quite cinematic in the sheer cutting). Totally unique, but it must be approached at the right time for you - I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. But is it good? Bit lost of that question. I think so..it is just over 100 pages, so I'll be spending more time with it, after letting it lie there.

ILH lent me the impetus to read Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl. I checked it out from the public library and I am ~60 pages into it now. I agree that the stories are powerful. I expect the cumulative effect will outweigh any single story.

Pere Gimferrer's Fortuny is more like it:

I have this, and must actually read it

Jane Gardham's Old Filth. It's very good although maybe a bit on the nose in terms of how the plot and character development serve the overarching themes.

Sometimes it's like WE GET IT, HE HAS TROUBLE FORMING ATTACHMENTS WITH PEOPLE BECAUSE OF HIS PAST, THE BRITISH EMPIRE IS A METAPHOR FOR THE COLDNESS, AND THE CRUMBLING OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE IS A METAPHOR FOR HIS CHANCE TO OVERCOME HIS COLDNESS IN OLD AGE.

reading Cryptonomicon

barbarian days: a surfing life by william finnegan.

really good so far, about a quarter of the way in. i love the modesty of spending decades reporting from war zones and then making your big memoir all about your hobby.

Just got David Hepworth's 1971 and then leet it in the pasta place I ate in. Thankfully the owner came out with it. So I do have it.
Found it at some discount after missing it elsewhere.
First chapter seems promising. Though I hear he's rude about T Rex.
So think this will be main for next while.

Also got the Magicians by Lev wassisface after seeing the tv series. Cost 25c

got A Magick Life the Aleister Crowley bio yesterday too.

i'm having a hard time focusing for some reason. stopped reading the Stead book i was reading after about a hundred pages. i just didn't have the energy for her demented characters. then picked up victory by conrad for some reason and made it about 100 pages into that. then i picked up a short story collection by Kate Wilhelm and got TOTALLY confused by her story The Mile-Long Spaceship. i didn't understand the ending at all...and felt like a dummy.

i'll find something better for my addled brain....

I'm starting Clarice Lispector's Agua Viva, one of her more plotless and fragmentary books, which gives her freer sway as an aphorist, and approaching finishing book 4 of Knausgaard's My Struggle, which convincingly reinhabits states of teenage abjection (which is to say that I've learned much more than I wanted to about Karl Ove's struggle with premature ejaculation), but which lacks some of the intensity and variety of tone of the first two volumes.

xp to scott - maybe your brain just wants a chance to think its own thoughts. try getting away somewhere quiet, like a beach or a forest. what could it hurt?

Found 'the mile long spaceship' on google books, can patronisingly offer an explanation if you like.

yes please do! hahaha!

i think i was just really tired when i read it. and i got to the end and i was like wait what?

Spaceship that Allan telepathically encounters is part of evil empire, they try and implant a desire for learning astrophysics so they can find where he lives and enslave us all, instead he learns atomic physics, and with the info he is getting from the ship will develop interstellar travel so we - being a precocious race - will beat them at their own game. So they have to destroy the ship which also gives him a headache.

hahaha, i only got like half of that when i read it. i must have been really sleepy. i mean i got the part about them wanting to find out where earth was, but when they blew their own ship up i was totally confused.

spoiler alert...

I'm reading Emerson, in a nice oversized Belknap-Harvard edition. I'd previously read maybe five of his essays, so a lot is still new for me, e.g. "New England Reformers", "The American Scholar", "The Poet". He hasn't let me down yet, always pure joy to read.

three musketeers

I've been reading Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges. It gets a lot more into the technical details of Turing's work than the movie did - something needs to fill up the 600+ pages I guess. Very enjoyable so far.

That book is grebt, perfect match of author and material. Keep meaning to read again.

Yes, it's perfect if you're interested in Turing's life and also enjoy math puzzles of the Martin Gardner variety.

I'm reading Emerson, in a nice oversized Belknap-Harvard edition. I'd previously read maybe five of his essays, so a lot is still new for me, e.g. "New England Reformers", "The American Scholar", "The Poet". He hasn't let me down yet, always pure joy to read.

― jmm, Friday, May 20, 2016 5:15 PM

Dude's been my lodestar since my junior year in high school. Loved my teacher.

i was reading some nietzsche recently (for the first time in forever) and it seemed weird to me to read him talking about Emerson for some reason. i just picture them living on different planets. N was a fan though.

Emerson and Thoreau are very welcome guest entities, sort of like nightly comets, in Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Earth, the recent one-volume mixdown/update of his Science In The Capitol trilogy. One of the central characters gets in the habit of reading them every night online, as somebody posts (also lots of archives). He starts turning his friends onto the sites, all over post-Storm DC. The nomadic squatters, who also spend a lot of time running way back into outlying parks, are especially appreciative of the links. Best part of the novel.

The best part, I mean, is the recurrence of copious but never too much quotations of Emerson and Thoreau. Which becomes a subplot of sorts: eventually, Thoreau dies, and Emerson is frustrated that he never lived up to his potential, to be something more than "the captain of a wild berry expedition," or maybe just wild berry party.

my great great great grandfather was a transcendentalist and a total Emerson fanboy. he wrote an essay in an 1841 issue of The Dial called “Prophecy—Transcendentalism—Progress” which is a good read but, according to Margaret Fuller, Emerson didn't like it at all. which is kinda sad. But, hey, at least he read it.

Oh yeah, I actually came here, not to post yet another typo, but this link----anybody read Clarissa? Says here it favorably impressed even some of those who justifiably parodied Pamela:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/samuel-richardson-inventor-of-the-modern-novel

Sorry, I didn't see your post, Scott----is your ancestor's essay in print or online. Ralph was obv. hard to please---what, did he want Thoreau to lecture or something equally respectable? Screw that, especially with the tuberculosis.

i don't think it is online.

i've never read richardson. maybe someday!

That's amazing, Scott. Jonathan Saxton, according to Google? His son sounds like an interesting dude too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rufus_Saxton

oh wait i did quote some of it on a thread a while back:

"All the powers of nature, unseen but irresistible agents of truth, are at work, and this stupendous imposture must soon explode. The whole moral force of humanity is pledged for its extinction. Come out of the earth then, ye purblind statesmen, and sense-fettered politicians! It is for you to determine, in some measure, whether the explosion shall take place by a silent, scarcely felt transfusion of moral-electrical force, operating by gentle shocks, or whether it shall burst upon the world like "a doom's thunder-peal."

punk rock essay my great great great grandfather wrote for the dial in the 1840's

yeah, his son, my great great grandfather, lived on a commune with nathaniel hawthorne. not rufus. rufus was my great great uncle.

i think that's one of the reasons i feel so at home here in Greenfield. the ghosts are friendly to me. well, maybe not the Indian ghosts. i lost some family during the raids here...

"November 12th, 1843- Fuller writes to Emerson that she is displeased he had decided against publishing a piece of French Translation she had sent him. Fuller also remarks on negative reviews of “Prophecy -- Transcendentalism -- Progress” by Jonathan Saxton and Thoreau’s “Aulus Persius Flaccus”."

damn punk kids....

by commune you mean brook farm right? as in the blithedale romance?

Yeah, that's the one. Started by a Greenfield radical. Friends with J.A. Saxton. Rufus went to West Point and great great grandpa went to Brook Farm for three years.

also an interesting dude. his family home stood directly across the street from where my store is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Ripley_(transcendentalist)

the Saxton family totally knew and hung out with the Dickinson family too. which blows my mind. Emily even hung out with Rufus in Washington D.C. on one of her rare trips outside of Amherst.

my great great grandfather became really good friends with John Burroughs when he lived in Washington. Does anyone still read his essays? Maybe people at the Audubon Society. Burroughs was good friends with Walt Whitman and Teddy Roosevelt. Here's a nice picture of Burroughs and my grandfather and my great-uncle after a little baseball.

https://scontent.fbos1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/1532150_10153687411685298_918354684_n.jpg?oh=e92483d6a250ba3dc9fcad442c120f00&oe=579EA3E3

Burroughs was also a big Emerson fanboy.

Has anyone read 'The Manuscript Found in Saragossa'? Nearly finished it, enjoying it a lot - say the film first, obviously.

Any idea what are some of the important texts by Burroughs? I like the sound of this one: https://archive.org/details/acceptinguniver00burrgoog

Has anyone read 'The Manuscript Found in Saragossa'? Nearly finished it, enjoying it a lot - say the film first, obviously.

xpost no Burroughs in The Green Earth, though he would have fit right in. Plenty John Muir, though. Scott, any family lore about the Dickinsons?

he wrote a lot. i don't know what is easy to find. i'd like to read his two books on whitman.

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

An interesting American radical I just read about recently is Benjamin Lay, a very early Quaker abolitionist. I'm not sure if he is well-known in the US. According to legend, he once kidnapped the child of a slave-owner in an attempt to impress upon the father what a sin the African slave raids were.

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

no, no family lore about the dickinsons. all the rad families knew each other around there. thomas wentworth higginson was another family friend. my uncle rufus sent for him during the war and had him lead a regiment of freed slaves down there in south carolina during the port royal experiment. higginson was the first person to publish emily's poems.

x-post

the story of my uncle rufus, jefferson davis, and jim limber is good family lore though, don:

http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/limber_jim#start_entry

there isn't much to see where Brook Farm was. i've been there and all the buildings are pretty much gone. if you are ever in massachusetts though i highly recommend a trip to Fruitlands. it's beautiful there. another utopian vision of the period:

http://www.fruitlands.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruitlands_(transcendental_center)

never read this either and i should really find a copy: "An account of its less-than-successful activities can be found in Alcott's daughter Louisa May Alcott's Transcendental Wild Oats."

also i think Benjamin Lay linked above might have played a noise show in the basement of my store last year:

"The most notable act occurred at the 1738 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Quakers. Dressed as a soldier, he concluded a diatribe against slavery by plunging a sword into a Bible containing a bladder of blood-red pokeberry juice, which spattered over those nearby."

Wow! So what happened to Jim Limber after he grew up, or did he grow up? Great weird story, thanks.

the devil's candy -- magazine style aside (for god's sake stop telling me what kind of jeans people are wearing) this was totally fascinating, and i loved its sly ambition to become, itself, the money-drenched polyphonic snowglobe '80s the movie failed to be. it was (inevitably) too kind to the source material, and to wolfe; it never lets on that the word most frequently applied to the movie's problems -- "shallow" -- also belongs on his tombstone. (nobody in wolfe's bonfire is as real as melanie griffith.) but pretty sure that was the best thing i've ever read on post-studio-system big-budget hollywood filmmaking. hat tip to da croup, who's brought it up several times.

melville's mardi -- no one ever told me this existed. definitely feels like a dress rehearsal (not just in subject but in bookish-sailor style) but still great to read aloud; also i have watched dress rehearsals for much worse shows than the best novel ever written.

Back to OSCAR WAO.
I don't think it is good.

Do tell. I have successfully avoided that one so far.

Re: manuscript in Saragossa, it feels oddly modern, though you can point to older parallels (1001 Arabian nights, for example). But the sense of different voices on top of the nested structure was interesting.

Back to OSCAR WAO.
I don't think it is good.

― the pinefox, Sunday, May 22, 2016

It isn't. I had the misfortune of reading it soon after Feast of the Goat, which reduced Oscar Wao to an MFA exercise.

i thought everyone loved that guy! i feel like i've been hearing about him forever and how much everyone loves him.

only one novel, right? is he the stones roses of lit? is Drown his "Fool's Gold"?

sorry, "Fools Gold".

Cruised through The Magician King. My impression is that ILX collectively disliked this book, but I enjoyed it a lot. The characters were easier to relate to than in The Magicians. There's one scene that was totally gratuitous, but other than that, very good. Looking forward to picking up a copy of the last book.

Turning my attention for the time being to picture books, grinding my way through Jodorowsky & Gimenez's The Metabarons. So far, one of Jodorowsky's better, more coherent series.

wiki says this is his second novel:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/04/monstro

or will be.

i forget that he's one of those lit people who wants to write sci-fi.

speaking of sci-fi. not really a sci-fi guy myself but im reading and enjoying the world-building and intrigue. bought it at a bookstore in Lansing, MI recently and the girl behind the counter said it was THE BEST BOOK EVER

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_BsePKX0h59Q/SiIU_tpJfHI/AAAAAAAACnk/aUPvVq7pfTo/leguin_darkness_thumb%5B3%5D.jpg?imgmax=800

Diaz abandoned the sci-fi epic iirc

Just have a few pages left in Voices from Chernobyl and the most striking thing about the book for me has been how deeply and unmistakably Russian these voices and the story they tell are. One might have thought that a disaster of this nature would look about the same wherever it happened, but the thoughts and actions of the victims, the emergency response, the lies told and rumors spread, the landscape, the mistakes and the heroism are so wholly Russian in character that it took me by surprise.

And the copious vodka as an antiradiation measure

started reading requiem, mass by john dufresne. figured i could handle some tragicomic meat and potatoes semi-autobiographical american trade paperback fiction about a quirky family written by someone who has taught writing for a million years. haven't read any in a while.

wtf I had no idea there was pre-wao diaz???

Drown, a book of short stories

I went to Rutgers post-Diaz but pre-Wao, and Drown was a book that a lot of people liked to tell you to read because he was one of our own and he was seen as up-and-coming. I thought it was alright at the time, not amazing.

I don't like the narrative voice of OSCAR WAO, at all. I don't really have anything positive to say about the book - it all feels quite juvenile and overexcited with itself - except that I do still respect the interest in SF, comics, RPGs etc in itself; someone could still write good fiction about that (notably RPGs which I don't really remember being done).

wao is top ten of the millennium so far imo... been eagerly awaiting his next novel ever since. never gotten really into his short stories, the ones i've read are all from the sister's bf character pov or a fictionalization of Diaz (womanizing English lit prof) who just don't interest me as much.

reading amy hempel - reasons to live this week. p impressive stuff.

needed a comma there, it's called reasons to live. it has a terrible cover unfortunately, looks like i'm reading a self-help book for the suicidal.

Zinky Boys by Svetlana Alexiviech, a similarly powerful account of the disaster that was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Her ear for a phrase, the talk that isn't necessary 'literary' is transformed by her skills as transcriber/journalist/editor/alchemist into something better and richer than that. Feeling drained at the mo (need sleep) so er 'better than literary' is all I can manage.

At the same time I scored a terrific slim volume of Holderlin's poetry (tr. David Constantine)

James Baldwin's essays: The Fire Next Time

Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed. It's great.

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO 'ULYSSES'

mixed.

How so?

It's a collection by various hands. Some essays are better than others. One strikes me as really implausible, but others are good. I'd like to say more but had better not do so in public!

A pint of plain is your only hand.

Anthony Trollope - The Prime Minister
Randall B. Woods - Prisoners of Hope
Anthony Hecht - Selected Poems

THE LITTLE REVIEW 'ULYSSES'

a fine feat of scholarly editing, annotation, explication.

Finished Edwin Morgan's letters, which are great and I recommend if...you're really into Scottish poetry. I wish is had it when I was doing my dissertation. Now I'm re-reading his 'essays' because lots of stuff in the letters sounded unfamiliar. Also reading 'a peace to end all peace', which is fairly pop but I'm enjoying it.

How are you finding those Anthony Hecht poems, Alfred?

having a look at William Cooper, SCENES FROM PROVINCIAL LIFE.

strikes me that I could really enjoy reading a straightforwardly written little novel like this for a change.

i was thinking of reading that the other day, pinefox. might now do so.

How are you finding those Anthony Hecht poems, Alfred?

― The Klosterman Weeknd (James Redd and the Blecchs

I've read him over the years. The sharpest and most astringent of those new formalists but without James Merrill's wit and suppleness.

I am on a brief 3 night vacation trip to the Oregon coast and brought 5 books & a Kindle with me. Of the books I brought, I started reading The Farfarers, Farley Mowat. It is a speculative book wherein he theorizes that Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland were first visited by the pre-Celtic inhabitants of Britain, most notably the clans that lived in the Orkneys and Shetlands. The accepted history is that the Vikings were the first visitors to these places coming from Europe.

To make his argument, as far in the book as I've read, Mowat references the few fragments of ancient history regarding pre-Roman tribes in Europe, Britain and Ireland, along with much archaeology and some oral traditions. His basic premise is that for a great many centuries before the Romans arrived these pre-Celtic people engaged in a lively trade with the rest of Europe, bartering walrus ivory for other highly valued articles, especially bronze. When walruses became scarce near to home, they moved ever outward to locate more.

Whether or not the Vikings were the first Europeans to visit Iceland, Greenland or Newfoundland is, at best, a footnote to human history. All of North America was inhabited before any Europeans came sailing over and until the post-Columbian period European influence on this continent was negligible. But Mowat's imaginative recreation of the pre-historic cultures and the movements of people in Europe is about as solid as the imaginative recreations assembled by more academic archaeologists. Mowat is a credible polymath and a shrewd and engaging storyteller. Interesting stuff. I intend to finish it.

I was underwhelmed by book 3 of Knausgaard's My Struggle, but I'm enjoying Isherwood's Mr Norris Changes Trains for its dry wit and for the way it treats queerness as subtext, although I'll want to see later how Isherwood reworks that material in Christopher and his Kind.

*book 4, I mean

I love Isherwood's fiction: a better, wittier attempt to go for that Hemingway iceberg effect.

I read Scenes From Provincial Life, many years ago, after Burgess picked it as one of his 99 best postwar novels. I can remember precisely nothing of the plot, but do recall that it is an obvious (and acknowledged by Amis) antecedent to Lucky Jim, with iirc some of the same class and gender assumptions that would not fly today. 'Straightforwardly written little novel', yes, tho' of course the kind of strict realism the novel trades in is never just 'straightfoward'.

What do you think is not straightforward about it?

Well, it's a literary form or type so invariably involves artifice, evasion, structuring, misdirection etc - it's not just reportage (again, not specifically talking about the Cooper here).

Yes, I agree about artifice being involved in all literature; and that 'fiction' is an innately complex idea.

Though I also think that some fictional prose is more straightforward than others, and I find this straightforwardness itself quite interesting or appealing.

I would read yr book on straightforwardness, Pinefox. It seems to me as complicated a word as realism (again, reading wiki etc on the Cooper, it seems it was received as an antidote to, or refutation of, complicated literary modernism - laudable straightforwardness in opposition to the non-straightforwardness of Joyce et al - perhaps within that, the implication that the non-straightforward is in some way duplicitous, a con job, modernism as the emperor's new clothes.)

Some of the this stuff has been on my mind since Ken Loach won the Palme d'Or again, and what that means (if anything) - the way that Cannes juries seem to love this strain of social realism (Dardennes Bros - sons of Loach for sure - also very lauded/rewarded at Cannes), the way it has persisted in cinema in a way that, as far as I can tell, hasn't really persisted in literary fiction - I mean, who is the William Cooper of today (the nearest ppl I can think of are ffs Nick Hornby or Roddy Doyle)

I actually haven't seen any Ken Loach films, so I'm not sure how exact the comparison is, but surely Elena Ferrante is a modern example of straightforward social realism?

Loach seems to have a particular cachet at Cannes - more than in the UK or elsewhere. A bit of the old Jerry Lewis in France syndrome?

Tracking / comparing tendencies from one art to another is tricky, though interesting.

Echoing Robin in a way but going further - I think that some kind of 'realism' is still a default for fiction. But this is so much the case that I am doubtful whether 'realism' is a very useful tag. Most fiction 'represents', makes us picture things. Often those are the kind of things we see in reality. Sometimes (as in SF / fantasy) not. But I'm not sure that the representational mechanism is very different.

As you bring Joyce into it: he did a great deal of representing / picturing / narrating, but he increasingly became interested in the words in their own right. Maybe this is one thing that cuts athwart 'realism'. So in film, a film-maker who explored images for their own sake rather than just picturing people doing and saying things (as let's suppose Loach does) would be the counter to Loach.

Hornby would, possibly, be Loach-like in being less interested in words or techniques than in people and stories. But I'm not sure this is entirely true of him (have not read any recent works). Doyle's use of dialect could sometimes mean he's not into narrative transparency either.

In one way all this (discussion) is tres vieux chapeau, I know; but it never seems to get settled enough to leave behind.

I think of Dubliners and The Neapolitan Novels---and The Way We Live Now and the Henry James I've read (incl. The Turn of the Screw, in terms of individual psychology, roles, choices etc in social context)---as developing different strains of multi-dimensional realism. Ditto the more resonant magic realism, especially One Hundred Years of Solitude. Also, I'm sometimes startled by the social resonance/relevance---ringing some kind of bell somewhere---of stand-alone sentences from Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, among those tweeted damn near every day.

That is, *some* of the sentences tweeted get to me, or buzz by pretty close.

But what I came here to mention:
However he cobbled it together, Jeffrey Franks' Ike and Dick turns up a lot of detail and nuance I hadn't seen, building to and through what he successfully sells as the "transformative" Checkers speech, to which young Nixon, left by brings everything he has and is---in just the right measure! This sink-or-swim experience--live, on all three TV networks and many Mutual Radio affiliates, with no commercials, no overtime, cut-off in mid-sentence---and its mixed results, fate-of the-nation-wise, reminds me of the sink-or-teleport breakthrough in Alfred Bester's 50s SF classic, The Stars My Destination (working title: Hell's My Destination).
And it's the best example so far of the General's already established way of (sometimes) making best use of gifted crazies like MacArthur and Patton, now re-emerging in (and changed by) what he acknowledges is his very belated adult civilian life (at the top, too). Part of it is indecision, finding his way on unfamiliar turf, but it works out---better than he might have wanted, since he always had professional-minded misgivings about/visceral resistance to Nixon.
Funny to read soon after Scoop and Wodehouse's Uncle Fred In Springtime: Ike is yet another kind of charming, alarmingly problem-solving uncle altogether.

I finished the Mowat book. It had lots of interesting stuff in it, but he chose to present it in a way that rather watered it down with needless amounts of admittedly fictive speculation as he progressed toward the end. Still and all, it was not the same old same old and held my interest better than any of the books I've been reading lately. I'm grateful for that.

Now I am reading a slender book by Haruki Murakami I found shelved at the public library near the hiking books I regularly browse. I don't know what its title would be in Japan, but Knopf published it as What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

(shakes finger) Bad publisher! Bad!

I'd bet money that the carver allusion comes straight from murakami

Has anyone read 'The Manuscript Found in Saragossa'? Nearly finished it, enjoying it a lot - say the film first, obviously.

― inside, skeletons are always inside, that's obvious. (dowd), Saturday, May 21, 2016 12:55 PM (6 days ago)

This reminded me I never actually finished this when I read it years ago. Loved what I did read just lost the thread somewhere (prob due to academic stuff). Also saw the film first.

(Sorry for responding to this so late, I only check back in on this thread every week or so as my own status doesn't update that fast - did just finish Sarraute's Tropisms, which was brilliant and beautiful.)

xp. it is and the English title is a direct translation of the Japanese title

never read that book tho because i hate running

never read that book tho because i hate running find murakami's style really dull (at least in translation) in a way that at best contributes to the dreamlike quality of his narratives but not consistently enough to make me keep seeking out new books by him, even leaving aside how awkward he is at writing female characters

(Also, this thread is reminding me that I need to read Sarraute, finally)

The Only Rule Is It Has to Work (Lindbergh and Miller, baseball nonfic)
High Rise (Ballard)
Trouble Boys (Mehr, Replacements biog)

A bit of the old Jerry Lewis in France syndrome?

Jerry Lewis was a big fuckin' star in America for at least 1949-65.

Mystifyingly true

re xpost developing different strains of multi-dimensional realism, I meant something more like multiplying dimensions, new units and angles of measurement (cubism and then some, but can also seem quite linear, plotwise)

In one way all this (discussion) is tres vieux chapeau, I know; but it never seems to get settled enough to leave behind.

Any old hat can be worn at a jaunty new angle.

Already I think we're all talking about different kinds of realism. Certainly, the kind of Jamesian realism of The Turn of the Screw is a psychological realism, not a Loachian realism (or a Scenes From Provincial Life realism) - firstly, of course, because of the supernatural element, but also because James as so often is playing with form - a story inside a story - and advancing a late style of deep ambiguity which is about as far from straightforward as it gets, for this reader anyway. It's frequently unclear "what really happens" in late James, which seems to me to be the opposite of realism, its deliberate antithesis.

So when I use the word realism I mean a style that never gets meta, or breaks the fourth wall, or slips between different voices, or uses a range of literary techniques, some of them pretty obscure, to 'represent' people, places, actions, feelings. A documentary form, explicitly so with Loach, and carrying with it all those complex claims to truth and authenticity and engagement with the real that again, negate any sense for me that this is a straightforward business.

Will hang my chapeau in shame at not yet having read The Neapolitan Novels.

i thought henry james wrote science fiction. the dialogue alone is from a different planet.

i kinda like the artificiality of the dialogue in the Requiem, Mass book i'm reading. Dufresne does break the fourth wall and he does get meta - the book starts out with the author giving his just-finished manuscript to his wife and her telling him to start over and tell how things really happened and that's what he does and that is most of the book. on the surface it feels like the typical american quirky childhood/bildungsroman where someone fondly recalls the horrors of their fucked up family and Catholic education and there are lots of great little period details but i actually appreciate how stylized everything is. even more than in one of those early richard russo books like Mohawk or The Risk Pool which this book resembles. and i like that the dialogue is COMPLETELY phony and clever. i mean i just like snappy dialogue. and this guy writes snappy well without it resembling a screenplay or a sitcom and that's hard to pull off.

documentary realism can be a chore and kinda tedious in a novel. trying to think of someone who did it in a compelling way. i don't think Ferrante really fits the bill. and if you get too flattened/deadpan and matter of fact and never add flourishes you end up being really post-modern and arty and no longer realistic at all.

ive read that murakami running book, its ok; i mostly rcall the part where he does like an ultramarathon race

started reading both rivka galchens 'little labors' & curtis sittenfelds 'eligible'

was not by design but realized im kindof excited that both these gals are so relatively young and i can follow and anticipate what theyll write for yrs to come.. not sure there'er young male writers i feel the same abt

also am reading joyce carol oates "the falls', as i am nearly always reading something by her tbqh

better hurry and catch up w/the novel she's about to finish

'Realism' is a tricky topic, and one I'm fascinated by. There are some great things to read on mimesis, from Aristotle to Auerbach, Irigaray etc. My personal distinctions could be characterised as "Hollywood realism", "social realism" and "truth-telling realism". The first of these presents things smoothly to immerse you in a world you accept as real (for the duration of your time spent there at least), the second attempts to portray the world as-is but as scott notes, there has to be some smoothing of affect and narrative in order to achieve the same level of world-stability as Hollywood realism, the third is a confession that the world is disjointed and confusing and that bivalency is untenable, that is to say, metafiction is a form of realism in itself.

Yeah, I chose those authors re *different^ kinds of realism; each one grows his or her own. (Really thinking mostly of Dubliners re Joyce, though seems like his more experimental work also pertains to social representation, like even Dylan's most imagistic flights/tangents.)

I read Vladimir Makanin's Laz which I'm guessing is called Escape Hatch in English translation over the last few days. Fine new Danish translation. Dystopian post-soviet short novel from 1991, a surreal travelogue that reminded me a bit of Erofeyev, or of what Sokurov was doing in film at the same time. And kinda has kept on doing.

was not by design but realized im kindof excited that both these gals are so relatively young and i can follow and anticipate what theyll write for yrs to come.. not sure there'er young male writers i feel the same abt

Just finished valeria luiselli's sidewalks, an essay collection, and feel very similarly about her

James, was that Leonardo beaver meme caused by your recent reading of Radiance?

Was thinking I needed to read Delmore Schwartz again, and this take on a new collection clarifies (and narrows) some of my notions of why he's relevant now: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/irretrievable-cent-fate-need-delmore-schwartz-now-ever/

Reductive (doesn't really get far or maybe gets too far into the tension of his poetic realism, for perspective) but right and powerful, as far as axes to grind can go.

The Murakami book on running was moderately interesting, though rather self-indulgent. It was probably no more informative than any other book by a somewhat literate person who runs marathons and participates in triathlons. Such people are a bit unusual and therefore their experience holds a certain amount of interest, just based on the novelty.

James, was that Leonardo beaver meme caused by your recent reading of Radiance?

You got me!

I think that murakami has been read by more members of my family than any other book. that and freakonomics

That might be true of my family, too! Unless you meant THAT Murakami.

I spent some time in the woods this weekend reading Whitman. I can't believe how great he is.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Having trouble getting into it so far, it reads like such an Award-Winning Novel. Tons of "voice," sentimentality masked by nuance. Also something about the narrator just doesn't *sound* right to me for his character, like he sounds too, idk, gentle and lyrical?

You're identifying some legitimate problems with Gilead imo. I thought Housekeeping was much superior: more approachable and less heavy-handed.

i think i got about 20 pages into that essay collection of hers before giving up. i don't think i have a Calvinist streak. and i don't know if i ever finished gilead or home. but i still admire her! for being such a knotty force of nature. and that one essay of hers in harpers back in like 2008 is still an all-time fave of mine. and housekeeping will be 4ever in my heart.

After Luiselli's Sidewalks, read Fiona Wright's 'Small Acts of Disappearance', a collection of essays about all sorts of things refracted through personal experience of eating disorder; also, like Sidewalks, really fucking good. Both these women are significantly younger than me and write so well and this leaves me faintly depressed.

Terry Gibson Sect Appeal
memoir of Downliner Sect guitarist. I've loved the Sect since I got either Sing Sick Songs or the Rock Sect's In lp when I was 13 or 14. So this is interesting reading.

It may not have been the best choice available to me, but I've commenced Gore Vidal's Hollywood, his WWI and 1920s political-historical novel.

Started Game of Thrones this morning.
Should really have gone for one of the library books I've had out for the last couple of months.
But I thought I'd give actually reading the GRRM I picked up since it's been floating around the bed for the last couple of months and I've been watching the tv version.

Teffi: Tolstory, Rasputin, Others & Me -- selected non-fiction, really wonderful so far, based on her experiences as a white Russian aristocrat and writer (loved by both the Tsar and Lenin, which was a bit of a trick) and refugee who fled the revolution to Paris and lived for decades more

muriel spark - the driver's seat. first spark. going away for the weekend and am also bringing some joan didion with me as i reckon the spark will not last long.

i hope you enjoy your first spark!

xp

I just finished reading that two days ago! I liked it a whole lot. It's my second Spark this year (and ever) and I don't think it will be my last. I hope you like it and your break! Which Didion are you taking?

Reading 'Where There's Love There's Hate', a collaboration between Bioy Casares and his wife Silvina Ocampo (who sadly I don't think has many English translations yet), which is a very wry, taut murder mystery. They have a uniquely scathing attitude towards their own protagonist (a doctor masquerading as a literary aesthete) and it's all full of mystical symbolism and is so far amazing.

I thought the cloying deliberateness of the tone in Gilead was great. Like this disembodied sermon buying into its own desperate hope of spiritual equanimity and transcendence of mortality. I think his lyricality is artfully contrived...a device to stimulate the suspension of disbelief between altruism and perception, but not quite pulling it off. Idk, I love that book.

Maybe I should join in the Spark n00b club soon. Though iirc I haven't read any Casares or Ocampo and they're probably much more my area of interest.

Am currently stalling at a similar point to the last time I tried to read Hopscotch by Cortazar. There is so much to like about this book but I'm kind of hating the 'love affair' bit, it's so try-hard boho cosmopolitan, of a sort I would've adored as a teen but find patronising and p offensive to the women it writes about now. And it doesn't even have the excuse of being particularly old. I think it moves past that later so I am going to stick with it for the awesome writing/formal techniques.

muriel spark - the driver's seat

In a career writing marvelous novels, this might be her best

I'm reading Cortazar as well at the moment. A collection of short stories in Danish. It's ok, but disappointing that there's no information on year written, where it's from originally. Or any information at all, really. Just some short stories from all over his career together in 200 pages. And I really don't hope these are his very best stories.

I also read Giacomo Joyce. 24 pages of poetry, and then a 75 page essay explaining what it's about. Ok.

Also, I've begun The Years of Lyndon B Johnson. And it's amazing.

I've had a similar issue with 'Hopscotch'... Although more due to lack of motivation than anything else (most books I've read this year have been <120 page novellas). I don't know if I could handle anything too offensive! The potential for rediscovering that formerly beloved authors of my adolescence are actually rampantly misogynistic is always threatening. I mustn't ever read Goethe again, just in case. I read the Cortazar short story collection called like 'Blow Up and Other Stories' or something more recently though, and found it compelling throughout.

(Xp with tangenttangent):

That was my main stumbling block with Hopscotch as well, e.mily: Cortazar's representation of women seems like the aspect of his work that's aged the most awkwardly for me.

I'm reading the new collection of Alejandra Pizarnik poems, Extracting the Stone of Madness: the poems themselves are striking in how they balance hermetic abstraction and anguished expressiveness, and the translations by Yvette Siegert seem sensitive, but I'm a little disappointed that the edition is so decontextualized (no editorial matter except for a handful of endnotes about Pizarnik's allusions) given how little has been written on Pizarnik in English, and that the early volume Arbol de Diana couldn't be included (although it's worth supporting Ugly Ducking Presse, who've published it as a separate volume).

I've also started reading Mavis Gallant for the first time with the Linnet Muir stories in Home Truths: she seems like a careful and nuanced stylist, but I think I might have a limited appetite for New Yorker lyrical realism at this point in my life; I'll read on, though.

I'm also starting Patrick Modiano's In the Café of Lost Youth because I'm interested in Debord and the Lettrist circle, but I haven't gotten far enough into it to comment, especially since Modiano's style in translation so far mostly seems muted and unobtrusive. I'll probably also be reading Hayao Miyazaki's manga version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind for quite some time: I find his manga storytelling somewhat more meandering than his animation work, but I've heard the manga winds up somewhere darker and more complex than the film adaptation (especially since the film was made several years before the series was finished).

* sorry, emil.y, I mean

*emil.y, that is

with all due deference to the multiple ilh'ers who think the driver's seat is the best of spark's many, many excellent books, I found the artifice of it was a bit to much to the fore for my tastes, in contrast with her more naturalistic novels. I'd rate memento mori above it.

I like that one too! I've liked most of them except for The Takeover and A Far Cry From Kensington

would you say Spark is a naturalist or a realist? I say the former.

I would agree that she's more a naturalist.

What is the distinction?

to define it somewhat puckishly, I'd say a naturalist writes as if creating an exhibit for a museum of natural history, while a realist writes as if they were collecting specimens for a natural history museum.

I've only read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, where she does provide or allow that she has in mind a certain historical context for Brodie's, ah, POV---a context/POV which eventually leads to her downfall---but she doesn't lecture us on this, and also dig how she can jump ahead for a sec, tossing out "spoilers" in passing (but w good timing), while still keeping things fairly linear. Her own variant of realism, I reckon.

Naturalists in the Zola tradition believe environment determines fate.

Not that Brodie's own variance or deviance is fully accounted for, although we can see she relishes power (also, Mark Sinker said recently that he had finally read it and noticed that Brodie is an A.A. Milne fan---I'd forgotten that).

But yeah, Zola (and Balzac? Flaubert too, I guess) would prob have her figured, basically.

Silvina Ocampo (who sadly I don't think has many English translations yet)

Funnily enough I picked up the Thus Were Their Faces at the library and then the poetry collection 2nd hand later that weekend! Making my way through the former now...

I finished more essays by James Baldwin as collected in Notes of a Native Son which details different levels of alienation - from his father, community, culture, Paris and its Bohemians (this is a counterpart to Edmund White's love letters to Paris). The writing seduces you into agreeing with whatever - but that's why re-reading exists.

Hrabal - Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is a kind of Arabian Nights on a lethal cocktail. Almost nothing like it, just enjoying the shape without really knowing or caring what happens to whom, just keep turning them.

Alejandra Pizarnik poems, Extracting the Stone of Madness

Really good piece by Vila-Matas, looking forward to picking that up.

"She who died of her blue dress is singing," from Extracting The Stone of Madness, no less--this is all a Woody Allen parody, yes?

Sorry, passing the stone of can't resist at this moment

Matos, Sign o' the Times
Brontë, Jane Eyre

I'm reading Moon Tiger and liking it a good deal, mainly for the evocations of place, which hum with presence. There's also a real structural sense of mourning to the whole thing (it's explicit, of course, but there's a subtler edge to it, a repressed mourning). What other Fitzgerald books are worth a look?

After today's news, I'm going to have to dig out The Fight

the man without qualities

To be sure, if one is bent on calling it prostitution when a woman does not, as is customary, give her entire person for money, but only her body, then Leona did occasionally go in for prostitution. But if one has known nine years long, as she had since her sixteenth year, how small the wages are in the lowest singing-hells, and if one has one’s head full of the price of evening-dresses and underclothes, the deductions, the avarice and wanton despotism of the owners of such places, the commission on the food and drink consumed by patrons growing ‘merry’ and also on the price of the room in the hotel round the corner, and if one has to deal with these things daily, having all sorts of rows about them and trying to be businesslike about them, then what the outsider can happily regard as debauchery turns out to be a métier full of logic and matter-of-factness, and with its own professional code. And precisely prostitution is a thing in which it makes a great difference whether one is looking at it from above or from below.

I picked up an interesting book on Haida oral narrative poetry, A Story As Sharp as a Knife by Robert Bringhurst. It's based on transcriptions by an American linguist in 1900-01 from two storytellers, Ghandl and Skaay, who I gather were the last ones in possession of this oral tradition among the ~700 people left in Haida Gwaii after small pox wiped out most of the population. The myths are very cool and complex, full of shapeshifting and strange cosmic journeys into different animal worlds. Gary Snyder apparently wrote a book on the same material which I would like to read.

picked up the Thus Were Their Faces at the library and then the poetry collection 2nd hand later that weekend! Making my way through the former now...

Let us know how this is! I'll likely buy it next. I want to know how she sounds separate from Bioy Casares.

Reading Perfume now and walking around smelling absolutely everything.

Chinaski, you mean Penelope Lively, not Fitzgerald, right? Her 'Jacaranda, Oleander' memoir is lovely.

'Oleander, Jacaranda', I mean.

Speaking of Fitzgerald, what do you think of her writing, James (and anybody)?

Assume you meant the other James, but I will answer too- she's great. Recently been reading the short story collection and the bio. I think some people have difficult getting into her meisterwerk, The Blue Flower, so they should perhaps start with Offshore or The Bookshop.

Interesting family too.

I ignored Fitzgerald until last spring when I read Offshore, The Gate of Angels, The Bookshop in one swoon of admiration. She's like Spark: she has no masterpiece. I don't claim The Blue Flower is it, at any rate.

Biiiiiig Fitzgerald fan. Especially love The Bookshop, Human Voices, The Gate of Angels, At Freddie's and The Beginning of Spring. I realise that's half her output listed there, but she's great. Only one I'd suggest not starting with is her odd-duck first, The Golden Child, which is a sort-of parody, sort-of serious mystery novel written to entertain her dying husband.

And the Spark comparison holds up in book length, too: so much richness in such short page counts, no wasted words.

Don't sleep on the Italian one, Innocence, which was almost titled "The Same Mistake" or "The Villa of the Dwarves." The historical/abroad novels aren't necessarily better than the others, but they do demonstrate her skill in that you feel the Italian sun on your back, smell the earth and get caught up in the intricate social world with the same amount of clarity as you smell the mold on the houseboat in Offshore. The Spark comparison holds up quality, density and humor-wise, but ultimately they were probably working in different areas. To oversimplify: Dame Muriel was still more or less writing Novels of Manners, whilst Penelope was working a little more in the vein of Novels of Ideas, however much it lay hidden until the very end. Also the former usually had a deus ex machina "punish" her characters, while the latter was content to let the old school Fates weave and then inevitably unweave.

Have been meaning to read The Knox Brothers, about her fathers and uncle, for ages.

Ugh, father and uncles

Maybe I am trying to see that PF's characters are a little farther from being her puppets and that her approach is less typically British.

HAllucinations by Oliver Sacks
I've enjoyed Sacks work for years. I think I read Man who Mistook His Wife back in the 80s or 90s. Have had this outof the library sitting unread for too long and have finally got into it. Now finding it very readable and wanting to read more of it.

Hallucinations is good, especially for helping to expand the common consent ion from drugs/madness to something that effects huge numbers of people. As someone who occasionally experiences such things I found it much mor comforting to place be phenomenon as an extreme version of a common occurrence rather than the magical and violent other that it's sometimes perceived as.

xpost Thanks again for all the appealing responses. The only PF I've read is (some of) The Knox Brothers, but can already see how this group bio draws on, maybe prefigures novelistic gifts (this was published before her novels, right?)
Judging by James Wood's review, Fitzgerald's own biographical was challenged by her subject's, er stiff upper lip, in the family tradition of emotional distance (which of course didn't come across in Fitzgerald's presentation, or not the way I read it before reading Wood).
He also takes another look at her novels, incl. The Blue Flower, which is also described in the context (one with a with sustained, self-revealing intensity which seems unusual for Wood) of another piece---several re PF by him and others here (I haven't read all of them yet):
http://www.newyorker.com/search?q=Penelope+Fitzgerald

"Fitzgerald's own biographer," that is.

No takers for the DMS vs. PKF fite!? Oh well.

Wood says somewhere something to the effect that he thought Lee was perhaps somewhat too complacent and resigned in not being able to dig deeper in certain areas, but I think he approves of the biography, which I can second after having dipped into it over the weekend.

always glad to see man without qualities mentioned. i wish i had highlighted parts of it as i read it.

finished driver's seat this weekend. i thought it was pretty good - i mean the provocation of it has stayed with me, and it's full of brilliant lines, but i did feel some of it was a bit forced, like lise's behaviour felt a bit like a writer's depiction of mental illness rather than the reality. i guess this must have been quite controversial when it came out? i tried to find discussion of it online but couldn't really. i really like the first few chapters, i loved the repeated "she is neither good looking nor bad looking", that really was a neat way of forcing me to think about how or whether i'd think about a protagonist that way.

the didion i have is play it as it lays, first didion also. gonna start that today i think, though i also picked up richard yates's eleven kinds of loneliness, i read a story from that a few weeks ago which really bowled me over.

I love Didion the essayist, can't penetrate her fiction.

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness has the best of Yates. The stories deal with the same people as Cheever's yet their obsessions and Yates' surface detail and odd rhythms are his own; it's like the difference between Ozu and Naruse.

i love cheever. the yates story that prompted me to buy the book was called "no pain whatsoever" - a welsh writer called thomas morris recommended it in a newsletter he does.

i really really liked the amy hempel collection i mentioned upthread, reasons to live. it's v much in this vein also, though it has the brevity/edge of carver.

i came to it via her paris review interview, which i loved: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/227/the-art-of-fiction-no-176-amy-hempel

mentioned this somewhere else but i also bought vs naipaul's the enigma of arrival - knausgaard reading the first chapter of it on the new yorker podcast kinda blew my mind, even if i find his own stuff a bit silly.

I agree with Alfred: I like Play it as it Lays to a degree, (it's one of the sleeker LA nihilist novels), but Didion's essays are really staggering performances.

Interesting timing: this discussion happens just as I was wondering whether I should give Play it as it Lays another shot.

When I finished it last December I wrote the following (which I don't think contains any real spoilers):

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.

My reading roundup the last couple weeks.

play it as it lays is best when it's nastily funny which is.. a handful of times. the daughter / abortion / psycho 'faggots' / and the anhedonia are all an eye-roll. it's pretty bad imo.

Bret Easton Ellis also credited it with inspiring him to become a writer, although we probably can't blame Didion for the collateral damage wrought by her prose.

"The Bookshop in one swoon of admiration. She's like Spark: she has no masterpiece."

The Bookshop her masterpiece for me!

mentioned this somewhere else but i also bought vs naipaul's the enigma of arrival - knausgaard reading the first chapter of it on the new yorker podcast kinda blew my mind, even if i find his own stuff a bit silly.

I found Naiupaul's Enigma of Arrival almost unbearable in places - mainly because of the torpidity. I got the 'why' of it (his rebirth, his insistence on the idea of post-colonial melancholia) but jesus it was hard going. It felt like structural torpidity by the end of it.

Post-Ali, I'm reading George Plimpton's Shadow Box, which is fantastic. Rich in new detail about various fighters and, because of Plimpton's background, full of weird tangents such as him introducing Ali to Marianne Moore.

yeah i think it's very definitely "boring", probably deliberately so. but listening to the first chapter there were several profound moments or clutches of lines where i was really gripped, felt like the lengthy descriptions were necessary to achieve that. it made sense that knausgaard really liked it, as his own work has that sort of deliberate tediousness, but this felt significantly better than anything in knausgaard.

Think i have done this before, but anyone bored by v s naipaul needs to read shiva naipaul, his much more talented, died-too-young brother

one of the sleeker LA nihilist novels

this and the fact the cover of my copy of play it as it lays compared didion to nathanael west, makes me more interested. i love west.

this and the fact the cover of my copy of play it as it lays compared didion to nathanael west, makes me more interested

That comparison is quite fitting from what I can tell, though I've only read two of each. Both deadpanning their way through horrific/hilarious America... Both quite detached from their subject matter.

I loved 'Play As It Lays' at 22, but it might be too much depressing giving-in-to-masochism for me now. It made me want to drive through the desert like nothing else though.

Didions husbands 2 books about the hollywood system, Monster and The Studio by JohnGregory Dunne, are both great too

man, i loved play it as it lays when i was a young fella. that and speedboat.

I wouldn't say I find Naipaul boring as such, at least not in a pejorative sense. Which is to say I think his torpidity is purposeful.

I've started reading An Inspector Calls first time - with a couple of classes. It's a bit farty and polemical but the kids do seem to respond to it.

I had the same reaction to A Bend in the Woods – a Paterian evocation lulling in its cumulative impact. It had the texture of an Eno-Budd album in words.

erm, The Enigma of Arrival that is.

I wouldn't say I find Naipaul boring as such, at least not in a pejorative sense. Which is to say I think his torpidity is purposeful.

yeah i didn't mean it pejoratively at all, that's definitely the feeling i got from the extract. the more revealing statements felt more arresting in the middle of all this bucolic stasis. looking forward to reading the rest.

I didn't enjoy Enigma really, but it's grown in my imagination - as has been said here, it has a lulling impact, but one riddled with melancholia (or, I think you could argue, outright depression). Anyway, I can't seem to shake it.

I want to agree with the Naipul/Budd/Eno thing! But the undertow is more sinister than that for me. Maybe Aphex or Deathprod.

Thanks for the evocative discussion; I'll be sure to to not read/listen to any of those, for a while anyway. Usually no need for added emotional ballast.

always glad to see man without qualities mentioned. i wish i had highlighted parts of it as i read it.

i've got pages of highlights now. it seems like every other page is just some brilliant idea, dazzling wit, or gorgeous description

I've given it a couple tries, no go. Yet I want to read Joseph and His Brothers – go figure.

I only care for Mann when he talks about his love for the boys. Really want to read his diary, the fiction I found to be mostly dull.

often with Mann (and that Naipaul novel) I suspect boredom is the point, i.e. the effrontery of including pages of French dialogue in The Magic Mountain

In The Magic Mountain Mann is writing about a lot of the big themes so I can't see boredom being the point.

Listening to the Knausgaard podcast and loved his voice, some of the descriptions are quite something - I didn't stay with all of it but feel like I immediately want to read it, and Naipul has never been in my radar till now.

he's clumsy when he tackles Big Themes, as if he assumes his audience is as hyperliterate as he and thus doesn't need connective tissue explaining, say, Naphta's ideas.

(It's true that Mann's the last of the big novelists who assumed his audience was a cult that knew Horace and Goethe)

Listening to the Knausgaard podcast and loved his voice, some of the descriptions are quite something - I didn't stay with all of it but feel like I immediately want to read it, and Naipul has never been in my radar till now.

yeah exactly the same for me. knausgaard's delivery was brilliant, i listened to this in the bath last week while feeling a bit unwell and i was mesmerised by parts of it.

i agree mann can be a bit boring, i never loved mann in the way i love musil, he lacks the wit or something, i always thought it had the feeling of a kind of worthy professorial type whereas there's a kind of acerbic quality to musil.

my favourite thing about mann is that the lyrics to "is that all there is" were written by the songwriter's wife after she read a thomas mann short story. still not read the story in question.

He influenced me. The way Tonio Kroger casually addresses the protagonist's crush on his best friend blew 16-year-old me.

Think good old H.T. P.-L.'s translations may be the problem sometimes; I've read some by other hands (blanking on names_ which read better, at least to or by American semi-educated me. Also, recently found a version by (still blanking) of Magic Mountain which translates everything.

Not long after I finished In Search of Lost Time I picked up a nice collected edition of Man Without Qualities and thought it wld be a piece of piss after Proust, but I soon ran aground - yes, a very unique mind and an intriguing - difficult! - way of writing 'the novel of ideas' - but not, the 100 pages or so pages I read, very engaging at the ho-hum level of story. But I hope to return to it.

Been meaning to ask you guys: recommended translations of In Search Of Lost Time/Remembrance etc.? Think I might put off trying Finnegan's and re-reading Ulysses, moving Proust to the front.

I read the Scott-Moncrieff trans revised by Kilmartin (there is a further revision by Enright) - seemed very readable to me, I think the main complaint is that possibly it's a slightly flowery, 'Victorian' rendering (iirc the Kilmartin revision restores the more salacious material previously omitted or evaded by the first English translation)

If I were to ever re-read Lost Time - hope springs eternal, I should live so long etc - I would try the more modern translation in six volumes by six different translators, starting w/ Lydia Davis

The discussion from Knausgaard at the end was very good as well.

I think of MwQ as a bunch of essays knit together rather than a novel. Its narrative element isn't as strong but the first two vols esp have some all-time pages that Mann could never ever manage - and I don't think any of this is an issue of translation. I think I'd be able to see something to MM, even in a 'bad' translation.

xp - Read Moncrieff and liked parts of it but it really took off when I read the later translation, starting w/ Lydia Davis. Knew I'd finish the whole thing after about 10 pages.

Yeah the story goes AWOL for huge sections of it, especially the final third. I didn't find it anything like as difficult as something like Ulysses, which I still haven't had a serious go at. I haven't read Proust though. I probably should.

Lydia Davis no doubt. I hadn't noticed how funny S&G was until she swept the cobwebs off some of the passages. I'm thinking of the Princess de Guermantes' ball, for instance.

Not long after I finished In Search of Lost Time I picked up a nice collected edition of Man Without Qualities and thought it wld be a piece of piss after Proust, but I soon ran aground - yes, a very unique mind and an intriguing - difficult! - way of writing 'the novel of ideas' - but not, the 100 pages or so pages I read, very engaging at the ho-hum level of story. But I hope to return to it.

i feel bitter recently about iowa-style narratives about domestic dramas and minor personal revelations so this has been fresh air tho agreed that some plot is preferable, if at least for pragmatic reasons (to keep the reader's attention). in any case i like it a lot and incidentally have proust queued up next.

some of the things i like most about it: there is something wonderful about hanging ideas on the barest bones of a narrative, refreshing in its overtness. and his sentences are so luxurious that go on and on without strict adherence to terse bite-sized thought but without ever losing or confusing the reader. and he writes for grown-ups which is probably the most endearing bit ot all like his entire audience has a vocabulary and has facility w/ the arts + culture (nb that i have to look up references bc i am not conversant in 1930s culture - i know the big names obv wagner and neitzsche). also for some reason i feel like this between the wars moment feels a lot like this moment - like a lull between great events of history - and it feels particularly resonant to some of the details of my life (despite on a plot level containing v little action at all).

also for some reason i feel like this between the wars moment feels a lot like this moment - like a lull between great events of history

Also, as with MWQ, probably something horrible is going to come along soon and ruin all our plans

magda szabo the door. so great. i took a break when the library expired the e-book but i picked it up again. intense & weird & the husband is like a woman in a normal man book.

Ive just started "One Hundred Years of Solitude". Beautiful writing.

"(It's true that Mann's the last of the big novelists who assumed his audience was a cult that knew Horace and Goethe)"

i feel like i should read more Goethe! the heck with Mann. or at least whenever i've looked inside his books i always say to myself....yeahhhhh, maybe later...........which is what happens whenever i've picked up any naipaul come to think of it. and rushdie too...

but i will keep in mind what james said abour naipaul's brother.

i once met a pub-owner in montpellier who made a really good case for me to read midnight's children.

i started reading The Damnation of Theron Ware last night. i need some hot Methodist action.

well midnight's children is supposed to be his best, right? like a house for mr biswas is supposed to be naipaul's best?

i'd never even considered naipaul until hearing that new yorker podcast. had no opinion one way or another.

http://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction/karl-ove-knausgaard-reads-v-s-naipaul

i should pick up proust again. i read the first two years and years ago and loved them - the old moncrieff translations - and i had those really cumbersome hardcovers (two volumes for all six books) with extra-small print and i'm convinced having those is partly why i stopped reading them. they were a drag. maybe i'll seek out the new ones in handier form.

i started reading The Damnation of Theron Ware last night. i need some hot Methodist action.

― scott seward,

ahhh memories of my graduate thesis....

xpost

Paul Theroux's book about his broken friendship with Naipaul - In Sir Vidia's Shadow - is a compulsively readable piece of literary gossip - one utter shit writes about another!

p weird to write an entire book about a row

John E Woods is the newer Mann translator- he's really good, has done great work getting Arno Schmidt into English. I read TMM years ago in the Lowe-Porter and his more recently - he's a lot more enjoyable - more flexible tone, less of that woodenness or murky plod that's in the older translations. He translates the French, or has it at the back or something.

I'm reading George Dangerfield's The Era of Good Feelings. Look at this excerpt introducing John Calhoun:

With the exception of John Quincy Adams, the Presidential aspirants in the Cabinet had not arrived there through a deliberate choice of Monroe's. Mr. Crawford had been Secretary of the Treasury under James Madison, and was simply too powerful a man, with too many claims upon Monroe's iindulgence, to be removed against his will. Mr. Calhoun had reached the
War Department by a process of elimination that, whatever else it may be, is certainly not selective. He had fought for the War of 18I2 in Congress with dignity and intelligence: he was now, more than ever, a nationalist. A strange and somber destiny awaited him. He was to remain a nationalist to the end of his days-but a nationalist of a most peculiar kind, a nationalist who preached the rankest secession, and who became the architect of civil war. He was and continued to be the most original political theorist of his time, with a supple and steely dialectic at his command: yet the fruit of all his political theorizing was a scheme which, if worked out to its logical conclusion, would have reduced the nation to immobility within a year. He was a man of vision who perceived, long before the publication of the Communist Manifesto, that an unrestricted capitalism must reduce larger and ever larger masses of people to virtual slavery; and his remedy for this was not to ponder those measures by which capitalism might be restricted, but to propose for the majority of mankind, and in the name of minority rights, a more and more unrestricted slavery. In 1817, he was not yet that "cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born" whom the acute
observation of a visiting maiden lady so unerringly transfixed in the mid I83o's. The great reactionary was still concealed in the ardent nationalist. The champion of slavery was still just another slave-owner in a slave-owning capital. Age, mortification, and sickness had not yet converted his face into that terrible mask with which Senator Calhoun, voiceless and dying, confronted the Senate in 185o. In 1817, he was rather severe, rather puritanical, somewhat too introverted, but fascinating; and many were the audiences he captivated with his flow of ideas, uttered in a harsh controlled voice and enlivened by the peremptory glances of his glittering, dark-gray eyes. But even then he lacked to a conspicuous degree the art, not of getting on with other people, but of understanding them.

No one does this kind of portraiture like this anymore.

xp

Naipaul does sound like a bit of an arsehole, to be honest - particularly with relation to his ladyfriends. The great looming presence in Enigma is his housebound wife. She's like a madwoman in the attic. Unrepresented. Absent.

Not that Theroux is a bastion of morality, of course. Tangential: There's a bit in Jonathan Raban's Coasting where he meets Theroux on the Sussex coast somewhere. They're both on their round Britain journey (Raban anti-clockwise, by boat, Theroux, clockwise, on foot, writing The Kingdom by the Sea) and the sense of writerly chagrin and tension is palpable. You could almost imagine them coming to a duel over it.

NAIPAUL IS ATROCIOUS ABORT ABORT

well then how did he get to be such a big name then? one of those looming figures and all that.

He wrote a couple of good novels.

I think there's a case for everything up to and including A Bend in the River, but I do wonder if his presence is shrinking with each passing year. Style-wise I think he's pretty robust and ageless, but his novels are trapped by circumstance as much as anything.

i second the rec for the theroux book about his relationship with naipaul. two shits warily circling each other is more fun than one psychopathic racist shit doing a conrad impersonation. hilarious sex scenes too (tho not with each other)

i think the only theroux i've read is chicago loop. never read any of the travel books. dude has written SO many books.

a bend in the river is concern trolling in the form of a novel

looking at descriptions of shiva naipaul's stuff and i'm already interested. the non-fiction book on jonestown/cults/mass movements looks intriguing indeed.

speaking of rushdie, i should read some more marianne wiggins. i remember really liking John Dollar a million years ago.

I want to read MWQ more than ever while reading some of Mordy's posts, but for me, "novels of ideas," especially ones that don't bother with a lotta plotting (not Dusty's, in other words), can seem too much like the narrator propping himself up for a favorite lecture, and/or cafeteria conversation---can be agreeable as such, but I look more for show-don't tell, or "No ideas but in things," even. I'm sure I miss some cues, but still think of xgau on mid-70s Newman (implicitly contrasted w 12 Songs etc. early creative peaks):

Born Again [Warner Bros., 1979]
This has more content and feeling than Little Criminals. But as with Little Criminals, its highlight is a (great) joke--"The Story of a Rock and Roll Band," which ought to be called "E.L.O." and isn't, for the same reason supergroupie radio programmers have shied away from it. Hence, the content comprises ever more intricate convolutions of bad taste; rather than making you think about homophobes and heavy-metal toughs and me-decade assholes the way he once made you think about rednecks and slave traders and high school belles, he makes you think about how he feels about them. Which just isn't as interesting. B+

"the story of a rock and roll band" is so terrible. the roots of Pixar music.

Maybe I should have cut that part, but the last two sentences get me. Also, from his '68 take on Newman's self-titled debut:
Two of Newman's uncles compose movie music, and we can only assume that he has long since digested all available clichés. His songs rely on no special verbal facility but on a oblique interplay of themes that are well-worn or even silly, but succinctly understood, and on his voice, which is a cross between a "grumpy mumble" (Michael Thomas's phrase) and a deliberate drawl. Imagine such a voice proposing ("I like your mother,/ I like your brother,/ I like you,/ And your like me too") and then describing the marriage on through death. Or presenting a fat boy at a circus sideshow. Or mourning a cowboy. Or just lamenting a ruined love affair. Add intermittent quasi-symphonic accompaniment (arranged by Newman, whose musical training is extensive) that neither reinforces nor works against the theme but somehow, like that voice, does both at once, or one after the other, or something.

It's hard to do this right, as some of those later albums demonstrate, of course. Which reminds me, I've been thinking of Red Harvest lately; I'll prob re-read it soon, and maybe some later Hammett too.

I want to read MWQ more than ever while reading some of Mordy's posts, but for me, "novels of ideas," especially ones that don't bother with a lotta plotting (not Dusty's, in other words), can seem too much like the narrator propping himself up for a favorite lecture, and/or cafeteria conversation---can be agreeable as such, but I look more for show-don't tell, or "No ideas but in things," even. I'm sure I miss some cues, but still think of xgau on mid-70s Newman (implicitly contrasted w 12 Songs etc. early creative peaks):

the thing is, i know what you mean here, but for me it still has a sense of people seeing and feeling things, and it still has scenes. like it's not just mouthpieces for musil. in fact the (admittedly p basic) backstory is key to the context of the whole thing. and the "ideas" aren't solely high philosophical ones, it has observations on almost every facet of life. he's casually brilliant in all sorts of ways even while dissecting some big idea. this is why i found it p easy to read overall, there are sections that are hard going but ultimately musil is p kind to the reader imo, he lets you in and guides you along and plenty of the time the things that are happening feel very alive and of real life.

The Novel is very flexible to me and MwQ is certainly a demonstration of that ahem, quality. As for 'Novel of Ideas' I think you really feel the weight of certain of ideas by their consequences on the psyche of the cast and their time. When dealt with by Mann it feels more like chatter, in Musil I feel the weight of thought, the movement of it on the mind.

John E Woods is the newer Mann translator- he's really good, has done great work getting Arno Schmidt into English. I read TMM years ago in the Lowe-Porter and his more recently - he's a lot more enjoyable - more flexible tone, less of that woodenness or murky plod that's in the older translations. He translates the French, or has it at the back or something.

― woof, Wednesday, 8 June 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Might pick up Doctor Faustus in his translation; Death in Venice is the only thing that really worked for me.

i feel like i should read more Goethe! the heck with Mann

Mann and Goethe are very much in this "Germans I just don't get" corner. Give me Von Kleist, Buchner or Holderlin any day.

man I've given Doctor Faustus several chances. I think I need the Aleph to penetrate it.

i love von Kleist to death. i just wish he had written more fiction. i don't really read plays...

Don't often read 'em these days but funnily enough I sat down to read a play by Von Kleist at the weekend.

Buchner wrote Lenz btw...that was enough.

Thanks for even more reasons to read MWQ, comrades; I'll get to it (but prob Proust first). I dimly recall Goethe's Elective Affinities passing the Random Read Test...

Lenz's The Soldiers is worth reading, and probably The Tutor, though I don't remember that as well. He wrote more plays, also essays, a novella, maybe other, none of which I've read (must look for collection).

Tutor, damn!

Also entertaining writing about Naipaul in Diana Athill's 'Stet': when she retires reluctantly from editing, her major consolation is 'Well, at least I'll never have to be polite to Vidia Naipaul again!'

Just halfway through Cynthia Ozick's 'The Shawl', and man was this a bad book to choose when already feeling depressed. Wonderful writing, but fuuuuuuuck I did not want to read about a toddler being killed in a Nazi death camp

Ozick's one of my favorite essayists, but I've never warmed to her novels other than The Messiah of Stockholm. Reading Henry James at a vulnerable point -- she's admitted this -- fucked up her narrative sense.

i've always found her...minor. and her fiction never engaged me much. despite her big brain.

my eternal caveat should be that i haven't read a lot of people i talk about in like 25 years...

The Messiah of Stockholm was great. The Shawl is basically a very short story and a novella together telling the mother's story at 2 different points in her life. Would not have worked inflated to novel length, I think, but at under 70p total it's very powerful. But horrible.

Been a long time since I read a collection of novellas etc. incl. "The Shawl," but remember liking it, without feeling the urge to seek novels. Also enjoyed her remembrance of z-z-z-zs past in Lionel Trilling's unthrilling classroom.

Anybody read this??
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-books-manbooker-southkorea-idUSKCN0Y8050

I recall really digging a few of the stories in Bloodshed re: ozick; not too interested in her essays

"Envy" is good. Even Harold Bloom likes it!

Just watched Brooklyn, thought it was well done, though suspected Nick Hornby's screenplay might have knocked off some corners. Should I read the original, and /or others by Colm Tobin? That one about the unthrilled Mother of God looks promising.

The original is a well executed minor thing. I enjoyed it thoroughly. He's one of my favorite writers.

Started reading Flashman At The Charge. I really need to stop starting several books at the same time, or at least in the same place. This is the 3rd book for bed this week. & I do want to get through the other 2.

That one about the unthrilled Mother of God is good, and you can read it in about half an hour.

Just started a Hungarian writer I had previously not known of, Margit Kaffka, who died in the post-WW1 Spanish flu outbreak. The book is 'The Ant Heap', about the febrile atmosphere in a convent school, sort of a sunnier, feminist companion piece to The Confusions of Young Torless.

Need to brush up on my Hungarian writers.

Didn't Anthony Burgess's mother die in that epidemic? So there is a fictionalized account of it in Earthly Powers and a non-fictionalized account in Little Wilson and Big God.

I second Alfred's endorsement of the wonderful Brooklyn (still haven't seen the film). Only other Toibin I've read (aside from a nice piece he wrote on Joni Mitchell's Blue) is Nora Webster, which I really liked without being as knocked out by it as I was by Brooklyn.

Years ago I read 'The Blackwater Lightship' and loved it. Was sort of interested in his Henry James novel, but flipping through it made it seem a bit like an extended wish-fulfilment exercise in letting poor old Henry get some secret gay sex

That's not an anti-gay-sex post, btw, just that I think Henry James was waaaay too buttoned up to have ever have any kind of sex

but he doesn't!

xpost

doesn't he? ok, so I know not at all what I'm talking about

He wrote a long story set called "A Long Winter" set during the Spanish Civil War Mothers and Sons that is one of the saddest and most suspenseful and erotic pieces of fiction I've read in the last fifteen years.

er, cross out that first "set"

He also wrote a piece of hot stuff in the same collection called "Three Friends" about a grief-stricken gay man who hooks up with one of his straight bros.

I've got Mothers and Sons somewhere--must actually read it. It's one of the many books I bought before the last moving of house and which now are SOMEWHERE in a box I'm not sure where I'll find them someday hey look a new shiny book i'll buy that

Need to brush up on my Hungarian writers.

https://www.rifflebooks.com/list/28230 is a list of 43 very good indeed Hungarian books I put together a few years ago and then juts desultorily added to a little while ago.

Enigma of Arrival is so not the place to start w/VS Naipaul. Read A House For Mr Biswas, the old prick's masterpiece, and if you like it put yr nose into his early nonfiction like An Area of Darkness.

Along w/James M I've repped for Shiva here so I'll just concur that his slim shelf - two travel books, three novels and a collection - needs to be reissued but probably won't be anytime soon.

given i've just heard the first chapter and liked it, i reckon it prob is the place to start.

ok then, enjoy

ty

I was going to read Ackroyd's Hawksmoor next, but we're going to Cyprus next week and that combination doesn't seem viable. I'm really enjoying dark, occult themes at the moment...does anyone know of such a book that could nevertheless be enjoyed in hot weather? Like Maldoror Goes to the Beach...

reading guerillas and a bend in the river in my late teens was a scales falling from eyes moment for me, to realize fine writing was not itself a source of superior wisdom, that it could also be reactionary and could, if you really bought into it, diminish your sense of people or place. that's stating the obvious probably but it jarred me and those strong emotions are still with me i guess even if i haven't read or thought about naipaul in many years.

i didn't get far in the enigma of arrival but what i remember best is naipaul describing his arrival in england and how it rained for weeks or months on end, and that he could see nothing of the place he was in. and i thought this was pretty weak, betraying or limiting common sense to make a supposedly more profound writerly point, since I was born and raised in a very rainy temperate climate and i know it's still possible to see plenty of what's around you.

I was going to read Ackroyd's Hawksmoor next, but we're going to Cyprus next week and that combination doesn't seem viable. I'm really enjoying dark, occult themes at the moment...does anyone know of such a book that could nevertheless be enjoyed in hot weather? Like Maldoror Goes to the Beach...

I like the idea of reading stuff in incongruous places - go with Hawksmoor! I can only think of Garcia Marquez's Strange Pilgrims (there's one particular story, a gothic horror, set in southern Spain, that has always stayed with me), but I'm sure there are better suggestions.

I guess there is something nicely off-kilter about Jute Gyte- and Hawksmoor-on-sea, plus I've got a couple of Bolaños in reserve if required. I do need to read another Garcia Marquez though (regrettably I've only read Of Love and Other Demons for some reason...), so I'll keep an eye out for it - thank you.

Silvina Ocampo - Thus were their Faces. Its a compilation from the few books of short stories she wrote throughout her life. Only made my way through the middle ones ('The Fury' and 'The Guests') and there is a quite a bit here around women who often are...out of place, lost or in a predicament they try to get out of. Except its too fantastical for my tastes and I'm reading too many short stories lately so I'll leave it at that - but that dimension will be worth revisiting. I quite like to see those volumes fully translated in individual editions. Thought of that as a problem when I moved to Antonio Tabucchi - Time Ages in a Hurry. More concentration to the selection.

Finished more poems by Pessoa, a sample of Ocampo's poetry, von Kleist's play Prince of Homburg which gives full vent to a nationalism via macabre hallucination.

Bolano's The Third Reich is beach-set

the "maldoror goes to the beach" line did remind me of this, which is quite a good selection of nerval's work:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51hii-iLVPL._SX370_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Reading Adrienne Rich's first volume. I love poets in their larval state.

Gold medal for Lucia Berlin collection, ditto for two I haven't read The Sympathizer (winner for first fiction) and Ghettoside (nonfiction). Been meaning to get those.
http://www.eastbaytimes.com/california/ci_29997745/california-book-awards-go-lucia-berlin-viet-thanh

Maldoror Goes to the Beach

Maybe John Fowles' The Magus

Anyone read fowles' the maggot? Reading about it in the encyclopedia of science fiction got me interested.

a maggot... yes, but a looong time ago. the end vision could be construed as sf, sure, though most of it is in the form of reports (maybe letters too?) & 18th century newspaper excerpts concerning the disappearance of a mysterious group of suspicious individuals with questionable motives. also shakers. looking back, might be my favourite fowles. (and yeah, the magus would be great beach reading!)

Thank you for the suggestions! I've read The Third Reich a couple of times but it's certainly worth revisiting. The Nerval collection looks intriguing. If I can find it today I may well pick it up.

I actually quit The Magus last year just over half way through because I was highly sensitive at the time and nervous about where his treatment of female characters was going...perhaps it is time to finish it. I did love The Collector.

i'm still reading The Damnation of Theron Ware and i really like it!

i am officially the slowest reader. i need to step it up. too much to read. and i was thinking of reading Jude The Obscure after this but it will take me the rest of the summer to do that at this rate. and i still have those last two Ferrante books to read...

it's the curse of netflix/hulu.

do we need to start a summer reading thread? i know everyone is packing up their Ludlum paperbacks for their trips to the beach.

northern hemisphere-ist

maybe we should wait until June 20th.

wait, wehre does a koogs live?

Swaziland?

I'm all but finished with Vidal's Hollywood. It's middle of the pack in terms of his US history novels. The research is solid. The plot and characters are workmanlike. But it feels constructed with a handsaw, hammer and nails -- just rough carpentry compared to his best stuff.

Happy Bloomsday, ILB!

http://i.imgur.com/CCEARAK.jpg

Dag Solstad - Professor Andersen's Night. Its about a murder on the one hand. On the other its actually about Jeremy Corbyn's generation of social democrats/far-left. Terrific pages, why are there only 3/4 books by this guy available in English? Tragic.

Making my way through another couple of novellas by Hrabal: The Little Town where Time Stood Still and Cutting it Short.

That solstad sounds like my thing

Envious of tangenttangent!

Reading JON WILLIS, All These Worlds Are Yours, a state-of-play book about current cosmology and its implications for SETI

I'm just about to finish the General From The Jungle by B.Traven and then I think I shall go onto Ham & Rye by Charles Bukowski which I started before Xmas but didn't take to London with me so has sat unread for 6 months.

I'm also about half way through Oliver Sacks' Hallucinations. Think I'm on epilepsy after reading about Sacks' drug experiences thorugh he 50s and 60s which ended when he wrote Migraine, or at least his amphetamine use did.

& something like 2/3 of the way through London the Biography by Peter Ackroyd which is pretty interesting though I've heard taht some of it is spurious.

I'm all but finished with Vidal's Hollywood. It's middle of the pack in terms of his US history novels. The research is solid. The plot and characters are workmanlike. But it feels constructed with a handsaw, hammer and nails -- just rough carpentry compared to his best stuff.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless),

That's about right but Wilson steals every scene he's in, and I was so happy that Blaise finally got his rocks off.

It was actually mostly too hot to read, but I'm liking Eco a lot so far.

Finished Perfume, which was thoroughly enjoyable. It's pretty rare to encounter a book that has such an impact on how you physically move about the world, and (without knowing anything about how this came to be written) it feels so lovingly researched. I was pleased that the tone avoided superfluously oblique archaisms whilst not pandering to contemporary dialect or colloquialisms either. Also, the significance placed on the protagonist's infancy offered this unexpected lens of object relations therapy through which to view it all. Yes, great.

Ham on Rye and Post Office are tied for me as best Bukowski, but I haven't read him for ages so I can't guarantee this opinion would hold true today. I remember seeing this amazing animation of one of the sections from Ham on Rye about ten years ago that really stayed with me but I've never been able to find it again...

where are you tangenttangent? i am reading the richard yates i mentioned upthread, eleven kinds of loneliness, in the south of spain. i've nearly finished it. mostly perfect stories.

That sounds idyllic. Where in the South of Spain? And do you have more to read when you're done with Yates?

Sadly I'm freshly back in South London, though the picture upthread was from less than a day ago in Cyprus (Paphos, though we went to Limassol as well). Not much fiction set there actually as it turns out. I always plan to read and write so much on holiday and invariably end up running from site to monument to restaurant and waking up in the night to plan new routes.

lol I am the same, I write snippets of paragraphs based on things I see or people I meet, but never do any real writing when on holiday, which is probably good. I am in Estepona, my parents have a place here, about an hour from Malaga. I will write the great Brits abroad pensioner holidayland story one day. I'm getting through Play It As It Lays as well as Yates.

Cyprus looks nice from that photo.

Chief sodding Football Writer In Alicante. My desk, by January.

I didn't read anything in Cyprus but I did start writing a new novel, if that is inspiration enough

I guess I read the first chapter or two of Foucault's Pendulum over tt's shoulder, seems pretty far-out

I absolutely adore Foucault's Pendulum, though it remains the only Eco novel I've read (I was put off by the film of Name of the Rose but I really should give it a try).

Also put off by film, but greatly enjoyed the novel when it was first published, dunno what I'd think now (then ignorant of most of the historical context he elucidated, so may have overrated it for that reason, but it seemed to add to the truly but non-terminally hip professor's thriller momentum).
Speaking of Cyprus etc., anybody read Lawrence Durrell? I only know him via little brother Gerald's wonderful, zoological My Family and Other Animals

It is wonderful, thought consensus was that Gerald was the better writer

I read Justine many years ago and enjoyed it, though I think now I would be wiser to - or less tolerant of - Durrell's symbolic/poetic (over)writing (I guess the portrait in My Family might already lead one to suspect that Larry was very much ' the artist' at work or play.) It feels like nowadays his reputation has been eclipsed by the tragedy surrounding his daughter's suicide, and the rumours of incest surrounding their relationship. He was of course a great admirer of Henry Miller, another author who I sometimes wonder if anybody reads these days...

reread burroughs's "junky" on a whim (very good, better than i remembered, very funny and well-written), read "cat on a hot tin roof" (good, hadn't read before), and now on to charles shaar murray's "crosstown traffic" (another book i read years ago and barely remember).

Just bought some ePubs for my Summer holiday:

FICTION
John Crowley - Engine Summer
James Joyce - Complete Works (thinking of attempting Finnegan's Wake)
William Hope - House On The Borderland

NON FICTION
TEDTalks Official Guide (I want to improve my presentation skills)
Neurotribes - Steve Silberman

Still slogging through The Dispossessed. Really not taken with it unfortunately and have found the whole thing very dry and humourless despite the interesting premise. Determined I'll finish it, only got about 50 more pages to go.

Other meat-space fiction piling up around me ready to read:
John Darnielle - Wolf In White Van
John Doran - Jolly Lad
Bulgakov - Master & Margarita
Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend
Frank Herbert - Dune
Patrick Leigh Fermor - A Time Of Gifts
Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings

Looks like I've got my work cut out for me. What should I start with?

Ham on Rye and Post Office are tied for me as best Bukowski, but I haven't read him for ages so I can't guarantee this opinion would hold true today. I remember seeing this amazing animation of one of the sections from Ham on Rye about ten years ago that really stayed with me but I've never been able to find it again...

― It certainly is punk of the Church of England to think that way (tangenttangent), Sunday, 19 June 2016 12:20 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've read Post Office. Started Ham On Rye and it was very good but I found it infinitely more depressing (Post Office is hardly jolly) and had to give up.

> meat-space

> Ham On Rye

xxp - didn't mean to call Doran's book 'fiction'

Frank Herbert - Dune

life's too short

Dune rules (but then so does The Dispossessed)

How much time you got?
Dune and Dune Messiah are very enjoyable, Children of Dune got some wobble, God Emperor of Dune is a slogfest; I know the GE's philosphical bullshit is meant to be that, by him and his Author, but way too much to be funny)(and the serious motive for laying it on his followers---so they'll one day know not to be so bowed down to and by the Ages of Brian---doesn't help, in this case). Heretics of Dune is better, but most things are, and it doesn't fully re-engage w the improbably sleek megaship momentum of the first two volumes. Still haven't tried the finale, Chapterhouse: Dune. Life may indeed be too short. But if you just have Dune at hand now, no prob, except you may be left with a craving, ditto the following case:

Reading My Brilliant Friend tends to cause reading of the other Neapolitan Novels, which are not as long as the Dune books (are they?), but have so much going on that they seem like it. Very extremely worthwhile, I think, but they do take a while.

So you might wanna go next to Wolf In White Van, that afuckingmazing stand-alone (so far, anyway).

And it's just the right length, at just the right pace, seems like.

Yeah, I really really liked Wolf in White Van. It was one of my first real post-academia non-experimental reads and it hit just the right spot.

Last night I picked up The Warden as my first ever Anthony Trollope and stuck a toe in. The first dozen pages carefully delineate the sources and amounts of income of the main character. How very 19th century English of him! But, it retains a certain anthropological interest to read such details, so I am not yet put off by this approach.

He's such a delight.

Hard to tell, but suspect The Way We Live Now would seem great even if it weren't so close to the way we live now; for instance, much of its centrifugal and centripetal churn involves an ancestor of Madoff and Candidate Trump, among many others.

And the female characters, incl. the one who at first seems like she's just going to be there for author-reader smirks...

TWWLN is on my list for reading this year but I'm put off by the length.

Just finished New Grub Street which was full of poverty and inheritance, and very autobiographical I gather. Writing about the slog of writing 3-volume novels in a 3-volume novel...

Love New Grub Street. 'Sell out or fail miserably!' is an unusual moral for late Victorian fiction.

This morning on the radio, Gore Vidal was quoted re Mary McCarthy: "She is our greatest critic, because she is uncorrupted by compassion." Or was it "most valuable"? The part after the comma is exact, pretty sure. What should I read by her, nonfiction or fiction? The only thing I recall is her saying that young Updike's painterly sensitivity came off like pornography without sex, or something like that (porn was def mentioned).
Trying to find the Vidal quote, I came across this promising intro to his paywalled review of her on the Modern Novel, w intriguing GV comment on Middlemarch
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1980/12/04/the-thinking-mans-novel/

I have a modern, unread by me, Virago Press edition of The Group by Mary McCarthy that p much tries to sell it as the 50s equiv of Sex and the City - that's her most 'famous' novel, right?

Without googling - she wrote an early hatchet job on Salinger and/or Catcher in the Rye? Did she have an affair with Edmund Wilson? Are you and I the only ppl typing on the internet abt Mary McCarthy IN THE WORLD at this moment in time?

In continuing The Warden last night, it is now clear that the source and amount the main character's income has become the nexus of the plot, so Trollope was not simply introducing his protagonist by detailing his precise position within England's class structure, but had further developments in mind.

Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta -- makes me somewhat nostalgic for LA and made me think about the effect of television or film on point of view; now it seems that the narrator is seldom within the narrative; the audience is not a part of the telling; separate chapters for separate characters, cuts between scenes

Shirley Jackson: Let Me Tell You - big volume of uncollected bits and bobs. Lots of good stuff, lots of B-sides, some bits you can see why she didn't publish them, but some real treats.

I read Walter J Ong's Orality and Literacy, kind of a mind-blowing book on an impossibly huge topic.

Now rereading The Lord of the Rings, and thinking about devoting some time to reading Tolkien's sources. I bought a copy of The Saga of the Volsungs to start with.

Damn. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/25/arts/michael-herr-author-of-a-vietnam-classic-dies-at-76.html?_r=0 Would like to read the Winchell book, never heard of that one.

Edmund White - Our Young Man
Ian Hamilton - Robert Lowell
Thomas Frank - Listen, Liberal

speaking of ozick...this is good.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/magazine/cynthia-ozicks-long-crusade.html?hpw&rref=magazine&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

Like her characters, a sorry gaggle of pallid shut-ins and thwarted fantasists, Ozick doesn’t get out much. She has spoken of her aversion to stages and of her impatience with what Henry James, her lifelong inspirator, called “the twaddle of mere graciousness.”

...

Of life, she once wrote: “I dislike it. I notice no ‘interplay of life and art.’ Life is that which — pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially — interrupts.”

I probably will read her essay collection.

Lol, love that quote.

yeah, need to read more Ozick. Coterie represent!

start with The Messiah of Stockholm. Her collections Art and Ardor and Quarrel and Quandary (lol) boast first rate essays.

imagine me gone, adam haslett

gonna sneak in before summer thread with some rubbish. read over the last couple of months when I should have been studying

william gaddis, JR: listen, will you shut up a minute? I had an idea what to expect from this - cacophonic collage of overlapping unattributed dialogue - but didn't realise it would be in service of such antic satire. As in, in the first hundred pages or so of the novel a sheaf of papers gets knocked to the floor seemingly every few pages, and the slapstick only escalates from there. I'm not complaining, I honestly think this might be the funniest book I've ever read. lots of trenchant stuff about art v commerce.

that gave me the courage to finally start the recognitions, and again it was not at all the book I was expecting. From my many scans of the first few pages, I thought it would basically be the opposite of JR, huge blocks of dense allusive prose with no dialogue. It is dense and allusive but wonderfully so and almost as dialogue-heavy as JR after a while. It's enormous though. Also as rich and expertly wrought as both these novels are - and they really are - part of me keeps thinking "this is franzen's favourite writer" and it's like: mass culture is bad! society is in the gutter! I think there's more to it though and I love these books and want to read his others.

clarice lispector, hour of the star: my first of hers apart from a couple of stories. read over a weekend and felt like I was walking around in a dream.

the secret diary of laura palmer:tv tie-in written in a few days, way better than it has any right to be.

Observations on the Florid Song; or, Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern SINGERS, Written in Italian by PIER. FRANCESCO TOSI, Of the Phil-Harmonic Academy at Bologna. Translated into English by Mr. GALLIARD. Useful for all PERFORMERS, Instrumental as well as Vocal. To which are added EXPLANATORY ANNOTATIONS, and Examples in MUSICK.

The book of jokes by momus: lol I read this so I could post that I was reading it on facebook for the lols. It isn't good but I wonder if I'd like it more if I wasn't aware of the author's dorky "look mummy I'm an aesthete!" online persona; in any case it is funny to read a dalkey archive paperback whose back cover blurb reads "his music - from Brecht to Beck on Moog and simulated harpsichord - is suitably challenging"

but really though I am reading cadenza by ralph cusack, 40 pages in, and wow. not only is it the descendant of o'brien the momus wants to be, but it's... I want to locate the weird aporiae in the prose in terms of this discussion http://ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?showall=true&bookmarkedmessageid=5459666&boardid=79&threadid=83377 but in truth it seems singular, stuff like It could be, in my opinion, I was there in that bus on the high Corniche road to the village above; or in Skerries the day the sea froze in slimy undulent sheets on the foreshore as the tide fell. I must ask Mrs N. if she knew or if she knows. or a page later But wherever it was made absolutely no difference: my ideas in the matter were not at my mercy: the wheels of the train on the iron causeway, the fact that I had slept much, little or never, soon settled me down far away or elsewhere. or a page later We dried ourselves on ourselves and ourselves in the sun and made love closely with gay urgent passion, clutching at each minute and moment with the vice-grip of insisted arrested escaping time, there, on a great bed of gentians, so that for my love and myself all else was sky blue; and our eyes. Until finally we were chilly and hungry for food and we had to dress up to go on.

Enjoying unpacking my books for the 'Oh, I forgot about that one!', but I'm not liking the mocking resurfacing of the books I failed to finish.

nice posts wins. my best friend recently read the first half of a copy of JR i found in a dumpster and gave to him and is currently reading recognitions. the passages from the latter he's read to me were really fantastic

the secret diary of laura palmer:tv tie-in written in a few days, way better than it has any right to be.

For a moment I took this as meaning that you wrote it. I hope it is written in the style of your post

finding an ambitious novel in a dumpster is like the kind of thing that would happen in a gaddis novel

xp lol I am not yet at the stage of writing twin peaks fanfic

I think you might be. Maybe it could be an ILX project. Has anyone here every tried a collaborative novel effort?

Also lol at Gaddis in the bin. I think he'd approve.

does your copy look like this?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/16/JRnovel.JPG/220px-JRnovel.JPG

I'm about 2/5 through Foucault's Pendulum and it's fantastic so far, but only understanding about one in every fifty references, which has spawned excessive purchasing of occult texts – precisely what he's parodying.

Just looking through recent purchases and there's a copy of The Tipping Point in there - why?

xp no mine is the penguin edition

I forgot to mention that the recognitions has characters called recktall brown and agnes deigh

i bet i have that Gaddis book, gotta excavate

as soon as you brought it up i could see that cover

https://biblioklept.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/img_1392.jpeg?w=739
or
http://simania.co.il/bookimages/covers70/709914.jpg

former

my favourite gaddis that I have is my copy of a frolic of his own because it does this on the spine

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32863603/2016-06-27%2021.51.47.jpg

and also had this newspaper cutout inside

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32863603/2016-06-27%2021.52.34.jpg

My copy of JR is part of a uniform Penguin paperback 1980s edition along with recogs and carpenter's gothic (can't seem to find the JR, this is the CG)

http://www.fedpo.com/images/CarpentersGothic/01CarpentersGothic.jpg

Ward, I think you might have been the one who advised me to start w CG when I asked which

Is that in fact or plausibly a good place to start (anybody)?

my CG is a bright red picador with a kinda cartoonish picture on the front. I'm a bit annoyed I never picked up agape agape when I used to see it around - curiously that is also the title of the abandoned book of one of the tortured compromised artist types in JR

forgot to mention in my roundup that I've listened to a load of stephen king audiobooks at work - I've decided this is the best way to experience this writer and for all his faults I do enjoy them especially the stories where he lets his nastier bachman side out. The new one though, third in his (lol) "recession trilogy" is a damp squib and I am really sick of his jive-talking blacks and baby-talking women atp

xpost to dow

It's one of his shortest, if nothing else - not a particularly 'difficult' book certainly, in comparison w/ any of the thicker ones, though has much the same treatment of dialogue and scene transitioning as JR. There's also a fairly broad and angry attack on creationism iirc (it's been maybe 25 years since I read it - and haven't read agape agape) - as always with Gaddis, there's a lot of humour, too.

BTW,that's Gaddis on the right in this very brief scene from the cult movie Ganja and Hess (a bit like Graham Greene's cameo in Day for Night)

http://williamgaddis.org/imagesother/filmganja3a.jpg

loved the recognitions. been keeping an eye out for jr...

a bit like Graham Greene's cameo in Day for Night

what! never noticed this... did spot lawrence durrell as a pub habitue in the film version of sir henry at rawlinson end, though.

few hundred pages into Master of the Senate. good stuff.

yeah. caro takes his reader on a tour of senate history that really encapsulates how maddening and useless it is about 98% of the time, and how critically important it can be the other 2%. it could be lifted out as an extended essay and taught in high schools, if high school students could ever be induced to care about history or politics.

Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay: 'Panty' - first book published by a very interesting-looking new feminist translated-fiction press from the UK. I just wish this first book was more promising, because it alternately annoyed and bored me.

György Dalos: 'The Circumcision' - Hungarian Jewish black comedy set in 1955 about a 12yo boy whose single mum goes to a Jews for Christ church and who is very trepidatious about his long overdue circumcision; very good stuff

Wolf In White Van - OMG this book!

Its good innit

I feel bad about writing off Mavis Gallant's Home Truths as New Yorker lyrical realism: I mean, it is, but its irony is more tangled and barbed than I initially recognized, and the fluidity with which Gallant handles time and memory within the short story form reminds me of Alice Munro. I'm now reading book 5 of Knausgaard's My Struggle and starting a NYRB collection of Eileen Chang's early stories and novellas, Live in a Fallen City.

*Love in a Fallen City, that is

I'm nearly finished with Symposium, Muriel Spark. After a somewhat slow start getting the characters sorted, it is up to her usual standard for late career Dame Muriel. I am noticing more that she started to lean more heavily on criminality as the spur for the action in her books as the decades passed, in contrast to the less gaudy, but more relatable character flaws at the center of her earlier works.

Story of the Stone - very funny, very charming - love the little poems, aim to memorize them and break out into recital

Read it long ago as Dream of the Red Chamber, loved how the short chapters were eventually tightened into a---well won't spoil it now---can't find an image of the cover, maybe cos can't quite picture it--red and yellow panels, line drawings of figures?--- so can't figure out translation.

the hard life: an exegesis of squalor by flann o'brien. only one of his i've never read before. not quite on the level of my memory of his others, but still worth the read.

The Hard Life isn't so experimental or wildly imaginative as the others, but it is a good satire and has the true Flann O'Brien touch. I rate it above The Dalkey Archive and The Poor Mouth, both of which I like quite well enough.

I've started Eugene Thacker's In the Dust of this Planet. It's ostensibly a treatise on the overlap between horror and philosophy, and follows a path into the horror of the unknowable, via black metal, Schopenhauer, Lovecraft, mysticism and various representations of the unknowable in art and literature (Danielewski, Beckett etc). I've not read much 'academic' literature in the last few years and I'd forgotten how elliptical and dry the style can be but it's intriguing enough.

Its all crisis in masculinity week. Strindberg's The Defence of a Madman is all delirium w/this account of a marriage as psychological abuse, torment, diseased jealousies and misogyny. His prose is amazing, full of speed and modernity.

Reading this in tandem with Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo.

been thinking of seeking out a copy of the new edition of that strindberg. supposed to closer to what he originally intended publishing, right? copy i read was a sixties reworking of an earlier translation, but even so: great (if overwrought) writing. need to reread inferno again sometime too.

Yeah the new ed is a restored text (iirc the prev translation was based on a cut edition). Strindberg's biographer wrote a review for the TLS but I can't find it right now.

Is that the sea creature cover version?

Yes James.

I feel bad about writing off Mavis Gallant's Home Truths as New Yorker lyrical realism: I mean, it is, but its irony is more tangled and barbed than I initially recognized, and the fluidity with which Gallant handles time and memory within the short story form reminds me of Alice Munro.

― one way street, Thursday, June 30, 2016 2:32 PM (2 days ago)

What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?

I don’t know about “ever,” but the most recent would be Mavis Gallant’s “Paris Stories,” because if I’d not been given it I would have continued under the misapprehension that she wrote neat New Yorker-type stories, rather than these very strange, convoluted but weirdly perfect — and often sprawling — miniatures.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/books/review/geoff-dyer-by-the-book.html?ribbon-ad-idx=4&rref=books&module=Ribbon&version=origin®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Books&pgtype=article

I would have continued under the misapprehension that she wrote neat New Yorker-type stories
This kind of thing seems to happen a lot, an easy way to avoid adding to the already on-the-verge-of-toppling To Read pile.

I've never read the new yorker but I think I have a good idea of what people mean by "neat new yorker type stories"; which one writer would you say most typifies this style? I ask because I'm reading up in the old hotel at the moment and loving it, would this be included pejoratively in that category (I know he wrote for the ny obv)

cadenza continues to delight btw

Ha, that is sitting near the top of the To Read pile. Can you explain to me the purpose of the dentist putting the pieces of the broken (coffee?) cup into his mouth, is it just to keep his mouth in a certain position with something else sets firm?

I'm giving Motherless Brooklyn a run for the money. First chapter was extremely mannered, but considering the main character and narrator has Tourette's, allowances must be made and the style seems well-justified. iow, it works even though in most circumstances it would grate horribly.

xp

I cannot

I guess I took it as temporary ad hoc dentures but it isn't explained (so far) or really mentioned again after a while

i did not enjoy Motherless Brooklyn when i read it.

Updike would be one example of a past New Yorker house style that people might avoid when reading similar stories in the New Yorker not written by him. I am not an Updike fan.

(but honestly there aren't any magazines in the U.S. that have published as much stuff worth reading as The New Yorker. over the years. wanted to steal my dad's 50's collection when i was over at his place not long ago. so much cool stuff in that.)

Most of what I know about it comes from reading (about) barthelme & it sounded pretty cool to me

I'm reading Jean Stafford and her stories strike me as classic New Yorker.

New Yorker short story writers - Updike, yes, also John Cheever, James Thurber and Salinger. William Maxwell?

with Motherless Brooklyn i just felt like i could have been reading a great crime novel by a great crime writer. instead of Motherless Brooklyn. and there are a million great crime novels i haven't read.

it makes me think of my fancy pizza analogy. smart young people open up a fancy pizza place and throw all kinds of fancy stuff on top of their pizza but they don't always know how to make a good regular pizza. all the artisanal pepperoni in the world can't save a bad crust. if you understand the mechanics of genre writing when you do your pomo pastiche "take" or "spin" then i can hang with you. i get the impression that people think it's easy. to do crime. or sci-fi. or whatever. it takes practice!

ann beattie. for the new yorker. tons of imitators.

does anyone read kay boyle much anymore? probably not so much.

1940-1949

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/55_Short_Stories_from_the_New_Yorker

calisher has been written about in recent years. as someone forgotten who should be remembered.

tempted to seek out all the people on that list who are without Wiki entries....

this is a good old list of stories too:

https://www.buffalolib.org/vufind/Record/56738/TOC

Thurber kind of atypical.

in all fairness, renata adler is REALLY not e.l. doctorow. you know?

thanks B-) always assumed I would love Beattie and Cheever, they were on barthelme's list I think

Magazines though lol I'm not a fuckin millionaire

i loved those early beattie collections a ton. haven't read them in years. and cheever kills updike.

I'm a big fan of the film the swimmer

cheever has a lot to answer for, but it wasn't his fault. any more than it was john o'hara's fault or richard yates' fault. best to just blame chekhov.

i was actually reading chekhov last night. change the names and do a little editing on one story i read and you have a dandy raymond carver gem.

feel like any distinctive writer could end up being a model for mediocre ones, but they shouldn't be answerable

you can definitely make a living with the template of: sad man/wait, is that something good on the horizon?/i remember something good that happened once!/ah, no, it wasn't a good thing after all/sad man.

"but they shouldn't be answerable"

ha, yeah, just kidding. unless it's ayn rand maybe....

well ayn was distinctive and mediocre...

Cheever was a deeply strange writer, a fabulist, not at all like Updike.

I love Beattie too and went she published that collection a few years ago it never left my nightstand. She's a minor writer though.

went=when

Minimum distinction eh

The best pomo detective novel is possibly Cameron McCabe's the face on the cutting room floor, which was McCabe/Bornemann's first book. Postmodernism is kinda redundant in detective fiction, since it is itself a postmodern genre in the way it conceals or inverts key plot machanisms in an almost Raymond-rousellian way.

Minimum distinction eh

I got totally disgusted w NY fiction around 2010. I think, and skipped it for maybe a year, still reading the non. But around 2012, maybe '13, seemed like they went on a roll, at least with non-US writers (maybe not Oates' stuff, but def. cont. to incl Munro). Haven't read the magazine much at all in the past year or so, sticking to long-neglected longforms.

I greatly enjoyed xpost Jean Stafford's novels Boston Adventure and The Mountain Lion, but never read her short stories. A lot of writers are better writing shorter, but not all. Want to see for myself, though bracing for the one based on her surgery or surgeries, after Robert Lowell, maybe in one of his manias, broke her nose. Treatment turned out to be tricky, and then he broke it again (that last part may not be in the story).

Beattie a minor writer with a huge influence on later north american short story writers. i'd say the same about oates too probably. and both are new yorker babies.

A lot of writers are better writing shorter, but not all. Want to see for myself, though bracing for the one based on her surgery or surgeries, after Robert Lowell, maybe in one of his manias, broke her nose. Treatment turned out to be tricky, and then he broke it again (that last part may not be in the story).

About to read that one!

I enjoyed The Mountain Lion too. I've recommended it to many people.

(lorrie moore kinda the new yorker love child of ann and joyce...)

When I talk about NYer lyrical realism, that's mostly shorthand for Updike and his ilk; of course, the NYer published many wonderful and deeply strange writers too (Nabokov, Shirley Jackson, Barthelme, Gallant, Cortazar, Bolaño, Elizabeth Bishop, Cheever in his more perverse stories, etc.).

btw, lorrie moore otm with "watercolors of the highest order" :

"A spareness of prose style that in other writers can glibly falsify and flatten human nature Beattie has always used to complicated effect. No other writer manages such warmth and coolness simultaneously. In her work there are no loud noises or bright colors; there is little overt grief, rage, gloom or giddiness. Hers is a palette of compassionately wielded pastels, and her stories are watercolors of the highest order. Do the characters sometimes seem similar from story to story? The same can be said of every short-story writer who ever lived. Does the imaginative range seem limited? It is the same limited range Americans are so fond of calling Chekhovian. Is every new story here one for the ages?"

haw haw

i got that, one way street. everyone knows what the cliche new yorker story type is. without giving specific examples.

oh, i didn't finish the quote there...

"Is every new story here one for the ages? With a book this generous from a writer this gifted, we would be vulgar to ask."

vulgar, i tell you! so don't ask!

i don't think i'm a huge fan, but tao lin definitely a fan of a lot of my back in the day short fiction jams. amy hempel reprazent!

https://taolinscontemporaryshortstoryclassatsarahlawrence.wordpress.com/syllabus/

his thing on minimalism/k-mart realism/lyrical realism backlashes is fun. i wish i could read that Bell Harper's piece right now but i think i have to subscribe to Harper's to read it.

http://observer.com/2011/04/does-the-novel-have-a-future-the-answer-is-in-this-essay/

are those = dirty realism, too?