A Model TrILBY; or, What Are You Reading Now, Winter 2016/17

A successor to The Decline and Fall 2016 of gILBert the fILBert: What Are You Reading Now?

Read that Laurie Penny sci-fi novella, 's all right. Now reading Arendt on Socrates.

lol you couldn't have waited one day

as 2017 comes into view, I'm reading don quixote and john berryman's recovery. we'll see how the year goes.

Time waits for no one, wins
And it won't wait for ILB

Oliver Twist

wins what don quixote translation are you reading? i am waiting on tobias smollett's to come in the mail. (i've read edith grossman, which was good as far as i can tell but man i really like warty 18th century translations and their uh often creative fealty to the mother text.)

Bits of a load of turn of the 80s Music Press that my brother had in attic. Largely NMEs. But not going to have time to do them justice. Wish I could take them with me.

The Naked Woman by Desmond Morris. He goes over the female form head to toe in ja revised update of an earlier work which had covered both genders.

Another Side of Bob Dylan by Victor Maymudes. One time Dylan tour manager has book constructed post humously by his son from a set of tapes he'd dictated.

New Ugly Things arrived in Rough Trade on Thursday. Have looked through and read some reviews.
Wish they'd used some contrast colour on the cover is the one quibble I'd have so far.
Also odd that Kings of The Wild Frontier gets reviewed in there, or maybe not.

xp I'm reading the ormsby (not gonna lie, this is down to it being the best-looking ebook ed I could get for pennies); it's great so far, I've read that it has been criticised for being too faithful to the point of confusing syntax but I'm not getting that at all

I've spent the break reading art books. I read:

Marianne Barrucand and Achim Bednorz - Moorish Architecture in Andalusia
Ernst van de Wetering - Rembrandt: The Painter Thinking
Michelangelo Muraro and Paolo Marton - Venetian Villas
Erwin Panofsky - Perspective as Symbolic Form
Peter Humfrey - Titian

Also Maurice Merleau-Ponty's amazing essay "Eye and Mind", which has convinced me that I need to be reading MMP this coming year.

Speaking of naked women, am reading Kelley Swain's The Naked Muse, a poet/science-writer's memoir of being a nude artist's model: very good
Also, as referred to on redshifted science books thread, Ed Yong: I Contain Multitudes, fascinating book on the microbiome

happy new year, ilb :)

i'm reading

Rick Perlstein - Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

which tells the story of how the Republican Party became conservative. while thickly descriptive, the pacing feels breakneck and boy does the writing go down smooth, making for a thrilling + highly addictive read. looking forward to Perlst's Nixon and Reagan books

Anyone here read David Carr's The Year of the Gun and can say it's qualitatively better fhan just reading the shorter magazine feature version?

It's not.

So toward the end of the previous What Are You Reading I was thanking everybody who told me to read The Last Samurai, and we were raising a glass for that and Lightning Bolts and their author and I just "finished" TLS but sure I'm not done with it it, however on first read I eventually felt like I was attending A Thousand And One Night Schools, being tested like a samurai okay, but also it's Seekers vs. sheeple like couldn't Red go into counselling isn't that an obvious option is his crusading wife really so clueless also lots of convenient coincidences and also minute descriptions of physical settings are not always of any discernible point other than Reading Assignments as a point of discipline maybe, for the reader submitting to such but speaking of Red omg, wish we could have gotten to him sooner anyway I probably shouldn't have devoured so much of it so quickly during the last third but did get hooked and will re-read at least some of it thanks again.

And your hunch that you would like it seems pretty plausible, Scott (I greatly enjoyed most of it despite some reservations so far).

am a third of the way into döblin's berlin alexanderplatz in jolas' near contemporary translation: more or less renders the prose into 30s americanese but reads nicely imo (would seem whoever did the subtitles for the fassbinder adaptation must have relied heavily on this, cos there have been a fair number of déjà vu moments)

That is getting a new Michael Hoffman translation this year, which i intend to use as my intro

yeah, i'd definitely be interested in reading other translations of this. there was also an eighties penguin with a newer translation (think it has an otto dix painting on the cover) that i see around occasionally.

reading the slaughterhouse section i kept having visual flashbacks to franju's blood of the beasts documentary :-/

I read "The Treasure" by Selma Lagerlöf, 1904, which is equal parts ghost story, Icelandic saga and feminist fairy tale. V brief, vg.

Bruce Springsteen, BORN TO RUN

As usual I'm reading several books at once.

I'm making my way slowly through Adorno's Minima Moralia, re-reading constantly but still feeling like I'll have to go back through the whole thing ... it's strenuous but enjoyable.

Trying to get some context for Adorno, I read Peter Stirk's Critical Theory, Politics and Society: An Introduction -- a very dry survey, but more or less what I needed, and useful for ideas for further reading.

I'm about 200 pages into the first fat volume of Outlaws of the Marsh (Shapiro translation). It's fantastically entertaining, though I can't keep track of all the characters. It's startling to encounter every 1970s kung fu movie trope already fully formed in a 14th century text. I thought the episodic structure might be boring, but I'm finding it easy to put down and pick up again.

After enjoying a number of early 20th century books on jujutsu, I'm working on Gracie and Danaher's 2003 Mastering Jujitsu. Surprisingly, it starts with a thorough and well-researched historical survey, though most of the book is about modern MMA tactics and techniques. In terms of organization and thoroughness, it's one of the better practical martial arts texts I've seen. The publisher, Human Kinetics, is a good source for professionally-oriented works on sports and fitness.

Just read and *adored* The Bookshop, following discussion in previous thread. Now starting Month in the Country, which is also delightful. Many thanks, I would never have picked either up otherwise.

That is getting a new Michael Hoffman translation this year

o wau

sometimes i find myself just out and about, whatever, thinking, oh poor franz biberkopf

Franz Biberkopf ist schon wieder da!

Wonderful Wonderful Times - Elfriede Jelinek
No Quarter: The Three Lives of Jimmy Page - Martin Power

The Glass Key - Hammett

Chuck - I think the magazine version is sufficient

I recently read Sam Quinones' Dreamland, and in retrospect would have rather just read a magazine version. So much repetition...

i really enjoyed it but yeah, it did need a good edit. was willing to forgive him tho - he was a bit overly happy with his theories and repeated them a lot, but they were good theories and his frame for the book was all quite nice. i'd blame the editor.

I enjoyed it too and learned a lot, but I thought he / the editors could have supposed that some stories, like how the Xalisco Boys ran their show, were well-established after being told once or twice, instead of being repeated again and again. I also didn't understand what the divisions into parts signified. But yeah, those are editing rather than journalism choices.

it definitely is too long. also he repeats the pizza comparison about 20 times. to me the divisions were meant to split the book into diff parts of america i guess, and the two forms of drug addiction converging. but prob at some point that split becomes meaningless.

Timothy Egan's The Big Burn, seems in some ways a thematic as well as chronological prequel to his National Book Award-winning The Worst Hard Time, about the Dust Bowl.This is about the or a great natural and man-made/-contributing disaster of 1910, resulting from and in certain shifts/resistance, but subtitle The Fire That Saved America is of course optimistic and not at all suggested by the author. "Fire makes its own weather," and its own culture, apparently. Cuts and burns through the dry forest of facts just so.

Getting to the end of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. If I'd been informed beforehand that it was basically torture porn I wouldn't have started. However if you loved the conceited bright young things of A Secret History and are a fan of extremely sordid real (not real) life trauma stories then run don't walk to your nearest bookshop to get this.

i'm juggling a few things at the moment, including:

john burnside: something like happy (read a story of his over xmas and bought this, i like it so far, like a more reflective carver)
livia llewellyn - furnace (i read a recommendation of this, it's horror, a bit genre maybe and the stories are quite lurid and disgusting but some of the writing is nice)
jon mcgregor - this isn't the sort of thing that happens to someone like you (i like some of the stories in this, others are a bit too deliberately ordinary)

Dance of Days the book on punk in Washington DC. Got as far as the forming of Minor Threat as I traveled yesterday.
Birthday present from my brother.

Was that mention of Biberkopf a few messages back the same character from Berlin, Alexanderplatz that Chris Bohn took his pen name from? Saw bits of the TV version when it was on in the 80s and have wanted to rewatch it since. Might read it now.

Finished SPQR by Mary Beard, those Romans sure were wacky. Engaging and of course lots of stuff I didn't know one thing about but it felt a bit slight in a way, would like to read a more academic work by her maybe.
The Name of the Rose - going down easy, it's right up my alley, RIP Umberto Eco
Letters from Russia, Custine - slow and sporadic going but dude's a trip
New Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare - I'm on the introductory essay, tempted to just try to read the canon cover to cover

Was that mention of Biberkopf a few messages back the same character from Berlin, Alexanderplatz that Chris Bohn took his pen name from?

right, couldn't find the first post when I was looking at it on my phone. So may need to read this new translation, or is the older one better?

Not sure if I'd be up for hours of watching with subtitles. I tend to be doing a couple of things at the same time these days so having to keep up with subtitles and sew or something has been a problem. meant that I couldn't get as into the Americans as I might have done otherwise since kept getting hit with having to read translations from the Russian.
But since I only caught part of the Channel 4 showing I would really like to rewatch the tv series. I think I missed the first episodes but what I saw I enjoyed.

Finally reading Pale Fire by Nabokov, loving every minute of it.

Also dipping into Electric Light by Seamus Heaney and Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel.

Jean-Henri Fabre's The Life of the Grasshopper. More sex and sadism than an Ian Fleming novel.

Erwin Panofsky's Early Netherlandish Painting

I'm enjoying it a lot, but I can't imagine how anyone read it before Google Image Search. The black and white plates are totally inadequate to get a sense of these pieces, and many pieces with extensive discussion aren't even reproduced. What is a reader in 1953 supposed to get out of an unillustrated description of an obscure crucifixion panel? Maybe you're just supposed to know it all already. At least there isn't too much untranslated Latin. Panofsky's a great writer, but this book is very slow-moving and closely reasoned, moreso than anything else I've read of his. He doesn't take any shortcuts, which I don't mind, even if I'm currently in a third chapter on pre-Eyckian book illumination. Jan van Eyck is definitely the protagonist. Everything so far seems to be preparing the stage for him.

Erwin Panofsky's Early Netherlandish Painting

"― jmm, Sunday, January 8, 2017 3:15 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink"

I highly recommend this book if you can afford it or find it in a library - my dad has a copy and its easily the nicest art book I've ever seen.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51uBemSstcL._SX258_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I'm enjoying it a lot, but I can't imagine how anyone read it before Google Image Search.

This was what it was like reading Susan Sontag's 'On Photography'. The times when I was reading it on a bus, away from a computer, were not helpful.

I recently took another break from Robert Gordon's "The Rise and Fall of American Growth" to read "Wolf in White Van" by John Darnielle. I had a cross-country airplane trip to look forward to, which is usually my best opportunity for sustained, uninterrupted reading time. I read half the book on the way over, and the other half on the way back. I can relate to the narrator's immersion in DIY fantasy world role-playing and text-based adventures. I'm old enough to remember older brothers of friends who played games like ZORK on primitive PCs, though not quite old enough to have played them myself. I never heard of a play-by-mail game - I suspect the author may have invented the concept. It is a good fit for a bookish and (understandably) anti-social character, and it resonates in faintly symbolic ways with the book's other theme of living with the consequences of a violently self-destructive adolescent choice. Although the narrator at one point claims to hate mysteries (contrasting them unfavorably with his favored genres of pulp fantasy and sci-fi) the book reads like a mystery - not a whodunit, but a whydunit. And instead of dropping hints to lead up to the big reveal, the narrator patiently closes off possible explanations. The reader can't help but try to figure out why the narrator did what he did, but the book doesn't really provide much assistance there. Rather it seems to be a sort of quiet celebration of survival, with not thinking about the why perhaps being part of an essential coping mechanism.

Play by mail games definitely existed. I rember all the ads for them in old issues of dragon and white dwarf, and puzzling over who had both the patience and $ to play them.
http://www.tomeoftreasures.com/research_forums/crasimoffsworld.jpg
http://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/DFQAAOSwnDZT~5Pi/s-l300.jpg

Those covers go with the scenes, settings, environments in the novel:reduced and reductive, on the face of it, but still with enough detail, muscles in the line drawings etc., you can tell life goes on there somewhere. somehow, and the subsistence level, low-grade fever is easy to relate to when you're a teen (for instance), so let's go inside. Something about the desert just under and between the Southern California green, but also the grassier Midwestern flats in the game and its real life equivalent and the hospital room ceiling and the nickel bags and paperbacks and groping of high school parking lot, the house he still lives in and the front yard and the walk to the store and good talk with two lost stoners of the present day. You nailed a lot more of it, o.nate. John D.'s got a new book out next month.

@TriciaLockwood
remembering a dude I met in Norway who wrote a book about "a race of immortal superheroes whose job it was to make everything more calm"

@TriciaLockwood
when an american writes a calm book it's like Stoner or something & makes people wanna cut their hands off. get with the norwegians on this

Review copies of John D's new book come in specially-made VHS covers, which fits its theme, and I wish I could get hold of one :(

i just read 'In a Grove' by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. i've never seen Rashomon. re-read it a few times trying to puzzle together the opposing accounts, but getting confused about who is wearing a blue kimono ~,~

The film's no clearer 8)

Was also remade set in the West and starred William Shatner and that's worth a look too.

George Eliot - Felix Holt: The Radical

The Alteration - Kingsley Amis (delighted by the unexpected reference to The Man in the High Castle)
Euro Gothic: Classics of Continental Horror Cinema - Jonathan Rigby

Vol. 1 of LoA's Women Crime Writers, discussed in an earlier ILB thread

It's striking how different some of these novels are from their film versions, especially Dorothy R.Hughes' In a Lonely Place, which shares little except its title with the Bogart movie. Vera Caspery's Laura is the best of the novels in this volume and also the most similar to its film adaptation.

I found Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's The Blank Wall oddly disturbing, not because of its standard thriller plot, but because of the way the protagonist's dependency/learned helplessness/pretty-little-headedness kept compounding its menace. There are some feminist ideas in the novel, but they are mostly expressed through an image of 1947 female consciousness that felt weirdly archaic. In the (first) film version, The Reckless Moment, Joan Bennett was much tougher and more formidable, and it is better than the book for that reason, but points to Holding for generating suspense with the opposite of the usual clever, resolute heroine.

Read The Blank Wall a couple of years ago - it felt very anticipatory of Patricia Highsmith's work, and also Devil Take the Blue-tail Fly by John Franklin Bardin, so I guess I took the central character's 'learned helplessness' as symptomatic of a certain mental fragility on her part, which of course is conducive to suspense.

read the play 'I never sang for my father' yesterday, p good, reminded me a lot of 'the subject was roses' but w the melodrama a lil more reigned in, I enjoy these mid-60s era dysfunctional/confessional family dramas

The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowenstarts with one about a bachelor boarder, who pays extra for home-style comforts, which incl. very close attention by females across the breakfast table; the simple male mind thinks they all want to marry him (well maybe not the venerable Aunt Willoughby, maybe) and senses as much as he is able--in the familiar, always edgey morning drills---the shifting within the pecking order, the political significance of their comments and questions for him, comments and ripostes for each other among them. Just a few pages---he has to eat fast, leave for work---but already, in her late teens or early 20s, she's killing it.
Maybe a little too imagery-happy in the one about the antsy young unmarried teacher who impulsively invites her wary hungry teen girl students to tea, but only at the beginning, which does crank things up for the spring fever spin.
These could be the beginnings of good novels, ditto the one about the vicar and his disconcertingly aspiring benefactor, while "The Confidante" and "Requiescat" could be satisfying endings (could also see all of these as plays). This last is the most complex so far, as a man receives a letter requesting help with "some papers" from the recently widowed wife of someone who was apparently more than a friend. He dreads and feels compelled, by duty and rivalry, to go see her; she apologizes for demoting him---"I tried to play the game." He leads and leaves her to this, then responds in several ways, changing masks and letting them slip a little.

Think all these so far are from her first collection, Encounters, published in 1923 (B. b. 1899).

Did you buy that book or take out of the library?

The Alteration - Kingsley Amis (delighted by the unexpected reference to The Man in the High Castle)

This is a very underrated book, I reckon. It was referenced a lot in the book I just finished, James Gleick's 'Time Travel: A History', which was an enjoyable wander through the literary/cinematic history, philosophy and physics of time travelling.

Kraftwerk Publikation which I just found today in a sale.
Didn't remember having heard about it before at the time but it looks like it covers the full history so I thought I'd grab it.

Still finishing taht Other side of Bob Dylan by Victor Maymudes.

Then was going to go through the memoir of the Flying Nun label head which turned up as 2 for £5 in FOPP over Xmas.

still got 100 or so pages of Ford Maddox ford's March of Literature to finish.
JUst found out taht library has changed policy and you can now get 12 books out at the same time which sounds a bit excessive, so I don't quite get why they went up from 6.

About 1/2 way through Dance of Days on the DC punk scene too. Which was a birthday present from my brother.

I hadn't finished a book in a few months so i read through A Brief History of Portable Literature by Vila-Matas -- 86 pages. It was OK. I didn't know all of the historical figures, and didn't get half of the jokes.

Library book club book this month was a gothic horror novel by a local author. Purple prose (I don't want to see the phrase "Dawn's golden fingers" except in translations of ancient Greek), way too many characters, too much setup. didn't get to page 100.

Now I'm halfway through Candide, another shorty.

I have been crawling and clawing my way past the 1000 page mark of The Man Without Qualities.

atm, Walter and Clarisse keep threatening to do something interesting, but can't seem to get the hang of it. Ulrich has been gabbling a lot to his sister and he seems like an awful sad sack now, whose mind shuffles along and trips itself like a person wearing shoes whose laces have been tied to each other. Everyone is impossibly high-flown and ineffectual. Makes for tough sledding to read about them.

sounds like ilx

fewer zings

"
The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowenstarts with one about a bachelor boarder, who pays extra for home-style comforts, which incl. very close attention by females across the breakfast table; the simple male mind thinks they all want to marry him (well maybe not the venerable Aunt Willoughby, maybe) and senses as much as he is able--in the familiar, always edgey morning drills---the shifting within the pecking order, the political significance of their comments and questions for him, comments and ripostes for each other among them. Just a few pages---he has to eat fast, leave for work---but already, in her late teens or early 20s, she's killing it.
Maybe a little too imagery-happy in the one about the antsy young unmarried teacher who impulsively invites her wary hungry teen girl students to tea, but only at the beginning, which does crank things up for the spring fever spin.
These could be the beginnings of good novels, ditto the one about the vicar and his disconcertingly aspiring benefactor, while "The Confidante" and "Requiescat" could be satisfying endings (could also see all of these as plays). This last is the most complex so far, as a man receives a letter requesting help with "some papers" from the recently widowed wife of someone who was apparently more than a friend. He dreads and feels compelled, by duty and rivalry, to go see her; she apologizes for demoting him---"I tried to play the game." He leads and leaves her to this, then responds in several ways, changing masks and letting them slip a little.

― dow, Wednesday, January 11, 2017 6:44 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink"

Oddly enough I bought the collected stories a few years ago, read all the stories you described here but no more, then sort of forgot about it except for reading a story I saw a reference to somewhere recently. I must go back to them!

Believe Eudora Welty liked every one of the stories. I know the WWII stories are the most famous, such as the ones from Ivy Gripped The Steps

There was a version of the Collected Stories which led with an introduction by Angus Wilson. One with a green, kind of boring cover. Current version in the US with the nice painting lists the Angus Wilson intro in the TOC but it has in fact gone missing.

Mine has an Angus Wilson introduction (boring cover but its navy blue). Were you looking for it? I'm sure I could take some photos and upload it somewhere, its only a few pages long.

Thanks, but I read it recently in a library copy so no need right now. Not sure exactly why its absence irks me. Maybe I am missing the brick and mortar bookstore where I bought his Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.

Also just remembering that somewhere I have the intro she wrote herself to Ivy Gripped the Steps and Other Stories.

I'm reading the navy blue doorstop edition with Angus Wilson's intro, but you're not missing much without that. Makes a few good points I guess but he's very hats-off to what he beholds as her robust country heiress grace, Conservative but fair-minded (also claims she's better than Woolf etc). But she seems to be full of mischief from the get-go, initially in a way maybe fairly familiar to yer more sophisticated sort of magazine readers, but increasingly pushing against and around gender norms, as female characters, especially (but not only) test power factors and divine secret codicils in their heritage---along with the money and status, always useful, and you can't get away from any of the expectations and possibilities; even if you don't have much yourself, you're downwind of Someone who does. Also, you might be a good little wife secretly lost, re-entering the clutches of the Helper (as she says her friends on the Continent call her), for instance.
Wonder what Woolf, Mansfield, Jane Bowles thought of her? Wonder what DH Lawrence thought, for that matter---prob mixed emotions: here's a "secret" sister, but an suavely uppity woman too.

So far the stories are still pretty short, brief encounters, hit and run. See you soon.

Michael Moorcock: My Experiences in the Third World War And Other Stories -- only a few in, but the first four stories, linked under the book's title, about a Russian spy in the lead-up to and early days of a WW3, are very nice and significantly less pulpy than a lot of the Moorcock I've read.

I like his description in the intro of how his huge volume of 1960s/70s books were "written quickly, but not cynically" (ie Elric in 9 days, apparently)

Finished The Count of Montecristo two days ago. It's hard to imagine that I'll be reading a better book this year.

Now I'm halfway Thomas Olde Heuvelt's HEX, a silly Dutch horror novel about a small village and its very own 300-year old witch.

Blue Boy by Jean Giono; fictionalised autobiog, swelling dripping fecund nature-humans with the real world clearly there but dreamily unacknowledged. Very Giono, in other words. I like it.

Michael Moorcock: My Experiences in the Third World War And Other Stories

is this the new Gollancz collection? (It looks like there was a previous collection w the same title)

God, I read Count of Monte Cristo last summer, Robin Buss translation -- it really is the best thing

Cervantes - Don Quixote. Now onto Part 2, see you next month :-)

did you dudes reading the count of monte cristo do abridged editions or did you go the whole hog?

Philip S. Foner - History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. 1: From Colonial Times to the Founding of the American Federation of Labor

sweet

Sciatica - I read the Robin Buss Penguin translation, which is unabridged and really easy to read, if not to hold.

Not sure how an abridged version could work - even at the length it is, there's very little filler. Even the wet romantic leads get some really good bits, and the off-topic chapters about Italian bandits fun - it never drags. There's no Tolstoy-style "...and now I'm going to do a short essay about love/betrayal/tractors before we get back to the story. It's ALL plot and ridiculousness and jaw-dropping twists. Just got 1200 pages.

God I should proofread before I post but you get the idea.

i should learn to read period since i see you mentioned the edition in your original post

also a little googling shows the abridgements to be pretty severe -- looks like maybe 400 pages total in an old penguin paperback

damn you for getting me excited about another long-ass old-ass book

Michael Moorcock: My Experiences in the Third World War And Other Stories

is this the new Gollancz collection? (It looks like there was a previous collection w the same title)

― Οὖτις, Saturday, 14 January 2017 2:44 AM (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, part of the supposedly definitive huge new moorcock collection they have been doing for the last couple of years. I also got Von Bek and another collection, The Brothel in Rosenstrasse

Spots

It's amazing, be excited! I managed it in 6 weeks, as a very slow reader, which is... not too bad? The only challenge is the length, it's super easy to read. NB Buss version is the way to go - I read a few chapters alongside the original uncredited version, which is beautiful but misses the jokes and the fruitiness.

Spots = autocorrect for xpost

ah yeah I don't bother with a lot of Gollancz stuff. Von Bek books are ok, nothing special. Haven't read the Brothel in Rosenstrasse.

xp

I got the Von Bek because it had an interesting-sounding mitteleuropa thing going on; not sure how that will square with all the Eternal Champion! stuff

Passably imo

Basically everything Chuck said re: Monte Cristo. You should definitely read an unabridged version.

You might want to make a list of the characters and their relationships, especially if you take more than a few weeks to get through the book. Wikipedia has a nice diagram, but it contains massive spoilers.

I finished the novel in about 2 weeks, but that included several days of getting up at six to get another 50 pages in before breakfast. I feel bad for those poor newspaper readers who had to wait days or even weeks for the next installment.

I love that TWO of the arrows on that diagram are "poisons (but doesn't kill)".

I just finished The Ballad of Peckham Rye, not sure what to make of it.

Ballad of Peckham Rye has not aged well. The social norms it assumes have changed too drastically.

The Eye Listens by Paul Claudel, a collection of essays on art. His "Introduction to Dutch Painting" is lovely.

Reading He Died With His Eyes Open by Derek Raymond. I feel like I know Cook/Raymond because of various Iain Sinclair books and conversations, but this is the first thing I've actually read. It's great - fizzingly brutal, British noir, full of great dialogue and aphorisms (the 'Raymond' is a deliberate nod) and quite clearly a forerunner to the likes of David Peace and Gordon Burn.

Those derek raymonds are amazing, and get more brutal as the series goes on

I've heard Dora Suarez is kind of unreadable in its brutality. That true?

Pretty much. It is excellent writing but a truly horrible book.

Wikipedia: To Cook’s delight, the ensuing novel caused Dan Franklin, the publisher of its three predecessors, to vomit over his desk.

Reading film related stuff. Shusako Endo's Silence, William Carlos Williams' Paterson. And Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas, which isn't really film related, though I'm finally reading Bolaño because he got compared to Pablo Larrain. Everything's good.

judging by James Wood's comments and quotes here, Helen Gardner's books can be pretty strenuous, incl. for her, but worth it. Would esp. like to check what he says is her best (of the fiction, anyway): The Spare Room, an autobiographical novel about taking care of a dying friend, which turns out to be even more emotionally complex than expected. Anybody read her?
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/12/helen-garners-savage-self-scrutiny

Helen Garner, that is.

Her non-fiction is especially good--she's a big deal here in Australia. Another very good one of hers is Joe Cinque's Consolation, a true crime story about a group of friends/housemates who decided to murder one of their number with poison.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/26/Book_joe_cinques_consolation.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Cinque's_Consolation
It was just made into a poorly received film.

Her fiction is mostly from the 1970s/80s, and there is some good stuff there too. With that I'd start with 'The Children's Bach' or the two novellas 'Honour & Other People's Children'.
https://cdn.penguin.com.au/covers/original/9780143180043.jpg
https://cdn.penguin.com.au/covers/1440/9780143180050.jpg

shit, sorry for huge cover images

The bigger the cover image the better. Was in the Old Country Store side of a Cracker Barrel yesterday, unready for the LP versions of album covers familiar on CDs. wau

Thanks for Garner tips too, don't think Wood mentioned those.

Halfway through "The Master And The Margarita"; whats strikes me most is how much it's a novel about the elites, with ordinary workers (tram drivers, cabbies, maids) getting a few lines at most and clearly inhabiting a different universe. Not that I was naive about the Soviet Union's pretenses of a classless society, but it is striking how much this book would be seen as a critique of the bourgeoisie if it had been written in the wets.

Started Go Set a Watchman (it was a gift), I feel like I'm being amiably hectored by the Mark Twain character from that star trek episode.

"Blue Boy" is fantastic. Whenever I start a Giono I seem to think it's not as good as other Gionos I've read, and by the time I've finished it I think it's the best Giono I've read.

Now I'm reading "The Evenings" by Gerard Reve, (just) post-war Amsterdam business in a handsome new Pushkin Press edition whose cover is a clear nod to my beloved Amsterdam School architecture:

http://www.pushkinpress.com/wp-content/uploads/Evenings-.jpg

That's lovely - who drew it? (Got a bit of a Darwyn Cooke vibe about it, tho unlikely to be his work)

Oh, and reading The Jinx by Theophile Gautier

I'm not sure (and I've left the dust jacket at home for safe keeping) - will check later.

Would like to hear what you think Tim. It's odd to see this book finally getting an English release after all these years. I doubt there are many people over 40 in Holland who haven't read it, it's top ten canon stuff.

i picked that up in foyles yesterday cos of the beautiful cover.

I couldn't really hack Don Quixote tbh. I've started reading Knausgard's, "My Struggle Vol.1" instead and I'm enjoying it. It's like the best boring book I've ever read. Kind of amazing how he's able to remember such inconsequential childhood details so vividly.

What's up with that title though

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Quixote

I finished the 'official' portion of The Man Without Qualities and have decided against plunging onward into the posthumous papers atm. I toyed with the idea of Reading a quick Penelope Fitzgerald, either Blue Flower or else Gate of Angels, but I am in need of a non-fiction break and therefore picked up The Thirty Years War, C.V. Wedgewood last night.

Blue Flower is denser than some of her other stuff and might not have gone so quick anyway

Just blazed through Tana French's first two novels. I can see why she's a cult

and there's only six! I'm sitting on my hands re: the second one until I finish some other stuff

The person responsible for that Reve cover is apparently called Bill Bragg.

I couldn't really hack Don Quixote tbh. I've started reading Knausgard's, "My Struggle Vol.1" instead and I'm enjoying it. It's like the best boring book I've ever read. Kind of amazing how he's able to remember such inconsequential childhood details so vividly.

What's up with that title though

― An Alan Bennett Joint (Michael B), Tuesday, January 17, 2017 9:00 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the title is a reference to mein kampf (in norwegian the title is min kamp) and the 6th book in the series has a long section regarding adolf hitler

ilx discussion here

oh and also he admits he doesn't remember all the details vividly which is what makes it a novel rather than a memoir

At the moment I'm reading "A Month in the Country" by JL Carr, because of the enthusiasm shown on ILB and by Penelope Fitzgerald, its very good so far.

Recently finished:

Bird in a Cage by Frederick Dard
Moderato Cantabile by Marguerite Duras
What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

In Sunlight or in Shadow: Stories inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper

So far the standard quality mix of antholgies, but includes some really good ones. And also, sadly, Stephen king.

I've started reading Knausgard's, "My Struggle Vol.1" instead and I'm enjoying it. It's like the best boring book I've ever read.

yeah it's like a mix of trashy airport book memoir and deep melodic tedium - it's extremely unbalanced between these but i still enjoyed it. i thought it was a great holiday book, like easy fairly brainless reading. a lot of it felt like diet musil. there are plenty of stupid bits in it too tho, think i commented on those in the dedicated thread. i'll prob read the others at some point.

I've stayed away from Knausgard, mostly for a vague sense of the stuff described above. Then I heard him read from VS Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival, (a novel wretched with torpidity, and a book I really struggled with, but keep revisiting for some reason) and thought he explained (embodied?) the structural depression at the heart of it. It's made me think I should try the 'Struggle' books.

I loved that reading so much!

Intrigued by that, is this it?

yep. i listened in the bath one evening, it was like a bedtime story for adults, his voice is soporific and comforting, even discussing death and the power of the mundane.

Aye, that's the one Bateau. It's properly hypnotic (and really gets to the heart of what Naipaul was trying to do with parts of Engima. I think).

Thanks guys, definitely saving that one for tonight!

Eileen

Come on, Tracer.

:D

Thanks Tim, at first I was like 'Bill Bragg' must be a pseudonym, but apparently not, he has his own website and everything (must admit, the cover you posted looks to be amongst his most appealing work)

Pleasure! Havign looked at his site, I'd say I quite like his work in general but (like you) really enjoy this particular cover.

Eileen was a disappointing book

her new collection of shorts sounds interesting.

Yeah, I think I might get that from the library--she's obv. a talented writer, it's just that Eileen was not strong enough a novel to justify itself at its length. Would have been a better story or novella.

Now I'm reading "The Evenings" by Gerard Reve, (just) post-war Amsterdam business in a handsome new Pushkin Press edition whose cover is a clear nod to my beloved Amsterdam School architecture:

http://www.pushkinpress.com/wp-content/uploads/Evenings-.jpg

― Tim, Tuesday, 17 January 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Love that cover. Almost never buy books on Hardback but certainly considering it.

Let us know your thoughts - saw Lydia Davis saying v nice things about it, and it seems totally up my alley.

Eileen is a little repetitive - it loses the forward propulsion that it needs, and falls prey to the same "literary thriller" problem Richard Ford had with Canada, i.e. it keeps hinting at some earth-shattering thing that is going to happen but then it keeps not happening and you're like wtf I'm 2/3 of the way through this book now man. But I like the style of it, and living in this person's mind.

Robert Scholes, STRUCTURAL FABULATION: AN ESSAY ON FICTION OF THE FUTURE

Been reading some pieces from a collection of D.H. Lawrence's travel writing on Italy. I like the one about the trip he took from Sicily to Sardinia. Sardinia in the 1920s sounds remarkably un-modern. His account of the "inn" they stayed at there is guaranteed to raise shivers from even the most seasoned traveler.

I struggle with Lawrence as a novelist, but love his poetry and travel writing. I think Sea and Sardinia is my favourite of his travel books. I've been, but didn't make it up into the mountains. Next time I'll go see the mamuthones: https://mysardinianlife.com/2013/11/05/mystical-mamuthones-from-mamoiada/

Finished the Derek Raymond and oh god the sadness of it all. It made me go back to Sinclair (there's a Cook/Raymomd segment in Lights Out...) and I picked up Rodinsky's Room again, which has hooked me straight in.

Started Kazantzakis' Last Temptation of Christ last night.

Kazantzakis is an author with very idiosyncratic obsessions. In the west, we're more used to authors who struggle with and against the doctrines and traditions of the Catholic church, rather than the Greek Orthodox. This makes him feel exotic.

Go Set a Watchman left a sour taste. A long slow build of childhood reminiscence and you can never step into the same river twice, all with a particularly southern flavour, none of which lit up the page; some well intended but questionable politics, and finally a confrontation between scout and atticus in which he is painted as wrong and reasonable, she as right and unreasonable and literally in need of a good slap.

A Month in the Country, just finished, thank you whoever was talking about it last year. And thanks again for the P-Fitzgerald recommendation, too. I am genuinely excited there are so many more books of hers to read.

"
A Month in the Country, just finished, thank you whoever was talking about it last year. And thanks again for the P-Fitzgerald recommendation, too. I am genuinely excited there are so many more books of hers to read.

― Chuck_Tatum, Saturday, January 21, 2017 10:57 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink"

I just finished it as well, really enjoyed it. You're in for a treat with the Penelope Fitzgeralds as well.

Has anyone read any more J.L. Carr?

Read part of PF's group biography of father and uncles, The Knox Brothers, which was dense and rich and fluid enough, telling me stuff I'd never ever got about early 20th Century British culture, despite all my long-time, on-going reading about all that...Hermione Lee's tenacious bio of Fitzgerald turns up the other side of emotionally reserved family brilliance, according to James Wood; Lee gets him re-reading and re-thinking out loud about Fitzgerald's novels too: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/late-bloom

Still hoping the shorthand initials PKF ( for Penelope Knox Fitzgerald) will catch on.

Ive read all of Carr, and enjoyed it immensely, but A Month is probably the best of his books.

Two others i remember with great fondness:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Harpole_Report
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harpole_%26_Foxberrow_General_Publishers

Good to hear the other Carrs are worth investigating.

I'm planning on re-reading all of Fitzgerald's novels soon before reading that biography, I flew threw the eight of them first time round, looking forward to taking my time with them this time and really trying to figure out what it was I loved about them. I'll also be reading the Golden Child for the first time, which I'm sure will be a bit of fun even if its not as good as the others.

Kazantzakis is an author with very idiosyncratic obsessions. In the west, we're more used to authors who struggle with and against the doctrines and traditions of the Catholic church, rather than the Greek Orthodox. This makes him feel exotic.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless)

Can you point out some of the ways he shows this in his work? I don't think I know enough about the differences between Greek Orthodoxy and 'regular' Roman Catholicism to be able to spot this.
Although I suspect The Last Temptation might not be the best book for examples since it's probably more about Judaism vs Christianity.

recs upthread for the Buss unabridged translation of The Count of Monte Cristo very much otm

finished crime&punishment last night + started Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers. next fiction i have lined up is Zola's The Beast Within; I tried reading the first volume of the Rougans series a few years ago but found it dull. i think this one will make nice symmetry w/ c&p.

That Zola is very good

Ive read all of Carr, and enjoyed it immensely, but A Month is probably the best of his books.

― I hear from this arsehole again, he's going in the river (James Morrison), Saturday, January 21, 2017 8:34 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

pvmic ;)

Reading "Mathilda". Kinda lol how Dahl spends the first few pages shouting about how parents think too much of their children, complete with fantasies of insulting the children in school reports, only to then go "what's even worse is when they DON'T value their children", presumably what the whole book is about.

Not sure if these pvmic posts are friendly or not...

just started Martin Felipe Castagnet: Bodies of Summer -- Argentinean SF about minds being uploaded to the cloud and then doenloaded into new bodies, where the poor are stuck with unhealthy host bodies and culture shock from the long periods of time that pass before they are reincorporated

Lee Child, Night School

Compared to the last few entries in the Jack Reacher series, this is an improvement, effectively suspenseful for much of its length, not too badly derailed by a few especially gratuitous fights and sex scenes. As usual, the plot starts to sputter near the end, but not too many pages from the end; it's twistier than I expected.

I think Child exhausted his interest in flyover country several books back, so setting this one in Germany helps, as does turning the clock back to 1997 when Reacher is still in the Army and can get into trouble under orders rather than as a wandering hobo do-gooder.

Tried a Lee Child once, my family raves about him. Liked the oddly congenial tone, but so much padding and repetition!

still reading Bruce Springsteen. He has finished THE RIVER.

I'm not a big fan of audiobooks, but I noticed that Springsteen does the narration of his own autobiography. Not sure if it also has music, but it might be worth checking out.

In love with these times Roger Shepherd's Flying Nun memoir.
. I need to pick up some of this label's material that I stilk don't have.
Probably more as I go through the book.
Got it as a 2 for £5 in Fopp over Xmas. Nice surprise since it's pretty recent.

I have a few friends who like Lee Child, but I can't get past the wish-fulfilment writing style - I never lose the image of Child, sitting at a desk, thinking "Well, what's my tough guy getting up to today?". It all seems writery and fails the disbelief-suspension test. Compared to Michael Connolly, who's no great stylist either, but seems comfortably invisible.

Child is all about forward movement punctuated with moments of nastiness, comedy, or badassery. I imagine him at his desk trying to see how fast he can get to the next punchline or plot twist. In at least one interview he's implied that his first draft is what goes to the publisher. When he's rolling well, his style makes for a fun ride, after which the reader may notice that the story made no sense at all. The way Child hypes and sells his absurdities is part of the fun, except when his energy flags and the action becomes rote and mechanical. Not surprisingly this has happened more often as he's added book after book to the series.

Connelly is under-rated, I think, maybe because his style is so direct and workmanlike, but his plots are usually much better constructed and more plausible than anything Child comes up with. His background in journalism comes through in the realism of the places and situations he presents and his evenness of tone. He too has weak books in his catalog, but his overall standard is higher than Child's.

Yeah, I like Connolly a lot, and did a mini-Bosch tour of downtown LA once.

I used to read them every year, till he put out a few bum books in a row (Reversal, Gods of Guilt and Black Box, I think).

Is there a Lee Child that's like a "read this and you won't need to read the rest" or (I suppose) "read this and you'll *want* to read the rest"?

speaking of thrillers who likes Harlan Coben? i started reading "Fool Me Twice" and it was OK - but i lost it and haven't bothered replacing it to see how it ends

I'd say the first Lee Child, The Killing Floor, is the best entry point and also a good representation of the whole series. It's a little uncharacteristic in that it's narrated in the first person -- almost all the later books are in third person -- but its strengths and weaknesses are the same. There are some later entries that have creepier, more interesting villains, but I can't remember which ones. The continuity from book to book is minimal so there's not much need to read them in order.

the one i read was 1st person, too: about a suicide bomber on a train, and the CIA training bin laden

Think it's time to read Harry Matthews: Cigarettes

It is, it always is. RIP Harry.

I love "The Evenings", it's right up my street (no plot to speak of, unsettled and somewhat unsympathetic main character in a constricted world) despite the consistent and IMO unnecessary baldy-shaming. I don't really know enough about the historical context but I guess there's a chunk of raging against the post-war Netherlands. Written in the late '40s but the war is barely mentioned, Amsterdam is just carrying on complacent.

Now I'm reading "Thousand Cranes" by Yasunari Kawabata, I loved "Snow Country" and this one's shaping up to be similarly brief, lovely and heartbreaking.

the reacher books get weaker later on. i think those guys get a little burnt out on writing them. the last one i really liked had all the stuff about his mom and being a little kid overseas. can't remember the title. i've really enjoyed the sandford books i've read but it's the same with him. the last davenport book and the last virgil flowers book were his weakest. this is when people start getting a co-author.

but i would say the first, uh, dozen reacher books are fun! (i can't even remember how many i've read.)

it's their own fault though. they don't have to write so many...

i'm reading Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker. from 1944. WWII actually starts in the middle of the book, so, she was timely. i'm enjoying it. you'll probably never read it. montana wheat country in the 40's not a very sexy sell these days. i could see it being read in a women's studies class though. it has a great struggling young heroine.

Started Middlemarch, see you in either three months next week when I decide to read Goldfinger instead

"Thousand Cranes" predictably* lovely, crystalline and sad.

Now I'm reading another brief volume: "Helping Verbs of the Heart" by Peter Esterhazy, a (so-far) plainly-told tale of the death of his mother interspersed with capitalised blasts of literary quotation I think. It seems good.

I'm piling through some short things as a run-up to the second volume of Doderer's "The Demons", which will no doubt dominate February.

*not in a bad way, though I get the feeling repeated readings might bring rewards.

walden, again

james gleick - time travel: a history

Middlemarch is beautiful.

Any Jhumpa Lahiri fans here? I'm wondering where to start.

I just watched a fascinating interview with her which made me suspect that I may have underestimated her based on her books covers (there's actually a section where she talks about the disconnect between the covers that publishers choose for her books and how she feels they should be presented).

She's very interesting talking about Italian writers and the differences between various literary cultures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQkK8ThNsOY

Same here. I haven't read any of her books but, er, I've always thought The Namesake was a very underrated movie, and keep meaning to try.

She actually wrote a very good short book about book cover design and the experiences of being a writer with an obvious ethnicity, and how that affects the way your books are marketed. Only bad bit is it had no illustrations so you could never see what she was praising or damning.

The Clothing of Books.

She was talking about that a lot during the interview, I must have a look for it, its interesting how books are marketed in different countries, there are some huge differences.

The Lowland's opening certainly held my (sometimes leaky) attention in The New Yorker, and it was short-listed for Man Booker and National Book Award.

I liked her first book of short stories--The Interpreter of Maladies?? Can't remember much about it other than it was good. Meant to read more by her, but never got round to it, the book on covers aside.

Read Jesús Carrasco's Out in the Open yesterday in one sitting. A bleak story about a boy who runs away from home and the old goat herd he joins up with. Desolate landscapes, scorched earth, ruins and ghost towns. A cross between Malot's Sans famille and McCarthy's The Road. Hardly any dialogue, great visuals. An excellent book for a hot summer day.

Ok, i'm having that

Jonathan Coe, THE ACCIDENTAL WOMAN -- reread this, very fast. Slight, quick, wilfully callous in a 'young man's first book' way.

Jonathan Coe, A TOUCH OF LOVE -- again very quick (Coe's career started with rather slight works) -- more formal ingenuity, less callous, some of the familiar comic routines starting to get going. Tons about the bombing of Libya in 1986, which seems a relatively tame affair now but in the book is seen as an outrage.

I can barely remember Touch of Love, except being disappointed by it - but I do recall a couple of really strong passages about living in London (basically about how shit it is, and how you always wish you were somewhere else) and the sentiment (if not the exact sentences) really stuck with me. Is that the right book?

Penguin History of Modern Russia by Robert Service. Kind of an impulse buy, no idea if it's the right one to go for.

Still reading xpost Bowen's Collected Stories, though after the consistently excellent first thirty-odd, the ones she wrote in her and the century's thirties seem uneven, developing manners, ritualized elements, also, though there are always nuggety bits worth remembering credible and sometimes startling observations and conjectures re psychology, she can also(more than in earlier stories) make flat, harsh statements about some of her thirtysomething female characters...but the stories still grow over and around them, like scar tissue.

The one that keeps coming to mind is from The Twenties (section), "The Back Drawing Room", which starts with a round of fules making philosophical pronouncements, centered by an older(-seeming) lady who may be a theosophist---I don't know much about those---the talk sometimes veers "dangerously closely close to comprehension", which may overly encourage the troublesome little man (a regular is in charge of him for the day, and couldn't find another sitter or something) to volunteer the story of his experience with a real ghost, honest.
This is the only time she's presented an extended story-within-a-story, and though the little man is def not a pro at this sort of thing, his account gradually accrues its own elusive, persistent ghost of meaning. Think this would be true even if, as with certain seemingly mysterious folk songs, I picked up on certain fleeting references the way their early audiences did, the way this story's 1920s readers probably did, the way its characters do. Anyway, b-r-r-r, eh?!, and o shit!

Some of those songs seem like they were coded, satisfying the singers and their early audiences---Ford Madox Ford wrote about getting that impression when he moved to the country, listening to the music of people whose ancestors had adapted to invasions etc.; also it's a way to savor favorite old gossip and (as in this story) other in-crowd satisfactions.

Re: The Evenings https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/01/why-it-took-so-long-to-translate-a-dutch-classic/514604/?utm_source=atltw

John Donovan, I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth The Trip
Jonathan Lethem, They Live
Isabelle Holland, The Man Without a Face
Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story
Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century

I've been dismally slow in my reading lately. Only halfway through The Thirty Years War, but it isn't the author's fault. Wedgewood summarizes and connects the major events and the motives of the major players with admirable clarity, especially given the muddled complexities of the war and large number of players.

After I finish this, I need to roll back into some light weight books for a while.

hugo ball: flight out of time

Frank Harris: The Bomb -- novel about a man getting radicalised, culminating in the Chicago police bombing of the 1880s

that is something i've been interested in checking out since hearing part of an adaptation of it years ago. has it had a recent republication?

I'm rereading Henry Green's Loving, New York Review of Books Edition. What a master.

The Bomb ed I've got is a Feral House edition from 2008, still in print; http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0922915377.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

It has an intro by John Dos passos, which begins thus: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C3fFf5zUEAAQsKU.jpg

sorry, big octopus

ah, nice thanks! think it was feral who put out the nicely designed edition of jack black's autobiography that i have.

Chuck Tatum: I don't think that's in A TOUCH OF LOVE which is not set in London at all. More likely THE ACCIDENTAL WOMAN. Also some passages in WHAT A CARVE UP! cover some negative London experiences.

sad trombone: I think Lethem's THEY LIVE is one of his better later books, though it quotes Zizek too much.

I am now reading a third Coe, THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS - remarkable for being, so far, totally non-comic.

I am now deep into volume two of "The Demons" by von Doderer. It's shapeless, confusing and way too long, and I'm enjoying every page.

:D

Fred Reid - Keir Hardie: the making of a socialist

Flann O'Brien, 'Thirst'

Followed my own advice upthread and started listening to Springsteen's autobiography. 2 or 3 chapters every day, while doing the dishes. It would have been nice if he spoke a little more conversational, like "uncle Bruce tellin' stories".
But the prose doesn't really lend itself to that style of narration, and while his voice is quite monotonous, the book itself is great and he is a good writer.

Finished xpost The Thirties (mid-section of Elizabeth Bowen's Collected Stories and thought most of it was pretty good after all, despite/along with some some wear and tear, hers as well as the characters' (in her and often their and def. the century's thirties, yeah). This part is less about (self-described) winners and losers in social clashes---still a lot of conflict and barriers between man and wife, adults and children, siblings, friends, neighbors----but more about the aftermath, incl. of outright violence occasionally, and the takeaway from all that, in terms of new sense of self, or lack thereof, the cost of either. She seems older. but tougher in some ways.

If sometimes a bit of a schoolma'arm in this section (with black stockings though, mmmm)

Finished the Mark Kermode book I started before Xmas this morning since it was lying around the bed. It was called teh Hatchet Job.
May read some more by him if i get the chance. But do have several other things on the go too

Roger Shepher'd In Love With These TImes

read teh first couple of chapters of Simon Rerynolds' Shock & awe so want to get through that.

couple of Horrible Histories that I picked up from the 25c section of a charity shop.

a few other bits and pieces that I need to finish.
including Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia

reading 'summer house w swimming pool' by herman Koch ~ not sure im enjoying this, or where its going, but a breezy read

also swamplandia by Karen Russell - this seems really good, digging it

& the Richard yates biography

ilx is good cuz apparently I read this^ already 7 yrs ago ~o-o~

ive been reading 'a tragic honesty', it's really good.

― johnny crunch, Saturday, February 27, 2010 7:51 PM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Finished Quixote last night. Nothing less than the best that we can be.

Now onto a set of spiralling sentences by Claire Louise-Bennett - Pond

Dennis Marks: Wandering Jew - The Search of Joseph Roth

Entertaining short travel/biography book, trying to unpick the various lies and elaborations included in Roth's many life stories

search FOR, that should say

The Broom of the System - David Foster Wallace
this is super fun and pulpy, really wish he wrote more stuff like this- he basically disowned it after IJ.

psyched to get John Darnielle's new book Universal Harvester on Tuesday.

Pretty far into the life-during-wartime stories (incl. late entries in The Thirties, mostly in The War Years) of the xpost Bowen doorstop: some few homefront characters are brought to crisis by having the longtime shields of convention dissolved(and one is so traumatized she falls back and forth from a bed full of ceiling plaster to a complex pastorale, through time and space and identity, kind of pre-channeling early 70s Lessing), but most adapt by getting deep into new habits, goals, jobs, tunneling from aspect A to G etc, and/or spinning sometimes skimming through diffuse details of rationing, paperwork, detours, evacuations, skirting and blurting but keep moving---"I've been outside of London once or twice; the countryside is very full"---friendly yet not quite to friends who don't quite look like themselves, coming back in on govt. business, having left us for the country---"I have no more home---" "Oh yes, Belmont Square! How nasty"- but bombing's too tedious to talk about (to explain to somebody who went off to the country)---then there are those who seem reproachful to visitors from London, return of the local boy between generations, who didn't have to leave us like that (and he, caught between generations, is offended and attracted by the rude girl who wants to run away to London and will look him up there, screw the blitz, at least it's not the posh sticks). For instance.
Any other fiction about life in the WWII UK that I should check out, written in the same period or not too much later? Prefer something that seems based on personal experience, more than research.

"diffuse details" but the driver never gets lost.

Any other fiction about life in the WWII UK that I should check out, written in the same period or not too much later? Prefer something that seems based on personal experience, more than research.

Henry Green: Caught
Patrick Hamilton: The Slaves of Solitude
Graham Greene: the End of the Affair

Plus some stuff by Julian Maclaren-Ross, though not sure what bits in which books off the top of my head. The relevant bits of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time would also qualify.

The Sword of Honor Trilogy, Evelyn Waugh is worth a look. I can't recall much about his Put Out More Flags from 1942.

PLUS PLUS Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes
and Betty Miller: on the Side of the Angels
and Elizabeth Taylor: At Mrs Lippincote's

i remember nothing about put out more flags save learning at a later date that i'd missed the characters based on real people

Henry Green wrote another WWII novel, "Back", a particular favourite of mine.

I finished vol 2 of "The Demons" and I'm moving from thinking it's a diverting curio to thinking it's absolutely brilliant, so isn't that nice? It still reminds me of "A Dance To The Music of Time" (NB no higher praise), though the differences between the two are at least as pronounced as the similarities. Has anyone here read it?

been reading john burnside's "something like happy" alongside some other things - some of the stories are absolutely brilliant, these wonderful lyrical philosophical feelings but all quite grounded too. there's one called "peach melba" that just blew me away when i read it last night.

this is the story that made me buy the collection: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/10/29/the-cold-outside

Dennis Marks: Wandering Jew - The Search of Joseph Roth

Entertaining short travel/biography book, trying to unpick the various lies and elaborations included in Roth's many life stories

― I hear from this arsehole again, he's going in the river (James Morrison), Sunday, 5 February 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Funnily enough scored a copy of a couple more Roth novels 2nd hand - on Silent Prophet rn.

I finished vol 2 of "The Demons" and I'm moving from thinking it's a diverting curio to thinking it's absolutely brilliant, so isn't that nice?

Sure is :-)

finished John Brunner's Bedlam Planet which has a completely fucked up ending that you will never see coming in a million years.

now reading Up The Walls Of The World by James Tiptree, Jr.

I finally got around to Helen Dewitt's Lightning Rods - great modern day Swiftian satire and an amusing exploration of management/self-help/instructional speak. A couple of lol moments - I highly doubt it would ever happen, but I think it would actually make for a really great/devastating film short (if not, movie) - especially if "tastefully" done.

"A Start In Life" by Anita Brookner, my interest piqued by repeated touting of Brookner on the Backlisted podcast. So far I quite like it, though I can't shake the feeling that the story and the characters have been created as a vehicle for a barbed / piquant tone, rather than the other way around. Only halfway through, I'll likely warm to it.

Pique the bones out of that one.

Oh yeah? Sounds like something I might get into, with similar misgivings but still. Thanks for all the homefront fiction; think I'll start with the only one on hand, The End of the Affair, topping a little stack of Bantam Greenes(21 Stories is a goodun there).

I recently read Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin's thorough and incisive history of the Black Panther Party, Black against Empire, which is particularly interesting on the year-to-year shifts in the Panthers' praxis, the alliances of the New Left, and the dialectic of party recruitment and state repression. (It also makes me wonder if there's an especially good history of COINTELPRO out there.) I've also been reading Joshua Bennett's poems in The Sobbing School, Penelope Fitzgerald's subtly comic and melancholy novel of boatdwellers on the fringes of London, Offshore, and some of the Fantagraphics collections of Tove Jansson's Moomin comic strips.

Finally, I've been starting James Baldwin's Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone. About a quarter of the way through, I don't understand why its critical reception was so harsh, unless it was because critics were uncomfortable about Baldwin's politics tacking further to the left in the later 60s; I know it was seen as doctrinaire, but apart from its narrator's tendency toward monologues, so far it doesn't seem markedly more polemical than Another Country.

from the amazon listing for Black against Empire:

Notice: The California Department of Corrections has designated this book dangerous contraband. All CA prisoners are prohibited from purchasing or reading this book.

basically no faster way to sell me a book tbh, thanks for the recommendation

just finished Coe, THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS. I quite like this, though it's diffuse and evasive - you never really know what the mystery or question to be answered is. It relies on an extended technique of ekphrasis (a character describing photographs) which can be wearying (maybe ekphrasis should never be so extended?). But it ends well, back in its post-2000 frame story.

So yes, "A Start In Life" is good, sad and sort-of funny, but I can't help but think that Brookner has written better books.

Now I am reading "The Planetarium" by Nathalie Sarraute, in preparation for a trip to Paris. C'est un nouveau roman ancien, dontcha know?

rereading Jonathan Coe, THE DWARVES OF DEATH (1990)

Franz kafka: The Burrow -- his posthumous stories, newly translated by Michael Hofmann. Have read many of these before, in the old Muir versions, but Hofmann is great and there's some new 9to me) stuff here too

Robert Silverberg "Downward to the Earth" (this is great - the beginning of his peak period?)
Gene Wolfe "Home Fires"

Love "Downward". read that and "Nightwings" in an boobtastic-covered omnibus years ago, my intro to Silverberg.

Been reading "SPQR" by Mary Beard, boning up on my Roman history.

me too!

How do you like it? Seems pretty informative - a good balance of scholarly restraint and readability.

Re the Hofmann Kafka, this is the stuff:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C4RlgbdUMAE9-_C.jpg

I've been reading Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet novels, also set in WW2 England. They veer close to soapy popular fiction in places and there are passages where Howard seems to be phoning it in, but they are readable, absorbing and provide a good detailed portrait of family and social life in the period, albeit seen from the perspective of the kind of family that can afford to employ a number of servants. There have been some longueurs (inevitable over 5 chunky novels) but on the I've found them hugely enjoyable. There's a big autobiographical element, it's almost a roman a clef in places and if you know anything about EJH (which I did through my interest in Kingsley Amis) it's fun trying to spot the parallels.

i'm enjoying SPQR as i read it sporadically. her style is kind of . . . breezy? not at all a bad thing, just not what one might expect from a highly learned ancient historian

After Janet Malcolm's fantastic Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (I love a book in which the tangential or deferred wisdom seems to send you into orbit) I've been reading David Roberts's On the Ridge Between Life or Death. I loved Mountain of My Fear back in the day, particularly for its naked existential terror. This is much clearer-eyed, but I think weaker for it; there's less of the sense of awe, of tumbling rawness. The climbing stories are still riveting, but whereas Roberts's affect - buried, or distorted - used to return in the language, its clear he's now mastered it to a certain extent, and refuses to let it escape. The writing suffers. Still, I wish I had his devotion and drive.

i am reading The Crying of Lot 49, for the first time, also my first Pynchon (although I had a false-start to Gravity's Rainbow on a long flight once). it's extremely SIXTIES

One of my favourite books, which I first read 20 years ago. I'm scared to re-read it.

Dom't sleep on V and Slow Learner, early stories very eventually and perhaps reluctantly collected, judging by his great intro (says he misunderstood the definition of entrophy, and still doesn't know what a tendril is, just thot it was a cool word to use---he 's amazed when the writing does or did still seem good; "it seemed to have done by elves.").

I'm still somewhat frustrated by GR, though some of it is great, yeah yeah; nevertheless I got off the bus after that---but the 60s stuff helped get me through high school halfway sane (might have been much less so otherwise).

V is 60s as hell too iirc (although I remember next to nothing about it)

i've been cautioned away from V. by a friend, but i'm sure i'll get around to it one day

The Laurel and the Ivy: The Story of Charles Stewart Parnell and Irish Nationalism by Robert Kee

All thee early stuff might well be best read in high school (and the Sixties), for all I know, but if you end up still liking The Crying..., check the rest. It's at least fun, which he seems deliberately to spoil in much of GR, in between some amazing, nobody-but TP set pieces, which aren't necessarily fun either, but are more amazingly enjoyable in this bloated, often overcooked-to-charred context, what with all his Calvinist hipster shit---shame on us for "seeking distraction", as he pretty much says toward the end.

And it's his fault I'm mixing "bloated" and "charred", but both fit.

The Cazalets was filmed as a Tv series in the 1990s, was rather well done, but it stopped at the end of book 2, which rather left things hanging

I bought A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki because she was in a University Challenge question, don't know yet if this was a gross miscalculation.

i enjoyed it, mostly

the main character is a writer called ruth living in canada. this always raises alarms.

there is one bit that is very close to a bit in ghostwritten that i've just read. maybe it's a common thing in japanese schools... (briefly: ostracising people)

James I think I'll try to get my hands on the DVD of that. I read Trollope's Palliser novels last year and when I was about half-way through the old BBC dramatisation was broadcast. It was dated and creaky in places, the photography muffled and bleached out, and the actor playing Phineas Finn woefully miscast, but it still somehow survived as brilliant tv drama. I doubt the Cazalets will be as good, but it still looks worth tracking down.

Thanks for the recommendation of Black Against Empire. It's impressively detailed, judicious, and well-written ... also timely.

Having survived the Thirty Years War, I'm now most of the way through On Trails: An Exploration, Robert Moor. I needed something less grim and this fits. It is factual, but not dense, lightly told, but not breezy, and like a great many contemporary non-fic books I've read in the past four or five years, it could easily be recast as a series of magazine articles tied together by a fairly loose common theme, but may just as well be framed as a somewhat unfocussed book.

iow, its greatest ambition is to keep the reader occupied, but not challenged and certainly not altered. That's OK with me atm. There's a lot going on in my life right now.

Buddenbrooks is good for that too.

Aimless: how much background in European history did you find was necessary for Thirty Year's War? my grandma gave me a sweet folio edition late last year and i skimmed the first few pages on the bus-ride home and it seemed dense with references I didn't know

My sense of it is that you only need to know the broader strokes of European history in the century or two leading up to the war. Wedgewood assumes you know what the Holy Roman Empire and the Hapsburg Dynasty were, but she tries to introduce the players in her drama individually.

But the key question is whether you, flopson, can follow what's happening well enough to maintain your interest in the book. It's no sin if you can't. Not long ago I dipped into The Stones of Florence, Mary McCathy, and before I'd read ten pages I was overwhelmed by several dozen references to people, places and events that were pure cyphers to me and McCarthy made no attempt to compensate for my boundless ignorance. I put it aside and will never read it.

But the key question is whether you, flopson, can follow what's happening well enough to maintain your interest in the book. It's no sin if you can't.

indeed! thx Aims

I finished the xpost Bowen collection a couple of days ago. Tonight she has me thinking that maybe all thinking is magical thinking, on some level: her characters tend to believe, whether they bother to put it into words, "If I plan and strive and get a transfer and say this and go there and there or stay very still forever, I will have or lose the key", and thinking is all about that, all movement is getting to the state of absolute possession or loss, the end of striving, maybe "satori, the end of desire" and "nowhere is now here", to quote a couple of songs. Negativity can produce a coping or non-coping (non compos, even) mechanism. Sure can go wrong in a lot of ways, but not always. I do recall that one of her occasional ghosts occasions the author's passing remark (and demonstration) that "haunting begins with haunting oneself", and possession is nine-tenths of that particular babe, but also true of a number of self (and other)-haunted non-ghosts in these stories.

Also thinking, magically or not, that maybe I should read some art criticism----suggestions?

I guess that depends on what artists, periods, and questions you're interested in, but have you read much of John Berger's art writing? That might be a good place to start.

Almost done with Alan Hollinghurst's The Spell, the only one of his novels I hadn't read and a wee ething.

er, thing

@wee_ething

Oh yeah, should have thought of Berger; had already wondered about his novel A Painter of Our Time, after reading Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth. Also---Clement Greenberg?

The xpost "all thinking is magical?" bit appeared after finishing the Bowen and then reading about the experience of reading Kant, on this thread:
'I FALL upon the spines of books! I read!' -- Autumn 2014: What Are You Reading?

Yeah, I haven't gone very deep into Greenberg but Art and Culture is a very elegant formulation of the formalist approach to modernist painting. This thread also has some pointers: What are your favorite art books?

I want to read some John Berger too. I'm also interested in art writing right now, but I'm not sure I could give good general recommendations. I just pick up books on the painters I want to read about.

I haven't read the two late collections by Berger, Portraits and Landscapes, but Ways of Seeing (probably his most pedagogical and best-known work), Another Way of Telling (his book on photography), Permanent Red, and About Looking, are all classic.

Also, dow, I think you might enjoy Dave Hickey's Air Guitar on the grounds of his style, even if I think his central point (that attempts to separate visual art from market activity just produce vitiated academic exercises) is a little trite. I'm more sympathetic toward Chris Kraus's Video Green and Claire Bishop's Artificial Hells, among more recent works of criticism.

People will probably throw things at me for suggesting it, but Julian Barnes recent collection of art writing, 'Keeping an Eye Open', is really good

Gathered over the years that I'm more of a Julian Barnes devotee than anyone here so I'm not throwing anything other than OTM. He may be better at non-fiction than fiction. Currently I've been marching (haha) through Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs. He's an absolutely brilliant writer, so astute, insightful and compassionate while at the same time an apparently brilliant military strategist. I've never read much about the US civil war so it's an education. Some of the battle descriptions get a bit technical (though never bloody) still the book never loses momentum.

so blindingly bright I called him brilliant twice

So has anyone read "The Noise of Time?". I've read a couple of Shostakovich bios so know the story pretty well. The reviews I've read have been from the perspective of people who didn't already know the source material, and tend to imply that the merit of the book lies in finding out how a major composer (and highly sensitive individual) functioned within the horrors of the Soviet system. Which leaves me wondering if it's still worth reading if you're already familiar with all that.

Currently I've been marching (haha) through Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs. He's an absolutely brilliant writer, so astute, insightful and compassionate while at the same time an apparently brilliant military strategist.

If you haven't, you should read Edmund Wilson's chapter on the Memoirs in Patriotic Gore (Gertrude Stein also a fan).

I also like Julian Barnes, in a way, while sharing James Morrison's sense that he is unpopular with many; which I suppose is a reason I like him. He is good at that non-fiction stuff and art criticism. Maybe, indeed, better than the fiction.

finished reading Coe's DWARVES OF DEATH again. Light, daft, ultimately wildly implausible if you like; but funny and in a way ingenious, and perhaps better on music, band practice, etc, than most fiction by mainstream English writers.

an odd thing about this book is, I once unwittingly saw the film based on it and after a while realised it was the same story. Here it is. Had also forgotten the Smiths title.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0205936/

My wife and I went to an ENO double bill of the Rite of Spring and Bluebeard's Castle in 2009 and realised we were seated next to Julian Barnes (or rather she was). He was a bit of a tragic figure at the time, his wife having fairly recently died. I couldn't help but speculate about how he might be responding to Barkok's mournful piece about a man who (possibly) murdered and/or tortured his wives.

Last night I started a novel by a local author, Martin Marten, Brian Doyle. The setting is also local, the forests around Mt. Hood.

It starts out aggressively whimsical in its narrative voice, but I'm going to stick with it, because there are detectable signs of personal experience of those forests (which I know very well, too), sound observation of the natural environment, sobriety and depth lurking beneath that peppermint-flavored surface and my wife, who read it last month, assures me that the aggressive whimsy fades a bit and the other qualities come more to the fore as the book progresses.

I liked The Noise of Time a lot, actually. Lovely writing and an interesting subject matter. Worked for me. But i did not know a lot about Shostakovich.

I implied that I know the background fairly well, but in truth some of the biographical material is very problematic. The main area of contention is the so-called 'revisionist" view that sees S's work as an extended, coded critique of the Soviet regime and of Russian life under it. The main source for this is a book by Solomon Volkov, which claims to be S's memoirs (as told to Volkov). The authenticity of Volkov's book is much disputed.

Unfortunately this has become a happy hunting ground for fanatics. Volkov's allegations were manna for people who desperately wanted the composer of music that was deeply important to them to be a dissident hero, rather than a normal human being who at times understandably compromised with a deeply unpleasant regime so that he (and his family and friends) might survive. They got a predictably enthusiastic welcome from virulent Soviet haters and from the composers' own family who were no doubt happy to be connected to a hero as well as a genius.

It's a textbook case of the will to believe turning an unlikely version of events into something close to the official version. One result is that many critics have treated the music as Rorschach blots for projecting their fantasies of dissident and ironic meaning. Ian MacDonald, better known for "Revolution in the Head" about The Beatles than for "The New Shostakovich" is the most obvious example.

I'll be curious to see how Barnes negotiates the morass.

And now on Rick Bass: For a Little While -- new & selected short stories -- a huge book of what are, frankly, mostly shaggy dog stories, but beautifully written ones

Back to Bruce, BORN TO RUN. Over 350pp in and 150 to go. It's become compelling again.

I'm about a third in. Born to Run (the album) has just been released and they're about to go to Europe for their first foreign tour. I'm going to watch the Hammersmith Odeon '75 DVD this weekend.

Super!

One thing it has made me think again is: why did he lose so much 'musical ambition' after BORN TO RUN? I mean, DARKNESS, THE RIVER, BORN IN THE USA have a few great songs and I love them, but the grandeur of 'Jungleland' is gone and bar-room rock is in.

... But that's an ILM discussion. (Which was probably already conducted 15 years ago.)

The departure of David Sancious from the E Street Band is one common explanation. And yes, there is s thread, let's see if I can find.

Here's one: Springsteen's "Rosalita"

From what I gather from the book, he was listening to more punk and country and wanted to pare back the sound. the ornateness of BORN TO RUN didnt feel right for the times. DARKNESS is my fave Bruce tbh

One of the things I'd like to read about in that: he's said that he didn't know what kind of career he was going to have after the court wars with his ex-manager, which began soon after the much-self-delayed lift-off of Born To Run, and he found himself brooding even more about his mid-60s high school years,still especially relating to illin' Dylan's punk peak, Highway 61 Revisted, also characterizing that tyme and place as "David Lynchian." Results already incl. reading opps, as wiki says:
The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story...deluxe box set (also) contains an 80-page spiral-bound reproduction of Springsteen’s original notebooks documenting the recording sessions for the album containing alternate lyrics, song ideas, recording details, and personal notes.

(Re: "David Lynchian", Highway 61's twin punk peak is the equally alienated John Wesley Harding, although a third could be Bringing It All Back Home and of course many tracks here and there, but this isn't a music thread, so.)(But H61R is the one he cited on the press sheet.)

I always thought it was at least in part owing to the negative reaction to the hype surrounding Born To Run: "the future of rock'n'roll" etc (I first heard the term hype in this connection). I believe he was genuinely a bit scarred by that, and it forced a retreat from anything smacking of the grandiose. It's a pity - I think he lost something he never recovered, although judging by his popularity millions would disagree.

Glad to see old school ILB poster frankiemachine back on board.

I'm reading Born to Run as well, and really enjoying it. above all else Springsteen seems like a really good and generous guy, very empathetic and with zero bones to pick with anyone. There are stories of bandmates leaving or being asked to leave and if there was any drama, he doesn't mention it nor lay the blame on them. It's just life. (maybe it gets nastier later, I'm only on page 140ish...)

He seems to epitomize some kind of ideal tough (or demanding) but fair, um, boss.

read: 7 dada manifestos & lampisteries by tristan tzara

reading: selected writings of filippo tommaso marinetti

Reminds me that I read somewhere, years ago, that if any musician, in or out of his band, mentioned even considering considering taking some more courses, working more hours--much less taking a break from the biz---he said he would always say, "Yeah, you should gp do that." Life in music was for those who felt they had a Calling, and/or couldn't do anything else.(This was some time before he said, "the greatest day of my life was when I picked up the guitar, and the other greatest day was when I learned to put it down again." Still.)

Hi one way street, I've read xpost Air Guitar and know what you mean about his style vs. sometimes belabored points, a lack of self-critique (though it can be more x than vs., with the style so cranked up it overshoots the mark, I suspect). I trust him more when he's writing about music (maybe mainly because I don't know that much about art), though he's always been an extreme case of quality over quantity in that department, ditto when it comes to writing music. Most appealing at all when he drops all grand generalizations about music and comes up with a seemingly keen-eyed character study, for instance of his buddy from way back, Waylon Jennings: http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/his-mickey-mouse-ways/

Nomar - I'd say it doesn't get any nastier in the next 200pp!

A good test case is how he writes about his first marriage and divorce. He's perhaps reticent and evasive about it, but he lays all the blame on himself and says only good things about the wife.

Thanks James, very kind - not sure why I drifted out of the habit of posting, although I've always checked out the board from time to time to see what people are reading and to try to pick up recommendations for my own reading.

I'm within a few pages of finishing Martin Marten. I'm sure no one was eagerly awaiting my verdict, but I like to jot a few thoughts about most of the books I post to this thread, so here goes.

I'd describe it as an excellent Young Adult novel with a higher than average level of literary content. But most of the features that would recommend it to 13 through 16 year olds made it slightly aggravating to a sixty-something like me.

The author takes pains to make every character wondrous and sparkling and preternaturally alive, rather like he's an extra-large Tinkerbelle tossing fairy dust about with a liberal hand. The reader is demanded to see the world as a sort of magic kingdom, which is far too Disneyfied a filter not to distort the world badly and leave a saccharine residue similar to the aftertaste of cupcake frosting.

otoh, there is nothing actively pernicious there that could warp a young mind, no isolated thing I can point to and say "this is wrong and misleading; life is never like this". The basic problem isn't what's there so much as the long list of what is missing: real fear, real anger, real confusion, real grief, to name a few.

Another well-cut profile of a friend and colleague: xpost Hickey's intro to Splendor in the Short Grass: The Grover Lewis Reader.

Title piece is the lead-off and best of the pop culture features (fiction, poetry, memoirs, urban studies, mixtures also incl.). From notes made on the set of The Last Picture Show, it works through several levels, all ofthem apparent to some telling degree right away, while some of are detailed by Hickey and the editors in front, also by the author, almost as an afterthought, near the end of this collection and of his life (Lewis being one of the least-self-promoting New Journalists, also, as noted in a blurb, one of the least-known).
Lewis and McMurtry were crucial figures in each other's lives, on an early 50s Texas boondocks campus, where they were shunned by the slicker hicks 'til becoming prodigious lit geek celebs---mostly local, though Lewis won a national dramatists' award---then they started The Coexistence Review, and made the absented-minded but huge mistake of choosing red for the color of the debut cover's Lone Star, This, in early Cold War Texas, was taken as sacrilege: a number of reprisals and more rumblings followed, and they didn't know until the day of graduation if they would get their diplomas.
All that, and probably some creative competition---"You wrote this?! Wow, congrats!" ("O shit.") And they got back together, professionally at least, when Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters came to visit Kesey's old Stanford pal McMurtry in Texas, and Lewis covered the
events in "real" tyme, way before Wolfe did in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Yet they had drifted apart, and Lewis finally reads The Last Picture Show on location in Archer City, the arid setting of the novel (where it stars as Thalia) and McMurtry's life before college: The narrative is sometimes crude, more often tasteless, and always bitter...But it is true---true to the bone-and-gristle life in this stricken, sepia-colored tagend of nowhere...The adults who alternately guide and misguide their young---even Sam The Lion, the salty old patriarch who rules over the town's lone movie theater---are no less disaffected by the numbing mise-en-scène of Thalia; in Dorothy Parker's phrase, they are all trapped like a trap in a trap....So goes in the short-grass country. But this use of Vonnegut's handy phrase, doesn't get him far: he keeps having to engage with customized, personalized variations on the canny and uncanny verbal agility of Hollywood dream factory pros---variations in the form of Texas recruits, like the (self-anointing) White Trash With Money bit player, an insatiable culture vulture, something of a giant funhouse mirror image of Lewis, which can be sensed here and comes closer to confirmation when recalled while reading his reluctantly disclosed autobio notes, near the end of this volume, with microscopic intervals of his horrific-to-jgrim, Jim Southwestern Gothic Urban beginnings, before he began to self-medicate with reading, writing and moviegoing.
Also (along with producer Polly Platt, who thinks out loud about grooming her replacement in Boganovitch's life, Cybill Shepard, who also turns out to be more engagingly expressive than in any subsesquent coverage I've ever seen, probably thanks at least in part to Lewis's very discreet way with evocative, mostly author-edited-out questions, which he was known for among his co-workers),more appealing landsmen and -women, especially one of the other bit players, Archer City's own born-to-the-neverending-story Loyd (his place so mean he only got that single L, yeah). Prompted and challenged by his new mentor, the equally youthful Jeff Bridges, to come out of his corny deadend badboy shit if he really does want to be an actor--or anything worth being---Loyd finally blurts,
Ah was thankin' the other night at the house...and all of a sudden, Ah was on the subject of God. Jesus Christ, Ah says to mahself, what's goin' on here? Ah never did figger it all out to suit me, but anyways, what Ah was thankin'; you limit yourself to God, but He don't limit Hisself to you, does he? Ah mean God can be whatever he takes a notion to be---a tree or a rock or whatever the fuck...But a guy can't be nothin' but a human man, a see what Ah'm gettin' at?...Alla that made me feel---lonesome somehow. Ah don't know how to explain it, but Ah guess you cain't hep but feel lonesome sometimes, can ye?
"

Also incl: excerpt of a novel, with deep focus aerial mapping of decades in the cowboy movie subculture (remember furtive glimpses of that in Day of the Locust, in a crisp, low key Lewis groove, until the main characters emerge, in something like a reverse Ishmael-Slotrop effect. Just fine! But then it's over, he didn't finish it. Hope there's more in a safe box somewhere. Poetry is at least as unsettling as the memoirs.

Though at least one of the memoirs has a happy offstage result: he says that an extended bender with Lightning Hopkins taught him somethings about himself, incl. that he was ready to leave the South.
Later he comes back, paid to write about his hometown, Oak Cliff, a withered offshoot of Dallas. He found early stimulus in the discovery that it was also the origin point of Horace McCoy, who wrote They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and an autobiograhical novel about Oak Cliff in the 1920s, No Pockets In A Shroud, and of William Bramner, author of The Gay Place, three novellas about lives in orbit around a gas giant Governor of Texas, based on LBJ. Lewis came to know and be mad at Bramner, who destroyed himself, talking away his next book on speed, taking their shared legacy of internalized nuthin-but-a-hickboy deprecation all the way, as Lewis almost did, some of the time.
After some pro-journo shrewd views and interviews, he checks on his high school solace place, the (now much better cared-for) grave of homeboy Clyde Barrow. Bonnie and Clyde were teen friends with Lewis's parents, who were equally doomed and dangerous, at least to each other (almost as much to their kids).
At the other end of the avenue is the more secluded resting(?) place of Lee Oswald, whom Lewis thinks of like some of his other relatives, "patsys on a treadmill." He can't find the grave, but signs the guest book, "Family."
He also revisits the Texas Theater, where he was an usher, long before Oswald was apprehended there---"third row, fifth seat," says his guide---for shooting Officer J.D. Tippit, though he isn't spooked 'til discovering a small sealed door, the ushers' dressing room, where his little notebook disappeared, a notebook crammed with notes, stories, and the beginning of a novel, some of it written while his lover, an older (twentysomething) divorced lady, lay sleeping. Their boarding house landlady, her mother "would have shot us in the name of Jesus" if catching them, which she almost did, and eventually "we cam full circle, back to being strangers at the dining room table."
Lots more in here---the darkest stuff is magnetic in the sense that it must be written around and around---war and peace out.

If you check for The Gay Place as by Billy Lee, not William, you get better choices of editions and conditions (also if you spell it Brammer, not Bramner), for inst:
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Billy+Lee+Brammer It's worth reading.

The Four Wise Men by Michel Tournier. Think I picked this up as LG mentioned it as a pre-Christmas possible read, and it sounded appealing. I read it very intermittently, and only finished it the other day. it pulls together the basic three kings mention from Matthew, and the wider detail from apocrypha and later pietistic writings and legend (the Gaspar, Melchior and Balthasar stuff, adds Josephus's account of Herod, and adds a fourth king from some more recent sources) to tell a set of fables. Blackness, art, likeness, authenticity, representation, logos are explored through each of the three king's narratives. Herod's story is a litany of how a blood politics masked with pragmatism has physically and spiritually ravaged Herod. The final story is about an Indian king with a sweet tooth who pursues the recipe of pistachio turkish delight as the ultimate in sweetness, but do you see after a set of tribulations finds the ultimate sweetness in being the first to taste Christ's communion, whereupon his fate is that of Enoch's - one of the few people not to die in the bible iirc, tho that may be apocryphal.

Christ is the King that resolves all the stories one way or another. Not quite *do you see* but I'm not religious and did respond with a slightly testy 'yes yes ok'.

So yes, I'm sure this is all very good, but I struggle with modern-day fabulism (something that extends to magic realism). I'm not entirely sure why. Old folk stories, animal fables, religious exemplars, are generally fairly plain and simple their effect is gnostic - here is the shell of a story, inside there is a secret, I guess I'm also thinking of Chesterton's Ethics of Elfland here - the simple magical singularity of existence. (Citing Chesterton these days immediately produces an internal counterpoint of FUCK CHESTERTON, and I should stop, but not just yet). There's something bogus feeling about deploying fabulistic style and mannerisms into the sort of complicated spaces Tournier does. Hmm, still haven't nailed the source of my unease satisfactorily though, and it's not quite enough to say 'Look, this is religious/pietistic writing, take it or leave it as such'.

One charming aspect is the way the kings all listen to each other, each feeling that they have things to learn from the other, even if they do not feel wise themselves. The portrayal of Sodom and its economy of salt in the final narrative is pretty striking and memorable, and the art theory/representation etc stuff at the beginning in stimulating. It just didn't quite stick for me, but I also feel a bit peevish saying so. This is not a bad book. You may enjoy it!

I saw Shaw's SAINT JOAN the other day which has led to me reading around very slightly on GBS - revisiting Raymond Williams' DRAMA FROM IBSEN TO BRECHT (very harsh on Shaw!), looking at what library has on him. SAINT JOAN itself is evidently a canonical work with whole collections of essays on it.

I also wound up taking Shaw's BACK TO METHUSALEH out of the library - anyone know this?

Separately I also started reading Gary K. Wolfe's EVAPORATING GENRES - a critical book about SF which seems very good.

The later plays are worth another look probably; was it Back To Methuselah or 2100 with the characters in a swanky apartment house watching each other have sex on closed-circuit TV? Written in the 30s, maybe the 20s. I read most of his plays and saw several: too many endless monologues overall, but for instance Heartbreak House and Major Barbara are also worth more attention (at least the former, which might be his best, though I got obsessed with the latter in school, and the real-life basis of several characters).
xpost Fizzles I know what you mean about fabulation; I enjoyed but sometimes resisted The Last Samurai's patterns and referred to it on this thread as 1001 Night Schools---wonder if you've read it--?

i think the 1001 Nights Schools is a good name for it. But I loved The Last Samurai, and it didn't hit me that way at all, so we might have slightly different conceptions of it. i feel uneasy about my instinctive reaction against it as well, as it slides into "lit *shdnt* do this" which is the worse response. i shd make some effort to order my thoughts and report back.

that's a v good description of the four wise men - i enjoyed it plenty but it didn't necessarily all hold together or grab me. also read it intermittently. tournier's "the erl king" prob moved and shocked me more than most books i've read.

Read the start of England's Hidden Reverse this morning got as far as Tibet and John Balance's childhoods. Seems to be an intetresting read.
Looks like it has been restocked in various places after prices seemed to soar over the last couple of months. Did they do another print run?

Also was David Tibet based in Walthamstow at one point? So far its said taht his girlfriend worked in a cat shelter charity shop there and somebody I used to know had said a few years ago that they bumped into him regularly there but I thought i was told he lilved elsewhere at the time.

funny you shd mention it but this came up last night ahead of going to see shirley collins and this book came up. apparently yes, i'm told it's been re-issued by strange attractor last year, hence affordable availability.

The Last Samurai works overall but I'm hoping Lightning Bolts takes a sufficiently different approach. Just read my first Adam Johnson, a short story starting with snappy patter but that's a set-up for something deeper and unsettling---hard to do such a shift effectively, but he sure does and now I'm bracing myself for The Orphanmaster's Son---it's good, right?

funny you shd mention it but this came up last night ahead of going to see shirley collins and this book came up. apparently yes, i'm told it's been re-issued by strange attractor last year, hence affordable availability.

― Fizzles, Sunday, February 19, 2017 4:21 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I had noticed a reissue last year which i'd meant to pick up but didn't get around to. Then went back to check on prices or had it turn upas part of an Amazon recommendations list with a price closer to £200. So wound up searching around for it a couple of weeks ago and finding that Strange Attractor still had it for £20 plus p+p. I think I missed it for €17 or something last year elsewhere.
So looks like there may have been a delayed 2nd print run or something.

BUt could also be taht I would have kept back burnering it if the price had stayed consistently low and I hadn't thought I'd missed it again. So at least I have a copy now and it does look like it is something I really want to read.

Wish somebody'd redo Wreckers of Civilisation now, want to read that too. & I think there have been significant TG events since it first came out. Band reunion and Sleazy dying.

Edward White - Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
Paul Bowles - *Selected Stories
V.S. Naipaul - The The Return of Eva Peron

I briefly touched Elaine Dundy's The Old Man and Me, but put it aside as not fitting my mood of the moment. I will instead go back to Penelope Fitzgerald and open up The Blue Flower. I'm also strongly considering The Count of Monte Cristo as a candidate for next up in the queue. So many good books, so little time!

speaking of England's Hidden Reverse, has anyone gotten to Keenan's novel, This is Memorial Device, yet? sounds very promising.

I read Eichmann in Jerusalem, which was short, easy and interesting. Then took a look at Origins of Totalitarianism and decided now wasn't the time.

Also reading Yu Hua's To Live, mostly because it became a film. Might be the first Chinese novel I've ever read. So far it's good. And continuing reading Bolaño and By Night in Chile. And flipping through a few books on Chinese Cinema, including finishing Planet Hollywood.

Antonio Tabucchi: Pereira Declares -- engaging, discursive wander through Salazar's Portugal in 1938

Yeah that's a good one.

Finished SPQR, which was a lively and thought-provoking read and despite being written by a belaureled academic, was not dry or stuffy. The book opens with the matter-of-fact statement, "Ancient Rome is important", and the book lives up to that statement, reminding us in ways subtle and overt that Rome is very much with us today, in matters cultural and political.

Now I'm reading Renata Adler's Speedboat.

England's Hidden Reverse is great, and largely insane. I'm guessing there aren't many other scene biographies that involve Crowleyan summonings and five-day wanking rituals?

I should read SPEEDBOAT !

I've eyed that novel warily. I admire her journalism.

lol

speaking of England's Hidden Reverse, has anyone gotten to Keenan's novel, This is Memorial Device, yet? sounds very promising.

― by the light of the burning Citroën, Sunday, February 19, 2017 12:58 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm definitely going to be getting this. novel about a fictional post-punk band in 80s lanarkshire could not be more relevant to my interests

i read renata's other novel pitch dark but it left me cold without much curiosity for speedboat. iirc the year nyrb reissued those was around the same time knausgaard started getting translate? kind of glad the moment of as-boring-as-real-life-vignettes has passed

Whitman novel to be republished:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/arts/in-a-walt-whitman-novel-lost-for-165-years-clues-to-leaves-of-grass.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Farts&action=click&contentCollection=arts®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=1

Also wondering again about Paul Beatty's The Sellout, which Amazon spam just reminded me is

Winner of the Man Booker Prize

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction

Winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature

A New York Times Bestseller

Read Speedboat a few months ago and loved every bit of it. Fun, clever, great details. The kind of book I might read again, soon (but first I should get to Pitch Dark.

Currently reading Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales and Semina Culture, a well done survey of Wallace Berman and people he worked/associated with. Before that Modiano's Dora Bruder and Ellison's Invisible Man.

John Darnielle: Universal harvester -- niiiiiiiiice

i'm pissed he wrote another book before I even finished the first one, making me look like an idiot

^^what flopson said^^

I'm about to start re-reading a novel(la) by M.Blanchot, Thomas l'obscur -- it's included in the collection of his works which I recently ordered to replace an older book, my well-loved copy of Thomas w/ copious underlining, marginal notes, cross-references, &c, * fell under the floor of my car into the hatch where the spare tire is, and got soaked when we had a snow storm and I guess lots of melted snow & ice inside my car drained into there?? idk

* all in my hand -- it was from the secondhand book store, but the pages were clean when I got it

BEFORE ANYONE ASKS: no I did not discover the soaked, near-ruined state of my books * , *
(in what would surely be too much horror for one human mind to be forced to endure) at the
same time that I was going in there to get the spare to replace a punctured tire; my tires
are fine, thanks for asking! ... Knock on wood! Ha-ha! * *: yes there were others

that's nightmare fuel, bernard snowy

Gary K. Wolfe, EVAPORATING GENRES - a very well-informed book about 'fantastic literature' including SF, Fantasy, Gothic and how they have interacted.

i read renata's other novel pitch dark but it left me cold without much curiosity for speedboat. iirc the year nyrb reissued those was around the same time knausgaard started getting translate? kind of glad the moment of as-boring-as-real-life-vignettes has passed

I guess there's a "reality hunger" marketing angle that unites Knausgaard and Adler, but other than that I couldn't think of 2 more different authors. Whereas Knausgaard documents real life in exhaustive second-by-second detail, making sure you completely understand what happened and how he felt at every moment, Adler tosses off context-free impressionistic anecdotes, mixed with apparent inventions and non-sequiturs, and tends to play it cool rather than laying bare her emotions. There's a somewhat jocular, distanced tone which makes Speedboat read like a series of oblique, witty blog posts. She has a deft touch with the occasional aphorism as well. Actually, the book that it reminds me of in some ways, though stylistically quite different, is another novel of New York in the '70s that I read recently, Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet. There's a similar theme of anxiety about street crime, and a pre-PC way of talking about race issues that lands awkwardly today. Both are also intellectual name-droppers of a sort.

I finished reading Mark Fisher's "Capitalist Realism" and while its insightful, intelligent polemic, the alternatives he proposes at the end of the book are rather vague; which made the book a ultimately depressing read. I KNOW capitalism is fucked, I wouldnt be reading it otherwise

Enough of that politics shite anyway, I'm reading Ruud Gullit's "How to watch football" now

I finished reading Mark Fisher's "Capitalist Realism" and while its insightful, intelligent polemic, the alternatives he proposes at the end of the book are rather vague; which made the book a ultimately depressing read. I KNOW capitalism is fucked, I wouldnt be reading it otherwise

iirc he blames the fact that it's hard to imagine an alternative to capitalism ON capitalism? that always struck me as a peculiar way to go about it...

I had to quit Middlemarch after Book 1, as I'm going through a migraine phase, my concentration wasn't up to scratch, and I wasn't enjoying the ne cast members. It's good, though (obviously). I'll go back when I'm freeing better.

Easier fare in the meantime - Goldfinger (sadly the first Bond book I didn't enjoy as much as the others) and a classic random charity shop find - the novelisation of Alan Plater's Beirdebecke Trilogy, which is a joy so far, if you enjoy mild-mannered British comic literature of the 80s (I do).

My partner, who shrugs violently whenever she sees me on ILX, would also like to thank you for Month in the Country and The Bookshop, which she enjoyed.

aww

I also bought a used book at the local charity bookshop for $1. Timothy Egan's The Big Burn, about massive forest fires early in the 20th century.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless)

I enjoyed this recently and predict you will too, esp. given your stated interests x locale.

Sorry, meant for Books Recently Purchased.

but it reached its audience. ty.

read the 1922 novel (or novella) the untamables included in the selected marinetti in one sitting... strange little sf-infused parable which seems to be about futurism's position within contemporary italian politics after breaking with the fascists. opening scenes set in a desert island pit had the odd beckettian echo.

one thing i wasn't expecting from marinetti's writing was the element of absurdism that runs through much of it.

I think I mentioned I was reading "The Planetarium" by Nathalie Sarraute? It's one of those books which is really good without being terribly lovable; told as an almost-series of interior monologues but always in the third person, presumably just in case you get too close to identifying with any of the venal scumbags whose interiors we're inspecting. It felt like slightly hard work, though that may have been something to do with the tiny type and close spacing of the cheapo '60s Calder / Jupiter edition I bought.

Now I'm chipping away at "Time, Forward!" which is going slowly (for reasons of my being generally a bit tired just now) but I'm enjoying. Things are ramping up, one of the shock teams may be about to attempt to set a new record for the number of cubes of concrete laid in a single shift! Oh and it begins like this:

https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2128/32252148083_c12388051a_m.jpg

Phwoar!

i'm reading Moby Dick. now all i want to do is read Moby Dick, and i get very frustrated whenever circumstances prevent me from reading Moby Dick

Finished the Cazalet series by EJH. The fifth and final book, written much later than the others, was much the weakest although there were some good things in it.

Now reading The Noise of Time.

Allow me to gush a bit.

As could have been predicted, I found The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald, to be astonishingly good in its concise, low key, sharply told, captivating way. Historical fiction is usually sprawling and doughy, because the author wants to pass along the whole mass of research they did on the period and its characters. This is 190 pages long and every sentence contributes its share to the whole.

In my rush to praise Fitzgerald's control and technique, I must not forget to mention that the characters and story are amazing, too. The historical moment that provides the backdrop is barely suggested, but it also fully present in every aspect of the story. Saxony still has one foot in the medieval period, while the French revolution has just exploded and is about to overthrow every social convention. All this is conveyed so lightly, so deftly, that it is like the color blue that always lurks in a pile of snow.

There are depths here that put it well up on the list of great books I've read. It's a wizardly performance. Huzzah for Penelope!

After finishing Baldwin's Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, I still think the critical backlash was excessively harsh and probably politically motivated, but the novel's structure and pacing seem more awkward than was the case for Baldwin's earlier fiction, even for a novel as sprawling as Another Country. The relationship between the narrator and his much younger militant lover, Christopher, seems crucial to the political problems Baldwin is thinking through, but it mostly gets sidelined until the very end of the novel, and most of the narrator's reflections on race in the theater are more vividly developed in Baldwin's later notes on film in The Devil Finds Work (the same holds for Baldwin's notes on Black Power in No Name in the Street). There are still some indelible passages on police terror, prewar Harlem, and the absurdity of the prison system, though, and it's fascinating to see how Baldwin approaches the artist's novel.

I'm also starting J0hn D's Universal Harvester and the anthology Wavelength: Twenty-first Century Essays by Women, and still sorting through feelings about Float, Anne Carson's extremely varied box of pamphlets.

reading some cavafy poems. the overall effect is like getting your ass totally kicked in street fighter. you start trying to get up from being emotionally floored by one and then just as you're doing so, BAM, on the ground again. brutal. it's not just the emotional content but the quality of the execution. i recognise this is not first class crit.

Not a book but I've enjoyed the last two Curtis Sittenfeld short stories in the NYer. They are trashy, like slightly-grown-up Gossip Girl books, but super fun.

Also, okay, I'm reading The Blue Flower soon then

i recognise this is not first class crit.

good enough for me! cavafy is wonderful

Loving ILB right now, this thread in particular.

Finished that history of modern Russia. It's crazy how after a few hundred pages you get to used to the inhumanity of the system that you start cheering for Very Bad People just because they're doing stuff that's somewhat better within that context - "come on Kruschev, get those reforms through!".

Now tackling "Ways Of Seeing".

i'm NOT gonna live-blog Moby Dick but.... when Ishmael and Queequeeg cuddle up under the covers!!!!!!!

Yeah, that blew my mind too.

Just finished Sabbath's Theater and feel flayed. I don't know where Roth got his hate-viagra back in the mid 90s but christ the roaring, relentless disgust of the thing, the excess, the utter refusal to turn away. Sabbath is ridiculous and tumultuous and I wouldn't let him anywhere near my soiled underwear but damn I was rooting for him (for want of a better phrase) and I spent a good chunk of the last 100 pages in tears. There's a number of Roth conversational set-pieces I carry around with me (the scene on the ice in the otherwise dubious Human Stain, numerous sections of the Ghost Writer) but Sabbath's conversations with Madeleine at the rehab unit, and with Fish, are right up there.

I read most of Sabbath's Theater at Reagan National Airport waiting for a delayed flight in the summer of '03 and I agree: in a short list of Excellent Books That Left Me Flayed, I'd include that novel.

Finished Invisible Cities.
I think I'm about 20 pages away from finishing Ford Maddox Ford's March of Literature too. I had meant to make a list of the books he talks about in that with the idea of trying to work my way through them at some future point. But really not seeing that happening.

Gone back to reading the Naked Woman by Desmond Morris so hoping to get that finished too.
Also want to finsih Peter Ackroyd's London the Biography.

But main thing I'm reading is England's Hidden Reverse which I'm about half way through. Just got past the photo based on the Hangman's Beautiful Daughter cover.
Need to find what happened to my NWW and Current 93 flacs and try to listen through them.

A quiet place, Matsumoto

Moby Dick... Have you got to the hand squeezing in the sperm bit?

couldn't finish sabbath's theater for the flaying

fp'd alfred for saying reagan national

StartedUniversal Harvester this afternoon, and when I looked up, a couple hours later, was halfway through, without the sensation of reading quickly---just climbed aboard and went rolling through the video store, the dinner table, the cornfields, the den, the video store, the living room, the cornfields, the smalltown traffic, the farmhouse, the video store---the social mapping of patient creatures across the great flat surfaces, though happens in hillier states too, lemme tellya---incl. the urge to find and re-find/-form context around out moments seemingly inexplicable yet at times alarmingly relatable, as the kids will one day say (this is set in the 90s). Individual experiences vary, but seem to be converging (veering again oops).

xps- not yet, James

U.Harvester is such a gripping book, despite its deliberately downbeat, low-key style. I want to get the audiobook version, listen to Darnielle himself read it.

Yeah that book totally swept me away, how do you say - quietly devastating

In fact UH is one of FOUR books already this year that I've had flopson's moby-dick experience with, the other three being wolf in white van (this guy!), quixote (all I was hoping for & more, & clearly the wellspring of so much I love) and a brief history of seven killings (I'm an avowed fan of polyphonous novels, cf JR, and this one is doing something truly unique imo (although it feels like bolaño had to be a touchstone) even as it feels like the apex of the true crime gangster saga Netflix binge genre; things like the inclusion of a literal "duppy" and the refrain from natural mystic reverberating throughout the text are risks that could easily have failed to pay off but work great)

On the other hand, I am still sloooowly making my way through berryman's recovery. Not for lack of interest - I love it about as much as the abovementioned - but like its subject it is hard and slow

Wonderful, if blue, year so far

The confident & lightly-deployed use of metanarrative for emotional effect in universal harvester - the occasional glances towards other possible versions of the story before regretfully but firmly staying the course - reminded me a little of (my memory of) sorrentino's "the moon in its flight", which I need to reread

no way

yeah "I need to reread" because I'm probably totally misremembering that story

even as it feels like the apex of the true crime gangster saga Netflix binge genre

this is the thing that's most made me want to read ABHO7K

I remember the mood it put me in very vividly tho xp

Loving ILB right now, this thread in particular.

I don't post much on this board because I'm always aware of the weight at which I'm punching relative to everyone else but I love all you lot & it's helping me keep going atm, also can I just say I'm a big fan of dow's idiosyncratic use of "xpost" as prenominal adjective

dude you've read more + thicker books than me so far this year and i post dumb shit on this board literally every day

ha my unusual momentum (for me, these days; when I was 19 I tore through heavy lit at an incredible rate but I think I read v shallowly) is the books' doing, not mine. Also having read thick books is not in itself noteworthy (pay attn 19yo me)

It's funny tho cause I have no problem coming into a film thread eg with nothing more than "I saw this" but the standard of discussion here is v high

well I can't convince you but, i like your posts about Books and i hope u do more of em, winsy ;)

I had a cheapie abridged mass market (Signet) paperback of The Count of Monte Cristo that's been sitting around here for over a year, so I've started reading that. It is a mere 450 pages long. I'll make do with that.

I must say the plot moves along at a blurring pace, and it has all the high adventure an adolescent boy could possibly desire, but compared to the various Musketeers books Dumas put his name on, the characters have few or no nuances, so that's a disappointment.

xp I'll do the same amount and you'll like it

Neglected to mention that I'm also listening to the complete stories of Bernard Malamud, a long-time favourite - actually started listening to this last year but keep putting it away because a couple of the readers get on my tits, which is a shame because this is an author that should really come alive aloud. One in particular had this cadence I've encountered before that's like a midpoint between Laurie Anderson and a text-to-speech program, which sounds kinda great in theory but is really grating irl

Also read a lot of twin peaks ephemera & essays this year on my kindle app, cause the new & old series is a pretty constant background hum of obsession for me atp although I try to avoid shitting up this place with it. ALSO dipped a toe into a certain .docx from under the floorboards round here

deal B-)

I finished Go Tell It to the Mountain. Although I haven't read the novels he wrote after the late '60s and probably won't, I'm pretty confident in saying it's Baldwin's best novel. Another Country has many grisly moments, and I can't take the one-note Giovanni's Room.

xxp at Aimless: There were at least three different people in this thread saying you should get an unabridged edition of Monte Cristo. Of course the characters are going to be shallow when more than half of the original is left out. Just throw this edition away and wait till you find time to read the original version. Whatever you're reading now is not The Count of Monte Cristo.

I think Forster's flat-vs-round-character thesis is beside the point with Dumas.

Got to the end of Universal Harvester, though I'm not through with it and vice versa--was thinking for a while that it was even more seamless than Wolf In White Van in that there were no whole passages that I found myself compulsively typing out in the midst of online comments---but there's a bit about the difference between the wind in the city and beyond:The full-throated wind of the plains has leeway to seek out the hidden registers of its voice.”
Which also happens with the prose and the author's voice, far beyond the Southern California sprawl of Wolf... and his own teen years. The language changes when it needs to/just when it does, like the wind, with resulting effects not entirely predictable or I left all this to ferment...the land whose air assumes the familiarity of whatever surroundings it finds. But it was never far from me, I learned. Left to guess at the dark around it, it became subject to simple metabolic laws of action and reaction. When it all burst free from the tank yadda yadda; also, the business about the silos reminds me (though he doesn't mention it) how solid and absorbing those things can be, much more common and at least as dangerous as quicksand. So it is with the metanarrative here: it's not coy, but its slide and its grip feel equally true, and maybe most of all when I felt that the big reveal was not the whole truth, that the emotional power and grounding of the story and its variants fit the frames within frames, for the master cut. (Also I read back to a possible clue or two.)

that the big reveal (re narrator) was not the whole point either.

or whole/only truth.

In my readings in Feb I have turned to the confusions of the 1920s and 30s - Joseph Roth's A Silent Prophet, his Trotsky novel where a level of evasiveness around identity and action seem a normal state of things. After all this mirrors the state of things - and just as importantly - the decay of the European order. Themes that Roth has written time and again, always eloquently, in sentences that have a zip and verve. Turning to Russia even more so (I could say its the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution but then again there has seldom been a time since I was about 18 or 19 when I haven't been thinking about all of this anyway #killMeNow) in Pasternak's The Last Summer, more a fragmentary prose piece and a Proust-like recollection of lost love & youth at the dawn of WWI. Its certainly worth a read, its brevity will not impinge on your reading life too much. Jean Rhys' Quartet also, but she is more of a companion - think I've read almost everything now - she is so good at the humiliations that falling in love can bring. Savage. One of those writers where there is a huge pay-off in (re-) reading all of her works, which I hope to do (Rhys and Green are my favourite Eng novelists of that time, the canon is forming here folks).

Poetry-wise its the 20s and 30s and Russians - Osip Mandelstam's Moscow & Vorozneh Notebooks. The latter especially is such a great cycle of poetry, really essential and the presentation of it on Bloodaxe (with notes and essays to contextualise) seems definitive. Can think of only Vallejo's Spain, Take this Cup Away from me matching in that intersection (as a cycle of poetry) where art & its bloody time are in synch with one another (any more recommendations like this are welcome!). Onto The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems and Paul Schmidt's work looks considerable to me. I will need to find more of his translations in future. For now I'd say this is is the best primer for the Russian poetry of that time, in all its revolutionary and anti-revolutionary flavours (in the sense that some of these poets were and were not attached to the revolution). Its nicely sequenced and culminates in Tsvetaeva's Poem of the End, where the end of a relatinship feels like the end of a whole era.

Also had a quick scan through a Marianne Moore selected but not in the mindset to engage with her work rn.

A pit-stop in Anita Brookner's A Start in Life where it feels a bit cardboard cut-out. The book-ish girl who hasn't lived the teenage life she should be living, that everyone else her age lives, but its brief enough and the themes do resonate. Only 20 pages in.

funny you mention Mandelstam. I'm reading Gjertrud Schnackenberg's long poem about him.

just finished Lolita & it knocked me out, extraordinary prose, but it also seems the sort of book that one could read again and again and again and detect new twists each time, new references, new puns. like a fractal. I was pulled ahead by the story but I wanted to linger all the same. It seems like a book that would be a dream for a literature seminar (as I imagine such things).

hermann broch - the death of virgil

This image of Anita Brookner summons the atmosphere I feel when trying to read her.
https://literarylondonrg.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/anita_brookner_1355488c.jpg?w=547
I just can't sustain my enthusiam for a whole book.

Partway into Dorthe Nors: Mirror, Shoulder, Signal -- very unhappily funny novel about a middle-aged female Danish translator of misogynistic Swedish crime novels whose life is slowly crumbling under the weight of trying to finally learn to drive

Lol :)

That doesn't seem to be available in the US :(

I really enjoyed Nors's novellas in So Much for that Winter, which is available stateside and works in a similarly "unhappily funny" groove.

That has 'Minna Needs Rehearsal Space' in it, doesn't it? Great book.

James, that picture would be a good one for Pictures of Writers

Stevolende: How did you enjoy Invisible Cities?

I liked the Nors collection Short Cuts quite a lot. I didn't read Minna Needs Rehearsal Space though it came with the edition I bought. That description of the new book makes it sound v appealing.

The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes.

A strange one this. I'm still not clear what Barnes thought he could add to the source material, apart from increasing awareness of it - easier to read a short novel distilling the essence of Shostakovich's predicament than tackle the longer biographies.

I've already recommended it to a couple of friends I think will be interested in the story, on the grounds that it's short, clear, easy to read and avoids the fanaticism that often comes with the territory. Barnes's take is essentially the "revisionist" one that Shostakovich was a muted dissident and perpetual ironist but he doesn't do an aggressive hard sell on this or try to make him a hero (in fact I think he's a bit harsh on Dmitri). His portrait is moderate and plausible. The problem is that there are other equally plausible possibilities, including the one that Shostokovich was a more enthusiastic and loyal Communist than some of his admirers might be comfortable admitting.

(Tchaikovsky suggested that Mozart was the last non-neurotic composer. Neurosis in classical music goes into overdrive in the 20C. Irony was practically the lingua franca of classical music when Shostakovich is composing, one reason that the argument that his use of irony is evidence of a coded political dissidence always seemed to me extremely thin.)

Beyond this it's hard to see what Barnes is trying to achieve. His style is curiously distancing, so the novel doesn't read like an attempt to immerse the reader in Shostakovich's situation in a way that a biographer or historian can't. There are a lot of ruminations on the function of art but Barnes doesn't seem to have anything new or urgent to say. It's hardly news that tyrannies bully artists, and the Soviet argument - that art is "for the people" (and therefore in a socialist country the state) isn't one that Barnes's readers are likely to have much sympathy for, so no need to disabuse them. The only view of art set in opposition to that is a very conventional "great artists" one that someone like Kenneth Clark would be entirely comfortable with, and it doesn't seem to be subjected to any critical examination beyond a very vague sense that it might not be quite as definitive as we think.

Euler entirely correct about Lolita.

Today: reading some books about intertextuality.

INvisble cities was pretty great. Want to read the If oN A winter's night thing too but am reading about 5 different books at the moment and still buying more.

Was pretty great and surreal and stuff. Will hopefully read some more of him and not take 20 odd years to get around to doing so.

read The Baron in the Trees!

The Baron in the Trees is magnificent!

And for an unusually realist but also fucking good Calvino, The Path to the Spider's Nest, based in his time as a partisan fighting the fascists

This image of Anita Brookner summons the atmosphere I feel when trying to read her.

See that picture makes me want to read more by her. A Start in Life had some mildly amusing scenes in the end - thought it would've been way more centred on the main character and her relationships but it went in and around her parents and the problems of caring for them as they grow old. Interested to see how she might refine her aesthetic but the writing is a bit dull in strecthes, sparks in others. It wouldn't take long to get through half a dozen of these and you see them around 2nd hand shops all the time so might pick up.

It wouldn't take long to get through half a dozen of these

True, but my limited reading suggests that much of each of the six books would be interchangeable. Quietly lonely and mildly bitter middle-aged English person trudges through boring repetitive life, encounters flickers of hope in another person, sees them dashed.

Brian Francis, Fruit
Frank Musca, All American Boys
C.J. Pascoe, Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School
Plato, The Symposium
Brent Hartinger, Geography Club
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

Reading Adele Waldman's Love Affairs of Nathaniel P, which is an entertaining attempt to do a love story from the POV of an idiot. I'd call it "grown-up Gossip Girl" but the GG books were funnier and more sharply observed. It's a lot of fun, though.

That CJ Pascoe book sounds interesting, would be good to hear more when you're done.

yea I liked that Nathaniel p book
glad for the Sabbaths theater 'praise', yea it is unflinching + incred
im still working on swamplandia! which is still really fun & v well written

JUst finished England's Hidden reverse which was great and now has me listening through the 3 artists' catalogues which I found the soundfiles for over the last few days.

Now got a few things to go on with. Should finish Shock & Awe the Simon Reynolds thing on glam.
also want to start The Emperor of All Maladies a biography of cancer which I found in a charity shop earlier thisi week and looks interesting.

Got Henry Green's Survivinig as the transport book at the moment.

& maybe Peter Ackroyd's London a biography asa bog book now that I've finished Ford Maddox Ford's March Of Literature.
But have another couple of books I want to read sitting on the bookshelf in there.

& stacks of others I need to read immediately and hopefully will get around to.

the black echo by michael connelly, early 90s la noir, something about the tone and pace remind me of heat (the movie), deliberate, serious, melancholy. the lead even has a cantilevered house with a balcony overlooking the lighted sprawl where he and the main lady have brooding half convos about their loneliness. i'm grateful to find another crime writer who seems to be more on the elmore leonard end of things--a bit old fashioned, maybe, still a bit of a romantic, clearly grew up with and was shaped by classic hollywood notions of how this sort of thing is supposed to be done, if that makes sense. i can't handle the gore and cynicism in james ellroy let alone the scandanavian writers and whatever else qualifies as crime or noir fiction these days, but still enjoy the genre in its classic form, and this is a late (i think?) example of that.

did a quick google search and i see connelly was just mentioned on this thread a month ago! glad to see there are people here who will rep for him, i feel validated

That CJ Pascoe book sounds interesting, would be good to hear more when you're done.

Its interesting. Basically an ethnography of an American high school, in which none of the conclusions reached should be all that shocking (teen boys are homophobic, school authorities look the other way when it comes to homophobic teasing, non-white students are punished far more severely for various transgressions than white students, etc), but its a quick read and easy read. I'm looking at it for my dissertation, which is more on the theoretical and literary end of the topic, so in terms of usefulness, it will probably end up being worth not much more than a footnote, but I'm glad I read it.

Finished Speedboat. It kind of just stopped rather than coming to any sort of conclusion or summing up. It would've made a great blog. It was worth it for the flashes of cheerfully askew cerebral humor, I guess, though it was an uphill battle at times against the stasis-inducing structure.

"I Love Dick", Chris Kraus. I mostly read on public transport so this shouldn't be awkward at all.

i've hit my first Whaling Encyclopedia portion of Moby Dick. bit of a momentum killer as the adventure was just getting started, but so far very interesting

get used to it. 8)

Despite the scolding, I continue to read the book I have been assured is not the Count of Monte Cristo. Slowly. There's been a lot going on.

speaking of Clement Greenberg, his sister-in-law just passed---she was also Courtney Love's grandmother, which may be why she made Billboard---I remember her crisp New Yorker memoir of early life in Cuba, but haven't read the fiction---is it good?
http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/7710163/paula-fox-author-courtney-love-grandmother-dead?utm_source=twitter&utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=referral

I didn't know about those family connections, but Fox's Desperate Characters is superb.

That's the one to start with, apparently. I also enjoyed Poor George, never got around to anything else other than the first memoir, Borrowed Finery, which I would also recommend.

Despite the scolding, I continue to read the book I have been assured is not the Count of Monte Cristo. Slowly. There's been a lot going on.

The Gustav Sonata, Rose Tremain. Early on I thought I really wasn't going to like this but I ended up liking it very much indeed. I'd have some difficulty in explaining why, though.

The Whole Harmonium, Paul Mariani's bio of Wallace Stevens. About a third of the way in but doubt I will read much more. Fabulous, fabulous poet, not especially likeable or interesting human being.

"Time, Forward!" starts by meandering then booms into life (it reminds me, in this respect, of "In Hazard" by Richard Hughes), it's great. Another book it reminds me of, in a very different way, is Martin Parr's "Boring Postcards", that sense of such energy and optimism; shot through with an unavoidable reader-supplied horrified awareness of what happened, was already happening, to corrupt and make all that optimism a failure.

To change the mood a little I've been posing down the pub reading "Over The Frontier" by Stevie Smith, which rambles and muses along in a wholly delightful fashion. It's the second part of her semi-autobiog and I haven't read the first half. If I had I *might* have more of an idea what was going on, but I'm not at all sure I would.

just finished Universal Harvester and feel i know Iowa much better

just started the gingerman by jp donleavy. some nice sparse prose. i like it so far.

ooh that book is a cracker. i need to read more donleavy

I recently read "The Adventures of Pinocchio" by Collodi in the NYRB edition to my four-year-old. We both enjoyed it. I've also been reading the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska from the collection "Map: Collected and Last Poems".

ooh that book is a cracker. i need to read more donleavy

it is such a fitting book to read in a pub.

Its Shane McGowabs favourite book

McGowans

that makes sense. sometimes with that type of thing the literary irishness is a bit on the nose, which i know might sound like heresy. just the pints and roguery etc. but i can't deny the writing is great and i like pints and roguery as much as the next man.

I know what you mean, I think the main character has a dark and nasty streak behind all the craic and roguery tho.

yeah he's p awful. i'm surprised already how awful he is.

wyndham lewis: the (complete) wild body

* Egon Hostovsky: The Hideout -- Czech man hides in French cellar from Nazis in WW2, gets mixed up with resistance
* Éric Plamondon: Hungary-Hollywood Express -- incredibly self-indulgent novel sort of about Johnny Weissmueller, has some good bits but no way am I reading one of the sequels which is about Steve fucking Jobs
* Margaret Millar: several books, I'm basically mainlining her at this stage, she's so good

From prev. What Are You Reading?, from a discussion of Canada in lit, which I'd asked about re curiosity whetted by Robbie Robertson's autobio:

Encountered Margaret Millar's novella "The Iron Gates" in a Hitchcock anthology: urban Canada, mid-WWII, everybody's either underage or middle-aged, mostly indoors, overheated, overfed, mostly upper middle class: sometimes stuck, teetering, anyway several degrees removed from the Big Time, and Canadianess seems part of that. She pretty much shows you whodunnit, but distracts, like a stage magician. Wife of Kenneth Millar, AKA Ross MacDonald. Judging by her Amazon page, an attempted revival is in the works, following her inclusion in the Library of American "domestic suspense" (olde-time code for "female-written, female lead characters") noir collections.

― dow, Wednesday, November 30, 2016 And yeah, def looking fwd to her book in Library of America's (and now Canada's!) Women Crime Writers of the 1940s. Couple of articles about her on the loa site, I've just noticed.

Today, stuck in a lobby, I discovered I'd left behind the anthology I'm nearing the end of, so embarked on Lydia Davis's translation of Swann's Way, surrounded by trees and clouds, via lobby with big-ass windows. Finally home again, I've found the excellent collection, but getting back into its homestretch will be wrenching---totally captivated by Li'l Marcel and his goofy adults.

The Millars I'm reading are in this so-far-half-published collected works series:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53271fade4b09aa77d06459a/5327bbf8e4b0137cd27fd2e1/57a37890725e25c6898215f3/1470332871640/Complete+Set.jpg?format=500w

The LOA inclusion is 'Beast in View', which is excellent

Eric Foner - Reconstruction
* Henry James - The Ambasssadors

wanted to bump this thread but w only searching via google:site i can only see it logged out and then get an error when trying to login

OMG, Why didn't you people tell me how AMAZING the movie version of DESPERATE CHARACTERS with SHIRLEY MACLAINE is???

rip paula fox...did not know she was Courtney loves grandma ? hm

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

> i can only see it logged out

did you try adding www. to the start of the url?

o sweet, nice tip

This Stevie Smith book, "Over The Frontier", as of about halfway through, ambles and chats amiably, so far she's been to a party. On a minute-by-minute basis it's good, but it's making no sense to me as a whole. I should stop reading it really, but it's hard to when I come across pages I like as much as this (but the page seems broadly unlined to anything before or after):

https://c1.staticflickr.com/4/3818/32511809314_02972723c1_h.jpg

Yes my thumbnail is inky WHAT OF IT?

(unlinked, not unlined)

the Holiday and Novel on Yellow Paper have similar thing going on. I think you just have to surrender to it being a book to enjoy on a sentence hy sentence level

Hence her success as a poet, i guess

I finished Not The Count of Monte Cristo and am now nearly finished with The Big Burn, Timothy Egan, a history of the creation of the National Forests and Forest Service, coupled with a history of the worst firestorm in North American history that consumed 10 million acres in about two days (!) in Idaho and Montana.

The portion of the book concerning the "Big Burn" is certainly dramatic, even if the stories of a limited set of individuals who were caught in that wildfire is not exactly history in the larger sense. It is interesting, but harrowing, in somewhat the same way that Voices From Chernobyl was harrowing.

Fire makes its own weather, Egan observes, and demonstrates. Also shows how how it creates its own culture, or changes what's already there. The sensibilities of the fire fighters and their proponents and opponents seem historically relevant enough (that asshole senator and his own proponents especially).

Also building out past the likely limits of fire prevention etc, and who wants controlled burns in the 'burbs or industrial parks, etc etc---all too relevant today. Prob moreso with likely federal cuts to NOAA and Interior.

The Forest Service (rather tellingly) is part of the Department of Agriculture, not Interior, which has the National Park Service. But the FS budget is still an object of constant attack by those who hate conservation and love unchecked capitalism.

Malcolm Bowie's book on Lacan. Lacan's a high wire act. I admit to finding it exhilarating.

I like his seminars, seeing a theory get constructed and reworked week after week.

Read Ranciere's book on Bela Tarr. Short, and could use either an introduction or a conclusion, but made me want to watch what I haven't seen, and rewatch what I have.

I like Tim Hopkins' posts and his passion for interesting books.

Today I finished Bruce Springsteen, BORN TO RUN.

It is much like its author: long-winded, repetitive, irreverent, epic, colloquial, grandiose, big-hearted, wise, deep, humane.

i dunno, a little petrarch, a little emerson, nothing really

It seems I read the wrong Springsteen biography. 2 or 3 years ago my wife gave me the Peter Ames Carlin bio at Christmas, based on a false impression of how much of a fan I was. I was big into some of the early stuff at one point, but my enthusiasm didn't last - nowadays, with a handful of exceptions, I find his music boring.

Carlin's was a decent bio but I wasn't very interested and it was a bit of an effort to get through. It's left me with no appetite for another Bruce bio, even an acclaimed one by the man himself.

I'm now reading Elizabeth Bowen's "The Death of the Heart".

Published in September 2015, according to Amazon, but hadn't heard about it 'til just now: The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories by Joy Williams, "The legendary writer's first collection in ten years---and finally, the definitive one." Good as previous? I'd settle for that.

Last night I started on the first few pages of The Only Question, Muriel Spark. Nothing to report on so far, but I'm only a few pages into it.

familiar territory for many of you perhaps, but i really enjoyed listening to mary gaitskill reading john cheever's "the five forty-eight" on the nyer fiction podcast. http://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction/mary-gaitskill-reads-john-cheever

Working, Studs Terkel

fantastic book

my mom was interviewed for it but didn't make the final cut

Yeah I'm liking it a lot. Didn't expect it to be as hueg as it is tho!

Really interesting to hear people muse on stuff that's not too far away from current universal basic income theories in the 70's.

George McGovern proposed or mentioned it during the '72 campaign, was ridiculed by Nixonites ---"See? Just the kind of hippy-dippy stuff he always comes up with"---though the idea didn't start with him:

But one idea that Frum highlighted is more radical: a guaranteed basic income, otherwise known as just giving people money. The idea isn't new. As Frum notes, Friederich Hayek endorsed it. In 1962, the libertarian economist Milton Friedman advocated a minimum guaranteed income via a “negative income tax.”Aug 6, 2014-
The Conservative Case for a Guaranteed Basic Income - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/why...a...basic-income/375600/ Friedman was a leading/fairly often-quoted conservative economist, then most commonly referred to as a "monetarist" (but ok, libertarian too, I guess, in this instance anyway).

Nixon wanted it too iirc

Cheney (!) and Rumsfeld (!!) ran the pilot for Nixon's UBI LOL

Pilot programs testing the effects and feasibility of the concept are now underway in places more friendly to the idea: California, Finland, and Canada, for example. But these are not UBI’s first field experiments. The US government tested similar income plans five times, beginning in the late 1960s—and the administrator that oversaw the first of these experiments was none other than the Republican veteran Donald Rumsfeld, as director of the Office of Economic Opportunity under US president Richard Nixon.

That year, Rumsfeld, who later would be best known as the controversial Secretary of Defense under President George W. Bush, hired a special assistant, Dick Cheney, the man who would go to become Bush’s (loathed by the left) vice president for two terms. Together they supervised the New Jersey Graduated Income Work Experiment, which ran from 1968 to 1971, at the tail end of the “war on poverty” introduced by Lyndon B. Johnson. (Rumsfeld and Cheney’s offices have not responded to Quartz’s requests for comments.)

James Livingston, a history professor at Rutgers University and author of No More Work: Why Full Employment Is A Bad Idea, shared this little-known detail in the history of basic income in a recent interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

“What in the world was going on here?” he said. “It does tell us that there was no left-right distinction for thinking about universal income.”

The much-cited New Jersey project involved more than 1,300 families, some of them living in rural Pennsylvania. The control group was made up of people living below the poverty line who were not offered any subsidies. Families in the experimental group were given federally funded supplements so that their income was at or just above the poverty line.
Among their goals, the researchers were curious about what basic income would do to recipients’ productivity and work ethic. They found that federal payments did little to discourage breadwinners in the families from working: The men who were given a basic income worked one hour less per week, while women reduced their work week by five hours. Mothers in the program spent more time with their children, whose performance at school improved.

The same study was replicated in Gary, Indiana, as well as Seattle and Denver, and all offered evidence that a guaranteed income’s effect on work ethic was “nil,” says Livingston. As the New York Times reported in 1970, Congress was convinced by Rumsfeld’s experiment and approved his proposed measure to replace welfare with this more streamlined system. The Senate didn’t approve the plan, however, and the issue faded. Nixon, too, turned against the idea.

Not everyone would agree with Livingston’s conclusion that the experiments prove UBI is our best hope for a future of more equal economic opportunity. And ultimately, it’s hard to know who’s right: Whether you’re for or against UBI, the data from past basic income trials, including Rumfeld’s and Cheney’s, is shaky at best.

https://qz.com/931291/dick-cheney-and-donald-rumsfeld-ran-a-universal-basic-income-experiment-for-president-richard-nixon/

Elif Batuman: The Idiot -- enjoying it, but it seems oddly mild and straightforward so far: just the story of someone going to uni. I assume something else will happen as it goes along. Not quite what I expected, having loved all of her non-fiction.

I'm reading 'Cinema: The Archeology of Film and the Memory of a Century', which is supposedly written by Jean-Luc Godard and Youssef Ishagpour. In reality it's an essay by Ishagpour and an interview with Godard by Ishagpour, where Ishagpour does nearly all the talking. And for some reason it's broken up into 18 chapters which never gets started and ends before it gets anywhere. Here is the entirety of what Godard says in chapter 4:

Certainly, it felt a bit like that, it's not very clear, it was very unconscious, later on reflection it became more conscious. When you, and many others, quote an author or talk about a book, you've really read it, but with me, I hear a sound, I think it ought to go here, there's a mixture... [...] Oh yes, I didn't know that...

At least it's a quick read. And Histoire(s) du Cinema is on of my favorite films.

I've been reading stories from the Balzac collection Human Comedy from NYRB.

Rereading Lethem's DISAPPOINTMENT ARTIST. Slips down pretty easy. Well written, very fluent, obviously immensely centred on himself, to an extent that could become self-parodic, perhaps should be _more_ self-parodic than it is.

Curiously much of the material feels more homely and familiar than it once did. I have the sense that JL himself has probably left a lot of this stuff behind, having got it out of his system here.

The Hoyt-Schermerhorn essay I quite appreciate as I have been in and around the station several times since I first read this, a decade or so ago, and JL's writing on it has always lent the whole zone, the surrounding department stores, etc, a kind of magical status.

Elif Batuman: The Idiot -- enjoying it, but it seems oddly mild and straightforward so far: just the story of someone going to uni. I assume something else will happen as it goes along. Not quite what I expected, having loved all of her non-fiction.

― I hear from this arsehole again, he's going in the river (James Morrison), Tuesday, March 14, 2017 6:14 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.vulture.com/2017/03/elif-batuman-on-writers-block-and-the-magic-of-early-email.html

according to this^ interview with Christian Lorentzen the text of The Idiot is an unearthed novel she wrote while in grad school, and polished off the embarrassing parts for publication cuz she was near a deadline and her Actual novel wasn't near completion:

The Idiot isn’t the book you proposed to Penguin when they signed you up as a novelist. What happened to that one?

It’s still there! I still want to do it. It’s called The Two Lives, after a phrase in Chekhov. It’s about a Turkish-American journalist in her 30s, a lot of it is set in Turkey, and it’s more difficult book than The Idiot — it’s more political, it has a lot more compromises in it. I worked on it for three years. But as I wrote, this weird thing happened. I kept adding flashbacks. I’d get to the next chapter and be like, “Well, if you really want to know where it all started, it was here.” And that point just kept receding further into the past.

By 2015, it was overdue, I was really stressed out, I kept reading about publishers making authors return their advances because they took too long to write their books. Still I couldn’t stop writing flashbacks. They just went further back. At some point I found myself writing a flashback where the main character was in college. So then I was sitting there at age 38, trying to remember what college was like.

That’s when I had the idea of looking up this old novel draft I wrote in 2000, when I took a year off from grad school. A lot of it was about my experiences in college. I hadn’t looked at it in a really long time, because I knew it would be super-embarrassing. But I figured I would just take a quick look, just to find some details about college life to copy-paste into The Two Lives.

As I read through the file, I automatically started tinkering with it. It was so absorbing. The writing was really easy to improve, too, because it was so, uh, I guess youthful. It was really embarrassing and painful in certain ways, but I also felt all kinds of stress I’d been having just somehow lifting off me. With The Two Lives, I’d been finding it really hard to think of the narrator as not me, as not my nonfiction narrating voice. But this old manuscript was about someone who clearly wasn’t me, because she was 20 years younger than me — she was a kid. So working with that story really felt like fiction.

And then, as I was going through it, this strange thing happened. I started to see resonances with the story I was trying to tell in The Two Lives. Even in this story I’d written 15 years earlier about this very innocent, ignorant person, there were resonances or figurations of the same difficult adult compromises I’d been trying to write about. And I realized then that for whatever reason I had to finish that book first — that it was sort of a prequel.

i was also excited about it based on the strength of her essays but the parts i've read excerpted didn't get me too riled up

That makes sense about it being an old book. Seems a bit of a mis-step, though.

Started Jonathan Lethem, A GAMBLER'S ANATOMY.

The Only Question was a fine Sparkian effort, mainly allowing her to muse about the Book of Job and its meaning and its contemporary relevance from a variety of angles. As usual, she said what she had to say briefly, sharply and with acute wit.

Not sure what I am reading tonight. Too many choices in the to-read pile tbh.

Do you mean The Only Problem? It's one of the few Sparks that would've benefited from an extra forty pages.

Yeah. The Only Problem. Stupid memory!

laura riding: anarchism is not enough

t’s still there! I still want to do it. It’s called The Two Lives, after a phrase in Chekhov. It’s about a Turkish-American journalist in her 30s, a lot of it is set in Turkey, and it’s more difficult book than The Idiot — it’s more political, it has a lot more compromises in it. Would rather read this than The Idiot, as described (though Sam Sacks liked it in his WSJ weekend round-up, for what that's worth). But hoping to get into more of the younger (not naive grad students) or at least contemoprary writers from or in Middle East and Asia soon---recommendations?

Would recommend Hassan Blasim (The Iraqi Christ, The Madman of Freedom Square, (UK) both collected in The Corpse Exhibition (US)
A good overview is the book he edited, Iraq +100, with lots of youngish writers in it:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/B01MA5DKPZ.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Bae Suah from South Korea also well worth investigating. Weirdly, she was first published by Amazon, but now getting books out from other publishers. And for other young Asian writers, I'd look at Tilted Axis ( http://www.tiltedaxispress.com/books/ ), with the caveat that I really didn't like their first publication, 'Panty' by Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay.

Now reading The Coming of the French Revolution, Georges Lefebvre. It sorts out the tumult around the events of 1789.

The story he's setting up is that the monarchy massively over-borrowed to back the Americans against the English. This set in motion a whole train of power struggles, with the aristocracy and clergy aggressively seeking to weaken the monarchy. They succeed in rendering the monarchy weak, but overplay their hand by grabbing for all the power. In the process they alienate the bourgeois, who then combine forces with the peasantry, rise up against the aristocracy and clergy and end up filling the power vacuum that the aristocracy and clergy created, intending to fill it themselves.

Iraq +100 book looks great, thx James

idk, i've liked batuman's new yorker pieces but two memoirs-as-novels-with-titles-from-russian-literature doesn't seem all that interesting

so this has to be ed ch4mpion, right? https://twitter.com/BatumanTruther

Whoever it is, they're unhinged.

Finished The Idiot. Its a quite likable, ridiculously overlong, strangely unambitious book that I suspect she will regret publishing in years to come.

I was saddened to read a couple of days ago that Helen Dunmore has terminal cancer, aged 64. I haven't read a lot of her stuff: she specialises in historical fiction, never my favourite genre. But I recently read "The Betrayal", a cross between a Le Carre-esque Cold War thriller and something soapier and more empathetic, fairly conventional but well written and very enjoyable. I also have a vague sense of her as someone I'd like if I knew her, presumably from mostly forgotten interviews etc.

Current reading:

Powers of Darkness: Valdimar Asmundsson -- in 1900 the Icelandic translator of Stoker's Dracula got bored partway through and completely changed the story, cutting out almost all the non-Transylvanian bits and adding ape-men, naked ladies, human sacrifice, Dracula fomenting some sort of European political revolution, etc. And nobbody noticed until a few years ago, and now they've translated that version back into English.

taking an 5 hour flight wednesday night and got the audiobook of the George Saunders novel, with 166 actors reading all the characters

report back

yeah that sounds awesome.

How is "Powers of Darkness", James? That sounds interesting!

It is interesting more than good, tbh. Dracula is by far the better book, and the post-Transylvania stuff in PoD is a 30p Cliff-notes-style canter through a plot summary. But entertaining enough, overall.

oh btw I got the George Saunders audiobook free with a trial of the Audible app and i get a 2nd free audiobook as part of my trial... any recommendations? stuff that's both a good read AND a particularly good audiobook?

The Coming of the French Revolution was good. Clear exposition. Included research on the hinterlands and what the peasants were thinking and doing, not just events in Paris and the actions of 'notables'. My anticipatory summary didn't do it justice. It stops at the point the king is hauled back to Paris in October, after officially accepting the major legislative acts of the National Assembly.

Now it's onward to either Willa Cather's One of Us or Narayan's Malgudi Days. I've both books with me here at the Oregon coast, while I'm on a brief vacation trip.

^One of Ours

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1q2F_18cjg

One of Us will likely disappoint you, Aimless. It's a muddle.

Karl Ove Knaugard - My Struggle, Book Three
Derek Walcott - The Bounty

mah struggle

hehe

that will never stop amusing me

It's a muddle.

I'll look for the small redeeming qualities.

Yeah -- Cather's always worth reading.

so far this year...

Dava Sobel - The Glass Universe
Kind of a literary prequel to Hidden Figures, about the women "computers" who helped map the sky in the early days of modern astronomy. Sobel isn't flashy by any means but equally adept at illuminating human lives and explaining hard science to laypeople.

Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind - Occasional Essays
Zadie Smith - Swing Time
Collected essays are by nature a mixed bag but the standard is pretty high here. Skipped the film reviews, may go back to them. currently reading Swing Time and am floored by the 1990s media world depiction, so true. LOL "freebism - the practice of giving things to people with no need of them." welcome to my CD collection :)

Ulysses S. Grant - Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant Volumes 1 & 2
Mentioned this before, can't recommend enough. Utterly remarkable how un-dated much his prose and perceptions read today.

Tana French - The Likeness
There's an acute psychological twist to this crime novel but ffs is it overlong, I mean accruing details sure why not but I was deeply annoyed by these characters ultimately. Reminiscent of Ms Donna Tart in that regard and oh yeah French boldly borrows plot from The Secret History along the way.

Dawn Powell - A Time To Be Born
Maybe the best novel I've read by her? Lacerating. Funny and melancholy social satire set in 1940 NYC. Thinking about trying her Diaries next.

Jan Willen vänder Wetterling - Hard Rain
Another bizarre shaggy-dog crime novel in the Amsterdam Cops series.

Andrew Lownie - Stalin’s Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring
Basically read this with my jaw hanging open at Guy's compulsive dissolution and outrageous behavior. And yeah, spying. The more I read about these events, the more I think "how on earth did they get away with it as long as they did?"

It's by far her best novel, Mark.

Finished Lethem, A GAMBLER'S ANATOMY. His most bizarre book. One of the few things that makes a bit of sense or just about fits in: what feels a lot of homage to Pynchon.

In March I've been reading a bunch of things from the 30s or relating to it. Ramon Del Valle-Inclan's Tyrant Banderas is a recent-ish first time translation courtesy of NYRB where several scenes from a revolution (taking place smack on the Day of the Dead, natch) are not so much written as sprinkled on the page (note to self: use other words than fragementary). Short, intense, sharp with layers that'll reveal on re-reads. Has a terrific last paragraph. Tabucchi's Declares Pereira is an evocation of Salazar's Portugal, at the time of Spanish revolution. I had read a couple of things by Tabucchi in the past that were nice enough but this is next level. Tabucchi found his subject and the phrasing and the tics and runs with it in an unstoppable desk-performance, around a man who has to take an action out in the world. Really one of the great books of the last 30 years. Onto Buddhism with Soseki's The Gate (this time an NYRB re-translation), a novel which almost mirrors a not-very-much-happens type of film (the intro mentions Ozu but for me it had the rhythms of a Kore-eda as well, especially Maburosi), where the meaning of a life is questioned for a few minutes - an interiority is seen, exercised for a little while then...left.

Finished stories by Jaroslav Hasek, in a collection entitled Red Commissar. I sorta admired Svejk, whereas this particular collection - with several bunch of stories that cover several times in his life (a few around the time he took a job in a pharmacy) give the full range of his anarchist imagination. There are a few Soldier Svejk stories too. The last story, this portrait of a Macedonian butcher has a hilarious turn (it centres from around the time he founded a political party).

Johnny Marr, SET THE BOY FREE

How is that, the pinefox?

Just read Pereira recently too, and thoroughly endorse xyzzzz's acclaim

James Redd: I am only about 40pp in out of 400. It is plainly written and clear. It is the childhood stuff; will probably get more interesting.

There are moments where you could (as people do, and I think did with Morrissey) take out a sentence and say: 'who said this - Johnny Marr or Alan Partridge?'.

T-Rex were a big early band for him: clearly a key formative influence on Marr, Morrissey, Paul Morley (for whom 'ride a white swan' is the formative 45); perhaps Simon Reynolds also.

I've had T-Rex's "Life's A Gas" stuck in my head for weeks now. I don't have any strong emotional attachment to Bolan and realise he probably rhymed it with "I hope it's gonna last" because it's an easy rhyme but still bums me out a bit every time.

My fav Tabucchi anecdote is when he visited Portugal after the revolution and was astonished to learn that a major Portuguese poet and her husband addressed each other formally ("você"); "I didn't know there were communists like that!".

He was crazy for Portugal; one of the very few authors I know of who's written about the Azores (where I grew up).

Pereira was my first by him, and I need to find more. Any recommendations on what to read next.

hai guys

I discovered St. Aubyn

I'll have to ask my aunt, she's the Tabucchi fan. I only read Pereira and then noticed how the guy keeps popping up in articles/biographies of Portuguese authors I enjoy.

This looks like a good piece on Tabucchi: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/06/04/italys-seriously-playful-genius/

I finished Jeremy Treglown's biography of Henry Green. I know more about Henry Green now than I did before I read it.

Now I have started "The Invisible Player" by Giuseppe Pontiggia, on the ever-reliable Eridanos Press.

almost done with Chris Hayes' new one A Colony in a Nation. very very good, I liked his last book Twilight of the Elites, as well. he's a bit of a weeny, but just the right balance of earnestness with none of the cute affectations or pretensions of his colleagues at MSNBC.

A cute weeny, though.

he's adodrable. His first book was in essence an excellently written master's thesis stretched to unforgiving book lelngth.

I have no interest in reading him. Or listening to him either, really. But when the hubby has MSNBC on, I will occasionally look up from whatever I'm reading during his show.

What is a weeny?

a weeny is: the CTRL + F search term I'll use to find last posts, thanks!

Would recommend Hassan Blasim (The Iraqi Christ, The Madman of Freedom Square, (UK) both collected in The Corpse Exhibition (US)
A good overview is the book he edited, Iraq +100, with lots of youngish writers in it Thanks for the reminder, James; meant to check this guy out ever since your prev. rec. on Rolling Speculative etc.

Just finished the Lydia Davis mix of Swann's Way and wishing she could have already done all volumes, for my convenience and jones. Seriously---haven't gotten into her own stories yet, but this is great---and I'm pretty sure I'd think so even if I hadn't eventually dodged an Odettesque bullet, with lots of Swann-like mentalism along the way. Grieve's got a tough act to follow, but Proust will come through no matter what. (Hope so, since I may get past Volume 4 before Penguin Classics Deluxe does.)

Peter Higgins: Wolfhound Century -- clever, beautifully written fantasy set in alternative 1920-ish Russia, about a police officer trying to uncover a conspiracy against the state; the Tunguska Event, or something very like it, is a vast stone archangel which has fallen from space and become buried/fused with the Earth's crust. First of a trilogy, which I would normally use as an excuse to avoid, but this is good enough that I've ordered the other 2 books already.

I'm nearing the end of Cather's One of ours and Alfred is right that it is not up to the level of her best. When I'm finished with it I'll try to sum up my few thoughts on where it fails. (NB: She won a Pulitzer for this novel.)

nathalie sarraute: the age of suspicion (essays on the novel)

includes mentions of henry green and ivy compton-burnett, the latter of whom i'm finally going to attempt after finishing this

If you enjoy Green's long passages of dialogue-only-or-mostly---rather than being spoonfed by a narrator, unreliable or possibly otherwise---you may well dig Burnett, but forewarning: in the ones I've read, she sticks to family life, twisted implications by lamplight (she's great).

i have yet to read any green (will pick up the picador collection next time i see a copy), but your description there fits nicely with the one sarraute novel i've read so far. the i c-b i have is a family and a fortune, no idea where it stands within her canon.

hai guys

I discovered St. Aubyn

[waits...]

I bought the Dawn Powell online based on the squib review above, looks great

tried my 1st green (loving) earlier this yr and had trouble w it

sadly too, cuz my main impetus was updikes recommendations re: green

& relatedly, just abt finished w updike's 'the centaur' - has some great stuff in it, beautifully captured coming of age insights & fears; v mature writing

So, I finished One of Ours. I won't disrespect it as a bad novel, because it isn't. It shows a lot of Cather's usual strengths, but as Alfred put it, it is a bit of a muddle.

It was published in 1922 and must have been written in 1920-21. It's apparent that Cather quickly understood that WWI had radically altered the lives of about two million young American men and it would inevitably alter the course of the USA. But she can't do much in the book with that insight, because it was far too soon to decide what any of this cataclysmic change would lead to. Instead, the first 4/5 of the novel just follows the rather misshapen development and thwarted idealism of a rather sad-sack Nebraska farm boy named Claude. Consequently, the novel seems like a strange hybrid, combining a Nebraska-centric follow-on to the success of My Antonia with her still-nebulous insight about how American lives were about to change direction in some large way due to the war.

This between-two-stools quality may account for another of the weaker aspects of the book, which is a tendency toward hazy romanticism and sentimentality that runs counter to Cather's usual spare verbiage and clarity of observation. The book often stops dead in its tracks to heave in a paragraph of somewhat overwrought "fine writing" about nature. She also indulges in musings about how fine and upstanding young American manhood is, and how idealistic! There's a definite hangover quality in the book from the heavy war propaganda that flooded the USA in 1917-18. I suspect these delicate concessions to popular sentiments that only weaken the book are some of the very qualities that led the Pulitzer committee to select this book.

If you enjoy Cather (as I do), it's worth reading, but there are at least three or four of her other books you should read before this one.

reading lots of short stories this year fsr. Ted Chiang, then George Saunders, now reading Carver Cathedral

I suspect these delicate concessions to popular sentiments that only weaken the book are some of the very qualities that led the Pulitzer committee to select this book.

This is a good observation, whether it's true or not

flops what did you think of the Saunders audiobook? I think I tried a story of his once and it was too cutesy even for me, but I was probably just in a pissy mood

I read 10th of December mostly in a non-pissy mood, but too much (not all) of it was too cutesy indeed, also increasingly predictable and he lifted at least one plot, though not the right one, because it didn't help. Maybe he's better as a novelist? More often it seems like good short story writers can seem overextended as novelists, but some writers need the room.

xps wins-

the most prominently featured voice (about 30% up to the point i stopped) was Nick Offerman and I couldn't deal

imo (speaking as a Huge Saunders fan) he permanently walks the knife-edge of 'too cutesy' and 99% of the time pulls off the tight rope walk to spectacular results. But having offerman read throws it completely off and into twee middlebrow hell. shame as some of the other voices were quite good. and I love the recordings I've heard of Saunders himself reading stories from Tenth of December. having many voices worked with the disjointed format of the book and everything, shame about that one casting call... i will definitely read it tho

I suspect u may just not like him dow. he's pretty divisive. 10th of December p representative. i read him for the lols + for the warm feeling i get that he's a nice cool funny dude

Somewhere I saw Cather quoted to the effect that the Nebraska boy in One of Ours was based on a cousin, whom she didn't like and had as little contact with as possible, but she felt compelled to write about him and his fate---didn't know him very well, trying too hard to fill in the blanks---? I haven't read the book, but from those comments, expected the character to be something like doomed space cadet in "Paul's Case" (re William Carlos Williams' "The pure products of America go crazy").

I'll give him another go - I said "even for me" because I have a high threshold for cutesiness and often like it

Yes I'll give him another go too---anyway, my mixed feelings as reported last month on G
George's own thread:

Most of Tenth of December seemed overwrought and and/or too crafty, also maybe not crafty enough, re pattern recognition---if a hyper and otherwise goofy boychild and an old man with dementia are wandering the same landscape, of course they're eventually going to come into proximity and have A Saunders Moment, very painterly. But did like for instance when the way the Unstable War Vet, the kind that used to be standard on TV etc. before vets pretty much vanished from TV etc, gets re-absorbed into the family dynamic, for a while--and of course might actually freak out etc. later, with family members getting some measure of blame, suspicion etc; Saunders does always seek some kind of verisimilitude, and there he gets it. But overall, I think Karen Russell's Vampires In The Lemon Grove is much better at social commentary x imaginative writing, with no overselling.
I'll prob read some more Saunders----Civilwarland In Bad Decline was pretty good, I take it?

really fascinating nonfic book about film collectors (mostly from the '50s through the '80s), A Thousand Cuts.

Aidan Chambers, Dance On My Grave
Jim Grimsley, Dream Boy
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
Raziel Reid, When Everything Feels Like the Movies
Tim Federle, Better Nate Than Ever
Tim Federle, Five, Six, Seven, Nate!
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Oh, how is that Grimsley? Read an excerpt of something, saw him on a panel in New Orleans, with Rick Bragg and Dorothy Allison, via BookTV.org---both glimpses quite a while back, but impressive.

Dream Boy is fairly well regarded in queer lit circles, and I certainly cannot fault his prose (my thesis supervisor described it as "having a kind of haze over it," which'll make sense to anyone who has read it), but I disliked the way in which the main character was defined solely in terms of his (constant) victimhood. The Aidan Chambers book that I listed above is an ideal counterpoint, I think, focusing upon a queer death (not a spoiler; we know who dies from the very beginning) as a means of reflecting upon a life and a relationship, rather than simply a martyr-in-training.

After reading a few of Wm. Carlos Williams's essays as an appetizer, I started reading The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake, Samuel Bawlf, because I need to intersperse some non-fic in among the novels to cleanse my palate so to speak. So far, it is rehashing the history of Cabot, Frobisher, the search for the NW passage, the Armada, etc., but this stuff does have a tangential connection to Drake's circumnavigation of the earth and the author is willing to be brief about it, so I forgive him.

My main interest is reading about Drake's exploration of the Oregon and Pacific NW coast, which will probably get big play later in the book, even if most of the details will be deduction and guesswork. Other than Drake, almost no Europeans came within 500 miles of that area for another two centuries.

Raduan Nassar's Ancient Tillage is so good - his speaking out against Brazilian government austerity is also a model in the way a writer conducts himself in public life - although he hasn't been active since this was published in the mid-70s (which is perhaps another example to writers). Mostly made up of a series short, intense chapters where time and space are slowed and you are fully soaked in nature, sex, rebellion and God - written in this modernistic-style prose. Maybe its the power of modernistic prose, that it can partially shade these things in another mode entirely on the page that give it a different sensibility - Nassar feels fully in command of that.

Agustin Fernandez Mallo - Nocilla Experience. This is almost the first piece of fiction I've read that has tried to LOL respond to globalisation. My problem is I'm kinda sniffy about globalisation - I'd rather it fell apart as a conversation first (its always been something that is not really there, really, a cover for horrible policies and a world that is faaling to pieces). The prose is as flat as you like - and actually you wouldn't have it any other way. People/where/what they find themselves in develop as fragments (and their fragments are taken up 20+ pages after, very 'Short Cuts' I suppose). Its the kind of fiction you could run out of town by simply destroying the theory behind it - and the music he likes. Its like a very technocratic way of doing fiction (Mallo is a Physicist, an 'expert' in other words).

Spring thread time?

Done. ILB Gripped the Steps and Other Stories. What Are You Reading Now, Spring 2017