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

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

Carver - Cathedral

and

Queneau - Exercises in Style

To continue the Cather discussion started by Aimless: yes, I don't doubt the Pulitzer thought OFO's topicality put it over. Their picks in the '20s were schizophrenic: accommodating modernity but only after taking a couple lateral steps. Wharton's The Age of Innocence beat Main Street because Lewis' novel shocked too many voters; in 2017 I suspect most of us think the crew made the right decision regardless.

I finished Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus' essential Landslide for a paper I'm writing and have moved on to Pynchon's Bleeding Edge

(Now regretting not using a colon or at least a semicolon in thread title)

Steve Pinker's Language Instinct. I read this 15 or so years ago but I feel I've learned a whole bunch since then so giving it another go. I find him kinda hectoring but I can't argue with the clarity (albeit some of the deeper grammar modelling is a bit beyond me). Is it still considered canonical or is there something else I should be reading?

Spending a lotof time looking through a book of cooking ingredients since getting into putting more Asian etc greens in stir fries recently.

Errornomics by Joseph Hallinan book on making mistakes. PIcked this up in a charity shop a while back and it's come to the top of the pile for bog books. I think I finished something I was just reading also have been shuffling things around since i finally got my sower rail done after way too long and had to have things outof there while it was done.

Think i'm still mainly reading Surviving by Henry Green as a transport book but since bus strike is on not sitting on buses to read it.

Queneau - Exercises in Style

love this book.

^^ It's great. Have you seen the comic it inspired, which illustrates in 99 different comic styles a man working at his desk while his wife calls to him from the next room? http://mattmadden.com/comics/99x/

Am currently reading Denton Welch: Maiden Voyage, which is marvellous, Can't believe he was only in his 20s when he wrote it, the precocious fucker.

I've been meaning to read Queneau's Le Chiendent/BarkTree/Witch Grass since it turned up in Rowland S Howard's Portrait of The Artist as a Consumer in the early 80s. Did start it as Bark Tree I think in the mid 80s but didn't finish it. Assume Witch Grass is a totally different translation.
Georges Perec is also good if you're into weird French stuff.

Zazie dans le metro is also good by Queneau.

I love Denton Welch and totally agree on the precocious fucker call. He strikes me as one of those characters who were 'borrowed from death'. Recommend the journals if you can get hold of the them.

need to read the welch collection i have, maybe after the compton-burnett

xpost: think witch grass also uses the barbara wright translation (not sure if there are any others)

Im reading and enjoying David Byrne's "How Music Works"

just finished the ginger man - gotta say i'm glad it's over. i really enjoyed parts of it but dunno if it has aged very well - the main character is such a terrible prat, which is one thing, and the violence against women and general misogyny is another, but also it's sort of unbelievable and a bit false to me. like this character is supposed to be american, behaves like a posh british person, but the author imbues him with some form of irishness too. it might be possible to balance all these things but it comes across extremely confused. it's also just so cartoonish. there's no real centre to the story and the character's journey doesn't make much sense. there are far better books in the irish wastrel pantheon.

next up i'll prob read these:

knausgaard 2 - a man in love - going on holiday next week so might as well go back to this trashy/easy world. the cover is so embarrassing i'm almost unwilling to read it in public.
mark o'connell - to be a machine - irish guy has a book about transhumanism - sounds interesting.
richard yates - liars in love - read his other collection last year so figure i'll like this

Is the Byrne book any good? It's sitting on my shelf unread.

Yeah I'm really enjoying it, a lot of stuff about how tech and context shapes music (slightly ilm-ish at times even!) and a fair bit concerning the creative process behind his own music.

Reading more Lispector atm. Thinking about getting some Katherine Mansfield, I've never read her. Any ILB recommendations for best collection?

I was a bit disappointed by Exercises in Style when I first read it, while still enjoying it a lot. I think my thing is that while I've always loved the ideas of Oulipo, only Perec really managed to create something that was both a fun formalist experiment AND a world that resonated with me.

Mansfield's Bliss and The Garden Party, the second and third of the three collections she published during her lifetime, have most of her strongest writing, as far as I can tell.

On the most recent What Are You Reading or maybe the one before that, I got cranked up about Stories---Vintage trade pb, ISBN 0-679-73374-4, intro by Jeffrey Meyers (not always perceptive, I say): 28 stories, from early to very late (and the first, though written in 1908, wasn't published 'til 1924, the year after her death). The POV and voice are always there, even in the apprentice work, and despite some occasionally obvious influences (incl. magazine editors) along the way, and when she really gets going (somewhere in every selection and all of quite a few), omg.

Agreed on Exercises in Styles and almost all Queneau and Oulipo. Diverting, kinda slight..

Perec is often great (Species of Spaces collection above everthing else) and I want to engage with his work again. I'd add Harry Mathews to that.

Ah yes, I've been meaning to ask: anyone have any particular Mathews recommendations? Interested in actually being able to read some Oulipo in the original language.

(Although I must say the translation of e.g. <i>Life a User's Manual</i> (which I read recently and looooved) seemed to me to have survived translation impressively well, based on my occasional cross-referring to the original (which I certainly don't have enough French to properly read).)

gnah bbcode sorry

would agree with the evaluation of bliss/the garden party above. the penguin collected km should be easy to find and has her three original volumes + some posthumous collections.

about a third of the way into ivy compton-burnett's a family & a fortune: lots of (so far) unspoken familial tension. most struck by her remarkable ability to conjure up quite vivid images with little more than dialogue.

Haven't posted in a bit since fitfully starting to a few months ago. Since my last post, I've read and would warmly recommend: Rachel Cusk's Transit, Coetzee's Scenes from Provincial Life, Victor Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary, and Tim Lawrence's history of NYC nightlife/music in the early 1980s (Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor).

Up next for me: Paul Beatty's Sellout, Kamel Daouad's Merseult Investigation, and - after months on hold from my library and my forgetting about it until it arrived last week - Chris Kraus' I Love Dick (which I'd never gotten around to despite wanting to - the (pretty good) Amazon TV pilot of the adaptation renewed my interest in it)).

Anyone read Sellout and have any thoughts on it? I was initially skeptical but have since come around and am looking forward to reading it.

The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake has proved to be quite good. It is well-researched, well-structured, clearly written, level-headed, and knows just how much detail is enough for an intelligent lay reader to follow the evidence and get the point, without feeling the need to exhaustively prove its case to academic historians or specialists. The author is not a gifted stylist, such as Barbara Tuchman, but more than good enough to keep my interest at a simmer. Good stuff.

Reading Red Shift by Alan Garner. I wasn't sure at first - too dialogue heavy, too riddled with elisions - but it's grown on me. Kitchen sink landscape mysticism? It might just catch on.

This is a bit Books 101, but I read The Dead today, my first ever Joyce, without knowing anything about the story, or about Joyce really.

Anyway - so much to love - not just the ending (which I gather is famous) but the party section too, which reminded me of a showoffy long take from a Welles movie, and the tension of the cab home, and the constant dread even though the story itself seems quite joyous and full of light incident. I feel like I'll be able to read it every ten years for the rest of my life and feel something different every time.

You might like John Huston's film version too. I came to Dubliners very late, about 40 years after reading A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man and Ulysses in school, and was bowled over. I know some people who don't care for any of his others, but love these early stories. Not me, but---wow.
And don't worry about Books 101; several of us are still catching up. As mentioned upthread, I recently/finally enjoyed Swann's Way (Lydia Davis translation), and only in part because I realized how much Swann and I had in common, a while back---but today I was relieved to get to the end of "At Mme. Swann's", midway through In The Shadow of Young Girls In Flower (James Grieve translation). To paraphrase Grieve's intro, Proust will show you some wonderful scenes, but before, during and instead of showing, he will tell and tell and tell and fucking tell some more, incl. some of the most obvious and/or boring talking points, Didn't mind in the amazing first volume, but here it can be a chore. But I do think he's left me to infer, right or wrong, that the climatic, rhapsodic odes to Odette as a genius of dress, which I found hard to swallow, given her cheesy tastes in Swann's Way, can be taken as the narrator cheering himself up after the long autopsy of "the slow painful suicide" of his earlier romantic self-image---the self that blew any chance at happiness with Gilberte, whether there really was or could have been one or not.

Although I didn't mind it all that much, mainly compared to Swann's Way: Monsieur P.'s got me spoiled, "cossetted" as Grieve says of him (lots of complaints, but you didn't get drafted, JG).

Also wondering about The Sellout.

Started Jane Rawson's 'From the Wreck', about a shipwrecked Australian man in the 1850s who is haunted for the rest of his life by a transdimensional shapesifting cephalopod, and which is really good.

I find 'The Dead' more moving than I can account for - especially the closing few paragraphs. I can access most of it from memory, and it's like a piece of music in some regards. So much great poetry and poetic truth but the 'falling faintly/faintly falling' is enough to reduce me to tears.

^^^^^

Play with Christopher Walken was good too and they sang at the end.

In other words, ^thirded

What did they sing?

The last sentence of the story, iirc

Agree with Chuck Tatum and others about 'The Dead'!

still reading Johnny Marr: SET THE BOY FREE.
They are making the first LP.

It inspired me to record an instrumental version of 'this charming man' with one take per guitar.

THE BOG OF ALLEN

I find 'The Dead' more moving than I can account for - especially the closing few paragraphs. I can access most of it from memory, and it's like a piece of music in some regards. So much great poetry and poetic truth but the 'falling faintly/faintly falling' is enough to reduce me to tears.

― The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums (Chinaski

The Huston adaptation finds an analog with the music in Angelica Huston's monologue about the delicate boy.

Mark S did you know that one of Flann O'Brien's funniest early writings is a mock play called THE BOG OF ALLEN ?

It stars a character called ALLEN BOG.

I've been reading Malgudi Days, a set of short stories by R. K. Narayan, mostly by the light of an LED headlamp, because we've been out of power for the past 3 days. Just got electricity back about an hour ago. There was a windstorm on Friday.

Did you like it? I'm a big Narayan fan. Downloaded a whole bunch of Malgudi episodes from the Indian 1980s TV series a while back, but have never actually got around to watching them yet.

On book 2 of Wolfhound Empire trilogy, which retains its excellence. People who like Alan Furst or Dave Hutchinson and who can handle a bit of fantasy will like this, i think.

I love Narayan, have a bunch of his stuff. His American tour diary is v interesting.

The first 2/3 of Malgudi Days is excerpted from two early short story collections. These stories all tend to be quite short, about 5 pages each, could more accurately be described as brief tales or vignettes than fully-developed stories. Their interest for me lay chiefly in their capturing some small slice of Indian life drawn almost exclusively from the poor or petty middle class, which a contemporary Indian would have instinctively associated with particular castes, but I am not versed enough in the culture to make such distinctions. The latter third seems to contain longer stories of a dozen of more pages, but I haven't read these, yet.

imo, Narayan's great strength is his ability to capture India's bewildering diversity of people and folkways in extremely simple and convincing microcosms. These stories display that strength. It's like a slide show but in full color and 3-D, full of lively detail.

Should I read Mistry's Such a Long Journey?

Reading a trashy paperback I picked up ages ago: Forbbiden Lovers, about lesbianism during the classic Hollywood era. It's a total mess, making no real distinctions between relationships that have actual documentation backing them up, shady rumor based stuff and stars who happened to have a strong gay following (an interesting topic in its own right, of course). It's padded out with lists of gay women on Broadway and 1920's Paris, and chapters on stuff more unrelated still - Fatty Arbuckle's scandal, for one. Also jumps back and forth in time to a frustrating degree - the "Garbo talks!" moment is mentioned after, like, chapters on her talkie career. Still, the first few chapters, which get very detailed about the love triangle between Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and screenwriter/author Mercedes De Acosta, are written with empathy and avoid trying to make things seem sleazy or lurid - could make for a good episode of You Must Remember This.

and - after months on hold from my library and my forgetting about it until it arrived last week - Chris Kraus' I Love Dick

Interested to hear what you think! I read that recently and found it both fascinating and irritating - reading GoodReads reviews of it made me more puzzled still.

Reading Red Shift by Alan Garner. I wasn't sure at first - too dialogue heavy, too riddled with elisions - but it's grown on me. Kitchen sink landscape mysticism? It might just catch on.

I got the BFI DVD of the TV version of this and it comes with an extra on Garner that makes him seem hyper-pretentious in a not entirely unlikeable way.

Ah yes, I've been meaning to ask: anyone have any particular Mathews recommendations?

There is a thread btw.

Oh! Thanks!

Thanks for the Mansfield tips upthread. Has anybody read any Melvin B. Tolson? I randomly found an excerpt of his Libretto for the Republic of Liberia and it looks SO MY THING.

I haven't, really, but I came across him via this book about canonization which is really good and readable.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/916704.Marginal_Forces_Cultural_Centers

^
It explores the idea that 'Tolson urgently needs to be brought into the canon' contradicts 'Pynchon is depoliticized by being canonized', ie divergent ideas of canon relating to writers from different backgrounds / literary spheres.

= "the canon" shd in fact be an argument abt what canons shd be?

"The Death of the Heart", Elizabeth Bowen. I've read a short story or two by her in anthologies but this was my first novel. She's a heavyweight and an original and there's some really wonderful stuff in this but also stuff that must have looked a bit dated even in 1938: a Henry James type preoccupation with subtle moral failings of the cultivated classes, and a wodge of observations of a philosophical and/or psychological sort by an omniscient authorial voice - some perceptive and interesting but others just portentous.

As a complete change I'm reading Anthony Burgess's "Earthly Powers". I've avoided this for ages thinking it might not be my thing at all, all macho intellectual display, but I'm about 120 pages in and it's been great fun so far.

mark s I agree - a lot of discussion of "the canon" treats it as though it were a fixed thing, but I think of it more as a dynamic system constantly re-evaluating itself; also as an aggregation of sub canons, all jockeying for position.

Re: Earthly Powers. Hand it to a Catholic to do a proper job of taking the piss out of the church.

Picked up The Evenings by Gerard Reve. Its a kind of ALWAYS angry and alienated young man novel, pretty witty and at-times fucked for the lolz. Reminded me of Mishima, a novel someone writes in their 20s except the person writing it won't grow out of, a phase that won't pass, its just there for some reason and won't go, and they are bringing the flavour of THAT on the page. Written in '46 so there is no respite from the torment just because a war is over.

As the sun turns up I went back to pre-war middle Europe (where else?) for an account by Gershom Schoelem in Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, a nice enough trawl through the memory of the scholar's time with Benjamin in the intellectual humanist hothouse, and his attempt to claim Benjamin as a superior metaphysical thinker instead of merely a materialist cultural critic that he went on to be painted as. His attempts to get Benjamin to Palestine well ahead of time are tragic although he writes with much distance (actual or otherwise, this book is from '75). Kafka hangs very deeply through much of this. Went back to fiction, firstly via a bunch of micro-stories by Peter Altenberg as collected in Telegrams of the Soul where the translator doesn't mention Walser which is really odd as this is surely the sensibility its tapping up, and went onto more Viennese stories by Joseph Roth in his novella Weights and Measures where it seems to directly draw from his drinking problem and marital disaffections on the one hand. On the other the guy does mood, the pages describing the outbreak of cholera in the town - and where that takes the story - are expertly done in an A+ performance.

As a complete change I'm reading Anthony Burgess's "Earthly Powers". I've avoided this for ages thinking it might not be my thing at all, all macho intellectual display, but I'm about 120 pages in and it's been great fun so far.

It boasts one of the two or three best opening sentences I've ever read in a novel.

I am reading "The Wager" by Machado de Assis.

I really wish that there was more Peter Altenberg in English: that collection (Archipelago-published) is very good

Sueurs Froides by Boileau and Narcejac; the material Vertigo is based on. They also did the original novel of Les Diaboliques.

Both those have been republished in english in the last couple of years, by Pushkin Press

Just started Lanark.

Cool. Are you listening to Belle & Sebastian as you read it?

Hahaha, no, but I could dig some out.

Because I think I know someone who did just that.

*raises hand*

Of course, this was during the Sinister days.

Not that I was on Sinister or knew of its existence, but I must have sensed its presence across the Atlantic.

What's the connection? I don't know b&s too well

I started in on Lanark v skeptical and still think the second part drags a bit but the back half is so so great.

No connection other than being Scottish, as far as I know.

I read Lanark in a malarone fug in a hut in Senegal. No Belle and Sebstian was consumed.

Lanark is way too weird to be compared with B&S. It also has one of my favourite book covers

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/cf/49/cc/cf49cc215e3112125ba79a717e80cf42.jpg

idk there is a shared repressed, artsy Scottish gloom in common

lanark is more the second half of 'the red thread' imo

Shakey otm

Gray is a precursor of B&S as a voice of art school Glasgow, but by about 40 years - he started writing that book in the 1950s.

There was ultimately supposed to be a genuine connection as he was set to do some kind of illustration for them but I can't now find reference to it. Also a member of B&S played in the stage version of LANARK, this decade. There is a general parallel in their becoming West End icons and also, I think, agreeing about Scottish independence (as do Deacon Blue, Hue & Cry, et al).

The Real Glasgow sections of LANARK have some relevance to B&S or any other subsequent vision of Glasgow but I don't think the resemblance in tone is very close.

The SF / Fantasy / Gothic sections, I think there is still less connection.

Overall - of all the things Gray has done, I'm not sure that LANARK is the closest to B&S.

I always wanted to like the book a lot but found it actually very stodgy to read, except the Prologue (?) 3/4 of the way through which I thought the most dazzling section.

Actually the Gray work that IS closest to B&S is his Hillhead mural.

http://www.sadlergreen.com/_images/_versions/l/164.jpg
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-19612581

I wanted to read Lanark because I thought it would be about a wonderful fantasy Scotland where Belle and Sebastian don't exist

I agree that Lanark is kinda stodgy. I loved the section with the mural, but the Kafka/sci-fi bit felt interminable.

Ward Fowler: it is -- a Scotland prior to c.1981.

Thank you Pinefox, I was being a wee bit cheeky, as they say up here.

Actually, I have been trying to think of other Scottish performers who seem closer to A Gray than B&S, and the nearest person I could think of was Ivor Cutler.

I'm reading Darian Leader's Stealing the Mona Lisa, which is a kind of avuncular take on Lacanian views of art. It's taken a while to get going, and there's a LOT of passive/subjunctive mood waffle, but it's hitting it's stride and slowly pulling me in.

Xp Long Fin Killie?

Cutler without doubt! Very close.

But I think there is a tendency for a great swathe of 'Scottish alternative artists' to get rolled together, either by themselves or by others -- so eg: I am sure that B&S will have talked about Cutler (maybe even collaborated with him somewhere), and Edwin Morgan --so it all gets implicitly connected.

For that matter I'm sure that Deacon Blue (who were not so Alternative) repeated Gray's most famous slogan re 'the early days of a better nation' on a record sleeve.

Cutler and B&S both on this record.
Will stop now and remind myself that this is ILB not ILM.

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

Thanks for following up so diligently on my derail, the pinefox:) If you want to keep it ILB, you could talk about Gray contrasted with Muriel Spark- TS Glasgow vs. Edinburgh- although perhaps that is a too facile, classic New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure Section-style comparison.

James Redd -- the thing there is: I get how Spark is Edinburgh / Morningside ... but I don't really get how Gray is Glasgow in a directly contrasting way. The big contrast would surely be Spark vs Kelman (or Leonard or Torrington) - the really gritty working-class-tenement writers -- rather than Gray's tendency to fancy, whimsy, Gothic, history, etc.

(this has always been a general point for me - I get that Gray and Kelman and Leonard are pals and have similar politics -- but I don't see the literary, stylistic, generic link between Gray and the others)

In fact this would lead back to the B&S idea in that eg: Kelman = gritty Govan and Gray = whimsical Hillhead -- more the B&S world / era.

Or put another way: Gray, unlike Kelman or Leonard, is the great writer of the *Glasgow School of Art* - maybe you can draw a contrast with something in Spark, but it doesn't feel like a traditional Glasgow vs Edinburgh contrast. Maybe it's a more interesting contrast.

The Art School side is partly why Gray seems to link forward to B&S, perhaps via 'The Postcard Scene' et al.

The other B&S connection (so I am now confirming your original idea) is religion -- LANARK describes, very autobiographically as I recall (cf A LIFE IN PICTURES), a long period of painting a mural in a church, which is very Stuart Murdoch.

years ago i gave a copy of "the fall of kelvin walker" to my friend bill as a bday present (glasgow born and bred, was briefly in a band w/pat kane, who he has little time for)

bill said it was MUCH TOO PROTESTANT and he was unable finish it

that is my helpful anecdotal contribution to this chat

The Art School connection also tends to make me connect Gray back to Mackintosh - but I don't know that Mackintosh was a writer.

The origin of Kelvin Walker, according to the pinefox:

https://flic.kr/p/8T1Aqy

"I wanted to read Lanark because I thought it would be about a wonderful fantasy Scotland where Belle and Sebastian don't exist."

I read Lanark well before Belle and Sebastian did exist, which makes that sentence jar a bit.

Like Pinefox I wanted to like it but didn't much. Belle and Sebastian are even more completely not my thing, but for very unrelated reasons. Not that I know much about B&S, but I do own at least one barely played album. Before reading this thread it would never have occurred to me to connect the two.

everything scottish is the same

https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2015-02/23/8/enhanced/webdr08/enhanced-32054-1424697475-5.png

B&S are my thing.

It is true that as there are only 5.3 million people in Scotland, in a relatively small space, in theory they could be more the same than other things eg: the populations of China, Russia or the US.

But I doubt that Scottish people would accept that view.

Mark is that your idea of "the B&S aesthetic" ?

there is no aesthetic it can't illustrate

http://cheapsurrealism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/kul.jpg

I have started reading Junkie by the noted non-Scottish author William Burroughs.

http://cheapsurrealism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/kul.jpg

All this scottish chat makes me wish the once-great Canongate Classics series, full of great scottish lit, was still a going concern

http://cheapsurrealism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/kul.jpg

Reading Giovanni's Room, which is beautiful and heartbreaking. I'd not read any Baldwin in a while, and I'd forgotten how mannered and 'European' his sensibility is - albeit a Europe refracted through Henry James: the exaggerated, almost sacred, sense of the minutiae of communication, the precision of each paragraph (despite the savagery and chaos of what is often being described), the elegance. And I'm totally conscious of my age as I read, and how young Baldwin was when he wrote it - at times, by dint of age alone, I feel like a seedy voyeur like Jacques or Guilliame.

was on a bit of a tiresome walk round a park with my brother and his wife, but passed a second hand bookshop along the way, all paperbacks one pound. found a collection of peter reading's first three books of poetry - diplopic, C, Ukulele Music. Sitting in a pub enjoying the caustic violence and wit set in a sort of deep pastoral (in itself bloody and sexual).

"kiddies" are "(sinister dwarfs, next issue's parricides)". skinheads throw 280 million year old fossilised desert at nesting kittiwakes - that desert in itself an unpleasant compression:

Arid hot desert stretched here in the early
Permian Period - sand dune fossils
are pressed to a brownish bottom stratum.

arid hot desert - sand dune fossils - brownish bottom stratum

labouring trochees + guttural speech of birds - "'uk-uk-uk and a plaintive 'ee-e-eeh' - and teens - 'Gibbo, gerrofal getcher yaffuga'.

Junky was short, reportorial, but artful. By artful, I mean to say it is one of those books that appears utterly straightforward and gives the impression of almost guileless simplicity, while being based in decades of thoughtful observation and a fully developed philosophy of life.

I am now reading Sagas of the Warrior-Poets, an anthology of five brief Icelandic sagas, where the main character is a skald.

I finished I Love Dick, which I really enjoyed and wish I had read a long time ago. Funnier than I'd expected and was very well executed, imo (I think it's irritating-ness, mentioned upthread, is deliberate or at least she's very self-conscious of it - whether or not that excuses it I guess depends on your taste). I do wonder, if the show indeed continues, how it would carry on. Would have been interesting to read when it was first published ('97?) and its novelty (in tone, if not form) would have been better appreciated. I'm definitely going to pick up 'Torpor', her 'prequel' of sorts to ILD, soon.

Also read a few stories by the early 20th century Chinese writer Lu Xun (from this collection https://www.amazon.com/Real-Story-Other-Tales-China/dp/0140455485) which I liked, though fear I missed quite a bit due to a lack of knowledge of Chinese history. As his "Diary of a Madman" story would suggest, he writes in a Gogol-ian (Gogol-ese?) tradition (Kafka-esque too, avant la lettre) with what seem to be heavily allegorical strands running through.

Started Paul Beatty's the Sellout which has been literally laugh out loud funny. I'm not sure if he can sustain the comic momentum and riffs over the course of the novel (am about 60 pages in, now), but I'm really enjoying it so far. Great one-liners and set-pieces. Funniest book I've read in a while.

i really liked kraus' aliens and anorexia, maybe even more than ild

Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy. According to the introduction by Rachel Cooke, "The finding of a voice for the book - and it is a remarkable voice - Dundy credited to her friend the novelist Henry Green. At their lunches together, she made is her business to make him laugh. 'I began to recognise that I was hearing a voice that was me but that wasn't me', she wrote in her 2001 memoir Life Itself! 'It was a voice Henry gave me, yet I'd heard it before. But never this clearly. It let me play the screwball again.'"

Sample sentence that made me laugh: "I said casually, 'I saw this stinking little Art film last night. All about the simple life on a barge up and down the Seine. How about that? Not a bad idea.'"

dundy wrote a good book abt elvis and his mom iirc

I thought I'd give BEE another go. I read "Glamorama" a few years ago and I remember it being annoying.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41i4iaoq%2BsL._SX328_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I noticed once more that the authors of Icelandic sagas are generally very specific and detailed about wounds inflicted during battles, including all the particulars of the weapon used, the site of the wounds, the extent of damage, and the type of blow which inflicted the damage. Just as medieval European court poets always lavished a lot of attention on the dress of the knights and their ladies. In each case, it is an exact reflection of their audience's keenest interests.

John Darnielle - Universal Harvester
John A. Farrell - Richard Nixon: The Life
* Edmund Wilson - To the Finland Station

John Darnielle - Universal Harvester

Me too! I liked it very much. Got quite a lot of reading done in hospital; I'll maybe figure out a list at some point. Really loved 'War with the Newts' - an impressive breadth of targets, piercing and funny.

I noticed once more that the authors of Icelandic sagas are generally very specific and detailed about wounds inflicted during battles, including all the particulars of the weapon used, the site of the wounds, the extent of damage, and the type of blow which inflicted the damage.

it's like my teenaged self reading the critical injury tables from the Rolemaster RPG

Partway into Alison Moore's 'The Lighthouse', about a sad recently divorced man on a Danube hiking holiday who gets involved with an angry hotelier convinced the hiker has slept with the hotelier's wife

I should write blurbs

Surprised how big a part the war plays in the Boileau-Narcejac novel; had Hitchcock come across it earlier perhaps he would've set it in Paris and not LA? The narrator's wandering between personal and political tragedy strikes a chord right now, what with the awfulness of the coming election and having lost my cat to feline aids last Sunday. Uhm, not that those are comparable to the rather more dramatic circumstances of the book, but you know.

I finished I Love Dick, which I really enjoyed and wish I had read a long time ago. Funnier than I'd expected and was very well executed, imo (I think it's irritating-ness, mentioned upthread, is deliberate or at least she's very self-conscious of it - whether or not that excuses it I guess depends on your taste). I do wonder, if the show indeed continues, how it would carry on. Would have been interesting to read when it was first published ('97?) and its novelty (in tone, if not form) would have been better appreciated. I'm definitely going to pick up 'Torpor', her 'prequel' of sorts to ILD, soon.

I was very surprised to go on GoodReads and see a lot of people accuse Krauss of stalking and even abuse, when to me Dick's reactions never seem anything other than flattered and bemused. My frustration comes from the absurdity of investing capital l Love into a guy you barely know and who really doesn't seem either interesting or interested - which I guess the ending kinda confirms, so yeah, it might be intentional.

I noticed once more that the authors of Icelandic sagas are generally very specific and detailed about wounds inflicted during battles, including all the particulars of the weapon used, the site of the wounds, the extent of damage, and the type of blow which inflicted the damage.

Was reminiscing with my mum the other day about how much I loved Mallory as a kid - would draw and then cut out these tiny paper shields to represent different knights and re-enact the story. Tried giving it a go again recently and couldn't get anywhere with it - dude becomes much more difficult once "and then knight x unseated and bloodied knight y" no longer gives you a "oh cool, better write that down on a chart!" impulse.

I thought I'd give BEE another go.

http://www.vulture.com/2013/01/bret-easton-ellis-real-art-form-tweeting.html

The Warmth of Other Suns is a gorgeous and hugely important book but I may have to stop reading it on the train because it's almost sent me on a sobbing jag several times over. Also, I can feel any lingering patience I have for deniers of white privilege rapidly melting away, which might not be an altogether positive development.

Been reading the NYRB collection of Balzac shorter works "The Human Comedy". Venturing into murder mysteries, war stories, political commentary, and other detours, in addition to the Paris high-society-meets-low-life milieu he's best known for, they showcase his range. Currently, taking a break to re-read Unamuno's Tragic Sense of Life. A once every 10 years cycle seems about right for revisiting that great theological edifice of despair.

That reminds me of this post

If anything would cure despair it's surely that cover art.

fragments of a life story: the collected short writings of denton welch

Ooooh

yes, was glad to find a copy of that... a hell of a lot cheaper than this thing if not quite so impressive looking!

Made my way around Malcolm Bowie's appraisal of In Search of Lost Time in Proust Among the Stars. I think it says something about the quality of this work that you wouldn't give it to someone who hasn't read at least a substantial portion of Proust, despite having many excerpts of it scattered throughout -- its so highly detailed in its surgery of the book and will enrich the experience for people who love the book and go back to it. Bolano's Last Evenings on Earth is simply magisterial. Most of the stories (as so much Bolano) centre around literature, politics, love & friendship - its a skilled intertwining of these, and more. How people connect and then can simply disappear (usually because of politics, although sometimes they just do to end a story). Much of it is an affectionate portrait of a person or scene. Above all its his skill as a supreme storyteller in a kinda Arabian Nights mode that comes through.

I'm finishing Henri Michaux's account of his experiences with Mescaline and Hashish in Miserable Miracle. Having read a book on Proust that has a chapter on Time its actually nice to see an account that talks about how drugs enhance space (as well as time). I am rushing through as I don't particularly like it as writing.

I've just started Bolano's "The Savage Detectives". Pretty great so far

Finished Paul Beatty's The Sellout, which was very funny and continued to have laugh out loud moments throughout the rest of the book. Like Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods, it's well-executed satire in the Swiftian tradition and it delivers well on its audacious premise. Unlike DeWitt's more deadpan treatment, Beatty maintains a fast-paced comic energy throughout and it's filled with great asides and one-liners.

At one point he references the book Oreo by Fran Ross (a former writer for Richard Pryor) from the 70s. Has anyone read it? I've seen it around - New Directions Press re-published it in the last few years - but I don't think I've heard much about it (apart from a few reviews). I'm curious to hear what anyone's thought and how it holds up today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oreo_(novel) and http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/an-overlooked-classic-about-the-comedy-of-race

I've been wanting to read more Bolano ever since finishing By Night in Chile and Nazi Literature in the Americas a while ago. 2666 is sitting, daunting, on my shelf and I don't think I'll bring myself to it yet. Perhaps Last Evenings on Earth is a good one to read in the meantime?

Up next for me is The Mersault Investigation by Kamel Daoud, or rather, Merseult contre enquete - which I will attempt to read, with the help of a dictionary, en francais - which is a re-telling of Camus' Stranger from the perspective of the brother of the Arab killed in the story.

take a hint from your friend Michael B and read the Savage Detectives!

Another review of "Oreo" from NY Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/07/14/blacks-jews-entangled/

Sounds interesting.

Lol, I'm a Michael B irl and before seeing the message above mine was verrry confused and weirded out for a good minute. Yes, I do want to read it too, but am trying to squeeze in a few shorter things in between longer books. I do mean to read both it and 2666 eventually...

2666is actually much more approachable if you think of it as being the five conjoined novels that it is. Read one, take a break if you need to to read something else, read another, get your momentum, read book 3, really in the grove now, read book 4, then hang yourself, read vol 5. it's easy.

Savage Detectives is technically ""long"" if you count pages but it's p breezy, i read the first half of it in a sitting without even noticing

All this scottish chat makes me wish the once-great Canongate Classics series, full of great scottish lit, was still a going concern
― I hear from this arsehole again, he's going in the river (James Morrison), Friday, 14 April 2017 07:44 (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what's your search & destroy for this imprint

'savage detectives' is such a satisfying novel. everything hopeful and juvenile; everything looming and setting up 2666. i don't know how you channel that adolescent love in the face of impending doom. i don't know how i could ever stop envying those mexico city cafes and rooftop bodies.

i've been reading harry mathews again ('the conversions'). i prefer 'my life in cia'. i also love that he existed.

i just met with a bunch of people who teach out at montana: david gates (ann beattie's ex) whose novel 'jernigan' is such a world to live in. he's a fucking riot. but i'd really like to recommend kevin canty's novel 'the underworld.' it deals with the aftermath of a 70's mining disaster in idaho. the grief is everywhere; nothing is adorned; the reader lives in the mines and bars and everything else seems utterly true. it's nice to read something without any conceit.

Canongate Classics worth reading, to start with:

Wild Harbour by Ian Macpherson

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg

The Member And The Radical by John Galt

A Beleaguered City And Other Tales Of The Seen And The Unseen by Margaret Oliphant

A Glasgow Trilogy by George Friel

Complete Short Stories by Muriel Spark

Plus pretty much anything by Nan Shepherd, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robin Jenkins, Catherine Carswell, Alasdair Gray (if to your taste), James Kennaway

And also, just because ut's so well done and weirdly charming, The New Testament in Scots

I read "The Wager" very slowly because my eyes have been tired but also because I found it slow going; I was all ready to dismiss it as a piece of tedious mannered Victoriana and then it walloped me with a big emotional sucker punch at the end. Glad I kept going but I didn't find the process of reading it especially enjoyable.

I am now reading "There But For The" by Ali Smith. I like Ali Smith.

started reading calvin trillins 'American stories' I really love how plainly he writes

but headed on a vacay soon so gonna bring rafa nadal autobio & Truman capotes summer crossing

henry green: blindness

it's nice to read something without any conceit.

ain't it the truth. ten years ago that novel would have been narrated from the pov of a local dog. and praised for it.

bringing Jeff VanderMeer The Southern Reach Trilogy on a sorely needed vacation

I finished Sagas of Warrior Poets. The last of the five included in the group, Viglund's Saga was interesting in that it was an attempt to mash-up the usual saga material (envy, lust, raiding, sneak attacks, bloody death) with a romantic tale more along the lines of Tristan & Isolde. But because Vikings did not 'do' chivalry or romance, the romantic parts are bit like crude application of lipstick on the usual blood-and-guts.

I checked out a copy of Wolf Hall from my local library, based on many admiring mentions on ILB. I am only half-certain I'll engage with it, but I'm willing to try it next.

Hilary Mantel's prose is really delicious. I need to read Bring Out The Bodies the sequel to it.
Also have Mantel's French Revolution book somewhere and at least one other.

Just started Positively 4th Street which I've meant to read for ages.
Picked it up for 1p plus p+p.
So far reading about Joan Baez being manipulative in late 50s Boston. I think Richard Farina's just appeared too.

Just finishing Errornomics about Human capacity for error, causes and possible solutions which is pretty interesting.

I loved Wolf Hall and Bringing up the Bodies. I'd be happy to say they were minor novels, but there's something vast in the vision of them, and the undertaking. Mantel is an odd proposition. Given what she's been through, and the breadth of her powers, I find her quite intimidating. There's something of the night about her...

This is making me want to read Beyond Black again.

Yeah, those Cromwell books are, if nothing else, amazingly addictive page-turners. Still a bit puzzled as to why she decided to rehabilitate a figure that, from all the historical accounts I've read, was a pretty terrible guy - it's not like she has a very clear agenda for doing so - but as fiction it's great stuff.

I'm continuing my run of Hitchcock source material with Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca

Having in the distant past (mid-1980s) attempted to write an historical novel, I kind of understand Hillary Mantel's job, so that I notice the author doing her job much more than the average reader. So far, this doubled awareness of seeing both the story and the mechanics of telling the story has not damped my engagement with the story. That's a good sign.

The (completely necessary and unavoidable) anachronisms embedded into the novel are not likely to dissuade me from enjoying it. iow, it looks like a winner. But, this book is not in the same class as Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower which I read last December. That one was a small miracle of concentrated excellence.

I went back, and it was just this past February I read The Blue Flower, not last December!

i'm reading bruce sterling's the zenith angle which is a 9/11 cyber-whatzit. lotsa early 2000s microwave talk.

I've been wanting to read more Bolano ever since finishing By Night in Chile and Nazi Literature in the Americas a while ago. 2666 is sitting, daunting, on my shelf and I don't think I'll bring myself to it yet. Perhaps Last Evenings on Earth is a good one to read in the meantime?

I can't say I enjoyed Savage Detectives, it felt like he got the shape of the thing wrong and actually got it right in 2666. One thing I'll say about almost any Bolano is that once you start you find it very hard to stop - he was a supreme storyteller.

Nocilla Dream by Agustin Fernandez Mallo. Upthread I said how little I liked Nocilla Experience and this was just to check really (it was a cheap copy), got half-way through before I threw it in my 'to sell' pile. Kinda easy-going and easy to read, a bunch of dispatched stories from around the world with attempted essayisms that is either half-baked or alienated, very little there for me to chew on. It was telling when it quoted from Thomas Bernhard's Correction (a real favourite of mine) that it really felt so so flat, as writing. My problem is the speed at which I read is dictated by the writing and sometimes the things that are easy I justt read way way too fast and with no patience to try and extract more sense out of a thing.

Better though are essays by William Empson as collected in Argufying (not the best title in the world) and what comes through is a mix of highly analytical readings with oddly sprinkled biographical details and anecdote. Its eccentric to say the least, but never less than exhilarating too. You learn something, or you laugh at something else. Dipping in and out of this as well as Borges' essays as collected in Total Library, basking in the concentrated talk-prose of his lectures given toward the end of his life.

Supplementing the above with a collection of selected poems by Heaney, and another collection of medieval poetry from Portugal/Galicia (Troubadour tradition).

It is hard to stop with Bolano, but I found that I could pace myself, because of his pace--- according to the editorial supplement incl.,each section of 2666 was meant to stand alone, in series, tantalizing but not teasing, to increase royalties for his kids (he knew he was dying, which adds to the sense of walls behind and between the spectacles). But I yammered about all that enough on the Bolano thread.

Sorry for the punctuation---anyway, see James Morrison's advice above.

I can't say I enjoyed Savage Detectives, it felt like he got the shape of the thing wrong and actually got it right in 2666.

my reaction too

2666 is definitely a more accomplished work than The Savage Detectives.

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
*Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

* (zora neale hurston is left-handed)

^ so, had it not been for sexism, she might've had a good career as a boxer or baseball pitcher?

“Future married couples pass by, chatting seamstresses pass by, young men in a hurry for pleasure pass by, those who have retired from everything smoke on their habitual stroll, and at one or another doorway a shopkeeper stands like an idle vagabond, hardly noticing a thing. Army recruits – some of them brawny, others slight – slowly drift along in noisy and worse-than-noisy clusters. Occasionally someone quite ordinary goes by. Cars at that time of day are rare, and their noise is musical. In my heart there’s a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation.”

- Pessoa

Is that the Book of Disquiet? For whatever reason, I've avoided that until now. Waiting for the stars to align or something stupid.

I'm reading Harold Bloom's massive book on Shakespeare. While I quite like the central conceit - that Shakespeare has become a kind of secular godhead, and fundamental in our understanding of what it means to have interiority and selfhood - the book is strong bluster and oddly empty of anything new to say.

Yes it is! I just started it

Is Harold Bloom ever worth it? he seems to be a factory for producing high-class Cliff notes

Lol

Harold Bloom cannot write a word that holds the slightest interest for any audience that he would claim to be his peers.

just finished Book 1 of Jeff VanderMeer's southern reach Trilogy. good creepy suspenseful glacially slow reveal

He was a terrific gateway drug, and while signing my copy of The Western Canon sixteen years ago his bullfrog eyes rolled back in his head as he recited the last stanza of "Sunday Morning"; when he finished he said, "Will that do, dear?"

i liked Harold Bloom in college, haven't read since. what i liked about him was not so much criticism but his soaring, hyperbolic praise for the things he liked

Amazing, can very easily picture this --- > "The Western Canon sixteen years ago his bullfrog eyes rolled back in his head as he recited the last stanza of "Sunday Morning"; when he finished he said, "Will that do, dear?"

I think he was best described as a "bloviating windbag" but high-class Cliff Notes is a spot-on description of much of his output (not in a bad way, I read a lot of his ed. collections and intro essays in my undergrad years). When he's on a roll, he can be very good on Shelley, Shakespeare and Whitman, imo.

His lechery is pretty gross though. I read somewhere that he was the thesis supervisor to a young Camille Paglia and David Duchovny (!) at the same time in the late 80s. Must have been uh interesting discussions in the seminars of that cohort.

Just finished the new David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon. As good as any true crime book I've read.

i kinda love harold bloom, but i don't think of the present-day bloom as a real literary critic so much as just a very brilliant eccentric sitting there talking to himself, not really caring if anyone's listening. (not unlike gore vidal in his later years, though harold managed to avoid becoming the conspiracist crank that gore did.) he's definitely not somebody you go to for sustained argument these days. his shakespeare book never really gets around to making the "invention of personality" argument in any depth, apart from talking about some character he loves, like rosalind, and then saying something like "ah, but what real person could compare to the divine rosalind?" but back when i read the book i remember feeling like his genuine and unforced love for shakespeare was contagious and maybe more fun to read than a more serious, less indulgent book might have been. it did bum me out that he apparently thinks all of orson welles's shakespeare films are "dreadful." (i suspect orson's falstaff, sad and alone at the end of life, hit a bit too close to home for harold.)

the collection The Western Canon has what I think is an essential essay on Middlemarch and another on Dickinson.

xp, I watched Chimes at Midnight last week!

Oh, I could read those essays in The Western Canon! The soaring hyperbolic qualities mentioned above definitely have an infectiousness to them. He does have that 'brilliant eccentric talking to himself' quality (I also sometimes feel that way about George Steiner, too). Incidentally, I started reading Frank Kermode's Sense of an Ending which I got second hand on a bit of a whim (I'd wanted to read it a few years ago but never did) and am enjoying it. He seems to have been someone who I think better bridged the academic/popular divide in his time? It's got some good reflections on literary form and its relations to time, endings/figures of The End, and the development of the novel although he comes across as more conservative than I would have thought (this may have largely been a product of the time, to a significant degree - writing in the mid 60s amid the celebrations of the 'nouveau roman' and in the midst of so much other formal experimentation).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sense_of_an_Ending:_Studies_in_the_Theory_of_Fiction

book 2 of Southern Reach Trilogy is really testing my patience... 50 pages in and I haven't learned anything i didn't know at the end of the first book, and i couldn't care less about the new main characters back story, which he insists on building up, along with endless descriptions of scenery (that were cool enough when he was describing The Zone but i don't need to read your pointillistic description of a U shaped office for the fifteenth time, dog! VanderMeers foibles as a writer stick out more when the plot isn't actively making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up -_-

if you finish the whole thing you can add the to the thread:

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

still wish it was going to be a long netflix or hulu thing instead of a movie.

i still think about that thing fondly. i think i read it at the EXACT right time in my life. never felt compelled to read anything else by JV.

I enjoyed the trilogy as well, by and large, but more in its initial implications, suggestions and possibilities than the fulfilment of them - i was flagging seriously by the final book.

reading gershom scholem's story of a friendship with walter benjamin which is all good stuff. there's a bit in it that i keep returning to in my mind:

Among the books he [WB] read in connection with this seminar was Daniel Paul Schreber's Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken [Memoirs of a Neuropath], which appealed to him far more than Freud's essay on it. He also induced me to read Schreber's book, which contained very impressive and pregnant formulations. From a salient passage in this book Benjamin derived the designation "flüchtig hingemachte Männer [hastily put-up men]. Schreber, who at the height of his paranoia believed for a time that the world had been destroyed by "rays" hostile to him, gave this as an answer when it was pointed out to him that the doctors, patients, and employees of the insane asylum obviously existed.

I keep thinking about that formulation - there's something compelling about it, although I can't quite work out its extension. There's a temptation to use it for people you just don't like very much or who you consider insubstantial, but it loses force through such imprecise application. And it's not quite indicating a sort of Potemkin Village situation, though working out why is difficult. After all, they are both intended to deceive, both have controlling forces behind them, both are temporary. I think it's because the fhB are closer to fundamentals of perception, there's a sense that the Potemkin Village is in a way benign, but for the fsB the conspiracy has to be a lot deeper than just a studio set - there is of course a touch of the PKD about them. Nor is this a 'we are the hollow men' situation:

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

So i can't work out its application. I'm sure there is a situation or set of people or type of person who when encountered in a type of situation immediately make you go 'fsB!' but I haven't quite worked it out yet.

Also reading Nick Tosche's biog of Sonny Liston. He shoots from the hip with his sentences, and clearly fetishises a period and style of reporting:

The following account comes from the New York Daily News, September 3, 1931, back in the days when journalists could wield a sentence:
"Trapped in a Manhattan hotel with a pretty red-headed night club dancer, Paul Carbo, gang leader and ex-convict, was held last night charged with being the hired assassin who murdered Phil Duffy, Philadelphia and New Jersey beer overlord, in the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City last Saturday.

The portrayal of SL is a little disturbing. He's not a communicative man, is given to violence and drinking, doesn't smile, has fists like hams, and there's a lot of uncertainty in the biographical documentation. But onto this Tosches projects a sort of heart of darkness vibe - dead the day he was born, out of the darkness of the savannah, African religions underlying the Baptist/Methodist overlay, violence comes from within sort of stuff that feels a romantic and in some lights frankly a bit dubious (wrote 'racist', deleted it).

It's an entertaining read, obviously. Enjoyed this excerpt from a senate antitrust subcommittee interviewing mob player John Vitale:

Would you care, on the basis of your general knowledge of boxing, to give the subcommittee some of your own thoughts as to how to eliminate underworld racketeering and monopoly in the field of boxing?"

"I take the fifth amendment." [Pause.] "What a question."

man y'all haven't hyped Edna O'Brien enough. I spent spring and summer '16 reading her short fiction for the first time; now I picked up The Little Red Chairs and I'm staggered by her. An 85-year-old person wrote this novel!

I had the same problems with the Tosches biography, FIzzles, and also throughly enjoyed it for the same reasons. Some dubious essentialising of 'blackness' but I can't deny the power of the representation. I need to read his biography of Dean Martin.

Hastily put-up men typing all over the Web right now (not me tho)

A key thing in the Dino is the Italian for "He Who Does Not Give A Fuck" (as w SL, NT attracted to this kind of negative capability, fuck-you satori)

(beyond fuck-you, of course)

Tosches' Dean Martin and Jerry Lee Lewis biogs are much better than the Liston book, tho' his best book as book is prob Country, still.

Yes, and it's fun to compare the original and somewhat revised editions of Country, thinking about why he might have changed this and that, to what effect.

Hastily put-up men typing all over the Web right now (not me tho)

^ good point. a phrase that has come of age. i wonder what particular application or resonance it had for WB.

Alfred, I agree with you re Edna O'Brien, though thought Red Chairs one of her weaker books.

ilxor reviews new JV by the way...

http://www.wweek.com/uncategorized/2017/05/03/jeff-vandermeers-borne-is-a-psychedelic-dystopia-with-an-evil-levitating-bear/

About 200 pp into Wolf Hall. It has atmosphere aplenty and is deftly written, but somehow I'm not feeling the love for it. If I were to guess about the lack I am feeling, it would be that, while the characters are well-delineated, the world in which they live is never made concrete, so that their encompassing reality is never fully imaginatively formed. This could have been conscious on Mantel's part, since inhabiting a lost reality in one's imagination sufficiently to describe it will always result in historic errors. But, I miss them.

Anyway, I'm having difficulties keeping my interest going, which sin be on my head alone.

Cosign on being underwhelmed (and quitting) Wolf Hall.

Speaking of quitting books, would anyone recommend Foucault's Pendulum for someone who's never managed to get past the first few pages? Does it get easier? I don't know, it *sounds* like a lot of fun, just never succeeded with it.

Usually read a couple of books a week. Wolf Hall is the only one I've quit in the last few years.

I am still reading Johnny Marr, SET THE BOY FREE.

Am in of those periods where I can barely read, apart from skimming non-fiction books

I am still in that period where it takes me weeks to read a paperback designed to appeal to air travelers and people on beaches.

took a break from VanderMeer to read William Hope Hodgson 'The House on the Borderland' now THIS is how you tell a story!!!

I read Foucault's Pendulum many years ago, and burned through it. I suspect if the opening few pages have wound you up, it's not necessarily going to get any easier...

I've started reading Irvin Yalom's 'Staring at the Sun', a book about death anxiety. My wife's old man isn't so good, and I'm wondering if I can do anything. So that's all very cheery.

Love's Executioner is amazing. He's a wonderful writer. I just picked Sun up on Amazon after you mentioned it (similar troubles with my partner, too).

I found Love's Executioner really moving and Yalom's wisdom beguilingly unassuming. Which I guess is the point. Makes me think of that line from Charles Olson about having learned 'the simplest things last'.

I put aside Wolf Hall. Now, 45 years after my first reading of Xenophon's Cyropaedia, I am re-reading it. It is an odd book, a rambling pastiche wherein Xenophon rides all his many hobby horses. It is heavily didactic in purpose, but presents itself as a highly romanticized, piously moralistic novel, claiming to be a true history of Cyrus the Great.

Under the caveat that much early writing has been lost, it appears that no book like it had ever been written before.

It is a bit disappointing how Johnny Marr's critical faculties seem to decline after about 1989. He loves to go on about The The, Electronic and Modest Mouse. What's worse is how much he goes on about The Healers and how in thrall he becomes to Oasis - there is something troubling about this last episode, as though Marr is kidnapped by Gallagher.

If you imagined that Marr post-Smiths lost his sense of style and art and became more into bland 'bloke rock' or something then this book tends to suggest that ... he did.

I still have a little way to go though. Maybe the very late Marr is a bit better.

The other curious thing is the way that to many of us, he seems to have done relatively little post-Smiths (30 years!), but he sees himself as being constantly busy, always making music. Somehow both perspectives must be accurate. He has been busy but given his talent he has done little that breaks through and is truly worthwhile.

I finished my re-read of Unamuno's Tragic Sense of Life. I think the first couple of chapters are the best, it gets a little repetitive in the second half, as Unamuno himself admits. He keeps circling back to the same set of themes. I still find it a very powerful expression of a certain viewpoint on human psychology and motivation, and one of the most clear-eyed books I know on grappling with one's own imminent demise.

I also finished the last story in the Balzac shorter fiction collection The Human Comedy. Actually I think the last couple of stories, which tend more towards what I'd call a typical "Balzacian" milieu, were not as interesting as the ones that came before them.

Shock & Awe by Simon Reynolds.
I've disagreed with this book more than i have with any of his others as far as I can remember.
Just read him saying that Neil Young's music never changes so he's the anti-Bowie which I found ridiculous.

I assume he's heard "Trans" or "Everybodys Rockin'"? I usually read any book SR has out but I havent really been intrigued to check this new one out

I just thought he was trying to fit something to a not very thought out observation. Thought he was better than that.

I'm trying to think of who'd be a better fit for the rootsy North American rockist archetype Reynolds is no doubt trying to evoke - thing is all the big guns (Springsteen, Dylan, Young) are chameleons of a sort and choosing someone like James Taylor wouldn't give him the impact he needs.

Chuck Berry didn't change much!

reading: NLR responses to the new US political situation.

Predictably cool, disparaging of Clinton and Obama, keen to put Trump in a detached perspective and minimize his importance.

Useful different perspective but I'm never wholly sympathetic to it. I mean these are the kind of people who'll say Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn are not radical enough to be taken seriously.

Finished with Edward Timms' study of Karl Kraus' works in Apocalyptic Satirist. I was thinking of doing some kind of map from turn-of-the-century Vienna to today at one point but I wasn't so sure towards the end. Suffice to say there is a lot here around how basically that section of society almost conspire (its a more subtle process than that though) via government and media (artists often go along) to manipulate, distort and misinform a nation into the abyss, except its all thrown in a background of a failing empire (don't almost all empires sleepwalk?) Its a weird process of self-destruction. Timms kinda examines all this from the Kraus angle, how he took many to task while not turning an eye away from his conservative streak, what with his own options veering from one end to another, finally breaking at a late point in proceedings (its what allowed him to evade the kind of censorship others faced on the other hand). To be utterly alone is the hardest thing.

My understanding of satire is a slightly more improved (from a really low base). There is v little biography (it only take us to the end of WWI) and what there is critically engaged with the times he is living in. There is a great little essay on his play The Last Days of Mankind in the penultimate chapter.

Currently more or less on the "plausibly describable as in progress" list

Moby-Dick
My Brilliant Friend (Ferrante)
A Lover's Discourse

Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy

On pause: The Stack by Benjamin Bratton and Ghosts of My Life by Mark Fisher

Additionally, this came in the mail earlier: https://www.urbanomic.com/book/ccru-writings-1997-2003/

Really enjoyed Priestdaddy, though I genuinely wanted to kill her parents

There is a great little essay on his play The Last Days of Mankind in the penultimate chapter

I need to read Last Days--I've had it for ages, and it sounds like just my thing, but it's so ludicrously vast

just read The Sellout, on a sequence of long plane rides. a real howler

damn i should probably resume Moby Dick :-/

I'm only like 40 pages in or so, it's already pretty gay

friend just loaned me this, thinking of starting it since I'm a few pages shy of finishing Kotkin's Stalin bio but idk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHhH

I enjoyed Lesley Nneka Arimah's What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky a lot. The stories all have dark endings, almost to a fault, but the three or so that have more surreal/speculative/folkloric elements really have stuck in my memory. One in particular would make an amazing arty horror movie.

HHhH is very enjoyable in a goofy french postmodern way

Currently reading Max Scheler's Ressentiment, cited by Pankaj Mishra in this essay on the "Age of Anger" in national politics:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/dec/08/welcome-age-anger-brexit-trump

Just finished Stanislaw Lem's 'MORTAL ENGINES', much of which are some of his humourous short stories about robots/AIs. My taste for Lem is much more for his steely, serious side, so luckily this collection ends with 'The Mask', an astonishing, rich and strange novella worth buying the book for alone.

x-post I bought Ressentiment last year, but still haven't got around to it yet. I need to have a moratorium on acquiring new books so I can clear the backlog.

Decided not to read Bolano after all (though will try and pick up both Savage Detectives and Last Evenings on Earth later this summer, if I can). Instead, I was talked into reading Middlemarch by my wife and am loving it so far!

Mihail Sebastian: For Two Thousand Years -- very good, and this seems like something xyyzz would like

I mean xyzzzz_

I need to have a moratorium on acquiring new books so I can clear the backlog.

Never!

In one of my many half-read books, a book about Alain Resnais by James Monaco, there is a discussion about exactly this. Wonder if I can find it.

useless information alert: discovered last night that nathalie sarraute's daughter was the editor on a number of resnais (& marker) films!

currently making my way chronologically through the two henry green collections i picked up a few weeks back & wow. have finished the first four and would have to say so far living has been the stand-out for me, but these really are exceptional.

Just finished Stanislaw Lem's 'MORTAL ENGINES', much of which are some of his humourous short stories about robots/AIs. My taste for Lem is much more for his steely, serious side, so luckily this collection ends with 'The Mask', an astonishing, rich and strange novella worth buying the book for alone.

Recommendation accepted.

Maphead by Ken Jennings has become my bogbook. It's pretty fascinating look into cartography. I picked it up from the library sale box for 50c. It talks about a dept in Washington D.C. holding a lot of significant historical rare maps which now has me worrying about the fate fo them under the current administration.

Positively 4th Street is teh book that I carry for transport etc. Been meaning to pick it up for years and it is pretty good. Hadn't known that Richard farina and Thomas Pynchon were close friends until I started reading it.

Finished Shock & Awe and not 100% about it as i said elsewhere. It's the Simon Reynolds book I've disagreed with most as far as I can remember. Maybe I need to reread the Post Punk ones but thought they were better.

May finish off the book i was reading before i started that, Flower Confidential about the international flower trade cos it's nice to have insight into things like that.

useless information alert: discovered last night that nathalie sarraute's daughter was the editor on a number of resnais (& marker) films!

Adjacent: I recently learned from a podcast that Patrick Mondiano helped Catherine Deneuve write a book about her dead sister, and also wrote some lyrics for Françoise Hardy.

Finished Shock & Awe and not 100% about it as i said elsewhere. It's the Simon Reynolds book I've disagreed with most as far as I can remember. Maybe I need to reread the Post Punk ones but thought they were better.

Does it go much into glitter rock? The most interesting, usually unremarked thing about Glam as a genre to me is the disconnect between the small group of critically acclaimed legends (Bowie, Roxy Music, Lou Reed I guess?) and the legions of populist, bubblegum chancers that actually give it the numbers to be a "real" genre.

There are several pages of entries on Legacy of glam after 1975 after Reynolds covers Bowie's Berlin era. I think there may be some input about Poison etc but I think it's dismissive. He does talk about Siouxsie and the Banshees among others as having some legacy qualities too, as well as the Blitz scene.

just finished len deighton's funeral in berlin and now want to read everything he wrote and start fights about how he's MUCH BETTER than john le carre

also just started: beat the devil by claud cockburn (it has an eric ambler feel, perhaps not very surprisingly)

(as a kid i remember my dad reading ambler's death and his brother sleep and thinking that title was just the coolest, deepest, most evocative phrase ever penned) (but i never read it myself, maybe i ought to)

I really love the movie of Funeral In Berlin, enjoyed it much more than Ipcress File.

Dave Cairns has written about Deighton, too - https://dcairns.wordpress.com/2016/10/06/the-secret-diary-of-harry-palmer/

Stevolende, I was more thinking about the Sweet/Hello/Mud types than Hair Metal; feel like they often get conviniently written out of more tasteful histories of the genre.

Last night I finished reading Xenophon's Cyropaedia. I know this sort of stuff isn't really ILB's cup of tea, but it is a pretty remarkable book for its time period (early fourth century B.C.). Xenophon's habits of thought were about as prosaic as it is possible to be. He was not a philosopher, but he had a keen mind and a great breadth of interests and talents. He would have been the perfect 18th century rural English lord of the manor, fox hunting with gusto and tinkering endlessly with improved drains, a couple of millennia before the English invented the type.

Sweet are in there definitely. I think there may be some mention of the Velvet Tinmine type bands too

I need to finish off the book Children of The Revolution which I've had for the last few years which is also on Glam. Just got cheap copies of Barney Hoskyns and Dave Thompsion books on the subject too.

I think Reynolds mentions at least Jet, the band that came out of John's Children and Davy O'List of the Nice and begat Radio Stars.
Can't remember what others he talks about. Think there's something on the Runaways too. Also the art troupe taht tomata du Plenty was in in the late 60s or am I getting that confused with other things i've watched ovber the last month. Other books by Reynolds have had me picking thet hing up and wanting to read as much of it as I can as fast as I can. This had me picking it up intermittently over the course of a month or 2

Reynolds definitely isn't above the less critic-friendly stuff

iirc there are whole chapters on the Chinn/Chapman stable, Gary Glitter and David Essex

There is a great little essay on his play The Last Days of Mankind in the penultimate chapter

I need to read Last Days--I've had it for ages, and it sounds like just my thing, but it's so ludicrously vast

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Tuesday, 9 May 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well the book certainly made arguments for its full performance (its seen as un-performable and Timms broken that down) well. I got the sense that a few carefully curated episodes would be good to have as a book. Didn't see it as a stand-out work. I quite like to read some of his essays but I'm not sure whether it would need too much local context to appreciate, but he is great in a study like this.

Mihail Sebastian: For Two Thousand Years -- very good, and this seems like something xyyzz would like

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Wednesday, 10 May 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean xyzzzz_

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Wednesday, 10 May 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Its xyzzzz__ :)

Heard of it, did sound like my sorta thing then forgot about it. Hope to see a copy one of these days tx.

I finished Johnny Marr's book!

It's good that Mark is reading and sticking up for LEN DEIGHTON.

Next: COOKSTRIPS ?

Just finished David Keenan's This is Material Device, nicely structured as a collection of personal histories of people connected to a post-punk band, collected by a fanzine editor. Really great, funny, much to love as a music obsessive.

Also: Alexander Trocchi, Young Adam, subtly built a tension that pushed me to finish the (mercifully short) read to escape the lead character's world. And Lavinia Greenlaw, The Importance of Music to Girls, which didn't really grab me until she reaches adolescence/romance/punk rock. Enjoyed it but underwhelmed.

Just got Cosey Fanny Tutti's Art, Sex, Music which should be a perfect follow-up to Material Device. But I'm not up to reading it on the bus, so just started the Grover Lewis Splendor in the Short Grass for that.

I've been reading mostly poetry this week. Alejandra Pizarnik's Extracting the Stone of Madness is a hyper-concentrated blast of all yer modernisms. Weirdly enough there might be something affinity between her and someone like Ann Quin in terms of a distanced mood but I need to do the work on this one. Turned to Sor Juana Ines de La Cruz - she was a Mexican nun who wrote a letter pleading to the Bishop at the time for her right to keep learning, you'd say its kinda proto-feminist however its such a weird pleading, wearing its learning and language on its sleeve that it doesn't necessarily chime in with other types of feminist tract in terms of rhethoric, so it isn't too surprising it was only translated into English in the 80s. We then turn to some of her poetry and sonnets - I think there's a lot there but I don't particularly like the curating in this Penguin paperback - great to finally read her tho'.

I don't enjoy Deighton but maybe i haven't found the right book yet? His cookbook is definitely more fun than Tinker Tailor. I kinda prefer Fleming and Ambler. Less "realistic" but better sentence writers.

Right now I'm reading CONCLAVE by Robert Harris, a thriller about choosing the new Pope. Fancied something easy and middlebrow. It's good, but like Fatherland, it's a bit too quotidian and polite to be first tier.

I am currently reading a silly confection by Bill Bryson, The Road to Little Dribbling. One joke in it did entice one very loud guffaw out of me last night, which joke I immediately shared with my wife, who reacted much as I did. So I have established that it is, at least intermittently, Laugh Out Loud funny. That is an admirable virtue.

Never really saw the appeal of bryson. Flicked through his Australia book, and it seemed to be all 'wow, lotsa poisonous spiders and snakes here, lol', so didn't bother with any more

I've got soft spot for Bryson, mainly due to reading Notes From A Small Island when I was in Australia and needed an avuncular arm around the shoulders and a rose-tinted view of home.

Enjoyed what I've read by him so far.
Especially remember him talking about people's behaviour towards wild bears. Putting peanut butter on their kids hands so that tehy can take photos of the bear licking it off.

Have a few of his sitting around waiting to be read though

imo Bryson has two talents, neither of which can be prodded to create high art, but which usually suffice to entertain: he knows how to tell an anecdote with proper pacing and he can write words on cold paper that produce the effect of an individual voice, so his books appear to have a lively personality (although I am sure it is more of a well-crafted persona). iow, his books mimic companionship, and you either like being in the company of his persona or you don't.

just picked up solar bones based on more recommendations than i can easily count

Thread mavens: where should I start with James Salter?

Heath Robinson 2 books I got this week, Travel and Leisure Pursuits.
LOve the guy's convoluted machinery drawings and these were on sale through Postsceript books.
A bit too much overly genteel work included whereas i'd have preferred the cartoony stuff. That is to say there is some very of its time material showing what a decent artist he was doing straighter stuff. But that stuff seems a lot more dated.
Wish the layout included years that things appeared alongside the artwork cos there are some interesting ideas that seem to come from currently outdated notions. Oh & at least one overtly racist image which wouldn't have seemed so at the time.

The Hunters or Light Years both great launching points. His last novel, All That Is, is his weakest. Or f you like mountain climbing, read Solo Faces.

Xpost

Just finished:

Ryan, Remembering How We Stood: Bohemian Dublin at the Mid-Century
Barich, A Pint of Plain

Started Segrave, The Girl from Station X, but will never finish it. It's the history of the author's feelings about her mother, supplemented with facts about her mother's life.

Thread mavens: where should I start with James Salter?

― The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums (Chinaski),

I second the Light Years rec

Like that book but feel like A Sport and a Pastime may be a better -as well as more canonical *ducks*- start.

But, yeah, probably good to read The Hunters early on.

Wading into 'Russian Emigre Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky', which has a not-easy title to remember but is FULL OF THE GOOD STUFF

Picked up Lem's Mortal Engines,at the library. Dunno how I overlooked this one before, might be cuz a few of the stories are collected elsewhere.

Yeah, it was put together by one of his English translators, rather than being done by Lem himself

I've definitely read "The Hunt" cuz that's in one of the Pirx the Pilot collections. The other robot fairytale sorta things I thought were in the Cyberiad but not in the copy I've got. They do seem familiar. I may just skip to "The Mask"

Also got Paul Park "All Those Vanished Engines". Never read Park before but Gene Wolfe seems to love him and there was a NY Book Review of him recently that caught my eye. Seems p interesting so far.

Aaand a James Blish collection, "Galactic Cluster". Only Blish I can recall reading previously was the incredible "Surface Tension". Obviously a big name/figure of his era, figured this would go towards plugging that gap in my reading.

have been reading the tana french novels in order. just read broken harbor, and it is one of the most upsetting books i have ever read. also gr8.

I finished with the second (The Likeness) a few weeks ago; trying to space them out a whooooole lot so I don't run out too soon

read them all in two weeks lol

I enjoyed a very old copy of The Hunter, but think that New Yorker profile mentioned that he tweaked it later, and his later approach def. not as taut---it can work, but suspect not for The Hunter(which ain't Pylon: no room for purple clouds of prolixity that I can foresee with any confidence), so I'd check for the first edition. Yeah, the spacier Light Years told me some stuff about life-goes-on that turned out to be true.

Finished Rebecca. DuMaurier sure knew how to write! First chapter is nothing but description and works its magic well. So many dark undercurrents: it's not just the memory of Rebecca that haunts Manderlay, it's the British class system and repressive masculine norms and the protagonist's own deep, crippling neurosis. Top marks.

Now going to read a novel by Augustina Bessa Luís - Manoel de Oliveira adapted it into a movie I'll be tackling for my podcast, so I wanna get a grip on the source material. Doesn't seem to have been translated into English, nor any of her other work either - a shame, she's one of Portugal's finest.

I finished the Bryson, because it was so easy to read that finishing it took almost the same amount of effort as not. I took up with William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity for an hour or so before going to bed Friday, but I'm not sure of my staying power with a book originally written as a post-graduate thesis, with all the stylistic implications of that fact.

I'm about to go away on a brief vacation trip, so whatever I bring with me shall limit my choices of reading material. I haven't made my selections, yet.

Reading Julian Barnes' The Noise of Time. Ach, I dunno. I've read quite a bit of Barnes over the years, but not for a good ten years, and I'd forgotten how bloodless I find him. I can't deny the architecture is superb, and the level of immersion in the research is impressive, but I don't get a genuine sense of Shostakovich's pathology or a true sense of jeopardy.

Andrzej Szczypiorski: The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman -- this is good stuff! About the last 36 hours of life in Warsaw before the burning of the ghetto, jumping in and out of lots of connected stories, with the disconcerting habit of introducing a character and, almost in passing, mentioning how they'll die (burned to death, end up in Russian dissident prison, live to ripe old age as a hypocrite, etc) beyond the end of the book itself. Not sure about the title, though--Polish original translates as 'In the Beginning', and Mrs Seidenman is hardly the central character

I enjoyed a very old copy of /The Hunter/, but think that New Yorker profile mentioned that he tweaked it later, and his later approach def. not as taut---it can work, but suspect not for /The Hunter/(which ain't /Pylon/: no room for purple clouds of prolixity that I can foresee with any confidence), so I'd check for the first edition. Yeah, the spacier /Light Years/ told me some stuff about life-goes-on that turned out to be true.

Len Deighton: Yesterday's Spy
Claud Cockburn: Beat the Devil
Nicola Barker: Darkmans
Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities

all recommended

I've been reading Deborah Lutz's The Brontë Cabinet, which is a series of biographical essays on the Brontë sisters organized around different archival objects: homemade booklets, walking sticks, letters, writing desks, hair bracelets, and so on. It has some interesting details on Victorian material culture and gendered spaces, but I can't really say it's dramatically changed my understanding of the Brontës or their texts. I've also been reading another, more measurable book on everyday life, Bernadette Mayer's long poem Midwinter Day: what I've read of her other work (mostly her later collections) also has a playful, miscellaneous quality, but Midwinter Day braids together observation, fantasy, gossip, local history, and reflections on the conditions of women's writing more compellingly.

*"memorable" in place of "measurable"

I grabbed a library copy of Paul Theroux's book, Deep South, about multiple road trips he took into Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and such. Unless it proves unreadable, it is my current book.

I can't say his introductory chapter has impressed me so far. He spends a dozen pages early on griping about how travel books about America indulge in mock adventures, inventing dangers that do not exist, all the while ignoring the presumed subject of his book. He also spends several pages naming famous writers who owned autos and travelled in them. Basically, him riding his hobby horses.

Finished Pizarnik's Extracting the Stone of Madness and my initial take around 'modernism' is really off, its something else and more. Well there probably is an affinity between her and Ann Quin but its like she is making that space where you are struggling to come up for up for air and its kinda ok to be down there, see what that feels like. I want to read Plath (who I bet she is not at all like but is compared with simply because they both committed suicide).

Roberto Bolano - Skating Rink.

JM Coetzee - Disgrace. Only read his (kinda dry) essays before this. Quite a breezy tale of a Professor having an affair with a student. I hope this is going somewhere more interesting.

Don't think I've posted here since saying I was picking up Lanark. Finished it a while back - I really loved it, basically felt that every section complemented each other and nothing was a waste (lots of reviews I saw only seemed to like one chapter, or one 'set' of chapters).

Have read a couple of shorter things since then as well, lastly Red Rosa, the graphic-novel biography of Rosa Luxembourg. In general I liked it, though it felt a bit too lightweight for my taste - the appendix went some way to rectifying it but perhaps not far enough.

Am waiting on the post bringing me my copy of the Debutante & Other Stories by Leonora Carrington, and a bit stuck for what to read in the meantime. I seem to have misplaced some books that were high on my 'next to read' list (I have too many books for my bookshelves and must have put them in a box somewhere), the only things I fancy on my shelves are too hefty for my mood (was debating Portrait of a Lady or Perdido Street Station), and I've re-read most of my short story collections too recently to fancy them again (I don't have that many). I should probably go visit the library but that involves going outside.

fwiw, found Portrait of a Lady easy-going actually. Especially compared to his later work..

Still, even if the prose is not particularly heavy to wade through, it's probably a bit too much of a time commitment for me to make while I'm excitedly waiting to devour some Carrington shorts.

Also I never bloody get the spelling of Rosa Luxemburg wrong, except up there, where I flagrantly did.

Every time Verso has a sale I um and ah about that Red Rosa book. It's 50% off atm, so I might have to go for it.

I loved 'Disgrace', but I am a very pro-dog person and it seems to have been specifically written to break my heart. You may feel differently.

About to start the short novel by Matthew Weiner, 'Heather, the Totality'

Hi one way street, have you read Lucasta Miller's The Bronte Myth? The process she's tracing could be said to start with the layered books themselves (and the male pseudonyms), but but def. Mrs. Gaskell's bio-alibi (like West Side Story: "He ain't no delinquent, he's misunderstood), with helpfully shaped input from the surviving sisters. This review is maybe too generous with the detail, but isn't really that much of a spoiler, because there's always more, where the still factoid-robust Bronte myth-machine is concerned. Also, the book touches on even more interpretive approaches than mentioned here, and (my sense, though been a while since reading), the author is pretty fair-minded about who's got some piece of the truth, even in LOL dated terminology and thinking. Who *seems* to have a piece of the truth, because the Brontes can't be entirely pinned down even by today's coolest heads.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/29/books/annals-of-the-brontes.html?_r=0

(The book also deals with the Bronte cottage industry in context of England as tourist bait.)

But it's very pro-Bronte too!

The Mexican poets trip to Nicaragua story in the savage detectives is a wonderful bit of writing

Portrait of Lady and indeed most James before 1897 is rather easygoing.

Yeah its all 'good' up to that point. Agree with Emily is probably too much of a time commitment - and if you start Portrait of a Lady you will not want to stop.

Not that I ever ever ever should buy one more book, but wondering about Great Short Novels of Henry James, a couple of which I've read, but some I've never heard of, and intro by Rahv:
https://www.daedalusbooks.com/Products/Detail.asp?ProductID=131927&Media=Book

(Also, just below that listing, Lawrence's Paul Morel, early version of Sons and Lovers. Looks like it might be better, if description's accurate.)

Len Deighton: Yesterday's Spy
Claud Cockburn: Beat the Devil
Nicola Barker: Darkmans
Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities

all recommended

read imagined communities recently too and thought it was great.

i loved some of the cosmology > cartography stuff he does around spatial boundaries in Thailand, in fact i loved all of it. it's one of those books where i found myself wanting to highlight everything. tho i picked my way slightly cautiously through his version of Benjamin's messianic time v journalistic or simultaneous time (where we are made to be aware of things happening at the same time as us, as we go forward into a sort of void, rather than towards an apocalypse, revelation or some other cosmic religious realisation). wd need to go back to the book to remember why tho.

it also cleared up a thing that grated in the translation of michel tournier's four wise men - his use of the word négritude, which i felt might have been more appropriately translated, maybe as "blackness", which was because i was completely ignorant of the entire history of the concept of négritude. an embarrassment i'm now fortunately free of thanks to IC.

I read "Good Morning Midnight" by Jean Rhys which I think is the Jean Rhys book I've been waiting to read.

I am reading "Attrib." by Eley Williams, published this year by a London press called Influx and it is ridiculously good; I was expecting it to be good but it's better than that. Small stories that fixate on the language in which the stores are told, but still they just get me every time, wallop. And often just when I think they're going to disappear up themselves. I can't recommend this stuff highly enough, really. HAVING SAID THAT I do wonder whether a book that contains a story which links Bridget Riley and Walt Jabsco might actually have been written specifically for me by some unseen cosmic force, so maybe you won't like it as much as I do?

I think I've read most major Brontë biographies in addition to reading the Bronte Studies journal for years but I've avoided The Bronte Myth because I just hated Lucasta Miller's intro text to 'Shirley' (where she seemed ignorant of pretty significant truths of Charlotte's). I've seen it referenced enough to feel like I know it though, and I'm sure it deserves its reputation. Of course Juliet Barker's The Brontës in 1994 already confronted The Brontë myth and unearthed basically the rest of the records needed to get to where we are today in terms of knowledge of their lives, even though her interpretation of the _characters_ in the family is very much up for debate. With every new Brontë bio sympathy shifts and various family members are reinterpreted. Bought the Brontë Cabinet but haven't read it yet - instead read through Claire Harman's 2016 Charlotte bio. Not much new but perhaps a fairer look at Charlotte than Barker's, with more years passed since major new reveleations allowing for a cooler take on, for example, the relationship between Emily and Charlotte. Enjoyable, breezy read.

Bios aside, the best thing I've ever read on the Brontës is Heather Glen's study "Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History", an eye-opener even if (or especially if) you feel like you've read endless amount of Brontë takes. Out of print I think but used copies on Amazon.

Thanks for the leads, dow and abcfsk - I've been meaning to read The Brontë Myth but haven't yet, and I'm unfamiliar with Heather Glen's work, but it sounds intriguing. I still have some more primary texts to read (Shirley, The Professor, Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and the juvenilia) before I make a deeper dive into the secondary literature, but I'll keep these books (along with Harman's new book on Charlotte) in mind when I do.

I should read more by the Brontes before I read any more about them (but thanks especially for the Heather Glen tip); I was just taken by Lucasta Miller's delving into different POVs: a first for me, though have since come across Ben Ratliff's excellent Coltrane's Legacy: The Story of a Sound

misread that as coltrane's legacy: the sound of steel which is a better title imo

I am reading Tenant of Wildfell Hall for the first time. Havent read either of Anne Bronte's works before but good lord this is gripping stuff. Into it!!

And Anne's preface!

if there were less of this delicate concealment of facts — this whispering, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and misery to the young of both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience.

I have never known what 'The Bronte Myth' (as referred to in the book title) is.

Everyone who reads GOOD MORNING MIDNIGHT seems to love it.

That would be because it is excellent.

I am reading Tenant of Wildfell Hall for the first time. Havent read either of Anne Bronte's works before but good lord this is gripping stuff. Into it!!

― Yoni Loves Chocha (VegemiteGrrl),

In its own way it's as powerful as Wuthering Heigihts and Jane Eyre.

reading Priestdaddy. really good

Found a rave review by Crowley of the Paul Park book Shakey is reading, as well as various used/antiquarian bookstores selling Tom Disch's personal, inscribed copies of Park's books, some with Disch's letter of blurbage inside, in his own hand or from his own typewriter.

Oops, sorry, wrong ILB thread.

I'm about 2/3 through Deep South, in which Paul Theroux provides a procession of portraits of mostly black southerners, whom he often allows to speak for themselves. They provide the real value in the book. Paul Theroux, when he gives voice to his own thoughts and insights, mainly adds either bookish digressions or rather tired and hackneyed commentary, which serve to tie the book together, but add little else. Luckily, the more interesting voices prevail.

Reading Henderson the Rain King. It's making me think of Sabbath, mostly, or Sam Pollit - in the mad ebullience, and the character as embodied desire (I want!). Albeit Bellow doesn't allow Henderson the same perfectibility of vision - his thinking is too erratic and he's too chthonic somehow, always sounding for the dark undertow.

cyril connolly: the rock pool
lawrence durrell: the black book
rayner heppenstall: saturnine

more or less three variations on the same theme: cynical & underachieving young man with literary pretensions navigates the bohemian milieu in hopes of attaining redemption and/or escape (the heppenstall played the superior name-dropping game)

reading Priestdaddy. really good

― flopson, Monday, May 29, 2017 9:49 AM

I did this. And read her two poetry books too; liked the second more than the first.

^^^

cyril connolly: the rock pool

such an odd book

i love honelandsexuals and always wondered about balloon pop outlaw black, love the title for sure

the chapter with the Italian seminarian cracked me up

I started Tree of Smoke. Five hundred pages to go!

I always liked that you could read most of Denis Johnson's novels in a day

never got along with Tree of Smoke

Sorta abusing this thread for a non-what am I reading now post but I love Queirós a lot and am happy to see this NYRB article. The Proust comparsion there almost purely for alliteration tho, he was a 19th century Flaubert/Balzac type realist.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/05/31/the-proust-of-portugal-eca-de-queiros/

Thanks for posting that! Now reading In Search, where every now and then somebody requests the juicy gossip but assured the consultant that it's only needed for "Balzacian reasons". also the swells tend to drop B.'s name occasionally, maybe just in case you need a reminder that they know some books as well as authors(he is one who can be mentioned without considerations of fashion or table manners, so far, though may yet turn up in Lord De Douchefoucalron's family chronicles, blah-blah-blah).

Really got my fill of most of these titled creeps in The Guermantes Way, though of course Swann and omg Charlus keep shaking things up a bit, but after many a summer Swann, my favorite, is dying---oh well still got Charlus, and the prose-poem revelations will also show up again---the convincing ones, that is, after the narrator very eventually sweats them out (back in Balbec for what he tells us is the second and last time, so that should work out okay, eventually).

I'm nearing the end of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur and still on the first trip to Balbec. Marcel has just a meltdown over the "petite bande".

I finished "Ressentiment" by Max Scheler. Basically it's a book length defense of Christianity against Nietzsche's slur of calling it "slave morality". Scheler thinks that Nietzsche should have rightly applied that tag to bourgeois liberal humanitarianism, which is a perversion of the rightly much less egalitarian teachings of Christianity as properly understood (by Scheler and others he cites approvingly).

Brecht's Life of Galileo. Really enjoyed it. Opening scene of friendly, argumentative, chaotic household of Galileo, housekeeper, hk's son, Andrea, and passers by and guests sets tone.

Main theme is obv truth v power, and the role pragmatism has as it shuttles unequally between the two. Also "truth" is variously constructed as knowledge, as philosophical concept, as a practical value (ie. being able to use the stars more accurately to navigate by).

There's also a lot - perhaps unsurprisingly it's the other main theme - about the worth of truth to the labouring classes. G's friend Sagredo warns him against too much candour:

Galileo, I see you embarking on a frightful road. It is a disastrous night when mankind sees the truth. And a delusive hour when it believes in human reason

But Galileo commends the shrewdness of the peasant laying in hay for their horse before a long journey, or the farm boy who puts on a hat because he knows it's going to rain. He believes this means they are open to reason. A scientific monk warns against taking spiritual value away from the poor - G claims they will be liberated. And his daughter's landowning betrothed says that it will cause revolt and destroy obedience.

Ultimately Brecht's G, after his recantation, says that science must always consider how it may assist humankind or the "gap between you and it may one day become so wide that your cry of triumph at some new achievement will be echoed by a universal cry of horror". Towards the end of the play Andrea, who deserted G after he recanted, receives his final great work the Discourses on Two New Sciences, says that it is better for hands to be stained than to be empty, and Galileo agrees.

G treats and is seen to treat his daughter badly, carelessly, with the irony that she later becomes effectively his prison warden.

Pretty much the best bits of this edition though are Brecht talking about his work with Charles Laughton to translate and stage the first English-language LoG:

We usually met in L.'s big house above the Pacific, as the dictionaries of synonyms were too big to lug about... he used to .. fish out the most aired literary texts in order to examine this or that gest, or some particular mode of speech. In my house he gave readings of Shakespeare's works to which he would devote perhaps a fortnight's preparation... If he had to give a reading on the radio he would get me to hammer out the syncopated rhythms of Whitman's poems on a table with my fists, and once he hired a studio where we recorded half a dozen ways of telling the story of the creation, in which he was an African planter telling Negroes how he had created the world, or an English butler ascribing it to his Lordship... The awkward circumstance that one translator knew no German and the other scarcely any English compelled us, as can be seen, from the outset to use acting as our means of translation.

Charles Laughton was also concerned that for the Beverly Hills performance, in a small theatre, that it would be "too hot for the audience to think" so he ordered trucks full of ice to be parked against the walls and fans to circulate the chilled air.

oh and subsequently reread Stephen Jay Gould's essay The Sharp-Eyed Lynx, Outfoxed by Nature in part about Galileo's struggles to perceive the true nature of Saturn - he, unable to conceptualise or properly see its rings, thought it was a "three-part planet". And quite a lot of the play is about G's insistence on the power of observation to prove and so convince of the truth. SJG's point being that this belief, along with a belief in the excellence of your measuring instruments - here obv the telescope - can lead to certainties of truth that will turn out to be incorrect. That there is an element of contingency on our social and intellectual context.

The narrator's Mama now sitting on the beach, dressed in black and reading her own mother's favorite book, Mme de Sévigné's letters to daughter Mme de Grignan. Translator John Sturrock notes that S. was "thought by many to be the greatest of all French letter writers, and admired particularly by Proust for the quick, spirited impressionism of her style." What's a good collection in English? Doesn't have to be just the letters to her daughter.

(just posted this by mistake on purchased lately thread)

Hi Fizzles, really want to read that, and reminds me that my Mom's got Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter, collecting and providing context for letters to her father (his replies have been lost, maybe burned by abbess of daughter's convent, being too hot to handle re his branding as heretic, though some of what he said might be inferred from her side of the conversation). Chapter One here, with link to the NYT review:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sobel-daughter.html

Got my Carrington collection - only read a few but they're beautifully-formed surreal vignettes.

has anyone read riddley walker?

they have

(however i have not: i own martin skidmore's copy and will one day -- perhaps soon! -- embark on it, as i know several ppl who love it)

i read about it in an article about "threads" and feel similar trepidation about it.

perhaps perversely, i personally still prefer the russell hoban of the mouse and his chuld and the frances books to the adult author, tho i am in no doubt i read kleinzeit, pilgermann and turtle diary too young (i was a teenager trying to transition to grown-up books) and shd revisit them and this judgment

https://mutteringretreat.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/frances-cover.jpg

^^excellent work (all his adult work is written after he and his wife -- and illustrator -- lillian split up, apparently a very hard break-up) (i saw him give a very entertaining talk at the royal geographical society of all unlikely places a few years back, i think with geeta dayal) (i mean i was with geeta, RH was with other ppl i don't remember or recall)

(i shd write one day abt my failure as a teenager to transition to adult books -- basically i went from puffin books to my dad's science fiction books to the nme and rockwriting, with a brief failed attempt at adult novels somewhere in there: they were dull, my landing was bumpy, it took me years to renegotiate this and stop being an i-only-read-nonfiction twerp

Just finished Live & Let Die. As racist art goes, it's a much better book than Tintin in the Congo. I'm re-reading the whole series slightly out of order and loving them - Casino, From Russia & Moonraker being the highlights so far. I'm glad I didn't read them as a kid - he's such a beautiful writer (really!) in a way I never would've understood as a teenager.

I wanted to read something less blokey next, but ended up starting Elmore Leonard's Swag as the opening pages were just *too* good. Next time.

man you Denis Johnson fans: how the fuck did you finish Tree of Smoke? At pg. 400 this thing is a monument to voluminous dialogue.

RIDDLEY WALKER IS GREAT READ RIDDLEY WALKER

Maybe we should form a book club? Oh wait

read & much enjoyed the selected stories of julian maclaren-ross. his memoirs now definitely on my radar!

started in on a selection of edward dahlberg's fiction, poetry, criticism, memoirs, letters & whatever classification the sorrows of priapus might fall under.

late response to mark s: russell hoban's frances books are all really delightful -- well paced and gentle and funny, some of my favorite kids' books. (i dearly wish there were a frances stuffed animal, i have a friend it would make the perfect gift for.) i read the mouse and his child a few years ago and i don't know if i'd even count it as a children's novel, it's quite intense and frightening in ways that i think would have traumatized me as a kid.

Maclaren-Ross: his memoirs are great. Do not bother with his letters, though. Just lots of begging for money and asking for deadline extensions, basically.

I think I'm going to ditch Henderson the Rain King - unless anyone can convince me to stay? I'm about 100 pages in, and I'm finding it a bit all over the place. The heart of darkness narrative is hackneyed, the centre of consciousness is the least convincing Bellow stand-in I've come across (6ft 4, wrestler, testosterone mountain - aye, right. I mean, there's worse reasons to write, but do all his leading men have to be irresistible/repulsive?) and even his sentences, usually his greatest ally, don't zing to the same degree. Maybe I'm dead inside.

No, I think that's warranted: there's something interesting about the way Bellow steers directly into the pitfalls of white writers inventing a private Africa as an exotic backdrop for the white hero's inner struggle, but that doesn't mean it works as fiction or as a critique of that colonialist impulse.

I've started reading Amulet, one of Roberto Bolano's novels. It is written entirely as a first person narration by a woman character. I will report my impressions later.

Maclaren-Ross: his memoirs are great. Do not bother with his letters, though. Just lots of begging for money and asking for deadline extensions, basically.

yep, and obviously from love and hunger if for any reason you haven't read it. some of his essays and fragments are good too - or are those collected with the short stories?

I think I'm going to ditch Henderson the Rain King - unless anyone can convince me to stay

I ditched twice, resumed it two summers ago, endured a desultory read. Not worth it.

Really feel like almost every long novel after Augie March is a disappointment. Some shorter stuff here and there is good though.

Haha I've been approaching and backing off from Henderson for years now, the fact of its existence is fascinating but I'm afraid to finally pick it up. I'm like could this even be good if it were

"What Kind of Day Did You Have?" is the best thing he wrote after the seventies. If you want a rant, check out The Dean's December.

I did enjoy Ravelstein, though it has receded enough that I do only have vague sense impressions of it.

I've been reading Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book: Shonagon's historical moment (around 1000 CE) is distant enough that, as with Proust's characters, her fascination with rank and her thorough contempt for servants, commoners, and less skillful courtiers are more ridiculous than wholly repellent (although her snobbery sometimes takes on bizarre forms, as when she writes a poem to mock an unsophisticated man for losing his home in a fire, or when she states that ugly people should never let themselves be seen napping). That aside, Shonagon is witty and vividly observant, and I appreciate how open her writing is to reverie and digression.

Just finished Kenner, The Pound Era

I've been trawling thru Diana Athill's Make Believe, a memoir of her dealings with Hakim Jamal, a former Black Panther and distant relative of Malcolm X - who also had affairs with Jean Seberg and Gale Benson, a socialite and daughter of a Tory MP. All feature in some way, its pure late-60s/early 70s and has a similarly energy to some of Doris Lessing's fictional work - a very similar intersect of class, race, unbound sexuality. A play between freedom and catastrophe as sides of the same coin. Allen Ginsberg's poetry (discussed this a bit on the book biuying thread) and have just started on Elizabeth Hardwick's study/biography of Herman Melville (as part of the Penguing Lives series) and I like her prose v much - and I see NYRB will be issuing a book of her essays, which is clearly happening, although its slightly disappointing that Confidence Man only gets literally a couple of pages of crit, touching on its modernity then leaving it at that(!)

a play between freedom and catastrophe as sides of the same coin--often the cliche take on the 60s, and not without plenty of justification, but also I've known people running classes, bands, free clinics, voter registration drives, and more questionable endeavors, starting in the 60s/early 70s, and though probably all of them have had experience with catastrophe, they're still at it, for better and worse.

Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to in Search of Lost Time by Eric Karpeles: appealing description here, any of y'all familiar with it?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0500238545/ref=pe_848010_240916020_em_1p_2_ti

dow yes, plenty of positives, certainly not trying to deny - however it was mostly the worse for almost all concerned as portrayed in this book.

I've dipped into the Karpeles book: it's not hugely revelatory, but it's pleasant to look at, and beats interrupting your reading to do image searches.

xpost oh no doubt mostly the worse, from what I've read about some of that, especially Seberg's last years.

I might try the Karpeles book, since Proust is often at his most enjoyable when relating to painting and paintings.

When at his most painterly too, unlike a number of other authors.

Really feel like almost every long novel after Augie March is a disappointment.

Disagree w/ this - Herzog could hardly be termed a disappointment, and Humboldt's Gift might be the best thing he ever wrote.

searching for a bday present for dr vick i broke my resolve and bought a second copy of "the ipcress file" to read instead of the one i've misplaced in my flat: glanced at the opening pages -- never read this stuff before! so maybe i *haven't* misplaced a copy of "the ipcress file" somewhere in my flat and was thinking of "funeral in berlin" all along (GiS-ed for the cover i thought this missing copy had, and no sign of it, which doubly puzzles me: clearly my brane less than billion-dollar these days)

nearly finished "only when i larf"and nicola barker's "darkmans"

also bought (for me) jean rhys: "wide sargasso sea "(bookshop lady v enthusiastic) and "good morning, midnight"

plus vick's bday present to me included the original 1731 poem THE SOT-WEED FACTOR, or A VOYAGE TO MARYLAND by Eben.Cooke, gent., which i started reading on the bus home last night (additional prsent from vick: the revisionist harper lee, which i'm a bit wary of, AT SWIM TWO BIRDS, which for some reason i've never read, despite loving FoB to bits, and THE SURGEON OF CROWTHORNE, which i know nothing abt whatever but starts well)

I am reading "A Posthumous Confession" by Marcellus Emants, which is a nineteenth century slow sickly slick of self-loathing if ever I read one, just my cup of (gone-cold) tea.

Recently read and enjoyed The Surgeon of Crowthorne myself - it's a bit like a less erudite version of Richard Holmes' Dr Johnson and Mr Savage, and includes one of the most squirm-inducing incidents I've ever read about.

That Emants was translated by JM Coetzee, who is a neighbour of mine. I raved about it to him at a bbq and he looked very embarrassed and barely said anything. We also offered him some of our vegetarian bringings, but he couldn't eat them because he's allergic to coconut. I really am not sure what my point is here, other than deeply unimpressive showing off.

Well, I'm impressed.

I've never read any Coetzee, btw; any recommendations?

Really feel like almost every long novel after Augie March is a disappointment.

Disagree w/ this - Herzog could hardly be termed a disappointment, and Humboldt's Gift might be the best thing he ever wrote.

― Bernie Lugg (Ward Fowler), Wednesday, 7 June 2017 08:11 (two hours ago)

Also there is his basic message of "When I finally came of age, I realized that the life of the mind wasn't all that so now I hang around with wise guys and zaftig shiksas to keep things interesting. But behind the scenes, in the sanctum sanctorum of my thoughts, the intellectual project continues unabated. Hermaphrodites, The Best of Both Worlds1'

I've never read any Coetzee, btw; any recommendations?

― Tim, Wednesday, 7 June 2017 11:03 (fifty-nine minutes ago)

I've only read "Disgrace" but it is excellent

Xpost to James Redd

Caveat - I went through my major 'Bellow phase' well over 20-30 years ago, and might well revisit my opinions now. I mean, I really enjoyed Henderson the Rain King back then, but suspect I would have a lot more difficulties with it now.

But - yes, Bellow grew more conservative as he get older, and I don't share a lot of his views about cultural collapse, the moronic inferno, blah blah. At the same time, I think his prose, right up to Ravelstein, retains a liveliness and zest for life and culture that mitigates the grumpiness; plus, he could frequently be unexpectedly tender, humane and engaged with the world (in this regard, but almost no other, he reminds me a little of Kingsley Amis (a confirmed Bellow hater, unlike his son)). Just recently I mentioned on ILB the long, lateish short story 'Him With His Foot In His Mouth' which contains a sincere tribute to the work of Allen Ginsberg, not a writer you wld expect Bellow to have much time for. He was constantly capable of this kind of surprise and generosity of spirit, and these are not traits I generally associate with a frozen in aspic reactionary.

Moreover, I love that combo of intellectual pondering and lusty living that's in Humboldt and other books and that you seem to disdain. I think this helped me to bring down authors and intellectuals from their ivory towers and see them as human, flawed, like the rest of us.

'Him With His Foot In His Mouth'

The first Bellow I ever read. I didn't really have a concept of early or late then, and really enjoyed it. Like many of the first things you read by an author it becomes an initial reference point against which you read other works that other people may come to first. I ended up reading the rest of the short stories in that volume, Herzog and Augie March, but haven't explored beyond.

Herzog is near great, agreed; Ravelstein unintentionally funn

've never read any Coetzee, btw; any recommendations?

― Tim,

I'm not crazy about hsi early novels, but Disgrace moved me about 15 years ago. I liked Elizabeth Costello too.

Recently read and enjoyed The Surgeon of Crowthorne myself - it's a bit like a less erudite version of Richard Holmes' Dr Johnson and Mr Savage, and includes one of the most squirm-inducing incidents I've ever read about.

omg i can't believe you just reminded me of this. but yes it's v enjoyable.

looking forward to it! very dr vick to trick me into squirm w/o a warning

(i gave her darnielle's white van book and the mantel abt the french revolution)

I really like Coetzee - especially Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello (though it's a polemic, really) and Michael K.

The narrator is taking Albertine to their first Wednesday with Mme Verdurin and her followers, the most faithful being Princess Sherbatoff, who has "quarreled with her family, in exile from her homeland", and from high society everywhere else, so makes a virtue of necessity, associating only with a very few other prestigious outsiders. "The Princesse was very rich; at every opening night she had a large ground-floor box, to which, authorized by Mme Verdurin, she took the faithful and never anyone else. People would point out this pale, enigmatic figure...They admired both her influence and her humility, for though always having with her an Academician, Brichot, a celebrated scholar, Cottard, the leading pianist of the day, and later on M. de Charlus, she still did her best to book the gloomiest baignoire and remained at the back...living exclusively for the little group, who, a little before the end of the performance, would withdraw in the train of this strange sovereign who was not without possessing a shy, fascinating, worn-out beauty. But if Mme Sherbatoff did not look at the auditorium, and remained in the shadows, it was in order to try to forget that there existed a living world that she desired passionately but was unable to get to know; the 'coterie' in a baignoire was for her what their almost corpse-like stillness is for certain animals in the presence of danger."

Yes, that Emants is amazing.

I swiftly zizzed through this peculiar little number, which sees a Sinclair/Sebald figure survey a present-day England where it's clear to them something has gone terribly wrong, something easily recognisable to anyone who reads the Real England thread.

http://probabilitydistributiongroup.bigcartel.com/product/this-wounded-island-volume-one-the-condition-of-england

In the Arndale Centre in Dartford we found an inscription on a wall which read God knows more than you and he doesn't even exist. Green found this to be a perfect summary of our journey to date.

When we returned to the site the next day the message had been removed by the authorities.

Re Coetzee, I'd second Disgrace and Michael K, and add Waiting for the Barbarians, Boyhood and Youth (the last two of which, while hardly rollicking LOL stuff, are surprisingly funny)

Gardiner said that two rising trends on their platform are “puppet horror” and “dark mermaids.”

http://www.publishingtrends.com/2017/01/digital-book-world-asks-what-do-the-readers-and-the-gatekeepers-want/

it would be so easy to combine those two and make a fortune.

Escaping THe Delta
Elijah Wald's history of the Blues. Pretty interesting so far, if a bit dry possibly. He's been exploring the ori8gins of the genre. Says a lot of things were swept up into the category, shows that most of those viewed as archetypal blues artists may have been playing much wider styles live as opposed to what was recorded I guess that's nothing new, John Hammond etc have been shown to be somewhat agendaed. Wald does say that before that, throughout the 20s those recording were doing things more widespread to see what regional styles might catch on. & after a certain point they knew what would sell and therefore cut out the widespread recording of different styles.

I've listened to one side of Robert Johnson's King of the Delta Blues and heard what sounded like a jukebox playing through several different performer's styles. I think he has been shown to have picked up influence from a number of different artists, but that always sticks in my mind when the idea of purity or authenticity comes up.
looking forward to reading this through.

Just finished Elmore Leonard's SWAG. I enjoy everything he writes but this was by far and away the best one I've read - has the usual loose narrative but doesn't spin on too long like some of the others.

I finished Bolano's Amulet last night. It is definitely of a different cast than 2666, Savage Detectives, or the other novels of his I've read, in that its narrative style employs much impressionism, some surrealism, with a bit of stream-of-consciousness thrown in for good measure.

Although he does succeed in this experiment to a large degree (I got some pleasure from the book), I'd have to endorse his decision to move away from this style in his subsequent novels. Both 2666 and Savage Detectives are much more effective books. The somewhat airy contrivance of Amulet suffers in comparison with their greater brutality and directness.

yep, and obviously from love and hunger if for any reason you haven't read it. some of his essays and fragments are good too - or are those collected with the short stories?

outside of a simenon translation don't think i'd ever read any j m-r productions: will keep an eye out for the novel too... the selected is made up of pieces from the collections published during his life + an otherwise uncollected later story (no essays). think i must have first come across his name in nz novelist/publisher dan davin's collection of reminiscences of his writerly acquaintances way back in the nineties.

Anybody around here read this?
The Collected Poems: A Dual-Language Edition with Parallel Text (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
"No doubt anyone with an interest in Marcel Proust will be grateful for Penguin's new dual language edition of The Collected Poems, incisively edited by Harold Augenbraum and drawing on the work of 20 translators. But devotees of David Foster Wallace, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Jean Rhys -- even Kenneth Burke -- will also be enthralled: if an infinite book has no beginning or end, then surely this is one. Augenbraum's introduction and hugely entertaining notes help make the volume at least three books, really. Palimpsest or holographic to the poems, Augenbraum's given us a biography of Proust as well as an engrossing cultural history, a cubist portrait of the writer's milieu and his most intimate friendships. [ ...] All along the book has been a network of boulevards and gardens, cross streets and alleys, and we are flaneurs, flaneuses, wandering once more through Proust's youth, roaming through the middle of the text again, and we find there much worth discovering, much worth remembering."
—John Hennessey, Huffington Post

Also wondering about Proust's Days of Reading.

Of Love and Hunger is excellent. Very Patrick Hamilton, from memory.

I've picked up and started The Post Office Girl, Stefan Zweig. After the idiosyncratic, impressionistic first person narrator of Amulet, this one has an omniscient third person narrator who is as dispassionate and detached as lepidopterist skewering dead butterflies into a specimen pan.

Just finished Kleinzahler, Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs. August Kleinzahler's personal reminiscences aren't much more interesting than yours or mine, but he is good on other writers. He was a long-time friend of Thom Gunn.

He liked picking up younger men and doing methamphetamine with them, and enjoyed bringing off a splendid poem of his own devising most of all -- as you do if you're in that line of work -- but he loved rereading Dickens and Shakespeare in his garden, always finding new bits to marvel over.

That could be Thom Gunn in one sentence.

Miguel Tamen's What Art Is Like, In Constant Reference to the Alice Books. It's a book on philosophy of art, but quite unusual: it's written in numbered, interconnected paragraphs kind of like the Philosophical Investigations, exclusively references Lewis Carroll, draws weird analogies (the main analogy in the first part is between poems and kittens), and derives most of its jargon and imagery from the Alice books. The Alice references build up so that after a while you end up with paragraphs that would sound ridiculous without the prior prep work. Enjoyable, but I'll need a second read to actually take it in, after I've reread the Alice books.

wonderful

That sounds both mad and great

Hi Fizzles, really want to read that, and reminds me that my Mom's got Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter, collecting and providing context for letters to her father (his replies have been lost, maybe burned by abbess of daughter's convent, being too hot to handle re his branding as heretic, though some of what he said might be inferred from her side of the conversation). Chapter One here, with link to the NYT review:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sobel-daughter.html

― dow, Friday, 2 June 2017 19:31 (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

btw, thanks for this dow. it looks good, and certainly provides a corrective to the portrayal of their relationship in the Brecht. In fact reading that excerpt, it's a little bit of a mystery how he ended up portraying daughter and their relationship. She is seen to be curious about Galileo's research, but he constantly rebuffs her (where he encourages the housekeeper's son), and is seen to stifle her curiosity (at a cost). She is betrothed to a landowner's son - clearly a good-ish match - but I hadn't clocked the fact that as she was born outside of marriage, it's extremely unlikely this would happen. I can't specifically remember but it's possible Brecht nods to this at all by implying her beauty is enough. The fact that she ends up his keeper - ward to warder - is again well outside the biog, but i guess this is about dramatic logic rather than biographical truth.

Now reading perennial ILB fave "A Month in the Country" by JL Carr.

^ I have a hold on that at my library.

read paul goodman's shortish novel don juan; or, the continuum of the libido. written in 1942 but not published till the late seventies after being found amongst his papers (doubtful he would have found a publisher at the time given some of the language/subject matter). from what i understand the central characters were all supposed to represent different/conflicting aspects of the omniscient narrator's psyche... didn't entirely work for me or come anywhere close to the magnificence of the empire city.

now started on felipe alfau's locos: a comedy of gestures wherein a hapless author is being bamboozled by his characters...

Like that one, Locos, and the whole crazy story about the author. Still haven't gotten around to reading his second novel though.

Just had Cosey Fanni Tutti's Art Sex Music arrive and read the first couple of pages.

Been reading Positively 4th Street on buses etc and am about 30 pages or something from the end. The Farinas have just recorded their 2nd lp. Been an interesting read.

Elijah Wald's Escaping The Delta is the book i have for bed. Got 4 chapters or so in. Interesting so far. Not come across robert Johnson yet so not sure what his depcition leaves to be desired. Really enjoying it so far.

Colour: The Professional's Guide is my bog book. Interesting overview. Doesn't seem to go into full spectrums as far as I really want. So may need to pick up further books or further training.

Got Memoirs of A Geezer by Jah Wobble waiting to be started, probably as my transport book since I put it in my bag yesterday thinking I might finish Positively 4th Street

Just got the Leith How To Cook book and the Cook's Book through the post yesterday so been looking through them as I've been sitting around the flat. Hopefully will learn some techniques and improve my cooking beyond stir fries which I think i'm getting progressively better at.

crawling my way thru Tony Tulathimutte's Private Citizens, I think I have like 70 pages left. Came out last year, my dad gave it to me to see what I thought because it was pumped up as another "millennial spokesman" novel. It's like Franzen meets Tao Lin. Also lots of incredibly obvious DFW worship and riffs that are straight out of Infinite Jest. But he's a good prose stylist, very lyrical, lots of really cool turns of phrase. I look forward to reading whatever he puts out next.

Re: Elijah Wald and Robert Johnson, see my post and Edd's response here: Big Star

Or here: Good books about music

Isabel Colegate: The Blackmailer

Lena Andersson: Wilful Disregard -- very chilling/bracing novel about romantic obsession; liked it a lot, though the plot requires focus of obsession to be a selfish shit, and you get pretty sick of him by the end

plus many Margaret Millars

Thanks James. Will see what I think when I get to him actually covering RJ. I've heard him sound like he's going through a load of borrowed styles and thought the obscurity thing might be true. But will see how it's covered. Thanks.

Wondering about Man Booker winner A Horse Walks Into a Bar and David Grossman's previous:
http://forms.em.penguinrandomhouse.com/ats/msg.aspx?sg1=32f7bb0deb0c2732d9b8a5d6eb33450a&aid=randohouseinc48279-20&ref=PRH68BB44CE61E0&linkid=PRH68BB44CE61E0&cdi=49C5BD5957C34D9EE0534FD66B0AC478&template_id=6543

Grosssman wrote better books imo

Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti
very interesting. Only got as far as '71 or '72 so far. Cosey is just beginning to pose nude. Coum are operating. & Genesis sounds like a self centred asshole. Not really sure what the attraction to him is. But guess that Cosey wouldn't have got things together herself in the same way then we wouldn't have the toetapping tuneage of TG.

Psychedelia by Richard Morton Jack.
this has 101 lp review entries and so far i've only dipped in and not read the introduction.
But enjoying so far, though thinking that some extra input would have been good. The Electric Prunes Stockholm '67 set showing how good they were live was pretty revelatory when it came out after there had been rumours they were more of a studio band before that.
& I've been thinking that I read Amon Duul saying taht the Hapsash and the Coloured Coat lp was influential on them.
Also i think i would have had Can Monster Movie as an entry.
But good introduction to the genre and RMJ is a decent writer. Hate to think how unreadable something like this by John Mills or somebody would be

An Advertisement for the House I Don't Want to Live in Anymore, Bohumil Hrabal

I want that

gombrowicz: ferdydurke

I finished "A Month in the Country". It's a quite enjoyable book. Often nothing much seems to be happening plot-wise, but by the end, I was admiring how seamlessly it hangs together, even though plot is not really the main interest. It's more of a poetic reverie on youth, innocence, and simpler times, with a current of melancholy running through it. My only complaint is that at times the WWI backstory seems called on to provide more in the way of pathos and empathy for the main character than the author really earns. Not that I'd have wanted the author to flesh that out more - it would have changed the focus of the book - but maybe it could have been downplayed a bit, or leavened with a bit of sardonic wit, or something. Anyway, that's just a minor quibble.

"Three men in a boat". Something breezy and light-hearted for the sunny weather

The first issue of Jacobin’s journal, Catalyst.

I read "Three Light-Years" by Andrea Canobbio, which is a mildly diverting tale of a relationship, I enjoyed it well enough but it's going straight back on the free book exchange thing from whence it came. It's on MacLehose, and I've generally been extremely pleased with romance-y books on his imprints, "Con Brio" by Brian Svit comes to mind -I loved that one; this one didn't meet my high hopes. "Italo Calvino meets Paul Auster", said Boyd Tonkin, according to the cover. Tonkin.

I am reading "All The Devils Are Here" by David Seabrook, Backlisted podcast favourite fwiw, this one is living up to its billing, spooked (nearly) non-fictional tales of Kentish sleaze and loathing (possibly sleaze and loathing of Kent, I can never remember how that sides-of-the-Medway thing works). Charles Hawtrey and Lord Haw-Haw, cor.

I finished "A Month in the Country". It's a quite enjoyable book. Often nothing much seems to be happening plot-wise, but by the end, I was admiring how seamlessly it hangs together, even though plot is not really the main interest. It's more of a poetic reverie on youth, innocence, and simpler times, with a current of melancholy running through it. My only complaint is that at times the WWI backstory seems called on to provide more in the way of pathos and empathy for the main character than the author really earns. Not that I'd have wanted the author to flesh that out more - it would have changed the focus of the book - but maybe it could have been downplayed a bit, or leavened with a bit of sardonic wit, or something. Anyway, that's just a minor quibble.

i felt like the slow pace gave it a strange combination of realism mixed with human emotion. i never felt that way about the war stuff, but that's just my take on it, the sparseness and almost vague sense of the main character was a sort of strength for me, it really is just one month of this life, but there's a sense of a longer story never told that i like. i guess like many here i consider this book almost perfect, so my view is prob irrational :)

I finished The Post Office Girl, Stefan Zweig. It is an excellent book and I don't want my criticisms of its imperfections to obscure that fact. It is class conscious, as befits a 1930s novel, and its critique of capitalism and class are deft, compact and hard-hitting, without making any of its characters into cardboard villains. The people act as people are wont to act, from understandable motives. The psychology is usually well-observed and quite sound.

Only two really incongruous elements obtruded themselves as I read it. One was the head-spinningly swift transformations Zweig imposes on his title character, which may be convenient for the plot and moderately plausible when each one is considered in isolation from the others, but occur in such rapid fire succession they at last become hard to swallow. The second was the dismaying sexism Zweig displays in the second part of the book, which would have seemed harmless and natural to his contemporary audience, but grates on today's sensibilities.

The final ten pages give Zweig a chance to be clever and demonstrate his ability to plan a 'perfect' crime, but they were fun to read anyway and fitted snugly into the story, so it wasn't purely an exercise in showing off.

Suspect, from reading other Zweig, that those sudden-change infelicities might have been ironed out in a final draft

Love "Three Man In A Boat", particularly the bit where he contrasts his own relationship to cats with that of his dog. Still need to read the sequel.

Sequel is fun, if not as good: also full of prescient stuff about germany, along the lines of 'if these weirdly efficient people ever get militaristic we'll all be in trouble'

I am reading "Wayward Heroes" by Halldor Laxness, his go at Norse saga business. I am a sucker for this kind of thing.

plus many Margaret Millars

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Wednesday, June 14, 2017 11:03 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I grabbed a small pile of these a few years back but haven't read any of them yet. Any in particular you'd recommend?

Beast in View is her best-known and is great, the Tom Aragon novels and Fire Will Freeze are very funny. Any of the books from the 1960s and 1970s are likely to be wonderful, from what I've read so far.

Been thinking for a while of buying book of her husband's correspondence with Eudora Welty.

Bought book of Eudora Welty/William Maxwell letters instead.

Beast in View is in the pile. Will start there. Thanks!!

David Lodge, THE YEAR OF HENRY JAMES: astoundingly myopic self-importance and lack of perspective - embarrassing - an inadvertent comic novella.

Jonathan Lethem, HOW WE GOT INSIPID: two stories from his Fantastic 1990s - the second an odd combo of detective story and Surrealist art

Michael Wood, ON WILLIAM EMPSON: so far, often hilarious; MW back on form after the last book of his I read that slightly disappointed me (oh yes, it was his Hitchcock)

I got off the David Lodge train around the time of Nice Work, although I did go see him do an instore at Books & Co for Paradise News. Still curious about his H.G. Wells book. Feel like linked to a funny review of that James book which mentioned someone "stealing his Groucho's card."

I got off the David Lodge train around the time of Nice Work

same here, although a grad school professor assigned Paradise News for a class set in London.

Oh – I discovered Mary Renault! I'm almost finished with The Persian Boy, which I've gobbled.

'I FALL upon the spines of books! I read!' -- Autumn 2014: What Are You Reading?

^contains link to review by and pull quote from Terry Eagleton to which I was just referring

I am reading "Wayward Heroes" by Halldor Laxness, his go at Norse saga business. I am a sucker for this kind of thing.

be interested to hear how this is.

A fifth of the way through it's brilliant but I'll let you know.

the sparseness and almost vague sense of the main character was a sort of strength for me

I think it worked beautifully for the most part, ie. the quickly sketched-in backstory, but something about doing that with his war experience seemed a bit off to me, but it might have been just the mood I was in at the time. Anyway, I'm now reading Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves, which will presumably sketch in a war experience with a lot more detail.

Haven't read that one, but some veterans have mentioned the sparseness and almost vague sense of battlefield experience, maybe the mind's defensive deprivation--- with the registration of certain things, some very relevant, some random, but filtered---can be actual smoke, fog, and/or dust, but the same effect can be in broad daylight. Can start, that is.

While on a brief camping vacation I read Graham Greene's early novel Stamboul Train. After reading the Zweig novel, it was surprisingly shallow and, for want of a better word, garish, in comparison. But comparisons are odious, as we all know, so had I not read the Zweig I could say with confidence that Stamboul Train is a readable and modestly entertaining novel, but nothing to cross the street for.

In addition, while camping I cracked open my used copy of the Penguin Classics edition of R. J. Hollingdale's translation of Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra and read the translator's very fine and perceptive Introduction to the book, which was so perceptive and convincing in its insights into Nietzsche's oeuvre and Zarathustra's place within it that it immediately convinced me that I wanted nothing whatsoever to so with reading that book or anything further by Herr Nietzsche. I plan to give away my copy to a charity shop.

Finally, this morning, sitting by a clear rushing river of snowmelt water from the Cascades Range, I dipped into an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson on 'Solitude and Sociability' and my god that man could string together the most self-assured series of assertions about What Is Most True About Life, with the fewest references to solid fact or fig leafs of qualification or doubts, than any writer I can recall reading, because I have mercifully forgotten every word by Ayn Rand I ever read. You are forced either to wag your head in endless imbecilic agreement with his every sentence or else hurl him across the room in a fit of rage.

xp What if someone buys it from the charity shop and is thereby persuaded that charity is slave morality?

tra-la-la-la-la and fiddle-dee-dee! they are welcome to their brilliant nihilist superhumanity and much good may it do them. but, by and large, R.J. Hollingdale convinced me that Nietzsche merely backtracked in the end to a sort of egoistic maniac's version of Lutheranism (<-- my words, not his.)

Reading Don Paterson, 40 SONNETS which Stevie T of ILB fame gave me. Nearly halfway through. I didn't think I liked Paterson as a persona - macho? tough? sarcastic? - but apart from craftsmanship, this volume has a certain quality of ... the phrase is probably 'unflinching honesty' - it tends to look into the abyss, is challenging about bleak existential outlooks, rather than engaging in false uplift. And there's a pretty good generic sonnet in honour of a dead person, something you could read aloud at a funeral. Quite a few quite striking little poems.

Also a poem addressed to Tony Blair which turns out to be an attack on him for familiar post-Iraq reasons.

Because I have not finished any of the books so far listed, I have now started THE DAMNED UNITED by David Peace. It is about football apparently.

True enough, although I believe it can be enjoyed without extensive knowledge of (English) Premier League etc.

I loved it and (because?) I know nothing about football

i want to read it - i am trying to write some fiction about football at the moment so also reading this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Living-Volcano-Secrets-Surviving-Football/dp/1780893272

some pretty harrowing stuff - if anything it highlights what a wilderness these managers are in, they are essentially clueless and unqualified, the vast majority of them, wading through a complex and multifaceted job with for which they have only paltry training and precious little skill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgXunbW4h9Q

actually remember this^^^ as a kid (not the match lol, but bremner's shirt-strip tantrum as he left the field) (haha also the commentary, a vanished world)

They always mention David Peace hails from Dewsbury in interviews etc. He is from Ossett which is a whole different culture from Dewsbury, there are only a few miles separating them but they are quite far apart in other ways. You won't find the calm, genteel atmosphere of Ossett's Gawthorpe estate anywhere in Chickenley, The Moor or Thornhill! Although there did used to be a book shop in Dewsbury run by a Chinese lady who told my partner David Peace's dad was a regular customer.

Hi Aimless, I suspect Greene might agree with you---in one of his memoirs, he says he was so unhappy with the early crap he was turning out that he tried to crawl back to a journo job he'd blown off---his editors had pointed out to him that there were other novelists on staff, that it was possible to do both. Was trying to figure out his first good book; the earliest I've read is Brighton Rock, but it's from '38, not terribly early for him. Might be this one, written in the early 30s, published in 1974:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/20/specials/greene-monkey.html

He even suppressed his 2nd and 3rd novels--they've not been reprinted in decades.

Reading MALAFRENA by Ursula Le Guin: 19th-Century writer revolutionaries in an imaginary country vs the Austrian govt. It's enjoyable and well-written, it's just that given there are a number of very good books about such revolutionaries in ACTUAL existing Central European countries written by actual Central European writers, it all feels a little ersatz and unnecessary. Good fun, though.

I recently finished & enjoyed TOUCH by Courtney Maum and THE SARAH BOOK by Scott McClanahan.

On Saturday, I finished The Persian Boy, my first Mary Renault. I'm hooked.

Mary Renault writes historical romances with the emphasis on the second word. If you want to understand Alexander, read Peter Green's Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C..

well, yeah, I'm reading a historical fiction -- I know what I'm getting into (although what criticism I've read since I finished it suggests she was fairly accurate).

and I don't want to understand Alexander, actually!

thanks for the recommendation, though. I don't read enough historical fiction. I'll probably start Mantel soon.

Alexander is worth understanding, not so much because he is crazy different from all other conquering leaders, but because he is such a perfect specimen who can be studied in some detail as the pure example of his type. Understand him well and you instantly open a window onto large chunks of human history, both before and after.

Memoirs of A Geezer by Jah Wobble. Just got as far as Jeanette Lee joining P.I.L.
Quite enjoyable so far.
Makes me regret not buying a bass a few years ago when i was thinking of doing so.

Finished Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti this morning.
God Genesis P Orridge comes off asa hateful arsehole from that.
& I now want to go and check out more of Carter and tutti or whatever name they worked under's work.
Also wondering if the Temple of Psychic Youth's location remained the same until it left London. Cops i got taken down there in the late 80s. But not sure if that is the Beck rd premises.

aimless wrong as usual

^ you almost baited me into responding seriously to that troll.

The best way to understand history is to read novels anyway.

Ditched Henderson the Rain King and am reading Remajns of the Day. I'm kind of cynical of the cohort that came out of Malcolm Bradbury's UEA course, inasmuch as there's a voice I associate with it: immaculate, mannered, a little bloodless. Ishiguro seems to be the apotheosis of this - and Remains is riddled with a kind of structural neurosis that almost swamps the already neurotic narrative voice. It's fascinating to watch Stevens' fear of being though, and how the affect sort of seeps out, gradually accumulating in the margins.

xp How do the people who write those novels acquire their understanding of history then? By reading other novels?

Obviously! But your initial post sounded as if you were tut-tutting me for reading a novel about a historical personage; I said I don't read fiction to "understand" real people.

(I'm reminded ofWilde's remark about memoirs being the best novels)

EP Thompson - William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary

bedside reading: Raymond Carver - Collected Stories

I've read The Persian Boy and about four other Mary Renault novels, so I must have been tut-tutting myself as well. I also read a variety of historic novels by other writers, most notably Gore Vidal's series on US history. But historic novels aren't history and while Renault's accuracy extends to broad facts and some minor details, these are woven into a larger fabric that is largely imagined, highly colored, and no more accurate than anyone else imaginings about characters, a place and a time wholly outside their experience. Compare The Persian Boy to The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald, and it is quickly obvious the degree of romantic fairy dust that has been sprinkled upon it.

I'm not sure how you define "romantic"; The Blue Flower is set during the apex of German Romanticism. Or why you imply that "romantic fairy dust" is something to wince at.

You still sound as if you're urging me to rip scales from my eyes about the verisimilitude of historical fiction that I never applied! And I think you underestimate to what degree a Gibbon or Dangerfield embellished historical narratives with irony and asides.

And Vidal's Lincolnis as truthful to the historical Lincoln as anything Eric Foner has written.

The idea that we can history /= fiction is rather pedantic...

omit "we can"

The Blue Flower is set during the apex of German Romanticism.

Surely you can appreciate the difference between an historical setting and an artistic style. The style in which The Blue Flower is written is not the German Romantic style.

You still sound as if you're urging me to rip scales from my eyes about the verisimilitude of historical fiction that I never applied!

Sorry. This was not and is not my intention. I didn't think I was talking about you, but about books and about how I perceive them, individually and generically. I am sorry that my statements have obviously promoted a misunderstanding between us.

The idea that history /= fiction is rather pedantic...

I think the imperatives of the historical fiction writer produce a rather different kind of fiction than those of the historian. Each has a purpose in its own sphere, but I don't think they are equivalent to one another simply because each contains a certain amount of questionable interpretation, omission, or bias. So, call it pedantry, but I don't think it is truthful to say history = fiction, if fiction is taken to mean historical novels.

Came to post that History is Blecch I don't know how Alfred made it through an American Junior High School or Intermediate School without reading The King Must Die.

Sorry. This was not and is not my intention. I didn't think I was talking about you, but about books and about how I perceive them, individually and generically. I am sorry that my statements have obviously promoted a misunderstanding between us.

It's all good!

I don't know how Alfred made it through an American Junior High School or Intermediate School without reading The King Must Die

I don't read Bernie Taupin lyrics!

just finished "riders in the chariot" by patrick white. i loved it, but i knew i would, as i love everything i read by him. definitely felt that it in many stages crossed the line between visionary and eccentric/mad after threatening to often in the novels that came before it. perhaps better to say that in the work the line doesn't really exist or is arbitrary. lots of very beautiful scenes that read more as set pieces.

picked up a copy of "today i wrote nothing" by daniil kharms. the microfiction is amazing, lots of absurdities and breaks of causality. the poetry is more hit and miss, lots of it feels like free association, reads like scribblings in a journal which makes sense as it is. i envision leaving this on my desk for a while so i can pick through the microfiction often.

/I don't know how Alfred made it through an American Junior High School or Intermediate School without reading The King Must Die/

I don't read Bernie Taupin lyrics!

Some of Kharms I really enjoyed, but I found a lot of it a bit, "I'm so crazy, I am, I really am, watch me put this, uh, here, this lobster... IN MY HAT!"

Now reading Dawn Powell, Angels on Toast.

^^ nice one

Am withdrawing my reservations about Le Guin's 'Malafrena', was completely absorbed in it by the end

dissolution, disaster & decay:

robert walser - jakob von gunten
alfred kubin - the other side
géza csáth - the magician's garden

What's the last like? Loved Csath's diary, have not been able to afford a collection of his fiction.

a strange mix of naturalism, psychiatric case studies, ornate/decadent fairytale & (proto)kafka-like fables... elements of late nineteenth century lit shading into early 20th c. modernism. found the more realistic stories concerning turn of the century hungarian petty bourgeois families unquestionably more disturbing than the overtly fantastic/horror material. was interesting and worth a read, but not sure i'd say i actually liked it!

Started reading the Cherie Currie autobiography Naked Angel. I picked it up a couple of months back and its been lying around the bed since. Quite interesting so far, she's just been raped by her twin sister's ex a few pages after her dad collected teh rest of his clothing to move to Texas. but she's discovered Bowie live and presumably been saved. Also the joys of food colouring as hair dye.
I was thinking this might be a dodgy read cos I thought it was the one where she alledged Kim Fowley raped her and other band members claimed it was spurious. But that turns out to be the bassist Jackie Fox not her. So can keep reading with confidence, great.

Thanks, no lime tangier

Read Truman Capote.: The Early Stories -- feeble stuff, should not have been resurrected. hilton als's intro valiantly avoids discussing the quality of the stories, and understandably so. At least capote got better, before he got worse again.

back to Wood on Empson: Wood naturally great, but the super-subtleties of whatever Empson is saying are getting away from me. His kinds of irony, as described by Wood, are increasingly things I don't follow.

I thought "Wayward Heroes" by Halldor Laxness utterly brilliant: it has the form and texture of an Icelandic saga but inserts just enough hints of narrator-reflection and occasionally even of the internal life of the characters to bring recognisably saga-ish heroic deeds into a world that feels recognisably human rather than saga. It ends up being partly mock-heroic, occasional hints of saga-style Don Quixote and even Candide... Along with "Attrib." it's the best book I've read this year.

Natalia Ginzburg: Family Lexicon -- for some reason I had it in my head that though this was probably going to be good, it was also going to be pretty dour, but it's not at all! Really wonderful so far.

Empson's THE STRUCTURE OF COMPLEX WORDS seems to have been entirely passed over in this Michael Wood book.

I meant to say, almost entirely passed over; I think it's quoted once.

I suppose I should just try again to read Empson himself, one of these days.

Was in Russell Square a little while ago, was pleasantly surprised to see a blue plaque for Empson there (just a few doors down from a blue plaque for Kenneth Williams).

B-b-but where is the blue plaque for Emlyn Williams?

That's in Marchmont St also, IIRC?

Correct!

Cheating on Len Deighton by dipping into "All-Out War" about the Brexit vote. It's a huge "Servants of the People" style political bonkbuster. Pretty well-written for a cash-in, interviews with everyone. No idea if I'll finish it though.

Nicole Markotic, Rough Patch
John Darnielle, Universal Harvester
André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

Prof Wood: an apology. I was wrong to say that MW passes over COMPLEX WORDS. It just comes up later than I thought.

Now on what I think is the last chapter, on Empson & Milton.

i love empson tho i have not read COMPLEX WORDS

COMPLEX WORDS, COM-PLEX WORRDS, CMPLX WRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR-DSAH

I finished Michael Wood's ON EMPSON.

The opening chapter or so is often stunningly interesting and droll. Then it comes and goes a bit. But it's Michael Wood so it's better, and funnier, than almost anyone else would be.

Back to Flann O'Brien's drama - still on his first play Faustus Kelly. Will read the rest also.

remy de gourmont - angels of perversity
mirbeau - the torture garden
cendrars - moravagine
apollinaire - the poet assassinated

had only read some of gourmont's criticism prior to the story collection & wasn't that impressed by it (theophile gautier did that kind of thing better!), still interested in reading the novel of his that arthur ransome translated though.

Jean De Florette, Pagnol. I recently watched, and very much enjoyed, the Yves Robert adaptations of Pagnol's memoirs so I'm happy to dive deeper.

I've now read all the Simenon Maigret novels from 1931 up to 1950, and the absence of any mention of WW2 is quite odd

The way my (German) parents talked about their parent's generation a lot of people just wanted to forget about the era as quickly as possible, perhaps in France as well? (though that doesn't explain lack of mentions in the 30's volumes).

Simenon was accused of collaboration after the war, so maybe he wanted to keep quiet about everything. Also, he didn't publish any Maigrets between '34 and '42, and then only a few for the remainder of the war.

2/3rds of the way through Mason and Dixon

Haven't read it, but I've seen favorable review of Simenon's The Train, about a little guy faced with moral conundrums in Vichy France---maybe also self-justification, like On The Waterfront---?

Reminds me, I recently skimmed NYTimes veteran Alan Riding's And The Show Went On, about Vichy Paris (lots of research, incl. interviews of some who were there, now octo- and nonogenerians): some complex situations etc. of too-visible culture workers, big names and others.

Ive got patrick marnham's simenon bio. Should actually read it. I just need to read these other 20 books by simenon himself first.

^ has his priorities straight

Never get into Simenon myself. What am I missing?

Got

economy of phrase, plot and detail. good at the psychology of ordinary people.

Dirty Snow might be Simenon's WW2 novel - one of his best romans durs. Never read any of his Maigret novels but read plenty of his romans durs and they are excellent, brutal, existentialist works not really very far from Camus's L'Etranger.

Eric Foner - A Short History of Reconstruction

woke up in the night so decided to read something comfortingly easy. Turned to James Wood, THE FUN STUFF and reread essays on Hollinghurst and Orwell.

I finished Angels on Toast, Dawn Powell, last night. It's a strange mix of qualities I have a hard time putting my finger on. The most prominent quality is satire, it is not in a pure form. It is certainly not a comedy, even if it has a few comic moments. It has flashes of wit, but they are not allowed the front of the stage. I'm not sure I'll come to any more solid conclusions about it or about Powell, unless I read several more of her works in close succession.

I haven't decided my next book, but I am eyeballing The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton. I read it originally a couple of decades ago and may revisit it. He is easily the most sympathetic modern Christian author I've encountered.

Yeah, if trying to get into Simenon, go for the non-Maigret stuff. Dirty Snow, Red Lights, Striptease, Three Rooms in Manhattan all good starting places.

Now on Frank Tuohy: The Ice Saints, about a woman trying to get her married-to-a-Pole sister/nephew out of 1960s Poland; low-key, insightful and very good on the dreariness of day-to-day life behind the Iron Curtain.

My favorite Dawn Powell is A Time to Be Born, but I suspect any Powell novel you read first will be a favorite.

I just finished a boring John Tyler bio and finished these things.

I did read The Locusts Have No King about two years ago. Enjoyed it. Not enough to ignite an ardent fandom in me.

Turns out I read it back in 2012.

Reading a battered copy of Huysmans "against nature"

Finished Middlemarch which I loved and happy to note that I made good on my post upthread about revisiting Bolano (Last Evenings on Earth and Distant Star). I hope to turn to The Savage Detectives soon and am also interested in reading Enrique Vila-Matas as well. Has anyone read Bartleby & Co.?

It's really good. Very congenial and clever and bookish.

Seconded

All I remember is finding it enjoyable rather than mind-blowing but I kept it (rather than reading it and moving it on); that's a good sign.

I am reading "All My Puny Sorrows" by Miriam Toews.

I've started The Seven Storey Mountain. It is most definitely the work of a new convert, a young man hugely grateful to have found his vocation in monasticism. He is almost painfully careful to frame his entire life story as a justification of Catholic doctrine and to emphasize the perfect sincerity of his new found faith.

Having read other, later works by Merton, it is interesting to see how much he deepened his approach to spirituality as he passed more decades as a cloistered monk. His abbott must have been a fine man, who understood how Merton differed from most of the monks he oversaw, and who allowed Merton to flourish as a scholar of the contemplative traditions, including Buddhism and Taoism.

Miriam Toews: Her 1st, 3rd, and every odd-numbered book seem to be really good, her even-numbered books all seem to be duds. Very odd.

David M. Friedman - Wilde in America
Colm Toibin - House of Names

How is the Toibin? The reviews make it sound nothing like Brooklyn or Nora Webster.

Based on thr Oresteia!

Thought that was posted on the wrong thread for a second

I could never bring myself to read a Colm Toibin book. They sound so dreary

Ha, me neither. Couldn't even read the one(s) he wrote under a pseudonym.

Oh sorry. Mixing him up with John Banville.

I think this new Toibin will indeed be dreary.

He is not the most exciting writer, in any way.

I started SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY, after all these years owning it.

I understand why people love eccentric amusing Empson, but so far this book is giving me very little of that. It seems technical in an I.A. Richards sense. I am finding it very dense and not entertaining, not always really comprehensible.

I have an idea that later Empson is easier. I read some of SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL years ago - didn't really get it but it does seem less technical.

But I think my big problem with Empson is -- though he offers lots of local insights and fun, I just don't understand his main ideas. His sense of 'pastoral' has never intuitively made any sense to me, and his senses of ambiguity don't seem to click for me either.

Toibin is one of my favorite writers, particularly when he writes short fiction.

Banville is dreary, yeah.

> John Darnielle, Universal Harvester

Kazuo Ishiguro likes it:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/08/hot-books-summer-reads-holiday-writers-recommend

Ishiguro OTM.

Terry Pratchett Pyramids
not sure if first 11 pages of this are missing or not. Library copy that I've had out for months and am only just getting around to reading.
Events in the Assassins guild college.

Memoirs of A Geezer Jah Wobble
think I mainly picked this up because of teh p.I.L. connections but am getting interested in his solo stuff, probably should have been already.

The Philosopher's Stone Peter Marshall
picked this up from a sale years ago. Got about 100 pages into it then started reading something else.
Thought I'd give it another shot.
History of the transforming object, starts with an ancient Chinese tomb being opened and the lady inside still being perfectly preserved. he then looks at similar beliefs across the globe and across history ancient to modern going through alchemy etc etc.
Should be really interesting.

Wholly without warrant or authorization, I have initiated a new WAYR thread: Heavens! Look at the Time: What Are You Reading During This Summer of 2017?.

I am hoping ILB will soon occupy it, like a hermit crab seeking a new shell, and adorn it with our usual literate observations.

And for the people who use www.ilxor.com, not those heathens who use just ilxor.com

Heavens! Look at the Time: What Are You Reading During This Summer of 2017?

And for the people who use www.ilxor.com, not those heathens who use just ilxor.com

Heavens! Look at the Time: What Are You Reading During This Summer of 2017?🕸