2018 Summer: A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine, and What Are You Reading?

The Summer Solstice finds me reading Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope. What can I say? The man knew his craft.

For future reference, this thread supercedes 2018 Springtime For ILB: My Huggles. What Are You Reading Now?.

I'm on a Barbara Pym kick. I'm also reading Garrett Epps' superb Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America.

I already believe the 14th amendment is the best thing America has ever done so that sounds appealing.

I just signed up for this course. In anticipation I'm reading Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography by David Reynolds. So far, excellent.

I'm listening to Anthony Horowitz's Magpie Murders on audiobook (a silby rec), and I'm enjoying it a lot, too. Good readers.

Recently, I finished Sy Montgomery's The Good Pig and Soul of an Octopus, both lovely and simple memoirs about the author's obsession with the titular animals.

For work, I'm steaming through a bunch of anthologies of by young American writers from culturally diverse backgrounds. Flying Lessons and Other Stories, by Ellen Oh, part of the #weneeddiversebooks movement had some good middle-grades pieces, and I'm working to get my hands on an advance copy of the same organization's new young adult anthology, 'Fresh Ink.' I also checked out of the library a half-dozen young adult anthologies by LGBTQ+ authors, but they're mostly fan-fic, and nearly all present queerness through either a deficit lens or in a way that is creepily erotic given the age of the intended audience.

I really enjoyed Soul of an Octopus. I must get The Good Pig. And an actual pet pig.

NYRB Classics one day sale right now from their web store. The more you buy the more you save.

I’m still reading Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

That NYRB sale is brilliant and I wish I lived in a country where the savings weren't more than destroyed by postage fees

Just finished reading John Darnelle's Universal Harvester (which was fantastic and puzzling and a proper joy) and now I'm reading Ben Myers' The Gallows Pole set among the Cragg Valley coin clipping gangs . It's good so far!

Natsume Soseki's Kusamakura. So far it seems like a treatise on Japanese aesthetics framed by a ghost story.

xp Have you read Wolf In White Van, dog latin? It's even better.

Seems like a genius move, if anything is.

Yeah I liked Wolf In White Van a lot!

I finished Light Years, which turned out to be not too skeevy after all. It was more of an homage to domesticity and dinner parties than a celebration of the phallus. In fact my main take-away from the book is that I should try to have more dinner parties. There were some things I didn't understand about the relationship between the central couple - they never have sex yet they also never fight - but perhaps we're not meant to understand it. The whole thing is bathed in this wonderfully elegiac burnished glow which probably inspired a lot of bad novels but somehow works beautifully here. If more people had read it, I'd think it might have had something to do with the decline in divorce rates that started a few years later. The sex is sexy but also kind of menacing, like the spread of the wife's father's cancer, eating away at the bubble of domestic bliss.

finished Light Years, which turned out to be not too skeevy after all. It was more of an homage to domesticity and dinner parties than a celebration of the phallus. In fact my main take-away from the book is that I should try to have more dinner parties

Shrewdly put.

Bloodlands, Snyder: maybe not the best thing for my mood these days. learned quite a bit, the timing of events and sense of location for things I'd only understood disparately. and the post war stalinist ethnic cleansing of the satellite states, I'd never read anything about that.

Ancillary Sword, Leckie: in the middle of this one. idk it's ok. her ideas are interesting but i don't think i like her as a writer. all of the tedious etiquette stuff plus the constant overlay of personal data, you're losing me a little bit.

Harry Potter. I managed to avoid this stuff totally until now. and you know what, they're... fine. they breeze right by. i get some of the same energy i got from d&d: a bunch of folklore and myth put together into a sort of coherent, inviting world. but the plots all rest on lying to or negligence toward children so the cheery nostalgia is lost on me tbh

Memoirs, US Grant: not far into this. pretty dry with occasional dad jokes.

the plots all rest on lying to or negligence toward children

Yes! There is definitely agree to which these novels lean heavily on the Idiot Plot: how much time is wasted with Harry, Hermione and Ron scrambling, usually at great personal risk, to solve some mystery that Dumbledore could have easily cleared up from the very beginning?

I'm currently reading Mackenzi Lee's The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue which, despite a bisexual protagonist and an 18th century setting, has a very Potter-ish makeup. It's a lot of fun.

solve some mystery that Dumbledore could have easily cleared up from the very beginning

In the world of Potter, the adults all seem determined to keep children in the dark about many highly important matters. This has the ring of truth to it for young readers.

Yeah, and kids investigating and uncovering what adults don't think they're ready to know is a children's literature wish-fulfillment standard, c.f. kid detectives and such.

I'm on a Barbara Pym kick

Where's good to start? I have No Fond Return of Love and Excellent Women, but haven't opened either

Excellent Women will do.

xxposts

Agreed that the lies of adults make both generic and emotional sense but the formula stops making much logical sense after a few HP books.

A colleague of mine is crazy about Pym, so I’ve been curious about her for a while. I think I’ll start with the gay themed one that Alfred wrote about on his blog.

To call it gay-themed is to suggest it's explicit. Like I wrote, if you're not paying full attention, it may slip past you.

i am reading james' twitter

working so much I have no chance to read : /

Finishing up Helen DeWitt's short story collection, then the new Rachel Cusk.

The DeWitt is an enigma at times in that I'm not always certain what she's trying to do with a story, but you definitely get the sense that there's some sort of specific conceptual motivation at play.

I interrupted my reading of Barchester Towers and took a detour through Kitchen Confidential. I needed something that would be fast and undemanding.

I can see why KC was very popular and made Bourdain into a celebrity. It has a lot of sensational stories, told with touches of Hunter S. Thompson's style, but also a very friendly and unassuming authorial voice throughout.

Soon, back to the vicars of Christ and their hijinks.

re-reading Pale Fire thx to Raymond jogging my memory

good stuff

I read a few things this month.

Further into Kusamakura - not a ghost story as it turns out, it's just the female character the protagonist fancies is very elusive.

The stuff on aesthetics is still interesting, though also a bit windbag-y. Very chauvinistic towards Western art (fair enough, we can take it) and also Chinese art (dodgier). Can't quite tell if Soseki means the protagonist to be an idiot or not - he's a young student, so I think he is supposed to be a bit pompous and naive, but you never know. Meiji era authors often split between adoration of Westerns forms/urges to "modernize" Japanese arts and letters and a (very understandable) backlash against that and militancy in valuing Japanese traditions.

Reading Elmore Leonard's The Switch. It's fun. I'm starting to think late 70s is my favourite era for Leonard. They're just as strong as the 80s/90s classics but tighter, shorter, more exciting, and after Swag he finally figures out to how to relax with the dialog thing.

Sōseki spent some time in the West, London specifically, and HATED IT: had the most miserable time

Haha! This is also true of Stefan Zweig and Portuguese realist novelist Eça de Queirós, off the top of my head.

I like it ok myself ftr.

Slays two. Found gassed. Thinks of cat.

Sure, it's no Maidenhead.

I'm reading Angel by Elizabeth Taylor. It's lovely for so many reasons: how dialogue reveals character, the furnishings, the gentle (and not so gentle) sneering, the sheer depth of self-loathing. I need to read everything she has written.

I didn't mention finishing Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness. I found it oddly muddled in places (deliberate ambiguity of the narrative voice makes absolute sense in the circumstances, but still) but the last 100 pages, on the ice, are some of the most sublime I've read in the last few years.

Ben Myers' The Gallows Pole

Let me know how you like this - it's been sitting in my 'to-read' pile for months. I think I liked the cover?

I bought it because I really liked the cover tbh. But it's good. I haven't read George R R Martin, but it's written in a way that I would imagine is Martin-esque crossed with a folk-horror/Quietus/Ben Wheatley aesthetic. Lots of good descriptions of the Yorkshire Vales, very atmospheric. Strong characters and doses of ribald humour and creative swearing. I'm enjoying it so far. It's a surprisingly easy read too.

"I'm reading Angel by Elizabeth Taylor. It's lovely for so many reasons: how dialogue reveals character, the furnishings, the gentle (and not so gentle) sneering, the sheer depth of self-loathing. I need to read everything she has written."

It's a long time since I read it, but Angel is pretty untypical Taylor. It's a kind of pastiche (a sardonic take on a certain type of "womens' fiction)", whereas most of her work is solidly in the realist tradition. I like it less than the best of her more characteristic stuff but for some people it's her best work; if you're one of those the rest might be something of a disappointment.

I finished Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, volume 3 of 4 of Elena Ferrante's "Neapolitan Novels". I started Brideshead Revisited. The first 30 pages have totally sold me, I love Sebastian Flyte already.

the first section of BR is by far the best iirc, steep drop off after Sebastian (who, yeah)

Maigret On Holiday and so am I.

Shirley Collins All In The Downs.
She's in London and already introduced to the library at cecil Sharpe house while working as a waitress/counterstaff at the cafe upstairs at the Troubadour and doing solo spots in the folk club downstairs.
Nice book as was America Over the Water.

Maigret and the Informer: Closet crims build up lavish bourgeois overlays of custom and properties, but/and eventually just have to kill/be killed, disrupting the routines of others, incl. cops, but that's also customary, so of course we have Maigret pulled from his bed and table and even city, but I shall say no more tonight (click).

I'm about 3/4 done with Barchester Towers. It has an impressively nuanced grip on the role of communication and miscommunication in human affairs and happiness. But perhaps even more impressive is the good nature and generosity with which the author views the failings and foibles of all his characters, even those who play the role of villains. Trollope has a similar penetration into human nature as Jane Austen did, while being less acerbic, less witty, but warmer in his sympathy.

Some of his contemporaneous fans found The Way We Live Now too dark and disturbing. I thought it was great. Justice is a fairly rare form of good nature and generosity in this our life.

Justice, justice you shall pursue

I spent 2011-2016 reading a Trollope novel every semester. I never read BT -- I read every one of the Palliser books. They're shallow but deep, if that makes sense. They're Balzac novels w/out the interest in character. Boy, do they understand politics, power, and money.

TWWLN got interest in character as well as understanding p, p, and m. Haven't read any of his others yet. (They're all long as fuck apparently, and now I'm stuck in the 20th Century.)

Reading Henrik Pontoppidans Lucky Per. One of the best Danish novels I've ever read, a complete joy through and through. Very French in style. Highly recommended!

Also reading R K Narayans retelling of the Ramayana, and Octavio Paz' Labyrinth of Solitude.

It's a long time since I read it, but Angel is pretty untypical Taylor. It's a kind of pastiche (a sardonic take on a certain type of "womens' fiction)", whereas most of her work is solidly in the realist tradition. I like it less than the best of her more characteristic stuff but for some people it's her best work; if you're one of those the rest might be something of a disappointment.

It's not really a pastiche. Angel is an author of a particular kind of 'women's fiction' for sure, but her portrayal is a serious one. She's a study of embattled optimism, hiding from modernity.

Angel Deverill isn't *that* far removed from Beth in A View of the Harbour. Taylor certainly gives the impression that she found writing crushing and excruciating.

Robert Caro, The Power Broker - long, reading it slowly, savoring every page. (I bought it to prepare myself for Caro's LBJ books but it's a treat in and of itself.)

Robert Caro's The Power Broker: C/D?

This morning in the library, I read "The Guermantes Trio," Moira Hodgson's extensive, very appealing take on Caroline Weber'sProust's Duchess, studies of three lives folded into The Duchesse de G. by P.---seems like they might be more consistently interesting than his character.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81OMEOsPIkL.jpg

$35.00, but extensively researched, many many photos, and 100 pages of related material at the end, including "two newly discovered articles by Proust."
Would link the review, but it's behind the WSJ paywall (I read the print).

Amazon's got it considerably cheaper than the list price, should have checked.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to checking that out. I have it on reserve at the library. I read one of the canonical Proust bios recently, George D. Painter's from 1965. It devotes a lot of time to the originals of various characters, including several of the high-society women who influenced the Duchesse. The primary original of Charlus, the Comte de Montesquiou, is the funniest real-life character as well.

The Painter bio is very interesting (it's the only I've read so far), but it gets a bit hilariously dated whenever it comes to psychoanalyzing Proust's sexuality. On his reported fetish for torturing rats: "No doubt his victims represented many things; for rats are among the most powerful, universal, and complex symbols in the inferno of the unconscious, and are regarded with special libido and dread by homosexuals as emblems of anal aggression and anal birth."

One of the subjects was considered by many aristos, including herself, to be the most beautiful woman on Paris. Her brazenly philandering husband forbid her to go out and about with non-family members, so she ran around with her uncle--Montesquiou!

Holiday reads: Chateaubriand - Memoirs from Beyond the Grave (NYRB) was great, especially the early sections dealing with childhood. I ended up wanting more of those early volumes. The later ones have fine section on America, England and his wanderings though I was looking for more concentration. Some killer sentences (as documented in Fizzles' thread on the book although iirc he is drawing on those early editions).

I am halfway through The Penguin Book of Yoga. This is a compilation of writing on yoga from all eras. Covers all aspects. For people who don't practice the early sections on place to practice and diet has some beautiful lists and would be good on any classical/medieval era literature. Asanas and pranayama are too technical.

Doubt I'll finish I don't like reading the detail wrt yoga. Its a practice which you learn from others in a mimetic way.

I've been reading Bellevue by David Oshinsky: well-researched and it includes lots of interesting facts and stories I hadn't heard before.

Really enjoying this Maigret. The Maigrets vacation in a seaside town, but his wife comes down with something and has to be hospitalized - so, without his wife and without a case, Maigret just wanders around aimlessly, getting drunk in various bistros. Of course the crime element soon sets in but I wouldn't have minded a whole novel of that tbf!

Yeah, same in Maigret and the Informer: he has to go to the highly publicized, massively attended funeral of a bourgeois ex(?)-criminal in the ritzy South, and everybody seems to know he's going, which irritates him more and more, that they know, and because he feels like he's taking an unauthorized holiday, and he's hot and the sun burns his skin instantly and constantly and he drinks and he drinks on his way through the spectacle to do his duty dammit.

Working my way through all the Maigrets as they get republished (I'm about 12 months behind atm), and enjoying them so much.

I'm halfway through the Simenon biography The Man Who Wasn't Maigret by Patrick Marnham and it's a great read, even if Simenon comes off as a monumental prick (metaphorically and literally). It took him 7 to 8 days to write a book, which means there are Simenon books that have taken me longer to read than Simenon took to write!

Have read plenty of Simenon's "romans durs" but none of the Maigrets as police procedural isn't really my thing, but maybe I should give one a shot

I'm pretty certain that every chapter in a Simenon book is a discrete day's work.

Yep I think that was the case. He did a chapter a day, and a day's revision at the end and he was done. I guess if you get the "spare" style down pat (he deliberately limited himself to a 2000 word vocabulary) then maybe it's doable but he still must have been some kind of novelistic savant.

Question:

I want to read THE RADETZSKY MARCH - can anyone recommend a preferred translation?

Annoying they both to seem to have good and points: the Penguin translation is terser and funnier, but drowning in adjectives; the Hoffman translation for Granta is much easier to parse but a little less vivid.

Any thoughts?

I read the Hofmann translation several years ago.

And recommend?

Hello readers. Popping in to ask what Laurie Colwin I should read?

I'm reading the Penguin translation of Radetzky-march, and it's quite readable. And yeah, funny.

Henry Roth: CALL IT SLEEP

Terry Eagleton: RADICAL SACRIFICE

the Penguin translation is terser and funnier, but drowning in adjectives; the Hoffman translation for Granta is much easier to parse but a little less vivid. Judging by that, I'd go w the Penguin. Snipping adjectives as I read is a lot easier than squinting it terser and funnier and more vivid.

I started reading The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei. I like it so far - it's terse and funny, no sci-fi elements yet.

Ge Fei's A Flock of Brown Birds is very magical realist, for better or worse

Still Brideshead, also cracked open Nixonland.

I'm reading The Underground Railroad. Halfway through a book isn't the time to make such calls, but there are issues with structure and pacing, I think. It's my first Whitehead, so no frame of reference, but he seems to be a relatively comma-free writer. Which is a thing.

Re: Laurie Colwin, Happy All the Time was my favorite. Likable characters, nice resolution. Enjoyed Home Cooking, too. Was sad, discovering and waiting for her next, when she passed.

Just finished The Evenings by Gerard Reve. The hardcover has a classy art deco promise, but found the book very tedious. Strange to read reviews calling it a masterpiece. The main character reads like Holden Caulfield crossed with Freddie Threepwood, with little to no humor or insight surviving.

Now reading Andrew Sean Greer's Less, and feeling relief that I'm enjoying it.

I partly agree although The Evenings had a bit of Celine to it - and I liked how it didn't mention the war even though it was written during that time. I reckon he got more interesting later on though!

Friedrich Holderlin - Hyms and Fragments is just a masterful rendering by Richard Sieburth. So many incredible lines. If translation is loss..

I have just started reading Gyula Krudy's Kinight of the Cordon Bleu with an account of horse racing and high society at the end of the Hapsburgs. Good 1930s pulp!

I just read Aucassin & Nicolette and Other Tales, tr. Pauline Matarasso, a Penguin Classics compilation of five medieval tales. The occasion was a short backpacking trip and the impetus was that this slender collection was a mere150 pages and weighed under 3 oz. making it easy to carry up and down mountainsides.

The tales themselves were entertaining, but very much in the vein of medieval tales, they were full of formulaic elements, unbelievable plots, and stiff underdeveloped characters. You have to overlook these factors and enter into the spirit in which they were written. The translations seemed thoughtful and strove to communicate what the translator most loved and admired about the works, across what must seem an unbridgeable abyss of cultural strangeness.

Xp funnily enough I am reading krúdy’s sunflower atm, it’s 12 years shy of the 30s and I wouldn’t have thought to call it pulp but I’m really into how torrid and unashamedly high-flown it is

Based on ILB enthusiasm, I checked out a copy of The Soul of an Octopus, Sy Montgomery, and started it last night. Seems like a sound choice for summer reading.

John Fox's The Boys on the Rock, which has been haunting me ever since I finished it last night.

It’s my favorite kind of memoir - meandering, personal, and sciencish.

I'm assuming you're referring to something upthread, as The Boys on the Rock is only two of those things.

The Soul of an Octopus is very good; 'Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life' by Peter Godfrey-Smith is probably even better--more hard science, much of it both boggling and beguiling

I finished The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei. I would definitely seek out more work by him. For some reason I thought it was going to be science fiction, but it wasn't at all. Sort of dreamlike neo-noir, in a Murakami-esque mode.

Can second the Godfrey-Smith book. A really fascinating account of the octopus as a kind of alternative experiment in intelligent life, since its common ancestor with mammals/reptiles is probably a sightless almost brainless worm living 750 million years ago.

currently averaging < word a day at the moment.

Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything by Graham Harman. One of the attractive new Pelican series, got waved in front of my nose by an ilxor. Extension and significant variation of Bruno Latour's actor network theory. Appealing in many ways, as it encourages the common sense appeal to the existence of things (including fictional and theoretical entities) rather than hard empiricism, and having attributes are more than the sum of their parts, and not defined entirely on their impact on the human observer.

As always I approach these things with a very wary scepticism (no not that kind). Harman lets himself down quite badly with his choice of terminology for approaches to objects that are elemental or atomic, and do not allow for higher order emergent properties - this he calls 'undermining' an 'object'. 'Overmining' he terms the definition of an object entirely through that which is available to us as perceivers. Because he's dealing with new abstract terminology, the use of 'undermining' throws forward its military/siege warfare meaning, in the absence of anything else, something then further confused by the use of 'overmining' for its opposite.

I'm not convinced - as in I'm still working through - by his application of the mechanics of metaphor to allow for objects to retain, effectively, an imperceptible, impossible to conceive, interiority, or, i guess, noumena (forgive me - my philosophy, he's very sick). This is a general wariness around the application of aesthetic philosophy to artistic method, where that application feels like a constraint - or i guess in his terms, 'undermining'.

He then looks at some practical applications of what I suppose he's right in insisting is abbreviated as OOO, but that is also distracting. Great! I thought, let's see what use this approach can have. He then applies it to what i assume is an area of expertise - the US Civil War.

Using the magic of OOO to identify truths otherwise hidden, he discovers that the start date of the war (or the beginning of the existence of the object) is the same as historians have generally identified, and the end is... about the same as historians have generally identified. Going through a few more twists and turns, it wasn't at all clear that OOO was bringing anything new to the US Civil War party other than making things slightly more difficult by insisting they all get re-interpreted by OOO.

Fortunately, I have also picked up David Edgerton's really brilliant The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History. Now, i don't know for certain that this is a specific application of object oriented ontology, but it might as well be, as it is the project of the book to understand the hidden notion of the British nation to make sense of the 20th Century (and beyond). Any of you who've read his very good The Shock of the Old will know how careful he to meticulously, and with documentary evidence, unravel received wisdom and assumptions, many of them academic, many of them popular or political, to try and get a clearer image of the matter in hand.

Adam Tooze, who is a close ally and also a very good historian, gave an example of this recently in an excellent podcast, where he points out that though the Third Reich is often characterised as a 'war machine' - exemplifying heavily mechanised and inhuman warfare - in fact this characterises Britain better prior to the second world war (an argument Edgerton reiterates) and that the third reich war effort was still reliant to a surprising degree on for example horses. (Edgerton remarks that things like conscription in the UK were disparagingly seen as 'Prussianisms' and it was only after the second world war that Britain aligned with the European standard of peacetime conscription).

The wider project of the book is to understand 'Britain' better in terms of the economic, political and ideological forces at play: his project is to bring the workings of capital and the theories of political economy at play in the 20th century into the light, and to essentially identify (as an object) the ideology of a 'British nationalism' realised on both the right and the left, and within a context of a response to Free Trade Liberalism and the project (more project than actuality until the Second World War DE argues) of Imperialism.

Clearly with such a high-wire act, he has to be bloody careful and rigorous, and for the most part he passes (to this non-expert). There are a couple of flabbier bits where you feel slightly less easy, but on the whole this is a fantastic book. So much in there that can be applied to our current situation fruitfully.

I've read.. largely read.. The Old Rendering Plant by Wolfgang HIlbig but that will have to wait another day. And I've been slightly harsh on Graham Harman - it's an interesting introduction to a modern concept in philosophy and has interest as such, and as a set of ideas that are v thought provoking to explore.

It's a thrilling read – I hesitate to say that on the K Amis rule that you should only really say that of writing which doesn't include 'a gunshot rang out' somewhere in it – but to see so much so brilliantly reworked, with new concepts and narratives in place on every page, produces a real rush.

er, well, good to see not having posted for a while i haven't lost any knack for sentences missing vital words, or indeed general direction, also clanging GCSE repetition and that last para refers to the Edgerton history not to the Object Oriented Ontology book.

Library's got The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy, Norton 2013, intro by John Waters, blurbists incl. Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes---good? Better at novels? (Says here he wrote 19, not to mention plays and other.)

Having finished The Soul of an Octopus, I found it both pleasurable and suitably lightweight for summer reading. soda's description of it as a rambling and 'scientish' memoir fits the book better than to call it popularized science. There are plentiful anecdotes about various people she met and interacted with and many ornate descriptions of her feelings about particular octopuses she met and played with at the Boston aquarium. It does convey a fair bit of information about marine life alongside this, but the personal far outdistances the scientific.

Based on that Murakami/neo-noir description, have The Invisibility Cloak at the library for pick-up. Will fit nicely into the time waiting for new Daniel Silva.

Thanks to Alfred, I am now reading Democracy Reborn, Garrett Epps, about the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.

The Maigret detour (?) unexpectedly continues into A Maigret Trio(Harcourt, '73), billed as "three novels published in the United States for the first time": Maigret's Failure, Maigret In Society, and Maigret and the Lazy Burglar.
Failure is set in the middle of the wettest, rottenest March in modern memory, when an obnoxious childhood classmate appears in Maigret's office, now a devouring sack of meat, wealthy and in with the Minister of the Interior, M.'s boss. He promptly announces that he's the target of anonymous threats, demands and promptly receives protection, is promptly murdered. M. wonders if his attitude to this deliberately repellent, obviously (to always-watchful old "chum" M.)fearful butcher shop baron has influenced the Superintendant's professionalism and sense of duty, that it's to some degree his own fault that the guy is killed, at least so promptly (lots of enemies, trophies of his success). All this and much more in the first few pages.

Those Maigrets sound great, I need to read more.

Started and finished Jean Rhy's Voyage In The Dark on a flight. Depression, homesickness, London as a total dump, sex used only as a desperate measure that'll leave you feeling exploited anyway. Really grim stuff, and (as the blurbs bleat) "surprisingly modern". Man, there's a lot of great English novels about hating England (though obviously this author's colonial roots play a large part, too).

Next up: Girls & Dolls And Other Stories", Damon Runyon.

Finished Brideshead Revisited, which maybe dragged on too much but had good bits up through the end. Don’t think Waugh really earned his way to the deathbed conversion et sequelae but he presumably wouldn’t care. Will probably be a classic for a long time for its gorgeously gay first third.

Reading The Secret Place, the fifth Dublin Murder Squad by Tana French, which seems to retread the previous entries a bit but breaks format a bit by alternating the tight first person narration with omniscient flashbacks to some of the teenage girls at the center of the plot. The New Yorker review that got me on to these books originally didn’t think much of that but I’m digging it. I’m a sucker for sentimental-ish stuff about being a teenager.

The new Megan Abbott is a lot of fun, but piles on the unlikelinesses at the end to become a bit OTT.

xp miniseries of Brideshead is a beautiful memory, with its own sense of time (in part because it took a lot longer to finish than intended; Jeremy Irons kept going away to do other stuff). Better than the book overall.

This DUBLIN MURDER SQUAD sounds promising!

I've just about started Daniel Fuchs' SUMMER IN WILLIAMSBURG (1934 - I hadn't realized it was the exact same data as CALL IT SLEEP).

[*date not data]

Thanks to Alfred, I am now reading Democracy Reborn, Garrett Epps, about the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.

― A is for (Aimless), Thursday, July 19, 2018

Keep us posted!

Swans Sacrifice and Transcendence the oral history. I just got onto the 2nd incarnation of Angels Of light and the arrival of Devendra Barnhart. Been pretty fascinating and puts different focus o some things i was semi aware of.
BUt I'm just wondering where Virgil Moorefield came in. I just checked the line up of the Foetus band on Rife and it has Ted Parsons on it. I thought that was Foetus fronting the same band that had played as Swans in London that week.
& I've always had the heavy folk rock band I loved in '88 as being the same band as Children of God i.e. with Ted Parsons so am I remembering that wrong. Can't think how many times the band hit london that year. I remember seeing them in Edinburgh in '89 with Vinniwe Signorelli who went onto Unsane on drums. & I think I do recognise Virgil from somewhere.

ah well, great book which has had me wanting to read it continually. Love it.

May need to read that Soul of the Octopus thing somebody else has been reading. I just turned it up while tidying my room.

Yeah, he played with the Swans, Laswell etc., wanna say he did some art (album cover or two?)
xp Maigret's Failure is shaping up to be a true whodunnit, a locked room groove: the Meat Baron victim and the semi-survivors among the multitudes he's exsanguinated all seem to have been going through the motions for quite some time, to the extent that no one seems capable of making a radical change. Nevertheless, some of the leftovers take news of his death a little bit like Christmas/occasion for another drink; "Father hung himself too soon--="
In further news, the real scandal is what's legal.

I've been reading The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell, one of the 3 books I scored from the NY Review Books sale a few weeks ago. I really loved Troubles. This one is pretty good so far, but perhaps doesn't that have extra bit of magic- maybe it was a happy marriage of subject and style. I think maybe the Indian colonial situation doesn't lend itself quite as well to Farrell's slightly oddball comic touch - perhaps it's just not as fertile ground for comedy.

having sped through the first part of elizabeth bowen's final novel eva trout in one sitting & thought it splendid, curious how her earlier work compares? think i may have a copy of the heat of the day lying around somewhere.

All Bowen is worth reading, though I find her unusually hard to speed through: not that she's not gripping, but that something in her style makes me slow down and appreciate it. If you try her Collected Stories you can see how consistently good she was through her whole career.

I just finished reading Helter Skelter by Kyoko Okazaki. I generally don’t read manga (this is a josei book, aimed at adult women), but I was intrigued after a friend described it to me.

What a book, though. It’s about a model at the top of her game, Liliko, who’s achieved everything she has through illegal surgical modification and treatment, and what happens when it all starts falling apart. Josei is strong on emotions and expression and this book more than delivers. I loved the contrast between the dreamy art of the characters and scenes and how deeply ugly and flawed almost everyone in this was.

I really liked Liliko even though she’s awful. I generally almost always like troubled female characters but they’re seldom so terrible. I liked how frank the whole thing is; about being a woman, about beauty, about expectations. It doesn’t hold back at all.

This was completed in 1996 so some of the musings about women, fashion and celebrity are no doubt dated but it’s as sharp as anything I’ve read on the subject. The Japanese context lends it some unfamiliarity as well but it’s all pretty much otm even for being written as far back as it was since then. It’s incredibly graphic - there’s sex (censored) and gore (less so), so not one to read on a commute.

I read it all pretty much in one go, and I’m still thinking about it now. The ending alludes to a sequel, but sadly that never happened as the author was struck by a car after completing this and left bedridden.

This is only one of two works she has translated into English, which is such a pity, because I’d love to read more if her stuff.

That sounds really interesting. I've only ever read one manga book I genuinely liked, so I may have to ivercome some prejudices to actually read it.

yup, same - no prejudices against manga just a part of human endevour I never got around to checking out. We should merge I Love Comics and ILB sometime.

Anne Carson - Red Doc >

Finished my Irish murder. Snuck in Stefan Zweig’s short and good as hell Chess Story tonight. And I think now I’m going to start plowing into Nixonland in earnest. This Nixon fellow is coming across as pretty unpleasant.

I just finished Garrett Epps' Democracy Reborn. I feel much better informed than I did prior to reading it. He was very clear about the constitutional issues created by the three-fifths compromise and how the slave states' oligarchy had a stranglehold over their own state governments and consequently over the Congress and the federal courts.

He made it plain that the anti-slavery elements in the post-Civil War Congress well understood the necessity for altering the fundamental structure of the constitution before re-admitting the secessionist states, or they would simply win back all the power they'd lost. He clearly defined the players, their positions and their faults, plus the political climate in the Union. He describes the immediate and instinctive migration of ex-slaves away from their plantations, homeless and uprooted. In short, he set the stage for the drama very well.

What I found ultimately dissatisfying is how, after defining the profound stakes at play, and giving a modest set of details about how Congress did its work, he rushes headlong through the election of 1866, the ratification process by the states, and gives only a couple of pages to explaining that in spite of the Fourteenth Amendment, the southern oligarchy rapidly emasculated it and indeed won back all their power for nearly another century, despite the passage of the fourteenth.

The amendment was an abject failure in accomplishing its aims until many generations had passed and he quickly glosses over why this happened. He never comes to grips with the extreme depth and persistence of racism in every part of the USA. He never concedes that it was the ceaseless, heartbreaking political work of black people, decade after decade, that did the real work and still does it now. The amendment was just a handhold, not a resting place. The book seemed excellent as far as it went, but still seemed incomplete. I wanted more.

another 25 pages of Terry Eagleton's RADICAL SACRIFICE.

I carried on about The Collected Stories of xp Elizabeth Bowen on at least one previous What Are Your Reading?, maybe more; because it's a brilliant doorstop, but still haven't gotten to the novels, though read some very intriguing descriptions. The stories are so dense, usually in a good-to-great way, that they're almost like mini-novels at times.

Thinking about starting John Berger's G next, or Malamud's Rembrandt's Hat---which is better?

An acquaintance's poetry book I will not name, since I am struggling to think of nice things to say. "Nice paper stock!"

Don’t go with that.

I am reading a lot of Frank O’Hara poems rn for my class. They are hit or miss. I’m also reading a lot of Gwendolyn Brooks poems and they are all A+.

The amendment was an abject failure in accomplishing its aims until many generations had passed and he quickly glosses over why this happened. He never comes to grips with the extreme depth and persistence of racism in every part of the USA. He never concedes that it was the ceaseless, heartbreaking political work of black people, decade after decade, that did the real work and still does it now.

I thought this was in there, but I may be projecting what I've read of Eric Foner and Douglas R Egerton. The amendment wasn't a failure -- the Supreme Court gutted it in Cruikshank and the Slaughterhouse Cases, and he makes it clear.

Will Hobson’s Musketeers translation, which is better at the jokes than Pevear

went back to OSCAR WAO, having never finished it. I really don't like this book.

By chance I stumbled upon the works of Welsh writer Cynan Jones, and the first I've read of him and finished last week - The Long Dry - has blown me away. Sparse and succinct, with quite a lot of white lines between paragraphs or even sentences for 'breathing' (I thought this would annoy me but it didn't), he's a master of punching you in the gut when you don't expect it, (heart)breaking and important plot-twists delivered almost offhandedly cool. He develops his characters beautifully and deep, without overdoing it. It's about our shortcomings, about regret quite a bit, about how we're captives of our own 'fate' perhaps, or the path we go down in this life which is so hard to leave even if you wanted to. Idk, I, shit at writing about literature but he's a master of fine, crafted prose that gets under your skin quickly. Also, he knows his nature (farm life, animal birth, dogs, the weather) and uses this for maximum atmosphere, without showing off. Highly recommended.

Reading his The Cove now.

(Also his books are rather short, 100-250 pages at most, which suits me well)

I'm reading Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Thomas Merton. These essays were not written for a broad audience, but get into some rather technical aspects of Catholic theology while explaining Zen to interested theologians.

I read 99 stories of God by joy williams, never read her before. I thought it was really good, just the right level of arch. I read the whole thing through quickly as I thought the cumulative effect was the point, more so than most collections - it felt very like flipping through a book of cartoons, with the title of each story printed at the bottom like a caption.

I haven’t really read much flash fiction so my main point of comparison is Bernhard’s the voice imitator which is at something quite different - but then sure enough Bernhard himself shows up in story number 76 which mostly consists of a character reading a newspaper

Right, got to get some Cynan Jones.

That Joy Williams is really good.

Last night I decided to re-read The Aran Islands, J. M. Synge. It's been 40 years since the first time I read it, and I recently acquired the copy I bought for my father, a 1911 edition.

Spent much of the day going through Geoffrey Hill's Selected and a selection of poetry by the Bronte Sisters.

Eimear McBride - A Girl is a Half-Formed thing. Catholicism, sex, growing-up, Ireland, Joyce. Kinda know where its going to go. I'm not sure whether I want to finish it - It will be fine, it won't take long yet life is short.

I love Hill through the nineties up until the terseness I so admired often turned him inscrutable.

Its my first reading of him really. Quite like to chase some of the individual books.

Talk by Linda Rosenkrantz. great summer read

Have dented Nixonland, which is enlightening and infuriating. The guy had to have been history’s biggest piece of work.

Worse to have lived it than to read it, I can assure you.

First as tragedy, then as farce, or something.

I have read the McBride debut 2 or 3 times!

Would really like to make time for Synge's ARAN ISLANDS and other prose.

James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

I liked that a lot!

His last completed novel, I think? Soon to be a film by Barry Jenkins of Moonlight.

Yeah, I gotta get on that one.

Speaking of books soon to be movies, I'm 2/3 of the way through Emily M. Danforth's The Miseducation of Cameron Post, which is excellent so far. Pumped for the film.

Lidiya Ginzburg: Blockade Diary -- fucking hell

½ way thru nabokov's collected stories

(thanks for e. bowen recommendation: will keep an eye out for it... & after reading a collection of elizabeth taylor's stories think i need hers as well!)

Antonio Tabucchi - The Edge of the Horizon
Milton - Selected/Paradise Regained

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett
The Bird's Nest by Shirley Jackson

Would really like to make time for Synge's ARAN ISLANDS

It is quietly excellent. There's none of the wild extravagant language you might expect after reading Playboy of the Western World. He writes about very simple and ordinary things in very clear and simple prose, and lets the things described shine through.

after reading a collection of elizabeth taylor's stories think i need hers as well

YES YOU DO

Anybody read Leonard Woolf? Leon Edel's references to and contextualization of Tales From The East and The Village In The Jungle are intriguing. Kept telling himself he was anti-Imperialist, but watched himself get deeply involved in grassroots governance of Ceylon.

Very observant of self & others, it seems.

The Wise Virgins by Leonard Woolf is really good, and also really makes you wonder how he put up with his horribly anti-semitic wife.

Toook me a while to get into Damon Runyon but now I'm loving it! I think as with Wodehouse part of the trick is having this utterly self-contained world, where people agree on the same absurdities and thus can interact with each other regarding them.

"Well, I state that this sounds to me like stealing, and stealing is something that is by no means upright and honest, and Regret has to admit that it really is similar to stealing, but he says what of it, and as I do not know what of it, I discontinue the argument."

"I never know Jack O' Hearts is even mad at Louie, and I am wondering why he takes these shots at him, but I do not ask any questions, because when a guy goes around asking questions in this town people may get the idea he is such a guy as wishes to find things out."

Also the description of Alice In Wonderland as "nothing but a pack of lies, but very interesting in spots".

Last night I started The Golden Spur, one of Dawn Powell's NY-centered novels, from 1962. Last year I read a much earlier novel of hers, Angels on Toast (1940), which was a bit on the grim side. The other one of hers I've read was The Locusts have No King (1948), which saw the failings of its characters in a more humane light.

This one seems a bit more comedic than the other two. The characters are treated a bit more frivolously and there's a touch more buffoonery at work, but it is not mean-spirited in the least.

A Time to Live is one of the century's funniest novels.

a time to be born? (not trying to be a dick, just checking)

Was wondering

I finished Siege of Krishnapur. My initial impression held- it wasn't as good as Troubles but still pretty good. I still want to read The Singapore Grip. This one had more action and historical detail, but lacked a bit of the surrealism and humor. Now I'm plowing through Jonathan Mahler's Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, which is eminently readable, though at least a passing interest in baseball doesn't hurt.

a time to be born? (not trying to be a dick, just checking)

― mookieproof, Friday, August 3, 2018 8:37 PM (ye

yep!

Ronald Firbank, THE FLOWER BENEATH THE FOOT (1923)

THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE (2003) for the 3rd time.

My sense-memory of that ^^ is that the first half is magnificent and hallucinatory (perfect for this incessant heat) and that the second half, when it became more conventional, couldn't match the intensity. Would like to read it again.

I finished the Red Riding Quartet by David Peace and, overall, it's a brilliant achievement. Incantatory, oneiric and like plunging one's head into the orphic soup of the Real. It needn't be about 'truth' in the end, but given the Savile revelations, there's something of that, too. Fuck knows what Yorkshire did to Peace, but damn he takes some sweet revenge.

Also read Olivia Laing's The Trip to Echo Spring, which was fine, but is fading. I think part of the issue is writing about already familar characters, and using a familiar narrative (they were pissheads: who knew?). There's also the problem of the diagnostic framework, which is under-explored, or maybe inadequately explored. I did enjoy the road trip element of it.

Now reading Stuart Jeffries' book on the Frankfurt School. It's ripping along well enough so far.

I’ve been wanting to read Laing for a couple of years now, since hearing her speak at a thing; was thinking I might work backwards from her new novel “about” Kathy Acker. I know ilx seems cool on her in general

Rebecac West - The Fountain Overflows

Chinaski, what you say about TFOS is what seemed to be something of a conensus on the ILB thread, years back. I think I'd largely agree also. The first section is impressing me all over again -- it's by far the richest, deepest, most painterly bout of writing JL has ever done.

The Trip to Echo Spring was mildly disappointing when I finally got round to it. I mean, it was fine, but hardly revelatory.

Never got past the first Red Riding book, it was so OTT that it became ridiculous.

Just finished Who Is Martha? by Marjana Gaponenko, which was charming and clever but a bit ruined by endless dream sequences.

Anybody read The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary, edited by S.P. Rosenthal? Contents (via page linked below) look even better than this description:

The first section of the volume, Bloomsbury on Bloomsbury, contains the basic memoirs and discussions of the Group itself by the original members, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Desmond MacCarthy, and others. These recollections range from unpublished private correspondence and diaries to formal autobiographies. Published here for the first time is the remainder of Desmond MacCarthy's unfinished Bloomsbury memoir. Virginia Woolf's complete Memoir Club paper on Old Bloomsbury and excerpts from her letters and diaries also appear, as do letters about Bloomsbury by Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, E.M. Forster, and Vanessa Bell. The second section, Bloomsberries, contains observations on individuals by other members of the group and their children. Virginia Woolf's hitherto unknown biographical fantasy on J.M. Keynes is newly added, as are accounts of Molly MacCarthy, Lydia Lopokova, and David Garnett. Bloomsbury Observed, the last section, consists of reminiscences of the group mainly by their contemporaries. Additions to the revised edition include an early anonymous newspaper account of Bloomsbury, and observations by Quentin Bell, Beatrice Webb, Gerald Brenan, Christopher Isherwood, Frances Partridge, and others.

Also included are an updated chronology recording the principal events in the careers of Bloomsbury's members and an enlarged bibliography. (This is the second edition.)
https://www.amazon.com/Bloomsbury-Group-Collection-Memoirs-Commentary/dp/0802076408

Just finished The Changeling, by Joy Williams. I found it oddly hard to focus on in the beginning and I feel like I need to read it again but it was deeply unnerving. NYT slammed it when it came out, highlighting the sentence “She was young but some day she would be covered with ants.”

“but”?

“She was young but some day she would be covered with ants.”

lol i love joy

You might enjoy Karen Russell's take on her (they're two of *those* Florida writers):
https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/the-bracing-wisdom-of-joy-williamss-the-changeling

I finished Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning. I think I would have preferred more baseball actually, and maybe a bit less on the mayoral race, but it was pretty enjoyable. Now I'm reading Ottessa Mossfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which is off to a strong (and funny) start. Not sure if the narrator's eye is jaundiced or gimlet, but probably one of those.

You might enjoy The Red Smith Reader. His takes, his visions of what made baseball and many other sports glorious and childish and corrupt and otherwise involving and emblematic, for fifty freakin' yeahs, from the Great Depression to the Age of Reagan, presented in a very concise, compressed, translucent way--sunlight through the blinds behind the breakfast table, smokelight in the auditorium, etc.=the best rip 'n' read clip file ever. There's also a collection in The Library of America, dunno how much overlap. H'm-m-m

I've been out hiking and camping in the mountains. While out there I read The Grand Babylon Hotel, Arnold Bennett. It was a grandly silly pot-boiler of a novel, written to be serialized in the English popular press of 1902, so every chapter is short and ends with a jolt of mystery or intrigue. It's mostly rather stupid, but fun, about on a par with 1960s 'high concept' television adventure series, like Wild, WIld West or The Man From U.N.C.L.E..

I also read about halfway into Watership Down, Richard Adams, which does a very creditable job of cribbing from such Greek classics as the Oresteia, the Odyssey, and Anabasis and transforming them into something midway between a talking animal fable and an English pastoral. For such a weird pastiche, it is amazingly compelling stuff. They say it's not stealing if you can make it your own.

Milton - Lycidas/Samson Agonistes/Paradise Regained/some translation (Psalms). Connect with Milton a lot more than Shakespeare (maybe its unfair to compare and so on).

Prose-wise I started on a wide ranging selection of Rilke's Letters. Some really entertaining passages, one early on around Count Tolstoy's villa. Other letters display his (really awesome at times) powers of description and making a scene or a person come alive. Plenty of egos stroked and much self-pity too, that can get tiring (I have read a lot of Rilke's letter writing over the years).

Andrew Smith - Grasshopper Jungle

About armageddon, giant insects, sexual confusion, coming-of-age, Iowa, Ronald Reagan's balls, and Exile on Main Street. Edgar Wright apparently has an adaptation in the works.

I read a lot of Kafka in 2015, but am nibbling at him again, and would be happy to delve deeper into this burrow once more.

Aimless: does GRAND BABYLON HOTEL suggest the title of GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL?

WATERSHIP DOWN was my favourite book aged 11.

oblomov

Halfway through The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. So far less racist/orientalist than I expected - the Indian cult trying to recover their gem take up much less space than I'd have thought - and the mystery does keep you glued to it. There's some repetition, owing to the author's choice of having several narrators, all of whom are writing down their experiences at the behest of a character. Reminded me of Nabisco's point about the beginings of the novel, when you would have all these conceits so at some point you're reading a letter of someone detailing reading a ship log that quotes a newspaper article etc.

I think I saw a BBC adaptation of that over Xmas.

The Moonstone is much less racist than the thematically overlapping The Sign of The Four, which is from a couple of decades later.

It should be pointed out that though the Indian cultists in this are portrayed as murderous and implacable to a supernatural degree, it is made pretty explicit that the original theft was shameful, so you've got some pretty obvious subtext regarding guilt over the plunder of Empire in there, even if Collins wouldn't necessairly have looked at it that way.

It's taken me about 4 years so far to read moonstone, but I'll get there. Watched the TV version at Christmas and can't remember the ending.

Frankenstein is the king of a story within a story. I think it gets 5 or 6 levels deep at one point (monster eavesdropping a letter being read)

Currently re-reading Our Mutual Friend. Was my first Dickens 11 years ago and is now the first of the rereads.

GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL?

They're certainly phonemically similar, but I think that 'Grand ____ Hotel' was a fairly common construction for luxury hotels in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so it could easily be coincidence.

Keep thinking you people are talking about Grand Hotel Abyss, which I think somebody actually was talking about a week or so ago.

xxp Also The Neapolitan Novels are stories within stories about stories within stories, with the narrator--ageing female literary celeb who has recently seen her career-making roman a clef referred to in passing as "the Italian Bonjour Tristesse", reports that some of her characters/people are less negative about her blend of art and sensationalism than they are about her bungling it--she tells that, works it into the story, like everything else (and justly builds it into the finale and punchline).

I'm reading Grand Hotel Abyss! I don't think I can read 300 pages of it.

Read Roland Buti's Year of the Drought, from 2014. Swiss writer, first book to be translated into English (by Charlotte Mandell), won a few prizes. It was alright. Heavy with symbolism about the battle between atavism and modernity, the battles of puberty. The coda was the best thing about it.

Now reading Butcher's Crossing by John Williams and, slight credulity problems aside, liking it very much.

Now reading an old library book, Rembrandt's Hat, mid-70s collection of stories by Malamud: going or lean yet layered, limber in strict tempo, which makes the rong bits, even when pebbley, more of a stumble, and some are whole paragraphs etc.---there's a sense of a distinguished athlete or musician past his prime, who hasn't adapted accordingly, but will just do what he's always done 'til he falls over. But I'm not tempted to stop reading, it's okay. What else should I read by him? Just start at the beginning? His basic approach also seems a bit---dated? Historical, in that you can tell he's an American who started prob in the early 50s lit mags--but/and still an appetite for bold/abrupt turns, even with the stumbles.

Haven't read The Moonstone but The Woman In White is really really great

xpost to dow

Really enjoyed The Assistant by Malamud when I read it a long, long time ago - realist novel about assimilation and Jewish identity, amongst other things. FWIW, it was chosen by Anthony Burgess for his 99 Novels selection - and he also picked Dubin's Lives, which I haven't read, and which I believe has elements of myth and fantasy, so something of a departure from the norm maybe. I could be wrong, but - at least in the UK - Malamud seems to be rapidly receding from view as any kind of 'significant' writer. Maybe if The Natural had been a bigger hit...

Thanks, Ward! Some implications of myth, fantasy, paranoid vision here, though mainly in the freewheeling opener. Wasn't he the basis for Roth's "The Ghost Writer," the old maestro who was already fading from view in the 70s, 80s---late 60s, even?
These stories orig. pub or copyright 1968, 1972, 1973: eight of them, 204 pages, so a spate, it seems---"going *for*" and "there's *a* sense," speaking of going pebbles.

The fixer, which burgess dismissed as “too parodically Jewish” or something like that in 99 novels, is also really good. Idiots first and the magic barrel are much more successful short story collections imo/iirc; the other year I got the audiobook of the complete stories and the quality definitely got less consistent as the years wore on. I loved the story cycle pictures of fidelman upon revisiting as much as when I initially read it, though.

& yeah he’s not really much of a figure in the uk at all, though a few years ago I saw that my Hungarian coworker at Tesco was reading a translation of the fixer

I'm enjoying Gallows Pole guys. If I'd read any Game Of Thrones, I'd say it's Game of Thronesy in terms of style, but it's good. Like Game of Thrones for the Quietus / folk horror generation

Thought it was more recent, but the '97 TV series for The Woman in White is also great. Had forgotten Andrew Lincoln was the hero, but Simon Callow's Count Fosco is note-perfect oily and sinister.

Count Fosco is one of the best literary villains ever.

With Malamud, would definitely recommend Dubin's Lives, and I loved The Natural, even though I care/understand nothing for/about baseball.

I like that one Malamud story about the father that wants his daughter to marry an artist while the mother wants her to marry a businessman, can’t remember what that one is called

I finished My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I read an interview with Moshfegh where she said that she comes to writing almost more from a musical perspective than a literary one, trying to capture the particular flow and rhythm of a voice, a stream of thought, in a way that can take the reader out of themselves like being enraptured by a piece of music. I think that is probably her strongest suit. The narrator's voice is strong and distinctive and intriguing - I'd say a lot of the interest in the book is trying to understand who this funny, frank and disturbing person is. It's not the plot, such as it is. My interest in reading about fictional conceptual art pieces is probably even less than my interest in reading about nonfictional ones, the ending seemed like it belonged to a different book, and I think Moshfegh is perhaps a bit too interested in cultivating a reputation as an enfant terrible, but I'd be interested in reading more of her work.

Things I can remember reading since I last updated here (some months ago):

Ursule Molinaro: Encores For A Dilettante - early seventies experimental feminist New York business, I liked it despite the fact it kept pushing me away. I didn't take it personally.

Egress - interesting new lit magazine from Little Island Press, inc my fave raves Eley Williams and David Hayden.

Therese Bohman: Eventide - Swedish novel of a disappointed Swedish academic getting tangled up in some sort of mid-life love/work crisis, something about vulnerability and agency and victimhood maybe? This one is very good until the end which is very good indeed.

Dag Solstad: Armand V - I think Dag Solstad is a genius and I loved every page of this. IIRC James thought the conceit - these are footnotes from an unwritten novel - was a bit superfluous but I found myself adrift in the unwritten novel itself and I loved it.

Peter Benson: A Private Moon - this is one of those novels (what are the others? Sciascia? Gadda?) that starts off like it's going to be a private detective yarn and then everything falls apart. I really liked this book and I think that Peter Benson is maybe a writer who's drifted out of fashion, but I'm not sure why. I've read three or four of his books and they're all good, and all different.

Victoria Brown: Cherry Bomb - slim volume of piquant pop poetry on Dostoyevsky Wannabe, I kept this next to the bed for a few nights and enjoyed it, must revisit.

Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay: Abandon - fractured-self Indian novel of a woman adrift from society and (sense of) self. I thought this was periodically brilliant but came away feeling a bit unsatisfied, like I could see the scaffolding of the novel in a way I didn't want to maybe? I would recommend it, mind.

Richard Brammer: Girl At End - more Dostoyevsky Wannabe, this one might - might - have something in common with the Solstad in so far as it seems to be incidents and reflections from the lives of incidental characters in a story, without that story existing. I might have got that wrong. It's full of northern soul, indie and dance references and it's definitely more Jonathan Richman than Jonathan Frantzen.

Per Olov Enquist: The Magnetist's Fifth Winter - quack medicine / mesmerism in early modern Germania. As ever with Enquist's historical stuff I'm left feeling that I've learned something deep about the nature of human relations and belief, but I can never tell you quite what. Also as ever, hugely enjoyable (I'm less enamoured of his more recent autobiographical bits, I think, but let's not worry about that.)

Rosie Snajdr: A Hypocritical Reader - short stores, fragmentary pieces, some brilliant, others confusing, they might all be linked (certainly you see the same names recur without it being clear whether it's the same characters). I'm going to have to read this again and I'm very much looking forward to doing so.

Oh and I started "Arlington Park" by Rachel Cusk but after two chapters I asked my wife if it got any better and she sadly shook her head. I couldn't stand it. A rare abandonment by me, friends whose taste I trust swear by Cusk so I'll likely try another one at some point.

After about 350 pages of the exploits and adventures of a bunch of rabbits, I am beginning to detect a certain sameness in the sorts of adventures a rabbit might meet with, even in the course of an exceptionally adventurous life. The prospect of reading another 130 pages of the same stuff is beginning to look a bit dimmer than it did 200 pages ago.

lol

I'm sure rabbits think the same about us.

"Rembrandt's Hat", title story of xxxp Malamud collection, def a step up, woke up this morning still buzzed from bedtime reading. A little contrivey but if this is what his prime was like, I want more! Thanks for recs.

Especially as justified set-up, however contrived, for v. strong, step-up ending---prev. endings tended to let down.

Or let-down, but never noticed it like that.

I finished Watership Down last night. I can see how it fits the arc of the classic hero tale. I wonder if Richard Adams was consciously seeking to duplicate some of the explosive success that Tolkien's books were having in the decade before this came out. Anyway, he did a bang up job, considering the material he was working with.

I have a copy of John Williams' Stoner checked out of the library, but I may delay reading it. I expect to go camping next week and I'm reluctant to take library books on such trips. I'll probably opt for some of my many cheap used paperbacks. I don't mind if they get some rough treatment.

Watership Down is better than Lord of the Rings because the characters in the story realize that not having any women around is actually a big problem.

I've been reading Crashed by Adam Tooze, which I think is really excellent. Aditya Chakrabortty thought it impressive but bloodless. For me the anger is latent in it. Tooze, like his confrere David Edgerton, roundhouses explanatory and subtly or not so subtly eculpatory narratives and explanations by going hard in the detail and having the skill to extract both explanatory narrative arcs and say quite clearly 'no, this is *not* what happened.' He has explicitly stated he wanted to write an economic / financial history, and says at the beginning that this means much of the social impact, the wider human frame if you like, is regrettably absent.

But the mechanics of how it happened, how people missed what they shouldn't have done, and the reasons they took poor decisions, or deliberately avoided taking better decisions are meticulously covered. The book has a very powerful explanatory force, powerful in part because it has underlying it an anger. Chakrabortty's review is worth reading, but i think it misses this.

The timing of the book also gives it an additional facet without which it wouldn't be anywhere near as powerful. Tooze says that he started writing it in 2012,2013, when the dominant story was that liberal economics had won out over the conservative impulses, in terms of how to deal with the crisis. That it was, grotesquely given the impact, a 'success story'. The latter sections of the book deal with the impact of this 'success story' on political narratives and reactions. Because of the rigour of his method he is able to link quite explicitly, through objects and events, the rise of the far right in Hungary and Poland with the economic decisions made in Europe and the States. Again, this ability to do forensic explanatory history is part of the power of the book.

I still don't have the first clue about how anything but the most basic financial instruments work, and these bits I had to take rather on faith, like reading a science-fiction book in a made-up language.

Devices and Desires by PD James. Route into this was slightly odd. I'd been flicking through twitter and seen Emily Wilson (translator of The Odyssey) laying into the Loeb opening line 'that man of many devices' (her 'that complicated man' did a lot to publicise her approach and stir up controversy – i was sceptical at first, but now v much like it). She said it made it sound like he was using android apps and iphones etc. I thought this was a bit silly and remembered the PD James novel – just as a phrase – which pulled 'device' away from 'a mechanical contrivance' and towards a definition located more closely in the human (i thought one was more archaic than the other, but in fact the various definitions of 'device' are equally old).

I wondered whether it was a biblical phrase, tho it didn't look like it from a quick google, so I ended up downloading it to my kindle. There were other reasons as well. I've often tried to read PD James – my mum who has an unaffected good taste in the stuff she likes, has always loved her, and so I've tried several times to get into them, usually starting with An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (the first). All the books were on the shelves at home, and memorable for their Sphere edition covers:

https://pictures.abebooks.com/1LACEYLANE/9585688614.jpg

And I've always struggled with them despite liking crime fiction.

It wasn't until I started Devices and Desires that I remembered two things: one that this was late, so late that I remember buying it in hardback for my mum for Christmas when it came out, and two, that I dimly remembered (and had been quite scared by) the TV adaptation. Not enough to spoil the book – just enough to remember the main serial killer MO.

I was going to say 'main serial killer MO that's at the heart of the book' but that in fact is the complete opposite of what it is. It's almost completely irrelevant, as fine an example of a mcguffin outside of the maltese falcon as i've ever seen. (oh, there's that Anthony Price novel, but that's a surreal example for another day).

Out of laziness just going to bung down a few points without trying to order them in any way:

• 'Devices and desires' is not biblical, just a phrase she uses in the novel, but her style, manner and content is laced through with the cadences of pre-20th century religious writing. It means she's got a mean eye for quote. Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3, verse 13:

and Burton occurs to Dalgliesh (the main detective-poet, off-stage in much of this book) when he views a suicide:

He thought: Yesterday I was reading The Anatomy of Melancholy. Odd. Robert Burton, that seventeenth-century Leicestershire rector, had said all that could be said at such a moment and the words came to him as clearly as if he had spoken them aloud. ‘Of their goods and bodies we can dispose; but what shall become of their souls God alone can tell; His mercy may come inter pontem et fontem, inter gladium et jugulum, betwixt the bridge and the brook, the knife and the throat.’

As you can probably tell from this, the subject of her writing, the moral cruxes, with Dalgliesh at the centre as a sort of version of Christian in The Pilgrim's Progress, are at the centre of what she's writing.

Maybe this sounds a bit claustrophobic or unappealing, but I think it's one of the positive aspects to her books – this lacing of depraved crimes with an exploration of Christian moralism, both as language and as thought, produces a thoughtful tone in places, to be contrasted with some of the didactic moralism she veers into occasionally.

• Her prose can nevertheless be quiet ponderous. She takes her own time over the construction of scenery and domestic interiors – this may be an aspect of being a crime story writer: the necessity for golden age writers to ensure you know what the lines of sight in a country house are, or the exact time it takes to get from one place to another. The setting, by the way, is intended to be Norfolk, around a power station at Larksoken, similar to but contrasted with Sizewell. I know that area quite well, and it seems far more Suffolk than Norfolk in the book.And actually maybe I'm being harsh on the scenic description. Some of it is quite powerful:

That's not totally successful, but i think it's more successful than not. I remember standing on the Suffolk coast, looking at the vivid stars wheel above me, thinking about the fire and sword of viking incursion, and looking up at the looming shape of Sizewell, and the way it connected the power of the stars to those distant invasions of fire and expressions of violence and power and I think PD James does a very decent job of exploring that space.

• As already noted, the main sinister serial killer is a complete McGuffin, only producing a sort of psychological pressure on the main characters in the novel. Although there are several murders, there is only one murder that counts here. As a consequence you get an odd feeling of irrelevance to portions of the book that deal with the serial killer. The emphasis is on characters who exist around the space of the serial killer. This means the book is a search for psychological motive, and I think this is part of the problem I have with PD James. Naturally nearly everyone is seen to have some sort of motive, so maybe this of necessity makes all the characters unattractive. But it also means you have to sift through their minds in order to try and work out who did it, and because really, well anyone – psychologically speaking, rather than spatially or chronologically as in v traditional stories - *could* have done it, I felt I was just reading for the sake of getting to the end.

Regardless, one way or another the characters are all in one way or another unsympathetic pricks. I don't know whether this is inevitable for a crime book that does have a psychological angle, but it's also the layer of upper middle class society with which it largely deals. I don't give a damn about any of them, therefore a book whose main purpose is to explore their psychologies, is going to be coming from something worse than a standing start for me. That said, biblical and freudian (for shorthand) elements are strong in the analysis, so it is also intended to be archetypal and maybe i need to think a bit more about its applicability.

• Nuclear power and the power station that sits at the heart of the book, science, a haunting which sees one character unexpectedly find herself briefly in the 16th century, PD James includes a *lot* and it's another point in her favour. I think it's fair to say that the space of the serial killings allows her to explore all sorts of things that she's just interested in.

• The lateness of the book means there's some badly handled and almost totally irrelevant stuff about a teacher who had to leave her job due to insisting on calling a blackboard a blackboard despite a pressure from an education board 'pursuing the fashionable orthodoxies' (or some such phrase). It's minor, but it's also significant – it's a casual moral didacticism rather than the more focused and thoughtful stuff, and marrs the enjoyment in small ways that pull you up.

posted all this before actually finishing - D&D veers in a different direction of political intrigue and social activism.

Impressive reading and observation from Fizzles!

thanks pinefox. as always it feels more like imperfect grappling. have just finished the PD James and feel in balance it was better than i was allowing it to be. christian morals, nuclear power, science and nature have an interesting relationship during the post war nuclear period. nigel kneale and also penda’s fen come to mind as they often do. devices and desires is at least in part working in that space.

it also briefly touches on the adjacent theme of where including where nature stops and christian morals kick in - around abortion and birth, which is of course the subject of the science fiction Children of Men, which came soon after.

Dag Solstad: Armand V - I think Dag Solstad is a genius and I loved every page of this. IIRC James thought the conceit - these are footnotes from an unwritten novel - was a bit superfluous but I found myself adrift in the unwritten novel itself and I loved it.

Great to hear it - I'll have to get around to this. Tough to even get the time to go into a shop and buy this rn. Have you read T Singer?

No but it’s on the shelf ready.

I have stopped reading Rilke's letters for now to focus on Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. It is for sure - given the nature of the book and its size/scope - a book to dip in and out of however I find myself being swept along on the language and the sheer weirdness of what I am reading. Its a very fun book and difficult to stop. Its the combination of recognition - depression and mental health are (rightly) given such a prominence, recently becoming such a highly charged political issue and its interesting to see, first of all, how preoccupied people were with it at various points throughout human history, and how (edited by Burton like this) its in so much European thought. And, as listed in terms of cause, we know much of what causes depression as known then and discussed, such as diet, loneliness, heartbreak but the aggregation of known detail around these then reads so bizarrely - mostly now just simply wrong or disproven by the very different frameworks we use to look at the detail. Of course much of what is listed as causes, eg. witches, or the positions of the stars, are simply not there anymore, which is very funny too. xp = cool.

reading a short story collection from New Directions in galley by Mexico's Amparo Dávila -- this is remarkably good stuff, eerie little miniatures with incredible atmosphere, images and situations that stick in my mind for days, really highly recommended

pretty interested in Anatomy of Melancholly -- it was one of Gass's favorite books -- I have a very old copy, which means I will have to read it when I'm going to be at home for an extended stretch. Thanks for the write-up xyzzzz__, it will encourage me to get to it.

I finished Naipaul's Guerillas and In a Free State in quick succession, perhaps too quick: they blur. Enthusiasts have praised the former, but the structure and pace don't suit the muddled politics. The latter is better thanks to a road movie structure (and the queer politics surprised me).

The Hard Stuff the Wayne Kramer memoir.
MC5 have moved out to Ann Arbor after trouble in Detroit, I think I may have just got past the events at the Fillmore East when they were sharing a bill with the Velvet Underground and getting hassle with the Motherfuckas about selling out the Revolution.
Pretty interesting so far. Has me wondering how good teh Michael Davis book is.
Also if there might ever be a photobook of the outfits made by the girlfriends

& wanting to read the recent Sylvain Sylvain memoir and Jerry Nolan biography not sure what other semi related rock memoirs.

I'd just got into reading Broadway Babies Say Goodnight by Mark Steyn, a book about Broadway musicals when I bought the Kramer memoir. I had bought that a couple of years back and it had turned up as i tidied up my bedroom.

pretty interested in Anatomy of Melancholly -- it was one of Gass's favorite books -- I have a very old copy, which means I will have to read it when I'm going to be at home for an extended stretch. Thanks for the write-up xyzzzz__, it will encourage me to get to it.

― she carries a torch. two torches, actually (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Sunday, 19 August 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The NYRB edition (which has a great cover and ideally should've been split into two volumes) has a really terrific intro by Gass. Both Musil (another Gass favourite) and Burton have that similar intellectual density that promotes a dipping in-and-out, one which the A++ rthythm and style does not allow you to really do. The world is in these pages, and you just keep turning them till your eyes tire.

My late summer has unexpectedly turned into a dive-into the English Renaissance (was reading Milton last week and a selection of Thomas Browne's prose is to come).

I've been reading Imagining Robert by Jay Neugeboren, which is frequently quite grim but redeemed by its humanity and (seemingly) rather brave honesty.

Under The Net, Iris Murdoch.

Just finished War and War by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Was much easier than other Krasznahorkai I've tried, since for most of the book every sentence is numbered making it much easier to not get lost, but I can't help but feel a bit underwhelmed. Perhaps too short, perhaps too mundane, but the mystical philosophical core of it wasn't quite as developed as I'd hoped.

Now reading The Temple of the Golden Pavillion by Yukio Mishima and Zinky Boys by Svetlana Alexievich.

xp Stevo, have you seen the MC5 doc, A True Testimony? Release halted at the last second, but turns up online sometimes, currently here---a rip from the promo DVD, I think:
https://archive.org/details/Mc5-ATrueTestimonial-2002#
Still reading Rembrandt's Hat---even more of an improvement than the title story, "Notes From a Lady at a Dinner Party" gives me flashbacks to Grace Paley's The Little Disturbances of Man, although this is from a man's POV, the male gaze taken for a spin. Startling.

And more than his gaze

I've started UNDER THE NET too!

But also started rereading Lethem's DISSIDENT GARDENS.

XP Yeah i got a copy of True Testimonial several years ago taht looks like it's set up to be an official dvd with bonus tracks etc.
Had a lot of live stuff with it.
Did it finally get the go ahead for release a few months ago? I still don't really get what the story was on its last minute cancellation. It seemed to be true to its name and one of the better band biographies I've seen.

I just got the new Ugly Things yesterday which has a review of the Michael Davis book I Brought Down the MC5 which sounds good from the review so i want to read it. I saw an ad for it somewhere a few months ago which has had me wondering about it.

I started Masters of Atlantis, Charles Portis, last night.

The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Universities in the Nineteenth Century, George Elder Davie

Emma Reyes: The Book of Emma Reyes -- if you don't start this book loathing the Catholic Church, you will by the end - artist's memoir (in letters) of being a child slave labourer in a Colombian convent in the 1920s and 1930s after being abandoned by her mother

In the last (for now) of my Swiss odyssey (Year of the Drought, Clouds of Sils Maria), I'm reading Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Pledge. It's my first of his and it's clouded and dreamlike; the nested narrative is disorienting and keeps me making me think of Coleridge. It's also got a lot of Stefan Zweig in there.

And so help me god, after hours of wondering, it suddenly dawned on me this morning: it reminds me of the 'late' John bloody Lanchester.

Is C.F. Meyer translated at all? There's a Swiss author I enjoyed...

"My Son The Murderer," another one from xp Rembrandt's Hat: son is consumed with fear, which is often expressed as rage, most often at his father, who is what we would call a helicopter parent. The fear-->rage is very fixated, at least currently, on the prospect of being drafted into the Vietnam War. There were a number of ways to get out of the draft, or at least to be considered unsuitable for combat, and word about these ways got around campus (son has recently graduated from college), as I'm sure Malamud, veteran teacher at Oregon State etc., still at Bennington when these stories were written, also father of Paul Malamud (b. 1947, draft bait), was aware, even though B was "The Ghost Writer."

Still, there is the implication or at least inference (penultimate story in this lean dense collection, so even noob me has been properly groomed, despite reservations) of dark dim backstories: son has been properly groomed by life, his life, his grubby life, grubby as the lightswitch flick of first person between father and son, grubby and clear as the light can be, in the "smelly"(son's take) apartment hallway where the father tends to hover, near son's room (when they're not out near of at deserted Coney Island in February). Jeez.
Well-enough done, but I give it a B+, really need to get back to his prime time.

near *or*

Little disturbances of man wants an urgent reread

Yeah! Also, having said all that, I should add that son does have a plan of sorts: if drafted, he'll just go Canada dammit. And father, who's started monitoring the mail, suspects that son has recently written to his draft board (there was this whole squirrelly system of local draft boards x Feds), to bring everything to a boil, as perhaps he should, having apparently dismissed all other options---but he isn't depicted as having the kind of resources---other than stubbornness, rage, fear---that would get him from near-Coney Island to Canada. But what he's got counts, to some extent, so maybe.
Some of his mindset comes from being by far the youngest in his family, and some people do get stuck when the support system brings them to graduation (he may be the first person in his family to go to college; father "has a post office job at the stamp window," of course, Malamudy as hell).

No money, and he's enraged by parental suggestion that he should at least "take something temporary," by everything/anytning being temporary.
My father listens in the kitchen.
My temporary son.
She says I'll feel better if I work. I say I won't. I'm twenty-two since December, a college graduate, and you know where you can stick that. At night I watch the news programs. I watch the war from day to day. It's a big burning war on a small screen. It rains bombs and the flames go higher. Sometimes i lean over and touch the war with the flat of my hand. I wait for my hand to die.
My son with the dead hand.

Might be an A- if only he'd stopped closer to that part.

Or maybe not.

One of the things that sets him apart for me is the rhythms of his dialogue, very good and funny

I feel like he wrote the same story about shopkeepers like 6 times tho. I also don’t think I ever want to read his novel about black people

xxpost Also he and his original audience would have been well aware that title "My Son The Murderer" and the recurring "my son" bits in the story related (and succeeded many other media references) to the best-selling New Yorky Jewishy (50s-60s as hell commercially) comedy album My Son The Folk Singer, by Allan Sherman--hit single: "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah, here I yam at/Camp Grenada."

Maybe it's like, "What if Camp Grenada/Grenade-a were military---?"

Masters of Atlantis was wildly inventive, veering between satire and pure farce. I found myself wishing for more satire and less farce, tbh.

Now I have started a popular-science book, with the twist that it was written by a scientist rather than a journalist, titled (I kid you not)-- Gorgon: The Monsters That Ruled the Planet Before Dinosaurs and How They Died in the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth's History. That's a sweet 19 word subtitle for those interested in advanced statistics.

The book centers on research concerning the causes of the Permian mass extinction, when approx. 90% of the species on earth went extinct, which is the biggest known mass extinction event. For comparison the K/T asteroid impact event that killed off the dinosaurs is estimated at about 50% of species disappearing. The central question is whether it was an abrupt event, or a fairly gradual one, as was believed for many decades by paleontologists.

The less-sciencey content is about the day-to-day anecdotes that surround field work, the shoestring funding, the politics of sorting out conflicting theories, etc. It is all supposed to make the book 'more human' and accessible. It does. I'll let you all know how it ends.

Haven't posted here in a while, but trying to get back into it :)

This weekend, I started reading "Mumbo Jumbo" by Ishmael Reed which is very funny and enjoyable (and which I recommend to anyone who liked Paul Beatty's The Sellout). Great biting satire on race in the US, though depressingly still relevant (was published in '73). It reminds me quite a bit of Pynchon - it's the first of his books I've read. I think the less of the plot revealed beforehand the better, so I'll refrain from more detail, but if any of the above appeals to you, it's worth taking a look at.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Crashed, Fizzles. I'm looking forward to getting to it. I picked up his older book 'The Deluge' from the library (as Crashed was unavailable). It's very good, so far. It looks at WWI and the interwar period, layering in an economic history that had been largely absent from the accounts of the period I'd read. It looks at how diplomacy during this period was influenced by the rise of the US' industrial and financial power and hegemony (the book's subtitle is "The Great War, America, and The Remaking of the Global Order" which kind of says it all). It avoids being too reductive and Tooze does a good job of grounding the narrative of the war/post WWI period in tons of research.

I also read Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone - about a retired professor in Berlin whose life is affected by the migrant crisis - and which is very moving, unexpectedly funny in places, and elsewhere quite savage (it reminded me of Coetzee a couple of times).

pynchon explicit cites reed as an inspiration in gravity's rainbow

explicitLY

inherent vice, pynchon.

got about 30 pages in doing the laundry. enjoying it. I've seen the movie 3 times so doc sportello is joaquin phoenix in my head (which i find unfortunate, not because i don't like joaquin phoenix). of pynchon's books I've only read gravity's rainbow, which i found about the hardest novel I ever read, and I'm not in the mood for anything abstruse this weather, so the breeziness is welcome

Crying of Lot 49 is also breezy and even shorter than Inherent Vice!

Nixonland is too much to plow through quickly; I started reading The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down which is definitely gonna be a bummer also, because I’m stupid.

xp. good to know, will get to that after this

Cool, I didn't know he explicitly cited him (I haven't read GR - but can definitely see the influence on The Crying of Lot 49). Will one day work myself up to GR and Mason & Dixon...

I'm going through the Bonds in sequential order and just finished Thunderball; it's a huge improvement on Dr No and Goldfinger, which are prob the only two books improved by the movies.

Thomas Mann's Reflections of a Non-Political Man.

The Apex Book Of World SF

I can add to the Pynchon flavour by noting that I'm continuing to reread DISSIDENT GARDENS whose bad Pynchon elements continue to come through consistently.

Thomas Mann's Reflections of a Non-Political Man.

― The Silky Veils of Alfred (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 28 August 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Bet this one is a barrel of laughs..

re early TP also check V and Slow Learner. And re early Ishmael Reed, also try Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and The Freelance Pallbearers.

Bet this one is a barrel of laughs..

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, August 28, 2018

I caught myself laughing at pg. 61!

If I come across a copy that is the only page of it I'll read.

Thanks for the other Reed recs, I just finished Mumbo Jumbo and will double down on the high recommendation for anyone who liked Paul Beatty's The Sellout and The Crying of Lot 49. Will definitely keep an eye out for those other two.

Though I mostly don't like Pynchon, I also somewhat admired THE SELLOUT! The first 20pp or so I thought a virtuoso outrageous riff, a bit like (in that sense though not the actual content) Amis's MONEY.

Oh I missed reed talk! +1 on early reed, I would add the last days of Louisiana red - I’ve also been wanting to reread them this year since reading the sellout and (possible missing link) platitudes by trey Ellis, which pushes a lot of the same buttons & is v funny

I finished Gorgon. Aside from learning far more about the author's personal life than I cared to, I learned that at the time of publication in 2004, scientists were coming around to the belief that the Permian mass extinction was not due to a collision with a large extra-terrestrial object (asteroid, comet) but was indeed rather swift in geological terms (under 100,000 years) and that the mechanism was a rise in global temperatures by as much as 6C (11F) due to a dramatic increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide coupled with a drop in atmospheric oxygen from about 20% to 10%. The source of the carbon dioxide is likely to have been volcanic, as one of earth's ancient supercontinents was ripped apart.

I started Stoner, by John Williams (one of the non-musical variety). Although the book is very much about academic life in a Midwestern state university, a subject full of tedium, the writing style is interesting enough I intend to read more of it, until it either hooks me properly, or the tedium overpowers me.

Oh right I plowed through Bad Blood (the sordid tale of Theranos) on audiobook in a couple days over the weekend. A hell of a yarn.

I am going to fly in the face of the accumulated wisdom of ILB and set aside Stoner as a book I do not wish to read any further than the first 80 pages (about 25% of it). There are reasons for this and I shall tell them, but recognizing that a fully developed critique is impossible for a book based on its first quarter.

The first problem I noticed, somewhat subliminally at the beginning and more so as I continued, is that both the characters themselves and the author's handling of them, are completely humorless. Not the slightest glimmer of humor is allowed to seep through anywhere. This not only renders the characters inhuman in my evaluation, but makes me distrust the author's intent. Such a choice is highly artificial and very unrealistic, and if the intent is to draw Stoner as a tragic figure, it is precisely the wrong choice in my view.

Next, I noticed that, although the character of Stoner makes at least three profoundly life-altering decisions in this part of the book, the author makes no attempt to justify, explain, or illuminate them from the perspective of his character. He is a cypher, a nullity in this regard.

Then, Stoner falls in love. The woman he falls in love with is described as somewhat pretty, but every other detail the author delivers about her makes it obvious she is emotionally stunted, vacuous, completely empty of human warmth. There is so little life in her she is not even capable of rising to the level of vapidity. Yet we are to believe Stoner falls in love with her at once and quickly decides he cannot spend the rest of his life without her. This is unfathomable.

Then comes some painfully clichéd scenes of their honeymoon and her frigidity. Then, with almost no transition, she becomes semi-hysterical in the first months of their marriage.

I recall how, a year or two ago I read O! Pioneers! and remarked admiringly how material that a lesser author would handle as melodrama, Cather handled with depth, grace and dignity. Stoner seems just opposite to me. It delivers melodrama and feigns depth, grace and dignity, using unusually well-crafted, grave and reticent sentences. But behind the dignified and reticent prose style is... nothing much.

Now, hit me in the stomach as hard as you can. I can take it. I've been working ou....OWWW!

Aimless, you’re not the only one who feels this way about that book. There’s ledge, I think, and myself, to name two. I managed to make it to the end and don’t recall it getting better. It’s no Ethan Frome, that’s for sure.

feel like the consensus on here was that people didn't like stoner

Before writing that I did a search on "stoner" confined to ILB and found far more admiration expressed than not.

Haha, this is just going to add further weight to my contrarian reluctance to read Stoner despite being a total NYRB stan. Speaking of which, I just finished The Gallery, by John Horne Burns, which is composed of vignettes of soldiers and citizens in a Neapolitan arcade in 1944. Some questionable depictions of black soldiers, though there’s a very interesting portrait of a gay bar (written in 1947). I think I’d only read about this particular part of the war in Catch-22, and this is a much warmer and more thoughtful exploration of what Americans and Italians were doing to get through it.

Butcher's Crossing is humourless too. Fwiw, I think Stoner's 'silence', or his affectlessness, can be seen as structural - something he inherits from his parents. Or it's modelled to him. I struggled with the book to some extent, but did find the end beautiful in its way; if anything, that's where the affect manifests itself, where he's finally allowed to breathe.

reading Aimless’ post just reminds me of how much i loved it. not that anything you say is off point; it *is* humourless, he *is* a void, his wife *is* zero-dimensional. it succeeded in spite of all those things, somehow. you gave up before my favourite scene (the dissertation defence) but it doesn’t really matter

Before writing that I did a search on "stoner" confined to ILB and found far more admiration expressed than not.

― A is for (Aimless), Thursday, August 30, 2018 12:09 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hmm, think i might have selective memory maybe based on some favored posters' opinion

I preferred Williams' novel about Augustus. First-person POV helps.

Aimless's description is intriguing, reminds me I still need to try that one, and Augustus too.
JoeStork, you might also like From Here To Eternity, maybe especially the edition (first ebook-only, but now in print, judging by some descriptions on Amazon) with restored/even more detail on interface of certain older white male gay circles in eve-of-Pear Harbor Honolulu w soldiers stationed at Schofield Barracks etc., most(?) of whom supposedly only do it for the drinks and pocket money. There's also a central character who only a few years ago was ateen hobo of the Great Depression (there were quite a few of these, apparently, though I've never seen their way of life dealt with at much length, and never anywhere else in fiction). Got raped by an older guy, knocked the guy out of the boxcar.
Whole thing is dense, layered, warm, pulpy, thoughtful, tending to the fatalistic, but driven and driving as hell, even more amazing to read as a bestseller of the early Korean War,the Cold War and McCarthyism--def in the same lineage as Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy and Catch-22 (prob The Gallery as well, but still haven't read it).

The gay element is only one of many in the cut version, and doubt that it dominates the restored, but certainly roils around in there with the overall "Whut Fools Us Mortals Be!"

Last day of Women in Translation month, which I have been observing this year. Best books of the month I read were:

Ricarda Huch: The Last Summer (German) - really clever and stylish short epistolatry espionage/assassination thriller from 1910 about a student embedding himself in a White Russian family as a tutor/helpmeet who is really there to kill the family father, a local Governor who has upheld the law sending a bunch of anarchist students to prison

Lidiya Ginzburg: Blockade Diary (Russian) - as grim and as fascinating as you'd expect, lightly fictionalised memoirs of life during the Siege of Leningrad

Barbara Yelin: Irmina (German) - really nicely done graphic novel about a German woman in the UK in the 1930s who falls in love with one of the first black students to attend Oxford, but then runs out of money, returns home and becomes a good Nazi wife and mother; could have been very heavy and programmatic, but dodges all the potential pitfalls

Madame Nielsen: The Endless Summer (Danish) - modernist, beautifully done group portrait of a family and various hangers-on over the course of a rural Danish summer

Emma Reyes: The Book of Emma Reyes (Colombian) - artist's memoir-in-letters of life as effective child slave in Catholic convent in Bogota

Regarding Madame Nielsen, she has said she hero worships Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen as a model, and she's not kidding: (Nielsen on left, Blixen on right)
https://www.kiwi-verlag.de/ifiles/autor/large/autor_1939.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--DoQP3TZCF8/TmjjaYmFrWI/AAAAAAAAESQ/h59nxKTGkns/s1600/isak-dinesen-67.jpg

woah, big blixen, sorry about that

My feeling is that Stoner is a guy who loves literature and the inner life but just doesn’t get other people or even have very much perspective on himself. The way the book is told is true to his limitations.

Maybe all this becomes clear later in the book, but I failed to detect much evidence he loved literature or the inner life in the first quarter of the book, other than Sloane, the English prof, declaring that Stoner was in with love literature. The reader is given no direct proof of this.

But I am being unnecessarily querulous. I'm glad you liked the book.

I've had a disrupted reading month but I am please to note that I enjoyed "People In The Room" by Norah Lange very much, even if (because?) I mostly wasn't sure what was happening.

In place of Stoner, I've started reading Troilus and Criseyde, Geoffrey Chaucer.

The Everyman edition I have has marginal glossary notes which help to quickly disentangle some of the more obscure Middle English words, so it reads somewhat smoothly with the occasional glance to the margin when matters are unclear. Reading Pandare's, or Pandarus's (Chaucer uses both spellings) lengthy arguments to Troilus about why he ought to divulge the name of the object of his affections makes it obvious why Chaucer was given some diplomatic assignments.

lizzy goodman - meet me in the bathroom

God I hate Madame Nielsen. Her latest stunt was a show based on Rachel Dolezal called 'White N*****r / Black Madonna' done partly in blackface. And yeah, I've censored the title.

It got your attention. Now you've spread it around. Gee, thanks.

It was one of the biggest cultural news stories in Denmark, and James Morrison just wrote admiringly about her.

James Morrison just wrote admiringly about a particular book she wrote. I'm guessing the book did not contain any minstrel shows or throw the 'N' word around. I trust his judgment that it was a beautifully done group portrait of a family and various hangers-on over the course of a rural Danish summer.

It was.
And I'd not heard about that show, which does indeed sound incredibly stupid.

I'm not attacking you! Just explaining who she is, and saying that if you go to Denmark and say you like Madame Nielsen, people will either get really uncomfortable or beat you up.

look, they'd have their reasons even if i said nothing

Fair enough. We're a shitty people.

Finally got back to the Malamud collection, Rembrandt's Hat, finished it: the title story actually has the viewpoint character, an artist, sneaking into his colleague's studio, sitting down and figuring out the other guy's point of view, and something about his own, coming to see how and why they are so at odds---there's a little Borgesian logic leap via imagery there too---this instead of the usual melodramatic finale. And the last story, "Talking Horse," though something like literary special effects, is fun and makes use of the mythological aspect other posters have mentioned, re stories from his prime. This is obv. not the one to start with, but stimulating even when wearing thin (which is appropriate to his stubborn characters).

Been thinking of the Malamud story about the dad who advises his daughter to marry an artist and the mom who advises her to marry a professional or businessman but can’t remember the title, it’s been a while.

I finished Imagining Robert - an affecting look at what it's like to love someone with mental illness - with all the frustrations, anger, guilt, shattered hopes, and fleeting joys that go with it. Now I'm reading Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton.

Slaves is one of my favourite books, with one of Hamilton's most monstrous bore characters.

Stewart O'Nan: A Prayer for the Dying -- very well done and deeply grim; main character is currently living with the corpses of his wife and child, kidding himself they're still alive, in the middle of a C19th diptheria outbreak

Now 2/3rds of the way through Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Reading through the section on Love Melancholy and wondering if Freud has read it. It seems like a similar sort of project to mine the literature of antiquity for insights into the working of the mind and body. I only have a sketchy knowledge of Freud (and of course he developed more of a theory from all that).

Doubling that up with Dante's La Vota Nuova and sorta enjoying its lack of immediate pleasure in Dante's dry, technical commentary to the poetry/balladry.

I'm roughly halfway through Troilus and Criseyde.

Random thoughts: Chaucer takes pains to cast the story into the mold of earlier tales of romantic chivalry, such as the dozens of Arthurian romances, or Tristan and Iseult. He mostly succeeds in pasting the correct sentiments into the mouths of his characters, but the basic story rather resists his efforts.

So far, Troilus is a pasteboard parfait knight, a lion in battle, completely lovesick, honorable to the last scruple, and boring as hell. No indications yet that this will change. Criseyde is more interesting in that her concerns seem far better grounded in reality and her judgment of the situation is cool under fire. Pandarus is the only character given variety and interest, but he hovers in an indistinct territory where he does lip service to noble ideals, but his actions just don't synch up with his sentiments and Chaucer doesn't seem to know what to make of him, yet.

Of course, Chaucer may well pull a few rabbits out of his hat and all the above may be turned on its head before the end. He was nobody's fool.

Been thinking of the Malamud story about the dad who advises his daughter to marry an artist and the mom who advises her to marry a professional or businessman

Reminds me of the Langdon Jones story about "Ludwig van Beethoven II." The boy dreamed of going into law, but his father forced him to compose music. Late at night the boy would sneak up to the attic and pore through law books.

Robin (Williams bio) by Dave Itzkoff

finished céline's london bridge (continuation of guignol's band) & now started on ee cummings' eimi: a journey through soviet russia... a sort of novel based on the journal he kept during his 1931 visit to moscow/kiev/odessa

far too much work has meant I haven't really been able to keep up with this thread. putting down a few things i've been reading recently for the record.

Will Eaves – Murmur, this on a James M recommendation from the Nothing is happening in British literature thread.

This was a good recommendation (I didn't doubt it would be).

My rather stenographic summary that I put up on goodreads:

Mirror worlds, divided selves, replicated selves, and of course fictionalised selves all wondering at their definition, and the bounds and autonomy of their selves. bodies 'disenchanted' from their inhabiting selves, programmatic routines occupying past figures from the life of 'Alec Pryor' (a fictional proxy for Turing). inability to humans to understand how, or *that* they are thinking or that it is distinguishable from hyper-efficiency, similar to machines who also do not know they are thinking. pryor's hallucinogenic passing from one world to another.

desire and intention, cause and effect, as reversible equations, death as a dissolution of a contextual framework, a passing through of the context. An intensity of 'I'-ness, when you are have been chemically altered to no longer be the person who you were.

the writing is often good, sometimes poetic (whether that is good or bad i'll leave) ..

eaves also uses the natural ecology of england to both provide context and the setting of some of the material transformations that take place in the book. this produces a pleasing sense of being linked to the seasons, frosts, mists, water, trees, and an obsession with birds, their thought process, their intentions.

the writing doesn't always avoid a sense of having a touch of the writing school about it. though that is mainly a feature of the initial chapter / short story (in itself with a number of good bits).

So that's stenographic but it's also lazy in another way, in that it doesn't really examine the interplay of the elements it lists, which is fairly vital to engaging with the book. I say that, but I'm not entirely sure whether the interplay is indicative of a schema or structure in Eaves' head (I *think* it is, that it must be), or whether he just scumbles the elements to provide a sense of relation, which perhaps lacks structure. As I say I think it's the former.

The comment on the writing style is worth unpacking a bit, because I don't really understand it properly myself. I can give examples of both the poetic, and other places where it thickens into something that is neither of the writing school or of poetic diction:

So, an example of the poetic – June, Alec Pryor's former wife and correspondent, is described as follows, on a walk on the South Downs:

She smiles through hair. Clouds flee the ridge. The red flash of a goldfinch darts up from a thistle clump. It is an art to be fearless. June's like a guelder rose, the dogwood's umbels and the bark of the elder, all plants that mark these hills with centuries of growth and form. Unpretty, strong.

That 'unpretty' seems to me to be a word of poetic diction. And though it's very good here, and I wouldn't want it not here, it is also noticeable, with its Larkin final line like cadence as well. The writing school method – what I call the writing school method! – bit is harder to define, but is perhaps a flip side of the poetic, in that there is something self-conscious to it. Perhaps in that sentence it's expressed with the specificity of the iteration of flora. The *writer* has noticed something, found out the words for it and put them into Pryor's internal speech. I was just flicking through the book to find more convincing examples, but I'm not sure it's that easy to cite. I think one way it finds its way in is where you find the author heavily mediating some of the messages of the book around AI and other modern implications – there is a sense of that awful thing relevance at play. The following example captures something of that, though I would say my issue is more one of tone than this passage conveys:

Two people at a table, together, each on the phone to someone else. The physically present companion incidental to the real contact. The sign, you see, is contradictory: those people on the phone are saying, 'Yes, I know exactly what you mean', but there is no do distinction between you and you, between an electronic echo and the occupant of space. And that is what it will look like, to begin with – a sort of ecstatic, immediate empathy (I know exactly what you mean) increasingly detached from any one person's presence. You will see more and more people perplexed, distressed, distracted by the men and women they are with, people they love, prefering to take calls or messages from friends or strangers who are elsewhere, and so full of potential.

It's fair to say that this 'future reaching' and 'authorial bleed' are both completely valid in the terms of the book. Its reference to field awareness and of controlling entities outside of the immediate frame of reference (which may nevertheless be available through mirrors and that field awareness) (author, future, the ability of characters to reach outside the frame as well) these things are present as concepts in the book.

He frowns. 'But no one thinks a character inside a book has actually written it?'

'And yet the author is a part of his material. It's paradoxical, that's all.'

That which is outside, is also inside, and as it is inside may be considered elements in our computational processes. We are not fully aware of this operation. And of machines: 'If part of how you think is inaccessible to you, perhaps a sham, and theirs is totally, then where's the point of severance?'

The bits of writing that got me most excited here were sentences and images that prosaically combined the natural and the subject matter:

The room is dark, the window bright, and through the glass the stricken researcher sees deep into a complex green: the beeches from another vantage point, shifting dynamically, hidden birds' eyes taxed with their subroutines of grooming, sex and predation.

Is that a magpie or a jay? Its puppet head confronts the scientist. It looks without seeing, alert. Its vision is a corvid mystery of weak interpretation and associated forms.

The joint of the mechanical and the natural. It is what the prosaic does best - that flexible and flat co-existence of disparate ideas with explanatory and descriptive force. The awareness and description of a 'corvid mystery' to computation both explicit here and implicit at other points is where the book is at its strongest. The paradox of state preservation and persistence.

One remarkably section takes the Snow White story, and uses it to create a hallucinogenic depiction of a family confrontation, with a paranoid sense that these family members are computational processes designed to elicit information, and which hallucinogenic characteristics are later 'explained' by the depiction of the whole scene in a concave mirror.

It's good.

While trying to nail down what it was distracted me about the tone in certain places, I thought I'd pick something very different off the shelves to see if the distinction made it easier to frame the tone. This was a penguin classics collection of Cervantes' Exemplary Stories, and I read The Jealous Extremaduran.

An exemplar is not a great counterweight tonally, as its tone is didactic and fabulistic – the formality of it isn't required to achieve nuances of naturalism and voice. That said it's worth pointing out that Cervantes is witty and present, despite the form he's chosen. Slightly more surprisingly, I realised I was reading a story on closed systems, exactly the same as the book I'd just put down. The Jealous Extremaduran of the title – Filipo de Carrizales, wealthy, 80 – marries a 15 year old he has spotted leaning out of a window while on a stroll. He takes every precaution of locking her up, not even male animals are allowed in, and the door is guarded by a Moorish eunuch... this is described in a fascinating line:

...never was monastery more enclosed, nor nuns more withdrawn nor golden apples more strictly guarded; but for all this it was impossible to avoid falling into the danger he feared, or at least thinking he had fallen into it.

That seems also the heart of the argument presented in Murmur via Turing. The crucial bit is the thinking of the thing you are thinking about, not the thing you are thinking about itself - that is here what has undone the de Carrizales, it is what creates the possibility of an sealed system's undoing, since to be able to think about it is to have created a way into it.

The Jealous Extremaduran is generous in the face of the inevitable, and recognises his folly. this tale is also a circle, as he has been a young nobleman dicking about europe and frittering away his cash, and his young bride's virtue is attempted by the same, who also goes off to the Indies tho it is his heart and head that has been beggared rather than his purse.

Also read:

An essay on James Merrill by Edmund White in a book of his essays that i picked up in a second-hand bookshop for £2.99 on a work lunchtime foray. He has that mandarin certainty that brings lucidity:

These are books of ideas (as well as of feelings, visions, people and personages), and the ideas are comprehensible. Whereas Eliot's ideas about tradition or Pound's economic theories are stated in clear, no-nonsense formulations only in their essays, the poetry acting as a dramatiziation (sometimes a fragmentation) of thought, Merrill's epics are as straightforward as Pope's Essays. Nor are the cultural or scientific allusions in Merrill obscure .. Of course Merrill is playful in the way we might say Mozart is playful – alternately noble and funny, disarmingly unrhetorical but never afraid of true grandeur.

Looking forward to dipping into the rest of the essays.

Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart by Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M Todd and the ABC Research Group. Not, I should point out, a self-help book, but a proposal for how humans use heuristics successfully and what the characteristics of those heuristics are.

iThe Belle Sauvage – Philip Pullman. A patrician old-school approach to fantasy, which happens to be one i like. this is a voyage of the dawn treader / odyssey like connection of incidents on a single thread of a river journey. He is capable of some exceptional images and description which i'm sure will stick in the mind of a child:

But then he did see something at the base of the wall: just a shadow slightly darker than the building. Something man-sized but not man-shaped – a massive bulk where the shoulders should be and no head – and it moved with a crabwise shuffle.

..

The shadow appeared around the side of the building again. And then the man staggered, and the burden on his shoulders seemed to squirm away and fall to the ground; and then they heard a hideous high-pitched cry of laughter.

The man and the dæmon seemed to be spinning around in a mad dance. That uncanny laughter tormented Malcolm's ears; it sounded like a high hiccuping yell of agony.

'He's hitting her...' whispered Asta, unable to believe it.

When she said that, it became clear to Malcolm too. The man had a stick in his hand and he had forced the hyena-dæmon back against the wall, and he was thrashing and thrashing her with fury, and she couldn't escape.'

Quoted for that central image of the dancing shadows and the high-pitched cry of laughter.

The ending of Belle Sauvage is such a puzzler - it's hard to tell how much is deliberate anticlimax, or if it's just clumsy writing (or both).

I just finished Wodehouse's Uncle Fred in the Springtime - it's very good but not quite up there with Joy in the Morning or Leave it to Psmith.

An unusual amount of repressed violence - there's a death fantasy in almost every chapter - references to skinning someone alive, setting them on fire, or bashing them in the head with a break... it's all very lightly handled as you'd expect, but there's such a **lot** of it.

*with a brick

on Belle Sauvage, I think it's a common problem with high episodic narratives – one thing happens then another thing happens then another thing happens and then it stops. the fact they don't get anywhere or complete anything is peculiar I agree. very hurried.

the book has been very insistently trailed as a part of a trilogy, including the cover where the title of the book is confusingly beneath the 'Book of Dust' wider work, and with the heavy-handed 'to be continued' at the end, that I wonder whether this was something that was also noted by the publisher. or whether the publisher insisted a larger work be chopped up and released in more books. or something like that anyway.

There's something so unsettling about the way it fails to provide resolution to many of the plot strands (especially the part about Malcolm being used as a honeytrap) that it's hard not to think it's deliberate. But then we get that very rushed final chapter that's all a bit "[throws up shoulders] fuck, here's some plot to finish it off". So I came out unsure whether I'd felt unsettled by the deliberate, Aickman-esque choice to avoid resolution, or if, like you say, it was just clumsy packaging.

Mostly I found it very engrossing and relievedly easy work after Amber Spyglass.

Not sure if I'm completely remembering, but I think in an NYTimes interview around the publication he said that the next book was already finished, but the third one wasn't. Ah, here we go:

"Now he is rejuvenated, though there remains more work to do. Before it can be published, the second volume of “The Book of Dust” requires what he calls “carpentry.” The structure needs to be sawed up and reassembled, the sentences sanded smooth. The third book then needs to find its way out of his head and onto his two-holed paper. He warned there would be a delay, just as there was before the last volume of “His Dark Materials.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/magazine/philip-pullman-returns-to-his-fantasy-world.html

new shteyngart

there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.

I finished CHRONIC CITY again.

[SPOILERS re: Belle Sauvage]

The thing that really bothered me was the total lack of follow-up to the implied sexual assault of a major character right near the end - for a book that was so deliberate, and that took into account the more commonplace work that was foisted on the female characters, it seemed really off.

I’ve had Patrick O’Brien’s Master & Commander on my shelf for a few years. I did not suspect that the wholly delightful first chapter would be followed by 400+ pages of impenetrable naval architecture porn, inc. long discussions of the relative merits of grommets to pulleys in sail maintenance. I’ve read easier pages of Gravity’s Rainbow.

I still dug it though. Has anyone read the sequels? Do they get any more plotty and less, er, shippy?

The fanfic is all shippy

You don't need to understand much, if any, of the nautical jargoning to read the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O'Brien. Just skate past it and you won't lose a thing.

All that shippy stuff mostly gives you a sense of how complex a sailing ship was and how important it was for the crew to 'know the ropes'. The characters who spend a lot of time gabbing about this nautical minutiae have worked on ships for the great majority of their lives, and by contrast, know almost nothing about life on land. They are just as lost and "at sea" when ashore as the landsmen are when aboard ship.

If you read many of the novels, you'll start to see many of the same jokes reappear multiple times, but that, too, is probably authentic. Old jokes get handed down in small isolated communities, just as playground games get passed down by children.

The Fire and the Fury Michael Wolff
Funny that people with both the male and female versions of this name were causing the White House discomfort at roughly the same time.
I just got around to reading this when the Bob Woodward book came out. Wondering what of the books on the current regime are still worth reading.
Also saw Active Measures this week which was good.

Philip Roth - "Portnoy's Complaint"

A few pages in and I feel this is going to be a lot more Freudian than the other Roth books I've read

lol well you aren’t wrong

Getting into Howards End (someone was talking Forster upthread I think) and it’s remarkable so far. It’s impossible for me to read the Miss Schlegels as other than Jewish, which may yet turn out to be contrary to the text but no matter. Seems like it will be an instructive contrast to Brideshead Revisited, in some ways. Nice to read something of this ilk with no barons in it (so far)

I don't think they're supposed to be Jewish, just German - but I don't remember anything in particular in the novel that would state clearly they're not.

Certainly they could be German liberal aesthetes and be gentiles but as a descendant of German Jewish liberal aesthetes I’m predisposed to read that type as a Jewish one

Joseph Lelyveld. Move your shadow: South Africa, black and white. Picked this up in a box of books on the pavement on the walk to work on Wednesday morning. Good appalled account of apartheid South Africa written in the early 80s by the NYT correspondent who had been expelled from South Africa in the 60s after a year by the South African government for his reporting and allowed back in 1980, staying for 3 years.

is it worth continuing with the trilogy if i wasn’t totally blown away by Three Body Problem?

I finished Troilus and Criseyde last night. It was a confusing work for a modern reader, because nothing added up to an integral whole. Chaucer took an older story and reworked it, but he failed to rework it into a shape that was satisfying, because he kept elements of the story that glaringly didn't fit with the direction he wanted to take it.

The result was kind of a mess. He spent the first four books making the two main characters fit the mold of chivalric romance, then in the fifth book they fail entirely to live up to the ideals they have lengthily and poetically declared they believed with all their hearts and souls. I can't begin to count how often they invoked their willingness to die for love, then when push comes to shove, Criseyde changes her mind in the most perfunctory way imaginable and takes another lover. Afterwards, Troilus, the paragon of princely virtue declares he will seek honorable death in battle to satisfy his vows of perfect service to love, but as the story peters out, Chaucer mentions briefly in passing that he failed both to die or to get his revenge on his rival.

One is left with a parable of courtly love that conflicts with itself and an author who shrugs and sidesteps the glaring issues no reader can fail to notice. This dangling conclusion is not meant as irony or as cynicism; it is just a problem Chaucer doesn't know how to resolve, so he punts.

chaucer sonned by an aimless in epic poem beef

T & C doesn't seem like something I'd be interested in, but I appreciate your take, Aimless. Cheers for sticking with it even though you found it confusing.

I finished Slaves of Solitude. It was good. It reminded me a bit of Skylark (another NYRB reissue) in the way it's psychological acuity and careful rendering of aspects of small town life made it relatable to a modern reader, though admittedly 1940s England is already a bit closer to modern times than Belle Epoque Hungary. The rendering of civilian life during the long days before Normandy as stretches of anxious dreariness punctuated by the odd boozy bacchanalia seemed believable. And its portrayal of the boarding house boor, Mr. Thwaites, was devastatingly acute, even though the author's deployment of much felicitous prose to take down an annoying dunderhead did seem a bit like a bazooka being aimed at a gnat.

I finished Thomas Browne's Religio-Medici, and as a perfect follow to Burton's Anatomy..., just as a fireworks display of language and learning, anchored by a deep well of faith in a god, which in their hands its a complex figure. Burton and Browne are companions in the best sense and you realise what pub talk as prose could be.

Lawrence Goldstone - Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903

I could not disagree more re: Chaucer's Troilus, which to me seems pretty clearly Chaucer's multi-angled comment on the future fate of all such starcrossed-lovers tales

Currently reading Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety. Love it! I tried it once before but gave up early...really glad I tried again. You can see the way she perfected her style with Wolf Hall etc later...all the building blocks are there. Also love the way she has written the various women.

Debating whether to pursue another fictional French Revolutionary novel afterwards, or a meatier non-fiction instead. Def want to stay in this arena though.
Maybe that Marie Antoinette book by Antonia Fraser?
We’ll see.

I just finished Ourednik's The Opportune Moment, 1855 btw and it was fucking great. I loved Europeana and didn't really understand Case Closed entirely but 1855 is just terrific - clever and biting and fun and dark. I'm glad Dalkey has this guy, wanna read everything he writes

I'm now digging into Crashed, Adam Tooze.

I'm taking some time out of town and Crashed is too massive and unwieldy to bring with me, so I'll probably start and maybe finish another book before I can get back to it.

Violette Leduc: The Lady and the Little Fox Fur -- another really good Penguin European Writers book with a lovely cover and hideous paper stock

I keep meaning to talk about stuff I’m reading, but never get around to it. Anyway, started to reread ‘Seibi There Below’ by Krasznahorkai, and reminded how much I loved it. The writing is gorgeous.

Should be Seiobo

Vile Bodiesm Evelyn Waugh. It's funny! Was taken with this passage:

"Adam ate some breakfast. No kipper, he reflected, is ever as good as it smells; how this too earthly contact with flesh and bone spoiled the first happy exhilaration; if only one could live, as Jehovah was said to have done, on the savour of burnt offerings. He lay back for a little in his bed thinking about the smells of food, of the greasy horror of fried fish and the deeply moving smell that came from it; of the intoxicating breath of bakeries and the dullness of buns...He planned dinners of enchanting aromatic foods that should be carried under the nose, snuffed and thrown to the dogs...endless dinners, in which one could alternate flavour with flavour from sunset to dawn without satiety, while one breathed great draughts of the bouquet of old brandy."

T. Singer by Dag Solstad, in which a fellow hamstrung by self-consciousness lives his life. The book does its Dag Solstad thing, which is to say I loved it. I think he's probably my favourite living writer at the moment.

I have also been reading Dag Solstad. His Armand V, which I finished last night. This one has very light games played with narrative although apart from that it isn't that different to his other books and what they work over in all its European white-male neurosis in a tragic-comic mode with an awareness of priviledge. Both he and Thomas Bernhard have a lot in common although there are some key differences - in Bernhard, whose central figures like to berate you with truths - although they hate themselves for never standing outside of it. They are very much post-war and dealing with something like the fall out from the politics of the 60s and 70s, but then Solstad also engages with the aftermath of the Berlin Wall, and Western imperialism too -- something Bernhard never got to do as he died in the late 80s. Both write with a really addictive rhtyhm to their sentences (although Bernhard has that trademark density of his). Its quite a novel to be reading today -- as we drive toward what feels like the end of certain projects -- the EU, NATO, etc. as the kind of consensus fractures and we march toward what nobody knows.

Other than that its poetry via a couple of key NYRB issues:

Poems of the Late T'Ang
Proensa An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry

The first set fo translations is by Welsh sinologist A.C.Graham who seems to, in his introduction, attempting to bridge a gap between a conception of Chinese culture and poetry somewhere between Ezra Pound and William Empson. I often wanted to engage a bit more with ancient Chinese poetry but I never found a starter volume. Till now. The notes are good - when I can understand them, and I feel that I can go on a learning curve now. No such problems with Troubadour poetry although I have only started on Proensa I've read a couple of vols in the past. This one is translated by Paul Blackburn (who had a corerspondence with Pound) and there's a quote in the back from Richard Sieburth (translator of, among many things, courtly love poetry and an editor of the Faber Selected poetry of Ezra Pound) so join the dots.

Re-reading Derek Walcott's The Arkansas Traveler and just started The Sellout.

started hugo wilcken's the reflection and hoping it becomes a bit more than wow this narrator is *really* unreliable

In the home stretch of Ha Jin's Waiting, but slowing down my reading, resisting the tide, even though I know it's time, it's time---so much quiet momentum, the characters are so fluid within their constraints, their circumstances, their logic: lightning in a bottle, across the decades, that is.

During my short beach vacation, I started reading Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson (Freeman Dyson's son). Now I am halfway through it and must decide whether to set it down and pick up Crashed where I left off, or finish the Dyson before I return to Tooze's book.

Is it bad, or just overwhelming?

I'm reading the Confessions of Augustine in the new Sarah Ruden translation. The translation is great: jazzy, punchy, and thoroughly unstuffy. The work itself can be repetitive at times and elusive at others, rather like a stream of consciousness, despite the overt devotional character of the work, I do picture Augustine indulging in a tipple while leisurely dictating this to an amanuensis, but at times it snaps into focus and you feel like a bit of historical vertigo as you catch a personal glimpse down through the centuries.

The Unforeseen by Dorothy Macardle. A woman, Virgilia, staying in isolation in a cottage in the Wicklow mountains, realises she's developing second sight. Her daughter, Nan, is trying to decide whether she's in love with Perry, a dick, or should be dedicating herself to her art. There's a combination of building dread, confined hysteria, and uncertainty, within a lovingly depicted Wicklow countryside and its bird life, which is striking. In fact one of the successes of this book is how Virgilia's visions and the nature surrounding her are seen to participate in each other.

As the main characters attempt to come to decisions about their futures you are shown them probing the future in different ways, whether it is the predictive force of hereditary traits, a sense of unease, being able to visualise yourself in alternative futures successfully or common sense. The way these interact and compare with the dangerous certainty of second sight is well done.

It has a terribly glib resolution though, which squanders the building unease. The scientific seriousness with which the male characters take everything makes this feel, as an introduction also suggests, that this is doubling up as an assault on scepticism about second sight and paranormal things generally. The overall lingering message – that which is unforeseen is sometimes the most important thing, in our previsions and attempts to make decisions based on a perception of the future – is a decent one.

And the shadow of the war sits within this book (published 1945, set summer 1938), with so that the decisions the characters are trying to make are laced with a presentiment of death:

'And, you see, for our generation, life is not going to be a summer holiday. What we've got to find out is whether we shall want one another when things are frightening and terrible.'

It's written in what I would call an Edwardian fashion - that is to say it's pretty stately, but i quite like that mode of writing, which is well done here at least, and which made this perfect reading while convalescing, and the descriptions of Wicklow and Dublin Bay made me wish I were there rather than blowing my nose in London.

also started forbidden line by paul stanbridge. in many ways it looks like the sort of thing i should like - a mixed plate of history, pseudo-religion and the arcane, - but it’s written in that facetious, garrulous style that seems like its intended to be described as pynchonian but which also seems to be the congenital style of a category of well-educated young male tyro, and to be lacking in any sort of constraint that might make it interesting.

am ambivalent. will continue with it for a bit.

That Dorothy Macardle book is going on my wish list.

Same.

Robert Harris's enjoyably sprightly SELLING HITLER, about the fake Hitler diaries, is lots of fun

That Dorothy Macardle book is going on my wish list.

Hey, it’s fall

so it is.

Oh yeah, basis of the Ray Milland movie The Uninvited (made during WWII, I think). Never watched the whole thing, but have seen it compared to Val Lewton signature films re (post-Turn of the Screw?) supernatural as lens/prism of character development.

I just started 2018 Autumn: The Rise and Fall of What Are You Reading Now?. Feel free to commandeer the throw pillows and stretch out on the sofa.