Summer 2020: What Are You Reading as the Sun Bakes the Arctic Ocean?

This is the successor thread to : "And sport no more seen / On the darkening green" -- What are you reading SPRING 2020?

As for me, I am well along toward finishing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein. Although It has a dizzying cast of characters who whirl through in cameo appearances and a steady stream of self-promotion from Gertrude, it is really rather entertaining and clever.

I read* The Perfect Spy (Le Carre) and it was as wonderful as everyone says.

I'm now reading Berlin Game by Len Deighton. (Not obsessed with spy stuff, it just happen to come up in my hold queue at the library.) It reads like something Alan Partridge would like.

*listened to the audiobook of while wrangling an infant

Currently reading Berger et alii's Ways of Seeing and Deborah Lipstadt's History on Trial. I can't stand fiction right now, it all seems so petty, minor. Here's my 2020 goodreads page: https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2020/5253329

Book VI (of VIII) of Anna Karenina. It's a much easier read than I imagined, which probably means I'm missing a lot.

(reading a book per month on top of my usually monthly themed reading and so the 1200pp are 8 easy 150pp chunks)

Think I'll finally take the Sebald plunge---should I start with Austerlitz or Rings of Saturn? Other? The first two are nearby, but not the only possibilities, if somebody really hypes me. (But seems like Austerlitz may be the ILB favorite.)

if it's only those two I would start with Rings of Saturn just because his characteristic digressiveness is reflected in the structure and conceit, and I think you'll get more out of Austerlitz having already been on that walk with him

but if Vertigo is an option you should read that first!

Rereading The Golden Bowl; finished Late Auden and Kierkegaard. It's been that kind of week.

The Magic Mountain is making pretty good quarantine summer reading.

Which edition do you have? is the French translated? I got along alright without it, but still curious.

Have started Austerlitz just because it's nearest, liking it pretty well, incl. James Wood's intro, will have to find his interview with the author. But now I'm really wondering about Canetti, where should I start with him??

I, too, picked up Austerlitz and started it last night, but rather late, so I haven't proceeded very far into it as yet. I will soon go out camping for a few days and this gives me some reading time. I'll will take the Sebald with me and two other books to spell it off if it becomes tedious.

xp The Book Of Flies is great aphoristic bathroom reading

Seconded!

Listening to Simon callow over-read death in Venice and having a lovely time.

Struggling to interest myself in fiction these days, so I'm doing the history thing instead. I'm surprised at what a page-turner Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the making of American capitalism is turning out to be – he's a very good writer, and his organization of the material into chapters is truly inspired & revelatory. (This sounds like damning with faint praise, but as a layperson I don't really have any better criteria by which to judge a work of serious historical scholarship, hah!)

Other works I'm reading around the Baptist, in whole or in part, for context include: Jacksonland by Steve Innskeep, Surviving Genocide by Jeffrey Ostler, The Source by Martin Doyle

Oh, and I'll probably also revisit the relevant chapters in Asch & Musgrove - Chocolate City: A history of race and democracy in the nation's capital, which I read earlier this year, and which did a good job bringing out the centrality of the District of Columbia within the domestic slave trade.

The International Anthony Burgess Foundation are going to be running a virtual book group for Earthly Powers, which is 40 years old this year, so am about 100 pages in to that

I reread Austerlitz in May, my first time opening it since 2002. I fell in love, really in love with it. Perhaps its Zen-like serenity beneath which ominous undercurrents are detectable was right for these times.

Meeting up for the occasional freebie expert commentary in Antwerp etc., picking up mid-sentence after every 30 years or so, serious and sly and wry and somewhat warm somewhere in the brisket: reading along got me into comfortable expectations---then scenes, segments, moments of heartbreaking beauty surfacing in Wales: another maestro would have made these into an extended bravura finale, and I would have clapped,-but
ooks like there are still quite a few pages to go.

Still reading Mann’s Dr Faustus. It’s just interesting enough to keep me going though the thought of bailing out has crossed my mind. It seems rather self indulgent. The plot moves at a snails pace with many pages taken up by the author ‘s barely dramatized thoughts on music, politics, culture, religion, etc. It reminds me more than a bit of Moby Dick in the relative proportions of plot movement vs essayistic digressions. The translation is serviceable but rarely soars, often it feels stodgy but perhaps that’s faithful to the original. In some ways it reads like a love letter to prewar turn of century German culture at least the more refined aspects. In that way it also reminds me of Stefan Zweigs The World of Yesterday.

I've read Joseph and His Brothers and would read a sequel about Joshua, the judges, Samuel, and Saul. Dr. Faustus bored the hell out of me.

I’d say bail on Dr. Faustus. It doesn’t go anywhere else. Read some Robert Walser instead.
I’m pushing through East of Eden (my first Steinbeck) and it’s great. Also a quarter into the new Ottessa Moshfegh and am not into it. I’ll finish it, though. It’s relatively short.

Just finished Death in Venice. Found it extremely silly.

My ten-month old daughter’s favourite toy is an plastic-wrapped DVD case of Far from the Madding Crowd that she likes to eat, which might make her the fist ever human to experience joy from Thomas Hardy

*first

Barely read a thing over the last month. I feel listless and incapable. Have been desultorily picking through some of Adam Phillips' essays and reading the LRB. I've got Kavalier and Clay lined up for when this term actually ends. I might give Ulysses a go over the summer.

I think a lot of people are feeling that. All this time for reading books and instead I'm reading stupid Twitter beefs.

I'm kinda wondering if I should abandon 'serious' books for a while and read fantasy instead.

Highly recommend audiobooks from your local library in the present circumstances

I find audiobooks too stressful, somehow. I zone out too often; I'd forever be rewinding.

I've been alternating Octavia Butler's Earthseed books with Agatha Christie novels because the Earthseed books are pretty intense

Still crawling towards the end of that damn Mantel, but I did get the audiobook of Emma Warren's Make Some Space, about Total Refreshment Centre, and listened to it while walking from Stokey to London Fields. Didn't expect I'd be as into it as I was, this being a place that I never even went to, but it makes a passionate case for the importance of physical space, which is all the more poignant now that...developments beyond gentrification have endangered the concept even more.

Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
Pier Paolo Pasolini - Roman Poems

I'm still c.240pp into Curtis Sittenfeld, PREP, and c.100pp into David Thomson, THE BIG SCREEN.

I should really focus on finishing PREP before I do anything else.

But catching up also with LRBs: still on 21.5.2020, on James & RLS.

midway through robin hyde's wednesday's children, one of her five novels published over a few years before she took off for england. was not expecting quite the level of whimsey/fantasy in this given her engagé reputation (such as it is) & that it was written in the midst of depression era nz, though socially conscious elements do creep in: passing mention of the first labour government, depictions of working class auckland neighbourhoods, pākehā/māori relations, but mostly deals with the place of women and individuals who don't quite fit into a conformist society (see also anna kavan's nz writings from slightly later for more on this). going to give her collection of journalism a go after this.

Japanoise book on noise music in Japan.
Just reading about people's effects set ups. Though writer doesn't go into technical details.
But awareness of awareness of set up plus random elements that come in and have to be communicated with is interesting. Set ups can be custom created from semi decent pedals etc but there's always this extra presence of randomness.

About a third of the way in, I'm having a problem with Austerlitz. The problem is that the narrative technique is so strikingly unusual that it led me to start thinking about the choices made by the author to achieve this effect. This combination of engaging with the continued oddness of the narrative as I read along, coupled with a simultaneous consciousness of how the author is leveraging several peculiar techniques layered one upon another, keeps me mentally falling between two stools. It doesn't help that all this artifice in pursued in service to promoting a perspective I do not personally find sympathetic.

It would have been better to read it naively first, then dissect it. I do plan to continue with it though.

i'm midway through children's bible by lydia millet. it's very good so far.

I found James Woods' concise intro to Austerliz very helpful: he sketched the plot, explained use of photographs---He'd interviewed the author, seen the archive--and other use of "journalistic" elements, like the constant "Austerlitz said," and that this could lead to stories withing stories within stories, as A.is quoted on what X said that Y said etc,also the way time-bending effects can include dropping phrases like "a fate untimely" and less noticeable bits into into the stream (I think of it as going back and forth and sideways in time-space, establishing its own groove, like Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace, and Tim Lawrence announcing and fulfilling his self-imposed mission to proceed "crabwise" through the inter-and intra-related scenes of Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor 1980-83.) Also, the blurbs that mentioned Borges didn't hurt. So I felt like I knew some of what I was getting into.
But maybe you have the same edition, and found that the intro was too much of a load to take into reading the novel itself? I can see how that might be. I did find Austerlitz to be a fairly sympathetic character, even "relatable" somehow, though my own parents died in normie ways. To some extent it seems like Alfred said, the book suits these times. yeah, keep reading,if you can stand it; there are some (some) changes ahead

the Woods preface is not included in my edition ( Modern Library) of Austerlitz. the perspective I am not sympathetic with is not a lack of sympathy for the character Austerlitz, but rather that the time sense being promoted through many subtle rhetorical and narrative means is one I think is founded upon poorly grasped linguistic and mental confusions the author is exploiting rather than something found in time itself.

Time itself can be many things to many people though.

Which is why instead of saying I think it is a wrong view, I say it is not one I find myself in sympathy with.

Prepping to teach a re-vamped version of a short fiction class this fall, so I just finished Toni Cade Bambara's 'The Sea Birds are Still Alive,' and am now ploughing through Charles Yu's 'Sorry Please Thank You.' Next up is ZZ Packer, then an anthology of older Black writers.

While I am enjoying myself to some degree, I am eager to return to my stack of new poetry books...most of my reading on that front has been going to the readings I've selected for an online workshop I'm facilitating at the moment. The workshop is a real joy, of course, and I love talking about weird poetry that I love with people who are reading it for the first time.

I read the Wood essay in one of his collections, and I agree, he preserves the book's remoteness.

I discovered Sebald at the same time he published Austerlitz but to school myself in Sebaldism I read The Emigrants first. It consists of four short stories, Aimless, and it was a splendid intro.

Will have to read that too; I'm more of a short story junkie anyway. xxpost ZZ Packer! Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is one of my favorite collections. Please keep us updated on your reading, incl. what might further fertilize the Modern Poetry thread.

have been too anxious to read for several weeks and I'm grouchy

The Age of Innocence, this new oral history of The Office, and the Neil bio Shakey.

Modern Poetry thread? The rolling poetry thread? Oh gosh.

I am 4/5ths of the way through “Burr” by Gore Vidal and I dont want it to end, it’s so much fun.

I'm going to admit I've never read Gore Vidal. I'm a bad fag.

his novels are great. He makes dusty old history very lively & amusing. Well worth the time if you’re inclined!

Another vote for ZZ Packer here. What happened to her? Did she never recover from that terrible punning in the Updike cover blurb?

I'm a bad fag.

Very little of Vidal's output attempts to portray any aspect of lgbtq issues. He was a patrician and therefore his bisexuality was not very consequential compared to someone lgbtq who was raised among the plebian masses.

^ vidalsplaining

^ creativeneologismproposing

Aimless, I've heard as much,.but have also read about the queerness of his style... And isn't there a book or two that could be called smut? Or am I making that up?

According to a baggy but relevant thinkpiece in Salon, his first novel, Williwaw ( based on his WWII time in Aleutians"), was, like, haled--but he followed it w "homoerotic" (1n 1948!) The City and the Pillar, whereupon, says Salon, The New York Times' Orville Prescott "issued a fatwa" that got him banned from reviews for 20 years. The article's author says that this only added to Vidal's aversion to any kind of gay affirmation, identity or approval-wise---oh here it is, still online: https://www.salon.com/2014/05/22/how_one_sexy_gay_novel_derailed_gore_vidals_literary_career/ It's quite a theme for his biographers etc., as referenced here. I really don't know much about it, so I'll speculate: something to do with his Southern old school origins, which, as with Tom Wolfe, could twitch his contrarianism this way and that (in the Voice, Richard Goldstein eventually gave it up to "the old Anti-Semite" for his perfect comment on Leon Wieseltier: "He has very important hair." In Saul Bellow's introduction toThe Invisible Man, the Bellows and the Ellisons occupy a house not far from Vidal's, but only as the crow flies. "Gore regarded us with ironic pity. 'He's a campy patrician,' said Ralph.")
Closer to homo--well, the Salon writer talks about the class thing, and it might also be in part the Greatest Generational background: somewhere I read a comment by one of Warhol's early colleagues about the disapproval they got from older modern artists who were gay or bi and maybe married with children, specifically World War II vets like Vidal.
I used to own a paperback of The City And The Pillar, republished in the 60s, but don't remember a thing about it. of course there was that genial conversation about snails and oysters that he slipped into the screenplay for Spartacus---may have been excised from original release, but I remember it from TV, long before TCM. Also the film adaptation of his play, The Best Man, in which a decent presidential candidate (bemused Henry Fonda) has a chance to foil scurrilous Nixon-lookalike with charges of a Wartime man-man affair, while serving abroad...

HAILED, sorry!

Also, online descriptions of his 1952 novel The Judgement of Paris seem pretty polywhatevah, despite the fatwa.
And wiki sez: Myra Breckinridge is a 1968 satirical novel by Gore Vidal written in the form of a diary. Described by the critic Dennis Altman as "part of a major cultural assault on the assumed norms of gender and sexuality which swept the western world in the late 1960s and early 1970s",[1] the book's major themes are feminism, transsexuality, American expressions of machismo and patriarchy, and deviant sexual practices, as filtered through an aggressively camp sensibility.(cast of 1970 movie incl. Mae West
John Huston
Raquel Welch [titular trans]
Rex Reed
Farrah Fawcett
Tom Selleck)

Yes, it was that Salon article I vaguely remember reading about this issue, actually. Thanks!

Executioners song

his novels are great. He makes dusty old history very lively & amusing. Well worth the time if you’re inclined!

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Sunday, July 12, 2020 10:05 PM (two days ago)

otm. Lincoln, I think, is a legit great novel.

speaking of faggy authors i ordered a later delany novel and i can't wait to read the smut tbr

Chip is great, one of the finest SF authors and smut authors we have. Also his memoirs are astounding.

I will say, though, that to see him read is an exercise in frustration. It's like he's reading aloud to himself rather than to a room, and he has no sense of time but is old enough that no one wants to risk being seen as rude to tell him to cut it short, but whew...I once saw him read an experimental narrative on 95 degree summer day and after the first forty minutes I was out.

I finished Austerlitz last night.

I very recently read Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and recently seen a French film (unfortunately I can't recall the title or director) whose plot was centered on a French Holocaust survivor and explored somewhat similar themes about a life adrift, a past largely erased, and memories fragmented. Consequently, some of the impact it might have had was vitiated by recent engagement with many of the facts and themes which occupied the book.

What remained which was signature to the novel were the many stylistic choices Sebald employed: the wrapping of narratives inside narratives, the use of photographs to 'authenticate' the fiction, frequent lists of objects and tiny objective details, the stubborn refusal to allow anyone but the highly-effaced narrator to speak directly in their own voice or for any aspect of the novel to exist in the present tense, the frequent use of dreams, visions, hallucinations, and many just plain oddities. All of which were intended to disorient the reader to some degree. Except I was too aware of them and their intention.

I tracked down the James Wood essay and read it after finishing the book. In it he identifies much of what I had already observed about the book and praises these contrivances for their positive contribution to the experience of the reader. Personally, I found them more obtrusive and distracting than not and the overall effect of disorientation and dysphoria they were intended to induce, while admirably artful, were not ultimately helpful to my understanding of the character or his story.

I readily admit I am sensitive to seeing what authors are doing 'behind the curtain' as I read and this is not common among recreational readers. It makes me uncommonly intolerant of some books, based on aspects that would not bother most people. Consider it a bug, not a feature.

I finished children’s bible by Lydia millet. brutal on the rage children will have for our generation when the climate change penny drops. Story somewhat unsatisfying/irrelevant but the ideas are too interesting. Recommended. Verging on speculative fiction/sci-fi but not really.

I know what you mean, Aimless, although it bothers me more often in music---"pattern recognition gets us all in the end," Jane Dark observed long ago, although he kept reviewing for quite a while, and may still be at it---in my case, especially in country and jazz (my specialties after all), new albums by a fairly wide age-range of artists can seem distractingly retro, whether they seem merely retro or not---but if I refer to it as vintage, "O Vintage Youth!" etc., that means they did it right, that means I like it. Yet other veteran listeners, incl. those much younger than me, can still be like, "wha," like either it's new to them, or it's fair/given use of trope, a trope-cal blend.
It does bother me sometimes in reading, some George Saunders stories, especially---more often in my own attempts at Creative Writing ("oooo, how Symbolic." "Nowww, claaasss, what does the author meeannn here??" So for instance Poetry->poems->verse->verses->lines get more anecdotal, though with spaces to be filled, if the imaginary reader chooses to do that.)

xp Aimless, any chance the French film you're describing could have been the 1961 documentary, Chronicle of a Summer?

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-extraordinary-chronicle-of-a-summer

Not a documentary and some time post-2000.

My present book is a translation of Ovid's Heroides. It is the Penguin Classics paperback edition with (as the saying goes) copious notes, most of which are fairly rudimentary and aimed at college students unfamiliar with Greek and Latin classics. The translator is Harold Isbell. It is quite readable and moderately enjoyable.

Reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Black Swan, years after everyone else probably. Only a short way through but it's shaping up to be highly idiosyncratic, loosely argued (full of anecdote and autobiography), entertaining, and persuasive. I'm cantering through, I'm sure a close reading would throw up lots of questions and criticisms - e.g. at one point to demonstrate the deceptiveness of categories he suggests trying to explain to a martian how most pro-choicers are also anti capital punishment, as well as pro high taxes (i.e. in favour of personal but not economic liberty). Not that hard imo. But I don't doubt he'd have answers for those criticisms too.

Took the thread's advice and took a break from Dr Faustus and return to Nagel's The View From Nowhere, which is kind of a model of clarity for a contemporary (well 1980s) philosophy book. Nagel almost always strikes me as eminently sensible. The book's theme is roughly about the incommensurability of the first- and third-person perspectives and how this can inform philosophical topics ranging from the mind-body problem, to epistemology and ethics.

Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet (tr. Margaret Jull Costa)

Its one of the great books for me, read it before in the Richard Zenith translation. The book is written as the Soares heteronym whereas this version has entries from Vicente Guedes that are translated here for the first time, which he wrote about 10 years earlier. One of the later entries talks about a bit of writing found from years ago, and he goes on to roughly say how little he has changed, however these earlier entries feel on the immature side. The misogyny and misanthropy is a tad more apparent, whereas later with Soares this a bit more under control as his conception of a thinking feeling dreaming individual is more fully hashed out. iirc Musil cast MwQ (or his writing) as a kind of lab, and while I can see that its Pessoa that fully carries this out here to an almost sinister extent. This is basically someone who sacrificed everything for his art: look at how his 1-2 relationship events with another person (it appears he broke it off before it became anything that would basically interfere with the way he wanted to live his life) scars him somewhat -- he experiences something outside of himself rather than dreaming it, say -- he works at what he was up to in 2-3 entries, as he often does with other matter, so he can write 2-3 entries about things such as oh, men and animals are not so different, for example. But you see there is an additional charge of seeing someone so humiliated that is just striking, someone who wanted to become pure thought seen, for once, as flesh and blood. (btw, it looks like he is revisitng and adding a thought he hadn't done so earlier and I'd guess that's because it never got to be an actual book in his lifetime. One of the great things (though perhaps accidental) about this book is watching the process of revisiting and re-working a take obsessively years apart, but I wonder if it would've ended up as one entry in an edited final version.)

Anyway, I'll revisit the Zenith one day again.

Finishing Anna Gurton-Wachter's 'Utopia Pipe Dream Memory' today and finding it is a slow burn-- expands in its range and feeling as the poems, mostly longer sequences, move forward. Whether this qyality is due to the referentiality of later sections to previous sections or whether it is because the sense of the project's stakes are raised in later sections is difficult to decide. Either way, recommended for those who enjoy Bernadette Mayer, Lisa Robertson, and Julianna Spahr's earlier books...

Now in the homestretch of A.J. Liebling's The Earl of Louisiana, first published in 1960; this is the 1970 edition, with an introduction by Southern historian T. Harry Williams, who says that the author got a few facts wrong, but he clearly relishes the book. As well he might: I could hardly believe how painlessly, how infotainingly, how Marshall Bermanly, AJL inserted my head into arcane intricacies peculiar to Louisiana (yet in context of outside world!), and turned on the light bulb. And that's during work hours; we also get some struttin' with the barbecue and all manner of aleatory chin music as he makes the NOLA rounds---necessarily going much further afield, where the motorway food is as bad as anywhere else, but always with an ear for passing relevance (so far, I've counted exactly 1 of the expected cute barroom set pieces, good enough to count for lagniappe).AJ
AJL loves Governor Earl Long for his motoriffic gift of gab, strong enough, amidst so much stiff competition---Liebling says that W.T. Cash's classic The Mind of the South should have a companion volume, The Mouth of the South, and that in part is what this---as said gift is in the service of (among other things) his and long-gone brother Huey's vision of a decent living for the poor---including the poorest of the poor, mostly black, necessarily disparaged in public speaking, but rewarded more privately--as are a lot of other voters, and pols, but he, like Huey before him, has kept the whole thing going basically by "soaking the oil companies."
But the oil companies and other commercial interests now see Earl faltering as another election comes close, and they're ready to rise with trending racists---Louisiana's finally getting in the swing of things, with the rest of the Deep South. So the narrative's lucidity, vivid as ever, becomes chilling, as author and reader watch and feel the initially occluded dye spread through the system, as it still is spreading, of course.
Damn, I gotta study this. It's exemplary writing.
(PS: Liebling doesn't present previous Long time as Edenic, it's all the things in the system, all the wheels and deals and other volatile elements in a precarious balance, previously enforced---Louisiana reminds him of Lebanon---that are now finding new purchase, for a while. As Malcolm X said a few years later, when asked about the death of JFK, "Some chickens came home to roost.")

Richard Usborne's Clubland Heroes. Happened upon this in a stray line of a LRB review of a John Buchan biography and decided to track it down - it's an affectionate study of Buchan, Sapper and Dornford Yates, the author's favourite writers in adolescence. Even on first publication in 1953 Usborne views these writers as old fashioned and problematic, and the book seems to doa. good job of pointing out all the privilege and bigotry that underlines them while still being sort of in love with them, which I can relate to, if not necessairily for these particular authors - I find Buchan tedious as well as unpleasant, Sapper gives better pulp thrills while being foaming-at-the-mouth bigoted; I'd never heard of Yates, though, and the idea of an author who does comedy as well as spy yarns appeals. The Berry stories seem a bit Wodehouse but w/o Wodehouse's subversion of the class system - the butlers aren't wiser than their masters here - and it's funny how changes in the UK tax system make the family move from England to France to Portugal. These people are The Enemy, no doubt, but there's something entertaining nonetheless about seeing people enjoy the good life - Usborne describes the characters as "idlers but not wasters". Apparently Yates was the only author still alive when the book was published and very hostile to Usborne whom he saw as a radical leftist.

I finish Curtis Sittenfield, PREP (2005) at last. It's very appealing, but long at 400 pages. I should have made myself read it much faster: it was best when I was reading in what by my standards are substantial bursts - like 60 pages or so yesterday.

It's good enough that I would now like to read more by this author.

There is something enigmatic, even disturbing about the protagonist. You're with her for 400 pages, yet never know what she looks like; and barely what she likes (books, music, films? hardly at all). Her whole identity seems to centre on being undistinguished, and she seems to have few good feelings for anyone. She is watchful but also negative, morose, self-obsessed. Maybe she troubles me because she's recognisable.

I must crack on with David Thomson's BIG SCREEN but might take a diversion through another book first.

Started reading the Derek Bailey biography after having had it sitting around for 2 or 3 years.
Finding it an easy read. So much oral testimony.

Also got Japanoise most of the way through. Have enjoyed that.

Started Conor Cruise O'Brien's The Great Melody, his Edmund Burke. Thanks to a week at the beach, I was able to finish:

Georges Simenon - Maigret at the Coroner's
Elizabeth Taylor - A Game of Hide and Seek
Wendy Moffat - A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster
Ottessa Moshfesgh - Death in Her Hands

A week at the beach reading Simenon sounds perfect right now.

Still plugging on w/ Earthly Powers, which I am enjoying/not enjoying.

which I am enjoying/not enjoying

I hear Anthony Burgess was like that in real life, too.

Dissertation reading: Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories
Non-dissertation reading: Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films Revisited

Ben Lerner Leaving the Atocha Station - Great read. It really had to win me over; I though the constant use of hash/weed was an unnecessarily on-the-nose way of expressing there was a veil over perception; or if it wasn't to express that, I just don't care about an American in Madrid being high all the time and saying so. In the end it didn't matter a lot though: he very much succeeds in describing the sense of loneliness in a foreign world, alone with your thoughts and insecurities you are ashamed of. Slacking it, questioning talent, poetry, and everything else. There are highly original passages on the fraudulous, the struggle. His passages on Ashbery were a highlight for me. I saw someone else saying invoking the train bombing was too unimaginative, but I thinked it worked in showing he knew History was being made but he couldn't find a way (or desire) to be part of it. And yes, it's pacy and at times very funny.

(File under minor quips to get worked up about: I totally would have ditched the definite article in the title. It's felt like a stumbling block every time I pronounce the title, or think about it even. 'Leaving the Heathrow Airport', 'Leaving the Berlin Hauptbahnhof' sounds just as lame. Unless I'm missing some genius use of the article to express his alienation or lost-in-translationness, which is entirely possible, but for now I'm not buying it?)

I hadn't really considered the article in the title, but I wonder if it's part of the ostentatious need to create meaning - to make it sound more meaningful? There might also be something to say about his inability to leave the station.

I read this a couple of months back and am still in two minds about it. Fundamentally, I didn't really need another novel about a struggling writer, no matter how ironically and cleverly that central conceit was staged. That said, it has grown in my imagination, and like LBI says, the Ashbery section - although only a couple of pages - absolutely sings and elevates the whole text. The ending is problematic in a way I can't quite put my finger on. It's wrapped up in the unreliability of the narrator, who undercuts all attempts at typical gestures at meaning and structure, but that redemptive closure was neither earned nor needed.

I admit that after learning about his person from a number of colleagues and students who worked with him, I have been unable to read Lerner.

I remember his 'Angle of Yaw' to be a nice book of prose poems, tho.

I'm finishing up Lawrence Giffin's 'Untitled, 2004,' a book-length long poem addressed to the author's infant daughter that dwells on questions of art, agency, fate, and how we make a life. Beautiful and rather moving, it's certainly Giffin's most accessible book. It was reviewed favorably over at Hyperallergic if yr interested in reading more: https://hyperallergic.com/?p=573032

Somehow (power of suggestion, after reading your description of the novel) Having "the" in there, the cadence of the full title, with pronunciation of "the" at that point in the phrase (I hear "th" as clunky, "ee" as slight loss of air, mocking very idea of escape from clunk) as dead middle dragging down, making a drone of (as insect, not Velvet Underground) the potential crispness of, for instance, "Now leaving Atocha Staion." Thus emphasing the weary and/or spooked irony: no matter where he may roam, no matter how big the ticket, he's still just barely peeling himself away from the station. Been there.

Walking past a box on the sidewalk, found a copy of Fifth Business. Narrator's habitual disdain and tendency to punch down grated, but an enjoyable read. Some scenes, like his vision of the Madonna, were excellent. Also the phrase "night plungers".

Is the definite article in 'Leaving The Atocha Station' not a typically Lerner-ironised allusion to 'To The Finland Station'?

Good point!

Delaying Thomson's BIG SCREEN by starting Terry Eagleton's MATERIALISM.

Naturally enjoyable but it seems to skip past the difficult questions of what matter is anyway, and what is its other - spirit? ideas? - and how far these things actually exist. It goes straight on to more specific sparring with people like Deleuze, which is fun but not a great way into the real heart of the concept. TE says in the foreword that he cut the first 40,000 words in response to a peer reviewer. Maybe he shouldn't have.

xposts I haven't read the Lerner so maybe I'm missing some kinda joke that y'all are in on, but... "Leaving the Atocha Station" is the title of a poem in The Tennis Court Oath (1962) by John Ashbery, and I always assumed that was a good enough reason for the book to be named that.

Reading Borges' (Labyrinths) for what feels like the first time but isn't. Found him too impenetrable about eight years ago, and it's hardly something I can speed through now, but it contextualises so much! Why didn't I try harder before? In the process of realising how many artists are deeply indebted to him.

For some reason I wasn't prepared for it to be as experimental as it is. Those mid-sentence u-turns in logic... It is the best time.

Borges is god.

Xp of course! It might even say so in the book. I'm blaming lockdown senility.

Here's a Borges doc that I haven't finished watching but ... I dunno why I'm surprised that there's a film in color with him being interviewed (in English), he died in the 80s. But I am surprised.

http://ubu.com/film/borges_portrait.html

Stanisław Lems somewhat famously wrote a kind of takedown of Borges, dismissing those u-turns as a cheap logician's trick, but the charge doesn't stick. It's a classic case of narcissism of small differences.

My friend (who is a former ilxor) really loves Lem...but I just can't get into him.

xpost Thanks for the doc link, lukas. You might also enjoy transcripts of student cassettes, collected as Professor Borges: A Course in English Literature, his own 1966 fanverse.
I long ago enjoyed Lem's Solaris, and Tarkovsky's Russian As Fuck screen vision, but somehow those were enough, so far.
Good thread: Borges translation?
And maybe this one, which I don't remember:
Labyrinhts (1962) - Jorge Luis Borges POLL

From the publisher, New Directions:
Writing for Harper’s Magazine, Edgardo Krebs describes Professor Borges:

“A compilation of the twenty-five lectures Borges gave in 1966 at the University of Buenos Aires, where he taught English literature. Starting with the Vikings’ kennings and Beowulf and ending with Stevenson and Oscar Wilde, the book traverses a landscape of ‘precursors,’ cross-cultural borrowings, and genres of expression, all connected by Borges into a vast interpretive web. This is the most surprising and useful of Borges’s works to have appeared posthumously.”

Borges takes us on a startling, idiosyncratic, fresh, and highly opinionated tour of English literature, weaving together countless cultural traditions of the last three thousand years. Borges’s lectures — delivered extempore by a man of extraordinary erudition — bring the canon to remarkably vivid life.

Now translated into English for the first time, these lectures are accompanied by extensive and informative notes by the Borges scholars Martín Arias and Martín Hadis.

I should have incl. translator, Katherine Silver.

I’m finally at the epilogue of War & Peace (Maude/Mandelker translation), a book which I’ve been reading slowly and with long breaks over the last six months. It’s quite a journey. I did hit a few lulls, particularly in the middle third, but everything from 1812 onwards is really exciting. I probably need to read an actual history of these wars at some point. There's so much that Tolstoy's contemporaneous Russian readers would know like the back of their hands but which was totally unfamiliar to me. I spent quite a bit of time on Wikipedia reading about the battles to try to make them more vivid for myself.

The first long novel I read when quarantine began. It's pretty good.

I feel that Eagleton's MATERIALISM somewhat missed an opportunity - he's too interested in 'the body and the soul', but those are not the only kinds of matter and non-matter. He really should have gone deeper into the question of just what matter is, and what is not matter. And what difference it makes.

Thank you Bernard for pointing out it's the title of an Ashbery poem. I can't remember if I knew that and then forgot about it. Will now have to read it to see why that definite article is in the poem's title!

It's probably just Ashbery being cheeky, as most things Ashbery are

Pinefox's comments on "Materialism" remind me that I've had Bertrand Russell's "The Analysis of Matter" on my to-read list for a long time. Some day I will read it. I've been casting about for what to read next, searching through my old books to see what's due for a re-read. I first tried Beckett's "Molloy", which I remember having liked when I first read it in my college days, though I think I forgot how much of it I had just skimmed. It does have some pretty funny jokes, but it's too much work to get to them, so I set that one aside. I tried "Malone Dies" next, which is more readable, though less funny. I'm trying to decide whether to stick with it, or give Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles" a whirl.

The Beckett books are masterpieces, but I think not things to approach casually. You really need to feel ready to encounter them - probably reading in a very sustained way - would be my own view.

I don't agree actually that MALONE DIES is less funny that MOLLOY. I recall it as among the most comic of all Beckett books.

But that Bradbury idea is a great one, O.Nate - let us know if you do make the trip to Mars.

MATERIALISM: stimulating on Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, more than on Marx. A lot of the old Marxian claims - eg that the era of capitalism abstracts objects, dulls the senses - are just repeated again, though there seems no empirical evidence for them.

Overall the title should really be something like SUBJECTIVITY. It's more an account of TE's view of that than of matter as such.

Nearly done with Black Swan (in the middle of the second edition's postscript essay). It is very entertaining, Taleb is not afraid to sing his own praises or to rubbish other people - directly or indirectly, he takes a swipe at "a well respected Harvard professor" but also calls people out by name (one poor guy is described as "abject") - whole professions get taken down as well. His thesis is original (or I'm prepared to believe him when he trumpets its originality) but lots of supporting arguments borrowed (with acknowledgement) from others, especially Kahneman and Tversky (former of Thinking Fast and Slow fame). It jumps around a lot ("As we shall see in Chapter 17", "As we saw in Chapter 6", "As you will recall from my conversation with Daniel Nebbish in Chapter 3" - er, nope) and often leans heavily on jargon ("The Fourth Quadrant") that doesn't get explained till later. I was reminded of The Origin of Species, another book about a simple idea packed with supporting evidence - there one is impressed with the steady accumulation of a moutain of reliable evidence, this seems more like one of those walls in a crime thriller with photos and newspaper clippings and scribbled names all linked with a maze of red string.

Oh, and somewhat hearteningly he is not immune (none of us are) from the psychological errors he warns against, in the second edition postscript essay the section on personal fitness (which seems out of place even in a book full of somewhat irrelevant personal anecdotes) is reliant on confirmation bias and the narrative fallacy.

o. nate: There are some really fantastic E.C. Comics versions of Bradbury stories. Million Year Picnic is the best, IMHO, but if you've got a way to look up the graphic versions, they're worth your time. (Some info here... https://marswillsendnomore.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/ec-comics-ray-bradbury-the-handler/)

The best way to read Bradbury is to consume a slew of his short stories in one sitting. His tics – the midwestern cadence of his language, his use of color (red, green, metallic/silver) and consistent symbolism (balloons, grass, rockets, shoes, sports, rain) – seem more intentional when they're allowed to play out across a number of stories.

Most Ray Bradbury Theater episodes are on Youtube. Most episodes are well done. Mars is Heaven is a genuinely fun hour of TV.

For me, the Bradbury Rosetta Stone is a gorgeous little essay that ran in the New Yorker on the week that he died: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/04/take-me-home

It's like, at the last minute of his life, he wanted to pull back the curtain and say 'look! here's what I was doing this whole time!'

That sounds excellent, Soda. Good post.

The most lyrical and sentimental major SF writer I can think of - and the motif of fire as well as Mars.

Also, the wages of compulsive sentimentalizing in some of his stories, like the one I mention below:
Also read Farenheit 451 for the first time (which, a couple of short stories aside, is my first Bradbury). I mean he wrote the bastard in 9 days (albeit built around a framework of other short stories he'd already written) and it stands and falls on that fact: it's in a hurry, is clunky and overwritten (the adjectives, Raymond!) but it belts along, is full of conviction and he never writes at anything less than the top of his lungs.

Just started Magda Szabó's The Door.

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Thursday, April 23, 2020 10:28 AM (three months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't remember Bradbury's novels, unless you count some others built from sequential stories, like The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles: most recently, I encountered the anthologized account of a stray Martian child, the last of his kind in an area that includes a battered colony of Earthlings: he's seeking company, but he's had no training in how to control his shape-shifting-reflective abilities, and the colonists project images of their lost loved ones onto him, into him---it gets horrifying pretty quickly, and then it's over, in a way that's even worse. His short stories are worth seeking out, if you liked him at all.

― dow, Thursday, April 23, 2020 10:55 AM (three months ago) bookmarkflaglink

there are two huge (900pp each) volumes of his short stories (which aren't even everything)

my favourites of those i've read so far (just over half way through volume 1, but have read 3 of the collections elsewhere)

There Will Come Soft Rains (pdf - https://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf)

The Emissary (pdf - http://www.newforestcentre.info/uploads/7/5/7/2/7572906/the_emissary.pdf)

The Scythe (html - https://talesofmytery.blogspot.com/2013/11/ray-bradbury-scythe.html)

― koogs, Thursday, April 23, 2020

I teach There Will Come Soft Rains on occasion, always gets very despairing reactions.

Here are my favorites. I couldn't tell you how they've been re-anthologized, but by original volume:

From "Collected Stories": Pumpernickel, The Witch Door, Toynbee Convector
From "Dark Carnival": The Night
From "Golden Apple of the Sun": The Murderer, The April Witch
From "I Sing the Body Electric": I Sing the Body Electric, Night Call Collect
From "The Illustrated Man": The Long Rain, The Rocket, The City, The Other Foot, The Highway, Marionettes, Inc., Kaleidoscope, The Fox and the Forest
From: "The Martian Chronicles": The Long Years, There Will Come Soft Rains, The Million Year Picnic, Mars is Heaven,
From: "The October Country": The Scythe, The Jar, Skeleton (dumb...), (Uncle Einar, Homecoming, The Traveler... these three are all part of an abortive novel Bradbury started about a family of monsters. I wish he'd finished.)

Of these...
My sentimental and endearing favorite: "The Rocket"
My favorite non sci-fi: "The Night"
My spooky one-shot favorite: "The Witch Door"
My favorite for 'experimental' Bradbury (not actually experimental, but fun): "The City"

Thanks for all the Bradbury suggestions. "Martian Chronicles" is a book that I esteem very highly though the last time I read it was assuredly more than a decade ago. I have a few other collections of his stories that I also love. For now, I'm sticking with "Malone Dies". The humor to me seems much more muted than in "Molloy", which often reads like a comic monologue, in bravura passages such as:

And in winter, under my greatcoat, I wrapped myself in swathes of newspaper, and did not shed them until the earth awoke, for good, in April. The Times Literary Supplement was admirably adapted to this purpose, of a neverfailing toughness and impermeability. Even farts made no impression on it. I can't help it, gas escapes from my fundament at the least pretext, it's hard not to mention it now and then, however great my distaste. One day I counted them. Three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an average of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it's not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. It's nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes. It's unbelievable. Damn it, I hardly fart at all, I should never have mentioned it. Extraordinary how mathematics help you to know yourself.

But then he tries your patience in long passages describing very precisely and with perfect diction some tedious piece of inane business. I think the voice of Beckett is unique and definitely worth knowing, but maybe easier to encounter in the theatrical works.

I remember enjoying this one, but in the 80s, so I take no responsibility for saying so.
Take it away, wiki:
Mercier and Camier is a novel by Samuel Beckett that was written in 1946, but remained unpublished until 1970.[1] Appearing immediately before his celebrated "trilogy" of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, Mercier et Camier was Beckett's first attempt at extended prose fiction in French. Beckett refused to publish it in its original French until 1970, and while an English translation by Beckett himself was published in 1974 (London: Calder and Boyars and New York: Grove Press), the author had made substantial alterations to and deletions from the original text while "reshaping" it from French to English.[2][3]

The novel features the "pseudocouple" Mercier and his friend, the private investigator Camier, in their repeated attempts to leave a city, a thinly disguised version of Dublin, only to abandon their journey and return. Frequent visits are paid to "Helen's Place," a tawdry house modeled on that of legendary Dublin madam Becky Cooper (much like Becky Cooper, Helen has a talking parrot). A much-changed Watt makes a cameo appearance, bringing his stick down on a pub table and yelling "Fuck life!"

Scary surprise (not Watt) near the end.

robin hyde: dragon rampant

Oddly that description of MERCIER & CAMIER is totally unfamiliar to me. Maybe because I haven't read it for ... 26 years.

Started today by finishing Eagleton's MATERIALISM.

I'm about halfway through the first volume of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time: A Question of Upbringing. I'll admit to a certain amount of immediate disillusionment with its milieu (Eton, ffs) and even the roman-fleuve in general, but so far it's Powell's eye, the lulling unfolding of his sentences and the humour of it that's keeping me going. This description of Le Bas, a housemaster at Eton is fabulous.

He was a tall, untidy man, clean-shaven and bald with large rimless spectacles that gave him a curiously Teutonic appearance: like a German priest. Whenever he removed these spectacles he used to rub his eyes vigorously with the back of his hand, and, perhaps as a result of this habit, his eyelids looked chronically red and sore. On some occasions, especially when vexed, he had the habit of getting into unusual positions, stretching his legs far apart and putting his hands on his hips; or standing at attention with heels together and feet turned outwards so far that it seemed impossible that he should not overbalance and fall flat on his face. Alternatively, especially when in a good humour, he would balance on the fender, with each foot pointing in the same direction. These postures gave him the air of belonging to some highly conventionalised form of graphic art: an oriental god, or knave of playing cards. He found difficulty with the letter “R,” and spoke – like Widmerpool – rather as if he were holding an object about the size of a nut in his mouth. To overcome this slight impediment he was careful to make his utterance always slow and very distinct. He was unmarried.

That final payoff is exquisite.

I spent a month reading it in 2007. It disappointed me but I'm glad I read it.

I'm reading Ford's Parade's End, which covers the same ground with a tad more art.

I think ADTTMOT is utterly brilliant but I wouldn’t want to read the whole lot straight through. I think some time has to be allowed to pass between each (the whole thing, after all, is weaved around a series of set pieces, where two or more of the main characters’ lives intersect and they catch up).

E.M. Cioran - Short Histroy of Decay.

This seems like parts of a reckoning with a strand of German philosophy I know about (like all philosophy) through 2nd hand readings (Kant, Hegel, Nietzche), published around the time of French existentialism. What it most reminds me of is parts of Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, and post-Pessoa, writing around the struggle to exist. The best bit was the third part, which is a 10 page essay that veered into a kind of SF-ish post-apocalyse post-human post-loss of language, but I do prefer Pessoa's imagination - or at least I am far more attuned to that.

Back to Thomson, THE BIG SCREEN.

He does France (to the 1930s) in a chapter called ... FRANCE. A couple of pages each on Meliés, Vigo, et al. Then a whole chapter on RENOIR - whom he adores. Then AMERICAN: suddenly a chapter on Welles.

I enjoy the boldness. It's not a rigorous 'history' in that it doesn't, for instance, describe the French production system to compare it with the US or Soviet at the time. It's a very long series of vivid sketches. It makes me want to spend less time watching recent films, more time watching old ones - say, pre-WWII.

Going to spend some more time with poet Ed Steck's latest today, 'An Interface for a Fractal Landscape.' This is the first in a trio of books about the same world, using lots of computer engineering and video game jargon to create strange surfaces revealing an alternate reality of language. He's pretty incredible, highly recommend all his former books, particularly if you're a "head" who doesn't need typical lyricism in your poetry.

I finished two books last week while on a hiking/camping trip, A Few Green Leaves, Barbara Pym, and Maigret in Society, Georges Simenon. Both of these are among the authors I consider highly reliable and I was not disappointed.

The Pym novel was her last and according to Wikipedia she was not entirely satisfied with its state when she submitted the manuscript, but she was dying of advanced cancer and sent it in anyway. She needn't have worried. It was fine, and revisited some characters from previous work, placing them later in life.

The Simenon was slightly uncharacteristic but I thought it one of the best of the Maigret novels among those I've read. It should be said there are more than 50 Maigret novels I have not read.

Wyndham Lewis - Tarr (1918 version)

Its a pretty good novel, overall. Found myself thinking it sits between Anthony Powell (the milieu, the cynicism around marriage, women, relationships, money and art and failure) but then a modernism in prose also sets in at points in the way he describes motion and action both in the dance party and the duel later on. Will definitely read his criticism at some point.

i think tarr is good in both its iterations, but have a slight preference for the og version. coincidentally recently read two works in a row where a character is reading time & western man (one of them being powell's a dance to...)

if you're looking at reading his non-fiction i remember the creatures of habit and creatures of change collection being a good way in, also the julian symonds ed. essential wl.

j symons, that is!

TIME & WESTERN MAN is hilarious - at least in part unintentionally.

Delightful that Thomson finishes his chapter on Welles and Kane, AMERICAN, and follows it with ... what? ... AMBERSONS!

I admire his Welles book from the '90s, but he does disparage him for weight problems often and makes purely speculative claims about whom he slept with.

Last night I tried starting Orwell's A Clergyman's Daughter and it was... not good. It suffered horribly by my having recently read some Barbara Pym and Simenon, so the relatively poor quality of the narrative prose was all the more glaring. I think I need to ferret out a non-fic book from my shelves to occupy me next.

I've been slowly chipping away at Hesse's Magister Ludi for most of the summer. Not sure what I think of it tbh. In the meantime I've been trying to read more short stories, which is something I don't do very often. Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales and Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage were both pretty good.

Just finished another Maigret and started on Wharton's The Custom of the Country, which is very promising so far.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage has some of my favorite short stories by anybody ("Floating Bridge" for one), and I've tried imitating them.

She's my favorite short story writer, maybe. Top 3, which switches around depending on the day.

I found Dear Life, Runaway and The View From Castle Rock at a used book sale last year and figured I'd grab them all; which one should I read next?

Superior:The Return oF Race Science by Angela Saini
Interesting recap of the history of race science so far or at least the roots of it in the 18th and 19th centuries so far.
Quite well written. I think I'm about aware of the stuff so far. Saini's main point in the book is saying that dodgy science with pretty subjective interpretation which had been hopefully sunk into the past has returned to be an active thing in supposedly reliable areas.
I think it is a decent book but I've only read about the first 3 chapters.

Runaway, cwkiii, her last strong collection. I found her concentration faltering in the last decade.

I finished Malone Dies. It was okay. Beckett's ability to wring comedy out of the state of being bedridden is impressive. Instead of trying the reader's patience with prolixity, as in "Molloy", here he tries the reader's patience with vagueness and incomplete information. It's not clear why we should care about the stories that Malone is writing and they're too intentionally crude to stand on their own. Overall I would judge it an interesting but not wholly successful experiment.

Now I'm re-reading "The Martian Chronicles" by Bradbury.

Returned books and got books from the just-reopened uni library where I adjunct today, and am very excited about the books I got: a load of Brossard novels I haven't read yet, a book of Norma Cole's poetry and one of her essays on art, plus a P. Inman book that a friend recommended.

xp. I absolutely adore the trilogy. very fucking frustrating reading at times but also hilarious

I've been reading Dark Sun, Richard Rhodes. It's his sequel to The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which is excellent. This book mainly follows the further development of nuclear weapons after WWII ended, including the Soviet Union nuclear program (and nuclear spying), the invention of a working hydrogen bomb, and most aspects of the Cold War and arms race.

The contrast in this sequel is that it is less about the step-by-step solution to a long series of thorny physics problems and the scientists who engaged and solved those problems. In this book politics take over center stage. Mostly national security politics and internal scientific community politics. The experimental science and technological advances aspects still appear, but in a much less central role. This makes it a much different story than the original, somewhat less intellectually thrilling and somewhat more depressing.

I read Ben Macintyre's The Spy and the Traitor. It ripped along right enough and painted a picture of the 80s that I wasn't wholly aware of but it wasn't exactly keen to bring any nuance to the idea of Russia as the evil empire.

Then I read Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me which moved me deeply but at which I can only chuck platitudes like profound and unsettling.

In a potentially absurd move, I'm now reading Houellebecq's Platform. Eck, I'd forgotten how grubby he makes me feel.

Now in the homestrech of (re-reading, after many years) Willa Cather's The Professor's House(1925), and trying to slow down, because so far what I distantly rembered about it has been confirmed and then some: Professor St. Peters, with whom I somehow identify, has to on extent painted homself and been painted into a corner emotionally, is bound to fall. He's finished lifeswork, an eight-volume history of Spain's North American exploration, in early middle age, and reaped rewards, in terms of professional recognition and even a bit of money, which, as the book opens, had finally provided a new house, but he keeps going back to his attic study--though he now does no more writing, it's still a good refuge---ih the old place(which was always "funny and somewhat bare," but if he and his wife couldn't afford a suitable item, they and their daughters did without--none of the "pathetic" settling-for so common in the little Hamilton College faculty community.
He knows it was always a mark against him that he wrote beyond the minimum requirement---for magazines and shit---and now he's got these honors from outside, extra money, oooo--and not from climbing, and cultivating the kind of commercial "academia" favored by the State Legislature (courses in bookkeeping, egads sir!), But he's been here so long, also teaching his ass off when not writing (he's Lord of the Books, so why should he mind all these courses, sayeth the Powers), because it's a familiar, orderly setting for his productive perch---and because, when he was young and in love and ready to marry---it was the first school that accepted him and was near his eternal resource, Lake Michigan--- Professor St. Peters, of French-Canadian descent, from just over the border, identifies mostly with France and Spain, the wells of his other increasingly crucial memories,,,,
He is sophisticated, aesthetic, sensitive--but also increasingly insular/moving out of his depth, and he senses this too, even while reflexively observing, appraising, whenever possible: hes older daughter does indeed have a beautiful face, as everyone agrees--but he's the one who also perceived a subtle slope to her bod, a slight but unmistakable, inescapable legacy of her Canuck great-grandfather. She's also the sole heir of the Professor's best student ever, the *one* whose brilliance lasted---'til he was killed in the Great War, after making a remarkable discovery, later commercialized by the heiress's charming, brainy new husband, whose name is Louie and who is beginning to be something of a local Medici, only nicer, and uh, Jewish, though it's seldom mentiojed outright, but he's a supersalesman and, you know, good with money---realigning family and other dymanics, but then The Professor sees his daugther, Madame Louie, also his wife, respond with their own realigned dynamics (Mrs. St, Peters, whose husband is fading, now plays what he sees as the game of womanhood with her sons-in-law, trying to balance and advance everything).
Challenge to the young reapers, and to student Tom's seemingly ironclad will are beginning to surface, to which The Professor is somewhat sympathetic, though what can he do; he feels himself more useless in such matters than ever---also he remembers Tom's confided secret (better than he sometimes remembers Tom himself, who is becoming "a dazzling idea," maybe especially via Louie's Commemorations, though Louie never met the guy, and sure wishes he had): Tom's *first* discovery, when he was a young cowpoke in New Mexico, of a beautiful, deserted mini-civilization, which he ahd his colleague/best friend first called Cliff City, and then they found some more settlements on the same nesa---so he went to find Smithsonian or some other source of recognition and support of further, deeper study, in D.C., which turns out to be much more a deserted city--of the heart, yet swarming with climbers, other talkers---and then he goes back and really gets crushed, also crushing---goes way up to Hamilton College and starts over'
Stays on the wheel, as The Professor sees it now---and of coursel the author and her characters can't know how much of this will have been moot, re the Great Crash of '29---but I'll bet she wasn't too surpised: the slide is already in place.
Having said all that, I should give it up for Cather, who seems at the top of her game, leading mel discreetly, unstoppably, though rooms and buildings and mesas in layers of compressed clarity, incl. appetites and affections and amusements and archness and sadness and a sense of the tragic coming back(also the shit you can't take back). As Willie says in his recent "Love Laughed," "It was fun---in a strange kinda way..."

Tho I didn't understand all of what you just wrote, it made me want to read that book. Thanks!

That's the main thing, thanks to you too. Sorry for typos! Why didn't I magnify? Getting too set in my ways, like the or The Professor.

Hope that's not too spoiler-y---*how* she presents all this is what's amazing.

Memoirs and Misinformation by Jim Carrey and Dana Vachon

I read Ben Macintyre's The Spy and the Traitor. It ripped along right enough and painted a picture of the 80s that I wasn't wholly aware of but it wasn't exactly keen to bring any nuance to the idea of Russia as the evil empire.

The Professor's House's structure emphasizes its queerness.

right now:

i'm listening to friends and strangers by j. courtney sullivan.

it's mostly pretty trashy, but it has some very keenly observed moments about class, parenting, new york etc. and i'm enjoying it.

never read/heard of her before this. her previous books all have very conventional Serious But Accessible Women's Fiction covers (cf. kate atkinson etc.), but this one has an extremely sally rooney cover. the comparison is not off the mark but it's not as good, and it's about older people. but if you like sally rooney you might like this.

i'm rereading outline by rachel cusk because it takes about 90 minutes to read, it's great, and i'm about to read the other two for the first time.

recently:

october by china mieville which was... informative. it came alive a bit in the final chapter where it felt like he finally allowed himself to analyse things. aside from that it was extremely stodgy "and then what happened was ... and then what happened was ..." history writing. some awful prose too.

our man in havana by graham greene:

"comedy" but not funny.

i can apparently no longer sleep at night, so i read the first third of chuck wendig's 'wanderers'

solid if you want an extremely long thriller with paint-by-numbers characters confronted by plague, white supremacy and dysfunctional american politics. i do not

Rereading Seamus Deane on Joyce. Insight and intellect but also, as always, sometimes gnomic to the point of meaning very little.

The Professor's House's structure emphasizes its queerness.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)
The scenes down in old New Mexico did bring Willie's (and Ned Sublette's) "Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Found of Each Other") to mind a little bit, but what's another example?

"Fond" even

if you're looking at reading his non-fiction i remember the creatures of habit and creatures of change collection being a good way in, also the julian symonds ed. essential wl.

― no lime tangier, Sunday, 2 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Thanks there is a copy of his book on Shakespeare around here.

Well, Houellebecq's Platform was desperate to be provocative ('insolent' says Julian Barnes), full of Islamaphobia and affectless sex. Who knew?

I've started Michael Chabon's Kavalier and Clay. Can I take 600 pages of that intimate, folksy voice?

Bernhard's Old Masters and Caro's The Power Broker last week.

My mom got me the new Houellebecq for Christmas and I immediately put it in a little free library. Like, that day. Can't stand the guy.

I read a book, the first novel I've finished since March. It was "A Liar's Dictionary" by Eley Williams. It's very good - without the intense blasts of the short stories (which I love so much), it has a lightness that reminds me of Elizabeth Taylor or maybe Shena Mackay. Which is not to say that it doesn't tangle with its own language quite often, to does so very pleasingly. I think - I'm not sure - it does something quite clever with the momentum of the storytelling, but my sense of a quickening pace may have mad more to do with my circumstances than the book itself. I'd have to read it again to find out, and I look forward to doing so at some point.

You read the power broker in a week Alfred?!

I put it down to finish Elizabeth Taylor, but I resumed reading this morning. I should finish it by Friday, yeah. Caro's such a confident storyteller.

"i don't care what anyone says, i think the power broker is a good book" -- me being edgy

I loved kavalier & clay at the time, suspect it would annoy me now. The bit everyone hates in the Arctic is the best bit imho.

I have about thirty pages to go with Earthly Powers, have been reading this fucker for over a month. What a boorish, tedious, entertaining, eccentric, imaginative, funny, inhuman, obscure, wanky, and above all, unconvincing read! For all his linguistic whatsits, erudition, self-awareness etc etc Burgess is extraordinarily slapdash at times, he really is using this fictional alter ego to rehearse yet again all his old indulgences (obscure wordplay, puns, dialogue in untranslated foreign languages, reactionary prejudices, you know the usual) but that just makes the world and story he conjures so utterly unbelievable (without ever slipping into the fantasy that makes Clockwork Orange/Wanting Seed more bearable - and besides those books are much, much shorter!) You sort of feel that Burgess really thinks this one is his best bid for airport bestsellerdom but he's out of his fucking mind! Although he affects to be interested in everything - including popular fiction - he's actually got a total tin-ear - or contempt - for modernity and the popular. One example, the narrator's brother is a professional comedian whose most popular skit revolves around jokes on Shakespeare's Hamlet and the Danish language! Later on, one of the main characters, a composer, starts to write ghastly modernist stuff involving shudder a synth and tapes, to indicate his moral/spiritual/physical decline (this is after a never-ending description of an imaginary opera about St Anthony by the narrator and this composer). All of this stuff that bungs up the book - the fake songs, novels, plays, films, poems, stand-up comedy routines etc - are all fake fake fake. All of the constant scatalogical Joycean stuff is wearying and grotesque - no city visited is without its foul smell, forensically described. Needless to say, all of the stuff about Africa, just for starters, is deeply problematic 40 years on. Yet at the same time there are moments that are very human, well observed, interesting, thought-provoking, clever, obviously converted from the author's own experience - he definitely doesn't seem oblivious to things,he's not actually that self-absorbed and - I guess like all good authors - he can surprise you sometimes with his empathy and identification with people and groups outside his own experience. It's just - it's all too much, and six hundred pages in I'm hankering for something much more streamlined, next read round.

To console myself I have also been reading the sublime Essential Avengers Vol 6 containing Avengers #120-140, Giant-Size Avengers #1-4, Captain Marvel #33 & Fantastic Four #150 by Steve Englehart, Roy Thomas, Jim Starlin, Gerry Conway, Bob Brown, John Buscema, Don Heck, Dave Cockrum, Joe Staton, George Tuska, Rich Buckler & Friends - heroes all!

I liked that one, but yeah.

Has anyone read Lonesome Dove? I’m into the first few chapters but it is LONG

Yeah, I read it last year. A good book, very dark. I thought it was worth reading.

Bruce Pascoe Dark Emu
reevaluation of the history of aboriginal agriculture etc.
IN the light of its destruction by incoming british settlers. Looking back over some early explorers' memoirs and a lot of physical evidence.
Hope this did start a revival of some of the techniques talked about.
I am hearing about Australians wanting to go back to growing plants that are more in tune with Australia's own environment than that of the places that people came from. or at least having to recreate the old version of it.
Good to see that the US seems to be picking up on ideas from native American nature stewardship so hope similar can happen in Australia. But don't know the Australian political system and the last documentaries I saw were showing quit ehow badly Australian behaviour to its original population has been over the years.

I also just finished Frederick Douglass's original slave narrative. I think he wrote autobiographies 3 time sover his life so covered some of the same areas differently each time. Want to read the other 2.
May be just about to start the narrative by Olaudah Equiano which is in the same omnibus book

Missing Person, Patrick Modiano. So far it's about a private detective suffering from amnesia. Expect it to get weirder.

The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States 1638-1870(1896)was the first book by W.E.B Dubois. It's a monograph, in professional academic format, included sources footnoted on each page, and a narrative, a story, with some individuals, factions, some counties, colonies, groups of colonies, as characters, realigning over the years, in relation to each other, foreign powers, and other socio-political elements: agricultural, technological, in the broadest sense, the coming and going of uprising, fears of same, the Revolution, Civil War, and other struggles (laws passed, ignored, deals made, superseded, etc.)
Impression is more of a conversational, down to earth report than Lecture etc.
By this account, in just about every colony (though least of all in Georgia),there was always a moral objection, or at least anxiety, but also the money, and what slaves, available at reasonable expense, could be traded for: rum and molasses especially, which were not only tasty, but very good for resale, even in colonies where there was no agricultural advantage to slaveowners. Also in every colony: fear of a black earth uprising, so that they all had some kind of slave-importation-limiting laws, usually duties, however (also if ever) they were enforced at any given point (deals etc.)
No real prob for several colonies in terms of importation, but they tended to be very dependent for goodies and $ on the trade, most of all Rhode Island Massachusetts. Puritan heritage incl. moral concerns, but it seems that only the Society of Friends really proved a formidable legislative influence---relatively speaking, and only within Pennsylvania.
All concerns came to a head as the Revolution approached, and indeed, an outtake from the Declaration of Independence rips the King a new one, accusing him not only of oppression via enslavement, profiting from it, and paying off the slaves to plot against the colonists.(from Jefferson, Works "This radical, and not strictly true" passage, as Du B. coolly tags it, didn't make the final cut, Jefferson says, because South Carolina. SC was very big on rice, which was very labor-intensive, much more, as Du Bois notes, than the tobacco farming of Virginia and North Carolina, which were not as unequivocally pro-slavery or pro-trade at this point.
We haven't gotten to the rise of cotton, or the Louisiana Purchase, which brought in sugar, which took the most and biggest turnover of slaves.
Also in this Library of America edition: The Souls of Black Folk, Dusk at Dawn (autobio), and essays.

Dow, have you read "DuBois' Telegram" by Spahr? You might find it interesting.

Stevolende, that book has been hugely influential in Australia, and so of course the Rupert Murdoch press has instituted a long-standing campaign to discredit Pascoe, trying to prove he isn't actual Indigenous, etc etc etc. They kept bitching he wouldn't do interviews to respond to their stupid gotchas all summer because he was out working as a volunteer firefighter against the hideous bushfires we had.

Basically, fuck Murdoch.

I want to read it now! On the list. Most of my knowledge of Aboriginal issues comes from being into Aboriginal poets, so I should probably get my hands on something rather than another Lionel Fogarty book sometime

It's an interesting read. Does have me wondering about a couple of things though. The idea that aborigines would grow some things as monocultures across vast distances seems to go against the biodiversity I'm seeing being integral to other native stewardship. I thought the more diverse the more robust, also thought that the film Living Soil was saying monocultures tended to wreck the soil. Could just be what that monoculture was though.

Also was a bit iffy about Pascoe extolling the idea of being able to make some money out of various types of native flora and fauna. Though maybe that is the point and he's trying to sell it to farmers who are making money out of non native product which is not good for the environment since it requires more water and pesticides etc. Just didn't feel right on reading it. But enjoying it overall.
& would really love to hear something more sustainable could be introduced.

I need to look at the map of Australia. I have an image of vast deserts between the main cities but maybe that's watching Mad Max and things. Or at least 2 since I thnik the first one may have a backdrop of green fields and things or at least grasslands.
Maybe that's a result of native agriculture being destroyed by European farming techniques leaving the ground less arable than it was with them.

Speaking of Australia, I finished The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, which I found a powerful read.

I finished Brossard's 'Mauve Desert' (a re-read), read 'Notebook of Roses and Civilization' in a day, now onto her 'Picture Theory.' I tend to get obsessed with writers whose work I find challenging yet simultaneously readable, and she's really doing it for me right now.

xpost such a good book!

The hydrogen bomb history was too bulky to take on a recent camping trip, so I took Maigret and the Lazy Burglar instead and finished it. Now I'm back to the Cold War.

Finished The Martian Chronicles. I think my favorite story is still the one that was my favorite when I first read it, now these many years ago, and perhaps my favorite ghost story ever, "Night Meeting", but there are so many good stories here, it's an embarrassment of riches. Now reading The Shadow of Vesuvius: a Life of Pliny by Daisy Dunn, which often reads like a collection of research notes placed on 3x5 cards, sorted into piles on a whim, and loosely linked together into chapters, but my interest in the material is enough to keep me going, so far.

Simone Weil - Anthology

This is almost an unclassifiable voice, like a three-way between anarchism, christianity and Montaigne. With a voice that channels matter that seems to be lost from antiquity. This anthology is an ideal starting point, but you probably need to know a little bit of Greek/Latin literature and any 2nd readings of anarchist thinking. I think I got about 20% of what she was saying about politics or anything else -- the details might take a lifetime. Someone I will definitely read more of.

Night Meeting (and about half the rest of the book) doesn't even make it into the two large volumes of Bradbury short stories, which are about 1000pp each. (and i'm still only 60% of the way through the first)

I have a couple of his other anthologies, "The Vintage Bradbury", which contains "Night Meeting" as well as a couple other Martian stories, and "Golden Apples of the Sun", which doesn't overlap. I should reread those as well. I always thought the common themes running through the Martian stories always added something to that book.

Juan Ramon Riberyo - The Word of the Speechless

Rarely enjoy short story collections these days. They have a 'hit' rate which means you have to put up with stuff you are not particularly enjoying, and the trend to do a 'Complete Short Stories' (as in the case of Clarice Lispector) exacerbates this but I wanted to read this guy -- nothing else available -- and actually the hit rate is near 100% in this case (the selection from Silver is excellent) and the longer stories the better they were. Besides, he is known as a short story guy and I guess you can tell. The title makes it seem like he is writing from the POV of the downtrodden and while that is often true it isn't always the case. My favourite story is Silvio in El Rosendal where the cast of characters changes fast in this fixed land as the fortunes of the people who own it undergo their ups and downs (its a little bit reminiscent of Boccaccio and Michael Kohlhaas at times). For Smokers Only is basically his medical diary, but I love that all sorts of little tall tales are inserted into it as well, he wants to imagine as well as tell. In a couple of other shorter works I love how he can write about death, the way he freezes it as a part of life. An act as much as anything else you get to do.

I love me a Complete Short Stories BUT the book should include the stories in the order they were originally published and ideally divided into the original books they were published in. Lorrie Moore's just put them all in alphabetical order, which is disgusting savage territory.

I have Raymond Carver: Collected Stories and it's my favourite book that I own. Just dip into it randomly ever so often. Have read all the stories before but always enjoy them.

reading jrr tolkien's translation of beowulf. i know the poem well -- i've read a couple translations, one back in high school and then the seamus heaney one several years ago -- but i'm amazed how difficult this one is for me to follow. i think that's down to it being very much a literal translation, emulating the odd flow of the original sentences. it's probably also a bit unpolished because tolkien translated it for fun and doesn't seem to have ever thought of publishing it. but i'm glad i own it anyway, it's a beautifully put together book and i'm looking forward to digging into the commentary (gleaned from tolkien's own notes and lectures on beowulf).

Sounds a bit like Nabokov's startlingly unreadable version of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

P.G. Wodehouse - Week-end Wodehouse

Raced through a compilation of stories and extracts from Wodehouse's career. There are a lot of stories where the action takes place on the golf course lol but that aside it was interesting to see the (very narrow) range, and in the extracts where he is introducing a volume you see the insecurities (Wodehouse as a 'light' writer). Tha racism on one of the Jeeves extracts took me aback, it must've been so common at the time. His career of poking fun is sadly an artefact of a time when everything wasn't so on a knife-edge politically. I know we can say things are "of their time" but that absolutely applies to Wodehouse, for good or bad.

Still: James Joyce, the PORTRAIT, and David Thomson, THE BIG SCREEN.

THE BIG SCREEN becomes baffling. It has (PART I) about 250 pages of material up to about 1950, dynamically organized into chapters which intrigue and surprise.

Then it has a PART II for about 100 pages, with no chapters, covering everything from late 1940s to 1960s.

There's no apparent reason for this organizational shift. PART II could easily include chapters on SUNSET BLVD, TELEVISION, JAPAN, BERGMAN and whatever else. But it's as though DT has forgotten to insert them.

Perhaps it will all change again after PART III.

Part 3 will consist entirely of his masturbatory Nicole Kidman fantasies.

I've already read that book. It's good.

So The Power Broker was good.

I got Reaganland in the mail. I'd hoped to take a break from novelistic history.

Du Bois is good at that, along w up-front analytical considerations, also zoom lens and aerial views, stylistic flights, dropping well-aimed rocks, eggs (still reading the xpost Library of America omnibus).

Got 'Late Victorian Holocausts' from the library. One of the only Davis books I haven't read... should be working more on my actual work and school work, but alas, I'm too busy being absorbed by his prose. He really is the best and most accessible radical scholar around.

I finished Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb last night.

The main times when it dragged were the chapters devoted to the specific details of Soviet espionage. Contrary to novels, espionage in action is extremely boring and humdrum, unless you happen to be the spy, in which case it is just nerve-wracking. Thankfully, the book makes clear that the USSR would have succeeded in making nuclear weapons in any event and even the information they did get from spying all had to be carefully verified experimentally. Helpful as it was, it probably only accelerated the Soviet program by 18 to 24 months.

I was also glad to see Rhodes, the author, calling out Curtis Lemay as a dangerous warmonger, and giving just enough information about thermonuclear bombs to make their destructive capability both vivid and terrifying. Even one H-bomb exploding anywhere that's heavily populated would be a catastrophic event unparalleled in history.

However, the companion book to which this is a sequel, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is more compelling reading, in that it lends itself to a more unified and exciting narrative. It also covers a more fundamental shift in world history than the arms race and cold war covered by this book. Read it first, but read this one, too.

I read and liked the first one a couple of years back. Dark sun is on my list. Thanks.

I’m not back in the habit* of reading yet, but I’m reading The Children of Men (PD James). Had never read anything of hers before, but got this in a kindle sale or something at some point and I think I’d read something that mentions the book.

It’s quite different from the film (that’s good not bad). All the major elements are the same, but she has much more time and space to build the universe so all the bleak little atrocities that happen slowly drop in to fill in the background: the pet christenings, the destroyed playgrounds, the Quietus (which is extremely upsetting btw).

I have only been to Oxford for a few hours but you can feel the sense of place come through and it’s interesting to set it in a small dying city rather than London. (Also darkly funny that the only way Theo can get good housing in Oxford is by a cataclysmic global event).

Her prose is exactly the kind of thing I like; very spare and sharp, so I think i will continue reading. Any recommendations on where to go next are very welcome.

Have you read James Tiptree Jr.? Maybe start with novella "Slow Music," where she creeps up on and then along with the reader. It's in an exemplary collection, the aptly titled Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. If you want something British, but never science fiction, as far as I know, try Muriel Spark and Ivy Compton-Burnett.

Wow, I thought the book of ChHildren of Men was a lot of ill-thought-through bollocks. The narrator is a man born in the late 20th Century who just happens to have the waspish prejudices of someone in their 70s in 1992. Those confounded noisy Beatles and their new-fangled rock music! The film, otoh, is brilliant.

Anything I read about the making of the hydrogen bomb always reinforces my opinion that Edward Teller was a monster who should have been suffocated at birth.

A good place to be when you finish The Power Broker and turn to Reaganland.

The narrator is a man born in the late 20th Century who just happens to have the waspish prejudices of someone in their 70s in 1992. Those confounded noisy Beatles and their new-fangled rock music!

he's a don at magdalen college?!

My general impression of Teller is that he was among the top eight or ten nuclear physicists available to work on the Manhattan Project and he was a valuable piece of the effort and contributed some core ideas to the H-bomb dsign. Otherwise he was a inchoate mess of a human being whose blend of egotism, ambition, cunning and paranoia found plentiful allies during the McCarthy era in DC who used him just as much as he used them. He ended his life a near-paraiah in the physics community and a hero to the "better dead than Red" cold warriors in the Pentagon and Congress.

_The narrator is a man born in the late 20th Century who just happens to have the waspish prejudices of someone in their 70s in 1992. Those confounded noisy Beatles and their new-fangled rock music!_


he's a don at magdalen college?!

I finished the Pliny biography by Daisy Dunn: some interesting material, haphazardly organized. Now I'm reading Weather by Jenny Offill, because my wife bought it and it was lying around the house. Rather charming and amusing. At 200 very small, generously spaced pages, its more of a novella, but that's ok by me. I guess maybe I should check out Dept of Speculation too.

reading Crashed by Adam Tooze

Read The Relutctant Fundamentalist over the weekend for a book club. It's...rubbish? lol at narrator describing the object of his affections as "more Paltrow than Spears".

I'm a little reassured to hear that judgment. That book has a good reputation but I feel it's somewhat cackhanded. The voice is very mannered, but I'm not convinced that the author is terrificially in control of this.

That's not to mention the strange irrelevance, as I recall, of the romance plot which isn't properly tied into the political story. Someone once told me that this was because the author had simply changed what the book was about between drafts.

David Thomson reaches a section on FILM STUDIES. Material on early film studies, in which he was somewhat involved, is engaging and interesting. He mixes it with the whole history of 1960s film. Again, naturally very interesting, with a few pages for instance on BLOW-UP. I also like his explicit bit to redeem the idea that films influence us.

Again, it's difficult, at present, to fathom the compositional principle, in terms of chapters and structure. I don't feel sure that DT was really paying attention to the basic architecture of his book - the simplest aspect of writing, you might think.

I finished reading A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN yet again. A simple observation is that this book is better to read concertedly, if not exactly fast, then in long sessions, not in pieces. Perhaps that's true of most novels.

More than before, I sense that the central character isn't necessarily a spokesperson for the author, but is a flawed figure among others. The observation is extremely primitive, but maybe I can make it sound mildly more sophisticated by saying that a Bakhtinian view is needed - that this novel should not be confused with SD's monologue, but is dialogic, relativising him amid a larger cast.

Specifically, it seems clearer to me than ever that his most engaging, simply nicest contemporary is Davin, by far the most nationalist. Which makes the book's scepticism of nationalism seem newly doubtful to me - with all the caveats anyone wants about any fiction taking a position on anything.

Along with my reading for classes I'm teaching and classes I'm taking, I must say that Late Victorian Holocausts truly is the most grim book in Davis' oeuvre. Infuriating and tragic, still I persist in getting through it because its subject is so important and details a history of which I previously knew only the vague sketches

I'm a little reassured to hear that judgment. That book has a good reputation but I feel it's somewhat cackhanded. The voice is very mannered, but I'm not convinced that the author is terrificially in control of this.

That's not to mention the strange irrelevance, as I recall, of the romance plot which isn't properly tied into the political story. Someone once told me that this was because the author had simply changed what the book was about between drafts.

The mannered voice feels like it could belong to an "Arabian" character in some old time adventure film, which might be a conscious choice but if so why?

A lot of the book seems like it's lecturing you on very basic misapprehensions on Islam/people from middle Eastern countries, which makes sense within the book as the narrator is presumably speaking to a not very enlightened member of the US military, but I already know that those don't correspond to the truth and I'm guessing the same holds for most people who'd pick up and read it.

The love story felt like it came straight out of an early 20th century novel, the tragic love interest suffering from a terrible illness. Mental as opposed to physical in this case, sure, but the arc was still the same as you'd encounter in novels by, like, Erich Maria Remarque.

Last night I started The Unforgiving Years, Victor Serge. I plan to alternate it with Uncle Fred in the Springtime, Wodehouse, as a leavening for the grimness of the Serge.

Daniel RF: I think you hit a couple of nails on the head here! The 'Arabian voice', indeed !!

Aimless, BTW LRB recently carried a Tariq Ali review of Serge.

In xpost Du Bois LoA omnibus edition of The Souls of Black Folk(1903), after (among other thing) very nuanced, even-handed history of the Freemen's Bureau and Booker T. Washington's influence---mixed blessings all around-- and his frequently moving, as always carefully detailed account of his first summer as a schoolteacher, deep in rural Tennessee---he travels the deReconstructed backside of Georgia, especially Dougherty County, in the Black Belt, experiencing population drain despite the vagrancy laws, though still busy; "the car-window sociologist" finds plenty of people to talk with and observe. But sometimes it's all about the places, which can be much more decimated than this, or more developed, even occasionally thriving (although "gaunt" is a frequent keyword, in my view). But somehow the notes he hits here keep coming back to me ,more than some overtly intense passages:

Now and again we come to churches. Here is one now--Shepherds', they call it---a great whitewashed barn of thing, perched on stilts of stone, and looking for all the world as though it were just resting here a moment and might be expected to waddle off down the road at almost any time. And yet it is the centre of a hundred cabin homes; and sometimes, of a Sunday, five hundred persons from far and near gather here and talk and eat and sing. There is a schoolhouse here---a very airy, empty shed, but this is an improvement, for usually the school is held in the church. The churches vary from log-huts to those like Shepherd's, and the schools from nothing to this little house that sits demurely on the county line. It is a tiny plank-house, perhaps ten by twenty, and has within a double row rough unplaned benches, resting mostly on legs, sometimes on boxes. Opposite the door is a square home-made desk. In one corner are the ruins of a stove, and in the other a dim blackboard. It is the cheerfullest schoolhouse I have seen in Dougherty, save in town. Back of the schoolhouse is a lodge-house two stories high, and not quite finished. Societies meet there---societies "to care for the sick and bury the dead"; and these societies grow and flourish.

Andrew Gibson: JAMES JOYCE. A short, stimulating, punchily written biography.

I'd actually recommend it to anyone looking for one short book to introduce them to Joyce.

Edna O'Brien wrote a punchy short one too for Penguin.

I finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I feel like a curmudgeon but it was a bit silly and way too long.

Now reading Rose Macaulay's The Towers of Trebizond.

That's interesting, Chinaski. The length of KAVALIER / CLAY made it a bit of a struggle, though maybe likeable. The basic pastiche of old-time comics (via RADIO COMICS) is a high point, I'd think.

finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I feel like a curmudgeon but it was a bit silly and way too long.

The globetrotting episode (hey, now we're in the South Pole or whatever!) played like creative writing exercises.

finished Anna Karenina, in which anna karenina was a minor character.

have been reading it a book or two a month (8 total) since march and part 8 was a bit of a let down so it feels like a disappointment overall, sadly, even though i enjoyed it for the most part and didn't find it as difficult as imagined (long != difficult). it was the P&V translation.

I'm being harsh on Kavalier and Clay. I loved the first 100 pages and laughed out loud numerous times - I just ran out of steam. I think my patience for a garrulous shaggy dog story has thinned.

I don't think the South Pole part of K&C works at all.

But I read it on a plane as I was moving to New York in my early twenties, a few months after my cousin Tommy died, and I got to the part where Joe's brother Thomas dies and just sobbed and sobbed in my airplane seat. I didn't see it coming at all. And I don't cry at books, at least not full-on real crying. So I'll always think of it as a flawed but very powerful book, but I don't really know how it would have affected me at another time.

This was the phase in Chabon's novel writing when he included a well-drawn gay relationship.

I liked The Yiddish Policemen's Union, his alt-universe procedural.

I lived in Sitka for a year so that one was super trippy to read. The street names are the same but the real Sitka is so very tiny that it's kind of impossible and mind-bending to picture it as a huge city.

I finished Weather, it's short enough to read in a few sittings. That kind of aphoristic/telegraphic style runs the risk of veering into deep-thoughts/daily-affirmations territory but done well can be plenty enjoyable to read. I cut my teeth on Vonnegut and his style of short blurb-length mini-chapters.

Now I'm reading Song of the Lark by Willa Cather, which is quite different in style.

i liked weather, but i preferred dept of speculation.

Finally started Hillary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light — between the language & the characters & the air of fond conspiratorial knowingness between Cromwell & the reader it’s like a warm bath

tbh I have no objectivity about this series at all, I just love the world & the characters so much

Aimless, BTW LRB recently carried a Tariq Ali review of Serge.

I took this as my main reading book on a camping trip, where I would read it in a tent using a headlamp before dousing the light and sleeping each night.

I'm about 2/3rds of the way through it now and it has been some tough sledding, both because of the subject matter and because Serge is fitting his prose style to the violence and extremity of his characters' situations and emotions. The ratio of simple sentences to highly tortured and opaque ones is roughly 1:10, or so it feels to me. Still, his prose is fitting and original and a worthwhile attempt to express what seems an inexpressible madness. This not a book to 'like' or even admire. It is more a book to endure and then be grateful it can be endured.

I will continue and finish it.

I read Thomson on THE GODFATHER, which I've never seen. It seems to be the single biggest canonical gap in my film viewing.

Virginia Woolf - Diary (Vol. 2) 1920-24

Although I have my ups and downs with her fiction I find her wriitng in this, more 'relaxed' setting, to be often superb, probably at her best. The odd portrait, a sketched party with its multiple conversations, her worried relationships with Katherine Mansfield (who dies young and is thought about over and over in different entries is a strong highlight) and Eliot (whom she is scared of at times but says she is over that feeling). And of course her ups and downs with her own writing -- she will complete the first draft of Dalloway by 1924 -- and readings, with her loathing of Ulysses (on a first perhaps only read, her shutting down of herself to the book is interesting), her admiration-mixed-with-fear of Proust as far as livings writers, to writers such as James (really nice one page set of impressions of Wings of a Dove) to Greek writers. You get an impression of that sort of old, liberal politics, but mostly quiet on the events of the day. Post-war life gets the odd mention however building a life, the writing, a way to live off it (her love-hate relationship with journalism and reviewing), the social set - all feature more prominently.

I agree -- in the same Cheever's journal contains his freshest, sharpest prose. I reveled in the way she "built up" the material for what eventually becomes The Waves.

I've never read Cheever but I shall look out for that. In my head I was attmpting to contrast with Kafka and Musil's Diaries, but its been too long since I've read these. Both similarly sketch away, the work never stops.

Another Diary I should read is Victor Serge's, recently translated and discussed in the LRB essay that the pinefox refers to.

I like what I've read of The Common Reader-First Series, which is online here and there: don't always agree with her readings, but pos or neg they catch me up in excitement of reading and thinking and writing, reporting from the front or whichever lines.
Any of yall read The Discomfort of Evening? Been wondering about it---this just in from LRB:
The incredible debut novel from Dutch poet and dairy farmer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, translated by Michele Hutchison, has won the International Booker Prize 2020!

Rijneveld and Hutchison discuss this startling work of fiction with poet and translator Sophie Collins on our blog.https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/blog/2020/6/my-imagination-takes-me-there-marieke-lucas-rijneveld-and-michele-hutchison-interviewed-by-sophie-collins?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20200827%20Bookshop%20Newsletter&utm_content=20200827%20Bookshop%20Newsletter+CID_1557a904eae7a923a5c12539360ead26&utm_source=Bookshop%20email&utm_term=Read%20more%20here

(sic will butcher you for that link lol)

I've read it a couple of years ago, in Dutch obv. Not read the LRB piece yet, but did read an interview w/ her and Hutchison in a Dutch paper a couple of weeks ago, about how they went about translating it. When I read the book I already thought it'd be a mean feat, with so much quintessentially Dutch things in there. But apparently they got it right.

Still surprised it won the Booker, but kudos to her. I enjoyed the book and the imagination, something sorely lacking from Dutch novels nowadays imo.

I've kind of accepted that I'm in a reading slump. It's doubly painful because the summer holidays are when I normally catch up. There's shit going on at home and obviously shit going on out [there. Kind of hoping that returning to the madness of school will kick things off but not holding out much hope.

Ugh, tell me about it

I near the end of Thomson's book. I admire the energy he keeps finding to kickstart it.

Just finished a re-read of Dambudzo Marechera's 'House of Hunger.' I can see why it's the more lauded of his novels, notwithstanding the rarity of 'Black Sunlight,' but I personally believe it is the lesser of the two-- less deranged, more explicitly political and thus more obvious, and I'd venture to say the writing is a bit more juvenile, which makes sense as he wrote it when he was younger. Still highly recommended, love him and all his work tbh!

Reading: Jeff Vandermeer - Annihilation. Pleasantly easy to read but also extremely well written. I saw the Netflix film a while back and was slightly underwhelmed, but the text really shows what a difficult and good job they made of it.

Listening: Just started John Crowley's AEgypt. I struggle with Crowley. I've started both Little, Big and Engine Summer. The first was impenetrable, the second maybe a little easier on the brain. He has a strange rhythm to his writing which I find exhausting; and listening to AEgypt on Audible is no less of a task to follow. His paragraphs are rooms with many doors and no matter how much I rewind, I still have trouble following the free associative subject matter - one minute he's describing angels in a scrying glass, the next a clergy-boy, then a bus journey through a mythical America, an internal monologue about wish-fulfilment, a meeting with a shepherd - and that's just the first hour of this massive great book. I admire Crowley's imagination, but he certainly isn't spoon-feeding me here.

I've only read shorter things, in collections now out of print, but Novelties and Souvenirs is all the shorties (and some not so short), as of 2004, anyway. Amazon's Look Inside for print edition will even let you access some whole stories via titles in table of contents, and the Kindle version provides a bunch of previews. I don't remember ever having much problem with the ones I read, but could be we're in similar strata of spacey density.
I recently came across "The Reason For The Visit" for the first time, in Interfaces, a 1980 anthology edited by Virginia Kidd and Ursula K. Le Guin: somehow he indicates right off that his guest is Virginia Woolf, although he never drops the name (eventually says, "I can't remember if I ever got to the lighthouse," which isn't a euphemism: he's just strung out on her letters, diaries, essays, and I've been there). Her English manners just get more lovely, and he feels her disappointment in him. Oh, this has happened before, in attempted demonstrations of social changes to time travelers Dr. Johnson and "to Max Beerbohm I'd insisted that I would be considered well-dressed---even something of a dandy---wearing an old, yellowing tropical suit and a vulgarian's Hawaiian shirt. But those visitors were figments, really. This visit was hers, and she asked the questions, and I was shy."

Oh yeah, there's also a 2019 round-up of stories, And Go Like This, and Reading Backwards: Essays and Reviews, 2008-2018, which might or might not provide illuminating gateways to his brain, hmmm.

(Title might be a warning.)

After finishing Reaganland and The Power Broker, I needed, uh, lighter fare. I'm reading David Thomson's Sleeping With Strangers (hi, pinefox!) and the LOA edition of Sherwood Anderson's short stories; he's an unacknowledged influence on Lydia Davis, I've realized.

Finished Emma Warren's Make Some Space: Tuning Into Total Refreshment Centre on audiobook. Was initially skeptical of a book about such a young scene (TRC was one of the main hubs of the London jazz scene), but it also doubles as manifesto in favour of youth clubs, social clubs, etc. in an era where those kinds of institutions are close to extinction. Lots of food for thought, and a melancholy listen while walking around a London that currently can afford no nightlife at all.

Warren and some of her subjects are quoted from the book, along with other TRC backstories, in Andy Thomas's 32-page booklet for Kaleidoscope, a really good Soul Jazz Records 2CD set that came out after everything shut down---it's a fine consolation prize. I'll have to find her book.

I finished David Thomson, THE BIG SCREEN.

I've mentioned before that its structure is odd and sends it a little off-kilter. You could try to find a few other weaknesses in it: not enough on the very beginnings of cinema, or much of the silent era (no appearance at all for England's Cecil Hepworth). Perhaps less than it could do on the development of genre as a system. And little curiosity about international, non-Anglophone cinema after, say, 1980 - even though it's richly well-informed on many national cinemas (especially France and Italy) before that point. This last point, I think, also potentially undermines DT's characteristic pessimism about film - who says it's become worse in Japan, Iran or Brazil?

But it's a book no one else could have written; a narrative history enjoyable on every page; a pile of facts from which I've learned much; a prompt to watch more and more films; a personal vision, critique and elegy as usual. By the end, as he rises to new heights, it feels like a masterpiece, like one of the great books written about the arts. It feels like a last testament, a valediction - from someone who wasn't actually ready to sign off yet at all, and quickly wrote about six more books that I haven't begun to read yet.

i reread children of men prompted by gyac upthread and, while i don't agree with the criticism that theo is a cipher for pd james's own opinions about pop culture, the film is indeed better in every possible way. a hugely improved plot! interested to see that cuaron refused to read the book while he was revising the screenplay.

i also read on immunity by eula biss, which was beautiful and sensitive and funny and all that good stuff. it's not science writing, but it's better writing about science than i've read for a long time.

i am now reading https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39971023-white-kids which is pretty light going as a sociology text and in terms of jargon about spaces and problematizing and interrogation etc., which is good, but it's an intense read because we're reading it because it's decision time for my family and schools and honestly what a hugely fucked up situation. i'll probably post more about this and other books on the privilege thread i guess.

i have read 60 books so far this year. i read 33 books all of last year.

By way of contrast, my reading life was badly bogged down all spring. I have read 31 books so far this year, putting me on pace for a rather mediocre mid-40s number of books read by year's end.

The narrator is a man born in the late 20th Century who just happens to have the waspish prejudices of someone in their 70s in 1992. Those confounded noisy Beatles and their new-fangled rock music!

It's 24 years since I read Children of Men but even as a teenager this annoyed me about the narrator. Also I vividly remember a scene in which they lapse into a reverie brought about by an episode of Neighbours appearing on TV, including moaning about the theme tune. IIRC that didn't make the Cuaron adaptation.

The only lassitude I feel concerns my film watching. I've read about 35 books since March.

no childcare and no subway commute has robbed me of almost all my reading time. sometimes i can beat the toddler up and get 40 minutes in, and sometimes naptime and a lull in working-from-home coincide. i've finished fewer than 10 books since all this began. i don't know how you do it caek.

thank u to this thread for hipping me to olivia laing's crudo.

Audiobooks and a newborn.

And (v important): wireless earbuds.

I've read 20, which already beats my pathetic count from last year. My rate is increasing now that half my reading is trashy fantasy. I could get through fifteen fantasy books in the time it took to read War and Peace.

I’ve had a good reading year - I reckon I’m at about 50 books though I am v bad at judging this - with the exception of April and May, when I was locked down and thought I would read a shitload but in a weird version of “time enough at last” found myself unable to do anything except watch trash and shitpost on certain messaging apps. I started reading loads again as soon as I had no time to do it lol (also for some reason I now struggle to make myself watch anything after work - I just want to listen to music and do a bit of reading)

xps: crudo (and laing’s new one) are in my queue. I remember ilb was decidedly cool on the lonely city and I was determined to be into it; I did end up liking it but did feel it didn’t quite add up somehow

The Biss was the second consecutive book I read that cited the silent spring as a key reference point (the preceding book being the three body problem) and then it was added to my library’s ebook collection so I guess I have to read it soon

Wait, what new one?

it's an essay collection called funny weather. it has an attractive design.

I loved crudo. I didn’t love the lonely city as much. the personal bits were better than the art history and criticism. funny weather is in my queue.

Just added Eula biss’s new one “having and being had” (about capitalism apparently) to my queue too.

Goodreads is an unbelievably badly done website but it’s where I keep my list. Please add me I’m so lonely.

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/80167070-mike

I'm https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/55905-james

haha, not an Emily Brontë fan, caek?

Ha I think I posted about that here. Really lost my rag with that one.

I've followed you both!

I've given up on anything heavy and have picked up Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. It's grim, and everyone involved is an arsehole of one kind or another, but it's kinda compelling.

Deleted my goodreads some months ago in a "fuck Bezos" fit and now I've got fomo :(

I have a gr account but I never use it and have never really got anything out of it, and I could def stand to have less bezos in my life so it seems a good place to start. I got a really basic bookshelf app to note what I’ve been reading (with a ui as bad as gr) and I’ve been occasionally posting pictures of books on Instagram (tho I am still needing an equivalent of ilxor neechy’s turntable Dennis the menace) which along with lurking & sometimes posting here is probably all the readerly social network I need

I used to keep a 'reading diary' that just listed a date and where I was when I read the book - I've got details going back to 1999. I use GoodReads for this now. It's a pretty ordinary site but it does a job.

goodreads is terrible site-wise, yes. navigating back from a page, on app or web, appears to do the entire previous (slow) request again. some of the alternate apps are better but i think the server-side code is a limiting factor.

it honestly looks like no one has touched the code for 15 years. but it's quick to add things to my list, and i like getting a little alert when someone i follow starts a new book.

I am: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/27469265-jer-fairall

Rarely updated these days, as I'm mostly re-reading and reading articles/individual chapters of academic books as I write my dissertation. But I'll follow anyone who posts their links here.

the only good social network is inaturalist, but goodreads is one of the less bad ones.

Now reading a bit of Wodehouse insanity, Uncle Fred in the Springtime, with a plot so convoluted it could not be summarized in fewer than 20 closely-spaced pages.

Lurev it, rec'd it a couple times on prev WAYRs: Uncle Fred is truly to the manor born, but/and truly means to help---something like a funhouse Jeeves...

Lurv it, that is.

I publish my list at the end of every year. Here's my 2019: https://tedreeswords.com/2020/01/01/books-read-2019/

But keep in mind that I was on a light teaching load and never went out.

There's also an ILB thread for year-end reading lists every year. Here's last year's: What did you read in 2019?

Thanks Aimless! Tbh I only started looking at this board upon my most recent return to ILX.

It's a fine little corner of ILX. Very soothing compared to the other boards. Opinions abound here but any controversies are served unheated.

Agreed.

I've really struggled with picking up something that sticks with me recently. Had a failed run at Murnane's The Plains, which felt like one big joke that went on too long, with not a lot grounding it in actual humanity. Was initially thrilled with, but quickly bored by, Gombrowicz' Diaries. Saw Drifts by Kate Zambreno getting discussed a bit, and thought it sounded interesting. Was definitely a nice balm, very readable, and has helped me get out of the rut I was in. I enjoy most of the stuff marketed as autofiction, and I think this one nicely captures a sense of the distractedness of modern life, of the struggle to pay attention and get something done, but still finding moments of joy within it all: from art, relationships, animals (Especially animals. She really loves her dog to a degree that is alien to me as a non-pet lover). Contains meditations on some of my own favourite writers like Walser, Sebald, Kafka, but she is mainly preoccupied by the life of Rilke, a writer I've always found it hard to connect with. Introduced me to the work of Durer. Takes digs at Knausgaard and Lerner for the way they approach their work, but is trying to do basically the same thing as they do. Is she as successful as them? For me, less than Knausgaard, about the same as Lerner.

I reread John Gross's JAMES JOYCE (1970), the first book on Joyce I ever read and, I realise, probably a crucial book in setting my literary interests for life - even though the book is no hagiography.

A brief skim of life and work, it's superbly readable - a model of how to 'introduce' something in prose so smooth that the reader hardly notices it's there. The life is narrated with terrific succinctness, and accuracy. Many of the judgments are fair, and I found literally no errors of fact that I can recall.

It does make more of Ulysses being a maze of allusions and myths than I would, or many might do now - this seems to me rather a false problem. Most of what's in Ulysses can be deciphered quite straightforwardly, when 'decipher' is even the word. It's also unusually harsh on the character of Molly Bloom. (There were 18 of these Modern Masters volumes at the time, all about male figures, and all by male authors.)

The oddest thing about the book is that it almost never quotes Joyce's actual work at all. I wonder if this was for copyright reasons, or Gross just thought he could paraphrase it all more briskly. He does it very well, but with this of all authors it might be relevant to see the actual words on the page.

Triggercut, I'd try the plains again when or if yr ever in the mood for a book about what it means to be an artist. In the end, it is a book that is one long, weird allegory, that has some really interesting bits in it...

But then again, we could just have differing taste, as I find Zambreno totally unreadable! Lol

I want to like Murnane so badly because a) I find him a really interesting figure, and b) as an Australian I have massive cultural cringe when it comes to literature. He's one of the few prominent Australian writers who seems to owe a lot to Modernism, and feels totally seperate from the bland Winton-core peddled by most Australian writers. So I appreciate him for that, but have found it difficult to connect with his work.

I got a fair way through his Collected Stories about a year or so ago, and liked it okay, but I didn't feel much, besides being a little alienated. For The Plains, I found the bits about the rival artistic movements amusing, and enjoyed the idea the scenes involving the artists clamouring for patronage from the completely pissed landowners. I got up to the part where the filmmaker gets to the landowner's estate and that's where it lost me. I get that it's allegorical, but I couldn't really feel much, or connect the world or people he was talking about to any reality. But that's on me, I guess. This has been a weird year, so I notice that I'm frustrated by the stuff that actually challenges me, and am enjoying the stuff that soothes me. I'm sure I'll give it another go eventually.

Aus is a blind spot for me too, tbh. Other than Murnane and some Aboriginal poets like Lionel Fogarty, I'm at a loss!

(Then again, I'm from the US and live here still, so that I know anything about Australian lit at all is somewhat of an achievement, I guess!)

Also, tho, I do think that one has to sort of be in a very specific mindset to really dive into Murnane. I just happened to approach him at the right time of my life!

Yall have me trying to think of---somebody---whose life work, as described in contextualizing of a collection, I inferred as ummmmm---maybe like Alice Munro, that kind of discipline, but also with more of a sense of personal experience, what she and/or other women have come to at this point, and what they make of it, in her view. Does that ring a bell---? Damn I can almost see her name.

I am now reading Picture a long form journalistic piece by Lillian Ross profiling John Huston as he attempts to film a script of The Red Badge of Courage. It was originally published as a serial in the New Yorker in 1952. This is a NYRB reprint edition I checked out of the local public library.

Sorry, I can't help with the author name, dow.

Should have specified that I was trying to think of an Australian short story specialist's name (though she may have also written a novel or two). Somebody still active, at least 'til recently.

Somebody well into middle age, or older.

Helen Garner?

Listening: Just started John Crowley's AEgypt. I struggle with Crowley. I've started both Little, Big and Engine Summer. The first was impenetrable, the second maybe a little easier on the brain.

I love all three of those, will reread them someday, but you inspired me to read Beasts which was also great, and basically takes Wittengtstein quote "If a lion could speak we could not understand him" as its starting point. Now to get hold of his book about intelligent crows. We have a John Crowley thread btw: Tell Me About John Crowley

Maria Gabriela Llansol - The Geography of Rebels
Janet Malcolm - The Silent Woman

Probably this year's most challenging read, not that it was difficult to read, more around getting hold of a writer's voice and where its coming from. The book seems to involve a series of tableaux involving a cast of characters drawn from the medieval all the way up to Nietzsche. They share a space in a commune-like manner, and all that comes with it - mostly thoughts, some around the practice of writing, in her obituary you get some of her own personal history.

An interesting writer except it will need more translations and multiple reads.

No problems as such with Malcolm's book on Plath. Like the poems, read Bell Jar and love Letters Home. It was good to live with this material and knowing the (boring, like so much of the literary scene) controversy before reading this book. Its a biography within a biography as Malcolm details the culture industry surrounding Plath and Hughes, where she goes after the biographers. She says she comes down on the side of Hughes (I think this is more out of the sense of the way he has been treated by biographers), but she details enough of all sides, for the most part. I think it lacks is a bit more detail on Assia Wevill (the woman Hughes left Plath for), as a counter balance to the detail on Plath's main boyfriend before Hughes came along. Plath disparages the previous boyfriend as not enough of a hunk; otoh Wevill was a beauty in the way Plath was not (Malcolm says this in one line but leaves it)). There is tabloidy level stuff that Malcolm often gets at but doesn't go on with, which you can be also thankful for. The story is as balanced as its going to get, but I can see how it could never be the final word. Although it is for me. What makes the book are the asides on the nature of writing, biography, journalism, stories and memory, so you learn things too, rather than just interviews with mostly terrible people.

Count me as someone who loves Murnane. Like tiggercut, some of the set pieces in The Plains left something to be desired, but the writing is so so good I ended up not caring. He is probably the only (maybe Anne Carson) writer in English that I'd like to win the Nobel (I get the sense Australians would be trolled by this, but its mostly because he is one of the few writers writing in English that aren't embarrassing). Really look forward to picking up a couple more books that have been published/re-issued over here in the last year or so.

I enjoy most of the stuff marketed as autofiction, and I think this one nicely captures a sense of the distractedness of modern life, of the struggle to pay attention and get something done, but still finding moments of joy within it all: from art, relationships, animals (Especially animals. She really loves her dog to a degree that is alien to me as a non-pet lover). Contains meditations on some of my own favourite writers like Walser, Sebald, Kafka, but she is mainly preoccupied by the life of Rilke, a writer I've always found it hard to connect with. Introduced me to the work of Durer.

I like this but I am really trying to avoid writers talking about other writers. Seems lazy, plus I think I am getting to a stage where I've read as much as the writer so any thoughts on it might rub me up the wrong way too (I've read a ton of Rilke, and all of those other people).

I've finally started on a book I've owned for years and never read: C.P. Curran, JAMES JOYCE REMEMBERED (1968). Despite having read a lot about Joyce over the years, I've been curiously neglectful of the genre of 'the Joyce I knew'. Well, I know Budgen, Gilbert (x2), Power - but I never read Curran, Colum or even, in truth, the brother.

It's fascinating, actually, to get this almost first-hand account. The detail of what Joyce really read at university, the way he talked, etc. Glad to be on this book now.

Helen Garner?
Sounds right, thanks triggercut! Think this is what I read:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/12/helen-garners-savage-self-scrutiny

one of the few writers writing in English that aren't embarrassing Helluva blurb!

I read The Silent Woman when The New Yorker published a long excerpt in the summer of '93; it haunted me. I love her Chekhov and Stein studies, but this one might be her best.

The meeting between Malcolm and Jacqueline Rose in The Silent Woman is p electrifying!

The Silent Woman is really great. In my memory it's a huge book: it fits so much into what is a pretty slim volume. Her book on psychoanalysis is fantastic.

oh wow -- she's in trouble today!

Re: Murnane, I read The Plains when I had a couple hours to kill in a library, and found it quite hypnotic and oddly funny, but I don’t really know what I took away from it. His story “Finger Web” still gives me chills, though - his weird stylistic tics, refusal to name characters, etc, have this kind of distancing effect even as the sense builds that something bad is going on, and then the last few paragraphs reveal the full horror of what he’s writing about. Very insidiously disturbing story, I recommend it!

I just finished reading Chaos, by Tom O’Neill, his unnerving book from last year on the Manson case, the various possible conspiracies surrounding it, and the author’s own tendency to get lost in this labyrinth of contradictions and impossible-to-prove theories. Inevitably frustrating but still worth reading. Vincent Bugliosi sure seems to be a terrible person!

I find Zambreno totally unreadable!

let it be known that table and i are the same person, i am a table sock, etc.

i am the table

Lol Brad.

I am to finish Mark Francis Johnson's Sham Refugia today, and then will spend the rest of the day preparing for the workshop I facilitate tonight...which means reading excerpts from a number of poets, plus poems from three workshop participants. Tuesdays are packed!

Virtual, flesh, both?

(None of the above?)(like a message board, then?)

It's a Virtual thing. I started running them this past summer. Participants from all over the country! I'm running two this fall and both are already full.

i reread (with a 15 year interval) room temperature by nicholson baker. it lands differently now i'm a father, but it has not aged well objectively. i remember liking mezzanine more, so i'm going to reread that at some point this month too.

i'm now reading the unconsoled by kazuo ishiguro. about 1/4 the way through. it captures the maddening logic of a dream well. there's a bit with a piano performance that reminded me very strongly of the coffee tasting scene in mulholland drive. not sure if it's going to be interesting after 300 more pages.

but i'm not sure that interesting enough to sustain 500 pages. i guess we'll see.

The meeting between Malcolm and Jacqueline Rose in The Silent Woman is p electrifying!

― Ward Fowler, Tuesday, 8 September 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Yes but I also love how, a mere 20 pages later, she is sitting in with Thomas.

Started Joyelle McSweeney's 'Toxicon & Arachne' this morning since I'm on a poetry jag. My feeling toward the book is pretty neutral, at this point-- like many poets with tenured jobs, the sociopolitical commentary in the work is a little too obvious and overdone to really make much of an impact on anyone whose read Language, KSW, or other associated movements. In other words, where it wants to be strident, it feels tame.

But seeing as how the second part of the book was written in the immediate aftermath of the death of her newborn and is supposed to be shockingly bracing, I'm going to stick with it.

As is often the case, I was sent this as a bonus with a book that the publisher thought I'd like to review...and that latter book turns out to be wholly unimpressive, imho, and this one more interesting.

I finished Curran's JAMES JOYCE REMEMBERED. Tremendous details in this book. I have Herbert Gorman's biography here, really ought to read that.

i'm now reading the unconsoled by kazuo ishiguro. about 1/4 the way through. it captures the maddening logic of a dream well. there's a bit with a piano performance that reminded me very strongly of the coffee tasting scene in mulholland drive. not sure if it's going to be interesting after 300 more pages.

i could almost wish it were twice as long. what sustains it imo is the use it puts this dream logic to - dissecting in agonising detail the quotidian agonies, anxieties, frustrations, and heartbreaks of human life (sounds amazing, sign me up!), leavened with a surreal humour that wouldn't be available in a more conventional narrative.

That McSweeney book I mentioned above doesn't get much better, sadly.

It makes me wonder sometimes how such mediocre talents get these fancy jobs, but alas, I guess I will be wondering such for the rest of my life. Or until I, a mediocre talent, get a fancy job.

10 years late to the party but I read A Visit from the Goon Squad last week. I think I would have enjoyed it a lot less if I had tried to read it before the pandemic: even when I didn't sympathize with the characters (which was often, because they're all pathological New Yorkers) I was willing to keep reading and allow the interesting things happening around them to distract me from the four walls closing in around my cat and me.

I then moved on to Nell Zink's The Wallcreeper, which I'm already nearly done with. Not sure there's enough plot and character development to keep the novel from dragging in places, but DANG! she can write. I can't remember the last book I read with such a high laughs-per-page ratio -- and the pages are small, so that's saying something!

Started Gravity’s Rainbow. Made it through 80 pages in college, then 300 pages in law school. This time I’m going all the way.

― Mazzy Tsar (PBKR), Thursday, March 28, 2019 11:24 AM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

Just this morning I finally finished after about 18 months of reading. Good god. So many questions; can someone explain it all to me? Why does Slothrop fade away in the last quarter of the book? Why the digressions to 1970 (is this to show a post-Rocket world living under fear of annihilation?)?

The Pökler chapter might be the most moving passage. The writing near the end is also very beautiful. More thoughts to come.

My mother gave me two copies of Going Squad in back to back years. One was signed. Both were put on the curb without being read, though that's probably for the Authors You Will Never Read thread.

Xpost I enjoyed some of GR too, and could see how it was an (over-) extension of prev. perceived agenda in earlier stuff, which I preferred. Don't try too hard with it, like he did (yeah, I'm that one guy). Some people say none of his subsequent works are as Great, so maybe I'll try some of those too.

I did subject Tremor of Intent to the totally unfair Random Read Test, and the words seemed to squirm with self-consciousness, but maybe I'll try again---the movie, at least: can see how he and Paul Thomas Anderson and Joaquin Phoenix might be kindred spirits, in a good way).

Other Zink books are such a disappointment after Wallcreeper, sadly.

Ciaran Carson - The Star Factory

Poet's prose. Full of words (you feel their materiality), a pile of digressions, reflections and experience. I'll check but I think Mandelstam does something similar in Journey to Armenia, except Belfast is where Carson has grown-up and lived. I think quotes about Belfast from other sources Carson picks up do at times detract a bit, just cutting him off when he is at his (and our) best. But that's a minor complaint in a great, great find.

just started Too Much & Never Enough the Mary Trump book and am a couple of chapters in.
Hadn't realised she was a clinical psychologist, just knew she was a niece.
She's going over the childhood influences on why he may be behaving the way he does.
NOt very long so will finish this before long i hope.
Seemed to be one of the books on the subject that might be better tahn others and add some insight.
I have soem o the others elsewhere that never moved down the to be read list

Robert Draper - To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq
Muriel Spark - Reality and Dreams
Robert Browning - The Ring and the Book

Norma Cole- Spinoza in Her Youth

Cole never fails to astound.

xxxp just reminded me I have his translation of The Táin on my bookshelf, I must read it. He was a Gaeilgeoir as well I think, fairly uncommon in the North.

Nice, want to read his version of Inferno next.

Someone - was it o.nate? - praised Jean Stafford's THE MOUNTAIN LION on here.

Last night I read this LRB review of Stafford:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n12/tessa-hadley/and-he-drowned-the-cat

Wole Soyinka Death and The King's Horseman.
Interesting play set in colonial Nigeria.
Shows a lot of racism and arrogant assumptions made by white colonial authorities. Reading it for a theatre group which should be interesting.

The Mountain Lion is terrific. The Catherine Wheel was the first novel I read under quarantine.

wondering where to ask about the book 1491 by Charles C Mann.
Are there major differences between editions, different years and different territories or anything.
Or is teh 2006 UK on going to be as good as the more recent US Update? & if so are they significant?

Robert Musil - Posthumous Papers of a Living Author
Stanislaw Lem - Highcastle A Remembrance

Lem's novella sized essay on his growing up in pre-war Poland among French novels and made up schemes was fine enough, in some ways his struggle with Proust points to why this doesn't endure. Not that Lem wanted this series of recollections to be anything more.

The Musil is again, a minor collections of sketches and fragments that, when framed in his best writing, take on another dimension entirely. Its interesting how fascinating and annoyed he was by psychoanalysis, but he needs length to explore.

I am reading some R.K. Narayan, The Bachelor of Arts. His tales are always both human and gentle, which qualities are good for my mental state atm.

xxxp don't remember The Catherine Wheel very well, but seems to be regarded as a letdown after Boston Adventure and The Mountain Lion, both of which i thought were outstanding. Ditto what I've read of Collected Stories, gotta get back to that.

Next April, Library of America will follow their Collected Novels with a volume of collected and uncollected stories, essays, and the somewhat notorious A Mother In History, from time spent w Marguerite Oswald. Stafford is in my literary punk pantheon, along with Flannery O'Connor and Kelly Link.

Someone - was it o.nate? - praised Jean Stafford's THE MOUNTAIN LION on here.

It wasn't me - this is the first I've heard of it, but it does sound like an interesting book. I just finished Song of the Lark by Willa Cather. It's a more interesting tale of the development of an ambitious young artist than Dr Faustus, which I abandoned earlier this year. It's a big canvas novel, in terms of settings, character development, and the range of time it covers, although the cast of characters remains fairly small and focused around the main character of Thea Kronborg. I guess it's on the cusp of the 19th and 20th century novel (it was published in 1915). The scenes of small--town, frontier Colorado are particularly memorable, and the development of the main character through childhood, adolescence and maturity is psychologically perceptive. I found it quite enjoyable. Now I'm reading a collection of 2 novellas by Natalia Ginzburg Valentino and Sagittarius.

he scenes of small--town, frontier Colorado are particularly memorable, and the development of the main character through childhood, adolescence and maturity is psychologically perceptive. The central character of The Mountain Lion, some shorter works, and Stafford herself came out of that setting, maybe more and certainly to an extent differently influenced by the remoteness and the terrain and the times than some other characters.

Cather's The Professor's House, which I went on about upthread, unless it was
the previous WAYR, is---not just like The Song of the Lark, but compatible.

"Stafford is in my literary punk pantheon, along with Flannery O'Connor and Kelly Link."

I find that interesting, Dow! Have read about Link, but not actually read the work.

I can't praise Cather enough.

She's amazing. Come to think of it, now I'm wondering if The Heart is a Lonely Hunter came in part from absorbing My Antonia and O Pioneers!---recurring characters through the years, in and out of the foreground, but w a sense of axis pov, of protagonist and/or author---and later Cather, like The Professor's House, following a more interior somewhat vs. exterior line of development---could apply also from going to The Heart... to Member of the Wedding and some of McCuller's shorter fiction.

xpost Pinefox, maybe start with Link's latest collection, Get In Trouble.
Others in the pantheon: Highsmith, Tiptree, maybe Jane Bowles, Plath---oh, and what I know of Anna Akhmatova, in the translations of Babette Deutsch and Lyn Coffin, set to music by Iris DeMent, on The Trackless Woods. But mainly punks on the page. that's about it. Standards are very strict.

Haven't read enough Cather. I teach "Paul's Case" quite often, and many students hate it, to my utmost horror. I think it's brilliant!

At the moment toggling between poetry and philosophy, a practice I had earlier in the pandemic but gave up as the heat got to my brain. Diving back in:

Carlos Lara- Like Bismuth When I Enter= a protege of LA-based Surrealist Black experimentalist Will Alexander, Lara's work is clearly in the mold of Alexander's, but parts from Alexander's in interesting ways, most notably in the length and momentum of Lara's line— long, propulsive, and dense, rather than more ponderous and porphyric, as Alexander's tend to be. At first I was unable to detect as much "political" content in the work, but as I move forward, more themes seem to emerge, and I'm finding myself excited by it in ways that I wasn't when I first began.

Jean-Luc Nancy- Being Singular Plural= I love what little I've read of Nancy, and this is no exception. Only about 20 pages in, but totally invested in his thought.

Replace Hemingway with Cather on the middle school canon imo

I love what little I've read of Nancy, and this is no exception.

Make sure you read Expectation, which collects many of his most important writings on literature over several decades. The Literary Absolute (with the late Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe) is also a classic, if you care about Early German Romanticism.

I praised The Mountain Lion! It was good and sad and challenging. I would never want to meet the author.

I put a hold on it at my library. I want to see what all the fuss is about.

i finished the unconsoled. it was exactly like having someone describe a dream to me, which is not a good thing imo.

golden gates - somewhat gossipy journalistic book about the rise of yimbyism the housing crisis, and local politics in the bay area. good writing and analysis as far as it goes, but the focus (and sympathies) are clearly on the yimby side of a ~five-sided debate.

now reading riddley walker (slow going because i'm reading it and my brain is mush, but it seems great) and listening to the right stuff (obviously interesting subject matter, but oy vey tom wolfe prose).

James Acaster, Perfect Sound Whatever

caek, you might like the screen version, minus Wolfe prose, but, like the book at its best, w Wild Blue Yonder sardonic plot shading, esp. later on---won't spoil.
Alfred, which Hemingway would you suggest for middle school? We had to read The Old Man and The Sea, among shorties by various authors, but did seem tedious at times. My copy was inscribed by a previous reader: "I hate the old man. Get him, sea!"

I read The Sun Also Rises in eighth grade, missing nuance, of course, but it was intelligible. The short stories too.

Yeah, I got to the short stories in ninth grade: I had a sense of missing something, but 'ppreciated that he wasn't taking pains to explain each and every thing, like most of my teachers and other grown-ups. The stories were intriguing, evocative--- despite early-teen concerns, don't remember picking up on the anxieties behind detailed descriptions, ditto even/especially some of the good times in the Great Outdoors---but I hadn't gotten to the war stories yet, the way they kept turning up in the midst of a big collection, when I came back to him much later.
In several ways, he seems to have been his own worst enemy--incl.proud displays of shittiness re his American friends in A Movable Feast---but the stories are still worth reading (never have tried the novels).

Raymond Chandler - Playback
Jacques Ellul - The Technological Society

Loved him for a bit in 8th-9th grade...now, not so much. For Whom The Bell Tolls is his best novel, imho, and 'Hills' his best story by a mile.

cather is the freaking best, even her lesser novels are singular experiences. i read o pioneers! last year-ish and it quickly became my favorite; also love death comes for the archbishop especially the hallucinatory shimmer that her descriptions of the desert give off

wow i also read the sun also rises in eighth grade alfred

i reread it in college and don't think i'll get much more out of it or hemingway himself. he was great with dialogue. there is a sadness always aching in the space he left in his sentences. idk maybe i should give for whom the bell tolls a shot one day

not to steer the conversation toward fitzgerald, also they were fundamentally very different writers, but i go back to fitzgerald way more bc i have a very different experience with his work every time i revisit it, there's a denseness and a richness of perspective always at play, especially in tender is the night (but even in the novels i think sorta suck like beautiful and damned)

I've always had a fairly blank reaction to Hemingway. In a way, my favourite of his, despite it being fairly demented, is A Moveable Feast. Fitzgerald is more nourishing.

I only read my first Cather this year (O Pioneers!) and it continues to bloom in my imagination. It shares much of the Hemingway ethic of 'what should I leave out?' but her work bleeds in a way Hemingway could only claw at. O Pioneers! feels like an epic; it's astonishing that it's only 100-odd pages.

not to steer the conversation toward fitzgerald, also they were fundamentally very different writers, but i go back to fitzgerald way more bc i have a very different experience with his work every time i revisit it, there's a denseness and a richness of perspective always at play, especially in tender is the night (but even in the novels i think sorta suck like beautiful and damned)

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson)

otm -- Fitzgerald's stories are lodestars for me. Like Hemingway, he's a storywriter in essence marooned as a novelist; their work often collapses into gleaming fragments, though The Great Gatsby is a perfect novel for those who care about such things -- the culmination of the Conrad method.

I wish more anthologies included stories besides goddamn "Winter Dreams" (e.g. "The Bridal Party," "One Trip Abroad").

How do people feel about The Crack Up or even “The Crack Up”?

Sorry, The Crack-Up or “The Crack-Up”

A Movable Feast is painterly and entertaining, though many of the hooks are shithooks. Did like the description of Wyndham Lewis as having "the eyes of a disappointed rapist," though might like it less if I were more familiar with Lewis.

there's a denseness and a richness of perspective always at play,
That's in my reading or Fitzgerald too, and you can get to it in unexpected ways, like in The Last Tycoon there's a ride down the Southern California Coast, with glimpses of the ecological problems to come, aggravated by construction---the kind of thing that he and his characters wouldn't live to see, not nearly the big time. Come to think of it, this may also tie in some way with Stahr's unfinished dream house.

My sister wrote a grad paper on The Crack Up of Crack-Up, with acerbically self-observant quotes, but I haven't read the whole thing. The Pat Conroy stories are otm, wryly and maybe ryely based on later Fitz, incl. Did you hear about Pat dropping dead in the studio cafeteria, oops.

Crack Up *or* Crack-Up

There's more self-pity in The Crack-Up than I want to read, and he's not rigorous a thinker enough to sustain the concept.

I'm so excited to still have a stack of unread Cather to go through after reading a few earlier this year. Death Comes for the Archbishop is probably next up.

Right now I'm reading my first P.G. Wodehouse (The Inimitable Jeeves), it's pretty good. I can see myself blowing through a bunch of these pretty quickly.

There's more self-pity in The Crack-Up than I want to read, and he's not rigorous a thinker enough to sustain the concept.

Uh, Pat *Hobby*, that is: perfect name, and apologies to the talented Mr. Conroy, also RIP.

i always enjoy a good story of someone fucking up in Hollywood screenwriting, and the Pat Hobby stories are brilliant.

I did read a load of Fitzgerald stories in the past so for once I've not been left behind here.

I don't think THE SUN ALSO RISES is very good at all.

I like the way we have a swell of intrigue about THE MOUNTAIN LION !

How's Riddley Walker going, caek?

My wife just read I'm Still Here, Austin Channing Brown, which she borrowed from a friend. Now I'm reading it.

I've started reading: B.S. Johnson, CAN I COME IN AND TALK ABOUT THESE AND OTHER IDEAS?

It's a slim collection of facsimiles of his proposals that weren't used by the BBC and publishers.

If you like BSJ, you might enjoy it.

It includes, in mildly Half Pint Press fashion, a postcard which is also a fascimile of something that BSJ wrote.

http://texteundtone.com/

I have various BS Johnson things around the house, none of which I've read. I need to sort that. Is the Coe biography the/a place to start?

I finished Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (first book I've actually finished in about six weeks). It was lurid and ugly and sad: so many shattered lives, so much bullshit.

As I'm listening to so much ambient stuff at the moment, I've picked up David Toop's Ocean of Sound again. Three pages of reading and I was sucked right back in. I need to read some of his later books.

Biskind is as much a misogynist as the directors he reveres.

I was about to ask about that, I’ve been put off reading that book for this reason

He takes as much delight, for example, as those he-men directors in taking Pauline Kael down a peg in the basest of terms.

Biskind is vile about Kael and is nakedly voyeuristic about any number of the female actors and (to him) bit-part players he profiles. It plays as a dispassionate, objective look at the 70s but really, he's way too invested in the lurid details and clearly revels in it.

Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983 is exactly like the continuation of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire I wanted it to be. Thanks to table (I think) for the recommendation.

How's Riddley Walker going, caek?

I think it was me! Such a good book, Lawrence is a great writer.

You guys otm about Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. I enjoyed it at the time but in retrospect feel unclean.

Diarmid Ferriter: A NATION NOT A RABBLE.

Odder than I thought. It doesn't announce a very clear argument or theme; it has a very odd structure, much of which is about retrospects on the revolution; it has very short chapters, about some of which I wonder if they came from newspaper articles.

I was the one who carried on so much about Lawrence's books, but no doubt the table knows like the Shadow knows, as always!

Also, you can stream all of a listening companion for one of the books: https://reappearingrecords.bandcamp.com/album/life-death-on-a-new-york-dance-floor-1980-1983 and a few more freebies from Love Saves The Day, I've got 'em both on double CD sets as well, so far seems like Life and Death is a bit more consistent, but both are amazing, with Lawrence's notes providing even more context.

By gum, this thread's natural lifespan of one season will be up in a couple of days.

After struggling with reading maybe three pages of Gravity's Rainbow a night for so long, I am really, really enjoying knocking out 10-20 pages of the Lawrence book at a clip with no stress.

When I get the chance I plan on putting together a playlist of all the discographies Lawrence includes in Life and Death.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4fNpY29kDNLfEjdPi58jOH

(Not trying to burst bubble, just pointing it out!)

No bubbles bursted! I'm lazy, so thanks.

Finished my chronological Penelope Fitzgerald run-through with The Blue Flower — still to read: The Golden Child, Means of Escape, the non-fiction.

The middle run of four, from Human Voices to Beginning of Spring, is as great a sequence of novels as I can think of. Gate of Angels was the only dud for me; Blue Flower is remarkable but maybe overrated — somehow easy-to-read but colossally dense and difficult at the same time — I felt like I was never finishing it.

Funny that the last four books are all variations on “smart woman meets clod”

Have you heard about her husband?

You may well not need it as a guide through her writing life and novels, but might anyway enjoy Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, Hermoine Lee's Plutarch Award-winning bio: very dense, always clear, moving right along, as far as I read---got hooked, kept me up all night--before giving it to my auntie, along with PF's own bio of her father and uncles, The Knox Brothers. Lee tells some more stuff about them and later generations, without getting lurid (again, far as I read)
The most poignant passage that I came across: an early review by an always respectfully candid reviewer of her work, Frank Kermode, seemed to indicate that (in my interpretation) that she *may* (it wasn't a big dramatic review) have finally hit a wall in her abilities---forget which novel; certainly not the last. Think the main concern, as reported, was how this would affect sales/influence other reviews, since Kermode had cred.

Heh, yeah her xpost husb@nd was some kind of influence I think.

Has anyone read pillars of the earth? On a historical fiction scale from wolf hall at the literary end to like Tom Clancy but with monks at the other, where is it?

Related to the Cather novel I just finished, I was reading Jed Perl's review of Alex Ross's new book on Wagnerism in the NY Review of Books and came across this:

Ross aims to demonstrate that the novels of Willa Cather, to whom he devotes an entire chapter, exude a Wagnerian spirit. There's a good deal of evidence that might support this view. In her youth in Nebraska, Cather studied piano with a man whose father, also a musician, had been a strong supporter of Wagner and conducted a number of the operas in Germany in the 1850s. Much later, in New York, she was friends with a well-known Wagnerian soprana, Olive Fremstad. Cather knew and admired the operas. In _The Song of the Lark_ and other works, she wrote brilliantly about the women who sang the great operatic roles. Even fairly casual readers of Cather will remember that one of her finest stories is entitled "A Wagner Matinee".

It continues in that vein for another paragraph.

I'm reading Death Comes for the Archbishop again, and I'll repeat: let's replace Hemingway in the canon w/Cather.

I still need to read that.
PBKR, you might also like The Disco Files, Vince Aletti's Billboard column of that name, and some related writing: as it happened, with his vivid mini-reviews, also reports and playlists from many places, week by week, from peak to peak (Lawrence will tell you about the decline, but Aletti was gone by then, having jumped to A&R, then back to writing about music and photography for the Voice etc.).

I just finished I'm Still Here, Austin Channing Brown. It's a remarkable little book mainly for the simplicity and directness with which she bears witness to her experience of being Black in the USA and her experience of what whiteness looks like from the receiving end.

She brings an excellent mix of passion and clarity to page after page. Even if it teaches you nothing you didn't know, it is heartening to see someone laying it all out in language so clear no one could misunderstand the message or its import. It achieves a sort of minor greatness, just by constantly and humbly aiming for the good.

I recommend it to ILB, just because it was written in a way to reach the widest possible audience and will do the most good the more broadly it is recognized and read.

I started an new What Are You Reading thread: Autumn 2020: Is Everything Getting Dimmer or Is It Just Me?