Bonfires In The Sky: What Are You Reading, Winter 2021-22?

AKA The Void Whisperer

Previous WAYR thread: Now the year is turning and the eeriness comes: what are you reading in autumn 2021?

Discussions worth continuing (yall paste some too)
I just read it for the first time in my forties, but was bowled over Harriet the Spy, and by how honest and funny and original it was.

― Chuck_Tatum, Thursday, October 21, 2021
The Gossip Girl books are similar - clear-eyed, observant, funny, merciless - they’re the sort of books Harriet the Spy might have grown up to write. The series is more like Dynasty for teens, although like S&TC, it’s enjoyable in its own way.

(Also to tie it in with Janet Malcolm, who wrote a fun column in the New Yorker in praise of the GG books.)

― Chuck_Tatum, Monday, November 8, 2021
Finished Louise Fitzhugh's The Long Secret (as discussed on the literary treats thread) and pleased to discover it's just as goddamn wonderful as everyone said it was. Different pleasures from the first book, but just as good. I love

Foiled, Harriet stood in the middle of the group. Everyone looked down at her. She felt like a spilled drink.
Such a perceptive, funny, original writer.

― Chuck_Tatum, Wednesday, November 24, 2021

i read both harriet the spy and the long secret several years ago on alfred's recommendation and adored them both. both harriet and beth ellen are wonderful characters. i dearly wish there were more louise fitzhugh books to read!

something fitzhugh has in common with plath: both wrote novels that somehow disappeared after their deaths. fitzhugh wrote an adult novel called amelia that was rejected by a publisher and apparently got lost, and plath at least started writing two other novels besides the bell jar that haven't survived.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Wednesday, November 24, 2021

I'll go with the 'nuns' thread.

Well, y'all convinced me to go back to The Corner That Held Them so I've spent the afternoon 'with the nuns'. Turns out that after a plague has swept through, there follows labour troubles and artisans and serfs alike just won't do as they're told and realise that through united action they find their true power and well, it's all bizarrely familiar.

What I love about it is Warner's gentle ironic tone (it is she who holds them, after all) but also the seemingly effortless turn to equally gentle wisdom: There is pleasure in watching the sophistries of mankind, his decisions made and unmade like the swirls in a mill-race, causation sweeping him forward from act to act while his reason dances on the surface of action like a pattern of foam'.

That scene after the clambake where Harriet and Mr. Roque discuss the existence of God is A+. Here's how JFK-era live-and-let-live-ism plays.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, November 24, 2021

Goes w Chinaski's latest post.

Nobody's Family is Going to Change is not bad but not nearly as good as Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret. Great title though.

― Lily Dale, Thursday, December 2, 2021

Just read Harriet the Spy, didn't take to it straight away and may have stopped if i hadn't remembered a Lily Dale post that mentioned her love of this book in passing.

I'm astonished. It's not at all what I expected and though it has some thin veneer of kid lit, it's probably one of the most complex, unsettling and lifelike novels i've read. There's a ton of stuff to unpack.

I'm mainly posting this in the hope that Lily Dale might be persuaded to share any thoughts on Harriet the Spy.

― The 25 Best Songs Ever Ranked In Order (Deflatormouse), Tuesday, December 21, 2021 12:39 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

My favorite book. I read it in...sixth grade.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, December 21, 2021 4:28 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ole Golly was right. Sometimes you have to lie.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, December 21, 2021 4:28 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

It seems that I will have to read HARRIET THE SPY.

― the pinefox, Tuesday, December 21, 2021

Louise Fitzhugh taught me how to think like a writer.
https://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2021/12/21/reading-as-spying-on-the-wonder-of-harriet-the-spy/

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, December 21, 2021 4:58 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol, I also just read Harriet and The Long Secret (also prompted by the discussions on this board.) They were great. I wonder what I would have of them as a kid. They're very non-condescending.

― jmm, Tuesday, December 21, 2021

Hi Deflatormouse! It was actually The Long Secret that I posted about - I like Harriet the Spy a lot, but The Long Secret was the one I read over and over as a kid. I think what appealed to me was the sense it gave of permission - permission to be angry for no reason, permission to be outraged and in pain when you got your period, instead of wishing for it like a Judy Blume heroine, permission to not like your family very much. That last one wasn't one I had personal application for - my family was/is great. But one of the absolutely essential things about Louise Fitzhugh imo is the way she consistently says, "Hey, a lot of thoughtless, self-involved people have kids and are mediocre parents to them - not abusive, but not good, either. And if you have parents like that, they're not going to get any better, and it's okay to not like them."

― Lily Dale, Tuesday, December 21, 2021 10:07 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I prefer it too. The depiction of the gang of rich kooks descending on Water Mill, that beautiful post-clambake talk about God with her dad, the Jenkins family and their evangelism and acquisitional spirit (Fitzhugh makes the connection) -- beautiful.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, December 21, 2021 10:15

Thanks, Lily Dale. Great post! I want to read the Long Secret right away, of course, but unbelievably NYPL doesn't seem to have a single circulating copy??? I guess I'll have to buy it...

Harriet does a lot of things you wouldn't expect of a kids' book. wtf did I just read? It doesn't really have any clear point, it demands further inquiry. There's so much mirroring in it, it's practically a funhouse. Most of the characters aren't really good or bad, but the parents suck for sure and Janie Gibbs's mother is the closest thing to a Disney villainess.

Is there enough interest for a Fitzhugh thread?

The 25 Best Songs Ever Ranked In Order (Deflatormouse), Tuesday, December 21, 2021

Chinaski, glad your giving the nuns another go!

Harriet's parents come off significantly better in The Long Secret.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

Typical of Louise Fitzhugh's Tact: yeah, good example.

The only time Fitzhugh almost disappoints me in that regard is where she employs a psychiatrist (obviously where this was going) to bring the story to a swift resolution by explaining everything. But thankfully the shrink only tells us what we already knew, and mainly just reinforces the obliviousness of the parents.

― The 25 Best Songs Ever Ranked In Order (Deflatormouse), Tuesday, December 21, 2021

(I am very glad that the pinefox plans to read Harriet the Spy. I might stick to my memory of it in case anything changes. I recommended it to my brother for his daughters this Christmas.)

― youn, Tuesday, December 21, 2021

revisiting some of the books i've enjoyed this year:

deep wheel orcadia

i was surprised how well this worked. the spareness of the orkney – orkney 'supplemented by a large reserve of Scots' – seems entirely appropriate to people working at a subsistence level on the edge of void. in this space *everything* is on the edge of things, Orcadian, so to speak. the poetic lines connect only the essential elements together – people, their labour, love – so that those things feel connected to each other with no intervening matter (appropriately enough in space), and to the 'haaf' (deep space) around them. in other words people *become* their labour, in the way that subsistence labour is your life. here Olaf and Astrid out sailing/farming for Light (their income):

Thay work the park the station wis biggie
tae wirk, hint the fuel at fuels,
the oyl at owls

a interstellar system o industry,
traed, galactic expansion: Light.
Inga an Olaf is aye a kord
wi voltage differes, atmospheric
dabble, mairjins

...they work the work that the station was built to do, gathergleansnatching the fuel that fuels, the oil that oils
an interstellar system of industry, trade, galactic expansion: Light.
Inga and Olaf are always a chord with voltage differentials, atmospheric ripplesagitationconfusionchoppiness, margins.

v occasionally orkney parallels, english/scots (deep wheel orcadia/mars) and gender/youth/age politics/and the experience of youth returning home, are clumsily mapped, but for the most part the elements combine v effectively. and around and into their lenten space, the pressure of the past/future/other world is pushing in through their computer screens and machinery, and the whole is broken up into songs of the individuals and events taking place in the community.

Sheu snacks the monitors wan by wan,
fer the plant tae idle the sleepan oors.

Sheu lillilus tae her machines
her aald face in ivry gless

- but no, yin's no her face. Sheu blenks.
A karl sportan some kinno helmet

(but maed of some kinno metal? an glessless?)
is skirlan - but silent. He chairges the screen.

A flist o Light. Sheu shuts her een
but feels the sair lowe trou her lids.

But eftir a spell sheu peeks an than
thir notheen thir. Nae willan Light,

nae flegsome man. Sheu skites ootbye
an slams the doar, an waits ahint hid,

an sings a peedie bit looder, looder
as the hivy clankan an crashan inbye

at isno the weel-kent tick o the plant
mairkan hids time, but soonds instead -

no - ya - no - but -
like steel brakkan steel, a draem o a sword

She turns off the monitors one by one, for the plant to idle the sleeping hours.
She lullabies to her machines, her old face in each grey mirrorglass
- but no, that's not her face. She blinks. An older man wearing a kind of helmet
(but made of a kind of metal? and without glass?( is shrieksqualling - but silent. He charges the screen.
A rushrageboastbang of Light. She shuts her eyes but feels the harshdireoppressive flameglowflickerflare through her lids.

But after a short while she looks and then there's nothing there.
No wildwandering Light,
no terrifying man. She slidebouncesshoots outside and slams the door, and waits behind it,
and sings a little louder, louder than the heavy clanking and crashing inside
that is not the familiar tick of the plant marking time, but sounds instead -
no-yes-no-but-like steel breaking steel, a dream of a sword.

'like steel brakkan steel, a draem o a sword' shows how the lyrical is reached out of the spare functions of the space station 'tirlan in the haaf' (turntwistwhirlspinning in deep space) and the language.

The relationship between Astrid - a returning student - and Darling - a high born on the run from her family on Mars, is intimate and touching:

Than eftir, whan the cruisies brighten tae morneen,
wi Darling yet sleepan, Astrid busks an leuks
fae porthole tae bunk, fae the tide tae Darling's hair,
an speirs o the gods, at dinno exist, if
thir both fund whit thay waant, or need, or no,
or if thir maed hid, or if hid ivver matters.

Then later, when the lamps brighten to morning, with Darling still asleep, Astrid dressprepares and looks from porthole to bedbunk, from the seatimetide to Darling's hair, and asks of the gods, who do not exist, if they have both found what they want, or need, or not, or if they have created it, or if it even matters.

it does quite a lot well and is full of lovely moments - the archaeologist – english speaking, on the outside – being invited, unexpectedly, shyly, by the barman, to a festive dance at his bar:

Thir quiet a piece. He poors, sheu drinks, thay smile.
An a thowt comes tae Eynar at warms him, o somtheen
he coud share wi this bonnie aakward body.

"If thoo waants tae ken fock better, come
tae the Dance Firstday next. Hid's wiss at wird best."
Noor coudno, sheu didno, sheu wadno waant tae impose,
disno think sheu'd be walcome, canno dance,

but Eynar's insistan wi more an more blide wirds
as ony gien the night. Forbye, Noor waants
tae gang, an dance. Whan sheu's finished her drink,
he asks, "A'll see thee thir?" an Noor says, "Yaas."

They are quiet for a placedistancepartwhile. He pours, she drinks, they snile. And a thought comes to Eynar that warms him, of something he could sahre with this finepretty awkward personbody.
"If you want to know us folk better, come to the Dance next Firstday. It's us at our best." Noor couldn't, she didn't, she wouldn't want to impose, doesn't think she'd be welcome, can't dance,

but Eynar's inissting with ore and more happyfondpleased words than any he's offered all night. Besides, Noor wants to go, and dance. When she's finished her drink, he asks, "I'll se you there?" and Noor says "Yes."

but it all takes place at the sharp end of an impoverished place, at the edge of a mystery, and with no future

So mibbe this bairn'll waant tae brak

the next speed barrier, or the next?
In this peedie bunk, draeman
o cities, draeman o meanan more.
Or draeman a love fer a dwynan piece?
Whit wan o this futurs is bruckit most?

So maybe this child will want to break

the next speed barrier, or the next? In this little bedbunk, dreaming of cities, dreaming of meaning more? Or dreaming a love for a pinefadewithinering placedistancepartwhile? And which of these futures is the most brokenrubbishruined?

and in fact at the sharp edge of commerce, the question they all live their lives with, which the songs in DSO exist to question:

fer then this twa taal men
dinno hiv tae blether
aboot the peedie chairs

or age, or wirk, or Light,
or whit lot o credits
this haep o dirt is wirth.

because then these two t all men don't have to talkchatramble about the little chairs
or age, or work, or Light, or how manymuch credits this heap of mudshitrubbish is worth.

so yes, by no means perfect, but a striking, affecting, rich book with plenty to explore and bits, lines, thoughts, images that resonate.

― Fizzles, Wednesday, December 22, 2021

bloody Christmas repeats

currently dipping into The Atlas of Anomalous AI ed. Ben Vickers and K Allado-McDowell. It's an attempt to bring Aby Warburg's 'mapping' of cultural images and memory to the field of AI, to help it escape the 'westernised Hollywood futures that dominate popular discussions of AI'

that attempt is i think necessary and useful, but *goddam*, 'cultural' writers or critics like this need to be a lot more careful about the language they use and how it connects to the practicalities of AI. No Aby Warburg did not create a way of working that 'could be called digital' – it's not at all digital. if you're imprecise about this sort of thing, you're not doing the hard work about where there are connections.

there are reasons to think about colonialism wrt to AI, but these writers often take a lazy route to it (similar to Tom McCarthy in that recent LRB essay we complained about), and they need to distinguish carefully between the mechanics of capitalism and colonialism.

eg to call 'the black box of AI' (an enclosure, apparently) 'a hyperdimensional space' requires some... definition i think? 1) AI can often be hidden, but that doesn't mean it's a black box - in fact transparency around data updates and use case failures is an important part of the practical usage of AI. Not all providers do this, but it's definitely a practical thing that can be done, which belies the black box definition here. hyperdimensional space - well it's true that much of the data will have considerable amounts of metadata, which possibly make it something described as hyperdimensional. and indeed the 'curse of dimensionality' creating sparse local data everywhere is a well-known problem in AI/ML. here it's deployed as a sort of fuzzy high-concept word that links AI to *shamanism*.

However, as an encyclopedia of images and relevant or peripherally relevant thinking, it does serve a useful function. and it's worth entertaining the hokum, which may be just a shortcut to some interesting approaches to thinking about AI. eg medieval maps of the humanistic space wider than ours is today, that is to say of a scholastic humanism that required the supernatural as the competion of the natural world and will map angels and daemons onto a cosmos with terra and subterranean tenebrae activae, may help us think how we get outside a contemporary technocratic humanism that places us at the centre of things and allows new spaces to be mapped in new ways.

― Fizzles, Wednesday, December 22, 2021 8:12 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i should add there are good artists like james bridle mapping this space it’s just you have to tread with some care.

― Fizzles, Wednesday, December 22, 2021

Much more about the above, w good response from caek, but for now I'll shut off the oldies spigot with a few more Fizzles picks---have read the first; it's a feast:
Fin-de-siècle Vienna - Carl Schorske
Excellent set of essays on the building and failure of the liberal bourgeois Jewish period in Vienna, the face of right wing and socialist populism and anti-semitism, and the vectors of aesthetics, politics and the psyche.

The Gunman - Jean-Patrick Manchette
He tried to get out but they dragged him back in: fascinated by trying to locate this French gun-for-hire novel in a specific year from its trappings of observed culture and will post more.

Max Weber: A Biography - Joachim Radkau
Biographer consumed by subject in a psychological way (haven't finished, because its lol hueg, but great intro imo)

In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities – Jean Baudrillard
Love this, so easy to read, and I don't care whether it's *right* or not, which would anyway be an odd standard to apply, it's just great fun and yeah he's playing with some stuff that's clearly applicable today in a way that other people couldn't see.

oh did i do

Lydia and Maynard - the letters of Lydia Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes, I did not. Charming and peculiar in many respects, with JMK shooting between epochal international conferences, and Lopokova dancing and irritating the Bloomsbury set and them both utterly charming each other with affection and intellect.

― Fizzles, Sunday, November 7, 2021

If you're going to import the entire previous thread, I'm not sure there was a point in starting a new one.

Carver-Cathedral
Mcinerney- Bright Lights
McGuane - Bushwhacked Piano

For now, I finished Dave Hickey's aforementioned Prior Convictions: Stories From The Sixties. Before sending them on their way, now all (?) at once, he says he polished them up a little, with no attempt at drastic, tone-alterting surgery, just trying to be a good editor of the Dave of Oct. 196X--but also ending with the story of how he (third person) came to write them---starting with the middle-school discovery of Conrad and Melville: "I understood maybe a tenth," but it was enough to start thinking of himself as a traveler, not that weird kid in yet another new schoolyard, as his parents dragged him & sibs around the West, searching for whatever---and came to escape from what he considers the narcotic of style, as absorbed in grad school, especially: apprentice stories, which I hope will surface someday, were praised by teachers and friends: "They weren't 'horse operas,' more like 'pony epiphanies'", true to his supposed raisin' and education simultaneously--but really, he says, based on his grandparents' lore, though all of the present stash move through his gleaming x-y axis of the mostly post-cow West; incl. the ones I mentioned as pre-channeling good early Terence Malick and Robinson's Gilead, though unmistakably Hickey all the while.
He says that he tried to go deeper in the stories he does include, but the worst thing about his training, I think,is that he projects what he hates about it into his re-reading: the amber is his lens, for the most part---I do think the very first one is too contrived, and there are bits I'm not sure/dunno about in a few others, but the good stuff carries them along/
But he does point out what he considers his great escape from a formally dictated ending, which I'd already enjoyed, in the penultimate one===counting this finale narrative as another good fiction, his necessary myth, seeing as how he declared in front that he "writes to live, not lives to write"---beginning as a reader, with that rando-to-traveler transition via Conrad in Melville---and found that immersion in fiction-writing was getting too hard to come back from, that his wife and the rest of his life were shadows, grist. etc.
He doesn't mention giving up fiction altogether, and he didn't give up songwriting and narrative nonfiction---does say that he found, beyond the painterly, received, approved modernism he was groomed for, he found realism by other means in the def. not approved John O'Hara, who didn't bother with imagery: in The Horse Knows The Way his collection of constrained boondocks people lived for/ sometimes damn near destroyed themselves and/or outbursts and grapevines of talk, of crucial shitty little details---also realism by other in the propwash crop circles of Donald Barthelmoe's collection Come Back, Dr. Caligari...
Of course he didn't really escape from style, but continued to make-remake his own, mixing on the fly and plotting "asymmetrical" truth-serum injections,and, as art school bad boy, never got tenure (but his wife did).

sometimes destroyed themselves/and or *others via* outbursts and grapevines of talk I meant to say.

This last part of the book is pretty complex, incl. emotional in ways I haven't tried to trace here, will be coming back to it maybe even more than the previous.

I know, I feel it: I'm gonna have to finally read Portis pretty soon---where should I start w the novels? How's the collection?

Max Beerbohm: A CHRISTMAS GARLAND (1912).

I'm biased in this guy's favor by playlists/downloads he's posted here and there, also his comments on them, will prob read:
Tin House Books

Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California, by Matthew Specktor
Tin House Books

Matthew Specktor’s sad and entrancing book takes as its topic failure, “a pattern of mind,” he writes, that is also, “when we are close to it, delicious.” A child of Hollywood—his mother was an unhappy screenwriter, his father a high-powered agent—he focuses his attention on its denizens, exploring artists meaningful to him “whose careers carry an aura of what might … have been.” Specktor is a sharp cultural critic, but he also writes with the sweet conviction of someone who still has heroes, and he opts to consider foundering a virtue.With that lens, he examines the lives of folks such as the coolly talented writer Eleanor Perry, who never got sufficient credit for work that she’d done with her husband, Frank, but then wrote a gimlet-eyed novel about her marriage; or the vibrant yet aloof actor Tuesday Weld, constantly on the verge of becoming a starlet but perhaps also saved by her ambivalence about fame. Specktor threads into these essaylike chapters a portrait of his own tempestuous allegiance to this city of dashed fantasies. Dreams, he suggests, don’t protect you. But he begins to wonder, as I did, whether failure, brutal though it is, “mightn’t have been the real pursuit all along.” — Jane Yong Kim

Was also impressed by a New Yorker essay previewing this book:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Right to Sex, by Amia Srinivasan

In 2018, the philosopher Amia Srinivasan published a viral essay for the London Review of Books that interrogated the formation of our sexual desires. Modern feminism’s impulse to think about sex in individualistic terms, she wrote, fails to acknowledge how broader political forces shape what we want. Her incisive book expands on the original essay, covering sexual assault, false rape accusations, porn, #MeToo, and sex work. Srinivasan excels at closely analyzing, then questioning, the facts of our sexual lives that we might take for granted. In the essay “Talking to My Students About Porn,” she is surprised by both her students’ and her own conservatism, expressing wariness of porn’s power to define sex for kids raised in the internet age. She doesn’taccomplish her lofty aim of completely reimagining sex, but that very ambition is what makes the book so successful. The Right to Sex clears the slate for others to imagine a future in which physical intimacy is, in her words, equal, joyful, and free. — Kate Cray
It also delves into "feminist wars" re porn etc.

I was amazed by this one, as indicated on an earlier WAYR?:
Ecco

Afterparties, by Anthony Veasna So

Afterparties often moves like a boomerang––zippily flitting back and forth among its characters to create a ricochet effect. The nine short stories in Anthony Veasna So’s debut collection feature an ensemble of young Cambodian Americans whose parents and grandparents fled the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime; this generation, though, is more familiar with the streets and storefronts of Stockton, California. So writes about this community—and about family, sex, and cultural inheritance—with a sharp-toothed, darkly comic bent. “Every Ma has been a psycho since the genocide,” one character muses; another achieves enlightened clarity about his boyfriend’s VC-funded “safe space” app while in the throes of a threesome. This Khmer choir of voices is, at turns, horny, haunted, irreverent, and hustling. The stories careen between doughnut shops and Buddhist temples, and spiritual reincarnation figures into several plotlines. So’s narrators sometimes balk at their parents’ religiosity, but they still can’t quite abandon the belief that their ancestors move among them. The author died last year unexpectedly, months before the book’s publication; one can’t shake the feeling that he, too, meanders through these stories now. — Nicole Acheampong
from
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2021/12/five-best-books-2021/621123/

Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
Book on imposed social hierarchy comparing African American life in slavery and Jim Crow to the Untouchables in India and Jews in the 3rd Reich. I'm quite enjoying it but am a little wary after she treats the Stanford experiment as though it proved how malleable people could be to torturing others. I listened to a closer examination of the actual experiment on a podcast a couple of months back and it seems like the popular version of the story is not accurate. So hope other things here are not wildly off too.

Stamped From the Beginning Ibram X Kendi
I'm now in the final section which has Angela Davis as the theme individual.
Reminds me I need to read her autobiography through which I don't think I did when I bought it. & it's been sitting on a shelf for 15 years here.
She's a very interesting speaker so not sure why I never got to it.

Cruel Britannia
Book on torture by UK army since WWII. Took a break from it while I finished Steven H Gardner Another Tuneless Racket vol1. Now looking at a unit in post WWII Berlin that has gone overboard on the wrong people. Some who offered to be informants or were found to speak Russian. Seems to have been vengeful massively. & I thought Russia was considered an ally at the time too.

I know, I feel it: I'm gonna have to finally read Portis pretty soon---where should I start w the novels? How's the collection?

Thanks! What does #pvmic signify?
Good point about xpost Stanford experiment, although "caste" seems right re American system, on the face of it.

The Beehive, Camilo José Cela - A Madrid neighbourhood bar circa WWII, its employees and regulars all close to financial ruin but holding on tight to their class status. A lot of talk of good customs, a lot of pettiness, a general rottenness to mirror that of the country and the times. Haven't read a book that's felt this consistently dirty, not in a lascivious way but in the sense that it makes ya want to wash your hands after reading, since Under The Volcano.

#pvmic means “post very much in character”

Johann Grimmelhausen - Simplicissimus

One of the classics of Europen Literature, although it hasn't had the work done in English that Rabelais or Cervantes have had. Like Boccaccio it takes an awful event (Thirty Years War as oposed to the Plague) as a starting point for our hero's adventures, using his eye to glimpse at every little bit of what we do: our capacities for destruction, love, friendship, knowledge, etc. I love reading it for the beginning of the novel, how characters and their myhtologies come into being in chapters and then more often than not disappear in mere sentences (the technique is so different). How it veers from a brutal realism to the fantastical last section. Its descriptions of vice and virtue and the ramdomness of encounter and event, and its wide reading of classical literature as a source of all, regurgitated and re-written for readerly pleasure. Just some of the content in this great book.

The Beehive, Camilo José Cela

A new translation is forthcoming via NYRB classics in Autumn '22. Apparently the old one cut some of the dirty stuff out!

One of the classics of Europen Literature, although it hasn't had the work done in English that Rabelais or Cervantes have had.
What translation should we look for? Your description is v. appealing, thanks!

Just saw on the other thread that you said you read the translation by Mike Mitchell.

Johann Grimmelhausen - Simplicissimus

I've been wanting to read this for a while. Maybe 2022 will be the year. Currently I'm reading Fog by Miguel de Unamuno, translated by Elena Barcia, an early Modernist Spanish novel first published in 1914. I'm a fan of his philosophical writings so giving the fiction a try.

xxxxpost what first got me interested in readingAlways Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California, by Matthew Specktor
Tin House Books: his comments here about Dream Syndicate in context of early 80s L.A.:https://saveyourface.posthaven.com/the-dream-syndicate-live-1982-1983 And the link to his DS live comp still works; I just now used it again.

Specktor wrote the intro to the Eve Babitz collection I'm reading.

I’ve mentioned this before but if you want a book where Simplicissimus is both a recurring plot point and thematic touchstone (and many reasonably do not want that at all, fair) then perfect spy by John le carre is reet good.

i did end up rereading harriet the spy bc of the previous thread, and will at some point next year read the long secret, but i just wanted to say that i still am delighted by this book (which i read more than once as a kid but haven’t picked up since, and also i was obsessed with the nickelodeon adaptation, which is, iirc, more faithful than you’d expect) and that it’s got the worst goodreads page of all time

Ann Wroe: SIX FACETS OF LIGHT (2016).

Paul McCartney: THE LYRICS (2021).

I've never tasted an egg cream, I'm sorry to say.

Not missing much.

How do you like Eve Babitz so far?

Does anyone have book plans for 2022?

My main resolution is: more short books. I'm going to take a break from long fantasy series. That's been a lot of my reading during COVID. They've been really good distractions, and helped me avoid being online too much, but the sunk-cost of a long series can also feel like an obligation.

I’m also thinking that I want to read mainly non-fiction, specifically along the lines of memoirs, travelogues, diaries, letters, stuff like that. I have Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water and Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie to kick things off.

While waiting for my dog at the vet— she's okay, seems like a UTI— I finished Warner's 'The Corner That Held Them' this morning. Great book, and the bits of wit that Chinaski mentions sneak up on the reader so that they're really quite hilarious. I admit that there were moments where I got my nuns confused, but I learned to care for some of them as characters nonetheless. I also loved Sir Ralph.

I have set myself up with a bunch of books taht I ordered from the library as inter library loans so have like 8 already set up to arrive at some point. Picked up 3 yesterday. A load of anti racism stuff plus on eof teh books by Noma Agrawal who was on one of teh teams in the Xmas University Challenge . I thought she might be the same person as wrote Sway but foun dout her work is more in explaining how buildings are built as popular science and so on.

Bought so many books over teh last year that I want to read like immediately and obviously can't. Cover a load of different subjects.
But next couple are probably goiing to be teh ones I got from my Brother for Xmas. The iNconvenient Indian by Thomas King and Surviving Genocide by Jeffrey Ostler which are both Native American history related.
Also Carl Sagan Demon haunted world, Thinking Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

Started reading Gentlemen prefer Blondes by Anita Loos which was one of the library books
& the History of The White people By Nell Irvin panter which i got through the first chapter of this morning

Also got The iNvention of teh White Race by Theodore W Allen which i bought a couple of months back when verso was selling books at 1/3 off and had heard of possibly on here about 3 or 4 years ago.
So yeah got a stack of things i have planned to read and will hopefully get to reasonably soon .
& will probably pick up others as I go.

I finished Harriet the Spy last night (first read, no idea why I'd never read it before!) and will start The Corner That Held Them today. I read a lot of ADHD, PTSD, and vagus nerve/polyvagal theory books last year. Will be interesting to see what path my nonfiction reads follow in 2022.

> Does anyone have book plans for 2022?

Gibson's bridge trilogy in january
More Hardy in february, probably Mayor of Casterbridge
Start, at least, a long foreign thing in March, maybe Stalingrad?
April = Dickens
all four ali smith seasons books sometime

Plans: going to jump on the Harriet the Spy and The Corner that Held Them bandwagons, The Count of Monte Cristo, Rachel Cusk's new one, re-read The Dispossessed, one Dickens, one Henry James, one Edith Wharton, one Woolf. I'm going to try and buy more real (not e) books, if the rumours of a new local independent bookshop are true.

don quixote

plans as of now:

More Clark Coolidge, and I think that at some point, I want to try Anna Karenina, which I have not read.

Also, I just finished Clark Coolidge's 'Melancolia,' a vanishingly scarce chapbook that a pal gave me as a gift, which is what has spurred on my desire to read more Coolidge. Last year, I read a collection of a few of his longer books, 'Solution Passage,' and it blew my mind but cashed me out on him for the year— 300+ pages of very dense poetry by one person, and a break is sometimes necessary. Ready to dive back in.

i don't care what anyone says, i think anna karenina is a good book.

i read it a couple of years ago and it might look long but it's 8 parts of about 100-150 pages each and was no trouble.

As soon as I finish the second two books of The Book of the New Sun series, I'll be starting Against the Day, which be take me the rest of the year I imagine.

JUst finished Jane Jacobs The Life And Death of Great American cities and think I will be looking out for more.
Wondering if i have missed copies of her work over the years without having noticed. I think I need to make an authors list for browsing charity shops.

is there a consensus on the best version of anna karenina to read?

starting the new year with one fiction and one non:
aimez-vous brahms? -- françoise sagan
the first four georges -- j. h. plumb

I've been distracted and lazy lately, so my progress on House of Mirth has been spotty and slow. It has enough melodrama to cater to the tastes and demands of a 1905 audience, but Wharton is so scrupulous about her characters and their motives that it has far more depth than is normal with such a plot. Also, unlike pure melodrama which always has a hero and heroine, the nearest approach to a decent human being in this book is an ancillary character.

Decided to start Mason & Dixon today. Let's see how that goes.

Realised last night that I had house of mirth and a couple of companions sitting on the table. Must read some this year.

Back to Brecht on Caesar.

Earthlings, Sayaka Murata - As in Convenience Store Woman, the protagonist of this is a woman confused and frustrated by society's insistence on trying to force her into a life trajectory, in terms of career advancement and marriage. But society is considerably more scarring here - the protagonist is subjected to emotional and sexual abuse - and fittingly her attempts to escape its clutches are far more radical. Things get really grotesque by the ending, which could be Murata reacting to CSW's international best seller status by going "oh yeah? well see if you can enjoy THIS", though of course there's also a long tradition of this kind of grotesquerie in Japanese literature (Tanezaki) and cinema (Takashi Miike could do the film version). A hell of a trip, either way.

Captains Of The Sands, Jorge Amado - Amado kept showing up in my end of year polls and considering that I've read almost no Brazilian literature I figured I should at least dip my toe into its biggest beast. These are chronicles of the lives of a group of homeless kid criminals in Bahia; considering it was written in 1937, I'm surprised by how hard edged and explicit it gets, totally in line with modern films on the subject like Pixote. As in that film, there are clear references to homosexuality, and while it is portrayed as a vice, it's just another one that the kids indulge in alongside purse snatching, knife fights, etc. and justified along the same "society is to blame" lines. It's pretty amusing/depressing that when the (well intentioned, inefficient) priest tries to get the kids to stop engaging in buggery on moral grounds they just laugh at him but when he changes tacks and says that it is "womanly and not worthy of a grown man" the leader immediately forbids it. Also always fascinated by the fluidity of religion in Brazil - some of the kids are catholic, some believe in African orishas, some combine the two integrating European saints into an African pantheon. I'm about two thirds in, right now a pandemic has hit Bahia (inescapable!), and it is described as an African god unleashing his wrath on the rich inhabitants of the city, but alas they are vaccinated, how could the god have known of that? And so the plague hits the shanty towns instead.

Janet Malcolm - In the Freud Archives.

i read clark coolidge's 'the crystal text' a couple of years ago which i liked a lot. i should read more. i have a copy of a book of his called 'space' that looks good

i got andrew durbin's 'skyland' for christmas and managed to read most of it at my in-laws while they watched rugby and then finished it the other day. very enjoyable little book - perhaps it has some of the issues in contemporary fiction that i usually don't care for - blankness of the protagonist and their relationship to place, history, nature - but this was breezy enough to get away with them and with just enough grit in there to offset some of its more indulgent sections (the basic plot is the protagonist goes to a remote greek island in search of a portrait - which might not exist - of hervé guibert)

i also got the duras collection 'me and other writing' which i've only dipped into, and don mee choi 'hardly war', which i haven't quite been in the mood for yet

i finished alison rumfitt's 'tell me i'm worthless' and i can't understand all the plaudits this is getting (i've seen people calling it a state of the nation novel about britain, or about england specifically - i mean, everyone knows england is terrible, i don't need to read a novel to tell me that, or at least i felt like this novel never got much beyond just telling me it's terrible). a lot of it seemed sloppily written and uneven, some appealing moments and some insight, but overall a miss for me

Coolidge is a GOAT as far as I'm concerned...

I like Andrew but think his writing is meh.

"i also got the duras collection 'me and other writing' which i've only dipped into"

This looks fantastic!

8 Detectives,Alex Pavesi. The premise being that in the 1930's a mathematician wrote a book of short stories hiding within them the simple rules that all crime stories follow. Then he disappeared. ffwd to the 1960's and an editor revisits them and thinks they contain clues to a real unsolved murder. the problem I'm having so far is that the short stories as revealed, and then critiqued as paired chapters seem unremarkable and mundane. So far they're all pretty crap, but I'm not sure if that is intentional or not and if the greater mystery will hold more interest. I will finish it, but for now someone has put in a request for one of my other library books so had to get cracking on that.

The Woman In The Purple Skirt, Natsuko Imamura. Now this is more like it, 50 pages in a and rattling along, have no idea where it's going, though presumably it's somewhere other than an remarkably odd case of stalking.

George Schuyler Black No More
Got this today because of a lack of communication with a librarian I was trying to get teo renew a couple of books I had rebewed too often to get renewed online.
I'd listened to a Backlisted on the book a few weeks back and ordered it as an interlibrary loan.
A satire on teh subject opf race by a maverick contemporary of the Harlem Renaissance . It has a basic premise that is inherently racist so has a transgressive nature of did he really go there and yes he did.
Actually set up seems to be a black ne'er do well gets stricken by a racist white woman who turns him down flat when he asks her to dance so he goes off and guinea pigs a new cosmetic technique where he becomes a caucasian.
I've read the first couple of chapters which are quite compelling, writing is pretty good.

bell hooks Sisters of teh Yam
Taking care fo oneself as part of an activist lifestyle.
Looking at the influences on a black female activist at the time>
I'm finding hooks to be a really interesting read. & keep wondering what I was doing at the time these things were coming out and if I knew anybdoy who was actually reading her at the time of release. 2005 I was getting involved in the ShellTosea campaign which was largely white outside of me. But I think this was not exactly an early book by her.
Finding I can read her pretty quickly but am trying to read as much of her as I can.

A Little Life has a new cover judging by the copies that arrived in store this week, and it is without doubt the worst cover I have ever seen whilst at the same time being an incredibly on the nose assessment of the novel therein.

just finished the long secret. beth ellen is the best character ever

and Mama Jenkins!

scene on the beach with the fried chicken + fanning herself with Bible

Finished House of Mirth, but have nothing to add to what I already said. I just started Blues, by John Hershey (who also wrote Hiroshima and A Bell For Adano). It consists of a series of dialogues about fishing and is transparently modeled upon Isaak Walton's Compleat Angler, right down to the highly artificial language of the interlocutors, who are named Fisherman and Stranger, instead of Piscator and Viator. The tone hovers between pleasantry and pedantry, but the latter tends to overpower the former. Luckily it is short and offers me a change from Yet Another Novel.

Wharton is an all-timer. I'm afraid to re-read it for fear of hyperventlating.

The back cover of my Penguin edition calls House of Mirth "a black comedy", which I think completely misreads it. Maybe someone thought the title was meant to convey that message to the reader. Wrong!

My current book is Paradise Reclaimed, Halldor Laxness, an author I've greatly enjoyed for the most part. So far this one features much drily humorous dialogue and definitely qualifies as a comic novel. However, this being Icelandic literature, there's bound to be a large measure of darkness interlaced with the humor.

Just finished the Anita Loos anthology of the 2 lorelei Lee /Dorothy books . Wasn't sure if I was gooing to go through Gentlemen Marry brunetes cos iI don't think it's as good as Blondes. Then had it in my hand in bed this morning so went through it.
They're bot pretty light reads but I do think they are pretty funny especially Blondes.
Would love to read teh memoirs even if tehy are like 40 years later, I think Loos has a lot of style.

Been reading several books at the same time like reada chapter or 2 put the book down read a chapter or 2 and then change over again.
Spending a coupl eof hours before I go to sleep and again when I wake. Maybe lie down in the middle of the day cos I've been feeling lousy for weeks, did just get a negative covid test this weekend.

Also still reading Cruel Britannina by Ian Cobain
history of Torture in teh Uk since teh 2nd world war. Now on renidtion and outsourcing.
Quite interesting, might read some more on the subject

The History of The White People Nell Irvin Painter
Black female author traces the idea of race back to the classical world and follows it up to th epresent day. So farr I think I'm still in Rome./ Interesting to hear this week's Media-Eval podcast to hear that there is a supposedly somewaht popular rumour that the Roman Empi9re was invented by the church in the 15th centyury. This weeks episode showed teh flaws in this idea , kind of interesting to have it so destroyed i guess.
But thsi book by Painter is really interesting.

Back To Black Kehinde Andrews
One of his earlier books that he wrote New Age of Empire asa bit of a prequel to.
Currently reading about Pana Africanism and the West Indies.

Black No more George Schuyler
Satirical work by 30s black author about a process taht allows black to become white and what the ensuing chaos would be. p[retty transgressive i guess, Definitely funny.

Of One Blood Pauline Hopkins
early 20th century science/speculative fiction by black female writer positing the discovery of a high tec black civilisation that has lain underground for centuries. Like a proto Wakanda .
Part of a great anthology of Black Science Fiction that has a lot of early stuff as well as much more recent. Wil grab this if i get a chance to get my own copy. One of teh Flame Tree Collection anthologies.

The iNconvenient Indian THomas King
Canadian novelist looks into the relationshgip between settler colonial power and teh indigenous peoples that were there when they originally arrived,. He's looked at teh way that the indigenous are represented in various media. I had no idea that Will Rogers was an Indian just one taht didn't look the way that White society wanted to look at Indians, while tehy did seem to be happy to have him portray a cowboy.
It's a good read and one i had recommended in a few places.

Finished Prynne's collection of wisdom, "Apophthegms," and today will finish Kate Soper's 'Post-Growth Living,' with which I have some serious issues, but is provocative and interesting nonetheless. Also dipped my toe into Frank Kuenstler's "LENS," a vanishingly rare book that is dense and playful and which I don't think I'll ever really "finish," since its structure sort of defies easy front-to-back reading

Fave scene in Long Secret was at the nightclub, when Harriet’s mum discovers the ex-girlfriend isn’t quite the foe she imagined. Also HTS having “the worst goodreads page of all time” as mentioned is very otm but

Ignore my but

I finished Bertolt Brecht's THE BUSINESS AFFAIRS OF MR JULIUS CAESAR.

A historical novel, written c. late 1930s, about Caesar's rise to power in Ancient Rome. It's only about 2/3 finished with BB's notes indicating what else it would have said (a bit like reading Fitzgerald's for THE LAST TYCOON). The work is very incongruous in a way, that BB in flight from fascism should devote so much time to such a detailed account of an ancient period. Yet, as the editor is keen to say, one assumes that it had contemporary resonance with him - not that one can see direct parallels with the Third Reich in the novel as it stands.

The formal construction of the novel is noteworthy. It's framed by a biographer, 20 or 30 years later, researching Caesar's life -- so, a kind of CITIZEN KANE approach, which you might also liken to Conrad (embedded narrators). A couple of interviewees reminisce about Caesar, but most of the narrative comes from the biographer's reading of the diaries of a slave who was also somehow senior in Caesar's household. I suppose this resembles, say ... the discovery and inclusion of the diaries in THE SWIMMING POOL LIBRARY - and there must be innumerable other such cases where a document is embedded in this way.

The slave's narrative is curious, almost literally queer, as it contains much angst over his relations with his male lovers. The only extensive treatment of homosexuality in the whole of Brecht? - and treated totally matter-of-factly.

The overall effect is 'revisionist', turning a great man into a more sceptically observed figure - primarily by emphasising 'business', seeing everything in terms of finance. Politics, law, military, empire, all here are financialised. Yet it doesn't exactly debunk Caesar entirely, rather showing him to be an operator, an extraordinarily fluid, chameleon figure who can alternate between high politics, demagogic rhetoric to please a rebellious crowd, or a military campaign. He's an immensely talented politician, I suppose. I was reminded of Tony Blair. He's not necessarily diminished by the narrative (depending how big he was to start with), but is seen in very material and contingent settings.

There is an argument that the book overlaps slightly with Walter Benjamin's thought of the time, eg: his use of the image of the Roman Triumph (procession) in his 1940 Theses - the Triumph is also a key theme in the later pages of this book.

Interesting. From my reading of Roman history I'd say Julius Caesar saw no difference between the political, military and financial aspects of his career. He would have viewed all of them as thoroughly intertwined and equally necessary components in his personal pursuit of power.

Captains Of The Sands, Jorge Amado

This sounds pretty interesting. I'll check it out.

Since my last update I finished "The Friend" by Sigrid Nunez. I thought the beginning and ending were strong, but in the middle it kind of drifts. The middle section is a bit like Nicholson Baker's "The Anthologist" in terms of lack of plot motion, but somehow it doesn't feel as free-flowing and natural. The ending is a nice little formal twist that causes you to reinterpret everything up to that point. After that book, I read "Fog" by Miguel de Unamuno. Most of the book is kind of a romantic farce/philosophical joke, with an older, wealthy, educated, but comically naive anti-hero falling for a rather more shrewd young piano teacher. The book's sense of humor reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut. The ending brings Unamuno's more morbid preoccupations to the fore in a somewhat jarring but memorable way. I've started off 2022 by attacking the longest book in my to-read pile: "Living in the End Times" by Slavoj Zizek. So far, so good.

I thought I'd warm up a bleak Sunday with the fourth of Derek Raymond's Factory novels, I Was Dora Suarez.

For anyone that doesn't know, the Factory novels are a series of neo-noirs set in the cesspit of Thatcher's Britain and fucking hell are they scabrous and bleak - and Dora Suarez is at another level entirely in terms of the violence and depravity on display. I think it's debatable as to whether Raymond goes too far with the graphic descriptions of murder and debasement but there's no denying the gut punch of the book or the odd, almost Old-Testament fire of his avenging nameless detective.

I only remember Ken Bruen talking him up so I figured it must be something like that.

I'm plodding through The Corner that Held Them but I'm afraid I haven't been transported into its world. The nuns are interchangeable, I can't picture what they look like, whether they are tall or short, thin or fat, even how old they are, and I can't feel for any of their cares or concerns, even when they were half dying of the plague. I can't even picture the landscape despite being more familiar with Norfolk than I would like. I guess I'm just about interested enough to not abandon it, and despite not connecting with it the writing is fine, being strangely fond of geese I liked it when one character was described as being as clumsy and majestic as a goose.

Dora Suarez has been on my dad's bookshelf since the 80s and I've always been curious, sounds like a fun summer book.

I felt similarly about TCTHT - like one of those meals where every bite tastes the same. One of those books I enjoyed, and you could probably pick a page at random and find something spectacular, but I put it down mid-way because I felt like I had the gist to the point of punishment.

first book of the year, which I hope to finish either today or tomorrow, is Wollstonecraft Shelley's The Last Man, which is a future-plague novel (though the future resembles the 19c in almost every respect). The plague doesn't show up until the midway point, which is an interesting decision -- I think the idea was to establish the glories of the world about to be depopulated and degraded, but she rises to her talents so conspicuously as soon as there's devastation to be detailed that it's hard not to say "what this book needs is more plague"

the paragraphs about how people really didn't figure they'd be the ones to get sick are, y'know, kinda hard to read tbh

I was thinking there was a tie in with Dora Suarez and Gallon Drunk. They released an lp called I Am Dora Suarez and then it looks like james Johnston did a spoken word thing with the author and Terry Edwards

Ledge, Sir Ralph and some of the now-minor nuns become very important and interesting as you move through.

xpost, yeah, all the ongoing intrigues, dreams, wars, everything just---fades away--and The Last Man is walking around, as everywhere becomes nowhere, maybe...not as much a philosophical concern as being in shock, maybe? Passing beyond words, precedents, mile markers of Europe and Reality, his own kind of Grand Tour---

Roots, Radicals & Rockers, Billy Bragg's reportedly very exhaustively researched history of Skiffle.

About two-thirds into Paradise Reclaimed and it has certainly evolved into something far more complex and mythic than a comic novel, while still retaining its wry outlook. This stuff is why I love Laxness.

Just finished Lolita, and was impressed by how the momentum of Kubrick's simplified movie plotting also and first drove through the ever-fertile, multiplying details of first-person narrator Humbert Humbert's looping obsessions, incl. observations and all other personal histories, now becoming a closed circuit in his final testimony, celebration and too-late remorse, as the penny, having occasionally dropped, becomes something he can't shake lose---but, when it's finally published, only when they're both dead---which he ultimately visualize as in the far, ethereal, finally fittingly high-class, European-style future, far from wild-at-best/most useless to him, though usually seedy, sometimes poignant America (he's acknowledged he knows better, but this is one last flight of mad cultivated outsider arty magical thinking).
I do think his badness came across unmistakably in the film anyway, also that Delores, as in the novel, eventually became one of the sanest characters, in terms of officially acceptable rational self-interest: contacts him one last time, only because needs money for husband's decided-on relocation of growing family (she is "hugely pregnant," Humbert can't fail to tell), for better prospects. But the film does leave out most, not all, of her earlier moments of seeming utterly lost, draining into visible resignation in at least one image that novel Humbert can't shake (there's one instance of the stuck penny), in between tantrums and zings and mood swings.
Movie and book also both (though necessarily more implicit in former, like so much else, re censorship) led me to the thought that her rational self-interest, expressed through risky contact, implying some desperation as well as boldness and calculation, comes from being groomed by and observing Quilty and Humbert, both very organized around and feeding the through-line of pursuit and possession, more than/over and around moments of gratification---it's all about The Big Picture, to use the title of an informative Tv series of that era.
The book would be unbearable without this drive, riding in and peering out of Humbert's head.

Ok, I can’t parse this at all, is this book or film or what? Both?

Also, I would like to hear you explain more about “rational self-interest” as this is not really what I took from it, at all.

(Movie should have had a super at the end revealing her end, as it does his, cause makes it look like she came through all that, and she's gonna be fine, or at least survive, however messed up she might prove to be [in the novel, Humbert sees that the 17-year-old expectant wife is already starting to remind him of her messed-up mom]: like, what happened to her was not so bad after all---might be the possible interp which censorship inadvertently left the door open for, once again also inviting a kind of perv justification, as has happened before and since)(Kubrick has been quoted as saying he might not have made the thing if he'd known how hampered he'd be by this kind official meddling, but it does gain by not spelling so many things out, incl. some of the novel's scenic plotting x commentenary does seem to go way too far into the weeds, whenever the erudite emigre author's shadowing of his narrator veers toward imitative fallacy of compulsive density, though not fatally)

I'm comparing book and movie. "Rational" in terms of I need stability, I need this young husband who is interested in a better life for both of us and our child, I need money for this kind of stability, Humbert bribed me on the occasions when I made him think he had to, I think he may give me money again. but I won't let him have his way with me this time (though he does succeed in financially motivating her to tell him about her disappearance, also backstory of that and what happened between then and now, which disclosures she first refuses: consciously or not, she also succeeds, much more than she ever did as his stubborn sex-slave--though the mutual success of the last transaction leads to the end of both characters, at least in the book.)

He would likely die of a heart attack either way, but otherwise not in prison, with this book his only outlet.

I just now finished the novel, so comparing how it seemed to having watched the movie.

the momentum of Kubrick's simplified movie plotting also and first drove through the ever-fertile movie camera as "third person," novel's narration first person, gyac.

Right ok, I didn’t understand the relevance of discussing one of the adaptations itt.

you're really a barrel of fucking laughs, aren't you, gyac.

Sorry I might have opinions about my favourite book?

Sorry I was confusing. What's your take on the novel?

In any case I did drop and leave this thread pet snippily (concerned with trivial matters like the husband potentially having pneumonia, you know).

I don’t find the rational self-interest point one that really strikes a chord with me tbh. It’s because I think the whole construct is really dependent on the veil being pulled over the eyes of the reader through Humbert’s narration, the part where the teacher tells HH that Dolores is “immature” for her age and implies that she’s developmentally stunted for reasons we the readers know…that is not a child acting with agency in any sense of the word apart from the clumsiest sort of self protection.

I haven’t seen the Kubrick adaptation for a long long time, hated the Adrian Lyne one because it seemed to me that that adaptation focused on the wrong interpretation of Lolita and was overly sympathetic to HH, but again, I haven’t seen that one in about fifteen years.

It’s not uncommon for people who have been abused to keep in touch with their families or even to still love them in a fashion, so I guess that’s why your explanation sort of pulled me up short - I didn’t even understand it as something worth particularly noting.

xpost, yeah, all the ongoing intrigues, dreams, wars, everything just---fades away--and The Last Man is walking around, as everywhere becomes nowhere, maybe

it's honestly incredible -- a super-modern effect, after the very VERY 19c vibe of all the preceding 1/2 of the book

Sorry I was confusing. What's your take on the novel?

Yeah, I should have been careful with that. The rational self-interest bit just applies to when she finally writes to him and he goes to see her, how she comes across via his perception and retrospective account in his manuscript.

"Rational" in terms of risky, limited options.

Myaybe I shouldn't have used Ayn Rand's favorite term, speaking of the 50s! But it fits, in limited way.

it's honestly incredible -- a super-modern effect, after the very VERY 19c vibe of all the preceding 1/2 of the book
I got this from her father's Caleb Williams too! Although that one has a fig leaf ain't-mad-at-the-class-system bit at very end, contrast actually just kind of enhancing what has come before, like screen version of The Magnificent Ambersons.

The conscientious young Caleb has unaccountably offended a gentleman, who won't let him leave the British Isle. which becomes very much like this big greasy rambly boarding house, and he can't figure out how to make amends.

Roma Agrawal Built
architect talks about the considerations for designing buildings. I first came across Ms Agrawal on the Xmas University Challenge series i think, wondered if she was the writer of Sway, then if she was related. i looked her up and saw she had a couple of books out then ordered thsi asan interlibrary loan. So far it is pretty fascinating. First chapter is talking about load and other forces that need to be chanelled through a building constructiion to make sure it remains upright. She starts from talkingf about an early 20th century situation where a bridge in Canada was built too heavy thereby putting even more pressure on itself to stand and wound up snapping and collapsing while still under construction.
So this seems to be a really good popular science book. I was looking for something that would explain a lot of this stuff i think.
Anyway, really good book so glad i came across it. Will probably look for her other one afterwards.

Carl Sagan Demon Haunted World
Famous scientist writes about teh popular misconceptions and folk devils he has to deal with. he starts by talking about his childhood and what influenced him there. Then starts the main book talking about a taxi ride with a conspiracy theorist taxi driver who enthusiastically comes up with a number of misconceptions about things like the existence of Atlantis and fun things like that. I'm still in the first chapter so not sure where else he's going at the moment. So9mebody was making a lot of references to this book in a podcast I was listening to a few months ago I think so hope this isn't the 2nd copy I've bought. Turned up for a couple of Euro in a local charity shop anyway. Have been trying to think which Podcast it was, possibly behind tHe bastards or one the presenter does.

The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
Eric Foner

An authoritative history by the preeminent scholar of the Civil War era, The Second Founding traces the arc of the three foundational Reconstruction amendments from their origins in antebellum activism and adoption amidst intense postwar politics to their virtual nullification by narrow Supreme Court decisions and Jim Crow state laws. Today these amendments remain strong tools for achieving the American ideal of equality, if only we will take them up.

re the discussion above between poster gyac and poster dow:

I share gyac's tendency to bafflement here for, in my case, the very mundane reason that dow's posts tend to be written in a way that I cannot disentangle. They often don't seem to have paragraphs. They often seem to contain very long sentences which in turn contain abbreviations or personal code.

It's possible that poster dow is a brilliantly insightful reader of literature but that this does not come through to me, because of my difficulty with this poster's way of formatting their thoughts on screen.

Like most readers, btw, I think that LOLITA is a masterpiece; though I think that I wouldn't relish reading it again now.

Having finished Brecht, I returned to Alasdair Gray's UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY (c.1983, but this is an edition from c.1997). I have owned this book for well over 15 years, have read the two major novels either side of it, yet had never really made the effort with most of these stories. This proves an odd omission, for the first few stories are very short and thus easy to finish. Gray here is in a mode of the fantastic, fabulous and darkly allegorical. Longer stories await later in the book.

Lanark has been sitting in my library, unread, for about 10 years.

It's long and dense and often dour! It's frankly not easy to get through - I'm inclined to say.

It's a book that I feel very glad to have read, but I wouldn't particularly want to face the task of reading it for the first time.

Yet I'm sure that many readers find it easy and rewarding. It may be a sign of my own limits that LANARK seems tough going for me.

Like most readers, btw, I think that LOLITA is a masterpiece; though I think that I wouldn't relish reading it again now. Me neither. That's why I was relieved to discover, right away that the book had the momentum, the drive, of the film, right from the beginning
Without the momentum, it might be an unbearable read---it's already claustrophobic enough, being in narrator Humbert's head like that, but he's hellbent on giving us the Grand Tour of his heart, like George Jones, so things never get too dense for too long, though there are so many impressions of people, places, things, some of them nearly interchangeable, except that's part of the author's effect: Humbert struggling through the sea of faces, in his purpose-driven life. (But what the hell was Nabokov's purpose in all that with Rita?)

Speaking of drive, wonder if anybody has ever compared these views of pre-Insterstate America with the ones in On The Road? Wonder what Kerouac thought of this book, if anything. He might have enjoyed all the French (in which he wrote some pre-fame novels, fairly recently published for the first time, I think.)
If you have any questions about what I was trying to say, pinefox, anybody, let me know thx.

I agree, poster Dow, about the claustrophobia, and the parallel with ON THE ROAD.

8 Detectives,Alex Pavesi. The premise being that in the 1930's a mathematician wrote a book of short stories hiding within them the simple rules that all crime stories follow. Then he disappeared. ffwd to the 1960's and an editor revisits them and thinks they contain clues to a real unsolved murder. the problem I'm having so far is that the short stories as revealed, and then critiqued as paired chapters seem unremarkable and mundane. So far they're all pretty crap, but I'm not sure if that is intentional or not and if the greater mystery will hold more interest. I will finish it, but for now someone has put in a request for one of my other library books so had to get cracking on that.

The Woman In The Purple Skirt, Natsuko Imamura. Now this is more like it, 50 pages in a and rattling along, have no idea where it's going, though presumably it's somewhere other than an remarkably odd case of stalking.

― oscar bravo, Tuesday, January 4, 2022 5:32 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

8 Detectives Turns out there was a reason the short stories were dull, not a good enough reason for the pay off to be anything other than mundane and derivative unfortunately.

The Woman In The Purple Skirt was absorbing and didn't really go where i was expecting it to go or anywhere really but not sure that's a bad thing. disquieting.

Currently reading The Plotters, Un-Su Kim. South Korean John Wick but funnier so far. 100 pgs in and loving it but still trying to get an idea of the wider society that exists outside of the protagonist and his associates.

Re-reading Brossard's 'The Blue Books,' her trilogy of experimental novels about/around political radicals and lesbians in 1970s Montréal.

Xpost

I wrote an undergraduate essay way back in the 20th century titled Windscreen, Silver Screen, TV Screen: On the Road in Astral America, comparing experience of driving/perception in On the Road, Lolita and... White Noise. I doubt it was v good :/

I'd like to read it! In his afterword, Nabakov says he haaated people taking it as a European critique of American culture, and he also lashes out at (says someday somebody will get wise and take a hammer to)"topical trash," meaning Balzac, Gorky, Mann, so I'm guessing he wouldn't have much use for On The Road. Did not live long enough to check out White Noise, but might have deigned to take a look at DeLillo's 1973 Americana, in which a Madison Avenue hipster takes a national road trek with a movie camera, catches a lot of good talk, but sure is a lot, and tending to monologues---I still remember some witty moments, incl. back at the office, but gets pretty dense. The author has since said that the less he thinks about his early books, the happier he is, but it's worth checking out (grab a coffee to do so).
Oh yeah, Humbert and the American scene: gradually he stops pouncing on each little flaw of each little person, many of them familiar stereotypes of that era, from other American lit and movies with a satirical or tongue in cheek quality (though he does take great satisfaction in finally telling off a couple of stuffy pests). The more he lets himself become aware of his own shortcomings, to put it mildly, the more he seems to accept his surroundings, trudging toward murder and his testimony. Even comes to see, along the way, where Delores should be, should have never left, not with him. Duh devil

I took the book back to the library as soon as I finished reading it, wanting to be done with it, but now it seems to be why I've started thinking about an old Randy Newman song, "Have You Seen My Baby?":
"She say, 'I'll talk to strangers if I want to, I'm a stranger too.' "

finished the Audre LOrde Compendium this morning.
THat was Cancer Diaries, Sister Outsider and A Burst of Light. Enjoy her writing so wish I had discovered her earlier. Shame this set is no longer available. Would be good to dip back into it. Well I think it may be available individually.
Now need to read Zami

I finished Time Will Darken It. Now I am reading The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois. In the former, I like the "textbook" (adept) use of point of view, particularly at the beginning and the end, to contrast with the primary perspective of the narrative, which still remains satisfyingly opaque.

I've started in on The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu. It is still setting up its premise (which has taken 65 pages!), so it's premature to draw any conclusions about anything, yet. Preliminarily speaking, it seems to me very 'centrist' sci-fi, by which I mean it feels designed to please readers who read sci-fi almost exclusively, but some of what reads to me as clunky awkwardness might be attributable to the difficulties of translation from Chinese to English.

I think I saw that on the shelf of one of the charity shops i was in yesterday. I was thinking about Cartesian duality and fun things like that when i saw the title.

the duras book i mentioned earlier ('me and other writing') is very good, but i would only recommend it if you're already all in on the extended durasniverse. she says a lot of stuff i disagree with, but says it with such intensity and conviction (but a conviction that can be overturned or compromised a second later) that it's always compelling. the title essay, 'me' is the best example of this, but there's also a longer diary piece which is up there with her best fiction imo, and in fact closely resembles some of the later fiction and films like 'agatha' and 'l'homme atlantique'

i also read eva baltasar 'permafrost' which is a newish translation. a good companion piece to the duras, very voice-y, irascible narrator; a fun read

i started reading the collected kenneth patchen. there's a bit of youthful jauntiness to the early poems, which can be a little off putting, but i mostly get the sense that he was very fearful when writing, but didn't really know what to do with the fear - that sense of everything not being quite right makes the poems still feel quite contemporary despite some of the self-consciously poetic register he's working in

Duras wrote so much I’ve barely made a dent in it over the years but yeah, her voice never fails to interest.

Alasdair Gray's story (1970s I think) about 'The Great Bear Craze' in England in the 1930s is remarkable - a piece of agreeable, readable whimsy which also works as a remarkably convincing political allegory today.

'The Crank That Made the Revolution' is also a very canny, zany, comic yet serious take on the industrial revolution.

On to the stories in the middle of the book: Kafka and his treatment of (Chinese?) empire a big, acknowledged influence.

Started Arthur Phillips Prague, which has been on the shelf for years after my parents gave it me after reading. Read some old ilx talk that made me think it wouldn't be as bad as I feared, but 25 pages in it's very mediocre, already I'm slow to pick it up.

I read Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer years ago and always meant to read more Patchen and never did.
May have tied in with the Grateful Dead group writing pseudonym which was a name lifted from that book.
McGanahan Skjellyfetti
but I thought it was interesting, maybe very of its time

Aimless, you might be interested in this article re: Cixin Liu from a few years back. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/24/liu-cixins-war-of-the-worlds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7nQiUl6Iqw

Anyways how’s that going ?

Sorry wrong thread

Pertinent to my interests.

Bessie Chris Alberton
Biography of early female blues singer an updated version of a book originally published in 1972.
Very well researched though he is conscious that some data he could have perused got destroyed before he got to see it.l he found a recording session slog and a room full of further similar data that got destroyed before he could look at it.
Also som efamily infighting caused teh destruction of further material he would have loved to look at.
But so far, 2 chapters in this si really good.

I have like 12 books outof teh library and i'm trying to read tehm all and get them back to the library where I have other things coming through on order. Result of searching through books online and then checking the library catalogue.

Also got
Marlon James A Short History of 7 Killings
multivoiced fictionalised oral history of the events surrounding the attempted assassination of Bob marley.

Roma Agarwal Built
architect talks about the considerations involved in designing buildings in terms of a number of elements.
Finding this really interesting. Came across her as part of one of the teams on Xmas University Challenge

Nell Irving painter The history Of White People
Black academic traces teh history of teh idea of race from way back in the classical world through to present day. I think i'm now somewhere in the 15th or 16th century talking about the slave trade in Eastern Europe.

Carl Sagan Demon haunted World
I'm still in the early stages of his look at the widespread illiteracy of the population where science is concerned. This has been seen as very prescient dating from teh mid 90s since it seems so topical right now still. Though he's talking about tv eating popular cognition instead of the internet

Alasdair Gray's story about 'The Axletree', published in 1979, has a sequel, also I think published in the 1983 UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY. Reading this, I come to see what a vast allegory the story is; for civilisation, empire, religion; technical development, industry, 'modernity'; human capacity to destroy its environment through such progress. The allegory plainly becomes more specific than I'd expected, too, with a version of the USSR involved.

Remarkable ambition, scale of thought or imagination, that Gray had.

I regret to say that, although I will finish reading it, my opinion of The Three Body Problem after reading the first 280 pages of ~400 total is that it amounts to a very long text-only comic book. It might possibly contain some very sophisticated astrophysics. I have no ability to judge if those elements of the book are made up or not. But once those parts are set aside all that remains is a bit of razzle-dazzle and a comic book plot.

This judgement of course has no connection to the amount or type of enjoyment that other readers might derive from it.

it, and the two other parts of the trilogy have been mentioned in the sci-fi threads but, yeah, there be monsters.

Haven't read those books, but I suspect that having Ken Liu as series editor and translator (w Joel Martinson translating the second) was a mixed blessing, judging by some of his choices in the Chinese SF anthology Broken Stars and some other projects I've heard about (some of us were complaining about this Liu problem on science fiction etc. threads)

Also having to write around what govt. etc. might consider problem areas doesn't help, unless you're really, really good at implication x sleight of hand, and it comes across in translation, as sometimes happens.

having to write around what govt. etc. might consider problem areas

Yes. In 3-body the People's Liberation Army is admirable and benign. Now that the war is about to start I expect the PLA will soon be heroic, while it's the 'environmental extremists' and 'disaffected social elites' who are villains. These difficulties are incidental to what I think are even more fundamental problems for the story meeting my standards and my getting enjoyment from it.

I was going to say The Fat Years is plenty critical of the govt but it's never been published in mainland China.

Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us by Brian Klaas

Does power corrupt, or are corrupt people drawn to power? Are entrepreneurs who embezzle and cops who kill the outgrowths of bad systems or are they just bad people? Are tyrants made or born? If you were thrust into a position of power, would new temptations to line your pockets or torture your enemies gnaw away at you until you gave in?

To answer these questions, Corruptible draws on over 500 interviews with some of the world's noblest and dirtiest leaders, from presidents and philanthropists to rebels, cultists, and dictators. It also makes use of a wealth of counter-intuitive examples from history and social science: You'll meet the worst bioterrorist in American history, hit the slopes with a ski instructor who once ruled Iraq, have breakfast with the yogurt kingpin of Madagascar, learn what bees and wasps can teach us about corruption, find out why our Stone Age brains cause us to choose bad leaders, and learn why the inability of chimpanzees to play baseball is central to the development of human hierarchies.

Corruptible will make you challenge basic assumptions about how you can rise to become a leader and what might happen to your head when you get there. It also provides a roadmap to avoiding classic temptations, suggesting a series of reforms that would ensure that better people get into power, while ensuring that power purifies rather than corrupts.

So far, it's highly readable and very interesting.

^Also includes twenty surefire tips for taking weight off and keeping it off.

Aimless, I agree with you about the Three-Body Problem. I kept waiting for the story to start. It felt like the whole thing was just world-building and scaffolding for a story that never quite materialized, and I don't have the patience to read the rest of the series and see what comes of it all.

And I thought the whole business of the video game was very dumb. Like, you have a planet called Trisolaris and a book called The Three-Body Problem, the game is called Three Body - it's not exactly a big mystery that the planet has three suns. And yet people are obsessively playing what sounds like a very unpleasant and not-fun video game just to figure out a piece of information that we already know and that is telegraphed in the name of the game. And really, why does the book give so much attention to the three-body problem at all? It sounds cool but it doesn't go anywhere, it's just a plot device that gives the aliens a reason to invade earth. Just say aliens are invading the earth because their own planet is going to fall into the sun, and start your damn book there.

We aren't the audience for the book, which seems to me to be made up of people who have very little knowledge of or interest in humans.

…

I just deleted a long further explanation of the book's shortcomings as I see them. Nobody needs that. Comic books are enjoyed worldwide by millions every day. It makes no sense to criticize them for not being good literature when their readers do not want or expect good literature.

you aren't exactly wrong about the series' shortcomings but nor does ilb really need its own bargain-basement neil degrasse tyson

friendly reminder that comic books are a medium, not a genre, and as such capable of accomodating as many different kinds of story as, say, the novel

It makes no sense to criticize them for not being good literature when their readers do not want or expect good literature.

My less friendly response is that this is utter horseshit.

I have been interested in when the stigma and association with comics and lack of artistry or communication level came. Since it isn't true in all cultures.

Or to puty that another way, it seems like in the West or possibly the English speaking west there is an association of combination of text and graphics that it is for children or the lesser educated. Which is definitely not true elsewhere and elsewhen.

Not all cultures are capable of producing Matt

>>> friendly reminder that comic books are a medium, not a genre, and as such capable of accomodating as many different kinds of story as, say, the novel

Yes, I agree with this medium / genre distinction.

It makes no sense to criticize them for not being good literature when their readers do not want or expect good literature.

Yeah, even as quite the admitted snob when it comes to a lot of lit stuff, this doesn't make any sense, but I'm chalking it up to not having been exposed to the right comics.

I will say that it took comics like Black Hole, the Watchmen, Transmetropolitan, and L&R to really allow me to see how the binary isn't just "trashy superheroes" vs. "graphic novels." As Daniel and others have put it, as in any medium, there are more trashy elements and more high-minded elements, and everything in between. Seems really limiting to shut oneself off from it!

Not all cultures are capable of producing Matt

In fact I think most cultures have at least one cock-and-balls face cartoonist.

I apologise for my ignorance

Many xps: I read patchen’s sleepers awake a long time ago, sort of splurgy proto-Beat prose along with v appealing (to me, then) typographical experiments

& I read duras’s wartime notebooks *checks notes* last May (ha another one I failed to include in my wdyr 2021 list, why do I bother ffs) & even in incomplete or draft form the power of the voice is overwhelming, must read more

Speaking of, I read nothing at all in the first half of January but I made up for it by kicking off with joy williams the changeling, 10/10 masterpiece holy shit. I don’t even know what to say about it except that the sentences are perfect and inflected with a real strangeness and it’s very funny and also belongs in the corpus of great horror fiction imo. Then I went straight into her new novel harrow, which I read half of yday & is fucking me up somewhat. It’s unsparing & free of easy sentiment & yet it’s one of the bluest books I’ve ever read, captures the feeling of These Times perfectly: the world is gone, goes dismally on still

Joan Didion's Where I Was From is an immersive memoir of delusion, collective and personal: the past tense in the title denotes a life-long, sometimes excruciating process of pulling away, like some of her ancestors did from the Donner Party, just in time, from a sense of California pioneer heritage as identity---a phrase repeated from one of many amazing documents included, a letter from a girl who stayed with the Donner Party, "never take no cut-offs, and hurry along as fast as you can"---hurtling via "rugged individualism," sometimes including radicalized survival moves, into dependence on outside money: the main chance, the sweet deal, act now!
She was no fan of the hippies, right? So would not be thrilled to know that her alternation of narratives is like nothing else in my reading experience except Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace---A Hippie Dream's space-time groove. But where he launch from, say, frozen Western Canada '64, to sunny-smoggy L.A. '67, to leafy polio-y South Ontario '53 to Honolulu and back to Cali at the time of writing (ca. 09, I think), her momentum covers even more ground by going deeper and faster, though carefully (incl. evocative phrasing times pacing that encourages the reader's thought, rather than racing along), in, typically a page or two of detailed exposition, storytelling that is forensic without a whiff of the clinical, or not too much of one(a little bit is bracing, as befits the daughter of a dry land, also a flood plain, long since watered into an artificial paradise and money pit). A page or two soon amounting to a section that may end with a little leap of logic, a cliffhanger, even, but it's okay, she'll come back to fill in some of the gap, in good time.
So I was thinking about this (departure from and with) Neilian grooves, when I came across a brief excerpt from Christopher Hitchens' take on another late Didion book, about her daughter: he refers in passing to "slight syncopation, in the manner of Bob Dylan": the second line of the syncopation here could be the penny of awareness and warning dropping, bouncing off the through-line of destiny as many Californias rise and fall, sometimes crash and burn, as depicted here. (A unity, detected pretty quickly by mark s, is anxiety, a current that runs through all her work, as she in part critiques here, also now finding her debut novelRun River, despite some appealing quotes, to be a case of "pernicious nostalgia.")
Should add that the whole thing is also very entertaining.

So much in a 226 page trade pb.

White Rage Carol Anderson
black female academic's history of white racism in the US.
I was thinking the term White rage was a description of a particularly intense formof anger like white heat was a description of intense heat. & the application of it to entitled racists feeling discomfort wasa secondary meaning. This shows some particularly virulent examples of pretty institutional levels of racist BS pulled on the black population since teh Civil War. I've just read a scathing account of President Andrew johnson and the destruction of the reconstruction. This leaves him looking like a jackass turd and leaves me wondering to waht extent him being the wrong person at the wrong time caused this or if another person in the role at taht point might have done something a lot better.
I caught a webinar book club on this last year and have wanted to read it ever since. Very depressing

On a similar note, the xp Didion book although very entertaining is also affecting, as the cost, not nearly just financial, accrues, including how the author is pushed/pushes toward a higher degree of understanding/extreme degree of perception and recounting, including (spoiler as warning) her parents' lives and how they end---just so you know, in case you're not into reading about that.

Andrew Johnson was a pro-slavery president sitting at the top spot of an abolitionist party that hated him and he felt the same about them.

In Alasdair Gray I at last read his story 'Five Letters from an Eastern Empire'. Remarkable density and extent of imagination (albeit drawing on precursors including Kafka). Curious that he's known to many of us as an archetypally Scottish and Glaswegian figure when some of his major, fabulist work is totally unrelated to those places. The story is ingenious and, I think, a tragedy.

I move on to a historical story called 'Sir Thomas's Logopandocy', which seems to me perhaps the hardest prose of writing to read that I've yet come across in Gray's work.

It makes no sense to criticize them for not being good literature when their readers do not want or expect good literature.

My less friendly response is that this is utter horseshit.

― Ward Fowler, Wednesday, 19 January 2022 bookmarkflaglink

otm

I read Play It As It Lays!

great novel

At one point, the marketing folks put a cover on that book that showed a man playing chess with a nude woman. Not sure exactly what they were going for.

sales

Seems only fair to reprint an Eve Babitz book with the Didion/Corvette photo on the cover.

The Vintage International trade paperback of Where I Was From has replaced the Didion/Corvette with Eve Arnold's spacious, tight photo: at the bottom, dappled waves of two-story tract homes roll over the hill, rising out of the dry plain of nowhere to 1950 "middle class" worktopia, toward 00s obsolescence---but very pretty, some houses looking like little emoji faces as the sun hits them---sere hill behind them to the left, but waaaaay up in the sweet blue yonder is a jet! This town, Lakeview, is bordered, defined by McDonnell Douglas, name running around the pylon in forward-leaning letters, ready to ascend---past one one of the aircraft industry spokesman dismisses as "green eyeshade," chickenshit coin-poking squints at Free Enterprise: they got the Gov. of Love money tit, they got artistic license, because this is a one-hand-waving-free, rodeo industry: if you want those stars to spangle, here's how.
But by '93, some of the programs are so far over-budget for so long that even the Pentagon, in the Post-Cold-War era---remember?---is getting ready to pull the plug---great found comedy of a glorious flight of eccentric cargo plane through media, even while back at the 'gon debate is over how not if it should be grounded, for more (handed-off) tweaking or pulling of plug.
Contracts are lost, companies are saved by downsizing---McConnell starts to focus on pulling operations back into its St. Louis home, shutting the gates----Didion walks into the Lakeview Center one day---that being the center of town, the shopping center, mall--village, as it was called near where I live: an ultra-modern triumph in 1950---but she says to a clerk, oh I've never seen a home sale booth in a mall before, and clerk says, "Oh, those are just FHA/VA repos."
Ripples spread back to L.A. proper, where the people who have paper on the mortgage holders out there start to feel it in the Beverly Hills, Brentwood etc. real estate market, blaming it on the Rodney King riots.
Meanwhile back in Lakewood, a media scandal erupts, spinning through afternoon talk shows especially: a suburban gang, the Spur Posse, has been accused of rape and other shades of sexual coercion, with pre-memes of "B-but the high school gives out free condomw!" (false, says author), and "blowing it out of proportion"--but this is traced back to a pipe bomb exploding on front porch of a family containing a Spur: it's Spur vs. Spur escalation, turns out---a meeting is held at school, somebody mentions rape, and whole thing gets narrowcast---for a while---yadda yadda at least one Spur goes to prison, and not for rape or bombs---it's like a book-within-a-book, one of several: that's how she rolls.

though her Californias, old and new and old and new and why cant these new new people be like us old right new people

John Aubrey - Brief Lives
Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep
Joseph Conrad - The Secret Agent

Aubrey's Lives is outstanding. In an era with almost no parallel in England's literature this really has a place. Obviously "Lives" are a thing, but what makes Aubrey stand out is what I can only conceive as a lack of concentration which can reduce a life to scatterings, juicy gossip, plenty of (tall) tales, with an at times review of the funeral that Aubrey has attended. The other is the Civil War: on which side of the fence did the various participants in these lives stand, and what were the consequences? Its an insight into that particular episode in England's history, too, but you can just bask in the wonderful prose (but that isn't necessarily of note, there was so much good prose and poetry in England then).

Then onto Chandler's dialoguing and Conrad's moods.

I've begun Soldiers of Salamis, Javier Cercas, based on many favorable comments here on ILB when it came up during the recent 'Favorite Book of (Year)' polling. So far it seems like a very fine bit of storytelling. My only irritation with it is a pure quibble: the battle of Salamis was a sea battle so I keep thinking "but it's sailors of Salamis, not soldiers!"

The second half of Sailors of Salamis is some of the best stuff I've read in the last, I dunno, five years. Great book.

I'm midway through what feels like about half a dozen things. JB Priestley's English Journey, wherein farty old Jack rambles around a Depression-affected England, visiting factories, drinking stale beer and complaining about how ugly everything is. Despite confusingly standing as an independent MP at one point, Priestley does have a coherent Socialist vision but there is a whiff of one-nationism about him. He sentimentalises his subjects rather than giving them subjecthood and, at times, there's a Heart of Darkness feel about some of the places he visits. Despite all of that, I do find him oddly good company.

Also most of the way through Flyboy in the Buttermilk. This is glib, but I could read Tate about anything, all day.

Peter Bogdanovich's book on Orson Welles (This is Orson Welles). I've got about 1/3 of the way through and it's breezy and damn do I wish I was drinking with them. I need to catch up on some films before I continue.

Pauline Hopkins Of One Blood
Black medical graduate reanimates a trainwreck victim then takes off to Africa with a british expedition in a book by black female writer from 1902. Interesting since this is supposed to be a proto Wakanda society. But she seems to be working with some pretty racist tropes and also seems a bit scathing about Arabs.
I stumbled on this on some recommended list possibly historic sci fi or balck sci fi or soemthing. It is included in a book anthology of Black Sci fi from a publishing house that specialises in sci fi and fantasy anthologies. Book has 4 or 5 stories/longer pieces in dating from mid 19th century to about the 1920s which is interesting. I wasn't sure teh whole novel was going to be included since it isw listed as tens of pages shorter than the listing i found for pp in a standalone copy. But format is different and it all appears to be here.

Kehinde Andrews back to Black
I finished this overview of black political movement in the 20th and 21st centuries. Quite interesting. Shares a lot of his own opinions on things. I may be reading too many things at teh same time but I seemed to devour this less hungrily than his New Age Of Empire at teh beginning of last year. Anyway he is a writer and interviewee that I enjoy. So will be trying to read more by him.

Stephen Fry Mythos
fry's retelling of Greek mythology which I've wanted to read for a couple of years. I find his writing pretty readable so will probably read Heroes his 2nd book in the series when I can.
Started this yesterday cos I wasn't in the mood to take in just how bad teh situations described in

White rage Carol Anderson were
just read about the situation concerning brown vs Board of Education and education in general for the black population.
Read that chapter this morning.
Disgusting history. & she hasn't talked about later attempts to overturn what was eventually achieved yet.

a book anthology of Black Sci fi from a publishing house that specialises in sci fi and fantasy anthologies. Sounds good, what's the title?

Black sci-fi short stories : anthology of new & classic tales / foreword by Temi Oh
from Flame Tree publishing.
I've seen a number of anthologies from the publishing house on various aspects of sci fi and fantasy.

(that one should be public domain given 1920 publish date but i can only find a scan at the moment ( https://archive.org/details/HopkinsOfOneBlood ))

I persist with Alasdair Gray's story 'Sir Thomas's Logopandocy'.

It is a formally distinctive work in which eg: a verso (left) page is split into two columns, which carry on on subsequent verso pages, while each recto (right) page carries on another discourse. Thus three, or more, discourses are going on at once. I can well imagine a critic writing 'Gray challenges our reading practices, making us decide whether to read both pages at once, or reach each column in full then go back and read the other -- drawing attention to the practices of reading'. I can't say I find this hugely rewarding, in this particular instance, as the actual contents of each discourse are uninteresting.

Regarding the complex page layout, I'm impressed that Gray was somehow able to set it up. I can imagine ILB poster Tim of Halfpint Press doing something similar, though sadly I can't see him reprinting any Gray as, presumably, it's all been done. (If he did produce a Gray text, I'd buy it.) But poster Tim has printing skills. Did Gray actually have those? How did he do this?

Gray seems to have done a huge amount of historical research to write this story - mainly into Scottish Renaissance history. The content feels to me very obscure, but for some reason the author went into minutiae. Why? What's its interest for him? I don't yet know.

The story is, though, enlivened by small moments of humour, as when the titular narrator forgets something then remembers it.

just realised that Verso books is a Leftist print publishing house. Have put out some really good books but have unfortunately stopped having a differentiation between post to Europe and teh rest of teh world . Shame pesky brexit. I wanted to get a copy of a few things from there. The Omnibus Invention of teh White Race, WEB du Bois Darkwater and some Walter Benjamin but now seeing all post is £10 not what I payed last year and there is a postage category missing.

Nelson Algren Never Come Morning
1940s era book about day to day life in the underclasses in Chicago in the Polish community and others. JUst read the first chapter and its pretty rough.

Owen Hatherley Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances
A collection of short pieces by British writer under the theme of Pete Meaden's description of what mod meant. It looks at things from a perspective tied into architecture among other things. Seems interesting. Will see how I feel after i read afew more.
First piece has music by Marlene Dietrich as a central focus.

D.t. Suzuki The Zen Doctrine of No Mind
populariser of Zen in the West talks about the subject and gives a load of aphorisms.
I was lkooking at this a couple of weeks ago but thought I was overspending so left it in teh charity shop then rgretted not getting it went back and found it this week.

i just finished didion's democracy, thought it was staggeringly beautiful and well-constructed, a novel of "fitful glimpses" as she put it, but these fitful glimpses gradually, invisibly mass into a narrative flow like an underground river

ppl who do not favor her politics will find the main character falling in love with a spook hilarious, but also the book is at least partially about the failure and folly of colonialism and the mean emptiness shared by a family of hardcore colonists, what can you do

i have started reading the sluts by dennis cooper which i will probably finish in two days bc it's like reading a really lurid message board thread

I finished Soldiers of Salamis last night. It's always pleasant to read a book where all the parts mesh together and deliver such satisfaction.

It wasn't journalism by any measure, but it benefited a lot from the author's sense of journalistic restraint and discipline in handling factual material. After so much restraint, the final few pages of unrestrained, almost euphoric, prose came as a surprise. The real weight of the book culminates just at the inflection point where Cercas realizes he knows exactly how he'll write the book. The final burst of relief is like a release from captivity; it says nothing the reader hasn't already concluded, but the abrupt change of tone has value.

I'm reading David Copperfield by Dickens and Blood Meridian by Mccarthy. The opening to David Copperfield was glorious but I got a bit bogged down 100 pages in so put it down for a month or two. But I'm back into it and enjoying it again - Mr. Dick is such an interesting character!

Blood Meridian is astonishing - I'm not sure I've read anything like it.

i am also reading Blood Meridian. spoilers: they have just shot up a small town.

(as above, i prefer Grebt Expectations to David Copperfield, which makes me the only one)

I think I just read that bit too! The violence is so intense.

NYT: Anne Arensberg, Insightful Novelist of Mysteries and Manners, Dies At 84---paywalled of course, but brief wiki bio incl.
Her stories "Art History" and "Group Sex" were chosen for the 1975 and 1980 O. Henry Award Stories collections. After writing her two novellas, Arensberg won the American Book Award for First Novel in 1981 with Sister Wolf while the award replaced the National Book Awards during the 1980s. Her later publications include a novelization of "Group Sex" in 1986 and an additional novel, Incubus, in 1999.
is she good?

Blood meridian is very good

JUst finished Pauline Hopkins Of One Blood
it's a bit gothic or something. Not exactly what I was expecting might compare to an H Rider Haggard or something.
Well I've read it now. Think I was more impressed by WEB du Bois' contribution to this book The Comet. Well will try to get through the rest of it anyway.

also
Carol Anderson White Rage
which is really depressing and aggrovating and did clarify what Shelby County meant. So pretty topical still in a way that one would have hoped might have been corrected. It does go into corruption too which might also be topical. It was published the year taht t got the Presidential role and this copy does add an epilogue covering some of that era

Small Things Like These and Foster by Claire Keegan, short and beautiful and I wept at the end of the second. Now on to The Count of Monte Cristo, I know it's a celebrated example of the genre but at the moment I feel like I wouldn't be too unhappy if I only had similar adventure stories to read till the end of my days. Not sure how he's going to spin it out for another 1000 pages though.

It spins out and spins out and never lets up imo

Make sure you read the Robin Buss translation!

I heard that it originating as magazine instalments meant that is not as coherent as it might have been if it was written as a stand alone book. I know i read an article on teh subject, may be in an Umberto Eco anthology I read.
NOt read much Dumas. have heard about his background him being the son of a black general who had managed to build up his own rank through merit I think. has been a few years since i listened to the Stuff You Missed in History podcast on Dumas pere. But interesting story.

The Alasdair Gray story becomes slightly more cogent: the narrator is interviewed in the Tower of London by an official and they discuss the history of language and the Tower of Babel. The narrator claims that he can reunify the languages of humanity.

The Tower motif strongly echoes the tower of the other story, about the 'Axletree': so I perceive some coherence across the book.

Make sure you read the Robin Buss translation

Any particular reason? I'm reading the Gutenberg version, presumably the original anonymous English translation and it seems fine, only occasionally obscure in matters of 19th century French politics which is perhaps unavoidable.

This is a thing from 2019 where Eco talks about Monte Cristo. I think what I was remembering was older though and had been anthologised at a much earlier date
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/10/28/the-cult-of-the-imperfect/

I had thought some details had actually changed between instalments as it was gradually published in a magazine when it first appeared.

Monte Christo is not the greatest novel ever written, but when I'm reading it and learn I haven't moved an inch in an hour it's the greatest novel ever written.

I just read The Prisoner of Zenda, a great little adventure story, very nicely paced, and thankfully short enough that it didn't lose its charm by the end. The sequel looks intriguing too - apparently it takes a darker turn.

Not read the book though may have it somewhere. have seen at least a couple of films of it.
Ruritania what a lovely place to visit, but possibly a bit white.

Oho, will have to try those, now that Melville's truly high generic (for Melville) historical Israel Potter has given me a good taste of those.
re A. Gray's parallel columns: can work, like when I briefly got Bible-curious around the turn of the century, read some of an edition with the Synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke & John all lined up with their own accounts of how it all went down---think it's pretty well established that none of these versions were actually written down by the eyewitness Disciples who got their names on the covers: the earliest known manuscripts are from several hundred years later, whatever relationship they had to the ur-sources--but still engrossing, once you get used to reading that way.
The only other example that I've come across is in some passages of Long Time Gone: The Autobiography of David Crosby, where co-author Carl Gottlieb asks various Croz associates how something happened, if at all---I think he just asked cold, without reading them David's side of the story. Makes it an even better read: whole thing even had me wanting to revisit some of his music that I'd dismissed, if not detested. Well-played, DC & CG.

I am reading a WWII memoir, And No Birds Sang, by Canada's favorite beardo, Farley Mowat. He spent months continuously under heavy fire at the front lines in the Italy campaign, which, as he strongly conveys, was a highly unpleasant place to be.

finished plotters - good but didn't quite maintain it's early momentum.

currently reading Outline , Rachel Cusk. terrific so far.

Reading Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped for the first time (I vaguely remember the Disney film from when I was a kid). A decent boy's adventure story so far, and queerer than Treasure Island, at least.

Make sure you read the Robin Buss translation

Any particular reason? I'm reading the Gutenberg version, presumably the original anonymous English translation and it seems fine, only occasionally obscure in matters of 19th century French politics which is perhaps unavoidable.

― for 200 anyone can receive a dud nvidia (ledge), Monday, 24 January 2022 13:32 (eight hours ago) link

They're both good but IMO the Buss is better and more faithful: Buss keeps the dirty innuendoes and the fourth-wall-breaking asides that get cut from the Gutenberg version; his sentences and paragraphs are closer to the original Dumas without being cloth-eared and awkward in the Richard Pevear style; the jokes are funnier; and the Gutenberg version flattens everything in a Walter Scottish way, without Dumas's joie de vivre. But they're both good! I read the Gutenberg as a kid and still loved it. Try and chapter from both and see which you prefer. Just don't read the abridged version!

just realised that Verso books is a Leftist print publishing house

The Slavoj Zizek book that I'm currently reading (Living in the End Times) is published by Verso. Its kind of interesting to me despite knowing very little about Hegel and even less about Lacan. I take it he repeats a lot of the same jokes in other books, but they are new to me. I do have to skim when the dialectical reasoning gets too heavy going.

'when we cease to understand the world' by benjamin labatut. just started it but i'm loving it so far. it's supposed to be dystopian historical short stories about science and mathematics. but so far it's mostly about nazis

Cold Water, Gwendoline Riley's book. She's so good. The voice is fully there, even in the debut she wrote in late teens. Proper "fold up my biro and go home" good.

Glad to see all the Cercas love itt

Billy Bragg's history of skiffle just introduced a guy who was "gardening critic for the Sunday Times". The past truly if a foreign country.

Maybe son or grandson of the guy who reviewed the countryside in Scoop!

I'm on a Clark Coolidge kick right now, reading his massive Selected Poems and often finding myself seeing if the books that poems are taken from are available. They often either aren't or are vanishingly rare. Great poet, the selected is well worth getting for any poetry fan.

I've also been tasked (a paid task, at that) to review Dennis Cooper's most recent book for a publication, so will be diving back into some damaged Twink ass for a while.

White tears brown scars; How white feminism betrays women of color. / Ruby Hamad
Finding this quite compelling. have read about half of it since picking it up from the library yesterday.
Australian Arabic feminist talks about race and the ideal of the white damsel and how white tears are a negative tool. I've seen this compared to Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility but this seems to look much closer at history. Colonisers attitudes to various ethnicities that they are attempting to control sexualising women in a very instrumental way. She talks about the abuse of aboriginal Australian women as black velvet which is something i hadn't come across before, the veil in its earlier form and its ability to disguise women in their sexual endeavours in a way contrary to the way the tabloid press depicts the more recent version of the veil.
Yeah quite enjoying this book.

Bessie Chris Albertson
Later update of a thoroughly researched biography of the 20s/30s blues singer. Slowly reading this.
Includes a series of stories of her ribald carrying on as well as the recording process.

The History Of White people Nell Irvin Painter
I'm now up to the 18th and 19th century.
Author has just been talking about the popularisation of German thought in the 18th century when I wasn't sure there was a Germany to have thought in that way. & has then moved onto de Tocqueville and his companion Gustave de Beaumont travelling around the US and leaving with different foci. De Beaumont made a lot of the one drop of black blood idea and used it as a basic hingepoint for the novel he wrote whereas de Tocqueville concentrated on teh boston white male asan ideal . de Beaumont appears to have been largely written out of history including having his name removed from the title of the book about their travels which is now simply called Alexis de Tocqueville In America

Bought the Buss translation of Monte Cristo, it's half as long again as the Gutenberg one! Also sadly lacking repeated use of 'mephitic' ('méphitique'), replaced with 'sulphurous' or 'musty'.

Just now made it almost all the way through Klara and the Sun before echoing another ilxor's recent cry re another offering, "What the Hell, Ishiguro?!" Because of a spot of fantasy appearing in the swirl and clank of fairly rigorous, or at least committed, faith-keeping science fiction, the kind with nuances of individual characters, in context of small group and societal dynamics, influenced by technological options and some related shades and spaces back there (a lot of detail, but gaps for readers to fill as well, agreeable balance, I think).
So better to think of it the way Wells labelled his most popular novels as "scientific romance," like, don't expect total rigor, and know that this sweetened spot (though not "sweet spot," in terms of ideal balance) of authorial convenience leads around and back into the overall cadence, groove of involving elements (Eliot did some of this shell game switcheroo too). What the hell, still, but already thinking of checking the rest of local library's KI stash.

re show and tell, lots of expository conversations, but also hearing yourself say that, and how verbalization x thought loops, plans, decisions snowball that way, re diff ideas and "Oh it wasn't even really an idea...(later, re same conversation)Mom just had this shitty idea..." as everything keeps moving along.

I finished And No Birds Sang. The book's major narrative momentum was simple enough, following Mowat's transition from a youth impatient to participate in the war, up through his escalating battle experiences to the point where his battalion had suffered more than 50% losses including many close friends, he was experiencing frequent and crippling panic fear he manages via large infusions of rum.

The book ends shortly after his apparently fearless and battle hardened commanding officer hands him a poem he wrote that amounts to a suicide note, then the next day commits suicide-by-enemy-fire by charging at a machine gun emplacement. His epilogue is brief, not specifically pacifist, but harshly anti-war, warning younger generations that war grinds up both soldiers and civilians into unrecognizable shapes, both living and dead, and is neither glorious nor usually even necessary, and any suggestion to the contrary is a lie. His story reinforces these facts with brutal clarity.

I started Riddle of the Sands, a pre-WWI tale of espionage last night, but may set it aside for something less war-centered.

Yeah, those two in a row sound like a lot, though have seen RINTS referred to as a classic of its kind, so would be worth coming back to. The plot's pretty tight, so hard to highlight w/o indicating spoilers, but, re xpost Klara and the Sun as scientific romance, I now notice that Library of Congress data has it classified as Science Fiction and Love Stories, which is right: these are the love stories, as told by Klara, AF (Artificial Friend) series B2, of her and her chosen child owner,Josie, of Josie and her longtime best friend, Rick, as they now struggle with new roles of boyfriend and girlfriend, also stories of love of children and parents, incl. more struggles of course.
Model B2, state of the art/being superseded by new B3, but perhaps compensating for relatively limited features, is here especially challenged tune into and understand humans, sometimes remixing on the fly, as do the humans--because Josie is one of those lucky children, not just gifted, but lifted, genetically edited, which is risky, expensive in a lot of ways, but worth it, if you want your child to have a chance at anything in this world, which is strange and getting stranger, also more familiar, just up the road a little way (copyright 2021, but no pandemic culture; he probably wrote it before we were assured of the probably lingering elements of that, but isolation is a way of life in this story, though Josie and her privileged peers are now reaching the age, as part of college prep, when they must have meetings, which means learning how to be with people outside of the immediate family and household---and that's enough for this month, kids).

Wah? RotS, sorry.

I seem to be sticking with Riddle of the Sands. It is sedately paced and has spilled no blood so far.

finished the sluts, started outline

the sluts was a hilarious thrill-ride about homicidal topping fantasies

Finished Ruby Hamad White tears, Brown Scars; How white feminism betrays women of color.
Found it really good , it expands on White fragility and ties it into further historic context. As the white damsel is seen to be a major tool of racism which I can see to be true. An artificial level where the feelings of a white woman are more important tahn the reality of a BIPOC woman's existence. Have seen how that impacts on me as a black person in similar situations. But this hasa theme of how feminism is undermined by the ignorance or utilisation of racism involved. I think there is more widespread context with that racism that the subtitle might put people off reading that would benefit from knowing about. Do wonder if taht is something taht would put people off who are not already not reading things because they are written by a woman of colour.
I found this pretty eye opening and can see it's truth. Because she is based in Australia I am also hearing things tied into Aboriginal women that i haven't heard elsewhere. I need to read more about that.
One thing that did confuse me was that I thought she had explained why the idea of a Middle East was a misnomer and inherently confusing and misrepresentative and then she uses the term quite a bit later in theh book. Wonder if there should be quotation marks around it in that context or something cos it does seem to be the one thing I would question. Oh that and her referring to the female Doctor Who as being inevitably as far as they would go with the character in terms of minorities when there's since been a black female incarnation presumably very shortly after the book appeared,. If I'm reading that character right.
Anyway glad i read this and i found it pretty compelling so i got through it in a couple of days.

Paul Gilroy There Ain't No Black In The Union Jack
late 80s book on race in the UK. I think it's from a sociological background . First chapter seems pretty academic but I'm beginning to enjoy it

hey uh, why haven't people aggressively pushed me to read outline before? this is magnificent

xpost reminding me that I meant to read Gilroy's Black Atlantic---Modernity and Double Consciousness, putting modern music in context of Black diaspora, among other things---he was the applecart upsetter at a conference transcribed in A Hidden Landscape, the chronicle-anthology of UK music writing edited by mark s, who rec BA to me, and there are pdfs of at least some of the text online, also quite a few references.

some of Black Atlantic's text online, that is.

lucie elven - the weak spot: pretty so-so uk experimental lite in the tradition of walser's 'the assistant' or similar. set in a pharmacy in an alpine village and partly about a despotic pharmacy manager who eventually runs for office (sidebar: you could not set this book in the UK because all UK pharmacies are incredibly depressing, and the one in this book is meant to be just ok. sidebar 2: i don't like plots about people running for office. it seems to be an obsession with american writers and filmmakers, remember the guy in polygamy drama 'big love' who ran for office? why?)

i read '91/92' by lauren elkin: almost comically slight. a diary of bus travel in paris

i also read some of elle nash - nudes: bleak american short stories with teenagers doing drugs and gas stations and all that stuff. the territory is familiar but there's enough in the book that goes beyond the merely lurid

i'm continuing with 'the luminous novel', which i put down a while ago after being put off by the misogyny and homophobia. that's still very much there and still offputting, but it does build to something very satisfying - a slow accumulation of coincidences and unexplained events but narrated with a straight face. the book is definitely a "grower not a shower"

i picked up but have not yet started 'fuccboi' by sean thor conroe. i recall some controversy about this last summer(?) regarding accusations of plagiarism from sam pink, who i really respect as a writer, so i'm interested to see what this one - which is on a big publisher and has had some push, neither of which are true of sam pink's books - is like

hey uh, why haven't people aggressively pushed me to read _outline_ before? this is magnificent

Mande Music Eric Charry
History of the Malian region and its culture and how it ties in with the music produced. So showing the roots of people like Tiamate Diabate, Ali Farka Toure, Rail Band, Ambassadeurs . I think when i started reading this last month i was finding it too dry to get into at that point. I picked it up yesterday and found it really fascianting.
Would love to find some more books like this on the history of Africa and its music.
I think the writer is a French ethnomusicologist which might give it a perspective that is a bit remote but it reads pretty good. Also interested in reading books by people more closely involved.

Clean living under difficult circumstances : finding a home in the ruins of modernism / Owen Hatherley.
Collection of articles by British writer with an archaeological theme. I found one piece on the shop fronts of Walthamstow High st which was an interesting thing to find especially since he highlights Saeeds one of my regular stops for fabric if I'm there.
Title comes from one time Who manager Pete Meaden's description of mod.

Zami : a new spelling of my name : a biomythography / Audre Lord
her memoir. I'm still at the point where she has started school and been tranferred from a school which focused on saving eyesight to the main Catholic school in the area. So she's being taught by nuns. I need to look up her sight problems again since I'm not remembering the exact details.
Anyway another really good read. I enjoy her writing.

started Franzen Crosssroads (not even a guilty pleasure at this point) finished Jeffers Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (had not kept in mind the fundamental violence)

I would like to read that Franzen novel. One day.

Don't bother, he's awful

Crossroads is great, definitely worth your time.

I finished Jeffers’ Love Songs of WEB DuBois last week, i loved it. Still thinking about it a week later, it has such long tendrils. She writes so beautifully that there’s no work to even start, or “get into” the story… it just flows like a river.

Today i finished Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet”. Also beautifully written, it knocked me out as well. A believable, affecting story that’s really not “about” Shakepeare in the normal ways, centering his wife & children of whom so little is known instead. Really stunning.

Metaphor - Terence Hawkes (from the reissued Critical Idiom series). Very handy, very brief guide to the history of metaphor and its changes, though 'some 20th century views' is putting it mildly - it's a very partial view, with sections on IA Richards and Empson, and something of a fixation on Levi-Strauss, but little on the other theoretical linguistic and theoretical developments (Hawkes has also written a v good guide to Structuralism).

The Making of Incarnation – Tom McCarthy. A novel largely comprising a series of analyses of simulations and reconstructions: motion capture, hyrdo and aero dynamics, Lilian Gilbreth wireframes of motions of labour, and how they constitute reality, new realities, new vectors of meaning, and what glitches and memories these new spaces might create or retain. I'm very much interested in the topics, but it's delivered in a very baggy literary voice, with some seriously embarrassing stylistic solecisms appearing from time to time, and little in the way of bringing emotional content or dramatic impulses to the quite essayistic topics. More rambling here, with the pinefox providing a suitable, sceptical foil. I'm not *not* enjoying it though.

Social Contagion, and other material on microbiological class war in China – Chuang. A series of essays on Covid and China brought together in one volume by the Marxist Chuang collective. A very nice little volume, so much more appealing than those large hack-historian *takes* that appear. Chuang are dedicated to representing and describing China from the inside as a corrective to western representations. The first essay is the one from which the volume takes its name, and deals with three topics: pandemic as a consequence of capitalist processes, via an examination of how agri-industrial practices intensify the process of zoonotic viral transfer, and the way that Covid and lockdown has been a good test and analysis of Chinese state capacity, and what lessons this might teach people about how to rise up, disrupt or otherwise revolt against that state capacity. The authors suggest that the Chinese shutdown has many similarities to the global impact of a Chinese general strike.

The essay originally appeared here - though it's significantly expanded in the book, and there are some important corrections. Probably the most important of those is dialling down the disagreement about the possibility of accidental lab leak hypothesis. As Zeynep Tufekci points out here, lab leaks have been by far the most common cause of viral epidemics, including many previous SARS outbreaks and eg the disastrous 2007 foot and mouth outbreak in the UK. It seems at least very possible that an accidental lab leak was responsible here.

Regardless, this doesn't affect the authors' central thesis that pandemics are a consequence of intensive farming and creation of monocultures, with little in the way of natural firebreaks to transmission and viral mutation. A lot of the detail of their argument here rests on one book (Big Farms Make Big Flu by Rob Wallace, and in summarising that single book, phrases like 'because pigs are often susceptible to both avian and human-adapted viruses, those viruses remix across pig populations to create new varieties of influenza that can lead to epidemic diseases' make you a little jumpy.

Remix? Really? As I say, the overall content that we have seriously disrupted our agricultural environment creating new vectors of disease doesn't seem too contentious, and it's to their credit that the authors spell out the argument to allow the reader to examine the connecting premises.

There are striking phrases and arguments throughout:

... capitalism's tendency to repeatedly position humanity on the brink of extinction. In past decades, that extinction was threatened through global nuclear war. Today, it confronts us in the shape of an ecological catastrophe which is as much microbiological as macroecological.

There's an excellent section called There is No Wilderness that looks at how vectors between wild animal and environmental spaces have been brought into capitalist processes and supply chains, partly through driving scarcity in local populations, then required to look elsewhere for food, partly by industrialising... well, they say it better:

Again, Wallace and his numerous collaborators point to not one but two major routes by which capitalism helps to gestate and unleash ever more deadly epidemics: The first, outlined above, is the directly industrial case, in which viruses are gestated within industrial environments that have been fully subsumed within capitalist logic. But the second is the indirect case, which takes place via capitalist expansion and extraction in the hinterland, where previously unknown viruses are essentially harvested from wild populations and distributed along global capital circuits.

I found this section particularly interesting because of a fascination with the grotesque, that artistic examination of the boundary between the truly wild, and let us say subconscious, and the civilised. Chuang's contention is that with the viruses we are seeing the result of internalising the wild into our 'civilised' global supply chains, an interesting new aesthetic boundary as well as an important socioeconomic question. My mind, as so often, inevitably drawn back to Kipling's short story, The Eye of Allah, as the medieval monks look at microbes through the lens of the new microscope they have acquired - incidentally the sort of dramatisation of abstract spaces that Tom McCarthy would do well to study.

There is of course plenty of latent and explicit argument in the west about Chuang's characterisation of capitalism. They note that the significant medical advances brought about by capitalism are incontrovertible, but point to their uneven distribution - too little, too late. At the beginning of the second essay, on Chinese worker organisation and the dynamics of corporate and state institutions under Covid, they say of the US and a perceived direction of state capacity into 'the hands of a police state', "Such a shift is clearly indicative of a once capacious state in the throes of a decades-long decay." To set against that you might set Audrey Tang's comment in an interview with Tyler Cowen (i know i know, he's a preposterous prick, but his interviews can be interesting and this one is):

COWEN: Now, my country, the United States, has made many, many mistakes at an almost metaphysical level. What is it in the United States that those mistakes have come from? What’s our deeper failing behind all those mistakes?
TANG: I don’t know. Isn’t America this grand experiment to keep making mistakes and correcting them in the open and share it with the world? That’s the American experiment.
COWEN: Have we started correcting them yet?
TANG: I’m sure that you have.

That of course is part of the capitalist argument as well - that is to say, flows of capital are mutable enough to enable renewal *at some level*. Now that level is often at the level of the wealthiest, so we come back to Chuang's key point about uneven allocation, but of course also capitalism's tendency to bring us to the edge of extinction. Hell of a gamble. Hell of an experiment. I think again about Tufekci's point about the precariousness of gain-of-function experimenting and the porousness of even top graded biological labs. Add that to Chuang's observation that actually, we have been lucky these have just been Covid viruses - an aggressive flu virus finding a vector into the global circuits would be considerably more damaging.

Anniversaries Vol 1 - Uwe Johnson. Started reading it. Put it down. Went to a Patrick Wright lecture mainly on The Village that Died for England, and then ended up also buying his book on Uwe Johnson's time in Sheppey, The Sea View Has Me Again. picked it up and put it down. Finally, got a copy of Luke Ellis' Twenty twenty, which quotes liberally from Anniversaries. I found myself enjoying the Anniversaries sentences more than Luke Ellis', so I've picked it up properly this time, and am finding it quite compelling. More at another time though!

The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II - Vol I – Fernand Braudel. As always a delight in style, intellect and observation. His separation of the book into levels is justified wonderfully:

The first part is devoted to a history whose passage is almost imperceptible, that of man in his relationship to the environment, a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles....

On a different level from the first there can be distinguished another history, this time with slow but perceptible rhythms. If the expression had not been diverted from its full meaning, one could call it *social history*, the history of groups and groupings. How did these swelling currents affect Mediterranean life in general...

Lastly, the third part gives hearing to traditional history – history, one might say, on the scale not of man, but of individual men, what Paul Lacombe and François Simiand called '*l'histoire événementielle*', that is, the history of events: surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.

(sic: man and men in their unwelcome blurred old form as proxies for 'people' and 'humankind': obv for dynastic history as well as social women play and major part and more generally gender constructions exist on a spectrum across which people participate in the dynamics of history)

And so in that first section you get a wonderful disquisition on the commerce in snow and ice-water, which i will quote in full to conclude this overlong entry:

These are the snows that explain the long Mediterranean history of 'snow water', offered by Saladin to Richard the Lionheart, and drunk to fatal excess by Don Carlos in the hot month of July 1568, when he was imprisoned in the Palace at Madrid. In Turkey in the sixteenth century it was not merely the privilege of the rich; in Constantinople, but elsewhere as well, Tripoli in Syria, for instance, travellers remarked on merchants selling snow water, pieces of ice, and water-ices which could be bought for a few small coins. Pierre Belon relates that snow from Bursa used to arrive at Istanbul in whole boatloads. It was to be found there all the year round according to Busbecq, who was astonished to see the janissaries drinking it every day at Amasia in Anatolia, in the Turkish army camp. The snow trade was so important that the pashas took an interest in the exploitation of the 'ice mines'. It was said in 1578 to have provided Muhammad Pasha with an income of up to 80,000 sequins a year.

Elsewhere, in Egypt, for example, where snow arrived from Syria by relays of fast horses; in Lisbon which imported it from great distances; in Oran, the Spanish *presidio*, where snow arrived from Spain in the brigantines of the Intendance; in Malta, where the Knights, if we are to believe them, would die of snow did not arrive from Naples, their illneses apparently requiring 'this sovereign remedy', snow was, on the contrary, the height of luxury. In Italy, as in Spain, however, snow water seems to have been used widely. It explains the early development of the art of ice cream and water-ice in Italy. Its sale was so profitable in Rome that it became the subject of a monopoly. In Spain snow was piled up in wells and kept until summer. Wstern pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land in 1494 were none the less astonished to see the owner of the boat presented, on the Syrian cost, with 'a sack full of snbow, the sight of which this country and in the month of July, filled all on board with the greatest amazement'. On the same Syrian coast, a Venetian noted with surprise in 1553 that the 'Mores', 'ut nos utimur saccharo, item spargunt nivem super cibos et sua edulia, 'sprinkle snow on their food and dishes as we would sugar.'

couple of additional things: a key point across the Chuang essays is that Covid has shown the Chinese state capacity to be significantly less robust than western depictions of it. It is highly effective when focused on a single area - eg Hubei in the case of Covid – but does not have the capacity to apply that level of rigor nationally, leaving local areas to apply their own, occasionally ferocious, lockdown rules.

second, i meant to quote part of the final paragraph to the first essay - the overall essay is excellent, clear in a way that allows you to see its argument, strikingly phrased in places, and this final para summarises nicely in tone, image and argument:

In quarantined China, we begin to glimpse such a landscape, at least in its outlines: empty late-winter street dusted by the slightest film of undisturbed snow, phone-lit faces peering out of windows, happenstance barricades staffed by a few spare nurses or police or volunteers or simply paid actors tasked with hoisting flags and telling you to put your mask on and go back home. The contagion is social. So, it should come as no real surprise that the only way to combat it at such a late stage is to wage a surreal sort of war on society itself. Don't gather together, don't cause chaos. But chaos can build in isolation too.

Finished Clark Coolidge's "Selected Poems 1962-1985," a 464-page opus that took about two weeks for me to get through. Now onto a re-read of Dennis Cooper's "I Wished," probably followed by a re-read of the George Miles cycle, then another re-read of "I Wished" before finally writing a review...

*correction - Twenty twenty is by Ellis Sharp, not Luke Ellis. Luke Ellis is someone I work with.

I hope you get to it one day (xp). I had heard that he lived in NYC and wondered what he made of the Central Park birdwatching incident and the Arbery case in light of his own hobbies and the urban and residential development in gritty areas and class themes that were topics in his earlier work and presumably his lived experience with first generation immigrants. I haven't yet figured out what makes it compelling in spite of all of the naysayers and one's own perception of gullibility while reading. I have made scant progress.

The writing to me was candid, and the coverage made me aware of alternate worlds and new things to explore (including working with archival and historical materials ... xp).

Sounds appealing, but what book are you referring to?

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

Ursula Le Guin - The Dispossesed
Domenico Starnone - Ties.

A really rare thing for me is to finish reading a book and think it was the right time. Most of the time its an 'oh just wish I had read Middlemarch ten years ago'. Le Guin and her imagination of a world organised along anarchist lines would not have had the same effect at 20 (when I was reading lots of SF) that it does today, when our politics has utterly crumbled to dust and the no one able is able to govern from the top.

I'll talk more about Ties in the Elena Ferrante thread.

Valdimar Ásmundsson, powers of darkness - this is the Icelandic “translation” of Dracula that was published just a few years after the original; almost a century passed before anyone realised it isn’t at all a translation in the usual sense but a completely rewritten novel, notably racier and bloodier than stoker’s, with added political intrigue - that’s the pitch anyway. The intro by the (re)translator is very keen to convince you that this version is somehow drawn from stoker’s notes for Dracula, making it semi-official, but the mystery of the artefact is the draw for me. Oh, there’s also a foreword by stoker himself… probably

Is it any good? It spends a LOT more time on harker at castle Dracula (as in, most of the book) and this stuff is quite good, especially the count’s extreme libertine rants, the blood cult and ghostly figures, none of which lead anywhere. The stuff in England (which weirdly ditches the epistolary mode in favour of standard 3rd person narrative) is disappointingly sketchy, the endgame across Europe absurdly truncated (& no renfield, fuck that). The most interesting change here is that while Dracula is mostly an unseen character in the second half of stoker’s novel, here he interacts with Mina & co. Interestingly the translation was done by committee, with the named translator really more of a project leader; it’s no doubt diligent but maybe missing the flair that would do justice to what halldór laxness apparently called one of the greatest works of Icelandic literature

~~~ok since writing the above I have read the Wikipedia entry and apparently it has since emerged that the Icelandic text is based on a previous Swedish translation, in which the second part is much longer? This is like borgesian soap opera

Also recently Frederic dard, bird in a cage - downbeat murder mystery I would never have solved in a million years, with an extra very dark wrinkle if I’m reading right

Izumi Suzuki, terminal boredom - seven sf stories by an author who acted in pink films (& was in throw away your books, rally in the streets!) & died by suicide aged like 36. I hope more of her stuff appears in English, I really enjoyed these. I’m not an expert in this genre by any means but I can see how it could be standard post pkd: drugs, identity, shifting reality, what if anomie but too much — but I felt the mood was v distinctive

+ Seamus Heaney Beowulf - this is where I learned Grendel isn’t a dragon

the izumi suzuki sounds intriguing. will put it on the list.

*correction - Twenty twenty is by Ellis Sharp, not Luke Ellis. Luke Ellis is someone I work with.

― Fizzles, Sunday, 30 January 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Had a look at a review and did laugh that someone had a go at a 'this is what I did in lockdown' type book.

https://www.themodernnovel.org/europe/w-europe/england/sharp/twenty-twenty/

*correction - Twenty twenty is by Ellis Sharp, not Luke Ellis. Luke Ellis is someone I work with.

― Fizzles, Sunday, 30 January 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Had a look at a review and did laugh that someone had a go at a 'this is what I did in lockdown' type book.

https://www.themodernnovel.org/europe/w-europe/england/sharp/twenty-twenty🕸/

It reminds me of Journey to the End of Night when Bardamu says "Every virtue has its own indecent literature". We need more of such indecency in virtuous English literary culture.

January hasn’t been a great month for me reading wise but I think that will improve.

The Brightest Star in the Sky - Marian Keyes

I can’t remember why I read this after having it on my shelf for ten years but it was one of the few of hers I’ve never read. It’s very very strange (my husband “how strange can a Marian Keyes book be?” “Chunks of ice falling off airplanes to kill rapists in the street strange”). For me, the conceit didn’t quite work and the characters weren’t quite there - with the exception of Maeve maybe - and I’m wondering if it’s because the slightly fantastical element is removed from her usual groundedness in her life experiences? Like, Rachel’s Holiday despite its cover is the furthest thing from fluff - it’s about addiction and the lies and hurt and pain caused by it! - whereas there was less to this than I wanted. Still, I liked reading it, but I wouldn’t reread it to death like all her other work.

Breasts and Eggs - Mieko Kawakami

I haven’t finished this yet. I really enjoyed the first part - the days in the apartment in Tokyo with her sister and niece and couldn’t stop reading that, but I’ve ground to a halt in part 2. Maybe because the subject matter is less interesting to me. I do need to come back and finish it though, because it’s been really good so far. Ofc with translated work you’re always wondering how much the translator’s perspective contributes to the voices of the characters, but I found the portrayals of poverty and sisterhood in part 1 really enthralling and I just need to come back and finish part 2.

Tokyo Girls Bravo - Kyoko Okazaki

I love Kyoko Okazaki a ridiculous amount??? Only two of her works are officially translated into English - this is one of the many French translations. I own a French translation of this but the version I’m reading is actually a scanlation done by a hobbyist - which I am incredibly grateful for. I got most of it through the French but the English fleshes out there stuff that was slightly ambiguous to me. Anyway, I love this a lot, it’s semi autobiographical with plenty of focus on the things that mattered to young Okazaki - fashion, new wave, Tokyo scenes - and her art style works really well here. When Tokyo is a focal point, it’s drawn slightly fantastically, with stars stamped in the sky like a child’s imagining. Her faces and expressions are drawn with the same sort of relaxed, nearly sloppy, flow she always uses, which contrasts nicely with the sharpness of her actual text, and the observations about people are as great as she always manages. I am always very fond of how she uses blank spaces to force a focal point, like someone abruptly punching the pause button on a tape recorder. I kept coming back to this particular piece:

https://i.postimg.cc/LX7McjGJ/708-B131-D-0-ABB-4646-81-CC-117-D05393-F58.jpg

Anyway no idea when I’ll finish it as it’s up to the scanlators but it’s great and I’m really enjoying it.

Ofc with translated work you’re always wondering how much the translator’s perspective contributes to the voices of the characters

There's a bit in here about the Osaka dialect and how the published translation doesn't really try and capture it:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/11/breasts-and-eggs-by-mieko-kawakami-review-an-interrogation-of-the-female-condition

I read that and that seemed to gel with the tiny amount I know about it alright

Good book post, poster Gyac.

xp to gyac

yes Rachel's Holiday is really good and far more than the light funny quick read I was anticipating going in. tho it is still funny. sequel is out this month I think.

Ty pinefox!

Yeah Oscar, I am cautiously looking forward to that, but I’m never really sure about sequels so late after the original. But let’s wait and see I guess?

I finished Alasdair Gray's story 'Sir Thomas's Logopandocy'. The narrator explains his idea of a reformed language that would be perfect. He is, it seems, discreetly released from confinement and travels the world in the last pages. Some of these are almost unreadable fragments, like Dada poems. He winds up in a mysterious town like one of Calvino's invisible cities. Meanwhile discourse is interrupted by statements like HERE A GREAT PART OF THE MANUSCRIPT HAS BEEN ATE BY MICE.

I think I'm still missing something re: this story. I don't much see how the first part relates to the second and third. But I rather marvel at Gray's knowledge and his ability to persevere with such an elaborate, extended piece of historical pastiche. The ambition - historical, allegorical, textual - of this volume, UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY, is remarkable. I've one more long story to go. It's called 'M. Pollard's Prometheus'.

Walter Rodney The Groundings With My brothers
Short set of essays on Black Empowerment from teh late 60s looking at teh history of teh West Indies and Africa.
Pretty short and now bulked out a bit with commentaries. BUt I think this is the first Rodney I have read and hopefully will be far from the last. Do wish I could get a cheap copy of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, do have a request in for a copy as an interlibrary loan but it appears there is only one copy in teh system which isn't good. Would have thought he wasn't that obscure.

Audre lorde Zami A New spelling of my Name
Black lesbian feminist's memoir . I've just got to her leaving college cos she didn't get the grades she wanted for subjects she hadn't studied for and thought she had no capability for. Really nice memoir anyway, really shows where her thought comes from I think.

I finished The Riddle of the Sands. I needn't have feared it as overly war-centered and bloody. I'd estimate more than 80% of the narrative was taken up with discussions of small craft seamanship and navigation. Even the dastardly German plot to invade England was nowhere near immanence, but rather was proceeding at a slow pace requiring uncounted further years of preparation. Not one drop of blood was shed in this book. If you love small craft seamanship, this book will be your nirvana. Otherwise, be advised.

depicting Germans as dastardly then acquiring real guns from them to help in 1916 oh well.

A Short History of 7 Killings Marlon James
The multivoiced novel about the events concerning the assassination attempt on Bob Marley in 1976. It's done like an oral history or rather a collection of different accounts of the time surrounding the real life event. I just got up to the end of the section set in teh year of the hit. I need to read up on what happened to the actual group of gunmen.
This is very welldone and i should have really concentrated on it more a few months ago before I got into the continual stream of interlibrary loans I'm trying to keep up with. Think I will be trying to read more of his work.

Groundings With My brothers Walter Rodney
short set of articles by Rodney on the history of Africa initially done as notes for a history course he was teaching.
I just ordered his book on the Russian revolution.

Bessie Chris Albertson

I made a brief run at The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth. It is written almost exclusively in the omniscient voice and the past tense. It is full of keen observation of the characters and their actions, but it is unleavened by other voices; only about 1% of the writing is devoted to dialogue between the characters. Instead Roth gives us descriptions summarizing their interactions. The dominating use of the past tense adds an elegiac tone, but robs everything of immediacy. That kind of relentless objectivity allows for exceptional levels of nuance but it makes for very dense reading. I'm postponing this one for another time.

a lot of people want to look at every single thing through a manichean moral lens. figure out which guy is the good guy and which guy is the bad guy. not me though. to be the king of deals you have to be a master of nuance. comfortable with grey areas

— Richie Deals (@allahliker) February 3, 2022

That kind of relentless objectivity allows for exceptional levels of nuance but it makes for very dense reading.

Yes! Felt similar. Also why I (temporarily) (probably) gave up The Corner That Held Them.

i'm reading season of migration to the north based on glowing recommendations here and it's astounding.

I've given up on both the Radetzky March and The Corner that Held them, too. I found myself drifting.

I'm reading Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This. I don't think it's doing me much good in terms of my general grasp of reality right now but it's very funny in places and her figurative language frequently pulls me up short.

I retreated into the world of 'science lite' in the form of a book called The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean. It's a grab bag of science-and-scientists anecdotes centered very loosely around the Periodic Table of the Elements. While it does contain some history and some almost 'hard' science that I hadn't encountered before, the overall effect is like listening to Everyone's Favorite High School Science Teacher, who spends the entire class time 'making science fun', while ignoring the textbook, in the hope that the dullest kids in the class will pick up a smattering of science instead of tuning them out. Luckily for me, I can walk out of class for a break when I feel like it.

Bullet Train
by Kōtarō Isaka

Nanao, nicknamed Lady Bird—the self-proclaimed “unluckiest assassin in the world”—boards a bullet train from Tokyo to Morioka with one simple task: grab a suitcase and get off at the next stop. Unbeknownst to him, the deadly duo Tangerine and Lemon are also after the very same suitcase—and they are not the only dangerous passengers onboard. Satoshi, “the Prince,” with the looks of an innocent schoolboy and the mind of a viciously cunning psychopath, is also in the mix and has history with some of the others. Risk fuels him as does a good philosophical debate . . . like, is killing really wrong? Chasing the Prince is another assassin with a score to settle for the time the Prince casually pushed a young boy off of a roof, leaving him comatose.

When the five assassins discover they are all on the same train, they realize their missions are not as unrelated as they first appear.

A massive bestseller in Japan, Bullet Train is an original and propulsive thriller that fizzes with an incredible energy and surprising humor as its complex net of double-crosses and twists unwind. Award-winning author Kotaro Isaka takes readers on a tension packed journey as the bullet train hurtles toward its final destination. Who will make it off the train alive—and what awaits them at the last stop?

I've only just started it, but so far it seems to be a cracking read.

A massive bestseller in Japan, Bullet Train is an original and propulsive thriller that fizzes with an incredible energy

I'm not sure that quoting publisher's blurbs at length is quite in the spirit of I Love Books. Blurbs are more to be avoided, like the piles of dog shit that festoon a city sidewalk. I want to hear what you think of the book.

Someone open a window in ILB already

Done. While I'm up, anything else you'd like?

Reading Grossman's Life and Fate. My father-in-law's favorite book, decided I should read while he's still around to talk about it. Other than the challenge of tracking all the patronymics, diminutives, etc., really enjoying it.

Love The Radetzky March.

Done. While I'm up, anything else you'd like?

If that is your desire, you may whistle up the wind.

Plenty of that when you’re around.

Joseph Roth rules.

I want to hear what you think of the book.

As soon as I've read enough to form an opinion beyond the one-sentence impression I gave at the end, I'd be glad to share it.

Not sure whether that is a publisher's blurb per se--I just copied off of Goodreads. But, I understand the point you are making.

I didn’t mind it, I like reading descriptions of stuff I’ve never heard of because I can go off and read elsewhere about if it’s something I’m interested in.

I will go back to Roth for sure. I need a good block of time to read fiction. Which is to say, it was me, not Joseph.

Eh, the Lockwood is good but something in there is making me think of Martin Amis. I will articulate this badly but I think it's the war against cliche 'here comes a metaphor and by god I'm going to make it new' aspect of it. I absolutely appreciate it's in service of a wider point about digital culture and the affected, viral nature of the always online voice but I can't shake it now I've thought it.

This poster will eviscerate itself in t-minus 10 minutes.

Not sure what a quoted squib about a book, written by someone who might have an idea of what the book is about or "doing," is against the spirit of the thread, but maybe that's because I find blurbs to be an interesting literary form. Either way, we're talking about books or quoting other people writing about books. Who cares?

xp I almost agree except that there's something deeply surreal and idiosyncratic about Lockwood's metaphors that makes them seem less affected, more a product of seeing the world at a very peculiar slant. Usually with writers like that I figure out the trick after a little while and can generate metaphors in their style almost automatically; with Lockwood I can't.

Count me in on the "blurbs are fine" side. Well maybe not if you're reading Great Expectations, but a Japanese thriller that most ppl on this thread haven't heard of yet? It's fine.

I finished Alasdair Gray's collection UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY (c.1983, 1997).

The long story 'M. Pollard's Prometheus' was another remarkable work, containing a complete, miniature allegory about the nature of power, government, oppression, liberation. This story is also, I suppose, contained and criticised by the frame story in which the beloved woman, a radical and feminist, rejects the allegory. It's a sad, bleak little work but once again shows how extraordinarily ambitious Gray could be, and how learned he was.

The book ends with further very short stories, and a postscript which turns into a critical essay - characteristic Gray again, letting his book be invaded by another author (who is not actually Gray in disguise) - which, on close reading, is perceptive and convincing. It even takes in the paratextual material and images around the edges of the book. I went back and looked at the map of Scotland at the front, full of the scribbled names of Scottish authors, and finally saw that at the bottom right was 'Mistress Spark in Rome'.

A remarkable book. I should have read it long ago.

I went on to read some of THE METHUEN DRAMA BOOK OF PLAYS BY BLACK BRITISH WRITERS (2011), edited by Lynette Goddard.

Mustapha Matura's play WELCOME HOME JACKO (1979) is quite disturbing in its depiction of violence and abusive behaviour. Now on to Jackie Kay's CHIAROSCURO (1986) which is more peaceful, also much less naturalistic and more stylised, and describes Black lesbian life in England. The original production starred Bernadine Evaristo, with music from Gail Ann Dorsey !!

Unable to sleep last night I returned to Adam Mars-Jones' essay collection BLIND BITTER HAPPINESS. It has the odd feature of very short paragraphs (often one sentence or two), probably a legacy of appearing in newspapers but actually disconcerting to the reader of a book. Someone as attuned to form as AM-J should surely have noticed this, might have altered it?

But what a writer he can be - his review of Gore Vidal is devastating, one of those performances with lines to rank alongside Vidal's or Capote's own. And he has a tremendous doggedness about matters of fact and logic that helps him in eg: his dedicated, detailed reading of a random gay detective novel as a sign of gay culture in the 1980s. He swerves through all this in clipped elegant style

I suppose that the whole collection is a legacy of a moment when 'gay' meant something slightly different, more prominent and controversial: when there was barely LGBT, let alone LGBTQIA+ or whatever name one now finds most accurate.

despite everyone saying it's very good, it looks like The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is going to be very good. Removing teleology/whig approaches to economics and history, and looking at developments

I can't actually start it yet until I've got other things out of the way (new year, new rules), but there were a couple of great things in the first few pages I flicked through.

I did a v cackhanded edge round Braudel's use of 'Man' in his introduction to The Mediterranean in the Age of Phillip II upthread. My usual approach is in this order:

• 'Man' meaning 'humankind' was standard in English-language writing pretty much since the Enlightenment, and while it's good it's being retired, there's no point asterisking every use of it.
• However, how Braudel/Braudel's translator (what is the original french?) uses it here is quite awkward. The first 'man and his relationship to nature' is fine in the standard 'humankind' transfer, but his second use is unhappy: "history, one might say, on the scale not of man, but of individual men". Its all but imperceptible adjacency to the first use, an all-but seamless Man-as-humankind = man-as-significant-men is poisonous. Or to put it another way, the connotation/denotation blurring isn't helpful.

as I say it was clunky though.

ANYWAY

The Mushroom at the End of the World has a lovely exuberant formulation in its introduction:

Ever since the Englightenment, Western pilosophers have shown us a Nature that is grand and universal but also passive and mechanical. Nature was a backdrop and resource for the moral intentonality of Man, which could tame and master Nature. It was left to fabulists, including non-Western and non-civilizational storytellers, to remind us of the lively activities of all beings, human and not human.

Several things have happened to undermine this division of labor. First, all that taming and mastering has made such a mess that it is unclear whether life on earth can continue. Second, interspecies entanglements that once seemed the stuff of fables are now materials for serious discussion among biologists and ecologists, who show how life requires the interplay of many kinds of beings. Humans cannot survive by stomping on all the others. Third, women and men from around the world have clamored to be included in the status once given to Man. Our riotous presence undermines the moral intentionality of Man's Christian masculinity, which separated Man from Nature.

The time has come for new ways of telling true stories beyond civilizational first principles. Without Man and Nature, all creatures can come back
to life, and men and women can express themselves without the strictures of a parochially imagined rationality.

the phrase 'interspecies entanglements' also threw me back to the passages in Social Contagion - the section on the economic and biological relation of human capitalist structures and Nature was part of the reason i picked this book up.

The focus for the short chapters that follow is the Matsutake mushroom, with a distinctive smell associated with autumn in Japan, and the author quotes this lovely fragment:

The sound of a temple bell is heard in the cedar forest at dusk,
The autumn aroma drifts on the roads below.

Akemi Tachibana (1812-1868)

One of the key questions the book looks to answer, via its central theme of mushrooms, is 'How might capitalism look without assuming progress? It might look patchy: the concentration of wealth is possible because value produced in unplanned patches is appropriated for capital.'

I finished Jackie Kay's 1986 play CHIAROSCURO, about Black lesbians in Britain.

Continuing with Adam Mars-Jones' essays, I reflect again on how the place of 'gay culture' or 'gay identity' has changed. And with it, gay style or deportment. AM-J's prose (from the 1980s & 1990s) can often be catty and camp, with great skill and humour. Few critics are more entertaining. But this in turn made me wonder how far camp had been diminished as a necessary gay style since then. Camp still has a strong association with gay men (if not women) - for sure. But it seems more an option, less compulsory, than it did.

AM-J at his most amusing:

What is art? That's a big question. Let's discuss that another day. What is a critic? That's much more tractable. Here's where we scale down from philosophy to ethics. We can settle that now if you like.

Argh, I cannot unsee that actually quite otm Amis/Lockwood connection

Do I even want to scroll up and so what that is about?

Too late.

Angela Davis Autobiography
Somehow taken me 20 years to start reading this deeply. I think It may have been started when I got it about 3 houses ago. I know it's been sitting on a shelf for as long as teh unit has been there I think. May have meant to start it before it went up there.
Now wondering why it took so long and why I didn't get into it when I got it. May have needed me to have read other stuff before I really contextualised it. Really don't know.,
Anyway Angela has been arrested while trying to get away after a gun she bought had been used to kill a couple of people or used in an escape attempt which wound up with that result. & she is in prison being kept in isolation after having been initially put in to the psych unit.
have been meaning to read this for a while so glad i'm now getting into it. I think the writing is good so wish i had read it when i got it.

Yeah---The Marin County Courthouse shootings (and hostages-taking), part of an ongoing prison war, spilling out along the way: https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/11697197#Background

Operation Shylock by Philip Roth, from the book-swap shelf of the Co-op near my dad's house. It's been said plenty of times, but Roth really had a burst of creative energy in the 90s.

xp She was accused of smuggling at least one gun into prison, having taped or glued it to her head (covered up by her afro, of course). Really don't think that would work.

I'm sorry about the Amis Lockwood comment! I do sort of stand by it. Fwiw, I was much more thorough and uh, glowing, on the Lockwood thread.

Natalia Ginzburg - The Dry Heart
William Congreve - Incognita
The Poems of Wilfred Owen

Two novellas, published centuries apart. Congreve, from the 18th century, where love ends well. Ginzburg, from the 20th, where love can't even begin. Owen's poetry is written in between either where his skills from a time spent with late romanticism is used to document something else entirely. He would've probably been a good but minor poet but life had other plans.

Fizzles, I am teaching the Tsing book later this spring, to high schoolers. I like how it is both provocative, investigative, and accessible. Great book.

Owen's poetry is written in between either where his skills from a time spent with late romanticism is used to document something else entirely. He would've probably been a good but minor poet but life had other plans.

My AP English teacher recited "Dulce et Decorum Est" from memory.

Fizzles, I am teaching the Tsing book later this spring, to high schoolers. I like how it is both provocative, investigative, and accessible. Great book.

Natalia Ginzburg - The Dry Heart
William Congreve - Incognita
The Poems of Wilfred Owen

Two novellas, published centuries apart. Congreve, from the 18th century, where love ends well. Ginzburg, from the 20th, where love can't even begin. Owen's poetry is written in between either where his skills from a time spent with late romanticism is used to document something else entirely. He would've probably been a good but minor poet but life had other plans.

“having” ffs > *writing*

Is that some kind of scripting language redirecting its output?

as someone who has never knowingly closed brackets in their life i think i’m just going to have to say “no, it’s just a malfunctioning human correcting themselves”

eg rosenberg

https://i.imgur.com/qm1Q9Qi.jpg

what a mix of timbres and locutions!

right! it’s really… idk, *chewy*.

definitely worth checking Isaac Rosenberg in this respect. a v different background - Lithuanian East London Jews - and an extraordinary letter writer and poetry theorist, as well as having poetry v different from Owen.
― Fizzles, Monday, 7 February 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Thanks Fizzles,I will.

and it doesn’t mind - like the content - flaring out. it’s not looking for internal consistency - that mix, as you say.

I finished The Disappearing Spoon. It stayed a grab bag throughout. Various ideas were knit into its anecdotes, but they were not pursued or developed outside the confines of brief stories that covered four pages at most, but the stories and snippets of elemental chemistry were usually interestingly told. Some were far enough off the beaten path that I don't think I would have encountered them outside this book. So, I found it generally engaging.

xpost “chewy” was completely the wrong word. but there’s no lyrical decorum (in distinction from Owen) and that makes it v exciting to read.

ariosto - orlando furioso

Finished Re-reading Dennis Cooper's George Miles cycle, and also finished Robert Glück's 'Reader,' a now scarce volume of poetry where Glück imitates and pays homage to favorite poets... including Cooper, as well as Shakespeare, Keats, and a number of others. Well worth the $45 spent on it.

I finished the Zizek book ("Living in the End Times") including the 80+ page afterword added to the paperback edition, and it only took me the month of January. Hopefully will pick up the pace by reading shorter books for a bit. Next up is "Beautiful World, Where Are You?" by Sally Rooney. First impression: she's still got it.

Adam Mars-Jones: the writing is always good and perceptive, but the essays are at times flimsy and ill-assorted for a collection. A profile of Boy George (very well done) from before 'Karma Chameleon'! An interview with Marc Almond. A report on the Rolling Stones from ... 1982! (There are so many of these, aren't there: Sunday newspaper interviews with the Stones way past their peak.) Then again, a long LRB essay on some confessional poetry that seems quite bad and tiresome.

But the book does contain some major things, notably the remarkable long essay VENUS ENVY which I tend to feel was the best thing anyone had ever written (c.1990) on Amis and McEwan. AM-J also has a long-standing interest in disability (I'm not sure why exactly), and writes a very long essay here about its representation in mainstream cinema.

Emma Dabiri What White People Can Do next
Short book on racism and anti racism from perspective of Nigerian-Irish writer . I read it overnight. Want to read her Don't Touch My Hair Too.
Quite enjoyed this but it is a small book and I think bite sized to entice new readership into the subject.

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, Michael Lewis.

Just finished first read of Stop-Time, the apparently hybrid memoir by Frank Conroy, first known to me (via mentions in 70s-early 80s New Yorker and Dowbbeat) as a self-taught, professional jazz pianist and writing instructor.
I say "hybrid memoir" because he taps in, constructs with, a lot of precise detail, incl. exact quotes, dialogue at times, though never boilerplate realness for its own sake, or scene-setting for more sympathy's sake---he could have eidetic memory, up to a point, if that's possible---he recalls walking by a brownstone in middle school age, looking/not looking, refusing/stealing a glance (in character as hell: he even rebels against his proudly refusenik self): it's where, he's always been told, he lived the first eight years of his life, but he's creeped out/drawn to this place that evokes 0 memories on the face of it---but maybe if he were to go inside, get inside, someway---? That process would be boy Conroy-typical too, except he does have also have some sense of when to pull back from dubious endeavors, though can be when they're already in "progress". He's learned, is learning, incl. in asides while writing the book, about teaching, testing himself, and the messy void---his earliest memories, and probably related to the reason he may have shut out earlier ones, incl. his only experience with prescience, of realizing that his father was about to materialize, on unscheduled flight from the latest "rest cure," and chase young Frank under the bed---though his mother has had maybe the same inkling, leaving in the middle of a work shift for the first time ever, to come home just in time.
He also recalls dread of and being drawn toward the everyday vastness of empty winter sky, while relating it to the eyes of the "feeble-minded" men his de facto stepfather of sorts tends in yon cottage, so better not go there again, self. Back in NYC, peeling back the top bread slice the sandwich his mother sent along, "with catatonic rapture, gazing into the paradox" of being consumed with hunger and repulsion--perfect balance of the chronically picky eater!---then the bell rings, and he gets up and leaves.
Yet fascinated also with detail, with the possibility of meaning, and/or just the pleasures of perception, following the beam as well as the dream---at one point, he becomes a yo-yo wizard (this was a huge trend, when the Duncan yo-yo Co. sent roving adepts, demonstrating hi-tech/more durable product, then conducting levels of competition). The different moves, up to The Universe, are elegantly described--turns opt the state-wide contest comes down to who can do the most Loop-de-Loops, whose string happens lasts the longest--a "fat kid's"---but secret knowledge, incl. of his own talent and capacity for self-discipline, stays with him through subsequent zone-outs and zoom-ins. Also understands chess well enough to convey why he loses. Has revelation when sees his Paris friend John Rich's drawing of the parts of a humble Metro lock in motion, a microcosm of motion, caught on the page. (Rich's portrait of the teen future author, featured on the cover of this early edition, is otm visual equivalent of "voice": deep focus/total dilation dark eyes, w braced, skeptical gaze---but also w hilarious pout of outsized lips: apotheosis of resting bitch face in 1953, and fascinating to compare with
cover flap photo of Conroy in '65, still young and etc.)
The jab and flow of jazz piano is suggested by structure (incl a three-line sentence, a two-line sentence, an abrupt fragment, and there's yr graf, followed perhaps by something much more of a network/traffic management), also the aforementioned fascination w void and detail, sometimes the one of the other, also makes me think of negative space, emptiness bordered, defined, made use of by placement of elements around it---rather than just playing fancy notes, notes, notes alla time.

Stop-Time is appropriate use of musical term: when the rest of the world/accompaniment disappears, he keeps sensing, breathing, writing to the other side, sometimes of small spaces, within and between chapters. The book takes itself out of the running, the massing of time as river and sediment, until he has to come up for air, also for driving to London in his sports car, playing jazz, and coming home,to wife and baby, way after dark, on deserted little motorways of the early 60s, is the real blast.

Or so he says as intro and outro.

Ted Hughes: most of RAIN-CHARM FOR THE DUCHY (1992): poems as Poet Laureate.

Sometimes you might be able to admire the artistry here, including the detail of TH's knowledge of flowers, rivers and birds. He does bring his animalistic, nature-oriented poetics to the laureate task.

On the other hand, most of the time he's celebrating royal personages whom we know not to be worthy of the mythology. The nadir has to be a poem celebrating the wedding of ... Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson. Yes, really. It mentions a helicopter. Yes, really.

Of all the poems I've ever encountered of which you could say 'That didn't age well', in 2022 a poem celebrating Prince Andrew probably goes to the top of the list.

Seamus Heaney: AN OPEN LETTER (1983): the pamphlet in which he disaffiliates himself from 'British' poetry. Unsure about this. I suspect that SH was too, as he seems hardly, or rarely, to have reprinted it later. As if it was a one-off that belonged to a moment but shouldn't be repeated.

It's conversational, playful, addresses the relevant editors by name. It makes what might look like strong nationalist statements (and these get quoted most), but, as you might expect with SH, it also tends to reverse those and say it doesn't want to exaggerate. The ending, citing the contents of another poem by Holub, is puzzling, not very well-judged I think as the climax of such a public statement.

Interesting, though, to see him along the way engage with Larkin, Hugh Haughton (whom once I met, not knowing who he was; he was very likeable and friendly), Donald Davie and *The Waste Land*.

Ted Hughes: bad person and worse poet.

Currently taking a break from Dennis Cooper and reading Clark Coolidge's 'Own Face,' a strange and lovely book of poems about self, confession, projection, and identification.

Ted Hughes: bad person and worse poet.

the table: I'd like to see further explanation of this, from you.

A feeling that I, personally, had while reading the book was something like: Hughes had, in real life, been involved in such dark, dodgy events - wouldn't this naturally lead him, as a writer, to a sense of ... what's the word - atonement, sorrow, a refusal to assert authority?

Yet this didn't seem much to be the case. Still, perhaps this volume is not representative. And perhaps my thoughts were naive, or implied a connexion between life and writing that needn't exist.

I realise that the parallel is very, very imprecise, and I don't mean to assert it strongly -- but it now occurs to me to see Hughes and (his poetic subject) Prince Charles this way, as guilty husbands whose celebrated wives both tragically died, and who both went on in public life ... viewed by many as the widower, the husband, but also, oddly, not seeming to be much held back by what happened; both going on into other long-standing relationships. Prince Charles this very week was celebrating the fact that his wife will be 'Queen Consort'.

I stress that the parallel only comes to mind because I've been reading, specifically, Hughes on the Royal Family. But this is what puzzled me about Hughes on the Royal Family: why couldn't he see them more clearly? As the flawed, fated people they were -- especially knowing all that he, from life, happened to know?

I've got a couple dozen pages left in The Premonition: A Pandemic Story. Having just read another pop science book, the contrast is pretty stark in terms of Lewis's skill at conveying science to a lay public through storytelling. He finds interesting people whose lives intersect with the larger story he wants to tell, uses them to hook you in, carefully builds his story in successive layers and never fails to explain what's at the stake in direct human terms.

This was never going to be an uplifting story; it points to too many dunder-headed failures that inevitably led to too much needless suffering and death, but it comes as close as possible, by highlighting the efforts of many people within that failed system who moved heaven and earth to direct it toward better outcomes, and through them suggesting how the system might be mended.

Full Prince Andrew Hughes poem and amusing contemporary news story here

https://apnews.com/article/740aceba9a434164a305cd9c129049ff

Remarkable! As it happens the version in the book omits the opening stanzas about the wedding, and starts with the proposal.

The pinefox, feel like this has been discussed elsewhere on ILX maybe, but Hughes' editing of Plath's works to make them more favorable to him is quite literally unconscionable. A sexist pig more interested in washing his own reputation than the dignity and integrity of Plath's work.

His poetry is lyric garbage, nothing inspired or interesting in it afaic.

Russ's search for the edge reminds me of my father. I am glad Perry is treated within the confines of a happy ending; I haven't finished yet but predict this is how it will end. It is interesting that Russ cares about Clem and Marion and sees the other children as neighbors.

Poster the table: if it has been discussed, in any detail, I haven't seen it. And lots of things get discussed multiple times, so I'd be happy to read more information / views from an ILX poster.

I don't or didn't know this about the editing of Plath's work. (Which is not to say I'm unaware of him being controversial, in general, in his relations with her.)

re the quality of TH's poetry, I'd like to see it demonstrated. In truth I don't know it well enough. His fascination was animals was, perhaps, rare, among English poets of his era.

I seem to recall that Philip Larkin was disparaging about Hughes (and many others, including Heaney), but then an odd thing is: Larkin is routinely chastised as 'right-wing' or whatever, but Hughes' poems celebrating the monarchy may be almost the most right-wing English poems I've ever read.

Pinefox, long story short: Hughes rearranged and cut unflattering sections from Plath's 'Selected' as well as from 'Ariel.' He also admitted to burning parts of other manuscripts and the journals from the last months of her life. All of this was done to protect himself and his own legacy.

If I thought his own work was any good or if he'd displayed any remorse for his actions during his lifetime, I'd cut him some slack, but he never did the latter and I think his work is really conservative tripe.

Nothing in here regarding his editorial role in altering Plath's poetry, but:

What think you of Ted Hughes?

That looks quite a substantial thread, thanks.

This is so old: can't remember if I read some some of Crow beyond excerpts in reviews, but it is or was considered a turning point in his writing, incl. by him:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow_(poetry)

But this is what puzzled me about Hughes on the Royal Family: why couldn't he see them more clearly? As the flawed, fated people they were -- especially knowing all that he, from life, happened to know?

Forgive me the cynicism, but: I think perhaps he wasn't attempting anything of the sort, seeing the job of poet laureate as one of being sycophantic and glorifying of the Royal Family? And that he was right, in that this was indeed what the Royal Family wanted from him?

TH's poems give the impression that he thinks the UK Royal Family is a glorious institution of mythic proportions, that should be celebrated.

And within that, he doesn't seem to have any problem with celebrating individuals (notably the Queen Mother). He doesn't seem to see much distinction between an institution he thinks absolutely good and the individuals who were, in reality, necessarily more flawed.

Dipping in to Stuart Hall's THE HARD ROAD TO RENEWAL: THATCHERISM AND THE CRISIS OF THE LEFT (1988): impressed anew, and finding it more enjoyable than I'd ever remembered. It's surprising how little Hall's arguments seem dated.

The Inconvenient Indian THomas King
Great book on Native Americans with a focus on Canada where the author hails from I think. I had this recommended to me a few times over eh last couple of years and got sent it for Xmas by my brother.
JUst read a confirmation of the status problem which seems to be intended to reduce the amount of Indians there are of status to minimum so nobody will qualify to be part of the status group that reservations and things are catered to. Similar things seem to be happening to Indians in the US as to who qualifies as a member of a given tribe etc.
I'm now reading a chain of books I've ordered as jnterlibrary loans so this is taking me longer to read than it would have done otherwise. Shame cos it is a great book.

The History of White People Nell Irvin Painter.
Black academic's book on the history of the idea of a white race. I'm just in teh middle of the time when Race Science is showing its hide thoroughly. Just been reading about Ripley and the races of Europe that actually seems to be a rather risible incoherent book on what denotes race that contradicts itself heavily etc but was very popular and seemed to add a scientific sheen to the idea of race. THis Ripley appears to have maintained a reputation until he died .
Very interesting book. Buit again I'm reading like 10 books at the same time so I'm not concentrating on it as heavily as i should be

A Brief History of 7 Killings Marlon James
the novel based on fictional oral statements about the assassination attempt on Bob Marley in 1976. I'm now in 1985 with some of the characters having somewhat moved on and still unpacking who they are etc.
Quite enjoying this. But again taking me months longer to read than I should have done.
Think I will be back for more from the same author though.

White Feminism Koa beck
hawaiian lesbian feminist author tells the story of feminism showing how much of a betrayal of those of non-white status was going on throughout. Just been reading this for the last few days. Think its quite good.

Mande Music Eric Charry
Ethomusicologist tells teh story of the factors leading to the music from the West African peoples. Finding it very interesting after it took me a while to get into it. Seemed a bit dry at first.
Currently on the subject of jelis and the etymology of the idea of griot which appears to be an external term not the one they would call themselves. Actually moved onto the instruments played. Am finding it very interesting though.

Bessie Chris Albertson
biography of blues singer Bessie Smith first published in 1972 and this is an update from over the last couple of decades. Very interesting and had me wanting to listen to her so I picked up one cd of hers. may get another more comprehensive one.
Shame she died when she did did appear she was just about to change her style and return to some level of popularity. This book destroys the myth about her being taken to a white hospital and dying as a result. She was found by a surgeon a while after the accident who happened to be off fishing so was around early in the morning, she was then taken to the black hospital in the area where they did the best to save her for several hours but she was too deep in shock. Story seems to have taken a lot of weight from being repeated by John Hammond in a column he wrote despite having other contradicting information at the time and he comes across as a bit of an a-hole from other things in the book. Destroying the career of Bessie's sometime companion Ruby for one despite promising to help her.

i finished outline, it only took me this long because i read every chapter twice

i am now rereading written on the body by jeanette winterson ;_;

Brad, based on my minuscule internet experience of you, I would recommend one of the last two Gwendoline Rileys

oh wow thank you for the rec!!!

lmao i have actually read gwendoline riley, i made the ebook for the melville house printing of first love, i did think it was very dope and i need to give it a more focused read

Continuing my recent trend of mainly reading things that are a relatively easy reach, I'm already past the midway mark of The Light of Day, Eric Ambler. Apparently this novel formed the basis for the film Topkapi.

It's very well thought out and manages to maintain a consistent veneer of acceptable plausibility while spinning out a very intricate plot about very improbable events. I guess it would generally be called a 'thriller', but it has many elements of a 'puzzle play'.

I read it years ago so am not remembering fully, is it told by the character played by peter Ustinov in the film. Which would indicate a decidedly unreliable narrator.

I think the Light of Day is the name of the jewel that is being stolen from the Topkapi museum

On Stuart Hall: particular essays:

Cold Comfort Farm - on Broadwater Farm, racism and police in the 1980s

No Light at the End of the Tunnel - an outstanding analysis of the state of Thatcherism and the UK in 1986 - stands up as well as anything by anyone

Authoritarian Populism: a reply - entertaining format, to see Hall respond briskly to critics

The book is often compelling. I come back to the fact that it feels - prescient? Not quite that, more that because it was accurate at the time, it's also a good guide to how we got here.

i liked him on It's A Knockout

(i appear to have missed the bit about the child sex offences) 8(

Still stuck in (and very much enjoying) Crossroads.

I didn't know Jennifer Egan had a Good Squad sequel coming out soon: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Candy-House/Jennifer-Egan/9781476716763. I thought it had a mushy, disappointing ending but the first half was fun; I much preferred Manhattan Beach, which was more satisfyingly trad than Goon Squad was satisfyingly "experimental", whatever that means.

realise that this is far from universal, but I *enjoyed* Goon Squad tho do have a vague recollection that i found the end similarly disappointing. I prefer dissatisfyingly experimental to satisfyingly trad! (I think)

I enjoyed it too ftmp but the last several chapters are really very bad I think - also iirc the stuff about music was all really cringeworthy so it doesn’t bode well that this new one is using “EDM” as some kind of organising principle

I thought she navigated the cringe pretty well, but the sci-fi parts at the end were super parochial, in that way that literary authors often clunk when they try genre writing.

It's maybe not a good sign that the new book is mostly set in the future, but I'll still read it! IMO her best bit of writing is the boys-own-adventure shark attack section of Manhattan Beach.

i think there are far worse chapters in goon squad than the last two. chauvinist failed writer/journalist whose thoughts sprawl off into endless pointless footnotes one is unendurable

a sequel is deeply unpromising lol

If you thought Goon Squad, a thoroughly milquetoast bestseller, was 'experimental,' I might have to find a better adjective to describe the novels that I like to read. Not trying to shame-- I liked Goon Squad well enough-- but it isn't experimental, by any stretch of the imagination.

lmao

Ha, your post made me feel like defensive about the book, even though I basically agree. Egan's always described as "experimental" in profiles, but if so, they're pretty controlled experiments. Perhaps playful is a better word; on the other hand I don't think conventional storytelling and experimentation are mutually exclusive; and perhaps the distinction doesn't matter anyway.

I definitely don't think conventional storytelling and experimentation are mutually exclusive, but I think that a book that amounts to MFA-style formal exercises isn't "experimental," it's merely clever. Goon Squad is certainly that.

Been a long time, but I dimly recall liking most of it well enough, incl. the ending, though maybe because I don't expect that much from the endings of contemporary novels---I remember thinking that the sections weren't crucially related, and even that if I did decide that if some of them were too two-dimensional, I could just roll them overboard, with no detachment necessary.
The New Yorker Science Fiction Issue of several years ago incl. an Egan short story, a stylized thriller, poignant in passing, not mushy. But a much more recent New Yorker story, also science fiction, had some soft spots in its construction, and esp. ending, which bothers me more in shorties. Thinking it might be an excerpt from the new novel, hope not.

The Order Of The Day, Éric Vuillard - Account of the early days of Hitler's rise, mostly centered on the annexation of Austria so far. Written as a series of encounters between statesmen and other notables, which inevitably pushes it into Great Man Theory. Also the occasional outbursts of moral indignation ring a bit hollow - not that Chamberlain and Schuschnigg don't deserve a rinsing of course, but somewhat silly for the author to get so het up at already widely maligned historical figures, especially when the portrayal of Churchill (one character in this play that is still treated as a sacred cow by many) is portrayed entirely as a mischievous imp. The whole project feels very old fashioned for a Goncourt winner, reminds me more of Stefan Zweig than anything else.

He's very good at the darkly comical bits: Ribbentrop extending a social outing with Chamberlain to prevent him from reacting to the invasion of Austria, Exterminating Angel vibes; Austrian villages breathlessly awaiting the arrival of the German army which never comes because they're stuck in a logistical rut.

I couldn't even make it through the first few chapters of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tITdu1nyHHk

a book that amounts to MFA-style formal exercises isn't "experimental," it's merely clever.

This statement, from poster The Table, may be correct, but it relies on a knowledge of "MFA-style formal exercises", or a consensus about what are "MFA-style formal exercises" and what are ... ... "formal exercises" of a different kind, which might be ... ... "experimental"?

I suspect that poster Table may well be correct in their judgment, but am unsure how one could know without undertaking an MFA course.

Jennifer Egan is probably too old to have done that (60 this year?), so whatever her reason for writing as she did, it was presumably not because an MFA tutor advised her to do it. It could, I suppose, have been because she saw the work of other people who had, indeed, taken such courses?

The question of how one could distinguish between something that was genuinely experimental, and something that wasn't and was merely falsely claimed to be ... seems vexed.

For a writer of brief, difficult, obscure poems to write a fat, salacious blockbuster would be, for them, an 'experimental' gesture. And vice versa. In either case, the writer would have to try out new techniques that were unfamiliar to them.

It could be said that a real experiment only happens when a writer does something of a type that no writer has ever done before, but how often does that happen? How feasible is it?

I fear that the criteria would need to be scaled down a bit from that.

It's likely that there are ways of writing that are coded as 'experimental', and will be accepted as 'experimental' (minimalism, poetry that is fragmented and hard to understand, possibly maximalism also) -- but as such, we may doubt the application of this label. If something is generic then is it experimental?

I think that these questions are rather tricky and the targets are moving.

I daresay this has all been said before, here never mind anywhere else.

let me put it this way, a series of interconnected short stories that constitutes a novel is not "experimental." a chapter written in powerpoint could be construed as an experimental flourish within a deeply typical book

jeeeezus, I didn't think anyone remembered Goon Squad!

i do think the radical is realizable within super traditional forms tho, i like music too much to deny that

It's a marketing category really but that's no less legitimate than any other genre.

I was thinking, a good definition of "experimental fiction" might lean on the word experiment, i.e. be about putting unusual things together without knowing how they're going to react - but that would end up including Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as experimental literature too.

While staying in a yurt with no cell service read Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police in an evening. Overall I liked it a great deal, with a bit of reservation - i think the placid and simple style works very well, but it does really push against what you might want out of a story - no information of the outside world, or interactions with others who remember, or substantial progress except in a negative direction. It reminded me a bit of Never Let Me Go, both stories living inside a dystopian setting that is almost totally accepted, but I think The Memory Police works better as a enclosed story, while Ishiguro's attempts to engage with the larger world and wrap things up kind of expose how flimsy the whole thing is.

I've started reading A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, Alastair Horne. It looks pretty readable and should fill in a very large gap in my knowledge, because I know almost nothing about this war. It ended when I was seven years old and the hegemonic powers seem determined never to mention it again.

I will note that the British author is clearly a Francophile and his sympathies in that direction do color his tone, even if it doesn't prevent him from trying to collect and describe the facts. My awareness of this tendency helps to neutralize it somewhat. This is an NYRB reprint and was probably added to the catalogue in 2006 as a result of the Iraq War.

I think the word "experimental" in the context of literary criticism may be an example of what Frank Kogan calls a "Superword" in the context of rock-crit, i.e. a word whose primary purpose is to be fought over, like "a flag in a bloody game of Capture the Flag". A word that "will jettison adherents and go skipping on ahead of any possible embodiment". "For the word to be super, not only must people disagree on the ideal, but some people must consciously or unconsciously keep changing what the word or ideal is supposed to designate so the music" - or book, I would add - "is always inadequate to the ideal, even if it would have been adequate to yesterday's version of the ideal."

Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger and Geoffrey Willans/Ronald Searle's Molesworth.

xpost -- Yes, it feels v. much like a sunday supplement/music crit word. Like, "This sounds unusual, and my writing skills aren't sharp enough to describe what it's doing, so I think I'll call it 'experimental'".

And I guess, just as "middlebrow" is a putdown camouflaged as descriptor, calling something "experimental" is a way of self-congratulating one's reading prowess ("I'd like to read something more experimental next time").

The recentish NYer short story is, unfortunately, an excerpt from the book.

Geoffrey Willans/Ronald Searle's Molesworth.

Thomas Hardy - Far from the Madding Crowd
Victor Sebestyen - 1946: The Making of the Modern World
Shirley Hazzard - The Bay off Noon

Emma Dabiri Don't Touch My Hair
Dublin born mixed race author talks about hair and its significance in her life and others. By way of connotations of what being a mixed race girl in teh 90s and earlier meant, do wonder if I ever met her since I was around at the time but would have been a lot older and have had dreads since my own late teens.
But anyway am really enjoying her writing so hope there is more of it to come.

Beginning Theory Peter Barry
Book on literary theory etc taht looked interesting when I was looking through a charity shop earlier. Read the introduction and seems like something I will benefit from reading.

recent reads:

Sabrina Orah Mark - Wild Milk short story collection
Jesse K. Baer - Midwestern Infinity Doctrine
Karel Čapek - War with the Newts
Clarice Lispector - Soulstorm: Stories

currently reading Thomas Bernhard's Correction

Update on Bullet Train: this is a very enjoyable book. At the risk of using an overused term, his writing is cinematic. He's very skilled at maneuvering his characters within the confines of his chosen setting of the Shinkansen. Plus, it's funny AF.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if it won a Pulitzer, calling a book "experimental" might just not be accurate.

Plenty of people who aren't in their twenties get MFAs, the pinefox, tho it seems like Egan just did the normal Ivy to Cambridge rich kid route.

Yes, I'm sure a range of people get MFAs. My original point about them was that for those many of us who don't have them, we can't really tell what is an "MFA exercise" and what is something else.

GOON SQUAD may not be experimental. But the question of what that word actually, in practice, means, abides. I am inclined to think that posters O. Nate and Chuck Tatum are going along the right lines, on this question.

I tend to agree, too, but when I'm describing a book in a forum like this one, I'm not writing a book review for the LRB or anywhere else. Using the word 'experimental' as shorthand, both here and on ILM, is completely reasonable and not 'lazy' as these posters would so have it.

MFA exercises: play with this wacky formal constraint that readers will find charming and interesting, but don't make it so challenging that you can't get a book deal or sell the story to the New Yorker.

Also I was merely trying to be kind before, Goon Squad is fucking garbage.

In poetry, for what it's worth, the debate about descriptors like 'experimental,' 'innovative,' and others continues to rage.

What I often think is ignored in these debates is that the state of mainstream poetry and literature is as such that words like 'experimental' serve an important function in establishing a work or poet as against a dominant hegemonic aesthetic. Other than this function, the words don't mean a whole lot.

And if you want to know what the dominant hegemonic aesthetic might be, look toward the dilatory epiphanic tone that permeates the most popular English language poetry: Gorman, Kaur, Billy Collins, etc.

Ugh. When I hear the name Collins that’s when I reach for my ….

Anyway, I like your term “dilatory epiphanic.”

It's been growing on me since the first time you used it

I always like this takedown by August Kleinzahler, although I don't know if I have had any takers yet on this borad: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/60488/no-antonin-artaud-with-the-flapjacks-please

Ha! Apart from the forced imbecilic simplicity of Collins' verse, I thought his mortal sin was going straight for the arena rock climax in the first stanza.

You can also find it in the inexplicable fawning of the mainstream presses and book reviews of mediocre dead poets like Robert Lowell, who seems to have a new book around him every year for some godforsaken reason that no one I know can figure out. Heaping praise on dead people who were lauded mostly for their ghastly biography instead of engaging in challenging work of the present is not new, but it still irks.

Billy Collins was in attendance at a good friend's wedding. It didn't end well.

Norman Mailer's son was there too, to add to the fun.

You can also find it in the inexplicable fawning of the mainstream presses and book reviews of mediocre dead poets like Robert Lowell, who seems to have a new book around him every year for some godforsaken reason that no one I know can figure out. Heaping praise on dead people who were lauded mostly for their ghastly biography instead of engaging in challenging work of the present is not new, but it still irks.

mmm I disagree. Lowell did change the course of American poetry briefly even though I prefer the chillier early stuff like Lords Weary Castle and have little to no patience for most anything after 1960; those 1970s collections he shat out are doggerel at best.

He wrote one good poem afaic, and it's the most unlike the rest of his other work. Just a crazy racist Boston Brahmin who never should have been given a second thought.

But even if you love him, why does his work still command so much attention when...well, he's been dead for 45 years? I think it has a lot more to do with mainstream fetishization of mental illness than the quality of his poetry.

In a sense, what I'm getting at is there *is* an industry that keeps certain types of writing in circulation and has a vested interest in doing so. To my mind, being called 'experimental' often means that the work cannot be totally subsumed into the flow of capital that guides this industry's decisions. That's the kind of writing that I'm interested in, and similarly with music.

The idea that there is anything profound about ubiquity is a bankrupt one.

You mean like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-nxdyTOtE8

(xoost to your previoius post)

Any book with a spine is too structurally unadventurous to be called experimental IMO.

Lol

user Tim v much walking the walk

At what point should we shit out dead poets? As soon as the doctor calls it? Get back, Homer! You too, Jethro!

lol

Nice to see that people are taking reasoned points and shitting on them for the purpose of dunks.

Instead of engaging with them in any meaningful way because you know I'm right.

Really no wonder so many people are leaving this site, tbh.

If you’re talking to me, let me be clear that I wasn’t dunking on you or anyone (except myself, slightly).

Yeah, I didn't notice any dunking. Just some friendly disagreement about when Robert Lowell jumped the shark or whether he was ever even on the right side of the shark.

FWIW I think, per TTITT and Daniel that “experimental” is used as a catch-all (marketing) term for art which resists being incorporated into the mainstream. I think it’s a bad term because it doesn’t say anything about the nature, content or quality of that art.

Non-ubiquity, in and of itself, is no more profound than ubiquity. Less so if anything because at least ubiquity has the kind of profundity that comes from shared experience (see Ewing, T; “Come On Eileen”, 2009).

Pretty much agree with all of this.

Totally disagree with the point about ubiquity vs non-ubiquity, but whatever.

There’s that meaningful engagement

Go fuck yourself.

But even if you love him, why does his work still command so much attention when...well, he's been dead for 45 years? I think it has a lot more to do with mainstream fetishization of mental illness than the quality of his poetry.

― we need outrage! we need dicks!! the table is the table)

Lowell made a lot of friends in the poetry and publishing world; he was, as you point out, an establishment figure. His persistence well into a new century makes sense when you consider how many dads and grandads of writers he may have talked up.

Also, though you and I will recoil from this point....he commands attention because people still like his poetry. As a junior in college I was quite alone in thinking, say, "Skunk Hour" and Lowell generally not particularly interesting if not gauche. I wanted to spend more time on Bishop and Merrill, the contemporaries who still command MY attention; the latter in particular's a queer lodestar for me. THERE'S a guy with millions at his disposal who was lighter, gayer, and wittier in verse than 187 Lowell lines.

But what I'm saying, Alfred, is that I really believe that a big part of his popularity has to do with establishment publishing and academic types manufacturing an idea that Lowell is what quality poetry is. Even John fucking Berryman is a more interesting poet than Lowell, and there's comparatively little attention given to him.

Give Harold Bloom this: he wished with all his being that Lowell would remain a period piece.

re Berryman: have you seen the new editions of Dream Songs? The New Yorker spent a lot of words on him a little over a year ago:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/19/the-heartsick-hilarity-of-john-berrymans-letters

I think that people liking Lowell's poetry and that people will tend to consume what's most available can both be true and not necessarily in conflict. I think there's something of Don Draper about Lowell. He's an archetype of a particular east coast intellectual and particularly when you factor in the weird ongoing fascination with the Elizabeth Bishop relationship, his mental illness etc you have a very sellable package.

Also, doesn't it also come down to how invested you are in this - as in, I can imagine as a poet vying for real estate in what is the smallest of marketplaces anyway you're perfectly entitled to be pissed off at how much of a colossus Lowell still is.

That second part is clumsily expressed. I hope I don't come across as a patronising dick.

No, it makes sense.

I thought Lowell was finally gone until that collected poetry tome came out in 2003, goddamn it.

^prestige publishing

"when you factor in the weird ongoing fascination with the Elizabeth Bishop relationship"

It is my impression his behaviour towards Bishop is over-used to write about Lowell, no matter any actual quality of the poetry.

I've never heard anybody bring up Lowell in conversation so don't feel in any way oppressed by the continued appreciation of his poetry by people I don't know

I feel like at this point he's just an American Ted Hughes, a figure of dwindling prestige that people more easily remember the gossipy unflattering stuff about

So are you guys telling me I should or shouldn't bother to read the Ivana Lowell memoir I eventually bought after seeing it for months if not years near the checkout counter at the old RIzzoli Bookstore flagship on 57th Sttreet?

I would read it if it appeals to you

Chinaski otm about some of the anger coming from being a poet, finding the Lowell's work to be largely trash, and being totally confused by the ongoing attention paid to him and his work. It's worth noting, too, that I don't know a single poet who will stand up for Lowell besides a few poems, if that.

Another thing that concerns me about his prominence is that it reinforces the idea that poetry is largely dead. Obviously that isn't true, so why do mainstream critics and publishers pretend it to be so? I don't want the just-died David Melnick, whose work is astounding and irreplaceable and obscure, to be hailed in the Times review, but I'm also tired of hearing about this one motherfucker when I know there are so many others whose work is amazing but remains hopelessly lost in frightfully expensive original editions. Only a year or two ago did John Wieners get a selected, for example, and he's considered one of the great queer poets of the past 100 years. Full editions of his most important books go for $150-- that's a shame. Instead, we get another book of Lowell's farts to Hardwick or whiny letters to Bishop.

I don't want the just-died David Melnick, whose work is astounding and irreplaceable and obscure, to be hailed in the Times review

ooh -- my uni library's got Wieners' 1986 collection.

Any book with a spine is too structurally unadventurous to be called experimental IMO.

I'm very late to this but the idea of experimental writing seems very anachronistic and quaint to me

That’s how I feel about washing cast iron pans with oven cleaner tbh

fuck washing a book

classic

Why not?

I think the intention was that he'd be satisfied with a lesser level of prominence than a big up in the Times, rather than that such a thing was anathema.

Exactly, thanks Aimless.

I'm very late to this but the idea of experimental writing seems very anachronistic and quaint to me

― plax (ico), Friday, February 18, 2022 12:07 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

What other adjective would you propose, or do you mean the idea of writing that is experimenting with language is anachronistic and quaint?

Actually, forget it, I need to take a break from this site I think.

Take a break if you need one, but please free to come back when you are ready.

Why not?

I think the intention was that he'd be satisfied with a lesser level of prominence than a big up in the Times, rather than that such a thing was anathema.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Friday, 18 February 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Exactly, thanks Aimless.

― we need outrage! we need dicks!! (the table is the table), Friday, 18 February 2022 bookmarkflaglink

This is absurd.

Why is that?

Or, more clearly, in what way?

What I'm reading here is a fantasy of an intention that this recently deceased poet might have had, that he'd want to remain obscure (or even just like a cult figure), because you are precious about his work and you wouldn't want those people (libs, say) to touch it and yet bore on and on about Ted Hughes/Lowell being prominent and that those people don't know better.

I'd like a better class of snobbery here.

Reading slightly wrong but still the desire to keep poets/writing away from people because well who knows, they might like this, but not in the right way, seems to be the fear.

I sent tables my regrets for posting just as I did...
Got John D.'s new Devil House at library this evening.

Non-ubiquity, in and of itself, is no more profound than ubiquity. Less so if anything because at least ubiquity has the kind of profundity that comes from shared experience (see Ewing, T; “Come On Eileen”, 2009).

Love this !!!

(But surely it was more like 2001?)

I finished Adam Mars-Jones' long article about disability. He's shrewd and eloquent. Some of the ideas discussed are compelling and challenging. I get the sense that AMJ didn't previously have a special interest in the subject, but developed one after this. He's good at thinking about the relations between disability and other identities that have been the basis of identity politics.

Actually I sense that things have moved on since then (1996) and disability *is* now a bit more established as a significant form of discrimination, alongside eg: race and gender, than it was when AMJ wrote this.

The title of AMJ's collection is BLIND BITTER HAPPINESS. I'd never known where that phrase comes from. I now see from one essay that it's a paraphrase of his mother's name (ie: those words were the 'meanings' of her names).

I also returned to Gerry Smyth's DECOLONISATION AND CRITICISM (1998) and Graham / Kirkland's IRELAND AND CULTURAL THEORY (1999), as well as the perpetual standby Kiberd's INVENTING IRELAND (1995).

You’re right, PF, my swift google picked up the slightly shortened re-write that formed part of Tom’s Popular project.

xyzz I don't think that's what's being said at all, table's point is it would be great if this poet got written up in the Times but that's clearly not going to happen so he'd be fine with a lesser level of prominence instead of the relative obscurity he's in.

"I don't want the just-died David Melnick, whose work is astounding and irreplaceable and obscure, to be hailed in the Times review" is the direct quote. No "it would be great if the chumps at NYT got this".

well, I guess it's the words of a living author, so I'll let table say which one it is, unless he's quit ilx

White Feminism KOa Beck
Book by hawaiian lesbian author on the problems with various focuses of traditional feminism and what it has excluded in terms of non-white women. Also in the way that it has put forward teh single individual heroine as model for activity rather tahn showing that the way things work relies on collectivity.
Quite enjoying it. may need to reread so may need my own copy instead of this being an interlibrary loan.
I have been looking through the irish library system and ordering things i find interesting which may be a bit counterproductive since it has meant i have several books on the go and more deadline than I should have given myself. Plus I'm not paying attention to the books I've picked up in charity shops. Have to find a better system for doing this. Have been flying through books at speed and buying a lot of very interesting looking things. Still looking for others. Think I'm already on like 28 books finished this year.

Emma Dabiri Don't Touch My Hair
Half Irish author talks about black hair in her own personal history and in general. Which leads on to a number of other connected issues.
I'm enjoying the writing. Hope she writes more.
THink she may be regularly in some newspaper which I need to look out for.

Carl Sagan Demon Haunted World
astronomer's book on scientific illiteracy and general credulity.
Good read, may have some issues that need to be clarified and is 25 years old now . But a good starting point for further research/investigation. shame it is still as topical as it was when it was published though still not as up to date as a more recent book would hopefully be. I need to read Great Popular Delusions since i have at least one copy lying around. Think that may overlap with this to some degree but is much older.

Xyzzz, Melnick quit writing in the 80s after writing a long poem on the AIDS crisis and becoming absorbed in his job as a copyeditor at the SF Chronicle. He purposefully dropped off the map, and in the only interview he gave, he seems pretty content with his decision.

It's probably best for you to shut up when you don't know what you're talking about.

That’s never stopped him before.

Remember that not everyone longs to be in the limelight, or to have their work read by everyone.

Which is why the point about ubiquity still stands for me. The idea that collective or shared experience is more profound than individual experience, and that thus, more popular media is more profound than what lurks in the shadows, is an absolutely ridiculous one. I'll argue that to the end.

You bring up that the media only writes about Lowell but you just want things you find good to remain obscure and then lash out when people apparently don't know what you're talking about, or people don't know the names of these poets. It's just incoherent rubbish.

Lock yourself in a room with trashy SF and cheap crime paperbacks for a year to get these banal notions out of you head, table

That’s never stopped him before.

― Solaris Ocean Blue (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 19 February 2022 bookmarkflaglink

As for you, put up a witty YouTube link, that's all you're good for.

Fellas… this is the wayr room

lol!

I'm not going to waste more time responding to blatant projection and mischaracterization.

Today, my plan is to do one final read-through of Cooper's 'I Wished' to get some pull quotes for the review I'm working on.

Currently reading Clark Coolidge's 'To the Cold Heart' before bed, and Gail Scott's 'Permanent Revolution' with coffee in the morning. The latter is disappointing when compared to her novels-- there's something about her style that doesn't work well for me in the essay form, but is extremely provocative in her novels. It might be her approach to disjunction...trying to put my finger on it.

I like Clark Coolidge fine. Is that what you meant by experimental? He seems to me to write in a high Modernist style which I find enjoyable and interesting but very much anchored to early 20th C aesthetics.

'experimental' i think invokes at this point a set of strategies to unsettle preconceptions of how writing makes sense (i.e. 'anti-' gestures that interrupt legibility in various ways) tied to avant garde ideals of progress and novelty. The idea that these kinds of approaches continue to lead an aesthetic vanguard I think is fairly outmoded even within this very limited bourgeois construction of modernity. This is also true in the more straightforward sense that these traditions, regardless of the popularity of individual poets, are now similarly sanctified by just as many stuffy cultural institutions.

From this point of view I agree that the positioning of certain kinds of works as 'experimental' is useful to claim and repudiate certain kinds of capital and prestige for works/authors but I can't see that it has any utility that I would find particularly productive or interesting.

Good post, plax.

I'd argue against that categorization of Coolidge, if only because the guy has written so many books that simply saying he writes in High Modernist tradition is doing the breadth of his work a great disservice.

I don't really agree with the rest of your post because the experiment that you call 'outmoded' continues to be so stridently rejected by institutions that many of the finest poets of our time are lucky to sell 100 copies of their latest books, but I'm also not sure what sort of stuffy institutions you're speaking of.

There's also much beyond the ease of avant-garde ideals of progress and novelty...maybe it's just me, but I actually think some people are interested in playing with and unsettling language not because of any unconsciously absorbed bourgeois desire for progress, but because that is what interests them. I don't think anything I write is progressing anything, but I do it because it allows me to think and feel in a way that feels most like myself. If other people like it, fine. If not, fine.

I do wonder what you'd consider an aesthetic vanguard these days, but this isn't the thread for it.

I will also admit that one of the reasons I get worked up about this stuff is that I am consistently called an 'experimental' poet, and many of my best friends are also categorized in this way, so when all the work we've done is dismissed as mere bourgeois trappings, I get defensive. Seems like punching down.

"I'm not going to waste more time responding to blatant projection and mischaracterization."

If you don't like your own words thrown back at you be more precise.

This table is broken.

"I don't really agree with the rest of your post because the experiment that you call 'outmoded' continues to be so stridently rejected by institutions that many of the finest poets of our time are lucky to sell 100 copies"

As if you are interested if it sells more. Comforting that it doesn't, huh?

If other people like it, fine. If not, fine....all the work we've done is dismissed as mere bourgeois trappings...Seems like punching down.

These two attitudes would appear to be at war with one another. Not that this is wrong or bad. We all struggle to reconcile conflicting ideas and feelings. Absolute consistency of judgement is not a sign of infallibility so much as lack of self-knowledge.

1. I think its fine for a general characterisation of a writer to not take in and reflect the full breadth of their work. This is the nature of general characterisations. So I do not retract this characterisation which I think was broadly accurate and I would be surprised if Cooldidge himself would take any umbridge at it. I would hope that any authors work would at least aspire to something not entirely identical with these categorisations.

2. I think the legacies of early 20th Century Modernism that I suggested in my previous post do enjoy high cultural prestige and are very much celebrated by conservative cultural institutions such as museums or music venues and in the specific instance of Coolidge I recall buying a very handsome copy of one of his books in the LRB bookshop a few years ago, probably on the shelf between Anne Carson and Emily Dickinson. He was not selling it photocopied out of the back of his car. It's certainly true that Cooldidge and his contemporaries hold far more prestige than other kinds of writing, say romance novels marketed to women or detective novels. Its also worth remembering that writers with all kinds of ambitions remain obscure regardless of how palatable their work might be to different audiences. Amazon is full of self-published books by writers working in the aforementioned genres as well as others others.

3. Regarding your assertion that some may be interested in playing with unsettling language because it interests them, I don't disagree. I would have assumed that some combination of this and a need to pay rent is why most people who do most things do thos things. This is also why people write romance or detective novels, watch TV or learn to bake sourdough bread. What psychic drives guide these interests is not really for me to say.

4. I thought in my post I was quite clear that the ideal of an aesthetic vanguard doesn't interest me all that much, but if it wasn't clear then I'm happy to clarify that this is the case.

5. I will end by saying that I was not in any way responding to you or your friends poetry, neither of which I have read. I cannot speak to the motives of anyone who has called it 'experimental' but rest assured that they and I are not conspiring in any way. I was only responding to the posts you have made in this thread. My characterisation of the ideal of an Avant-garde as being fundamentally bourgeois was simply my argument and opinion about a very large and important movement of aesthetic practices since the late 19th Century and was certainly not directed at you. And, as I am not myself Robert Lowell, I don't think this could be thought of as 'punching down' even if you want to think of it as punching at all, which I don't. I do note however, that nobody in this thread seems remotely exercised about the kinds of prestige afforded or withheld by cultural institutions in the way you are.

The idea that collective or shared experience is more profound than individual experience, and that thus, more popular media is more profound than what lurks in the shadows, is an absolutely ridiculous one.

Who has proposed this idea?

The only person who just about slightly has is Tim, in response to an earlier claim that people had proposed this idea.

I actually thought of exactly the same thing as Tim (ie: the one person who HAS claimed that ubiquity is great is Tom Ewing), and greatly enjoyed his reference.

I thought about Robert Lowell today. Years ago, I tried to read him. It didn't go well. I got little from it, and didn't go very far. It was a pity.

But I must say that this must be just as much about me as about Lowell, as I seem to feel this way about many poets.

It's definitely true that Lowell still gets vast editions of his letters published, and these still get vast reviews in certain places (for myself, I mainly just know the LRB). These reviews are typically quite tedious - but that's partly because they're always written by Colm Toibin.

The single most interesting thing about Lowell that I can think of is his appearance in Norman Mailer's THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT. That always intrigued me.

I'm not sure now whether anyone was arguing that Lowell was overrated compared to Bishop, but I'll add in any case these factual observations:

Lowell's and Bishop's reputations are certainly connected, but I would have thought that for some time (30-40 years?) Bishop has been more highly valued - or, simply, more frequently and highly praised. I don't think I've ever read a bad word about anything Bishop ever wrote -- literally. It feels as though you can find someone praising her to the skies literally every week somewhere in the literary press. I'm not sure that's true of Lowell.

Indeed, I ended up thinking that Bishop is probably the single most highly rated modern poet in the world now - perhaps with Heaney second?

As Lester Bangs, or possibly Frank Kogan, once said: "We'll never agree on anything again like we agreed on Elizabeth Bishop".

agreed re: tóibín on lowell. i read something by him once that was, typically of tóibín, fascinated and very easily seduced by class and wealth. He seemed breathless at the idea that lowell was from a very wealthy brahmin family and that this alone guaranteed an inherent degree of interest in his poetry. That he is such a great poet was simply a bonus. this is all obviously very tedious.

I like bishop a lot but i'm always baffled by what others say they like about her. i find almost everything i've read about her writing seems to describe quite a dull writer and not the author of 'the waiting room,' a poem I think about all the time.

Toibin wrote one of my favorite long things about Bishop!

I'm loving this discussion because I'd not once concluded like plax that Toibin is a writer fascinated and very easily seduced by class and wealth, especially since his master Henry James wrote about class and wealth with some fascination but not once was very easily seduced.

Reading parts of, though not the whole of:

Joe Cleary ed, IRISH MODERNISM (2014)

Maurice Bourgeois, SYNGE AND THE IRISH THEATRE (1913) - which must be virtually the first book ever written about him - in fact it was submitted as a student thesis in Paris in 1912! It has an astounding series of Appendixes detailing every known first performance of a Synge play in a given country, every translation (Dutch, Czech, etc!), every newspaper article about him. The level of empirical research here would put many current writers in the shade.

Quite looking forward to dipping into the much looser Sean O Faolain's THE IRISH (1947).

re Bishop she's weirder than her reputation for "simplicity" or whatever should suggest:

Here, above,
cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.

But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.

Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.

Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.

Each night he must
be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie
his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,
for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.

If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention
he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

Xyzzz, go fuck yourself.

Plax, I don't agree with much of what you wrote, but am tired of clogging up the thread, so will simply state that nobody else in this thread is exercised about these issues because they're not poets, as far as I know, and so these issues aren't personal to them.

The pinefox, I reworded exactly what Tim wrote, and both you and he are wrong.

Get fucked, table, stuff your chapbooks up your arsehole.

I don't have an arsehole, it was sewn up after I nearly died of cancer in 2019, so you'll have a find a better insult, dickhead.

You still have a mouth, don't you?

Is someone talking?

As for you, put up a witty YouTube link, that's all you're good for.

― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 19 February 2022 13:17 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

coming from mister fucking twitter lmao

The tweets have content, unlike your posts.

anyway I'm reading the Hollinghurst debut it's v good

not very experimental, but it ain't that sort of meal

I like Hollinghurst, tho have only read the most recent one and The Line of Beauty

how's the recent? imo he is the best modern (i.e. elegiac; aware of info overload) approximation of an austenian comedian of society i've read

He's gotten worse, or, rather, his material is thinning and his treatment of it etiolated and blah.

love both the Swimming Pool Library and the Line of Beauty (with the latter taking the nod). from reading round here, decided not to venture further, disappointedly.

Kind of agree with Alfred-- it's fine, and there remain some exquisite sentences (pages even), but it does sort of seem like he's run out of material.

Even not having read The Stranger's Child, I found Sparsholt to be a little much like The Line of Beauty, and one of the major criticisms of Sparsholt is that it was too much like The Stranger's Child..

That said, if you like his sort of thing, then it is probably worth a read.

The Line of Beauty is very much one of my favorite novels. I was afraid of rereading it 2018, but, happily, it still won me over.

'i knew i could never love it or want it, but it was an achievement, this armour of useless masculinity' is a rollercoaster in twenty words

I wrote:

Non-ubiquity, in and of itself, is no more profound than ubiquity.

That's the main point I was trying to make, that the extent to which a piece of art is well-known is a useless way to judge its quality. It's entirely possible to have a profound engagement with a popular (even an immensely popular) work of art, and it's just as possible to have a profound experience with a terribly obscure one.

TTITT, you "reworded" what I said as "collective or shared experience is more profound than individual experience, and that thus, more popular media is more profound than what lurks in the shadows" and that isn't what I think, neither is it what I said. That's at least in part my fault, because I added:

Less so if anything because at least ubiquity has the kind of profundity that comes from shared experience

This was only a half-expressed thought and I'm sorry for any lack of clarity. But here's what I think: my experience with a piece of art is deeply individual and comes from my individual engagement with it: that experience will be more or less profound according to the art and me. But that engagement also comes with a context (I might be alone, I might be in a class, or a book group, or a concert , or a club...) That context can also lead to a profound experience, in addition to the personal engagement with the art itself. Being one of a thousand people going crazy to an amazing record in a club can be (though isn't always) a deeply profound experience and it's a profound experience which simply isn't available from solo engagement with that same work of art.

To be clear, I'm neither saying being one of those thousand is a more profound experience than engaging intensely with a piece of art on my own, and I'm not saying work that millions of people engage with intensely is somehow better than work that a very few people engage with intensely, I'm saying that shared experience can bring its own profundity.

If it makes you feel any differently, although I'm not a poet (and thank goodness for that) I do engage in literary pursuits that also fail to get much or any attention outside a tiny circle of somewhat interested people and I feel the frustration of not being able to reach wider audiences who might find the work valuable, so these questions are at least somewhat personal to me also.

Great post Tim

tick.jpg

🥉ded

I didn't love Cold Spring but that particular Bishop poem is weird and great. Was it a misreading of a headline about the finding of a mammoth or am I misremembering? It read likes Poe or Washington Irving.

I liked Tim's post but it does use a model of ubiquity that is about as pure and perfect as possible to illustrate the point (something I'm going to clumsily call the phenomenology of engagement). The presence of media in that space is of course governed by contingency to some extent but nothing close to the governance of space in literary magazines - and in particular with regards to poetry. It makes perfect sense to interrogate the ongoing presence of someone like Lowell in that space, an interrogation that isn't really about engagement at all but about the 'political' (in the broadest possible sense) nature of ubiquity and who controls access.

This whole discussion seems to correctly revolve around trying to sidestep Old School High/Low Divisions or Poptimist/Rockist Divides, as opposed to Duke's Dictum "if it sounds good it IS good" or whatever Ellingon actually said, or its contrapositive, **WARNING Obligatory YouTube Content **
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CscPTI8fwA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV3z2Ytxu90

Thanks for that clarification, Tim. I do agree with you to a certain extent, but I think Chinaski gets at the reasons behind my aggravation and occasional outbursts on the issue — who allows such ubiquity to happen? Who makes it happen, what stake do they have in it? How can media consumption and consumption of art be connected to ideas of manufactured consent? Why are certain types of difficult or weird poetry (or writing) pushed over others, as this is certainly a real phenomenon? To what extent do writers have to change their work in order to find an audience or gain credit from institutions, and to what extent do writers need to forge their own path and hope that institutions will catch up to them? These are complicated questions, I think, and that's maybe why I find myself confused and self-contradictory at times.

All that said, sometime in the next day I'll start a thread on here around this conversation. I apologize for my excessive word spillage clogging up this thread. Let's please make this about books we're reading again.

Antonio Lobo Antunes - Act of the Dammed

Managed to finish this lol experimental novel, its in a Faulkner-esque vein, detailing the getaway of a rotten family from Salazar's Portugal. I liked a lot of the writing even if I didn't really go for the narrative so much. There are a couple of lines around Angola, and I know Antunes explores those colonial wars more in his other writing so I'll make sure to pick some more up.

'a future for socialism' by john roemer

under 200p informal and accessible discussion of possible alternative socialist economic systems written in the wake of the collapse of the soviet union and the apparent failure of the command economy by a marxist economic theorist and analytic political philosopher. most of the book is an investigation of roemer's 'coupon socialism', where every adult has an equal number of "coupons" which they can trade in the stock market but are prohibited from selling. the fact that workers can trade coupons preserves the "allocation" incentive where productive firms are rewarded with high share prices, but the fact that they cannot sell them prevents the ownership of the means of production from concentrating in the hands of a wealthy minority. he also discusses proposals around worker-owned firms and forms of socializing corporate governance, mostly based on japan's keiretsu system. it includes some theoretical investigations as well as discussions of the hybrid market socialism systems that existed in yugoslavia and hungary in the 70s and 80s. the book is in many ways a product of its time. in some ways that limits it; roemer was at the cutting edge of economic theory in the early 90s, but many recent developments (particularly the fields of mechanism design, market design and matching theory which study different forms of non-market allocation when private property is infeasible or undesirable) that were nascent at the time of writing have now matured, and it would be great to read an updated version that engaged with them. however, the best part of the book being a product of its time is that no one would/could write a book like this today. it's virtually unheard of for a contemporary economist with requisite mastery of economic theory to ask huge questions like 'how should we transition to socialism?', and actually make bold proposals that are specific enough to analyze formally. the book that comes closest is glen weyl's radical markets, but that wasn't from an explicitly socialist perspective (and glen has since pivoted to a weird form of blockchain-based decentralized "digital democracy"). most western socialists today seem to want to "get to scandinavia." that's a fine goal, but it's refreshing to read perspectives from a time when people were still thinking about socialism beyond the social democratic welfare state. the book's also very well-written, roemer is a clear and succinct writer. also, the fact that it's not only short but divided into short chapters (most under 5 pages) made it very digestible

xp sounds interesting; i love experiments

It will change your life!!

Pretty good portrayal of a centrist labour councillor around page 1120 of Alan Moore's Jerusalem. Throw in a few jibes at Corbyn and it could be from this year.

I agree with Tim's statements above.

Though I don't altogether share Tim's aesthetic tastes, I find that his statements on, at least, this board are almost always wise, accurate and precisely formulated.

No matter how far I tread in xpost Devil House, when I look at the bookmark, the needle, it's still in the middle, aieee---something so densely immersive is this. All of JD's novels, including Master of Reality, his response to thee album, in 33 1/3's series of same, are lives continuing after and via shattering events: picking up the pieces when feasible, making of them what you can and will and must more often walking on them: a thought that occurred somewhere in here early on, maybe when the narrator is walking up to a little old house, repurposed as the office of a young female real estate agent, who is vibrant with ambition and skills, an oddly bright note in this small potatoes market and hick town (which is just starting to glimmer, a few years before The Great Meltdown of 2008 and its effects on California land speculation).
The reason the narrator is walking up the path to her office, as she probably tunes in to pretty quickly, is that, although he consents to be shown around, he's already chosen the first house he mentions, known as the Devil House to some True Crime mavens down through the ages, starting, in the mid-80s, with the discovery of gutted corpses atop a pile, maybe a pyre, of porn---books, mags, VHS tapes, shreds---amid elaborate interior decoration.
The reason he's picked the Devil House is that he's a True Crime author, Gage Chandler (mentioning significance of his name, in a way that gives a clue to his private correlations, now with their own glimmer), and his editor has talked him into living there, after a fact-checker of another book came across references to this case, which has become obscure at best to non-mavens. One thing that tips scales of interest for editor is location: the small town of Milpitas, which also brought us what became the hit True Crime-based movie River's Edge, so maybe Gage can find more gold in those sleepy little row homes.
Although this one is a bit apart, and "in the shadow of the freeway," also remodeled, but he moves in, to do his thing. Which is catching, amplifying the vibes, charging the particles of minutiae, the research done, all traces on microfiche, scanned posts, primordial listservs, his own interviews, and especially all the hospital records and mich other printed matter, even a diary-sketchbook of one of the perps, so available on eBay.
This is nothing, the 80s: his careermaking book was about certain events of 1972, the still stan-hearted The White Witch of Morro Bay. Who was indeed white, but that's about it.
He specializes in venturing, delving, debunking, even deconstructing, without disappointing. He knows that amazing stories which begin for most of the audience with "a bloody climax" (essential, unmistakable ingredient, beyond debunking) can read quite differently if you and he start tip-toeing in from the beginning, but not too slowly, and finding just the right point of entry.
He also knows, and this is a or the other key ingredient of Darnielle's themes, in fiction and music, that the supernatural, and attendant ancient glories of the arts, ov legacy, can be a language for personal mythology, however oblique stroke, in some sense inchoate, struggling, yet succeeding in being personally coded, branded, enough to also reached Those Who Know, and shocks, confounds, titillates ignorant villagers etc.
But this is has not turned out to be that assigned True Crime book, as he tells you upfront.
Nevertheless, while settling into his process, he reflects on the true life of Miss Crane, young high school teacher, AKA The White Witch of Morro Bay (these pages could be from his book of that title; there is a high generic vein of True Crime). in recounting, revisiting the granular, perhaps with some speculative fiction between dots, he gently presses her moments into something that suggests she was born with some orientation toward the quotidian, incl. her own approach to collecting, which became evidence against her---she even finds her own way towards----Mrs Dalloway?
But then. On to the business at hand in Devil House.

Yet another key ingredient of this book in particular (also a whiff of it in Wolf in White Van, esp, whenever narrator walks to the convenience store): the elusively beguiling (has something to do with the hypnotic pull of drones, of monotony) everydays of Northern California, starting here ca. 1972, after upheavals in rough patch of the 60s, settling back down, for a while, and on what, but never the same: Miss Crane leads a sheltered life, but it's the time and setting as in Emma Cline's The Girls. I'm far from there, but it's not that different, these days---nor is The Crying of Lot 49, which seems more and more relevant--big 60s kids buzzword---every year.
It's also apparent to the Devil House narrator, considering target events of 1986, and in the same area during his early 2000s stake-out.

Stefan Collini: THE NOSTALGIC IMAGINATION: HISTORY IN ENGLISH CRITICISM (2019)

Renata Adler - Speedboat
Deidre Bair - Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography.

I must admit, SPEEDBOAT is one of the books I most ought to read that I have never yet come close to reading.

An easy read once you get accustomed to the fragmentation.

Didn’t she write a famous takedown of Pauline Kael?

This, probably: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1980/08/14/the-perils-of-pauline/

She's a fine cultural critic. I treasure her essays on the confirmation of Rehnquist as chief justice and on the Lewinsky-Clinton affair

Can't wait!

I can't wait for this volume, to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York) in August this year. It will include a previously unpublished autobiographical study of Lowell's childhood, plus memoirs of figures including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, and others. pic.twitter.com/Gto1eEdfXq

— John Haffenden (@johnhaffenden) February 22, 2022

lol

Can't haridy wait.

I suspect Lowell may be more read about than read these days. I was in a smallish independent bookstore yesterday and happened to check the small poetry section (maybe a couple yards of titles). There were no books by Lowell to be found. For comparison, there were several volumes by Rupi Kaur (I thumbed through one hoping to be appalled but sadly must report that I liked the few poems I read), the obligatory Bukowski, a surprisingly large section of William Blake. There was one anthology called "100 Poems to Break Your Heart" which appeared to be, as the title suggests, a selection of sad poems, in chronological order, with exegesis, and there was a Lowell poem in that.

There was also a large stack of "Devil House" prominently displayed on the front table. Reminded me I need to read "Universal Harvester".

I suspect Lowell may be more read about than read these days.

Agree. Especially as most of us are confronted with LRB (or NYRB, TLS or whatever) articles about his letters, always by Colm Toibin, once every 3 months.

I'm reading Audrey Schulman's Theory of Bastards.

The parts of Devil House I mentioned above, especially the fictional True Crime author's reverie on the pre-TC life of Miss Crane---that fine tuning of the fictional and the real author's shared (though not entirely the same) sense of what can be shared, and not, expressing that boundary too, crossing over, just long enough: another example of JD at his best---and a lot of subsequent development was worthwhile---but the ending lost all credibility even before I got to the bottom of the page.
And it exposed some inherent structural weaknesses of the Devil House story proper that I then realized I'd been keeping almost below the level of awareness, building enjoyment around, because the virtues of the book had that kind of momentum---yeah, yeah, the same old Willing Suspension of Disbelief, but it could have kept on working for a while, allowing a decent interval before the penny dropped---if not for the ending.
And I'm the jaded novel reader who usually says, "Endings, shmendings." But this wasn't baggy enough for that. (There was also a close-to-penultimate set piece, but it did no harm.)

But I still say it's worth reading.

the ending lost all credibility Unless! Unless it is a deliberate "loss," of a character, giving an exaggerated confession:"If I say this much, which is true, it's bad. But if I add this much more bullshit, it makes my whole huge mess blow up, and go away!" Manic (true to to this character) and magical thinking, thematically appropriate as hell to the story, and the story-within-the-story. Or is this my own magical thinking? Is this post fan fiction? All of this shell gaming is also thematically appropriate to the JD reading experience. Just read this damn book, if you were already thinking you might.
RIP Dave Hickey wrote that he believed in the evolutionary, not the creationist theory of art: as soon as some one sees it, it continues to change, all bets should be off.
But I can't unsee what the "loss" or loss made a bit more visible re preceding structural weaknesses, though they don't upstage all the good stuff.

But if I add this much more bullshit, it makes my whole huge mess blow up, and go away!" Manic and maybe so magical it's too magical to be more than a moment's outburst, not an official confession, but it's being recorded.

The Audrey Schulman has got its hooks into me. It's set in the near future, where there is increasing evidence of climate crises and attendant issues. Most people wear a Bindi, a version of Siri worn as an implant, and wear Lenses, a kind of contact-lens version of Google Glasses. The protagonist is a long-term sufferer of endometriosis and we're slowly told her story - of multiple misdiagnoses and how she has learned to live with pain - while also being shown her other 'story': her role as a researcher and nascent evolutionary biologist, assigned to study bonobo chimps (all in captivity, their habitats having been largely destroyed). The latter unfolds in the present with the rest told in flashbacks. I almost don't want to mention Houellebecq but he's probably the closest analogue I can think of. Thankfully, Schulman is free of Houellebecq's stink of fascism and is more concerned with compassion - with the bonobos and with the central character's pain. The architectural work in entwining the two narratives is masterful.

Several of us have read that, starting with James Morrison, of course, think most would agree with you, I know I would, although I do wish you hadn’t mentioned that other guy.

A friend of mine mentioned he was reading the newest Houellebecq and I've never thought the same of that friend.

Reading a set of Myles na gCopaleen CRUISKEEN LAWN columns from 1940s to 1960s.

On the whole fair to say: in the 1940s he is astoundingly consistent with his lightness of touch; in the 1950s he veers into anger, sometimes reactionary - yet he does still retain the underlying verbal wit and can often pull something out, eg with an alphabet of Irish items late in the 1950s. Didn't read so much 1960s this time, but he still seems able to keep going till near the end.

Another simple observation: into the 1950s, the column more typically becomes broken up into smaller sections, separated by asterisks; possibly a sign of loss of inspiration and flow.

Individual columns are treasurable though, eg: one where he essentially pretends to be have been W.B. Yeats on the first night of THE PLAYBOY.

Anyone read Meredith? I've put down The Egoist three times in twenty years while digging his poetry ("Modern Love" sonnet sequence in particular). I picked up Diana of the Crossways and I'm rarin' to go.

Seems to me Meredith went out of fashion ages ago, so perhaps ripe for a reappraisal. Recall reading Wilfrid Sheed writing about Edmund Wilson saying to him "What do you think of Meredith, Sheed? We don't think much about him now, do we?"

He went out of fashion the moment he expired. Woolf was calling him out of fashion a hundred years ago.

I have Diane Johnson's book "The First Mrs. Meredith" and have been meaning to read something by Meredith before reading it, but so far, nothing doing.

Rereading Hugh Kenner's A COLDER EYE: THE MODERN IRISH WRITERS (1983): the long chapter on Synge, and the early chapter on the Abbey and the Playboy riots.

Once I start rereading this book I could easily want to reread the whole thing - apart from anything else, it slips down so easily. It does, though, contain some very dubious beggorah-istic condescension towards the Irish.

I finished Theory of Bastards. I liked it a good deal and found it very emotionally affecting. Although, I found the final third kind of frustrating and the 'no, don't do that!' aspect of watching an apocalypse unfold kind of wore me down (even as I fell more in love with Frankie and the bonobos). I don't know that I ever need to see/hear/read another version of the North American apocalypse.

why hidden text?

I spoilered the entire last third of the book?

I'm finding A Savage War of Peace about the Algerian War for independence to be slow going, partly because it reaches for a level of detail that requires close attention, moving forward and back in time as it covers different areas of the country.

The author's sympathies for the French are not hidden, but he at least has the integrity to expose the war crimes and intransigent racism of the French in depth and detail. He struggles to frame them in the kindest light, but any attentive reader will see them for what they are: war crimes, massive racism, and white colonial arrogance.

Reading it right now does throw an interesting side light on the current invasion of Ukraine, although the similarities are far more broad and general than strikingly obvious.

Finished Clark Coolidge's 'To the Cold Heart' and Gail Scott's 'Permanent Revolution.' The former I found to be the most accessible of Coolidge's books, but still able to display his unparalleled style and music. The latter was perhaps the most dreary book of essays I've read in recent memory— unlike her fiction, the pieces seems uninspired, full of apologetics and repetitions without purpose. Best when writing about her perspectives on how literary culture and communities relate to each other.

Going to take a break from full-lengths and focus on chapbooks for a while.

Against White Feminism Rafia Zakaria
Pakistani American writer tells history of the inherent bias in mainstream feminism which excluded women of colour.
I'm finding this to be a pretty easy read. Trying to read as much in this area as I can.
Caught a webinar with the author a couple of weeks ago and thought it was interesting. & now 1/3 of the way through the book after one sitting.

Demon Haunted World Carl Sagan
Finished this yesterday and thought it was pretty good. Mid 90s book on scientific illiteracy and avoiding credulity which still seems pretty relevant right now in the age of MAGA, anti-Vaxx and other anti-science movements.
Not sure why i haven't read this before.

Biased Jennifer Eberhardt
Book on forms of prejudice and bias etc. I started this a few months ago and then got into my continual chain of interlibrary loan reads .
So now have it up as my loo book .
Pretty great book anyway.

Speaking of Winfrid Sheed, he also seems to have gone out of fashion or at least out of print, but I recall his novels being quite good. I do see in the archives that James Morrison has read Max Jamison, at least.

re Renata Adler: she is discussed in this marvellous review by David Thomson:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n02/david-thomson/peachy

It suggests that writing a bad review of Kael ended her career.

I'd like to read the Kael review (I don't have NYRB access) and again, I should read Adler's novels.

For comfortable reading I went back to Maurice Bourgeois: JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE AND THE IRISH THEATRE (1913).

I have a naive tendency to be impressed that people in the past could do things, and thus I'm naively amazed by the quality of Bourgeois's scholarship, 110 years ago, with no thought of digital reference systems. I suppose he spent much time in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, and dug out all these obscure newspaper items there. Or perhaps much came from the National Library of Ireland, that oddly small yet legendary place.

It's marvellous how old books contain facts or suggestions that complement each other, or add little things to what we think we know in the present. This one has some of that, and also a hilarious opening outlook which may be a justification for discretion. At the start of a long account of the life of J.M. Synge:

Of his parents little need be said.

I have never seen a biographer say this before.

It gets better:

Synge's father dying on April 13, 1872, when Synge was quite a small child, cannot be said to have affected his upbringing in any way.

!!!

Finally, this marvellous sidelong note, breaking the fourth wall in a way, on p.58:

As a rule he preferred original works to critical writings. He would not have read a book on himself - this one least of all.

Speaking of Winfrid Sheed

Demon Haunted World Carl Sagan
Finished this yesterday and thought it was pretty good. Mid 90s book on scientific illiteracy and avoiding credulity which still seems pretty relevant right now in the age of MAGA, anti-Vaxx and other anti-science movements.
Not sure why i haven't read this before.

― Stevolende, Saturday, February 26, 2022 10:33 AM (yesterday)

i have been meaning to read this since it came out! maybe this is the year.

I enjoyed it. Probably better to read it in a more concentrated fashion than i did when I'm not trying to get thorugh a load of other things. But does make quite a bit of sense.
Want to read that book on Great Popular Delusions but got a few other things ahead of that. Gone back to reading Biased by Jennifer Eberhardt which is pretty good. Also got Thinking Fast & slow lined up.

Oh yeah finally finished A brief History of 7 Killings last night too. & Marlon James was in the Guardian magazine hing yesterday. Want to read Black Leopard, Red Wolf when I get the chance . Magazine thing ties in with a sequel I think.

All The Marvels, Douglas Wolk.

Mona by Pola Oloixarac - "like Rachel Cusk's Kudos on drugs" according The Atlantic which a) lol and ii) would only be true if the drugs were to turn Kudos' somewhat humble narrator into a monster of self-obsession.

Seems like a thing drugs do to people (some drugs; some people).