The (S)word in the Autumn Stone: What Are You Reading, Fall 2022?

Was going to let somebody else have it, but got tired of waiting? Submit Question

Link to the old thread, for good luck:

Bright Remarks and Throwing Shade: What Are You Reading, Summer 2022?

I've nearly finished a memoir by Elaine Pagels entitled Why Religion?. I've been finding it interesting for reasons that might not greatly interest others here. She experienced two consecutive deep grief events in her mid-life, the death of her first child at six years of age and the death of her husband in mountaineering accident a couple of years later. So, the book is mostly about her grief and how she coped with it. The title is a bit misleading, in that religion was an aid in her struggle, but not in ways most people would recognize as 'taking comfort in religious belief'. This has some resemblances to my own life, Hence, my interest.

Sounds good. Many years ago, I read her The Gnostic Gospels, which indicated, however accurately, evidence that the teachings of Jesus were more broad-minded overall than the sum that made it into the Bible. Think her husband, Paul, also had a progressive interest in theology, but prob just knew of his writing via reviews.
A little later, at an opportune moment, I came across A Grief Observed, by CS Lewis, which was much less formal than its title and otherwise expected: about the sudden death of his wife. It was brief, concise, articulate, deeply felt---early days, but he seemed to be managing well enough.
(Also, more secular of course, but like the title says: Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking.)

[Minor Detail - Adania Shibli/i]

Devastating. Starts just after the formation of Israel and then concludes decades later in Ramallah. 2 narrator's, one covers the first half of the book another the 2nd. the 2 halves are very different stylistically. despite knowing from the blurb that something horrifying happens in the first part and the narrator being in fact the perpetrator I still found this portion the easier read. the 2nd half was more challenging for me but once I got used to the rhythm it really conveyed the sense of dread and anxiety that one imagines living under occupation must feel like. I hadn't read anything quite like this before.

shoot messed up the italics tags

it's ok, this thread isn't relevant for another year anyway

Sorry, I just now put in request for correction.

Started Koko by Peter Straub this afternoon.

Richard Brody - Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life Of Jean-Luc Godard
Christopher Ricks - Tennyson

I read The Ax(e) by Donald Westlake. Such a great premise and so expertly carried out. 'Rooting for a psychopath' isn't exactly new but Burke is so up in late capitalism's face, it's hard not to identify with him and his, ah, project.

Joe Moran's If You Should Fail is a series of consolatory essays about the inevitability of failure. It's not de Botton, thankfully, and Moran's research is wide-ranging and unusual. The essays on Natalia Ginzburg and failed poet and Soho vagabond Paul Potts are a signature example of the form. Recommended for sure.

Now reading Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football by David Winner. The majesty of Cruyff by way of Vermeer, Dutch situationism and spatial theory? I'm in.

Barry Adamson Up Above the City, Down Below The Stars
memoir of Manchester post-punk bassist, Pretty well written, if this is all him he should think about writing more stuff.
So far I'm still in his childhood in the mid 60s. I hadn't heard about him having physical problems at birth that he has had to overcome.
Anyway this is great and I'm enjoying this looking forward to reading about the band stuff which is going to be 15 odd years away I guess.

Representation Stuart hall ed
Great book on the methods by which things are represented like,.
methodologies of language, semiology, and various other phenomena.
Pretty interesting.

INsurgent Empire

The invention of The White Race Theodore Allen
a look into the process by which the concept of the white race came about. First volume looks into the way that England tried out various processes they would use later in colonisation across the globe prototyped in Ireland in the 15th and 16th centuries. It was that that made me cue this as the next thing to read after having bought it a couple of years ago. I bought it thinking i would read it more immediately .I could have waited and got the omnibus edition of the 2 volumes of the book together from Verso but that was several months away from release when I grabbed this from them. I heard it being talked about a few years back, possibly on here and meant to get to read it.
THe subject of the trial runs of several colonial techniques here came up in a couple of discussions in a conference on Travellers last weekend.
I have only got about half way through the introduction so far but have hear dit is a classic so hope i do get to read it before long.

my carry-along bag for the month I just spent away on business included Baldwin's Another Country, Bioy-Casares's The Invention of Morel, Imre Kertesz's The Union Jack, Duanwad Pimwana's Arid Dreams, and that was as far as I got during the month away which I knew would happen if I pivoted to a short story collection (Arid Dreams), the forward momentum is always hard to sustain for me. So I got a lot less read than I'd hoped but the Kertesz, brief as it is, left a huge impression, incredible style -- I grabbed several others in used bookstores as soon as I'd finished it.

Now enjoying my second book by Igor Stiks, The Judgement of Richard Richter. Amazon Crossing publishes some really good stuff and I have complicated lover-of-books-in-translation thoughts about that.

I read the Bioy-Casares over the holiday last year: a lot of fun.

I posted the first two responses to this thread and confirmed their existence, but they seem to have disappeared, which is interesting.

I am reading A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee and Motichur: Sultana's Dream and Other Writings of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (OUP translation).

I've read The Witness by Juan José Saer and I found the philosophical reflections muddy and a real mismatch with the events in the book, that have to do with a boy captured by a cannibalistic tribe in the New World. I haven't been too lucky with my Spanish/Latin reading ever since I picked up one each from Saer, Marias, Vila-Matas, Vallejo and stopped Hopscotch quarter-way. The Vallejo was real fun, a "treat", just no masterpiece.

I've also made excellent use of all your NYRB recs and I've read Leonora Carrington, J.L. Carr and John Williams with immense pleasure this year. Butcher's Crossing was the last one before the Saer and I still have Elliott Chaze lined up.

I've held the Carrington book in hand several times. I dig the drawings.

I don't understand the thread title.

As noted on other thread, vaccines have made me incapacitated and thus I've been reading a lot of things that I somehow found easier to manage.

Ross Macdonald, THE BARBAROUS COAST (1956) - notably more action-driven than the previous RM I read, maybe because it's earlier and the protagonist is younger.

Ross Macdonald, THE GOODBYE BOOK (1969) - less action, and the protagonist has an affair with a person of interest in the inquiry. I thought he was generally too principled for that.

The quality of writing in both is excellent in being terse, communicative but also capable of regular bursts of descriptive metaphor. These enliven the novel but don't overwhelm the story. The dialogue is also generally terrific.

It gradually occurs to me that fine detective writing like this is, in a way, better than other writers to which it compares, eg: on one hand Hemingway - who wrote the simple prose that detective authors use, but then didn't do anything *interesting* with it as they do; on the other hand stylists, like (anachronistically) Martin Amis, who can flex the metaphors but only really has those, the style, to offer, not the intrigue of story. Macdonald is in a way a more complete, balanced writer than either of those, before and after him.

I looked for another detective novel and found John le Carré's A MURDER OF QUALITY (1962). It's remarkable that JLC started as a detective writer, in effect. Again he makes great use of Smiley. My one problem here is that I'm not sure how well the murder mystery itself holds up, especially by the standards of 'fairness to the reader', relevance of clues and all the notional rules that on the one hand people claim are absurd but on the other we may feel are quite intuitive. Beyond that, the novel is a) a super satire of English class, at an extreme pitch - the arcane archaisms of a historic public school where the staff remark on a tradition and say 'of course, you probably know this', as if their traditions are famous; b) terrifically decorated with novelistic detail, observation, perception. I reflect that JLC was only about 30 here and already so good at the craft of the novelist.

Still not feeling great, I turned to the closest thing I could see to a detective novel, at a far lower calibre: Robert Arthur, ALFRED HITCHCOCK AND THE THREE INVESTIGATORS IN THE SECRET OF TERROR CASTLE (1967). This is a children's book; its prose is simple; sometimes it's marred by geez-whiz tones and excessive narration of a character's thoughts about something that's already obvious. It is about detection and involves some of the features we'd expect - a gradual deduction from clues - and it did surprise me by having more twists than expected. It shares with Macdonald's BARBAROUS COAST a Hollywood background, thus in both novels action sometimes takes place amid film sets, props etc. I'd quite like to read another in this series if I can justify it.

* The second Macdonald is THE GOODBYE LOOK.

I don't understand the thread title.

― the pinefox, Sunday, September 25, 2022

The Goodbye Luck would also be a good WAYR? title.

recently learned that ross macdonald's wife, margaret millar, was also an award-winning mystery novelist. haven't yet read any of her stuff tho

(xpost The Goodbye Luck would also work for WAYR?)

Have only read her novella The Iron Gates, set in WWII Canada: a wintery hothouse, insular, well-to-do, well-fed, somewhat feverish older people for the most part (most younger men, and some women, are off in the military). Some glancing social critique works with stage magician's use of distraction re clues of this whodunnit. Apparently the kind of thing she was known for, and several of her books finally came back into print a few years ago. James Morrison is the Millar expert around here.

It's too bad that she apparently did not make friends with Eudora Welty, her husband's penpal (a collection of their correspondence has been published, come to think of it).

I never know if you're serious, and that's as it should be

I'm afraid I don't understand this statement either.

I have read that Salinger story - over 20 years ago, and thus certainly don't remember every, or indeed any, phrase in it.

But even once one notes that the phrase is from Salinger, how does it fit with the thread ie: what are you reading in Fall, or, as some would say, Autumn?

That question is premised on the notion that previous threads (which I believe were mainly named by poster Aimless) had titles that were in some way appropriate to the seasons in question. Though I'm not sure how far back that small tradition goes.

Thanks to another ILB tradition of linking back to the previous WAYR threads when starting a new one, I rambled back as far as Dec, 2013 and the split between seasonally appropriate and non-seasonal thread titles was about 50-50.

xxp
really loved 'brilliant orange' when I read it years ago and lots of it made even more sense when reading Dennis Bergkamp's sorta autobio many years later

youn, interested to hear what you think of A Gesture Life. I believe I had to read it for summer reading before my junior year in high school— as was often the case in those days, I was the only one who liked the summer reading book.

Recent reads:

Either/Or - Elif Batuman
Simply what the campus novel should be. I liked it even more than The Idiot. A while back I wanted fiction that eschewed plot but held my interest with humor, insight, and detail, and those two books fit the bill. I'll be sad if she keeps her word and there is no third installment.

The Passion According to GH - Clarice Lispector
Just did not care for this, did not have time for it, and bailed before I had to suffer through the cockroach-eating scene. May be some class issues at play RE: my view of the narrator as well. Prior to this I had read some of Lispector's earliest short stories from that collection.

The Invention of Morel - Adolfo Bioy Casares
Borges-influenced classic novella that holds up.

Cuba: An American History - Ada Ferrer
A little over halfway through now -- young Castro has just gotten out of prison. One of those times you decide to pull the trigger on reading something if the right reviewers are calling it anti-American. A very well-written summation of the island's political history (there are references to the broader culture -- music, literary movements, etc. -- but she only mentions them in passing and doesn't delve into them).

xxxpost use of the zingy quote was just meant as a little fun with readers in general, including myself, that hopefully could be enjoyed by readers in general, and meant for all seasons. I figured it was likely that you had read the story, but like I said, posted the link just in case, because it's a good 'un.

I never know if you're serious, and that's as it should be

That's what I meant, I mean.

If anybody wants to change the title, it's okay by me.

i don't care about the title, but this entire process is fully established as aimless's thing and one should wait for him to either make a new thread or abdicate the role

and he hasn't done the latter

B-but I've done it several times, so have Chinaski and some others. Take this one if you want it, Aimless, all good.

My main complaint is that it’s much too long, but then again we’re all readers here, so whatever!

Reading Wanda Coleman and some others at the moment.

this entire process is fully established as aimless's thing

nope. check the stats, mookieproof. it's a team effort.

okay man!

I'm far enough into Les Misérables that I think I'm officially "reading" it. Good so far.

Seeing by Jose Saramago - enjoyable but more whimsical, less profound - and less depressing - than Blindness.

The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt. A novel comprised of diary extracts, interviews, and the like, about a female artist, exasperated that her work is taken less seriously than that of men, who decides to hide her work behind 'masks' of other male artists. Brimming with philosophy, psychology, history, as well as imaginatively drawn characters.

Second Place by Rachel Cusk - I'm half way through, not sure if it's a serious study of a very thoughtful woman or a comic piece about a pathological overthinker. Maybe the ambiguity is intentional. Where the Outline trilogy was full of fascinating and often profound glimpses into other people's lives and thoughts, the narrators thoughts here are often opaque or cryptic - to me anyway - but not in an off-putting way, I want to figure them out.

It's remarkable that JLC started as a detective writer, in effect.

I think much spy fiction, certainly including JLC, is very close to detective fiction anyway: there's usually a mystery with lots of twists, and the noir vision of a fallen world where everyone's out for themselves and any moral man will be driven to despair fits like a glove to Cold War realpolitik.

Robert Arthur, ALFRED HITCHCOCK AND THE THREE INVESTIGATORS IN THE MYSTERY OF THE VANISHING TREASURE (1968).

This one features an invasion of Gnomes.

to me -- as a bit of a JLC sceptic (three good books tops) -- i do think it's interesting that he realised he had something with smiley as a character like right away (ie in call for the dead, his first book) and so wrote a folloow-up presumably feeling (i) that ordinary spy fiction didn't quite suit this character in the role he envisioned (or wouldn't interestingly sustain several books in the mode of call for the dead) a and (ii) maybe tec fiction could! he could dispense with one set of conventions and drag out another!

so he immediately switched to a gentleman-amateur whodunit and tried it out and evidently (equally immediately) decided that no, tec fiction wasn't going to be it (he's right, it's not one of his three good books) so he then straight went back to spy fiction and gradually fashioned a new mode of it where this character as he envisioned him could be successfully central (for at least one great book = tinker tailor; with actually a longtail aftermath of increasingly tiresome entries but by then he'd blocked himself in)*

smiley's roles in the spy books before TTSS are i guess a useful fashioning of backstory but it's not really of consequence that it's smiley undertaking them except as a token in a broader world-building (the circus)

*ok i do quite enjoy smiley's people as a sequence of setpiece scenes (and toby has good stuff in it) but it's sentimental fan service at best (even the toby stuff if im really real abt it) plus karla's daughter is a classic jlc dud (he can write women but if they approach any intensity of damaged sexiness that right there is his achilles heel)

i am so pleased you are reading the THREE INVESTIGATORS books pinefox, even if it means you are probably not better yet -- get well soon!

Thanks Mark S, I greatly appreciate your last post.

I have one more THREE INVESTIGATORS on the shelf which I may yet manage.

But why do you think A MURDER OF QUALITY is not good?

I think it is excellent except in that I am not certain that the murder mystery quite adds up. The surrounding description etc I find very fine.

It is funny that Smiley is in THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD (the next book), but in a supporting role. Very curious for an author to do that with his main creation.

I've always liked the thought of Hitchcock being called away from setting up a shot on eg Topaz to help out the Three Investigators with the case of the stuttering parrot.

I am sure that I have read the Parrot one, which is flagged as next at the end of TERROR CASTLE. But I don't seem to have a copy of it anymore.

The Hitchcock Introduction to VANISHING TREASURE is truly desultory. But the lady with the Gnomes is supposed to be a friend of his.

it's 20-plus years since i read a murder of quality so i don't remember anything beyond a general impatient disappointment and no wish ever to reread it, even when it came time to reread all the smiley books (which are very variable)

if i hazard a partial guess i am out of the sympathy with the milieu it's set in (tho this doesn't for example set me off with christie or sayers) and i am never terribly invested in the fine clockwork of the precision of a good whodunit itself, but both of these arise from the shape of the wider genre and not of the book itself. and tbh i would generally say i am fine with the wider genre, even if i come at it from a slight angle (i don't really care who dun it)

but most of my books are packed up right now so a diagnostic reread will have to wait

On milieu: the milieu, ie: the old private school, is alienating, and this could put a reader off -- but it becomes very clear that JLC is at odds with this, rather than promoting it. His satire of the vicious snobbery is quite direct.

One tic that worked well for me was a schoolmaster repeatedly telling Smiley something about the school's rituals and adding 'of course, you probably know this already' - ie: assuming the fame of his own institution. JLC doesn't comment on this but lets us observe it. I have been in slightly similar conversations myself, when briefly stepping into unfamiliar cultural zones like this. Like Smiley I nod and imply, as far as possible, whatever they want to think.

Oh my god can we PLEASE keep the tedious back and forth conversation about detective and murder mystery books to their own thread

I’d rather read people’s thoughts books on this thread than stupid back and forth about thread title (and also people simply naming what books they’re reading, put some effort into it, would you).

Anyway, what the fuck am I reading? A question I am constantly asking myself atm.

Giant Splash: Bondsian Blasts, World Series Parades, and Other Thrilling Moments by the Bay - Andrew Baggarly. Nonfiction about a sport I knew fuck all about until a couple of months ago is it, apparently. I read part of Baggarly’s other book about this Giants side, Band of Misfits on Google books one night I was having difficulty getting to sleep - side note, do not read about baseball when you’re trying to get to sleep, you might end up getting into it accidentally - and ordered it from my local shop; I’ve been reading this one while I waited for it to come in. It’s a lot more dense and serious in tone than what I’ve read of BoM but very useful.

You can tell how much the author loves the side. He breaks up quotes from players and managers with questions of his own, either contemporaneous or answered in follow up paragraphs. There’s plenty of colour and he’s frank about the various sides’ failures and jubilant in their triumphs. Each chapter is dense with info, you can’t read this all in one sitting, but it’s so far been an immensely rewarding read. They’re an interesting team to read about not just because of the group of players but because the stress they put their fans and themselves under with the combo of strong pitching and often inadequate run support.

A day later, broadcaster Duane Kuiper continued to ruminate on all the unbelievably wasted opportunities in the 1–0 loss—including a leadoff triple from Nate Schierholtz in the eighth inning—and he opened the telecast with a quick recap. Then he stared into the camera and used the only word he could to summarize the situation. “Giants baseball,” he said. One beat. Two beats. “Torture.” It was a one-word slogan that struck a chord with fans. For the remainder of the season, TORTURE signs dotted the ballpark. When the Giants lost, they lost in excruciating fashion. And when they won, it was almost never a comfortable blowout.

Yeah, classic sportswriting quote. Will look for that at library.
Speaking of JLC for a sec, think it was caek who recently mentioned A Small Town In Germany as "a banger."

Pinefox, I'm sorry, I didn't handle that well. Hope you're feeling better.

Think I'm gonna put in a request for (shorter, more seasonal) thread title in several hours, if no one else has.

It's fine, dow.

Robert Arthur, ALFRED HITCHCOCK AND THE THREE INVESTIGATORS IN THE MYSTERY OF THE VANISHING TREASURE (1968).

This one features an invasion of Gnomes.

― the pinefox,

I bought a bunch of those paperbacks used on Amazon at the start of the pandemic.

Did you read them?

I know them of old, but it's so long ago that any plot surprises are now fresh to me.

They don't really have the pleasurable value of reading an adult detective novel, though they do carry part of it, as a basic structure: a mystery or crime; clues; suspects; a false trail before finding the right one.

They also strike me as a precursor to, or contemporary with, SCOOBY-DOO, ie: it's very close to "unmask the mummy and it turns out to be the sinister janitor".

I read them in elementary school. I liked the small inversions -- the kid with the glasses is NOT the leader or the smart one. I liked the junkyard with the hidden entrances. I liked Jupe and his deductive skills.

I think he only has glasses in the illustrations! Well, in the two volumes I've seen so far.

I was absolutely fascinated by the Three Investigators when I was a kid. I dreamed of living in a junkyard like Jupiter Jones.

he kid with the glasses is NOT the leader or the smart one

Right! Instead, it was the kid who labored under the moniker "Baby Fatso" from his child star days.

I dreamed of living in a junkyard like Jupiter Jones.

a sublime sentence

Jupiter Jones finally got what he wanted when he was cast as Jon Hamm's wife in Mad Men.

Three Investigators books share some of the same Californian sea breeze and sunshine ambience as the Lew Archer books, so I can see the connection in pinefox's reading. Aside from yes, Scooby Doo, it's the same mise-en-scene as in West Coast shot serial TV shows - all that good daylight shooting time, but murderous too.

well put lol

Yes, good post Ward Fowler.

Again, Hollywood itself is also a connection. In THE BARBAROUS COAST they have a fight in the middle of a film set, and Lew Archer later thinks critical thoughts about Hollywood, which he then sends up as "deep thoughts". In THE THREE INVESTIGATORS they travel to a studio where Hitchcock has a bungalow, and the first novel revolves around a silent-era star who is still using his old props and costumes.

Haven't yet heard about Mark S's relation to the THREE INVESTIGATORS series, something I look forward to.

After months of being very intrigued by it, I am about to start Sean Thor Conroe's Fuccboi.

Speaking of JLC for a sec, think it was caek who recently mentioned A Small Town In Germany as "a banger."

i looked it up. it was apparently "an absolute banger".

certainly better than murder of quality. i don't get a lot out of mysteries generally, but i don't remember MOQ striking me as a particularly good (or bad) one. the cultural critique struck me as a little ... broad? iirc. lacking subtlety.

I’d rather read people’s thoughts books on this thread than stupid back and forth about thread title (and also people simply naming what books they’re reading, put some effort into it, would you).

― barry sito (gyac), Monday, September 26, 2022 4:07 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Okay.

The Wanda Coleman book— a collected poems from late 60s to mid-80s— is strange in that there is the hum of Black Arts movement writing in it, but because Coleman was based in Los Angeles rather than NY, there are some different cadences and focuses in the work. A lot less spiritual consciousness thematics and much more about daily struggle of being a poor Black woman artist on the ground. It's also quite different than some of the poems being made by other Black female poets from this time, such Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and June Jordan. More unpredictable and loose. I'm glad to be reading it.

I loved the Three Investigators when I was a kid - along with the Hardy Boys books, they fuelled hours of idle sleuthing and fence climbing.

(Seeing as we're having a navel-gazing day: is the capitalising of the titles of books some unspoken rule from days past or just a quirk? It's like being poked in the eye.)

Capitalization of book titles is right there in The Rule Book, on page 37, if you'd like to consult your copy, under: Proper names, capitalization thereof.

back after a protracted period of work, mainly to say Diego Garcia by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams is a very good, perhaps surprisingly good book. The narrator is a 'we' comprising a he and a she writer, proxies you assume for the actual authors, drifting in Edinburgh, suffering from a form of hypersensitised post-GFC and creative anomie. Periodically the narrative will bifurcate into a double-columned page, when they are apart from each other. The actual subject of the book is the forced expulsion of the Chagos Islanders in 1965 as part of the creation of a US Air Force base on the Mauritian island of Diego Garcia, among others, and the last British colony, The British Indian Ocean Territory.

I don't really feel the yoking together of these two worlds should work. at all. but it does. it's very well written for a start, with a strong sense of material surroundings and a sentenceless, fluid prose style. the popular culture references are extremely on point - it feels like a v ilx novel, in some respects. Music, drink, creativity, sadness, anger, politics, the quotidian, conmingling.

One half of the we is Mauritian, which provides part of the connection. But in general, the notion of sagren – Sagren, to the Chagos refugees, signifies a mix of nostalgia, desperation and overwhelming sorrow – a sickness for home so intense it can be lethal – and anger, of being dislocated in a time of 'Emergency', of the state of the two narrators, and the Chagossian they meet for a short while on the streets of Edinburgh, come together to present a sense of the current state of things:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.

The Chagossian, who gave himself the name of Diego, left his various items of baggage in a pub - Sandy Bell's for anyone whose been there, a very good bar, I recollect - and they put it into a trolley with a bosky wheel to try and take it back to where they live, so they can find him and return the bags.

And then Diego goes and leaves his bags he says. Maybe he feels lighter without them. Think about the effort of me pushing you she says, think about this journey home.

It seemed to describe the minute to minute difficulties of being a migrant very well, in quite a surprising but natural way. A lot of the book is like that.

I'm only a third of the way through, but yeah, recommend it.

a return to a previous conversation as well, because i read a load of other wimsey novels and i must disagree with mark s when he says that wimsey's irritating manner is part of how he detects. honestly *everyone loves him*. yokels defer to his 'bungho' bullshit, women of all classes relent and unbend at his natural talent for being very wealthy and relaxed about it too, oafs, boors and criminals obviously don't get it, but yes, otherwise, the most beloved man in the british isles.

otoh, the early novesl are *shot through* with bleak and alarming expression of PTSD from Wimsey and others, including self-immolation from one character, and a naked, stark fear from Wimsey, whispering in the middle of the night, when he's thrown back through overwork into the WW1 trenches in his mind. i think in many respects it was mainly his courtship of Harriet Vane I despised mainly.

i also picked up The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen, on recommendation from an ilxor, and very psychologically intense and beautifully written it is too, right in the middle of WW2 with very brilliant depictions of character and behaviour. I put it back on the shelf, because i'd only been waiting for something else, but i'm going to need to pick it up again soon. it seemed remarkable.

Bowne and Taylor have been my major discoveries of the last four yeasr.

*Bowen

the quality of the writing is of a different order - in both, though the force and intensity of the bowen really took me aback at the weekend. not just the quality of sentences as such, though v much that, but the quality of insight and observation.

there is an an extraordinarily generous - though not always kind - range and subtlety of emotion on display, and dramatically active.

actually in The Heat of the Day it’s the level of sexual anger, connivance and antagonism at play that is really striking.

Damn, still need to read her novels--The Collected Stories stayed amazing alll the way through its many, many pages (I read the edition with royal blue cover and dumbo intro; current one has John Banville in front, who is very likely better, almost has to be). She was b. 1899, teen prodigy telling it here right into late 60s (cigs got her Feb. '73, when she was still 73). I'd rave on, but have done so on several previous WAYR?s which that collection took me through.

Speaking of WWI's lingering effects, was thinking about that this weekend, reading a study which projects the decimation of Russia's mass-mobilized workforce, based on what's already happened in earlier Ukraine campaigns (so maybe a conservative estimate). Thinking about its effects in 20s and 30s, through Depression, for instance. And that brief mention in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, as how Brodie got that way, at least in part: raised to believe that serving a wife would make sense of everything, but then either Johnny didn't come marching home or was damaged goods, likely enough.

serving *as* wife

A sense of loss so pervasive in society that it does seem to go almost without saying/as trace elements in early 20th Century British fictions, as far as I've read (a certain sense of dizziness, of sway, in early Waugh characters, for inst, more explicit in Bowen's stories)

(She's the greater artist duh but there can be convergences worth noticing, as they live through the same times with some of the same sorts of people)(also Green and Greene)

actually in The Heat of the Day it’s the level of sexual anger, connivance and antagonism at play that is really striking.

― Fizzles,

otm. That ferocity coupled with the sense of a world where people will live and die and nothing matters. She reminds me of Woolf and Hamsun but with few traces of the epiphanic.

Multiple xposts: Fizzles I couldn't tell from your post whether you were aware of this, but the first italicized passage ("The tradition of the oppressed...") is direct quotation from Walter Benjamin's "On the Philosophy of History" -- a work that was itself left behind in some luggage at a hotel iirc

Diego Garcia sounds interesting. I'll keep an eye out for it.

xpost to broccoli rabe thomas: I thought it was well written, and it held my interest. The pacing of the sentences and their structure seemed appropriate for the character (directed and purposeful but also exploratory and hesitating, as if avoiding confrontation) and for interweaving memories with heightened details unveiled in layers and for rendering the present somewhat like the deja vu that comes with age. The themes of assimilation, assigned and assumed identity, and self-awareness and self-knowledge resonated with me, and I read with interest about the Korean experience in Japan, particularly that of comfort women in World War II. So overall I thought there was a good combination of technique and research into the topic / reflection on lived experience. Sorry for the clumsy summary!

xpost to broccoli rabe thomas: I thought it was well written, and it held my interest. The pacing of the sentences and their structure seemed appropriate for the character (directed and purposeful but also exploratory and hesitating, as if avoiding confrontation) and for interweaving memories with heightened details unveiled in layers and for rendering the present somewhat like the deja vu that comes with age. The themes of assimilation, assigned and assumed identity, and self-awareness and self-knowledge resonated with me, and I read with interest about the Korean experience in Japan, particularly that of comfort women in World War II. So overall I thought there was a good combination of technique and research into the topic / reflection on lived experience. Sorry for the clumsy summary!

Yes, as Bernard Snowy says, that line is a well-worn quotation, which makes me think it wouldn't be so impressive to find it amid the novel that Fizzles mentions.

I happen to know one of the authors of Fizzles' book. Rather than discuss that I will query this line from Fizzles:

the popular culture references are extremely on point - it feels like a v ilx novel, in some respects

Please explain further? I posit that most people on ILX are now over 30, over 40, in many cases over 50, and therefore not actually the most in touch people with "popular culture", at least as it is today.

I read half of THE HEAT OF THE DAY when I was 21. I made a lot of marginal notes and markings. I never finished it. I suppose I should go back and do it all again.

I finished THE MYSTERY OF THE VANISHING TREASURE. The magical Gnomes turned out to be Hollywood midgets, who lived with other midgets in a midget hotel. It seems fair to say that "you couldn't write that now". I note that in both books I've read so far, a powerful adult is required to save the boys from trouble. I don't share the admiration for Jupiter Jones upthread - I find him mainly irritating - but I do see that deduction in itself is a good skill and in a way he is modelling this for young readers, and is a Holmes figure.

Holmes was pretty irritating as well.

Nowadays some probably take him as being on the spectrum.

the table is the table, which Wanda Coleman collection are you reading? I heard mixed things about the selection in the 2020 Selected when it came out ~ but I can't remember what or why. (I've loved Mercurochrome and a few other things + I have the newish The Complete American Sonnets on my library queue.)

Feel like I am in the minority in sort of liking the thread title. Reminds of the time I tried to start an ILF excelsior thread.

thread title is good (if short)

lol

the table is the table, which Wanda Coleman collection are you reading? I heard mixed things about the selection in the 2020 Selected when it came out ~ but I can't remember what or why. (I've loved Mercurochrome and a few other things + I have the newish The Complete American Sonnets on my library queue.)

― zak m, Tuesday, September 27, 2022 8:02 AM (twenty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I found a cheap-ish copy of 'Heavy Daughter Blues,' and had only read a poem or two here and there before I purchased. It's decent, and probably doesn't suffer from the selected's problems that you mention. Tbqh, despite his reputation, I don't find much interesting in Terence Hayes' work, it seems almost like he's replicating other poets' and extending other poets' metaphors.

Last night I finally made it to the end of Eve's Hollywood. Uncharacteristically, I began it a month and a half ago and read another 8 books before I'd picked this one up often enough to get through it. This was a symptom of my never being able to puzzle out what I thought of the author and her stories. I still don't know.

Her tales have a certain fascination, because she lived within a cloud of privilege and glamor and she is able to describe it as an acute observer and participant, but mostly she is mostly unconscious of it, like a fish who accepts the fact of water so completely as to be completely unaware of water except as an invisible but pervasive presence. When she is most aware of the privilege that surrounds her, it is felt as the mysterious power of beauty, mainly female, and a deep appreciation of sensuality in all forms. At times, her descriptions rise to the level of knowing her life is full of intense and unearned grace.

It was this double quality of acute observation and deep sensual appreciation on one side and her utter obliviousness to the world outside her privilege that kept me constantly ambivalent toward the book. There was very little to admire about her, but that little was pure in its way and therefore admirable.

Interesting. I could never quite bring myselt fo read her stuff for similar reasons. I recently had an interaction with someone vaguely similar and it was really weird, can't go into detail right now.

I tried Babitz excerpts on the NYRB Classics site, soon got the impression of a snooty teen who couldn't spel too good, and that was about it. Maybe she got better later.

dipping back into the generally engaging and interesting erving goffman interaction ritual: essays in face to face behavior, and the chapter/essay Mental Symptoms and Public Order and i can only conclude he was going through a bad patch

The final triumph of this psychological, technical perspective is the implication that socially improper behavior can be psychologically normal (as when a man shows strength enough to terminate an unhealthy marital relationship), and a socially proper behavior can be truly sick (as illustrated by the obsessive concerns and sexual withdrawal of some research chemists).

respectively

: | (though this is 1967, still tho dude plz)

and lol.

positively nabokovian.

to earlier points about Diego Garcia - lol i knew i knew the quote from somewhere! WB is referenced, but my tired brane did not in fact register so thank you!

and pinefox on cultural markers: Sun Ra, Dave Clarke’s Red 2 at a rave, 90s, 00s and post GFC culture. They don’t hit a bum note in the way that 🚨 lanchester 🚨 inevitably would trying to do a roughly similar thing.

What is GFC culture?

Wikipedia: "The financial crisis of 2008, or Global Financial Crisis (GFC), was a severe worldwide economic crisis that occurred in the early 21st century."

Thanks, poster Aimless.

So Fizzles, you seem to be saying "this book is good at popular culture because it's good at ... culture, since the 1990s". That seems circular, and not very specifically related to ILX.

I'm not familiar with the two examples you cite, but don't they mean "this book some mentions quite obscure culture, which I know"?

Fizzles specifically mentioned ILX. I suppose ILX discusses "everything", and I'm not sure whether it has particular tastes. There was a time, 20+ years ago, when ILM / ILX had a focus on the pop charts. Many of us had no idea about that stuff, but some did. I feel that if someone wrote a novel that was full of chart pop singles from 2001-2, then I might say "that's very ILM" (or "very Freaky Trigger"!). Maybe that, in fact, is what Fizzles is getting at.

It wouldn't occur to me to read "good at popular culture" as implying "good at portraying current youth popular culture". I'd just think it means the pop culture references, whatever they were, were well integrated into the text, not drawing too much attention to themselves, not giving off "look at me I know this thing". It's much easier to describe when ppl fail at this than when they succeed, thus my definition centering around negatives I guess.

The Boys by Katie Hafner - This may be the first pandemic novel I've read and my favorite. As current fiction (with journalistic currency and expertise?), I think it represents the experience perfectly.

good awareness of a cultural mise-en-scene, with specific awareness of music and art which clearly shows knowledge of the subject matter. the ilx bit is just really saying 'there are music and other references (including eg that Benjamin quote) that jostle together in a way that reminds me of ilx'.

Read the first two Jackson Broddie books by Kate Atkinson: Case Histories (excellent) and One Good Turn (middling). One chapter in the first book is so sad, I broke into tears after finishing it, which never usually happens to me with books (films, all the time). Atkinson's plotting - baroquely complicated but easy to follow - is incredible, sort of Wodehouse/Tom Sharpe-level at times. I like her unbashful way of describing sex and gore; it made the Lawrence Block book I read before them seem quite prudish. (It was 8 Million Ways To Die - also very good.)

Pinefox, I highly recommend THE CHILL if you want another Macdonlald.

I finished Second Place, didn't really get on with it so well in the end. The characters seemed like theoretical exercises, unlike those in the Outline trilogy. (Not that some people might find them convincing or identify with them, but I didn't.) I found it hard to square some of the more absurd elements - e.g. a character deciding on the spur of the moment to become a writer and churning out a fantasy novel which turns out to be an unintentional and unconscious copy of one he read some months ago - with the otherwise painfully serious style and atmosphere.

My current book is The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene. Part One, down. Parts Two and Three, yet to read. He has a great sense of how to write a scene dramatically. No wonder he wrote many successful screenplays, too. The Catholic elements are designed to jolt you, and ultimately inspire a grudging wonder and admiration, but the jolting lets him conceal a lot of their inner machinery and ultimately they don't really move me.

By chance earlier today I was also thinking about what makes a novel dramatic or what makes a play a play and I had to fall upon the mechanics of the stage, the pressure of time and place. Place could be fudged with staging within limits. As You Were by Elaine Feeney strikes me as a novel that could be dramatized; it mostly takes place in a hospital ward. It has lines.

The screen would be different. There you would have the camera and if television the attention of the audience. Whether this is a freedom or a curse I don't know but I guess some have figured out how to use it to advantage.

There's a lot of silly stuff in 'Second Place' but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

I finished Joan Didion's "Complete Essays" (which is not complete of course, just three books, it was a pleasure to finally get into her work.

Thinking about reading that new Joshua Cohen next, anyone read it?

read BEAST IN VIEW, winner of the 1956 edgar award for best mystery novel, by margaret millar, wife of the oft-mentioned ross macdonald

not very impressed tbh. i can give it a pass for the gay-baiting -- such were the times, i guess -- but the twist was obvious and hoary and the characters were cardboard cutouts who often did nonsensical things. also the titular phrase was used twice in the last 10 pages and you only get to do that once imo

Maybe that's why he was so into his correspondence with Eudora Welty.

ditto on second place.

Thinking about reading that new Joshua Cohen next, anyone read it?

I read it earlier this year. This is what I wrote about it then:

My main quibble is that for a comic novel it's only occasionally funny. The Netanyahus themselves are interesting characters, and the book comes alive when they show up, but the Blum family never really came to life for me, and the opening subplot seems kind of a rote depiction of well-worn themes of assimilation.

In retrospect, this seems maybe a bit more negative than I intended. It was an enjoyable and amusing read. In more recent reading, I finished Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli. This book does a thing I've noticed in other contemporary authors like Helen DeWitt and Otessa Moshfegh of describing matter-of-factly and at-length some conceptual art piece that the characters are involved in in a way that seems to want to stand in for a more traditional type of character or plot development but mostly ends up provoking a nonplussed shrug. The contemporary art influence extends to the way the book is titled (leaving off the definite article makes it sound like a listing from a catalog raisonne) and the rather abstruse end matter describing the Luiselli's process and formal aims. As a novel I think it only partly succeeds.

My current book is The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene. Part One, down. Parts Two and Three, yet to read. He has a great sense of how to write a scene dramatically. No wonder he wrote many successful screenplays, too. The Catholic elements are designed to jolt you, and ultimately inspire a grudging wonder and admiration, but the jolting lets him conceal a lot of their inner machinery and ultimately they don't really move me.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless)

I haven't read Brighton Rock., though I did start reading it once.

In TPatG, the lieutenant who implacably hunts down the priest is motivated by his overwhelming resentments against the church from childhood onward, fueling his fanatical commitment to 'saving' the children of generations to come. As of the end of Part One, the exact nature of his resentments has not been described in terms sufficient to explain his zealotry. Perhaps these will be made more explicit later on.

This one of the keys to Graham's basic framework for the story. The modern, clean, efficient lieutenant's motives are extensions of the merely personal and secular. The shabby, alcoholic priest's motives arise from the sacred, and in spite of his obvious weakness and failings as a human vessel of the sacred, he recognizes his obligations to his sacred role as inexpungeable, even as he embraces those obligations in weakness, fear and degradation. Greene is leaning hard into this mystery and paradox and I expect this theme to be further developed as the tale evolves.

I note o.nate's comment: "mostly ends up provoking a nonplussed shrug".

"nonplussed" is a confusing-looking word which perhaps for that reason has drifted from its previous or canonical meaning, which was or I even still dare to hope is: "so surprised and confused that one is unsure how to react."

That is, it used to be mean shocked and it now means not shocked.

I see evidence that this is a UK / US split, that the latter is more normal in the US (in which case poster o.nate would simply be correct), but I am unsure even that this explains the drift.

I think the truth is that the word was never very descriptive and therefore a generation of people lost touch with what it was supposed to mean, and started using it to mean the opposite, to the point where even people like me, who remember the original or previous meaning, can no longer confidently remember it much of the time, let alone use it, as others, using it the new way, wouldn't know what we were trying to say.

I have been reading through John Scaggs, CRIME FICTION (2005) and Richard Bradford, CRIME FICTION: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION (2015).

The latter author is prolific and quite suspect. He has read a lot of novels, which is good, but he tends to repeat himself from one of his many books to the other, and also to be derivative of other books. He is also something of a self-styled conservative, which tends to lead him to him striking stances rather than focusing on factual statements. (He might flourish on UNHERD along with Dr Bastani!) In this book, not for the first time, he quotes badly and doesn't make enough of the quotations. So I'm not selling his book very well but as a simple factual guide to the names and history it is not so bad. He queries the influence of Poe on detective fiction, which is at least usefully bold, and is actually OK on the complexity of Sherlock Holmes. He also has a whole chapter on global crime fiction which I have not yet read. As I say, he has read a lot of novels.

John Scaggs' book again is useful as a gathering of facts, but veers badly into certain grooves, eg: an obsession with comparing Holmes and Poirot with CSI on TV. Likewise he drags MAGNUM: PI in to his discussion of hard-boiled fiction. He also has a hobbyhorse about THE WASTE LAND and hard-boiled fiction which is much more tenuous than he implies, and spends much time repeating claims that are either obvious or tenuous.

The book clearly replicates, repeatedly, a well-worn theme, namely "detective fiction is conservative because it defends social order by focusing on catching criminals". Considering how widely repeated this claim it is, it is curious how weak it is. Most people - including, say, Jeremy Corbyn MP - are actually against crime and in favour of safer communities, though they may have differently nuanced views on how to achieve it or on how criminals should be treated after arrest (which Scaggs rightly acknowledges is an area often ignored by detective fiction anyway). Wanting "social order" in this minimal sense is not politically conservative.

Scaggs also reminds me of a critical tendency to inflate dubious claims. Example: "Chandler's private eye is really a romantic knight-errant". There is some textual evidence for this (the title THE LADY IN THE LAKE is relevant, though it refers very directly to the plot), and usually some chatter about what Chandler read at Dulwich College, but it usually mainly comes to Marlowe's one observation of a window at the start of THE BIG SLEEP. The trouble is, Marlowe is not really a romantic knight at all - this is a faint analogy, which might tell us something, but only on the margins. The genre he is in has little or nothing in common with medieval romance (which I would say misses two elements central to Chandler: detection / deduction and comedy), and even his ethical deliberations and values do not need any medieval dimension to justify or understand them. On the contrary, they are comprehensible to us as modern people (and they entirely lack the elements of religion and of monarchical authority that would, again, underpin a knight's code). So a faint analogy is routinely blown up to casual critical orthodoxy when it should really be minimised and put in its place.

The thing that perhaps most fascinates me about detective fiction is its underlying narrative shape and how far it is different from other kinds of narrative, almost to the point of being a special kind of artistic form - in which information has a different status from what it does in other kinds of narration. It seems that the best / founding statement on this remains Tzvetan Todorov's essay of 1966. I suspect that there is more thoroughgoing development of it, that I should try to read. Another book, Charles J. Rzepka's DETECTIVE FICTION (2005), is better than the two above on this stuff, and in general.

It is a strange fact that I once saw Tzvetan Todorov give a lecture. I think it was on ethical or human rights issues. I imagined that this veteran would be a wizened old figure, stumbling on a stick to the podium. (This was only about 10-15 years ago!) And yet - no, he looked healthy, tanned, dignified, much more youthful than I imagined he had a right to be.

The same was true of Quentin Skinner. I was astounded - nay, nonplussed - that this character who seemed to have been a contemporary of C.P. Snow and Lionel Trilling was lounging around in jeans and putting forward lucid and energetic arguments against the Iraq War (and this was years after the Iraq War).

Have you read Brighton Rock? Catholic education is (futher) incitement for the central character, a little monster, a criminal punk of the 30s. It can be taken comment by the leftist middle class convert on the kind of treatment he escaped by birth, but also he seems attracted to the harshness, along the way to driving this thriller as far as he should to make it a satisfying read.

I remember having my mind blown a bit by this book because it shows Greene views faith as a burden, not a blessing: the atheist character is inherently trivial because since she doesn't believe in an afterlife so hey, let's do whatever, while the Catholic character is constantly tortured by the certainty of punishment down the line. This flew right in the face of my own conception, that it is the atheist's knowledge of mortality that is a burden while the believer's sense of an afterlife is a bit of a balm suggesting things will turn out all right if they behave in a moral manner (somewhat condescending I know; very difficult for believers and non believers alike to get into these differences without at least a hint of condescension sneaking in I've found).

Greene’s view is very in line with how my parents (but not me) were raised and the older way of educating children about religion; Joyce deals with a lot in Portrait of the Artist. The End of the Affair is absolutely required reading not just because it’s a banger in its own right but because the Greene analogous narrator has a lot of thoughts about God and faith and obligations and so on.

The book clearly replicates, repeatedly, a well-worn theme, namely "detective fiction is conservative because it defends social order by focusing on catching criminals". Considering how widely repeated this claim it is, it is curious how weak it is. Most people - including, say, Jeremy Corbyn MP - are actually against crime and in favour of safer communities, though they may have differently nuanced views on how to achieve it or on how criminals should be treated after arrest (which Scaggs rightly acknowledges is an area often ignored by detective fiction anyway). Wanting "social order" in this minimal sense is not politically conservative.

I'd say the conservative element here is not thinking crime is bad but rather accepting the legal system's definitions of what counts as a crime and what doesn't, thus drawing a veil over a range of behaviours that are as or more harmful. The vast majority of crime fiction doesn't question this, and when an investigator does break the law it is more common for it to be in the service of handing out harsher or more effective punishment against the evil doers (i.e. facism) rather than any sense that the system is inhumane or punishing people unfairly. There's obv plenty exceptions to this but as a general take on the genre I think it applies.

Barry Adamson Above The City Down beneath The Stars
Great memoir from ex Magazine, ex(?) Bad Seeds bassist.
Pretty scathing about himself and i didn't realise he was going through any of that at the time. It seems he was full blown losing it at the time he was first in the Bad Seeds I don;t think he showed it. Both hooked on heroin and having extreme mental issues apart from that before his family started dying and then he loses and elder sibling and his mother in rapid succession and gets told his dad was dying.
Can't have helped his mental stability but this is before he started putting out solo material so he must have improved somewhat from that point. I have got as far as Mufti who was staying on the houseboat he was living on has given him a cassette tape with a number of soundtrack artists from the 70s on which sounds like it must be a direct influence on Moss Side Story.
I am enjoying the writing in this so hoping that he writes more. I think this might be roughly up to date though I have got as far as the mid 80s with 30 pages left to read so maybe there is space for a volume 2.
I hadn't realised he had known the Birthday Party since they first appeared in London because they moved in with a crowd he was already hanging out with.

RE: the pinefox on "nonplussed": As he correctly pointed out, my usage was the more informal, predominantly North American one. I think the common element of the two contradictory usages (surprised and perplexed vs. nonchalant and bemused) is the element of being bemused or perplexed.

Sorry guys, this is the only correct usage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrq-2FFFcrc

Hypotheses and questions about (1) detective novels and (2) descriptions of art in fiction:

(1a) control of the narrative (omniscience)
(1b) What information is shared or revealed? What knowledge is held in common?
(1c) Could motive be more important than any statements about societal control and order?

(2) IMHO there was less emphasis on the conceptual aspect and more on the documentary nature of the art, and perhaps how one reacted to that depends upon one's feelings towards children.

(2) ... but I may very well be mistaken!

Experimentation with the form of (1) could involve predetermination or existence of answers to (1a)-(1c).

xxxxpost

as drifted from its previous or canonical meaning, which was or I even still dare to hope is: "so surprised and confused that one is unsure how to react."

I think the common element of the two contradictory usages (surprised and perplexed vs. nonchalant and bemused) is the element of being bemused or perplexed.

Good comments by gyac and Daniel on Brighton Rock, also Pinky the punk (and I think this gurl he's involved with) think of "good" and "bad" as merely secular, earthbound, bollocks.

And now I'm thinking of "The pure products of America go crazy": pure as in uncut, in their usual container 'til the right wrong circumstances come along---though it's nature x nurture once again: not every Catholic child acted out like Pinky, uh-uh (though maybe it's a wonder that more didn't---think Greene lets us fill that in along the way (this thing moves).

Perhaps what was ingenious about The Boys as a pandemic novel was realizing that social isolation would be the predominant experience and exploring the implications of that (i.e., an unmooring) and playing on that with the narrative and character development.

(Aimless's description reminds me to re-read The Power and the Glory; gyac re-reminds me to pull trigger and read The End of the Affair, which is already at the top of my Greene stack ffs.)

IMHO there was less emphasis on the conceptual aspect and more on the documentary nature of the art, and perhaps how one reacted to that depends upon one's feelings towards children

Well, in this case I'm thinking mainly of the husband's project/obsession, which is threatening to break apart the marriage, of recording random ambient sounds from a particular region of the American Southwest, which was the last region controlled by free Native Americans. Seems more of a conceptual art piece than a documentary one to me.

I misremembered the details of the husband's project and thought it was more about recording dialects as they are spoken and somehow thought it was more closely related to the documentary project of the author. My apologies!

Williams, The Blue Moment
Leising, Out of the Ether
Murnane, Last Letter to a Reader

eudora welty "the optimist's daughter", owen jones "chavs - the demonisation of the working class", gilbert sorrentino "myysterioso"

the sorrentino i realised after i started it was the 3rd part of a trilogy i haven't read the rest of, but that doesn't seem to make any diff to how much sense it makes

also was reading eva figes' "light" but gave up on account of boredom

I finished Martel's Fludd -- what a delightful little thing. I can see Spark making something out of the supernatural element but not of the cynical arguments about dogma and doctrine.

Dorothy L Sayers clearly enjoyed writing this paragraph, well might Wimsey exclaim at his staid policeman friend's observations:

‘Oh dear, yes! The people in the flat below and the girl at the flower-shop were able to give me quite a good description of her. Tall, overdressed, musquash and those abbreviated sort of shoes with jewelled heels and hardly any uppers – you know the sort of thing. Heavily peroxided; strong aroma of origan wafted out upon the passer-by; powder too white for the fashion and mouth heavily obscured with sealing-wax red; eyebrows painted black to startle, not deceive; fingernails a monument to Kraska – the pink variety.’

‘I’d no idea you studied the Woman’s Page to such good purpose, Charles.’

This from Unnatural Death – a book with some racial attitudes very much of the time, largely but not entirely distributed among the less pleasant characters, and a central plot mechanism a matter of the most intricate and obscure of legal points.

QUIZ TIME: Which year?

C- and L- flew the Atlantic, and S- bade farewell to Brooklands. The Daily Yell wrote anti-Red leaders and discovered a plot, somebody laid claim to a marquisate, and a Czecho-Slovakian pretended to swim the Channel. Hammond out-graced Grace, there was an outburst of murder at Moscow, F- won the Gold Cup and the earth opened at Oxhey and swallowed up somebody’s front garden. Oxford decided that women were dangerous, and the electric hare consented to run at the White City. England’s supremacy was challenged at Wimbledon, and the House of Lords made the gesture of stooping to conquer.

alimosina - how are you liking/did you like Last Letter to a Reader?

Hung out at a buddy's for most of the night doing not-so-legal things. At midnight, my idea, we went to the local karaoke joint, my first karaoke since early 2020. We hung out until before 3 a.m. I sang "She's So Cold." Got home at 3:30.

lol wrong thread

"Exclusive: The Cheever diaries, unxepurgated!"

Fizzles, I have never read anything by Murnane before so effectively I am reading him in reverse. He's an unusual combination of utter subjectivity and remorseless precision. He's comparable to Proust in a way, but Proust used models from life and Murnane makes everything up out of his visual imagination.

The writing is very dry at first, but one acclimates. It's notable how Murnane never tries to interest the reader in the slightest. He simply assumes that the reader will keep on reading.

The frequent references to, e.g., pages A of file B of cabinet C of archive D were curious. Is Murnane were slightly autistic? But an autist could not have written that beautiful ending. He's an enigma.

Typo: remove "were"

I am reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK (2009) - a volume of stories. So far the settings include both Africa and North America.

Fizzles, I have never read anything by Murnane before so effectively I am reading him in reverse. He's an unusual combination of utter subjectivity and remorseless precision. He's comparable to Proust in a way, but Proust used models from life and Murnane makes everything up out of his visual imagination.

The writing is very dry at first, but one acclimates. It's notable how Murnane never tries to interest the reader in the slightest. He simply assumes that the reader will keep on reading.

The frequent references to, e.g., pages A of file B of cabinet C of archive D were curious. Is Murnane were slightly autistic? But an autist could not have written that beautiful ending. He's an enigma.

Finished: Halldor Laxness - Independent People.

Now onto: Joy Williams - Harrow.

Seamus Heaney - Beowulf
Greil Marcus - Under the Red White and Blue

Am reading, for the very first time, obscure deep cut fantasy novel “The Fellowship of the Rings”. I will report back to you in case someone else wants to give it a try.

ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow!

Seamus Heaney - Beowulf

New books take in a higher profit than books where you can easily pick up a nice used copy.

I've only just begun reading the NYRB reprint edition of Sylvia Townsend Warner that includes both a short novel and an even shorter novella featuring the same main character. The novel is Mr. Fortune's Maggot, while the novella is The Salutation. It was re-issued under the joint title Mr. Fortune. I haven't read far enough to get much of a fix on them.

fwiw, the headley is purportedly a very different translation than that of heaney et al

(i have not yet read it)

sounds like a good case for reading both translations

Patricia Waugh: HARVEST OF THE SIXTIES (1995)

Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee - I think it was his first novel, and perhaps semi-autobiographical. The first-person narrator has just described the self-discipline he practiced early in his career as a spy in completing daily registers or reports for his boss. The key was to write quickly following formal requirements without too much analysis or correction. This reminded me of the discipline cited by seasoned writers in setting aside time early in the day to write no matter what -- to get something down on paper for later revision, to practice a skill, and to let the act of writing clarify itself. The narrator also describes the art of being noticed enough but not more than required to be accepted without second thought.

Thanks to the Three Investigators discussion recently, I bought The Mystery of the Screaming Clock for a couple bucks used.

I must have read that long ago!

I have started rereading Samuel Beckett's NOVELLAS (so-called).

I am reading a collection of Don Paterson's aphorisms, having never read his poetry. They are quite funny.

I recently finished a book which I believe would fall into the category of detective fiction as discussed by Pinefox earlier in the thread, To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia. This is the first novel of Sciascia's that I've read, though I've also seen a film adaptation of another of his books (released as "Cadaveri Eccellenti"). Based on these two exposures to his work, it seems to me he occupies a distinctive niche within the taxonomy of detective fiction. His unique twist on the detective story is inseparable from the milieu of Sicily in which it take place, a place where it is generally accepted that it doesn't pay to stick one's nose in where it doesn't belong. The protagonist of To Each His Own is a professor of literature and a somewhat unworldly man, more comfortable with books than with the confusing motives and passions of the people living in his town. This being a detective story, a murder has taken place -- actually two murders -- and the professor gets drawn in, somewhat reluctantly, by his acquaintance with the victims (it's a small town) and his belief that the police are underestimating the import of a clue. His motive is not one of justice -- he doesn't seem to care very much if the murderer is caught -- but rather intellectual curiosity. An "obscure pride" prevents him from confiding in the police. There is an evocative passage: "At play in this obscure pride were the centuries of contempt that an oppressed people, an eternally vanquished people, had heaped on the law and all those who were its instruments; a conviction, still unquenched, held that the highest right and the truest justice, if one really cares about it, if one is not prepared to entrust its execution to fate or to God, can come only from the barrels of a gun." This view seems to fly in the face of the "conservative" streak that is supposed to run through detective fiction as a form.

That novel sounds good. I might enjoy it.

I continue with HARVEST OF THE SIXTIES.

The Haunting Of Hill House Shirley Jackson
playful liquid prose lightening the mood somewhat. Loving this writing.Mood created may be a bit weird for the subject matter but probably adds t the build. I've picked this up again after realising that Theodore Allen's The Invention of the White Race doesn't lend itself to short sharp bursts for a bog book.
I should be more familiar with her work. Think I will become so in the wake of this, hoping it as good. I also have a biography of her somewhere. Anyway enjoying this greatly.

Finding The Mother Tree Suzanne Simard
book on the intercommunication between trees by way of fungi. I thought it was going to be less autobiographical/memoir than it has turned out to be but may jsuty be helping establish c9ontext as to how and why the author knows what she does. Quite enjoying it anyway.
Wondering to what extent the market determines how much the author is in the book. I think other books I have read on similar subjects have been less personal/subjective. may be a reaction to the lack of possibility of fully objective perspective.
Pretty disgusted by the directives of teh Canadian Forestry services that she is talking about doing her early research work with. Seem overly destructive and she has talked about destroying very old growth forest which is sad and won't be replaced.
This has been very white perspectived too, not hearing anything about indigenous perspectives on treatment of woodland so far so hope that comes in later.

Insurgent Empire Priyamavada Gopal
book on the last century and a half of the British Empire and the role of indigenous and other colonised peoples in its demise.
I somehj9ow missed how recent the book was for a while , then became aware that the writer was referencing Brexit having happened. Book came out in 2019.
I thijnk it's pretty good and shouldn't have taken me as long to get to as it has done. I started it and then several others after doing so so its taken me several months to get through when I should have concentrated on it. I think it was a rewarding read when i did finally get to it.

Pat Barker - The Women of Troy

xpost o.nate, I think Joanie Loves Chachi mentioned Sciascia as a fave over on Crime Fiction, S/D, where there may be some more discussion of his work by now.

Good old thread, hadn't thought of it in a while.

I've picked up A Promised Land by Obama again and am determined to finish it on this trip. I left Native Speaker unfinished but was near the end.

As I'm reading about the public reaction to TARP and thinking back to how the perceived slowness of the recovery from the 2008 recession may have affected economic policies in response to the pandemic and the current problem of inflation, I'm wondering if being cautious may have been partially right and thinking how difficult it must be to calibrate an appropriate response to economic crises.

The Famished Road. The tale of growing up poor in Nigeria is very effective, I'm not so into the fantastical elements.

that stares at me from the bookshelf, bought the year it was released, unfinished and likely to stay that way 8(

I recently finished a book which I believe would fall into the category of detective fiction as discussed by Pinefox earlier in the thread, To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia.

I've read a fair bit of Sciascia -- when I first found him it was a used copy but a couple of years later Granta put a ton of his stuff back in print. There's really no-one like him in crime fiction, incredibly good writer who prefers ambiguity to resolve, really worth reading

I would say those bks are not like any Anglo detective fiction. One of a kind.

I've finished with Patricia Waugh, HARVEST OF THE SIXTIES - albeit having skipped some sections on religion and metaphysics in literature.

I can't help thinking that this book would be more useful and incisive if she'd structured it more intuitively and simply: a chapter on 1960s, one on 1970s, one on 1980s. Instead the thematic chapters go back and cover the same ground as each other. She trades in long lists of phenomena, and in generalisations, and doesn't dig into specific 'material conditions', 'institutions of literature' or just local contexts that much. Reading a given literary text she will often use a phrase from another text by the same writer, which I recognise but which a novice reader need not - unnecessary confusion here. Her reading of Philip Larkin is sadly ungenerous and evasive; she's better on some others like Martin Amis.

An oddity of the book to my mind now is its regular reference to 'Planners' as a (perhaps malign) post-war social phenomenon, when many of us now might feel that society needs more, not less, planning. A more concrete version of this is the remarkable frequency with which she uses 'welfare state' as a negative, saying things like 'the welfare state's planners had failed to account for the spiritual' or 'the play savaged welfare-state compromises and conservative myths alike'. I think that welfare states have been a good thing, a historic achievement for humanity, secured largely through the efforts of labour movements (sometimes via their labour parties), and with various background conditions like WWII and the USSR. Welfare states, in general, make people's lives better and more bearable. If you think you don't like welfare states, wait to see how much you like not having them. Casually dismissing them as a flawed, tired phenomenon that writers can see through is crass and misleading. This can't be specific to Waugh, so it must be that she is actually reflecting a rather longer and broader tendency to be complacent and impatient about welfare states, one that I, plainly, think was unwise.

I'm sorry I can't find more positive to say about this book. Its main problem really, put at its simplest, is that it's too abstract.

I would say those bks are not like any Anglo detective fiction. One of a kind.

Yes, though also I'd point out distrust of official authority and general cynicism regarding laws, norms, etc. runs through Italian postwar culture (it's why it rules).

Just picked up Robert Aickman The Unsettled Dust in the library in a Faber Finds edition. Anyone read it? I've read his We Are For the Dark collaboration with Elizabeth Jane Howard, which I liked.

The opening page of first story reads slightly heavy handedly, but he's a skilled writer. Not sure I can justify taking it out with my book pile as it is at the moment, but then sometimes those are the best books to read, right?

been an Aickman fan most of my life and Faber (and NYRB) doing a great service by putting his stuff back into print; unlike the true acolytes I don't devour everything and only know "Ravissane" from Unsettled Dust. His heavy-handedness is part of the deal but when you're in the mood for him nothing else will satisfy

that said I suspect him of fascist sympathies

Joan, what's a good Sciascia to start with?

I'd recommend To Each His Own as the best of Sciascia and it's entirely accessible, as opposed to recondite or difficult.

Howard Zinn A People's History of the United States
Been meaning to read this for a while, certainly since i read Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz's An Indigenous People's History of the same. She had worked as a researcher on this and he had said he couldn't really tackle indigenous people of teh area as much as she suggested because it wasn't an area he was well versed in. So she should write a book on the subject herself, she eventually did and it is really worth reading.
THis is pretty good, leftist history looking at things like racism from the start of the white population in the area. I heard one of the black comedians on My Momma Told me talking about not havi8ng read all of this recently as though it was an expectation that one would have done but certainly couldn't be expected of him. So not sure how well known this is. I'm enjoying it.
Currently I'm at the end of the 18th century and the declaration of independence has been made. I'm making some headway but I'm also reading several other books at the same time. Trying to get several of them that I've renewed multiple times finished by the next due date on the 25th while also having just started a full time course.
Need to read this for its won sake though and enjoying what I'm reading.

Vine Deloria God iS Red
Book by indigenous American author on beliefs of his people and other tribes and misrepresentation of those beliefs in popular thought.
I was seeing him and this book referenced in a few things i read at the beginning of the year. I'm finding it at least semi enlightening , possibly would be more so if I hadn't read Thomas king and others having overlapping thought and some of that has referenced him anyway.
BUt pretty great book. He also got Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz involved in native affairs when he got her included in a tribal case he was involved with, as I heard her say in an interview i heard with her last month.
Enjoying this too.

I've started Ian Littlewood, THE LITERATURE STUDENT'S SURVIVAL KIT (2006).

It's not what it sounds like.

The Zinn book was required reading on almost every course I did at UC Santa Cruz (natch) but man it’s a dry book, I found, I wish it wasn’t written in plodding Silmarillion style

Obviously it is righteous and good and has opened the mind of millions et cetera – I just wish it was better written

Finished a number of poetry books, including the extraordinary 'Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me' by Choi Seungja, a pretty wild South Korean feminist poet. (It was co-translated by Cathy Park Hong and Won-Chung Kim).

Also finished Wanda Coleman's 'Heavy Daughter Blues' and Chika Sagawa's 'Selected' (translated by Sawako Nakayasu). Seems I have been on a radical and abject feminist poetics tour, something that wasn't really planned but just happened. It's been great.

I've also been keeping up with my Prynne reading group, which has been nice.

There are some great stories in Aickman's *The Unsettled Dust*. The title story is one of his best, I think and features some of his key obsessions. The Cicerones is one of his most (MR) 'Jamesian', albeit the reek of violence is much stronger in Aickman. The Stains is just all-time - like some 70s sitcom turned inside out and left in a cellar for 20 years to curdle.

Many xps

Yeah, I've not read The Unsettled Dust but all those Faber collections tend to have at least a couple of his all-time bangers - 'The trains', 'The swords', 'The hospice', 'Into the wood'.

Recently I read some weird fiction by Walter de la Mare and L. P. Hartley and realized Aickman's style and methods aren't as unique as I'd assumed. He still rocks, ofc.

Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me is great! Reminded by her mention here, I just read the 2022 Wanda Coleman Complete American Sonnets collection. These were originally published across a couple books and it's great to encounter them together, the cumulative effect heightens their power. Other recent reads include Joy Williams' newish Harrow (this mostly disappointed me) and Max Aub's Field of Honour. Also Stacy Szymaszek's The Pasolini Book and Pasolini's Roman Poems collection with which The Pasolini Book was written in conversation. Currently reading The Judy Grahn Reader and Garielle Lutz's grammar book The Gotham Grammarian.

yes Walter de la Mare is central to the MR James to Aickman through line. WdlM’s uncanny writing is wonderful. Some of my favourite short stories.

zak m, glad someone else has read Seungja! Stacy is great, tho I admit that I've never had a taste for her poems— the essays in The Pasolini Book are more what I found interesting, but I also got my copy for next to nothing since Golias also published my second book.

Judy Grahn is extraordinary, a few years ago I saw her give a reading of "A Woman is Talking to Death" and she nearly fainted 3/4ths of the way through— her partner came up and finished the rest. It was stunning.

(for interested parties, it's long but whew one of the best poems of the past 50 years imho: https://poets.org/poem/woman-talking-death)

I read that last year - from a link you posted, table. One of those I immediately passed on to a bunch of people. Think about it often.

I'm still rereading Beckett - outstanding in familiar ways, though I also think that people forget the extent of the ... what might now be called 'queer' or 'pansexual' elements (not sure what Beckett would have called them, probably nothing).

Started on the essays in F. Scott Fitzgerald, THE CRACK-UP (just a collection). Evocative, useful, yet they also make me slightly suspicious. Is Fitzgerald on the Jazz Age more reliable than ... Christopher Hitchens or (aargh) David Aaronovitch on the 1970s, or John Harris on the 1990s? More elegant, but can still come over as glib. Basically a kind of quality weekend journalism. Unsure how much rigour is in these essays, or how much interest in testing his own memories against recorded fact or the fact of other different experiences.

Then I, after many years, started John Wain's HURRY ON DOWN (1953). It's very droll already: I should have read it decades ago. The cover drawing on this old orange Penguin is by ...

LEN DEIGHTON.

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1377729802l/880277.jpg

otm

Giant Splash: Bondsian Blasts, World Series Parades, and Other Thrilling Moments by the Bay - Andrew Baggarly.

Sigfredo Sanchez had to be cajoled into getting on the plane to San Francisco. He hoped at best to see his son throw a relief inning or two, then spend some time with him over the All-Star break. He shared so much more than that. At one point late in the game, a friend in Puerto Rico called Sigfredo’s cell phone to make sure he was watching on television, aware of what his son was doing. “I’m here,” he replied, holding out his phone to the crowd noise as proof. The father and son stayed awake for hours that night, watching replays and highlights. At one point, Sigfredo disappeared and nobody could account for his whereabouts. He went in search of the morning newspaper, both to take a souvenir, and to see the headline in print. Then he could be sure it was real.

Ishikawa reacted. He kept his front shoulder closed, whistled his bat through the zone, and felt the connection. There was no need to hope as he watched the ball shrink up into the stars, only the need to run. He knew he’d gotten enough of it, that at least the ball would hit the brick arcade and the winning run would score. When Ishikawa saw the ball clank off the green metal roof atop the right-field arcade, he let out a yell that nobody could hear but him. Morse’s decibel record in China Basin lasted all of one inning. The Giants won the pennant, and Ishikawa’s three-run home run clinched it in a 6–3 victory.

In his no-hitter at San Diego, Lincecum was Jackson Pollock: all drips and splatters and scattered tosses. In front of his home fans, Lincecum was Piet Mondrian: tidy, sparse, structured, and restrained.

Lincecum’s reaction was beyond understated. It’s almost as if he didn’t understand the game had ended. He watched the ball return to earth with his eyes wide, and gave the gentlest pump of the fist. He never saw Posey coming. He only felt the sudden bear hug from behind, as the catcher scooped him up like a forklift.

Lincecum had just thrown the greatest postseason game in the Giants’ San Francisco era on a night when anything less probably wouldn’t have been enough. His team managed just one run, and needed a blown call plus a single under an infielder’s glove to manage that much. Lincecum, so miraculously good on the mound, made loaves and fishes out of it.

New nighttime book is Clint Burnham’s dialogue-based novel, SMOKE SHOW. Interesting characters abound, Burnham has a real knack for the seedy patois of PNW/BC-area drug users.

Also reading and re-reading Prynne’s ‘Wound Response’ and a lengthy, 100-page commentary on it by the scholar Michael Stone-Richards.

Evocative, useful, yet they also make me slightly suspicious. Is Fitzgerald on the Jazz Age more reliable than ... Christopher Hitchens or (aargh) David Aaronovitch on the 1970s, or John Harris on the 1990s? More elegant, but can still come over as glib. Basically a kind of quality weekend journalism. Unsure how much rigour is in these essays, or how much interest in testing his own memories against recorded fact or the fact of other different experiences.

He wrote them for Esquire, at the time ruthless about concision. They're glib insofar as he writes several lines that have become part of his legend but they're about as honest as he could be in the late '30s.

After following an unofficial scanlation of Tokyo Girls Bravo (Kyoko Okazaki) for months, it’s finally finished, and I’ll miss it! It’s not unusual for niche or unpopular manga to be never translated here and TGB is definitely the former. Kyoko Okazaki’s officially translated works, Pink and Helter Skelter are very different - Pink is about a young office worker who does sex work at night to pay for her pet crocodile’s food, and Helter Skelter is about a top model whose body breaks down due to grotesque experimental surgery.

Tokyo Girls Bravo is…nothing like that. It’s really more of a slice of life where nothing much really happens…and that’s fine?

It is probably best enjoyed by people old enough to have been teens in the mid to late eighties due to the cultural references - the main character is a big fan of New Wave and drops references constantly - and it’s about how it is to be young, poor and wanting to experience big city life while going to school, dealing with family restrictions and not knowing anybody.

I found it very soothing to read due to the flowing line work, sharp dialogue and occasional drifts into dreaminess. The references to music and fashion are great and are very good at giving a strong sense of both time and place.

I think the almost final word should go to one of the unofficial translators though:

…the point is that our teenage years are very formative and we ignore the fact that we are still shaped by things we experiences in those years decades later and I think it's silly to imply that your first contact with things isn't important, your first concert, your first kiss, your first designer dress, your first sneaker purchase (not the times when your parents bought you shoes doesn't count, I don't care if your mom is still dressing you even though you're 25), your first true friendship, your first fight, your first fuck, your first heartbreak, your first rejection, these simple things can feel like the end of the world... but then you feel fine. Your taste in things also changes but the foundation is still built at that age, think about how your mind explodes when you first discover Kubrick at 16, or Tarkovsky, or Oshima, think about finding those albums that destroy your brain and heart and then do it again when you replay them…

I am on page 630, but tracking back to a memorable quote:

But as I'd discovered about myself during the campaign, obstacles and struggles rarely shook me to the core. Instead, depression was more likely to creep up on me when I felt useless, without purpose-- when I was wasting my time or squandering opportunities. Even during my worst days as president, I never felt that way. The job didn't allow for boredom or existential paralysis, and when I sat down with my team to figure out the answer to a knotty problem, I usually came away energized rather than drained.

gyac, thanks for that post. Students brought up House of Leaves in a uni class I’m instructing at the moment, and it got me thinking along similar lines as your post. That was the first book I’d read that utilized extensive visual and formal elements as a way of creating a narrative texture, so even tho the book can be derided as a bit of trauma porn with some visual poetry, it made a deep impression on me as a teenager and shaped what I thought books could do.

Music another thing— I was always on the hunt for new music then and now, but there will always be some foundations for me, and they were first encountered between 13 and 18.

I'm not sure why I didn't connect the Nobel laureate with the film based on Happening released last spring. Anyway, I'm reading it now.

I finished the double-feature book by Sylvia Townsend Warner published by NYRB as Mr. Fortune. As they say, it was a study in contrasts. The phrase that kept coming to my mind as I finished the second story was 'songs of innocence and experience' - not that they had any direct connection to Blake's poetry, but because the first and second parts diverged so drastically in those two directions.

The novel Mr. Fortune's Maggot I'd describe as a love story, where the love involved was innocent to its core, but irrevocably marred by the world's imperfections and finally made impossible. It was told simply and elegantly in direct statements that said all that was needed to be said.

The novella, The Salutation, follows the main character years later into a far different tale told in far different language. He is nameless, emotionally empty, and stricken by a grief he has never faced. Warner's prose often becomes a dense thicket of metaphoric imagery as she attempts to describe his state of negated being. All the actions of the tale are motivated through another character, an old woman, a widow, whose own depth of experience surrounds him, succors him and to a small extent heals him.

It's pretty good stuff.

Sounds it, thanks. Also for Sciascia rec.

xpost to gyac re quote: I am thinking of my niece when she tasted different types of solid food for the first time and frowned, but as it turns out, the exposure was not a sign of rejection but what came to be in my opinion a sophisticated palate able to adjust to context. Franzen describes this in relation to the sense of smell in Purity.

Mouth to Mouth, by Antoine Wilson. The narrator runs into a barely-remembered classmate3 from college who proceeds to relate how he saved a man from drowning. I'm not far enough into it to see where the author is taking the narrative, but the prose thus far is crisp and economical.

HURRY ON DOWN is entertaining.

John Wain remains not quite a novelist that no one reads anymore.

I've launched myself into To The Finland Station, Edmund Wilson. Because he was a literary critic at heart, he starts out approaching the subject mainly through that lens. I'll see if that m.o. continues.

As a work of theory, To the Finland Station is a dud; as journalism, it's fantastic. Wilson's an influence on my prose.

Yeah, that book is big fun. Have you read his fiction, Alfred? Been wondering about it, never seen it anywhere.

My first reading of The House of Mirth since 2006, and the inevitability of Lily Bart's fate gets more crushing with each re-acquaintance.

It's a good one to re-read, who doesn't need a little mirth now and then?

"Mirth, that is!"

https://i.imgur.com/YKDH4dP.jpg

Been a long time, but I remember liking the movie, starring Gillian Anderson.

I am 30-odd pages from the end of HURRY ON DOWN. In picaresque fashion the protagonist has gone from one scenario and place to another. An odd fact is that he is not likeable or admirable. In fact serious crime and guilt hangs over him, among other things. He is mostly not very nice to others. I am unsure yet whether the last 30pp will see a tying up of long-standing elements in the novel, or just an end to this last section. You would expect the former. The novel is quite erudite and cleverly written.

I finish the novel. In a sense it does resolve itself in that, yes, familiar characters turn up again. Indeed this is part of the knowing unrealism of the novel, that the protagonist keeps running into the same fairly small cast of people in different settings.

The title indicates that a) he has 'come down' from Oxbridge, b) that he has 'come down in the world' - from middle-class, to window-cleaner, to driver, to drug smuggler, to hospital patient, then orderly, then chauffer; then homeless, then nightclub bouncer and at last, from nowhere, highly-paid radio gag writer - thus he has also ultimately gone back up; c) perhaps also that he has morally gone down, as he gets involved in some quite bad things.

I think the novel wants to carry an implication of randomness, of 'life coming at you' with its unexpected twists and turns. I even think that this may have been part of a 1950s mood of 'Existentialism': cf also early Iris Murdoch. But if so, I don't think this convinces, because such major life changes as it shows are not just random. Most specifically one can aver that the character's final rise back to wealth is not random but a reversion to type, a return to the comfort of the class he started in. I don't think that Wain registers this, the historical predetermination of such things or the intractability of things like poverty, as much as he should - if he wanted to be realistic and serious. Maybe he doesn't. Maybe I'm treating a comic picaresque novel as if it were really saying something about society.

I then return to Wain's contemporary:

Sigggggh, I love Philip Larkin...

woman at point zero - nawal el saadawi

i let amazon's algorithm push this to me based on my like of "season of migration to the north," and while not as deep and arresting as that novel, it was enjoyably fierce (almost campy from my gay male pov). a journalist visits a woman on death row who tells her life story. born to peasants in egypt, brutalized by a succession of men, various veils torn from her eyes regarding patriarchy, until she becomes a successful prostitute and finally kills men and becomes a goddess of sorts. some nice imagistic passages, including repetition, creating an almost songlike effect. one glaringly unbelievable plot point is that the protagonist never becomes pregnant during the first 25 years of her life when she is raped by a succession of men, though later on abortions are mentioned in passing when she has the money to afford them. anyway, this book probably harrowing for some based on the events that happen to the protagonist, and to be sure i kind of glossed over some of the more intensely violent scenes, but i found the overall story to be a delicious, soap opera-ish revenge dish against patriarchy.

Derek Walcott: IN A GREEN NIGHT - early poems. Unsure how far the title is meant to be a pun on 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' - it wouldn't seem to mean much if it were - so perhaps it isn't at all.

Taking a break from The Famished Road. Just finished Black Teacher by Beryl Gilroy, a memoir of her experiences in Britain from the 50s to the 70s. It's written in such matter of fact, unemotional style, so that while you definitely feel for her when she talks about the racism she experiences, when she talks about the things that happen to her friends and colleagues - suicide after a child abducted by the father, child born out of wedlock to a black father and white mother abandoned in the hospital - it almost feels like she's talking about creatures from another planet. It really shines when she talks about her experiences teaching underprivileged children; the way she tailors her approach to reach the violent ones, the quiet ones, the slow ones, those who have picked on their parents prejudices, shows her as a highly accomplished and deeply thoughtful teacher.

Now on to The Wall by Marlen Haushofer.

A short and intense reading of early Derek Walcott, with a glance at later Derek Walcott, leaves me impressed but deterred. Impressed for I can see that Walcott was a gifted, bold, ambitious poet from the start. Deterred because I often can't very well tell what the poem is trying to tell me. I don't get much of an idea from it. Some of it just goes round and round talking about this island, this character, to what end I don't know. A lot of it may be called texture - often the texture of the Caribbean, though he does write about the US also and I believe he later lived in Boston.

I am reminded of Heaney, Walcott's later friend, whom I also find very textural and whose ideas I also sometimes find elusive.

It is reasonable to say that as a reader I would need to be more patient and carefully read through the later Walcott while also learning more about its contexts and the places he was writing about.

I went back to Larkin and his first book THE NORTH SHIP (1945). This is rather unlike the better-known Larkin. The poems were all written at ages 21-23. Many of the poems just have numbers (in Roman numerals); a few also have titles. Most could be called ... mood-pieces? - describing a moonlit night for instance. They are moody in that they describe loneliness, alienation between lovers. While the words are simple enough, what Larkin wants to say, if anything, is not always especially clear. A longer poem talks quite interestingly about finding more value in two old blokes shovelling snow than in watching a pretty girl being playfully (and happily) pulled through the snow by a lover.

I had always thought that Yeats was the great influence or model for THE NORTH SHIP. Indeed he can be seen here, occasionally very clearly, but not always. Eliot and others probably just as much.

It tickles me a bit that you are so intent on finding out exactly what a poet wants to say— poems are much more like paintings than novels, and don’t need to say anything (or even be coherent) to be interesting or good poems.

Lately I've been dipping into The Simple Truth by Philip Levine, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1995. Levine seems fairly well forgotten these days, but his poems are quite engaging and enjoyable. He seems kind of similar to Frederick Seidel, in that his poems have a very casual approachable style, with occasional surprises.

I also recently finished A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway has historically been kind of a blind spot for me. I enjoyed Moveable Feast but always rebounded off the fiction when I tried to get into it. This time I finally got going with the novel, and read it through to the end. The trademark style of long sentences made up of the shortest possible words has always been a stumbling block for me, but in this novel I have to admit, it mostly works. What he seems to do best is to write around the action kind of like a jazz musician plays around the melody, letting the story come through as much in what is not said. The story is basically an adventure story with a tacked on "serious" ending, and the depiction of the love affair definitely feels like the work of a very young man, but I was pretty entertained.

After a few unsatisfactory experiences, I started up Rachel Kushner's book of essays The Hard Crowd, and this is my shit. First piece starts with her in her dad's garage looking at his Vincent motorcycle (only time I've heard this brand namedropped outside of the Richard Thompson song) and then moves on to participating in an illegal race through Baja. She's there with her racer boyfriend, but has her own machine and her own ambitions; she recognises the boorishness of her bf and the other dudes involved but doesn't deny her attraction. In a way it feels like being 18 again and reading Kerouac - the wide open spaces, the loser types, the mix of ecstasy and mental collapse - except this protagonist is self-aware, skeptical and, of course, female. Can't wait to dig into the other essays.

Vladimir Sharov - Before & During.

Sharov is a historian of late medieval Russia by training and his skill is evident in a kind of historical novel, which starts in a psychiatric asylum, as the narrator hears stories of the USSR and Russia's past -- it actually covers a period between the 1880s to the 1940s, but his skill is to distort and make fantastical what might be familiar, so you have Madame de Stael as a protagonist (even if she died in 1817, she is leading a 2nd life in the novel) where Scriabin, Lenin and Stalin (and many others) weave in and out. It covers a Russia that is very familiar to those who have read the classics from the late 19th century. A place in constant upheaval, whose characters are constantly searching for something inside themselves, or God, a place of experiments and near-philosophies where things are barely kept from exploding, and then they do.

Just in the last stretch now and its really, really great. Its from 1993 so you could say it was a look back to the painful Russian history but I'd have to read some more of his novels to know for sure.

Derek Walcott: IN A GREEN NIGHT

reminds me more immediately of marvell's "in a green shade"

(i feel i am neglecting my own interpreting poems thread but i am mentally quite busy at the moment 😔 )

so as promised i read some of byron’s marino faliero, doge of venice today. i realised why i hadn’t read it before - because verse dramas always make me say “no i do not want to read that” unless they are jacobean or elizabethan.

it’s fluent enough as you would expect, but only one bit with real bite, where Faliero explains the loving union with his much younger wife:

Twas not a foolish dotard's vile caprice,
Nor the false edge of aged appetite,
Which made me covetous of girlish beauty,
And a young bride: for in my fieriest youth
I sway'd such passions; nor was this my age
Infected with that leprosy of lust
Which taints the hoariest years of vicious men,
Making them ransack to the very last
The dregs of pleasure for their vanish'd joys;
Or buy in selfish marriage some young victim,
Too helpless to refuse a state that's honest,
Too feeling not to know herself a wretch.

Making them ransack to the very last
The dregs of pleasure for their vanish’d joys

Byron says in his introduction that from his reading he does not think Faliero’s downfall was brought about by jealousy, which it would have been easy to make the crux of the drama, and that he was advised by both William Drummond and oh balls another famous person i can’t remember the name of to not do jealousy as the prime motive as it would immediately bring him into competition with shakespeare who had covered the subject so exceptionally.

This is what makes the poem - at least the first three acts that i read - quite interesting. for two reasons.

1 - the motive is a psychological obsession with the failings of the Venetian state regarding the mild punishment of someone who has slandered his young wife. there are meaningful involutions of justice explored here. faliero himself decides to align himself with an anti state rabble provoked in his anger to do so. it has insight for today’s brain-wormed world! anyway, that obsession and motive is abstract, slight and in some respects uninvolving: not so much to do with the heart but psychology of faliero - it’s quite technical! that’s quite appealing.
2 - friends/relations of both faliero and his younger wife - who is v strict about her devotion to her elderly husband are both sceptical - are you *sure* she/you don’t find young beardless men hot? and indeed despite byron’s intro, his stilted justifications suggest he himself doesn’t really buy all this. it’s an interesting tension.

i had to put it down at this point as i went to see flux gourmet so must hie me to another thread.

I've started, at last, Grace Blakeley's STOLEN: HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD FROM FINANCIALISATION (2019).

I've thought often recently of wanting to read and understand economics. Perhaps Blakeley is a person to help me with this task.

But will I understand the book? Within the first few pages, I'm not sure I do.

In the first para I read of a 'speculative boom' after which 'the bubble burst'. What does that actually mean? I'm not sure.

In the second para I read of 'the securitisation of mortgage loans' - a concept I don't know. I read that 'markets started to seize up' - what does that mean?

On the 3rd page I read that financialisation means an increased tole for financial motives, markets and actors, in economies. But then what does 'financial' mean here? Isn't any person spending money in M&S a financial actor?

My point is not at all to ask people on ILX to answer these questions. It is that GB seems to write with an assurance that we all know the answers. And while that might be because she genuinely does know the answers, I also have a feeling of her not wanting really to confront them, or not being able to explain them, and - like many people who write about finance - skating over whatever the facts are with rhetoric.

But if I am able to continue with the book, perhaps I will understand slightly more.

In the first para I read of a 'speculative boom' after which 'the bubble burst'. What does that actually mean? I'm not sure.

In the second para I read of 'the securitisation of mortgage loans' - a concept I don't know. I read that 'markets started to seize up' - what does that mean?

Not the thread for it , but these can be understood without your requiring any technical expertise. Many newspaper and magazine articles from that era had 'explainer' pieces to help the lay people know what happened. At the moment my personal life doesn't have a sliver of space for such matters. (Family in hospital and soon to be on hospice.)

Poster Aimless, I send my sympathy for your family situation. It is one of the most difficult things that one can go through.

there's a layer of abstraction in writing about finance that in part seems like an effort to cargo cult the abstraction inherent in less dismal disciplines (e.g. mathematics), and in part seems necessary because if you write things down literally they are insane.

all the best to you and yours aimless.

Sending good thoughts to you and yours, Aimless.

the pinefox, what the paragraphs you are referencing are talking about: amid a housing bubble fuelled by speculation, finance companies were pooling mortgage debt into bond-like instruments, creating assets out of less than ideal elements such as subprime and predatory mortgages. that is, they were pooling toxic assets, trading and betting on their value, and driving up the costs of housing artificially.

when housing prices began to fall, mortgage delinquencies soared, leaving these financial companies holding the bag on the assets that they had pooled in mortgage debt. in essence, they created the environment for the situation to occur, cheered it on as it happened, then cause a worldwide financial crisis which US taxpayers had to bail them out of, all while many people were left with nothing after being predated upon by shady subprime lenders.

i know that might just make things murkier, but essentially: a bunch of douches were playing with mortgages like they were monopoly money, and then were thrown to the kerb when it turned out that their actions were risky and depended on predation and idiotic assumptions about market dynamics.

that’s my layman’s understanding— i got B grades in all my econ classes through uni

Thanks, poster table, for providing your explanation.

I'm not certain that the thing you're describing is the same thing as what GB describes (she starts by talking about events in the 19th century), but it's certainly relevant.

I have read your sentences a few times and I'm not sure that I truly understand them. For instance, I don't really know in what way a mortgage is an item that can be bought or sold. In fact the very idea of a mortgage is an idea that I struggle to hold in my head.

re: poster caek's comment on abstraction: actually what I have in mind re economics writing of this kind (GB's) is rather a rhetoric, in which things sound exciting and dynamic (bangs, booms, crashes; 'money flowing across borders at the speed of light') - a kind of dramatic literary language - yet where I am not sure what is truly being described. But yes, you could probably say that this is abstraction too.

Another example: poster table writes "when housing prices began to fall, mortgage delinquencies soared". I don't understand this. Isn't a lower house price good for someone trying to buy a house?

It's not for people on a Books thread to explain these matters. I'm merely remarking on the opacity of it all, by my own lights.

“What is metaphor if not informal abstraction” — caek

finance jargon is over the top, even relative to the rest of economics. when you start hearing contango and backwardation, run

not familiar with GB but i don’t think a book with the word “financialization” in the title is a good place to start learning about economics. to me that’s a sign that the book is either too advanced or jargon-heavy twaddle. the kind of metaphors you’re using are also a red flag

fun book i like and might be both accessible and fun to a beginner is “lying for money” by dan davies. uses the lens of “fraud” to explain some deep concepts of economics and finance

i also enjoyed ‘house of debt’ by atif mian and amir sufi and ‘the return of depression economics’ by paul krugman when i read them in undergrad

my favorite writer on finance is Matt Levine. he has an incredible ability to explain the logic behind each financial security and contract from first principles in a funny way

Dan Davies is excellent on twitter (as long as he keeps to economics).

lying for money is v good, so is book he wrote with his partner, the secret life of money, with chapters like “why does it cost more to love a piano than install a lift?” and “who are rip-off label jeans actually ripping off?”

i’ve also heard good things about money in one lesson by gabon jackson.

gavin.

we could move this discussion here:

a thread in which ilx interprets economics and finance, sometimes linen by linen*, and disagrees a lot (probably)

Dan Davies is excellent on twitter (as long as he keeps to economics).

but yes good idea xpost

When I wrote that I was thinking of a couple of tweets from a few months ago on how even a small rise in interest rates could be highly consequential after a decade of near zero.

Now I don't really great lot of economics beyond its political effects, but that has turned out to be brutally right. It probably wasn't too that much of an interesting prediction but no one was talking about it much then.

i find dan davies’ twitter inscrutable. i can never tell which level of irony/sarcasm he’s on

I don’t do Twitter but I enjoy Davies

I won’t attempt much further explanation, but the pinefox, financialization is essentially the transmuting of debts into assets that can be bought, sold, packaged as securities, etc.

Vine Deloria Jr God Is Red
Native American writer compares Native beliefs to Christianity. Finds the practise of Christianity pretty wanting and heavily abused.
Very interesting book. I think I need to see if I can get hold of other work by him now that I'm coming to the end of this one. But this does seem to be the only one of his in the library system unfortunately.
Hope i can find stuff elsewhere over time.

Shirley Jackson Haunting of Hill House
I'm enjoying the prose here, so again think I need to pick up some more of her work once I get through this.
How subtle is the lesbian sub theme?
Really enjoying this , writing is quite playful for a subject matter that looks like it could get very dark.

Suzanne Simard Finding the Mother Tree
Scientist's memoir showing how she worked out importance of mycorrhizal fungal interaction with trees as part of a Wood Wide Web and also the importance of older trees in the network some of which are deemed to be mother trees who shepherd the younger shoots etc. Not quite Ent like but interesting idea which appears to be heavily supported by her work. I will see if i can read more on the actual process. Have found several podcast appearances by her tied in with the book and was initially turned onto her by the BBC science show The Infinite Monkey Cage a few weeks ago. I do like the idea of a woodland as an interconnected communication network with trees passing messages to each other about ensuing conditions , dangers etc.

bell hooks Communion
3rd in her series on Love. This one is about mature women looking for self fulfilment, trustworthy relationships etc.
I enjoy bell hooks , find her a quick read once I can actually get my hands on her books. Seem to be way too few copies in the whole of the Irish library system . One copy of each of about a dozen books . I thought she wasa lot more popular. So I think they may need to pull the finger out and buy a load more.

just got
West of teh Revolution by Claudio Saunt
which is about the other events going on across the Americas in 1776 . Spanish setting up San Francisco on the Pacific coast and French expanding their trapping set up and screwing up local native economies in what would later be Canada.
Not read any of it yet but saw it turn up in a bibliography from something recently and thought it sounded pretty fascinating.
Have a lot less time for reading right now and have a stack of other stuff still out from the library. Hopefully going to get through a lot more of it.

take the money talk to the money thread! a thread in which ilx interprets economics and finance, sometimes linen by linen*, and disagrees a lot (probably)

pinefox! poster bernard snowy is already explaining stuff for you there (i think he may have begun at an over-ambitious level but we shall see)

correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think poster pinefox is looking for help understanding particular topics (I’d read a thread on them though, so no harm) but rather is interested in why writing about finance fails?

I'm happy for there to be a finance thread and I will look at it with interest, but I post about GB's book here because it is the WHAT ARE YOU READING? thread and I am ... reading it.

I suppose I would like to understand topics - I think my point earlier was to say that it was not the responsibility of people on ILX to explain them, even if they could. It's GB's responsibility, in her book, I suppose!

Poster flopson warns against the word 'financialization', then poster table defines it anew!

The word 'debt' figures a lot already in GB's book. I know what a debt is in theory (if I owe Mark S £20 for a copy of his book I haven't paid for, that's a debt), but I can't really get from that to these more advanced things that people say about it.

(I did pay for my signed copy of Mark S's book.)

"we inhabit a revolutionary moment" - Grace Blakeley (2019), p.28.

Blakeley has made one point that was possibly new to me and that I understood:

Capitalist ideologues say "planning is bad", meaning "command economies are bad", or something. But actually big corporations are massively top-down planned (p.21).

This implies that ideologues are hypocritical and know that planning is actually good, not bad.

But perhaps this is sleight of hand from GB. Perhaps it is logical to plan within your own company which is competing against others, but not to plan a whole society, eliminating competition (a thing that the ideologues would say they like).

I'm loving the formality of pinefox's titles ("Poster flopson").

Now on to The Wall by Marlen Haushofer.

This was fabulous. The dystopian premise (woman on holiday in an alpen hunting lodge wakes up to find herself trapped behind an invisible impenetrable wall, everyone on the other side dead) is really just a pretext for a sort of solitary farmer's country diary, along with ruminations on loneliness, past regrets, and man's (not woman's) inhumanity to man (and woman). The repeated accounts of scything, milking, planting potatoes, chopping wood, are almost meditative, and the animals (cow, dog, various cats) are lovingly described and individual characters in their own right.

It's a really great book.

By about p.35 of GB's book I had reached a point of strangely almost anxious dismay, as though my inability to follow was important.

I have been meaning to read this book for some time but the way it's going, I think I will probably just have to stop.

Lol @ Blakeley shouting about revolution. That's all these people and the Novara lot know. They'll tell you to vote Labour at the next election.

xpost
Not read the Haushofer novel, but the film version from 20212 by Julian Pölsler is also excellent.

I have wondered about the film version. I need to have a look at that.

As for the book the writing is superb! Definitely worth a go.

lol I'm not watching German films from the future. Yet.

Still reading Fellowship of the Ring for the first time. I was hoping to be contrary, but man, the Tom Bombadil stuff is as annoying as its reputation.

Otherwise, the creepy bits are great

Thanks for the good wishes, pinefox and table. It's def not the right thread for it, but since this is the only one where I mentioned it, I need to say that my family member took a step away from the brink (and hospice) and my wife and spent the first night away from the hospital and together in the past 11 days.

Life breaks in sometimes. It’s ok!
Best wishes to you both and hope for a better outcome.

Yes.

^ best wishes aimless.

reading that robert aickman the unsettled dust. i think he likes the term 'strange stories' or something? (i could check but the book is upstairs). it's well written and enjoyable, but his knack almost exemplifies my general point about the incorporated horror going to the states and leaving the unincorporated horror in Britain... no, England I think.. at more or less the turn of the century, via Vincent Starrett, who transferred Machen's physically visible decay to Lovecraft and thence to US comics.

In the UK you were left with the most insubstantial of ghosts, barely even ghosts as we see in this collection. Still, a general *mood* is very well done in this collection. i could do with a bit more *threat* – I mean MR James is hardly lurid.

Glad to hear it, Aimless.

I am reading 'After Such Knowledge Park' by Mark Francis Johnson— the only book of his I know written entirely in prose. Unsettling, concept-based, and ridiculously funny.

All the best Aimless.

The threat is insubstantial in Aickmann for sure - to the point where I wonder if he was deliberately avoiding the Jamesian wallop. Albeit, in total, I think I find him more, ahem, *unsettling* than James. Have you read his story 'Swords'? One of the grimmest, most unsettling things I've ever read. 'The Hospice', too.

To be clear, James has the better canon.

I've just got back from 4 days in Paris - a school trip with 35 15year olds. It's broken me, physically and spiritually but it was an amazing trip. I'm in that strange zone where my body is back in the UK, but my head is still in France. I'm putting myself back together by re-reading *A Moveable Feast*. Ironically, I've always felt his coming apart in this book - the nastiness, the mythologising of his past, his generosity to his past selves. However, I'm still in the early stages of it and am in the right mood for Hemingway's sentimentalism and his polysyndetic recreations of the 1920s.

i haven't read either 'swords' or 'the hospice' - apparently 'the stains' in this volume is v good as well.

i'm pretty certain he was avoiding the jamesian wallop (a critical term for the ages). and i find it interesting, and unsettling. i just don't *enjoy* it as much. i think it's a high wire act in some ways, and i enjoy him trying it and me wrestling with it.

was sufficiently moved by light years to try another salter. picked all that is, essentially at random.

i liked the huge cast of characters and his willingness to describe the lives of so many people, although given his known willingness to appropriate real events (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/15/the-last-book), part of me thinks this he made this choice simply to allow him to use as many real events as possible.

it (or rather the many characters) are also very mean and quite sexist, which surprised me given it was written 35 years later than light years.

I've been rereading Joan Didion's THE WHITE ALBUM (1979). It does not stand up very well.

why not?

Funnily enough, I saw a copy of The Unsettled Dust in the library and motored through it. The weaker stories are definitely in the front - the final three, 'Ravissante', 'Bind Your Hair' and 'The Stains', are especially strong and have a real cumulative power. Without wishing to spoilerise, all three contain moments of more overt 'horror' and certainly moments that creeped me the fuck out. The uneasy sexual fear that Aickman was more at liberty to exploit (but which is also very deep in a lot of James) is again especially overt in The Stains, but it's also one of his saddest stories that, unusually, contains an epilogue that spells out the main character's fate.

I think the fact that Aickman edited the first eight Fontana Ghost Story collections is misleading; The Unsettled Dust itself is one of his few actual ghost stories (along with 'The Trains', another favourite). Although of course they can all be read as ghost stories, if you like.

Poster Alfred: I could try to explain fully, though I know others would not share my views. I know that there is a very extensive Joan Didion thread on which people have already had their say about her - I must have first posted about 16 years ago, and many times since - so one should not really relitigate it.

But ... specifically from this rereading:

1: I think the book is poorer than people might think or remember simply because it is a collection of reports culled together from magazines. Less good, really, than the average collection of LRB reviews (by Frank Kermode, James Meek, et al).

2: I think her writing is often brittle, mannered and not as good as she thinks it is. It contains a lot of redundancy and unnecessary verbiage in the form of rhetorical tics.

3: I think that when political judgments come through, they are often very conservative (which for some people would itself be a demerit), but are not argued through rationally and carefully; rather, usually, they are presented as sarcastic snipes. I understand that this mode may suit a weekly magazine that people then throw away, but it does not wear well as a book to be assessed decades later. The sarcasm is very limited and unpersuasive. The points that it makes do not convince me.

Again, the impressions that keep coming to mind are brittleness and an overestimation of her own powers, wit, persuasiveness. The style and the ideas feel much thinner and weaker than she seems to think they are.

Here is one particular point, which does not prove or disprove my view or any other view in general:

In the possibly famed essay on the women's movement (1972), Didion writes that the feminists seek an escape from adulthood and the body; cleanliness; an avoidance of things like the mess of the body and sex, things that come with being a woman.

This is particularly strange as I think the reverse could be posited. It could well be said that feminists of the 1970s were actually insisting on the body and sexuality; menstruation, blood and the menopause; the reality of sex (pleasure and violence); childbirth and childrearing (as has sometimes been pointed out in the past, feminist writers of that time were often also young mothers, sometimes bringing up children in more collective forms than the middle-class norm of the time). It could well be said that feminists were inserting these things into a public discourse that had indeed been too 'clean' and polite to acknowledge them (arguably in the interests of masculinity, patriarchy, inequality, etc).

In this specific regard, then, Didion seems to me to arguing the opposite of the truth.

However, it must be acknowledged that it must have depended on specifically which feminists one was reading, and on differences between schools of feminist writing in different places.

I tend to prefer most of her work from the '80s onward: Salvador, Miami, After Henry, Political Fictions. She perfected the hawk-circling-its-prey distance/attack.

Didion was small-c-conservative and big-c conservative, but, unlike many Orange County peers, Reagan broke her.

but his knack almost exemplifies my general point about the incorporated horror going to the states and leaving the unincorporated horror in Britain... no, England I think.. at more or less the turn of the century, via Vincent Starrett, who transferred Machen's physically visible decay to Lovecraft and thence to US comics.

British horror of the first half of the 20th century vs American horror of same era comparable to UK cinema vs classic Hollywood in these times maybe? I.e. first one stodgier, almost allergic to showbiz sparkle, occasionally producing works of great genius but not at a rate comparable to the latter?

october's reading was:

macbeth - william shakespeare
by the pricking of my thumbs - agatha christie
something wicked this way comes - ray bradbury

do you see what i did there?

did macbeth for o level in 1984

pricking was ok, tommy and tuppence, not attacking the labour party this time. and interestingly they appeared to have aged in real time, given they were teenagers in the first book.

first time for something wicked. felt a lot like stephen king but more poetic. maybe would've been more effective without some of the more outlandish things.

multiple xposts to ward f. yes good stuff: ravissante is excellent and your phrase “uneasy sexual fear” is on point.

A quick rereading of THE CRYING OF LOT 49 (1965), skimming slightly early on but then less and less.

By far my favourite Pynchon, even one of my favourite novels; yet this time it felt thinner than before. Maybe the stage management and narrative mechanics seemed more awkwardly on show. The dialogue is an example of that. And the drama of discovery which so thrilled me first time, many years ago, doesn't now. Yet it's still very densely packed for a short book.

The theme of information - and information theory, retrieval, memory, loss - came through strongly; more than the alternative term 'communication', though to be that's raised sometimes. The sequence where the heroine thinks about a hobo with delirium tremens and how much sweat is sunk into in his bed, and will eventually be lost - which as I write it out seems a pretty unsavoury image - is longer and more emphasised than I'd remembered. I don't fully understand this theme, still don't understand the Maxwell's Demon theme after over 20 years. But I do sense that Pynchon was one of the first, at least outside SF, to write fiction with information, in this sense, as such a theme and concern; with an idea, for instance, that matter contains information or could be described in terms of information. Mucho Maas's interesting peroration on how to analyse music down to its component parts would be a related example.

Hey, take it over to the book crying of lot 49

If not Itt videos of people singing “Crying”

Started Warren Ellis' book about a piece of Nina Simone's chewing gum. He retrieved it from her piano after a transcendent gig at the Festival Hall in 1999, wrapped it in the towel she'd used to mop her brow, and kept it a secret from thereon, holding onto it as a kind of sacred relic. The book is about his bringing it out into the open, as part of an exhibition Nick Cave put on in Copenhagen in 2019, and how it opened up into an archaeology of his past via various objects.

It could be pure self-indulgence (and it kind of is) but Ellis is so wide-eyed and generous that some of the more hokey spiritual stuff comes across as completely genuine. It's beautifully put together as well, particularly the photography.

I have to reread Crying of Lot 49 now. (I never connected that theme to the book and am intrigued that it is of interest to scholars in literature.)

I feel the same. I'd never thought about it from the angle of information theory before (and wouldn't have known enough about information theory to connect it anyway), and I'm probably due for a re-read at some point.

pinefox otm. Thought about that California again while reading Devil House (and especially when the narrator of Wolf In White Van walks to the convenience store and actually talks to somebody in real time, although Cali is always right there, now that I think of it duhhh), also Emma Cline's The Girls

Now I'm intrigued by the Warren Ellis mention as well, thx Chinaski.

The Ellis book is lovely. The central conceit - the archaeology of the self and ideas through the uncovering of a found object - isn't particularly original but his devotion to the magic of this thing he possesses is quite something. In some ways, the book is a bagatelle, really, almost a kids' book because of Ellis' lack of overt style and pretension, its structure and its use of repetition, but there are a couple of recurring stories in there that I found quite overwhelming.

Finished Mark Francis Johnson's 'After Such Knowledge Park,' a prose poem piece of 135 pages that is by turns insane, hilarious, and quite sad. It involved a "future" protagonist in what appears to be a version of the Earth, but this protagonist has several more limbs than we humans do. Like many future dystopias, the spectre of what amounts to enslavement hovers over the book, with talks of "selling parts of my cash-bod" and etc. Unlike any of his other books in form, it does contain some of the antic elements of Johnson's poems— there is a section of about four or five pages in length that is ostensibly naming starships, but they're all actually the names of daycare centers stolen directly from the phone book.

Also continuing with the Prynne reading group, spent some time this week with Wordsworth and Marvell as a result, too.

i re-started The Peripheral a few weeks ago to get past the initial (deliberate) disorientation. got past it. felt it was ok. then got bored again. then saw there was a tv series and thought “ah fuck it” and put it down for good.

I've been reading The Housing Lark by Sam Selvon. A novel about West Indians living in London in the '60s trying to get around racist landlords by buying a house, it's unusual for being told in the third-person in a West Indian patois. It's also acute about race, irreverent, and funny.

I really like Selvon, I’ve read Ways of Sunlight and I think The Lonely Londoners is somewhere around.

Has Warren Ellis been rehabilitated?

I assume you mean the twatty comic writer Warren Ellis? The memoir is him off Dirty Three/Bad Seeds.

Unless I've missed something major.

Mostly been reading newspapers, as most suited to my available time, energy level and attention span, but before bed I've been reading a few pages of Mowat's Greatest Hit: Never Cry Wolf. I should finish it before New Year's Day.

Is there another Warren Ellis? Who writes books, I mean.

There is a Warren Ellis who writes mostly comics, yes.

And yes, musician Warren Ellis (different from comic book/shitty dude Warren Ellis) apparently has a book now

It's great! (See garbled reviews from about 7 posts ago. Have I gone through the looking glass?)

I had not heard of musician Warren Ellis. I thought you were talking about the guy who writes comics, novels, screenplays, etc.

He was the front guy in Dirty 3 viewed as a master violinist and a bit of a raconteur. Took over from Mick Harvey as musical director of teh Bad Seeds too. Bought me a pint once.
He saved the gum that Nina Simone stucck to her piano when Nick Cave hosted Meltdown. He wrote a book about that and various other things. I need to read it.

At the moment I am reading Kid Congo Powers memoir Some New Kind of Kick which I got on Friday. I think I held teh door to the bookshop open for the person delivering it, then got told book wasn't in yet then got a phonecall saying it was like 2 minutes after that. Great coincidence. Bookshop is around teh corner from teh course I'm on so popped in there for a browse anyway thinking the book was still a few days away.
Quite great book, hope Kid writes some more after this. I'm 100 and something pages in and Kid is being a hellion on the LA punk scene. Has met the rhythm section he is going to play with in the initial Creeping Ritual/Gun Club way before he met Jeffrey Lee Pierce. Is dabbling with drugs a lot. Thankfully more acid than harder stuff so far. I think its a pageturner and will recommend it to anybody into his music or related. Glad I told him he should write a memoir, seem to have not been the only one to have done so. I remembered him telling me he kept a journal when he was with the Gun club , in 1984 o0r around then so hoped he kept one going.
I thought thsi was partially ghostwritten before i got it but it doesn't really seem to be. Thought there was a credit to a with somebody but if thsi si all him hope it is not the only thing he writes.

I have occasionally been reading Colin MacInnes' ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS.

Been a long time, but I remember preferring the first in that trilogy, City of Spades, about low-budget bohemian black-white youth subcultures in London.

I think I have an omnibus with both.
There was an overhyped film of Absolute Beginners in the 80s. Had Bowie in it I think.
Paul Welled used the book title for a good Jam track too.

After my 36 hours in hospital, settling into George Crabbe’s THE VILLAGE

Rereading Angela Carter, THE PASSION OF NEW EVE (1977).

I am still reading baseball books and I finished Andrew Baggarly’s first book about the 2010 SF Giants team which I’ll write up later. For reasons best understood by my seemingly enduring fascination with the World Series winning teams of the past decade, I’m currently reading Barry Zito’s autobiography, Curveball.

Zito is a really weird character. Literally every interview I’ve read about him I thought, is this a bit?

Reader, it was not.

The truly great sports book needs a rise and a fall, and maybe a rise again later. You also need brutal honesty about the person’s shortcomings and foibles. Does Curveball deliver? Does it ever.

From chapter 10, entitled Nobody’s Fault But My Own:

The strange feeling was likely the result of a crazy experiment I got in on when one of my spiritual practitioners offered me a homeopathic remedy to connect me with my “spirit animal.” You probably figured spirit animals would enter the picture at some point, right? After assessing me over the phone, the scientist declared mine to be a lion. He gave me some tablets to take that he said contained real lion’s milk. I never asked him how you milk a lion but I often wondered. After several days on “the milk,” Brian and I were on the double date when the thoughts of choking someone began to overwhelm me. As a normally chill, laid-back guy, this was completely out of character for me. A couple of hours later while still out on the town, a friend of mine saw me and asked if I would come next door to grab a drink at the bar where she worked. I gladly agreed.

…

Later at home trying to settle myself down, I called Paul and told him what had happened. After hearing my odd, out-of-character story, he got fired up, which made his accent sound even thicker: “Well, mate, do you know how a lion kills its prey?” He paused for a dramatic effect. “He goes for the throat and chokes ’em out! You’re becoming a lion, Barry!” Paul was obviously referring to the tablets I had been taking. In that moment, my mind rushed back to what I had texted Brian at the beginning of the night about choking someone. Finally connecting the dots, I thought it was obvious the lion’s milk had taken effect, because I had never wanted to do such a thing before; in fact, violence was always something I avoided.

In hearing everyone’s stories, I saw right away that—compared to me and my almost unlimited resources—these people had real problems. I don’t mean to say I wasn’t drowning in my own issues, but as humans who gain some wealth, we can all too quickly forget what struggling to pay rent feels like. That reality check was a positive element for me.

I had been growing a mustache for the past month, which also worked in my favor. She later told me, “I never thought you would propose to me with that thing on your face.”

I admit that I do admire your tenacity in a genre that means nothing to me, great write up.

Listen if anyone had ever told me I would give a shit about baseball six months ago, I would have laughed them out of it.

I should also tip my cap to one of the greatest ilb posts of all time about Zito

kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius)
Posted: 7 April 2010 at 02:49:41
Not only is Zito throwin zeroes, his ass and legs are lookin great.

I really should read the earlier Carter, THE MAGIC TOYSHOP and FIREWORKS at last - have been meaning to for ages.

Listen if anyone had ever told me I would give a shit about baseball six months ago, I would have laughed them out of it.

I should also tip my cap to one of the greatest ilb posts of all time about Zito

kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius)
Posted: 7 April 2010 at 02:49:41
Not only is Zito throwin zeroes, his ass and legs are lookin great.

Thanks!

lol morbs

I am also quite enjoying going back to THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS in book form. I love the brightly coloured books and the expansive interviews. This week I read G G Marquez who kept talking about being a journalist and a socialist. The interviews with Larkin and Faulkner, among others, are classic documents that one can read many times.

Angela Carter, NOTHING SACRED: essays.

Carter had a big reputation for this sort of thing. She knew quite a lot, eg about film, which is a good start. But her style seems to me hampered by rhetorical over-emphasis and forced jollity. The sense can be of brassiness compensating for insecurity. She was a significant writer and figure, but I have never been entirely convinced by her prose.

Reading Carter's 1977 essay on Viv Nicholson, thinking: well, yes, she could still get a job as TV critic for the Observer or New Statesman, I realised that her journalism reminded me of something - with its deliberate exaggerations, provocations, flourishes, elevation of rhetoric over coherence.

Julie Burchill.

The dates even make sense, in that Burchill was coming through when Carter had been, and still was, writing a lot of this stuff. But Burchill, I believe, went on to be denigrated (no doubt for various reasons), and Carter is still revered.

Elizabeth Bowen - The Little Girls
Charles Blow - The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

Since it's Noirvember I thought I'd read nothing but hard boiled crime fiction this month. Started this with Walter Mosley's short story collection The Awkward Black Man, which so far is turning out to be not what I'd expected. Mosley is known for his crime fiction and the book was indeed in that section of my local shop, but so far the stories are much more about sad middle aged people going through life; there's the occasional criminal activity, but no mystery or investigation. It's much more Raymond Carver than Raymond Chandler, and as with my experience with Carver as a teen, sometimes there's moments of pathos and beautiful sadness and sometimes it just feels like a bunch of events that don't seem to amount to much. Frequent themes: cancer, divorce, workplace sexual harassment.

I am reading Jay Caspian Kang and think I have the same sentiment: what a handicap it is to want to be a chum or a bro.

All Souls by Javier Marias, not yet convinced by this highbrow academic farce - just like ordinary academic farce, including male narrator obsessing over women he has barely met, but with longer sentences and paragraphs.

Chachi Aerosmith loves that guy. I've been intrigued by the plot descriptions but have never cottoned to those serpentine sentences. Maybe finished one and a half of his novels.

Crossfire, by Nancy Kress. One of about a dozen books by female science fiction writers I got from Humble Bundle a few years back. A very readable first contact story.

PARIS REVIEW interviews with James Thurber and Robert Lowell.

Lowell starts by saying that he's teaching a course on The Novel that features short stories and Baudelaire.

I reflect that short stories are not novels and I am not yet aware that Baudelaire wrote novels.

Just finished Dodie Bellamy’s ‘Academonia,’ her only book that isn’t widely available and which a friend who was working with her snagged for me. She was my thesis advisor, and a very fine writing teacher, so reading her takes on the travails of being an artist and part of the academic undercommons was pretty illuminating, even if some elements of the writing echo in later works.

I was particularly interested in one of her essays on difficulty and genre, “Crimes Against Genre,” as I find myself having to reiterate to students that there is no set way of writing poetry or fiction or non-fiction— the rules and boundaries they’ve learned are mostly arbitrary. Throw prose into a poem— include memoir in fiction— completely upend a piece of memoir by slathering it with dense theory. Why not? It might not sell, but if it is what the writer feels the writing demands, there’s no reason not to do whatever one wants!

Anyway, glad I have a copy, it’s a brilliant book.

never cottoned to those serpentine sentences.

I think a lot about how Romance languages encourage this kind of writing a lot and how even with the best translations it ends up feeling a bit awkward in English.

moments of pathos and beautiful sadness and sometimes it just feels like a bunch of events that don't seem to amount to much.

Halle Rubenhold The Five
Writer who I think normally does historical fiction looks into the backstories of the 5 women better known to history as the victims of Jack the Ripper. Her purpose was to show that these were actual people not the entities that the public mind had created. So this is looking at social history and how it effected 5 specific women.It looks like most of them were not the prostitutes they are publicly remembered as. Writer also comments early on that the quietness of the killings, the lack of screaming etc is likely to indicate that the killer killes sleeping women.
I am about half way though the section on the first of the women. & she obviously lived a really messed up life far more from pressures on women and moral strictures etc and an inability for a woman of the time to comfortably live alone thaniks to the patriarchy. She appears to have tried and struggled.
Writing is pretty good and I'm learning things i wasn't fully aware of beforehand. She starts the book talking about the Jubilee for Queen Victoria in 1887 6 months beofre the killings. & how one thing going on at the time was a shanty town in Trafalgar Square where the poor set up home. Writer says it was known that this was a crossroads point denoting the border between East & West London.

Scott Ellsworth,The ground breaking : the Tulsa Race Massacre and an American city's search for justice
book on Greenwood and the race massacre . White locals just killing off a load of semi successful black residents who were trying to make lives for themselves. Disgusting & I should probably have heard about it way before trump wanted to hold a political meeting rather too close geographically and temporally to its centenary. & 2 different tv shows had it appear as a plot theme they approached from a sci fi pers[ective at around teh same time. The book says that it was an event that was 'not talked about' intentionally and vehemently.
IT is something people should know about and was also one of several events along the same lines that happened around the same time. Like anytime blacks could be seen to be standing on their own 2 feet and possibly even getting a little ahead it was a trigger for racist idiots to 'teach them a lesson', disgusting. & it appears that that mentality is not a thing of the past with rather too many.

ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS, which I read now and again, is quite interesting and challenging. For instance the teen protagonist is pretty disdainful of the Attlee era, c.10-15 years earlier -- an era that for many of us now is relatively sacred, but that for him is more like 'the Blair years' to us.

All Souls by Javier Marias, not yet convinced by this highbrow academic farce - just like ordinary academic farce, including male narrator obsessing over women he has barely met, but with longer sentences and paragraphs.

― ledge,

I discovered it last month. Funnier than the usual David Lodge exercise.

!! Want to FP you for that.

Chachi Aerosmith loves that guy. I've been intrigued by the plot descriptions but have never cottoned to those serpentine sentences. Maybe finished one and a half of his novels.

I do think he's real good, yeah - the middle volume of Your Face Tomorrow is a triumph, and if you've stuck with the long sentences through that one, he repays you generously.

I haven't his sentences being any more serpentine than Bernhard or Sebald's.

*haven't noticed

If there's another one with less "male narrator goes on endlessly about the women he is or isn't fucking, can fuck or can't fuck. wants to fuck or doesn't want to fuck" then I'd give it a go. (This is an unfair exaggeration but it feels like a dominant theme to me and I'm 100% not into it.) There's also a fair amount of sexist language (harpy, fat tarts) - yes I'm aware any similarity between the narrator and the author is entirely coincidental.

entirely agree with ledge here. thought it was dismal. really hard to work out what distinguishes it in any way and i’m a machen fan.

Of the three Marias I've read All Souls Day is the weakest. I don't much like campus fiction; even Pictures from an Institution crumbles into awesome bits.

I loved A Heart So White by Marias. Yes, dense as all get out, but as the story slowly crystallised out of that denseness, it was revelatory. I think about the book often.

My reading has been pretty scattershot since I got back from Paris. I re-read *A Moveable Feast*, which was both more acidic and self-forgiving than I remembered, and quietly beautiful, albeit those passages are rare. I've been dipping back into Sarah Bakewell's *At The Existentialist Cafe*, which, despite that annoyingly twee title, is actually a good summation of existentialism and provides a nice snapshot of Paris in the 1920s.

I've also started Geoff Dyer's *Paris Trance* (do you see the theme?). It's got all the Dyer trademarks: irony, smugness, deftness of narrative voice and perspective. Dyer writes sex well, I think.

It's much more Raymond Carver than Raymond Chandler

After Mosley established himself as a successful writer of popular and very well written detective fiction, he started trying to break out of his genre confines and be taken as a "serious" writer, but with a mixed success. As I see it, "serious" writers have a miniscule audience compared to popular genre writers, and academics have appointed themselves as the gatekeepers of who is serious and who isn't. They guard this tiny bit of power jealously and actively dislike having a genre writer crash their party. It's by invitation only and Mosley might have to die before he's invited.

What academics are you talking about?

What you say doesn't resemble any academic I've encountered. Which is hundreds of people.

In any case, academics' influence over literature and the literary world is very limited.

Yes I think gatekeepers of highbrow culture in general have decreased or been made irrelevant in the past few decades, but that's not to say that they don't still exist within certain niches.

Meanwhile the Mosley collection has moved to different territories, though still not noir - instead there's been multiple mad scientists!

There could also just be the fact that Mosley’s non true crime writing isn’t very good. Not every writer is talented at every genre, no need to invent a conspiracy about it

I don't think ppl's personal preferences and biases are a conspiracy, unless we're talking in a Bourdieu sense here.

I also find the idea that anyone's writing being good or bad could be seen as "a fact" suspect and, if we accept that it can, the idea that critical or academic consensus is going to be right about what's Good or Bad doubly suspect. Might as well believe in sales figures as indicators of quality once we get to that kind of thinking.

I actually find that I agree with poster table here.

I don't know the writing in question, but whether it can be shown to be good or bad or not, maybe people didn't much like it, and didn't think it was as good as his other writing.

Again, academics are largely irrelevant - their only consensus on Walter Mosley, I guess, is that he's good and important, and most people don't care what they think anyway.

I saw Mosley speak once at the now long gone Donnell Library in midtown. A lot of what he said was classic protesting too much of the "Most people don't realize that I am actually a good writer and not just a genre writer" variety.

maybe people didn't much like it, and didn't think it was as good as his other writing.

Well of course that would be the case but when you get to a critical consensus it always becomes about preferences - formal, of marketing, of identity. "Maybe they didn't like the writing" is just restating the premise.

anyway I don't think I've ever heard of Mosley as "a good crime writer whose literary fiction is bad", I've only heard of him as "a good crime writer". So I don't know if this critical consensus even exists, really.

"Literary Fiction" overrated imho, except when it isn't.

It's like "Classically Trained." If I want Classically Trained, I'll go to Lincoln Center for some actual classical music, on the train perhaps, maybe even the A train, but I will get off at 59th Street instead of riding it all the Sugar Hill way up in Harlem. Of course Monk liked classical music too and that is yet another thing.

But those are ancient ILX tropes, from the time when the Twelve Foot Lizards were merely hatchlings.

I don't understand any of these last few posts.

Me riffing.

Trust by Hernan Diaz
Wikipedia and Investopedia articles on fiat money

Unrelated: description of Karst from Aesop (Has anyone tried this fragrance and if so, could you please describe it in your own words?)

The LRB recently carried a marvellous review of the book TRUST.

Please allow me to try to explain. There is an old pattern that has been discussed on this borad many times before, of genre writers, because they feel stung by being ghettoized and desire access to greater prestige and $tatu$, stating that they better than (and perhaps thereby implicitly “more literary than) Literary Fiction. Which argument these days, in a perhaps less defensive form, probably pretty popular in some circles particularly within academia and this borad, I would think. But in fact it is obvious, as the mathematician said before pondering for a half hour it was obvious and concluding that it was indeed so, once one applies Sturgeon’s Law and sees that the 10% of good genre writers will be better than the 90% of brisk crap nebula writers of literary fiction who by Redd’s Rule will never be read anymore by anyone in the future. QED.

Which has a parallel in rock musicians wanting to escape their long distance information (stuck inside of) Memphian roots by appeals to classical ideas of virtuosity and lyrics being poetry etc.

So many typos such a small chat box, such dirty glasses.

So you don't write 'borad' deliberately?

Genuine question.

Poster Redd -- insofar as I grasp your argument immediately above -- I broadly agree with it and think it is, as you say, uncontroversial, among academics, ILX, and most people.

Defensive has deep roots though.

So you don't write 'borad' deliberately?

Genuine question.

Defensiveness

In other words, the fastest lion eats the slowest gazelle.

the hell's going on here

Me and the pinefox could become close friends
…
Me and the pinefox don’t see eye to eye on a
Number of things

Mr Oswald said he had an understanding with the law

Okay I’ll stop. My work is undun.

The ghettoization of genre fiction discussion is almost entirely redundant at this point— science fiction and fantasy are wildly popular, and form the basis for a great deal of popular culture. The idea that anyone as popular as Mosley would be weeping about not being taken seriously as a writer is absurd— he's laughing all the way to the bank, whereas some of the "literary" novelists who are really pushing boundaries are struggling as adjuncts working bar gigs on the side.

I agree with poster table.

I mean, Le Guin earned several Library of America volumes.

the poster is the table is otm

Even Delany, who has basically become a gay smut peddler (and GOD BLESS HIM), wins achievement awards and gains new fans of his work all the time. Will they read "Hogg" or "Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders"? No, and probably for the better. It's his science fiction that gets the attention, not the stuff that's more akin to Guyotat or Bataille or whatever.

This was two and half decades ago, so the current world-building boom of sf hadn’t quite heated up yet, but crime fiction already seemed to be treated pretty respectably, what with Black Lizard editions and film adaptations of Jim Thompson everywhere you looked, to name one concurrent indicator.

But now that I think of it, Chip Delaney was already getting some nice reissues at the time iirc.

yeah I think even within the genre in the 70s the vibe was "this guy is on a higher level"

Yeah, just proves the point even more.

He never distanced himself from the rest of sf. His critical writing on the subject speaks favorably of the same Golden Age and New Wave novels and writers that do well in ILX polls of the stuff. Not sure if this is related to what you are getting at, but his respectability also reinforced the respectability of the genre as a whole.

(poets follow form. if iambic pentameter is the most common stress pattern for your language--I am not sure this is true for any case considered--is it remarkable to write poetry that follows speech? yes?!)
(it gets painful to read the hospital scenes and reminds me of Thomas Mann and Tove Ditlevsen. who gets incarcerated? I am looking forward to trying to follow the LRB review and seeing if there is a comparable review in an American source and taking sides, like cheering for a baseball or football team when there are no stakes.)

Yeah, I said all that in response to Aimless above. Still doesn't make "because they didn't like the book" a satisfactory answer to "why didn't critics like this book", tho.

also of course genre fiction on one side and "truly pushing the envelope" on the other is a false dichotomy - plenty of sci fi writers work in experimental fiction, tho I grant you wouldn't know this from what gets pushed in mainstream outlets

Delany was in Glasgow a few years ago for this event:

https://arika.org.uk/beyond-transgression/

The audience was mostly young and queer and totally focused on Delany's sex radical writings - I don't think any of his SF stuff got a look-in, apart from Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (he gave a fantastic reading from that). So I guess one of the reasons that Delany still thrives as a public author/intellectual is that he has sustained different communities of readers, genre and non-genre, without negating one or the other, perhaps in a way that Mosley hasn't been able to. I mean I'm guessing Mosley's crime novels sold pretty well without ever crossing over to bestsellerdom, and there was a movie adaptation with Denzel Washington, but I seriously doubt that he's laughed his way to the same bank as more prolific, streamlined bestseller types like Grisham, Child, Patterson etc.

Very excited to start reading Devil House by John Darnielle.

the notion of people who are comfortably off by any normal metric remaining bent out of shape by a need for proper respect from people who likely aren't would seem to be a dominant theme of our age: they *should* be able to laugh all the way to the bank, and to log off and just be as happy as scrooge mcduck falling back into a bed of bank notes

but instead they anxiously and frantically refresh their TLs looking for glimpses of that sought-after respect but only ever find evidence of the opposite

(i don't want to project this onto mosley especially tho -- i know who he is but i've never read a word so i'm in no position to make this call)

"only ever find evidence of the opposite"

"only ever find evidence or imagined evidence of the opposite" <-- may be more accurate here

Just a note that I never said Delany distanced himself from SF, and as was guessed, I never said that SF and genre writing cannot push boundaries.

But if you look at mainstream literary fiction these days, especially the vast middle of the pack, there are a LOT of write-by-numbers novels that don’t do much that’s interesting at all. Oh, a ludicrous and unlikely character walks into a ludicrous and unlikely situation and with the help of another ludicrous and slightly different unlikely character undergoes a hero’s journey of some sort? This is most of what passes for literary novels these days, from my vantage point— it’s depressing.

As noted, I think poster table has been highly accurate on this particular topic.

My statement that maybe some readers did not like a given book was a restatement of table's commonsensical view. It was not a response to the question 'why didn't reader X like book Y?'. That would be tautological.

I think that status differences between literary and genre have been heavily rebalanced or altered - though there is still much nuance to be explored and stated there. Walk into a Waterstone's (a UK bookshop chain) and crime has its own room. But is that a ghetto of second-rated books, or is it actually the first thing you walk into, with literary fiction relegated behind it? This can vary. I went to a super independent bookshop in Ely recently, with all kinds of books, where crime was the primary thing when you walked into the shop, and SF / fantasy dominated the back room, and other fiction had to find its way amid them.

Literary mainstream authors have tried to write in genre-inflected modes (Ishiguro the evident example) - which plays into this topic, but doesn't in itself destroy the boundary between the fields.

One thing that has not been fully stated here is that many or most genre writers like being genre writers and are proud of being genre writers. They have had a strong sense of community for a long time. In the case of SF, this is at least since the 1930s when eg: there were multiple competing SF clubs in Brooklyn (cf discussions on other threads about Fred Pohl et al). Quite probably the same is true for crime, fantasy, Gothic, et al. Most genre writers, critics and fans have a very strong sense of the history and shape of the genre, its interconnections, main currents, alternate lines. Many of them would be puzzled or resistant if invited to be part of the literary mainstream, at least if it meant giving up that genre community of knowledge.

That's a good point in your final paragraph, pinefox— while people like Mosley and some other outliers exist, many who write in "genre" forms are quite proud of their genres and the communities there.

On a personal note, I am obviously quite happy to be a moderately successful "innovative" (or whatever) poet. I get paid to give readings and write articles about art and literature. The community is a big part of this— these are my people, a lot of them, and I care about them and the work that they're making. I am, in a way, proud of many of my friends and colleagues. It's small potatoes, but it's our potatoes the way we like them. It's pretty easy for me to see how this feeling extends to other forms and genres, even those that rank much higher on the popularity scale.

B-b-but what about the fellow who wrote a pocket novel called The State That I'm In? #onethread

Mark S was correct and perceptive to say that even people who should be laughing all the way to the bank also want status and respect and are frustrated not to get it. (Possibly he was thinking of Elon Musk.)

Yet my sense is that this has also been part of the rebalancing, so that eg: genre authors who are successful can also get to be treated seriously as sages with things to say. There must be scores of interviews with Walter Mosley (him again) that hang on his every word, and that wouldn't dream of not doing so because he's 'only a crime writer'. Same with eg: Val McDiarmid, Ian Rankin. When was the last time you saw anyone write or say 'This person is only a crime writer so the following interview with them or their comments on the week's cultural events should not be taken very seriously'? Never. They are virtually 'intellectuals' within UK culture.

True, there are instances like Dan Brown (whom I've never read) who make lots of money but are not respected intellectually - at least, not by the same people who respect Mosley and Delany. But take another example: George R.R. Martin (whom I've never read). Mainly a fantasy author as I understand it; vastly successful franchise; seems actually be taken seriously. Lanchester wrote about him in the LRB 10 years ago!

Where do you place someone like Alan Moore, pinefox?

I think he is hugely respected all round. Especially in a broader, sort of broadsheet cultural sphere where people only know him more vaguely.

I suspect, though, that people who are deeply immersed in comic book culture have more particularised and nuanced views of him eg: he hasn't been the same since 1990, his last series was an improvement, his second novel is better than his first, etc -- detailed and well-informed judgments that outsiders to the field wouldn't be able to make.

If the question is 'is he genre or mainstream, popular or artistic' then I think he seems a very good example of someone who has been able to have it both ways.

Sorry to interrupt, I've got a question for anyone knowledgable about the book industry:

I've read the first three books of the Yale University Press versions of In Search of Lost Time in paperback. The fourth was published in June of last year, in hardcover only. I've been waiting to see if it will be released in paperback, but now they've announced the fifth book for February on next year, also in hardcover only. Is it likely that they'll never release these later books in paperback?

It's really another thread at this point, not WHAT ARE YOU READING?, but -- my sense would be:

relations between genre(s) and mainstream have been restructured, for one reason or another, over a certain period (post-2000 at least, maybe a lot longer) -- but the effect has not been to erase boundaries and make everything a free for all. Rather, the visible boundaries are useful and are used by writers (as well as publishers, bookshops). To cross the boundary brings a kind of kudos, either way, but you need the boundary to stay visible for it to have effect. Ishiguro impressing (some) people (mainly mainstream readers, say) by apparently writing SF is again a standard instance. If SF no longer seemed separate then he couldn't produce that effect.

at the same time, the 'revolt of the genres' as though they are continually kept down by snooty mainstream people equally remains a strong rhetorical force, even though the actual rationale for it seems to have dissolved. Again it seems to be useful for everyone to have boundaries in place and in view against which they can make moves (like Bourdieu's 'position-taking in the cultural field', even, if you like), even though the number of times these moves are made would seem to invalidate the boundaries and some of the perceptions or hierarchies hitherto associated with them.

Poster Halfway, I cannot say (but just looked at Yale site), but it seems to me that a publisher would intend to be consistent and thus having released 3 in PB would release the others in PB also.

I can't keep up with editions of Proust. I made it 2/3 through the old Penguin (I think this is Terence Kilmartin?), mostly hating it; will probably never make it to try any of these other versions.

Meanwhile I return to Adichie's book of stories THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK (2009). The writing is very cool and clear. Never spectacular, never vague. Most of the action so far has been in Africa. A lot of reference has been made to African war and history and I think I'll need to delve into that to understand better. Class hierarchies, in the society described, seem strong. People (the protagonists in fact) have drivers and servants while others live in poorer conditions.

it seems to me that a publisher would intend to be consistent and thus having released 3 in PB would release the others in PB also.

Thanks pinefox, that's my thought also, but I have no idea if publishers wait more than 18 months to issue a paperback version of their titles, or if there had been a sudden shift in the industry that made hardcover the only viable format for such a book. I had been wondering if they were waiting for the centenary of Proust's death next week for a bit of extra publicity.

(I am interested in the constraints imposed by form and how writers work within those constraints. I think that is one advantage of writing a work of a known genre or form: the writer and the reader have agreed to rules for communication and it becomes a game to impress each other with what one can do to express and interpret those rules.)

(many XPs) Delany's magnum opus had a healthy amount of gay (and straight) sex in it. It just about exploded my adolescent brain the first time I read it.

there's a lot of kinky stuff in dhalgren too, and underage sex, it just about exploded my late twenty something brain the first time i read it tbh.

delany's kinks i can get behind in theory but man, fingernails, nope not erogenous for me.

nest of spiders is like neverending slash fic written by a good writer who is into the raunchy stuff, it's fun.

Yeah, Dhalgren was the one I meant. What an amazing work, and not just for the sex. It was for me kind of what Steve Jobs described LSD as being for him: an experience that opened up his mind to seeing the world differently.

It should be considered considerably bad form to exploit reactions to win critical approval and the audience should not cater to the writer past the age when such sentiments are innocently expressed.

as usual i'm not reading anything right now, waiting for something promising to present itself. i tried with wolf hall after mantel died but it's too much of an adventure novel for my taste. season of migration to the north is the last amazing thing i read and i want something that is that good. i tried a few pages of dennis cooper, not for me, not now, i'm too soft. i think i want to continue reading authors on the colonized side of colonialism, chinua achebe maybe? but also i want queer subject matter but also i want characters who are shaped by trauma. i should go to the library and ask a librarian!

xp oh i think about dhalgren all the time. it's sort of become a lodestone for me when it comes to thinking about what my internal experience of a dystopic future. i really, really love and hold dear its dissection of and dismissal of the nuclear family.

sloppy typing but the gist is there

I read Angela Carter's very short story 'Werewolf'. It would be worth directly comparing it with a Grimm original of 'Little Red Riding Hood' to see how she changed the elements. Because I can no longer entirely remember the story of Red Riding Hood. In Carter's story I quite like the way she sets the scene of a cold Northern land full of superstition - the land whence fairy tales come, and also where this tale then occurs.

i think i want to continue reading authors on the colonized side of colonialism, chinua achebe maybe? but also i want queer subject matter but also i want characters who are shaped by trauma.

They're too young to have experienced real deal colonialism like Achebe, but Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater certainly ticks the other two boxes you were talking about.

... maybe have a look at Fiston Mwanza Mujila also? I read Tram 83 and recall being somewhat confused and very impressed, though I'm afraid I can't remember much about it now

Reading The Karamazov Brothers once again (the Avsey translation). The Godfather discussion a few days ago got me thinking about this book and made me want to go back to it. I don't think there's any other book that gives me the same raw emotion.

I finish the PARIS REVIEW 1961 interview with Robert Lowell. It contains a lot of waffle and name-dropping, and some material that could possibly be useful or relevant about writing in poetic forms. It's slightly interesting for instance that Lowell says that when reading poems regularly in public he rewrote them to make them simpler and more direct.

But, a) it contains the surprising statement from Lowell that fascism was a good thing for Ezra Pound, because it made him down to earth and engaged with history, rather than an aesthete. Those might be good things to be, but is fascism worthwhile as a way to reach them? Lowell literally says Pound's views, including fascism, 'were a tremendous gain to him' and helped to bring 'realism and life' to his poetry.

b) Much more broadly in this long interview what I notice is that Lowell says almost nothing about what his own poetry is about, or why he ever felt inspired to write it. On the last page he does finally talk about trying to render an experience into a poem, and how it comes out indirectly in a detail. But I find it fairly absurd that in a detailed 35-page interview you learn almost nothing about what this poet wrote about or what experience or feeling or belief ever made him want to write a poem. The main exception is something about Christianity, but he airily says that he doesn't know whether his poems are religious or not, which makes me think: if you don't, well, nobody else does.

Another example of Lowell's airy grandeur is his declaration that T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost are, "certainly", "the great New England poets". Now firstly this is banal because Eliot and Frost were practically the best known poets in the world at the time, so he's not having to work very hard to name them. It's like saying "Certainly, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are now the major Democratic politicians." Secondly, if you think about it, you wonder if it's even true of Eliot - who was from Missouri and who in London was known as "Tom (Missouri) Eliot", who lived in Paris and Oxford, who became one of the great London poets (certainly his most famous poem is not about New England) and more English than the English, and who in the Four Quartets writes most obviously about three English places (and one off the coast of MA, true). Well, you can kick it around and argue that TSE (who did spend some significant time in New England, yes) really was very New England (you can certainly say that most of the first book had New England settings in mind), and people will agree, but it's not a great argument to win given the banality aspect noted above.

That's a digression I admit. Mostly I wish the interviewer would, rather than chattily ask about this or that dropped name, ask what some of Lowell's actual poems are about and try to establish why they might be worth reading.

Maybe he caught on that they’re not worth reading at all, which is the correct opinion afaic

Despite my jest, I will say that Stevens is certainly more a New England poet that Eliot ever was— Stevens is practically the first person I think of when I think of New England poetry

But Lowell was probably jealous that Stevens was nine million times the poet he would ever be :-D

Lowell actually says:

"You hardly think of Stevens as New England, but you have to think of Eliot and Frost as deeply New England and puritanical."

it contains the surprising statement from Lowell that fascism was a good thing for Ezra Pound, because it made him down to earth and engaged with history, rather than an aesthete. Those might be good things to be, but is fascism worthwhile as a way to reach them? Lowell literally says Pound's views, including fascism, 'were a tremendous gain to him' and helped to bring 'realism and life' to his poetry.

I agree with you that even if he had acquired these qualities through becoming a fascist that would not be a net gain (lol), but this also seems to me like Lowell has no idea what fascism is? It's a cliché by now to call it the aestheticization of politics; certainly there is nothing at all down to earth about ethno-nationalist heroic narratives of the Ubermensch.

i have no brief for lowell -- the times i've tried to read him have not been rewarding! -- but is the hidden stress in that sentence maybe on "puritanical" (with new england as a shorthand for that), making this a cryptic comment on his own poetry (he's robert traill spence lowell IV, of the boston lowells who came over on the mayflower = as new england as you get?)

robert traill mixx lowell IV

The River of Rivers in Connecticut
by Wallace Stevens
There is a great river this side of Stygia
Before one comes to the first black cataracts
And trees that lack the intelligence of trees.

In that river, far this side of Stygia,
The mere flowing of the water is a gayety,
Flashing and flashing in the sun. On its banks,

No shadow walks. The river is fateful,
Like the last one. But there is no ferryman.
He could not bend against its propelling force.

It is not to be seen beneath the appearances
That tell of it. The steeple at Farmington
Stands glistening and Haddam shines and sways.

It is the third commonness with light and air,
A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction . . .
Call it, one more, a river, an unnamed flowing,

Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore
Of each of the senses; call it, again and again,
The river that flows nowhere, like a sea.

stevens does not strike me as puritanical but others here surely know his work much better

He resides in a Connecticut of the mind. People exist as muses and intimations.

Mark S: I agree that 'puritanical' is a key word, but what does it mean in relation to Eliot?

The truth is surely that in relation to Eliot, it has its most banal meaning - the thing that everyone would casually think puritanical means - that is: a fear and suspicion of sexuality.

It is arguable that this is present in TSE's most famous poem. Arguable also that it was present in his life, though that's another matter.

But is that really what Lowell meant to say: that TSE was prudish and fearful of / revolted by sex? If so, it has an element of truth, but it's a strange way to praise someone for being from New England.

Or did Lowell really mean to say something else about Eliot, by this word? If so, I don't know what it was.

yes i agree it doesn't open things up very much at all, and that many readers will likely reach for the least testing meaning -- tho i'm guessing a boston new englander might have more complex references for it, including even some positive ones? as much as anything it's a religion-based philosophy (what should you do? how are you saved?) and eliot was both religious and philosophical…

the interviewer should have asked him what he meant the word! (i haven't read the interview so i'm just parsing that point) (instead of getting down to my own work)

The interviewer should have asked him a lot of things. A poor job.

I agree that Lowell probably did, indeed, mean it positively, as you say. But again, TSE was not from New England, and was not a puritan - he was raised as a Mid-Western Unitarian and then became an Anglo-Catholic in London. To say he was a New England puritan seems something of a fiction.

I think I should partially withdraw my last statement, as Unitarianism could perhaps be called a form of puritanism.

well i think he's making a provocative rather than a factual claim: TSE is the most "new england" of poets – despite largely being from elsewhere – bcz to be a puritan is above all to be "new england" and TSE was above all a puritan. what did he mean by this tho? we do not find out (bcz the joke or the trolling or whatever it is went over the interviewer's head, and requires ilx to tease it out)

That seems a good reading. The point of the statement is that TSE is "very New England" despite not being from New England.

(he's robert traill spence lowell IV, of the boston lowells who came over on the mayflower = as new england as you get?)

Anthony Powell, almost certainly well aware of Lowell's family lineage, used to say that his own surname should be pronounced in just the same way as Lowell's (ie not to rhyme with 'towel').

Caroline Blackwood the most interesting writer in the whole Lowell 'set', imho.

brb developing a hilarious internet meta-joek in which they're pronounced poo-ell and loo-ell and also instead of boo-ie it's boo-urns

I did try to read Lowell 14 years ago. It was a struggle and unrewarding - just as Mark S has said. I seem to have got almost nothing out of them.

Can anyone who remembers tell me, or us, what (some of?) Lowell's poems are about?

Yeah, if Lowell meant puritanical and/or Brahmin related, then Stevens could not count, as he had to actually work for a living (horrors!) in the most dreary of professions, too.

mark s and the pinefox, he wrote what I would call historical confessional works that mostly involved the relation of the self to history as perceived in the present. “For the Union Dead” is an emblematic poem— blank verse, the intrusion of modernity and the (here literal) excavation of history, the way personal memory imbues a place with a certain subjective personal history as adjunct to objective history, a healthy dose of racism.

https://poets.org/poem/union-dead

I should say, i just woke up so “blank verse” not the term as it’s usually utilized— I meant free verse.

He wrote one poem that I love unreservedly— otherwise, meh.

But is that really what Lowell meant to say: that TSE was prudish and fearful of / revolted by sex? If so, it has an element of truth, but it's a strange way to praise someone for being from New England.

This made me laugh out loud.

His dense Tate/Eliot-indebted early work is about the only Lowell I can stand.

He lived in a tent on Allen Tate's lawn!

the only kind of influence i recognise

Poster table, thanks for your description of Lowell's work. This is helpful and clear. Apart from the racism, you do not make the poetry sound bad.

Caroline Blackwood the most interesting writer in the whole Lowell 'set', imho.

Hardwick. I like Blackwood too.

Hardwick's criticism, her fiction not so much.

Lowell really loved the "n" word, among the reasons why I dislike him tbh.

Trust was a fitting title as far as the first book because it calls into question the basis of finance and common knowledge (and presuppositions about behavior and mutual ties and obligation). When something is backed by nothing other than trust, what happens?

So did Tate. Cal learns from masters. xpost

"During Fever" by Lowell (thanks ILX for restarting my interest in poetry)

Blackwood, Hardwick, Stafford: excellent literary taste in choosing his abused wives (note related imagery of names too)

Now into the second book about Bevel, I am thinking that this novel reminds me of Buddenbrooks and Thomas Mann in general when it seemed possible to associate business with goodness and solidity that later dissipated into anxiety and fret manifest as care about linens. Wealth buys freedom from care which can turn into freedom from responsibility which I see can engender resentment. The ideal middle class would be exempt from privilege and want and be sympathetic to expansion (i.e., sociable or socially minded if introverted).

There are also strange ideas about (women and) health and frailty perhaps labeled Victorian or hypochondriac or melancholic.

I picked up a book that I got as a gift, Clark Coolidge’s “This Time We Are Both,” written in 1989 when he accompanied the ROVA Saxophone Quartet on their album tour of the same name in the USSR. It was published in 2015 by Ugly Duckling Presse.

Among the qualities I admire in Coolidge is that one has to re-learn how to read him with every book, and this book no different. It took me two sections to understand and flow with his basic strategy, which involves interrogatives answered by seeming non-sequiturs that eventually wind their way back to the question at hand. There are a lot of references to jazz, of course, as well as what was obvious even then as an eventual collapse of the Union. Super interesting and rhythmically complex book, the latter being a hallmark of Coolidge’s poems, as he is/was a jazz drummer.

I am glad there was more to Trust. I need to read the last book again with a piano around, even though I am probably tone deaf.

Regarding Lowell, or more generally, I am not sure if a line by line reading expands or constricts interpretation.

Christina Stead - The Man Who Loved Children.

Nearly finishing this novel (discussed around it a bit here: Like the 20th Century Never Happened), its a memoir of sorts from Stead -- who grew up with a step mother and had many step brothers and sisters -- and writes so well about the chaos in her early life. My first book by her and I hope to read a couple more.

I envy you. Read I'm Dying Laughing next.

Picked up Hazel Rowen's Christina Stead: A Biography at the library to give it the totally unfair Random Read Test, and was immediately pulled into Stead & hubbie's international escape from his prosecution for financial shenanigans, also description of her father as inspiration for The Man Who Loved Children: he wrote letters to his offspring and their pals in Uncle Remus "dialect" and signed off as "The King of the Kids"---also resented, challenged Christina for doing well in high school, like she was going above her raising/his level---on the other hand, was a pioneering polemicist, pushing his fellow Australian adults toward recognition of their environmental despoilation---a hundred-odd years ago.

Speaking of Hardwick, did yall read that New Yorker excerpt from Darryl Pinckney's forthingcoming memoir, here recalling his relationship with her, student/teacher/friends? Also scandalizing her some of her older white friends when they were seen in public together, going somewhere for actual recreation, enjoyment of an occasion, rather than tucked away working, or her out alone, trudging to or from the classroom, and no doubt still pining for the evil Lowell, poor thing. In Pinckney's take, she was taken for an interracial cougar (though he's gay, and they were taking a break from writing-critiquing). Not much she says here about writing tells me anything I didn't know, but she's a compelling presence---can't wait to see what else he says about her and others. Are his other books good?

The Man Who Loved Children is so extraordinary. Sam Pollit is like the inverse of Livia Soprano, inasmuch as he works against that dictum that whoever created the character must have really hated them. He continues to inhabit the outer rim of my imagination (for good, for ill). And hell, that closing section, with the line I have gone for a walk around the world. Take me with you.

A formal exercise for playwrights or copy editors if they ever had to line up as candidate typists and stenographers for job interviews as in Trust: screen or stage play of advertising copy lines as in Pierrot Le Fou or Ubik with extra points for penny magazine copy, obscure local dailies, etc. and imperceptibility / plausibility

Not sure whether to give up Vigdis Hjorth. Why does Norwegian literature seem state funded (not propagandist)? Started Crying in H Mart while deciding whether or not to continue.

I read my fourth Ross Macdonald: THE GALTON CASE (1959). My first in the 2012 Penguin reissue series (which only comprised a few). I can see why it merited that. It's probably as good as any of the other 3 I've read so far. The usual qualities: crisp dialogue, crisp thought and observation, large cast of minor characters, terrifically intricate plot, poetic flashes of description. This one has the additional theme of identity, whether a character is who he is said to be, making it slightly more uncanny.

I omitted to mention that this novel has a strong literary undercurrent. Eliot and Rimbaud are mentioned; Macdonald includes a whole poem, which seems to have been his own youthful work, repurposed; Lew Archer attends a San Francisco poetry club and hears a long Beat poem which is superbly rendered. Pynchon hardly did these things better. One passage even remarkably seems to invoke a discussion at the very start of Ulysses. The resemblance is so great that I suspect that it was conscious, but that Macdonald didn't require or especially expect readers to see it.

McDonald writes terrific, unusual endings - usually the worst part of a whodunnit. I love the "last place at the end of the world" feeling when The Galton Case changes location in the last few chapters. And in The Chill - the abrupt ending is incredible.

I think what was disturbing in Trust was the idea that booms and busts could have been engineered beforehand. This feeling of insecurity and powerlessness also pervades modern notions of privacy and security and undermines other forms of agency, to which one should respond somehow?!?!

(to rub it in by someone who didn't know what he was doing and incarcerated his wife until she could no longer provide market tips)

which may be a fanciful idea in the first place but just contributes to the sense of being completely unmoored from "reality"

All that is in there?! Got to take a look at that book.

I recently finished a book which I believe would fall into the category of detective fiction as discussed by Pinefox earlier in the thread, To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciasci...the detective story is inseparable from the milieu of Sicily in which it take place, a place where it is generally accepted that it doesn't pay to stick one's nose in where it doesn't belong. The protagonist of To Each His Own is a professor of literature and a somewhat unworldly man, more comfortable with books than with the confusing motives and passions of the people living in his town. This being a detective story, a murder has taken place -- actually two murders -- and the professor gets drawn in, somewhat reluctantly, by his acquaintance with the victims (it's a small town) and his belief that the police are underestimating the import of a clue. His motive is not one of justice -- he doesn't seem to care very much if the murderer is caught -- but rather intellectual curiosity. An "obscure pride" prevents him from confiding in the police. There is an evocative passage: "At play in this obscure pride were the centuries of contempt that an oppressed people, an eternally vanquished people, had heaped on the law and all those who were its instruments; a conviction, still unquenched, held that the highest right and the truest justice, if one really cares about it, if one is not prepared to entrust its execution to fate or to God, can come only from the barrels of a gun." This view seems to fly in the face of the "conservative" streak that is supposed to run through detective fiction as a form.

― o. nate, Saturday, October 8, 2022

You don't call the cops.

Rereading Don DeLillo, WHITE NOISE (1985).

Isn't that a Spillane thing too? Don't know how many other crime novelists go that way, but some people call it conservatism, deep tradition---

Think that's a false equivalence: the Spillane mode suggests cops are useless because they've been tied down by red tape and are unable to go on glorious murdering sprees of the criminal element. Sciasi sees the police as part of a fundamentally rotten, authoritarian system. They both view the police as corrupt, so there's overlap, but it's not really the same thing.

You don't call the cops.

"'Why don’t they go to the police?' I’ve always replied, 'They don’t go to the police because it’s dull.'" - Alfred Hitchcock

Wallace Stegner - Crossing to Safety.

So he is still read after all!

Thanks to the thread.

:)

I re-read Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways. I liked it more the second time around. It's probably the weakest of Macfarlane's books, mostly because it fails to cohere. The framing device is something like 'how we might configure knowledge of the self through exploration of outer landscapes', via a biographical reading of Edward Thomas. But Thomas is akin to Peter Matthiesen's snow leopard: elusive, ghostly, always out of sight along a chalk track, beyond the next range or peak. Unlike Matthiesen's book, the psychological aspect isn't developed enough, and with the protagonist remaining spectral, it can't carry the narrative, the book becoming a series of (beautifully wrought) descriptions in search of a unifying theme. For all that, I could honestly read Macfarlane on landscape all day.

When I read Macfarlane, I think of a couple of things: Kathleen Jamie's waspish comment about the 'lone, enraptured male, come to save us from ourselves' and Nietzsche's comment that earnestness is the 'sure sign of the slow mind'. He is undoubtedly the former but believes so strongly in his subject, and writes so precisely and with such a grasp of the specialist vocabularies he employs, that I find myself transported by him. The latter, well possibly: earnest, yes; slow-minded? Nah. And like Nietzsche wasn't earnest.

the Spillane mode suggests cops are useless because they've been tied down by red tape and are unable to go on glorious murdering sprees of the criminal element. Sciasi sees the police as part of a fundamentally rotten, authoritarian system. They both view the police as corrupt, so there's overlap, but it's not really the same thing.

Close enough Although I'm saying that w/o having read Sciasi's novel, which I really gotta.

Wallace Stegner - Crossing to Safety.

Love this book. An overdue for a reread. First Stegner I read and led to a handful of his other books.

Got my mom two Sciasci books for her birthday— will have to ask her about her experience, I have never read him.

I read “The Big Rock Candy Mountain “ by Stegner about 8 years ago and thought it was great!

Love this book. An overdue for a reread. First Stegner I read and led to a handful of his other books.

― the body of a spider... (scampering alpaca),

I couldn't, alas. Its lace-doily lyricism and its subject were inseparable, and by the end the thing unraveled in my hands. My impatience with novels about academics was part of the problem, I'll admit.

barbara tuchman - the guns of august

eating this up

good book

I continue to reread WHITE NOISE.

The American mystery deepens.

dow I really don't think it is close enough when one perspective is about wanting the cops to not be fascists and the other is about wanting them to be more fascist, but I guess this is more a political argument than a literary one

I was thinking in terms of results: that you try to deal with it, however extreme your methods might seem to some, like the reader, without calling the cops, not trusting them for whatever reasons, but the reasons, like the methods, can make a significant difference---anyway, since I haven't read the book and am far from an expert on crime fiction, I'll shut up about it.

This particular book is not really about taking the law into your own hands. The protagonist gets involved mainly it seems out of curiosity, and expresses many times that he has no particular interest in seeing justice being done. But there is also a beautiful woman involved, and he ends up getting drawn in further than he had intended, for reasons that have nothing to do with justice or vengeance.

I eventually crawled my way through Never Cry Wolf. I've just come down with a rip-roaring head cold. I wasn't planning on reading anything very demanding anyway, but this clinched the matter. I am now slowly re-reading The Letter of Marque, Patrick O'Brian. It's the twelfth book in the twenty book Aubrey/Maturin series of naval tales, all set during the Napoleonic Wars.

Haven't read Never Cry Wolf since they assigned it to us in the 9th grade. Worth revisiting?

It's def well-crafted, though rather slight. Mowat knows what makes for good storytelling and this tale sold hundreds of thousands copies (over a million?) so it has a basic appeal as infotainment. If you have a vaguely fond memory of your first reading, and no better prospects in sight, sure, it's worth revisiting.

The second to last story in that Mosley shirt story collection ties in to the debate on here some days ago directly - it is a ghost story, written from the perspective of an unpublished author haunting the editor of the literary magazine that kept rejecting him (not in a deliberate way; the idea is that his hatred of him keeps his presence about, through no effort of his own). Not sure that we're supposed to side with the protagonist entirely - the prose feels overwritten in a way the other stories in the collection aren't, which might suggest we're supposed to understand he's just a bad writer - but I was also interested in the idea that, while his stories do get rejected for being "genre fiction", the editor also says they are "neither fish nor fowl", so perhaps they would get rejected as too literary by genre mags?

Anyway, now I'm on to The Plotters by Kim Un-su, which is much more the straightforward Noirvember read I wanted: hitmen doing long aching sentimental monologues, gangsters grumbling about new gangs coming into town, late capitalism grinding everyone down.

Both of those sounding good, thanks. For those who want something that is fish and fowl, the jacket flap of Colson Whitehead's Zone One promises literary satisfaction x pulp gratification; book deliverahs. Narrator is one of many zombie hunters, hired to clean out some choice Manhattan commercial properties, cause we just know this pandemic's winding down. Zombie professionals still go to their offices and wait for zombie clients; habit is key in this environment, incl. for narrator, who remembers for instance holiday meals with his (now exterminated zombie) parents at this cafeteria.
His recent crime novel is said to be good this way too; reviewers' descriptions make me think of Chester Himes.

I just got a Le Carré Smiley collection and enjoying it very much. So far I've read Call For The Dead and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

Both great! I enjoy the former most.

Sand, The End of the French Intellectual
Hossenfelder, Existential Physics
Bullough, Butler to the World

Scott Ellsworth The Ground Breaking
This was actually less about the massacre which it covers in a couple of chapters and more about the long process of getting the story out. The author had been working on the story as a University project and going down a massive rabbit hole in doing so. The story of the riot/massacre had been treated as something nobody could talk about for decades before he did the research which uncovered a load of things people, largely white would have rather kept silent. This eventually wound up with a local committee to look into the event and a number of other books on the subject. Initially things were also covered in a more sensationalist way by a couple fo different outlets too.
Investigation into what had happened to a load of dead bodies was started but then stopped and put to rest for a couple more decades.
Very interesting book but i think it leaves me needing to read his earlier book still and possible a few of the others he mentions. Earlier book looks at the event itself with more focus but there has been more information uncovered in the interim. He had done a lot of interviews with survivors in the preparation of that book and knows even more now.
For some reason he mentions the Watchmen tv series being one place people came across the story but says nothing about Lovecraft Country which I thought also touched on it at around the same time.

I finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK (2009), at last. Short stories. I'm afraid that I ultimately wasn't very impressed. I kept hoping this book would get better, that the next story would show something more. But the style remained simple and plain throughout (that's OK, it's better that she writes clearly than overreaching and becoming pretentious), and the attitudes and moods remain the same ... a kind of passive-aggressiveness maybe (though I may not be using that phrase properly).

She writes about the same sorts of things over and over - basically, a Nigerian woman going to the US - so it makes a good change when she does vary it and writes about eg: an elderly Nigerian professor in Nigeria ('Ghosts'). Here she seems to be pushing herself more and I'm more impressed. The final story 'The Headstrong Historian' has the same kind of ... maybe faux-naif implicit polemic, as other stories do, but it's distinguished by taking place in an earlier historical period (mainly late C19?).

The story 'Jumping Monkey Hill' also stands out a bit. It has much of the same mood and voice as the others, but it's about (African) literature, set in a creative writing retreat, so has a certain meta-literary interest.

(One other earthquake worthy faultline in the strategy of the 1% to buy immunity from conscience or insulation from unpleasantness is not being able to foresee what will cause torment.)

Pat Califia - Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex (1994)

Loved this essay collection from the writer on queer politics of the 80s and early 90s. Essays on AIDS (including one on how the epidemic played out in the Lesbian community), the antiporn movement (with some v sharp words on the feminists of the time), with the final piece on sex work. There was some nuance on this that I would never picked it up if I hadn't read 10000 tweets from activists on twitter over the years. Really grateful that I was just able to absorb a bit more.

Strangely enough there was almost nothing on the trans community (he transitioned a few years after this was published).

I'm just finishing up The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler. Aside from Chandler's prose flourishes, which are usually quite witty and entertaining, the main interest for me is comparing the original narrative to the version Howard Hawks adapted for the film. Hawks stayed close to the original about 90% of the time, but his divergences are revealing. Mainly, Hawks enlarged Bacall's part, but there are other small choices that speak well to Hawks' sense of what the audience would feel was more 'just'.

A Band of Misfits - Tales of the 2010 San Francisco Giants

I mentioned in my baseball threadhow this was one of the first baseball books I started reading - it was actually through insomnia late at night and reading the previewed pages on Google books til it turned up.

The team has a great story - they were a mix of young aces, some hypertalented rookies (Posey! Bumgarner!) and some castoffs who brought the first WS title to the team since they moved to San Franscisco. You can feel the team's affection for each other and the camaraderie pouring out of the clubhouse and onto the page with small details like this:

On Opening Night in Houston, Lincecum spent the early part of his day tshirt shopping at a mall. He picked up shirts for a bunch of his teammates including one for Aubrey Huff. He knew Huff was a huge fan of the cartoon series Transformers as a kid - so much so that Huff had huge Autobot and Decepticon logos tattooed on each shoulder blade.
"Aubrey, catch," Lincecum said, throwing him a shirt. "Thanks," said Huff, who reached in his locker and held up an identical one. He'd gone shopping at the same store.

He doesn't shy away from opening paragraphs like this:

Nobody wanted them.

Aubrey Huff's phone had been silent all winter. Another team paid Pat Burrell to disappear. Cody Ross was given away. Andres Torres and Juan Uribe arrived as minor league free agents.

This is the real torture baseball team, with stretches of games won by one run and huge dependency on the starting rotation. Luckily they pulled it together to make the postseason and the rest is history. I've read about the 2014 WS and the way Bumgarner (also a part of this rotation) dragged that whole team forward, but I don't think the guy ever got it as bad as prime years Cain, who got absolutely fucked by the lack of run support more than any other starting pitcher, to the extent they called a one-run loss "getting Cained."

Because Baggarly was a beat reporter, he spent many, many hours in the clubhouses and on the road with the team, getting stories like Lincecum getting sonned by the Barrys in his rookie year over missing a flight. It was for me an interesting insight into the team's culture because even a team made up of characters is fiercely disciplined and often players take this task on to keep each other in line:

The Giants had a 10.30 wheels-up time to Cincinnati. Lincecum, who had been in the big leagues only three months, thought the team was meeting at the ballpark at 10.30. He slept in, then got to the clubhouse and knew something was wrong...No game was scheduled that day so no real harm was done - except for the $800 fare that came out of Lincecum's pocket.

But it caused a stir in the Giants clubhouse. As the bus rolled away without Lincecum, Zito took charge. "I said, 'By a show of hands, how many of you guys have missed a flight in your career?'" Zito said. "And it was just, you know, crickets. So Timmy had to do a little self-preservation on that one." Barry Bonds, of all people, called a meeting the next day and got in the rookie's face. "Are you kidding me, Timmy?" said Bonds, in front of the whole team. "This is ridiculous." Then he practically pinned a copy of the itinerary to Lincecum's chest. “Dude, I don't want this thing to leave your fricking sight the entire trip,” Bonds said.

When the road trip continued to St Louis, Lincecum was ordered to carry all the veterans' luggage up to their rooms. He was given one brass cart to do the job.The team walked into the lobby after midnight. Lincecum wasn't finished until close to 3.00am,
Lincecum fumed. But, as infielder Rich Aurilia said much later, "He hasn't missed another flight, has he?"

Baggarly writes with great affection for this team, and the city's love for them, and how the team was seen to reciprocate this. They had heritage nights for various groups and they even had an ad for season tickets following the 2010 WS parade where Lincecum mentions a fan in the crowd wearing leather chaps, which is about as blatantly fanservicey as I can imagine a deeply conservative sport getting towards its home city. (My 2022 eyes cringe at Cody Ross having the followup line to that, he's almost as bad as Huff nowadays.)

In summary: a very affectionate book compiled from millions of notes over the course of this historic season, with chapters on most of the players and plenty of background detail. This is what got me into watching old baseball games in the first place, I wanted to read about this postseason and honestly? Book (and team) delivers.

Moneyball - Michael Lewis

This is another highly granular story of a team, the neighbours across the Bay in fact, but this one doesn't censor its curses and it isn't shy of making its major players sound bad. (Not that Baggarly really does this, but you can sense Lewis's glee every time Billy Beane paces or breaks something.)

Anyway, HIGHLY entertaining. The various trading scenes where Billy Beane is running around on the phone like a hyped-up carlessHarry Redknapp character trying to insert himself into the middle of other teams' trades to squeeze out a minor league player or a few thousand dollars are hysterical. The various players we get covered in detail - Jeremy Brown, I felt so bad for this guy - are done with affection but also brutal in how candid they are, and you can imagine people described in some of these scenes cringing at the way they are portrayed.

I can recognise that a lot of the thinking behind this book is now considered dated or not applicable. But I was genuinely shocked at the FIP statistic being invented during the process of this book, because even starting to watch baseball games, I would think "but why does the pitcher have to wear the loss cos an outfielder fucked up a catch?" But baseball is a game very married to its traditions, and this whole book is very much About That. Hugely enjoyable. I read it in about three hours.

I returned to / skimmed / reread parts of Patricia Highsmith's THE GLASS CELL (1964), mentioned before. Such a remarkable book - in describing such extreme personal events with such plainness, never seeming shocked by anything. Nothing flowery either, scarcely any metaphor in the whole novel. Just the protagonist reacting to and thinking about things. His moment by moment reactions to things that people say are so superbly perceived and rendered by the author. The whole novel could be said to invert other kinds of crime fiction - in that it starts with the innocent protagonist in prison, then he gets out and commits a crime, then a detective fails to convict him; a reversal of a paradigm.

I’m also reading a Highsmith currently, The Blunderer.

gyac – have you read the Bullpen Gospels?

great post gyac

Big Sleep (the movie) definitely improves on Big Sleep (the book) - the bookstore scene! The Long Goodbye (the book) is Chandler’s masterpiece and imo even the Altman movie doesn’t better it (although they’re almost entirely different stories).

(Xposts)

gyac – have you read the Bullpen Gospels?

There are two different versions of The Big Sleep (film) in circulation

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038355/alternateversions

Also of course the Michael Winner masterpiece.

Back on Charles J. Rzepka, DETECTIVE FICTION (2005) - a book I've used before and the best book about the genre I've ever read.

Loads of material, often good judgments, clear and lively writing. Also a first chapter which digs into the profound questions of detection narrative, the way it moves backwards in moving forwards (cf Todorov, Brooks), and a second on the rise of science, history and psychology as intellectual bases for the genre. Such a sophisticated, substantial, yet brisk and readable book.

I can't be so bothered with C18 Newgate writing, though, and am inclined to skip to the detailed account of Poe's 1840s stories. I've come to realise that it's curious how Poe sort of founded a genre, but in such an offhand, haphazard, eccentric way.

Agreed, pinefox. The solution to the mystery of Rue Morgue is def not, erhm, the most solid blueprint for the whodunnits to come.

I have not - should I?!

Ty, ob!

if you like the clubhouse culture stuff, i'd highly recommend. "Out Of My League" is good too, but I liked Hayhurst's first book the best.

I read Geoff Dyer's *Paris Trance* and enjoyed it. It's the first of Dyer's fiction I've read but, as suspected, fiction only loosely describes what Dyer is doing.

Everything is covered with a sheen of irony: the classic Dyer armour, which, if I were being a cynic, he wears to avoid being accused of ever actually meaning anything. That title. The fact that it's based on *Tender is the Night*, basing the story around two couples falling in love; it quotes directly from *The Sun Also Rises* but in a deliberately banal way. It doesn't really have a plot. It plays fast and loose with narrative perspective - the 'we' is sometimes a direct character perspective, sometimes like an emanation from the entwined relationships.

For all that, it's affecting, the sex is great and it moves to a conclusion that is dislocating and weirdly Ballardian in its disassociation - of self and landscape, of time and place.

Now reading Jacquetta Hawkes' *A Land*. It's a book I've had for a long time but have decided to give it a go as part of my (poor attempt at) deliberately avoiding reading anything associated with JB Priestley. Hawkes was Priestley's second wife and a fundamental part of his move late in life towards Jungian mysticism. They authored a bunch of books together. Hawkes wrote a huge amount; was the first woman to study the Archaeology & Anthropology degree course at the University of Cambridge.

This book is broadly landscape mysticism I guess, tracing the geological and archaeological history of Britain. She starts from her home in North London and moves inwards, outwards, backwards - spanning epochs and genealogies to arrive, well, I'm not sure where. It's more literary than scientific, though the science is sound (for the time) and shows obvious deep learning. It's weird and I'm enjoying it.

Why are you attempting to avoid reading anything associated with JB Priestley?

And if you are attempting this, why are you reading a book by his wife?

I'm being daft. I have to teach Priestley and, outside of the necessary knowledge to teach, have always thought him stuffy and not worth bothering with. A bit of other contextual reading has led me to read a couple of memoirs and a novel and, as with most things, I was wrong - he's good company, a decent novelist and an interesting character.

She sounds a bit like Annie Dillard

Aye, fair comparison. Albeit, Hawkes doesn't achieve that almost psychedelic pitch of transcendence that Dillard reaches.

Helen DeWitt - The English Understand Wool.

Forgot I read this a few nights ago, but it is only about 60 pages. Delightful!

"I have to teach Priestley" - interesting - in what context? Multiple classes or lectures about Priestley? Sounds unusual.

I’ll have to find a book of hers, Chinaski.

I finished Jean Day’s new book, ‘The Night Before the Day on Which,’ which shows the continuing turn toward a more legible lyric that Day’s work has taken over the years. There’s still a fair amount of parataxis and strangeness, but the poems feel more grounded and precise in the concreteness of their images. Excellent book, she remains a favorite.

I also had a sudden urge to read John Wieners, so reread the posthumous ‘a book of PROPHECIES’ yesterday. His poverty and instability shown through more on this read than my previous, but as expected, so did his genius.

Maggie O'Farrell - Hamnet
Tom Breihan - The Number Ones

I teach secondary English at a state comprehensive, pinefox, where *An Inspector Calls* is still canon. In truth, I don't need 'more' Priestley to teach the text at all, but I always like to have a wider sense of an author in the (erroneous I'm sure) belief that it thickens the texture of my teaching and, well, for my own sanity.

richard osman : THE BULLET THAT MISSED. really enjoy his books even though none of the characters are even slightly believable.

Deniable Contact Niall o Dochartaigh
Book by a lecturer at local university that I saw a talk by during the Druid's Ball exhibition. It's about back channel communication attempting to create peace during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. & the reasons why this failed. The British stablishment only pretending to take the IRA seriously for one thing and wanting to maintain control etc.
Quite interesting and unfortunately this seems to be the one copy of the book that is allowed to be lent out in the Irish library system. It's am academic press book so I think buying a copy would be expensive.
Wanted to read it after seeing the talk to get a better grounding. Worthwhile read anyway.

The narrator of Graham Greene'sThe End of The Affair is a novelist who can't see his way to the end of anything, and eventually thinks of his characters who refuse to respond to their creator's touch, who have to be tortured into coming alive (often the ones that reviewers cite as the "best-drawn," which he associates with "drawn and quartered" etc.). He wonders if this is what God is doing to him, if there is a God, or is there just a sudden pile-up of coincidence? There's no way to know, of course---why do ya think they call if faith, brother-man?--but I found myself upset as well, thinking that Greene was coming to rely way too much on this gmmicky spirtual melodrama as 4th Quarter play. Now, on rewind, the particulars of these truly shady events become more recognizable for their inferably comic qualities: the stubborn one is getting a whoopee cushion, a hotfoot, a radio in the bathtub, unplugged before too much damage---or did the cord just come out of the outlet, aieee (the particulars aren't in such broad strokes; Greene's too sneaky for that, if he's going for this kind of possibly-comic thing at all---it seems too [deliberately?} reduced to be thought of as "tragicomic," or doesn't deserve to be---Greene the writer also of what he calls "entertainments, " thrillers etc. comes off closer to a carny or pickpocket pro in these coincidences-or-More.)
Not quite, so far, as satisfying a balance of art and entertainment as Brighton Rock---and very probably not up The Power and the Glory, wnich I haven't read since the late 70s---but there are a lot of lines and passages that leave their marks, and lead me on---like I just now realized that this fictional testimonial, concocted by a believer, anticipates by twenty years Lennon's "God is a concept by which we measure our pain/Say it again---"
(Sour-grapes narrator can't forget that his lover found some weird beauty in there too, for all the good it did her, and he's still jealous dammit.)

Not any of the genre-structural sense of "entertainment" as in the hustle of Brighton Rock, but some WWII boom-boom for civilians as familiarity and more, also for sure some moments of comic relief leading somewhere else (also possibly comic, for the reader, not the characters), and love and hate and sex and death and alcohol and so on, mostly more serious than bullshit Serious---I think---I want to believe, because when he's unquestionably good he's real good, and if he didn't push his luck he wouldn't be as Greene.

in reverse chronological order of reading, with the first in progress:
Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth
Crying in Hmart by Michelle Zauner
Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth
(I think I did not credit the writer of the third, a realization that came after starting the first, and wonder if I commonly make the mistake of conflating writers with narrators or characters when it comes to certain genders or races and if this is a form of implicit racism.)

(or gender bias)

LONG LIVE THE POST HORN! sounds uncannily close to THE CRYING OF LOT 49.

Still reading Charles J. Rzepka on Sherlock Holmes.

funnily enough just ripped through the novels and the first two collections of Sherlock Holmes short stories. Any highlights from what you're reading pf?

Agree with both you and Daniel that Poe essentially discovering the basics of the modern crime and detection novel in Rue Morgue is piquant. origins in the grotesque and arabesque - and the solution to Rue Morgue is certainly grotesque - gives a different angle to the genre (not a complete view by any means, but an interesting angle certainly): that it is a case of bringing rationally available (if recondite) evidence to bear on apparently supernaturally evil or morally absurd (ie grotesque) occurrences.

Am reading Sherlock Holmes w my 10 year old at the moment and surprised by how often the vague apparition of "gypsies" seems to swim into view, but always as a red herring, which is nice I think. Racism as a kind of irrational superstition that the modern sleuth must discard in the search for the truth.

Also quite a bit of thrills, danger, violence.. hadn't really remembered all that.

i was astonished at the one where the main character nearly gets crushed to death in a hydraulic press

and

is also suprisingly relaxed about losing his thumb

given his moment and who he overlaps with there's another dimension to holmes always worth digging into: conan doyle isn't a decadent but SH sometimes very much is (lassitude, shooting up, plays the violin). viz holmes as lawrence llewellyn-bowen as oscar "this wallpaper will be the death of me" wilde -- a horrible murder is the private detective's excuse to break open an englishman's home/castle to public view and there deploy snark abt his horrible curtains as the "solution" to the "crime" (of course for wilde and llewellyn-bowen they ARE the crime)

i mean lestrade aren't going to solve the mystery via attention to drapery

lol s/b lestrade isn't

“lestrade aren’t” to become canon plz

but holmes as decadent aesthete i think is correct. and there are strong fin de siecle elements in the stories more generally. eg if you take Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights as an essential model.

Charles J. Rzepka specifically compares Holmes to Wilde (p.131) and, more surprisingly to me, states that DORIAN GRAY and THE SIGN OF FOUR were both commissioned by the same publisher at the same luncheon.

Rzepka's book is very good on centuries of detective fiction, and has whole sections on Poe and Holmes. I would recommend it to anyone who wants a critical and historical book on this material.

Fizzles, re Holmes he a) gives good professional and scientific context for Doyle, b) articulates Watson's qualifications for being the sidekick, and an idea of 'bohemianism'; c) explores ideas of 'rivalry' between Holmes and other detectives and thus the reader; d) produces quite a detailed reading of THE SIGN OF FOUR.

FWIW he also gives a very elaborate reading of Poe's 'Rue Morgue'. I think he mentions that Paris had no Rue Morgue avenue at the time (but New Orleans did? Or Dylan and Lloyd Cole later sang about one anyway).

I haven't got back into The Sign Of Four with my son because the length is a little daunting. Does this thread rate it?

i think all the novels are a long slog in places

(hound maybe least so?)

Truth is, I haven't even read THE SIGN OF FOUR yet!

I have read SCARLET and would say: it's not long at all, but - as previously discussed with Mark S, and agreed by Rzepka - it has a preposterous proportionately long Mormon interlude which has basically nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes, which is not ideal for a ... Sherlock Holmes novel.

Rzepka actually states that this bad fictional structure is directly drawn from Gaboriau's Lecoq mystery, THE HONOUR OF THE NAME (unknown to me, but incidentally J-F Lyotard ends his most famous essay with that phrase).

well like A Study In Scarlet, the first crime and Holmes parts are the best and the “here is a long explanatory narrative set in our former territories and dominions” less so. that said the whole victorian attitude to the mormons is kind of fascinating.

Baskervilles remains the best imo as it has the least of this and Dartmoor is a brilliant setting, also used in the excellent Silver Blaze of. it’s surprisingly underused as a literary landscape - its laureate Eden Philpotts aside, who needs to go on the “authors no one reads any more” thread), Sign of Four is v enjoyable as they race around London, and ASS (sorry) introduces Holmes, so all good.

that first para referring to The Sign of Four. (consistently referred to as The sign of the four in the text)

Confusing divergence that!

apologies! comes from lazily/inattentively posting on my phone

Silver Blaze is so good.

Fizzles, though I do often find your posts quite difficult, in this particular instance I was just remarking that it's an odd divergence that people variously refer to THE SIGN OF FOUR and THE SIGN OF THE FOUR. Think this may actually have been a US / UK publishing divergence.

I would now like to go back and read many more of these stories. Though there seems only to have been 3 years of them in the first instance.

there is a considerable decline in quality after Conan Doyle brings him back.

I thought I had read all of the stories, but I have read the plot summary of "Silver Blaze" and for the life of me I don't remember it.

Speaking of John Watson, there is an amusing exchange at the beginning of The Sign of Four, where Holmes is being insufferably pompous and Watson is entirely correct. Holmes' response is pathetic:

“There is no great mystery in this matter,” he said, taking the cup of tea which I had poured out for him; “the facts appear to admit of only one explanation.”
“What! you have solved it already?”
....
"I have just found, on consulting the back files of the Times, that Major Sholto, of Upper Norwood, late of the Thirty-fourth Bombay Infantry, died upon the twenty-eighth of April, 1882.”
“I may be very obtuse, Holmes, but I fail to see what this suggests.”
“No? You surprise me. Look at it in this way, then. Captain Morstan disappears. The only person in London whom he could have visited is Major Sholto. Major Sholto denies having heard that he was in London. Four years later Sholto dies. Within a week of his death Captain Morstan’s daughter receives a valuable present, which is repeated from year to year and now culminates in a letter which describes her as a wronged woman. What wrong can it refer to except this deprivation of her father? And why should the presents begin immediately after Sholto’s death unless it is that Sholto‘s heir knows something of the mystery and desires to make compensation? Have you any alternative theory which will meet the facts?”
“But what a strange compensation! And how strangely made! Why, too, should he write a letter now, rather than six years ago? Again, the letter speaks of giving her justice. What justice can she have? It is too much to suppose that her father is still alive. There is no other injustice in her case that you know of.”
“There are difficulties; there are certainly difficulties,” said Sherlock Holmes pensively;
Damn straight there are difficulties, and Watson is entirely correct to point out that Holmes is overreaching by saying he'd pretty much cleared up the mystery, in fact the mysterious bit of the mystery remains entirely. His response really is very silly, and Watson is correct to point out elsewhere Holmes' vanity.

There's also this interesting exchange at the beginning of A Case of Identity

“My dear fellow.” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generation, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable. “
“And yet I am not convinced of it,” I answered. “The cases which come to light in the papers are, as a rule, bald enough, and vulgar enough. We have in our police reports realism pushed to its extreme limits, and yet the result is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor artistic.”

Holmes here is in an enjoyably baroque and fantastical strain, and suggests he does see something magical in it all - the *outre results* of life. Watson, who is often accused of romanticism by Holmes, is enjoyably brusque in response, and again there's a lot to be said for his view.

I mentioned RLS's New Arabian Nights upthread and I really should emphasise how much of an influence they had on literary London (like Sherlock Holmes they were serialised in a London periodical). They are well worth reading. Conan Doyle was a big fan - The Pavilion on the Links (seven years before A Study in Scarlet) was one of his favourite short stories. They set the template for anything being possible in London, and the visits 'low disreputable corners and suburbia', ie beyond Camberwell. Both Machen (in his very bad, very good The Three Impostors) and Conan Doyle take its geography and cadences. The idea that the stories that emanate from the commonplace are more fantastical than those that emanate from the upper classes is here too.

This

>>> “My dear fellow.” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generation, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.
“And yet I am not convinced of it,” I answered. “The cases which come to light in the papers are, as a rule, bald enough, and vulgar enough. We have in our police reports realism pushed to its extreme limits, and yet the result is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor artistic.”
<<<

is extremely good material.

1: the first statement about rooftops directly resembles something that Dickens wrote in DOMBEY AND SON.

2: the second, on 'realism', takes you towards that Wildean territory of, say, life not living up to art. James Joyce said related things - that journalism was about the exceptions, fiction about the norm, or something.

"most stale and unprofitable"

also sounds like Hamlet?

i think it's prob a deliberate reference on the part of holmes.

and yes it immediately struck me as an important section, probably something that was playing out in CD's mind. how to frame his dramas, out of what material to make them, how close to watson's view, how close to holmes'.

we read the speckled band in middle school (age 10ish). that feels like a solid intro to conan doyle for kids.

Dickens, admittedly making a different point from Doyle:

Oh for a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a mole potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes, to swell the retinue of the Destroying Angel as he moves forth among them! For only one night's view of the pale phantoms rising from the scenes of our too-long neglect; and from the thick and sullen air where Vice and Fever propagate together, raining the tremendous social retributions which are ever pouring down, and ever coming thicker!

In his very namedroppy autobio Conan Doyle talks about having tea with Wilde before the unpleasantness, and states something like "cannot believe the writer of such beautiful fiction could be all bad". Mind you, he is militant about trying to say a good word about everyone he meets, unless they're disgusting German soldiers of course.

Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler.

Thanks for the Dickens quote, pinefox! Where is that from? I sympathize with the frustration in that, more evident than (though also detectable in) Holmes' flight of fancy---was already thinking that newspaper accounts aren't necessarily any more reliable, and maybe moreso back then, with xpost bald accounts (which *might* be something for bored newspapermen, to push agains, concocting Jack The Ripper, at least as correspondent x super-serial kiler).
Doyle seems to set Holmes and Watson as a balancing act, based on aspects of his own personality or persona, but I think he may have been closer to Holmes, in terms of outside thinking that's sometimes more pie-eyed than magpie---ACD the adamant believer in fairies etc---but as an artist he knew he needed Watson in there.

and maybe less (reliable) back then, I meant.

Re-reading some of xpost The End of the Affair deepens the impression that you don't have to be a Christian, or engage in willing suspension of disbelief (in that, though as I said I do want to keep believing that Greene is a good writer), to find your attention span humming like a sympathetic string along this increasingly stress-tested, already scorched homeland Commons ov forked paths (core characters are neighbors and/or family, others easily find them).

It's DOMBEY & SON.

Colson Whitehead, THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD (2016).

I greatly enjoyed Whitehead's The Nickel Boys and would gladly read his other works.

Heinrich Heine - Travel Pictures
Bei Dao - City Gate, Open Up

Typed a short post about these in the Prose works by Poets thread.

Autumn
Winter
Spring
Summer

all by ali Smith. enjoyed them but probably the first one most, and that was a reread. nice mix of politics and literature and art mentions in them but I'm not sure they'd hold up in 20 years without notes on what exactly was happening at the time because they are kind of specific

(that said, the mentions of COVID in detention centres aligned perfectly with the news of diphtheria in detention centres so maybe not)

this was followed by Mother Of Invention where i was hoping for more examples than just the 3. but i kind of agree with her main point, that we can't basically ignore 50% of the population

and rounded the month off with the last 80% of Pandora's Jar which i enjoyed more when i had some idea of the stories beforehand (ie pretty much all of them bar Phaedra).

I finished "The Blunderer" by Patricia Highsmith, an entertaining and effective crime noir novel, although I thought the first half was brilliant, and the second half merely good. Highsmith is especially entertaining on the social behavior of the mid-century American upper middle class, and its impossible to put the book down as she sets the trap that will ensnare the comfortable Long Island lawyer protagonist. As the focus shifts a bit to the less interesting immigrant bookseller and ambitious detective characters, and as the plot becomes more predictable, the excitement flags a bit, but still overall an effective and impressively nihilistic thriller.

I greatly enjoyed Whitehead's The Nickel Boys and would gladly read his other works.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux),

same

Be Boy Buzz bell hooks
Classic existential work on the potential involved with being a child self defined as male. Very short read.
Like slam poetry or something but anyway quite profound for the economy of verbiage.

Here's what I read this year, a mix of genre stuff, new fiction, and binging on Didion (who I had never actually read before). And Karamazov, which I loved. Also really liked the Kate Folk and Joshua Cohen books.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Stanislaw Lem - The Cyberiad
Stanislaw Lem - The Star Diaries
Stanislaw Lem - Memoirs Found in a Bathtub
Ben H. Winters - The Last Policeman
Ben H. Winters - Countdown City
Ben H. Winters - World of Trouble
Jennifer Egan - The Candy House
Joan Didion - Slouching Toward Bethlehem
Joan Didion - The White Album
Kate Folk - Out There
Emily Mackay - Bjork - Homogenic (33 ⅓)
Joan Didion - After Henry
Joshua Cohen - The Netanyahus
Joan Didion - Let Me Tell You What I Mean
Joan Didion - South and West

Currently reading Marcel Theroux's 'The Sorceror of Pyongyang', which I have high hopes for, and going back to the last hundred pages of that long Thelonious Monk bio.

Any suggestions for the next Russian classic to read next year that's as enjoyable as Karamazov?

Dostoevsky's Demons is great if you haven't read that. The Idiot is good as well.

I greatly enjoyed Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov when I read it recently. Don't let the title fool you, there are some novellas in there too.

Anna Karenin is great

the new George Saunders “A Swim In A Pond In The Rain” is basically a book version of his Russian short story course and it’s great. the short stories themselves are included in full (Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev)