Please use the receptacle provided: What are you reading as 2023 begins?

The time has come to carve out a dedicated space in ILB for mentioning, criticizing, praising, dissecting, dismissing, summarizing, or simply naming the books we are reading in these first few months of 2023.

The prior WAYR thread can be found here: The (S)word in the Autumn Stone: What Are You Reading, Fall 2022?

I have four active right now:

Properties of Thirst, Marianne Wiggins. I cannot recommend this enough. Marianne has always been an immensely talented writer, and this is her best book yet. She has really captured the feel of life in the Central Valley. It's all the more remarkable achievement because she suffered a stroke before the book was completed, and finished it with the help of her daughter.

The Widow Queen, Elżbieta Cherezińska. The jury is still out on this one. If memory serves, it's a fantasy/romance I got for free from tor.com. It's OK, but I have a feeling that the translation (from the Polish) is lacking.

Collected Fiction Part 1: The Novels, by Leena Krohn. Highly recommended by Jeff VanDerMeer, who wrote the foreword. Again, something might have been lost in translation (from Finnish).

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, by M.R. James. I picked this up on the strength of a reading I heard on a podcast of "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book." I haven't made it yet past that story, but this kind of horror is my jam.

Tove Ditlevsen - CHILDHOOD, YOUTH, DEPENDENCY

finished childhood and almost done with youth really liking it so far though as with p much all auto fiction I'm always amazed/ sceptical about the amount of detail people can recall about their childhoods. my memory just doesn't work like that.

carlo collodi, "pinocchio"

The last few chapters of Howard Zinn A People's History Of America. Or possibly going back over a couple of chapters

Guy Deutscher's Through The Language Glass

Thinking Fast & Slow Daniel Kahneman
may get back to this after Through the Language Glass

Surviving Genocide heffrey Ostler
A history of the contact between indigenous people in America and the incoming Europeans. Xmas present from my brother last year taht I really wanted to read at taht point and now haven't a year later because i did read everything else i read;. & now have picked up again and it is looking really good

How To write About Africa Binyavanga Wainaina
book of short articles by a Kenyan writer my brother sent me for Xmas alongside the Richard Koloda Holy Ghost which I've already finished

The five : the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper Hallie Rubenhold
feminist author attempts to fill out the biographies of the women killed by Jack The Ripper and stop them being quite as faceless entities.

A history of the world in seven cheap things : a guide to capitalism, nature, and the future of the planet Raj Patel

The Big Blue Book of Bicycle Repair Calvin Jones

a few other bits and pieces since I have my library loans fully occupied with things so 16 books there
& I have been picking up books from charity shops to great degree so have piles of those around everywhere. Probably have several years worth of reading sitting here already and i don't know if i will ever repeat the amount I got through this year.
Oh & also have had one of the main book shops in Galway around the corner from the course I've been studying. Subsequently have been picking things up from there too.

bell hooks The will to change : men, masculinity, and love
which has been traveling around in my bag for months since I bought it

A restorative justice reader : texts, sources, context / edited by Gerry Johnstone.

West of the Revolution : an uncommon history of 1776 Claudio Saunt
the other events around the Americas at the time of the Declaration of Independence since it was a pretty dynamic year for a number of other populations around thanks to other colonising settlement etc and movement of indigenous tribes.

I have pinnochio started recently cos I picked it up in a charity shop a few weeks back. Saw most of the Guillermo Del Toro animation since picking it up but I think I nodded off for a bit in the middle.

By Bus, Erica Van Horn, an utterly delightful book that I could have finished today and which I'll probably actually finish before 2023 rings in. I have anxiety about what to read first for 2023 -- there's several Big Books I'm eager to get to, but I'll also be traveling soon, I don't love having to cart a giant doorstop with me while traveling -- at the same time, I'm always traveling, I should resign to it. Will I read Anna Karenina? Or attempt The Golden Horde, even though nonfiction tends to slow me down? Maybe Palace Walk, but do I have the rest of Cairo Trilogy somewhere in the house or not? I picked up Swann's Way last month, I could dive right in, but there's so much else I mean to get to, too -- these Tibetan Buddhist books are really thrilling for me, I'm not used to using that wrestling-thinking part of my reading brain so much as I did when I was devouring old Vaisnava scripture all the time. I could get back into Volodine & his heteronyms, there's a few more of those on the shelf, they're almost uniformly great. Moravia? I've read Morante but never Moravia, I could do that. I'm not sure! I'll finish By Bus tomorrow and then think about it some more!

Dwight E. Brooks - That's the Way of the World (33 1/3 series)
John le Carré - A Delicate Truth

Don Winslow - The Border
Nyanapoinka Thera - The Heart of Buddhist Meditation

I've picked up Delillo's Underworld again over Christmas after abandoning it for a couple of months. It's often frustrating - occasionally quite good!

Jane Eyre

Started The Dark is Rising. I don't think that I read past the first volume as a teenager.

Focuses for 2023: probably lots of fantasy and horror, and I want to learn more about French theatre, beyond the handful of things I've read already.

Shin, The Cryptopians
Ollier, Wert and the Life Without End
Savage, This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else

Happy New Year!

Reading books is a kind of enjoyment. Reading books is a good habit. We bring you a different kinds of books. You can carry this book where ever you want. It is easy to carry. It can be an ideal gift to yourself and to your loved ones. Care instruction keep away from fire.

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

What are your favorite recently published short stories?

which should I read?
remain in love by Frantz
book of drugs by Doughty
Echo spring by Laing
crude by Laing

Already finished the first book of the year: Hua Hsu's memoir Stay True, about his zine-making, indie rock-loving college years and unlikely friendship with a Dave Matthews Band-loving preppie student who was tragically murdered. Very touching and hits the right 90s cultural touchstones.

Will flip between:

New Juche - Mountainhead
Derek Jarman - Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping
Colin Barrett - Homesickness

picked up The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound by Roberto Mangabeira Unger again. It really is tremendously invigorating reading. I think the critics cited in the wikipedia article have it exactly right:

vintage Unger: exhortative, deeply romantic, full of moral intensity, relentlessly hopeful, marginal to professional philosophy. The work is part essay (after Emerson or the German romantics), part sermon, part political manifesto, and part critical theory. It is a left-romantic-existential-political Wake-Up Call. There is an American optimism and energy about it too. It seems more spiritually akin to Whitman or Emerson than to the "Pragmatists" it celebrates.

i read giant under the snow aged 10-ish and liked it, so was super-keen when house on the brink came out -- it was enthusiastically reviewed in puffin post! -- and i think no book has ever frightened me as much, though i've never entirely identified what it is about it

i still proceed quite gingerly when i pick it up again now

I think I got The Giant Under the Snow from Puffin Post as well! (see also Robert Westall, John Christopher, Susan Cooper, Rosemary Sutcliffe)

Yes, it’s not at all clear what it’s about, in quite an unnerving way. I like the way the children are *extremely* sharp edged.

I'm reading a thing I was sent to blurb and my expectations were low but it's very enjoyable crime fiction! a nice new year's surprise

^ That's a good blurb right there.

Can you tell us what it is, or do we have to wait for you to finish and write the blurb first?

So just finished A People's History by Howard Zinn. Enjoyed.

& got further into West of The Revolution by Saud which is talking about devastation felt by various native tribes around the continent. Does seem to be something I want to get through. & hopefully get through Surviving genocide before too long.

I need to get further into W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folks which is actually in the same bag within my shoulder bag that bell hooks The Will To Change is in. I think I started it a few months ago and not read more of it despite it being in that bag or possibly because it is in that bag

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I last read 30 years ago.

I've been wondering lately if it was time for me to go back to re-read Huck Finn. One of these years I'm going to designate as My Year of Mostly Re-Reading. This would be a great year for that, but I just bought a ton of new and used books, so I have at least a year's worth of stuff I never read before sitting in piles and I need to address them, too.

I like the idea of a year of re-reading. My main resolution is the same as last year: more forrin/translated fiction.

My other main resolution is to either a) not buy any new books and only read from my monstrous 'to read' pile/shelf/cathedral or ii) be frank about what I want to keep from my 'to read' vault and exorcise the least likely before buying anything new. The latter feels like the best approach, as the books are more likely to have been bought on a whim and don't yet have the attachment of longer-owned books.

Can you tell us what it is, or do we have to wait for you to finish and write the blurb first?

this right here. I didn't make the galleys blurb deadline, which was like 4 days after I got the wire-bound reader copy, but the press deadline is later. it's a good read, I've been in a genre fiction mood lately with Italian noir stuff -- this isn't that, Italian noir is its own zone, but it's good

The technology trap : capital, labor, and power in the age of automation Carl Benedikt Frey,
library book that has been sitting around teh bed waiting for me to continue. Book on why labour saving technology doesn't seem to save much labour in the long run. One idea being that time freed is soon taken up by other tasks.
THis book is looking into the history of the interface between mankind and technology. I've just got up to the point where the author has been looking at the power of the guilds to put off the introduction of labour saving technology. He's looked at Europe and China and come back to look at the UK. Apparently the decline of power of the guilds there meant less opposition to the introduction of labour saving technology and from that the Industrail Revolution ensued.

Rereading can be good, even essential, and I've been rereading certain books for my whole adult life, but at this point I think I'm still keen to read and learn as much as possible of books I haven't already read.

I sympathise with the point about 'reading what's actually on your shelves' rather than going out and seeking even more.

I continue with short stories:
What are your favorite recently published short stories?

With Hope, Farewell, Alexander Baron - One of those writers you run into a lot if you get interested in old East End stuff. So far, very good on the competitiveness of young boys and the awkwardness of trying to suss someone out whom you've just met and aren't going to see for long. The portrayal of anti-semitism is hardly subtle but then I'm sure neither was the experience of it in 1930's Britain.

I recently finished Candy House by Jennifer Egan; she does what she does well; she has experience.
I have a book of short stories and a novel by Claire Louise-Bennett with which I am trying to engage; I think I will read Pond first. Do you think it is important to read short stories in one sitting?

I reread at least one novel a month.

The Westing Game: fun, original, pretty woke (for the 80s)

Do you think it is important to read short stories in one sitting?

No, but if you add a long bath into the mix, then yes

(last bath was: The Garden of Forking Paths)

Alfred, did I dream that you read while walking, and, more to the point, walking at 6.30 in the morning?

Rereading is easily a third of my reading. I don't feel like I have a handle on any kind of complex book after just one reading. There's also just a different feeling to rereading. I'm not as conscious of my progress in the book, the width of the remaining pages, or like I'm running a marathon to get to the end.

Melville - Just started Bartleby, the Scrivener. Also plan to read The Confidence Man, though not sure if I will start that immediately after.

^both amazing works

speaking of rereading, starting on my second go through of christina stead's the man who loved children... been at least 20 years so my memory of it is fuzzy, pretty much just remember the overweening egotism of the father & the misery it causes for the rest of the family. in the collection of her shorter works i've just read there are a couple of autobiographical pieces which put a more positive spin on her relationship with her father/family life, but you can still feel some slight exasperation peeping through.

The Confidence Man

Alfred, did I dream that you read while walking, and, more to the point, walking at 6.30 in the morning?

― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski)

Yep. No one around, sun's coming out.

I think it's great and yet have no idea of the logistics! All power to you, of course.

Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo - clearly an absurd character but I'm not finding it laugh out loud funny, should I be?

I usually have one fiction and one non-fiction book going - right now it is:

Tim Powers - Forced Perspectives: second book in his Vickery and Castine series and, sadly, probably the last I'll read. I love Powers' previous para-historical novels, but the swerve into contemporary urban fantasy is bumming me out. Both this and the previous Alternate Routes feel like they exist solely to be spun off into some other medium: streaming cable, comics, or...

Serhii Plokhy - The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. Outstanding book. Slow going.

Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo - clearly an absurd character but I'm not finding it laugh out loud funny, should I be?

― ledge,

yes!

I'll see if I can rewire my humour circuit...

xpost continuation of my previous post ... The short stories are good; the writing is vivid in the sense that it calls to mind things that are vivid and feel present. Correction on her name ... it is Claire-Louise Bennett.

I could not read in the bath for fear of damaging the book. I hate it when I drop books from the nightstand. I can't bear it when people throw books.

Claire Keegan - Small Things Like These
Darryl Pinckney - Busted in New York and Other Essays

Youn, I feel like Pond is one of the greatest books by a British writer from the last 10 years. Don't really think of it as a short story collection though - more a very ruminative, meandering Beckettian novel...

Yes, it seems like Pond might turn out that way, and I wonder if the lines between the short story and the novel are beginning to blur. I used to think it was a sign of weakness not to be able to control point of view to convey plot with one character, but it seems to be a technique frequently adopted now (cf. Jennifer Egan), and the disjunction in perception is often worth it, but I wonder ...

I really liked Pond.

At the time I said this:

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett. Collection of short stories. Good, I think. Interior monologues in domestic spaces, with a careful awareness of the mechanics of interiority, the circling round a thing, the unusual snags of feeling and recognition by which thought progresses or insight is gained. The elliptical and non-cliched nature of thinking and feeling. Someone said that she was similar to Jen Calleja, but i don't get that at all tbh, in fact Pond reminds me more in some ways of Gerald Murnane, an understanding of how to get to the profound from the repeated mundane and quotidian, and how the unusual or genuinely strange is actually part of that fabric.

The effect to me is a little like trying to catch an elusive thought that seems to have whisked away just before the moment you were aware of it, but which you feel has insight. Sometimes you find it and can look at it, most of the time it flits away without any sense of what meaning or importance it may have had. CLB is adept at catching them.

Your posts are making me want to revisit and see whether I still agree with myself. I think the plural, unachored viewpoint is something that works here, though I’m sure it can be abused or fail quite easily with less skilled writers.

Interesting to consider writers with floating points of perspective - Jon Fosse? Murnane (not character but point of observation), Soobramanien and Williams? - all doing different things but the point of view is protean, not fixed to identity, in some way.

Uwe Johnson - Anniversaries (part 2/4) and loving it so far. Johnson manages this continuously time-shifting novel, where its 1933-45 and 1968 with some skill, and you are constantly on your toes as he shifts time and characters. He is as attentive to space and people as Balzac and he only breaks Gesine's reading of the New York Times once to go over a piece by Hans Magnus Enzenberger (who died a couple of months ago as it happens) in the NYRB to criticise 'intellectual' anti-Americanism, but the novel itself is more diligently going through the same questions, as Gesine reads the goings on in Vietnam-war era America and lightly contrasts with Nazi Germany. Crucially there are no judgements, despite precocious Marie's (Gesine's daughter) protestations that there is innocence and guilt, that a side must be picked. But Gesine (and Johnson) understand that it is in the process of histories re-tellings and livings that something more is happening. What is that? I can't tell, another 800 pages of this novel to go.

In between part II and III I also finished/read the following as a 'break'.

Bei Dao - City Gate, Open Up. This is a poet's memoir of his family, time, country, with lots of rich detail of the food, smells, friendships struck and forgotten. There is a lot of bloody history here, again, as Mao's cultural revolution gathers pace as adulthood is coming. I love the telling of it though, the prose is so good. It has the poet's concentrated speed of telling.
Yoko Tawada - Three Streets
William Shakespeare - King Lear

o jeez: Claire Keegan? Is she good, is she piercingly sad-beautiful as some say? Might be too much for me right now if so---

small things like these is great

so is foster but at the end i put it down with tears in my eyes thinking it was almost a mean trick to write something so heart-rending.

I finished The Third Horseman, Wm Rosen. Can't say I'd recommend it. It's one of those helter-skelter books that can't settle on its subject matter and does a poor job of staying focused. A lot happens, but you never learn much about any of it.

Started reading Le Carré's The Looking Glass War after finishing a couple of heavy reads (Underworld and Sound and the Fury). Really fun. The prologue is thrilling.

Anthony Powell - From a View to a Death
Laird Hunt - Zorrie

I still want to read THE LOOKING GLASS WAR, before any other le Carré.

That prologue (the one in the Baltic airport, right?) is great!

Alfred, what did you think of From a View to a Death? I think it’s prob my favourite of the pre-Dance novels. Unobtrusively tragic and damning at the end as well as being v funny generally.

That prologue (the one in the Baltic airport, right?) is great!

Yeah that's the one!

Alfred, what did you think of From a View to a Death? I think it’s prob my favourite of the pre-Dance novels. Unobtrusively tragic and damning at the end as well as being v funny generally.

― Fizzles, Saturday, January 7, 2023 2:27 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I've only read one of those slim things, but this one's a hoot so far.

sounds right!

New Year has been taken up with the return of Prynne reading group, and I'm about 1/4 of the way through Clark Coolidge's 'SOUND AS THOUGHT,' a collection of poems he wrote in the mid-80s. It's quite good, an oft-overlooked entry in his ever-expanding œuvre, though it does feel a bit less momentous that either 'SOLUTION PASSAGE' or 'THE CRYSTAL TEXT' which came immediately before.

Otherwise, I'm reading a LOT of plays, because I'm teaching an American Playwrights class and need to brush up/reacquaint myself with my syllabus.

The Five Hallie Rubenhold
Feminist author tries to show the lives of teh 5 recognised victims of Jack The Ripper. Attempts to stop them being very limited entities who really only exist around the bloody deaths. Shows that their own lives were pretty messy in doing so. But they did need to have a reason to be in a run down area to meet their ends.
I'm not so hot on the speculation bits where she is saying 'she must have .....' which is a habit throughout the book.
Shame cos I enjoyed bits of this and did like the idea behind this. I may read some more by Rubenhold and see if that is a habit of hers elsewhere. NOt a trope that seems to fit too well in a history book. I thought she was a better writer from what I had heard prior to reading this. Oh well.

Alfred, what did you think of From a View to a Death? I think it’s prob my favourite of the pre-Dance novels. Unobtrusively tragic and damning at the end as well as being v funny generally.

― Fizzles, Saturday, January 7, 2023 2:27 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I've only read one of those slim things, but this one's a hoot so far.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, January 7, 2023 2:38 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

sounds right!

― Fizzles, Saturday, January 7, 2023 2:45 PM (yesterday)

Maybe I should've guessed a key supporting character was a crossdresser.

I'm in one of those funks where I can't quite settle on a book so I'm going with it and re-reading a few bits and pieces.

John Suiter's *Poets on the Peaks*, is a gorgeous thing, tracing the history of Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac in the pacific northwest, specifically their time working as fire lookouts in the Cascades. It's meticulously researched and photographed and further proof that I need more mountains in my life.

Colin Thubron's *In Siberia* is a bleakly beautiful travelogue through the then newly-opened Siberia. Thubron speaks Russian well and throws himself on the mercy of local people, ending up in unlikely places and situations.

Also reading Tarkovsky's *Sculpting in Time* and Seamus Heaney's *Seeing Things*.

Just to get my blood moving I picked up The Outfit a hard-boiled crime novel by Richard Stark. It's good crime noir, very sharp and tightly written action, but the middle section is sort of a medley of miscellaneous 'heist' stories which loosely tie in to the framing story, but don't add much unless you enjoy fantasizing about pulling off a robbery in the same way other people fantasize about winning the lottery. This is part of a series about a superman tough guy named Parker. I think the others in the series stay closer to Parker's adventures and may be a bit less of a tossed salad.

You might like the first Parker, The Hunter (basis of the excellent Lee Marvin flick Point Blank): here he's outta stir and back for revenge, standardly enough, but also, the author says that he doesn't know all that he wants, so things go in different directions---by Dirty Money, (which I think is the last one, but don't care,) he's clearly into the cool of heists as planned and must be into the chaos aspect as lived out, considering how many times he's been through this and put others through it. Some of the other characters are more engaging, I think, but he's an asshole worth watching, in my limited experience (this is # 24 in the series).

tables, what plays are you reading?!

I'm curious too.

In the past few days, I’ve re-read:

Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Curse of the Starving Class
Fences
Body Indian by Hanay Geiogamah
In the Blood by Parks
A Murder of Crows by Mac Wellman
The Ohio State Murders by Adrienne Kennedy

Need to do a few more re-reads but that’s about 2/3 of the semester, more or less.

Oh, I also read for the first time:

Sarah Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone

It’s a course on American Playwrights so had to limit myself somewhat, normally I do a big double-header with family, fading ways of life, and the force of self-destruction in The Cherry Orchard and Curse of the Starving Class.

Nahoko Uehashi - THE BEAST PLAYER

Japanese YA fantasy book. p good, will definitely read the sequel.

Various Authors - MARPLE

12 crime novelists have a go a writing a Miss Marple short story. Only found a couple compelling. Also way too many of them featured nephew Raymond.

My current book is Niki: The Story of a Dog, Tibor Déry. The author is Hungarian and the dog in view was clearly based on a particular dog he owned, though the human characters are lightly fictionalized. Compared to, say, My Dog Tulip Déry adopts a much more intellectualized approach than Ackerly's sentimentality. The dog's doggy nature occupies the center of the author's attention and interest while the humans occupy the margins of the story.

I finished reading THE PENGUIN BOOK OF THE MODERN AMERICAN SHORT STORY.

What are your favorite recently published short stories?

I'm starting off the new year with John Fogerty's autobiography, Fortunate Son. It probably helps to be a big Creedence fan, as I am, but I'd have to say the book is a page-turner. Fogerty is in take-no-prisoners mode. He seems to not be on good terms with almost anyone from the band's heyday, and he's not afraid to tell it like he sees it. I enjoy the hunting and fishing stories, but I do wonder how he's going to fill the second half of the book. The Creedence period went by in a flash - which is I guess true to how it actually happened.

just finished ‘tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow’ by gabrielle zevin, about a trio of video game developers. interesting insights about gaming in there and characters who maks infuriating, and infuriatingly real, decisions

about 10% through marlon James’s ‘moon witch, spider king,’ which so far has his familiar mixture of elegantly constructed, free-flowing writing about just he most brutal violence you can imagine. feels easier to read than black leopard, red wolf, but the central character is less dynamic so far

James Kirchick - Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washingon
Amina Cain - A Horse at Night: On Writing
Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

xp There was a lot of music in a very few years. Hadn't changed the bandname until 68 and were falling apart by 71. 3 good lps in 69 so yeah over fast . Timeless music for many but one small part of a lived experience.

JUst catching up with Blood and Land which I was sent I think by mistake while I was looking for another book on Native Americans some time last summer. I think I still have about half of it to read. written by J. C. H. King, a British scholar.

just finished A history of the world in seven cheap things : a guide to capitalism, nature, and the future of the planet by Raj Patel,
which was pretty good.

& before taht The Five by Hallie Rubenhold which was interesting but did have some writing quirks I wish the writer hadn't used. The idea that this character must have felt.... was something I thought was looked at as a bad writing trope. So shjame to see it here so frequently.
Otherwise the idea is pretty interesting, give the women best known as the victims of Jack The Ripper an existence beyond that by fleshing out their biographies.

Through The Language Glass Guy Deutscher
talking about how culture shapes language

o. nate, it's funny you're reading the Fogerty bio given today's news

Yeah, just noticed that news too. Right now I'm at the point in the book where he's deeply depressed over the whole Fantasy contract situation, so its nice to think that there will someday be a resolution.

I'm about to finish a long book of mid-80s poems by Coolidge. The more I read of him, the more I'm sort of wowed by how much he's done— from more concrete poetry to poems that are like thickets of clashing syntaxes to beautiful pastoral lyrics, the guy's kind of done it all. Really incredible.

Prynne group continues, but I've been busy with other reading this week so won't get to the week's book until right before our meeting tomorrow.

I've started reading Behrouz Boochani's NO FRIEND BUT THE MOUNTAINS (2018). My understanding is that the author is Kurdish and was some kind of refugee, or perhaps other kind of migrant, in Australia, where he was locked up. I'm hesitant about saying this because I haven't read much yet. I'll find out more as I go. The book was written in the Farsi language, and translated into English. So far it describes being on a truck full of migrants, then a boat full of migrants, which is in danger of sinking.

The foreword by one Richard Flanagan states that this is a great book that has huge political import for what it says about how migrants are treated. Formally, the book is primarily prose but includes a large number of breaks into a kind of 'poetry', ie: language organised by line that expresses the situation already described by the prose. It is fair to say that in English, this poetry does not come across well. Possibly it does in its original language.

Funny talked about having watched a video of a refugee containment camp in the Australian outback in a conversation yesterday. Watched it in the first months of being in town in 98. It held a lot of Afghan refugees I think among others. There was a protest about conditions hence the film.
Hadn't thought about it in a while. So coincidence I think.

Antarctica, a short story collection by Claire Keegan. Most of the stories are very short (under 20 pages) and more like vignettes, focussed on scenes, situations, characters. Some of them build to a climax, some of the climaxes are cliffhangers - the first story is perhaps the most dramatic in this regard, also the least convincing. Most of the protagonists are women or girls, most from or in troubled, poor, or unconventional families. Simple writing, short sentences, the odd arresting image - 'the blustery trees made a carousel of shadow inside the kitchen'. It took me a while to warm to it but by the end I was finding them quite affecting, though there's nothing quite as gut-wrenching, thankfully, as Foster.

Finished Alexander Baron's With Hope, Farewell. Protagonist is a young man in 30's London, alienated from his Jewish background and eager to assimilate; he also dreams of becoming a pilot. Out of nowhere, WWII provides a solution to both problems - but of course he comes back psychologically damaged by the war, and meanwhile anti-semitism in London is on the rise again. Some great setpieces - a Jewish wedding with violence erupting in the nearby street, a huge riot which I think might be portraying the battle for Cable Street. Protagonist and his very pregnant wife get stuck in traffic on a bus while the crowds break police lines and chaos erupts, very scary read for anyone who's used to being stuck in a standstill on a bus at Dalston Junction.

ledge, I had a good experience reading Small Things Like These.

Yes I enjoyed that one as well, she calls it a novel here - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/20/claire-keegan-i-think-something-needs-to-be-as-long-as-it-needs-to-be - but in terms of story it's scarcely more incident-packed than some of her shorter ones, still it's good to be able to spend a bit more time in one of her worlds.

there's an interesting bit in that article about what small things like these is 'about', and her lack of judgement on the magdalene sisters. i did feel in some of her short stories a rather casual attitude towards real incidents or issues - one story features, indirectly, fred west, two others have characters using the 'n' word.

It's clear what her protagonist thinks.

yes her characters are not quite so forgiving!

xpost to Fizzles - I think your characterization of Claire-Louise Bennett's writing is apt, and your previous post makes me want to read Gerald Murnane. (attrition without dullness or numbing, where the focus is on the restlessness for the pressure applied)

Has anyone read Megan Giddings? Her novel The Women Could Fly is on sale for $2.99. The blurb compares her to Margaret Atwood, Shirley Jackson and Octavia Butler.

was reading something else this morning that compared something to Atwood and Butler. oh, it was Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers

Yukito Ayatsuji - THE DECAGON HOUSE MURDERS

Japanese and-then-there-were-none ish crime thriller. group gathered on an island are part of a university mystery writing club and all take the name of a famous author - poe, agatha ,ellroy etc are bumped off one by one. liked it a lot and didnt feel the solution was a cheat or anything.

pinefox's mention of xpost one Richard Flanagan reminded me that I'd meant to read The Narrow Road To The Deep North, probably his best-known novel outside of Australia, and Man Booker winner: based partly on what Flanagan's father told him about being a POW in World War II, partly on a doctor who cooperated and negotiated with the Japanese for the sake of his fellow prisoners, acclaimed as a national hero after the war.
wiki quotes the author of Schindler's List:

The Australian novelist Thomas Keneally wrote the book was "...a grand examination of what it is to be a good man and a bad man in the one flesh and, above all, of how hard it is to live after survival."

Flanagan is also an essayist, activist, and investigative journalist.
I'd like to read his "Parish-Fed Bastards": A History of the Politics of the Unemployed in Britain, 1884–1939 and Notes on Exodus, about the Syrian refugee camps he visited in several countries, also backstory.

Sorry, Keneally's book was titled Schindler's Ark; Spielberg changed it for the movie.

I managed to get back to Bono's memoir SURRENDER a little. I'm 75pp in, Bono is 18, and there are still almost 500 pages to go.

The book is very readable, but tends to fall into staccato writing when it wants to make a point.
Like this.
When you realise that your father is the singer you'll never be.
That's where a rock & roll singer comes from.
Maybe.

That style doesn't give me great confidence in Bono as a writer. On the whole I think he's a great talker, but not really a writer, and a bold thinker about big ideas, but not a deep thinker or, still less, an analytical thinker. He's often self-deprecating, which is unsurprising - part of the scenario is that he has reached a point where he can afford to be self-deprecating, and laughing at himself is a form of success.

The beginning of U2 is rather disappointingly washed over - there isn't enough on how they go from being rank amateurs playing in a kitchen for the first time, to being able to play a gig and ask for a record deal. It's a long way from the former to the latter. Why not tell us about their first actual gig? Oddly Bono doesn't, though his memory for many things seems highly acute.

I'd also like more material on the Dublin of the 1960s and 1970s, as a material and cultural place.

One thing that the book reminds me, which others will already have known or remembered, is how U2 were rather culturally unusual in 1970s Ireland - in that The Edge was Welsh, Clayton was English, and Mullen may, as far as I can tell, have been the only standard Irish Catholic type. Bono's mother was Protestant and raised him as such, and he has relatives with, arguably, Protestant names, including a brother Norman whom I'd entirely forgotten existed. His wife Alison was a Protestant also.

One of the better pieces of writing (p.58):

Everything I still love about Larry's playing was present then - the primal power of the tom-toms, the boot in the stomach of the kick drum, the snap and slap of the snare drum as it bounced off windows and walls. It was a beautiful violence modulated by the shining gold and silver armor of the cymbals, oddly orchestral, filling out frequencies. This indoor thunder, I thought, will bring the whole house down.

the skinny i got from insiders in the ghost-writing community is that yes it's bono's words and sentences and passages as spoken to a transcriber -- but possibly *not* his overall organisation (tho of course he will have signed off on and approved it) (which tbf not all subjects of the process bother to do lol)

Bono’s dad was Catholic iirc and did bring him to Mass on occasion. It can’t have mattered that much to his father, though, because normally if you’re Catholic and marry someone who isn’t, the premarital courses make you promise to raise your children Catholic.

(Though that only applies if you have a Catholic marriage which I’m guessing the parents didn’t?)

Anyway, there are other Protestant celebrities, famously Graham Norton, who spoke about how difficult this was, so it’s not that unusual, especially in Dublin which is always more diverse anyway.

Read Sebastian Castillo’s “Not I,” an Oulipian exercise in grammar and English usage— each chapter consists of 25 sentences, each individual sentence containing one of the 25 most common words in the English language. There are 24 chapters, two dedicated to each of the twelve commonly accepted verb tenses in the English language.

It is very funny and clever without seeming corny or a mere yuk-fest. There are some quite tragic and poignant moments, too!

Sebastian is probably best known for his Twitter presence— “bartlebytaco” on that platform. He is very funny.

Started Vigdis Hjorth’s ‘Will and Testament.’ Thirty pages in and absolutely hooked, who knew a book about inheritances and psychosexual family drama could be so entrancing.

I much enjoyed Niki: The Story of a Dog, Tibor Déry. Not a lot of Hungarian literature finds its way into English in a widely available form like this NYRB edition, but the few that do are usually remarkably good.

Hjorth book very good, read 170 pages in one sitting, pausing only to post my previous post.

(The prominent side is Halldór Laxness and what he conveys to writers or readers. Is the other side represented? Why was it tangled with a story about money?)

Glad I am getting into HJ KIng's Blood and Sand and thinkiing it shouldn't have been left sitting around for ages.
It is pretty interesting. & I really should have got into Survivng Genocide by Jeffrey OStler soon after receiving it at the start of teh year.
& a few other books on Native American relate dhistory I picked up last year.

Finally got a copy of Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa after waiting ages for it through Interlibrary loan. But not started it yet really. Want to get into it so may be next bathroom book after

Guy Deutscher's ThrouGh The Language Glass in which he is looking at the idea of Linguistic Relativity and trying to show positive aspects of a a t5heory he doesn't like much. Interesting book and i think I need to read further into the subject. I did think language did alter teh way one perceived the world around one. THings outside one's immediate experience being to some degree fictions one needs to filter into one's comprehension and therefore one's impressions possibly being didtorted in the process. Or never fully being able to know a thing in itself and one's interpretation being shaped by the language used in description/attempt to process .

En Cyclo Pedia Johan Tell
book on bikes by a Swedish writer which I found in a really cheap charity shop among some other great titles including Phillip Sandes' Ratline which I've wanted to get for ages. Need to read this and East West Street though.
But th ebike book is a good one, a series of short articles set out alphabetically telling anecodtal stories about the writer's experience cycling etc.

I'm currently re-reading The Hill of Kronos, Peter Levi. This book is one of those love letters to Greece from English authors that punctuated the mid-20th century, similar to various works by Patrick Leigh-Fermor, Laurence Durrell and others. This one came a bit late to the party, in 1981 and much of it concerns the 'first as tragedy, then as farce' reign of the Greek junta of colonels that was contemporaneous with the first term of Nixon/Kissinger in the USA. As far as I can see, nobody writes love letters to Greece any more. Sad.

I've started the year rereading The Fellowship of The Ring. It was worth it if only because the construction is so different from the film. The oppressive atmosphere, nostalgia for a golden age, and divide between the races are more pronounced. The descriptions can be sparse and a bit of a slog but they alternate with good dialogue and a good sense of place (Bree, Moria, Lothlorien). The book keeps a good pace even though it grows progressively heavy and gloomy.

End of a golden age is my transition to the early 17th century Chinese play The Peach Blossom Fan. I learnt about NYRB last year and I'm following ILB's lead. Looks great so far, and easier than Dream of the Red Chamber.

Perhaps GLASS ONION is a 'love letter to Greece' for our times.

One of the better pieces of writing (p.58):

I hope that's not as good as it gets, it's dreadful.

After being recommended a book titled HEALTH COMMUNISM by several people, I’ve begun reading it. The authors host a popular podcast called Death Panel, but I know nothing about it since I don’t listen to podcasts.

It is interesting though slightly annoying in the way that many current books of sociology and theory are— the same points are made in a slightly different way to arrive at a similar conclusion. Truly beginning to think that there really is no contemporary theory in the US that’s worth a shit, but what’s new, we’re a nation of fools.

Deesha Philyaw - THE SECRET LIVES OF CHURCH LADIES

short stories with black american women at their centre. like it a lot. the 'peach cobbler' and the 'snowfall' stories in particular. and 'how to make love to a physicist' is p romantic and fun also.

Tove Jansson, A Winter Book. This is my first by her, I've never actually read any Moomin stories! (I hope to change that soon and read some to my daughter.) These are short stories that are more like memoirs - written in the first person, with a family that closely resembles Tove's own. So far the stories are all from the point of view of a child. Like the Claire Keegan book they're more vignettes than stories, unlike Keegan this is, so far, about a mostly happy and well-adjusted family.

If it's autobio - Jansson loved her dad a lot but well adjusted he wasn't. Perhaps this will out later on in the stories.

it's in the film iirc

it's guardedly autobio: set on a small island, the main characters tove's essentially beloved mum and her little niece and their funny and fractious relationship, plus her brother (father of the niece) now and then but less front-and-centre

her dad had died several years before the niece was born and doesn't feature even as a mention i don't think (but then nor does tove or several other members of this quite close if not vast family)

essentially shd go before tove's tho it works afterwards also lol

is that a different book? her dad's in this one, a sculptor, has a pet monkey, glimpses of an *artistic temperament* but nothing close to claire keegan levels of maladjustment yet.

oh lol yes sorry i'm thinking of "the summer book" (which exactly fits my description yes i can be trusted to be accurate always)

Read the new Richard Osman thriller. It's quite good, again. I have a sub-zero interest in his TV work but he's a fun thriller writer and I'm looking forward to the next one.

Currently on TREACLE WALKER which is very good, and knowing how short it is makes it easier to swallow Garner's usual opaque style.

Rereading parts of Franzen's THE CORRECTIONS. Put simply, 22 years on, it's quite a magnificent novel - immensely detailed, intricately structured, comic, often superb in its tracking of the small interactions between people.

Hip by John Leland
Looking at the people thought to be with it the most like.
He spends a full chapter on Bugs Bunny as trickster which I get to shortly.
Just looked at Bebop then the Beats. Cast a critical eye on some of the latter. & all those involved being miserable most of the time as impulse on their lives.
Quite interesting. Thought I'd try to spend time I'm off ill somewhat constructively. Got this out a while ago and have neglected more than I intended.
Now I'm getting into it I'm getting into it.

xpost

I remember the Denise chapter as the highlight, and could almost have been a standalone novella. Twenty years after reading it, the image of Chip shoving the frozen fish into his sweater has really stuck with me. It seems very emblematic of the devastating (but somehow still comic) low points many of us have in our lives.

cesar aira - the magician
bud smith - f250

Curious, Chuck Tatum, as 'The Generator' is generally the one I remember least, just because it's tucked so far into the novel and I've reread it least. But I agree, and like your idea of the sections being novellas. The novel is immensely detailed, cross-referenced, subtle, amusing.

Gaston Bachelard, THE POETICS OF SPACE. So far windily pretentious and not particularly convincing.

I finished John Fogerty's autobiography. There's a rough patch when he hands the reins over to his wife, Julie, and she starts talking about where she grew up. But even that choice ends up kinda working, because it gives us an outside perspective on John's difficult period of alcoholism. Now I'm back on fiction with The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe.

I've started Dilla Time, the recent bio about J Dilla, and it looks like it's going to be more ambitious than I thought. The author is really intent on making the case for Dilla radically altering ideas about time signatures and contextualizing him in music history.

I would like to have lived in the cottage in which Claire-Louise Bennett wrote Pond and to have had a bicycle during the summer but could probably have done without a disposable barbeque. I like how the cottage seems built into its surroundings.

Finished Treacle Walker (it's very short), an incredible piece of work for a human in their late eighties. The story is told in the usual Garner opaque-ese, so naturally Goodreads seems to hate it, but it's pretty easy to find the simple story between the lines -- although, having said that, apparently it's also about quantum physics so perhaps I understood nothing.

What's a good Henry James to read after Washington Square (loved), Aspern Papers (can't remember), Turn of the Screw (hated), and Roderick Hudson (hated)?

The American is my favourite of the easier going Jameses. I love Washington Sq and The Aspern Papers, don't care much for The Turn of the Screw, haven't read Roderick. Or you could always level up to Portrait of a Lady.

not sure about sequence but I loved The Beast in the Jungle

The Europeans is where I direct people when I want'em to see how witty Harry could be.

Washington Square too.

all the garners since i guess red shift have hand-wobble sorta-kinda been abt high-concept science -- as in weird takes on time and and how it gums up space -- but i have to say i'm not really finding any reviewer who buys into the "quantum physics" claim also going on to elucidate it in any useful way. aside from the epigraph quotation nothing jumps off the page, and for that to register that you have to look up who carlo rovelli is and what he means by "time is ignorance"

i wonder if a better way into garner's idea is that the tales in mythologies are a rival way of unravelling the perceptional stumbling block of time, just as science attempts to? the book isn't "about quantum physics", it's a way to end-run towards the cosmological state of affairs that quantum physics is also pointing to

i haven't listened to this podcast yet, maybe it gets there (i have read treacle walker and agree that it is immensely readable and typically but also pleasingly opaque

This, on Treacle Walker, is excellent, not least for Alan Garner's idea that folklore/fantasy writing is analogous to quantum physics, while realist fiction is Newtonian. I only *sort of* get that, but it doesn't matter as the episode is so full of attentive love for the work. https://t.co/AMKwx4h1SL

— Peter Ross (@PeterAlanRoss) November 11, 2021

there's a bunch of stuff you have to look up in fact (tho all of it is interesting)

Thanks for Jameses and Backlisted link! I forgot they'd done a whole podcast on TW. The Red Shift one was very good iirc.

This looks interesting (also haven't read): http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/the-critic-and-the-clue-tracking-alan-garners-treacle-walker/

but i have to say i'm not really finding any reviewer who buys into the "quantum physics" claim also going on to elucidate it in any useful way

hah yes absolutely, lots of "it's really about time... [then drops the subject]"

time seems like another one of those huge mysteries that can easily be observed and described, but defies explaination

Yeah, there are plenty of weird things about time in classical physics, before one even brings in quantum weirdness, as Arthur Eddington pointed out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time

I read a section of Georges Perec's SPECIES OF SPACES / ESPECES D'ESPACES (1974 in the original). It was quite bad: just immense self-indulgence, doodling, writing anything down and producing almost zero insight. It was hard to justify its being published.

hah! you'd love Kev the Postman's Round About Town book then

time is a group hallucination innit

Time is the golden spike connecting the intercontinental railroad of the USA. Thus the table is the table, and the shot heard round the world. (But note that even Isaac Newton went on to other things, like alchemy: lead into gold etc.---people wanna take the scenic route, even going in the same direction---so: many approaches to/views of time, while the meter's running on interest, re: academic grants, publishing advances etc.)

I read a section of Georges Perec's SPECIES OF SPACES / ESPECES D'ESPACES (1974 in the original). It was quite bad: just immense self-indulgence, doodling, writing anything down and producing almost zero insight. It was hard to justify its being published.

The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight. One of those non fiction books that start out as one thing but then seem to meander wherever the author's fancy takes them. Begins with the 1966 Aberfan disaster - which I'd never read about in much detail before, absolutely horrifying. Talks about the premonitions various people, including one of the victims, had about it. Even as a non believer when I read about these things I feel the abyss of the unknown open up beneath me. Goes on to talk about the titular bureau, a feature & department in the evening standard, set up by a psychologist and journalist to investigate these things. Delves into the psychologist's life, digressions into kant, freud, helmholtz. Mostly well written except for when he describes entropy - "It is the cup of coffee which cooled when you drank it. It is the energy of the sun which lit yesterday. It is the leaves that fall from the tree. It is the empire that fell. It is the emails you didn't reply to." He doesn't go off like that too much though.

I like the sound of it but am tempted to read Knight’s shorter feature version in the New Yorker instead

Just finished The Journey to the East, Herman Hesse. I only made it through to the end because it is so short. Hesse writes as if he intended this book to be a sort of overview or culmination of his career. If so, it is awfully thin gruel. The main thing it accomplishes is to firmly establish how deeply Hesse was in thrall to German Romanticism and that German Romanticism was an incoherent mush of anti-intellectual idealism. For someone who wrote a famous book about the Buddha, if he'd ever had a clue about buddhism he'd forgotten it all by the time he wrote this.

xp lol fair. time short, books many.

Started Tom Crewe's debut novel The New Life, about John Addington Symonds and Haylock Hills' acquaintanceship leading up to the writing of their seminal Sexual Inversion.

there's another (fiction?) book about aberfan that i keep hearing about from various places....

A Terrible Kindness: The Bestselling Richard and Judy Book Club Pick. Jo Browning Wroe (99p - https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/a-terrible-kindness)

it's okay. about a young embalmer who volunteers to work on some aberfan victims and his life before and after. more about his relationship with his mother and his fear of having children with his wife.

the knight book was serialised on radio 4 and was an enjoyable listen iirc

Finished it, a very curious, almost astonishing read. The author doesn't come across at all like a credulous crackpot but all the premonitions and predictions are never treated with any scepticism - no suggestion that there's any foul play or trickery, no statistics brought to bear. And taken at face value they really strain at the bounds of what could be called coincidence - two people with twelve 'apparently' successful predictions in one year - that 'apparently' is pretty much as far as he goes in questioning it - including not only a plane crash but the number of casualties, a train crash and the train's destination, and the first man to die in space. I just don't know what to make of it all!

this sounds very like the classic charles fort mode: cheerfully listing the anomalies and never questioning them

pretty much - it's an entertaining mode and i enjoy the frisson it gives but ultimately i prefer a colder analysis, if only for my own sanity! and perhaps the author does lean slightly towards the woo, at one point he says he and his wife decided not to find out the sex of their baby after they saw three magpies ('for a girl') in the garden.

that's just good science

re: the prediction of the death of cosmonaut vladimir komarov, it was the first soviet manned mission in two years; he says the prediction was posted at 5.30pm on a sunday (how does he know? clearly not from a postmark) while komarov was in space, but news of the launch had been broadcast at 7am "by radio sweden" so "it is possible she knew there was a man in space". ok, telling us when it was broadcast by the bbc would be more helpful but perhaps that information is no longer available. still, she probably did know, take that one off the list of impossibles. sorry, there's probably a thread for this kind of thing.

The Soul of Black Folk by W.E.B. du Bois.
Have had this for a couple of years and think I've heard about it longer ago. So about time I actually got around to reading it not just seeing the author turn up in histories of Black America.
It was published in 1903 and I think the language use might just reflect that. It is a little florid or poetic or something. THink it's quite readable. He was a bit elitist or at least wanted to lift everybody of teh race up to a certain point rather than celebrate themselves. So thought a little too fitting around white supremacist policy possibly. I need to read a bit further into this to see how he combats that.

He pushed against the Booker T. Washington emphasis on vocational training for (as Du Bois saw it) an essentially docile workforce, playing it as safe as possible with white capitalism. If you did have a blue collar job, if that was most feasible for you, OK, but that didn't have to mean signing out of your day job, signing in at the bar, church, or at home, keeping your mind always in one harness or another.

I started a book a couple of days ago, Barbarians to Angels, Peter Wells. I bailed out about a third of the way into it. It was a survey of European history during the so-called Dark Ages, roughly 425 BCE to 800 BCE, when the western Roman empire fell apart. Since very few texts emerged from this period that could be described as histories, chronicles, annals, or memoirs, the majority of the book was based on archeological finds. The main problem was that the material was not very illuminating on a human level. It was factual enough, but descriptions of the average height of skeletal remains and the dimensions of building foundations make for very bland reading. If that's your cup of tea, give it a go.

Finished these recently (1878/79):

Victor Cherbuliez- Jean Teterol's Idea (a peasant is kicked by a nobleman and becomes wealthy so he can come back and fuck with him)
Hector Malot- Nobody's Boy (Orphan is happy doing tricks with his dog for money until his family is found and they turn out to be thieves and grifters)
Paul Heyse- Tales from the German
Anthony Trollope- An Eye for an Eye (man becomes engaged to a lower class woman, but then his rich uncle takes him in and he decides he'd rather have the woman as a mistress)
Octave Feuillet- The Diary of a Woman (Woman tries to maintain the good name of her suicide friend)
Benito Perez Galdos- Marianela (A homely girl devotes herself to a brilliant young blind man, but when he regains his sight she dies rather than let him see her)

He was a bit elitist or at least wanted to lift everybody of teh race up to a certain point rather than celebrate themselves

Darryl Pinckney argues in a couple recent essays that Black politics has room for both Washington and DuBois.

xp I could see those all being separate plotlines in a single novel

lol

room for both Washington and DuBois. Yeah, that's why I said (as Du Bois saw it). He was a dynamic writer, and sometimes way ahead of the curve insight-wise, but hardly the last word on what should/could be done.
Aimless on Barbarians to Angels makes me think of Updike on Vico and Herder, a warmed-over but useful collection of lectures by Isaiah Berlin (who 'pulls many dusty name from the library of his mind"):

(Berlin) shows a power of creative assemblage mostly toward the end, when, in a piece of original speculation, Vico's relativism is linked to the forgotten disputes of sixteenth-century jurists as they sought to recover Roman law in its presumed purity from its medieval and Byzantine accretions..."The more faithfully the despised medieval accumulation was removed, the stranger the classical world appeared: if anything, it was the alleged monkish distortions that gave it such affinity to the ideas of later ages as it seemed to have." Here, in the researches of once heated controversy, lie the seeds of historical relativism; the scholars themselves, though without the generalizing power of a Vico, were brought to perceive that languages and institutions have "their beginnings, progress, corruption, end."

425 BCE to 800 BCE

oops, correct that to CE, not BCE

I finished Fernanda Melchor's Paradais; it's fair to say that if you liked Hurricane Season, you'll like this -- it's even more gruesome, to the point of being lurid maybe, and her style, while it's developing more, it still very much a signature -- if you were put off by the style of HS, you won't find much to help you here. But her ruthlessness about how poverty and helplessness play out among people without anything to look forward to is rich. I'm a fan, even if I could hardly bear the ending.

Now onto Jazmina Berrera's Linea Nigra -- I'm making peace with living in this tide of memoirs, and she's a good writer, very much in the Euro-discursive-citation mode that Pitól uses, and Jergovic & a lot of Serbian/Croatian writers -- weaving things she's reading & has read into her story of her pregnancy & the earthquakes that happened while she was pregnant. For me her style takes some warming up to -- but as I say I'm making peace with memoirs, and 1/3 of the way through I've connected with her voice enough to think: yes, she's good. The pacing of that first section is really great.

I'm still reading the long refugee book NO FRIEND BUT THE MOUNTAINS. It's not enjoyable, but it's fair to note that as the book has progressed, it has improved. The bad poetry has lessened, the prose has become somewhat sharper, and the book is making stronger observations, about the management of space in a carceral environment.

> Anthony Trollope- An Eye for an Eye

have been meaning to read some trollope for a while. and this sounds like a good start. also the intro suggests it was delayed because it's siilar to Gaskell's Ruth which got bad reviews. and the wikipedia page for that says it shares themes with The Scarlet Letter. so there's another 3 things to read...

If you do like An Eye For An Eye, try The Way We Live Now.

Trollope was so prolific in the 1870s--usually at least two big novels a year, plus travel writing about Australia and South Africa and a book about Hawthorne. I like almost everything I've read.

Anybody: good collections of book reviews??

I usually read A Long Trollope Novel a year. I usually recommend The Way We Live Now as a start.

I'm really liking Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings

Dow, I don’t know if you’re speaking toward collections of reviews by different authors, but a recent collection of both short form and long-form reviews and essays that I enjoyed is Robert Glück’s Communal Nude

(i looked up Trollope on the penguin website to see if they had a complete set of *ebooks* of the Penguin Classics Barsetshire novels but it looks like they don't do Barchester Towers, although they do as a Vintage Trollope, but only the Classics version will come with intro and notes. maddening.)

https://www.penguin.co.uk/search-results?q=trollope+towers&tab=books
four different versions. what is the point?

Dow, I don’t know if you’re speaking toward collections of reviews by different authors, but a recent collection of both short form and long-form reviews and essays that I enjoyed is Robert Glück’s Communal Nude

― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table)

Iain Banks, The Quarry. Supposedly Banks didn't know he had cancer till the book was almost finished so it's curious that one of the main characters is dying of cancer, and largely uses his remaining time to fulminate about what a shitshow the world and the human race is. The narrator is a teenager with aspergers, a typical Banksian character. The rest of the cast are old uni friends of the cancer patient gathered for a last reunion, they're a pretty unlikeable bunch for the most part, there's supposedly a mystery about a lost videotape but it doesn't really come to anything. Overall, disappointing.

the only one i haven't read, i think. and the one about whisky.

my Culture rereads seem to have stalled at Excession

These are mostly older book reviews and longer essays, but the Dwight Macdonald collection Masscult and Midcult is pretty good.

Thanks for that---I've never read him, but came across promising mentions from back in the day: Marxist but not too reductive, right? Also convivial enough.

I've waded into Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman. Only 100 pages in and I've decided the best approach for me is not to get twisted up in trying to sort out its 'cast of thousands', but simply to read it as a series of sharply observed vignettes connected through a complex matrix of shared reality. I'll certainly miss many of the elements that Grossman intended his audience to understand, but that was always a given, since his audience was made up of his Soviet-era contemporaries who'd lived through the revolution, civil war, famine, purges, and a nightmarish world war mostly under Stalin.

Marxist but not too reductive, right? Also convivial enough.

Like many mid-20th century literary Marxists, the Marxism mostly serves the function of allowing him to ignore politics as a mostly solved problem and focus on more fruitful topics such as style and bitchy putdowns.

After owning it for years I started Gwendoline Riley's SICK NOTES because I was going to an event featuring her. The writing is surprisingly quite good, better than that in her debut (COLD WATER) as far as I can recall. ('Surprisingly' because that debut didn't leave me with a terrific impression.)

Thompson, Escape from Model Land
Bosch, "You Are Not Expected to Understand This"
Gosse, Gossip in a Library

I had to read Life and Fate (a slog, I thought) in grad school when it was impossible to find; now the NYRB has republished most of Grossman's fiction. I may give it another go.

I figure that by not concentrating on sorting out the multifarious relationships among all the characters I'll reduce the effort needed to read Life and Fate by about half.

I reread John Millington Synge's play THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD (1907).

The language remains a delight. The basic character of the running joke, that Christy appeals to people because he's supposed to be a murderer, comes through strongly. Elements of farce and rather caricatural dynamics (Christy getting scared immediately after he's said something brave - rather like a Warner Bros cartoon character).

I continue to find the last private dialogue between Christy and Pegeen terribly beautiful, one of the greatest pages of romantic exchange I've ever read by any writer - notwithstanding what happens in the rest of the play.

i love 'species of spaces'. i think that i first heard about perec and 'life a user's manual' from ilx back in the early 2000s.

i've been reading some poetry, 'fall garment' by paul cunningham, some beautiful, curt images, but he sometimes employs a slightly flashy, trick ending to the poems that i don't like so much. also read a bit of 'run off sugar crystal lake' by logan berry just now (you can borrow it on archive.org as the press don't seem to post to the uk), which i am enjoying

i started reading 'solenoid' by mircea cartarescu, which has been getting some very positive reviews - it's long and i'm only about a quarter of the way into it, but i'm not completely sold. some of the descriptive writing feels a little sophomoric to me and the surrealist passages... i don't know, they don't completely come off. i'll persist with it though. there is one set piece near the beginning where the protagonist reads a long poem in public for the first time and it goes down very badly, that was excellent

i also read 'diego garcia' by natasha soobramanien and luke williams which i think has been posted about on one of these threads before. i didn't care much for the style and while some of the political content about the chagos islands was fine, i don't think it was well developed or integrated - the first time i read about what happened to the dogs on chagos i was appalled, the fourth or fifth time i read about it i was bored.

been going through 'bonding', short stories by maggie sciebert and i read 'gordon' by edith templeton, flicked through the new translation of the kafka diaries and i also got the dril tweets book

i like to blame my broken reading rhythms on the pandemic but much as i love reading grand, endless literary novels i've had trouble maintaining focus on any of them for most of my adult life, so this year i'm attempting to break the pattern by starting off with straight trash — the thomas harris hannibal books, inspired by my recent rewatch of the nbc hannibal. a few surprises: 1) i've read red dragon before but i wasn't aware that some of my favorite lines from the show are straight up harvested from it ("he bore screams like a sculptor bears dust from the beaten stone"); 2) silence of the lambs, whatever its faults, is a marvel of sustained tension and atmosphere where it feels like nothing good will ever happen; 3) all of the great adaptations of these books are at least somewhat surreal and psychedelic, even manhunter feels like it's walking on the edge of unreality, but the books are extremely literal and have a proto-csi "forensic investigators doing their jobs just so well" quality (which made red dragon great raw material for mann tbh) except in isolated moments (the red dragon talking to dolarhyde, any description of buffalo bill's basement)

i'm on hannibal now and it opens with one of the most ridiculous and offensive drug war raid scenes i've ever encountered and i kinda hope it continues to be that stupid

Reading the newest Krasznahorkai, bc I am a parody of myself

just finished
Robert Thorogood - DEATH COMES TO MARLOW , unlikely people investigate a murder premise from the guy who created the death in paradise tv show. it was okay.
just started
Seishi Yokomizo - THE HONJIN MURDERS

Over a rare pint of bitter I went back to Declan Kiberd's perennial INVENTING IRELAND (1995) and at last properly read the chapter on Bernard Shaw's SAINT JOAN, which corresponds well enough to what I remember seeing on stage, and most of that on Yeats's THE WINDING STAIR, which doesn't correspond so well to what's great in that collection.

Just started Kristin Lavransdatter, 1100 pages of one woman's life in the 14th century \o/

I've been clicking through a netgalley advance of Ian Penman's book on Fassbinder. Some brilliant bits of course - IP is peerless at peering into old postcards, videotapes, fagpacket notes and discerning new constellations. But overall it feels adrift, frittering and noodling through airless, late night free associations through YouTube, wikipedia within a tomb-without-a-view lined with Benjamin, Cioran, Derrida usw. You don't expect coherence, but it feels like it runs out of steam, and the most vivid thread - Fassbinder's frenzy of industry recollected in IP's late-life sobriety and ambivalence - isn't really teased out enough...

I've never seen a Fassbinder film.

Doesn't like IP will help me change that.

Doesn't *sound like!

I do note that he made a BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ of some kind, which even I feel interested in.

You should seek it out, there’s a good chance you might like it and that will be your way in.

After a decade of failed attempts, I took a running jump at WOLF HALL and finally cracked it. It's impressive so far but "best book of the decade" as many of the inside blurbs claim seems like... pushing it.

I'm reading via the (excellent) audiobook and simultaneously reading Ian Rankin's LET IT BLEED in an old paperback. I've never read a Rankin before but it's almost exactly what I might expected it be like (i.e. highly readable but middle-of-the-road).

I read a graphic novel, THE NICE HOUSE ON THE LAKE, which is an apocalyptic take on LOST, and I'm just here to tell you it's bad and don't bother.

Just started Kristin Lavransdatter, 1100 pages of one woman's life in the 14th century \o/

― ledge, Wednesday, 1 February 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Let us know how you get on!

"I do note that he made a BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ of some kind, which even I feel interested in."

it's only probably one of the finest TV series of the 20th century. No rush kid!

Morbz once seemed to suggest on here that the real way for serious RWF headz to watch the 'plazt was in two 7 1/2 hour viewings in some arthouse cinema near you. I found that idea not good and just watched it like I would The Sopranos or whatever - one ep at a time.

the correct way to watch it is on 15 tellies simultaneously, each playing a different ep

for ease of viewing eight of the TV are arranged in a quarter circle while the other seven are stack on top, and upside down

:P

this is more of a heimat joek really

it's evolving from very funny before I realised I didn't get it properly, to mildly whimsical now I've worked through it a bit more, but probably still misunderstanding it! Are you a fan of tv series BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, mark?

i greatly enjoyed what i saw of it when it was first shown on UK TV in the 80s (C4 in 1984) -- which was however not all of it by any means

i have always planned and so far failed to rewatch it

(the joek is really just a silly elaboration of the notion of the "proper way to watch telly", pay it no mind -- rip morbz but he was surely talkin nonsense in this instance)

(and heimat is also a longish german TV serial which i also saw some of on telly and some of in the cinema, except this time it was partly abt a stockausen-esque composer among many other characters)

"the correct way to watch it is on 15 tellies simultaneously, each playing a different ep"

ICA played it all over a weekend a few years ago lol.

I did screen it at home from Xmas eve to Boxing day like five years ago.

Still largely basing my reading habits on whatever free ebooks I can find. So I just finished Jack London’s Martin Eden — I wouldn’t highly recommend it, it’s problematic in many ways. Unlike any of his other work I’ve read however. It seems mostly autobiographical? Kept waiting for the big reveal that the whole verysmart edgelord protagonist bit was parody, but no.

The ending tho, did any other sad sack make it that far? Wtf.

I don’t think I ever finished Berlin Alexanderplatz, were there only 15 episodes? It seemed…etwas langer. But in a good, meandering way.

Was it based on an Isherwood book? Probably not right.

Morbz once seemed to suggest on here that the real way for serious RWF headz to watch the 'plazt was in two 7 1/2 hour viewings in some arthouse cinema near you. I found that idea not good and just watched it like I would The Sopranos or whatever - one ep at a time.

It seems mostly autobiographical?

Long ago I read a critical piece that cited Jack London saying that his purpose in writing Martin Eden was to create a working class prototype for Nietzche's Übermensch and to use this superlatively capable character to 'prove' that his working class origins would be too great a barrier to his eventual triumph within society, thereby 'proving' to his working class readers that whatever their personal talents and capacities, banding together to promote socialism was their only means of meaningful social progress. Knowing London's biography it seems pretty likely he used his own life as a model to sketch out Martin's, but he altered it to suit his polemic goals.

Ah ok thanks. That sort of makes sense, in a completely counterproductive way. It really seemed proto-libertarian to me.

That actually would follow if we take Nietzsche as the ur-libertarian maybe?

Reminding me: how is BAP as a novel?
Here's the NYRB Classic, looking good:

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/A1BUlqh1ROL.jpg

I enjoyed it a lot when I read it a few years back - it is incredibly...busy...in a largely really fun, free-wheeling way!

I suspect Hofmann's translation is lively, and I would like to know Doblin [afraid I can't make the umlaut on here] as Brecht and Benjamin debated him so much around 1930. I imagine the book is long but I would like to read it if I could make time one day. Actually I think the idea has appealed to me for a long time simply because I like the actual Alexanderplatz.

Just finished: One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie - convoluted Poirot written during wartime, so full of stuff about Nazis, Communist agitators, plucky British spies, old v new values etc - all red herrings, in the end. The speed and economy of Christie's storytelling is impressive in a reckless sort of way - lots of dialogue, one or two line paragraphs, short chapters, vast subjects (the nature of capitalism eg) dealt with in a imperiously superficial way - it's still the essence of bestsellerdom, but tied to a vanished social world.

Just starting: Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter

Morbz once seemed to suggest on here that the real way for serious RWF headz to watch the 'plazt was in two 7 1/2 hour viewings in some arthouse cinema near you. I found that idea not good and just watched it like I would The Sopranos or whatever - one ep at a time.

I did this at the ICA screening xyzz mentions and it showed me that it was very much not the way to see it - the opening and closing credits between each ep really driving home that it's a tv show. And of course people do enjoy binging TV shows, it's fine on that level, but silly to pretend it's somehow intrinsic to the thing, it'd be like insisting you need to watch the first season of Cheers in one go.

I like the Doblin book better than the Fassbinder I think, understand where bain4z's coming from with "fun, free-wheeling", it's a lot more formally experimental than the show (which only goes that way in the last ep iirc). Be advised though that this playfulness comes within the context of a depressing as fuck Weimar crisis novel.

I think Ali: Fear Eats The Soul would be the Fassbinder to point neophytes to, but I'm not a huge fan so prob wrong.

RE: ways of watching BA - I think Morbs, or someone, quoted Fassbinder as saying he would prefer audiences to watch it straight through, beginning to end. And Tom D very wisely pointing out that Fassbinder never stayed still for 14 hours in his entire life.

Again, I seem to remember reading, possibly on Wiki, that Fassbinder considered the TV series something of a failure and wanted to have another crack at the novel at some point.

I’ve never seen it (or read it) but I watched 8 hours don’t make a day in one long screening at moma - I enjoyed it but I also thought this clearly isn’t meant to be watched this way

It's a curious period where it looked like things were switching over from cinema to TV, with lots of big name directors making multi part shows.

I caught a four part TV drama from the 70s directed by Bergman at the BFI on a Sat afternoon, that's the nearest I've gone to seeing something originally broadcast on TV by an auteur. Otherwise I've seen it in DVDs/Torrents.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_to_Face_(1976_film)

Watched a Gian Maria Volonté interview from 1982 where he keeps trying to guide the convo back onto "how our consumption of images has changed", this tying into the Christ Stopped At Eboli TV mini-series he had just done with Francesco Rosi. Pointing out that a viewer has much more agency with television (changing the colour contrast, muting, recording) and that the amount of images produced in a day are comparable to the amount of images cinema produces in a year. I'm not sure what he was getting at in the end, perhaps just obfuscating because he felt a bit ashamed at doing TV, but who knows?

Home recording made a huge difference! Also having choice of pre-recorded for home viewing---though I still wanted to go to the Film Society screenings at theater in Student Center, plus classroom screenings---pass the word on those---and out-of-town, sometimes out-of state, limited theatrical screenings:get it while you can.

Favorite film books?

As in? Just in general? I’ve always liked The Devil’s Candy, about the filming of Bonfire of the Vanities. You can read an excerpt from it here.

Thanks! Yeah, just in general: collected reviews, essays, by single authors, anthologies, re diff eras, genre/subgenre, also about specific films, actors, directors etc.
I don't know many, but usually enjoyed Kael and Sarris reviews in TNY and VV. Bookwise, Agee on Film is a trip; Manny Farber's Negative Space taught me some more things about writing and thinking about what I've seen and am seeing (he's kind of the counter-Agee, but not anti-); Alfred and I enjoyed Robert Gottleib's life-and-works-and-afterlife-incl.-mentions-and-swag bio-anthology Garbo.

Thanks! Yeah, just in general: collected reviews, essays, by single authors, anthologies, re diff eras, genre/subgenre, also about specific films, actors, directors etc.
I don't know many, but usually enjoyed Kael and Sarris reviews in TNY and VV. Bookwise, Agee on Film is a trip; Manny Farber's Negative Space taught me some more things about writing and thinking about what I've seen and am seeing (he's kind of the counter-Agee, but not anti-); Alfred and I enjoyed Robert Gottleib's life-and-works-and-afterlife-incl.-mentions-and-swag bio-anthology Garbo.

xp: ha, Tom Wolfe and Savonarola! Yeah, thanks for that.

Agh, too many windows open, sorry.

I read The Devil's Candy decades ago--I can recall a large amount of time spent by a unit director trying to prove to DePalma that they could do an interesting shot of a plane landing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No2xc_5zd4I

LOve Saves The Day Tim Lawrence
talking about the development of the discotheque largely in NYC in the early 70s. Ties in with the podcast LOve Is The Message where the author and a companion retrace a lot of the same scene and a few related ones. Pretty good so far.

Restorative Justice Reader Gerry Johnstone (ed)
various key texts on teh subject. I've had this around teh bed for months and need to get through it and return it sine they seem to be tightening the renewal process in teh Irish library system. Quite good so possibly good that I got an incentive to read it. Think I stretched myself in too many different directions to get everything I started trying to read last year so some things I really wanted to read go backburnered too much.
Want to read more on the subject anyway.

DePalma took the correct position. Shots of planes landing can only provide a few seconds of bland filler during a transition between scenes.

Just starting: Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter

― Ward Fowler, Thursday, F

I read it at a friend's rec about five years ago and it impressed me.

xp Great use of a stock shot, which does seem like its around ten seconds: a mighty airliner flying through glorious skies, headed right and West, then flipped left and East when characters are going back thataway yet again, in John Huston's ace gangster comedy Prizzi's Honor.
It's based on a novel of same title, written by Richard Condon, whose best-known work, I guess, was The Manchurian Candidate---is he good? Sees like he might be, judging by Huston's version and usual taste in source material.

Poster Dow, the film book I own that has most surprised people when they see it on the shelf is David Thomson's NICOLE KIDMAN. 'Why do you have a whole book on Nicole Kidman?'

Mark S, an ILX poster, once wrote a book about a film.

Big thread about film books:

Search: Good, nay essential, books about film

Today I would recommend A Long Hard Look at Psycho by Raymond Durgnat

the durgnat is very good yes

(my book is on the other hand very short)

Such great film writing!

And such small portions!

Poster Dow, the film book I own that has most surprised people when they see it on the shelf is David Thomson's NICOLE KIDMAN. 'Why do you have a whole book on Nicole Kidman?'

The question Thomson would ask if he saw this is, "When did I write a whole book on Nicole Kidman?"

Thanks all, incl for reminder about mark s book! Also about that film books thread.
I've never read anything by Thomson that made me want to read more, and that's from anthologies, can't imagine making it through a whole book. Just seems like a solemn slogger.
Think I'll look for a Cahiers du Cinéma collection with Godard etc.

Thomson is pretty much the opposite of a solemn slogger.

More of a rogueish raconteur or mischievous mixer.

dow, it's post-Godard et al, but you can get two volumes of translated Cahiers articles from 68-73 - 'the red years' - as free PDF downloads:

https://monoskop.org/images/7/72/Fairfax_Daniel_The_Red_Years_of_Cahiers_du_cinema_1968-1973_vol_1_2021.pdf

Lots of foundational Marxist-Semiotic-Structuralist film criticism if that's yr thing.

Thomson has flaws, but he's not a slog.

i have a battered copy of the collected 1950s cahiers du cinema (neo-realism, hollywood, new wave, ed.jim hillier) which is useful for historical access to the thoughts of the nouvelle vague before and as they first started making films -- godard on truffaut's 400 coups etc -- tho not in my opinion for terrifically insightful critical writing (basically they were working towards a cinematic reset to allow themselves space to have success at making movies -- which they achieved! but we live in the wake of the reset and as a consequence much of it seems super-obvious). manny farber is a far better writer (and you already have negative space, which i was rereading and enjoying over christmas)

That Durgnat book seems kind of expensive these days, thinking of posting on the appropriate thread for such things.

TS: Termite vs. Elephant

challopsing for team white elephant like there's no tomorrow

I read a chapter or two of Bono's SURRENDER. He describes his wedding in 1982. Adam Clayton was best man. U2 played at the wedding party, presumably quite ramshackle, with guest appearances from other notable musicians like Paul Brady. The honeymoon was in Jamaica. When they arrived the housekeeper said 'Sting, great to see you again!'.

Now reminded of an Alan Clarke film I saw at the same place I went to see Berlin Alexanderplatz, MoMA, only the former didn't require nearly as much sitzfleisch, this being Elephant, which I believe was about The Troubles iirc.

Have mentioned it before on ILX, somewhere, but this is a v well done summary:

https://www.versobooks.com/books/1028-a-short-history-of-cahiers-du-cinema

the one i keep hearing recommendations for is, i think, The Zone, which is someone live-blogging Stalker

(googles...)
"Zona: On Andrei Tarkovsky’s 'Stalker' by Geoff Dyer"

some ppl like geoff dyer but i am not one of them

That Dyer book was not bad, but between insights there were too many winky "can you believe I'm writing a book about this super-obscure, super-difficult movie?!?" asides.

I went to see Dyer read from and talk about the book. This was fine. But I have never seen the film.

re 'live-blogging a film', I can recommend Jonathan Lethem's THEY LIVE (2010), except that it contains too many references to Zizek. Otherwise contains some very good material.

Cool, thanks also for all Cahiers tips, and I'll give Thomson another shot the next time he happens by, won't seek him out. Should seek out my copy of Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber: says it was purchased in 2013 and never read! Oh well, I've got Negative Space on brane.

Stevolende, you might like the listening companion to Love Saves The Day, though it's even more wide-ranging than I expected from reading the book. A time trip across the dance floor, but I got into most of it pretty quickly. Bandcamp has digital (flac or whatever you want, as usual), CD, vinyl, though I got CDs from Amazon (a 2-disc set; BC seems to have them sep?). Amazon had mp3 and vinyl as well (the vinyl's sometimes sold out on BC). The only free BC stream is Charles Earland's "Leaving This Planet," though there may be more on other sites.
(All of the listening companion for the equally excellent second book, Life & Death On A New York Dance Floor (1980 - 1983), can be heard for free on Bandcamp.)

Cool. Thanks. Podcast is quite good too.
Was going to copy the discography in the book to somewhere.

Will try to get to read the 2nd book.

This copy was apparently in a store for some reason. As soon as I get it it has a request lodged so I need to get through it fast.
Surprised it's in a store and therefore not in usual circulation. Would have thought existence of Podcast would mean some demand.
Podcast is Love Is The Message but author is one of 2 hosts.

Second book better than the first, afaic, and gets into the recuperation of underground music culture into capitalist systems of extraction/exploitation in a way that isn’t didactic.

yeah, I loved Life & Death On A New York Dance Floor

After reading over half of NO FRIEND BUT THE MOUNTAINS, and 40-50pp of (tiresomely earnest and reverential) metatext by the translator and others, I'm bailing out on that book. But I can affirm that it improves as it goes, and chapter 8 is actually quite sharp on the management of carceral space, and the way that baffling, shifting regulations confuse and dismay prisoners. An odd detail, typical of this, is that the prisoner can receive half a glass of milk, but if the cook mistakenly pours slightly more than half a glass into the glass, then it becomes invalid and is set aside and wasted. Crazy.

I bought Michael Bracewell's UNFINISHED BUSINESS (2023) and have read the first chapter. Readable, enjoyable, and perhaps the prose is a bit better controlled than earlier Bracewell.

xpost the other volume in TL's NYC triology: Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 Romance of first part of that title well-balanced by research, incl. contending POvs, incl. great quotes.

Also expert social mapping, as Frank Kogan might put it.

I was quite impressed by The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe. Not sure where I heard about this book, but seems like it deserves to be better known. Ofc there's a voyeuristic aspect to a middle-aged married dude like me reading about the romantic lives of 20-something single women in 1950s NYC, but the book is much tougher and smarter than that synopsis might suggest. Its remarkable how well the book anticipates so many themes that continue to resonate down to the present day. Jaffe sets herself a challenge by weaving together 4 independent stories with 4 main characters (though they all know each other through an office where they worked together), but she needs a big canvas to tell the story she's trying to tell, a story as much about society as it is about individual characters, in which resonances and patterns can accrue between different people's experiences.

Is it better than THE GROUP?

A quarter through Gwendoline Riley's SICK NOTES (2004), I realise that though some of the writing is lively, the book is annoying. Its protagonist's ennui seems immensely self-indulgent and obnoxious. Question is, can I bail out of another book? I think I have to stay on and finish it.

^^ My first Riley last year. I'm reading My Phantoms; almost done.

Is it better than THE GROUP?

I haven’t read The Group, though it’s been on my wishlist for a while. I guess that one was written about 10 years later, so would be interesting to compare.

Riley is wonderful. I will say, I had a better appreciation of her debut, Cold Water, having read the later novels first. The voice is there fully-formed from the beginning, but it’s easier to recognise what’s working when you know where she ends up, and the twentysomethinginess of those books is less distracting.

Anyway I think she’s very good at writing about miserable things and obnoxious people without leaning on self-deprecatory jokes to sweeten the prose, but also without turning it into a sadistic experience for the reader.

Not sure anything in recent fiction has made me feel sadder than the bit in My Phantoms where the mum texts "bad haircut :(" to Bridget.

o.nate, I had thought that THE GROUP was earlier! ... But you're right, 1963!

I am over halfway through SICK NOTES. It's mostly been very bad, very irritating, one of the worst novels I have read in a long time.

However, halfway through the book the protagonist meets a random American and begins a relationship of some kind with him. I have no idea yet how it ends. But I will give GR some credit for writing about intimacy: the sensations of being alone with this person for the first time, the tension, speculation, mutual interest. It's something that most people experience some time, but that perhaps I don't see convincingly written in fiction.

Started the second book of Kristin Lavransdatter. I'm not quite in love with it but it's very good. Simple but not overly plain writing, lots of visual descriptions of the landscape and weather, and clothes, and faces - as usual the latter never work with me and just make me picture mr potato head faces but that's on me. The translation means there are no thees or thous or doths to get in the way of picturing them as regular people who just happened to live 700 years ago.

Stayed up late for The Leopard last night on TCM, but bailed after about 90 minutes: even though the characters discussed the Revolution and options right up front, I kept craving more nuance x overall story-sense. Is the novel good? What translation is best?

The whole film is a set-up for the final hour, one of the great extended scenes in film history!

only if you watch it tho

Good to know. I expect the novel will also be centered around the Prince and his circle, but at least his commentary won't be dubbed staccato.

one of the great extended scenes in film history!

is it an hour long slomo of a dog skin rug falling from a window?

I hope not, I liked the dogs!

Perry Anderson (hope Mark S will appreciate that reference) wrote that the novel THE LEOPARD is the greatest historical novel of mid-C20 Europe. I believe he called it 'a glittering jewel on a pile of trash', the trash being other historical fiction.

B-but what about The Bethrothed? Recent translation is good, I've read*. Maybe he meant relatively recent historical novels, not ones that are themselves historical/considered Classics.
*This is appealing, and not paywalled at the moment: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/17/italys-great-historical-novel

Betrothed, yes (even though it sounds wrong)

I watched The Leopard, enthralled, for the third time last Memorial Day weekend.

Actually, the film deepens the novel.

Read Mansfield Park for the first time. A reactionary and humorless text. All the characters you’re supposed to admire seem like prigs Dickens would have had some fun with 40 years later.

There's a certain sad fatalism in The Leopard, relating to some half baked ideas of the "essence" of spirit of southern Italy and its incompatibility with modernity. Get a lot of that in Portuguese fiction as well. It's an insiduous and damaging worldview, but I'll admite quite seductive in fiction.

Guess that's relating what the people around Lampedusa were saying iirc. Proust does something similar in his portraits of both reporting some of these views and making it seem weak, like Anderson's quote, in the way that class of people have the confidence of making pronouncements with little to back it.

Read Waste by Eugene Marten over the weekend - a short and nasty account of a necrophile janitor working in a big office block. Shades of Dennis Cooper in it's affectlessness but not quite as good as any of the Cooper I've read so far.

Having seen it pop up in a few threads on this board, I grabbed Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn from the charity shop for a pound. I've only read The Ecstasy of Influence before and that was years ago. Looking forward to seeing what his fiction is like.

I think it's his best novel, though not his most ambitious. If you mean the whole book THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE I'm impressed. That's long - and contains loads of tremendous, fascinating material as well as some weaker.

I'm pretty certain I finished it, but it was a long time ago now - just seen they have it in my local library so will pick it up today to refresh myself.

Read Mansfield Park for the first time. A reactionary and humorless text. All the characters you’re supposed to admire seem like prigs Dickens would have had some fun with 40 years later.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek),

Curious -- is this your first Austen?

No I’ve read S&S and P&P. long time ago but I don’t remember them being so priggish and I’m pretty sure they had jokes.

I'm not sure which novel would be my least favorite Austen (I haven't read Northanger Abbey). I do remember liking Fanny Price.

I think it’s silly when people don’t like books because they don’t “like” the characters but she was a bit much!

i had some fun thinking of lady bertram as a reductio of the idea that once you've secured a husband you don't need to do anything - even talk, or think!

While still reading other things, on the train home I started, after decades of not reading it, on W.B. Yeats's verse (?) drama THE SHADOWY WATERS (1906, or did it take decades more of uncertain tweaking?). It's about a pirate ship in a strange ocean.

All the characters you’re supposed to admire seem like prigs

I think you may be missing the fact that Austen was writing gentle comedy, not romance. When you see that a character is a prig it was her intention. She wants you to see their folly for what it is, but also their humanity. That may not be strong enough sauce for you, but please don't think she admired prigs.

fwiw I greatly liked NORTHANGER ABBEY, tremendously metafictional and playful, full of resonant passages. (Sounds like an abbey.)

Aimless, that's why I asked caek about other Austen. No need to be condescending.

Prynne reading group continues apace— we’re in the late 90s now, so a bit more than halfway through the most recent edition of the collected.

I quit ‘Health Communism’ halfway through— just a terribly-written and poorly-edited book. Very art school Marxism-lite, a genre which I can take if compellingly written, but this is not. Hard pass!

Reading both a proper Coolidge book and taking a first pass on a manuscript of his that my press is going to publish, which is very exciting news— and it’s a cool manuscript, too!

I can't deal with Jane Austen either. I understand that this is probably a me problem. I read a lot of stuff from earlier & later in EngLit but that zone, I just don't care about any of the scenes or people she writes.

i am familiar with (and have enjoyed) the experience of reading a jane austen comedy. mansfield park doesn't aim to be a comedy afaict. it is certainly not, in practice, funny.

fwiw my response doesn't seem to be unsual https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansfield_Park#Literary_reception.

I'd like to apologize to caek for my ungenerous and entirely unwarranted response to his post about Mansfield Park.

I am almost done with Piranesi, by Susannah Clarke. It is perhaps somewhat slight, especially compared to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but god damn have I enjoyed it. It's bizarre in all the ways I appreciate. I didn't know anything about the historical Piranesi before reading this, and so didn't grasp at first the significance of the application of the name to the narrator.

Susanna *

I loved Piranesi. I listened to the audiobook read by Chiwetel Ejiofor. It was beautiful

History of the Hanged David Anderson
History of the Mau mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s.
Some turns of phrase have had me wondering if the author is fully decolonised. Though I guess the idea fo end of empire may be something that would be in the air of the time. Just does strike me that the author may be a bit too white to have a perfect perspective on the subject.

Animal Land Margaret Blount
a survey of the appearances of animals in fantasy books. Written in 1974 so possibly a bit dated. She has some interesting points of view cropping up in passing that do make me want to learn more about the author.
I think this was in the bibliography of something but can't see what. Either taht or turned up in comment in a podcast. Was it one of teh books being read by hosts or guest on Backlisted or something.

Tim Lawrence Love Saves the Day
I'm finding this pretty interesting so finding it a pain that I keep semi dozing off while reading it. THink I'm doing a lot of early morning or late night reading but trying to get through this.
I think I'm in 1977 at the moment, the Record Pool that David Mancuso set up has just falen apart and been replaced.
Anyway, finding it a bit frustrating cos i do want to get through this and somebody else has it on order so it needs to go back next week. Ho hum.

I am now reading at least four different books because I started rereading Raymond Carver's WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE (1981), in a Harvill edition no less.

It's been a very long time and I remember the outcomes of none of the stories. I like the stories. I like the skewed dialogue (closer to DeLillo than people might think) and quite appreciate how Carver repeatedly generates weirdness, incongruity, in seemingly normal settings.

Carver writes a lot about drinking and alcoholism. I even find this a bit of a limitation. As though he was not a 'great writer who writes about drinking', as I'd like to think, but 'great alcoholic writer whose book is mostly about alcoholism'.

The story 'The Bath' is the one about a cake being made for a boy who is then sent into a coma in hospital. I believe it featured in the film SHORT CUTS. The ending, where the mother receives a telephone call, seemed to be ambiguous: was it from the hospital or the baker? But today I realised that it was from the hospital, the call would be from her husband. So really it has to be the baker. Which would make it a more black-comic ending, less a potentially tragic one.

never thought about that!

can't believe no one's posted this clip

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

16 years or so on from reading The Bath for the first time - or "A Small, Good Thing" as it was called in Cathedral - and I'm still in love with the lack of the word 'on' in that opening line:

"Saturday afternoon the mother drove to the bakery in the shopping centre."

Making my way through The Ecstasy of Influence and largely enjoying it.

I do, however, have The Recognitions by Gaddis waiting for me at the library so might have to make a start on that pronto. I've never read any Gaddis (outside of an interview or two) so not sure what to expect.

Years ago I read the versions of those Carver stories before his editor ruthlessly chopped them up. The Bath in particular I remember being much less cryptic but also far richer (and it ends similar to the adaptation in Short Cuts). I should compare them again some time.

The version titled "A Small Good Thing"

So is there a book that contains early, pre-editor drafts of these stories?

They are in the Library of America collection of his complete stories. My memory is bad, I think A Small Good Thing is the only one I actually read, and that's included in Cathedral. However, I do remember his editor Gordon Lish took a lot of credit for shaping the work of Carver as we know it, and that the editing process was excruciating for Carver.

I started Richard Holmes' Coleridge bio because he's the Romantic poet I'm meh about besides "Frost at Midnight" and a couple other things. So far it's splendid, especially the footnotes.

From memory, Pinefox, Beginners contains the pre-Lish versions of some of the most famous stories

I've read both volumes of that Coleridge biography. Magnificent. I read them before taking a long walk across the Quantocks and while it didn't really make me any more of a fan of Coleridge's poetry (Mariner, excepted), it certainly illuminated his whole intellectual project.

from my initial research it looks like one of the best of its kind

Holmes's Doctor Johnson and Mr Savage is one of my v favourite non-fiction books.

Not to be confused with the British military historian Richard Holmes.

Footsteps, his book of capsule biographies disguised as a book about the perils and thrills of writing biographies, is also brilliant.

Shelley: The Pursuit is one of those books I've bought at some point and have lost in the depths of my house, or blindly thrown out in a purge.

The meeting of Coleridge and Wordsworth has a John-meets-Paul air of suspense.

Re the pinefox’s point about Carver being an alcoholic who writes about drinking, he was in recovery while he wrote most of his most famous stories, so your perception is on point— but i also think he was a great writer. I love teaching “Cathedral,” always becomes a really amazing discussion of toxic masculinity, grace, and redemption.

Chris L, thanks very much for mentioning the LOA Carver Collected Stories---Looks like it might be a unique kind of anthology:

In gathering all of Carver's stories, including early sketches and posthumously discovered works, The Library of America's Collected Stories provides a comprehensive overview of Carver's career as we have come to know it: the promise of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and the breakthrough of What We Talk About, on through the departures taken in Cathedral and the pathos of the late stories. But it also prompts a fresh consideration of Carver by presenting Beginners, an edition of the manuscript of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that Carver submitted to Gordon Lish, his editor and a crucial influence on his development. Lish's editing was so extensive that at one point Carver wrote him an anguished letter asking him not to publish the book; now, for the first time, readers can read both the manuscript and published versions of the collection that established Carver as a major American writer. Offering a fascinating window into the complex, fraught relation between writer and editor, Beginners expands our sense of Carver and is essential reading for anyone who cares about his achievement.

Not that the uncut would nec. be better, but I'd love to compare, and might learn something more about the process (there always is more, lorb knows).

Agree. I know, in the vaguest terms, about Lish's alleged role, but to be able properly to compare texts sounds like a good scholarly task.

I used to love teaching "Cathedral" too.

I'm currently reading Captains of the Sands by Jorge Amado. It's interesting to me to compare this to another novel that came out a year later, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. Both depict gangs of criminal youth in seaside towns and have Catholic themes. However, I would say the similarities end there. Although Amado doesn't shy away from depicting disturbing acts, he romanticizes the gang in a way that Greene never does. The gauzy atmosphere of mischief and hijinks in Amado is worlds away from the creeping dread and menace of Greene. Perhaps it's because Amado wants to show that his gang's way of life is the inevitable product of an unjust society, whereas Greene is more concerned with questions of personal agency and guilt.

Dan s: I also loved the Piranesi audiobook.

Aimless: no worries.

iirc both caek and i quite liked PIRANESI but were not entirely certain the final chapter was necessary

I think a book has to have a last chapter otherwise it never ends

does it tho

I guess by induction if it doesn’t have a last chapter it doesn’t have any chapters

I finished Gwendoline Riley's SICK NOTES (2004). A few things can be said for the book:

* it makes a consistent effort to describe environment, place, weather - very rarely with really fine or memorable writing, but some kind of effort at texture is going on.
* the lackadaisical youths at the centre are at least literary. They talk to each other of Melville, Fitzgerald, Hamsun et al. This is better, to my mind, than if they didn't have these interests. On the other hand, no-one in the book actually produces insight into literature - it's rather like a 'Bookstagram' post in which someone posts book covers to look chic.
* as mentioned above, GR is actually quite good on intimacy; being near someone, even being in bed with someone. When she bothers to find the intensity to try to render such things, there is promise.

On the whole, though, the book is bad, and more annoying than bad. I wondered if it was the most annoying book I'd read, then remembered all the Banville, Rushdie, Amis and Pynchon I've read and realised it isn't, by far.

At a recent in-person event GR was sharp and eloquent, and it was stated that her later work is much better than her earlier. I hope so. She seems like a person capable of better than this.

I'm currently reading Captains of the Sands by Jorge Amado. It's interesting to me to compare this to another novel that came out a year later, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. Both depict gangs of criminal youth in seaside towns and have Catholic themes. However, I would say the similarities end there. Although Amado doesn't shy away from depicting disturbing acts, he romanticizes the gang in a way that Greene never does. The gauzy atmosphere of mischief and hijinks in Amado is worlds away from the creeping dread and menace of Greene. Perhaps it's because Amado wants to show that his gang's way of life is the inevitable product of an unjust society, whereas Greene is more concerned with questions of personal agency and guilt.

I think they're very different situations. Pinky is a gangster in the James Cagney sense, he's out for himself. The Captains meanwhile are kind of a mutual aid society of runaways and orphans, of an extent that I don't think would exist in 30's Brighton - even with all the poverty that no doubt was around, I'd wager similar structures would still be based around families; Amado's setting is more liked Dickens. Pinkie's also 17, so the senior of most of the Captains. He objectively has a lot more agency than they do.

Re: the Catholic themes, worth pointing out that the Captains reconcile catholicism with worship of orishas in that typically Brazilian way, while true blue catholic Greene is, erhm, less ecumenical.

the pinefox, what you described sounds promising. What ruins the book?

I read My Phantoms last week: a solid novel-length description of a mother-daughter relationship.

I thought you had read this novel? I'm sure you will quickly form your own view if you do.

I suppose a short answer for me is: aimlessness, self-indulgence, too many things that go absolutely nowhere, a narrator who has very little to offer us or anyone else. She randomly smashes all the crockery and her flatmate isn't bothered. It doesn't help that she spends most of the time drinking, and her life is subsidised by - it's hard to tell, as she never seems to work; maybe by the royalties of a book that she has, mysteriously, published, despite, on the evidence of the narrative, being no good as a writer.

I can see some people liking the book. On the whole, I think it's bad.

As mentioned, I can believe that GR's later work is better.

Listening to Piranesi while sick with Covid was one of the high points of last year for me. The fever really added to the experience!

As noted, I have no recollection of how the Raymond Carver stories turn out, so I was shocked and horrified - again? - on reaching the end of 'Tell the Women We're Going', where an already unpleasant, but seemingly quite ordinary character (and married father of three) is suddenly said to have 'used the same rock' on two women he's just met. The implication is that he kills them, though this isn't certain. It's like the horror of, well, horror fiction, but in a piece of what you'd thought was realism. The popular phrase 'toxic masculinity' has never seemed so fitting.

On the other hand, the ageing husband in 'After the Denim' is into knitting and needlework; one of the most profoundly 'feminised' characters I've encountered in Carver, if the term makes sense.

The last chapter wound things up well, I thought.

I finished W.B. Yeats's verse drama THE SHADOWY WATERS. My impression has long been that this text is notorious in WBY's oeuvre for its vagueness, the author's uncertainty over what it was, his vacillation in rewriting it repeatedly. I've meant to read it for years. In fact the version I've now read, at least, is quite short, only 30 pages or so, with a dense prefatory poem about Coole's Seven Woods - the usual material - and another about some mythic figures. The main text is about an ancient pirate ship captained by one Forgael who is given over to some kind of search for immortality. His crew raid another ship and bring him a Queen, Dectora, aboard. Unsurprisingly she and Forgael eventually get together despite her initial great reluctance, mainly I think because he plays a harp and casts a spell on her (and everyone else). It doesn't seem a great model of consensual love, a point noted within the text itself. At the end Forgael and Dectora sail off after the immortal birds with human faces (a pretty grotesque image perhaps) while the crew depart for the real world.

I can't say that this work is great, or terribly interesting or convincing. A few poetic phrases stand out for their directness: 'The whole ship / Flashes as if it were a net of herrings'; 'I am a woman, I die at every breath'. Thematically I suppose what it expresses is a Yeatsian mood in which a 'noble' or aristocratic union can proudly face down death.

I also read a narrative poem, THE TWO KINGS (1914), basically about a Queen, Edain, at Tara, who tells her King, Eochaid, how she had a visionary encounter with some other noble fellow (unsure who - the other King of the title?) who asked her to come away with him for immortality. She refused, insisting that being with her mortal love was what she wanted. This sounds standard fare but there is some poignancy in the passionate words with which she says this:

What can they know of love that do not know
She builds her ledge
Above a windy precipice?

The Captains meanwhile are kind of a mutual aid society of runaways and orphans, of an extent that I don't think would exist in 30's Brighton

I guess I'm skeptical it existed in '30s Brazil either - at least the way it's depicted in the book. It seems more like a myth or a fable. And at book length it becomes a little too predictable: the plucky orphans with hearts of gold vs the cruel police and reformers.

It absolutely existed, at least as late as the 80's when the film Pixote portrayed some kids in similar circumstances, and I wouldn't bet against it still existing today. Whether Amado romanticizes his protagonists is a separate issue - like no doubt these structures were/are full of trauma and violence and abuse, physical, sexual and emotional (which tbf Amado acknowledges, even if I'd agree it's not the main thing to take away), but they're still quite different from the wham bam gangsters of Greene's book.

I mean to a large extent this is just a reality of a society where social services don't have the reach (or most of the time interest) to follow up on individual cases.

I'm reading I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett - a deadpan comic novel. He's good with repetitions:

"To make a long and sad story abbreviated and sad"

"and so my entry was well attended and well documented by a shocked few who told a shocked, though mainly uncaring, many"

"her screams filled the streets like screams"

The main character's family name is Poitier, so his mother baptizes him Not Sidney. She also buys stock in Turner, so when she dies Not Sidney gets adopted by Ted Turner, who is somewhat uncomfortable by how much this reminds him of Growing Pains. From theron it's a picaresque novel. Currently he's going through a clear parody of The Defiant Ones, which makes me worry the rest of the book will also be riffing on Poitier's 60's output, which I am not very familiar with.

the "mutual aid" dimension to nascent mobsterism isn't unusual at all, as a self-ennobling claim if not as a fact: especially in the early stages of organisation -- it didn't take me long at all to find a version of the classic quote abt the krays: "“the krays were very caring and never touched ordinary people, they really looked after their own"

and the opening scene of the godfather also speaks to this ("you come to me on the day of my daughter's wedding", there will come a day when i need a favour of you etc: this is mutual aid). and it's all across peaky blinders also, the local mob as a police force for those that the official police (bcz racist and corrupt) never protect… but of course just as subject to tides of corruption and in-group prejudice and even more to charismatic sociopathy

Yes, agreed - but I'd say within the US and UK contexts the picture that's transmitted is more of individuals within an existing community fulfilling certain roles for it - i.e. there were already Italian-American communities in the US and working class communities in the UK, and they already had elements of mutual aid set up, the gangsters slotted into and/or exploited those.

The Captains are quite a different thing because it's not about a group organising within a community to defend and/or exploit it, it's kids who are mostly isolated from society at large and self-organizing within that; geographically isolated, even, in Amado's novel. Also of course being orphans they lack the family ties that contextualize ppl like the Krays within their community.

I do think there's paralells to be drawn, but I'd place them nearer to contemporary black gang culture in the US than the organized crime of the Krays or the cosa nostra.

And the gangsters in Brighton Rock I don't think fit into any of these modes - they are mostly punks, self styled Individualists, perhaps predecessors of youth cultures to come.

yes it's years since i read or watched brighton rock but i feel like pinkie is p much "charismatic sociopath" from the outset -- if he'd escaped his end in the book the fate of a joe pesci character always awaited him, at the hands of rival mobsters

Carver's stories 'So Much Water So Close To Home' and 'The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off' continue the presence of violence in the stories - in all these cases, violence by men and against women. In the first a girl has been killed and a woman attends her funeral. Here she hears about the violence. The husband is not guilty but seems implicated by having found the body and not immediately reported it. I note that a much longer version of the story appears in FIRES.

In 'The Third Thing', a quite long and dull story, a fellow who cannot talk acquires bass for his pond, then the pond is flooded. The fellow kills his (perhaps unfaithful) wife then drowns himself.

In 'A Serious Talk', yet again, there is at least the threat of violence, as the character Burt takes random vengeance against his wife's having a new partner - cutting her telephone wires, stealing her pies, and raising an ashtray as if to hit her. The last line is black comic / absurd: he has gone back to his car and started driving it: 'It was hard managing it until he put the ashtray down'.

I recalled that Carver wrote about troubled men, but not so much that he wrote about violence. This aspect is, naturally, I suppose deliberately, troubling.

But the collection makes me think about Carver and 'masculinity' (a concept I am not certain I understand). I think:

1: Carver writes about 'tough guys' who can build fences, drive cars, go fishing, drink whiskey, maybe even go hunting. (You may say anyone can do those things.) Carver is a 'masculine' writer.

2: Carver also writes about some of those people being actually violent or threatening violence. Carver demonstrates how such 'masculinity' can be dangerous, especially to women.

3: But more interestingly, Carver also seems to write a lot about men who are not very comfortable with these identities or habits. Men who don't really fit their roles, and feel awkward. Carver seems keen on awkwardness - it's even there in his great title WOULD YOU PLEASE BE QUIET, PLEASE? (The character who carries away the ashtray then remembers to put it down could be similar in a way - like Alan Partridge with his cheese.) Carver, I think, isn't just writing 'masculine fiction' about real men, but almost the opposite: repeatedly demonstrating how ill at ease these men are in the roles they're given. I suppose that's one reason they drink so much.

I feel a possible contrast with that obvious comparison Hemingway. He seems to me happier to let men be men, not to show them chafing at this role. But that could be because I am thinking of Hemingway the person, who really was masculine or macho, and not his characters.

I return to Michael Bracewell's UNFINISHED BUSINESS. I think that the book may be better written and more insightful and poignant than a lot of his earlier work - including THE CONCLAVE to which it's a sequel. I enjoy reading it. What I wonder is whether the book will prove to have any dynamism or plot. MB doesn't seem to have developed any new fictional material or areas of interest at all in the last 30+ years. Suburbia, offices; style and clothing; memories of punk rock.

Carver writes about 'tough guys' who can build fences, drive cars, go fishing, drink whiskey, maybe even go hunting...Carver, I think, isn't just writing 'masculine fiction' about real men, but almost the opposite: repeatedly demonstrating how ill at ease these men are in the roles they're given. I suppose that's one reason they drink so much.

Reading Hemingway's Collected Stories a few years ago, I was struck by how damaged his men and women often already are, no matter what they're doing or trying to do/avoid in the scenes shown. Likewise, in (far as I've gotten in the fiction)The Sun Also Rises, Brett and the boys bust out of Paris, wanting to be tourists again, and taken care of by foreigners as nannies, play therapists, performers.
I recently read a long review of a posthumous collection of his letters, written over many years copiously quoted: he crazy, jittery at best, and even when generating a smooth, cool-to-cold surface, the tremor is often there. (Also: lots of beefs, but more surprising are instances of vulnerability, though some of it seems manipulative.)
Alfred mentioned that posthumously published novel, Garden of Eden, about expermimenting with gender roles, I think? Would like to read that and some other posthumous.

I finish rereading WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE. The main impression that I record is to re-emphasise the presence of violence in these stories. In addition to the several I've already mentioned:

* 'The Calm': a hunter shoots a deer, then almost provokes a fight in a barber shop just by talking about it. (Why? Because he should have killed the deer and put it out of its suffering?)

* 'Popular Mechanics': a husband and wife fight over a baby. My fear is that the baby will be dropped over the hot stove. The ending leaves the possibility that they kill the baby by fighting over it. You could probably reasonably say that the husband is to blame for the violence. The wife is presumably smaller and weaker; by using force he is exercising an unethical domination over her. He's also probably hurting the baby. I thought slightly of THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE.

* 'Everything Stuck to Him': no actual violence in the story but only because the young husband doesn't go on the hunting trip he wants to go on. Classic Carver line when another fellow tells him 'The geese are flying to beat the band'.

The fact is that several of these stories are about males for whom violence, against animals, is normal. That isn't the case for anyone I know, that I can think of. I don't say that hunting is wicked, for that raises the question of hypocrisy for anyone who's ever eaten meat. But I do suggest that for these men, a certain kind of violence is normal and enjoyable. Meanwhile, violence against people also seems much more normal for many of them than it would be for almost anyone I know.

* 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love': well, maybe this will be more peaceful. Not really, as it contains tales of an ex-husband who threatened a couple then shot himself in the head. The cardiologist at the centre of the story is drunken, seemingly depressive, and ominously possibly violent himself. I'm bothered by his aggression. I wouldn't want to be around him.

* 'One More Thing': a male character, LD, storms out of a house after yelling at a wife and daughter, and - definite violence - throwing a jar of pickles through a window.

That's 5 stories in a row!

I posit that if this book were published now, people wouldn't say 'this is moody', 'this is minimal', 'this is the forgotten America of people scraping by' or 'this is how men and women fail to communicate'. They'd say 'this is very violent'.

If that's correct then does it mean that something has changed in c.40 years? That 'our culture' is more sensitive to or bothered by violence? Or more ready to talk about it? Or that potential victims of such violence are more audible in said culture?

If you suppose that 'trigger warnings' exist and aren't a tabloid fiction, then I can fairly imagine this book being labelled something like 'content warning: domestic violence'.

I don't posit that the book is bad because it's so violent, or so simmering with aggression. It could be an achievement that it conveys all this aggression. I do merely note that this is part of its unsettling effect, which makes me doubtful that I'd want to get too close to these characters.

pinefox, not to be weird in stating the obvious, but the US is a violent, patriarchal place. the problems of violence that Carver brings into the work are reflective of that reality. i wouldn’t want to get too close to these characters, either, but wonder if that might be precisely the point?

Or more ready to talk about it? Or that potential victims of such violence are more audible in said culture?

I finished Uwe Johnson four part novel 'Anniversaries', written over a ten year period and totalling nearly 1700 pages. It was an immersive experience like how those big novels are (though I read the first part two years ago and then left it, till I picked it up again around Xmas). The last parts build a picture of the just born East German state through the years of a woman and her child.

For a novel set in '68 it's actually as much a book about Germany from the 30s; the novel is actually lightly experimental in the way it darts from that period right through around 1949 (so lots of material on denazification, and the beginnings of the Stasi), but it also doesn't decide on whether this or that system is BEST. The character sees what's going in America, a country at war with Vietnam, and it isn't a rosy picture. So while it hardly mentions what's going with student protests in '68 it spends time with the character as a teenager, as her friends learn about life and politics in the heat of Soviet occupied Germany.

Ultimately the writing really deliver. Johnson can write about people, nature, psychologies, a place. Certain passages (the account of the harvest in the middle of part Three) are breathtaking.

One of NYRB's greatest triumphs too, in bringing this out.

^Sounds good!

I've seen Johnson's novel often enough at the bookstore to wonder. I may buy it today.

Intangibles: Unlocking the Science and Soul of Team Chemistry - Joan Ryan

I reviewed some of this when I was partway though already in my baseball thread.

It’s kind of an unusual topic, but I loved it. It reminded me, when reading, of Moneyball, in terms of the strengths of the stories told and how convincing they are of the central thesis. If you know me at all online, you have probably read me going on about the importance of communities and my interest in relationships between people. This book is about that, but it makes the argument that the function of team chemistry is to elevate a team’s performance. Sounds obvious, but in the highly quantified world of sports analysis, you need to show your bona fides. Michael Lewis actually told Joan Ryan that team chemistry doesn’t exist, and so I was very interested to see how this played out!

Ryan has worked with/around my beloved San Francisco Giants for longer than I’ve been alive, so a lot of her analysis and connections come from teams across the decades. She talks about the 1987 San Francisco team that won the NL West and the various characters in that team that made up the roster. There’s anecdotes about Kevin Mitchell joining and bonding with Dave Dravecky, who was a member of the John Birch society (!). She writes about basketball, a sport I have never followed as an adult, and made the case for the 1996 women’s American basketball following a path to build a team that worked and loved and pulled for each other after their previous failures. When I say I was glued to this story, wanting them to come through it?

I mentioned in my baseball post, about the characters in clubhouses known as “cancers”, players who can pull a clubhouse down by malingering and who contribute less than their intrinsic talents because of their effect on the cumulative whole. The interesting part of this book is when she explores the 2002 Giants team which had two high profile characters that clashed, Jeff Kent and Barry Bonds. Ryan went in with the received wisdom, that these two dragged the team down. But both Kent and Bonds reiterated, fiercely, that though they didn’t care for each other as people, they had each other’s backs to the death on the field. And of course, they played together and off each other and got to a World Series together.

I quoted a lot from the book on the other post, but there are so many great stories in this book that stuck with me. Despite the fact that this book covers the Giants in depth, my favourite chapter actually began with this:

The Society for American Baseball Research held its second annual analytics conference at Arizona State University in March 2013. A lanky, square-jawed pitcher named Brandon McCarthy settled into a chair onstage for a panel discussion. McCarthy had participated at the inaugural conference the previous year, too. He was a rarity among major league players at the time. He completely embraced analytics. He had begun reading Bill James’s sabermetrics books for fun, mostly to win baseball arguments on social media. He soon was following the daily stream of statistical analyses on websites like sabr.org and FanGraphs.com. He liked the black-and-white clarity of analytics. He had improved his own performance by applying what he learned. In short, he was both aficionado and practitioner and could hold his own with the mathematicians and baseball geeks in the Arizona State University auditorium.

Halfway through the discussion, the moderator brought up the squishy, anti-analytic notion of “clubhouse guys” whose presence supposedly somehow makes a team better. What was McCarthy’s take? The pitcher paused. He rubbed his face, knowing his answer might come as a surprise, and maybe a disappointment, to the acronym-and-algorithm crowd. “I think they’re really important,” he said. “And the reason I say that now — much more than I have in the past — is just being part of the A’s team last year.” By which he meant he had spent a season with Jonny Gomes. I had never crossed paths with this player. But I knew if I was going to understand team chemistry, I needed to understand Jonny Gomes.

sounds great! tho I've always been wary of 'cancer in the club house' takes because oftentimes I think a lot of it is probably just straight up bullying of a teammate who doesn't quite fit in.

Yeah, Bonds alludes to the inherent racism of the charge as applied to black players (whereas difficult white players kind of get to be characters or tenacious or passionate). Kent obviously was this himself and pretty loathed by the press as well, but the teammates didn’t see them that way at all.

Picked up a Jilly Cooper novel, Score!, at a charity shop for a bus journey. It’s crammed full of life and vulgar jokes, and reminds me of the way Joseph Wambaugh wrote in the 80s. It’s 800 pages long so I’m unlikely to finish it. But it’s very entertaining: Barbara Pym doing a script polish on Mario Puzo.

Omg, I have legitimately read that so many fucking times! You should absolutely finish it, and come back and talk to me about it!

RE: "Captains of the Sands", I didn't mean to say that I don't believe gangs of street children exist or existed in Brazil, or that they function as mutual support organizations to some extent. It was more the Disneyfication of the gang in Amado's book that I was objecting to, and the way he uses it to make his political points. It borders a bit too much on propaganda for my taste. On the other hand, Amado's frankness about the sexual activity of young boys seems more psychologically realistic, and unusual for writers during that period, although the way girls and women were portrayed seems potentially troubling from a modern perspective.

xpost

Amazing - that's reassuring to know! I'll see what I can do. I keep thinking, "I'll probably put this down at some point..." but then carry on reading. It never seems to run out of energy.

I lolled pretty hard in public when one of the characters was described as "the James Galway of cunnilingus"

A line that I have tried so hard to burn from my memory. Oh Jilly!

gyac, you may well be all over this, but do you know the sports writer Red Smith? Red Smith on Baseball and American Pastimes are a couple I haven't gotten to yet, but The Red Smith Reader is staggering: two 800-word columns a week, from late 30s to early 80s, models of passionate lucidity, from witty to red-headed furious (punching up at team owners, professional associations, media manipulation, fuck you too racist classist Cold War tool Olympics Committee), in drive-by shots, because always racing to the word limit through crowded bleachers while sorting out fields of play, so that even I (usually) feel like I understand some of what's at stake, right now, for leading players and their teams, in a wide variety of sports (which he periodically refers to as "games for children," trying to cool down himself and other sportsheadz).
Mind you, he's not above padding out horse race coverage with conversations and horse lineage, because whattayagonndo, those races are short. Indy 500 mostly interests him for the citizens very informally and somewhat massively camped out in whatever you call that green area the cars go round and round--and that's okay, cause the cars go round and round almost as briefly as horses, seems like (yeah he sufficiently profiles drivers too).
Non-sensational, unblinking coverage of a cockfight (once, not his regualr beat), while noting that such are still legal in a number of states at time of writing.
Sometimes takes his son, future international correspondent Terence Smith, in fishing trips, interviews locals and researches locales, also there's an image that's stayed with me, of a sea critter that stays noticeably dreary-ugly out in the tides, turns pink etc. in contrast to the harbor waters, perversely-bravely-perhaps mindlessly enough (mysteriously exceptional anyway).
Also lingering: his being under metal roof of a South African track star's homeland family home, with parents who are no fools, conveying enough in tone, facial expression etc.

I did not, Dow, and I greatly appreciate the recommendation! I actually have a long-standing love of/interest in horse racing so I will 100% be following this up. Thank you so much.

And, you know, all the rest, but I think it goes without saying that that’s all up my street.

You're welcome---it's more about team sports, but he seems reasonably, professionally engaged by horseracing and all or much that it entails)(get it, horses, tails) I'm told that book about Seabiscuit, maybe basis of the movie, is good.

I like to watch it on TV, but haven't read much about it (yet).

I love to watch things on TV

I continue towards the end of Bracewell's UNFINISHED BUSINESS (2023).

The novel is enjoyable. Easy to read. Elegant. You could say that MB is good at social and cultural textures, at least of certain kinds. City streets at dusk. Memories of summer evenings in suburbia (very Clientele, not that The Clientele told us much specifically about suburbia). Restaurants. Expensive wedding receptions.

However, it can also be said that MB's range as a writer and thinker has been narrow. This novel is a sequel to one from 1992. It seems a good idea to reuse those characters, not create new ones that are similar to them. But to write a sequel also, by definition, in one way shows a lack of imagination. At the same time the set-up is often very close to MB's appealing short novel PERFECT TENSE (2001): the alienated office worker remembering his past. That's literally what much of this novel is.

It makes sense that MB needs to fill in the gaps between what had happened up to c.1992 and c.2017 when this is set. But he also often goes back to earlier memories, ie: those that were already covered in the first novel. So he is almost literally repeating himself at times.

The novel tends to start from a scene - protagonist Martin Knight at his desk in the office, say - and go from that to a reverie: 'Martin thought of a dinner party, was it 15 years earlier?' - and from that, quite extensively described, to another scene earlier than that. Or he'll jump sideways and say 'At that moment, Martin's ex-wife was entering a restaurant'. The main point is that most of the novel's movement is backwards in time, not forward. You could compare MRS DALLOWAY, though that also contains a lot of present action. Or Proust, if the difference in scale weren't so great. I daresay that in his modest way (and at an in-person event on this I found him quite self-deprecating) MB is trying to effect some kind of fictional aesthetic for a C21 Proustian project.

It's a bad sign when Bracewell's sentences trail off into ellipses, and he presents snatches of remembered speech, which often aren't particularly insightful. It conveys a sense that he's running out of the energy to make the prose coherent and continuous.

MB's topic is poignant enough: a solitary man whose marriage has ended, who now spends much of time drinking alone (surely he doesn't need to drink so much) and reminiscing about better days. This has its truth. But MB could give the character more meat to chew on. He has a daughter: why wouldn't he make more effort to be with her and make that a good relationship? (He does a bit, but MB shows it only fleetingly.) He thought of himself as an 'aesthete' - OK, why doesn't he now, in the 2010s, go to art galleries, or films, or simply ... read books? The idea that exciting romance is in the past I understand; the idea that experiencing art and culture is in the past, I don't. The character is unnecessarily limited in this way.

The daughter Chloe could be a promising character. She is a lesbian and MB makes a good effort at describing her love for her partner (fiancée in fact). But why not say more about what this younger, almost Gen Z, person thinks about the world? It's set in 2017 - what does she think of the forthcoming General Election? MB leaves that stuff to Jonathan Coe.

MB is obsessed with rendering clothes - the exact details of a waistcoat, tie or skirt - and sometimes places or objects, even menus. There is potentially some virtue in this, in a Peter York way: a record of taste and time. But it would be better if it accompanied a stronger narrative, rather than taking the place of story. I reflect that MB is oddly the fulfilment of what Woolf complained about re Arnold Bennett's aesthetic: 'describe the exact number of buttons on her dress', etc, the 'materialism' that she distrusted. MB is very 'materialist' indeed.

What the novel could use is a bit more present-day drama and forward motion. In a way it gets that when the protagonist has a heart attack and a heart bypass - but even in this he is passive. I have a bit to go and I hope that MB can deliver a final element of story, rather than just more texture.

RE: "Captains of the Sands", I didn't mean to say that I don't believe gangs of street children exist or existed in Brazil, or that they function as mutual support organizations to some extent. It was more the Disneyfication of the gang in Amado's book that I was objecting to, and the way he uses it to make his political points. It borders a bit too much on propaganda for my taste. On the other hand, Amado's frankness about the sexual activity of young boys seems more psychologically realistic, and unusual for writers during that period, although the way girls and women were portrayed seems potentially troubling from a modern perspective.

I think it's certainly a fair charge to say Amado sentimentalizes his protagonists, though I wouldn't make as cruel a comparison as Disney - as I think I mentioned earlier, Dickens is imo a closer analogue, and all the sentimentality in the world hasn't turned people off him. tbc I do think it's an apples & oranges situation with Brighton Rock tho, just completely different contexts.

I finish Bracewell's novel. Certain events happen, but not in a way that's very connected. A character dies - suddenly and randomly, so it's poignant but has no meaning or causal connection to other events. The protagonist keeps drinking heavily despite having had two heart bypass operations. He leaves his job. He decides to move to a flat in the suburb where he grew up.

It's odd how blank MB has left this character. It must in some way be deliberate. He's extremely passive - but he's also totally uninterested in most things. He thinks nothing of politics - in 2017, when Brexit among other things was everywhere. He doesn't care about sport. OK, he's an 'aesthete'. But he doesn't go to galleries either, or the cinema, or read books (the only books he looks closely at, he admires their binding). He liked music in the 1970s. Fair enough that he's not into the music of today, Tom Ewing Poptimist style. But then why doesn't he care about Roxy Music reunions, or reflect on the death of Bowie a year earlier?

Bracewell said in person that he was the 'Ambassador for Suburbia'. He refers to suburbia a lot. He did write properly about it in ENGLAND IS MINE, I think. But in his fiction suburbia is more of an alibi. Suburbia is 'a memory of a summer evening, shining through on a landing, on a box of LP records, in 1974'. OK. Yes, I can identify with that aspect of suburbia. But if I were going to write a book supposedly rooting itself in suburbia, I would talk a lot more about what actually goes in suburbia. Chinese takeaways, Indian restaurants, minicabs, garden centres. People washing cars, mowing lawns and raising children. Pensioners. Busybody online groups. MB seems very uninterested in any actual _people_ who might live in suburbia.

Given the relative success (?) of this novel, it could be interesting (?) to see if he is stirred, or forced, to write another, and go a little outside the zone in which he is so comfortable.

West of the Revolution Claudio Saunt
Book on what else is happening in North America as the American army under Washington is trying to fight off British rule.
I've just been reading about a Spanish religious expedition trying to link Santa Fe with Monterey that was unsuccessful since it turned back halfway and did a circuit including the Grand canyon. They mapped the route but managed to get 2 rivers 100 miles apart combined.
Previous chapters have looked at Russian expeditions into what would become Alaska.
I think I came across the book in a couple of bibliographies, possibly of books on Native America. It is really interesting to see what was happening outside of the colonies you hear most about. What became America was and is a vast space.

Animal Land Margaret Blount
Been reading blount while listening to Blount since I been listening to Sun Ra quite a bit recently.
Book from the mid 70s about fictional animals in books especially Children's books. IT seems pretty knowing in some of its turns of phrase.
Doesn't frown on the Song of the South collection as much as later books would thanks to the way the stories were collected . But does touch on things like agency and nods to feminism though I don't think it says so explicitly.
I'm quite enjoying this, though not sure where I got the recommendation from as to its existence. Had to order it as an interlibrary loan anyway.

Patti Smith Year of the Monkey
Anecdotal tale of a time that Patti Smith was in California between San Francisco and LA. Spends a lot of time talking about dreams and everyday conversations. Again quite enjoying it. Quite readable, not sure what I'm going to come away with unlike Just Kids where you get a better understanding of an influential part of her history , maybe a better understanding of her psyche.
Anyway, go it over Xmas from a local library thinking I'd get through it rapidly. Instead wound up with it sitting around the bed for teh last few weeks as i got through some books I'd had out much longer. Glad i have got to it now though.
I would like to get a chance to read some of her 70s rock journalism though. I guess the writing style here is quite readable anyway which not everything is.

W.E.B. du Bois The Souls of Black Folks
Finally getting to read the great black thinker. Odd writing style possibly, maybe reflecting the times since this came out right at the start of the last century. May also be trying to sound biblical.
Quite anecdotal as he covers various subjects related to the black experience of teh time. I think I will be trying to read some more of his stuff.

The Big Blue Book Calvin Jones
Mystery about how a wheeled contraption works. Something I should have read a few months ago.
Written by porn mustachioed mechanic Calvin Jones.
Somehow over the next few weeks i shall get to the very bottom of this or fail or something.
If I do I can fix bikes, if I don't I won't be able to as much. Ho hum

I"m chugging on with Kristin Lavrandsdatter, just into the third and last book. I think it could be described as ultra realist - compared to this Middlemarch seems like a riot of larger than life characters and events. I'd say it's maybe 10% political intrigue, 30% christian guilt and 60% just people getting on with their lives, regrets, loveless marriages, etc. It's very good on family life, both the mediaeval aspect and more universally/timelessly.

Darryl Pinckney - Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan
Zora Neale Hurston - Dust Tracks on a Road
Barbara Comyns - The Juniper Tree

Two weeks and two thirds into Life and Fate. I'm glad I've spent zero time trying to keep track of which characters belong to the large family, whose far-flung experiences in WWII provide the device that attempts to tie the narrative together. The connections between all the people, places and experiences Grossman describes all run strongly through Stalin, the Party, the Soviet bureaucracy, the Holocaust, and the war itself. The family narrative is mostly incidental and only provides a slender emotional thread to connect a dozen disparate milieus.

The Chandler (NYRB) translation seems very readable, neither overly literal nor flattened out. The introduction points out that Grossman spent much of WWII functioning as a journalist and that experience is very evident in the novel. The structure of the book is very reportorial, worked over to give the descriptions greater resonance. The characters are all sketches, but Grossman is quite good at sketching them.

Very appealing, esp. your second graf, thanks.
Alfred please check back in some time(s) re:

Darryl Pinckney - Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan
Zora Neale Hurston - Dust Tracks on a Road
Barbara Comyns - The Juniper Tree

I've started N.K. Jemisin, THE FIFTH SEASON (2015), the first of a trilogy of fantasy novels set on a continent that seems to be subject to earthquakes. Can't quite tell what the technological level of the world is - low, I think, as a character rides a horse for transport. The novel puts you in the world without explaining its coinages and usages ('absent paradigm'?), which is quite wearying, but then again it does have a Glossary - maybe that's not a bad way to do it. The novel seems to be focused on certain telepathic children who have special powers and are feared by the community. The writing is clear but not otherwise especially good yet.

Alfred please check back in some time(s) re:

The Pickney was thrilling and obnoxious. On one hand I'm sick of Cal 'n' Lizzie and the letters and Harriet and even more impatient with their generation's petty wars, i.e. that liar Lillian Hellman. Robert Lowell refuses to stay dead. Written in hiccupy paragraphs, the narrative took me a while to get a hold of. But on the other hand Pinckney is a splendid tour guide and alert to Hardwick's old-Southern-dame casual racism (which to her credit she acknowledges and works on). Many, many book recommendations I jotted down, you might expect.

You're sick of Harriet? Can you imagine having those parents? She might well be a handful too, but also think it might be like when you meet Pete's parents in the "New Amsterdam" episode (also follow-ups) of Mad Men, and read what Evelyn Waugh's Maw and Paw really were, beyond his own mentions in A Litte Learning, I might be inclined to make allowances for the offspring.
Will take a look at the book if I come across it; thanks for your plausibly mixed take.

I read Barbara Comyns' *The Vet's Daughter* a few years back. A profoundly strange book, that, now I come to think of it, is quite close in tone to *The Ice Palace* by Tarjei Vesaas, which I finished this morning.

It's hard to put a finger on *what* Vesaas's subject is in the book. The intensity of childhood relationships, yes, but there's a numinous secret at the heart of the book, only hinted at in a conversation between the central child characters, that remains just out of reach, almost as if it's pre- or extra-linguistic. The titular ice palace is a beautiful, ephemeral free-floating metaphor for this unknowable quality but that is a clumsy explanation and doesn't really do justice to Vesaas' strangeness.

I've been puzzling over where I'd place Vesaas (not that he needs placing anywhere). I've read that Joyce was an influence and I can hear echoes of *Dubliners*. Bits of Kafka. The thing it reminded me of most was Angela Carter's *The Bloody Chamber* but that might be a stretch.

There's a good Backlisted episode on Vesaas. Worth it to hear Karl Ove Knausgård read in the original Norwegian. https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/175-tarjei-vesaas-the-ice-palace

I’ve loved all the Vesaas I’ve read, but The Ice Palace is particularly special I think.

I feel really guilty that I haven't been able to get through Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo, especially since it was a Christmas gift from my wife and it's so short, but I'm just too burned out with work to keep track of shifting narrators and characters who are alternately alive and dead. Will have to revisit it sometime when I'm in a better headspace.

Having better luck listening to the audiobook of Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything. Really fascinating stuff.

I read 'The Ice Palace' a couple of years ago thanks to a recommendation on one of these threads. A very good book.

Not being able to search previous opinions and realising you sound like a berk before posting your own, is one of the (very mild) issues that comes with rebirthing this thread with every new season.

I started Nick Hayes's *Trespass* today. It was a book born when Hayes was challenged while walking his dog one day by an oaf on a quad bike who told him to 'get orf my land'. It traces what should by now, be a familiar history of enclosure and the creation of private property but with the difference that Hayes is pretty provocative and trespasses as often as he can - relying on politeness and plausible deniability to get him off the hook. Hayes has a tendency to meander but it's engaging and is in places, as it should be, utterly enraging. I'm off to poach some pheasants.

(to be clear, I wasn't suggesting your opinions would be berk-ish, ArchCarrier! More that I worry I sound like a chump when posting about established (if niche) classics like *The Ice Palace* without any discourse to glom onto.)

Read Prynne’s “Pearls That Were,” a small book that has sold 50,000 copies in its Chinese translation, but several thousands of degrees fewer in its original English. It’s a strange book, seeming to be referencing forms of social control and linguistic violence. Of course, many of the poems rhyme, so there’s an added texture of the poet being cheeky in utilizing formal structures while damning such rigidities in the poems’ content. References to Puritan writings, Shakespeare, and Hawthorne are frequent. Neat book!

About finished Coolidge’s long prose book on alien abductions, and started Purdy’s The Nephew as my bedtime snoozer. Despite that characterization, I am really enjoying it— he really is quite a stylist, inimitable in some ways.

I'm seeing two listings for The Ice Palace: Penguin Classic, 2018, translator not named, and ‎ Peter Owen Publishers; Second Edition, Second (December 15, 2020), Peter Owen Cased Classic, translated by Elizabeth Rokkan. I'll take whatever I can get via library loan, but which should I ask for first? Translation is my main concern.

Both translated by Elizabeth Rokkan as far as I can see, so they’re probably the same.

The amount of love for THE ICE PALACE here makes me think I should read it also, at least when I've finished with the boring massive fantasy novel and Bono's engaging but massive memoir.

Same

I think I might even have a copy somewhere.

You'll read it ... after the pinefox ?

I can get a library loan, I'm in.

Pinefox! James Wood got to Gwendolyn Riley.

Elizabeth Hardwick - The Collected Essays.

Making my way through. The prose is superb, the judgements are pretty much in line with accepted canon (nothing surprising so far), she can rely far too much on biography for my liking.

I'm rereading Sean O'Casey's play THE PLOUGH & THE STARS (1926) for the first time in many years.

Elizabeth Hardwick - The Collected Essays.

Making my way through. The prose is superb, the judgements are pretty much in line with accepted canon (nothing surprising so far), she can rely far too much on biography for my liking.

― xyzzzz__

I've been wrestling with her for about five years. The Stein, William James, Wharton, Edmund Wilson, and Selma essays are clean, almost whittled; then she offers a sentence that knocks me flat with its perception.

Poster Alfred, thanks for the Wood on Riley link - must read. Looks like the novels he discusses are the ones I haven't read. And may well be better than the ones I have.

Will read if New Yorker checkpoint stops distracting me---meanwhile, Wood's opening mention of Helen Garner, whose books I still mean to check, reminds me of his essay on her:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/12/helen-garners-savage-self-scrutiny

The novels discussed in the Wood piece are her best by some distance.

Wood makes an error in the print version (he describes First Love and My Phantoms as her first and second novels) which I notice has been removed from the online version. Do you get a no-prize for finding a factual error in a New Yorker piece?

That's a very poor error for a professional critic to make!

What did he think she'd been doing in all those previous years?

O'Casey's PLOUGH AND THE STARS is a 4-act play, longer I think than the rest of the Dublin Trilogy, which veers between comedy and tragedy in its representation of the Rising and previous events.

An oddity of the play is that the couple who seem, from the dramatis personae, central - Jack and Nora Clitheroe - don't actually seem to be on stage much, especially Jack. Most of the actual stage time and talk is taken up by more comic, supposedly minor characters - Fluther, Peter, The Covey, plus Ms Gogan and Bessie Burgess.

Politically you could say that the play is pacifist. It presents war and fighting as a bad idea into which men are dragged by rhetoric, pride and bravado, while women are left to pick up the pieces. Declan Kiberd in his eloquent chapter on it repeatedly says that O'Casey counters nationalism with socialism. But if the play wants to speak for socialism, why make its spokesperson for socialism, The Covey, so ridiculous? His repeated desire to introduce other characters to a hefty work of theory by Jenersky is, I come to see, a strong running gag.

It's natural and common to see O'Casey in continuity with Synge. But rereading him, I felt more the difference between them. Synge's people speak a heightened, rhythmic language that often finds its poetry (which presumably he thought peasant speech did, though he also heightened and exaggerated it), and sometimes - Christy's entreaties of love to Pegeen, some of Martin Doul's speeches - feels as exquisite as any English written for the stage in that century. O'Casey offers much talk but, really, little poetry. His figures can often be called caricatures - maybe not quite of a recognised type, but still, exaggerated, comic versions of themselves. In O'Casey, there seems to be a lot of laughing *at* a character, in a way not really present in Synge. In effect, Synge the outsider treats his people with romantic respect; O'Casey the insider is happy enough to mock his.

O'Casey, I suppose, wrote as if for the music hall and melodrama. His play contains several songs. It's curious to realise that no play of Synge's contains a song. O'Casey was a major figure, with a remarkable political career, but I suppose he wasn't the subtlest artist. Yet I still must get round to his later work, which I've never done.

So I haven’t read this but knowing a little bit about O’Casey, I wonder if the Covey is a bit of self-mockery/critique? O’Casey was initially born into a relatively comfortable house but the family was thrown into poverty when his dad died and he went to work at a young age. He quite famously taught himself to read and write. He was very much an autodidact and read prodigiously despite having an eye condition that made this difficult for him. I wonder if writing such a character was him poking fun at that old socialist stereotype we all know and love, the theory guy who’s shiting on and on about some obscure text while people are struggling to pay the bills?

I also googled because I had this idea in my mind it might have been linked to his views on nationalism (I studied The Shadow of a Gunman, which I hated) and I found this post which perhaps provides you with more context?

The general state of Ireland and the Labour Movement, the plunges from the loftiest optmism into the depths of confusion and despair, must be taken into account when considering O’Casey’s Dublin plays. These seem to indicate a disillusionment if not with the principle of Labour, at any rate with the practice. Jack, the Trade Union activist in the Harvest Festival, is a hero. That was the mood in 1918-19. There is no socialist in the Gunman. That was written in 1922. Jerry Devine, the Trade Unionist in Juno, is depicted as a hypocrite.That was 1923. In the Plough the Covey is a mouther of meaningless revolutionary phrases. That was completed in 1925 in the depth of the Cosgrave reaction.

There was good reason for disenchantment. The strange transformation of the fiery revolutionary William O’Brien (by some thought ”the Lenin of Ireland”) into autocratic bumbledom as his union declined to a fifth of its membership in a decade, was the indignant amazement of Larkin’s supporters, and it was in this political circle that O’Casey moved.

By the way…

In effect, Synge the outsider treats his people with romantic respect; O'Casey the insider is happy enough to mock his.

Finished Something Close to Music by John Ashbery over the weekend - a nicely packaged collection of his later art writing and poems and a few playlists for good measure. I like the image of Ashbery sitting down to enjoy some Gavin Bryars Xenakis. Was published by David Zwirner so it looks nice too.

Now starting What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933 by Jospeh Roth, translated by Michael Hoffman. Have never read any Roth before but this looks like it'll be a nice introduction.

That book by Roth is fantastic. Good to contrast his observational powers to the majestic fiction he was writing.

I've been wrestling with her for about five years. The Stein, William James, Wharton, Edmund Wilson, and Selma essays are clean, almost whittled; then she offers a sentence that knocks me flat with its perception.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 19 February 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I am very much enjoying. I guess I wasn't expecting Hardwick to rely on biography as much.

vineland
much more accessible than I assumed it would be

Gyac, I have always felt that there is some kind of 'protesting too much', or 'deliberate overcompensation' quality about the Covey character - a caricature of a doctrinaire socialist, in a play (allegedly socialist) by a socialist playwright; as though he is trying to re-balance the work by inserting a damaging caricature of the position with which he himself is associated.

I suppose as if I were to write a story featuring a dogmatic 'Corbynista' who went around singing 'Oh, Jeremy Corbyn' and attacking 'Kieth'.

Which I'm afraid I couldn't bring myself to do, even if I had the talent to write a story.

But there could, as you say, be other, more specific reasons for it.

Now starting What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933 by Jospeh Roth, translated by Michael Hoffman. Have never read any Roth before but this looks like it'll be a nice introduction.

I've read a lot of Roth but not this. Thanks.

xp if you read the piece I linked (by a communist historian!) he outlines that O’Casey seemed to have an uneasy relationship with his own politics

Yes, now I see the whole article, it does look important. I didn't know of Prof Greaves' book.

I have a whole book of rather dry non-fictional writings by O'Casey that I have never got through. Much of it, as I recall, is his memoirs of the Citizen Army.

I must get round to reading O'Casey's RED ROSES FOR ME.

I once did a work-experience on a stage set for a production of Juno and the Paycock at the Bradford Playhouse (which incidentally is the building where the Labour Party was born). I remember the main set was a dirty stained walls room in a slum type setting and I can't remember much else. I did read a lot of the play at the time, but can't remember anything about it other than the style of dialect tbh. It was fun though, because seeing the set completed and lit up was a good moment. And for 3 days we had some pleasant afternoon drinking sessions in the theatre bar.

I like this story.

You just managed to avoid inserting a devastating attack on Kieth in the parenthesis.

it's pretty hard to link the namesake with Kieth, the former wanted a coalition of left-wing groups, not to kill them all!

The Blacker The Berry Wallace Thompson
Harlem Renaissance era novel about the misadventures of a snobbish young lady who was born too dark skinned for her own snobbery. She's tried University in LA then moves to Harlem NYC where she becomes a maid for an actress. She disdains dark skinned people despite being one and tries to avoid their company. Winds up in an affair with a very mixed race costume presser who danced with her when the actress she works for goes to a Harlem club with her (actress) brother and takes her along. Actress is a white woman playing a mulatto in an update of Carmen.
Anyway it's very readable if you can deal with race snobbery being a central theme. I think it reflects its times, was first published in 1929. I've had it sitting around as a library loan for way too long and thought I would eventually start it, Now read about 3/4s of it in a day or 2. Good book.

Nt Without Laughter Langston Hughes
I think this is about the only novel by the Harlem Renaissance poet. Got this out middle fo last year too I think and only just getting back to it last week .
this is about a family growing up in poverty in the South. The father is a travelling blues singer who just ups and leaves at one point, leaving a mother in bad health who is being looked after by her mother who does washing for all the white folks of the area. She also has to look after the couple's young son who is at the local school where all the black kids have to sit at the back of the class.
Writing is pretty good. I have picked up a collection of short stories by Hughes too that I need to read.

23 Things they Don't Tell YOu About Capitalism Ha-Joon Chang
Critique of capitalism by UK based Korean Economist.
Told in short chapters in pretty anecdotal plus explanation style.
Picked this up a while back, started into it. Got sidetracked into something else. Found it again in my toilet reading pile and now going to try to finish before starting into

Walter Rodney How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
which I was waiting to get as an interlibrary loan for most of last year then gave up and bought at the start of the year. Then had to finish up a load of books I'd had out of the library too .

Also wanting to get into Montaigne Complete Essays which I've meant to read for years and recently found out it was in local library so got last week .Plus books on Flamenco and Blues I got from a different library locally on the same day.
& Bought the Mark Lanegan book on having Covid and a Clinton Heylin book on songwriting and plagiarism and things which I picked up in Dublin last weekend

classical mechanics: the theoretical minimum by leonard susskind and george hrabovsky

i was a math major but never took any physics, something i occasionally regret. this slim book, part of a series based on a popular online course, has been a very nice read so far

23 Things they Don't Tell YOu About Capitalism Ha-Joon Chang

if you like this (or maybe even moreso if you don't...) and are still curious about the east asian growth model (industrial policy, land reform, capital controls) after reading it, i can't recommend highly enough How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

cool, thanks

Finished the scary alien book by Clark Coolidge, now have “Scattered Brains” by Darrell Gray as my morning reading, and will certainly finish Purdy’s “The Nephew” before I fall asleep in the next day or two.

I'm slowly listening through the complete Sherlock Holmes stories, narrated to perfection by Stephen Fry. Just finished the Final Problem. Next up: The Hound of the Baskervilles.

i have seen about half a dozen adaptations of H of the Bs and it has yet to click for me. is it real, or imagined? dunno. maybe i should read the actual thing.

The real prob with H of the B is that Holmes disappears from the central section of the book, and his surprise return to the narrative is not in the least surprising.

The opening section of the Hammer adaptation is Terence Fisher and the crew at their best, a riot of colour and intensity that doesn't come at all from the Conan Doyle story.

I love Hound of The Baskervilles, easily my favourite Doyle, but of the hundreds of film & TV adaptations, I haven't seen a single one that rises above mediocrity.

I wrote this about it when I read it five years ago: https://centuriesofsound.com/2018/05/14/sir-arthur-conan-doyle-the-hound-of-the-baskervilles/

There's a Folio edition of THOTB with very pleasing Edward Bawden linocut illustrations that can be picked up for a tenner or so, I recommend it.

More Women Than Men, Ivy Compton-Burnette - Life in a girl's school, featuring homosexuality amongst two genders. Feels very much a play in being almost entirely dialogue; a lot of Wilde in its DNA, with all these witty aphorisms, but sometimes the sentences are so strangely built that I might as well be reading Shakespeare. The kind of book where when asked if she had a good trip, a character will not reply "yes" but "I'm afraid the ayes have it in that regard". Have to finish it by Thursday (book club selection) and so reading it in big chunks, which does get wearying; think I'd enjoy it more in small doses, where the overwhelming eagerness to be clever didn't stick out so much.

THOTB is much more enjoyable to read when you're familiar with Conan Doyle's comforting, comic prose style. It's a terrible choice as a "my first Sherlock Holmes book" because the plot is stupid.

Unrelatedly - I saw the Jeremy Brett "Golden Pince-Nez" on ITV4 last week. It's just terrible. I've never seen a Brett episode before, and I know he's supposed to be an acquired taste, but I was surprised how... bad and stagey he was.

Oh, I'm reading Kate Atkinson's "When Will There Be Good News", which starts with the usual family massacre and promises to be good fun.

I have been slowly slowly getting back into the rhythm of reading again post-pandemic, mainly because I have been going into the office and reclaiming some reading time on the bus.

I started by tackling some easier-to-read things like the classic run of Alan Garner from the 60s and some less-good stuff in that line ("The Giant Under the Snow" by John Gordon which has a few fab scenes, like when the kids are flying over Norwich but is mostly a bit pish and flat) ("Seaward" by Susan Cooper which has virtually none of the power of the Dark Is Rising); some detective-y thrillery things, Len Deighton (shock news! "Horse Underwater" is nowhere near as good as "The Ipcress File" and frankly neither is much good) and Simenon and the like. These things are distracting enough but I'll never really love them, which I understand is a failing on my part. I read my first Le Carre which was clearly very well written but I've already forgotten its plot and its title, it had spies and that.

Had a good haul in Foyles sale, for a quid each. "Spiritual Choreographies" by Carlos Labbe is a nebulous and non-linear affair which (roughly speaking) tells the story of a pop group / rock band. It references Felt - one of the characters only listens to Bach and Felt. What is it about Felt that seems to inspire people? I like them well enough but have never been able to hear it. "The Endless Summer" by Madame Neilsen, the story of a non-trad family through the 70s to roughly the present - Neilsen has a really impressive way of elaborate digression, pulling focus to different times and places in a way that I found a bit thrilling; I found a real emotional tug in understanding the fate of the handsome one, and the one who was never really a boy but didn't know it at first, and so on.

I am usually a one book at a time kind of person but am currently enjoying Mephisto's Waltz by Sergio Pitol, The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter by Rosemary Walkdrop (these two represent the other half of my four for £4 Foyles find) and On Overgrown Paths by Knut Hamsun, billed on the back cover as KH's apologia for being publicly in favour of the nazi occupation of
Norway - a third of the way in he is mostly achieving a kind of befuddled indignation but he's under house arrest and not allowed to read the newspapers that are starting to contain news of what actually happened during the occupation. I look forward to the apologia. Interesting in the context of the current Telegraph / Today Programme manufactured freakout about cancel culture.

Waldrop, that says.

"giant under the snow" terriifed me as a kid (imagining being menaced by squeaky men made of leather as i waited for the bus!) but yes the plot is a but of a succession of more or less scary episodes which he doesn't tie together very well. his follow-up ("the house on the brink") scared me even more tbh and is i feel more effectively relentless

i never got on so well w/susan cooper but i didn't read her till much later

The Puffin cover for Giant Under the Snow is all-time tho

https://www.murrayewing.co.uk/mewsings/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Maitland-Gordon-Giant-Under-the-Snow.jpg

jonquil bill and arf

Yeah that was the edition I picked up for 50p and was v excited to do so. I was a bit hard on it, the descriptive passages concerning Norwich / Norfolk are good, especially in terms of crumbling bits of English cities in the 60s / 70s (v Elidor, of course).

vineland
much more accessible than I assumed it would be

It's probably his most accessible book. It's probably his biggest disappointment, coming after GR. On reread, it wasn't bad, but still very light in comparison.

i like vineland more on every reread, and GR less tbh

I have an inordinate fondness for Inherent Vice, which has both the SoCal hippie vibe I dig and some truly beautiful passages.

antony maitland art on the Giant btw

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=antony+maitland+illustrator&t=fpas&iax=images&ia=images

ooh nice, i like his work for leon garfield a lot and never made the connection

Soden, Jeoffry, The Poet's Cat
Podhoretz, Ex-Friends

I didn't know that Caleb Carr, the author of The Alienist, is the son of Lucien Carr, who was in the social circle of Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac in New York in the 1940s. Lucien Carr, who was not the best mind of his generation, killed a man who had been infatuated with him and who had been stalking him, and dumped the body in the river. Kerouac helped him conceal evidence. Lucien Carr did time but Kerouac didn't.

Sudjic, Norman Foster

He had a life-long antipathy to the use of capital letters, suggesting that if only Germans had been less partial to their pomposity, they might have resisted fascism more readily.

Graves dismissively suggested that he would rather practise law than be forced to build architecture like Foster's. In response, Foster remarked that post-modernism should be understood as a game to be played in private, by consenting adults.

I quite enjoyed The Alienist. I had no idea about Caleb's parental connection to the Beats and crime.

"Mephisto's Waltz by Sergio Pitol"

Can I borrow sometime?

Had always read about the Carr murder/homicide as response to repeated sexual harassment, but this skillfully delves into documented complexities: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/06/27/the-queer-crime-that-launched-the-beats/

Near the end, the author says, What actually prompted Carr’s stabbing in Riverside Park that August remains a mystery. But this account of adjustments made likely fits well into his book,Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall.

When Carr died, I read that he became a longtime AP editor, known for his advice to get a good draft and then delete the first graf---which has worked for me sometimes, seeing my original opener as a crutch.

(Delvings incl. how this murder and related matters figured in writing of Kerouac, solo and with Burroughs, also Ginsberg and Gore Vidal.)

app to xyzzz___: sure!

xp, not app.

xp, not app.

xp, not app.

xp, not app.

I am good at internet

I've seen that happen twice in the past few days, to posts by presumably different ilxors (both on ilm, I think).

Twice before this.

I found Mephisto's Waltz good but sometimes hard going; I strongly recommend going forward to the Trilogy of Memory if you find Pitól's manner even a little engaging. The whole trilogy is utterly marvelous.

I finished A Brief Histoy of Seven Killings by Marlon James, the Booker Prize winner from Jamaica in 2015. I listened to it. It was narrated by multiple actors, but many of them were really hard to understand. I liked it but I'm not sure I really understood the essence of it.

The audiobook of Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead is great, and I'm enjoying listening to Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet, longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize

can’t really imagine listening to that james book, part of the appeal is letting those words tumble in your head

he’s sometimes hard to read, but then there are these torrid passages where it feels like your head is on fire

Tim: thanks, will remind you whenever we meet next. And you are good at the internet!!

---

I found Mephisto's Waltz good but sometimes hard going; I strongly recommend going forward to the Trilogy of Memory if you find Pitól's manner even a little engaging. The whole trilogy is utterly marvelous.

― J Edgar Noothgrush (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Tuesday, 21 February 2023 bookmarkflaglink

If I were to compile a list of the best things to come out in translation over the last few years The Trilogy would be right up there.

I've got The Love Parade (the first vol in The Carnival trilogy). Might begin this weekend.

(shock news! "Horse Underwater" is nowhere near as good as "The Ipcress File" and frankly neither is much good)

I believe this is the one where Deighton suggests Germans are astoundingly good at speaking Portuguese without an accent, a notion that my native speaker Portuguese friends can not corroborate.

What is it about Felt that seems to inspire people? I like them well enough but have never been able to hear it.

I think they are very overrated despite featuring some good lead guitar parts.

So we agree, which makes me glad.

A novel about Norwich in the 1960s & 1970s? I really ought to read that.

The copy that is on my "get rid" pile is yours if you want it.

Thanks Tim!

re chuck_tatum's recoil from jeremy brett as sherlock

my sister and i *loved* brett in the 80s when these shows were first going out, absolutely chattering fandom stuff, so i was interested in this abreaction and last night tried to log in to re-watch "the golden pince-nez" (a plot i can't call to mind). i notice the ep is from the fourth season -- when i think the overall style of the show had become somewhat mannered and gimmicky -- but to recap what it was that we loved at the time (in earlier eps), was just a kind of expressive animality full of surprise grunts and wolfman tics, just very unlike the acting template of the time. he was fun to watch, and silly not bland! we were very sad when he died (younger than i am now i see).

i even wrote a piece about the show but it never ran bcz i quit the magazine for unrelated reasons… but the long-and-short of my thesis was i believe that brett was good bcz he took it as read that holmes was literally the monster in the narrative

anyway we have probably passed through three or four fashions in TV thesp templates since then? i often find myself watching 90s tv and thinking "why did i not notice how bad everyone's acting is?" when the reason is mostly that the degree zero mode has changed a lot. i do recall reading that he specifically aimed for a "theatrical" (presumably meaning somewhat over-amped?) approach to the role.

despite it being on ITV streaming my TV wasn't having it for some reason so i had to give up :(

I liked Jeremy Brett.

https://i.imgur.com/59BkUbu.gif

^He looks a bit like current Aston Villa manager Unai 'Dracula' Emery in that gif. Definitely a touch of the vampire there, which seems a not overly wayward interpretation of the character, really.

I don't really know the Brett TV series, but the Sherlockians I see on the interweb seem to think he was v v good in the early series and v v bad in the later ones.

Ppl here are underestimating the Rathbone/Bruce Hound of the Baskervilles, imho. Again, visually it's very close to a classic American horror film of the 1930s/40s, made possible by an A picture budget and the full technical resources of a major Hollywood studio.

I’ll give Brett another try then, maybe one of the earlier ones. They can’t fuck up Bruce-Partington Plans or Blue Carbuncle, surely. Perhaps it’s a case of readjusting my “this is what acting is supposed to be” preconceptions a bit. I will say, I enjoyed the general vibe of the show - excellent production values and direction - maybe a late example of the classic “expressionism in grey and brown” house style of 70s/80s BBC dramas like Tinker, EoD, etc

the brett version is also much more respectful of dr watson as a character -- via two successive actors (david burke then edward hardwicke) he's an intelligent foil, a long way from nigel bruce (of rathbone/bruce)'s bumbling nincompoop

Also true of Martin Freeman in Sherlock, Lucy Liu in Elementary.

xp

deem to think he was v v good in the early series and v v bad in the later ones.

seem not deem, sorry.

https://www.missionlogpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/06.jpg

the unicorn dog

oops

plz ignore 😩

Yas well getting back to Literature, we could say that the sidekick-foil-counterbalance--initially-seemingly-more-normcore-yarnspinner goes back to Sancho Panza---and before him---?

Read two very short books back to back to break up some other stuff:

Edouard Louis - Who Killed my Father
Paul Auster - Bloodbath Nation

Having loved the two previous Louis books I was a bit disappointed by this, largely because it really is very, very short and I think the bulk of it had already been extracted in the New York Times just before it came out. I definitely remember reading it somewhere online, anyway.

The Auster is...fine, just a sort of state of the gun-obssessed nation essay that doesn't really tell you anything new about gun culture in the US.

Finished Purdy’s The Nephew, a strangely moving little volume about a young man killed in war and the aftermath of this loss in his midwestern hometown. In truth, though, it ends up being more about our inability to know one another fully and truly, but to find some comfort in care and kindness. Given the brazen intensity of his later novels, particularly the gay southern Gothic sadomasochism of Narrow Rooms, it felt a little odd to be reading about a sort of befuddled old lady mourning her nephew and judging her smalltown neighbors, but in the end, it was very Purdy. One of my favorite novelists, I now feel comfortable declaring, and there’s so much more of him to read!

I'm about 250 pages into Vol 1 of William James's Principles of Psychology, which I was led to via Peter Naur's Anti-philosophical Dictionary, a self-published rant by the noted Danish computer scientist.

I finished Life and Fate last night. The final 250 pages narrows its focus somewhat and concentrates more on a smaller group of characters, but if anything this diluted some of the interest that had carried me forward through the book. If you aren't already deeply conversant with the Soviet state under Stalin and the social, military and political conditions there during WWII, this book provides a kind of compendium of that period, centered primarily on the lives of commissioned officers, and the managerial and intellectual classes rather than on the mass of plain soldiers and workers. The word that quickly comes to mind in that regard is 'exhaustive'.

I'm having a similar experience listening to Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida as I did with Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings.

It is so dense and foreign to me that between listens I have to research Sri Lanka's geography and history and have to keep going back in the audiobook to listen again

The presence of a state of purgatory and of ghosts reciting a litany of grief reminds me of another Booker Prize winner, Lincoln in the Bardo

c. trungpa, "cutting through spiritual materialism" - loved this.
a.c. doyle, "the hound of the baskervilles" - loved this, too.

currently continuing to make dents in chateaubriand's "memoirs from beyond the grave" and also reading james crumley's "the mexican tree duck" (on a bit of a detective kick and might finally read chester himes next).

The book of fabulous beasts : a treasury of writings from ancient times to the present Joe Nigg
not got beyond teh introduction in this so far but it looked good when I took it off the library shelf. I was looking around in there yesterday, thinking I might have another bash at Gramsci's excerpts from the Prison Notebooks and looked around teh literature/non fiction sections and saw this. I had just returned Margery Blount's Animal land a few days ago which semi ties in with this though I think this is far more what people did semi believe existed in marginal places whereas that was about animals in children's books that had abilities taht real ones don't.
THis looks at the fantastic/fabulous since the beginning of written work and recorded exploration. Hoping to get into this but probably grabbing too many books right now if i should be concentrating on getting th bike course passed.
Interesting anyway.

Langston Hughes Not Without Laughter.
Harlem Renaissance connected poet ventures into prose and writes a novel about a family struggling by in early 20th century Lawrence, Kansas having to deal with poverty, racism and other daily problems.
Has some nice turns of phrase in it. I have a set of his short stories, the Ways of White Folks that I need to read too. This is quite good.

Histories of the Hanged David Anderson
Book on the mau Mau in Kenya in the mid 50s. I think I'm semi struggling to get through this one, not sure if its the writing style which seems really heavy and seems to have some racist comments buried in it. Not sure how consciously, don't like the line about the Kikuyu realising they were not as good as the white man, think it could have been phrased better in its presentation. Anyway wanted to get through this and seem to just get sidetracked elsewhere to things i would much rather read. I do want to read up on this subject though.

West of teh Revolution
Events elsewhere around what would become the United States at the time of the War of Independence. I just read a chapter on the Lakota discovery of the Black Hills which this has contemporary to Washington fighting the British though the Black Hills had been sacred to Native American groups dating back several thousand years.
INteresting book but it does make me want to go further into Native American History elsewhere. To see what else is said there about movement of various tribes over time. I think this was in a few bibliographies of things i read last year, I need to check what.

The kaiser's holocaust: Germany's forgotten genocide and the colonial roots of Nazism David Olusoga
British historian looks into the setting up of a German colony in Namibia which became a hell on earth for the tribes already living there.
He has already mentioned that the Germans had traded heavily using sub standard alcohol as a main trading tool which is already a bad sign. BUt like European colonialism in general isn't great and this starts off on a very cynical footing.
I really enjoyed Olusoga's The World's War about colonial troops in the First World War and have meant to read more ever since. This is in 2 parts first of which is the history of the colonisation and 2nd looks into the birth of the national Socialist party. Book is a collaboration with another author. I'm not sure how it breaks down as to who wrote what.

Sweet Dreams: From Club Culture to Style Culture, the Story of the New Romantics Dylan Jones, (Editor)
Oral History of the early 80s scene. It's started in the pre punk era where future punks are talking about going to see Roxy Music, Bowie etc.
I've just read into 1977 and the more arty types are already feeling that what started as an explosion of creativity has already become way too formulaised/codified. Especially in the wake of the publicity from the Grundy show appearance with the Sex Pistols and the bromley Contingent. THis meant that people across the UK had a prescribed image for what punk was supposed to look like and behave like instead of it being a really amorphous form of self expression. I have wondered how wide the catchment area for Grundy was if he was a Thames TV presenter and how many people actually saw the show as opposed to how many read the headlines in the tabloids. Pistols were a last minute substitute for Queen anyway. Wonder if that would have got some level of reaction if it had gone ahead as planned anyway.
But does seem to have stopped punk or whatever it was called by those involved in teh arty side wanted to call it from going in one direction. Still does seem to have lead to some interesting results anyway.
Pretty thick book and quite good so far. I've had it out since Xmas and probably should be further into it.

Thriving on a riff : Jazz & blues influences in African American literature and film Graham Lock
A set of essays on the subject edited by Lock whose Blutopia i read last year.
Quite interesting. I'm enjoying it when i get to it. Think I may be overtstretching myself a little so taking me longer to read things than I should. Well will hopefully get through all of these.
Did get through 3 or 4 over the last couple of weeks.

Have you read Jeff Nuttall's Bomb Culture? That's Bomb as in The Bomb, A-Bomb, and its effect on culture, also trying for social change via arts, his experiences and others: published in 1968, so still in the thick of it while looking back and forward (or forth).

Sean O'Casey, BLASTS & BENEDICTIONS. A collection of essays and letters to the press. Often terrific.

Finished a few things, including Peter Culley’s first book of poems and some chaps, have now been flipping around Barry MacSweeney’s selected— some of the poems are electric but many are a bit too fragmentary in their referentiality for me to care much about them. Think I will read his final book instead of trying to make headway with the other poems here.

Started reading Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu. A novel written in the form of a screenplay, and a mordant commentary on the options available to Asians in film. Very readable so far.

The narrator's highest aspiration is to be "Kung Fu Guy."

Yu is a good writer

This is my first encounter with his work, but so far I agree.

Have you read Jeff Nuttall's Bomb Culture? That's Bomb as in The Bomb, A-Bomb, and its effect on culture, also trying for social change via arts, his experiences and others: published in 1968, so still in the thick of it while looking back and forward (or forth).

― dow, Monday, February 27, 2023 2:06 AM (sixteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Not read it, no. I'm pretty sure the name came up elsewhere recently though. May have been in a bibliography . Will put it on my to read list but not sure when that will mean I get to it. Sounds like something I would be intereste4d in though.

Reading through O'Casey's PLOUGH & THE STARS once again, I'm inclined to agree with poster Gyac's previous statement that The Covey is a self-parody by the author. The description of the character when he appears probably fits this, for one thing - though O'Casey was over 10 years older than The Covey by the time of the Rising.

I am coming round to the sense that O'Casey does actually agree with what the character says, even though he presents it as a parody. In a letter to the press about the play, he says that he had personally heard 'Jim Connolly' say the same thing as The Covey.

"She complains of the Covey calling sentences of The Voice dope. Does she not understand that the Covey is a character part, and that he couldn’t possibly say anything else without making the character ridiculous? Even the Greeks wouldn't do this. And it doesn’t follow that an author agrees with everything his characters say. I happen to agree with this, however; but of these very words Jim Connolly himself said almost the same thing as the Covey."

Sean O'Casey, letter to the Irish Independent, 26th February 1926.

Vita Sackville-West - All Passion Spent
Rereading Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Eichmann in Jerusalem is a towering work.

O'Casey is a brave, big-hearted writer, with 'generous anger' as Orwell said of Dickens. Or just generosity, much of the time - as in his tributes to Yeats, despite his clash with Yeats over THE SILVER TASSIE; his judgment of Joyce as the greatest of all; his appreciation of Shaw, Synge and so on.

He is more learned than one might think: he has a remarkable range of knowledge of history and literature, internationally. He knows the Irish language and the Gaelic Ireland before the Normans, better than I had thought. He is a stirring, enjoyable, wry writer, a 'fighter' as he says of others like Yeats; especially against ecclesiastical power.

The question mark over O'Casey, for some at least, would be his support for the Stalinist USSR after others had renounced it. He wouldn't have been alone in that - Harriet Shaw Weaver, GBS?, Eric Hobsbawm. I don't yet know enough about this aspect of O'Casey to judge.

I'm now halfway through As She Climbed Across the Table, Jonathan Lethem. It's short. It's clever. It's silly. The effect is rather like a cross between sci-fi and a late 1980s rom-com.

ok i finished the thomas harris hannibal novels (i'm not reading hannibal rising bc hannibal was godawful)

amazing they were able to stripmine that horrible novel for two different visually astonishing and textually intricate adaptations (first half of the third season of the tv show and the largely disliked ridley scott movie (which i loooove))

As She Climbed Across the Table

a definition of "mild enthusiasm": this is the only book i've ever read entirely in a bookstore

My brother gave me Fortress of Solitude more than a year ago, I have yet to open it.

xxpost Brad I cosign w your previous favorable comments on Silence of The Lambs because it's centered by Clarice, whose relating to the girl victims, living and dead, is crucial to the case's resolution and the book's readability: her empathy can't be mine, or the author's, because we're too far from being like her or those girls, but it fuels a tracking device, a throughline of anxious concern, for lack of a better phrase---also, the reader can get attuned. as the veteran crime reporter->novelist is, by her own focus, as a professional as well as a young female from such a background (Hannibal zooms in on this too, taunting this little hick cop, but focused on her and the case, the puzzle, the ever-blurry perp
's traces of acting out; he [H.] of no interest otherwise).
That scene in the girl's house by the water, where Clarice is looking around her room, picking up the costume jewelry box, knowing where the secret button is on such a box, pushing it and finding the photos---

That scene is well-shot in the film. Demme's good.

aside from ratner's red dragon the adaptations are all superior to the original material. silence was def the best book, despite knowing what would happen i found it gripping and stressful

I took a long time to read AS SHE CLIMBED ACROSS THE TABLE (1997) for the first time, even though it's practically Lethem's shortest novel. I can hardly explain that. I certainly couldn't have read it in a bookshop (unless I'd bought it and the bookshop had a café that was open all day).

I have read it probably 3 times. I think it's excellent. Aimless's description is sound, though he doesn't mention that it's also a 'campus novel', and has a few other rogue elements.

Finished Hardwick's essays last night. Her field really comes across as the 19th century, for sure (she berates the young in '69 for not giving Zola and Trollope a go). How that strand goes into the 20th century (Thomas Wolfe, West), basically the American fiction that isn't that kind of encyclopedic stuff that is loved on ilx (the line on Pynchon, where she concedes the ambition but hey who could possibly love this more than "Dead Souls"...could've gone trolly when this was put to the reader in '76, but by and large she stays in her lane.) Or Faulkner. You know she has read it all but the essays that got to me were the ones on Melville and the appreciation of Jude the Obscure, specifically the women in it. Her passion for Henry James. She doesn't do foreign fiction but oddly there is a piece on Brazil, (her essay on the country are reviews of both "Rebellion in the Backlands" and "Tristes Tropiques"). Her piece on prose as written by poets (in a review of Bishop's collection of prose) is different from Sontag's take and yet has its own distinct character.

And she loves her friends. Mary McCarthy gets two write-ups. She kinda has a distaste for the practice of almost all biography (bar Boswell, which I have a copy of and will read later in the year). So the review of another acquaintance's (Edmund Wilson) biog writes itself.

Lots of little things like this throughout. Raced through it.

Another dimension here is that for a short time she covered some politics (Watts, King, Chicago in '68). It sorta goes into the 70s but she then stops, pretty much. This also goes into a piece on film (covering Kramer's Ice and Warhol's Trash, what a pairing lol) (tell me you don't watch filmin the weirdest of ways and this is the kind of thing that comes out top). She is hitting on something where she talks about the reluctance of promising (in italics in the text) young people to have children. And that's pretty much the last we hear on matters other than fiction. In the end this stuff feels a bit out of place but it's good to see it all here.

Picked up Aug 9 - Fog by Kathryn Scanlan for a pound in my local Oxfam yesterday. It's a very short selection of edited sections from an 86 year old's diary she bought in an estate auction. A quiet, charming, sad little book that I spent a very nice half hour with. Not as good as Kick the Latch which is her recent – and very, very good – sort-of-novel about horse riding/training, but still glad I bought it.

Inspired by this thread I borrowed Interior Chinatown from the library and am 100 pages in and thoroughly enjoying it. m

Hardwick's short critical bio of Melville I also recommend.

In Thomas Wolfe, West, who's West?

Nathanael West?

Rebecca West?

Nathaniel

Rock, of the Westies

Think I read all novels of Wolfe in high school and don't remember a word; read all novels of West later (after the drug years) and remember him pretty well---might check that Library of America collection inc. shorter works etc: good? Also, is Wolfe worth another (sober except for caffeine) shot---?

Nathaniel West, that is (Rebecca was not American and I think of her more as nonfiction writer so didn't occur to me that Hardwick might've included her w Wolfe).

Wolfe had the very American trait of doing everything to excess. He figured that if something was worth mentioning it was worthy of being described at full length and the description should be embroidered and spotlighted and given a fanfare. For most contemporary readers it gets very tiresome.

Speeding through the Louise Penny series of Inspector Gamache books, after catching Three Pines on Amazon Prime. Reading out of sequence due to library availability. On the 15th book, _A Better Man_, now. Love that each book, although dropping familiar character bits for continuity, works up the mystery and side plots in different ways, so it doesn't seem stale. At the core of the series is an optimism about humanity that I find very, very refreshing.

gogol/pynchon is a perceptive comparison regardless of the judgment tbh

It is.

I'm now reading another short novel, The Vet's Daughter, Barbara Comyns. In just 30 pages, using simple language delivered by a young and very naive narrator, she's established an atmosphere of menace and cruelty that you know will lead to a very dark outcome.

I read Comyns' The Juniper Tree, graced with one of the better wtf endings I've read.

The Vet's Daughter is excellent. Is there a parrot or am I misremembering?

The parrot is there. It laughs.

I finished N.K. Jemisin, described on the SF thread.

I read more O'Casey reviews. He likes Shaw and Gregory, other Protestants. He points out how poorly Gregory's memory and legacy was served by the Free State which, it seems, promptly demolished her house. As it happens someone else recently told me they'd gone to Coole and found the house vanished and how sad it was.

One review of GBS reports what sounds a eugenic scheme to exterminate people who are weak and unproductive. I'm not surprised that GBS would come out with such things as provocations, or whatever. I'm more surprised that O'Casey seems to endorse it. I feel that I'm missing something; that O'Casey is being thoroughly ironic, or something. This was 1934, so O'Casey was already 54; he wouldn't exactly have qualified for one of the young and strong to be spared extermination for long. It's puzzling and troubling.

I just read The Winter of our Discontent for the office book club and absolutely loved it.

I read that as a a teen and even now, decades later, the ending sentence still pops up in my mind every now and then and I get choked up.

Sorry gyac I had to put "Score!" down - not because I wasn't enjoying it (I think it's glorious) but I'm going to save it for a sunny holiday (if I ever have one again).

It reminds me a bit of Dumas, everything is ladled on so thick it should be collapse under its own weight of ridiculousness - but it's hard to put down. Very sound, unpredictable plotting; the villains are hissable but still great company; cleanly written and lots of good jokes - a good novel. How does it stand amongst the Cooper ouevre?

Also, I picked up the NYRB edition Warlock at the library - I don't know if I'll read it, but if I pick up a book and feel the need to read the first few pages without stopping, I'll take it home and see. Also trying to give Song of Solomon another go.

It’s pretty solid! It’s a later one in this series so it’s full of references to and has characters appear from earlier books. Where did you leave off? Would be happy to rec any others if you are interested, but would need more specifics of what you’d like?

I got about 200 pages in. I have a toddler and my reading gets done in dribs and drabs, so I’m saving it for a holiday when I can binge it in a couple days. In ten years, possibly.

I filled in some of the character blanks with my distant memory of the Riders miniseries. I guess that’s the big one to start with?

James Cahill's first novel Tiepolo Blue, is about a 43 year old professor of art history who spent his entire adult life in Peterhouse College at Cambridge. His life then completely disintegrates when he's pushed into (and gradually embraces) the world outside of academics. The book is comprised of passages of academic decorum and interesting descriptions of classical and rococo art interspersed with wild scenes of transgression and ultimate degradation. It is supremely weird but is very readable

I go on with Sean O'Casey's essays. Fortunately no other essay has hinted at the crazy eugenics mentioned in the one essay on GBS. On the contrar, elsewhere O'Casey speaks up boldly for making the most of life, accepting our animal nature, enjoying birds and flowers. He mostly comes across as someone with good, generous values, albeit perhaps a bombastic polemicist. He's knowledgeable, certainly about history and literature.

In a remarkable late (final?) essay he attacks the Theatre of the Absurd including David Rudkin (who would later write PENDA'S FEN), Harold Pinter and others.

In earlier essays he is in 'reply to my critics' mode. Repeatedly, critics, priests and bishops condemn his work, and he rises to the challenge, issuing a pedantically detailed response which trashes their critical statements. It's spirited.

I'm reading and loving Calvino's Mr Palomar. Though I greatly enjoyed The Baron in Trees many years ago, and though should be very much up my strada, I always found Invisible Cities and If... a bit too... ethereal?... in their fabulism for me. This is wonderful though - minutely observed and ruminated episodes of everyday life, like a droll companion to Ponge or a phenomenological M Hulot. Particularly liked the horny tortoises and querelous blackbirds.

I read The Ice Palace. I can see how it might be numinous and captivating, but the magic didn't really work on me unfortunately. Nothing I would say against it really, though under all the poetic mysteriousness it is a rather simple story.

After more O'Casey essays I started on his play, WITHIN THE GATES (1934).

I also read a few more pages of Bono's SURRENDER: a tribute to Larry Mullen Jr. The book is written, or (as Mark S says) spoken to ghostwriters, with verve and spirit. So much so that it's 550 pages long and I'm still less than a third through it.

O'Casey, in his final essay on contemporary drama (c. about 1964), accuses it of lacking interest in nature and says 'They live in a silent spring'.

This made me think, did O'Casey invent the famous Rachel Carson phrase? No, her book was 1962 - well, did he take it from her? Conceivably. Or is it actually an older, familiar phrase? Or a mere coincidence that they used the same phrase for the same thing?

I have the same hesitations about Calvino.

That makes 3 of us!

Though I think I did warm to the actual city concepts in INVISIBLE CITIES.

the pinefox, a nice association with Keats:

The title Silent Spring was inspired by a line from the John Keats poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and evokes a ruined environment in which “the sedge is wither’d from the lake, / And no birds sing.”

and I admired The Baron in the Trees too.

See also This Be The Pocket Universe: Post Here When You Realize Or Are Reminded That An SF Title Is From The Canon Of English Poetry

I will finish O'Casey and Bono in due course, but for now I turn to rereading another great Irish Protestant - Elizabeth Bowen's debut THE LAST SEPTEMBER (1929).

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
It could be a parody, but the points of view of the two characters are surprisingly convincing. It is also amazing and wonderful that they are friends. I have been acquainted with the word kip. Lola is a character.

I don't get the feeling Rooney is writing a satire. It's nice to think their are still young people who make friends in college and then keep up an active written correspondence after they move away to different towns, but I'm not sure how common it is.

I started reading "Motherhood" by Sheila Heti, but I gave up on it around the halfway mark. It felt more like aimless ruminations than a novel, and the ongoing dialogue with the I Ching tended to sap what little momentum developed.

I have been acquainted with the word kip

Sergio Pitol - The Love Parade. Fans of Roberto Bolano (except it was written in the mid-to-late 80s, before RB ever got to writing the fiction he became famous for) could love this story of an academic/journalist type going in and around Mexican society to try to 'solve' the mystery around the violent events that took place during a party in 1942. Some of the digressions are wonderful. Anyway, this is the first of a trilogy so I don't know how it will turn out; the next couple are meant to come out over this year and next, so it might be best to get it all when it's out. I can't wait.

That sounds really intriguing.

I'm a Pitol fan but haven't gotten to Love Parade yet, am excited to do so when I get a chance.

having finished his dry as dust yet somehow hilarious autobiography, i'm starting on my first trollope novel barchester towers

I think I enjoyed the correspondence sections of BW,WAY more than the relationships, especially towards the end. She’s so astute at describing the intersubjective spaces between groups of friends and acquaintances, less good at resolving soapy plots

I finished The Vet's Daughter. It stuck it's foot into the territory of the gothic novel, but managed to avoid the sorts of overdone language and over the top plot elements that generally keep me away from gothic novels. I enjoyed it.

I've begun reading a non-fic book centered on Michael Servetus,and the 'heretical' book he wrote in the mid-sixteenth century which was so thoroughly hunted down and burned that it became the rarest book in the world. Servetus was also burned at the stake for writing it.

It's titled Out of the Flames, Nancy and Lawrence Goldstone. It seems to be very well-researched and the prose delivers its load of factual information smoothly and transparently.

I finished the beloved Mating yesterday. More indebted to Bellow than I realized: discursions into philosophy, socialism, the expediency of travel, and so on. I'm not sure the last third worked.

I think about *Mating* often. I think it over-reached itself in the final third but I was glad for it. It's one of those books I remember as much for where I was when I read it. (I read it in Porlock, in a house with a conservatory looking out over the Bristol Channel. Ftr, no one interrupted me while I was reading.)

Robert Harris, Act of Oblivion
Fun novel about the manhunt for the two 'regicides' of Charles I who escaped to New England.

Auke Hulst, The Mitsukoshi Consolation Baby Company
In Dutch, there's no English translation yet.
Overlong at 600 pages, but a great read about a writer who mourns the loss of his aborted daughter by buying a robot girl in Tokyo. In the novel-within-the-novel the writer's alter ego tries to deal with his grief by going back in time to prevent the abortion from happening.

I just started Thirst by Amélie Nothomb, in which Jesus tells the story of his final days.

I think it over-reached itself in the final third but I was glad for it

well put

I read Elizabeth Bowen's THE LAST SEPTEMBER (1929) for maybe the third time. It's very good. One brief description of it could be something like: You know how they say "Jane Austen wrote these comedies of social manners while the Napoleonic Wars raged in the background"? Well, here the war keeps coming into the foreground. (I'll leave aside the possibility that someone will say that Austen was in fact very engaged with the wars.)

Bowen is often stylistically close to Woolf, must have learned from her. But she also does other things that Woolf doesn't do: stark, strange, perverse descriptions, reaching for unexpected words, making the reader work to imagine a place or sight. Her prose can be remarkable. And it moves in and out from that modernist mode to the comedy of manners stuff where aristocrats are talking at cross purposes. Almost literally every page contains fascinating writing or ideas.

It's extraordinary how strongly Bowen makes politics (ie: the violence of the War of Independence) figure in the novel, while the novel is ostensibly focused on other things (cf the coming of age of protagonist Lois). You can hardly imagine an English equivalent. (Maybe if there were a Woolf novel where women's suffrage campaigns were constantly going on, rather than a distant background factor.) The novel seems remarkably perceptive, or honest, or informative, about the Anglo-Irish (especially the gentry or Ascendancy element). I feel, again, that it's a major achievement: one of the key Irish novels of the century, to say the least.

Yeah, it's as if she accepted a mission to flesh out Mrs. Dalloway's dinner parties thirty years later.

Finished a few chaps and more Prynne, of course, and am now dialing between a book of Prynne and Douglas Oliver’s letters and slowly reading Adorno’s Negative Dialectics.

Got a couple of biographies on the go (Ray Connolly's Elvis one, and Janet Malcolm's book on Sylvia Plath) and dipping in and out of David Thomson's very enjoyable 'Have You Seen?' - A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films.

That Malcolm book was one of the best things I’ve read in years. Please let us know how you get on!

It's wonderful! The New Yorker practically published the whole thing in '93. I spent an afternoon photocopying it at the uni library lol

pinefox, I'll seize the opportunity to once again hype catnip doorstop The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen: it's been republished with different covers and intros over the years (the one I read has gold letters on royal blue, with a dumbo intro by I forget who), but I assume the stories are the same. They start in the 1900s, when she was a teen, already unmistakably herself, if more exuberant about it, maybe---and proceed on into the late 60s, a few years before her death. Mostly in England, some on the Continent, a few in Ireland.
She was Anglo-Irish, and one reason for writing so much and lecture-reading tours and other activities was the upkeep of Bowen Court, but the Irish-setting stories are as committed to rigorous truth-telling as her others(incl.compassion and satire and whatever else she comes away with: a sense of justice).
Some effects come from her interest in movies: one of the more obvious examples is a story where the camera keeps going around the edge of a pond, revisiting different points of view, 'til it's time for everybody to leave the park and go back to blackout in WWII London.
(Way way before that, "Dead Maybelle" is the great-grandmother of Greil Marcus's Dead Elvis.)

ILB keeps encouraging me to read her novels, but I still haven't started.

Stendhal - Love. A curious book from the novelist, detailing in several short pieces the contours of love. Part II is like a tour of how love is thought and carried out in several parts of the world (mostly the rest of Europe but the US and 'Arabia' have chapters).

The main point of interest ended up at the way he was attempting to theorise the whole business of it, which bought both Proust (a few remarks on the concept of habit) and Barthes to mind.

I seem to recall he talked about the process of contemplating one’s object of desire through something that he called “crystallization” iirc (in English translation at least), some kind of idea of focusing on a flaw à la a diamond or a grain of sand in an oyster forming a pearl.

I've started reading "The Western Lands" by William S. Burroughs. The other Burroughs I've read are "Naked Lunch" and "Junkie". This seems closer to the "Naked Lunch" end of the scale.

Poster Dow, I own the Bowen COLLECTED STORIES and have never read it, somehow perpetually putting it off. I imagine it's about as good as people say it is.

I'm rereading Kate O'Brien's THE LAND OF SPICES (1941), a novel about a senior Roman Catholic nun running a convent school in Limerick in the 1900s.

Said nun, Helen Archer, is English, and grew up in Brussels. She represents a 'continental European' idea of the church: sophisticated and detached. Meanwhile, the Irish branch is pressured to be closer to Irish nationalism. 'Mother' Helen has various relations with the other nuns beneath her, and with a range of schoolgirls, some of whom could be in an old schoolgirl story (squabbling over a game of rounders, snobbish about their backgrounds, etc). One younger girl, Anna Murphy, is the other main protagonist: a bit of a prodigy and also virtuous.

The novel is elegantly and precisely written, rather than beautiful. It doesn't really seek aesthetic or poetic quality. It has more of the 'functional elegance' of the Catholic world and discourse it depicts. But like 'Mother' Helen it has a sort of generous heart hidden beneath its austere appearance. I'm quite fond of it, though its slowness and subject matter are quite far from current trends.

have you read J.F. Powers?

balzac's deputy of arcis; left unfinished at death, late style perhaps? piling intrigues on top of intrigues, old figures coming out of the wood work all over the place, never really anchoring on any character for much of the book. having a great time

Poster Alfred: I have not read that writer.

I would like to read Balzac. A task I must get to.

"I seem to recall he talked about the process of contemplating one’s object of desire through something that he called “crystallization” iirc"

Yes. I took it as trying to write about love as process, to strip the stuff that can't be written out of it. I can see what Proust (or Barthes) might have taken out from this.

it's a marvellous project to dive into, that only gets richer. little other fiction i find as satisfying at this point. black sheep would be my pick of the longer novels; the vicar of tours of the shorter.

xp that is

Lost Illusions or Pere Goriot are good places to start.