Nothing Doting Living Loving: What Are You Reading In The Winter of 2023-24?

Happy New Winter, everyone!

William Gardner Smith - The Stone Face
Yuval Taylor - Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal

I am actually reading Nothing!

Courtesy link to the previous WAYR thread:

I'm in Love With Books and I Feel Fine! What Are You Reading in Autumn 2023?

I am 21 'Books' (530 pages) into the Iliad with three more books to go. Spoilers: Patroclus is dead, Achilles finally stopped sulking and is massacring Trojans, but he has yet to kill Hector. I've been reading one or two of the books a night, then setting the Iliad aside and reading in something less demanding, so I am also now most of the way through an easy-peasy sports memoir Coach Wooden and Me, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It is pleasant reading. It's not the sort of thing most ILBers would find engaging, but I'm an admirer of Kareem from way back in 1965 when he began playing for UCLA, back when freshmen weren't allowed on the varsity team.

Edith Wharton's *Age of Innocence* which feels perfect for the time of year and Eliot Weinberger's *Karmic Traces*, a series of essays the unifying field of which is currently beyond me (but colour me intrigued anyway).

I am still making my way through Winner-Take-All Politics. It's been a struggle. Not that the book is badly written; it isn't. Not that the subject isn't interesting; it very much is, despite having been written pre-Trump and thus being a little outdated. It's just so fucking depressing: a post-mortem on what has gone wrong in American politics since the 70s, and why we are where we are now, particularly in the disparity between the very rich and everyone else.

which iliad?

(I've read three or four retellings of it but not the actual thing, the choice of translations is a bit overwhelming though. penguin alone have 4 versions available)

(actually 6 versions)

The recent Iliad translation from Emily Wilson. It's quite good in terms of clarity and force of language while retaining metrical interest and variety. It uses iambic pentameter.

yeah, i hear good things about that, but it's like £20 for the ebook version currently (which probably reflects the work that's gone into it, but probably not what i'll get out of it)

I checked out a library copy of it.

Wilson lives a few blocks from me— apparently her indoor/outdoor cat has a very large and charming bell.

that's a marvelous detail

Misak, Frank Ramsey

There was a lot of sex being had, but sadly, it did not involve Frank. Perhaps it had something to do with that simplicity of character. Perhaps it had to do with his massive size.

Ramsey in Vienna, writing about Roger Penrose's father-to-be:

"I live with Lionel, whose brains, if he ever had any, have been analysed away pretty completely, so that serious conversation is almost impossible."

Ramsey didn't like his wife's having an affair with Liam O'Flaherty.

He lashed out with some nasty words about the Irish: "their politics are mere assassination, their ethics superstition, and their literature fairytale."

Ramsey wrote an influential paper in economics about optimal saving. One if his assumptions was:

that we can't go on forever being more and more in debt to foreign nations

We know that this assumption is not true of the US, because the US is uniquely favored by history. Or something. C'mon, man!

Misak remarks that Virginia Woolf could have obtained the two main characters in To The Lighthouse by copying Frank Ramsey's parents into the book and changing one letter. Misak omits to add that in the novel, one of their sons was a mathematics prodigy. In the novel, the son was killed in the trenches and his mother died at home. Frank Ramsey's mother died in a car accident a few months after the novel was published, and he died three years later at age 26.

Also reading nothing, which is just after finishing The Sound and The Fury

finished Hardy's Noble Dames which was every combination of eloping and extra marital affairs and illegitimate children

started on the assorted uncollected short stories, the first two of which have featured horse theft

xp You meanNothing or nothing?
Just starting We Have Always Lived In The Castle (with afterword by Jonathem Lethem and gothic cartoon cover, in New Adult section, prob soon to be decimated by new Library Board, so I finally got to it while I could). Incredible tension of concentration as way of life for teen girl narrator---

Finished The Dark is Rising - as noted here

"The Dark Is Rising" - Classic or monumentally boring DUD

…the first few chapters are marvellously evocative and spooky, almost as good as Garner and Le Guin, and the rest is a bunch of pompous stodgy lore that only an 11-year-old could love (NB this is a book for 11-year-olds).

Rewatching the intro to Box of Delights on YouTube is a
briefer and cheaper way of getting to where this ends up.

I finished the Iliad. The bardic function of the poem, which was to steadfastly glorify the ruling class by commemorating (and inflating) their deeds of courage and wisdom, and praising their family wealth and pedigrees, is front and center at all times. The pace can get pretty slow and draggy when it condenses that function into making long lists of such stuff. The real fascination for me is how capably the poem rises up to function as great literature, in spite of that heavy burden of flattery. When it hits its marks, it's incredibly powerful.

Now I'm reading The World My Wilderness, Rose Macaulay. It's set during the immediate aftermath of the second world war.

closing out 2023 with the worst book i've read this year: the last one by will dean

woman goes on a cruise with her boyfriend, wakes up the next morning as the only person left on the ship, which is still steaming somewhere at full speed

this is the sort of premise that cannot possibly end well, but perhaps the journey might be interesting? no. plus completely half-assed characterization and an ending that is honestly insulting. fuck you will dean

Sounds like one that might be better abandoned.

This month's book club selection is How High We Go in the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu. Thus far, the premise is that climate change has caused some virus or viruses long dormant in Arctic ice to spread, causing a pandemic that affects children first and foremost. There seems to be some sort of redemption building, which is good, because otherwise it feels like an exercise in literary sadism.

Also, it features a talking pig.

Tolstoy - Hadji Murad (second time)

William Goldman - Adventures in the Screen Trade
Cormac McCarthy - The Border Trilogy (a combined edition of all three books)
Louis Menand - The Free World
Various Authors - Great Detectives
Guy Dubord - The Society of the Spectacle

re: McCarthy, I never made it past All the Pretty Horses. I should give the rest of the trilogy another go, if for no other reason than that my brother loves it so much.

mary shelley - frankenstein
was surprised at how different it was to the film versions i've seen. was dismayed at how long it was for a shortish book. could quite happily be half the length. although perhaps one wouldn't get the full effect of what a whiny prick frankenstein is. would never have finished this if it were a recent novel.

As it happens, I finished The World My Wilderness before the witching hour of NYEve, but after posting my 'WDYR in 2023' list. Oh well, pobody's nerfect. It was fine. Macaulay did indulge her penchant for burbling over ruins on a few occasions and the cast of characters, while cunningly sketched, stayed only fitfully vibrant or alive. As a novel of Europe adrift in chaos after the wreckage of WWII it quite succeeded, but from a peculiarly British ruling class perspective.

the memory monster by yishai sarid - short and quite powerful novel about the way in which the holocaust is remembered in israel.

HHhH by laurent binet - more nazi stuff. the conceptually ambitious metatextual stuff doesn't work, which is a shame because it dominates.

stone blind by natalie haynes - the perseus and medusa story. great fun.

the iron king by maurice druon - the first part of the the series that supposedly inspired game of thrones. france ca. 1400. i haven't read GoT, but i've seen the show, and this certainly reminded me of early seasons before all the wizard bollocks. quite trashy, nowhere near the political or literary sophistication of e.g. wolf hall. but pretty good fun. will probably read the rest.

first love by gwendoline riley - very good, very sad novella.

finishing the year with the https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/10/books/review/paved-paradise-henry-grabar.html, which is great. i'm sympathetic, but the book is very persuasive and surprisingly well written and funny.

the ebook of the new Natalie Haynes, Divine Might, which is Pandora's Jar but featuring goddesses, is 99p on Amazon.co.uk today

just finished paul murray's "the bee sting". next up "the leopard"

Finished How High We Go in the Dark. I can't say I would strongly recommend it. It reads like a collection of loosely connected short stories, which it was originally, and the final chapter relies on a deus ex machina that rings a little hollow. In the interview at the end, the author seems super nice and earnest, and he obviously put a lot of thought and work into the book, but in the end it just wasn't as great as it might have been.

Just got started on another Ross Macdonald 'Lew Archer' novel, The Underground Man (published 1971). The early set-up of the story is economical, effortlessly engaging, and damn near perfectly paced. The man could write a story.

I'm going to try reading The Tale of Genji, the Tyler translation.

So far I'm finding that it's a book that must be taken slowly, 5 minutes a page if not more. So probably over 100 hours in total.

Lucas Hilderbrand - The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After
Harry Crews - The Gospel Singer

as I said re 2023 reading:

Truman Capote:
The Early Stories of Truman Capote (half good, promising)
Other Voices, Other Rooms (maybe half good, disappointing)

sense of personal concerns as generator of characters' situations

Read Atlantic Island by Tony Duvert. A friend had told me this book was actually quite an astonishing indictment of bourgeois adult values and attitudes toward children, and in fact, she was correct, tho sometimes the means by which Duvert got there— depicting sex between teenage boys— was obviously icky. Like a more French and less hallucinatory Burroughs in this way, the book held some sentences that bowled me over, such as: “When you fall into the grip of those who have the right to be virtuous at your expense, you can never get out.”

Now I am reading Anne F. Garréta’s Sphinx, a pretty engaging short novel about a love affair between two characters who remain genderless and utterly ambiguous throughout the book. Digging it so far!

im seong-sun - the consultant
korean thriller about the restructuring consultant of an all pervasive company referred throughout as simply 'the company' whose job is to plan the deaths of anyone in need of 'restructuring'. v good flow and world creation but somehow slight in the end.

I just finished Mike Davis' City of Quartz. Amazing, amazing book, I didn't want it to end.

I thought the chapter on the Catholic church was going to be boring, but it was incredible. I would be curious about the church's legacy/impact/power since 1990. I would presume it has declined due to the fallout from the church molestation scandals and as most church attendance has declined.

The Urantia Book. Curious if there are other readers lurking around ilx

I finished the Ross Macdonald book, The Underground Man. In order to create an increasingly dense series of plot twists in the last twenty pages of the book he incrementally revealed that an improbably large number of the characters had converged at the scene of a murder that took place 15 years earlier, while at the same time most of them were unaware of each others proximity.

Surprisingly, this scarcely believable level of improbability didn't detract from the story at all for me, because the real interest wasn't generated by the mystery of whodunnit, but by the complexities of the characters as humans.

It's my turn to host book club, and I have picked a book recommended by my brother: Chain-Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. It looks to be a near-future dystopia in which inmates of the private prison system fight to the death for a chance at release. Very solid reviews.

boy, Harry Crews thinks he's Flannery O'Connor, eh

I have to confess to enjoying A Feast of Snakes. It definitely sits in the guilty pleasures bin.

I don't like to dismiss Major Novelists out of hand, so I'm picking that one up on Sunday.

It's my turn to host book club, and I have picked a book recommended by my brother: _Chain-Gang All-Stars_, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. It looks to be a near-future dystopia in which inmates of the private prison system fight to the death for a chance at release. Very solid reviews.

I barely get time to read but just finished Babel by RF Kuang - anyone read it? Think I was expecting more from it and it began to seriously annoy me. But, guess it kept me reading.

I barely get time to read but just finished Babel by RF Kuang - anyone read it? Think I was expecting more from it and it began to seriously annoy me. But, guess it kept me reading.

I was really disappointed by it (it had been highly recommended to me), for roughly the reasons here: https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2023/07/02/the-fall-of-the-tower/

i quit it after like 100 pages

It was like someone has tried to crowbar 2020s online discourse into the mouths of 1800s Oxford students and it felt so off even though I appreciate the actual positions of the characters. (The most minor, yet most jarring to me in some ways, was one of them declaring a dessert was supposed to be "sticky toffee pudding" which might sound like a jolly old traditional English pudding but is far more recent! like if they'd talked about Cheesecake Factory!). For a book about language, the way they spoke was bizarre.

I really loved the idea of how the magic 'works' but it had hardly changed the world apart from making existing things more efficient.

I should say a friend of mine who is not white found it really nailed some of his experiences of talking about nations of "Brown" people with white people.

I finished *The Age of Innocence*. Obviously the word 'perfect' is overused but well, sometimes it's the only thing that will do. It left me sobbing my poor ragged heart out.

Oh that sounds exactly my thing. Will see if we have it

It's quite well done

A model of decorum there, Alfred.

There's that feeling that you only really get with novels that you're in the presence of an intelligence so vast and refined that it's like being known.

It's 'how many 'thats' can you fit into a sentence', Saturday.

Wharton's one of my favorite novelists.

1) What should I read next? and 2) do I dare watch the Scorcese film?

The House of Mirth. You'll feel the noose tightening around your neck.

The Scorsese film is one of his best.

I haven't tried any xxxp Harry Crews novels yet, but his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place is amazingly good. Tough-minded teacher Mary Karr, in The Art of Memoir, says she's partial to it, while noting how it breaks some of her rules, and greatly prefers it to his fiction, likewise Casey Cep, in an astute New Yorker presentation. Those who do like the novels usually mention A Feast of Snakes first.

xp I thought the film version of The House of Mirth was quite good as well. Gillian Anderson is underappreciated as an actor.

Yeah, I thought it was good when first released, haven't seen it since, would like to.
Here's what I said about xp AC on a WAYR? thread last year:

In A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, the earliest memory of Harry Crews is of waking up under a tree with his excellent dog Sam, both of them in early morning sunlight: he's a sleepwalker who's hit it lucky, in and out of place. The place, into which he now centered by tobacco farming, is late 30s Bacon County, Georgia, sometimes extending across the St. Mary's River into Jacksonville, Florida's Springfield Section of tiny shotgun row houses and cigar factories, with the youngest children, like himself, left to their own devices.
In Bacon and the Section, he's the mostly the audience, including that of the glossy people in the Sears Roebuck catalog, so fantastically intact, unlike almost every one else he sees, that they must have wounds under their clothes: he and his friend Willalee and Willalee's grandmother, Auntie.a self-proclaimed conjure woman and ex-slave, tell each other stories about the Sears people: the audience continuing through the creative process.
Little Crews also responds and is responded and susceptible to an increasing number of people, becoming "a parade" of vistors to his bedroom, when he's confined with "infantile paralysis" (nice work, Dr. Colombo). Many of these are people he knows or recognizes---though not the faith healer from the next county---in a new context, with him more an audience than ever, but for their attentions. Scary, especially when Auntie
s dropping knowledge, though things were already disturbing enough, hence the sleepwalking, and now he feels in place (for one thing, he can't wake up in a dark field, because he can't get there).
The second session is even better: almost boiled alive, he now qualifies for actual treatment, by drying light and soothing spray (which becomes a protective coating) while he's under a protective shell, which he compares to the top of a carriage, with his Sears Roebuck Catalog and a tablet for his detective novel, about a boy detective who carries fireworks for protection. He's also allowed to keep an attentive baby goat in there---all things for the twice-struck child---
Before, in between, and after these confinements, he can disappear like a tiny Ishmael, one whose reappearances become more self-revealing, traced in and out of place, for keeps---spoiler of sorts: a mind-fuck evangelist appears, an alibi of sorts for very bad child Crews deed, but a plausible one, as far as he goes, which is pretty far, in a professional way. Even I, Boomer suburbanite, was singed by one during a brief primary school encounter, while preschool Crews and his crew get the extended treatment, as isolation's captive audience.
There are what I take to be fictional outcroppings, but not much to stumble over. He learns from the stories of men (character-driven, funny) and women (action, cutting the surface)--the former told while taking a break, the latter not so much.

“the house of mirth” is extraordinary

“the leopard”, which I finished today, was also extraordinary

^^ otm

I'm about halfway into A Lost Lady, Willa Cather. There's still time for a change of direction, but so far it tilts toward romantic sentimentality in a way that is uncharacteristic of Cather.

My suspicion is that this is partly due to a technical issue, where she fails to adequately disentangle and distinguish between her own omniscient/objective narrative voice and a narrative perspective strongly tethered to one of her central character's point of view. Cather is usually very intentional about such technical nuances, so this apparent leakage of romance into the 'omniscient voice' passages is puzzling to me.

The Leopard is amazing. Whole scenes whirl in dusty corridors of my mind.

I read (or, rather, listened to) Steven Price's novel about Lampedusa's writing of The Leopard, called (not surprisingly) Lampedusa. Now I have to read the source material.

I'm about halfway into A Lost Lady, Willa Cather. There's still time for a change of direction, but so far it tilts toward romantic sentimentality in a way that is uncharacteristic of Cather.

My suspicion is that this is partly due to a technical issue, where she fails to adequately disentangle and distinguish between her own omniscient/objective narrative voice and a narrative perspective strongly tethered to one of her central character's point of view. Cather is usually very intentional about such technical nuances, so this apparent leakage of romance into the 'omniscient voice' passages is puzzling to me.

Oh, wow, interesting. The narrative framing reminded me of The Great Gatsby's, where the distance b/w us and Gatsby works in the novel's favor; it deepens his mystery.

Here's a recent piece on Crews: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/04/a-childhood-is-one-of-the-finest-memoirs-ever-written

I should note that Penguin Classics has reissued some of those hard-to-find novels.

Yeah, that's the Cep coverage I xxxposted, glad to see it's not paywalled, thanks!
Late last night, wanting to be done it with it, I finished my first Portis, The Dog of the South. I can see how his deadpan, constantly active, funky panoramas suited the Coens, who declared their True Grit straight from the book, w/o bothering to watch the John Wayne version. And this might be a good movie too, though on the page it gets monotonous to me, with the same affects, especially via the motormouth monologues of self-justifying seekers, finders, who just keep a-goin', frequently on the shady side---I admit it's also a tad close to home, coming from several directions, but mainly drone-y, despite all the bumps, breakdowns and more turns ahead. Good choice of narrator,though: a determined driver and straight man for others, also naive, relatively innocent, conservative, if a bit crazed/compulsive, and can see maybe why his wife took off, somewhut starved,
I will read True Grit at some point, but how does A Dog... compare to his others? Should I keep-a goin' with any of them?

Yes, "affects," not "effects": in this case, the way I read it and feel about it: downtempo, despite the pace of the predictably colorful, crinkled road reports.

The poem "To Elsie" by Wm. Carlos Williams is my touchstone for understanding the characters and stories Portis wanted to get down on paper. It's online here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46485/to-elsie

totally ripped off beethoven imo

doesn't everyone sooner or later?

Water Closet Williams shoulda stopped after the first line, which is classick quote-bait, but after all who among us is that pure, and I don't think peasant traditions would help Portis characters, who are more decent (at least in the sense that a meal or an overcoat can be decent) than the rest of that, as are some Williams (he wrote better fiction than poetry, I now think). Portis seems closer to Sherwood Anderson (on the road, not in Winesburg, as far as they'd care to know).

they=Portis/Dog of the Southpeople. (I shouldn't generalize too freely, having only read the one book.)

Wharton musings this morning. I sometimes think of a thing Wallace Stevens said (particularly around Christmas, when I want to run and keep running), that 'life is an affair of people not of places. But for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble'. Wharton said of her move to Hyères in Provence in 1922 (two years after *The Age of Innocence* was published) 'I feel as if I were going to get married – to the right man at last'.

Prepping for a new class and reworking some older syllabi, I have been flipping around a lot in Keats, Mary Ruefle’s book of lectures, Adorno, Prynne’s long book on Wordsworth, and a few other things. Amidst all that, I am in the middle of The Palestine Laboratory, which I believe I wrote about in the old thread, and am slowly moving through EDEN EDEN EDEN by Guyotat, a small section at a time.

Mornings now taken up with a book by my favorite French poet currently working, Anne Portugal, whose Flirt Formula is beautiful, uncanny, and consistent in its surprises. She is truly a great, highly recommend her works.

Ooh. I'm quite interested in Field Notes, but, alas, neither my uni library nor the statewide catalog carries it.

Alfred, I have a digital copy— it is a strange copy because some British guy took literal photographs of every page, so you get his awful thumbs and bits of garden in the corners, but otherwise, it is a crisp and clear PDF of the thing in its entirety. Webmail me, I will forward it along.

I see now I spoke too soon about A Lost Lady. It did indeed change direction almost immediately, so that the apparent romanticism of the first half now looks like a set up for a more nuanced perspective. Because I haven't finished it yet I'll reserve further comment until then.

The Art of Memory by Frances Yates, about classical memory techniques and in particular their application in the middle ages. Way more academic than the kind of thing I usually read, I got it because it focuses on (among others) Giordano Bruno, who kept on popping up various novels.

Also decided that alongside this it would be good to start on Ulysses, wtf, make it easy on yourself why don't you.

OK, I finished A Lost Lady last night. Honestly, I had hoped for Cather to cast some serious side-eye on the seductive aura of beauty and refinement that the wealthy aristocracy weaves around themselves, which is constructed entirely upon the labor of the poor. Instead, Cather seemed to be endorsing the idea that the first generation who brought industrial commerce into the raw plains of North America were honorable visionaries and idealists.

The 'lost lady' at the center of the book was lost in the sense that as the book begins she embodies the highest and most ideal American version of what makes a woman "a lady" and by the end she has lost that ease of perfection. Her subsequent downfall comes not through her personal failings, but because the generation of Great Men of the West, as embodied by her husband, has been overtaken by men who do not uphold the ideals and manners of those giants. Their wealth has been appropriated and their days of greatness are over.

Her fate in the book is just a reflection of theirs. Her ideal figure of 'a perfect lady' could only be sustained through her connection to the great and good Captain Forrester. When his wealth disappeared, she fell out of grace. As the book ends and she has regained wealth through a second marriage, her grace is marred because the Captain's heroic virtues were irreplaceable and she can never be the same 'perfect lady' again. Cather's wistful, even elegiac, tone over this romanticized version of western history seems undeniable to me.

Alfred will probably want to quarrel some with my conclusions, but I don't see how the text supports an alternative interpretation.

In that same Capote trade pb w xxxxpost novella The Grass Harp(1951) is The Tree of Night and Other Stories(1949). Considering the era, he's been doing good to get the ones set in NYC published respectably, since they mostly feature protagonists who are (psst) double-gaited, as some said back then---also considering the era, they are bad serial boyfriends, equal opportunity destroyers, who learn the hard way that Crime Does Not Pay, via encounters with Thee Unknown (yet strangely familiar), cracking the shell of identity as effectively as Robbie Coltrane or an unexpected dose of acid.
Here he mostly lays off the Gothicky special effects gravy that overloaded some of Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), until near the end of the urban stories that get it, by which time their tawdry momentum just slams on through, leaving me with a satisfying stir of speculations about the characters.
An exception to the bad lover is the nice old widow who is just set in her ways, her own shell of normalcy, and has forgotten that she's in New York and should keep her distance, so nice that she introduces herself to a little girl who is all alone at the movies, a little girl who looks like one of the twins in Kubrick's version of The Shining--but who may not be supernatural at all. Whether and however she exists or not, she's needy and determined.
Likewise the androgynous girl in another story, an evocative outsider artist, possible (and possibly abused) paranoid schizophrenic, possibly a stalker: "the follower and the followed," at least according to the bad man whose mind she's still blowing,into psychedelic clutter, but not too terribly much.
(The most effective one in this vein might be the most restrained, where the love rat starts getting those calls, wherever he is, from a dry voice, never extant otherwise, just "You know who I am.")
The stories set way down South are rambunctious tales, mostly "Mayberry Southern Gothic," as I said of The Grass Harp, although one is more violent, and the finale, "A Tree of Night" itself, is a dark carnival ov three (Something on this night train is happening, and you don't know what it is, or do you, Miss Jones?)

As a side quest, I started The Grifter's Daughter, by Duane Lindsay, which has been sitting in my Kindle Unlimited checkouts for some time. It's good, light fare, a quick read that I'm hoping will take some turns I'm not expecting.

now reading: “poor things”

I read Cather as part of my American Literature degree and can't remember much except being bored! We had so much boring stuff on the syllabus (boring to a 19-year-old English person anyway): Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne, Sherwood Anderson, Roderick Hudson (I've grown to enjoy James but Roderick Hudson, ugh) so perhaps it was hard to see the wood for the trees. Will try Cather again.

her short stories are my favorite part of her work tbh!

is Roderick Hudson Rock Hudson's dad

between a Rock and a Rod Hudson

What Anderson?

Aimless, your interpretation strikes me as right on (I haven't read the novel since 1995). However, why should she cast a side-eye on the seductive aura of beauty and refinement? I didn't/don't expect her to. The novel as I remember it is a brief sustained reverie. What appealed to me about it as a writer was its structure (Cather's good about architecture) and the tints and tonalities.

I _am_ gonna reread it this semester though.

Xpost Winesburg Ohio, which I’m happy to reassess. I’ll stick to my guns about Fenimore Cooper though

I'm reading Vila-Matas, Montano's Malady, my third of his. I'm also writing stuff, and his writing really makes me feel incredibly mid while I'm working, he's so good, so capable of keeping multiple plates spinning while making it look like there's no real effort involved. Kinda wanna read all of him just like I kinda want to read all of Pitól, though Vila-Matas is the more entertaining writer by far.

why should she cast a side-eye on the seductive aura of beauty and refinement?

As an example, in the very first chapter Cather establishes how gracious and thoughtful Mrs. Forrester is by describing how, when she spots some boys from the town visiting the stream below her house she goes to the kitchen and tells the cook who is working at the the baking that "while she is at it" to make a batch of cookies. Later she brings the warm cookies in a basket down the hill and acts pleasantly with the boys. Then she walks back to the house.

(shrugs) Cather wants us to be charmed by her actions. But what did she really do here? All she must do to be thoughtful and gracious is to generate one simple idea: cookies. All the work required to manifest that thought is done for her by a servant. That's what I meant by the aristocracy weaving an aura of grace and beauty about them. Their accomplishment is to have 'good taste'. They make it seem effortless because their refinements of 'taste' manifest as beauty entirely by interposing the labor of servants.

I would have expected Cather to have at least acknowledged how this kind of ladylike 'accomplishment' is at heart an empty one and is confining enough to make any spirited young woman restive and wanting to break out of that box.

Maybe she's employing Show Not Tell?

xp Chuck, have you seen this:
Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses
Mark Twain

There are nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction -- some say twenty-two. In "Deerslayer," Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:

...2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the "Deerslayer" tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.

3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the "Deerslayer" tale.

Maybe she's employing Show Not Tell?

You could read it and decide.

you figured out the score

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/17/Rush_Show_Don%27t_Tell.jpg/220px-Rush_Show_Don%27t_Tell.jpg

I wouldn’t look to Cather for a materialist/ Marxist critique. Wasn’t her thing.

I'm reading a book of early Pinter plays. It's funny how all his plays are basically the same - couple sitting down for breakfast, there's an intruder who they may or may not know, sinister vibe throughout, then abrupt violent ending

xxxpost yeah, I'll ask Library Loan for A Lost Lady, also Death Comes For The Archbishop, which seems to be generally regarded as her best.

Bummer title though!

The Professor's House!

I wouldn’t look to Cather for a materialist/ Marxist critique. Wasn’t her thing.

― o. nate, Thursday, January 11, 2024 11:51 AM (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

From a queer POV she's fascinating

I could teach Paul’s Case to every fiction class I instruct until I die— it is an incredible piece of writing.

yup!

persuaded! just bought a cheap paperback of the collected short stories online

And I finished Harry Crewe's memoir; it earns the plaudits. An evocation of a time and place, it taught me about scaling (not skinning!) a hog, caring for a rooster with a stuck craw, how to cook possum, and other rural Georgia delights circa 1935. Unexpected too is Daddy, who breaks the stereotypes I've read in Faulkner and elsewhere by adoring his boy, showing physical affection, etc. This is of course a memoir, so, as Emily Dickinson once wrote, tell the truth but tell it slant.

Currently reading "The Ancient City" by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, about religion in classical Greece and Rome. As a person who thinks about Ancient Rome on a regular basis I couldn't pass it up after this Marc Andreessen shout out:

1. The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges -- the single best book I have found on who we are and how we got here.

— Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 (@pmarca) October 4, 2022

I've started reading the second volume of Taylor Branch's history of the civil rights movement, Pillar of Fire, covering 1963 to 1965. About a hundred pages in and he's still pacing over ground that was covered in the first volume with five hundred pages yet to go. I may intersperse a less heavy book (literally - this thing is a doorstop), just as I did recently with the Iliad.

The greatest value I've derived from this and the first volume is a much stronger sense of just how many thousands of people threw their lives and livelihoods into the struggle and how vast the obstacles in front of them were. The level of violence consistently used by the whites never loses its ability to shock and horrify, which of course was its purpose all along - control via terror.

It's magisterial stuff.

persuaded! just bought a cheap paperback of the collected short stories online

_The Rebel Angels, The Fifth Business, The Manticore_ by Robertson Davies

Extremely enjoyable novels. The main enjoyment is to be had in the overall description of an area where theology and psychology, probably more properly psychoanalysis, play together, with a large amount of more or less obscure erudition, and how that might applied to personal and generational histories. The Rebel Angels, although a lot of fun, is probably less successful, more

I enjoyed these. Take an area where theology and psychology, or psychoanalysis meet, throw some more or less obscure erudition - classical, neo-platonist, apocryphal, magical - at it, play it out across personal and generational histories in the contemporary world. The Rebel Angels has most fun with this, in particular with the character John Parlabane - "a real bad man" - a mixture of self-serving victimhood, caprice, and spiritual compulsion towards malice. The tone and language is consistently witty and amusing, and a little frenetic. The Big Themes that it plays with - character, destination, virtue - have the status of baubles or toys. Big Serious Novels tend to allow the 'giant homeric wheels' (to use a Mark E Smith phrase) to move at a slower pace, less visible on the surface. As a reader you feel the weight of their undertow on Matters. That's purely illusion of course, and I'm not saying one is better than the other - it's in the nature of comic novels to juggle and conjure with celestial bodies - but in The Rebel Angels it does leave you at the end wondering what all the froth was about. In a way that, say, Twelfth Night, to pick something more or less at random, somehow does not.

I must read 12th Night again, it's a wonderful play.

The first two novels of the Deptford Trilogy (The Fifth Business, The Manticore) dial down the knockabout considerably. This doesn't necessarily add anything, but the more muted approach means more of a balance between the comic (which is still definitely present) and the serious.

Robertson Davies can handle language, ideas, description and drama - in other words a very good writer, not at all dull. I should read some criticism as well as final book of the Deptford Trilogy, and the rest of The Rebel Angels trilogy.

The big thing for me in last year's reading was that I got sick and tired of... well it has a number of names, not strictly cognate - stream of consciousness, interior monologue, language as sensory time, the solipsistic narrative, or to use phrases from Wyndham Lewis' critique in Time and Western Man narrative as the 'self-conscious time sense' creating an 'unending prose song'.

I wouldn't want to steelman the full philosophical implications Lewis does - his conclusions are fundamentally illiberal and unprogressive, even if some areas of the critique, like the mode tending towards infantalisation, do hold for me. My main annoyance is that it leads to poor writing.

I'd imagine this is because it allows such enormous latitude to a writer. The free indirect third person, both invented and perfected by Jane Austen (well and Flaubert I guess), as well as creating an extra dimension in prose writing, also creates tension, especially with its ability to tweak matters of dramatic irony. Writing as *insinuation* as Henry Green had it. The management of it requires skill and concentration.

This is not the case for the interior sensory time narrative. And it *can* be more or less well done. I recognise that it is appropriate to Jon Fosse's Septology for instance - matters of perception in the winter landscape, memory on either side of death, the self in others - the mode is helpful to depicting these matters. In fact it almost compels these sorts of subjects, memory and interiority being so baked into the mode. Similarly Murnane, who *is* dull, but is also very good, painstaking in fact, at managing the nests of memory and perception and their interrelation - landscapes exterior and interior. In fact that is one of the chief pleasures of reading him. (and tbf to Murnane I'd tend to interiority in the Australia as well - i yes ok i mean that partly sarcastically, but partly genuinely, the interiors of Australia seem magnificent in concept and in reality, an expansive but intense imaginative space, whether the deserts or the Plains).

In the end, in fact, I'm not sure that you need anyone other than Beckett in this mode. Like Austen and the free indirect, he perfected the solipsistic, circling prose, both capturing the existential absurd, and a comic essence to our social and ambulatory beings.

But in general it's a mode that's extremely tolerant of slackness in the writing, and what is worse it can take you a while to realise - the words just fly by.

There are what I would call pure five-finger exercises (take it in both ways) like Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Spadework for a Palace (it's *fine* I guess), which has the virtue that it's short, and Cărtărescu's Solenoid, which does not. I should put an asterisk by Solenoid, because I read half of it last spring, before deciding it wasn't really a spring book, and that i'd save it to winter. I then picked up a very weak book - Garden of the Seven Twilights - and it's possible that this coloured me on that whole period of reading. Not that I don't think a very good and interesting book on international banking and the large scale movement of money couldn't be written btw. But this isn't it.

I thought Solenoid had a number of things going for it - a world where the tenebrae activae* is composed of the arthropod, the chitinous and skeletal, the fragments of industrial desuetude in the communist Bucharest hinterlands, a sort of electro-industrial mysticism. Enough to make me think I'll finish it at some point. Still, what Solenoid reminded me of most was The Great Fire of London. Not in style, but because they are both books about failures of writing and creativity. In fact it's the central theme of both as well as being the driving force. They both circle endlessly repeating themselves in an attempt to find some central matter. Again, five finger exercises. They're the things you do when you're not engaged in the thing itself. It's the easiest thing in the world to write in circles, endlessly around a topic, in this way.

It's lazy and it's rude to the reader and was enough to put me off reading for a long while. It was only picking up Muriel Spark that made me - warily - enjoy reading again - books where each sentence is a pinprick, that makes you attend, that adds something new to the perception and progress of the novel.

I realise the above is all rather captious, but i'm irritable about it, so am scratching that itch.

*tenebrae activae - Thomas Vaughan, 17th Century Welsh alchemist &c. and brother of poet Henry Vaughan: "beneath all degrees of sense there is a certain horrible, inexpressible darkness. The magicians call it tenebrae activae"

I still love the old Jesuit who knew the secrets of the saints.

In Fifth Business, I think.

Warlock because 22 mentions in the NYRB Publishing thread cannot be wrong

"In the end, in fact, I'm not sure that you need anyone other than Beckett in this mode. Like Austen and the free indirect, he perfected the solipsistic, circling prose, both capturing the existential absurd, and a comic essence to our social and ambulatory beings."

Feels like a mode with an interesting history (starting from Proust with ppl like Blanchot) where Beckett is an end point (only refreshed by a few others, like Bernhard).

"But in general it's a mode that's extremely tolerant of slackness in the writing, and what is worse it can take you a while to realise - the words just fly by."

I am currently reading Platonov's Chevengur slowly (mostly because life reasons otherwise I would have finished it fast), it's a different mode (a satire) where it feels like words are made to matter and never fly by. If they do, the characters who utter them could be killed in 20s Russia. Here they are allowed to say it, sometimes.

I still love the old Jesuit who knew the secrets of the saints.

― Pictish in the Woods (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 15 January 2024 00:25 bookmarkflaglink

In Fifth Business, I think.

― Pictish in the Woods (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 15 January 2024 00:26 bookmarkflaglink

Yes, The Fifth Business. This character - Padre Igancio Blazon - is great. 'Oho, you nice Protestant boy! Joseph is history's most celebrated cuckold ... Padre Blazon was almost shouting by this time, and I had to hush him. People in the restaurant were staring...'. RD writes some really good one-off characters who understand or can interpret the underlying cruces of his main players.

And writing that quote makes me realise that John Parlabane - an avatar of evil in The Rebel Angels - is very similar to Padre Blazon - a guide to the Devil in The Fifth Business.

Feels like a mode with an interesting history (starting from Proust with ppl like Blanchot) where Beckett is an end point (only refreshed by a few others, like Bernhard).

Yes, this seems right to a degree. Though i would say like any mode it's a tool in the toolkit of a writer. it comes with a set of strengths and some subjects and treatments to which it's particularly suited... though as so often you'd more often like to see the mode applied to subjects to which it's completely *unsuited* or rarely used. tho when i start to come up with examples - a crime and detection story, a spy thriller, a comic novel, i feel that this must already have been done a few times!

but yes, certainly proust is the great inventor and progenitor of it all - would be my rather casual view anyway.

I think of that Padre pretty much every time I learn about the dark side or personal failings of some artist I like, as part of a way to get a handle on whatever it may bring up. Maybe once in a great while it will be so bad I can’t stand them anymore but usually it just humanizes them and I have to take most of it in stride, ultimately there’s no way to avoid knowing it sooner or later if one is a fan.

yes, i mean i think one of the main morals in RD is that it's better to be a sinner than a Laodicean. In that language it sounds fine, but of course it means 'it's better to run the risk of doing something that might be considered evil than it is to sit on the sidelines.' put like that it's less clear cut of course. still, 'adults are messy and agency, especially moral agency, is not a simple matter, so be try not to judge other people's errors, even bad ones' seems a reasonable message, especially in a highly amplified social media age that runs very quick and noisily to judgment. (communities have ofc always run to this judgment - see Mrs Dempster at the beginning of the trilogy - it's the amplification and the encouragement to mimetic sorting inherent to social media that is the problem imv, though this ofc is me editorialising and not inherent to the books).

Speaking of Beckett in this (innerverse streaming etc.) context: although it's been a long time since I've read any of his fiction, I remember liking Mercier et Camier especially because it actively acknowledges the existence of the outside and even/especially? outdoors world, seeming closest in that respect to his plays, which are never closest drama, are always written for the audiences of stage/radio/TV/ the silver screen even, though the reviews of Film that I've seen (close as I've come to viewing it) aren't so enthusiastic---still, he recruited Buster Keaton and came to NYC and directed the damn thing---he could do things like that, and the Resistance and so on, not always the professionally depresso hermit etc.---
Also, Fizzles, was wondering what you currently think of Joyce and V. Woolf (and Leonard, for that matter; I've heard he's good)?

never *closet* drama I meant, damn!

Murphy's one of the century's funniest novels and it's got characters and an urban setting.

Yeah! Thanks for the reminder.
Good concise piece on Beckett and running buddy Giacometti, an influence and colleague, who contributed design ideas to early Godot production:

Giacometti died in 1966, while Beckett lived until 1989. Throughout their careers, both artists drew freely from a broad range of mediums including design, architecture, cinema and literature. This experimental approach to working has inspired many artists, such as Gerard Byrne, Bruce Nauman, Miroslaw Balka and Doris Salcedo, to name a few.

Murphy's great. first read it as a teenager, and it's always been a favourite with lines that have just stuck - the qauntum of wantum does not vary, the great buzzing confusion (of gas molecules iirc), the rocking chair being one of the few things that keeps getting faster until it stops.

leonard... woolf? no idea i'm afraid.

ulysses is a great book, human, garrulous even, of the city (the true meaning of Aristotle's politikon zōion - that is to say a being 'of the polis', a social being) and a complete joy to read, mostly. though when i was dipping back into Time and Western Man for the post above, I'm reminded that Lewis felt Joyce-as-schoolmaster was evident in the 'general knowledge paper' aspect of reading Ulysses, not totally unfounded - Joyce iirc said that chapter was the best adverse criticism Ulysses received. Time and Western Man is worth reading sections of, because it covers this moment, in its skewed a rebarbative way, very well - the moment when people were fighting over time, in particular the appearance of Bergsonian time as a philosophy that might underpin artistic representation. Now so much in the past that we forget it was ever a battle in the first place or that there are different options here. (very much, i should stress in opposition to Lewis, *a battle that does not matter*, and like many things that simply didn't matter, Lewis constructed an entire intractable edifice of a book out of it.)

Digression to quote, as I'm flipping through TaWM here:

Almost all Tories are simpletons – the simpletons of what passes with them for 'tradition,' we could say (as is proved conclusively by the way in which they have defended themselves - how they hastily close all the stable doors long after the horses have all disappeared; also by their rare instinct for closing all the wrong doors, behind which there were never any horses).

Virgina Woolf - and I feel bad about this - I've never really warmed that much to. I should probably revisit though, as it's been over twenty years.

terry hayes - year of the locust
much delayed follow up to his debut novel thriller 'i am pilgrim' a book i really liked. the new one is 400 pages of an okay thriller that's not a patch on his original followed by 150 pages of extremely lousy sci-fi so bad you wonder if he's actually trying then 50 pages of ludicrous tie up.

This was the "Have heard he's good" re Leonard W.:

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

― dow, Wednesday, August 1, 2018 9:29 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Very observant of self & others, it seems.

― dow, Wednesday, August 1, 2018 9:31 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

The Wise Virgins by Leonard Woolf is really good, and also really makes you wonder how he put up with his horribly anti-semitic wife.
― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Other good stuff follows on same thread---o hell, why not sample some more:

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

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

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

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

― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, August 2, 2018 5:00 AM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

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

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

― A is for (Aimless), Friday, August 3, 2018 12:28 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

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

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, August 3, 2018 12:38 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

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

― mookieproof, Friday, August 3, 2018
I finished Siege of Krishnapur. My initial impression held- it wasn't as good as Troubles but still pretty good. I still want to read The Singapore Grip. This one had more action and historical detail, but lacked a bit of the surrealism and humor. Now I'm plowing through Jonathan Mahler's Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, which is eminently readable, though at least a passing interest in baseball doesn't hurt.

― o. nate, Saturday, August 4, 2018 7:54 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

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

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

yep!

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, August 4, 2018

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

McElroy, Plus

Takeaway, Angela Hui - memoir about growing up in a Chinese takeaway in a small village in Wales (I do mean "in" - she describes how the counter would be used for homework, birthday parties, etc when the place wasn't open). Not to be read for the prose but an interesting window into a world for sure.

Now: Kawabata's The Rainbow. Man likes his long lost siblings.

Funnily enough I heard about that book. There is a Chinese takeaway near mine where I've seen the young girl grow up at the counter over the last six years. She is often doing homework while I wait for my order.

though as so often you'd more often like to see the mode applied to subjects to which it's completely *unsuited* or rarely used. tho when i start to come up with examples - a crime and detection story, a spy thriller, a comic novel, i feel that this must already have been done a few times!

― Fizzles, Monday, 15 January 2024 bookmarkflaglink

I would say Juan Jose Saer has written a few books like this. I would start with The Witness.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Witness-Juan-Jose-Saer/dp/1846686911

thanks xyzzzz and dow!

Welcome!
Y'all: I've occasionally read Grace Paley over the years, and she keeps coming back through my head today, a little bit, persistently enough that I finally have to ask: if I were to put in a library loan request, which book(s) should I ask for?

She is a marvel. I would go with Later the Same Day.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute too.

Los pobres!

When Republicans assumed control of the House early last year after winning a narrow majority in the 2022 midterms, Representative Earl Blumenauer, a veteran Democrat from Oregon, made a bold prediction: His party had a slight chance of reclaiming power before the next election — through sheer attrition.

Republicans commanded just a thin edge over Democrats, 222 to 213, Mr. Blumenauer reasoned, and typical turnover in recent years suggested that could shrink further. Plus, a certain new Republican representative from New York by the name of George Santos did not seem likely to survive a cascade of ethics issues and criminal charges.

Still, Mr. Blumenauer’s prognosticating seemed more like liberal wish-casting given the dominoes that needed to fall to fulfill it. A year later, though still highly unlikely, it suddenly doesn’t seem all that far-fetched.

Day by day, thanks to a combination of coincidence, scandal, health issues and political turmoil, the G.O.P. majority keeps getting smaller.

xpost thanks yall---think I might request The Collected Stories.

So what got me thinking about Paley again was Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman, written in the 50s, with an unexpectedly acerbic, elbow quality---in that sense reminding me of GP's first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man---as the 26-year-old single comes back to her South Alabama smalltown for a visit, on vacation from NYC job ("I hated it 'til one day somebody pushed me on the bus, and I pushed back. I realized we were enjoying ourselves, and that's when I knew I was a New Yorker.")
As you've probably long since read, so no crying about spoilers she discovers that the heretofore Perfect Atticus, who still has all the best lines, is a racist! And involved, in his ever-seemingly-laidback-village-lawyer way, with the citizens council(in this place, not even "White," and no need to bother with caps either); He patiently explains it all, of course.
She freaks out, then freaks out more when she realizes that he's set her up to freak out, to not know how to deal, by being so freaking perfect all her life! (Flashbacks to her childhood, when Jean Louise was the tomboy Scout and Atticus bravely defended a Negro boy accused of rape, are very readable and even get satirical, but then she realizes they're becoming nostalgically tormenting procrastination.)
Good, except the realistic striving of the novel before that doesn't go with the idea of a perfect ('til now) person---is she delusional, did she block out all previous glimpses (at least) of imperfection? I think the freak-outs could still be in there, if she realizes this about herself, or the blessedly third-person narrator does---self-discovery is already part of the social commentary----but can also see that potential publishers of this complete unknown female mouth from the South (who also has things to say about gender roles) may have found her MS. a bit hot to handle at the end of the Fifties
---so now I'm starting To Kill A Mockingbird, with the same straight-ahead narration (now by the former Scout herself), and Atticus already just like Gregory Peck.

Watchman is certainly no masterpiece, but it's a presentable achievement with potential. I enjoyed the read and pretend-edit.

cho nam-joo - kim jiyoung, born 1982
thought this was fabulous

sayaka murata - life ceremony
short stories from the author of convenience store woman and earthlings particularly liked 'a first rate material' where human remains are used for soft furnishings, jewellery and clothing. also 'body magic' which was extraordinary.

yoko ogawa - the housekeeper and the professor
good but some of the maths was beyond me

shion miura - the easy life in kamusari
enjoyable fish out of water tale about forestry with people mainly being nice to each other which is often p much all I want out of a novel tbh

Just a bit further into Mockingbird, and already I'm starting to wonder about Flannery O'Connor's verdict---"It did alright for a children's book": maybe the ending will be reassuring, but did children's books of 1960 typically have child abuse, child classism (in and out of school), child fights, and the recognizable effects of boondocks poverty, still trickling down and spreading?
One thing she's left out: true that village lawyer Atticus, and the village doctor, other professionals, had to expect some clients to pay with, say, a stack of stove wood, a bag of turnips, whatever could be mananged---but also, if the pros could manage it, they (incl. some in my family and their colleagues) had to keep a cow in the garage, a vegetable garden, chickens, a seasonal turkey, a hog (slaughtered off-premises if necessry x affordable)---the iceman's rounds were still necessary, and a few trips to the store, ---so far I'm not seeing any of that in the book, but no frills either.
Unless you count those on the very young teacher reduced to tears by her first encounter with hardened first graders, incl.some getting on up there in years, held back by family situations in several cases, routinely enough: "She was a pretty little thing."

Also thinking I should have re-read some of the Portis before returning it to library loan--wanting to try more of his---

Read Ernesto by Umberto Saba on a whim, NYRB edition. I was expecting something slightly different but I still found the book rather lovely in its way, almost akin to “Paul’s Case” if it were longer and took place in fin-de-siècle Trieste.

Stack of things as per usual

But Masalha Palestine 4000 Years History
History of the area going back a few thousand years. Seems to be detailed for the last 3000 odd.
& citing work using a variation on the name Palestine for most of that. Egyptian, Greek and Roman texts all have a related name. Also seem to view the area as a recognised population area and a very fertile one for agriculture.

Oein DeBharduin Twiggy Woman
Ghostly folktale collection based on Irish traveller tradition. 2nd set of his I've read. Will read more.

Michael Heller Loft Jazz
I think this may be more sociological than about the music. But interesting read even if heavily dotted with endnotes reference numbers. I think numbers may be less significant than in some books I've seen that in. Messes things up when it's being used as a bathroom book.
But interesting book.

Peter Fryer Staying Power
Book on black presence in Britain going back to a Roman battalion at Hadrian's wall.

During our recent two day power outage I took a detour from the history of the civil rights into something less dense and difficult, a Barbara Pym novel she wrote in 1936 at age 23 which was published posthumously in 1987, Civil to Strangers. Her full skill set as a writer was already apparent at that age, even in so slight a novel. Now I'm back into Pillar of Fire.

Susan Rogers This Is What It Sounds Like
Sound engineer going into scientific background of what reaction to various musics mean. Pretty interesting .

Travellers and the Settled Community John Heneghan, Mary (Warde), Moriarty, Michael O haodha
Short essays on various aspects and points of contact. Very interesting book so shame I keep backburnering it should have had it read months ago.

Therese Smith (ed) Ancestral Imprints : histories of Irish Traditional Music and Dance
I picked this up because it had an article on Captain O'Neill one of the main people to start recording ex pat Irish players in police and fire brigade etc bands playing Irish music in the early 20th century. It's another book i keep meaning to finish and not doing eo. Getting there now.

Just read
Paint My Name In Black and Gold by Mark Andrews
The Sisters of Mercy biography. A tale of self destruction and some delusion. But does have me wanting to listen to their early stuff. Just not sure where my Some Girls Wander By Mistake is.

Joe Sacco Palestine 2
Reread it but realised what I'd read before was the complete run of the comics not the 1st Volume this paired with. Pretty moving anyway. Think I'll read some of his other work so have some ordered.

Flann O'Brien - The Hard Life
Gerard Stern - This Time: New and Selected Poems

I finished "The Ancient City" by Fustel de Coulanges. It was surprisingly readable for a book by a 19th-century academic. On how ancient religion and politics are intertwined in Greece and Rome. Currently reading "The Existential Pleasures of Engineering" by Samuel Florman.

Swami And Friends, R.K. Narayan - Good case of "is this a kid's book or no?". Very much centered on the main character's childhood routines, but did kids use to know what denoument means? Also several instances of ejaculate used in the archaic sense, which is always fun. Best evocation of youth is Swami finishing an exam early and getting progressively more nervous as everyone else continues scribbling - I remember this sensation well but hadn't thought about it for decades! Also the adult world starting to intrude, Swami caught up in a protest as a political activist has been imprisoned by the English.

I have been slowly working through The Tale of Genji this month. I'm about a third of the way through. I find I need to read every footnote to be able to follow the text. It is wonderful: a lavish, intimate, poetic world, while also being basically a story of messy affairs and palace intrigue. Very funny too.

Finished Mockingbird and yeah I see what Flannery O'Connor might have meant in calling it a children's book, despite the ugly truths inside, and some thriller filler: all of it leading to attempted reassurance---somewhat labored at times, required at so many times----as readers and moviegoers of all ages might have responded to in 1960,looking at a story set in the mid-30s: reassurance about race-craziness resurfacing among fellow white people, incl. friends, neighbors, relatives---becoming less predictable among the ones that you knew/were being taught were bad.

(And so I see why it still gets banned.)

Andrei Platonov - Chevengur.

This is a translation of a book I have been waiting for about ten years. It finally arrived late last year and I picked it up as soon as I could, and the high expectations were met, if you like. In the introduction the translator (Robert, with Elisabeth Chadler) talks about how they have been working it at this book for decades, and anyone who has read the numerous books by Platonov over the years can get a sense of the utterly strange way he puts things. In Chevengur (named after the town where communism has been 'achieved') there is an example or several on almost every page of its near five hundred or so. It is about the way in which Platonov writes (as distinctive as any writer like Proust or Musil, whom I would easily compare him to), but also about the way he has come up with a language that has been transformed beyond recognition as the politics of the time has transformed humanity -- whether for the worse or better -- and communism has enlarged humanity's capacity to see, feel, relate to one another as well nature, whether animals or plants (he writes about grass as if it was a cathedral), and of course, to think, whether well or badly (there is no novel which follows to te nth degree what it is to think along collective lines of thought laid down by a theory of some sort).

In his works of the 20s and 30s -- in his many books and stories -- Platonov is fully embedded into the Soviet project, he writes about its results. As we know some of these are violent, they lead to famine, death, sufferin (it all comes with multiple, dense allusions to Russia literature (esp Gogol and Dostoevsky) and the bible). Platonov doesn't shy away from that, but there is also a sense that if humanity is to survive that something fundamental must change, in our souls and our thoughts (Musil similarly wrote about our souls, but at the end of the Hapsburg empire). Mistakes made? Hopefully we can work on making less of them, maybe we have fucked up, but everything put down here is how these lives are now being lived, how we have arrived at this, what roads we can take, or not. The bread and butter of literature is ambiguity about what has occured, there is no place for the final judgment that you or I could easily make about the blood spilled and millions dead.

There are many wonderful passages translated in the notes sections, too. In one of them Platonov writes how the sun's power must be harnessed to do our work. This is someone thinking about 'Communism', what it could do and didn't. Can we feel it? What is it anyway? It is a Science Fiction book like no other at points, an utopia written by someone who has nearly tasted it before melting away in violence (what else?). I can only think of Victor Serge or maybe a few pages of Trotsky's Literature and Revolution (where there is a similar sense that we are near something transformative for us all, and yet...) that get to similar matter.

Ultimately, it all comes back to the inner workings of Platonov's writing (and I cannot do justice to how he writes), which is really like no one else, and cannot be replicated. In Chevengur, more than his other books (but you must read them all) you can see the reasons why that is the case.

Picked that one up from a secret NYRB discount code I had, very excited to dig into it later in the spring, when I will have a little more time.

Finally a really good review of Chevengur.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-real-unrealists-on-andrey-platonovs-chevengur/

I'm about 3/4 of the way through Chain-Gang All-Stars and can highly recommend it. It's a pretty great examination of the carceral state, the overrepresentation of African-Americans in it, and its tendency to brutalize the entire culture, which adapts cruelty as a business model. I'll definitely check out his short story collection afterwards.

Tokyo Express, Seicho Matsumoto - Postwar Japanese mystery novel. Def a fun read, heavy on the procedural as I like it. Mind you the protagonist's hunches always seem very forced, and the suspect's innocence so obvious, that it gets eyebrow raising how long he gets to keep working at it. Case is part of a larger puzzle involving govt corruption - like so much media of its era, postwar Japan in this is a country without honour or humanity.

I finished Isaac Butler's addictive The Method and started Denis Johnson's Resuscitation of a Hanged Man.

I tried reading Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, loved the first couple of chapters, but found it maddeningly whimsical thereafter. So I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson instead. I think I still slightly prefer The Haunting of Hill House but it was a lovely and creepy read.

have an entire pile of books i'm working through but this is the current one.

The Underworld -- Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean, by Susan Casey

i heard about her via a very incisive and appropriately fuming piece she wrote for Vanity Fair about the Titan submerisible disaster (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/08/titan-submersible-implosion-warnings), and this book covers the world of undersea exploration, via private adventurers. What's notable to me is these people are all well-aware of the dangers and just incredibly cautious, they get all the certifications and make sure their submersibles are completely safe (i.e. they're made of titanium and not carbon fiber.) It's a good read. The most illuminating part is the chapter devoted to focusing on companies which would like to dredge the bottom of the ocean for minerals and metals, which would likely be catastrophic for the ocean environment and therefore the world, considering it's the one area of the planet which has remained largely pure and untouched.

I finished Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-1965. As with the first volume, Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch gets much deeper into the weeds of the civil rights movement than you'll ever learn about by watching the many documentaries and 'based on a true story' films on that era, and consequently paints a picture that contains far more truth. Even then, he's forced to merely hint at a tremendous amount of that history which was less directly connected to MLK, Jr. If you can stand the emotional punishment of reading 1200+ pages of detailed and often brutally horrific history, I can't recommend these two volumes highly enough.

Now I'm reading a novella, The Nonexistent Knight, Italo Calvino.

I'm reading *Doppelganger* by Naomi Klein (and yes, I very nearly typed the other name). It's terrifying.

I'm taking a break to re-read *The Handmaid's Tale* for a work thing. It might as well be a first-time read, in honesty. I get ghost-glimpses of the version of me that read this 25 years ago and worry at what I would have missed, what I might have sneered at. God, Atwood. The dizzying helical structure of it; the dread, the dread; the precision of each rendered detail screaming 'there is no time, there is no time'.

danielle evans - the office for historical corrections. short story collection a couple of which were v good indeed.

Read Christie's The Big Four during a delayed flight last night. Imho the most ambitious and least successful of the Poirot books.

Miguel Angel Asturias - Mr.President. A somewhat-based-on-fact fiction around a Latin American dictatorship. This was written in the late 20s and, though I'd have to recheck I found quite different from some of the Lat Am 'dictator' novels from the 60s where the focus is on the personality of the leader, whereas here its on the people around him whom he has to remove so he can gain power.

There is a real pleasure in the scenes where it feels like the world is falling to pieces, or just setting very dark moods, with the nod to that being a window into a perhaps better world, before this is all shut down violently.

I'm halfway through that Mavis Gallant doorstop - she writes exclusively about expats and immigrants but it's amazing what range she manages to display within that in terms of class, nationality, background. Latest one I read was about a couple of German immigrants in Paris, one Jewish one gentile, who make a living as extras and bit players in films and tv shows about the occupation - the gentile one as a German officer, the Jewish one as the guy who gets killed in the first episode to show the evil of the nazis. at the story's end it's the late 70's and they start to worry that by 1982 the French general public might be sick of hearing about the occupation. good stuff.

The Nonexistent Knight feels like Calvino had no clue what he was going to write when he started on the first chapter. He just plunged in and improvised everything as he went like a parent telling a bedtime story. The resulting story is a pleasant diversion, somewhat whimsical, mildly philosophical and more than a little slapdash. What saves it is his innate ability to improvise in interesting directions.

Will have to check that---I enjoyed Mr Palomar in something of the same way last year, although I thought he did have a clue to start with, one I won't spoil, but anybody who gets to the end will get what I mean---some dizzy moments on the high wire and the patio w Mr. P. (His little daughter knows when to yank him through the crowd, "C'mon.")

the auctioneer by joan samson! it good 🧡 70s small town new england suspense novel where the monster is neoliberalism. less gonzo batshit trash than is my usual preference, but the creeping dread/powerlessness really hits the spot, leavened by the sour lols of the old new england matriarch moaning about her family getting chased off their own land as if they was no more than a bunch of indians & the titular auctioneer selling off a baby who turns out, gasp! to have been his own progeny! in the time-honored american tradition (<- slavery reference, sorry)

Turns out I remembered how to read again!

Grown Ups - Marian Keyes

I had the hardback of this since it came out but never read it until this week. I went on an MK reread the past fortnight - Last Chance Saloon, Rachel’s Holiday, The Other Side of the Story, Sushi for Beginners. Grown Ups is about a big messy entangled family, centred around three brothers:

Johnny - the charming, handsome gobshite
Ed - kind botanist
Liam - a class-A prick

and their lives, wives and work and relationship dramas. The wives get as much time. I was very taken by insecure, slightly overwhelmed Jessie. Nell I didn’t really like that much - too gen Z in the worst ways, but Cara…

Oh, Cara. Cara is a bulimic and there is no detail spared on the humiliations, the rituals, the pain, the secrecy. I felt incredibly seen by this character. Keyes is a former alcoholic with a history of disordered eating and she gets it. It hurts to read some of these scenes. This, of course, is what made Rachel’s Holiday such compelling reading too.

Anyway the book starts with a big dramatic dinner scene where everyone’s dark secrets get spilled in front of everyone else, and then rewinds back to the previous year where everything unspools. It’s a pretty long book (600~ pages?) and there’s slow build on some of the threads but like someone managing multiple pans on a cooker, she keeps it all going.

Is it classic? It’s not quite up there with Last Chance Saloon or The Mystery of Mercy Close for me, but it’s very good. I found most of the characters, even the pricks, to be compelling and nuanced. There are many lives and there are threads of tragedy, births, celebrations and betrayals binding them all together.

There’s a minor character who is an asylum seeker and to be honest, I didn’t really expect direct provision* to be covered in a book like this. But then again, why wouldn’t it? Previous Keyes books have covered such cheery topics as drug addiction and overdoses, bereavement and denial, rape and nervous breakdowns. Her books have always engaged with the world we live in.

So. Very very solid, probably my favourite of hers since The Mystery of Mercy Close.

From the authors notes:

You’ll have seen the term ‘Direct Provision’ mentioned in the book. This refers to how the Irish state treats people who are seeking asylum in Ireland, having escaped war or trauma in their country of origin. While they wait for their application for asylum to be processed, they are provided for ‘directly’, as in their food and shelter is provided for, in one of thirty-six centres around the country. Their lives are subject to a variety of restrictions and indignities, from being ineligible to work, being unable to cook their own food, sharing sleeping space with people from many different countries and cultures and not being permitted to have visitors.

Many asylum seekers live like this for several years. It’s a terrible way to treat people who are already traumatized and I suspect that one day Ireland will feel great shame that we let this happen.

Finished Laura Henriksen’s Laura’s Desires, a two-part, rather long essay-poem that dwells within the poet’s sexual, political, and aesthetic commitments. Much of this is done via a reading and poetic analysis of Bette Gordon’s Variety, a film I haven’t seen in many years but remember rather well. A transformative and generous read, to be honest— very much in the tradition of Bernadette Mayer, which is an excellent thing.

gyac - I haven't read 'mystery of mercy close' but I will now if you regard it as top tier keyes.

have to finish patricia highsmith - 'deep water' first. halfway thru and I get the feeling that the husband isn't going to get away with it and I kinda want him to.

Omg I would love your thoughts on it, it’s up there with her very best!

Andrei Platonov - Chevengur.

This is a translation of a book I have been waiting for about ten years(...)

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, January 24, 2024 1:40 PM (two weeks ago)

Holy shit, thank you for the heads-up - have been out of the loop and had no idea they'd finally completed this (the NYRB Soul has haunted me for the past fifteen years or so). Let's see if anywhere in NZ is stocking it.

I've started a short semi-autobiographical novel by Barbara Comyns, Mr. Fox. One of the jacket blurbs tries hard to sell its comedic qualities, but I can't see it. The poverty of the narrator has pushed her life into a sad state of squalor. However, she just muddles ahead, skating along like a waterbug, rather than sinking into desperation or despair.

That last sentence sounds promising, also that the whole thing's short, and semi-autobio, so still some room to skate. Let us know how it goes.

I'm reading "Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons" by Jeremy Denk, about learning to play the piano.

Jeremy Taylor - Four Sermons. English language at it's most beautifully expressed. Good luck to today's writers.

I first read Crime and Punishment when I was 14 and the only reaction to it that I can recall is that it seemed to have come from another planet, one so unfamiliar that I was continually lost and bewildered. Since then I've read at least five other Dostoevsky novels and I'd describe my relationship with him as queasy and contentious.

For no reason I can articulate I recently bought two different (cheap, used) translations of C&P. Last night I did a brief side-by-side comparison and chose the Peavar & Volokhonsky as the easier one to assimilate. I will take a run at reading it for the second time, but it won't surprise me if I lay it aside. I guess I'll find out.

The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth: Curiosities from the History of Medicine, by Thomas Morris. I bought this years ago from Kobo for about .99, and it's a good, light read. Very funny at times, but I cannot tell you how many times already the descriptions have made my butt pucker.

I finished a re-read of Edward Saïd’s Orientalism, which was as astonishing as I remembered, and particularly clarifying in our current epoch.

Reading Don Carlenter’s Hard Rain Falling and a Prynne chap at the bedside, and Olúfémi Táíwò’s Elite Capture in the mornings with coffee.

Hard Rain Falling impressed the hell outta me five years ago. A strong queer novel.

Yeah I am only a few chapters in— I am loving it so far!

Hard Times by Dickens

Almost started reading that but we went with Dombey and Son instead, despite ledge’s deep disapproval.

Finished Táíwò’s Elite Capture. A little too slim for me, and perhaps a little too “positive”— but made some truly salient points about creating change.

One element of his argument that I found particularly compelling was the way he discussed “common ground.” Essentially, he argues that changing the epistemic regimes of how current systems operate is necessary to making them anew; that is, he argues against working within systems that tends toward elite capture, and instead trying to change their foundational bases. It is a quietly radical argument for losing the fealty to current systems and starting fresh.

I agree with him in this regard, and think that part of what is sometimes missed in my arguments on ILX and elsewhere is that I want to consider that another reality is possible within my lifetime, and I don’t think that this better world will come about via working within currently extant systems.

This is where I think the book fails a little bit, because it mentions positive programming such as revolutionary schools and embracing community models for change— which are great!— but sort of glosses over the fact that the sort of change that is necessary also comes about through the negative element of violence. From the examples he gives (Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau), it is apparent that it will take a lot of different strategies and disciplines to get what is needed for liberation.

Now my morning reading is Bevins’ recent book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution . Guess I’m on a jag about this subject!

positive programming such as revolutionary schools and embracing community models for change...the sort of change that is necessary also comes about through the negative element of violence.

The Jakarta Method, read at your rec, impressed me, table. And it looks like my public library has Elite Capture on the shelf.

Great subject, but what are these?

some truly salient points about creating change.

dow, he says that changing the terms of engagement— that is, moving the "common ground" away from institutional capture— is one of the ways to go about creating change. This means rejecting the simplicity of deference politics and epistemic knowledge and virtue, among other things. Elite capture is all about recuperation— and our willingness to go along with corporate and governmental cooptation and defanging of radical social policy is one of the reasons why things aren't getting better.

He doesn't necessarily give many examples, but does give some insight into contructive change, a la the revolutionary movements in Cape Verde which focused on building coalitions via different communities, schools, and talents.

I'm outsider-curious about: Diggers (original and 1960s), Levellers, peasant revolts, slaves uprisings, communities of maroons(fugitive slaves) and other ex-slaves, Oceania and landlubber confabs, Pre-Columbian/other Western arrivals, and later for that matter; Wobbilies (still active), Left libertarians, anarcho-syndicalists---this last got me going again, via WSJ war correspondent's dispatches re: Syria's Rojava Kurdish democratic confederalism, in part inspired by the writings of Murray Bookchin, with a gathering of the tribes for certain projects, such as fighting, capturing, and keeping Isis, in---a carceral state? Until enough American troops left the background that the Turks moved in, the Kurds ran away, and Isis got loose, until rounded up again by the Kurds, who had come to an understanding with Assad's people----democratic confederalism ain't very easy---much more here (pretty dense, grab a coffee before going in):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rojava_conflict
But this is a reading thread after all.

I wonder what publisher approved an Anthony Hecht bio in the 2020s. Does anyone read his generation's (and a previous one's) chiseled formalist verse -- poets like Richards Howard and Wilbur, Louise Bogan, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, etc.? I like a bit of Hecht but I don't read him like I do James Merrill or Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O'Hara, James Wright, etc.; this bio, as fastidiously composed as a Hecht poem, takes us through his Italian sojourns, his poems based on myths and Biblical stories, and I'm revolted by this midcentury postwar American privilege.

xp
From an ILE thread about HBO's The Anarchists:

sarahell, do you know anyone who was in the Diggers? I mostly know about them from Emmett Grogan's Ringolevio: A Life Played For Keeps. They gave food away in the Haight etc.:got donations from food places, dumpster dove, stole it. One of Grogan's colleagues in there is the actor Peter Coyote (also maybe the basis of Joni Mitchell's song "Coyote").

― dow, Friday, July 29, 2022 1:29 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

I have met at least one former Digger ... they were influential on a lot of counterculture stuff in the Bay Area in the following decades, so I am somewhat familiar with their history.

― sarahell, Friday, July 29, 2022 1:45 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

Good Diggers interview here:
https://diggersdocs.home.blog/2022/03/05/we-had-a-far-more-profound-effect/

― Andy the Grasshopper, Friday, July 29, 2022 1:45 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down is a great read on the original (17th century) Diggers (and Levellers and Ranters and etc.)

― papal hotwife (milo z), Friday, July 29, 2022

Alfred, lol @ Anthony Hecht bio. I think I have read a few poems and then promptly moved on, because...they're not good.

I'm about halfway through Crime and Punishment now. It's not hard to see what discombobulated my 14-year old self. The melodramatic elements run at a constant fever pitch. Every character at every moment is in the throes of wildly fluctuating emotions.

It didn't help at all that I knew literally nothing at all about Czarist Russia either. Or that Dostoevsky sets new sub-plots spinning with lavish abandon. It's hard to keep up. Since age 14 I've learned that most 19th century novels tend that way because most of them appeared as serials in periodicals and a successful one kept circulation numbers high for as long as it appeared, so that extending it on the fly with new characters and complications was standard practice everywhere.

The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation feels like a good one to me in terms of fitting the diction into adequately modern and colloquial terms without resorting to distracting anachronisms.

I like a bit of Hecht

His methods work in "More Light, More Light". But how could anyone write something like "The Seven Deadly Sins"? And there's a lot more where that came from, and it's just as not good.

I'd add "A Hill" and a few others.

Nur Masalha Palestine a Four Thousand Year History
Very good read looking into the history of an area that has been recognised since antiquity. & kept the same name or linguistic variations on that for most of that time. I think I semi forget that Philistine was one of the variations partially because I know that modern usage tied in to a German university population and I think hazing rituals.
Anyway book is a pretty compelling read when I get back to it since I'm also reading a stack of other stuff at the same time. But I would recommend it as the website Decolonize Palestine does too.
I think I learnt quite a bit. I'm now on the last 40 pages so looking forward to reading other things the bibliography has turned me onto.

Albert Hoffman LSD My Problem Child
Hoffman the discoverer of LSDor at least it's main pioneer looks back at its development. Apparently Sandoz weren't the only firm looking into synthesizing forgot and it's derivatives so there were similar substances being discovered and researched. LSD itself was created and shelved for 5 years before Hoffman went back to further research it.
Anyway interesting book, can get a bit technical. & do wish he'd give more background to some things he seems to see as totally abstract. Toxic effect on elephants etc stuck with either how you happen to have a spare elephant or alternatively his involvement in a later experiment which he gives no further detail on at least at that point. Hoping there is further explanation later.
This is a 2019 pairing with his memoir Insights/Outlooks and I'm not seeing when things were actually written.

A Disability History of the United States Kim E Neilsen
A book that is in the Penguin Revisioning History series though this edition appears not to be. I thought books were commissioned to be in that series so have been surprised by that. They are looking back at US and pre history from several marginalised perspectives. I'd like to read them all cos the ones I have done have been good.
So book looking at how disability is viewed or at least what constitutes disability from the setting up of the colony and also in native American culture before that. Native American culture largely attempted to include anybody who had physical injury or corporal diversity as an active member of the community where they could. This does talk about the wendigo where a person has been taken over by a malevolent spirit and can't be trusted may be cannibalistic too. & what the protocols for dealing with them are.
The section on rejection of would be immigrants at Ellis Island who are deemed to probably need state assistance is very interesting too. This included several deaf craftsmen who had previously settled family members saying they would help them find their feet or potential employers turning up to support the fact that a job had been offered. & the individual still being sent back to point of origin. 'Kin ablism.
That section also goes into abbreviations related to disability being chalked on the backs of individuals trying to get through the immigration process. Which were going to be assessed by the actual decision makers as to whether they would be landed.
Interesting book. But I think I haven't given it the attention I intended when I ordered it.

Political Theory an Introduction Andrew Heywood
Interesting overview of political theory like. I wanted a bit more grounding . As to why and wherefore. Still not sure about the ins and outs of liberalism totally. Why it goes hand in hand with hypocrisy and fascism and things. Hopefully this will explain, seems pretty good so far.

Does anyone read his generation's (and a previous one's) chiseled formalist verse -- poets like Richards Howard and Wilbur, Louise Bogan…

This reminds me I’ve been meaning to read Bogan. Nicholson Baker quotes some of her poems in one of his novels.

I want someone to talk to about Birnam Wood, which I just finished and enjoyed but can’t recommend. It’s fun but doesn’t really fulfil its potential.

Otherwise I’m splitting time between Call for the Dead and Jane & Prudence, both comfortably within their authors’ safety zones but very enjoyable. Le Carre’s voice is creepily fully-formed for a debut, although that voice seems amusingly precocious coming from a 20something rather than a middle aged man.

I'm reading James Leo Herlihy's first novel *All Fall Down* from 1960. Made into a movie by John Frankenheimer in 1962 way before all the Midnight Cowboy hullabaloo. His mentors were Tennessee Williams and Anais Nin! His Broadway play Blue Denim was made into a movie in the late 50s. I've never seen that one. And I've never read *Midnight Cowboy* or *The Season of the Witch* his other two novels but I am really enjoying *All Fall Down* so I might seek them out now. I guess I was expecting what I usually get when I pick up a cool-looking 60s paperback that looks vaguely "groovy": something dated, overwritten, melodramatic, and with some sort of proto-hippie "social" message. It is not that. It's very enjoyable and compelling. He had quite a bit of success for a gay man writing about gay themes in the 50s and 60s. He killed himself in the early 90s. I would definitely read a biography of his life.

Will look for that, thanks. You long ago posted about Fat City, right? Has always had a critical and popular following, for those who could find it, and now I see it's an NYRB Classic, will look for it as well (liked the movie).

speaking of crit faves, *All Fall Down* definitely reminding me a bit of Portis/Norwood without as much funny. but still funny at times. (and to be accurate, my paperback is a 70s copy with a 70s cool dude cover. not 60s "groovy" really but obviously vying for the youth vote. the kind of book i would pick up as a kid because i thought it would be about sex and drugs and then stop reading 10 pages in.)

I finished the Denk book "Every Good Boy Does Fine". It was an enjoyable memoir and inside look at some aspects of the classical music establishment: music schools, contests, summer institutes, job hunting, etc. Denk seems very down to earth and unafraid to embarrass himself or others he has come across in his education and career. And he also writes insightfully about classical music in an unpretentious and nontechnical way.

Now I'm reading "I Hate the Internet" by Jarrett Kobek.

great book (the Kobek)

It was pretty funny and prescient. Or at least I wasn't thinking about many of these issues in quite this way in 2016. I didn't even start using Twitter until a few years later. I had a moment of trepidation towards the beginning when it became apparent that the whole book would be written in that kind of faux-naive, "out of the mouths of babes", poker-faced style of narration. Reminds me of Vonnegut in his later period, when the somewhat didactic authorial voice started to overshadow the characters and plot. At least Kobek understands the remit. Your statements can be true, partly true or even wildly exaggerated, but they must be inflammatory and surprising.

I finished Crime and Punishment last night. I'm not sorry I read it, but it feels a bit like I've been spending time in a madhouse, so it will be a relief to move on to something less overwrought.

After closing the book and reflecting on it a while what struck me the most is how utterly conventional most of the plot, characters and ideas were, if the conventions in view were those of the melodramatic stage plays of the era, right down to featuring a prostitute with a heart of gold and a roué who corrupts young innocent girls.

Raskolnikov is the only innovative character and he is so wildly inconsistent, shifting character from one page to the next, that Dostoevsky doesn't even try to reconcile his character to reality and simply describes him as "delirious" whenever he does something inexplicable. Only a 19th century Russian novelist could get away with all this, if only because late stage Czarist Russia is the only nation where all this febrile insanity seems remotely believable.

"Greetings," Kuptsov said. "Here, make sense out of this one, Chief. It's written in this book -- a fellow killed an old woman for her money. Tormented himself so much about it that he gave himself up for hard labor. While I, if you can imagine, knew one client in Turkistan who had about thirty wet jobs behind him and not a single conviction. He lived to about seventy. Children, grandchildren, taught music in his old age... And history shows you can get away with much more. Like putting ten million in their graves, or however much it was, and then smoking a Herzegovina Flor."

-- Dovlatov, The Zone

"You're no better than Raskolnikov -"
"Who?"
"- yes, Raskolnikov, who -"
"Raskolnikov!"
"- who - I mean it - who felt he could justify killing an old woman -"
"No better than?"
"- yes, justify, that's right - with an ax! And I can prove it to you!" Gasping furiously for air, Clevinger enumerated Yossarian's symptoms: an unreasonable belief that everybody around him was crazy, a homicidal impulse to machine-gun strangers, retrospective falsification, an unfounded suspicion that people hated him and were conspiring to kill him.

Currently on Bonjour Tristesse / A Certain Smile. Undeniably impressive for a 17 year old and fairly psychologically acute but not profound, I hope it's not kneejerk old man reactionism but I did get a bit tired of the
superficiality and of both protagonists changing their minds every other paragraph.

You had to be there, I guess. I like it though, despite not being in the target audience. Maybe the movie is actually better.

I'm now reading A View of the Harbor, Elizabeth Taylor. It is very sedate, coming after Dostoevsky. That was deliberate. The novel does have a plot and characters, but at heart it is all about perfectly constructed, gently evocative sentences.

marian keyes - mystery of mercy close
as recommended by gyac. main character helen walsh has appeared in other keyes novels I've enjoyed that were centred around her sisters. in those she came across as acerbic, sarcastic, unsentimental, v funny and v don't give a fuck. I liked her but wasn't sure how that would translate into a whole novel.

her character is still all those things but also fragile, despairing, ominously accepting of depression and yet trying so hard to keep her head above water.

I'm fortunate not to have any personal first hand knowledge of depression yet keyes writing still rings true to me and makes complete sense especially the ocd nature of Helens illness. for instance helen is a p.i looking for a missing person and during her investigation spends a lot of time at the empty home of the person she's looking for. she feels bad for drinking a diet coke left behind in the fridge so replaces it and buys some more in case she gets thirsty again but then frets that she's stealing by using the fridge to keep her drinks cold etc

Helens suicide ideation was tough to read about but so it should be and I don't feel keyes ever took any easy or obvious choices when writing about the psychiatric hospital, medication or therapy. during the course of the book you get hints of back story about helens now absent best friend bronagh and helens back in the picture ex boyfriend jay. I thought I knew where keyes was going with this and guessed a betrayal from jay and a death for bronagh. I was wrong on both counts but the absence and the break up made complete sense and gave more layers to the characters than my more obvious conclusions would have.

oh and the whole book is v funny as well obviously. I wasn't that convinced that helen was that good at private investigation although maybe determination is mostly what you need.
probably my favourite keyes so far.

A View of the Harbor was my first Elizabeth Taylor novel, Aimless, and I hope the taste is agreeable enough for you to keep going. She's become one of my favorite 20th century novelists.

This is my second Elizabeth Taylor. I read Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont in 2019 and enjoyed it, but only now am I getting back to her. Too many good books yet unread and I read 'em at a much slower pace than you do!

Also unexpectedly good at English surburban horror, re: "The Flypaper"

probably my favourite keyes so far.

Btw that part near the beginning where Helen returns to her parents empty nest and finds them having cake and tea for dinner cos they can’t be bothered is something I have quoted to my own parents - grazers! - more than once.

I recently finished Nadja by André Breton. A strange, slight, but also dense, book, not sure it’s really a novel. The central narrative part is sketched very quickly. Characters are barely described. There are recurring digressions about apparently random coincidences or juxtapositions of everyday objects or events that the author takes much care in describing precisely, presumably these are the parts that relate to Surrealism as a unifying aesthetic and way of life. And yet there is a real emotional resonance to the story, the character of Nadja and her relationship to the narrator. Odd but memorable.

Thanks to a fabulous college professor who became one of my mentors Nadja was my first experience with flâneur lit.

it warms my heart that you guys read elizabeth taylor. i love her so. i feel like i raved about her on here more than once over the years.

i went to a retired english professor's house to buy records and he had a huge shelf of books and i couldn't help myself i said "Where are the women?". he kinda stammered and said there are women there and i said not many oh there is one barbara pym...it was like a sad where's waldo. and then he said oh when i was teaching of course it was all dead white males....and i wanted to say yeah they didn't have women back then...
he was 70 so he would have been teaching in the 80s and beyond...

I treasure those midcentury Anglo-Irish miniaturists: Pym, Taylor, Bowen maybe, Penelope Fitzgerald, even those two Philip Larkin novels.

i'm currently reading city of quartz by mike davis and having a rough go at it. i feel guilty because in terms of subject matter, style and orientation it ought to be up my alley (and it's beloved by many writers i like), but i'm finding it pretty charmless and feel like i'm not learning much from it

for a work of marxist political economy davis strikes me as oddly incurious about the actual nuts-and-bolts workings of urban political economy. he's extremely well-read, but reading it often feels like the recital of an endless list of poorly-contextualized proper nouns in a prose style that's at times way too purple and at others painfully dry and academic. for example, the second chapter, which documents the shifting elite power structures that shaped the city over the course of its history, is little more than a who's-who, going through the sequences of industries that boomed and busted and listing the names of the capitalists whose power waxed and waned. davis subsumes most of the (imo more interesting) story of how these elites ruled and wrested power over one another in the many violent metaphors and adverbs that glue his narrative together. for example, a central player in davis' account is harrison gray otis, publisher of the la times and real estate investor who sat on most of the city's business organizations. davis imbues otis with a near-dictatorial power, turning LA into "the most centralized ... militarized municipal power-structures in the united states", but never gives me anything on how he came to amass such power, how he used the various tools at his disposal to exert it. and when otis' political dynasty (then lead by his son-in-law harry chandler) finally loses its monopoly of power, davis' story is basically that new industries (automobiles and aerospace in particular) emerged and along with them new capitalists. did the otis-chandler empire put up a fight? if so, why did they lose when they'd previously held uncontested power for half a century? despite a conspiratorial tone, nothing is ever spelled out in enough detail to get a feel for how the conflicts and transitions played out at anything approaching a "micro" level. i wasn't expecting caro, but there's something really satisfying about the way a book like the power broker follows the money and traces the operation of power through the web of byzantine local regulations, and there's just nothing like that here

the first chapter--on the various waves of artist and intellectuals who shaped the country--had a similar problem, where it just felt like a long annotated bibliography. i added some cool books to my reading list, but other than that, not easy to say what i got out of reading it :/

gonna keep on with it for a while but i'm really hoping the first two chapters are the worst

I kind of felt the way you did… it’s impressive but there’s an assumed familiarity with decades’ worth of California politicians and developers.

I don't think Davis cares about the minutia of the history of the powers that be and their struggles (beyond the shift from Downtown to the Westside that gets brought up many times). He's way more interested in their effect on the city itself. Also, it's more a polemic than a biography of a person/city.

I was hooked by the book right away, but I will say one similarity to The Power Broker is that City of Quartz builds momentum as later chapters benefit from those that came before.

Funny, I think Davis is great, but then again I grew up reading dry leftist rags so my standards for a lot of that kind of writing are pretty low.

My February reading:

My February 2024 reading:

Denis Johnson – Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki – In Praise of Shadows
Lisa Tuttle – My Death
* William Shakespeare – Measure for Measure
John McGahern – Amongst Women
Peter William Evans – BFI: Written on the Wind
Teju Cole – Black paper: Writing in a Dark Time
Stephen Davis – Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story
Joshua Green – The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and The Struggle for a New American Politics
Edward J. Larson – American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795
William Maxwell – They Came Like Swallows
Harry Crews – A Feast of Snakes
David Yazzi – Late Romance: Anthony Hecht, A Poet’s Life
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò – Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)

Thanks, table, for the Táíwò recommendation -- a genuine education.

Paul Lynch - Prophet Song.

For once I am reading a booker winner. In this novel, Ireland has become a police state. What I am liking so far is the description of various stresses, griefs, despairs being passed "through the body" of one of the characters.

About halfway through If We Burn, Bevins’ new book on the missing revolution, and while I was a bit skeptical at first, I can see him pull threads together— the cooptation of leftist protest by libertarian/right forces; recuperation and manglingof leftist ideas to fit neoliberal ideologies; the detrimental effects of social media preventing coherent movements to take shape; state and corporate actors seizing on unrest to shoehorn in their own fascist plans; etc. I am reading about a chapter per day with my coffee, so should be finished soon.

Currently reading "Good Morning, Midnight" by Jean Rhys, always an inimitable bracing voice.

Euphoria, by Lily King. A more or less fictionalized account of the love triangle among Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson. It's well-written, and while it of course can't be taken as biography, it's already sent me down numerous Mead-related rabbit holes, as this is someone I knew of mostly by reputation.

I've started another Ross MacDonald 'Lew Archer' novel, The Chill. As with the others of his I've read, he keeps the action moving along at a breakneck pace. When Lew Archer meets an incidental character who supplies Archer with a single piece of useful information, MacDonald tends to dispose of the conversation in as few words as possible and speed Archer on to the next plot development. He's not like Chandler, who had a delightful habit of inserting brief conversations between Philip Marlowe and incidental characters that barely moved the plot forward, but were rich with humor and always gratifying. I kind of miss those moments idling on the side tracks.

Would love to mention something about The Chill (when you've finished it).

You're right that the Archer books are missing a little humour, and perhaps even boring at times, but I also kind of enjoy their seriousness: at the very least, they're never pompous or unintentionally camp. Plus - he's an optimist about people and empathetic about life's compromises, it's not just easy noir fatalism. I always find myself quite invested in solving the mystery - not the case with Chandler. I suppose you could say - Macdonald wrote many better books than The Big Sleep, but I couldn't imagine him ever writing a better book than The Long Goodbye.

Would love to mention something about The Chill (when you've finished it).

I finished it last night.

The many twists and turns of the plot eventually arriveded at a denouement that was pretty far toward the furthest reaches of believability. Yes, each of the many constituent elements were only somewhat 'out there', but within belief if considered in isolation. It was the concurrence of all of them in a single tight constellation of characters that pushed the odds too far for me. But ofc that's what happens when your audience demands plots so intricate they're left guessing the outcome wrongly until the final page or two. MacDonald was just doing what his fans expected and doing it remarkably well considering.

Now I'm reading How to Live -or- A Life of Montaigne, Sarah Bakewell.

pretty far toward the furthest reaches of believability

otm

I finished How to Live, Sarah Bakewell, the full subtitle of which is A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. It was a bit repetitive, as so many non-fic books seem to be these days, but on the whole I found it engaging. The gimmick of 'one question & twenty attempts' wasn't very helpful, but didn't actively detract either. The author succeeded in making Montaigne's life, work, and character consistently interesting. I'll chalk it up in the 'Win' column.

I had an extra hour, so I raced through a very slender book Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, which takes a brief four line poem by the T'ang poet, showing it in Chinese characters, then as a phonetic transcription, and then a literal translation of each character's possible meanings. It then gives sixteen modern translations of the poem into English, French and Spanish, with commentary on each translation. It quickly convinces you that translating T'ang poetry into modern european languages is fiendishly difficult to do well.

I've moved on to reading Grand Hotel, Vicki Baum, first published in 1929 and an instant best seller. I can see why. She handles her large cast of characters with marvelous assurance.

I am getting toward the later sections of the Thorpe biography I started about a year ago. It's actually quite a good book, if long. There is a lot to consider in this book and the life it examines, including the history of the hegemonic culture in relation to the indigenous, the shameful legacy of the same, our relationship with sport and its idols, the nature of fame. It's also an almost embarrassingly intimate view of one man's life. I kind of squirmed through the chapter quoting at length his love letters courting his (very young) second wife while still married to, if separated from, his first.

Ann Powers - Good Booty
David Yaffe - Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown
Henrik Pontoppidan - Lucky Per
Heinrich Böll - The Silent Angel

i'm experimenting with a new method of reading while at the gym. audiobook playing in my earphones, tablet placed across the screen with ebook of same book. for the latter i use an app called BookFusion that has an "autoscroll" feature which i calibrate to match the speed of the reader. i am aware it sounds insane but it actually works. i'm too adhd to listen to audiobooks, and pure reading while running doesn't work. i also zone out super hard and find i can run for much longer, do a few extra laps to finish a chapter, etc. i find exercise insanely boring but cardio helps me with stress/anxiety so i'm hoping it sticks. finished "say nothing" by patrick radden keefe (which was excellent) in a little over a week

Jones, Loaded

Getting some non fiction in - an immense world by ed yong (life is bonkers, evolution is insane) and fermat's last theorem by simon singh.

Jones, Loaded

― alimosina, Saturday, March 16, 2024 7:44 PM

I leafed through it at the bookshop yesterday.

Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood - Difficult to talk about because, here and elsewhere, fawning over Lockwood is a) an obvious move and b) already somewhat passé; also difficult because reviewing, even in this informal setting, is about finding a way to pinpoint exactly what a writer's deal is, and her deal to a large extent is pinpointing exactly what lots of other things in life's deals are, so my insight looks pale. Suffice to say I totally loved this and laughed out loud many times.

One I've actually read! It's great, isn't it? I was googling to remember the name of the other book, and found this about her meeting the Pope, which I will now sit down to read
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/patricia-lockwood/diary

Thanks, I was meaning to look that up!

Ted Gioia History of Jazz
pretty in depth history of jazz over 400 pages. Goes into the 21st century a bit.
I'm still on Modern Jazz, thought I'd be through this faster. But it is pretty good.

What is Modern Israel? Yakov Rabkin
History of the creation and results of setting up Israel. Looking at Zionism, its ties to the Nazi Party, the drive to secularism in Zionism. I've come across a lot of this before in Pappe, Masalha , Sand and elsewhere. So it's not as shocking as coming across the information contained absolutely freshly. But there is some dodgy behaviour looked at here. & it has confirmed the links between Zionism and the extreme right wing including the Nazi Party.
Interesting book and quite short,

Strangest genius : the stained glass of Harry Clarke Lucy Costigan
picture book on the stained glass artwork of Harry Clarke the Irish artist. I need to get into this. Still kicking myself for missing a cheap personal copy at the start of the first lockdown by not ringing a bookshop that had a few.
Great artist anyway. Seemed to have some influence from Aubrey Beardsley.

Sonic Life Thurston Moore
Sonic Youth ,mainstay's memoir. So far I'm still in the late 70s with him driving to events with his friend Harold. They're getting to a lot of gigs at CBGBs and Max's and discovering a lot of music.
Pretty great book but I'm reading a lot of other stuff at the same time so its being backburnered.

Andrew Heywood Political Theory
good primer on the subject. My current bathroom book,

fermat's last theorem by simon singh.

apparently this is called fermat's enigma, in large letters on the cover.

I started Morning and Evening, my first Jon Fosse.

"Good Morning, Midnight" was great. Haven't read a bad Rhys yet, so will definitely keep going. Currently reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt focusing on his youth: "Mornings on Horseback" by David McCullough. Covers a similar time period and American upper class social stratum as the William James bio I read last year.

fermat's last theorem by simon singh.

apparently this is called fermat's enigma, in large letters on the cover.

no, my copy is indeed called fermat's last theorem. enigma is the american edition. is "theorem" too scary a word for americans, like "philosopher's"?

Enigma I associate with Turing, maybe that’s why?

Oh wait

Finished a re-read of Lyn Hejinian's Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, which is, of course, none of those things. It consists of 270 free sonnets that interweave elements of Hejinian's visits to the USSR during perestroika alongside the plot of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. It's a great book, much more funny and joyous than I remember it being. That said, I first read it more than a decade ago, so my memory of it might have been a little blurry.

Hejinian is well worth reading, for anyone interested in contemporary poetry. She will be missed.

Today I need to finish my fifth or sixth re-reading of Etel Adnan's The Arab Apocalypse to prep for my poetry workshop students tomorrow, but I also am spending stray moments with a short Michael Palmer book, First Figures, which I picked up over the weekend. Palmer is an interesting poet, for while his first five or six books are quite mesmerizing in their focus on how and why we read and place signification the way the we do, his later works veer into a very French sort of abstraction that is deeply boring. This is one of his final "interesting" books.

It's officially Spring! Things have been a bit slack in the WAYR thread compared to days of yore, but maybe the pace will pick up a bit in a new thread. Either way, it's time for a new beginning.

Any takers for starting a Spring 2024 thread?

a very French sort of abstraction that is deeply boring.

My grad school experience in the early 90s in a nutshell.

lol— did you get hit with too much Lacan and Derrida?

As filtered through professors like Perry Meisel, yes.

a very French sort of abstraction that is deeply boring.

I gone done and made a new one: I have coveted everything and enjoyed nothing: what are you reading in Spring 2024?

I wonder if some of the French reputation for abstraction may have to do with translation difficulties. Just guessing it would be easier to make a long sentence with many abstract terms cohere in a language like French, with its wealth of inflections. I think many English translations try to keep the long sentences but without the inflections as hints they become rather frustrating to parse.

Thanks, Chinaski!

I mean that he utilizes a lot of abstract rather than concrete images, and this lends his poems a sort of French theoretical quality mixed with a strange messianism that I think of as rooted in “the mythic.” Part of my disinterest might be that this style is deeply dated; the other part of me believes that the poems are so hermetic that it takes a certain mindset to find a way into them. I enjoy a lot of “difficult” poetry, though— Palmer’s work simply feels like one sheer surface, whereas many of his compatriots write in multiple modes and in ways that betray surfaces of language and signification rubbing against one another. That kind of friction is ultimately absent from Palmer’s work after the mid 80s, to my mind.