I have coveted everything and enjoyed nothing: what are you reading in Spring 2024?

Happy spring reading everyone!

A link to the old thread: Nothing Doting Living Loving: What Are You Reading In The Winter of 2023-24?

As mentioned in the Winter WAYR thread, I'm reading Grand Hotel, Vicki Baum and I'm now about 3/4 through it.

It's an odd duck. If I were to write a brief synopsis of the characters and plot it would sound like so much stereotypic, romanticized tosh (e.g. a handsome Baron who's a cat burglar?!), but strange to say it rises far above that level. A bare description of the book would sound rather garish and affected, but the details on the page make it both human and affecting.

just finished “things fall apart” by chinua achebe. 10/10 masterpiece

currently reading “the rebel angels” by robertson davies. my dad gave it to me years ago when i first started grad school, saying something like “this book will make you want to do a phd.” it’s since sat on my shelf unread, but i’m now reading it in the last few months of my phd. finding it loads of fun so far

I have always wanted to read that. Maybe I'll pause my current read--A Master of Djinn, by P. Djeli Clark, a Kindle Unlimited book--just to tackle it.

(Never come across the book or stage version, but Grand Hotel is a grand film, with peak turns by Garbo at her wittiest as a hardcore diva spinning just past her commercial peak, John Barrymore as the well-born English cat burglar, a black sheep and desperate gambling addict, also Lionel Barrymore, of course shamelessy chewing all the grand scenery, wised-up low-expectations yet still young Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery[as mogul on the brink of Depression, not tugboat captain etc. this time] and an international cavalcade of character actors.)

Recently finished my first Iris Murdoch, The Red and the Green(1965)---study of an Anglo-Irish and Irish extended family, during "the seven or eight days leading up to the doomed Easter Rising in Dublin,1916," as jacket flap says, and I think I hit it lucky: jacket thinks this is "warmer" than previous, though also it's not too effusive/loose/garrulous, as I've seen complaints about re several later novels. This 'un moves adroitly between all the characters, checking in on latest seismic movements and dithering of male interiors, while the women are mostly known by what they say and do, incl. in male gaze.
Sex and money figure, ditto environment---weather, picturesque to appalling cityscapes, incl. poverty--but so what,"You can see a hundred scenes like that all over town every day"--news of the War and British promises for the peace, many points made in arguments and gossip and oratory re: Ireland, with even the mystical terrorist proving capable of second thoughts, for a while.
It's a well-tracked whirl, and I'm reminded of Ta-Nehisi Coates on the US Civil War: "Don't say you know what you would have done. You don't know."

Also curious about Under The Net, and what else should I read by her, incl. later ones?

Under The Net is, against all expectations, a fun romp of a novel, I had a great time.

The other Murdoch I read was The Sandcastle - more of a conventional literary novel, main detail I remember is the couple mourning a dead dog who managed to bring them together "the way their own children never had".

Agreed on Grand Hotel.

i'm rather sure audiobooking is forbidden here, but i happened to fall across maugham's _the moon and sixpence_ and it is... not how i figured maugham really. i'd not recommend other than for how odd the characters come across, it's almost interesting how weird and unlikely they seem.

Audiobooking counts, unless you aren't really listening.

a nice thing with audiobooking is that my absorption is deeper than much of my reading because i will relisten to sections simply to re-experience or reparse, it feels pretty weightless to do.

Rereading an anthology of Akutagawa short stories. Had forgotten the Kurosawa film is a) based on two different short stories and that b) the one called Rashomon ISN'T the one with the multiple perspectives.

currently reading “the rebel angels” by robertson davies.

Thanks for the tip! I saw I have a combined edition of the whole Cornish Trilogy sitting on my shelf and your post encouraged me to try out The Rebel Angels as my next book. I've enjoyed several of Davies' novels in the past, but I tend to space them out at multi-year intervals. Luckily his trilogies aren't so conjoined that later entries require a knowledge the prior ones.

Have finished Justin Torres' Blackouts and Fuminori Nakamura's The Thief, and both were excellent. Am now almost through the second of the 5 parts of Roberto Bolaño's 2666

I read the first chapter of Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine, which was very heavy on the lingo but I'm already enjoying it.
I read a short collection of short stories by Clarice Lispector, it was good to very good, clearly I should have gone for an anthology (now that I'm done with Lydia Davis' complete stories). I guess it worked as a taster to compare to her novellas.
Before that I read The House on the Borderland. It was certainly much more digestible, but ultimately with similar strengths and weaknesses as The Night Land. Interesting as a curiosity, but no masterpiece.

Finished Total Doing That, a book of poems from Thomas Delahaye, a heteronym of a friend of mine. More accessible and dare I say obviously humorous than the other books of his I have read, it retains some undercurrents of sexual trauma that is evident in his other work.

Today it’s been pissing rain mostly, so I started in on So Much for Life, the selected poems of deceased British cult poet Mark Hyatt. Hyatt was a half-Romani queer who didn’t learn to write until he was in his twenties— by 31, he was dead, leaving behind hundreds of pages of poems, most of which were preserved by Barry MacSweeney and Jeremy Prynne on the eve of Hyatt’s suicide.

This interesting and tragic life is reflected in the poems, which crackle with rage and beauty and also with sex and a very unorthodox, nearly Californian approach to language— there are times when one could be convinced that they were reading a lost poem from the Spicer/Blaser/Duncan circle.

Ted Gioia History of Jazz
Pretty thorough history by writer I had recommended and found in a couple of bibliographies. Interesting. Taken me longer to read than I meant to. May need to revisit.
But I think I can recommend it.

Eddie Piller Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances.
Memoir of mod/Acid Jazz label head I met several times in my teens and early 20s.
He came from an area I lived in as a child and was about 5 miles away from where we moved to shortly before most of what I read so far took place. So I'm hearing talk about areas I knew and mentions of people I met and half knew.
So quite interesting to me anyway. I van see a couple of details he got wrong and thought he'd know better about. Calling a Regal shirt a poloneck when those are quite different (and something I've meant to make for ages) and I thought the term for this side of neck and top of shoulder buttoning style was Dr. Or Dr Kildare. Also Regal didn't move from Kensington market it opened a 2nd branch that coexisted with it for a couple of years.
One was a small premises like a walk in stall the other was a standalone shop.
Otherwise finding this fascinating. Him finding his way through being a mod in the revival's earlyish days when I was too young to know about it. I'm about 3 or 4 years younger.
So yeah very interesting to me cos it's local history. Not sure if it would remain immediate to anybody more distanced from it.

Those are the main 2 right now. Going to get back into another load as soon as I'm through.
David Greener Debt
A couple of anthropological/historic books on African tribes.
An anthropological book on Guayaki Indians by Pierre Clastres.
& a few others.

Gioia reached its maximum renewals I can do online so needed to be finished. Had been backburnered.

currently reading “the rebel angels” by robertson davies. my dad gave it to me years ago when i first started grad school, saying something like “this book will make you want to do a phd.” it’s since sat on my shelf unread, but i’m now reading it in the last few months of my phd. finding it loads of fun so far

― flopson, Tuesday, 19 March 2024 18:07 bookmarkflaglink

oh i enjoyed this v much. lot of fun like you say. every page has something that you want to read twice. maybe slightly exhausting? in the end i prob preferred the deptford trilogy (I say that, i still haven't read the last). rebel angels more clearly a comedy, a farce even. rd was my main find last year and was surprised I hadn't previously stumbled across him.

my long run of not really being arsed with fiction continues:
some poetry: dipping into michael hofmann and tom gunn selecteds, and a late-ish RS Thomas - Counterpoint. the hofmann is fine, highly competent, and the thom gunn contains some striking stuff. to the extent i'm competent to judge (on grounds both of theology and poetry) the rs thomas is only intermittently successful, and somewhat arid - it feels v dated (mysteriously this slender volume of theological poetry was the only physical book i took with me for the 24hr flight to australia and back), but does have moments where you are aware of a profound poetic intelligence grappling with faith, evil and creation.

more generally re-engaging with poetry, the poetic act, feels like electricity coursing through the body and mind.

a history of fake things on the internet - walter j scheirer. good this, apart from an ill-advised foray into structuralism in the second section. the book starts from a place that questions how much fake stuff there is - sophisticated 'deepfakle' attempts to deceive us in terms of audio/visual media - very little. synthesized and selective creative acts, cobbled together images and text memes etc - 'participatory fakery', designed to make a point - a lot. and also questions the term 'fake' as it's generally thrown around:

Do all falsehoods necessarily mislead us? Are those who produce false content always malicious? What would happen if media that facilitate the widespread dissemination of fictions were strictly regulated or even banned? Who even has a good grasp of what those media are and how they work?

the author is sensible to then go into use cases to look at the mechanics and history of misleading content on teh internet. early hacker communities and 'culture jamming' ('the news is, in practice, is a system that can be hacked'), photoshop ('What was not initially appreciated by creators and observers of visual disinformation was that a fake image could be more effective in a democracy if it were obviously fake'), 'cheat codes' as a line into the passing about of information designed to provide special insight or knowledge, media forensics, shock content sites, and a couple of others that look more general on AI, and the internet (and social media) as creative spaces.

this all files under 'epistemic health' for me, and how we need to update it practically as the internet changes, and the book does good work identifying the mechanics of manipulations of cultural information on the internet.

Descartes' Error - António Damásio. Updating my very out of date understanding of neuroscience - especially the generally somatic view and approach. Hate reading about the brain - its complexity is so great and the impact of damage is so profound, it makes me feel very queasy, an enormous sense of fragility and dependency on it for everything. ugh. anyway, once it gets over some slightly irritating literary flourishes at the beginning and gets clearly into the topics about which Damasio knows and is interested in, it's very good.

Cybernetics and the Origin of Information – Raymond Ruyer. An old (now) book of engaged critical theory writings on information theory. interesting to see what needs updating because of recent developments. Reminds me I should pick up On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects by Simondon again - it was dense, but possible to engage with, and probably would be a good counterpart to this.

Monsieur (or 'The Prince of Darkness') - the first of Lawrence Durrell's Avignon Quintet, whose main subject matter appears to be gnosticism. I don't know whether i can stick it. It's laughably precious:

Sabine was older than the rest of us – not in years, to be sure: but in judgment and insight. Her voyagers and adventures had forged her mind already while we were still upon the threshold of our emotional maturity. The word I was looking for, I suppose, was "sphingine"

This produced an actual yelp of laughter from me. Yes, I suppose it was now I come to think of it. Sure. aiui the quintet or 'quincunx' (¬_¬) is meta-textual, so i'll continue into the second volume, Livia, to see if the nauseating polycule at the centre of Monsieur is undermined and made a justifiable laughing stock. Title isn't promising though is it.

I admit to a sneaking enjoyment of the flummery around the gnosticism. it's what's kept me reading.

also, also, he has a habit of putting *all* foreign words in italics. This gets extremely funny and irritating:

the scarlet bedsocks he always wore to match his vivid Egyptian babouches
at each corbner of the court rises a quaint and crusty little tourelle [sounds like a euphemism for penis]
I lit my candles and quickly put on the traditional black velvet coat which Piers had given me, with its scarlet lining; also the narrow stove-pipe pantaloons, dark sash and pointed black shoes – tenue de rigueur for Christmas dinner at Verfeuille. [also incidentally how i dress to put the rubbish out]
He will become the régisseur of Verfeuille while I am absent en mission [gone to the corner shop for milk]
I was seized by a singular sort of constraint, almost a pudeur [*almost*. not quite]
with always the danger of a fugue staring me in the face
at any rate she wore a red velvet carnival cagoule through the slits of which her eyes looked at us [£5.99 from M&S]
he had gone out to the Café Durance for a croissant and a cup of coffee [moi aussi, mon vieux, moi aussi, have u seen the price these days tho]
all but united in this central despair about the metaphysical status quo. Slowly, in his quiet voice, with its flavours of an ever mounting disenchantment he sketched in the terrible fresco of the present world, often in the form of a long quotation which attested as always to the formidable memory of this stage man. "The praying Mantis which devours its male even while it is fecundating her, the spider trapping the fly, and the pompile which stabs the spider to death, the ceceris which with a triple stroke of its sword scientifically destroys the three centres of the bupreste's nervous s ystem: and carries it off so that its larvae will be able to eat it still living, choosing their mouthfuls with skill, preserving the vital parts with a terrible science, unto the very last mouthful of the victim's flesh. Then the leucospis, the anthrax, the worm of which simply applies itself to the flank of the chalcidone, and sucks it dry through the skin, ingests, pumps out this living broth which is the young larvae, and then dries it cunningly, in order to keep it also fresh, living, until the last mouthful... The philante, the bee-killer, before even carrying off its victim presses out the crop to make it disgorge its honey, and sucks the tongue of the wretched dying insect as it sticks out of its mouth..."

[sorry sir this is a wendys etc]

why isn't fresco in italics why.

just to prove that i am indeed possessed by the ghost of a 50-something british woman who choked to death on turkish delight at a church jumble sale in the cotswalds in 1976 i am really enjoying Joanna Trollope's The Rector's Wife. she is a very good writer!

Last night I finished The Rebel Angels, Robertson Davies. It was a tour de force, a descriptor that aptly fits any of his novels I've read. This one displays the usual erudition, wit, mastery of form and strong sense of playful mischief. It's entertainment with an intellectual flair.

It also reminded me why I tend not to avidly seek out another Davies novel soon after finishing my most recent excursion into his work. There's a quality in him I find off-putting, but hard to pin down. He strikes me as having a depth of understanding of human nature, but one that is artificially induced via intellect. There is a cruelty in him, hidden beneath a mask of flamboyance and theatricality. He tries hard to seduce you into this attitude and does a good job of it, too, but he leaves me feeling uneasy about what's at the core of his art. YMMV.

Holly George-Warren's A Man Called Destruction. Itinerate commenter Edd Hurt dismissed it several weeks for not delving into the sources of Alex Chilton's guitar playing, but as someone who owns the Big Star albums and nothing else K found the bio was well-sourced and literate.

About to start The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World.

March was:

Zola - Germinal
Henri Alain Fournier - The Lost Estate
Dumas - Black Tulip
Balzac - An Episode Under the Terror
Balzac - At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
(the last two were very short, less than 100 pages total)

i'm not sure what i was expecting the lost estate to be like but it wasn't that.

germinal and black tulip a lot more readable than you'd think.

i'm not sure what i was expecting the lost estate to be like but it wasn't that.

in a good way or a bad way? (I love it.)

I picked up that book (The Lost Estate) about 15 years ago on the recommendation of a friend. I have yet to read it. I'm not sure why, other than this friend is a bit of a misanthrope. More than a bit, actually.

it's definitely not a misanthropic book.

it was probably a bit more modern than i was expecting. and i guess the cover suggested flouncy 20-something female and i got mostly scruffy teenage boys.

i liked the mystery of it. it was a bit tom's midnight garden. but i was expecting Thomasina.

(i guess it's not so modern that places even 20 miles away are practically unknown to people, because 20 miles is a day's travel)

There's a quality in him I find off-putting, but hard to pin down.

same tho i don’t think i agree with your point about cruelty. as i feel similarly about how it’s hard to pin down i’m not sure i have a reason for why i don’t agree.

whatever that quantity is, it’s less visible (but still disconcertingly present) in the deptford trilogy than the cornish stuff.

Yeah, cruelty isn't the right word for that quality. I was reaching and overreached. Whatever it is, it is submerged and cumulative in effect.

picked up after you were, i am by camille ralphs, which i’ve seen some fuss about.

this is - or at least the first section is - religious poetry, or rather religious poetry/texts from various periods (George Herbert, John Baillie, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Rumi) brought into contact with modernity.

Ralphs’ stylistic markers are so visible - word play, antithesis, dense clusters of alliteration and assonance (there must be a term for this) - that it’s a little difficult to work through the thicket as it were and find what else is there.

the project seems to be to divine something of the just future by applying mystic texts to the syllabic cacophony of the present.

i think there’s enough of interest on a first reading to go back and work through it some more.

from veni sancte spiritus:

Give to those who, doggèd, wait
on your fingers’ click and bait
the worried bone of friendliness

i suppose dogged needed the grave. but yes it gives a good general sense of it: the imv successful play of “your fingers’ click and bait” and something about in an age of social media captured well by the phrase “the worried bone of friendliness”.

when ralphs cuts loose a bit from their acrobatics they get some punch:

Like that last phrase, you run, like blinding colours through the eyeless world
and when the mind forgets itself, you’re there — where what is left to know is left to live.
Fine, hold me in your Holocene: give me a kicking; and the goods,
the martyrs with their hopscotch blood and nails as fragrant in their palms as cloves

(from Wessobrunn Prayer)

i’m looking forward to digging in, even if periodically i wish they’d let up a bit.

oh i think there must be something of the Pound here. interpreting the prosody of these old texts and modes to create unusual modern poetic forms (the alliteration, obv a form in old english/german etc)

periodically i wish they’d let up a bit

based on the fragments you quoted, understandable. sonically, it invites you to move right along, but semantically it's a slow, dense obstacle course, which tends to fight itself

I've started in on Kokoro, Natsume Soseki. The translator is Edwin McClellan. Too soon for comments.

S. Yizhar - Preliminaries.

Review here that is fine with giving the synopsis of the book:

https://wordswithoutborders.org/book-reviews/preliminaries-by-s-yizhar/

The writing is wonderful, if you like that kind of thing. This will do it for you, no question. If it is a well I will walk for miles everyday to drink from it, for sure. And so on.

Except: what is it to read this now? Arabs have been displaced and we see the images of what that means on our screens. Every day for the last few months. The politics of that situation isn't discussed much in that review.

What saves it (if you like) is a measure of acknowledgement, some guilt, some awareness of what it is to have moved to a place so alien.

Above all the writing on nature, friendship, people. This guy can extract every ounce of feeling for the sky in his writing. If we were all truly able to have those feelings as expressed here maybe things would not have turned out as they have. I am no doubt wrong about this.

really enjoying the ralphs. it's actually caused me to get my bible down this easter sunday to check the story of job against the prose poem Job 42:10-17 (the final verses covering god's double restitution to job of that which he had lost), which has the epigraph:

Yesterday P. asked: 'Do you think the children from Job's second chance could actually be happy?' Anna Kamieńska, A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook

His Children (whom he'd seen the fired pyres stripping of their nakedness and every woolly talisman) came back: came bringing groceries: and they said, this is what a bad trip feels like, we were never dead, you only thought we were: and though he had mislaid his face in tumuli of boils, had dropped his Eyes in lozenge-bottles crouched behind the ziggurats of shipping boxes at the docks, screamed at Life's fair unfairness, they beatified him

potent. i particularly like the mislaid face in the tumuli of boils, the brutality of those woolly talismans going up in flames, 'ziggurats of shipping boxes' does the job of the architecture of the ancient world in the modern well. and later, "And he blessed the World in turn because he feared to curse it" speaks plainly of what's been done to Job.

After This is That, he said, and if this were a bad trip I would know it. And did not escape the Feeling, angry as a tennis racquet, of his being made to serve.

And then Ralphs goes and does this! The actual metaphor, the maximal tautness of the strings in the tensile frame, the thwock of the tennis ball - no question, brings something to the quality of Job's anger. but 'of his being made to serve' can only be a joke. it's hard to see it as anything else. the immediate suspicion is that Ralphs couldn't find another way of putting it, was reluctant to relinquish this form of words, liked it too much maybe. on the other hand this could be depicting a nasty rhyming cruelty of the universe, indifferent to bathos. either way it's extremely disconcerting, and pulls you up short.

the final lines though, reassert the general tone of the poem, of Job alone retaining the memory of that which has been done to him:

You're dead, you're dead, he said, watching his children reproduce; and soon they too grew to believe it.

ralphs is willing to untether words from their moorings and use them for their abstract quantities, but this has the effect sometimes of causing you to wonder what a word is doing there - is there any constraint of meaning hanging off it at all? it can have the feeling of an LLM set to high temperature. but as i say, i'm really enjoying getting my teeth into it. it's fecund, energetic, smart etc.

Yeahm was already thinking that some of the word choices seem more willful than anything else, on first reading--but

And did not escape the Feeling, angry as a tennis racquet, of his being made to serve.

And I suppose that capitalizing "Feeling" could be sarcastic/counter-Serious, making your own damn book/Book, twisting the other side of the story around to the front.

oh i agree the psychology is apt - it’s partly the point, but the serve-as-in-tennis-serve is, well it’s just silly. introducing an image that does nothing for the poem.

germinal ... a lot more readable than you'd think.
i did germinal in january & this was my takeaway too. definitely piqued my interest for more zola.

recent reads have included ivan turgenev's virgin soil, austen's persuasion, and anna kornbluh's immediacy. hoping to get to sand's the devil's pool soon.

Fludd by Hilary Mantel. A strange little book, the kind where I feel like I'm on a completely different wavelength from the author, despite her easy cynicism concerning religion. (Though in an afterword she says she wishes that everyone could be brought up catholic, or something like it, because of the sense it gives that everything is not as it seems. Hmm.) You wouldn't think it was by the same author as Wolf Hall.

because of the sense it gives that everything is not as it seems

most religions and a fair number of drugs provide this sense, but catholicism will do in a pinch

a few children's books and an average imagination will do it.

Thurston Moore Sonic Life
Avant garde guitarist's memoir. He's just got to having Lee Ranaldo in Sonic Youth who have Richard Edson back in the band after playing as a drummerless 3 piece.
Been pretty good so far.
I needed some lighter reading. Feeling fluey or something.

So not getting as heavily into a number of other non-fiction books as I wanted.

Rashid Khalidi the Iron Cage
Book looking at why Palestine is not doing better in its struggle by a Palestinian academic and historian. Looking at 20th century history of the place.

Enzo Traverso
Book on Marxist explanations of the holocaust.
I really dug the author's name when it turned up in a bibliography. So grabbed the book when I saw it was in the local library.

Peter Fryer Staying Power
Book on black presence in the British isles. Pretty scathing on widespread racism.
I'm having the same problem trying to work out how you read a text peppered with endnote reference numbers. Which this has several per paragraph frequently. How frequently you turn to the end of the book to read the notes thereby messing up flow reading the text.
Had this with Federici and Theodore Allen too. Maybe shows level of research but doesn't help flow.

And several other books I'm part way into.

I've stuck with the Clark book, it's vastly entertaining. Steampunk without being annoying, that's a feat in and of itself.

javier marías - a heart so white

very good. i thought the modernist long stream of consciousness sentences would tire me out (tbh they do, a bit) but he keeps it moving and mixes in enough dark humour to keep me afloat. the weirdness of spain is underrated

A Heart So White has stayed with me. Great novel.

I'm reading *Night Soldiers* by Alan Furst. It's a spy novel, set in the 30s, and the central character (Bulgarian, but Russian by allegiance) is first trained in Moscow, then sent to Spain to infiltrate the Republican army. He's now on the run in Paris. I'm not at the stage where I can intuit a grand plan, so am sustained by Furst's moment-to-moment world-building. Furst clearly knows his subject but the sweep is so grand it can fall into national cliche pretty easily. Everything is buoyed by bawdy humour; weirdly, it makes me think of Jeffrey Eugenides in places.

Also reading *Empire of Normality: Capitalism and Neurodiversity* by Robert Chapman. He's using Marxist theory to show how capitalism both creates and exploits neurodiversity but how neurodiversity may provide a new mode of organisation against capitalism's worst excesses.

I'm in the middle of writing some essays for my MA, so I've had to take my first break from reading books in a few years.

That said I'm puttering through Jane and Prudence (great) and Pet Shop Boys vs America (complete classic, just page after page of prime Lowe/Tennant one-liners and mischievous glibness)

I finished Alan Furst's *Night Soldiers*. I come to espionage fiction for the tight plotting and this had an odd mix of almost picaresque and what I came to think of as ambient passages of detail. I liked the latter quite a bit in the end. Weird comparison but some sections come on like Poker Face (the Natasha Lyonne series), wherein, to set up a new location, Furst introduces peripheral characters 'at work' in their particular milieu (Paris, New York, Bessarabia), as a stage-setting for the central characters to arrive into. He's great at. Plot? Maybe not so much.

It's 100% made me want to take a trip down the Danube though.

Alejo Carpentier - Explosion in the Cathedral. Set during that period between post-American and French revolutions, this novel draws on the life of Victor Hughes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Hughes), where Carpentier basically uses him to sketch revolutionary undercurrents and alliances between members of the ruling class and the peasantry. The novel explores this episode of Caribbean history through the eyes of three characters as viewpoints. As a writer working in Castro's Cuba, Carpentier gets to write about revolutionary history, pre-communism (Peter Weiss does similar things with a Peasant revolt in the Aesthetics of Resistance (the 2nd part), drawing on peasant revolts in Sweden). All done in a Baroque framework (it is a new translation, released late last year). Can't recommend this enough.

Carpentier's wonderful. The Kingdom of This World is one of my favorite novels.

Great - need to read that and The Lost Steps (the other novel recently re-translated)

reading this Marcel Schwob collection Spicilège, laughed harder than I had in a long time reading the essay on François Villon, serious tears of hard hard laughter at the exploits of the Coquillards in the aftermath of the 100 years war and the ridiculousness of Villon. Highly recommended.

I finished Kokoro, Natsume Soseki. I found the intersection between Meiji Era Japanese culture and the lives and attitudes of the main characters interesting and revealing. It's basically a character study, where the psychology is equally foreign to modern American culture and familiarly human at the same time. It builds itself slowly and patiently, never rushing, so it requires a similar mindset for reading it.

By way of contrast, I've just started reading The Real Cool Killers, Chester Himes, which starts right out at a breathlessly violent pace and doesn't slacken.

Kokoro is a favourite.

Two books published within two years of each other - '73 and '75 respectively. Each feeling *very modern&

Japan Sinks - Sakyo Komatsu. I was slightly surprised to see this was two volumes in the original Japanese, given that it was quite short, but it turns out the English version is abridged. I haven't seen any of the films or anything. It's extremely competently done. There are two tracks to it: the progress of the scientific discovery and analysis, and the urban and social impact of the tectonic irruptions and eruptions. The former presents the sense of an increasingly scientifically tangible inexorable process, of an inevitable end, in a tone of calm analysis. In the latter, the right angles of the urban environment, the scientists lives, their parabolas and projections are thrown into disarray and disorder, via spectacular and explosive urban scenes. These are impressive btw - you get the feeling of someone who has done their research - and more widely Sakyo creates a descriptive context that draws on the mythic and the modern mythic (eg Godzilla) that produces some extremely potent imagery.

In one sense it's a standard template for scientific disaster narratives, but the alternation of the two, the impact of the one on on the other, and the fact that the cataclysms move the final event closer much more rapidly than the scientists can update their projections produce a compelling sense of two cadences coming to a single point. It feels intuitive to apply this feeling to climate change - that projections produce one view, alarming certainly, but that the manifestations of it will be uneven and extreme, and in the extreme areas, the frontier of change moves much more quickly than the generalised views can accommodate.

Of course, in Japan Sinks there is a definitive end, and climate change is a progressive alteration, upheaval and adaptation to an unknown degree, but still Japan Sinks certainly gives the reader an extreme way of viewing it all.

The Twenty Days of Turin - Giorgio de Maria. Surprised ilb doesn't seem to have covered this yet. It's a lot of fun so far, with an overall feeling of cryptic dread, revealed in only loosely connected events, gradually pieced together which is the sort of thing I really like - it allows the reader to project some uncertainty and speculation of their own into what's happening, produce their own terror and unease. What's surprising and delightful, is it's an unexpectedly perfect parable for the social media age, as at the uneasy centre of events is the Library, where people share to the point of exhaustion their quotidian psychopathologies in reams of unfiltered texts, bound and available (anonymously) for reading and, with a payment, for the reader to get the identity of the writers.

Or rather they helped to furnish the illusion of a relationship with the outside world: a dismal cop-out nourished and centralized by a scornful power bent only on keeping people in their state of continuous isolation. The inventors of the Library knew their trade well!”

...

The typical patron of the Library was a shy individual, ready to explore the limits of his own loneliness and to weigh others down with it.

...

Library. And so, a web of mutual espionage came together piece by piece—malicious and futile. You couldn’t leave the house anymore, take a tram, visit a public place, without sensing the leer of somebody who wanted you to believe he’d soaked up all your deepest secrets. If I’d left any of my confessions in that place, I’d probably have lost sleep too . . .” “So you think there’s a relationship between the Library and the insomnia cases?”

and so forth.

oh, and I've got Cyclonopedia: complicity with anonymous materials - Reza Negarestani (apparently from 2008!) lined up, which looks like it should be a trip.

Your take on your first find there reminds me of this WAYR conversation:

The Crazy Iris and other Tales of the Atomic Aftermath, edited by Kenzaburo Oe - Got this decades ago when I was reading a lot of Japanese authors in preparation for a trip to Nippon. Never got around to it, partially of course due to the very grim subject matter. But with Oppenheimer opening so much discourse on here and elsewhere, I felt its time had come - I think with these kinds of tragedies it's very easy to start from a point of "yes yes of course it was terrible we all agree" and then move on to the Philosopher King part of the debate on whether it was justifiable/inevitable without fully digesting exactly how it felt to the people caught up in it, and that's quite dangerous. Kinda like the information in the media that an atrocity has happened doesn't do much to public opinion but pictures do.

Anyway: most of the authors collected, though not all, were actual witnesses to the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombings. What comes across above all is the immense strangeness of the event - no one living through it had the slightest notion of what had just happened, ppl unsure of where to flee to, fears of incoming bombings continuing. Small groups of local doctors and nurses totally at a loss as to how to treat the people that need their help. Taken as a whole, the stories also give a strong context for life around that time: the before (a young schoolkid on his way to the mine that the Imperial Japanese regime had ordered his class to work in) and the after (Hiroshima survivors living in basically slum housing many months after the bomb was dropped destroying their homes).

― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, September 12, 2023

Daniel, have you read John Hersey's Hiroshima? based on interviews with survivors, it tracks their movements, in alternating third-person narratives, just before the blast and soon after, through the city built around a confluence of six rivers---well, one interviewee was swiveling around in her office chair, about to ask another worker something at the moment of the blast, was trapped in rubble for a long time--but later the German priest makes his way to the hospital, meets her, they have a conversation---I want to read the second edition, when Hersey follows up with more interviews and research.
He says in this first one that Japanese physicists deduced what had happened fairly quickly, from international professional scuttlebutt, despite Manhattan Project security (there was some awareness that Americans and others were working toward a thermonuclear weaoon, like that science fiction story that earned science fiction author Cleve Cartmill a visit from the FBI), and news reports added more evidence, which the Japanese physicists contextualized clearly enough for public consumption, while the US Gov was still not doing that so much. Hersey's book made a whole issue of The New Yorker, edited very quietly.

― dow, Wednesday, September 13, 2023 9:50 PM (six months ago) bookmarkflaglink

The second edition was researched and published in the 80s, I think. The science fiction story reflected some awareness that was around, at least on mid-40s geek fringes (as well as among those with security clearances).

― dow, Wednesday, September 13, 2023 9:55 PM (six months ago)

dow, I have not, sounds interesting. According to this anthology there's actually a lot of published testimonials from victims, tho who knows how many have been translated.

― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, September 14,2023

Hersey's book made a whole issue of The New Yorker, edited very quietly.

oh, and I've got _Cyclonopedia: complicity with anonymous materials_ - Reza Negarestani (apparently from 2008!) lined up, which looks like it should be a trip.

Taking Woodstock Elliott Tiber
jewish kid grows up in Brooklyn, finds out he's artistic and also a gay masochist all of which become thematic throughout the book. His parents decide to sell up their hardware business and buy a hotel in the Catskills. Because of lack of experience and wanting to economise they buy a rundown place which they do up and then keep expanding. Subsequently they owe way more than they take in.
Elliott the jewish kid mentioned earlier has managed to put himself through art school by keeping his grades high and winds up teaching design etc and working in interior design. So he's spending the week in New York doing so then gets sucked back into the parents' motel business which is a sprawling run down space with corners cut wherever they can be. After happening to be at Stonewall when the riot started and taking part in it two weeks later he's up at the motel when he hears the Aquarian Exposition had lost its planned location. One thing he has managed to do over his time building and semi maintaining the sprawling motel complex is to become head of the chamber of commerce for Bethel the town where the motel is. He's also got a standing permit to hold a music festival, though til then it has meantt a tiny gathering or a bunch of garage bands playing the stage in a theatre that's part of the complex.
He rings the Woodstock Festival people and offers up his space, though it really isn't up to scratch. So he asks his neighbour Max Yasgur if he'll accommodate and things escalate from there.In the book there is a month between this happening and the festival taking place. So for a month the Festival people are setting up and people are coming to Bethel to buy tickets and set up the Festival also hang out before the festival starts. I'm not sure the timeline is right. Hundreds then thousands of alternative types turning up in a sleepy town causes a lot of reaction including the town council trying to get the festival canceled. It went ahead of course and was somewhere between an iconic heaven and a disaster zone. Elliott comes out on top, has debts payed off because entire motel complex has been let during preparations. & festival has been a success . &his parents can actually retire
Elliott has also had a chance to hobnob with some famous gays which must be late 50s/early 60s. There's a film made of the book where he looks way too young for that timeline. & I'm not sure how accurate his timeline is.
But I enjoyed the book and found it a really fast read> Probably not for everybody since some of the s&m sex scenes and anonymous cinema cruising do come across as pretty sordid. I'm not sure how objectively accurate some of this is either.But, good, fast read.

Staying Power Peter Fryer
History of Black presence in Britain dating back to around the 16th century. Interesting book. I'm still struggling with how to respond to a text so peppered with endnote reference numbers, thankfully a load of these are citations. Other books I've read with a similar peppering have had longer actual notes which makes reading less easy. Never sure how long an interval between looking at the notes to leave which does effect reading, if its each paragraph or each page or what. Easier to read if numbers can be ignored totally which I'm not sure is possible. & means missing background info.
Anyway, pretty scathing, heavily researched book showing narrative of black presence and community in GB. I've just read his chapter on slavery and am now in his chapter on racism. He's looking at travellers tales about Africa's population in the light of black already having a traditional valorisation in English culture. He's talking about the idea of interbreeding with apes being widespread. It's pretty harsh.
Not sure what had predated this with the same erudition and research level before its 1984 publishing date.
I've stupidly let this be bacburnered in my reading it when it should be prioritised. Possibly a book that everybody should read if they can.
Now I've been reading this when I hadn't slept brilliantly.and it is one I think I would recommend. It's not the first book on the subject I've read and it does seem to be widely cited. Does have a lot more anecdote in constructing the narrative, some depiction of the immediate personal of individuals over time from cited sources etc. Would probably take a lifetime to read through all the material cited.

The bad trip : dark stars, blown minds and the strange end of the sixties James Riley,
Looking at the dystopian end of the 60s.The various conspiracy theories, cults and their explanation and understanding at the time. I just read a bit on Woodstock which was interesting in the light of Taking Woodstock. But does have me needing to look up cloud seeding which I thought was a thing, even if not the way it was being thought of as shown here. Paranoid hippies claiming the man was making it rain on the Festival, I thought it was something people had done in some crop growing areas, which it does appear to be. Not as good as directing hurricanes by Sharpie but probably more effective.

Testimony and retrieval of memory and activity from zones of existential extremity is a very valuable activity. I'm thinking here of Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl project (or Chernobyl Prayer) as well. There are all sorts of reasons it's valuable, obviously, but the main one I'm thinking of is expressed extremely well in an interview with Alexievich:

The things that people said were unique. These were texts from some new life of another world that is approaching very fast now. We have Chornobyl, coronavirus, the revolution, war. We are approaching a new reality for which we are not prepared. But Chornobyl is beyond all that because of the cosmic scale of the catastrophe, cosmic in the sense that it’s a shock to our understanding, our worldview. It’s something entirely new.

I guess my view is that most of the time we live in quite extended cultural phases - that is to say the imagery, cultural and moral assumptions, tone of our intellectual and emotional discourse is quite hoary. you might say of it that it's twenty years or a generation, or a cultural cycle out of date. We're working on old precepts while the future is rushing headlong at and past us. Our ability to see The Future Now, to get in place the new apparatus (language, imagery, cultural logic) is extremely limited.

Now, it feels quite crass to say one useful aspect of the recreation of dismal and cataclysmic events is their ability to give us a lens on the interaction of politics, technology and the human components that will go to make up the future, but I do think it is one valuable function they have.

I touch on the danger in the Japan Sinks post, which is that the language that come out of these holocausts, creates a language for the future which is only suited to disaster. We shouldn't see the 'new reality' only in terms of disaster, I think that would be a huge failing. I diverge slightly from Alexievich there. Still, it creates new frontiers in what it means for us to understand existence, new maps, new images and concepts that we need to incorporate.

As I've said elsewhere of Helen deWitt, although it's extremely lightly held (deWitt is such a good stylist), the fact their writing incorporates so many different frameworks means it's also doing quite a lot that's similar:

The concepts with which Helen DeWitt plays cover a wide ground of thought, across literature, language, coding, heuristics, probability, business, getting things done, and modern anthropology, to name a handful. These are not all the standard inputs to literary work, and they provide tensions, rules, systems, motivations and structure to the behaviour of [their] protagonists and to the world they perceive and their management of it.

Finding the new ground at the margin, at the frontiers of our current mores, at the points where they break down, or deliberately and actively framebreaking them, are always interesting to me.

Related, two relatively recent artefacts in this area are the Philippine marines on the rusting Sierra Madre strategic hulk on the Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea, a fragile point at the centre of a geopolitical crisis. The vocabulary alone is extremely piquant with its mixture of visibly old and extremely now - it feels like it might be something out of Warhammer 40k. Similarly, and I think I posted on this at the time, the picture of trench warfare in the age of the internet in Ukraine in this New Yorker piece - foxholes decked with LED lights, warfare co-ordinated by whatsapp messages with locals etc.

Sorry, the link to that New Yorker piece Two Weeks at the Front in Ukraine here. Sierra Madre stuff obv in the news at the moment, but report from last year here.

Excellent to hear about Cyclomania, table, thanks!

xpost

The Golden Child, Penelope Fitzgerald. Definitely the least out of the four I've read, I would go so far as to say inessential. Now on to Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin.

the hand of ethelberta, the last thomas hardy novel i need to read and his first attempt at cyberpunk, judging by the cover.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50961568-the-hand-of-ethelberta

Henry Green - Concluding. Beautiful book.

Never read Concluding, for some reason, and it's a good reminder to pick it up. Henry Green is wonderful.

I ordered an omnibus of Living, Loving, and Party Going from the library a couple of days ago. Never read any of his before.

Concluding is his funniest book, several laffs per page.

It's funny. It also uses the word 'lied' a lot.

I finished the bio of Teddy Roosevelt's younger years (basically from childhood up to the eve of his second marriage) by David McCullough. That turn of the century period is one I always find fascinating. Close enough to feel relatable but distant enough to give a sense of the past as a strange country. Now I'm reading an ILB fave, "Dog of the South" by Charles Portis. First couple of chapters were outstanding.

Halfway through Things Fall Apart. It's a challenging read for its brutality, but the prose is crisp and sharp. I want to see where it goes.

Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar. Taking it slowly; enjoying my brain being afire.

I Googled how to spell her name (I was right, fwiw) and saw it's being made into an Amazon series. Is nothing sacred?

I needed a quick, simple book, so I'm reading The Majestic Hotel, Georges Simenon. It's a 1940s Maigret novel. Standard issue fare, but soothing in the way all Maigret novels tend to be.

After reading the Maigret, I've now started Summer Will Show, Sylvia Townsend Warner. It is set in the late 1840s among the minor English aristocracy and will eventually move the scene to Paris and the Commune of 1848, but hasn't, yet.

My strongest initial impression is how confidently and solidly she creates her main character's inner and outer life. Although she's describing an era that was already long past when it was written in the 1930s, the author's convictions carry such weight that her descriptions feel like final and unshakeable truths. In that respect it reminds me of Marilynne Robinson.

I discovered Warner in 2020. Lots of laughs.

I'm liking the hell out of Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines/

Rereading The Leopard. In my 20's I was mostly impressed by the fatalism of a society that will not change no matter how many regimes come and go, and associating that with my own country. Now as I'm about to hit the big 40 I focus more on Don Fabrizio as a man, how this entropy dovetails nicely with his own mid life crisis and disillusion over his own life, how convinient these arguments are for him.

10 Myths About Israel Ilan Pappe
Israeli historian debunks some Israeli misinformation. Pretty interesting, maybe should be mandatory reading.
He cites Shlomo Sand's books as worth reading as I've seen others do.
Short book so should be a quick read.

Latest Xgau Sez answers questions about his (non-music) reading, incl. a Drabble I hadn't heard of---surprised that he found The Communist Manifesto rough sledding; Marx & Engels' combined journo skills sailed me right along. This is the free section:
https://robertchristgau.substack.com/p/xgau-sez-april-2024?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=17167&post_id=143674984&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=6pvn1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Finished go tell it on the mountain. Really powerful and lyrical. Despite being a massive god hater I even found the two or three page transcribed sermon vivid and transporting. But to me the cruelty of their religion shone from every page and I couldn't help but see the ending as a kind of defeat. (I know it's semi autobiographical and aiui baldwin did later distance himself from the church.)

Now on to the magic mountain!

Did you mean to read two books with 'mountain' in the title?

read kawabata next

I did not plan it but when the opportunity presented itself I knew it had to be.

if i hadn't read them both already i'd do the booker prize winners the sea and the sea, the sea.

Followed by booker nominee C

Shirley Hazzard - The Great Fire

i did

The Old Man and the Sea
The Sea, The Sea
The Sea Wolf (jack london)

the first wiped the floor with the others tbh

Wittold Gombrowicz - Ferdeydurke
Yasunari Kawabata - The Rainbow

Both of these express anxieties in shifting sands, and in v different ways:

- Gombrowicz is fantastical, surrealist, anti-novelist.

- The Kawabata is conventional but his voice is something I love coming back to. Lamenting a past lost, though very ambivalent about the glorious (imperial) past.

I've read much more Kawabata but I just didn't quite care for Gombrowicz in a way my 18 yo self would've loved.

Incidentally, idk if England has ever produced a novelist like Kawabata. Both islands lost a lot in the last century (though England has never been humiliated like Japan was), but I've yet to read an English novelist that really plots the decline of the place in a cool and quiet manner though I have to wade through a lot of shit here (it's been done much more in UK music and film, I think)

actually, looking just now, kawabata's sound of the mountain is cheap at the moment. and it's not one of the 3 I've read.

just bought it.

I finished "Dog of the South" which was as wonderful and funny as everyone said it was. The best part of True Grit was the voice of Mattie Ross, the narrator. This book was even better because it focuses more on unique voices and less on plot.

I finished Summer Will Show, Sylvia Townsend Warner. It did have a bit of humor from time to time, aimed at the habits and opinions of the petty aristocracy and pretensions of the Romantic movement in art, but on the whole it was full of serious intent. Perhaps more than was good for it. The main character never stopped analyzing her motives and taking her emotional temperature, or supplying a similar analysis for everyone around her.

The book makes some sturdy observations about the ambiguities and difficulties of revolutionary times and I took these to be Warner's primary interest in how she chose to construct the book. At the time of writing, the early 1930s, Warner was a committed member of the Communist Party. It was evident she had given deep thought to both the Communist theory of revolution and the real world developments in the Russia and her conclusions were far from cheerful.

Last night I read the first half of Rum Punch, Elmore Leonard, the novel that supplied the source material for the movie Jackie Brown. Leonard is bad at writing human characters but great at plot, action, and interesting details of criminality. It moves along quickly. Ill probably finish it tonight.

just finished Bukowski's POST OFFICE (and have learned for the first time the meaning of ilxor Chinaski's handle -- hi there)

going back to Lloyd Bradley's BASS CULTURE, which i made a good dent in earlier this year but lost steam.

Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman's White Rural Rage has become a best-seller and deserves it.

Hey Budo. Glad to be sat at the bar with ye. With the now-canon caveat that Bradley is wrong about dancehall and beyond, I love Bass Culture.

I started Heather Clark's Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. I'll see you in about six months.

Peter Fryer Staying Power
Just been reading about racist riots in Cardiff and Liverpool in the wake of WWI. Also tied into black seMen being laid off in favour of white to great degree.
So again pretty scathing

Chronicle of Guayaki Indians Pierre Clastres
Ethnologist writes about South American Indian tribe in early 60s .

V. S. Pritchett - A Cab at the Door

A terrific little book, detailing the author's somewhat chaotic early years.

The end of Things Fall Apart was bleak as hell. Any thoughts on the two subsequent novels?

Prichett's stories and Turgenev bio are wonderful

I love A Cab at the Door. like you say Alfred his stories are wonderful. language and writing of great style, managing tension, amusement, swiftly achieved and insightful character portraits. that he’s able to craft these feels like virtuousity but it doesn’t look like virtuousity.

With A Cab at the Door you feel all of that but there’s a certain relaxed brio and humour - it doesn’t need the same tensile self supporting structure of a short story. This is his life and he relishes the pattern of characters and behaviour and the world it gave him.

A great English writer. Possibly not all that visible these days? Though surely right at the front of great english short story writers.

Septology had been sitting on my bedside table this whole year, with just the last book to read. Typical case of me not wanting to finish something great. Totally absorbed in the world of Asles. The first book contains what I thought was a very funny scene of a man pushing a woman on a swing. When it returns to it in the 7th, it’s no longer funny, it’s truthful and beautiful. The final pages of this are a knock out. Absolute pleasure spending 700 pages in this world, wish it never ended.

Complications by Atul Gawande was a good intro to the human world of surgery

i have finished all the Hardy novels, the last two being Desperate Remedies and Hand Of Ethelberta, and started on The Time Torn Man, the Hardy biography by Tomalin, which, happily, starts by talking a lot about the two i've just read.

I'm midway through The Magic Mountain. It's moderately amusing, often thought provoking, clearly very intelligent and (questionable translation notwithstanding) marvellously written. But it's not giving me any *feels*, it's not a world I would say it's an absolute pleasure to spend time in.

That's next on my list! I really fubbed it not reading it while I was in Davos a couple years ago

i have finished all the Hardy novels

lol for a split second i read this as all the hardy boys novels

I started "Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking" by William James, based on a series of public lectures he gave in Boston and at Columbia University in 1906-7. Roughly 500 people attended the series of Boston lectures, and about 1000 in NYC, and the book was popular, but it caught a lot of flak from philosophers for being written in down-to-earth layman language.

I finished:

Elric of Melnibone
Elric: Sailor on the Seas of Fate
Elric: The Weird of the White Wolf

I'm now reading The Elusive Shift, which is a recent book about the development of conflicting play cultures in roleplaying games in the wake of the release of Dungeons & Dragons. Really great book so far. Fascinating how debates in the hobby the last 20 years go right back to the earliest days (and before that even).

The only "minor" Hardy I've read is Two in a Tower. Which should I go with next? The Trumpet-Major?

what're you calling major? Tess, Jude, Mayor, Madding, Native?

then I'd put, in no real order
Greenwood, Woodlanders, Blue Eyes, Tower, Trumpet

but they are all much of a muchness. pick a cheap one, or a short one.

Septology had been sitting on my bedside table this whole year, with just the last book to read. Typical case of me not wanting to finish something great. Totally absorbed in the world of Asles. The first book contains what I thought was a very funny scene of a man pushing a woman on a swing. When it returns to it in the 7th, it’s no longer funny, it’s truthful and beautiful. The final pages of this are a knock out. Absolute pleasure spending 700 pages in this world, wish it never ended.

― H.P, Wednesday, April 24

they are all much of a muchness

haven't encountered that one since my mom died. enjoyed it greatly. thanks!

Thomas Hardy - Search and Destroy <= dedicated hardy thread

I'd call The Woodlanders major.

Last night I tried out You Don't Love Me, Yet, Jonathan Lethem. Not sure I'll continue with it. It's kinda bad. It feels like something left over from his early apprentice years and when his publisher wanted a followup to his big hits Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude, he pulled it out of the drawer, polished it up the best he could, and submitted it.

One reason I suspect it is old work he necromanced is that, although it was published in 2007, it casually mentions that one character drives a Datsun - a brand name that was changed to Nissan in 1986. Nothing else tries to situate it deliberately in the 1980s, just this lone anachronism. Weird for a 2007 novel.

I read another 40 pages of You Don't Love Me Yet tonight, decided it was just bad writing and tossed it overboard without a single pang of loss.

I'm now reading The Elusive Shift, which is a recent book about the development of conflicting play cultures in roleplaying games in the wake of the release of Dungeons & Dragons. Really great book so far. Fascinating how debates in the hobby the last 20 years go right back to the earliest days (and before that even).

Thanks for this! It looks really good.

It’s sort of a sequel to the same author’s Playing at the World, which is a much longer and a bit drier history of the development of D&D, starting with chess and such. The best part of that book is him going through all these proto-RPGs that developed in the 15-20 years before the release of D&D that almost made the final leap.

Xp dow. Recent Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse! Recommendations for a first Henry Green book?

Oh yeah, Fosse, thanks for the reminder!
I first read a Green many years ago, that started with a boy and a girl having a conversation in a night club. Eventually the girl opened her mouth for the boy to look inside, and it was like another night club, or it *was* another night club. Think that was Doting? You prob can't go wrong wherever you start, but this year I went back to the posthumous collection Surviving, started with his good fun apprentice shorties, and then to his first novel, Blindness, written when he was 19-20, but with amazing empathy and insight re older characters--then more from Surviving in between chronology of novels---also his memoir,Pack My Bag, published when he was 34, because he thought he was going to be killed in WWII--have gotten as far as Caught and Loving, two of the three re life during that wartime, am a bit spooked about starting Back because I'm getting closer to the end of his novel-writing (although Surviving incl. subsequent pieces and commentaries by his son and grandson).

Loving is the Green to start with, HP.

I finished a re-read of Tan Lin's 'BlipSoak01' earlier this week— a booklength poem of "blips," or basically couplets that are often paratactic in nature but occasionally fall into a capitalist realism romantic lyric mode. He's one of the greats, IMHO, far too little known outside of certain writing circles.

Also finished Ellen Tifft's 'Complete Poems 1939-1990.' Tifft was a poet who grew up in some means and continued to live quite well throughout her life, but also managed to write some exceptional and strange poems while mostly spending time as a housewife and public writing workshop leader at the local public library in Elmira, NY. She was published nearly everywhere during her time, but was never connected to the poetry world in the same way as others, so is off the radar of many people. John Ashbery was a huge fan, however, and one can see why: her work is personal, referential, oblique, bewildering, and often very beautiful. It was a vanity-published book and is somewhat hard to find, but is worth every penny.,

josef kaplan - loser

H.P., you can also start with Nothing, a girls school novel with at least 10 caricatures done right.

flopson, hope you liked 'Loser.' his newest poems take some of the strategies from 'Loser' and elaborate upon them really astonishingly. his poems make me wince and laugh at the same time.

i’ve only read the first half of loser so far but i really enjoyed it. it’s very (darkly) funny!

I finished Marguerite Yourcenar's *Memoirs of Hadrian*. It's magnificent - as a concept, as a feat of sustained imagination, as an exercise in linguistic control. My edition has a series of meditations on the writing process, which are almost as good as the text. It's a series of nearly Bressonian reflections, where Yourcenar reveals her process - research, methodology, her fight to find the right voice; the meditations reach the height of aphorism in places. Dizzying.

That’s been in my queue forever, bumping it up

(Also wrt budo jeru upthread, I was eating fish taco’s at a place called Chinaski’s just last week!)

I now very much want tacos.

I've been resisting comparing it to Hilary Mantel because it seems too obvious, but I think it's fair to say that, like Mantel, Yourcenar utterly fell for her subject. She said that she found inspiration for the text in a letter from Flaubert where he wrote that 'just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone'; perhaps Flaubert's falling for Emma Bovary is as good an analogue.

I'm reading Something Wholesale, Eric Newby. Strictly speaking it's a memoir, but Newby is only interested in entertaining his audience rather than recounting matters of importance to him. His stories and descriptions pander cater to a particularly English nostalgia for their comfortable middle class way of life in the early part of the 20th century, when the Empire was spinning along and everyone knew their place. That nostalgia drives the book, although much of it centers on the immediate post-WWII decade, when the mechanisms of that bourgeois world were running down fast like an unwound clock.

Memoirs of Hadrian

This looks like something I would enjoy. I usually read at least a book per year about Ancient Rome.

I've never read fantasy, know nothing about the genre, have avoided even Lord of the Rings all this time (is that even fantasy? See, I know nothing). Anyhow, an acquaintance said I must read Brian Sanderson. Is this a terrible idea y/n

In other reading news, am very much enjoying Table for Two

is that even fantasy?

In my view Lord of the Rings (along with the Hobbit) invented many of the tropes of the modern-day 'fantasy' genre because when those books became enormously popular they spawned off a line of copycats which eventually codified the mainstream of the fantasy genre. But the roots of LOTR/Hobbit are in fairy tales and medieval allegory and Tolkien wouldn't have understood he was writing 'fantasy'.

A quick read: Whose Body?, by Dorothy L. Sayers. An airplane read I got as a free ebook. The first Lord Peter Wimsey book (and the first one I have read). It's entertaining, zips right along, and I am not sure whether I have it all figured out or have gone completely down the wrong track. Invested enough to see it through to the end.

I finished the David Lodge book I was reading. Deaf Sentence. I would read him again. I wonder if I would like his crit. I don't think I've read any.

I started to read The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada. From 2013. It's about a factory. And some of the people who work there.

i have The Factory in the Todo list, waiting for a Japanese month. bought it because i liked the cover 8)

Xpost “the art of fiction” is very readable iirc. With lodge, the drier the cover, the better the book imo

Finished Peter Fryer Staying Power
which I'd meant to read for a while. Pretty scathing look at black presence in Britain in terms of racism etc. Good read though

reading
George Clinton Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard On You?
which is a pretty fantastic memoir by the head of the Parliafunkadelicment thang. Great looks into the bands histories etc
written in a readable style not sure how much is him cos he's with a cowriter. But recommended

Thumbnail for The hundred years' war on Palestine : a history of settler colonial conquest and resistance

Rashid Khalidi The hundred years' war on Palestine : a history of settler colonial conquest and resistance
Palestinian author looks back at a century of attack on what was historically Palestine. His family has been involved in a lot of the history in some way, normally supporting Palestine. Very interesting book but scathing and depressing. There's a major queue for it in the Irish library system which I finally got to the top of and have thing 2/3s read. Recommended.

John Donne - Sermons

Anybody read Wellness? Just borrowed it from the library.

Ferit Edgu - The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales

You can read about it here: https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-wounded-age-and-eastern-tales

The interesting thing besides the subject matter of a state subjugation of its people is the formuts written in: which is these bunch of prose poems that do alternate between looking more like poems and then looking like prose pieces at other times, a push-pull between the forms as the violence of the situation, and the beauty of its surroundings, is related

finished The Factory which i am now pitching to Netflix as "Area X meets Kafka in Japan". we'll see if they bite.

now reading The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books by Edward Wilson-Lee. non-fiction book about Christopher Columbus's bastard son's quest to build the most comprehensive library on earth. including prints, posters, and pamphlets. dude was nuts.

Took a break from The Magic Mountain to read Henry Green's Loving. I kind of admired it more than I loved it. It took a while to get to grips with the elliptical dialogue but it's clearly a masterpiece of dramatic irony, culminating in the various shenanigans about the lost ring. And the humour is drier than a sun-bleached skeleton in death valley - excellently done but I can't say it raised more than a sly grin. But that last line! What a joker. I'm certainly not put off reading more of his, maybe my appreciation will develop.

Somewhat disappointed it didn't really fulfil the promise of the conversation that inspired it :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_(novel)

I think that its in line with my experience. I connected with some of Green's novels more than others while finding everything he wrote accomplished and very fine.

Trying to get Strangest Genius on the stained glass windows of Harry Clarke finished after not paying it attention for too long. Book by Lucy Costigan with a lot of photos of the windows in.
I do like Harry Clarke, he seems influenced by Aubrey Beardsley while adding in his own elements.
Oversized book which has contributed to it not being paid as much attention. But seeing the images now a lot of it is pretty breathtaking.

Rashid Khalidi 100 Years War On Palestine
really good book on the oppression of Palestine since the end of WWI when the Ottoman Empire lost control of it and I think a bit before that but book came out in 2020.
Author's family and he himself have been involved in various roles throughout. I wondered if my Dad knew him cos his dad was in the UN and lived in the same New York suburb but it appears to have been a few years earlier than I know my dad was there.
Very good book.

I'm almost done with Wellness, this season's The Corrections and Rabbit novel: one of those The Way We Live Now books that 50 years hence Nathan Hill hopes will show Americans what we cared about in the 2010s.

There's always some damaged, usually older character, occasionally brought forward, in all the Greem novels I've read so far, and that's life, that's what all the people say, along with the humor and sex and gossip and booze---in Loving, the old butler is dying for a start, then the slick guy takes his place, but has his own health or psychosomatic detours, bad vibrations, despite the arrow ov sexnluv, also Doll the daughter-in-law's sex quandary, some desperation on his gf's friend-colleague's part, and the alky older lady-in-service---but the most emotionally involving ones I've read so far are Blindness, Living, Caught, and the memoir/testifyiin' Pack My Bag.

we've been talking about henry green on here for 20 years. that's kinda cool.

I finished Pragmatism. I would be interested to read more contemporary reactions. From today’s perspective many of the ideas are commonplace: That there is no capital T absolute and universal Truth. That truth is a process. That my truth and your truth may prove to be incommensurable. Etc. I guess that’s because James’s views won out, at least in American popular consciousness, and not because he was stating the obvious.

I wonder what Henry thought about that. Did he acknowledge his own subjectivity, or think of himself as uncovering the ultimate Truth? Both?

It feels like I've been leaning heavily on detective/crime fiction lately, but my library hold on Cotton Comes to Harlem came in, so it jumps to the head of the queue.

I wonder what Henry thought about that

He wrote William some letters that were quite effusive in praise and agreement.

Why the devil I didn’t write to you after reading your Pragmatism –how I kept from it—I can’t now explain save by the very fact of the spell itself (of interest & enthrallment) that the book cast upon me: I simply sank down, under it, into such depths of submission & assimilation that any reaction, very nearly, even that of acknowledgement, would have had almost the taint of dissent or escape. Then I was lost in the wonder of the extent to which all my life I have. . . unconsciously pragmatised. You are immensely & universally right. . . .I feel the reading of the book. . .to have been really the event of my summer.

https://library.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/static/onlineexhibits/james/marriage_family/4_9.html

Thanks!

I simply sank down, under it, into such depths of submission & assimilation that any reaction, very nearly, even that of acknowledgement, would have had almost the taint of dissent or escape.

William was not often so generous about Harry's fiction, especially later in life.

btw I consider William James one of the great American prose stylists, bringing that malleable hardness of Twain, Crane, and U.S. Grant to explain abstruse concepts.

William was not often so generous about Harry's fiction, especially later in life.

Well, I'm sure he never would have criticized Henry to any outsider, but it's true that he had a bit of older brother syndrome and presumed to make some comments in private letters wondering why Henry couldn't just write a straightforward romance of the type he enjoyed by, say, Robert Louis Stevenson. And it's true that Henry had the patience of a saint in letting these ill-advised judgments roll off his back. Their relationship was very close, despite being separated by an ocean for many years, and there are some touching moments. Henry was always a favorite uncle of William's offspring. On William's deathbed be made his wife promise that she wouldn't let Henry die alone when his time came (a promise that she kept).

watched Shardlake, thought I'd trt the first CJ Samson book from which it's been adapted, Dissolution. Crap tv, crap book tbh. It's hard to blame Samson for not being as good as Mantel, but it's also hard not to compare. Oddly, one of the problems is shared by both the adaptation and the novel, which is Shardlake himself. In the TV series, it's seeing his bloody face pull the same expression a thousand times an episode, and in the novel it's a related invariability in his mode and pose. Shardlake is in fact persistently and tediously moralistic and somewhat stupid, something he himself recognises. In addition, the who in the dunnit is immediately obvious, and the whole has a flavour of 'modern police procedural transplanted to the 15th century'.

Martin McInnes - In Ascension. Fine. It was fine. It's oddly lopsided in its construction, as McInnes gets the various things he needs to get into place into place. The thematic emphasis is a bit bosky. It's almost all worth it though for the fantastic central sequence of the space journey itself, which has a mesmerising ambience and has been thought through in detail. I felt totally immersed for the entirety of this section. For those who've read it, or those who aren't going to read it, or those who don't mind admittedly rather abstract spoilers: The figure of eight temporal/evolutionary bootstrapping felt a little trite to be honest: things like Dark and 1899 never quite work for me on that basis - these things need to leak in some way to avoid being alienating imo.

Well, I'm sure he never would have criticized Henry to any outsider, but it's true that he had a bit of older brother syndrome and presumed to make some comments in private letters wondering why Henry couldn't just write a straightforward romance of the type he enjoyed by, say, Robert Louis Stevenson. And it's true that Henry had the patience of a saint in letting these ill-advised judgments roll off his back. Their relationship was very close, despite being separated by an ocean for many years, and there are some touching moments. Henry was always a favorite uncle of William's offspring. On William's deathbed be made his wife promise that she wouldn't let Henry die alone when his time came (a promise that she kept).

Well put. There's a lovely photo of Henry 'n' William from the final years.

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

Ernesto Sabato - On Heroes and Tombs

After finishing Cotton Comes to Harlem my overall impression is that Himes was excellent at creating an atmosphere grounded in Black culture, but juiced up considerably in terms of criminality and sexuality. He writes action sequences well. He isn't afraid of being silly or outlandish as long as he's being entertaining. It's pulpy, but he's having some fun with it.

I'm probably going to start next on The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus, Hans J.C. von Grimmelshausen. The author was a soldier in the Thirty Years War, which provides the setting. It's considered a classic in the literature of war, graphically depicting war's violence, its irrationality, and its cruelty, but also the black humor it inspires. My edition is from 2018, with a new translation by J.A. Underwood.

I enjoyed the von Grimmelshausen. Came across it in the local library in the 80s think I got part way through it and then wound up finishing it 20 years later as a college University book but could be remembering that wrong.
Anyway, yeah pretty grotesque satire on philosophy and things.

Do like Chester Himes too.

Reading Pride and Prejudice. I’ll go ahead and say that I had absolutely zero appetite for this sort of thing when I was in school. But having “lived” more, met more people, “grown”, etc, I’m super riveted. Lizzy rules so hard. This is a real all timer, isn’t it?

I think that reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell last year helped warm me up to it or something, I can imagine characters in each showing up in both, especially the haughty arrogant ones.

I'm still reading that insane book about Columbus's kid and its truly blowing my mind. I guess I never really knew anything about Christopher Columbus. I'm only up to the part where he goes on his 4th trip to the new world and he takes his 12 year old kid with him and 5,000 gallons of wine and the batshit insane book that he wrote about the prophecy of the islands and the second coming and they won't let him on the island he discovered so he has to sit out a hurricane in the ocean on his boat. and right before he got there 24 ships left for Spain and 23 of them get wrecked in the hurricane except for the one carrying Columbus's gold! Prophecy! I can't believe this shit is real...

anyway, i took the day off because my allergies were so damn bad and i've been listening to music and thinking of things I want to write about and I picked up my copy of Conversations by Steve Reich and its him having pandemic conversations with his friends and a lot of it is a victory lap were Steve says *wasn't it cool that time i did that one thing* and everyone is like *OMG Steve that was so awesome and it changed my life* and i haven't stopped reading it for hours. I can't stop. I do speed up and slow down my reading somewhat imperceptibly and keep time with a maraca as i go.

but there is a ton of food for thought too and that thing he did that one time WAS really cool and it totally CAN change your life. #itsgonnarain4ever

Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians by Pierre Clastres translated by Paul Auster
anthropologist in Paraguay in the early 60s meets a tribe of previously forest dwelling indigenous who have just moved to the land managed by a farmer. Very interesting study.

The Production of Space Henri Lefebvre
French philosopher looks at the meaning of space. Seems interesting, maybe a bit abstract.

Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard On You?: A Memoir George Clinton
pretty good memoir by the PFunk innovator. Been interesting reading the story behind his main bands. I'm now in the late 80s/early 90s with him so coming towards the end of the book and with music a little less familiar to me. Still pretty interesting. Drugs have had a lot of influence including some negativity. He's also had some financial troubles. But he's surviving and still making creative music. Also helped Sly Stone out. This has been a good read. I want to read Sly's book too.

Reading Pride and Prejudice. I’ll go ahead and say that I had absolutely zero appetite for this sort of thing when I was in school. But having “lived” more, met more people, “grown”, etc, I’m super riveted. Lizzy rules so hard. This is a real all timer, isn’t it?

yes! and a similar journey for me on Austen. i was v scornful at school, and it was only later, possibly even beyond university, i realised she was a great author - that there was considerable stylistic innovation which was intrinsic to the depiction of manners, the development of psychological insight and in general just the fun to be had and humour to be found in the books.

Onto The Age of Extremes. One thing that rules about this is… Hobshawn has this super compelling professor-ly way of writing about history where he is inviting you to speculate and think about why certain things were so before “explaining”, but he does in such a graceful way that isn’t explicitly didactic, it’s just the magic of a really great writer stimulating lots of thought in the reader.

Hobsbawm. Hobshawn is my sock account

Want to read that, thanks!
Lois McMaster Bujold is Jane Austen in Space (Opera), judging by (many comments online and) my gateway, Memory, in which son of regal legends and personal oddball-career-juggling space navy officer/mercenary Miles V. is summoned to home world for social ceremonial reasons, witty intrigue thereby also into security biz office politics, Le Carre-worthy, and unexpected police procedural thereby, also trip way out of town--references to What Has Gone Before brief,clear, and only mentioned when necessary for context. A banger, though need to read Miles back in Space per se for more flash and action out there (though this incl. a tantalizing taste).

Just finished A Month In The Country which was recommended by an ilxor. It was just great.

i love that book.

Finished The Magic Mountain, and Living by Henry Green. Living is much bleaker than Loving, though it does perhaps end on an ambiguous, if not fully optimistic, note. Set in a factory in Birmingham it's almost like a case study in how not to run a business, if it is truly based on his own experience then it doesn't speak well of the state of the british manufacturing industry in the mid 20th century.

Started on Mother and Son by Ivy Compton-Burnett. It has a technique quite similar to Green, the dialogue is generally unleavened with adverbs or descriptions of the speaker's thoughts or attitude. Unlike Green it's almost all dialogue, there's very little description of anything else, which makes it even tougher going. And the 'did they really speak like this back then?' energy is off the charts:

I have not the least objection to the office. Such sensitiveness would rather deserve the name of self-consciousness. And I shall be supported by the thought of their reception.

This from someone being asked to carry some grapes back for his wife.

For a short book it takes a long time for the drama to kick in, when it does it's hard to know how to take it or how much irony is present, it could be deeply serious or high farce (when a character is not once but twice found unintentionally eavesdropping on the reveal of major family secrets I start to strongly suspect the latter).

Ivy has been such an inspiration to me. I considered getting an IC-B tattoo in the past. just her name. though maybe a drawing of her iconic hair-hat would be cool.

we've been talking about her for 20 years on here too a la henry green! the G.O.A.T.s never die.

Melmoth the Wanderer, by Charles Maturin. Heavy on atmosphere and verbiage. Not sure I'm going to stick with it, but there is something about the story that keeps me going. Plus, I like the title.

that sounds like some kind of pulp fiction but there are two different penguin editions, an oxford world classics and a folio society version

I think it's usually considered a typical example of Gothic fiction.

Samuel Beckett - Wat

Watt, that is

watever you say

Wat is it good for

parker young - cheap therapist says you're insane

book of endearing funny and short short stories

xxxxpost Henry Yorke/Green dropped out of Oxford and started as a trainee on the foundry floor of Pontifex & Sons, under his company director-father's eye, while the alternate Henry/Bertie Woosterish heir's father died and son went directly to captain's cabin, without much understanding of how the workers and the overall biz worked. Thinks all the older guys will do fine when laid off, because pension, but the author knows that the workers don't think it's enough to live on. (He prob also knew, like a lot of people did, that World War I had decimated the younger work force, although I don't think he bothers to mention it, maybe seems obvious to his contemporary readers.)
Pontifex lasted another thirty-odd years, might have held on until the very belated post-WWII British economic lift of the 60s, if Henry hadn't gotten so far into his cups, dunno.

in the book it's less like a business more like a school playground, with cliques, rivalries, bullies, apparently no oversight or strategy or evaluation.

I have read a few books and chaps recently, but today arrived Diane Williams' Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, which was featured on Dennis Cooper's blog last week. Two stories in and I am hooked— can't believe I've never read her before.

she's awesome. her collected stories was one of the books that made my pandemic more livable.

oooh thanks for the rec

Obviously GoodReads isn't a good marker for *anything* but I still tend to use it as a database and for logging recommendations: *Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine* has an absurdly low rating on there - to the point where it seems almost pointed or targeted. What's that about?

After "Pragmatism" by William James, I read its wilder, woollier and more metaphysical sequel, "A Pluralistic Universe", in which James endorses panpsychism and a strong form of the Gaia hypothesis. Now I'm reading (for the first time) "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" by David Hume, a work which James frequently refers to and argues with.

...Diane Williams' Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, which was featured on Dennis Cooper's blog last week. Two stories in and I am hooked— can't believe I've never read her before.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Tuesday, May 14, 2024

She does sound interesting.

I haven't thought about Dennis Cooper in years. I think I've blocked him out

Closer (1989), Frisk (1991), Try (1994), Guide (1997), Period (2000)…

I read those books and am still haunted by them. They are supposed to celebrate the beauty of the pain and suffering of gay men but are really degrading and sadistic. I just can’t get on board with that kind of transgressive writing

xxxpost William could be as adventurous as Henry in his own way----here's young William on the Thayer expedition to the Amazon,several levels discussed: https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/19208 (also got on well with his student Gertrude Stein)

A book mentioned in there, which I'd like to read:

Brazil through the Eyes of William James
Letters, Diaries, and Drawings, 1865–1866, Bilingual Edition/Edição Bilíngue

William James

Edited by Maria Helena P. T. Machado
Translated by John M. Monteiro

Publication date: 11/15/2006

In 1865, twenty-three-year-old William James began his studies at the Harvard Medical School. When he learned that one of his most esteemed professors, Louis Agassiz, then director of the recently established Museum of Comparative Zoology, was preparing a research expedition to Brazil, James offered his services as a voluntary collector. Over the course of a year, James kept a diary, wrote letters to his family, and sketched the plants, animals, and people he observed. During this journey, James spent time primarily in Rio de Janeiro, Belem, and Manaus, and along the rivers and tributaries of the Amazon Basin.

This volume is a critical, bilingual (English–Portuguese) edition of William James’s diaries and letters and also includes reproductions of his drawings. This original material belongs to the Houghton Archives at Harvard University and is of great interest to both William James scholars and Brazilian studies experts.
View More
Praise
Brazil through the Eyes of William James comes complete with a full Portuguese text. James’s revealing narrative, his surprisingly witty and whimsical drawings, Professor Machado’s introduction, excellent notes, and overall high-quality book-crafting make this a model volume of great interest.

—Peter Skinner, ForeWord

from xpost "William James and the Deepest South"

That James decided in Brazil in favor of a philosophical life is one of the commonest themes among the American philosopher’s commentators and biographers. According to Ralph Barton Perry, the letters sent from Brazil by James date back to a period of time between his early medical studies and the beginning of his actual philosophical career (74). Jean Wahl states that it is in Brazil that James discovered his inclination to the philosophical understanding of the world in contrast with simple collection of samples and natural species (30). For Robert Richardson (2006), the expedition to the Amazon region was a crucial experience, on the one hand bearing the negative mark of his refusal to be a naturalist and, on the other, bequeathing his passion for detail and special facts.

...As we will see in the last part of this article, James started leaning towards a pluralistic thinking, when confronted with the struggles waged in the “Deepest South.” The transformation stemmed from three efforts, expended with considerable clarity, despite the author’s young age, namely: (i) an effort to observe reality without following established premises, allowing himself to be transformed by new experiences; (ii) an effort to be open to difference and to contact with new cultures, rejecting Agassiz’s racial theories; (iii) an effort towards a non-dogmatic reception of evolutionism, avoiding a new scientific determinism.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds Charles Mackay
Finally getting around to reading this. Not sure how long I've had this copy and think its probably not my first one. & book itself is mid 19th century. But is fascinating now I've started it.
First 2 chapters are on mismanaged fads that happened at the same time in France and the UK respectively. First one I need to look at further cos I think it was later applied managed more rigidly. & mismanagement through novelty, misunderstanding and greed seems to have caused it to sink. Fiat money relies on the fiat dunnit?
Anyway interesting book,

Edward Said The politics of dispossession : the struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969-1994
A selection of shorter pieces by the Palestinian writer. Very interesting, this got back burnered for a few other books a couple of months ago, but now I'm getting into it I want to read all of it. Really need to read Orientalism too. May have sped through it 20 years ago.

The bad trip : dark stars, blown minds and the strange end of the sixties James Riley ,
Dystopian look at the end of the sixties and the destruction of the hippy dream. From what I am aware hippies lingered on for years afterwards and some of what they were doing was in some way positive. But this looks at the darkness.

I haven't thought about Dennis Cooper in years. I think I've blocked him out

Closer (1989), Frisk (1991), Try (1994), Guide (1997), Period (2000)…

I read those books and am still haunted by them. They are supposed to celebrate the beauty of the pain and suffering of gay men but are really degrading and sadistic. I just can’t get on board with that kind of transgressive writing

I read Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds about 45 years ago. It still has value as the pioneering work on the psychology of large social groups. Q-Anon is just a recapitulation of a very old phenomenon.

james tate - riven doggeries

i bought this because it contains the poem “goodtime jesus”, which delighted me and made me laugh when i first read it. overall i do not think this is a very good collection of poems. goodtime jesus is a very funny poem, and most of these involve some attempt at offbeat humour, but most fail. it’s it’s kind of like if kurt vonnegut wrote poetry or something. i have very low self-confidence as a reader of poetry, often reading stuff that’s well regarded, not feeling it, and wondering “what am i not getting?” whereas with this, i feel pretty confident in my evaluation.

That James decided in Brazil in favor of a philosophical life is one of the commonest themes among the American philosopher’s commentators and biographers.

One chronology of WJ’s life sums it up pithily:

“1865: …Despondent from illness and tedium of collecting and packing specimens, resolves to return home, writing family in early June that he is ‘cut out for a speculative rather than an active life’…”

I can relate.

The "Deepest South" essay also incl. his fascination with detail going past collecting specimens etc. in observing the complex racial aspects of Brazilian society, toward a more philosophical and psychological approach.

Also the expedition affected his health, encouraging "a speculative rather than an active life"---as I think is mentioned in Menand's The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas In America.

Dino (Nick Tosches)
Several books on Edouard Manet
Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light (Peter Schjeldahl)

I spotted a new collection of Schjeldahl essays at the bookstore today and resisted buying it.

I didn't know there was a new one. Thanks for the tip! He's a favorite.

james tate - riven doggeries

i bought this because it contains the poem “goodtime jesus”, which delighted me and made me laugh when i first read it. overall i do not think this is a very good collection of poems. goodtime jesus is a very funny poem, and most of these involve some attempt at offbeat humour, but most fail. it’s it’s kind of like if kurt vonnegut wrote poetry or something. i have very low self-confidence as a reader of poetry, often reading stuff that’s well regarded, not feeling it, and wondering “what am i not getting?” whereas with this, i feel pretty confident in my evaluation.

table! I checked out Try, my first Dennis Cooper in 20 years from the library.

nice!

What a handsome man
https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1578101999i/28707898.jpg

Read the Oxford eleven stories paperback. Ranged from alright to pretty bloody fantastic! On the latter end was "The Duel." Charming, cutting and affecting. The relentless tear down and following redemption of a pathetic wannabe bohemian was just a pleasure to read. Loved "Terror:My Friends Story" too. Proper shivers at the end.

I think this return to 19th century Russia was what I needed to kick-start the book-reading engine again. Had a lot of fun with Chekhov

I turn to Chekhov every few years and he's a water fountain after a marathon.

penguin has a 52 stories book

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/565772/fifty-two-stories-by-anton-chekhov-translated-by-richard-pevear-and-larissa-volokhonsky/9780525562382

i've been working through the 13 volumes on project gutenberg but people reckon the translations aren't up to much (the formatting isn't consistent either, which bugs me)

since Alred has brought it up, here is a google summary of Dennis Cooper's Try:

"Simultaneously deadpan and queasily raw, Try is the story of Ziggy, the adopted teenaged son of two sexually abusive fathers whose failed experiment at nuclear-family domesticity has left him stranded with one and increasingly present in the fantasies of the other. He turns from both of these men to his uncle, who sells pornographic videos on the black market, and to his best friend, a junkie whose own vulnerability inspires in Ziggy a fierce and awkward devotion"

Ok, I admit there is some sense of redemption there in the retelling - but it didn't feel like that at all to me when I was reading the book or when the book was over. It just felt debasing. I don't need that in my life

I bought all of these books when they came out but gave them all away, and am not interested in reading them again to see if I was wrong, they were just too painful

I'm 60 pages from the end and I'll have a few things to say tomorrow.

The New Yorker's Jennifer Wilson has a very appealing take on Claire Messud's This Strange Eventful History---have any of you read the book itself? Local library's only The Burning Girl" Good? What else of hers should I read, if any?

here's the review, not paywalled for now:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/13/this-strange-eventful-history-claire-messud-book-review

Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu (abridged Penguin version) - Very hard to speak intelligently of something written in 11th century Japan; the world is just entirely alien to me in a way that even, say, 19th century Paris is not. So yeah, most of this is about how Genji, the Emperor's illegitimate son, is just the most awesome dude, better at poetry and dance and scholarship than anyone else, and everyone loves him and those that don't it's just because they're jealous. Of course this guy also fucks, a lot, including some occasions that a modern reader will view as rape and grooming. Can't say I was getting much out of it aside from ethnographic interest and the occasional beautifully lyrical passage...but then, quite long into it, Genji falls out of favour with the court, takes up residence in a desolate fishing village and, even though he's only in his late 20's, turns to talking a lot about the sadness of days gone by and the approach of death. Now this I can get with! We live and we die, there's yer human condition for ya, in 21st century London or 11th century Japan.

Lovely post on Genji. Makes me want to read it.

Shakespeare's Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays, A Selection

The NYRB paperback is a great endeavour in the first place. A re-print of a translation from the period that produces some of the greatest stylists the English language has seen.

The problem is that its only a partial selection, that's an issue at times as "An Apology for Raymond Sebond" gets cut (its a book by itself) and the oversell on Shakespeare which leads to (every now and then) annoying speculation.

This should've been like their reprint of Burton's Anatomy. Do it fully, without the overreach. I hope Penguin or someone else can reprint the full translation one day.

I want to get back to Genji this summer. I had to take a break about halfway through. It got to the point where I was writing in the names of every character in the margins to keep track of them (the Tyler translation frequently uses their titles or certain identifying descriptions, e.g. "the lady in the east wing", which change frequently.)

I also have this on the shelf, Seidensticker's memoir during his time translating Genji, which to be honest I bought because it's one of the prettiest looking books I've ever seen.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1438819207i/194631.jpg

the penguin deluxe edition (tyler) of Genji is relatively cheap as an ebook at the moment i noticed but i don't know how much of the deluxity translates to digital i don't know. 2k+ pages though. nevermind the quality, feel the width.

Finished two small things by cult figure Frank Kuenstler , thought long-lost but found in some archive by audio archivist and writer Michael Klausman. Typical 70s experimentalism but some nice weird moments in the poems.

Also finished another by Thomas Delahaye, who is among the more interesting experimental poets working today, I think, as well as Catriona Strang’s Unfuckable Lardass, an excellent book of poems that sprung from a hideous comment made about Angela Merkel. It’s an odd and refreshing book that gets into misogyny, particularly against menopausal and post-menopausal people.

Now onto nightly reading of Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, which I am reading for a big group art project thing, and then morning reading of Marc Masters’ book on the history of the cassette tape

the deluxity of Genji means it's 8MB rather than the usual 1. lots of spot illos and the odd map and diagram (which are never great, either stupidly low resolution and about an inch square, or so large that they don't fit onto a page). copious notes. terrible penguin boilerplate cover.

I should've been grossed out by the un-consensual underage sex in Try, but instead I reacted as if I'd watched a Gregg Araki flick.

I'm now listening to the audiobook of Homer's The Iliad (with a very good translation by Emily Wilson and narration by Audra McDonald). I read it in high school, but forgot that the death of Patroclus and Achilles' subsequent wrath was the culmination.

Next I'm going for Homer's The Odyssey by the same team, and then I'm going to tackle James Joyce's Ulysses

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o - Devil on the Cross

Never read a novel that centred the struggle against imperialism in quite this way. Set in post-Indepedence Kenya, its subject is really how the struggle against colonialism goes on. How that mindset poisons everything. A really unique kinda book.

i started reading The Dog of Tithwal by Saadat Hasan Manto, the renowned Indian short story writer who migrated to Pakistan after the partition of India. he is considered one of the greatest modern Indian fiction writers, and i am a fan of great modern fiction, so, its nice to have this translation of stories. He wrote 22 collections of short stories and died in 1955. A lot of stories about Bombay and the partition. Lots of darkness and lots of humor too. the style is my kinda style.

I finally finished The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus. The Introduction to the Penguin edition tried hard to sell this as cri de coeur against the brutality of the Thirty Years War, but the book didn't match that description at all. Instead it struck me as 'a book of tales and wonders', designed to entertain more than anything else, full of ribaldry, trickery and greed. And it was entertaining, if a bit repetitious.

From time to time the author made it a point to tut-tut and say how sinful and un-Christian all those activities were, but I got the distinct feeling that the intermittent sermonizing was just a sop that allowed the book to escape censorship. Mostly it was a book to feed one's imagination on tales of derring-do, easy wealth and unlimited license to ignore ordinary morality.

Sindbad and Other Stories from the Arabian Nights (tr. Husain Haddaway).

It comes with an intro by the translator, which reveals the project to be a hit back on the 'orientalism' with which affected both the reception of these stories - - both in their authenticity and their past translations - - which means that (past translator) Burton's language is toned down, but also the lewdness of some of the episodes are fully rendered.

I've returned to Katherine Anne Porter, a favorite.

i haven't read her in decades. those stories blew my mind. i'd like to go back and re-read them sometime. they had a big effect on me. they also made me realize how much great stuff was out there that nobody had really told me about or that i hadn't read about. despite her once-upon-a-time fame, it wasn't like everyone was raving about KAP in the 80s. outside of a short story class or american lit history class probably.

"Flowering Judas" and "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" used to appear in high school lit anthologies, dunno now.

yeah, she was anthologized a lot.

I reread "Old Mortality," one of the cutting fictions I've read about what family does in memory and in the flesh.

She's never been fashionable but she's one of our best imo

i agree. i never finished Ship Of Fools though. its all about those stories for me. they are quite an achievement.

Yeah, I've got a big collection of her stories, been thinking I'll dive in soon---seems like she has a better rep for those than the novels?
Speaking of Indian short stories, I've come across an intriguing in-depth take on R.K. Narayan's Malgudi Days: "No one disputes his charm and compassion," but some people---well,Naipul--while calling Narayan "a born writer," thinks he's too accepting of conditions of poverty---others say that the protest is implicit---descriptions can incl. some pretty tough stuff, also the comic twists can be pretty sharp, also judging by descriptions, which tend to get more detailed, like "Betcha can't eat just one": a good sign, when even nonpartisan reviewers get pulled in that direction.

Drive your plow over the bones of the dead - Olga Tokarczuk. funniest book I've read in a long time. An extremely sympathetic portrayal of a type of person familiar to me. Horoscopes, ecology, murder, the solipsism of an old lady. It's a good melting pot, loved it.

Reading Dostoevsky's poor folk at the moment and struck by the genius of allowing your first work to be the letters of two people who are meant to be poor writers haha. All criticism can be deferred to that fact! So far, it doesn't reach the heights of his more famous works. It's subtlety won't let it. But you can see the seed in it.

Reading a Pushkin collection at the same time (as poor folks character are). A forceful measure, I'm entirely ignorant and inexperienced with poetry, but I'm enjoying it and you have to start somewhere.

I'm taking another stab at Eula Bliss - Having and Being Had, prompted by moving in with my gf and it being one of the books we own two copies of between us. I've never read anything else of hers that I know of (maybe magazine articles? She seems New Yorkerish) but I like her writing, and her concerns accord with mine in this season of life.

Also a big brick of a book, The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón by Claudio Lomnitz, which rose to the surface during unpacking and called out to me after collecting dust on my shelves for years. It is clearly a labor of love for the author to resurrect the doomed international community of anarchists that surrounded Magón, and his passion is infectious.

And I just started listening to Serge Tankian's memoir on audiobook. Trying to decide whether it's rude to fast-forward through the Armenian genocide, which I admittedly know very little about (feel free to recommend books on the subject)

re: Olga Tokarczuk, I've really enjoyed but also been a little frustrated by her Flights, a 'novel' with 100 or so small chapters of musings about transit and in-between spaces as a diarist, and maybe 10 larger chapters which advance the story forward, but even those not in an obvious linear or connected way

I think I've posted this before

Masters’ book on cassettes, ‘High Bias,’ is much more fluffy than I thought it would be, though I am still enjoying myself reading details of taper culture and etc.

And here’s where I admit that re: the Odyssey, I just don’t care about this stuff. I never really did when I was younger, either, and since one can easily absorb the epic’s themes, symbolism, and signifiers easily enough without ever reading it, I think I am going to stop reading the Wilson translation. I don’t really know how I am going to work on this project with friends— it involves me writing a piece about a multimedia performance concert composed by twelve people or so, put on at a new music fest in Canada— but I will do the supplemental reading and think I should be fine. I just find myself bored bored bored with the book!

Not the most articulate post, I am pre-coffee, apologies

IMO the best part of The Odyssey is the second half, after Odysseus returns to find his house full of moochers with designs on his wife. I read the Fagles translation. I've recently been reading a bit of this and that. Finished Hume's "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding". Read Descartes's "Meditations on First Philosophy". Finished "Cawdor", a long narrative poem by Robinson Jeffers (spoiler alert: taking a much younger wife causes trouble). Been reading some spooky 19th-century tales by Wilkie Collins ("A Terribly Strange Bed" is a highlight). And now starting "Matter and Memory" by Henri Bergson.

Yeah, I've got a big collection of her stories, been thinking I'll dive in soon---seems like she has a better rep for those than the novels?

Just one novel whose reputation preceded it, so when it became a huge hit on release (and inspired a fucking terrible movie) it was pretty much forgotten afterward.

pascal quignard - the tears. bought his new one - Lord Chandos' Answer on whim, but it's blown past its publishing date, and I'm on holiday, so i got this out from the library instead.

tl;dr review: I don't know, I have no idea.

I don't know what to make of it! It's a collection of more or less fabulistic fragments that collect around the lives of two notional twin grandsons of Charlemagne, Harthnid and Nithard.

The style is a particularly gallic form imv; I don't mean the typical and exuberant 'gallic' essay style of Paul Hazard in The Crisis of the European Mind, for instance, but the opposite: a compressed, economic style to relate a history, which you also see in Pierre Michon and Eric Vuillard, I guess you might even see it as a feature of Camus. In this form, it takes on the quality of a child's story, a fable, as I've said, and denudes the text of explanatory force. This means as histories these texts have a sort of gnostic sententiousness, or a phatic opacity. If you accept the link with Camus, there it would be the opacity of purpose of an absurd universe. In Quignard it is to construct a method of history that takes the often fantastic stories recorded in chronicles, annals and histories – genesis of peoples, lineages, topographical features and local histories, cultural behaviour – on their own terms, and in the matter-of-fact economy style that characterises old chronicles:

In stories dating back to ancient times, there is often mention of great wonders. It isn't that there are fewer such wonders these days intervening – quite as unexpectedly as before – in the course of our lives. But their ocurrence doesn't register in the mind as it did in days of old, when, in the repetition of the tasks of ordinary life, nothing new really made calls upon it.

The memory of their surprising nature also fades because we are wary of noting them in family records, in res gestae, in chronicles, in private diaries, in history books, in engagement books.

So miracles seem less frequent to us, when in fact the world abounds with them

That conveys something of the method or spirit.

There is a line that starts a Michon book – is it Vies Minisculesp? – that says something like 'Let us describe a genesis for our pretensions'. Part of Quignard's purpose is to describe a genesis for Europe and for French letters, not just a historical genesis, but a spiritual genesis. I should give a flavour of it:

It was then that the defeated Franks told them of Sar's prophecy. They remembered now that everything she had predicted in the most minute detail three years before had come about: the rain, the river bursting its banks, the knees getting soaked, the surprise attack, etc. Then the Norsemen asked where Sar lived. Under torture, one of the Franks who had been taken prisoner pointed out to the young Icelandic sailors where the shaman had chosen her cave in the cliffs. The Norsemen climbed the slop, drove away the gulls, entered the cave, drove out the bats, took her by the arm and put her eyes out. Her blue pupils flowed and flowed without end. This is how the Somme was created, which now sends its endless flow out into the North Sea, reaching as far as the port of London.

So, that captures quite nicely the blend of compressed history and fable.

By the way, everything I'm writing needs *"I think"* in very heavy emphasis around it, because as I say I'm really not sure what to make of it. The chapters are extremely short, and I've been taking notes on many of them to try and keep track of how it all correlates. A lot - a *lot* - of my notes say 'I have no idea what this chapter is about' 'I really don't know what this means'. I feel a bit illiterate when I'm reading it – is this history or something that he's made up? is this a real myth? what is the symbolism here? I have no idea. why? to what end? i have no idea &c &c.

Harthnid fucks and fights a lot - there's quite a lot of women taking his 'member' (that's not me being prudish, it's the word in the translation) in their hands, mouths, loins etc. Nithard (see what he did there) is history recorder, a bookworm, a copyist and linguist.

The subject is love and loss all treated in immensely cryptic way – 'The Tears' are formed many times, but to take one example they are formed out of a shadow on a bar-room wall, left by a cheating bell-ringing husband who, seeing his wife, fled the bar so quickly he left his shadow. A renowned artist then comes along and creates an artwork *around* the shadow that tells the story of a dark lake 'of Origin' into which a goddess weeps...

For it seems that this mysterious water that runs down the faces of men goes back there sometimes, while it is possible that in the depts of every living being it merely dries out. I have known many men in whose depths that water had evaporated

I actually found this all quite moving, by by god it's all so abstruse. Maybe necessarily so, maybe this is how we need to approach love, grief and solitutde.

So, very much *unlike* Michon (it all shares some similarities with his incredible Winter Mythologies/Abbots etc - one of the best things ever *read it*), I'm finding it a real slog. I am also finding it fascinating, and it's super-dense. Trying to find details in its tiny chapters is so hard, because it's all so rich. So I ended up wondering if it was me not him. I am feeling more and more illiterate as I get older, and less and less capable of approaching fiction with any sort of seriousness. I think the great value of the book is that it does approach difficult subjects in a way that is very far from simplistic and which requires of the reader a sort of negative capbility to fill in the uncertainty.

oh, the relationship between the animal world, in particular horses, and people is important. no i don't know why. also it's all taking place within the great 'pincer' movement on the Franks between the Norsemen and the Arab world.

in short: I don't know. I have no idea. which may be the point. I don't know.

also I read The Honjin Murders – Seishi Yokomizo. A classic Japanese locked-room mystery. Kind of fascinating - the whole picturesque apparatus of the mystery is part of the solution to the deadly deed - kind of bootstrapped out of its environment. And although a lot of post-golden age development of the. detective story is to improve the quality of psychological motivations and character, this is the only one I've read that actually makes the psychological factor the key element - as in it dictates the necessity of the killing *and* its method - it's an ingenious piece of writing I think. Roger Ackroyd is a named influence I think (no, not in that way), as is John Dickson Carr and, interestingly AA Milne, a novel called the The Red House Mystery – I didn't realise he wrote detective fiction.

The style is a little plain (which may be the translation)

in short: I don't know. I have no idea. which may be the point. I don't know.

i find myself puffing my cheeks a lot and thinking 'wait, why am i reading this?'

intellectual and critical decay.

lol goodreads review of Quignard's Hatred of Music

The Hatred of Music has an irresistible back story. The author, Pascal Quignard, was renowned in the field of baroque music when "in 1994 he abruptly resigned from all of his professional administrative activities, both musical and literary." He proceeded to write Hatred "in the wake of this resignation."

...

When I gave up reading Hatred, I was satisfied that Quignard quit a good job less because he had had some dreadful epiphany about music and more because he is a supercilious, strange, French man.

i mean, i'm not saying the reviewer is *right*, but also, are they really RONG? this is the question with which i'm grappling as i read the tears.

> Seishi Yokomizo

there are over 70 of these, about 6 or 7 of which have been recently translated and published by Pushkin. of the 5 I've read only 1 has been a bit duff.

(and one of them is in the Kindle deals for this month)

> Seishi Yokomizo

there are over 70 of these, about 6 or 7 of which have been recently translated and published by Pushkin. of the 5 I've read only 1 has been a bit duff.

they aren't quite doing them in order afaict (and i skipped one, but have just bought a copy) and some of them do briefly mention previous tales

at this rate i will be dead before they get anywhere near the end

I'm reading Elizabeth Taylor's first published novel, At Mrs Lippincote's.

why does it give me so much joy that you guys read elizabeth taylor!! it just does. it does my heart good. she's so good and so entertaining.

I'd be fine if the only novelist whose books I was stuck with were Taylor.

*Taylor's

The Glutton by AK Blakemore is so good. Audiobook version is also extremely well narrated. Don't think I've read anything so well written in years, it's an absolute joy

never read at mrs lippincote’s. but was walking thru the park the other day and someone was on a bench reading it and i was “omg i love elizabeth taylor” to the person’s understandable bemusement.

I bloody love Elizabeth Taylor. I have Lippincote's on my shelf, unread.

I wrote about it on the Plath thread but I've nearly finished the Clark biography, Red Comet - all 1100 pages of it. It's terrific.

fizzles ilu

I finished the Taylor. As in her other books I've read, it mostly consists of many small things happening, but there is always in every small happenstance a bumping together of personalities asserting themselves in conflicting ways that creates a tiny jolt where something moves, almost imperceptibly, until by the end she has described all you need to know about her characters and their effect on one another for good or ill. In Mrs Lippincote's, Taylor rolls out some major revelations in the final pages that were only quietly hinted at before, but her groundwork has been so thorough that I accepted them without demur.

I have begin reading Life with Picasso, Françoise Gilot & C. Lake, a memoir.

*begun*

The Husbands, Holly Gramazio. Speculative rom com, a genre I'm delighted exists, but I probably won't be reading more of. This was entertaining enough, a couple of moments produced actual audible gasps, but it got pretty samey by the end.

Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck. I've enjoyed her Visitation and Go, Went, Gone but halfway through this isn't really working for me. It's about the romantic relationship between a 19 year old woman and a 53 year old married man and... not much else? It's set in east berlin in the late 80s so maybe the second half will get more political, there have been hints so far - when she gets a pass to visit Cologne and sees homeless people for the first time was the most interesting bit.

What I read in May.

Thanks, Alfred. The Mike Nichols quote re revelation of the other Elizabeth Taylor's "ability to handle...the verbal material" reminds me of Truman Capote's coverage in Portraits and Observation: not only does she own and read so many books, she understands them. This is far from his usual take on actors (he thinks the smarter ones know they're usually better off just taking direction, with Marlon Brando the hilariously pretentious bookworm exception, who somehow doesn't prove the rule, at least not too often, judging by"THe Duke In His Domain, " which combines amazing monologues by Brando and ace detective work by TC, both about the Artist's claims and just wtf is actually going on with Sayonara[[1957], despite being barred from the set, and because it and Brando are in Japan, we get some good stuff about Japan.)
Oh yeah, back to Taylor" great quotes from her, and Capote is mainly worried about her taste in men---Eddie Fisher is referred to as "the busboy," but at least he's out of the picture---yet Burton, who seems to have a touch of the poet onscreen, only talks about money, at least to Tru, which seems like it will have proved incompatible with her idealism and philosophical preoccupations (which I've come across in other Hollywood chronicles where she turns up).
Also good days and evenings with Marilyn Monroe and Willa Cather---more about this massive collection another time.

Second half of Kairos shaping up to be a stone cold bummer, the 53 year old cheating on his wife with a 19 year old is, surprise surprise, a manipulative abusive monster!

The politics of dispossession : the struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969-1994 Edward W.Said,
a collection of short articles related to Palestine by author with his roots there. I found it an educating read interesting to note how many current problems he's addressing in the 80s Wound up having to read it pretty fast after neglecting it for months. So may need to revisit in future,
I have Orientalism out at the moment too.

Understanding The Nazi Genocide : Marxism After Auschwitz Enzo Traverso
leftist writer summarises and critiues histories of the Holocaust.
Interesting read, will try to read some more by him.

The big con : the classic story of the confidence man and the confidence trick David W Maurer,
1940 book on con men reprinted just before the millennium and recommended in something I read over the last year.

The thirteenth tribe : the Khazar Empire and its heritage Arthur Koestler,
history of the Khazars a medieval eastern European nation who converted to judaism as a state religion.

The invention of ancient Israel : the silencing of Palestinian history Keith Whitelam

After flopping around in Creeley’s early collected for a few days, I picked up a copy of Lee Harwood’s ‘HMS Little Fox’ at a stoop sale and have been reading that during evenings and nap time— I have a hard time sleeping 8 hours in a row but am a champion napper, for whatever reason. He’s an interesting poet, for sure.

Breakfast reading now taken up with André Schiffrin’s ‘The Business of Books,’ which I am gobbling up— nothing like stories of corporate conglomerates running and ruining mass culture to get me going.

Cahokia Jazz – Frances Spufford

If this had been a pulp/airport novel, mixing it with a lot of indifferent, throwaway stuff, I would have thought it was punching well above its weight and would have probably been quite enthusiastic. However, blurb quotes like the one from the TLS saying 'With this third novel Spufford joins the front rank of living novelists' are laughable.

The first pages prompted two thoughts immediately, 'is this supposed to be pastiche?' and 'urgh, this reads like China Mieville'. Oh, and it reminded me of Disco Elyium, but that's one more mark in the 'pastiche' column (Disco Elysium much better). Vanilla quality Chandler similes, that sort of thing.

But *how* does it read like China Mieville? It's an interesting question because it's not bad in the obvious Mielville ways - Spufford can write ok. I *think* – and I've managed to pick up a lousy cold [update: covid ffs] on return from holiday so I'm pretty foggy – that it is to do with 'world building' (not a phrase I love - what else are you doing when you're writing a book?)

So a got some amusement when I read in Spufford's acknowledgments at the end that he was (and I haven't got it in front of me so this is a paraphrase) indebted to China Mielville for a single vital suggestion. But doesn't say what the suggestion was.

I think something they share, possibly, is the feeling, especially strong here, that they are describing a film – the words on the page are not in and of the world. Their relation to the world is muted, like you're seeing it through cellophane. So maybe it does relate to descriptive weaknesses after all. It was something about the spartan map at the beginning that made me feel it too - like it lacked in richness of imagination. Maybe that's it? There isn't enough richness in the background, so you feel what's on the page is everything, rather than the writer selecting details from a rich inner view.

It's an alternate history, a genre I quite like – The Alteration and The Man in the High Castle are favourite books. Spufford says he decided not to deal with the crux of the alteration (a weaker strain of flu brought over by the Spanish iirc), but I think this is a huge mistake. Your alteration has to be at the centre of things in some way, creating the constraints and difficulties and descriptive and moral strangenesses. The alteration is at a distance, and indeed you're very unlikely to guess what it is until Spufford tells you in his acknowledgments imv.

There are some strengths, the development of Joe Barrow, the Aztec lore, and I felt it picked up as it went on tbh, but in the end, it was very good for what i used it as, which was a beach book.

I read *Bluets* by Maggie Nelson.

1. It made me think of a less garrulous Patricia Lockwood.
2. I wasn't sure what the sex was for (could be one of Nelson's aphorisms but equally, I'm not sure what the sex was for).
3. I haven't looked for who came first.
4. 'Tell a dream, lose a reader' is the least observed truism in writing.
5. Our moods do not believe in each other.
6. I looked for more blue things today and saw a heron being mobbed by a seagull.
7. The Joan Mitchell painting is lovely.
8. I do actually like aphoristic texts jumbled into (cleverly organised) abstraction.
9. It's got Knausgård on the back, it must be good.
10. I do not repeat myself but I say the same thing over and over again.

I do not like Maggie Nelson. The two books of hers I have read seemed sort of “mainstream queer,” facile in their observations and smugly liberal-but-thinks-they’re-leftists politics. Whenever people say they love her, it’s a red flag for me lol

but in the end, it was very good for what i used it as, which was a beach book.
Reminds me of something I read recently---already blanking on title and most else---but incl. an agreeable quotation, a sentence or two, bobbing along in the tide, from Peter Benchley's Jaws. And your mention of The Man In The High Castle reminds me that PKD doesn't necessarily bother with much description, knowing that a strong enough situation can do more with less, as happened with the Jaws quote,although I haven't read that book, don't know how it holds up.
At first, I thought that TMITHC was seeming too drab and low-key (way back when I was reading a lot of colorful hustle-bustle science fiction), but then I found myself swaying through windy grimy old San Francisco streets with a raincoat character, getting immersed in the lasting effects of Japanese Occupation, an alternate Post-WWII 1961, I guess, since that was when it was published and it seemed like the same year (from my childhood). Bay Area native and early resident (Le Guin's successfully invisible schoolmate at Berkeley High) PKD evidently familiar enough with said streets to imagine and convey how such walks might feel.As with Benchley's Hollywood-ready High Concept, don't disturb this groove.
So I can see how Spufford's distancing could be frustrating in one way but work out as immersive, lulling beach read. (Maybe that's what more flattering reviewers can't admit to themselves, like with some of the things blurbed for "spare, elegant prose." Turns out: duh, yeah, it's easy to read!)

Xp I can see the smug liberal accusation tabes. Not sure I can see the value of pathologising people who read her, like.

I kind of liked The Argonauts but that kind of memoir and most memoirs for the most part don't sit well with me. It is something I can't recommend to anyone

I read the first two Jon Fosse novels of the three-volume Septology, so far it is an amazing work, shrouded in grief and full of religious belief, with doppelgängers of some of the characters and with a very atmospheric sense of rural Norway. It has many commas and question marks and many instances of hesitations like "I think" and "yes" and "maybe", but no periods, just a run-on sentence

I read that Fosse is associated with Karl Ove Knausgärd, and have started listening to the first part of his 6-part My Struggle, which is maybe 4000 pages long

Chinaski I recommend Gass's On Being Blue as a sort of companion volume/tonic for Nelson. I liked Nelson at points but also found it a little weighty. Gass I am in the tank for and On Being Blue is really him having fun.

seconding

I also love On Being Blue, and Gass in general.

I do not like Maggie Nelson. The two books of hers I have read seemed sort of “mainstream queer,” facile in their observations and smugly liberal-but-thinks-they’re-leftists politics. Whenever people say they love her, it’s a red flag for me lol

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Sunday, June 9, 2024 3:00 PM

incredible stuff lol

red flags for everyone

Lol imagine being a red flag over a queer author who sold a few books for a while.

Love getting you two riled up over literally nothing, Nelson (like Solnit) has publicly trashed leftists and radical movements for not being polite enough for her upper class liberal sensibilities, I like plenty of people with whom I don’t agree but a “red flag” in this instance literally means “i cannot trust this person’s politics.” nothing more.

also, admittedly, i both distrust and resent rich writers who were able to financially go into the fellowship-residency-visiting faculty circle. getting onto that track takes money, and many more worthwhile writers who don’t have it will never get the exposure they deserve. this isn’t shocking or surprising or anything new, but i still dislike it and distrust such people

"a “red flag” in this instance literally means “i cannot trust this person’s politics.” nothing more."

And that would be a strange conclusion on that person. I personally would need a bit more than that but you do you.

Got a great deal into that David Maurer The Big Con and can see how the Sting relates to it. Since the story is pretty much given as one of the set ups. Book is really interesting, may be a bit dated but it is 84 years old. Hearing about marks swallowing the con so deeply that they seek out the con men after losing a load of money thinking they will win next time is priceless and only part of the story. seem to be even worse cases of gullibility or self-conning
I can't remember what turned me onto the book but it's a good read.

"a “red flag” in this instance literally means “i cannot trust this person’s politics.” nothing more."

And that would be a strange conclusion on that person. I personally would need a bit more than that but you do you.

I am reading M. John Harrison’s ‘Climbers’ on the recommendation of a friend, I am having a great time reading about UK dirtbag climber culture of the 80s.

That's interesting about Spufford. I've seen so many positive reviews of his books over the years, but I've struggled to get through single paragraphs without cringing. The new one (British guy does indigenous American culture) seems like the Sort Of Thing We Don't Do Now, for good reasons.

right. and i wondered this. me circling round pastiche and the sense of being at a remove when reading it is another way of saying there’s a distance there. it feels research intensive and i think you can usually smell that on the page. exceptions being Pynchon, where yeah it’s clearly research intensive but that’s the wild trip you’re on and it’s super super dense or, say, Hilary Mantel, who manages something like alchemy turning what must have been an extraordinary amount of reading into a world with the material and psychological detail and presence of a george eliot novel.

where here i got the sense of someone going (and this horribly unfair but hey it’s ilx) “heres a topic i can do some literary fiction at”

There’s a question of whether an English author can or should do this sort of thing - yeah my view tends to be “you can do anything you like” - but certainly an english writer tackling US race relations thru an alternate history of the south in a noir style… you gotta go be pretty sure of your chops imo. or cut loose in the way that say, Percival Everett (or Pynchon!) does and just go “no rules, sux to be you if you don’t like it”.

the modes and methods of literary fiction as it is taught by people like spufford militate against that imv.

i’m still very curious about the mieville point! because my immediate reaction was “oh god this reads like mieville” - regulars will know i’m not a fan, and apologies to those who are - so id love to know what the *single suggestion* was. the key to that manner and approach i don’t like… i might email him, but will have to be mealy mouthed about my appreciation for it.

(Maybe that's what more flattering reviewers can't admit to themselves, like with some of the things blurbed for "spare, elegant prose." Turns out: duh, yeah, it's easy to read!)

yeah i'm cautious about *recommending* against reviewers and though I draw the line at 'one of the finest writers of the 21st century so far' everyone seemed to *love* it, can't find a bad review. The most I'd like to claim is it didn't entirely work for me above the level of 'fun'. i like plenty of bad stuff and don't like a lot of good stuff, and I hope people itt read and like Spufford/Cahokia Jazz.

i'll usually recommend stuff i love, but don't really believe in anti...dis......un...recommendations (how long can i carry on blaming covid for my mental decay), and there's nothing i love more than someone who can show to me that my cavils or dismissals have caused me to miss out on an actually excellent piece of music, book, volume of poetry, film etc that I then come to enjoy thanks to that person.

also i go through cycles - when I first joined ilx it was because i asked a friend what to do about the fact that i was consuming everything i already knew or was validated - classics etc, and not just books - that there was no route in for things outside my existing ambit. I think the phrase I used was 'breathing my own exhalations'. Friend said 'hey you should go on ilx' so i did, and was v grateful for it.

that meant picking up very deliberately a load of new stuff and not applying the 'classics' mentality, where everything you read is the quality of idk Flaubert or whatever. it means you're going to read things that are likely to have things that are done well and things that are done less well, and sometimes things that are entirely shit, but that engaging with that process is an essential corollary of reading great works. And you do it because doing it means you're treating with people who are at the very least working *in* the contemporary world, ideally refreshing the artistic and cultural mores modes and forms so their art is operating in and illuminating the now, rather than running on the generational fumes of the hegemonic cohort where most things operate, and even better just ahead of the now, speculating, divining, painting.

but right now I'm at the... aphelion (the furthest away one – I just checked) of that approach, where i'm tired of the sheer amount of middle-ranking stuff and have less tolerance for there being something of interest in most things. That may just be because of a lack of energy and time on my part tbh... and focus actually. but regardless there is a 'this isn't as good as it should be' response (Spufford) or a 'really tho?' response (Quignard).

so yeah, I'd hate to think anyone who might see Cahokia Jazz and have their interest tweaked might go 'nah actually' because of anything i'd posted (total egomania - covid, promise). It's got Aztec symbolism freighted in by Jesuits as a controlling and protective false consciousness and popular belief system for a city/state community preserving racial and indigenous power ffs and who's not going to have their curiousity piqued by *that*.

anyway, wrote him an email asking about the Miéville thing.

aw, he responded extremely promptly with a very nice and informative email.

In sum: Everyone read Cahokia Jazz, it's great.

I read Light Perpetual by Spufford some time age for a book club, and I liked it, though a flippant take would be "the 7up series did it better"; def no issues with cultural tourism in this one, it is very very British. He also has a certain amount of style, and I feel like amongst the kind of books his audience reads that's not very common?

former ilxor max is a fan of Cahokia Jazz iirc

right - it may even have been from max's substack that i picked up the rec? At least it was floating round my head for some reason, which is why i got it as a holiday read.

Mevlido's Dreams, the latest of Antoine Volodine's to be translated, is now out from Univocal @ UMinn, I started it yesterday. It's big like Radiant Terminus. Seems great so far but I'm completely in the tank for this guy, there isn't a living writer whose work just hits all my pleasure centers like Volodine

Oho, ahoy: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/07/08/from-nowhere-an-interview-with-antoine-volodine/ Looks promising; where should we start?

Yeah, that description in dow's link sounds like catnip for me.

Also on my list is the sequel to Sergio Pitol's The Love Parade.

lol i saw moira donegan express regret today for having once loved 'the argonauts'

moira donegan…

go on . . .

every generation gets the market apologist they deserve

lol i saw moira donegan express regret today for having once loved 'the argonauts'

― mookieproof, Saturday, 15 June 2024 bookmarkflaglink

This behavior really is lol.

I finished Life with Picasso. It was well written and well observed, full of anecdote, and gives a very full and revealing portrait of Picasso in his 60s. That was enough to keep my interest, mainly because Picasso was an interesting character who led a very eventful life. The best parts of the book were Picasso speaking about his art, his methods, and his evaluations of other artists and their work. Francoise Gilot was able to recall some of those conversations in great detail and they were quite illuminating. These bits were few, but valuable.

The other, lesser, parts of the book display Picasso, the person, rather than the artist. They were necessary to include in this memoir of their relationship, but simply put, he was an egoist, often cruel, and psychologically abusive. His rationalizations for his behavior were rather amazing, showing the sort of acuteness that he brought to his art, but in the service of manipulation for his selfish ends. He used DARVO at an unusually refined level, but it was still DARVO. There's some fascination in seeing this side of him through the eyes of the person he manipulated, but it's also wearing to expose oneself to it, even at second hand.

Girouard, Big Jim
Berenyi, Fingers Crossed
Hoban, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

i read On Locations: Lessons Learned from My Life on set with The Sopranos and in the Film Industry by Mark Kamine

it's much more than a sopranos crew member trying to cash in on their behind the scenes knowledge, really an admirable, heady look @ the movie biz life, largely bereft of gossip or star fuckery. recommended for fans of final cut -RIP Steven Bach, former United Artists exec and author of "Final Cut," one of the essential books about movies

I've started an early Eric Ambler spy thriller, Background to Danger (aka Uncommon Danger), published in 1937. It uses various tropes that Hitchcock soon picked up and used in his various spy thrillers, mostly the ordinary man who is innocently caught up in a web of international intrigue and must call upon all his resourcefulness to outwit his professional opponents. It is a period piece now, but well done.

pretty sure i've read that ambler if it's the one that starts out in an industrial region of italy? have yet to read one of his that bests epitaph for a spy.

currently in the middle of the minor english poet wh davies's adventures of a super tramp. was enjoying his retelling of his days hoboing around america and experiences in hobo jungles & work camps in the late nineteenth century till it suddenly hit an unpleasantly racist seam that's effectively tarnished it all.

“say nothing” (a dua lipa recommended book)

It's Ambler's Cause for Alarm that starts out in an industrial region of italy and is unabashedly anti-fascist. This one begins in Nuremberg, but rapidly moves to Austria. The anti-fascist element is there, but more muted.

ah right, cause for alarm it was!

the proper title for the davies book is *autobiography* of a super tramp, not adventures (also as i discovered later in the book he was welsh not english). it's an interesting portrait of the down & out milieux of both sides of the atlantic at the turn of the twentieth century written in a very plain prose style of wide eyed wonder, but can't say the examples of his poetry at the end have encouraged me to read any of his other work

now started on robert tressell's the ragged trousered philanthropists

You might also like Jack London's People of The Abyss, in which---maybe considering a roots move back to his American boxcar phase a little too redundant--he goes to London, buys old clothes, and hits the streets, then roads----working in a momnpop bookstore, I sold a collector kid's mom an edition I'd never seen before, and haven't seen since, with Jack's funky photos. (This book was said to be an inspiration for Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, as JL's The Iron Heel was a forerunner of 1984, and thematically Animal Farm.)

I've seen an early edition of People of the Abyss with London's photographs included! That was long ago. The copy currently in my library is part of an omnibus collection in the Library of America that also includes The Road, The Iron Heel, Martin Eden, and John Barleycorn. London's reputation has been unfairly whittled down until Call of the Wild is about the only title of his most people can name. He badly needs rehabilitation.

NLT (and all), the best book about hoboing around is “You Can’t Win” by Jack Black. Nothing else compares

I've taken the liberty of starting a summer 2024 WAYR thread:

'In a somer seson, whan softe was þe sonne': What are You Reading in Summer 2024?

xpost: was given a flash looking reissue of the jack black book a number of years back, so def on my agenda!

& jack london yeah, need to investigate more. think i read some of his sea stories years ago but that's about it.

unfortunately he was a vocal white supremacist. So if that's not a dealbreaker I guess he could write a bit.

A lot of 19th-century working-class socialists in the U.S. were pretty racist and supported the Chinese Exclusion Act and were completely paranoid that Asia would overrun this country. To be fair, every white person in the 19th century was totally friggin' racist. And also pro-eugenics. And they beat their children and their horses. But not all white people in the U.S. were as popular in Japan as Jack London was. So, there is that.

(then again if a writer wasn't being anti-japanese did the japanese ever really care how racist a writer was? especially in the olden days.)