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

The thread title quote is from the opening line of Piers Plowman. Because of leap year, solstice come on June 20th, so here's a new thread for all our summertime ruminations, commentaries and appreciations.

It replaces the springtime 2024 thread: I have coveted everything and enjoyed nothing: what are you reading in Spring 2024?

I am about to finish Eric Ambler's Background to Danger, as mentioned in the prior thread.

Soon I'll be out solo camping/hiking for more than a week. I need to choose a few books to bring with me. I'll opt for nothing too heavy - both literally & figuratively - both because I'll be fatigued in the evenings and I'll have to carry at least one of my choices upwards of 3000 ft of elevation gain along with about 28 or 30 more pounds of stuff.

I finished Robert Plunket's long out-of-print 1983 My Search for Warren Harding, which the likes of Frank Rich and Ann Beattie declared one of the funniest novels ever written. It takes about 50 pages to get going, and more than half the nyuk-nyuks are fat and gay jokes.

Just finishing Alice Munro's "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage". Unlike many short story collections I can still remember the individual stories long after I've read them - there's something remarkable in every single one. The theme seems to be "everything in my life I didn't tell my therapist".

Next up, Oliver Harris's "The Shame Archive". Highly recommend anything by Harris if you like well-written cut-above-the-average British spy and detective thrillers. His plots are quite hectic, sometimes enjoyably so - a bit like what Max Read calls a "systems thriller" - but he's a far better sentence writer than some of the big sellers like Herron, Rankin etc

"Floating Bridge" is one of my favorite stories by anybody.

i'm reading The Lost Ones by Ace Atkins which i highly recommend if you like average American crime novels written by someone who is not a far better sentence writer than Burke, Leonard, etc.

the plot is not that hectic. but the southern slowness does fit how my brain feels when i go outside this week.

still, even saying that about the sentences, there are little touches that a decent local color artist brings to the table that i appreciate. the dialogue is fun. Ace has an ear.

Is there a good entry novel for Burke? I remember his paperbacks used to be everywhere, not so much recently.

Reading Phil Hall’s ‘Killdeer,’ which is more than a decade old but remains classic Hall— meditative and autobiographical poetry and poetics. Kind of an astonishing book.

on Spring WAYR, Aimless mentioned one of the Library of America Jack London collections which I read maybe 20 yrs ago, still struck by The Road, esp. his focus on consecutive details of moving along train train w/o being mesmerized by its steady rhythm--also what happens on the ground, and I think that's the one where he talks about strings of jobs, such as working in a laubdry---winding up in hospital for a while, rough but vacation from the gig: he's often at his best in this kind of personal journalism, can see how he encouraged Orwell's (Burma Days etc.). As far as Beliefs, The Valley pf the Moon might be a gppd pne to avoid, judging by Joan Didion's pathology report on Where I Was From (where she probes fucked-up California hype->belief systems, incl. in her own life & works).

dammit The Valley of the Moon might be a good one to avoid, that is--sorry.

laundry!

"pathology report" on TVOTM is in Where I Was From.

By "personal journalism," I mean accounts of experiences, tending toward the practical x how I got that way. like not falling off train or into the wheels, working in laundry, shooting an elephant, in pieces where London and Orwell are doing it (Didion at her best with personal experience and how that informs her views pf others in Where I Was From and other late work).

Of course Orwell had that personal experience and how that informs her views pf others to some extent, like when he said that Gandhi found fasting to be easy pr personally natural, visceral response/tactic/condition: I've always had the impression of Orwell as having an ascetic/self-punishing side, like going way up to that cold-ass island to chain-smoke his way through 1984, but no time for self-analysis then, far as I know---in his case, empathy w Gandhi etc. seems mpre intuitive than Didion's life/lives project, though she has some of that.

i need to read more because I've enjoyed the 5 or so I've already read. the Iron Heal is very prescient.

they are all out of copyright so are easy to find / cheap
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/120

Just read Paul Tremblay’s Horror Movie, which is pretty good but doesn’t entirely stick the landing. Now I’m rereading Tony Judt’s Postwar and will probably try to finish Enrique Krauze’s Mexico: Biography of Power next.

Plymell, Benzedrine Highway

Allen Ginsberg once wrote a poem called "Wichita Vortex Sutra." The Wichita Vortex part was invented by Charles Plymell, a Kansan whose early work is collected in this book. Ginsberg wrote a supportive introduction to a 1966 collection of Plymell's poetry, and it is included here along with the poetry. One assumes that Plymell's poetry got better. The rest of the book, originally published in 1971, is prose.

-Do you remember that time we were working on the Dalles Dam in Oregon? Betty and I went over on the Washington side to see a whorehouse she had known about. We drove up this little winding road and came to a hilltop where an old burned out foundation was. (There were little lines of rubble indicating the space of rectangular rooms where burned up emotion sped away on the charred remains of cots into which the wind played as it raced over the hill touching the wildflowers and down the valley to where the wile rapids roared into Portland to the calm Pacific. A lamb played in the chilly breeze the grass was yellow and huge clouds puffed in the sky. It's as if we were somewhere we'd been before, or not been; or will be again, or never. While it lasted maybe it's the pleasure of life itself. And only life is remembered. Life is pure joy. A release. Freedom from all gravity and time. While it lasted each event seemed like the complete emotion. A long story unwinding without beginning or end. No more emotion. The memory is not easily felt. The conflicts were trivial crises of unaccountable billions that make up a routine day. And then the years speed by. It was only yesterday when. It is hardly worth the trouble to think about it. The days screeched by like the broken record of time. What is happening? I am here now. Someday I won't be here. Where will I be? Me. I'm hiding behind everything in the world. The real me is hiding. Knowing that someday I won't be here. Where will I be? Is that the whole history of me? The sum total. Driving from town to town. WHat is this whole thing? Anyway? The years passing. Wrinkles and pot bellies. What to do? Where to go? Where can I wait out the Reality Nausea? The Young Flowers, they have a choice. Be cut down and take their chances being planted in someone else's suburban rose garden every summer, or roll around, blow around with the wind, planting their seeds where the wildflowers bloom. Drifting around in raw emotion before it becomes a story, fantasy's companion, where pure fiction reigns, and desire is spent like hot billionaire come, golden time is thrown away, forever spent for pure drama, more time spent than graft will ever accomplish, more freedom than any government could buy with all its tonnage of murdered flesh, the life force being beautifully alive with no thought of recompense, where dreamers go and novelists are not allowed.)
-Remember Little TOOT?
-The little boat I lived in on the Columbia River? I didn't have a place to live until payday, so I went out on this boat and camped. I got up every morning and went to work on those big air drills drilling all day into rock. Wagon drills they called them. They were mounted on wheels and pounded and drilled holes in the side of the mountain either to put re-enforcing steel in or to put dynamite in. They were developed from the steam drill, I guess. The one that replaced the hammer of John Henry.

As with Kerouac, this evokes both nostalgia at second hand and a sense of belatedness. We are hearing about the party after it is over. The unasked question is whether it had any significance in the long run. There is a sense of loss, which is shared by the writer.

History is visible in the background. As the title sums up, two aspects of those early postwar years come through: the availability of amphetamines in various forms (including a powerful inhaled substance called Oxy-Biotic, claimed to be as strong as crystal meth), and the affordability of cars by the seasonal-job-having teenage Plymell. Jobs were so easy to get that even a high school diploma was a waste of time. Kerouac didn't start any trends with On The Road; he was just the first to record what was already going on. (Plymell clearly intended to make that point.)

We don't hear enough about Plymell's Odysseus-like father, who lived everywhere, did everything, and went from being a railroad brakeman during the Depression to making and losing millions of mid-20th-century dollars on impulsive land speculation.

The two geographic poles of this book are a sepia-toned Wichita and the San Francisco of the early 1960s (or metaphorically amphetamines and LSD). Plymell was drawn in by San Francisco, where the culture is moving fast, but also wary, being no fool. Those who had moved there seven or eight years earlier were effectively of an older generation.

Plymell's values were working class, and he admired his fellow union longshoremen more than the poets and painters he hung out with. He was a friend of the artist Bruce Conner, but also helped S. Clay Wilson relocate from Wichita and publish his repulsive cartoons in Zap magazine.

Plymell surely passed away several years ago, after Ginsberg but before Ferlinghetti (who died recently at 101). Wrong! Plymell is alive right now, in 2024, the year of the debt at 130% of GDP, the collapse of the Ukraine front, the Huawei P70, and analogues of black hole ringdown modes in superfluid vortices. His youth coincided with the apex of American power and prosperity, and he's still with us as we watch the empire's death thrashings. He has the last living memories of a lot of things. And it may be that he is being written out of his own history.

Thanks. Ginsberg mentioned in Plymell in some interviews---he may be the poet credited, in No Direction Home, with giving Gins, just back from India, his first exposure to a Dylan track (think it was "Hard Rain"): "I knew the torch had passed."
The hobo as boho, an educated, freewheeling migrant worker and player, goes back at least as far in literature as young and younger xxxpost Jack London, in late 19th and early 20th Century, then he even went back, for People of the Abyss, though there were other youngsters who found themselves caught in such a way of life for who knows how many reasons and seasons---Marilynne Robinson's novel Lila builds around some of this, in an engrossing way (when the Depression comes, it registers on Lila and her colleagues as competition, from the Oakies-come-lately and such).
One of my favorite parts of On The Road is when the narrator realizes how much company he's got out there, and my favorite part of that is the driver in the homegrown vehicle, like a telephone booth on wheels, or something equally vertical.
]

lol i thought 'maybe i should try and finish Pascal Quignard's The Tears'. Picked it up

Not only did Richarius lay hands on them and remove their pain, but the water from his spring, which was dedicated to Saint Marcoul, was magically curative.

Not only did those who lived along the Somme come on foot in their droves, but the North Sea fishermen came too in their boats.

Not just Saxon monks, but Celtic druids.

And the princesses of the islands of Ireland came, their vessels in full sail, the prows carved with monsters

and just went 'nope, i can't do this faux chronicles thing any more, for i see not the purpose'.

i've still got his Abysses to get through (in theory - I may just return it to the library unread), as well as Lord Chandos' Answer - a far more interesting title at least (I only ordered it for the title tbh and it's taking ages to arrive. let's hope it takes a little longer eh).

just finished Penance by Eliza Clarke which sounded great from the blurb, but instead of being "about" true crime/podcasts/Tumblr fandom etc. it "is" those things, i.e. it has nothing to say about the genre it supposedly critiques.

also recently read

chip war by chris miller. non-fiction about history and current geopolitics of computer chips. pretty good if you are disposed to be interested in that sort of thing.

the only one left by Riley sager. gothic novel set in Maine. didn't love this. some truly awful prose at times.

the phoenix project by Gene Kim et al. very strange business novel in which completely normal business things happen and there is very little drama.kind of soothing like I imagine playing the sims or something is soothing. fiction is used as a vehicle to present certain theories of busines (Toyota theory of constraints, just in time, devops, etc.).

by force of arms by James nelson. spiritual successor to the Aubrey-maturin novels, but set in the revolutionary wars. this was the first one. has a much more conventional adventure story structure than an Aubrey-maturin novel, does not (yet?) have the benefit of the interesting relationship between two lead characters (there's only one). I will probably give the next one a shot to see if they improve.

now reading

the passage of power by Robert Caro. don't care what anyone says, he is a good writer on the subject of power.

^^

That was definitely Plymell, who writes about the encounter. More generally Plymell was a sort of interface between the Beats, whom he knew and sometimes let live with him (Neal Cassady and wife), and "the 60s" as it was taking form. Later, of all people, Herbert Huncke (like the undead Dracula) shows up and Plymell drives him around.

Plymell's moments were the 1950s driving all night on the highway and San Francisco from the early 1960s until the deluge of 1967. Plymell had a low opinion of the hippies, although he and his friends didn't mind all the young girls. Unlike the hippies, Plymell was willing to work. What he had was a horror of doing one thing for very long.

One talks about transitional figures, but Plymell during this time was so literally transitional, and liminal (poetry-Zap magazine-blue collar work), that he may have made less of a mark than he would have otherwise. I want to read Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association, but according to Google Books Plymell isn't mentioned there at all, though Conner was a close friend.

I see there's a recent collection of Plymell's letters, and that he started a teaching career after this memoir and became more rooted.

A later figure you could mention is Chris McCandless. I wonder if the tradition (if it is one) is fading out.

Unlike the hippies, Plymell was willing to work. What he had was a horror of doing one thing for very long.

“Tramps and hobos are commonly lumped together, but see themselves as sharply differentiated. A hobo or bo is simply a migratory laborer; he may take some longish holidays, but sooner or later he returns to work. A tramp never works if it can be avoided; he simply travels.”

"serial enforcement": that is, you get busted for being unemployed, released in the custody of someone who has paid your bail, you work that off, maybe make a little more (minus more expenses), get laid off, busted again etc.

And you might have to work off interest as well.

I'm reading Pride and Prejudice again. It gets better each time. I'm tempted to just marathon all of the Austen novels.

reading what an awful lot of reviews called 'the best spy thriller of the year' etc as my 'don't start me thinking *now*' just before bedtime / in bed reading. also David Petraeus' ZOMG BEST THILLER EVER book as well apparently.

and what do you know it's a sort of US omnicompetence / bro fantasy with a lot of probably quite frighteningly well researched process detail. i see absolutely nothing to distinguish it, though as of still quite early in the book it seems competently enough put together and written.

what _is_ quite good though is reading it at the same time as the petrochemical lovecraftian qabbalistic found text faux crit theory iranian/middle eastern ludibrium (or bagatelle or whatever your preferred word is for fiction as game / pastiche / caprice) Cryptonomium: complicity with anonymous materials by Reza Negarestani.

The problem with this sort of thing is that the pastiche needs to exist in tension with another message otherwise you're reading a lot of words to no end other than a sort of loose mimicry. Swift was exceptionally good at this, often managing three levels of reference and irony simultaneously, Helen deWitt also very good, most noticeably in Lightning Rods). The other narratives being sustained here are a very attenuated 'plot' managed in the footnotes, and a possibly geniunely held view of power politics in the GWoT and US/Middle eastern relations. But there's a *lot* of faux kabbalism and other stuff to get through. Fun enough if you're happy skimming. I strongly recommend Howie Lee's At The Drolma Wesel-Ling Monastery as recommended by Tim F in his AOTY2024 post for keeping things moving and providing the requisite mystical-modernist vibe going, and also for other ilx links, Death from Above 1979 are also mentioned briefly.

Essentail view of oil as a sort of universal lubricant or alkahest for religion, politics and narrative is a similar theme to Tom McCarthy's really not very good Satin Island iirc.

However, as a subtext for a mediocre spy thriller it works really well, roiling middle-eastern desert religion gnosticism invisibly driving US spy fantasy motivations and descriptions.

It's called Cyclonopedia not Cryptonomium. I don't know why i wrote that (eldritch beings reaching out from alternative dimension controlling my thoughts or Monday morning? YOU decide.)

I found Cyclonopedia similarly interesting but skim-worthy— many moments of real insight sort of smashed between incomprehensible mathematical/logic jargon and the faint wisp of a plot. I still enjoyed myself reading it, tho, as it is quite singular— can’t really think of another book quite like it.

On my current quest to read many books about mountaineering, I finished James Salter’s ‘Solo Faces’ last week and thought it pretty remarkable in a lot of ways, tho I hated the ending. Much better descriptions of what it feels like to actually climb than in Harrison’s ‘Climbers.’ However, the latter introduced me in a roundabout way to an interesting figure, John Menlove Edwards, a pioneering Liverpudlian interwar climber who was also a Marxist conscientious objector and a homosexual. Reading Perrin’s biography of him at the moment, which includes some of Edwards’ own writings in the apoendix. It is a fascinating bit of history.

I've been out hiking, during which time I read a couple of books.

One was a John Buchan novel from the early part of the 20th century, The Island of Sheep. It preserves in amber a time when the elite of the British empire still cherished its ideals of noble amateurism and fair play rising victorious over all opposition. It was an attractive fantasy and remains so, but only when imbibed in its pure form, as a fiction from which all the sludge of ugly reality has been excluded.

The other was a rereading of a Walter Mosley novel, A Red Death. As a novel of crime and detection it is mediocre, but what always made Mosley's books worthwhile is their presentation of Black American culture as a distinct and very human response to daily oppression and exclusion. Putting it into a titillating package of crime fiction and male sexual fantasies was a kind of trojan horse for trying to educate white America about that culture.

I finished both Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey in preparation for it, but I can't imagine how James Joyce's Ulysses could really be related to them. I am committed, though. If I can read War and Peace I can read Ulysses.

I am going to first get through Zadie Smith's The Fraud, a book club selection

I started Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood. As one of the blurbs said, it is "unflaggingly ironic" and I found myself wishing her tone would vary into something more ordinary for a paragraph or three, but there's plenty of book left for me to find out and she's clearly a master of her chosen comedic voice.

Today I'm reading Enrique Krauze's Mexico: Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico, 1810–1996. I started it a while ago, put it aside, and picked it up again last night.

I'm reading Jacqueline Rose's *The Haunting of Sylvia Plath*. It's the kind of hard theory stuff I've not read for a while (rooted in post-structuralism and psychoanalysis) and I'm struggling with it and finding it exhilarating in equal measure.

xp I think there are some very effective moments in Priestdaddy that look more soberly at the environment and community that she grew up in.

Herbert, Destination: Void
Mezrich, Breaking Twitter
Malzberg, The Destruction of the Temple. A good book to read on Independence Day, and almost beautiful in parts.

This country is going to blow up. Something opens in my mind like curtains parting, I see the fires, hear the sounds of shooting, the still, doomed sense of panic rising and in this vision I see not only the death of my country but my own as well, the two intermingled; it must have always been this way because driving the interstate I am the country, the country is me, linked together forever. The country is going to die, for too long things have been too close together: misdirected energy, waste, ambiguity, loss, rage. Now at last a knife is going to be drawn limb by limb, north through south, east by west through the corpus and in the bed the patient is going to erupt in clouds of blood and steam. Thrashing, clutching, groaning on the bed this patient, the country is going to die; it has been willed for a long time, now at last it is going to happen. I am going to help it die. I could not be more culpable if I had willed the destruction myself. I am bringing the Lincoln Town Sedan to Dallas.

The tippler's ginger ale and cold pizza brunch with Collete, via My Mother's House/Sido, the slim Modern Library twofer, 1995 ed. w added biographical note: charging through the garden and other (always related) thickets of imagery to the latest moment's point of further access, revelation re a figure and/or ground which has come to seem familiar---and we're off, for another whirl-jump through space-time---to the point, the point, for she really is the force that drives the green fuse through the flower and vice-versa (ginger ale, wow).

always love a bit of malzberg, and that sounds good alimosina xpost.

Two remarkable vignettes:

Hugo von Hofmannsthal – Letter from Lord Chandos and a description of Emily Brontë's time in a Brussels educational Pensionnat/school from Katherine Frank's biography of Emily A Chainless Soul.

As a schoolboy Hugo von Hofmannsthal astonished contemporaries such as Alfred Stieglitz, Richard Strauss (for whom he wrote the libretto for der Rosenkavalier), Rilke and Arthur Schnitzler and Viennese cafe society generally with lyrical poetry published under the name Loris. He then had a spiritual and creative – you might say almost epistemic and linguistic – crisis. He addressed this crisis in a letter written by a fictional Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon at some point during the reign of Elizabeth I.

After a preamble, where he writes about an inability to comprehend or connect with the works and self of his youth, he is explicit:

My case, in short, is this: I have lost completely the ability to think or to speak of anything coherently

He is driven to an 'inexplicable anger' by straightforward moral judgments (that such and such is doing well, or someone has suffered a reverse), and reading the Classics, from which he had previously derived pleasure and instruction, he feels 'like someone locked in a garden surrounded by eyeless statues.'

He is overwhelmed by isolated minutiæ of the world, such as a beetle in a bucket of water, a distant shepherd's fire, and in one vivid section, the death of rats in a cellar where he has instructed poison to be laid down. He does not feel able to connect the world with grand abstractions and language is incapable of capturing them. The rest of the time he is filled with 'a barely believable vacuity, and have difficulties concealing from my wife my inner stagnation.'

Why has he picked this moment in history, and this figure, Francis Bacon? Hofmannsthal said that the word that best described the heart of his own work was Verwandlung: transformation. Perhaps Bacon heralds the moment where what is mysterious is converted into the legible, expressible, scientific. Does Chandos' stifling surfeit of transcendence get converted along with it, or is something left behind? Hofmannstahl is himself writing at a point, well captured by Joseph Roth and Robert Musil, at the decadent end of Empire, and his letter also seems to express the collapse of High Romanticism, and its transformation and mutation into the modern age.

As I say, a psychological crisis of Self and an epistemic, spiritual, mystical and creative - even an historical - crisis come together in this short letter.

Katherine Frank's portrait of Emily Brontë is of a wild, self-denying person in a strange prison with multiple walls - the hated flat lands of Belgium, and the carefully cultivated gardens, stone walls and educational system of Constantin Héger's Pensionnat. She responds to this situation with extreme and grotesque abnegation and silence, responding to all friendly comments or jokes with a terse 'I wish to be as God made me' driving off even well-wishers with the direness of her company. She cuts a strange figure, tall and lean next to trim and petite Charlotte, over whom she exerted a malignant controlling influence, so that Charlotte, who was very much enjoying the time there, felt unable to socialise, turning her head to profile or completely away from any people she was in conversation with. Emily in the meantime kept complete silence, and for her essay exercises in French wrote black misanthropic screeds and of all Nature being an engine to produce evil, that took Constantin Héger's breath away with their brilliance and originality, even though they existed in complete opposition to each other throughout. She sounds f'ing awful tbh, with a powerful ability to create intense suffering for herself, and an equally strong ability to endure it.

I was driven to both these texts by finally getting my copy of The Answer to Lord Chandos by Pascal Quignard, which it turns out is a response to Hofmannsthal's letter, and not anything to do with the Chandos Ammendment which was the only Chandos I'd been aware off before from A-level history, along with the Lord Chandos pub just off Trafalgar Sqaure. One of the things I took away from The Tears by Quignard was that I didn't really trust him with historical detail. I didn't have _reason_ to exactly, as I simply didn't know enough about that period of French history during the reign of Charlemagne. It was a suspicion, something about the way he worked historical detail.

Anway, first para of Lord Chandos:

In 1842, on Rue Isabelle, In Brussels, when she was teaching at the Heger boarding school, Emily Brontë never raised her eyes toward the other professors. She went only once into the room reserved for them; the panic attack that seized her then was such that she never set foot in it again. If someone watched her closely while she was eating at the refectory table, she would look away, confused, filled with a dizzying fear, although she was never fearful of anything in England, *in the Yorkshire*, when she was out on her own and roamed the moor in the company of her dog and her goshawk, when she encountered vagabonds and crossed paths with madmen there. She never had the courage to address her colleagues when she bumped into them in the hallways and they took her to task in a discussion; she rapidly bowed her head. Even the students to whom she taught English, literature and music...

I had two thoughts reading this. One, *did Hercule Poirot translate this*? Two, errrrr I don't think Emily taught English and literature, that was Charlotte? Hence me going to the biographies - and yes, as far as I can tell from those, Emily only taught music, partly because she was such an inflexible tyrant in how she did this, they didn't want her teaching anything else.

And in answer to my question, it was not translated by Hercule Poirot, en fait, but Stéphanie Boulard and Timothy Lavenz (US, I think).

So, my suspicion and intense wariness of Quignard remains and is intensified, but the book is very short and i'm grateful to him for causing me to read Hoffmansthal and the Emily Brontë biog.

also reading a selection of pieces by Anne Carson - Wrong Norma. Trying to collect my thoughts on it - it's extremely elusive.

oh, and Practice by Rosalind Brown. v undergraduate novel about a day in the life of a young oxford student trying to write an essay on shakespeare's sonnets. ikr. it fills the time with an obsessive iteration of miniscule sensory experiences, and hauling over nascent sexual awakening. it is a v undergraduate novel, and you kind of think Brown should have been left to complete and finish this as a worthwhile writing exercise, rather than having it published. because brown *can* write, no question, and the feel they have for the sonnets is well expressed. it's just the dramatic context of oxford undergraduate is so stale and not really retrieved by the throwing together of undergraduate experience, a dubious sounding sexual relationship, and the sonnets.

i've said it's a v undergraduate novel twice i see, which is entirely justified.

I am continuing with the book on John Menlove Edwards, the interwar British climber and adventurer who was also a homosexual rights activist and conscientious objector. It is a little sloggy but the good parts are quite astonishing— the author just included an entire sermon that Menlove gave in 1934 and it was quite moving.

Also began and finished Dennis Cooper’s new book of stories this week. All but one were new to me, and are typical for Cooper— teenage boys reflecting and projecting the nihilistic violence of society in increasingly perverse ways. I enjoyed it, particularly the way Cooper has really gotten the cadence of mindless sex worker chatter down to a ‘t’ (and I say this as a former SWer). Anyway, I am a fan and will continue to be, tho I know he’s not for everyone.

Thanks for all that, Fizzles---might be good to take a look at Lucasta Miller's The Bronte Myth and this thread: Bronte Siblings: FITE!

Thanks for all that, Fizzles---might be good to take a look at Lucasta Miller's _The Bronte Myth_ and this thread: Bronte Siblings: FITE!🕸🕸

Been a long time since I read The Bronte Myth, but liked the way it traced some stories etc. back to family members )maybe mostly Emily?), also looked at takes down through the ages, Victorian, Freudian etc, and in some cases, beyond doctrinaire lols, gave a sense of pieces of the truth therein, also non-reductive re the artistic adventures, challenges of, for authors and their readers (I think that Miller also expressed frustration w Bronte homeplace etc as part of the cuet British tourist industry).

I recently finished “Tarka the Otter” by Henry Williamson and am now re-reading it. The unfamiliar vocabulary made it slow going the first time but the second read is flowing much better. I’m not much of a naturalist so all the names of animals and plants and terms for waterways and geological formations send me scurrying for the dictionary or the helpful glossary he provides for the more obscure local terms that are peculiar to early 20th century Devon.

In something of a step down from many of the previous posts, I've just finished Me Talk Pretty One Day, which wasn't on my list but I had to read for reasons too embarrassing and long winded to go into. I wasn't totally against the idea but in the end I just didn't find it at all funny.

Now on to Second Class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta.

What's a good translation of The Red and the Black?

I started Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood. As one of the blurbs said, it is "unflaggingly ironic" and I found myself wishing her tone would vary into something more ordinary for a paragraph or three, but there's plenty of book left for me to find out and she's clearly a master of her chosen comedic voice.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless),

I started it yesterday night at your recommendation.

I've been enjoying it.

Finished Second Class Citizen. It reminded me of Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (as much as I can remember it) - largely autobiographical poverty and misogyny in mid (ish) 20th century London told in a fairly plain / straightforward way, with added racism. Adah/Buchi goes through hell for sure but she is so full of grit and self belief that the reading experience is almost uplifting.

I finished Priestdaddy last night. There's a lot going on in it.

My main impression upon laying it down was that the engine of Lockwood's humor was her powerful sense of the world as chaotic and menacing, which she tames and subdues by reframing it as absurdity. The book is funny because there is so much chaos and menace in her life that she is required to process.

It doesn't help her that her parents' love is more than a little chaotic.
But at the center of the book is the Catholic church around which her family life revolved. Her struggle with it pervades the book. Its teachings were the ground that was placed beneath her feet growing up and it, too, became much more a source of menace than comfort or stability. When she applies her protective sense of absurdity to it you can tell that there is deep sorrow, too. Absurdity can only take you so far before you find you've come to the edge of a void. At the end, she's starting to construct a better solution for herself. She's still young. I wish her luck.

It's a hell of a book.

I attempted to read a book called Confessions of an Economic Hitman (2004), John Perkins. It was a $2 purchase from the local charity bookshop. It exposes how close the connections are between US foreign aid policy, US intelligence agencies, the IMF & World Bank, and a handful of Fortune 500 companies who profit from scamming third world nations into debt. I stopped about 50 pages into it. My problem was that it was too rudimentary and repetitive, with lots of padding around the main subject matter to fill it out to book length. I wasn't learning much from it.

Now I've started The Long Ships, Frans Bengtsson. Initial indications are that it has a nicely understated humor embedded into its tale of 10th century scandinavian kings, vikings, and villagers. It ought to keep me contented for a while.

finally embarked on some prynne — the most recent volume of recent poems, opened it up, read a bit and thought “i need to go back a bit”. got the latest (2015?) collected, went to the beginning - no, too far back. ended up landing on 1979’s down where changed.

working out what combinations of sound, sense, phrasing and rhythm make the poems cohere (because they do seem to, mostly). where it works, or seems to, and where it doesn’t, or seems to not.

practice (see above) really was a damp squib. it really did feel like a writing exercise (hence or maybe hence the title) and as I say Brown can write. but i don’t need to read about the minutiae of oxford undergraduate life and as so often the blurb encomiums are mystifying.

Summer Will Show, Sylvia Townsend Warner - So I was reading this on the tube when a woman started trying to get my attention and when I looked up pointed to the family next to her and said "show it to them!". Confused, I imagined that this was some private joke, perhaps they were all fans of the book? So I raised the book to show it and...realised the woman was NOT with the family, was indeed mentally unstable and the family were a group of French tourists. The reason she had summoned me to show the book was its front cover - Félix Vallotton's Nude, Seated On A Red Armchair - and she was now telling the giggling French teenager "you laugh, but at home you like it". And so I shrunk into my seat, now seen as a perv while my actual reading material was, at that time, mostly about a woman doing calculations on farm upkeep.

Anyway the book's good.

It's a hell of a book.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless),

Agreed. The one-liner-per-sentence wore on me, but once the book settles into these lived-in meditations on Catholicism, small town kindnesses, and the mystery of our parents it won me over.

I continue with the biography of British climber and homosexual political activist Menlove Edwards, and am now embarking on another project: making my way through the many journals and magazines that have piled up since the beginning of the year. Read some excellent work from John Wilkinson in Ian Heames’ UK mag ‘FRAGILE,’ and am now onto some previously unpublished work by Ronald Johnson in Colorado’s ‘Luigi Ten Co.’

I'm currently reading the new Miranda July novel, "All Fours". I appreciate that she doesn't constantly have to be funny, but when she deploys her laconic, deadpan sense of humor, it works on me.

the biography of Menlove is quite horrifying tbh— at the moment he is suffering a horrible emotional disturbance, having twice attempted suicide, and everyone around him is sort of throwing up their hands going “oh shit oh well!”

the book is reinvigorating interest in somehow telling the story of my great grandfather, who was a member of the Lafayette Escadrille and then later became a virulent anti-war activist because of what was obviously undiagnosed PTSD. he was a brilliant poet and teacher but because of his political leanings, he couldn’t be promoted beyond permanent lecturer at NYU, and seeing the world fall further and further into bellicosity and being so isolated in his position, he walked off the Staten Island ferry.

While Menlove’s outsider status was due to his homosexuality and his political leanings, it is difficult for me to not make some connection between the two.

I finished "All Fours". I think it's July's best work yet. Not sure who else is writing like this these days. Maybe Sally Rooney when she's on her game.

I'm reading and loving The Girls by John Bowen. He's such a great writer! I've never read anything by him before. It's one of those McNally Editions reprints that I bought. It came out in 1986. I'm definitely going to seek out more books by him. It's really wonderful. Fun fact: When John Bowen was in advertising in the 50s he came up with "Have a break - Have a KitKat"!!
He also did heaps of British television including Play For Today and ITV Play of the Week. He had quite the career.

https://d28hgpri8am2if.cloudfront.net/book_images/onix/cvr9781946022707/the-girls-9781946022707_hr.jpg

I've since read a lovely little chapbook by beloved, sadly departed Canadian poet Peter Culley, as well as Steve Zultanski's Help, which is a sequence of dialogues and confessions about touchy or taboo subjects. For example, the first piece in the book contains part of a dialogue of four characters discussing the deaths of people they only sort of knew, like teachers at their school, or old neighbors, or classmates with whom they weren't close, or friends of friends. It's a strange book, but like most of Zultanski's work, its conceptual framing allows Zultanski to plumb weird depths of the human psyche.

Now I am re-reading Renée Gladman's Calamities, as I've decided to assign it to my "Writers Working" class this fall.

I just picked up swole: the making of men and the meaning of muscle by michael andor brodeur after seeing a passing reference to it and checking out the samples. i really like it so far and hard identify with just about every line, it's going to be a treat to read over the coming weeks.

Good Behaviour by Molly Keane. Unreliable narrator alert! This felt like What Maisie Knew, in that one has to figure out what the grown-ups are actually doing based on the narration of a clueless child - even though in this case the child is a grown woman remembering her life as a child and younger woman. I think I figured out most of it though I'm sure some things passed me by. Either way, expertly done.

I loved Good Behaviour.

At scott's recommendation I finished Ex Wife a few days ago.

Managed to backburner Avi Shaim's book Iron Wall for way too long and it is really long. Hope I do get through it at some point. Does seem in depth.

The Unicorn
Overview of various lore concerning the magical beast. How it ties in with Xian symbolism and others.

The writings of Helen Keller.
Not sure which book turned me onto this. Memoirs, diaries and essays etc by deaf and blind woman from early 20th century.

Fatal Invention Dorothy Roberts
Book on Science and racism that was recommended by Angela Saini among others that I've meant to read for last few years.

I just picked up swole: the making of men and the meaning of muscle by michael andor brodeur after seeing a passing reference to it and checking out the samples. i really like it so far and hard identify with just about every line, it's going to be a treat to read over the coming weeks.

― he/him hoo-hah (map), Thursday, July 25, 2024 2:29 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Ordered, thanks for mentioning it!

😎

already through the very thoroughly researched history of he-man and the boys' action figure / cartoon phenomenon of the 80s and onto the chapter about form, which is like one of the only pieces i've ever read about working out and the gym that gets there imo, and i'm only 35 pages in! looking forward to what i'm sure is a lot of good art history stuff.

To slip into trainer mode for a moment, more often than not, various types of bad form are a direct result of the same bad decision: to take on more weight than one can handle. Beginners beguiled by the optics of heavy weight can often forego proper form for the sake of getting a good take on camera. It is the origin story of every fail video. Thus bad form is parsed with all the moral simplicity of a nursery rhyme, with a much larger chance of internal bleeding.

But subtract this value system and it becomes something more pure and more profound. Form becomes something like an essential element, a guiding principle, the physical equivalent of a spiritual tenet. Form, at its core, is a relationship between your body and your intentions. An enactment of an ideal way of moving, doing, being. A worship of motion.

"At scott's recommendation I finished Ex Wife a few days ago."

I haven't read it yet! maybe I'll read that next. Did you like it?

I finished The Long Ships last night. It was nicely done. The whole book showed Bengtsson's deep familiarity with the Sagas and an imaginative connection with that era. He was especially deft at dialogue. His characters came most to life when they spoke. I found myself wondering how much the book was inspired by a desire to counteract the Nazi version of Vikings as invincible Aryan icons and the earlier Victorian version of them as subhuman barbaric beasts. In his hands they became understandable as humans. Recommended, if you're in the mood for a ripping adventure tale, extended to 500 pages.

I'm reading Philip Roth's *Operation Shylock*. Naomi Klein made it sound interesting in *Doppelganger*. In theory, sure, in practice, less so. Premise: Roth finds out an impostor is in Jerusalem impersonating him and proposing a new diaspora to save the Jews from an Arab uprising. Instead of calling the cops/lawyers, he goes to Jerusalem, where all kinds of lols and capers ensue. His double has a penile implant! He impersonates his impersonator to fool (I think) Edward Said! He has sex with someone called Jinx Possesski!

I realise calling out Roth for volubility is dumb but quiet man, just for a bit, please.

Yeah, I had to stop reading him a while back. I watched a French film adaption of one of the newer ones recently but the extra level of mediation made it more tolerable, like a form of eclipse glasses.

I thought Shylock among his best books when I read it more than 20 years ago. But I haven't revisited much Roth.

I should scan reviews for the word 'picaresque' before I read a book.

ha I feel that.

Now I am re-reading Renée Gladman's Calamities, as I've decided to assign it to my "Writers Working" class this fall.

xxxp I read Ex-Wife a couple months ago, I liked it! Some of the more melodramatic elements near the end got to be a little much but overall it was funny and raw and touching. The scene where she realizes a guy she’s on a date with is negging her made me despair a bit that men have been trying this since at least 1929…

It did give me this intrusive thought that I should wait for the perfect moment to say “Ex-Wife? Sounds like the last book I read!” in a 1940s comedian voice.

How do themes of these relate? Writer's dayjobs as well as writers working at writing? (Both would be my pref, or dayjobs mainly).
― dow, Friday, July 26, 2024 1:30 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Well, Gladman's book is very much about the labor one does as a writer and how it is mediated (and yes, obstructed) through various factors such as circumstance, capital, and institutional malice. I think it's a good example of a book that is not just about writing and how a writer thinks, but also about how a writer operates vis-a-vis the world.

Sounds good. What other books will you assign?

Ex Wife got silly in the last third but for two-thirds the portrait of a career woman in the '20s enjoying sex and slamming her ex husband is fun.

Pascal Quignard – The Answer to Lord Chandos

Referred to it upthread, because despite my wariness wrt Quignard, I appreciated this sending me to Emily Brontë's biography and Hofmannsthal's original letter.

I've now got through this very short book thank god. It's a defence of writing, creativity and poetry, written during his own depression and as a rebuttal to Hofmannsthal's Letter from Lord Chandos. the depression possibly accounts for a tone approaching mania throughout; it's rather wild.

Only... it doesn't really deal with any of the substance of Hofmannsthal's original letter – itself born out of a crisis of creativity and expression. The original letter gives form and life to Hofmannsthal's complaint – the rats in the cellar I mentioned earlier, amongst others, and a wonder at what has changed for him. It is an exploration of his experience of the crisis. Quignard treats it all as if Hofmannsthal is to be refuted which, as Hofmannsthal is not proposing anything, only describing and exploring, is an error in understanding.

Also, there is no sense in which Quignard's response might in any way be written by Francis Bacon, to whom the original is addressed. You suppose Hofmannsthal had some sort of purpose behind the selection of the recipient – I've suggested above it hands the problem - the impossibility of philosophical, Romantic generalisations - that Hofmannstahl was experiencing, and a related revelation of the ineffability of the world, to one of the people symbolic in history for their role in transforming the ineffable, the spiritual into the scientific. Hofannsthal's letter is both an exploration of the lack, the residuum that transformation leaves behind, and perhaps a recognition that new generalisations and categories might be needed at the end of the Habsburg Empire.

Quignard addresses none of this. It's abject. I can't even remember why i started reading it now... was it Ryan Ruby who recommended him on Twitter? Steve Mitchelmore? I hope I'm not doing either of them a disservice (though I wouldn't put it past either of them to recommend him), but Quignard can gtf, a really irritating writer.

to make the tone more positive, i’ve picked up anna lowenhaupt tsing’s the mushroom at the end of the world again and i think im enjoying it even more the second go around.

through the subject of the matsukake mushroom the book manages to do some fantastic journalism on the economy of mushroom picking, migrant US and off-grid communities, the nature of capitalism - with the emphasis as much on “nature” there as it is capitalism. it feels like le guin, which is appropriate as UKLG has a chapter epigraph and provides an approving blurb.

one of those books that would go on my syllabus if i had one.

it’s lesson - that nature may flourish in the ruins of the structures of capitalism and indeed already does, and that effect is capable of providing utterly fugitive emotions like hiraeth, and processes of alien symbiosis and many other exotic and strange effects. that, per chesterton, we *live* in the unique world.

"was it Ryan Ruby who recommended him on Twitter?"

Now there's someone who is overrated and pray doesn't get more widely known and published.

yeah, goes into the bucket which is me doing a Nux MEDIOCRE!!! voice.

uh immortan joe i mean.

Sadly reminded of RR's annoyingness recently sorry.

Sounds good. What other books will you assign?

― dow, Saturday, July 27, 2024 10:05 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Right now, M. John Harrison's Wish I Was Here as well as some pieces from Mark Nowak's Worker Writers School program, maybe Coal Mountain Elementary.

In my search for mental filler, I have picked up Thunderstruck, Erik Larson, a simple tale of Guglielmo Marconi, primary inventor of radio, and some guy named Crippen who murdered his wife, and the improbable way in which their lives eventually intersected. It's neither badly nor well written. It is the narrative history equivalent of spackle. It fills time and occupies the brain.

It frequently jumps back and forth from the story of one subject to the other, in part because neither man is particularly fascinating to read about for very long at a time. Things happen to both of them and we, the readers, are informed of them. Not sure I'll finish this one, but for the moment it is restful and that's OK.

I'm rereading Middlemarch. What a time.

i still have never read Middlemarch...someday!

i mean there is a lot i haven't read, but it has always been on my list.

I've read the first few pages twice...

I keep getting the urge to reread it.

It just keeps getting better, incl. in recollections. Just for one example, Casaubon has entered my pantheon of troublemakers, along with Bartleby, Baron Charlus (earns his title, also born to it), Robert Cohn, and Jinx, the teen girl raconteur/sociopath (pyschopath?) in Lee Smith's Guests of Earth.

Doing shrooms in the ruins ov capitalism takes me back, and will be glad to read Ursula's buddy, but nowadays, at least in my neck of the woods, such-type ruins are just personally financial.

"Troublemaker" implies some effort; I should say that each of these characters is trouble.

Loved Middlemarch, but I got thrown off by the sudden character change at the end of Book 1, and put it aside "for later", which turned out to be a decade. I have a pleasant period of unemployment coming up in the fall so I'll try again then.

Unrelatedly, I really like the Juliet Stevenson audiobook - it helped me understand where the funny bits were (or even that there were "funny bits"), and when I went back to the text, it suddenly seemed a lot more approachable.

I've only read Middlemarch and The Mill On The Floss; how are the others---Alfred, anybody??

personally love romola and also enjoyed daniel deronda.

the historical setting of romola really sets off the intensely creative detail that her realism entailed - it sort of shows you what she was doing with the contemporary world around her more vividly. at the same time, it has brio. love it actually.

I was waiting for a Romola endorsement. The Oxford World Classics paperback at my uni library was last checked out in 1994.

Felix Holt is a failure: she tries to explain radicalism with her usual fount of detail and her discerning liberalism but it comes out stodgy.

I love Daniel Deronda; it rivals Middlemarch.

never read FH actually. interesting.

James Boswell - The Life of Samuel Johnson. 1400 pages, that's my summer done.

I just finished “Uniform Justice” by Donna Leon. It reminds me a bit of Leonardo Sciascia in terms of the themes of endemic government corruption and the tragic consequences when an honest person gets caught up in its machinations. However it was much more of a typical detective novel structure.

James Boswell - The Life of Samuel Johnson. 1400 pages, that's my summer done.

― xyzzzz__, Thursday, 1 August 2024 bookmarkflaglink

This is an ok summary: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/24/100-greatest-non-fiction-books-all-time-a-life-of-samuel-johnson-james-boswell

The actual attempt at biography is a boring beginning of the first 200 pages, where there is an attempt to sketch a Johnson's childhood and early years, and there is a lot to wade through but I somehow just kept with it. Its written in a lively enough style that sustains and is actually breezy enough. The party that Boswell gets Johnson to attend is a fantastic set piece, which most people should read, if nothing else.

I found it to be a very strange -- though unique enough -- addition to the canon. There is a moment that comes in the last 50 pages where Boswell says he is rummaging through the few papers left by Johnson -- which he used to build a picture of Johnson's childhood, he says -- after he had a lot of it burnt down and you just think he left no stone unturned. There is something a bit seedy and tabloid-y about that episode. Its kind of vampiric, though in a nice way? There is no shame for Boswell, he wants to tell you everything about him, whether anecdotal, recollected, reprinted (letter after letter, then there is his will reprinted as a footnote), refined (a lot of footnotes include some letter from a person who is writing to Boswell about his biography, and Boswell include these with his own comments in the 3rd edition).

The heart of the book is a record of transcribed conversations from their years of friendships. Many nights of table talk are written down in a diary at the end of the night, so it becomes a performance of memory from Boswell's part, and it makes a bet that Johnson's manner of conversation and intelligence will be something that people will want to return to. Its a big bet. Boswell is very honest about Johnson, though he is very protective of him (Johnson was a Tory, and those guys were cunts even back then) and you can see why he wanted to embark on such project. At some points Boswell will just say 'here are just some remarks from Johnson on a varierty of topics that night', and then its Johnson as a takes machine, a pre-twitter power-user! At others Boswell will ask him about a topic of the day, and you feel he is almost plugging him on so he can write down whatever Johnson comes up with in the diary at night, he is like a 17th century language model (and well, you can say 'oh AI blah' but he did come up with the first English dictionary)

The shape of it is unlike anything, and I enjoyed it but I am not sure many would really. Sampling a chunk beyond the first 300 pgs, maybe. Exhausitng for sure, but I couldn't quite abandon it.

Oh yean,and Boswell's diaries, esp when he's young and sad and crazy and first comes to London, where he also loves a good time, like walking with a friend from one end of town to the other before going to mess with actors from the audience---and also loves.a a good conversation and a page to put it on. Later he goes back to Scotland and his sorrows and booze and hos and wife there (God she's too good for him), writes about all that of course.

Thanks for Eliot tips yall, but my local library only has Romala Book Two! Looking on catalog now: also

Silas Marner : the weaver of Raveloe / George Eliot ; edited with an introduction and notes by David Carroll ; with the original Penguin Classics introduction by Q.D. Leavis.

Bowsell comes across, especially in the early London diary, as a truly congenial egomaniac, always ready to be delighted, even astonished, by someone else, who can take him out of himself, rattling out of depressive gravity for a while to an --reminding me of B.S. Johnson'sThe Unfortunates (and his great friend in there was a Samuel Johnson scholar, which may have helped in dealing with 20th Century Johnson's Boswellian tendencies).

jeez typos, other stuff, sorry

xp silas marner is not middlemarch level but pretty good imo if you don't mind a bit of sentimentality. I bailed out of adam bede pretty early on.

I'm a few pages from finishing Thunderstruck by Erik Larson. I'm surprised at myself, because I thought it was A Very Bad Book. The book pretends that its two narrative strands were somehow intertwined, but neither story reflected any new light on the other or really had anything to do with one another.

Worse yet, the two people at the heart of the book, the inventor Marconi and the murderer Crippen, possessed characters about as interesting as a bowl of mush. I kept telling myself to chuck it aside, but my inertia was too strong and now that I've plodded my way through 370 pages I'll plod through the final 30. Then you can shoot me.

I'm about halfway through "There There", the debut novel by Tommy Orange. I didn't get the reference, but apparently the book shares a title with a Radiohead song. Recommended for fans of the "Reservation Dogs" TV show or dark humor in general. His latest novel is nominated for a Booker Prize.

I personally found Adam Bede very boring, but my mom loves it.

Finished Kingdom of Fear, HST's memoirs while traveling last month. By far and away the most entertaining part of it was his bit on Clarence Thomas. He did a great job of caricaturing his persona in a way that seems to resonate to this day.

i don't know what to read. might close my eyes and just pick something off the shelf. maybe i'll make cyrus pick for me. he's an impartial judge.

started turgenev’s a sportsman’s sketches a couple nights ago (“notebook”, in my translation), lovely

The Iron Wall Avi Shlaim
massive tome on the history of interaction between Israel and its neighbours. 800pp and I'm reading it too slowly so may need to pick up a personal copy. Reading it and a bunch of other stuff at the same time so this keeps getting backburnered. I think its decently written and Israel aren't being presented overly sympathetically. Most of its representatives dealt with quite critically etc.
I think its important history and need to commit time to it when I'm not going to bed or waking up.

The Invention of Ancient Israel Keith Whitelam
British Biblical scholar casts a critical eye on the narrative of the physical reality of the Bible, archaeology, direction of fit etc.What motivated supposed archaeological proof which to a large part had to do with religious faith and exclusion of other populations that didn't fit the chosen narrative.
Interesting book that turned up in the bibliography of a few books I read a few months ago. It has been backburnered while I focused on a few other things though. So I'm trying to get through it.

Stranded in the jungle : Jerry Nolan's wild ride--a tale of drugs, fashion, the New York Dolls, and punk rock Curt Weiss
biography of drummer who w3as cin the New York Dolls, Heartbreakers etc. He gets hooked on heroin early on and spends years being pretty exploitative though apparently charming. Does seem to remain functional for the most part as a decent drummer.
Book is pretty interesting even if main focus shown in non sympathetic light.

Unicorn : myth and reality Rüdiger Robert Beer
a look into the lore concerning the one horned mythical beast. a lot on christian symbolism of middle ages and early modern era,.

Fatal Invention Dorothy Roberts
a book looking at the reappearance of Race Science under new guises. I came across it as one recommended by Angela Saini a few years ago and bought it last year but only just getting round to reading it. Pretty good though.

Agatha Christie, Endless Night, read so I could listen to this month's Backlisted episode without having the ending spoiled

It's literally impossible to talk about without spoiling. It's quite a meta book. To put it vaguely -- the central tension is: "When is this slow-moving romance novel going to turn into an Agatha Christie thriller - or was it always a thriller and I just didn't notice?" Some previous knowledge of "what to expect from a Christie novel" helps here.

Unfortunately I didn't think it was quite as good its reputation -- I think it's one of those genre books that critics love, because it toys with genre expectations in more upfront ways (although of course almost all good genre books, especially Christie, will play with expectations - that's the point!).

Toward the end of M. John Harrison’s ‘Wish I Was Here,’ probably the best book I have read this year. Marketed as an “anti-memoir,” it is equal parts writing advice, literary criticism, recollection, and meditation on aging from a person who is obviously uncomfortable if resigned to the process. Truly incredible.

Reading Righteous by Joe Ide. He's fun. I just saw that Joe Ide wrote a Philip Marlowe novel in 2022. Set in modern day.

Gerard de Nerval - Journey of the Orient. Halfway through the last of the three story collection. This last one specially is a work of orientalist tropes, with accounts of the occult, hallucination, romance and...I am halfway through so will find out what else.

I've blown through the audiobook of Elle Reeve's Black Pill, about the rise and fall of some of the principal figures behind 8chan, Gamergate, the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally, and the 2021 attack on the capitol. (She's the Vice reporter whose interview with "crying Nazi" Christopher Cantwell went viral in 2017.) Really gripping and well-reported.

Years ago the Guardian reading group did Endless Night as their book of the month, and iirc the whole group agreed it wasn't very good. I was a bit surprised that Backlisted chose it and loved it, though I did like the episode.

I didn't love it as much as the 1930s classics but I'm glad I read it. The combination of spartan simplicity, narrative momentum and uncanny business even reminded me a bit of Paul Auster (that is, New York Trilogy/Music of Chance Auster). I think it would hold up pretty well against, say, an Aickman short story.

But yes, Backlisted is reliably good value as usual, and Andy Miller has even learned how not to interrupt guests (quite so often).

struggling through Trollope's The Warden currently. maybe not struggling, but progress is slow. he keeps swapping between names and titles (warden, archdeacon, bishop) and i've not quite matched those two up and keep getting confused.

five more of these, the last five of which are twice this size...

Jen Craig - Wall. Just started. Jen goes back to Australia to sort out family business and basically 'outsources' some of her father's rants in a Thomas Bernhard like tapestry.

Usually anyone who tries his style fails but I think this is p good.

That's one of the few "major" Trollope novels I haven't read.

The Warden is the first of the 6 Barsetshire novels and i'm told they improve. i finished all the dickens and all the hardy novels and this was next.

annoyingly, the second volume, Barchester Towers, isn't available as a Penguin Classics ebook, i don't know why (it is in paperback). they are all available multiple other places, for free or not, but the PC editions are generally good and i don't mind paying a couple of quid for a decent introduction and set of notes.

last month was mainly biographies - Laurie Lee, Chris Packham, Jeanette Winterson, Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk. bit unusual for me, and probably enjoyed them more than usual. i have a bunch more...

I've blown through the audiobook of Elle Reeve's Black Pill, about the rise and fall of some of the principal figures behind 8chan, Gamergate, the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally, and the 2021 attack on the capitol. (She's the Vice reporter whose interview with "crying Nazi" Christopher Cantwell went viral in 2017.) Really gripping and well-reported.

also the star of this gif featuring erstwhile ilx0r ghost rider:

https://i.imgur.com/HQM0UnS.gif

Monica by Daniel Clowes, maybe one of the best things he's done? The ending is... special.

A kind of The Vet's Daughter, "Oh that's where we going, was it?" ending.

i miss ghost rider* and hope he is well

*i mean the ghost rider of the wider internet, is he like writing a book or what?

I finished "There There". Not everything worked, but it was a promising debut. The decision to have a very large cast of characters whose lives are only tangentially connected was clearly intended to be a bold formal choice, but it sets up a difficulty in terms of having too much exposition at the expense of forward movement which I'm not sure the author was able to overcome completely. Now I'm reading "Cutting for Stone" by Abraham Verghese.

Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, the first Blume book I’ve read since Frecklejuice several decades ago. It’s good. And making me want to reread The Long Summer.

The Long Secret, that is.

I feel like taking some Blume books on holiday next week and reading one a day. What are the good ones?

Re: Trollope, you don't really need to read the Barsetshire series in order, and they get better as they go on. Don't let The Warden and Barchester Towers stop you from reading The Last Chronicle of Barset.

I feel like taking some Blume books on holiday next week and reading one a day. What are the good ones?

― Chuck_Tatum,

I'm fond of Then Again, Maybe I Won't

i've already started Barchester Towers. it is 2x as long

this is quoting Last Chronicle as >1300 pages
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-last-chronicle-of-barset-28

(but that's a 2026 problem)

i found barchester towers a surprisingly enjoyable & entertaining read. picked up the entire pallisers set earlier in the year but not sure i'm ready for it just yet.

currently reading some zelazny... do all his novels revolve around battling gods?

why isn't there an anthony trollope thread?

currently reading some zelazny... do all his novels revolve around battling gods?

i do want to read that... i mean if it was good enough for hawkwind, but right now it's isle of the dead

Cristina Campo - The Unforgivable and Other Writings

One of the best writers I have come across since maybe Simone Weil, though this Italian writer is far more obscure. Two essay collections and a few other bits translated. First and foremost she was a poet, and her writing reads like it in its fluid ungraspability, and her critical eye and taste can be similar to Borges (whose essays, collected 'The Total Library', is a must), coupled with a firmly held belief in writing as a form of magic (v few writers can give that sense, even if they are great). In the essay collections she runs through her readings of fairy tales, reading back the poetry of these to us, but this is also crossed with her takes on writers from modernity (like Gottfried Benn, Proust, and yes, Borges and Simone Weil), and antiquity (to the Bible and The Renaissance).

This writer will stay with me for a long time.

Summer Will Show, Sylvia Towsend Warner - Middle aged land owning woman whose husband has run off with a Jewish bohemian sees her two children die of disease and, at a loss, decides to travel to Paris to force her husband into making her another child, which she would then raise as a single mother. Two things she didn't count on: the other woman turns out to be far more fascinating than her husband, and it's 1848. So you could cheekily call this a sort of bizarre "Eat Pray Love" set during the French revolution, but while self-actualization is a big part of it it is also a very politically engaged work. Protagonist starts hanging out with a group of utopian revolutionaries, finds them fascinating but is also somewhat dismayed by their total lack of a vision regarding what is to be done now, and so she ends up gravitating towards the communists - amusingly her British pragmatism and severity dovetails nicely with radical militancy.

This book also tackles so many different levels of marginalisation, in a way that if it were written today might feel a bit cheklist-y but this novel is from 1936! A worker whom she blames for the death of her children points out the rate of child deaths amongst the lower classes; there is of course a lot about Jewishness and anti-semitism; there is no depiction of physical intimacy between the two women but it doesn't take much to read it as romantic (Warner was gay herself). And then there's a mixed race child, the son of a plantation owning relative, who gets sent to England and then France, causing much anger by being better at everything and who sadly still ends up a pawn of his white family...I don't know if this character comes off entirely, but it's certainly less racist than I could have ever expected from a white British author of the era.

Carrying on with essays.

William Gass - On Being Blue
Jean Genet - The Criminal Child (Selected Essays)

The Genet essay is a really fucking funny troll. The people who commissioned wanted a kind of expose of the conditions of juveline reform schools. What Genet sent back was a 'this was great, please be harsher on me' response, which is a giant fuck you to the libs. Really love him. Those novels burned through me, but I've never returned to them. I should instead of wasting time with some other French author who will simply not be as good.

The collection has the essay on Giacometti that I've read before, some letters, an insane sketch of a play, but not the Dostoevsky appreciation. Making my way through it.

I just read The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain. It was good, but the courtroom plot twist in the second act was a bit too gimmicky for my tastes. I agree with the cover blurb by Dashiell Hammett, it's a good swift violent tale.

I'm now about halfway through A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Harry Crews, a memoir about growing up in south Georgia during the Depression in one of the poorest counties in the USA. It is unsparing in its depiction of a culture that's ingrown, violent and deeply ignorant of the world just a dozen miles outside its limited bounds. It is also quite affectionate. Crews describes that culture as having the strength to withstand the daily threat of starvation, maiming or death, and he conveys that peculiar strength as its essential virtue.

There is a definite nostalgia at work here, but that's forgivable since this is the milieu that formed him. The virtue of the book is that it is an insider's account of a culture that would otherwise only be half-known, in the incomplete way anthropologists know cultures from the outside.

I'm partway through Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor. (Only ILX mention is this post from BradNelson a few years ago.) Kind of Orlando set in Iowa City in the early 90s, with a kind of shape-shifting trickster protagonist who also has a High Fidelity mixtape-making side. About halfway through, enjoying it so far.

The blurbs on the back convinced me to try it:
“HOT” (Maggie Nelson) • “TIGHT” (Eileen Myles) • “DEEP” (Michelle Tea)

Whoops, meant to link to this BN post about the novel.

The Crewe memoir I read in January when it got a reissue and it became one of my favorite books.

A Childhood is wonderful. I still have my 80s copy.

was it the NYT that did a piece on Hannah, Crews, and Brown? worst law firm ever. Harry, Barry, and Larry! i still enjoy all three a bunch. they were big faves of mine in the 80s and i always mean to do a re-read. i like in that piece how they mentioned in Oxford, Miss you used to see people with bumper stickers that said *I'd Rather Be Reading Airships*.

What Genet sent back was a 'this was great, please be harsher on me' response, which is a giant fuck you to the libs.

M Train is really an exemplary memoir btw: just her traveling around her room, her neighborhood, her favorite coffee shop for writing, also abroad from time to time, during the year she turned 65, thinking of Fred sometimes, approaching, via various routes, incl. revisits to friends, inspirations, and the graves of same, around the world, as occasions, invitations show up in the pile of mail on her bed, approaching and then revisiting his last days, those of her consoling, bracing brother as well---and continuing on, experiencing other stuff as well, and that's life, that's what all the people say, and her too.

There is a quote from PS at the back of the Genet.

Truman Capote declared that Katherine Anne Porter, in addition to being a major Woman of Letters. was "a 16-year old girl, dancing the hootchie-koo." This was based at least in part on partying with her in a writer's colony, but he may have also been thinking also of the antic spirit sometimes moving behind and among layers of life's rich tapestry in the first section of this, as I encounter them now (take it, wiki):

The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter comprises the works of three earlier volumes —Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1935), Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels (1939) and The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944)—and four previously uncollected short stories: "Virgin Violeta" , "The Martyr", "The Fig Tree" and "Holiday."[7] The collection includes a brief preface penned by Porter especially for the publication, entitled "Go Little Book."[8][9]

does that mean that you are reading The Collected Stories? everyone should! and have it on their shelf for visitors to read.

these books on the other hand....uhhh...thanks, but no thanks. carry on, blighty! (i mean i'd read a bill bryson...)

https://www.thetimes.com/magazines/culture-magazine/article/top-100-sunday-times-bestsellers-50-years-ndnkjkp60

xpost Yeah! The stories set in Mexico involve some stereotypes or overly-stylized, surface-y figures, but yeah she keeps everything moving toward enough startling insight (or anyway I'm sold) in most of these---right now riding the train with film makers from Hollywood and Moscow, in "Hacienda," the finale of expanded Flowering Judas and Other Stories (first section of The Collected).

i'm reading Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing stories by Lydia Peelle

she knows how to write a story. southern stuff. she lives in Nashville. not exactly k-mart realism. quirkier. but still slice of life style. the story Mule Killers is excellent. It comes first like a great first song on an album. i've read it twice. a couple of blurbs by Barry Lopez and John Casey on the back. i'll betcha she's a Katherine Anne Porter fan.

I've read maybe ten or so of those best sellers, but they were for light entertainment purposes only. The best of that lot might be Watership Down.

i was expecting more crime on that list!

Porter is a considerable influence on me. I've worn down that collection.

Two novellas.

Celine - War
Arthur Schnitzler - Fraulein Else

'War' is the first of the translations to emerge from the big treasure cabinet of manuscripts that were thought lost. The journo who released didn't want his widow to profit from them and waited for her death to do so.

This is pure grotesque Celine without the mature style that was to develop later. Its not essential but its worth it for a book that doesn't glorify war in any manner whatsoever.

There is a quote from PS at the back of the Genet.

― xyzzzz__, Saturday, August 17, 2024 3:48 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Still find this bizarre, Genet’s rep surely doesn’t need to rest on the plaudits of a mediocrity like PS. (Yes, I know I am one of the few PS haters around here).

I finished a few:

‘Cold Dogs’ by Zan de Parry: probably one of my favorite living poets, de Parry does that great trick where his poems seem to be about one thing but by the end you find they’re onto something else entirely. They’re funny, playful, strange, and a little provocative. Speaking of musician blurbs, Bill Nace lends a blurb to this book, as he and Zan are buds.

some assorted smaller things, including an extremely good chapbook by a writer named Nelle DeRaille, which totally blew me away— Creeley-like attention to the line but written by a queer trainhopping sex worker, so the image content is more interesting than the sad man-time of a lot of Creeley’s verse.

Right now a few chapters into John Taggart’s ‘Remaining in Light,’ a book-length series of meditations on an Edward Hopper painting in which Taggart incorporates Derrida, Holderlin, Stevens, Dickinson, Levinas, and a number of other poets and philosophers. Interesting book, reminds me of a less chatty TJ Clark.

My Mom got this!

27. Longitude by Dava Sobel

th Estate, 1995
A book about 18th-century clockmaking sounds an unlikely hit, but John Harrison’s clocks did more than tell the time: they solved the problem of measuring longitude at sea, so ships could travel further, faster and more safely. A story of the ingenuity and persistence that made the modern world.
112 weeks in chart

xxp in the anglophone world I don't think Genet has ever had much of a rep (despite Edmund White's best efforts), so it's fallen to rock musicians to pick him up as a 'transgressive' sort.

Bowie did all he could

I'm partway through Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor. (Only ILX mention is this post from BradNelson a few years ago.) Kind of Orlando set in Iowa City in the early 90s, with a kind of shape-shifting trickster protagonist who also has a High Fidelity mixtape-making side. About halfway through, enjoying it so far.

The blurbs on the back convinced me to try it:
“HOT” (Maggie Nelson) • “TIGHT” (Eileen Myles) • “DEEP” (Michelle Tea)

― bratwurst autumn (Eazy), Friday, August 16, 2024 1:35 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol that the link goes to that specific tweet

anyway yes one of my favorite books

xxp Think there was some kind of effort to give Genet a higher profile in the US. Satre seems to have talked about him frequently when visiting, from the 1940s on---his plays were performed in the US, where I've come across 1960s mass market paperbacks of his novels---but doesn't seem to have ever been interested in being anything like a typical
literary celebrity of that era, sniping with Vidal and/or Mailer on Cavett Show, appearing on panels, etc.

From the late 1960s, starting with an homage to Daniel Cohn-Bendit after the events of May 1968, Genet became politically active. He participated in demonstrations drawing attention to the living conditions of immigrants in France. Genet was censored in the United States in 1968 and later expelled when they refused him a visa. In an interview with Edward de Grazia, professor of law and First Amendment lawyer, Genet discusses the time he went through Canada for the Chicago congress. He entered without a visa and left with no issues.[3]

In 1970, the Black Panthers invited him to the United States, where he stayed for three months giving lectures, attended the trial of their leader, Huey Newton, and published articles in their journals. Later the same year he spent six months in Palestinian refugee camps, secretly meeting Yasser Arafat near Amman. Profoundly moved by his experiences in the United States and Jordan, Genet wrote a final lengthy memoir about his experiences, Prisoner of Love, which would be published posthumously.

Genet also supported Angela Davis and George Jackson, as well as Michel Foucault and Daniel Defert's Prison Information Group. He worked with Foucault and Sartre to protest police brutality against Algerians in Paris, a problem persisting since the Algerian War of Independence...] Genet expresses his solidarity with the Red Army Faction (RAF) of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, in the article "Violence et brutalité", published in Le Monde, 1977.

In September 1982, Genet was in Beirut when the massacres took place in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. In response, Genet published "Quatre heures à Chatila" ("Four Hours in Shatila"), an account of his visit to Shatila after the event. In one of his rare public appearances during the later period of his life, at the invitation of Austrian philosopher Hans Köchler, he read from his work during the inauguration of an exhibition on the massacre of Sabra and Shatila organized by the International Progress Organization in Vienna, Austria, on 19 December 1983.[4]

for the Chicago congress

In the late summer of 1968, writers Terry Southern, William S. Burroughs, and Jean Genet were deployed by Esquire magazine to cover the Democratic Convention in Chicago. With photographer Michael Cooper and poet Allen Ginsberg inseparable parts of their coterie, the “fab 5” (as Michael Simmons dubbed them) were unflappable, capturing the calm and riding out the storm.

i could never read genet. i didn't try much though. i always wanted to read all those transgressive grove press writers but i really only ended up loving hubert selby. john rechy didn't take with me either. but again i was a lot younger. it seemed tedious to me. other than junkie and naked lunch i felt much the same about burroughs. and all the beats really. zzzzzz. but selby was the man! he was a big inspiration to me. him and celine. and henry miller too when i was young. i don't read any of them anymore.
there are all those dudes who think oh i can be bukowski but then they all suck even though it looks like such a simple way to write and i am certainly no selby or miller or kathy acker who i loved in high school but i liked knowing that you could be simple and direct and powerful like that. punk rock. i guess i was hoping i would get that from genet too but maybe i didn't try hard enough to see him for what he was and not what i wanted him to be. his books just sat on my shelf for years. but i am not dead yet. there is still time. (dennis cooper more my speed back then. or A Boy's Own Story speaking of edmund white. gosh what a great book.)

Try Thief’s Journal, scott. that’s the one that sucked me in

Same! It's the novel that fully worked imo

okay, i will remember that. cheers.

I started watching the 2018 adaptation of The Woman in White so though I should give the book a go. Very strong "paid by the word" energy and rather conventional attitudes towards women, I think I might just stick with the show.

I finished last years popular middlebrow novel of note, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. It was ok, a bit like Halt and Catch Fire meets A Little Life sans child abuse. My mid year's resolution is to read less of this stuff.

Now on to The Little Red Chairs by Edna O'Brien.

We also watched that (very good!) adaptation of The Woman in White, and my partner partner subsequently read (and completely hated) The Moonstone.

oh, you know, i finished that 2nd Joe Ide book and they are very entertaining if you are looking for a fun crime/mystery book. his IQ series. about a young black guy/former criminal from the hood in Long Beach, California who goes up against Mexican gangs and Chinese triads and dastardly rappers and he is very socially awkward but a genius like sherlock holmes. you don't really need to read them in order but i am. in the first two books there is a running thing about his brother who was murdered. so, there is that.

I finished two Amit Chaudhuri novels re-issued by NYRB, both just fine.

"always wanted to read all those transgressive grove press writers but i really only ended up loving hubert selby."

Never thought Genet to be transgressive. He always felt like a one-off but also someone that could be contained within French literature.

Literary journalism -- apart from the excellent Edmund White biog -- almost never bothered with him, he is not written about much. Don't think the novels have been retranslated. Guess there's the film of Querelle, which I should watch.

well, transgressive for the time he was writing in.

i would try all kinds of things that i gave up on quickly when i was younger. My Life and Loves by Frank Harris!

and forget De Sade. never gonna happen...

two pages would make my eyes glaze over.

i couldn't even really read Bataille.

i would have made a terrible Patti Smith fan. did she love Nabokov too? she loved all the beatniks and poets i never read probably.

i was fond of rimbaud though. baudelaire. he was fun.

I guess as I see it there is that small undercurrent in French literature which starts with De Sade, goes to Bataille, via Baudelaire, a few others but I've read those three. (And no I would never recommend 120 Days of Sodom...)

I guess Genet was somewhat in that, but some of it was so beautifully written, whereas De Sade is not.

i still need to read some Zola. and some more Balzac! and the Flaubert that i haven't read. and Voltaire! shit, i better get busy...

just finished: dylan jones' book about the velvet underground - readable, but ultimately shite

just started: lewis shiner, "outside the gates of eden", which is excellent so far. actually the 1st decent novel about a rock band or rock music or rock fans that i have encountered, i've read a whole gang of em & they're always dreadful

Scott, your high school self might related, as mine, did, to Nabokov's The Defense, about an eccentric Russian chess prodigy---even though I couldn't and can't play a move, and preferred to think of him more as one of my classmates than myself. It's short, tight, with imagery passing by sometimes, sticking around, uh-oh: funny and eerie in the right measures and mixes (I recall the tone as properly attentive, even sympathetic, but hey: like my teachers, the narrator/Professor Vlad has seen it all).
Also read another short novel, Transparent Things, with same tone, but don't remember much else, and occasional anthologized stories, always good, short, startling.
A few years ago, with an Old Man Discovers Fire effect, I finally read and raved on WAYR about Lolita, then tried to explain a queried statement while edging around spoilers (nobody had told me I could cover then with warning label!)
]

might *have* related

i read and enjoyed Invitation to a Beheading. I could never get through Lolita or anything else. his style...is not my style. i have probably talked about it on here too much. i'm not a puzzle or game person. his kind of wordplay... maybe he's too smart for me. there is something about his sentences...i should read more early stuff maybe. things he wrote in russian.

fun fact: he was my uncle's literature professor at Cornell.

I guess I never really considered him as part of the Sadean legacy, because part of Genet’s who thing was criminality and poverty matched by an outsider homosexual status. The abjection evident in his work seems to be of one who has lived through or at least witnessed much of it, whereas with de Sade and Bataille, a lot of it seems more about titillating the reader and scoring philosophical points— it’s ham-handed. (I do like some Bataille fwiw).

I often wonder what would have happened if he had made any films after ‘Un chant d’amour,’ which he repudiated but which is truly a beautiful gay prison porn love story, with images that have been carried on through gay art— Wojnarowicz used the flowers outside the prison window, for example, as an image in paintings.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5n2pa5

(nsfw obv, lots of cock)

Sly Stone Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)
Funk bandleader and ex-dj's memoir . Quite a quick read I got through it in 3 days while doing other things. Thought itpretty interesting though maybe not as in depth as the George Clinton one I read a few months back and does have overlap here.
I love the Family Stone music anyway.

Arthur Koestler The 13th Tribe
History of the Khazars an Eastern European population that appears to have converted to Judaism in the 8th or 9th century.
I saw this in the bibliography of a book I read a few months ago Nur Marsalla or Shlomo Sand or something. Ties in with a theory that a lot of Jewish population across Europe dates back to this conversion and not the alleged one where Israel is an ancestral homeland for every Jew. The latter not tying in with Palestine having existed for a much longer time than that history would allow.
Anyway interesting book by an author I've read and enjoyed before.

Before European hegemony : the world system A. D. 1250-1350 Janet Abu-Lughod,
Historian that I found out to be Palestinian writing about set up of geographical/political/economocal set up in the 13th-14th century and how there were non-European trade systems that had as much if not more weight before that. So the West was not visibly predestined to be dominant beforehand which counters a Eurocentric viewpoint that has been prevalent for a couple of hundred years.
I remember having read about a book looking into this in a Guardian or Observer book review at roughly the time this book came out so have wanted to read whatever book that was since, subsequently am wondering if this was the same book. Seems well written and argued anyway.
So looking forward to getting through this. But again probably too many library books going on at the same time cos there are a few others I haven't really looked at yet plus one I had on order came through this morning. & one I'm still backburnering has a hold on it so need to rush through that.

Just finished Ducks, Newburyport after a year or so on and off. It really gets going in the last 150 pages, so I started to skip passages looking out for the plot points. Can't see myself ever rereading, tbh.

i made it halfway through Ducks during the pandemic. my bookmark is still there in case there is ever another pandemic.

have a lot of gay sex, get monkey pox, start where you left off

will do!

my review for Ducks still stands. "What if Erma Bombeck wrote Finnegans Wake."

have a lot of gay sex, get monkey pox, start where you left off

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 20 August 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Just got finished reading a new book here’s my review pic.twitter.com/5N0glNGz1S

— Liv (@Liv_Agar) August 20, 2024

I finished A Childhood, Harry Crews, and it really delivered all the way through.

I immediately left for a backpacking trip the next day. For reading material I took with me The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler. I'm about halfway through and it's OK. If it were my first Philip Marlowe novel I'd probably say it was superb stuff, but it's not my first. It's the fifth one Chandler wrote and there is a rote quality creeping in, where he does all his signature moves, but they're getting a bit shopworn from frequent handing. otoh, Chandler was a good enough writer that he couldn't write a bad book, only one that's subpar for him.

‘cigarettes’ by harry matthews

second novel i’ve read by matthews, first was ‘the journalist.’ so far ‘cigarettes’ is more conventional in form (though who knows what mischief lies in store) despite being similar in content (people caught in a web of infidelity). feels like an influence on whit stillman ‘metropolitan’ at times (young idle rich new yorkers). matthews’ impish dark humour just cracks me up. there’s a delightful momentum to it, lots of the early chapters capturing the brisk acceleration into infatuation of young love so well; there’s an early scene where two characters have sex in a mudbath that’s hilarious but also very romantic and cute

have a lot of gay sex, get monkey pox, start where you left off

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 20 August 2024 10:37 AM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

will do!

― scott seward, Tuesday, 20 August 2024 11:02 AM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

lmao

Reading a fair amount to prep for the semester but my night reading is ‘Summer’ by Edith Wharton, my second Wharton. i had forgotten how good she is.

I'm so glad you think so, tabes. Even now when I recommend her in person I get scowls like she writes this corseted fiction when she understood sex and power and geography more than any novelist/short story writer of her time

reading Real life by Adeline Dieudonne. i love it. scary. sad. magical. about two kids with a horrible father. something completely insane happens to them and the book is about what happens after that. its not a horror novel but it feels like one. i actually might like those best when it comes to horror. translated from the French. the author is from Belgium.

https://bunnyspause.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/86766520_561552091105524_7449956001404420096_n.jpg

lots of different covers for this book.

https://bookaroundthecorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/dieudonne3.png

I've begun to read Abigail, Magda Szabo.

I read it a couple years ago. Keep us posted!

I finished Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Mad and the Bad a few minutes ago. I'll reread The Silent Woman now.

I re-read *The Silent Woman* after finishing the Heather Clark biography. It's terrific - arch, funny, acerbic, all those things you want from Malcolm. She's kinder to Anne Stevenson than I remembered; Malcolm is rarely starstruck but carries vestigial respect for Stevenson from their shared background in the 50s. She's very human toward Olwyn too. As for Jacqueline Rose: she had Malcolm's number (and I don't imagine many did).

Malcolm's anything but kind about England, though. It functions almost as a character and it's clear she sees England and English attitudes as a fundamental part of Plath's story.

It's also a brilliant book about writing I think? Malcolm allegorises each 'character' as part of the writing process: the resistances, the strength a writer needs to conquer demons (real, imagined), what a writer must learn to *leave out*. I could quote whole passages!

nb, here's one of Malcolm being human about Olwyn. Human, but still, ouch.

We all move through the world surrounded by an atmosphere that is unique to us and which we may be recognized as clearly as by our faces... Some of us, however, have thicker atmospheres than others, and a few of us have an atmosphere of such opacity that it hides us entirely from view - we seem to be nothing but our atmosphere. Olwyn Hughes is like this.

I needed an epic in my life. Reading The Prophets of Eternal Fjord by Kim Leine. Part One of his Greenlandic trilogy. Translated from Danish.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91cAeWtPqdL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg

Finished Euclides Da Cunha - Backlands. Described about half of it here.

'Novels' by Journalists

finished Barchester Towers, almost a second 2/3rds to The Warden. found it a real slog though, half the page rate of other reading.

and the next one is about 50% longer than those two together.

i guess he's trying to out-Dickens Dickens with the character names, but misses. Proudie, Harding, Bold, Handy, just adjectives. Sir Abraham Haphazard, Omicron Pie, ridiculous. the bloke with 14 kids is called Quiverful, suggesting, i don't know, potency? (psalm 127 apparantly)

Heh -- that's the only major Trollope I haven't read. Sorr.

Sorry.

In the way we live now there is a baker called crumb. And other such things I don’t recall

The Way We Live Now pulled me right through its mass, and sometimes tours my head w/o warning (well, the news can trigger), to this day.
Only other AT at local library: first Lily Dale, The Small House at Allington---good?

Jenny Erpenbeck, The End of Days. Starts with the death of a child and, over half way through, it hasn't lightened up yet. I mean it's got the first and second world wars and stalinism so it doesn't have a lot to be cheery about. The writing is just incredible, I think it's kind of a masterpiece, but I don't know if I can fully love a book that only shows the worst of us.

The Small House at Allington---good?

good!

Jazz on Record a Critical Guide Charles Fox Peter Gammond Alexis Korner
1960 book from the Grey Arrow series of handy guides. Very interesting reading now since it features a number of significant artists in very formative stages and is dismissive of electricity in blues. Also no mention of Delta Blues or Robert Johnson, though the first lp compiling his work was 1961 so that is probably not that surprising. Just odd from a current perspective.
Chance find from a charity shop yesterday. Not sure it's going to turn me on to anything new but interesting to see what was thought at the time.

I guess one could argue that Delta blues was not as influential on jazz as the more urbane varieties.

I finished Cutting for Stone, which was great, highly recommended. A bildungsroman, family saga, exotic adventure, medical thriller and many other things.

I finished Abigail, Magda Szabo, about a week ago, but left at once to go camping so my impressions aren't as fresh as I'd like them to be.

The protagonist was a 14 year old girl as were many of the supporting characters, who were her schoolmates. Because the book concentrates its attention upon their thoughts and feelings, while portraying the adults exclusively through such words and actions as were visible to the girls, it felt like an exceptionally good 'young adult' novel, but one that only made a few concessions to younger readers. Its main concession was that the plot twist at the end was telegraphed rather frequently and transparently. Otherwise, it was very deft at suggesting the many moral ambiguities that are imposed upon adults, in spite of all their efforts to impose moral clarity upon existence, and how one's recognition of these moral complications is a major step into adulthood.

While camping I read a collection of early Dashiell Hammett short stories, The Continental Op. The prose was clean and precise. The pulpy elements were there, but only to satisfy the requirements of the audience, so that his stories could be sold, published and read. It was evident that Hammett had other interests as a writer that he was pursuing, often tangled up with how corruption is everywhere hiding behind endless facades, emerging into the open to protect itself with violence when challenged.

Any Thackeray fans? I want to read Vanity Fair? How does he compare with my beloved Trollope?

i want to be a fan. i will read some. he wrote a lot! one of these days...

this always looked fun to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Snobs

Thackeray initially adopted several pen names to remain anonymous, including the pseudonyms: Théophole Wagstaff, Charles Yelowplush, Major George Fitz-Boodle, Michael Angelo Titmarsh, and Ikey Solomons, Miss Tickletoby, Manager of the Performance, Arthur Pendennis, Timothy Titcomb, and Solomon Pacifico.

Finished the sixth Jackson Brodie book by Kate Atkinson, a very fun three-star book, which is kind of the same as four.

I've never really seen anyone talking about Atkinson on ILX, either here or on the ILE thriller thread - her Brodie books are all different degrees of excellent. If you liked Alan Plater's Beiderbecke books/TV shows, you're probably on safe ground here. They are grim without being grindark and fun without ever becoming "FUN!!!". It's almost a Doctor Who model - Jackson is always at the center but the tone of the novel depends on whatever the mess he's got into this time is.

i liked Case Histories a lot. it was very unique! but i never read any of the other ones.

Scott, you'll be pleased to know my next book is another Elizabeth Taylor novel, The Soul of Kindness.

she is such a pleasure to read.

Working and living in CT this summer with one day off/week. Hitting NYC bookstores once weekly and making a point of buying and reading a book each time. So far read The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras, Groove, Bang, and Jive Around by Steve Cannon, All Fours by Miranda July, Tremor by Teju Cole, Waterfront Journals by David Wojnarovic, and Scratches by Michel Leiris. All excellent and thank god I can still finish actual paper books!

Love Thackeray - well, Vanity Fair, anyway. Becky is an amazing character, a very modern anti-heroine, and Thackeray gives her her due.

I finished Music & Silence, Rose Tremain. Some raunchiness and vague hints at magic realism to distract from the fact that this is a very conventional story, featuring innocent star crossed lovers, a kindly but weak king, an evil stepmother, etc. Not angry I read it or anything but nothing special.

I’m almost done with House of Splendid Isolation by Edna O’Brien. This is my first by her. It reminds me a bit of Leonardo Sciascia in the way it combines something like a political thriller with keen social and psychological observation.

I just finished The Soul of Kindness last night. I was a bit disappointed in it, but that is largely due to the high expectations I have of Elizabeth Taylor's novels, not any grave flaws in the book. I simply found the characters and their actions to be less compelling than in the other Taylor novels I've read.

Finished a chap by John Coletti and a collaborative book of New Yorker cut-ups by Clark Coolidge and Larry Fagin.

New morning reading is Carl Sauer's selected essays from 1963-1975. having never read Sauer before but knowing his influence on the last generation of the modernist poets— Olson, Dorn, Prynne— I am actually enjoying myself.

Now reading Rick Moody's debut novel "Garden State". It reads like typical early work, something a mature writer might want to disown, but in his preface to the reissue, added later, Moody seems ok with letting it out into the world, warts and all. It seems like the writer is not sure exactly what effect he is trying to achieve a lot of the time. There is the sense that just getting down the truth of what happened (in some sense of "truth" and some sense of "what happened") is sufficient. Lots of references to local northern NJ suburban lore that probably tickled those in the know, but are guaranteed to fly over the heads of most. There is also apparently no connection to the Zach Braff movie, despite the similarity in theme and setting. This book is a lot tawdrier and druggier though.

In the meantime, read a book by young Canadian poet Hamish Ballantyne that was among the best I have read all year— surprising images, really deft line-work, and the sort of “learned dropout” sensibility that seems to spring eternal from the Vancouver area’s poetry scene. Good stuff.

hamish was my roommate in vancouver. funny worlds-crossing moment to see his name itt. great guy :)

(Aimless morphs into a giant white rabbit and looks at his pocket watch)

Dear, dear me! It's time already? I'm late. Oh dear, I'm late for a very important date. Time for a new WAYR thread.

As We Seek Moderation!!! In All Things!!!!!! What are Your Reading in Autumn of 2024?

With apologies to dow, he started a Fall 2024 WAYR thread a couple of hours before I launched mine. It takes precedence.

Caught, Back, Party Going: What Are You Reading In The Fall of 2024?

awesome, close thread, mods!

> It takes precedence.

i'd disagree. you linked to the new one from the old one, people started posting here. the other one was just created and left for people to find, and had no posts.

also, we don't do 'fall'.

To quote the man-god dying on a tree: "It is done."