"Together as in other snow times, drinking busthead 'round the fire"—WHAT ARE YOU READING WINTER 2013???

Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

this book is really good. I have no idea how much of it is "true", but the prose is lovely even in translation, and Genet's own unreliability is a kind of artistic triumph...

Still on David Byrne's How Music Works. It's very good. His prose is unfussy and his subject fascinating, which is a winning combination.

tom mccarthy, "remainder"

t Ismael: how exactly would you characterize "his subject"? I've heard good things about the book, but am curious to know the balance of anecdote vs. original theorizing vs. popularization of others' ideas

Reading Malaparte's Kaputt about thirty pages at a time because it would be a little overwhelming in larger chunks. So much incredible imagery.

xp it's pretty much a balance of the three so far (about 2/3rds of the way through). A lot is how music has evolved in response to the prevailing technology, some of which ILM is very familiar with (recording studios, vinyl running length, mp3s), others less so (amplification, physical size of venue), and others I'd never even contemplated (capacity to improvise, concept of live vs recorded work and which is definitive). Then there's a lot on his own creative processes, which I found especially interesting even though a lot is dealing with collaborations and solo work that I've never heard. The next chapter is on finance, I expect that'll be different entirely. I recommend it if the subject is of interest, I can't imagine anyone hating it.

One thing that jumped out from an ILM perspective is that a short section on mp3s and compression is entitled 'crappy sound forever'. I wonder if our own Scik Mouthy is a source work?

I am making a second attempt at Douglas Hofstadter's Godel Escher Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.

Yes, I say second attempt as if this is mountain-climbing or something, but honestly, I have never read a book which makes reading feel like such a climb. I'm trying to read it in stages, a chapter a day, with breaks to go and read something else (an actual book about mountain climbing right now) because I think what did for my last attempt (where I got halfway through) was the sheer bulk and density of it, and wanting to just go off and read something else, and never came back.

I don't know why this book is such a chore - perhaps it's his annoying habit of throwing a theorem at you and saying "see if you can prove it, haha!" as if you are expected to go off with a sheet of paper and scribble out the results (I did, the first couple of exercises, then got annoyed at it) when really, at this point of my life, I am not a maths student; I do actually want to be spoonfed and taken through complex subjects line by line instead of having to work it out myself.

I'm just kind of boggling at the idea that this was previously a best-seller. Were people that much smarter in the 70s? Or did people just buy it and put it on their shelves? I know it's a well-worn trope with scientific tomes on difficult subjects (I am reminded of the 90s cliche on A Brief History Of Time, where everyone tried to read it, and then would boast at which page they "gave up" - I failed on my first attempt to read that book, but by the time I came back to a second reading, the concepts of that book had percolated through culture widely enough that it didn't feel difficult at all, in fact, I wondered how I had been stupid enough to give it up the first time.) But with GED, it seems even *harder* on the second attempt, like I am understanding this *less* than the first time I tried to read it. (Or perhaps because I was reading it on the bus back then, I didn't realise how much I failed to grasp.)

I may be reading this for some time.

Byrne says he doesn't want to do just another "aging white rocker memoir," so he starts out talking about sound quality in venues and how this goes back and forth with the sound of genres and subgenres; maybe consciously avoiding the "I" word---but then he starts testifying---about recording through the decades, starting with home tapes, ditto with performance, busking through college towns in the late 60s, to CBGBs to discoveries made on stage, touring with dancers especially. But he also goes way back, to the dawn of recorded music, and how it changed listening/listeners, etc. Later: "How To Make A Scene," and the music of the spheres, as chased by scientists and other heavies through the ages---really one of the best books of any kind I've read this century, at least.

His email newsletter is pretty cool: he's got a wide range of interests and enthusiasms, a measuring eye and ear too.

I've picked up his urban cycling memoir too, it looks really neat

I just put a hold on How Music Works at my local library.

In the newsletter he announced the ebook edition ("with some little music files embedded"); not quite embarrassed but def skeptical about ebooks vs. books, re how usable for people of the future, what with formats changing (no Gutenberg Floppy Disk for our white-gloved descendants, apparently)

Gonçalo M. Tavares's _Jerusalem_. This was good. Plain prose and a structure reminiscent of thriller authors, where we follow a bunch of characters towards some plot-nexus, interspersed with a few chapters about past events. There's a hooker and a pistol, too. Lots of philosophizing about sanity and "horror" and fate/teleology. I think I'd like to read more by him, but a title like "Joseph Walser's Machine" puts me off -- same as Villa-Matas, who I haven't read for fear that it's all gonna be ingratiating name-dropping shit cynically written to make the reader feel all cultured and in the know. Then again, _Jerusalem_ had nothing like that.

Read a few chapters of Dino Buzzati's _The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily_. Uh, I didn't realize this was a children's book when I got it at a flea market, and I'm not quite charmed enough to finish it. The doggerel and illustrations are nice though.

Hrm, I suppose structuring a novel like that is pretty common and not really a thriller thing.

Man alive! Sicily's been invaded so many times it's crazy.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2huBqjZPQ_Y/Tp0bpfers3I/AAAAAAAABEk/CQ5VcOON8Kw/s1600/orsi-5.jpg

Turgenev: Smoke

I love him

Picked up this vol of essays/journalism by Bruce Chatwin at a friend's place when I was over there for xmas. There is an interesting piece on Ernst Junger's WWII Diaries, makes a claim for it being "better than anything by Celine or Malaparte". Another piece on Kevin Volans (a composers I really like) that makes a claim about him being "one of the best composers since Stravinsky" which annoys me bcz I wish Stravinsky was as good as Kevin Volans! A lot of this is tied with him meeting these people in the flesh which really gets in the way of seeing the works (with all its flaws and interests) so you get these claims instead.

The piece on Malraux looks laughable already (talks about his "revolutionary" novels which I'd like to think its in the sense in which they talk about revolution but its not going to be that is it?) - does anyone care about Malraux these days? But hey in the middle of this he pays the now minister of culture a visit.

But that's journalism for you.

Has anyone read Songlines?

I read Songlines many years back. It is speculative and quirky. It contains fictional elements which it presents in a factual tone (as did much of Defoe's work, I suppose). It coheres rather loosely and has no particular plot. In sum, I liked it and have no problem recommending it (along with the preceding caveats).

Thanks - will have a look. Went to a show of Aus art recently, a complete incoherent mess but saw some of the Aboriginal paintings, the only bit that intrigued me.

Songlines is half a journal/story about the Outback and the people in it, both the stories of settlers and tales of aboriginal people's - and half a rambling set of quotes and anecdotes about the act of walking itself, and the philosophical / spiritual effects of, some related to the Songlines / Walkabout mythology, some just interesting. It's both frustrating but also amazing. Definitely read it.

Have been pecking at Renata Adler's SPEEDBOAT for six months but only really got into it over this winterlude while in enforced internet exile. Delightfully acerbic, mordant mid70s New York anecdotes/apercus - though a little too pleased with its own cosmo ennui: vampyweeks avant la groupe...

probably gonna continue with Bernhard - Gathering Evidence, part 2.

gaston bachelard - the poetics of space
muriel rukeyser - theory of flight (in the collected poems anthology)

the bears are great. better than his grownup stuff

gass on rilke, the nyrb hofmannsthal stories, michael palin's diaries

Hrm, really now? I'd like to get to The Tartar Steppe some day. I'll probably hang on to The Bears in case I need to babysit a niece or newphew, but I don't think I'll read it just for myself.
I went on to a different sort of children's book,
The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. Loved three of his novels a long time ago. This was ... good? Between the "do you see?" theme-thumping and superspecial teens and the subplot about competing farmer-dads standing in the way of true love, it did give me a whiff of what I imagine a lot of what's called Young Adult novels are like. It made it a bit tiresome. Still, it's a pretty good story which goes at a great pace, and although it gets a bit iffy with the übermensch shit, the message is pretty nice. Could've used more freaky freaks. Not sure to what extent we're supposed to be unnerved by the creepy deus ex machina character. She is certainly not presented as unproblematic, but that seems to get pushed aside at the end. Wish I'd read it when I was fifteen.

The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns. "Autumn came and Mother was still dying in her room." This was wonderful. One of those rare books that make me want to translate it so I can give copies of it to a few people I know. A sad, mostly realistic novel that gets sadder and more fantastical as it goes. This was another one with an asshole dad and some strange mental powers, but much more elegant and artful than The Chrysalids. It tapped into some of the horrors I recall feeling when I saw Pinocchio as a child.

Nostormo - I always wanted to read Gathering Evidence

thomp - How weird I was just looking at an essay by Gass on Rilke (reprinted in my copy of Malte Laurids Brigge) yesterday!

Gass owns

Thomp is that the reading rilke book w gass's own translations?

what's stopping you?

it contains some of his finest writings, because it is very personal, and as a result it's even touching, as much as Bernhard can be.
also, it is sometimes less "technical" which is refreshing after so much Bernhard novels..

xpost

Stephen Kinzer's The Brothers, about Alan and John Foster Dulles, architects of American Cold War policy.

im reading robin wood's "from vietnam to reagan...and beyond" and very very good it is too.

in WH smith's scanning mills & boon blurbs.

Ultimate Italian playboy Count Roman Quisvada has more notches on his bed his bedpost than... well, bedpost!

Also, of course "medical romance" is a sub-genre:

Protected by her ice queen façade, heart surgeon Michelle is always in control. Then maverick anaesthesiologist Ty sweeps in and ruffles her well-groomed feathers!

what's stopping you?

Inter-library loan overload.

Oh, Fizz, if only you'd been woman enough to come to the Girl FAP of yore, in The Foundry's Mills & Boon room. We discussed all this and more.

I read a stackload of M&B when I was staying in a squat in Berlin, and have retained a mild fascination with them ever since - their categories, prose styles, gender types etc all seem slightly strange and subjects worthy of study (tho as far as I know "gender types" is inclusive to an extent unwarranted by the books themselves).

They're so carefully and responsively calibrated to a specific market, that it feels like changes in style, characterisation and moral mechanisms would say an awful lot about a socially significant psyche - almost provide a history of it.

GEB - haven't tackled it for a long time. Don't think I got irritated, do think i didn't really feel smart enough to continue without bullshitting myself, or losing the point of reading. Differs from Brief History of Time I guess in that you have to keep passing through the formulas, as you say, and there's a feeling that you can't really continue if you haven't understood it. BHoT I seem to remember basically allowed you to think of thermodynamics as a cup of tea, so you could continue through to the end even with C- understanding. Popularity of GEB? Early version of brain gymnasium? 'This book will make you cleverer'. Combines lit, music and physics in (as far as I can tell) a genuinely innovative and interesting way (has a touch of the grand unified theory of everything about it perhaps).

His book on translation - Le Ton Beau de Marot - really fucking annoyed me though. Not unstimulating, but v v materialist (bits of Guns, Germs and Steel reminded me of it), which isn't and wasn't to my taste at all, very poor literary sense (which admittedly is my judgment), which, by creating a hierarchy of literary success, ends up narrowing his conception of successful literature or artistic writing (doesn't feel so much my judgment - it's a limiting book I think).

Brother bought me a couple of (amazon wish list) books for Christmas:

The Foundation Pit - Platonov
The Spectre of Alexander Wolf - Gaito Gazdanov

The latter has a great opening paragraph:

Of all my memories, of all my life's innumerable sensations, the most onerous was that of the single murder I had committed. Ever since the moment it happened, I cannot remember one day passing when I haven't regretted it. No punishment for it ever threatened me, because it occurred in the most exceptional of circumstances and it was clear that I couldn't have acted otherwise. Moreover, no one other than I knew about it.

and in fact the hazy, dreamlike chapter that follows is great as well. Very much looking forward to it.

reading Leskov and W Benjamin over Christmas, but want to write at greater length on those later maybe.

Also, JM reminding me that 2014 needs to be the Year of Turgenev. Feeling like overdosing really hard on Russians atm.

What's the rest of the Mills and Boon in Berlin story, again

-

re: Gass: yes, it's 'Reading Rilke'. I find Gass a little bit look-ma-no-hands, though it's made me more interested in reading Rilke than I have been in years. Here's Perloff on Gass on Rilke, which someone sent mme and reminded me I'd not got to the book since I'd bought it:

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/articles/rilke.html

Oh, i was holed up totally skint in East Berlin, 2001, in a squat, with a dog, and about 25-odd M&Bs and War & Peace (or was it [Anna Karenina?), and I think I read about 20 of the M&Bs before finally cracking. Lived below some satanists. The dog was v old and smelly. I used to cook potato soup for myself a lot. Mmm. Once an old woman fed the dog frankfurters on the street as I stood there starving. Not sure that really constitutes a story. Was there more?

I just think War and Peace makes a fine and necessary counterbalance.

yep. 1W&P=20M&B.

Interesting article I read recently on the reflection of changing social mores in Mills & Boon...

http://forbookssake.net/2013/10/16/busting-mills-boon-myth/

Did the M&B and W&P come with the squat, or else how did they work their way into your possession? Ditto the dog? There are elements of your story which I feel could use some more details of explanation. Or maybe it's better just to think of it as a condition which arose in media res and not ask questions.

I am fast approaching the bit of GEB where I gave up last time. Part of the problem is the sheer unwieldiness of the thing. There really is no reason that it should have taken 270 pages to (spoilers!) prove why MU is not a theorem of the MIU system and why it's impossible to prove that without stepping outside the MIU system itself. Except for the fact that he does try to explain each step of the logic in 3 and often 4 different ways - a Bach bit (and this is the place where I fall down, because I'm just not familiar with the music he's describing) and an Escher print and a little Lewis Carroll story and then the maths. And on one level, that *should* be helpful, because if you don't grasp one metaphor, you might capture one of the others that words out to be your cup-of-tea-in-the-place-of-laws-of-thermodynamics. But mostly it's just this huge unwieldy bulk which has to be waded through to get to the idea of something like "formal systems don't handle paradoxes well, or indeed, at all."

In the preface to the 20th Anniversary edition that I have, he does seem perplexed about how many different people could have thought the book was about so many different things. But doesn't seem to connect that to the fourfold way he went at confusingly explaining it all!

But I have reached the nice, flat plateau where he explains the mapping of signals to symbols, as the equivalent of letters to words-concepts and ants to an ant colony which is a respite of "phew, OK, I understand all this" before he shoots off into gLoops and fLoops and bLoops and speaking of which I'm going back to my book on mountain-climbing and trying not to lick the page every time Macfarlane does something macho and literary. Why do I fall for this. Why. And yet I do.

BB are you a new poster or an old one under a difft. name

i think i bought godelescherbach over ten years ago. i read the first ten pages.

I am a very very very old dawn-of-time ILX poster who is sensitive about not using their IRL name on the internet any more because: reasons.

hm.

I got Joseph Boyden's The Orenda for Christmas. I really liked his first two novels, and I get a lot out of contemporary postcolonial stuff. Living where I live in Canada (white-white-whitesville), Native issues and history are basically never even thought about, let alone discussed.

Finished Kaputt. Fascinating and horrifying in roughly equal measure. Burned through the latest Fred Vargas translation which is as silly and charming as all her other policiers.

Currently reading Mawrdew Czgowchwz by James McCourt and thoroughly enjoying it.

re: that Perloff article is terrific! Read a v rub translation of Duino Elegies, the bits quoted in that article seem a lot better.

reading Leskov and W Benjamin over Christmas, but want to write at greater length on those later maybe.

Interesting how WB is interested in Leskov and that the guy is sorta an ignored Russian isn't he?

Anyway..

Finished Mountains of the Mind, supposed to move onto Robert Graves' The White Goddess (I read this when a teenager, and remember none of it) but feeling too distracted by grief to see the words as anything except lines on paper.

Maybe not the best thing to read in the circumstances, whatever they may be.

I have the two translations that Gass recommends or more-or-less does-not-condemn, it turns out: Leishman/Spender and the later and less poetry-y Poulin.

Perloff is a little unfair on Gass, or has read him hastily: he anticipates what she says about the slang sense of "awesome", e.g.

I also also have the Behn translation he puts the boot into: the one that translates "Jeder Engel ist schrecklich" as "an angel, alone, is misted in dread"...

yeah that was a really good article, although yeah I disagree with some of her conclusions (eg I don't think that gass's admiration for rilke or the way he expresses it sit oddly with his general ideas about literature)

the look-ma-no-hands thing is a thing, he wrote an essay (collected in I think a temple of texts) where he listed his main tics/habits/compulsions as a writer, and one of them was what he called "jingling". Personally I love that sort of thing - that jazzbo approach, john barth's "passionate virtuosity" - and one of the things I've enjoyed most about WHG's late work is that he indulges this side more & more often (tho as a stan I'd argue that his prose is often great in quieter, less flashy ways too).

Not for everyone, though: I gave middle c to a friend of mine certain that he'd love its flights of misanthropy, being a fellow fan of death on credit, but the style pissed him off so much he couldn't finish it.

oh, i forgot there was a new(ish) novel. still haven't read the tunnel. --

so like i think gass's notions of rilke's greatness are advanced in a self-aware way, i don't think in applauding rilke in broadly modernist (romantic wing) ways he's renouncing postmodernism and all its tenets.

like i guess a part of what the later diversions on the elegies and kantian noumenalism is about is resolving some of this! i'd stopped paying attention by then though; maybe i will read those bits again after i read the elegies.

also really enjoyed the perloff article.

BB - i'd run away to berlin to be with an ex who'd split up with me three years before and who i hadn't got over. she had been living in the squat, but was then living in another squat with her boyfriend, one of the many construction workers in berlin at the time. the M&B were the previous tenant's I think, though the W&P was hers. i think she might have been looking after the dog, but it might have been hers, i can't remember. the boyfriend got very pissed off when she and i danced to wanda jackson in a club, and things were complicated further by her boyfriend's best friend being hopelessly in love with her, and me actually having fallen for someone back in england who i was just getting to know as I left. ended up getting a flight home with the last of my money, then hocking my despised flute (a phrase that would make an excellent euphemism) to get together with the person i only realised i wanted to be with once i'd gone to berlin.

Interesting how WB is interested in Leskov and that the guy is sorta an ignored Russian isn't he?

i don't know how ignored he is - he doesn't seem canonical, certainly. WB wrote about him in a long essay The Storyteller (vol 3 of the selected writings). he's less interested in Leskov himself than Leskov as the avatar of an ideal - the storyteller as artisan who engages with fable, folk wisdom, and deals in non-novelistic incident and anecdote. the storyteller does not explain. his argument is that storytelling is declining or dead and makes a series of interesting assertions:

1. Story telling is declining because the value of experience is reduced in value. (this felt and feels unfalsifiable, if I'm using that word correctly - it has to be used as a premise to allow his consequent argument).
2. Although the process has been taking place over history, its most obvious expression is WWI:

Wasn't it noticeable at the end of the war that men who returned from the battlefield had grown silent - not richer but poorer in communicable experience? What poured out in the flood of war books ten years later was anything but experience that can be shared orally. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been more thoroughly belied than strategic experience was belied by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on horsedrawn streetcars now stood under the open sky in a landscape where nothing remained unchanged but the clouds and, beneath those clouds, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.

3. The emergence of the middle class and mass printing (as manifestations of fully developed capitalism) have brought about the thing that destroys experience: information:

Intelligence that comes from afar - whether over spatial distance (from foreign countries) or temporal (from tradition) - possessed an authority which gave it validity, even when it was not subject to verification. Information, however, lays claim to prompt verifiability. The prime requirement is that it appear 'understandable in itself.' Often it is no more exact than the intelligence of earlier centuries. But while the latter was inclined to borrow from the miraculous, information must absolutely sound plausible. For this reason it proves incompatible with the spirit of storytelling.

Found this bit particularly interesting - trying to extend Benjamin's argument into today's world (mainly involved watching a youtube of Lil B's The Age of Information). Yes, 'everything is now on the internet' & carrying code and meta stuff, NSA etc, but more going down one of my rabbit holes: the ascendance of statistics, cost-benefit, the application of mechanical efficiency to human environments and humans themselves. feels like if experience did die on the fields of Passchendaele, then we needed a new mechanism to evaluate the likely outcome of events, and that mechanical evaluation of reality, via stats, cost-benefit etc (all enlightenment inventions, and i'm not nostalgic for their absence and am generally agnostic about their effects - like many things humans do those effects are good and bad).

Neither is WB nostalgic about the decline of storytelling:

Nothing would be more fatuous than to wish to see it as merely a 'symptom of decay,' let alone a 'modern symptom.' It is, rather, only a concomitant of the secular productive forces of history - a symptom that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to find a new beauty in what is vanishing.

He's interested in presenting the storyteller as an artisan/craftsperson, so on a grossly simplified level it feels like his argument fits into the Frankfurt School 'marxist commodification of culture' set of ideas.

Still haven't actually talked about Leskov, but i do want to - feel each story i read i'm discovering new things about him, he feels very - 'complex' is the wrong word - strange, fascinating. i get magic realism triggers when i read him (it's not a mode i'm fond of) but of course that's not fair, applying a modern thing to an older thing (there's a fucking word for that and i can't remember what it is, this head of mine is like swiss f'ing cheese). anyway he's rich and strange enough to not really allow that simplification, and he's really got me wriggling on his hook. basta! i need some tea.

Ah yes I did have a quick look at the essay again in my copy of the Illuminations collection a day after my post and yes its less about Leskov's works than a jump-off point for the arguments you talk about.

I was reading this essay on Borges in the NYRB where it appears he is doing something in the same ballpark as Benjamin, but here talking up the strength of (or his tastes for) storytelling in Anglo-Saxon 'literature' against the novelistic and psychological by his remarks on Shakespeare/what he leaves out of his lectures/the fact his works are a dozen short stories (with no magical realist vibes).

is it in Illuminations? I didn't realise, must've skipped it or read and forgotten. xyzzzz__, have you (or anyone else for that matter) read Adorno's v early work on Kierkegaard? Can't find it in any of the usual places.

just having a break from the Leskov at the moment, dipping into some quite well-loved books of old - a couple of Victorian books of travels in the Low Countries by HM Doughty. They're very benign, but quite pleasing, and very occasionally given over to outbreaks of gothic excitement, such this enjoyable passage on the Dutch Hunnenbedden (Northmen burial ground monuments of granite and tumuli):

This land of long-forgotten ancestors reeks with an evening mist of superstition. The ghostly Hunnebedden! built, so the folk say, by Demons, Devils, Monsters, Horrid, Grisly of countenance, Savage, Thirsting for human blood, Sworn enemies of God and man, Grusome, Horrible, Huns, children of Anak, Emin, Nephalim, Rephaim, Born for destruction of mankind, Refuse of giants from the land of Canaan. No mortal may run the dread gauntlet of the heath by night. In the dark, burning flames play on the dead men's mounds, ghosts revisit their sepulchres, and leave open the gates of "hel." ANANIZAPTA! ['a thrice blessed word of never failing potency against 'Develen and Luther Gostes']

god i wish i didn't have to go back to work next week.

(That could almost be something being quoted in the Burren section of Macfarlane's Wild Places. How funny.)

Fizzles I've read bits of the Adorno book on Kierkegaard/possibly have a PDF stashed away somewhere; Susan Buck-Morss' The Origins of Negative Dialectics covers it pretty well, though that one may not be any easier to find...

got a pdf of the buck-morss - thanks bernard, I'll have a squiz. if you stumble across the adorno, that'd be great, but for god's sake don't expend an iota of energy looking for it.

flicked through The Crime of the Century by Kingsley Amis (thriller originally published in six parts in the Sunday TImes). Predictably absolutely dire. Really really bad.

Working my way through a collection of Luigi Pirandello plays, they are alright but lack the impact they probably had 100 years ago. Haven't read Six Characters yet, though. Also about to start up Nostalgia by Mircea Cartarescu.

Just finished up Fall of the King by Johannes V. Jensen, per recommendation from Frederik B on the obscure Nobel Prize winners thread. It was a pretty unique and awesome read.

Thought Mawrdew Czgowchwz was an absolute pleasure. Really made me regret how little live opera i see when i am in the UK.

Read James M. Cain's Double Indemnity, which is terrific and substantially different from the film at the end, after that. Currently on The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf.

just read The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaita Gazdanov. It's clearly very good, perhaps even a masterpiece, but I found myself struggling slightly to distinguish its features - probably because I didn't sufficiently move away from the Leskov, dealing with similarly weighty, but very different themes. It has a hallucinogenic... no, an anaesthetised quality to it. The sort of thing you get in Kafka or in The Image of a Drawn Sword, where you have, as you do here, a narrator who does not feel in control of their destiny or behaviour, and are unclear about their motives, and feel separate from their society. i kind of don't want to give anything away, as it's the sort of quite exciting book you want to read in one sitting I think, also I've been sitting here mid-sentence for about 20 minutes trying to work out what I think about it, and unravel some of what it does, and am still here pondering without really wanting to put anything into words. it feels like a spiritual rebus. also I don't want to give anything away. i think the best thing to do is put down again the excellent opening paragraph:

Of all my memories, of all my life's innumerable sensations, the most onerous was that of the single murder I had committed. Ever since the moment it happened, I cannot remember one day passing when I haven't regretted it. No punishment for it ever threatened me, because it occurred in the most exceptional of circumstances and it was clear that I couldn't have acted otherwise. Moreover, no one other than I knew about it.

and the only notes I took while reading:

death/not death
search for an author/not author
split personalities of AW and narrator (p40)

As I walked along avenue Victor Hugo, it suddenly occurred to me that none of this could be real, and I began to experience a sort of emotional vertigo as though all this were a page from a children's book about vanishing acts. p84

in fact they are the same -the black and white horses are perhaps an early indication of symbolism. see A Wolf's description of the path a life must take. it haunts the narrator's life.

the first sentence remains one of recollection over the whole novel - that is to say one of the curiosities of the novel is that the murder of which he speaks is in fact *not* a murder. and yet it haunts him - and despite the fact it is not a murder, still it haunts him.

i wonder if it is a peculiarity of emigre experience, or of people split from their home.

"what am I really guilty of?" p136

A quote from L'Express on the flyleaf suggests 'If Proust had been a Russian taxi driver in Paris in the 1930s...' Although quite exciting sounding that doesn't feel correct - I felt the closest analogues were Camus (esp those novels featuring existential sensualists - Jean-Baptiste Clamance for instance), Dostoevsky (particularly Notes from the Underground), Kafka, and by a certain amount of extension, Céline. Oh, it covers a lot of ground that Nabokov covers but in a very different manner (but that was responsible for my musings about the 'emigre' experience and split characters/memory).

if this all seems neither hot nor cold, it shouldn't do, the more i think about it the more i want to say IT'S EXCELLENT READ IT.

its nice and short. ugly cover though.

yeah, a one-sitting read p much.

under western eyes - conrad
afterwards: Oblomov - Goncharov

started rereading Agota Kristof's trilogy The Notebook/The Proof/The Third Lie, which I remember digging in HS. anyone else read it?

(note to self: use forward slashes to separate italicized terms.....)

yeah, overrated imo. too thin, too shallow.

elaborate? I recall enjoying the 'postmodernism' of its structure first time around, although I admittedly had a much greater tolerance for/keener interest in such things at the time

There was a power cut so I couldn't see my bookshelves. So I went to the library to get a cheap paperback to read in the pub.

And came home with a massive stack of books, including more LeGuin Earthsea tales, some massive Elizabeth Jane Howard tome, Marge Percy's Woman On The Edge of Time and - I am not even making this up - something I thought was a saucy lesbian novella which has turned out to be not just an Academic Quest novel, but also basically Foucault fan fiction. Foucault slash, no less.

Why. Why do I do this to myself.

I'm not sure if my reaction is pleasure or disgust but it worked for cheap thrills in the pub until the electricity in my road came back on.

i enjoyed it too as a teenager, went back to it again in order to write a book review for a magazine, and find it embarrassing.
sort of like the french avant-garde of the time (rob grillet etc..) but not groundbreaking. very commercialized, straightforward and provocative.
but try for yrself, it's the easiest read in the world.

xpoost

started rereading Agota Kristof's trilogy The Notebook/The Proof/The Third Lie, which I remember digging in HS. anyone else read it?

Several people whose taste I trust online recommended this, but I had real trouble getting into it :(

So far for 2013:

* The Black Lake - Hella S. Haasse: short Dutch novel from 1946, about the troubled friendship between white son of colonial manager and his Indonesian overseer's son, made more complicated when oversser drowns trying to save the white boy from drowning. Not earth-shattering, but plainly written and affecting

* Bertha Garlan - Arthur Schnitzler: more of my beloved pre-WWI Austrian shenanigans, about a woman trying to get back with her first love after her husband dies. Typically excellent. Schnitzler is great.

* Invasive Species - Joseph Wallace: would-be high-concept SF, but basically an airport thriller with pretensions, about parasitic wasps

* An Essay on Typography - Eric Gill: fascinating to me, as I work in publications/graphic design, but so fusty in language it could have been written in 1831, not 1931. Penguin avoid their usual author's note at the front, thus not having to deal with the fact that Gill was a fucking shithead bastard child molester

Branwells entire last post should be ilb new board description

basically Foucault fan fiction. Foucault slash, no less.

What?

Actually, by the end of the book, Foucault was the one person the nihilistic French author macguffin hadn't had gay sex with, but still. Enjoyable on an "academic fan fiction, LOL!" level.

Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker. There was another power cut later that night and I ended up lighting a bunch of candles to read the ending (most ridiculous death evah!) but yeah. Ridiculous and absurd book; great for a power cut.

Re-reading Proust's "Remembrance..." and nearing the end of vol 2 (Within a Budding Grove). I've re-read a few heavyweight novels over the past year or two (Tolstoy, Joyce, Eliot) and found that despite the passing of many years my opinion of the books had changed surprisingly little. Proust looks set to be very different - I'm liking this a LOT more second time around. Odd because there's a lot of the kind of high romanticism I think of as a bit of an adolescent taste.

John Banville's The Sea. God.

I hated that.

Almost done with Book 1 of Knausgaard's My Struggle. First half is about his high-school years, second half deals with his dad's death from alcoholism. Both halves pretty great. His ersatz-Proustian tic of recounting mundane activities in minute detail sometimes seems almost OCD, but the fastidious style pays dividends by capturing subtle emotional nuances in its fine mesh.

I ordered that on your recommendation, it sounds great

Cool - I think you'll like it.

"John Banville's The Sea. God."

i loved it. was i high? don't understand why lots of people don't like it

took a break from eric foner's 'the fiery trial' (great stuff, about 100 pages to go) to finish rereading 'gulliver's travels.' that's one angry, angry book. had forgotten how trippy the entire third chapter (floating island, time-traveling magicians, eternal-life pariahs) was. now i'm wondering if swift might not be the single best writer in the english language. toward the end i was slowing down just to savor every single sentence.

i loved it. was i high? don't understand why lots of people don't like it

― nostormo,

It's florid and purple in the worst sort of way: he tries way too hard to write Perfect Sentences.

i vaguely remember him trying to write like Proust

this novel, barely over two hundred pages, not one but three florid descriptions of girls on beaches.

I think Henry James, not Proust, is the main model for The Sea? Although, to be fair, Proust's florid descriptions of girls on beaches are all-time.

has he used 'flocculent' yet? He does love flocculent.

I liked The Sea, though it's probably 2nd-tier Banville & I am completely sympathetic to people who don't like him at all. I like the over-focus, the sameyness of his books: chilly evasive narrators, overworked prose, a murder or betrayal somewhere in the past. Can only read one every few years or so.

Haha I mentioned "flocculent," "“crepitant,” and “assegais” in my blog review yesterday.

I did quite like The Untouchable when I read it 13 years ago.

ha, he uses it in literally every book of his I've read - 5 or 6 of them.

(I thought The Untouchable the best of them.)

I am currently reading a book by Angelo Dundee, the trainer for Muhammad Ali among many other notable boxers, titled My View From the Corner: A Life in Boxing.

It's not so much a memoir as a rich feast of boxing anecdotes, and not just from his own career, but roaming as far back as John L. Sullivan and Jim Corbett, because boxing insiders like Dundee spend vast amounts of time swapping stories. It's co-written by another old-timer, the sportswriter Bert Sugar, and is told in language simple enough that most eleven year olds could read this book without much difficulty. I grew up humming the Gillette jingle from Friday Night Fights and watching fighters like Sugar Ray Robinson, Dick Tiger and Emile Griffith, so this is fun stuff for me.

"The Book of Evidence" is a really good Banville book. "The Sea" was a bit too purple for me though. He also comes across as a pompous twat in interviews, he's nowhere near as incredible a writer as he thinks he is.

The Untouchable was incredible, i'll give him that.
the rest? ok or less

Finished Woman On The Edge Of Time by Marge Piercy and holy fucking shit, that thing kept me in its grip for two solid days, absolutely un-put-down-able. I'm still trying to work out of the whole thing was supposed to be real or hallucination and which way to read it. Although it did remind me a lot of bits of other books (the time-travelling Utopia/Dystopia bits of The Female Man, the commune bits of The Dispossessed and the brain surgery bits of The Terminal Man) the combination of aspects was startling and... whoa. I've got that same "aarrrghhh... I want my hope/future back!" feeling that I usually get at the end of an Octavia Butler novel. I did not expect to enjoy it as much as I did. Fantastic book.

i started reading donna tartt's 'the goldfinch'. about as good as i expected.

I'm just realising that one of the tiniest things, but also, most affecting for me, things in that book, was the casual use of its own set of gender neutral pronouns. I'm just going to to start referring to everyone as "person" and "per" from now on. That was such a tiny part, and yet so natural and so amazing.

Reading Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation

Finishing Grant F. Smith's Spy Trade: How Israel's Lobby Undermines America's Economy, which is a good transition

Smith is rhetorically very restrained and good about documenting factual claims. A bit on the dry side, if anything. This could be a good transition (though it wasn't planned that way) from reading more than I had planned to in 2013 about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and related issues, to reading about economics.

finished the Kristof; picked up Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution, inspired by a brief detour I made thru Isaiah Berlin's lecture series The Roots of Romanticism

one thing I am really enjoying so far in Carlyle: the drastic tonal shifts, culminating in frequent outbursts of apostrophe which I am not at all sure how seriously to take, e.g. from his discussion of the monarchy's final years:

Certainly a singular Golden Age; with its Feasts of Morals, its 'sweet manners,' its sweet institutions (institutions douces); betokening nothing but peace among men!—Peace? O Philosophe-Sentimentalism, what hast thou to do with peace, when thy mother's name is Jezebel? Foul Product of still fouler Corruption, thou with the corruption art doomed!

Meanwhile it is singular how long the rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly.

i've been tempted by the french revolution, but only given it a browse so far. i picked up an old oxford classics edition of his novel sator resartus a few years ago and it's something. a big influence on emerson and the transcendentalists apparently.

more or less read nothing but nineteenth century russians for the last few months. currently half way through the uncompleted and twice destroyed second part of gogol's dead souls, which totally pales in comparison to the first part.

the new donna tartt is the worst good novel since freedom

The reviews/summaries of it make it sound completely stupid and ridiculous

idk i'd say it's more dumb and arbitrary

I can't deal with Donna tartt

Patti Smith's Just Kids. Kind of intriguing to read a book by someone with no sense of humour whatsoever. The Morrissey book has its problems but at least it's funny. This is an endless, solemnly self-regarding loop of New York… Rimbaud… highbrow celebrity encounter… Genet… I assumed I'd love it but it's bugging the hell out of me.

Last night I started reading How Music Works, David Byrne. So far, the most obvious thing about it, from reading the first few dozen pages, is the writing style. This book is definitely pitched at people who do not read much or who do not read very demanding books. That's ok with me, so long as the interesting bits are not scattered too thinly in there. So far, so good on that account. It's not a feast, but it isn't a famine, either.

I'm thinking that I might devote some reading this year to World War I history, probably starting with Tuchman. Anyone have other recommendations? I'm also gonna borrow a new book by Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914, and a book that I read some essays from a few years ago called Origins of the First World War (ed. L. C. F. Turner).

It might be interesting to have a thread keeping track of centenary milestones over the next four years.

Periodically reading A History of English Prose Rhythm by George Saintsbury after recommendations. He really is excellent company - witty, dry, but not mealy-mouthed - he's generous with words and opinions, as well as his vast store of knowledge - and it's a fantastic book generally, with great excerpts. Particularly enjoyed the monk spying, at night, on St Cuthbert standing in the sea, then having his feet dried by seals (from the Blickling Homilies).

Good selection also has a power to make you reappraise something you've read before, like this bit from Chaucer's version of Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy:

O thou maker of the wheel that beareth the stars, which that art y-fastened to thy perdurable chair, and turnest the heaven with a ravishing sweigh, and constrainest the stars to suffer thy law; so that the moon some time shining with her full horns, with all the beams of the sun her brother, hideth the stars that be less.

Aimless, the Byrne does start with early morning spoonfeeding, but gets better, once his obsessions kick in.

Haven't thought of Boethius since I read A Confederacy of Dunces, but thanks for the tasty quote; I'll check out Saintsbury.

Graham and Kantor, Naming Infinity
Anasi, The Last Bohemia
Rycroft, Reich

Rycroft on Reich is a little like the narrator of The Third Policeman on de Selby: a dispassionate recounting of some really nutty theories. But while the narrator is always reminding us that de Selby is after all a great thinker, Rycroft ends up as a sort of du Garbandier, referring to Reich's "futile life" and says that two of Reich's books are "readily available but should be avoided by anyone who wishes to retain any respect for him." Best sentence:

An even more preposterous notion is his idea, based on very shaky biological speculations about the orgiastic longings of protozoa, that human orgasm includes an attempt to become spherical, an attempt which man's possession of a backbone dooms to failure.

This is the original Fontana edition, one of a set with colorful geometric patterns which "can be rearranged to form a variety of patterns," designed to appeal to the collector in us all.

Oh my god, I am one chapter from the end of Godel Escher Bach and I might actually finish this monster by the end of the weekend! I feel like I have been reading it forever, and will go on reading it forever.

It was kinda cute, though, getting to the section of "things computers will and won't be able to do" predictions and seeing how many of them he got wrong. Never trust a futurist.

(wow, I could easily get obsessed with Bongard Problems.)

Now reading: This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski. Feeling pretty horrible about humanity in general.

Patti Smith's Just Kids. Kind of intriguing to read a book by someone with no sense of humour whatsoever. The Morrissey book has its problems but at least it's funny. This is an endless, solemnly self-regarding loop of New York… Rimbaud… highbrow celebrity encounter… Genet… I assumed I'd love it but it's bugging the hell out of me.

she's always been painfully earnest but in her 70s heyday Patti made amusing cracks with interviewers & in her Creem reviews. I get the idea that the deaths of her husband and Robert Mapplethorpe erased any SOH she possessed. As a fan I gobbled up Just Kids but totally get why other might find it insufferable.

rycroft on reich sounds great

finished the goldfinch

tempted to read some wwi history myself, after returning whatsisname's big second world war history (reselling, actually). this book 'the sleepwalkers' looks good, looks like my sort of thing; i tried to watch 'oh what a lovely war!' but it annoyed me. i resold that too, come to think.

Oh my god, I have finally finished Godel Escher Bach. I feel like I have been reading this book for an actual eternity. I am still not sure I understand many of the arguments (though the central proposition, of the emergence of consciousness from self reference and strange loops in tangled hierarchies, has been beaten into my head enough times for me to say "OK, OK, I get it already. Enough with yet another extended metaphor about chess already!") I cannot remember the last time that reading a book felt like such an eternal slog, and finishing it felt like such an accomplishment. Yes, I do feel like I learned a lot from it, and ideas were challenged and explored in a thought-provoking way. But my god, it could easily have been half the length and got across the same information.

RICERCAR. The end.

A re-read of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall awaits.

Christina Stead - I'm Dying Laughing
Gore Vidal - Williwaw
Robin Wood - Sexual Politics and Narrative Film

The story-within-a-story component of Wildfell Hall -- as is the heroine's sexual freedom -- is a big plus.

haha, it can't possibly be as recursive as the last dialogue in GodelEscherBach!

(Though I admit to laughing out loud at several points in that dialogue, so it did feel like there was a reward of some enjoyable LOLs to al that slog of reading the thing. A character in a dialogue insisting that he was not a character in a dialogue, that he had free will and consciousness, until the Author turned up in the dialogue, and told him, well, I'm very sorry but you are a character in a dialogue and your free will is a delusion. That was hilarious. Also, the argument between Turing and Babbage as to which one of them was real and which was a computer, to be settled by a Turing Test, that was great.)

I'm reading The Sleepwalkers right now in fact. I'm enjoying it a lot, glad I decided to go with this one first. It's about the lead-up to the war, not the war itself, focusing heavily on the Balkan context and how things unspooled in July 1914. He often seems to be emphasizing the contingencies involved in the lead-up to war -- events could have played out differently had different leaders been in charge or particular grudges between principal actors not been in place. It's really interesting stuff... complicated as hell though.

Here's a nice self-contained passage that I liked:

When the commandant of Belgrade, Miloš Bozanović, asked his subordinate, Major Kostić, for information about the Black Hand, Kostić was incredulous: 'Don’t you know? It is public knowledge. They are talking about it in the cafés and public houses.' Perhaps all this was inevitable in a city like Belgrade where everyone knew everyone, and where social life took place in coffee-houses,
rather than in private homes. But the spectacular secrecy of the Black Hand presumably also filled an emotional need, for what was the point of belonging to a secret organization if nobody knew that you did? To be seen wining and dining with other conspirators at the regular table conferred a sense of importance; it also created a thrilling sense of collusion among those who were formally outside the network, but in the know – and this was important for a movement that claimed to represent the silent majority of the Serbian nation.

Wilhelmsplaining:

It was one of the Kaiser's many peculiarities that he was completely unable to calibrate his behaviour to the contexts in which his high office obliged him to operate. Too often he spoke not like a monarch, but like an over-excited teenager giving free rein to his current preoccupations. He was an extreme exemplar of that Edwardian social category, the club bore who is forever explaining some pet project to the man in the next chair. Small wonder that the prospect of being buttonholed by the Kaiser over lunch or dinner, when escape was impossible, struck fear into the hearts of so many European royals.

finished salinger's "seymour" and atul gawande's "better" last week, now a couple of chapters into orwell's "burmese days". it's characteristically great so far, but it's just really cool to read a novel with burmese names in it after having lived over there last year

been on an orwell binge lately and am taking a detour from "BD" to read some essays -- in the past week i've read "a hanging", "why i write", "shooting an elephant", and "politics and the english language", which is delightful and an obvious inspiration for some of DFW's linguistic musings

started 2666 yesterday, just finished the first part. so far so good, but lol @ me utterly giving up on my new year's resolution to stay away from the literature of abjection and read things that are pleasant

... perhaps some Bataille or Céline after this, to cleanse the palate...

(in my defense, I just started working third-shift, & so 'crave strong sweets' from my reading)

reading marisha pessl 'night film' -- is v pulpy, i thought my library had misfiled it in mysteries but maybe not; also someone a while ago commented on its mad overuse of itals -- otm

it is reminding me of 'house of leaves' quite a bit, even w/r/t what a quick & addicting read it is

I've been reading some history, a book from 1950 titled This Reckless Breed of Men by one Robert Glass Cleland. It's about the fur trapping trade in the southwestern USA in the early nineteenth century (circa 1820 to 1840). It's mainly noteworthy for documenting the constant friction between trappers and the government of Mexico, which at that time extended far into New Mexico, Arizona and California.

It also documents how the native americans reacted to the entry of trappers into their territory, which rapidly devolved into open hostility and mutual brutality, often by their second or third contact with trappers. Lots of decapitations and other corpse mutilation going on from both sides. I also learned that Hudson's Bay trappers from Oregon and Americans from St. Louis were trapping deep into the southern CA Sierras by 1830. These guys got around.

Just finished Nostalgia by Mircea Cartarescu. It was great, especially the two long stories.

Now starting up Auto-Da-Fe by Elias Canetti. First impression is that this is one hell of an unlikeable main character.

Dyson, Disturbing the Universe

finished The Part About Amalfitano—not so thrilling as The Part About the Critics, but good atmosphere+deepening exploration of the themes—I was cracking up at the Chilean neo-Nazi/self-hating-Indian racialist Hellenophile crackpot

just started The Part About Fate, and while I'm sorta getting tired of being abruptly plunged into confusing new settings, I read on out of faith in Bolaño's storytelling ability, which hasn't let me down yet

... I should mention that this is a particularly 'meaningful' read b/c the book (that nice 3-volume edition that had all the book design bloggers buzzing when it came out) was a gift from an ex, who broke up with me before I ever got around to reading it*, so that a sort of 'leap of faith' was required for me to engage with the book in the first place—telling myself that if Important Literature has any real enduring value (which Bolaño at times seems no less skeptical of than I?) it should be able to get a hearing over so much ontic background noise

* hopefully not BECAUSE I never got around to reading it

they'll do that. you really gotta read those man.

new issue of Granta (lol their tagline still being "the magazine of new writing" when this issue contains work by Lorrie Moore, Edmund White, Ann Beatie, Joy Williams and Lydia Davis)

Z by Vassilis Vassilikos. I've never seen the Costa-Gavras movie but this is gripping so far - the story of a political assassination from multiple angles. Could only find a squat 1968 move tie-in paperback - feels wrong that it's out of print. I've been immersed in Greek politics for work recently and it's shocking how enduring the corruption and extremist violence has been.

wow I always wanted to read that ever since I watched Z (screens at the Lumiere about once a year btw)

Don't know why I said 'wow' to that. I do love that film. It would be relevant to reissue that book, given what is happening to Greece.

Started Kafka's Short stories but also finishing Gadda's Acquainted with Grief. Pretty much auto-fictional account of a man living with his mother and his hatred for her. He is described as 'Baroque', which is a style present in little known South American novels like Three Trapped Tigers, or The Obscene Bird of Night that I read a long time ago and only once. Its bizarre because the other thing w/Gadda is that he sets it in a South American country (he worked there for periods), he wrote much of it in the early 40s.

While I find the way its written somewhat aimless the hatred is savage and gives the book some focus. I need to think more on this while I re-read more parts before I give it back.

weird, Three Trapped Tigers and The Obscene Bird of Night have both languished on my shelves unread for several years now. which do you recommend first?

still on 2666, almost thru The Part About the Crimes; obviously I don't know if/how it all comes together yet, but WOW, what a staggering piece of writing—formally daring, challenging on every level, but motivated by the most profoundly human(e) concerns; the crowning achievement of a life's work.

Love love love both of those; Three Trapped Tigers is more stylistically experimental (blank pages, backwards text, etc), Donoso is one of my favorite authors so I personally would recomment The Obscene Bird of Night but you can't go wrong with either.

Three Trapped Tigers has some of the most beautiful descriptions of music I've ever read in a novel.

*recommend

I seem to be at loose ends. First, I read about 50 pp in a book called The Voice of the Coyote, J. Frank Dobie, which is a magnum opus of stories about coyotes, published in 1952. The subject matter is interesting, but the author fancies himself as a prose stylist and he slathers everything with a thick impasto of vocabularic abuse. The coyotes would not approve.

Next, I picked up As I Was Going Down Sackville Street, Oliver St. John Gogarty. The author of this was reportedly the model for Joyce's Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. In real life he was a surgeon, poet, playwright and Dublin raconteur. He also fancies himself a prose stylist and he's marginally better at it than Dobie, as you would imagine a man who was a good friend of W.B. Yeats would be, but even so, he writhes and wiggles his style so incessantly at the reader that he simply will not write a straight sentence. It's as if his whole reputation as a wag and a wit had to be upheld on a moment-to-moment basis. I may go on with it, but finishing it seems a faint hope right now.

xp

I need to finish Three Trapped Tigers, it can just be kind of a sensory overload if I read too much at once. I loved the chapter about the movie-mad boys witnessing a murder, particularly the last line - I can't for the life of me remember the name of the film we were going to see, which nothing would have stopped us from seeing, which we did see.

My recollections are that the last 150 pages of Three Trapped Tigers are the best of the novel.

I wonder what I'd feel about Donoso and Cabrera Infante and Cortazar and a lot of the Latin American boom-era stuff if I paid a revisit. It was a time where I couldn't get enough of this (I hunted the more obscure end too: Lezama Lima's Paradiso anyone? All those 'Dictator' novels), all-round formalistic experiments and overflowing-the-kitchen-sink-wordage!

Reading Kafka or Man Without Qualities rams it home that I need more precision, or a different kind of density. Borges is so unlike any of them. Same for Pedro Paramo

Further recollections are that One Hundred Years of Solitude avoids this...somehow it does.

Bolano just feels quite outside it, harking back further towards something like those Icelandic Sagas, or Arabian Nights. Maybe Bocaccio but the design of The Decameron is tighter.

I'm not super-knowledgeable about 20th-c. Latin American literature so I'm probably missing several key predecessors, but Bolaño (at least in this work) frequently strikes me as a postmodern problematizer-of-literary-representation in the line of Blanchot & Celan

btw I finished The Part About The Crimes, I'm pretty sure I sped thru it in two or three days without sleeping more than a couple hours at a time, highly recommend y'all do the same

so far, the beginning of part V is a breath of fresh air

Bolaño and Borges share a weird elective-affinity in my brain, too. maybe just the dialectic of high&low culture, assumption of nonliterary forms by literary authors with frequent asides to let you know they are not unaware of the existence of literature... didn't Borges co-author a detective novel at one point? I feel like if he had tried to write A Great Novel it would've turned out more like this than like Kafka or Dickens or Bioy Casares

i don't think borges would have written a novel anything like 2666. bolano is interested in the problems of literary representation, sure, and he had a good time inventing fake literary canons, but his main agenda in this novel is dragging the reader through hell.

Bolaño (at least in this work) frequently strikes me as a postmodern problematizer-of-literary-representation in the line of Blanchot & Celan

Oh yeah totally, he is a mix: writes in the shadow of that but I suppose its his facility for storytelling that gets me going, the way he spins out a tale is sometimes reminiscent of an Icelandic Saga. Can't bloody prove it.

I never feel Bolano is "dragging the reader through hell". Don't feel its an agenda . For me Pedro Paramo is key; its a Mexican thing, for sure. I saw an exhibit of a lot of Mexican art last year and death is in the psyche (or at least how its presented to the Western reader) and it infects Lowry's writing too.

I've been reading Donna Tartt's "Goldfinch" as a break from Proust. About 150pp in so plenty of time for things to go badly awry but so far I'm liking it a lot. Not for the fastidiously literary though - I can only imagine how much John Banville would hate this.

Simultaneously dipping into "Roth Unbound" by Claudia Roth Pierpoint. I think I'm enough of a Roth fan to be pretty much guaranteed to at least be glad I read this, but I haven't read his very early stuff (Goodbye Columbus or Letting Go) so I expect it to pick up when we get to some books I've actually read (about 3/4 of his output I guess). Roth Pierpoint doesn't pull her punches and I doubt I'll be picking up Letting Go anytime soon.

I just finished reading a massive interwoven Elizabeth Jane Howard novel and got so irritated at the ending I nearly threw it across the room! And it's both a brick of a book, and also a library book. Why did no one warn me she was allergic to happy endings?

I'm going to read the KLF book now, and it's already starting to smell like a particular brand of amusing bullshit that I'm really susceptible to, so I wish I could be in a better mood to start it.

Time to go back to the library and take these in and paw through the meagre offerings in the temporary structure to see if there's anything that could tempt me.

EJH ghost stories good, I think. Never read any of the Cazalet stuff - did you see the documentary partly featuring her on Adam Curtis's blog, BB?

Just finished Skylark by Kosztolanyi (ilx recommended).

spectacular descriptions of food (some of the best I've read) and v good descriptions of being drunk. it's a novel that bursts in the middle with unexpected festivity, and which is surrounded on either side by a sort of unfestive crimping by the tyranny of compassion and the dull important love of family. at the beginning it's constraining, by the end it's transformed, but not without denying the middle movement splendour.

it also has a good knack of not belabouring its... truthes (should go in quotes?) - there is a long bit about those who wake up after an all-night debauch and find themselves "meeting once again the selfsame night from which they had parted the night before". it's very good, but by and large such observations are brief and effective, connected enough to the locality of the anecdote that's generated them so they don't seem pompous or fatuous.

it kept on reminding me of Angel by Elizabeth Taylor (amazing novel, read it, read it), not correct other than that they're both about young women whose lack of physical and moral picturesqueness is emphasised. (that "and" is doing v hard bridging work between angel and skylark). they're both about women who exclude sympathy - ie are neither sentimental outcasts nor "fascinating" in any way. the reader is given existence without any sort of flair and the punishment of genuine indifferent dislike, not normal artistic subjects.

idk, haven't expressed myself at all well here - partly because the books are v dissimilar and I'm trying to justify a nagging link, partly because.., well if dull mediocrity is dull, and mediocre, it is also the most vivid representation of the unvarnished, unspectacular, unromantic stipulations of life - tiresome and tedious but basically, horribly endurable, and I think it's the achievement of kosztolanyi and Taylor to be able to portray that.

Oh, it wasn't a Cazalet, it was another thing. I have not seen any documentaries because my internet connection is so shit I can't watch TV on it, but thanks for the heads up.

spectacular descriptions of food (some of the best I've read)

I'd also recommend Krudy's Life is a Dream for this..

The angel/skylark comparison is a really good one, fizzles

Reading an galley of Megan Abbott's new one, Fever: not sure about it yet, though it's terrifying about teenage girls

Or Mo Yan's Pow! for good descriptions of meat (though I way preferred Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out)

i think 'truthes' would be a good word to adopt for talking about teh truths of/expressed in literature.

i am reading adorno, and northrop frye's book on blake, and smmore philosophy stuff as usual.

finished 2666 last week & I'm lost adrift ever since—not sure whether to start another Serious Business Novel (perhaps Doctor Faustus??) or give it a rest—in the meantime all I can seem to read are medium-length poems (Donne's Progress of the Soul, Ashbery's Self-Portrait)

I Keep picking things up and half-reading the first few pages and putting them away. Need something to properly dig into.

I read two football books. I'm not normally a fan of footy literature - it pains me to admit it but at heart, like most sport, it's too inconsequential to be worth prolonged thought. But these two were outstanding for different reasons:

Stillness and Speed by Dennis Bergkamp - really interesting format, being a sketch of a particular phase of his career, then Q&A with witnesses, then Q&A with Bergkamp himself. The phases are so well-chosen, it's what makes the book - technique, leadership, teamwork, character, rather than e.g. a season-by-season narrative. You get a very full portrait of the man as a result.

I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic - outstanding for the opposite reason, it's a whole jumble of things-that-happened tossed in pell mell. It reminds me most of Augie March, it's so entertaining.

I've now got three on the go. The Glory Game, a portrait of Spurs in the 1972-73 season - it's very sweet and old-fashioned. Lewisohn's extended Beatles bio, which is so deep. And Knaussgard's A Death In The Family - as recommended upthread, for which thanks - as noted, it's already a wonderful encapsulation of being a teenage boy, when you feel like you have to pretend you know everything but you actually know nothing. It's so tender and kind of heartbreaking, yet I'm only a little way in and hardly anything's happened.

Already evident that these last two are going to consume much of my year.

Post- my re-read of 2666 last year I wanted to go on and pick up some of his other works again: By Night in Chile, Nazi Literatures, Distant Star, Amulet and some others too (but not Savage Detectives). They are quick and would add much round the edges of 2666. xp

read rob young's electric eden over the last few days and now tempted to check out a bunch of the stuff listed in the bibliography/reread the electric muse/read the a.l. lloyd and bob copper books i picked up a few years ago... but for now i've started on a collection of algernon blackwood's supernatural tales.

Finishing the short vol of Kafka's stories. As I said, that collects all he published in his lifetime (plus three stories he corrected for publication). There was an old thread where I mocked the complaint that his final wishes were ignored by Brod (the artist often doesn't know anything about his own work), I said this bcz I was worrying away that Kafka wouldn't be the major writer he is but actually this one vol might have been enough. I still rather have The Trial and parts of America

I want to read his letters and I suppose there are diaries knocking about too.

Mishima - Confessions of a Mask. Modelled on Gide and Radiguet. Prefer it to the former at the least.

yall might like the Bolano thread---I'm tempted to get this, published in 2013:

A deluxe edition of Bolano’s complete poetry
Perhaps surprisingly to some of his fiction fans, Roberto Bolano touted poetry as the superior art form, able to approach an infinity in which “you become infinitely small without disappearing.” When asked, “What makes you believe you’re a better poet than a novelist?” Bolano replied, “The poetry makes me blush less.” The sum of his life’s work in his preferred medium, The Unknown University is a showcase of Bolano’s gift for freely crossing genres, with poems written in prose, stories in verse, and flashes of writing that can hardly be categorized. “Poetry,” he believed, “is braver than anyone.”

Also from '13, I'm wondering about this---anybody read it?

Crushed by a devastating scandal, university professor Óscar Amalfitano flees Barcelona for Santa Teresa—a Mexican city close to the U.S. border, where women are being killed in staggering numbers. There, Amalfitano begins an affair with Castillo, a young forger of Larry Rivers paintings, while his daughter, Rosa, reeling from the weight of his secrets, seeks solace in a romance of her own. Yet when she finds her father in bed with Castillo, Rosa is confronted with the full force of her crisis.

What follows is an intimate police investigation of Amalfitano, leading to a finale of euphoria and heartbreak. Featuring characters and stories from The Savage Detectives and 2666, Roberto Bolaño's Woes of the True Policeman mines the depths of art, memory, and desire—and marks the culmination of one of the great careers of world literature.

And this, out in May (hmm,Amazon pre-order price is $11.90 for paperback)

The brightest gleamings from Bolano’s unpublished fiction
A North American journalist in Paris is woken at 4 a.m. by a mysterious caller with urgent information. For V. S. Naipaul, the prevalence of sodomy in Argentina is a symptom of the nation’s political ills. Daniela de Montecristo (familiar to readers of Nazi Literature in the Americas and 2666) recounts the loss of her virginity. Arturo Belano returns to Mexico City and meets the last disciples of Ulises Lima, who play in a band called The Asshole of Morelos. Belano’s son Gerónimo disappears in Berlin during the Days of Chaos in 2005. Memories of a return to the native land. Argentine writers as gangsters. Zombie schlock as allegory … dot-dot-dot, that's sic

Whoops, they didn't slip the title in that time:

The Secret of Evil Paperback – May 27, 2014
by Roberto Bolaño (Author) , Chris Andrews (Translator) , Natasha Wimmer (Translator)

I love Bolano and all but even I'm reaching my threshold on some of this, wonder if its a prank.

Still: For V. S. Naipaul, the prevalence of sodomy in Argentina is a symptom of the nation’s political ills.

lol at that.

Reading through The Complete Poems and Plays of TS Eliot now. This was a big hole for me as I had previously only read Prufrock and The Waste Land. The handful of great stuff he has really is some of the best English language poetry.

Four Quartets is a very important work for me personally, but I tend to agree with Vendler's assessment that his best poetry was over with Prufrock—whatever one makes of The Waste Land, I can no longer separate the poem from a certain idea of 'literary criticism' that Eliot was also committed to at the time

... in other words, it just doesn't sing to me anymore. Except for the "weialala leia, walala leialala" part, maybe

I dunno, I still love it and Hollow Men (haven't gotten to Ash Wednesday or Four Quartets yet), Prufrock probably is the best though. The plays were actually better than I expected.

Finishing up Sergio De La Pava's Personae. It's a b-sides comp compared to A Naked Singularity (the whole middle section is the script for a surreal play) but I'm enjoying its charms.

Also a friend gave me Want Not by Jonathan Miles, only 30 pgs in and it's decent but I'm not sure about it yet. Seems a little bit on the nose with regard to its chosen theme (waste in contemporary America), not that there's anything wrong with that I guess.

Finished The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts, which I discovered through a recommendation on an ILB thread. It's an interesting attempt to reconcile science, religion and Eastern philosophy. Quite a loft goal, obviously, and I'm not sure if it wholly succeeds, but Watts keeps things lively with provocative but reasonably argued claims.

In response to Dow upthread: Woes of the True Policeman is possibly best read as an early and very rough sketchbook for 2666. It really doesn't have a sustained plot (the Santa Teresa/Juarez femicides are much less important as a background than the AIDS crisis, but that crisis is only dealt with in passing--the most developed thread is the correspondence between Amalfitano and his ex-boyfriend/former student, who bears some resemblances to Lola in 2666, while also serving as another poète maudit) and it never approaches the overpowering dread of 2666. Still, it's worth reading if you enjoy Bolaño's more playfully digressive moments (the Borges-style plot summaries of Archimboldi's novels are among the book's highlights, even if this robs Archimboldi's art of some of its mystery in 2666) and the Woes version of Amalfitano is of interest as (I think) one of only a few queer protagonists in Bolaño's fiction.

Secret of Evil is also worth reading for "Death of Ulisses" and "Beach," but it's not essential: I'd suggest reading the other short story collections first.

"Ulisses" there should be "Ulises."

Thanks, One Way Street; very intrigued by the Borgesian bits, especially because I finally read The Aleph and Other Stories. What Borges/Di Giovanni should I read next? Also wondering about the Borges/Bioy Casares-edited fantasy anthology.

Well, Ficciones has Borges's most iconic and influential work--if you haven't read it, I would pick that up next. Borges's Universal History of Infamy also makes for interesting reading in relation to Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas; both are structured as a series of brief lives, although Bolaño's fascist writers are entirely fictional while Borges tends to collage and rewrite text from purportedly non-fictional sources. The Book of Fantasy looks extremely entertaining, but I haven't read it so can't comment.

What translation of Ficciones do you favor?

I'm more familiar with the Andrew Hurley translation (from Collected Fictions), but I'm honestly not fluent enough in Spanish to have a strong preference between it and the Anthony Kerrigan version published by Grove.

Thanks. I know there's a whole thread about Borges translations, but I'm still canvassing. Just ordered The Book of Fantasy!

Cool! The selections look very wide-ranging.

you probably already know this, but Bioy Casares's novel La invención de Morel is for the ages

(curiously, I just started reading it in Spanish last week—something I've tried in the past on several occasions, but it didn't take until now)

King of the World by David Remnick. The book details the rivalry between Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston but its also much more than that. Well-written, insightful and illuminating on the boxing world of the late 50s-early 60s.

My most recent book was Michael Holroyd Introduces The Best of Hugh Kingsmill, a Penguin compilation of oddments by Kingsmill, of whom I'd never heard prior to stumbling onto the secondhand book and paying all of 50 cents for it. But then, I've never heard of Michael Holroyd either.

As befits a compilation of oddments, I skipped around a good deal and skipped over many bits. While the level of the prose was quite acceptable, the only piece that showed true excellence was an excerpt of his biography of Samuel Johnson, covering Johnson's early years before he was known. His sympathy for Johnson was unmistakable and lifted his observations to something approaching tenderness.

Amalie Skram: Under Observation

2-novel thinly veiled autobiog. story of her being locked up in mental hospitals in 1890s Denmark and being unable to convince anyone she wasn't insane -- very much ahead of its time

I am now reading The Garden of the Brave in War, Terrence O'Donnell, a memoir of 15 years spent in Iran in the period of 1957-1972, published in 1980 when Iran suddenly became topical. It is excellent and illuminating, mainly because it does not have to spend any time or energy dissecting the revolution and its aftermath in detail, as all books concerning Iran now must. What he does write is far more interesting than that.

What does he write?

He describes the people who lived where he did and tells stories about things they say and do. Because he spoke fairly fluent Farsi and lived in one small rural place for more than a decade, his interactions with his neighbors had considerable depth and variety.

reading tom clancy. it's pretty dumb

Ingeborg Bachmann - Malina. Started it yesterday. The (otherwise good) intro talks about Joyce but you know it doesn't have that sweep of things, its too bloody-mindlessly inward (an abandonment of mind). I love how she stops sentences (I suppose I need to read Wittgenstein huh?), you can see a person short-circuit, in a way.

A writer to be obsessed by. Don't know if I can handle that anymore sheesh.

Before that I've been re-reading Brodsky on Tsvetaeva's prose, and if you apply his criteria to Bachmann's novel i.e, what does the poet bring to prose I am not sure that essay would stand-up. I quite like that so I'll be reading more of both in the next few days.

Picked up 'A Brief History of Infinity' by Paolo Zellini for a quid just now...anyone read it?

goes for £18 on Amazon so feel free to tell me it's shit and I'll flog it asap.

Slowly reading too many things at once: Thomas Hardy's Moments of Vision, 2666 for the first time since 2009 for a reading group, the second volume of Knausgaard's My Struggle, James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, which is piercing and brilliant, and Imogen Binnie's Nevada, which impressively skirts most of the standard Transgender Narrative cliches, and reminds me a little in terms of style of a slangier Eileen Myles.

Finishing off The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell. I want to check out some of his source material next - Sassoon, Blunden, and Graves at least.

Great book; among Fussell's sources, David Jones's In Parenthesis is also very much worth reading or rereading.

Yeah, I want to read that one too. Fussell seems to be leaning heavily on it to make the case that "the tradition" couldn't adequately comprehend the war. If In Parenthesis was the best war literature in that approach, and it failed, then modernism turns out to be necessary.

I like his bit on Graves.

We expect a memoir dealing with a great historical event to “dramatize” things. With Graves we have to expect it more than with others, for he is “first and last,” as Jarrell sees, “a poet: in between he is a Graves.” A poet, we remember Aristotle saying, is one who has mastered the art of telling lies successfully, that is, dramatically, interestingly. And what is a Graves? A Graves is a tongue-in-cheek neurasthenic farceur whose material is “facts.”

....

Asked by a television interviewer whether his view that homosexuality is caused by the excessive drinking of milk is “based on intuition or on what we would call scientific observation,” Graves replies: “On objective reasoning.” His “objective reasoning” here is as gratuitously outrageous as the anthropological scholarship of The White Goddess, the literary scholarship of his translation (with Omar Ali Shah) of The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam, or the preposterous etymological arguments with which he peppers his essays.

But to put it so solemnly is to risk falling into Grave’s trap. It is to ignore the delightful impetuosity, the mastery, the throw-away fun of it all. Graves is a joker, a manic illusionist, whether gaily constructing flamboyant fictional anthropology, re-writing ancient “history,” flourishing erroneous or irrelevant etymology, over-emphasizing the importance of “Welsh verse theory,” or transforming the White Goddess from a psychological metaphor into a virtual anthropological “fact.” And the more doubtful his assertions grow, the more likely he is to modify them with adverbs like clearly or obviously. Being “a Graves” is a way of being scandalously “Celtish” (at school “I always claimed to be Irish,” he says in Good-bye to All That). It is a way – perhaps the only way left – of rebelling against the positivistic pretensions of non-Celts and satirizing the preposterous scientism of the twentieth century. His enemies are always the same: solemnity, certainty, complacency, pomposity, cruelty. And it was the Great War that brought them to his attention.

i'm a huge fan of the WWI poets -- sassoon's especially are incredible to read.

They went out into the glaring white sunlight. The heat rolled from the earth like the breath of an oven. The flowers, oppressive to the eyes, blazed with not a petal stirring, in a debauch of sun. The glare sent a weariness through one’s bones. There was something horrible in it–horrible to think of that blue, blinding sky, stretching on and on over Burma and India, over Siam, Cambodia, China, cloudless and interminable. The plates of Mr Macgregor’s waiting car were too hot to touch. The evil time of day was beginning, the time, as the Burmese say, ‘when feet are silent’. Hardly a living creature stirred, except men, and the black columns of ants, stimulated by the heat, which marched ribbon-like across the path, and the tail-less vultures which soared on the currents of the air.

i've thought about this passage every day since reading it a few weeks ago. "like the breath of an oven." wow

In January:

Franklin Bruno, Armed Forces
Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey Into Night
Susan Coolidge, What Katy Did

Started reading The Wall by Marlen Haushofer ('60s novel about a woman who is trapped inside a few acres enclosed by an invisible dome after some as-yet-unspecified disaster or weapon killed (?) everyone (?) outside of it). It's pleasantly quiet and eerie.

Right now going through The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss, which I really enjoy, and The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi, which is kinda depressing from a philosophical standpoint but a great read

I was given a copy of Life Among Giants, by Bill Roorbach, for Christmas. Last night I commenced reading it. So far, the author seems to be pitching his narrator's voice at a very uninflected and quotidian level, as if the story were a plausible telling of only moderately implausible events. But the author has built his plot and characters out of such a consistent and imposing structure of implausibility that I keep looking for a character wearing a pair of clown shoes, to provide the missing wink from author to reader. It hasn't appeared yet.

Thus far, it is hard for me to accept the idea that this disconnect between the plot, characters and narrative tone might be the result of the author's perfect control of the tools of his trade and the appropriateness of this approach will become more evident as I proceed. However, I intend to proceed and I shall hope for the best. It was a gift from my brother after all.

Started reading The Wall by Marlen Haushofer ('60s novel about a woman who is trapped inside a few acres enclosed by an invisible dome after some as-yet-unspecified disaster or weapon killed (?) everyone (?) outside of it). It's pleasantly quiet and eerie.

Oooh, I forgot I had bought that. Must read it.

Derek Walcott - Midsummer
Frances Stonor Saunders - The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters

I've started on Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. It's a lot funnier than I was expecting - mostly due to the narrator's bemused and cynical tone.

finished burmese days, which i really enjoyed, even if overall it was a bit minor. orwell's prose was so well-developed, so fresh even that early. and it was nice to see some burmese names and places

think i'm going to start nabokov's "king, queen, knave" -- i hope the translated prose is as amazing as his english writing

hobbes

I've settled in with Life Among Giants somewhat more comfortably. It has not lost its feeling of being a fantasy plot with fantasy characters, but, as with a sitcom, the longer you read it, the more you must take it on its own terms or stop engaging altogether. Since I intend to finish it, I've allowed myself to become inured to its flat-toned unreality. I have also discovered that the book wants to be a murder mystery of sorts, so for all I know it is a masterpiece of that genre.

P.S. It has a sex scene roughly every 25 pages, to lift one's flagging attention. I figure this is probably true of a lot of popular books that I do not generally read.

Read Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer last weekend and loved it so I'm starting Inside the Freud Archives tonight.

Richard Powers: Orfeo -- only ~30p in, but some lovely, lovely writing so far

adorno, still, for pleasure. it's a weird feeling.

let my love adorno you

i wanna be adrono

adorno even

I don't know why you would read Adorno for anything other than pleasure.

Re-reading a couple of essays from Brodsky's Less than One. On Tsvetaeva's prose is urgent + key. I love the way he comments on every chunk of her New Year's Greetings and explores her mechanics and yet it feels truly intimate at the same time. I suppose this is because he weaves her biography as well as Russian history and myth with controlled passion. Although at times he loses himself when he gets to the Soviet. Who can blame him?

for the advancement of nolidge & embiggenment of social justice obv

finished a collection of algernon blackwood's stories (kind of patchy) and now alternating between eliphas levi's key of the mysteries and the collected ghost stories of m.r. james (kind of great)

ILB will be happy to know I finished Life Among Giants, so they no longer have to skip past my bitching about it.

A bloody great read, recommended to students of Cold War cultural history.

Thanks for the recommendation, looks good. Also reminds me that I have an unread copy of The Devil's Broker: Seeking Gold, God and Glory in Fourteenth-Century Italy by the same author.

The Wise Man's Fear is pretty damn boring. The Drowned and the Saved excellent though.

Wau: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/02/le-promeneur-solitaire-w-g-sebald-on-robert-walser.html His take on Der Räuber is mine on Valis, although the former is deeper and richer, I strongly suspect. Anyway, there's a lot more here.

is everyone else gearing up to read samuel delany on friday like i am then

Yasushi Inoue: Bullfight

Another of those lovely rediscovered novellas put out by Pushkin Press, about a newspaper editor in 1949 bombed-out Osaka who has come to be running a "bull Sumo" competition to promote his newspaper
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TS8akPGjf4Q/UlijBci-kSI/AAAAAAAADqw/FLQFnc6khVY/s1600/IMG_4897.JPG

Which of these Trollopes in my local library should I start with? (Never read him.)

Miss Mackenzie

The Small House at Allington

The American Senator

Ayala's Angel

Barchester Towers

Also, I have their discard of Can You Forgive Her?

Can You Forgive Her?. I read The Way We Live Now last fall: revelatory.

Thanks. Yeah, I remember what you said; was thinking about ordering that---and it turned up among these this weekend, in WSJ's Five Best series. Also want to read Falling.

Ferdinand Mount
on stories of fraud
Mr. Mount's books include 'Cold Cream' and 'The New Few, or a Very British Oligarchy.'

Little Dorrit

By Charles Dickens (1857)

Debt haunts these pages. William Dorrit has been imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtors' prison for so long that he has become known as "the Father of the Marshalsea." His daughter, Little Dorrit, was born in the jail, and she skitters out through the gates into the world of supposed solvency, which is in fact a shakier and more frantic place. It is not until a third of the way through the book that we meet Mr. Merdle, the miracle-working financier. "Nobody knew with the least precision what Mr. Merdle's business was, except that it was to coin money." He is reluctant to let outsiders in on "one of my good things," but special friends are allowed a slice of the action. He is, in short, the Bernie Madoff of his day, the Ponzi before Ponzi. At the time, "Little Dorrit" was taken as a straightforward polemic against debtors' prisons. But really it is a greater fable about universal illusions and one of Dickens's greatest, if least regarded, novels.

The Way We Live Now

By Anthony Trollope (1875)

Augustus Melmotte is a big, flamboyant man of mysterious foreign origin, "with an expression of mental power in a harsh vulgar face." The amazing thing about him is that, right from the start of Trollope's irresistible novel, he has the reputation of a gigantic swindler who has already ruined those who trusted him. Yet respectable types still come running to the door of his office in Abchurch Lane. His prize speculation in Central American railroads is revealed as a cynical scam, and, like Mr. Merdle, he does himself in. "The Way We Live Now" offers another marvelous panorama of mid-Victorian London, but the difference is that most of Melmotte's victims aren't innocent dupes but greedy chancers well aware of the sort of man they are dealing with. Melmotte is based on George Hudson, "the Railway King," whose swindles bankrupted Trollope's father-in-law, but his whole career is a dead ringer for that of the newspaper baron Capt. Robert Maxwell, MC, MP, who was discredited time and again but always bobbed up until, in 1991, he went down for the third time off his yacht.

The Tichborne Claimant

By Rohan McWilliam (2007)

In the spring of 1854, Roger Tichborne, the heir to a baronetcy and a large estate in Hampshire, took ship out of Rio de Janeiro. Neither the ship nor Roger was ever seen again. It was 12 years later that his French mother placed ads in Australian newspapers, in the belief that he might have fetched up there, and a bankrupt butcher from Wagga Wagga called Arthur Orton slyly confessed to being the long-lost Roger. Roger had been as thin as a rake, Rohan McWilliam notes in his compelling history of the affair, but Orton weighed nearly 400 pounds. Roger had gone to a first-rate school and was half-French; the claimant was barely literate and couldn't speak a word of the language. The best that could be said was that the way the claimant waggled his eyebrows was reminiscent of Roger. Yet his cause attracted a national following. It took George Bernard Shaw to point out the irony of laborers clamoring for a working man's right to pass himself off as a baronet. Orton's two trials were the longest in British history, and when he was finally sentenced to 14 years for perjury, the Lord Chief Justice declared that not since Charles I had a trial "excited more the attention of Englishmen and the world than this." Certainly never was there a more delicious demonstration of willful public gullibility.

A Romanov Fantasy

By Frances Welch (2007)

The Bolsheviks had taken great care to shoot every member of the imperial Russian family in the early hours of July 17, 1918. But in no time Siberia was swarming with Romanov impostors who claimed to have survived, including no fewer than 14 Grand Duchess Anastasias. The most famous of them was a Polish peasant born Franziska Schanzkowska, who was fished out of a canal in Berlin in February 1920. Now calling herself Anna Anderson, she first claimed to be the Grand Duchess Tatiana, but when told she was too short to be Tatiana, she switched without blinking to Anastasia. Anna was squat and square-jawed, whereas the real Anastasia had been tall and long in the face. Nor could Anna speak Russian. Yet it wasn't until 1994, 10 years after her death, when a piece of her intestine was compared with the DNA of Prince Philip and some of his genuine Romanov cousins, that it was definitively proved that she wasn't related to the Romanovs. Frances Welch takes as the epigraph to her entrancing account the maxim from "The Ship of Fools": "The world wants to be deceived." You can say that again.

Falling

By Elizabeth Jane Howard (1999)

After she had left her third husband, Kingsley Amis, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard fell for a con artist who wheedled his way into her lonely life after hearing her on the radio. This is the novel she made out of her scary experience, which might have ended in marriage or murder, or both. She is rescued in the book, as in real life, by the inquisitiveness of her daughter, from whom she had been estranged for years—one good thing to come out of her humiliation. "Falling" is another. Perhaps the most brilliant thing about it is Howard's ability to think herself into the mind of the con man Henry, who tells the first half of the story. She makes him plausible in every sense of the word, so that we begin to see how he got into the habits of deception, without our beginning to like him. He gets creepier as the book goes on. Elizabeth Jane Howard died on Jan. 2 this year at the age of 90, and if you read one thing of hers, I recommend this.
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Oh, I really want to read Falling, after having such an emotional reaction to the selfish, self-obsessed not-hero of Love All. She does have the ability to make you emotionally connect with very unlikeable people.

I finished The Good Soldier. I preferred the first half- it kind of takes a Gothic turn after Florence dies. Still worth finishing though.

The way we live now is gr8 & a lot of the shots he takes still uh "resonate" I believe is the term

Reading The Glass Bead Game. Patching up another egregious hole in my reading experience. Never read any Hesse apart from Siddhartha which I read for a class in college.

I found myself in the mood for pure entertainment. I was saving The Three Musketeers for just such a mood. I'm now battling the minions of the Red Duke (Cardinal Richelieu) for the foreseeable future.

12 Years a Slave

what kind of edition have you got doctor morbius

it's the movie tie-in from the library (forewords by H.L. Gates, Steve McQueen etc)

also a Penguin Classic

I was looking at the British movie tie-in in Waterstones, which omits Gates, or at least doesn't mention him on the cover. I thought it was sad that it omitted any kind of scholarly apparatus.

dialectic of enlightenment, surprisingly lucid, at least up through the end of the introduction

Yeah, that introduction is remarkably compressed, even if the first chapter can be hard going.

he even details the plan of the book, like he's crankin out a monograph for cambridge university press or somethin

but the argumentation rapidly gets erratic in the extreme, feel like the compression of words into paragraphs in most adorno should be changed into scattered fragments separated by whitespace, you have to do the work to piece them together either way (and don't tell me about 'parataxis')

I think I prefer the books that dispense with the pretense of continuous argument (such as Minima Moralia and Aesthetic Theory) for that reason, although D. of E. is still remarkable.

need to find other words than remarkable

on the theory tip, I just picked up a cheap copy of Baudrillard's seminal (and weirdly out-of-print?) The Mirror of Production, which has already gone some way towards breaking me out of my dogmatic (Marxist) slumbers

Lately, in fits and starts: 2666 and v.2 of Knausgaard's My Struggle still, Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, a couple of books on gender (Julia Serano's Whipping Girl and Beatriz Preciado's Testo Junkie), Eileen Myles's 1995 Maxfield Parrish: Early & New Poems (the early poems so far seem to be in closer conversation with Berrigan and the New York School than I had thought about), and David Wojnarowicz's patchwork AIDS-crisis memoir Close to the Knives.

so far in 2014:
Rachel Louise Snyder What We’ve Lost Is Nothing
Douglas Kennedy The Moment
Philip Roth Goodbye Columbus & Five Short Stories/Letting Go Library of America edition
Terry Teachout Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington
Tom Standage Writing On The Wall: Social Media The First 200 Years

currently: Peter Baker Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney In The White House

next up: A Scott Berg Wilson
J Michael Lennon Norman Mailer: A Double Life
Philip Roth Sabbath's Theater

did you like the Baker book? Its stubbornness in maintaining a vet reporter's "objectivity" ground my teeth to pulp.

Has anyone read Kazantzakis's Odyssey? I'm intrigued, may give it a shot next.

xpost - know what you mean, keeping the salt shaker handy for taking grains re: stuff like constant insistence of w's being a good caring man on a personal level (too bad about all those war deaths but whatareyougonnado) though i am enjoying the opportunity to reconsider recent history. not changing my mind much.

not much fresh anecdotage though i smirked at barb bush's genteel wasp anti-semitism when george did something in israel she didn't agree with: "how does it feel to be the first jewish president?"

I read part of Kazantzakis's Odyssey about 35 years ago and gave up on it. It is substantially longer than Homer's epic and nowhere nearly as rewarding. Go ahead and satisfy your curiosity about it, but I'd counsel you not to invest much money into the project. A library copy should suffice.

always leave one out when I do catch-up. This time Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers hence my new screen name. Expected to like it more than I did; not bad but a little cold/calculated and somewhat contrived. I get that arty NYC types pretentiously ramble on the way her characters do - believe me, they do. Or at least they did back in the day. But I couldn't connect even though I logged years as an arty NYC type myself. And as somebody who was well, alive and a young adult in the late 70s, the time-period setting felt researched and carefully assembled rather than than organic/authentic. It lacked that raw random charge and while parts where vividly written others were kind of boring.

Zaza Burchuladze: Adibas - extremely disaffected/affectless fictional vignettes of life in Georgia during the Russian invasion a few years ago; everyone keeps shopping/clubbing/etc while tanks roll down the streets. Reads as though Burchuladze has read Brett Easton Ellis and nobody else ever. One of the most misogynistic boioks I've read in a long time, too: women are defined almost entirely by the tightness of their vaginas, with their breast size a vague secondary characteristic. I'm giving up on this one partway through, even though it's only ~120 pages.

I'm about 380pp into the Musketeers and Dumas has been uncharacteristically flailing for about the past 50pp. I'm hoping he gets the train back on the tracks soon.

Andres Neuman: Talking to Ourselves -- really good. Glad I dumped Adibas for this!

(somebody else I haven't read enough of; she's not like anybody else I can think of)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/19/books/mavis-gallant-short-story-writer-dies-at-91.html?_r=0

picked up a collection of orwell essays the other day, even though most are available for free online and i've read a few already. can never have too much orwell imo

also got a chekhov short story collection for cheap. i've never read him, does anyone have any favorites?

hey which orwell collection is it, k3v. so true about never rough; i hope eventually i read everything of his that i ought to.

also got a chekhov short story collection for cheap. i've never read him, does anyone have any favorites?

"Champagne" is good and short. "An Anonymous Story" is a good longer one.

hey which orwell collection is it, k3v. so true about never rough; i hope eventually i read everything of his that i ought to.

― mustread guy (schlump), Thursday, February 20, 2014 12:13 AM (14 hours ago) Bookmark

not sure, it's a little paperback copy i got used for cheap. will post once i get home

thx nate

"Ward 6" kills me. Other greats: "The Lady with the Lap Dog" (I've taught this story for 15 years; it never stops surprising students), "The Darling," "The Kiss," "The Duel," "The Princess."

Offhand, you might also check out "Gooseberries," "The Man in a Shell," "The Darling," and "In the Ravine."
xp

This winter I read a few things including

Philip K.Dick, THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, and Sylvia Plath, THE BELL JAR, again

Donna Tartt, THE SECRET HISTORY
Jonathan Coe, EXPO '58
Michael Wood, FILM: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION
Bryan and Mary Talbot, DOTTER OF HER FATHER'S EYES

bits of Henry James' THE AMERICAN SCENE

Paul Morley, THE NORTH

now I have nearly finished Franzen, FREEDOM

THE PINEFOX: A VERY RARE POST

Yes and I started Lethem's DISSIDENT GARDENS but have not felt quite ready fully to take it all on but I will soon.

I have also read lots from here:
http://www.stevenconnor.com/

the pinefox! wonderful.

work's been like being in a 24hr windtunnel of shit, plus am moving house, so not been reading as much as i'd've liked:

The Mind Within the Brain - David Redish. Neuroscience of decision making. dopamine, opiods, hazard thresholds, situation recognition, content-addressable memory. the basic materials and theory of thought-processes. human as super-developed animal organism, descriptions of the basic elements of complex processes. mainly free of reductive bumptiousness that can characterise scientific materialism, tho there is a tremendously crap bit about 'the success of great literature mainly being due to the recognizability of the characters' that stamps ineptly on for a few pages before you get back to the good stuff about basins of attraction and chemical inhiibtors.

The Foundation Pit enjoyed the three pages i read but put it down because i wanted to carry on with the Leskov but then did neither.

The Big Short - Michael Lewis. Character centred interpretation of the sub-prime market collapse. It's a weird book in some ways - financial explanations are B- (tho this is to a finance F-grade reader), narrative is a bit lumpy and difficult to pin onto a timeline, use of fairly simplistic tho usefully memorably character descriptions has the effect of showing that there was a massive systemic failure, but you don't really get a sense of the detail of that failure. However, the scale of the ignorance, fraud and greed don't stop being horrifying and thrilling, and clearly nothing has changed. (Saw the Wolf of Wall Street at this time, which was like having someone persistently bang you over the head with a saucepan for three hours).

Reading that as a friend is editing a load of financial writing atm, she's also looking at the HSBC Mexico laundering scandal, and by coincidence a few weeks before, I'd subscribed to Borderland Beat, which I've been reading a bit of. Can now at least name the six Mexican states that border the US - I could only manage Chihuahua before that.

I am Zlatan Presumably deliberately, there's more than a touch of the Celine about the manner, which mainly comprises wild, accusatory 'Fuck you!' defensiveness followed by rueful admission that everyone was in fact right and he was being a dick, aggressive bombast and pride, schmaltz, wild accusatory 'Fuck you!' aggressiveness followed by confirmation that he's right and in fact 'Fuck them'. Charming, sometimes a bit repetitive, but has some great set pieces - p much all of section that deals with his signing for Juventus - like when he and his dodgy agent, Moni, are having to run through Monaco to get a meeting with the Juventus chairman (and crook) Luciano Moggi, and Moni's wearing hawaiin shorts and the first thing Moggi says when they get to the hotel is 'What the fuck are you wearing?'

you can now write a comparison of THE BIG SHORT and your other favourite, CAPITAL.

I saw THE WOLF OF WALL STREET and very much share your response. Can't fathom the acclaim for this one-note narrative.

yes, "one note" was exactly the phrase I used after seeing it. I shd say that The Big Short is actually good (and factual), unlike Capital which is actually bad.

I just read a picture book. tbf, it had a fair amount of text alongside. It was Ghosts of Everest, about the 1999 expedition that found George Mallory's body and a lot of very interesting clues about the 1924 summit attempt when he died. The big controversy is whether he and his climbing partner summited Everest before coming down. The new evidence suggested they did, but there was nothing conclusive.

i have been jumping back and forth between adorno's 'negative dialectics' and 'minima moralia' and g.e. moore's 'some main problems of philosophy', which is… not as much of a thing as you might expect.

More on xpost Mavis G., a most unusual writer--kind of an outlier female Canadian short story specialist (though she wrote a few novels), forerunner in that sense of Alice Munro--Anne Carson? Kind of a Dawn Powell otm sideswipe too, but mainly present in isolated perspective and theme
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/02/postscript-mavis-gallant-1922-2014.html

Well, runaway, self-exiled Canadian etc.

Most everything in the archive is locked to non-subscribers, except this, from her diary, while she's in a perilous transition, observant as evah:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/07/09/120709fa_fact_gallant

Wow, don, thanks for those links, will have to read more. Did not seem to encounter Dawn Powell sideswipe you mentioned.

My impression of this, from the postscript link: that she was funny, and even showed "compassion for the characters she eviscerated"--not quite the exact quote; my tabs are messing up--but/and also:
The one time I met Gallant in person, in 2006, she was hunched and moving with great difficulty, crippled by osteoporosis, but she skewered two people I knew with such startling and sly precision that I was speechless for a moment, thinking I’d misunderstood—and then spent the rest of the afternoon trying to guess what soft target she’d aim for in her description of me. But Gallant’s vision is not, generally, a satirical one; it isn’t calculated for effect. She doesn’t show off. She is simply honest. In a card she sent me in early 2004, she noted, “I don’t believe any of us shed tears of nostalgia over 2003, which began with threats and ended with an earthquake. For 2004, I wish you not just une Bonne Année but une Année Meilleure—brighter and truthful.”

rereading Middlemarch cuz it's time.

But it's only late February. /dadjoke

Middlemarch was so great on last reread. Almost the only flaw I saw in the whole book was a lack of sympathy for Rosamond, conspicuous because Eliot never seems to stay mad at any of her characters; even the hated aunt in The Mill on the Floss gets some credit later in the book.

i like "on the road" but im finding kerouac's style on "maggie cassidy" a bit annoying. can you use a preposition once in a while? for a book about a reminiscence of young love, it lacks any real insight about it.

btw, schlump, it's this - http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/320878571509?lpid=82

(no idea why that is going for $160! mine was $2.95, used tho obv)

I had that edition, long ago. Finally fell apart.

Jonathan Coe, EXPO '58

What's this like. My experiences with Coe have been hit and miss, but this sounded promising, so thought I'd wait for the paperback

Also finished this Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. bio.

continuing with the Beat voib, I'm reading "The ticket that exploded" by William Burroughs. This is the first time I've read him. I guess I always bracketed him as a wilfully obscure writer (which he kinda is but now I'm not really bothered about that). The book is obviously wtf but I think its best to try not to look for meaning and embrace the weirdness. Its pretty funny at times - a spaceship powered by alien buttsex, for example.

Death in Five Boxes - Carter Dickson.

reading vmic.

Not even comfort reading - so familiar it's lost meaning and taste.

not very good either. tho the solution is tighter than in many. annoyingly acrobatic swindler. atropine poisoning. aesthetically displeasing murderer.

somebody else I haven't read enough of; she's not like anybody else I can think of)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/19/books/mavis-gallant-short-story-writer-dies-at-91.html?_r=0

More on xpost Mavis G., a most unusual writer--kind of an outlier female Canadian short story specialist (though she wrote a few novels), forerunner in that sense of Alice Munro--Anne Carson? Kind of a Dawn Powell otm sideswipe too, but mainly present in isolated perspective and theme
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/02/postscript-mavis-gallant-1922-2014.html

― dow, Sunday, February 23, 2014 5:03 AM (3 days ago)

xposts, did not realise Mavis Gallant had died... have you read The Cost of Living collection published by NYRB? It's a good choice if you're after more of her stuff. I like her writing a lot, I just wish that more people knew about her -- so many of her stories, I think, merit re-reads and discussion, sort of in the way you pick through stories in school/university to uncover all the layers. They just feel so dense and deliberate, in a good way. And I suppose, honestly, as a fellow Canadian abroad there's also a more personal fascination with her themes of exile/displacement.

> also got a chekhov short story collection for cheap. i've never read him, does anyone have any favorites?

gutenberg has those 13 volumes of checkhov short stories. i read the first 3 last year. but the thing that made me download those is 'The Bet', from some russian authors compilation.

http://www.eldritchpress.org/ac/jr/

have just finished The Wasp Factory and Breakfast of Champions. about to start 'S' - http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/11/the-story-of-s-talking-with-jj-abrams-and-doug-dorst.html

Interested to hear what S is like. The idea of it is cool, but I am no Abrams fan, so have not read it.

Alternating assigned reading for my Children's Lit and Contempo Amerian Lit seminars has made for a schizophrenic February:

Marguerite De Angeli, The Door in the Wall
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Rodman Philbrick, Freak the Mighty
Ron Koertge, Stoner & Spaz
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Bill Richardson, After Hamelin
Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking

Thanks for the tip, salsa shark, I'll check out The Cost of Living (speaking of NYRB, I just got Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows; more about that another time).
Yeah, was thinking today that Margaret Atwood's wariness about being considered a science fiction etc. writer (though she can get so involved in remembering the early allure and influence of s.f., before spurning it again, in the New Yorker's Science Fiction issue, for inst) has something to do with being a female Canadian writer of her generation (much younger than Gallant, but certainly old enough to remember the quaintsville, hick chick stereotyping)---one originally known as a female Canadian *poet* too; tres quaintsville. How did Munro make it through all that, never writing any novels at all?

Still working my way through Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour.

I don't really understand what's going on in my life, how I read, like a dozen books in January, and haven't managed to complete one small book in February.

(I suppose it's because words have been flying out of me at such an astonishing rate that I haven't any time for words flying into me.)

i couldnt be arsed with the burroughs book anymore, reading "fooled by randomness" now

Last night I finished The Three Musketeers, after laying it aside a while. Not as satisfying as The Man in the Iron Mask. The melodramatic elements were more to the forefront and Dumas clearly indulged in some padding out of the story - probably because it was being published in serial form and was hugely popular.

THE MUSKETEERS

I have moved house! and I am sitting in the pub! near my house! and I picked up a book off the shelf behind me that is Kisses of the Enemy by Rodney Hall.

I am assured by the quotes from the blurb (Angela Carter, Sunday Times, NYT Book Review, The Australian) that it is "wondrous".

Not sure I can be aris'd to read it tho. Short cut: go to ilx.

Tell me what I think of this book. first para exudes slightly the formal poeticised manner of the writing school, but augury of alternate future science fiction is appealing.

WANT.

the first 100-odd pages of richard house's 'the kills'. man is this a shoot and a miss or what

also behind me is the novel "G" is for Gumshoe by Sue Grafton, author of "K" is for Killer.

opening to see other ones.

"H" is for Homicide
"I" is for Innocent
"J" is for Judgment

back page

Now at work on "L," Sue Grafton is current President of Mystery Writers of America. She lives in Santa Barbara, California.

Oh found the others.

"E" is for Evidence is a little laborious. I need to on to Wikipedia and find out what L was. Life? Surely.

Turns out G is for Gumshoe represented something of a watershed for SG:

"After the publication of "G" Is for Gumshoe, Grafton was able to quit her screenwriting job and focus on her novels."

ffs "L" is for Lawless obviously. dolt.

"W" is for Wasted came out in 2013. She's already said Z will be "Z" is for Zero.

what is it with the fuckin quotes.

Once saw someone refer to Grafton as a modern day Ross Macdonald but tbh those titles are so silly I've been scared to investigate.

I'm semi-enjoying it so far.

I'm not whether I'm able to judge in any way. short of geniuses like George V Higgins, I just can't tell with late hardboiled. I mean Robert B Parker anyone?

Nothing terrible yet, but equally nothing to make your ears prick up.

not *sure*

x is for xenophobia, calling it now

i always get robert b parker confused with the guy that wrote the 'parker' books, who i have actually read

i am sure there are larger cultural-sociopolitical-economic reasons that the hardboiled aesthetic seems to not work after the 60s but it seems like a chore to think about why

apparently r.b. parker, who did not write the 'parker' books, wrote a thesis on hammett, chandler, and mcdonald

Yeah, Robert B Parker was frequently described as the inheritor of Chandler (and he wrote he completed an unfinished work of Chandler's, Poodle Springs), but I never really rated his prose. I guess in a way it read like someone who'd done a thesis on hardboiled.

best writers of that sort feel like screenwriters rather than novelists. strong crossover obv & hi Sue Grafton. Pelecanos for example.

Yeah, the only modern noir I've gotten into so far (not that I've tried very hard) is fantasy or horror noir, dectectives dealing with the supernatural, incl. their own proclivities, in some cases---in Dpwn These Strange Streets, edited by Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin. Even the stories that ultimately don't work are fairly imaginative---most of these writers, like Jim Butcher, have lots of fans, lots of geek police, so quality must be maintained. Exception proves the rule with the very first offering, so dead (but not in a good way) that the author's gotta be trying, and sure enough, Charlaine Harris has announced she's retiring Sookie Stackhouse, of True Blood fame, and hopefully the whole Stackhouseverse, judging by this slack tie-in.
My favorite is the closing novella, and now I'm blanking on the title of course, but the detective is Dashiell Hammett, who is also a middle-aged, chain-smoking, blood-coughing corporal in the WWII US Army, and editor of the base newspaper on an Aleutian island. Author Bradley Denton has his history down (Hammett talked his way past the Army doctors, although at this point recruiters couldn't be too picky; my 17-year-old father served with a couple of 14-year-olds, for whom parental consent was waived, or enhanced, or something). The narrator doesn't talk like a Hammett character, and neither do Denton's other characters (except Hammett, and you can tell this is how he deals with people).

"The Adakian Eagle, " that's the one starring Hammett. Sorry, Butcher's in another Dozois & Martin anthology Dangerous Women, which draws from several genres/subgenres. My favorites there are more often historical than fantasy, though Eleanor of Aquitaine's family, for instance, are weird enough. Also, a couple of authors here know way more about families dealing with Alzheimer's than I want (wanted) to know--good readin', however!
Erm, back to the detectives: another of my other faves in Down These Strange Streets: Lord John serves His Majesty as a fixer of sticky wickets (whether HRM knows it or not), and here he helps an Imperial brother out by investigating a plague of zombies further complicating the nightlife (bed chambers, hallways, etc) of an outpost in the Jamaican countryside. He has to find and negotiate with a village of Maroons, ex-(and descendents of) runaway slaves, up in the hills. The Enlightenment gets some exercise.

I didn't need to say "ex," did I. Sorry, enough attempted syntax for tonight. (Now for the sin tax.)

DID YOU KNOW the most popular weird tales author was not in fact h p lovecraft or robert e howard but some mook who wrote about a psychic detective?

I finished FREEDOM

then I finished Perry Anderson's AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY AND ITS THINKERS

yay for Fizzles in Sarf London!

Today: goes to library to take Flight Behaviour back and get Just One Book to tide me over for a week or so.

Comes back with six books. Including ~Derelict Buildings Of London~ what is even wrong with me.

In the last few days my German Lit project has started to take shape:

Finished Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann and I felt like reading Wittgenstein afterwards just to confirm that the puns around sentence sets and the general air of being crushed by language were derived from him. It was suffocating and yet quite exhilarating at the same time.

Re-read another 20 chapters of Vol.III of The Man Without Qualities. This is where many people who love this book depart from it, and while its true the theories around morality can get dampen the interest there is so much here: Ulrich and Agathe's "affair" and their efforts to live quietly scandalously, Clarisse's interest in Moosbrugger reaching some kind of macabre conclusion, the continuing awfulness of the collateral campaign..

Kafka - Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Finished the volume that collates all that K published in his lifetime. Love love the Hunger Artist and Josephine..., his voice just pierces right inside you.

Also finished Confessions of a Mask but I think I'll work in gathering more of Mishima's works and trying to read 'em as a bunch.

I think by the end of the collection you do believe that if Brod carried out his wishes and burnt the novels he would've still "survived" although of course I am glad he has not. I'll get on to those.

Kisses of the Enemy by Rodney Hall is very good but you probably need to have lived in Aus (as Carter did) to get it

Just finished A True Novel by Minae Mizumura http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1590512030.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

- 900p Japanese semi-anti-epic. Very good, but hard to say why. You're effortlessly carried along through this nested narrative (much of the book is a story about A and B, recounted by C to D, but told by E, who is a fictionalised version of Mizumura.

Starting new Lorrie Moore collection, 'Bark'

That one might get removed--here she is, on the case

http://www.parsnice18.com/PhotoGallery/FilmPicture/SerialFilm/elementary/elementary%20(15).jpg

Wrong thread, wrong board even---sorreee!

she has the look of someone who's just wandered into ILB by accident anyway.

Martin Amis - Difficulties with Girls
John Lukacs - George Kennan

Martin Amis - Difficulties with Girls
John Lukacs - George Kennan

Kingsley isn't it? his more or less autobiographical South London one?

She looks like she has better taste in books than some of you lot do :-P

The show is based on a book at least. How is the second season?

-

I finished reading 'Sutler', the first book in the Richard House four-book novel, and was glad it was over, and then put the whole thing on the shelf of books I'd read, which felt like a relief. Then I started reading 'The Infatuations'.

i always get robert b parker confused with the guy that wrote the 'parker' books, who i have actually read

Richard Stark aka Donald Westlake - a much better writer than RBP, who I've always found to be a bit insubstantial.

The 'Scudder' series by Lawrence Block are the most consistently entertaining post-war American hardboiled tec novels, imho.

Thomp, the xpost show is still mostly a slog, but she's an effective foil, and the only reason I keep watching. John Lukacs has always seemed like a dick, at least in speeches; haven't read him, but seems like he'd bring a very reactionary POV to consderation of controversially non-reactionary Kennan. Amis on girls, ugh.

Kingsley isn't it? his more or less autobiographical South London one?

yeah I wrote too fast

(Kennan was sometimes ridic reactionary re *domestic* political issues; Lukacks prob approves?)

Kennan hated hippies and porn.

She looks like she has better taste in books than some of you lot do :-P

zooks! the emphasis was more on the poverty of what she saw before her than any suggested poverty of mind.

South London is undoubtedly the place to be. genuinely feel a new person. more reading, more writing, more ilx are amongst the promises I've made to myself with this newfound strength.

Yay for Sarf London joy your way.

I am now reading Kate Mosse (I cannot wait until our library is back in its old building and we have a decent choice of books again, so I am not reduced to such as this) and jesus christ what sub-Dan Brownian wretchedness is this.

This is truly stretching my poptimism to the breaking point.

sub-Dan Brownian motion wretchedness has been popping up as a hip crush

Fizzles, I, too, live in South London. We should meet, some time.

That would be good!

You two are both coming to the FAP on Thursday, yes no? ::attempts beguiling booze gaze, manages only stern headmistress glare::

Ugh, that Mosse book was so obvious from page one, not the slightest hint of suspense in what was supposed to be a ghost story. Ugh ugh.

Now attempting comfort re-read of Jamaica Inn to recover.

Oh my god, we have no Du Maurier thread. I shall have to rectify this IMMEDIATELY.

I obsessively read Daphne Du Maurier between the ages of I think 11 and 14. Might pick one up again. Jamaica Inn was my favourite, though even then I think I recognised Hungry Hill was 'better'. But I liked the pirate stuff. Frenchman's Creek.

Yep, I'll be limbering up for the FAP next Thursday afternoon.

Here we go:

The novels of Daphne du Maurier

Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (novel >>>>>>> title), Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal and Mary McCarthy's The Group. Really bringing home how many novels I've read recently have no female characters of any depth or conviction.

I am currently reading Old Money, Nelson W. Aldrich Jr.

It's a bit windy at times, but does an excellent job of describing the USA's upper crust and their folkways, with wit and understanding that sometimes verges into wonderment and at other times disdain. To give an inkling of the author's old money credentials, the full name of a certain governor of NY, vice president by appointment, and frequent candidate for president was Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. They were cousins.

Also a pal of Frederick Seidel and is mentioned in Seidel's poems.

Or was that his dad?

surprisingly I have read both THE FROG HOSPITAL and THE GROUP

THE FROG HOSPITAL I think of as my second favourite novel

THE GROUP I can not be so positive about but it had its moments or it held aspects I wanted to like. I liked a character from Ohio. She made me laugh.

why is 'frog hospital' your second favourite novel, unless you mean it is your second-favourite novel by lorrie moore

i'm reading 'the infatuations', which is my third or fifth favourite novel by javier marias, depending on how one counts

Aldrich quotes from a Seidel poem in the book.

infatuations seemed pretty bad, i have been trying to work out why

i. jull costa's translation seemed more infelicitous than usual: stuff about 'blokes' and 'birds'; awkwardness about what people are saying in spanish; someone, near the end, 'palely loiters', which just makes the reader start multiplying the cases of what might be going on in the spanish ...

ii. the whole this is a book about Men and Women and Violence and Quoting Macbeth schtick, i don't know

ii. a. so all his narrators are studies in passivity, sure, but i don't know how i feel about the narrator here, female and the only female narrator of his i can think of, being defined almost solely in terms of stuff she does not do

ii. b. i find it hard to trust marias's productions of the way in which this female narrator is aware of her physical self, or the way that she thinks about men and women -- both are presented rather naively, or rather as like an essayistic versions of what it might be like to Be a Woman and have Thoughts

iii. it doesn't have a lot of plot, and the blurb on the back makes the first ... 240 pages? or so? ... of that plot predictable, which is unfortunate

perry anderson - the new old world

fairly unequivocal recommendation

Same pattern as before: finishing James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain, reading more of Pound's Cantos for a project I'm working on but finding A Draft of XXX Cantos and The Pisan Cantos still the most compelling parts of the work, dipping into two books on gender (Susan Stryker's Transgender History and Dean Spade's Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, the latter appealing for the way it connects trans politics to more systemic anti-capitalist agitation and institutional critique), going slowly through Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to GH and W.E.B. DuBois's Souls of Black Folk, and reading translations of poems by two morose and hermetic but emotionally piercing Latin American writers: Alejandra Piznarik (A Musical Hell) and Jaime Saenz (Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems); samples of their work can be found below.

http://jacket2.org/commentary/alejandra-pizarnik-uncollected-poems-1962-1972
http://jacketmagazine.com/08/saenz.html

paterson, and kora in hell, and various bits on williams and modernism

my ts eliot hatred is strong again

I forget how much I hate him when I read his essays.

i'm reading the norton critical edition of shelley's poetry and prose straight through, hopefully even including the essays. so far i am finding queen mab compulsively readable but sort of nuts. i get the sense that shelley feels he is laying it all out there, telling it how it is, but for him "how it is" includes the idea that dead matter is sentient and each individual atom of our universe contains smaller universes, each as complex as our own. he says a lot of good stuff too though. his rousseauist idea that human beings are "naturally good" but "corrupted" by authoritarian social practices is simplistic, but i can see why it was a necessary corrective to the doctrine of original sin, and also why it was inspiring to movements like the chartists who needed a vocabulary to justify their desire to radically change, rather than just reform, society. so glad i didn't read this in college when i would have just deconstructed its "metaphysics of presence" or something equally stupid.

wait till you read "Epipsychidon."

I became sorta obsessed with "Epipsychidion" last year--I wouldn't call it my fav Shelley, but there is something about medium-length poems full of mentalism which I find very appealing

Did Shelley (re)invent Platonic Love? And why do I find this poem so much more moving than his elegy for Keats??

ANSWER: oh right, it's because of stanza X:

True Love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light,
Imagination! which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human phantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills
The Universe with glorious beams, and kills
Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow
Of its reverberated lightning. Narrow
The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,
The life that wears, the spirit that creates
One object, and one form, and builds thereby
A sepulchre for its eternity.

*stanza XI

Also, the sublime heights of rhetoric in the earlier parts of the poem—"Veiled glory of this lampless Universe!" is a particular favorite, along with "I weep vain tears; blood would less bitter be, / Yet poured forth gladlier, could it profit thee"

taylor branch's parting the waters, the most dramatic book about organizing i'd read since trotsky's history of the revolution, interwoven w some great game-of-thronesy stuff w/ rfk + j.edgar. def moving on to pillar of fire after a hiatus.

david nasaw's the patriarch abt joe kennedy sr.: this was ok. lotta stuff about how the kids are doing at school. british ambassadorship stuff the most interesting, predictably. he had the financier's overriding fear of war. usually a pretty sound prejudice.

also i finally restarted and finished the stand (1978 ed.). the first 400 pages took me 12 hours and the remaining 400 took me a month and a half, so that's my review.

reading peter nichols, modernisms: a literary guide. had never been able to get much from it before, guess i'm in a different place now, but it's still kind of tiring/funny how mechanically he brings out heavy deconstructive guns to tease out aporias in everything he talks about, transparently so but without saying that that's what he is doing. fair enough i guess given how much basis for it there is in what deconstruction actually was actually working with in baudelaire, the symbolists, etc.

Stone, Einstein and the Quantum
Kragh, Niels Bohr and the Quantum Atom

Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling
recommended on another thread, amazing

I revere Perry Anderson as perhaps the greatest writer of non-fictional prose in English and am always saying so and never do I find anyone else that likes him.

I know Peter Nicholls, he is actually very nice and generous, but that book can indeed be quite thorny to read. It's tremendously learned but maybe the literary material was difficult enough without theory making it harder.

i knew you would know him, that's why i posted! i'm actually reading it to find out about modernism, not about literature. but embedding all the readings in a deconstructive framework does make the theory i am getting kind of ~performative~. could do with a fair bit more telling, little less showing. but the story i'm getting is eerily close to some of the concerns i brought to the book anyway, so i can tolerate being lectured at.

I have no interest in cutting off conversation, but we've got two reading threads going at once. Can we use the 2014 onee?

"i'm actually reading it to find out about modernism, not about literature"

what kind of modernism? non-literary modernism?

no, mostly the literary kind, but as modernism, as such. i've been reading about it ever since i was a wee student but still can't really employ the concepts for myself. 'all the CONVENTIONS were EXHAUSTED!' that kinda thing.

sorry al i just used what were in fronta me. it even says winter! i assure you this what i got here is winter.

re: anderson - writing 15000 words on Cyprus proved to be a good idea.

Because it was interesting?

I can't say, that was the one PA LRB essay I could not bring myself to read. I skimmed it and still could not find any point of purchase.

Well at the time you'd think it was...an odd idea. I read those series of articles on Italy, France, Russia and Turkey one after the other over a week at work (it was a very quiet week in August).

Two years later that area became entangled with survival of the eurozone, so it suddenly turned out to be one of his most important pieces for the LRB - or at least it felt like it/you could see a point to it.

Last night I finished Old Money and picked up Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin. Tonight will be the acid test to see if I stick with Baldwin or try something else. I still have Savage Detectives staring at me from my shelf of to-read books, so Baldwin has strong competition.

For what it's worth, the second of Go Tell it on the Mountain's three parts ("Prayers of the Saints") is probably the strongest, so it may be worth staying with it at least that far.

It's obviously your call and your reading time, though.

Baldwin's not a good novelist, I've learned.

As a novelist, he's a great essayist, I think.

better than great. There aren't any adjectives.

i was reading 'the specter of alexander wolf' but it got old real quick

yeah, it's brief tho. I'm not sure it's entirely without merit. feel undecided on it. decide me. it's certainly not great.

I think I'll go ahead with Go Tell it on the Mountain. It is constructed to maximize the melodrama of the story, but it has other redeeming qualities of dialogue, setting and observation. Baldwin had a good ear and eye.

Currently reading Stung! by Lisa-ann Gershwin about how jellyfish are taking over the world. It's terrifying.

haha f. i remembered you being decidedly pro! that was why i bought it! that and the paperback of the infatuations didn't cost enough, alone, for amazon to post it free of charge

xp

god I don't think I could read that - the LRB review of it made me really really tense.

Reading the recent Leo Damrosch biog of Swift - it's fine to good - I just enjoy reading about Swift tbh.

boo. i really dug Alexander Wolf. Oh well

> Interested to hear what S is like. The idea of it is cool, but I am no Abrams fan, so have not read it.

it's a nice thing, the actual object. story doesn't hold up, i don't think. the actual story is a bit slight - pirates, assassins etc, not the literary classic the margin people seem to make it out to be. but then it is probably just designed to have the other story hanging off it. then the marginalia story has holes in it. plus there are several layers of that from different times and often you are reading about fallout from things that hasn't happened yet (and sometimes happens off page). but fascinating idea, often slightly confusing and the book itself is quite beautiful. (am going back to read just the marginalia, see if it improves)

(also, i think the plan is to reveal bits of it over the next year, web related bits. will have to keep an eye out)

> Just finished A True Novel by Minae Mizumura

ha, this caught my eye recently. glad to hear it's good.

i didn't realise s. was so danielewskish

re alexander wolf i went off it when it had that phase of being About Women. the boxing match was exciting. the ending was weirdly foreshorted, given how predictable the ending was.

i saw it coming from the halfway point and yet it seemed like arrived too quickly, i guess, is my claim

made a note at the time of reading, which doesn't make entire sense to me now:

"the final event seems v cursory but it does not matter - it is the only real outcome of the novel and therefore it does not really matter how this is accomplished. it is in one way a happy ending - in two ways in fact - but rather than liberating them both from wolf, it perhaps only confirms his view of metaphysics of existence. their world now exists within the narrow conception that rah narrator has rejected. or perhaps they have freed themselves from the foreknowing that Wolf embodies."

i suppose i'd try and gloss it this way: if i remember, the book starts with a bifurcation (between wolf and the narrator), the separation, meeting and inevitable closure of which will clearly form the narrative of the novel.

the novel itself has four or five pulses of action interspersed with fairly long periods of self-philosophising. I'm not sure it does it any worse than plenty of other novels, but it is stuff many people will have come across before in Notes from the Underground, Kafka and Camus. As I say, I'm not sure there's any reason to suppose it's doing this sort of thing any worse than other books in a similar vein, but it possibly suffers slightly in this respect from being a 'lost' classic (a publisher's phrase after all, probably really only meaning, 'less well known than some other writers from a similar period or in a similar vein.')

The pulses go something like this:

1. Initial scene and murder - determines the cast of the life and action of the novel
2. Discovery of Alexander Wolf - the problem to be resolved
3. Boxing match and affair - the thing which is worth defending, the nature and philosophy of the narrator: why the problem matters.
4. Meeting, and deaths - the nature of the thing that haunts the narrator - the anti-philosophy - the confrontation between the two and conclusion

i can't remember the details of the philosophy and anti-philosophy, but seem to recall that Wolf espouses a sort of fatalistic determinism, which the narrator resists (he has something worth fighting for and defending in his love), but that the closure of the bifurcation produces an irony where the narrator is victorious, but has ended up fulfilling his spectre's understanding of the cosmos. (I'm not sure about this)

I was interested to see how much i could separate out the matter that would have appealed to me as a teenager (white jerk writing, insufficiently realised ego) from merits the novel had outside of that. Can't remember where I got, though did think a) the boxing match and b) the 'happy' ending were distinctive.

I was curious about certain non-stylistic parallels with another emigre Russian writier, Nabokov, as in certain aspects (rather through a glass darkly than in specifics) they mirror each other. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is both an obvious and a too obvious comparison.

another novel i dislike!! i made an okay poem out of the marginalia someone had left in my copy though

Reading the recent Leo Damrosch biog of Swift - it's fine to good - I just enjoy reading about Swift tbh.

revising my opinion of this downward. I like his cheerful embrace of biographical speculation – Stella was William Temple's daughter! And Swift was his half-brother! – but he's a bit shy of the works. He almost seems to be warning people off Tale of a Tub.

Marina Tsvetava - A Captive Spirit. Halfway through, like her poetry its a hurricane howl for a lot of the time. Things are named and said a lot quicker although I think this could've been more tightly selected. Curently reading a piece on her father and its just 'nicely written'. Porbably meant as a break (coming as it does in the middle of the book) but it ends up disrupting the flow-of-blood prose coming from the other pieces on her poets and friends.

I finished Go Tell It on the Mountain last night. I think it ran true to the psychology of Pentecostalism and Baldwin did a good job of explaining the extreme drama and excitement involved in fighting Satan from minute to minute, while serving a vertiginously all-powerful God who would send you to a pit of everlasting fire without hesitation if you fail him for even one moment, or redeem your soul to everlasting glory on a whim. It also was helpful for understanding how, when your life is already a living hell of poverty, racism and violence, such a religion makes good self-consistent sense.

As noted above, the plot is hella melodramatic, but the compressed melodrama of it helped to make Baldwin's point about how life looked from within that Pentecostal worldview. It's a very theatrical sect.

Last night I picked up Savage Detectives. It is a cliché to call a sense of humor "wicked", but Bolano's satire so far is more of a dissecting knife that he wields with a certain measure of cruelty. He seems bitterly disappointed in his characters and humanity in general, and he has been systematically flensing them.

Totally. I think you and I agreed about Bolano's hopelessness on another thread but maybe I'm misremembering. 2666 is definitely some kind of masterpiece but its emotional hollowness is even harder to take than its graphic violence, and makes me want to resist the novel, or refute it somehow, especially because it so clearly aspires to be something like the "last novel", a statement on humanity at its breaking point. That book was a very memorable reading experience because it was so antagonistic but I'm not sure if or when I'll go in for more Bolano.

I need to read a book for review but am putting it off by reading Shelley and ilxing. What can I do?

What can I do?

Leave the house for another location, taking with you only the book you're supposed to review. Give yourself a good shot at reading it consecutively. If the book is impenetrable or offputting to the point you can't actually read it, then give yourself permission to start dipping and skimming, as you mentally start to form your review, explaining your take on it.

I often write reviews switching from Word document to ILX.

I don't think you can take those hard and fast conclusions from 2666. It resists such things.

Some of us were arguing, or just differing, about this on the Bolano thread, but I didn't take 2666 as hollow, which is why I feel the urge to rush to its author's defense, as if he needed or could be aware of it. He's antagonistic to death, deadly assholes and inverted ones too---he wants us to get mad, not sad, or get both, anyway, when appropriate, which is always, when it comes to deadly assholes--until it's time to become coldly observant, tracking then, doing a body count of their victims, when/as if that all counts for something. All those writers in exile---sometimes with silence, cunning, mobility, sometimes just in exile, but always at least a residual magnetism, affecting the other characters going about their various pursuits, benign and malignant---and the old African-American behind the stage mic, the occult Mexican lady on TV, the upper class progressive female Mexican legislator speaking to a private detective: these three testifying, as the author is testifying, and all of his characters, including the murderers, who may or may not all be offstage, all raging in the cage of history and mortality, the story that goes on without us, never getting to the punchline, to the goddam point (ok, that's antagonistic too, but not hollow, except the way we all get hollowed out in time--but I think he was still ahead by a nose, while finishing this book).

Also it's pretty entertaining.

It does feel very consciously like a LAST novel from a career, though.

Having had vile gastro and been feeling unlike myself for several days (I didn't read a book for 4 days, which is like me not breathing), am getting back into the swing of things with Shirley Jackson's 'The Sundial': weird black comedy of manners about people holed up together in a mansion, waiting out a possible apocalypse.

It is lengthy but so is Savage Detectives. Do like that it doesn't feel like a big statement: its such a non-ending.

Never feels like an epic either, one of the sections is about literary critics. Its just an odd book.

2666 was a better book, attenuations and all, than The Savage Detectives.

Just finishing up All Quiet on the Western Front. Pretty boring, to be honest. Usually I like the classics, but this one has way too much philosophizing for my taste. I wonder if this one is a victim of its own cliché, as I love later somewhat similar books like Catch 22, Farewell to Arms, etc.

2666 is a much better book than Savage Detectives and just to make sure there is no ambiguity in my prev post it is in 2666 that I find no whiff of a big statement.

I really enjoyed "All Quiet on the Western Front" and I don't remember it being laden with philosophizing - maybe towards the end. I liked the parts that were just about life at the front - showing how life goes on even in the most hellish absurd circumstances.

All Quiet... is on the long list of novels that inspired movies I love and which I should therefore read one day, but as the qualities that I appreciate about the movie are largely "filmic" ones, I don't know how much interest the source material would hold for me.

y'all can feel free to stop posting here whenever (don't stop reading, though!)