As 2012 learns to toddle: what are you reading?

picking up david graeber's "direct action: an ethnography" again--his account of the planning & execution of major protest actions outside the FTAA meeting in quebec city in 2001. eerie how so many of the conversations & arguments are near verbatim the same conversations i'm involved in today with occupy dc.

also cracking "ours to master and to own," a history of worker-owned workplaces.

thomp on an enviable Beckett binge

i think i'm stopping after this one tbh

skimming about 50% of all the procedural gags in watt, also i have other things i really should be getting around to

like not understanding 60% of the gags in murphy

i feel like i get at least two thirds of the gags in murphy

"and their nights were serenade, nocturne, and albada. yes, albada."

Ellen Willis - Out of the Vinyl Deeps

Nicholas Thompson - The Hawk and the Dove, a readable but facile study of George Kennan and Paul Nitze that, thanks to John Lewis Gaddis' new Kennan bio, is now obsolete.

Wodehouse - Right Ho, Jeeves!

Ben Ehrenreich, Ether - Very quick, read it in two sittings, which was good because I felt pretty filthy after each one. Not sure if I could recommend to friends but I'm glad I read it.

filthy? i really liked this and im... surprised, i guess, by this reaction?

Lem - Solaris (2011 Johnston translation)

Finally a non-audio version and they fuck it up by leaving out a bunch of spaces in the Kindle copy. I read the Polish->French->English translation last year but I couldn't tell you what the differences are, apart from the character names being changed. Turns out that the original, lousy translation got the gist across.

i liked it too lamp, i just mean the world he creates is so grime-encrusted, everyone is in destitute circumstances, lots of gross scenes involving small animals. not saying it was gratuitous, just that i don't know if i'd want to spend 500 pages in that world.

oh, is that in print or just e-text? xp.

Teenage by John Savage. Bought it when I was in London 2 Xmases back. was overweight for flying so it got left there til a few weeks ago when I started reading it again. Am now 4/5s of way through it. Very interesting.

Lemmy White Line Fever picked up very cheaply in an HMV recently. Makes interesting light reading while I'm on the bus etc. Not really followed too much of Motorhead's career. Have been aware of some of the earlier & more popular stuff though. Plus I love Hawkwind + Sam Gopal are pretty decent.
Guess this is the memoirs of a guy who's lived through a lot.

Also Patti Smith Just Kids again very interesting memoir this time of her early days with Robert Mapplethorpe. Will finish this finally when I get through the above 2.

No Go the Bogeyman by Marina WArner. Have this out the local library, started it before Xmas and it was too heavy to carry. Found what I read of it so far pretty fascinating. Mainly got this cos I couldn't afford to buy From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers when it appeared in the local 2nd hand/remaindered bookshop before Xmas.
Wanted to check out her writing though. Will hopefully get that in the future though.

One reason I couldn't afford to get another book was having pickled up Dreamers of Decadence by Philippe Jullian in the same bookshop. Found it on the recently arrived shelf and it seemed to call out to me. just the kind of book that needed to be in my possession. Seems really reminiscent of the time it came out, back in '71. Not that I'd be completely conscious of the time having been a toddler but having gone through things like the psychedelic revival and having been aware of music & alternative culture of the time in hindsight it seems very resonant.

Was back in the shop today browsing, trying to make sure i didn't miss anything else neccessary but I'm really broke after Xmas. I'm also aware that I have a lot of other stuff I've picked up in there over the years that I've yet to read.

I took two bags' worth to the charity shop today. It's barely made a dent in my library.

went to the library, got whatever NYRB Classics they had that looked interesting, ended up with "Fatale" by Jean-Patrick Manchette (really quick read, wasn't super-impressed) and "The Ice Trilogy" by Alexander Sorokin, which I'm enjoying so far.

sorry, Vladimir Sorokin

just finished munro's /too much happiness/

wasn't as blown away by it as i was with /open secrets/ but still...sentences like this one make it worthwhile

She should have understood, and at that moment, even if he himself was nowhere close to knowing. He was falling in love.

Falling. That suggests some time span, a slipping under. But you can think of it as a speeding up, a moment or a second when you fall. Now Jon is not in love with Edie. Tick. Now he is. No way this could be seen as probable or possible, unless you think of a blow between the eyes, a sudden calamity. The stroke of fate that leaves a man a cripple, the wicked joke that turns clear eyes into blind stones.

or this

The college library was a high beautiful space, designed and built and paid for by people who believed that those who sat at the long tables before open books–even those who were hungover, sleepy, resentful, and uncomprehending–should have space above them, panels of dark gleaming wood around them, high windows bordered with Latin admonitions, through which to look at the sky. For a few years before they went into schoolteaaching or business or began to rear children, they should have that. And now it was my turn and I should have it too.

yeah its not her best collection but a couple of stories, particularly the one about girls at a camp and 'deep-holes', which was grinding to read but powerful, have stayed with me

yeah, the camp one is child's play -- very very good. i also liked wenlock edge (the one with the weird old man who has girls read to him in the nude)

Finished Short Orders. Romney is terrific really, ws interesting to read about things I started digging at the time in naivety, like the terrific Vietnamese film Scent of Green Papaya or La Haine which at the time I liked but had no idea where it was coming from. Those first touches with diff mode of filmmaking that took root then and grew and now are stored in categories like 'neo realism' or 'new asian cinema' and so on, just names that are useful journalistically but have a potential to stop you thinking about their content.

There is a dense essay on CGI at the end. Those discussion - ws tackling a similarly dense essay on 3D in relation to dance films such as PIna - and outcomes are all up for grabs.

Now I'm reading a couple of short books from the BFI classics - one on Ichikawa's Actor's Revenge, the ohter on Ford's Stagecoach.

I'm reading 'Let the Great World Spin' which I'm liking very much. I think he's a good writer. The stuff about the greiving Vietnam mothers was particularly well done.

Some recent reading:

Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre
Palinurus - The Unquiet Grave
Robert Gittings - John Keats
Oscar Wilde - De Profundis

All of which I thoroughly enjoyed. My rather limited French somewhat hampered my reading of The Unquiet Grave, but I still thought it was marvellous. I also tried reading 'A Tale of Two Cities', which I found pretty unbearable. A big fan of 'Great Expectations' too.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Before that Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. Next up The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.

Another Muriel Spark novel, this time Memento Mori, which I am enjoying very much. I'm about 2/3 through it and I think it very clever of her to borrow a few tropes from Agatha Christie to tart up what is really a very un-Christie-like novel about old age and approaching death.

With my off hand I am also reading Six Records of a Floating Life, Shen Fu (Penguin Classics edition). It's a sketchy memoir written by a Chinese 'legal secretary' circa 1809. It is highly stylized by western standards, but by the Chinese literary standards of his time, it is unusually informal.

I took a brief run at Oblamov, but it felt like a too-heavy cake, so I'll try again later.

talented mr. ripley
ripley underground

Londoners was really good. Slightly too many of the folk interviewed were zany characters, anticapitalists and conspiracy theorists and so forth, and slightly not-enough were regular folk in mundane but essential jobs (no civil servants at all, from memory; and every financial type was balanced out by an antibanker, which annoyed me a little as they had interesting stories whereas the protectors appeared not to know very much about anything). But that's small complaint, it was an excellent read, and I raced through because the style was so conversational. Laetitia Sadier was one of the interviewees and hence has her own three or four pages, which would please some folks round here.

Now The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, which has had some hype. I bought on a whim after finishing the other book while out yesterday. No discount or anything, but it paid off, I'm enjoying it very much thus far. It's one of those generous, ever-so-slightly flabby American novels, like Franzen maybe, rather than the DeLillo it was trailed as in Waterstone's. It reminds me most of Bonfire of the Vanities, in that I feel they both needed one more edit before going out - there are a few clichés here & there, the odd groanworthy gag, and passages where nothing much happens and nothing needed to. But that's minor fare when you've got a good story, and thus far I'm hooked.

munro book club discussion is tonight!

finished hateship...liked it better than _too much happiness_, but after reading these two I'm starting to wonder if anything else of hers will top Open Secrets. Maybe it's just cuz the first story in open secrets was so freaking good that these other two books just haven't compared? Or was it b/c it was my first Munro? It would be sad to think that Munro will never be as great to me as when I read that first one...

talented mr. ripley
ripley underground

Read 'Ripley Under Water'!

I'm going sequentially. They're really great fun.

about 3/4 through stone arabia now. it's weird how the writing is very straight-forward and unadorned for the most part, when it's supposed to be the sister character's written journal. but when she's talking in front of a camera, out come the florid metaphors, which would be fine except they're totally unbelievable as speech. then again, it's her written account of the interview and the main theme of the book is revisionism and unreliable narration, so...

Esther Leslie and her bk on Walt Disney. And Walter Benjamin, of course, can't forget him.

The KCRW/Bookworm interview with Eugenidies leaves me wanting to read The Marriage Plot.

Good interview? I'll have to google it, be curious to hear him talk abt it...

3 to kill - jean-patrick manchette (brutal stuff, a swift read, would make a hell of a melville film if he was still around to make them.)
death of the adversary - hans keilson (second keilson i've read, contains probably the most devastating single chapter i've read in a novel in a very long time, and said chapter ends on a singularly emotionally brutal note.)
hell at the breech - tom franklin (well-written and vv good with the exception of a character i can only describe as a "francis wolcott in deadwood" equivalent, who seems to have zero purposes except to cause chaos, which is fine i suppose but he seems utterly out of place. otherwise good.)
he died with his eyes open - derek raymond (working through this one now. so far, so good.)

A Mirror for England - Raymond Durgnat

Finishing Martin Chuzzlewit.
Dipping into Selected Journalism 1850-1870, also by Charles Dickens.
Starting Ackroyd's Dickens biography. God this thing is huge.

I was just trying to ignore the Dickens bicentenary, and not to let it make me too contrary (and I was saving my reading energies for the Browning bicentenary in May, Camberwell represent), but then a friend commissioned a brief urgent bit of hackwork on him, and I have been sucked in. I forget how much I love him; I basically am a sucker for that London-visionary Dickens, and though god knows he has his faults, none of the other nineteenth century sorts move me or excite me as he does - strange tableaux, titanic descriptive passages of universe where everything seems alive, caricatures going sideways to truth. idk in a few months I'll maybe be back to thinking that he should have written less, but right now I am even delighting in jolly filler episodes and thinking I should hole up and read nothing but for 6 months.

Cyril Connolly's mildly amusing The Rock Pool and Kenneth Ackerman's uproarious Boss Tweed.

hans keilson -- those two books of his are wonderfully written, and spectacularly dark. pity he hasn't written more fiction. as far as I know he's still alive, over 100, but has only written the 2 short novels (and lots of psychology publications)

doing some catching up on some classics:

halfway through lolita - i adore this
read "the lagoon" and about to start heart of darkness
started a portrait of the artist as a young man
attn alfred: trying to finish savage's takeover

After almost a year I finally finished Middlemarch! Feel quite bereft. Is Daniel Deronda worth attempting, does ILB think?

Over Christmas I read Alain Robbe-Grillet's Why I Love Barthes - not so much a slim volume, more an anorexic pamphlet - and JJ Sullivan's Pulphead, which I enjoyed parts of, but... I don't really get all the fuss.

Delphi have been putting out some thorough Complete Works ebooks of various authors fresh out of copyright. Have been browsing through the Virginia Woolf. Lots of essays I'd never seen before, most of them sensational.

Have been reading Paul Mason ahead of his new book. Live Working or Die Fighting - great, punchy history of worker's movements from Peterloo, through the Paris Commune up to Gramsci etc in the Italian car industry. Didn't know all the stuff about the Knights of Labor. And Meltdown, which made me think I almost understood the world financial fiasco. Also had a gander at a collection of David Graeber essays, including a pretty funny piece on Buffy.

Are you enjoying the Durgnat, Ward? Read one of his collections last year and want to chase some more down.

Really want a decent papk of Woolf's essays.

I really enjoyed Daniel Deronda. I think I wrote on the sandbox -

Daniel Deronda is a very strange book. Eliot is an extraordinary writer, such a control over the psychological motivations of her characters, and the bleakest most material ideas you can imagine all managed with great intellectual brilliance. You would fear her sympathy as being very little different in quality to her criticism .. I’ve never read a novel where it’s quite so clear that all the author is interested in is ideas. Eliot has absolutely no interest in the quotidian whatsoever – fashion is flippantly dismissed in a single short paragraph, and NO ONE EATS EVER. She mentions food once, and that dismissively (it’s a pet theory I have that realist writers aren’t interested in food, only genre and fantastic writers are – Eliot has given that rather wobbly idea a shot of amphetamines). Power and resistance, power and resistance, a vicious [wrong word] heath-robinson moral manufactory of a novel, with Deronda the most powerful of all – it takes a whole religion to take him down. And all so brilliantly done, too.

What's unusual about it I guess is the strong strain of mysticism competing and overwhelming what is otherwise an intensely cynical novel.

I really like that she writes a lot of her own chapter epigraphs:

Aspern. Pardon, my lord—I speak for Sigismund.
Fronsberg. For him? Oh, ay—for him I always hold
A pardon safe in bank, sure he will draw
Sooner or later on me. What his need?
Mad project broken? fine mechanic wings
That would not fly? durance, assault on watch,
Bill for Epernay, not a crust to eat?
Aspern. Oh, none of these, my lord; he has escaped
From Circe’s herd, and seeks to win the love
Of your fair ward Cecilia: but would win
First your consent. You frown.
Fronsberg. Distinguish words.
I said I held a pardon, not consent.

Love Sigismund!

But if you've just finished Middlemarch, you'll probably want a break. Eliot has such a tight leash on her characters' psychologies that I needed something a little breezier after.

Torrents of Spring - Ivan Turgenev

Interesting about the quotidian - the Pinefox should post up somewhere the essay he wrote about Sylvia Plath and food. (The missus is always horribly frustrated in films or tv [though oddly not fiction] where characters are obviously eating but you can't see what...)

Funnily enough, one of the things that most impressed me about Middlemarch was what I felt was Eliot's negative capability, how she did have some feel for the everyday, despite her obvious investment in Dorothea's high-mindedness - how a child plays with its cat, the way a lot of the time you can see Celia's point about Dodo's terrible seriousness, and at the end when the teasing relationship between Mary and Fred seems to be the truest of all the marriages, the real heart of the novel in a way.

I reread Daniel Deronda last May and was still impressed.

Not one of his best known essays, but one of his most penetrating.

Very impressed by Stevie's, as we used to call it ... book-learning.

I could possibly try to dig out that essay from the ghost of a draft of Papercuts 5, but not sure that anyone would make anything of it now, though it was the best I could do with Plath in 2000 and I could surely not do any better on that topic in this lifetime.

i think they eat in 'adam bede'!

austen -- emma (a writer i've never gotten with, but am enjoying this one. funny, exasperating.)
the presidency of james buchanan -- elbert smith (christ, what an awful president.)

just finished reading Positively George Street by Matthew Bannister. I liked it; I've wanted to read something about the Flying Nun 'Dunedin sound' scene for a while, and this--the slender memoir of the guitarist from the Sneaky Feelings--wasn't exactly what I had in mind. Sneaky Feelings is probably the one band that I was least interested in, but he had some interesting ground-zero insights in the whole NZ scene and though his pissy putdowns of the more punk/noise elements of the scene certainly grated, dude had an engagingly honest and cheerful voice. The exact opposite of vainglory. I can't imagine another rock autobiography where the writer talks about accidentally pissing on an electric fence, at least without turning it into some wild anecdote of endless, crazed partying (as opposed to showing it as the stoned and stupid mistake that Bannister sheepishly admits that it was).