Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022

just finishing jack black "you can't win", just starting jose saramago "blindness"

Wow I'm really glad I didn't read any marketing copy before I started Candy House (or Goon Squad, for that matter -- I went in cold a couple of years ago, knowing only that it has been much-praised on this forum). Not sure why every sales pitch for these books makes them sound so shite (I have some theories), but it's definitely one of those "fans make it hard to love the band" situations.

Various - The Tragic History of the Sea. All of the pieces in this book are accounts of Portuguese travellers and their journeys to establish African colonies in the 17th century. I found out about it after reading an interview with a blogger who gave the items in this compilation as examples of the earliest, good Portuguese prose -- as oposed to France having a Rabelais or Italy having a Boccaccio, and while none of the writing is on that level I can see his point. These accounts veer from what they attempt to be, which is something like a functional guide of snakes that future explorers should avoid in their quests, to these tales of losses...whether that's of life or health or nerve, with the constant need to keep moving to survive from one day to the next, and with some embellishments for sure (that's where a thing is on a path to becoming a literature of sorts, from one POV anyway). Its like an almanac of grotesqueries mixed with a religious fervour, where God is repetitiously thanked whenever fortune shines on these explorers, and no faith is ever shaken when a bad thing happens (which is often enough).

I finished FOUNDATION and have started Ian Sansom: THE SUSSEX MURDER (2019).

Will keep an eye out for The Tragic History of the Sea, thanks.

(or Goon Squad, for that matter -- I went in cold a couple of years ago, knowing only that it has been much-praised on this forum) Also much denounced, alas---on ILB, it's the Bizarro World The Mountain Lion.

My current book is A Small Town in Germany, John LeCarre. It was published after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but prior to the George Smiley series. His approach in this is well advanced toward his final voice, but he was still only half-formed as a writer. My reissue edition includes an Introduction by LeCarre from the mid-90s in which he clearly expresses his overall dissatisfaction with the book. It's not as bad as all that, especially after he gets past the somewhat clumsy early exposition and the characters take over from the plot as the force moving the story.

about to tackle the behemoth that is john cowper powys's a glastonbury romance

Good luck! How many pages is that one again?

I like the fact that THE MOUNTAIN LION is ILB's favourite book.

FWIW Smiley is the protagonist of two - very compelling - novels before THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, as well as featuring in that novel itself.

A woman character did appear in FOUNDATION on about p.188 out of 234. She was the wife of a planetary ruler. She was sharp-tongued and critical. She knuckled down when given a trinket. But she later appeared again and was still sharp-tongued.

That was literally the only woman in the book. I believe that this balance changes slightly as the FOUNDATION series goes on. I'll find it, to a degree, if I manage to read more of the series.

1/3 through THE SUSSEX MURDER which is the 4th or 5th in a series of THE COUNTY GUIDES, a series that Ian Sansom seems to have concocted to get a secure publishing and creative platform. In the 1930s a polymathic professor and his beautiful daughter travel England, accompanied by the narrator, researching for guides to the English counties (a bit like Pevsner but less architectural?). Seemingly, in each county they encounter a crime and have to solve it. However, 1/3 through this they still haven't got near the crime (except that the crime is mentioned on the first page). So these are detective novels with the balance only 50% or so detection and the other half comedy and travelogue. There is a great deal of historical pastiche and detail that Sansom will have enjoyed. The heroine lives in the Isokon Building in Hampstead. The Professor knows A.A. Milne. The narrator has a long scene around the top of Brick Lane in the era of its market and pie & mash shops. The interest of particular places is a very big part of the appeal. Overall it's very well done save that it could be handled with a lighter, less repetitive touch.

xposts: in the edition i have it comes to 1100 pages of text. suspect this might take me some time to get through!

Sue Steward Salsa : musical heartbeat of Latin America
which was a recommendation in David Toop's Flutter Echo since he set her on teh way to discovering the music concerned . Haven't really started it beyond reading teh Willie Colon introduction but trying to get into it.l Seems like something I m gooing to want to know a lot more about anyway.

Hip, the history John Leland
a book on the history of what is considered to be what's happening etc cutting edge like amongst the tuned in and so on.
I had seen this while browsing through the new Irish library system over teh last couple of weeks since that was set up. Think I'd even flagged it asa thing I would be interested in reading. Then went into town yesterday and went looking for a book by Gramsci which I didn't find but did see this . So gonna be reading this. well one of a pile of things i have on teh go anyway and now have a bunch of things goingto land on me over tyhe next couple of weeks after pursuing books i requested taht have just sat in the system as 'Available' for ages.
Well this could be good and should turn me on to some things I'm not already familiar with.

finished
Walter Rodney Russian Revolution A third World Perspective
David Toop Flutter Echo
Mande Music Eric Charry or at least on last 10 pages. This is pretty good and I want to read more and hear more.

A Glastonbury Romance is bonkers and all over the place and very great. Humblebrag or whatever but I dragged a copy around in a backpack in the South Pacific. The heat melted the binding glue, so I discarded chunks of pages as I read them.

Think you might just win ILB with that post.

Also, reminds me of some story I think I heard about Anthony Burgess smuggling a chopped up copy of Ulysses on his person across the border so as not to run afoul of the censors.

Which border?

After weeks of reading and prepping for articles and classes, finally got back to some full books read for pleasure, including Quartz Hearts by Clark Coolidge and Heroic Dose by Matt Longabucco. Ilxors into poetry might be interested in the latter— chatty and beautiful without being too dependent on epiphanic moments.

Which border?

In Little Wilson and Big God, he claims a teacher ‘had brought it back from illiberal Nazi Germany in the two-volume Odyssey Press edition’, while in Here Comes Everybody, his critique of the works of Joyce, he recalls his acquisition of the novel: ‘As a schoolboy I sneaked the two-volume Odyssey Press edition into England, cut up into sections and distributed all over my body’.

https://www.anthonyburgess.org/banned-books/anthony-burgess-censorship-ulysses/

a chapter of tweets

― mookieproof, Monday, 11 April 2022 02:30 (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

tbf i read several chapters of these every day

according to the internet the first recorded chinese restaurant in london opened in 1908 in Glasshouse Street near Piccadilly Circus -- it was called the Chinese Restaurant (clever name) (i imagine the chinese community that was active in limehouse in the early 1800s also had its own eating houses, but they weren't the kinds of places the anthony powells of 1810 wd be frequenting)

Believe Burgess told yet a third version in M/F.

Holidays back home means all Portuguese language reading list:

The Living And The Rest, José Eduardo Águalusa - Published in Portuguese, forthcoming in English. Angolan novel about a writer's congress on a tiny island off Mozambique getting cut off from the rest of the world. Always a bit suspicious of writers writing about the life of the writer, unless it's autobio, seems a bit indicative of having lost touch with anything else to write about. But I ended up enjoying this, especially for its insights into the intergenerational dynamics as well as those between writers of different African countries. Particularly liked one writer going off on a rant against local supersitions because "then when I write a realist novel critics end up talking about magical realism!". The island atmosphere also well captured; the mystery of their isolation alas sometimes a bit reminiscent of the TV show Lost. The author's stand in is described as a journalist who gave up his good work in that field to write mediocre novels - that is in fact Águalusa's CV, and the only journalistic work of his I've read, A Stranger In Goa, is indeed a bit better than this.

A Reading Diary, Alberto Manguel - Argentinian author who apparently has written many books on books and reading, though I'd never stumbled upon him before. Read to Borges after he went blind! Anyway, this is twenty years old, a sort of trawl through the man's favourite books with the backdrop of moving to a small village in France and living through the world's events (lots of talk of the Iraq war and Le Pen pére getting good results). It's now been reissued in Portugal - Manguel currently lives in Lisbon - with a new chapter focusing on a Portuguese book. A lot of name dropping and dick waving, as there's bound to be in this sort of exercise, and his trick of dropping in a sentence by some unrelated author that's supposed to effortlessly sum up a situation gets a bit old. But he's indeed well read and some of the descriptions are very well done.

O Susto, Agustina Bessa-Luís - The foremost chronicler of 20th century Portugal's upper classes. Often scathing, but not any sort of marxist critique, nor is it Wodehouse-style comedy about the idle rich. Antonioni might be a point of comparison, but being a writer instead of a director, she takes a lot of advantage of the passing of time; all the books of hers I've read so far take in lives from birth to death, a succession of stages of vanity, melancholia and decay. This one's a thinly disguised fictionalised biography of the poet Teixeira de Pascoaes - his family protested, which is understandable considering how they were portrayed; the introduction insists that Bessa Luís saw Pascoaes as an idol, and indeed within the novel his stand in's work is often referred to as brilliant, but the man himself does come across as weak, passive, devoid of life. I've not read any of Pascoae's poetry, did read his essay on "the art of being Portuguese", which struck me as fascist nonsense.

Bessa Luís's style is really something else, every paragraph contains these seemingly vague pronouncements that, if digested properly, give you insights into not just the characters themselves but the entire society they exist in. Really she should be read a page a day, certainly not in large chunks on planes like I did; not an author served well by the eagerness to finish as many books as possible, as quickly as possible.

Anyway, this novel isn't available in English, and unlike other works of her, not in French either. So I'd usually not write about it on here, what would be the point, but in this particular case I did have to mention that Fernando Pessoa, whom many here know and enjoy, makes an appearance. He is portrayed as a drunk, whose poetry deeply angers the Pascoaes stand-in, as does his indifference towards arguing over these matters. Later the main character learns that he has died, and is struck by a deep sense of loss, at not having been able to tell him that his anger stemmed, in the end, from love. He hears that, on his deathbed, the Pessoa stand-in's main concern was that he keep his eyes closed, so no one could close them for him after he died.

Read to Borges after he went blind!

Manguel is really keen for everyone to know this iirc

not before he went deaf tho iirc

He’s a pampas wizard iirc

But perhaps I shouldn’t comment since these days he’s out of my compass.

recent reads:

Fanny Howe - Night Philosophy
Lewis Warsh - One Foot Out the Door (collected short stories)
Andrei Bely - Petersburg
Stanley Elkin - Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers

just starting Bernadette Mayer's Work and Days

i need to reread the bely at some point, might try one of the other translations.

The heat melted the binding glue, so I discarded chunks of pages as I read them.

awesome. didn't happen to be the picador edition by any chance? purposely avoided getting one of those due to their spine issues. also reading it in the south pacific, but given the season little chance of meltage!

only 3 chapters in, but bonkers it is.

Ah 'preciate the way Brad Watson's novel Miss Jane gets the sectionality in the intersectionality of Deep South small-town-and-country life, the isolation that can be more of family situation and occupation, also self-image and terrain, than of distance as the crow flies---also, of course, there are boundaries of class, race, income, education---but here it's more about going down the road just a little way, or turning a corner anywhere, and finding a distinction, sometimes an unexpected variation---the plot does this, minus what might be called twists, but to sometimes startling effect, before the plausibility bumps in as well, given what's already happened, not too predictably, since the author's enough of a stage magician to slip in distractions between the feats---also, it covers a lot of ground, in time as well as space, discreetly fleet.
Veteran short story writer and novelist has long since absorbed the lessons of Dubliners re inner and outer realities of private and social life, also As I Lay Dying, re shifting POVS, good shell games---he's no genius, but he knows his stuff. The title character, Jane Chisholm, is based on his own great-aunt, born with a "uro-genital irregularity, " as the family doctor, her only confidante, puts it, in frequent correspondence over the decades with a friend and med school classmate at Johns Hopkins, still in a JH-related practice and relevant specialty---reminding me, though he isn't mentioned, that the well-named Dr. John Money became known for this kind of surgery (also sex changes, as they were once called, which could include medical decisions made in infancy---eventually, in the wake of Money in particular, there were repercussions). The novel continues into the 80s, the Money era, but I won't tell you how it ends.
Only reservation is that she is a little simpler than necessary, though not one-note. Born to a family of intelligent, resourceful, isolated characters, she also turns out to have some of their temper. Realizing that her blind date probably has a "debilitating war wound, " as students of Hemingway once dutifully put, and that this is her unlikely matchmaker's idea of a charity unfuck, Miss Jane doesn't like that, and reacts accordingly.

That is, Dr. Money became best-known (and eventually notorious) for this kind of practice while at Johns Hopkins.

And it could have specifically included Dr. Money, being the kind of novel about the Deep South that does take my mind around and isn't in awe of its own unities. Should say that, aside from evidence on the page, I know some of what Watson studied because I went to school with him for a while, when he was in the Creative Writing program and I wasn't, but our link was more via a long-dead, much-missed mutual friend, so I'm biased in his favor, though I've been aware of teh Creative Writing excesses of some others from our neck of the woods, so think I'd be aware of his (he is more into description, sometimes, than I care about, but if you want to know just how Miss Jane's father made his excellent untaxed whiskey, you got it. Nothing that can't be quickly skipped, a graf here and there)(and he's so right about "dusty light," apparently sourceless, whether you're under the trees or not: another reason to call it the Deep South)(and this town is named Mercury, somewhut ironically, though another thing slipped in, or anyway I for one just now got it).
Also I know some of what he studied and assimilated because of his afterword here, mentioning medical sources and WC Williams' stories about or including boondocks doctors, also his own granddaughter, who read an early draft and told him, "Put in a peacock, Pappy." "So I did, and that changed everything."
'

After that I read A Handful of Dust, deadpan snarky-to-more-serious as expected, scooping through the hive social activities and equally auto-to-desperate personal fixations of white privileged youth between wars---published in 1934, with no mention of the Depression or what's brewing in Germany, The Great War mentioned only re those members of the club who are too young to have "been in the war"(pretty much everybody who's anybody), though the title comes from The Waste Land, as quoted upfront. Lots of effective detail, gravels crunching by, though last part of book seems unduly sympathetic to the husband and turns to stunt writing as well, though the old bad guy's fixation fits overall context.

Pretty good for Waugh, although I read Scoop (1938) first, and liked it better: both have the succinct density and drive, but Scoop is more dynamic, with a greater variety of characters, many drawn into The Daily Beast's international shit-stirring: gets racist on the fly, but the Africans are the main victims of blind idiot god power auto-sprees, blaspheming against God and nature and maybe the Old Glory of Real England and Real Men, with time for some cuet corny romance near the battlefield.

He's no Elizabeth Bowen, but yeah, pretty good for himself, in these books.

I am reading The Women Troubadours, Meg Bogin, which seems to be the only book published in English on this subject that anyone can lay their hands on. It does include bilingual texts of all the extant poems, but so far I've only read the introductory essay, which is very good.

Never heard of female troubadours, more info please!

xpost to indicate that Waugh emphasizes Africans as main victims is prob giving him too much credit, but they certainly get hit by the shit stirred.

Bowen! I'd never considered a comparison. I put down A World of Love on Saturday b/c it strains to be Woolfian in effect (I'm a fan of Friends and Relations and The Death of a Heart).

I finished THE SUSSEX MURDER. It's quite good for conveying information about Sussex (and other things) and stimulating curiosity. I think that's a big part of what the author is about here. I also happen to have just seen an actual Sussex guide from 1957 which is rather reminiscent of the one the character in the novel is writing in 1937. The one way this novel really falls down is as a crime novel. The crime / detection element only occupies a third of it at most. Also, the writing can be heavy-handed, repeating certain tics and padding space. It could have been given another round of editing. But on balance it's relatively edifying. I am up for reading other books in the series.

I then started H.G. Wells, THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901). It starts in a bucolic Kentish setting (as THE WAR OF THE WORLDS does in Surrey), then develops through a kind of 'Hard SF' (discussion of fictional / extrapolative science and how a new invention will work) into the two unattached males floating to the moon in a zero-gravity sphere. On the moon they don't need spacesuits - there is *more* oxygen on the moon than on Earth! They see snow and plants that grow extremely fast. Then they see actual lunar creatures. This vision of the moon is fantastical and 'wrong' in real-world predictive terms, but not wholly - for instance they leap unexpectedly far in the low gravity of the lunar landscape, something that real astronauts would later experience. The novel seems significant in the history of SF. It also bears comparison with THE TIME MACHINE, re: the lunar creatures and their underground world, compared to that of the Morlocks.

when i read this book as a small boy i imagined the "cavorite" that enables anti-gravity motion to be a kind of marmite, which you spread on yr spaceship with a butterknife

Lol

the film seem to be on tv every school holiday when i was a kid. and is also on quite frequently on the minor Freeview channels these days.

Finished The Farthest Shore, the third Earthsea book. I found it pretty dull and preachy compared to the first two books, which are stone cold thrill-powered classics — but the ending was strong and cut strangely deep. Looking forward to Tehanu.

Bowen! I'd never considered a comparison. I put down A World of Love on Saturday b/c it strains to be Woolfian in effect (I'm a fan of Friends and Relations and The Death of a Heart). I've never read her novels, don't know how they compare tp his, but a lot of Bowen's Collected Stories go deeper and further in different directions with some of the same themes, times, related characterizations.

Read a few little books and also Karen Brodine's 'Illegal Assembly,' certainly her best book of poem-- we still get Brodine the militant working-class socialist dyke, but there's some stuff going on beyond polemic, and the line breaks feel more present in many of the poems.

In a day or so I finished THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON.

The protagonist Bedford is quite tough and ruthless, and openly has aims of colonising the moon and taking its wealth. He kills some ‘Selenite’ lunar beings (I had to deduce eventually that Selenite was a word for classical roots, not a random one that Welles had made up, hence the familiarity assumed with it), fighting his way out of the inside of the moon like a precursor of Han Solo in the Death Star. He finds the flying antigrav sphere alone and flies it back to Earth, landing very conveniently back on ... the coast of Kent. He is then reasonably content for a boy to board the craft and fly off to oblivion in it, while banking the gold from the moon, and to write up his story for publication – which leads to contact from an astronomer who has intercepted messages from the scientist Cavor. Cavor surprisingly survived on the moon, saw more of the inside, describes the hyper-'specialised' bodies that Selenites have developed (a precursor to Sheckley's 'Specialist'), even meets the Grand Lunar – and his talk here of humans' propensity to war leads the Selenites to kill Cavor before he can lead any more Earthlings to attack them.

This whole last 60pp is conceptually interesting but such an odd form of narrative, like the long digression in The War of the Worlds. I thought Wells was a master popular storyteller - it's odd in that context to find him using such disjointed methods.

I then started Willy Vlautin, DON'T STEP OUT ON ME (2018). This describes a farmhand of white and Native American heritage, in Nevada, who moves to Tucson AZ to become a boxer. He hasn't yet begun his boxing career as I'm 75pp in.

So far features are:

* a Hemingway-esque plain style: maybe less determinedly brief and brisk than Hemingway but still noticeably matter of fact.
* a strong feeling that it could be a film, or could want to be made into a film. It's easy to picture it as a Sundance movie.
* a slightly surprising sense that the boxer, Horace, is a *good person*, as are his de facto adopted family, and that part of the novel's project is to depict good, kind people and see how they fare in a world that is not always so good and kind. I'll see how this works out.

I finished The Women Troubadours. It was necessarily short, since so few poems or names have come down the ages, but it is excellently constructed and the original texts & her translations are very interesting to anyone who takes an interest in such things.

I finished Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Carcopino. It basically does what it says on the tin, so its recommended if you have an interest in the subject matter. (Some wag on Twitter posted that when a bookish man reaches a certain age he must adopt one of the following interests: WWII, Civil War, Ancient Rome, etc. I guess I feel seen.)

Next I read a fantastic autobiography in verse, Martin & Meditations on the South Valley by Jimmy Santiago Baca. I also grew up in the American Southwest and found his evocation of that landscape to be very resonant.

Currently I'm reading another autobiographical work, My Struggle: Vol 4 by Knausgaard.

I read a book called Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods a couple of decades ago. sounded like it might be interesting, think it was but may need to reread it if I still have it.
But yeah interesting to see how a bunch of people of similar intellect to the population of today would spend their time in a much different time. I think I've seen things like taht from a number of different eras too.

Certainly it is possible to fill up all one's time with endless trivia concerning WWII, the US Civil War, or the history of ancient Rome, but taking any interest at all in the world around you and where it came from will include some reading in those areas. I look at the other books you mention and I think you're safe from Roman history becoming a hobby horse you ride to death.

I don't think it (Rome) has reached obsession stage for me yet. It does seem to be wear most of my historical nonfiction reading is concentrated these days though.

read HARROW by joy williams, which is somewhat like alice in post-apocolypticland

not sure it really held together as a novel but she writes wonderful sentences suffused by rage