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

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

(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.)

I saw this (think the list actually said Mongols or other ancient stuff and *not* US Civil War), and I broadly get the joke, but as 'observational comedy' I find it also strangely inaccurate. I know many males over 40 and I don't think I know a single one who is obsessed with one of these things. Maybe the one exception, now I think of it, is ILX poster 'DV' from Dublin who did become an expert on WWI (which I think was not one of the listed topics).

But equally, I think it's good to have such interests and expertise, and not very helpful to mock them. And poster Aimless is correct: knowledge of them could be seen as a valid part of general knowledge.

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 was thinking about this recently.

People from the past (say, Medieval peasants) seem to have thought quite differently from us.

And yet they had pretty much identical brains.

So why aren't we more similar?

A large daft question.

Finished Shape of Things by Greil Marcus
which was somewhat interesting and does feature Pere Ubu and Twin peaks quite heavily but may need to be revisited to be fully encapsulated. Like.
Well has some interesting suggestions for further watching and listening and things. I guess.

differences in thinking between different ages if one takes there to be a constant array of intelligence in the different environments and maybe diet doesn't quite make things like taht constant.
Would think it had a lot to do with what one was influenced by at what times and what one thought could or shouldn't be thought and what prevailing epistemology would be. Also how much constraint things like religion and peer pressure had. So how much thought was kept covert and therefore not documented etc.

There's always chance elements taht have later consequences and influence etc. Waves, fads, representation and noise.
& so on.

I think the questioning as to why the difference is a large part of the process , larger than actually finding a fixed constant quantifiable answer cos I don't think you can really fully nail those things down. & the process of questioning has the effect of turning up new things, innovations etc. Like. Asking how long is a piece of string is probably the wrong focus whereas what you need it for or what you want to know for may be a bit better focus.

Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford (book club read) - Central conceit of this is a bunch of children got killed by a German bomb during WWII. But what if they hadn't? Book then checks in on these children every couple of decades. This makes it enjoyable social history; my wife said it reminded her of the Up series, which is an apt comparison. However: these kids grow up to have very ordinary lives, as interesting as anyone else's, which kinda lets down the sense of loss which I guess the original premise is meant to evoke. They live lives much like millions of others, if they had died others would still have lived similar ones. And yeah OF COURSE any death is tragic, it would be evil to mourn only the extraordinary, etc. But it does raise the question of why go with this premise in the first place? A bunch of unconnected lives wouldn't be enough for a novel without it?

(think the list actually said Mongols or other ancient stuff and *not* US Civil War)

Yes, you’re right. Your memory is better than mine. It’s probably not broadly true. Actually the idea seems a bit quaint these days, more men my age probably are more interested in comic books than any historical period. I find it fascinating to try to imagine myself in one of those times. At some point one has lived long enough to see some changes in society and the material substrate of daily life (this happens more rapidly now than it used to) and so the puzzle of how human personality has adapted to different conditions becomes more interesting. Rome is interesting because it’s the oldest period for which we have a very rich record. The Middle Ages is also fascinating. Carlo Ginzburg has written some books on how ordinary people viewed the world in those days which I want to read, I think one was reviewed in the LRB recently.

It was.

I would like to read LIGHT PERPETUAL. In fact I am rather encouraged by the news that its characters do not turn out very special. But I'm mainly interested because I believe it touches on geographical areas somewhat familiar to me.

I am now reading The English Teacher, R.K. Narayan. He was one of the rare novelists who could tell an interesting story about quite ordinary people in ordinary circumstances doing ordinary things. There's a touch of gentle humor in him that shines in all his books.

In the mood for a little light reading, I returned to Caihm McDonnell, who has put out a few since I last read him. Finished Dead Man's Sins and am mostly through with The Quiet Man. Fairly standard police/detective fare from a writer who, I think, started as a standup comic (?). Fairly formulaic, but he writes good dialogue and he's just fucking funny.

finished Chasers by Stephen Ira, a fine book of queer love poems.

getting back into Dodie Bellamy’s When the Sick Rule the World, which is good tho not as engaging as her more recent book, but that might just be a result of the more recent book being primarily about her partner’s death.

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

― mookieproof

Cheers. I discovered her short fiction in October -- impressed.

I was impressed by her early fiction: first novel, State of Grace(1973) (Florida Gothic, kinda early Patti Smith x Joan Didion), and 70s stories that made it into her first collection, Taking Care (1982). Was put off by fairly recent New Yorker story, but maybe I'll try again (maybe pick up where I left off).

Watch out for some Joyce Carol Oates-level snobbery in interview quotes.

like the pinefox, i've been reading hg wells -- a couple weeks ago i finally read "the island of dr moreau," which i've been hearing about all my life. it is almost hilariously fast-paced: as the book opens, the protagonist is escaping from a sinking ship into a fragile lifeboat, and a few pages later his two companions get in a fistfight and both fall out of the boat. a few pages later he's rescued, only to get kicked overboard for getting in an argument with the captain. then he's rescued again! but wait, it turns out it's the bad guys who rescued him! (why they bothered to rescue him is never really explained.) there are multiple chase scenes, and more than one scene where buildings get set on fire. and on and on and on! but it's masterfully done and, as with all of wells's earliest novels, very gripping. it's also quite grisly and rather upsetting in places: the basic concept (a mad vivisectionist who transforms animals into human-like beings, also for no real reason) is, thankfully, impossible. the last few pages turn quite wistful and melancholy in a way i associate with wells, who seems to me to have had a strong streak of instinctive pessimism despite being a progressive/socialist/futurist/etc.

i followed that up with another wells: "the food of the gods," the one about the food that makes plants and animals grow to giant-size. the first third of this book, which is about giant bees and wasps and cows terrorizing the english countryside, is delightful. the utterly blase reaction of many of the characters to this phenomenon is especially funny. the rest of the book, about the first giant-size humans' struggle to be treated with dignity, i found rather uninvolving and dull. i suspect there was some very specific 1904-era social satire here that flew right over my head.

now i'm on to joseph conrad's "the secret agent." not enjoying it much, honestly: i've realized that i find conrad's style to be a bit of a slog -- i've enjoyed a short story here and there, but i find him tough to take in large doses. kinda eager to be done with this one so i can move onto something else.

Bell hooks Teaching to Transgress.
hooks talking about a new form of pedagogy that is much more level with particular influence from Paulo Freire and a Buddhist monk called Thich Nhat Hanh.
I like bell hooks I find her very easy to read.
Had this on order since December through interlibrary loan and recently found that while there seemed to be a queue of readers there were also copies claiming to be available. I wound up ringing a couple of the libraries involved to see if I could get things moving and this turns up a week later. Which is really great. I thought I was a few behind and I would just get things faster if the people ahead of me got the available copy. But turned out even better.

Unfortunately this doesn't appear to have worked with the other book I got yesterday.
Blood and Land JCH King
Which is a native American history of America. More encyclopaedic than narrative.
It was ordered as
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz All The Real Indians Died Out.
I think it came from the same library and I'm assuming it was misfiled or something. That Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz appears to be vanishing from the system. I tried looking it up yesterday when I got home and couldn't find it. It is listed as such in my orders entry still but not through the search engine. Shame I want to read more of her work enjoyed An Indigenous People's History of the US .

In fact I am rather encouraged by the news that its characters do not turn out very special.

Feel like I should now add the caveat (spoiler): once character does spend some time in the entourage of a Rock star in 70's Laurel Canyon.

now i'm on to joseph conrad's "the secret agent." not enjoying it much, honestly: i've realized that i find conrad's style to be a bit of a slog -- i've enjoyed a short story here and there, but i find him tough to take in large doses. kinda eager to be done with this one so i can move onto something else.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.),

This was the novel that unlocked him for me, so if it doesn't work....

I've still not read much Conrad. Did enjoy some films of his work.
& Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost which gives the background for Heart Of Darkness not sure how completely incidentally. Conrad was a ship's captain dealing with the regime. Have heard he was more right wing than I would have liked, do hope he was disgusted by what he saw beyond it being a factor in a famous novel he wrote.

Good to hear about THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU - I was reading about it just recently and actually keen to read it.

I do like THE SECRET AGENT - a very cinematic / proto-Hitchcockian novel at times (never mind that Hitchcock literally adapted it)- with a great deal going on. Probably my favourite Conrad. I would certainly persevere with that.

Mine too. I'm also fond of Nostromo, which complicates the relations b/w natives and colonizers/imperialists.

Found The Secret Agent a slog too, until the last few chapters.

Conrad does tend to stomp into rooms with heavy boots.

hadn't realised that Conrad was born in what's now Ukraine so deeply topical like. Is anything being made of that right now.
I always though of him as Polish but the borders there had a major habit of changing over the centuries.

Yeah--Stanislaw Lem was born in Lyiv when it was in Poland (it's still only 40 miles from current border).

y’all have convinced me to persevere with the conrad! only about a third of the way through it so there’s hope for me yet. i had forgotten there was a hitchcock film of it —don’t think i ever saw that one.

Shirley Jackson The haunting Of Hill House
picked it up from a charity shop a while back and its been floating around for a while. I read teh first page a few months back and thought it was really something, descriptions of trees that seemed otherworldly. An opacity taht reminds me of Rowland S Howard's lyricism or something. THought yeah really need to read this then and then had a pile of books i was trying to get through.
Anyway, not feeling great earlier so I went an lay down thinking I'd get a lot further into a bell hooks book that I picked up yesterday and then wound up reading the first couple of chapters of this before getting to that. So the female protagonist has arrived at the house at the moment and nobody else has arrived yet. I'm enjoying her prose anyway.
So need to work out how to read this and several other things really rapidly.