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

ah, cool, thanks, zak and tabes. I was going to ask for a poetry rec.

Alfred, unfortunately Irby’s best stuff is really only available in the enormous and pricey collected, but if you look around Abe or Bookfinder, his smaller press books and chaps are widely available and often pretty cheap (and also beautiful objects).

I adored Catalpa, but I'm probably not articulate enough to describe it. I read it as unapologetically musical and conversational. Observational and descriptive, where observational includes landscape, reading, history, introspection. 1970s California + Midwest, "age of explorers" colonial violence & hubris, family history, Coleman Hawkins... So it's referential, but doesn't read as a string of cherry-picked allusions (thinking about our internet era writing hatched in the shadow of wikipedia or whatever).

I sometimes find the big collections intimidating, and the original context feels meaningful -- I read it as an interlibrary loan, though, so I didn't have dig around.

Glad you liked it— it is one of my favorites of his. It’s a really quite arresting example of early eco-poetry that seamlessly moves from the literal soil to the glacial movements that caused that soil to be there to the colonial machinations that sullied that soil and so on. Few come close to it, imho.

Here’s an interesting squib about it from poet Andrew Schelling: https://jacket2.org/article/kenneth-irby-and-catalpa

Gwendoline Riley - Sick Notes
Sarah Bakewell - How to Live: A Life of Montaigne

I'm making good stries with Tess of the d'Urbervilles which is fine sentimental heroin VS rough social conditions / conventions. Summer surprised us with a shower of rain.

This year I also returned to Soseki (Kokoro), Vargas Llosa (The Green House), Sebald (Austerlitz). Also discovered with pleasure Laxness (Iceland's Bell), Schwob (Imaginary Lives), Machado de Assis (Dom Casmurro). On the other hand, had little patience for Austen (Emma) and Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle), though I loved other of their books.

My face for the world to see - Alfred Hayes

Finished The Custom of the Country. As with The Age of Innocence I wasn't sure I was going to like this book about awful people but by the middle it had won me round; unlike with The Age of Innocence I cooled towards the end. Ralph is a great tragic hero, the part where she breaks up with him is outstanding, and that their son is at the crux of things adds an extra twist of the knife. But though Undine develops far beyond her initial similarity to Middlemarch's Rosamond, she remained too dislikeable and too central for me to really warm to the book as a whole, impressive though it is.

George V Higgins "Kennedy for the Defense". I've occasionally read that Leonard stole Higgins's shtick but it seems like they were contemporaries? This is fun but not nearly as good as Leonard's concurrent hot streak (e.g. The Switch, Stick, etc) and some of the dialogue goes on way too long.

Finished The Custom of the Country. As with The Age of Innocence I wasn't sure I was going to like this book about awful people but by the middle it had won me round; unlike with The Age of Innocence I cooled towards the end. Ralph is a great tragic hero, the part where she breaks up with him is outstanding, and that their son is at the crux of things adds an extra twist of the knife. But though Undine develops far beyond her initial similarity to Middlemarch's Rosamond, she remained too dislikeable and too central for me to really warm to the book as a whole, impressive though it is.

Wharton is the bomb.

That too.

Wharton occupies a slightly sweeter spot than Henry James in my esteem.

My present book is The Origin of Satan, Elaine Pagels. Nice to read exegesis on the Bible that frames things in terms that include history, culture and politics in addition to theology. It all makes much better sense when viewed in a more complete historical framework.

Currently revolving between the following and reading a few stories/chapters a day:

David G. Hartwell (ed.) – Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder
Patricia A. McKillip – Harrowing the Dragon
M. R. James - Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories
Edgar Allan Poe - Complete Stories and Poems
Stanley Cavell – The World Viewed

Finished Pohl / Kornlbluth, THE SPACE MERCHANTS. SF, satire (with lots of terrific inversions very casually relayed: the ad-man who can't bear to read a book unless it has adverts in it; the President who has no power in DC), and also a kind of hard-boiled thriller; industrial espionage. The text of my pulpy copy is often botched, but the writing is more punchy than Asimov, more controlled than Dick. Feels like a key book. Such a thriller that I'm surprised if it's never been adapted to the screen.

I'd like to read Pohl's memoir next: THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS.

That book is good, thought they were thinking of reissuing it, they meaning his family. He used to have a blog too, The Way The Future Blogs, that had lots of good stuff on it, but it's gone off the internet now because of..something. Maybe for the new book.

I met both him and Asimov. Pohl seemed really nice, a little reserved, almost seemed depressed compared to all the other loudmouths in the airport hotel at the sf convention. Asimov I had met a few years earlier when I won some kind of prize for some BS I wrote. prompting my English teacher or the Board of Ed or some other organization to send me to the related event. I asked him for an autograph and handed him my Junior High School graduation autograph book and he signed it but in no other way acknowledged me or looked it me. I guess I wasn't in the class of fan who could give him a Hugo Award or anything else he might want from a fan.

My friend met Ray Bradbury once which is probably a much better story, but not my story, so not sure whether to type it in.

You met Asimov, and Pohl? That's super!

I met Brian Aldiss! - which is good but still maybe not quite the same.

aldiss >>> asimov

^this

Do you have an aldiss anecdote for us, the pinefox?

Since you ask ... just about. It was an SF convention. I hung about with a woman I knew who was studying SF. I talked to Aldiss with her, soaking up his fame, his aura, the fact that I was in his presence for a few minutes ... (did I get him to sign something? I don't think I did) and he more than once said to me, in front of her, something like "You want to keep hold of her" and "Take care of her". I suppose he thought we were a couple - the kind of impression that is generically understandable, but she was probably much too glamorous for me. I was mildly embarrassed on her behalf, perhaps mildly flattered on mine.

(I don't think the SF lady was bothered one way or another by this brief faux pas, she already had a bf who was much more impressive than me.)

I wish I had taken a copy of NON-STOP or TRILLION YEAR SPREE along!

I think Aldiss said a few other things actually, I should see if I made any notes.

Now I think of it, I seem to remember people queueing up to have books signed by Aldiss and rather than handing him eg: one new book to be signed (as is quite normal), they'd have brought a box of 12 old books by him and required him to sign them all.

Feel like I've seen that at various signings. A question of etiquette.

James Redd, it's a pity you couldn't turn up to Asimov with the complete works of Isaac Asimov and ask him to sign them all. Two hours in: "A commentary on the Old Testament, volume 3 ... best wishes, Isaac Asimov".

Ha, exactly! Maybe I could have saved time by just bringing Opus 100, 200, 300,... etc. and a few Lucky Starr (as Paul French) books.

following my completion of a glastonbury romance (two thumbs up) have just done a reread of wyndham lewis's the childermass in anticipation of finally getting around to the later two books of the human age sequence. very much a book of two parts: the opening section provides an impressive visual description of a post-world war purgatorial wasteland where time and space are not as they were on earth... followed by the near interminable second part featuring the heavenly (or hellish) presiding judge-punch-bailiff figure spouting discoursing at length with various antagonistic interlocutors on lewis's then current preoccupations (bits of which i vaguely recall from the long ago read the art of being ruled, the revolutionary simpleton essay & time and western man) which makes up the bulk of the work.

Now I think of it, I seem to remember people queueing up to have books signed by Aldiss and rather than handing him eg: one new book to be signed (as is quite normal), they'd have brought a box of 12 old books by him and required him to sign them all.

Feel like I've seen that at various signings. A question of etiquette.

James Redd, it's a pity you couldn't turn up to Asimov with the complete works of Isaac Asimov and ask him to sign them all. Two hours in: "A commentary on the Old Testament, volume 3 ... best wishes, Isaac Asimov".

the journalist by harry mathews

i found out about mathews (the american guy in oulipo) after reading georges perec last year. it's pretty hard to find his novels, but i finally came across a dalkey archives edition of this one at city lights in san francisco. only a couple dozen pages in but it's very funny so far

that’s a good one!

I was really into Harry Mathews for a while, think Cigarettes was my favorite.

(what seems universal in reading Tove Ditlevsen is the position of women but the importance of this with respect to other matters may be contextually determined. i could understand if most people on sinister ended up being her fans and writing songs for her poems. what makes sympathy?)

(not to mean that they are powerless but that their power if any is negotiated and contingent)

in that situation are you supposed to hold their elbow or their back at a certain angle to indicate deliberately awkwardness or detachment unless the inclination is to do otherwise?

On to Frederik Pohl, THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS (1978) - a memoir of SF life, already to James Redd (and the Blecchs). Terrifically readable so far. Strong sense of the 1930s Depression, and of Brooklyn with its civic pride as a former rival to NYC; Fulton Street, Flatbush Avenue, etc.

This plus the theme of friendship and collecting ('my best friend had a better collection of SF magazines than I did; we read them all afternoon' - that kind of thing), not to mention the collective discovery of SF itself by clubs like the Brooklyn SF League ... all makes it uncannily a precursor of Lethem, 40 years later. Though Lethem knows the history well, I'm not sure I've seen him acknowledge how much his 1970s script was a retread of this one. Even the sense of political crisis is analogous, from 1930s Depression / pre-WWII to 1970s Watergate / blackout era.

We still have Judith Merril and the Futurians to come - and presumably close encounters with Asimov and others. Marvellous.

Some intense stuff coming up involving Merril and Walter M. Miller Jr. iirc.

I know he wrote about it on the blog, can’t remember how much detail got into the book.

Also thinking the next book if you continue on this Pohl jag should probably be Gateway if you haven’t read it yet.

The Water Lily Pond by Michael Siegel. A Kindle Unlimited book recommended to me by Amazon. An interesting conceit--in the near future, aging has been pretty much stopped by advancements in medical technology. The "world's greatest living painter" decides, at 128, to stop taking "the Daily" and die of old age. As far as I can tell, it's self-published, and is surprisingly well-executed, although it suffers from a lack of proof-reading.

Is GATEWAY the key Pohl novel? Looks like it's very late-career.

Eminent Victorians, its insistently insouciance the source for New Yorker journalism since mid 20th century.

There is another novel written with Kornbluth: GLADIATOR-AT-LAW.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator-At-Law

Is GATEWAY the key Pohl novel? Looks like it's very late-career.

Although Shakey preferred other stuff like Jem.

There are two more novels written with Kornbluth - Wolfbane and Search the Sky (Pohl tinkered with the latter in the 1960s) - and quite a few short stories, again some of them completed posthumously by Pohl.

Man Plus (1976) was considered Pohl's 'late' career comeback novel, although I agree that Gateway is more fun. After that, there's a good twenty more years of novels and short stories - incredibly productive writer! Just like Brian Aldiss.

I've just finished reading Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction
by Alec Nevala-Lee which I think Pinefox would find a useful adjunct to his current SF studies. As others have said, despite his unforgivable dirty old manisms, Asimov still comes out of the book as the most sane and reasonable of the main players - but that may only be because the others were SO monstrous. Pohl features (I suspect the quotes are taken mainly from his autobio) as a Campbell-sceptic mainly, but also as Asimov's agent and very late collaborator.

I didn't know that the basic idea for Caves of Steel came from Horace Gold.

That's all promising material, WF, thanks for posting.

This ASTOUNDING book sounds very much up my space-lane. I don't know about dirty old man - my own sense of Asimov as writer, if not as person, is more of a coy asexuality, simply an embarrassment about such things - but I do imagine that Asimov would be the sanest and most decent of the main names listed (though not necessarily better than Pohl, Sheckley, Kornbluth, or others). I mean for sanity and decency, Hubbard wouldn't be your #1 choice ?!

I very much want to read THE CAVES OF STEEL, since reading Adam Roberts' recommendation of it. I suspect that it's like a longer version of one of the I, ROBOT stories. I'm interested in Horace Gold. Am sure Pohl's memoir talks about him, wonder if there are others?

He always comes up. Daniel Keyes’s memoir too. He even gets a mention in the collected letters of John Cage, since Cage was an attendee at his legendary Stuyvesant Town poker game. Maybe Garland Jeffreys lives in that apartment now.

my memory of caves of steel is that it isn't. (it's been 9 years mind).

all the short robot stories are 'gven the 3 laws, what would happen if...?'. caves of steel is more detective story with a robot in it.

the wikipedia page has a link to a scan of the original Galaxy Magazine version on archive.org

Another regular, Robert Sheckley, mentions him briefly here: http://aaasheckley.com/bio/page8.html

The main robot in The Caves of Steel is so sophisticated that there is a lot more going on in his positronic brain than just the Three Laws.

Not surprising about Horace Gold coming up with the idea given the way he lived in that apartment. All kinds of stories about people coming there for meetings and Horace talking through the intercom in the front room but never actually coming out in person.

I’m sure he gets mentioned in one of the many Asimov memoirs but couldn’t tell you which: In Memory Yet Green, In Joy Still Felt, I, Asimov, Opus 40 and a Mule or whatever.

Asimov well-known for being extremely handsy and having affairs with fans. There was relatively recent discussion of this but I can’t find it right now.