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

i irl-met (n)DV for the first and only time at a friend's wedding a couple of years back -- he is intermittently active on twitter and possibly FB also

tho not as any kind of vicar

Thanks. I am nearing the end of Copenhagen Trilogy and find it painful to read. I hate reading about victimization and loss of agency.

I was supposed to be reading a different book, but I needed a smaller book to bring with me on a short trip, and I had Patrick Modiano's Paris Nocturne out from the library, so I brought that and finished it. I sensed that it's the kind of book you want to read quickly, because it conjures an ethereal, dreamlike mood, which could dissipate if left too long on the shelf. Not that its surreal in any way - it tells a story that could come from real life, but in such a way that it makes you reflect on how real life is often quite strange. The atmosphere is reminiscent of a noir detective story, but with a seemingly random accident instead of a crime at the center.

Finished George V Higgins Kennedy for the Defense, which got better as it went along, then just stops when the plot runs out.

I ended with the general impression that he's a better sentence writer than Elmore Leonard, but a worse book writer. There's a welcome humanism in Leonard that was lacking here -- if anything Higgins reminded more of Joseph Wambaugh: the claustraphobia, the saltiness, the sleaze.

(Overall v. impressed though. Now starting on Howard's End.)

Wait, Higgins wrote a book called Howard’s End?

sp: Howards End

Pym has now stealthily introduced a vicar into the novel. Oh, well.

Introducing Victor at the end of the Copenhagen Trilogy may have been a cop out and the way one composes a story to make one's life make sense (the way this can be conspicuous and time bound is notable) may be deemed a weakness but maybe the ending of an addiction is only meant to be sorted out in real life. I think B & S fans will be sympathetic to the novel and to B & S for the same reasons and that they are good.

read THE SCAPEGOAT by sara davis

it involves an increasingly unreliable narrator trying (ish?) to solve the mystery of his father's death

fantastic on a sentence level and pacing; does not, like everyone else, stick the landing

does not, like everyone else, stick the landing I like this! What does it mean?!

so many things have brilliant premises and so few reach legitimately satisfying conclusions — eg monty python sketches that just abruptly end whenever they ran out of ideas, or the x files, or lost, or smilla’s sense of snow

and obviously not every story needs to be tidily wrapped up! but i think this one just ended without dealing with the issues it raised

Today I finished THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS. That was tremendous.

Then started John McCourt, CONSUMING JOYCE: 100 YEARS OF ULYSSES IN IRELAND (2022).

Bane of my pedestrian existence on campus, but yes, good idea for a book, maybe by ilxor alumn?

Loved getting to review Jody Rosen’s endlessly curious new cultural history of the bicycle - with cameos by everyone from Keats to Hitler https://t.co/XQCIwwm2lv

— Charles Finch (@CharlesFinch) May 29, 2022

Bike was heavily instrumental in Women's Liberation in the 19th century & vilified for it a lot.

Not our JBR, fwiw

Jody Rosen v few degrees of separation from this place but yeah I don't think he's ever posted.

I think he did post once, blaming ILM for leading him to buy a Pitman LP!

His book about the history of the song "White Christmas" -- which is also a sort of a potted biography of Bing Crosby, and a history of Jewish songwriters -- is one of the most enjoyable music history books I've read (and aggressively avoids Gladwell-iness).

Ha! Yes, I seem to recall he posted here at least one time.
(xp)

He's also one of the few good angry tweeters

Unrelatedly I can't wait till the UK version comes out as my partner is expert on women's cycling (esp in the 19th century) and am curious to see if she's been referenced

A few novellas and a couple of vols of poetry to round spring off:

Peter Stamm - The Sweet Indifference of the World
Wole Soyinka - A Shutter in the Crypt
Cesare Pavese - The Beautiful Summer
Xavier de Maistre - Voyage Around my Room
Christopher Logue (Homer) - War Music

Vesaas, The Ice Palace
Lafferty, Okla Hannali
Lurie, The History of Bones

John Lurie's memoirs are sourly amusing. Taking them at face value (although at one point he says that he has "run out of madeleines"), he has near-total recall of every humiliating, tawdry, or disastrous event in his life, whether it's the haze of cocaine and heroin he lived through, holding back vomit from hepatitis during a solo concert, or betrayal by most people he worked with. Even the numberless women he took to bed, or vice versa, don't enliven the book much. (A 20-year-old Uma Thurman in his bedroom is mentioned once in passing while talking about someone more important to him.) His few triumphs are musical, and thus transitory. Strangely, the greatest catastrophe in his life, the loss of music later on to Lyme disease, is barely mentioned.

Downtown NYC from the mid-70s to the early 80s will live in legend the way Paris in the 1920s does. Lurie appears to have known everyone, such as Basquiat, who lived in his apartment and was his best friend. Also Boris Policeband, Rene Ricard, Eric Mitchell, Julian Schnabel, Andy Warhol, Ornette Coleman, Jack Smith, David Byrne, and Patti Astor. Jim Jarmusch, in the telling, became a famous auteur thanks to Lurie's ideas. Later, in the wider world, there were Willem Dafoe, Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Stan Brakhage, Rei Kawakubo, and Flea. (There is no index, so that is from memory.)

Lurie is not a writer and tells the story as though in casual, irritable conversation, where one anecdote follows another for 435 pages until the book simply stops. There is a constant undercurrent of anger as Lurie believes that he is being written out of history. If so, how much of this is on account of his permanently adolescent personality and how much the Woody Allen effect in reverse (no longer being able to show up) is unclear. Lurie's flaws aren't important in the long run. One hopes that he will get his rightful due.

Almost bought that one on sale but decided to give it a pass for some reason.

xxxpost I know that JR, *Professor* JR, is not JBR, but yeah was thinking he posted on ilm at least once, to lecture another professional writer about something or other, though I only saw gen. reference to it, by bystander

Wonder if Lurie's tour incl. this phase:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/16/sleeping-with-weapons

And JR started, then contributed good comments to, a good thread:
P&J&...Latin Music???

Lurie mentions that article in passing as just another betrayal.

A few novellas and a couple of vols of poetry to round spring off:

Peter Stamm - The Sweet Indifference of the World

Diverting is it, really. Just a nice couple of hours in the afternoon. The plot (if you like) wasn't as strong as Seven Years, which is a favourite.

Taking them at face value (although at one point he says that he has "run out of madeleines"), he has near-total recall of every humiliating, tawdry, or disastrous event in his life,

It me.

On a different note, since there's no Elizabeth Bowen thread: Backlisted alerted me to the existence of this lecture and holy shit her voice

https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/truth-and-fiction--elizabeth-bowen/z77rpg8

i spent an enjoyable couple of hours drinking coffee with jody (not beth) rosen (and keith harris* formerly of city pages) at EMP in 2014

*did keith ever post here? i just came across an ilx post from owen hatherley in 2002 when he must have been like 12 (he was dissing todd rundgren)

I followed Keith Harris on twitter purely based on seeing so many ILXors followed him and assuming it's someone from here whose government name I was unaware of

The Clapback Elijah Wald
possibly overly jokey book on combatting racial stereotypes. Found some of the snarky footnotes a little iffy.
Written by a black British Google executive. Otherwise has some interesting bits in it. Maybe good for beginners but I really don't know.
Think I got something out of reading it . Read it now anyway.

sorry that's Elijah Lawal not Wald

Finished Lisa Robertson’s Boat, an incredible experience, made even more incredible by the fact that other than the 77 page poem that begins the book, much of the content has been previously published in slightly different form in older volumes. It is, as one might have it, a way of thinking about revision, accrual, and affect… great book, she’s one of the treasures of poetry.

About halfway through Iman Mohammed’s Behind the Tree Backs, translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida. Strange prose poems that seem to be remembrances and flashbacks of war and conflict, but written so that the pain and suffering is approached almost obliquely— perhaps making a comment on war’s insidious qualities, the way it sneaks into the quotidian while seeming far-off simultaneously.

this month i finished the last third of Grossman's Stalingrad and read Beevor's Stalingrad

grossman's was fiction although he was a journalist that had first hand knowledge, beevor's was military history and was almost more focussed on the 'kessel' where the german 6th army (et al) got surrounded. none of this was pleasant, starvation, cold, disease.

(strange parallels with current times, lots of fighting around factories)

Sorry Tim yes I agree that the Stamm is just diverting. Sorry was on the move when I wrote my last post.

Alice Oseman, Heartstopper (vol 2 - 3)
Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Fantasies of Neglect
Sara Paretsky, Overboard

Now in on Lisa Robertson’s Anemones: A Simone Weil Project, a lovely book on Weil, troubadour culture, and resistance to the language of genocide.

kessel might have the most interesting Wikipedia entry ever:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessel

(Wikipedia is doing great things for Linked Data and I hope some of this was so enabled.)

I have started Three Californias by Kim Stanley Robinson and hope to visit the Torrey Pines for vestiges.

they still call them kettles when demonstrators are surrounded by police.

those two books also full of the words 'encirclements', like every other page, and 'salient' and 'hedgehog' amusingly.

oh, the beevor was full of maps (and photos) but the ebook conversion software defaulted to a smaller screen so they were unreadable.

been reading utter garbage over the last... period of time. a mixture of pure genre pabulum, shitty tertiary 'business' and 'technology' writing and... nothing. pure negative space in my head. Re-read the Eye of Allah by Kipling the other evening and it was like I'd taken acid so full of skill in language, image and art it was.

a lot of poirot for instance. just bingeing like I'm gorging on sweeties.

in the course of this, I did read a late poirot novel – Hallowe'en Party – not very well known afaict, which turned out to be unusually interesting. these late ones have a few points of interest anyway.

The Partner

Ariadne Oliver is the most refined expression of the Hastings/John Watson type. They are most obviously kept around by the author as chroniclers for the main detective, into 'normal reader' language - they also provide someone to whom the detectives can usefully explain themselves (or not - the management of how opaque or runic the detective is being is also a management of their insight and a source of enjoyment for the reader, who is led to second guess the hints). Hastings is both in terms of manners and insight presented as not very bright to say the least, some comic relief. Watson is obviously far more intelligent, though not treated as such by Holmes. So their use to the author is obvious, but why are they kept around by the detectives? Sometimes they don't seem far above an amusing pet, or glass through which to reflect their own intellectual excellence. Christie makes a big deal of how conceited Poirot is. Yet these characters are also a mixture of foil, divining rod, and phatic seers - occasionally they make unwitting utterances that cause their superior partners to claim they have been an imbecile, or a blind fool.

Ariadne is not exactly a chronicler, although she is a renowned author of crime and detection novels, the hero of which is an elderly Finn, who she can't stand (but who you might want to playfully/irritatingly aver is an early avatar of Scandi Noir...). The relation of her perception of character and how that is converted into fiction is one of the heuristics Poirot uses to analyse her thought processes, in which he feels she often has much insight. It is insight that takes unseen frictions and pre-crime behaviour that isn't obviously out of the norm, and causes Ariadne to be inarticulately disturbed, aware that she is disturbed by *something*, but which she can't quite figure out other than through subliminal or sublimated routes. Poirot considers her a friend, and will also immediately answer her call, even though he is somewhat irritated by her lack of tidiness - mental, vocal and actual. His meticulous unravelling of the ball of wool of her incoherence, is part of a process where he takes those subliminal intuitions and converts them into objects that can be usefully placed on the chessboard of his fastidious mental order to generate criminal insight.

It's quite an intriguing relationship, and as I say, the most sophisticated version of the type.

Modern Times

These late Poirots take place well after their classicl pre-war, wartime and post-war period. Poirot himself is aware of his age, the world around him has changed significantly, and to his chagrin, reluctantly accepted, many people have forgotten him. The free-floating nature of identity and actual people, which was the source of a lot of the early mystery in Agatha Christie, where people went away or were otherwise disrupted by war, and returned only as bundles of government identity and stories of their past, possibly true, possibly not, is too far in the past to be a thing. (The equivalent in Sherlock Holmes, often relied on to a painful degree as the solution, is either people who have migrated to the US, or colonial returnees and relations).

Whereas the only main post-war issue was the endlessly complained about difficulty of finding decent servants, across Agatha Christie 'new housing' starts to feature, heavy taxation, the nature of the new young generations, changes in the meaning of morality. Although the tone of the characters when speaking about these changes is heavily negative, it's quite interesting to see how Christie manages it with regard to her main characters, and interesting also to try and triangulate her own authorial stance.

After all the entire world she created for her characters - the world of the country house, and luxury train or boat, is being demolished, to be exchanged one day for that hard bitten mixture of Philip Marlow and police procedurals we have today (although not as bad as many detectives today, Marlowe is largely characterised by bumbling from violent mistake to violent mistake until he accidentally solves the murder - something very visible in much of the Scandi Noir mode, especially in its UK versions like the reprehensibly bad Broadchurch). 'Ma fois!' Poirot might well cry, seeing the lack of insight and intellect in his epigones.

In one of the novels Miss Marple, now very elderly, ventures into a local housing estate. I can't remember exactly what she says, but it's something along the lines of 'well, of course, one never likes *change*, but if it had to happen, and she rather supposed it did, then the clean, modern houses, with new families working in other towns, seemed rather better than a lot of alternatives she could think of'. Poirot is more silent - Hastings characterised him as 'an oyster' something in which Poirot takes some pride and often relays to frustrated companions.

Hallowe'en Party, is particularly interesting. The hallowe'en party itself is seen as a mixture between a foreign novelty - in the first chapter Ariadne Oliver goes on a minor, unlistened to disquisition on pumpkins in the US - and the traditional: a key moment in the party is where the children play an old game of Snapdragon, where raisins are placed on a plate in a darkened room, poured over with brandy, set alight and the children have to pluck out the raisins without getting burned.

A child murder is committed. And pretty much every single person in the village/town – 'It's one of those places where there are a few nice houses, but where a certain amount of new building has been done. Residential' – has the same answer when asked why they think the crime has been committed. It's a sex crime, done by a random lunatic, because all the asylums are full up and these people are out in the community these days, crime is rampant, especially sex cases, and the youth are morally detached from their forebears, making them particularly susceptible to crime. In other words it can be explained generally, and anonymously, by 'psychology' as a social problem. The explanations are so consistent around the town that it looks like a defence mechanism - it must be the new-fangled world outside, and can't come from within our village with its traditional values. Poirot is old-fashioned and is continuously sceptical of these explanations, feeling that murder is always a matter of psychology yes, but of the individual psychology. He feels that, even where a person is mentally deluded or deranged, crimes are still committed because a person *wants* something. it has a motive, even though the motive may be deranged.

The interplay between Poirot's view and the 'modern' view is interesting. The reader of course knows what the village inhabitants can't, which is that, this being an Agatha Christie 'classical' crime and detection novel, means the suspect must be among the known characters, and not a stranger at all. Poirot does not have this benefit, other than having been consistently involved in such cases since he first came over from Belgium and therefore, perhaps, 'trained' to it.

It is the resolution, the centre of the problem, that is most interesting. There is an almost unheimlich, very strange, section in the novel, where Poirot sits in a garden of extreme beauty, he is thrown into a reverie of recollection, yet feels there is something sinister about it. It is a fascinating internal monologue on beauty, the unseen and the sinister. It reminded me most of some of Walter de la Mare's writing. Someone who plays the local witch in pageants and the like is an important source of guidance.

In fact that core of the problem is a sort of vicious Hellenism, or pursuit of Eden, and a tyrant of moral force, each energy finding it no longer has a place in modern british society. It is in fact a problem at the heart of the English village parsonical pastoral, always one of Christie's key landscapes, where the very thing that characterises it, and the intention to preserve it, is the root of evil, not society in a general sense.

It's a fascinating mood of Christie's, and I half wonder whether it was all entirely meant.

Poirot himself says, by way of explaining his view to the second sharpest person in the novel, a headmistress, that he does not *approve* of murder. And he weights this apparently light word with the utmost gravity that causes the headmistress to sit up and recognise the deep moral core at work in the detective. This has come out of a discussion that the modern world does perhaps condone or excuse murder (perhaps because of that social emphasis).

Throughout, Christie *somewhat* checks the anti-modern sentiments at play - there is this from the witch-type character, on fashion:

All the girls can think of is to push their skirts higher and higher, and that’s not much good to them because they’ve got to put on more underneath. I mean what with the things they call body stockings and tights, which used to be for chorus girls in my day and none other—they spend all their money on that. But the boys—my word, they look like kingfishers and peacocks or birds of paradise. Well, I like to see a bit of colour and I always think it must have been fun in those old historical days as you see on the pictures. You know, everybody with lace and curls and cavalier hats and all the rest of it.

and this, earlier:

‘I can’t help thinking,’ said Ariadne Oliver, ‘that girls are really very silly nowadays.’
‘Don’t you think they always were?’ asked Rowena Drake.
Mrs Oliver considered.
‘I suppose you’re right,’ she admitted.

Generally the impression is that Christie distrusts reactionary views, though is perhaps more deeply conservative. The question I have is does Christie *approve* of murder herself? I assume not, but perhaps her view is more like that of the heroine in The Mystery of the Blue Train who Poirot sees is delighted to be in a real life roman policier.

also, for reasons, finally catching up on blockchain and crypto reading, which frankly I've always found dull as f', but which is at the base of something that's nagging away at me, which I'm trying to scratch.

so, going through David Gerard's extremely negative Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts.

Sarah Schulman - Rat Bohemia
Sarah Schulman - Empathy
Fanny Howe - London-rose
Garielle Lutz - Divorcer
Yoko Tawada - Memoirs of a Polar Bear

read 'rat bohemia' when it came out; probably my first explicitly lesbian novel (not sure that 'written on the body' exactly counts)

Love that book