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

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

read john gardner’s “grendel” yesterday. fun read, certainly not much like i expected it to be. i don’t know how high gardner’s reputation is these days but I’d certainly recommend this one. grendel’s mother plays a surprisingly small part.

Gardner's critical study On Moral Fiction seemed to gain some traction with comics guys for a while in the 70s, mainly because it mentioned Howard the Duck in a not wholly disparaging way (tho I think Gardner was more often p hostile to pop cult). Grendel was part of Gollancz' s Fantasy Masterworks series at one point.

JUst got hold of Lenny Kaye's Lightning Striking where he looks at the scenes that created moments in rock history. I may be trying to read too many books at the same time as per usual but this sounded really necessary reading after I heard him on a podcast recently.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3pKGvGalCBYc5mBMKvbUqw?si=894d388c0d0548c9
The Ace Records podcast which has been good for a few other guests too, I listened to their episode on the Seeds where they interviewed Alec Palao alongside Darryl Hooper and the drummer who joined the band in 1968 who were all playing together in a reunion band.
Npt got very far in the book so far sine I just got it from the library yesterday. He looks at 10 scenes including Memphis 1954, San Francisco 1967, Detroit 69, NYC 75(which he emerged from as a member of Patti Smith's group) & London in 77.
Looks good so far.

Also need to gt through Monolithic Undertow by harry Sword which is about drone music.
Also looks good . & I know I have a deadline for finishing since it has a request on it after me.
I keep finding books appearing in the Irish library system that I really want to read but are disappearing before I get to them. Like lost book, destroyed or whatever or can't be lent out or something. Which is a pain. But have this now so do need to get into it.

JUst finishing David Treuer's heartbeat Of Wounded knee
In which a half native writer tries to look at what the living population of Indians who are so frequently depicted as a thing of the past are doing. It's part history part sociology or something along those lines. I'm just getting what the title means which I should have got earlier. as in heartbeat shows a body is alive.
Interesting book that I had recommended in a few places a while back and has probably taken me longer to read than it should . Which is a problem with reading several things at the same time. I would recommend it myself anyway.

also coming to the end of the book Soldaten by Sonke Neitzel and Harald Wenzler
in which they try to show the mindset 9of the WWII german army from transcriptions of tapes made of them as POWs it can be a hard read if you're squeamish. I'd be interested in reading more similar books from other armies and not sure what is out there. Like there must be a reason people think they are fighting for and checking taht against reality can be interesting.

but which is at the base of something that's nagging away at me, which I'm trying to scratch

Classic Fizzles.

Enjoying the surprising way that Howards End went from zero to DRAMA in two chapters

I thought the drama around a lost umbrella and the elephants in Beethoven were in one of the early chapters of that novel, but I may be misremembering.

Finally finished reading the Brothers Karamazov (on my phone). I'm here to tell you it's great! Found some characters and chapters more engaging than others but as a whole was much more fun to read than I expected. Lots of other thoughts but I'm sure I don't have anything particularly new or illuminating to say about it.

Which translation? Been trying to figure out the best one. Not a Pevear fan though.

I read the Constance Garnett one, which apparently is maligned for its inaccuracy but I really enjoyed the way it read. A friend is reading a different one (can't remember who but its supposedly the most literal translation) and it seemed way more stiff. Glad I didn't read that one, although I did ask him about certain lines.

I read Bros and some other D translated by David Magarshack: no idea how accurate, but enjoyed it.

I still haven' worked my way through a Constance Garnett translation but was beginning to think that her style was what effect Dostoevsky had been working on. I have heard he was heavily influenced by the English novel. So still wondering. I found her style offputting when i was trying to read him a few decades ago.
NOw still got all my Dostoevsky on the to read list and loads of other stuff I'm likely to read ahead of it. Do have a number of his books though. In several different translators versions. Had a more modern version of Crime & Punishmnet that I meant to get to over the original lockdown.

I think I might be a heathen because I'm reading Roberto Bolano's By Night in Chile and getting nothing from it. Where I feel like I should be reading patterns and motifs in the prose, getting the swirl and frenzy of a dying man's feverish recollections of the past and the dread of the build-up to Pinochet, instead I'm just blank, verging on annoyed. If I had my time again I'd take it one hit, but as of now, halfway, I think I'm going to quit.

I've got this weird dissonance because I feel like I know Bolaño because of Javier Cercas's Soldiers of Salamis and this feels like a betrayal.

I have confirmed that the elephants (as well as goblins) are in Beethoven and an umbrella has been lost, both rendered dramatically. The fear of poverty in the middle classes seems modern. I think the drama is there but elaborately cloaked as if he is parodying Henry James (as fussy, which might not be generous).

Conversations with Contemporary Continental Thinkers edited by Richard Kearney.

mainly for the enjoyable derrida conversation, which i found surprisingly conservative in that he admits several constraints in deconstructionism, and the inescapable or very very difficult to escape nature of working in the western logocentric world.

https://i.imgur.com/LvlEsdU.jpg

Just started Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. Too early to get a sense of it, but everyone in my book club who has got farther into it is loving it.

Had a lot of fun reading that Towles book. Reminded me a lot of Huckleberry Finn and As I Lay Dying. Will be curious what your opinion is at the end. Would love to read a sequel following several of the characters. The ending was a bit of a swerve, after multiple perils played out harmlessly. Wish Woolly had telegraphed his intentions, and leaving Duchess in the leaky boat wasn't well-thought out by Emmett.

If you like it, would recommend "A Gentleman in Moscow", also.

lol mark. always a classic pic.

tbf he could probably get in the england batting line up these days if he wanted.

more things i bin reading recently - the lewis trilogy by peter may. i don’t know. the main feeling of reading these was that it felt like reading a tv series.

grim detection burrowing back into the past for the answers to a crime committed now. interleaving alternating narratives - one the current investigation, one revealing layer by layer the history, until they meet at the climax of the novel. technically probably quite well done but it felt formulaic.

otoh, some of the past narrative segments, if they were taken as interlinked short stories, could in that light be seen as quite good, well-researched and fairly well-written vignettes of Lewis life.

uses the word desuetude far too often. twice in the first novel. more in the others.

uses the word desuetude far too often

always slightly embarrassed when i notice this sort of thing but also i like it

I finished No Fond Return of Love. It embodied Pym's mildly amused perspective on ordinary human behavior. Not her best (which is Less Than Angels), but still a pleasant meander through middle class English foibles.

Have now read about 1/2 of that Harry Sword Monolithic Undertow where he explores teh drone through history. or at least goes back to prehistory to look at its presence then through the artefacts surviving from teh time and then jumps forward to the jazz scene in the late 50s/60s and then goes into Minimalism. I think the book could have been better proof read, Cecil Parker the famous pianist is mentioned.
But I'm finding this an easy read and a compelling one. Quite enjoying it. Don't think I'm disagreeing with it overly, do think he skips a few bits and pieces. Did think he might have mentioned Peter Walker the guitarist that Timothy Leary used as an accompanist for acid sessions since he does talk about those sessions in passing.

Finished Lisa Robertson’s Anemones: A Simone Weil Project this morning, started my first experience with James Purdy last night with Eustace Chisholm.

Purdy is bat shit in the best sense.

Think his last book he really went off the deep end, maybe some medical thing was going on with him someone might have told me.

I have been told that I will love him, the first two chapters of Eustace are confirmation that those who have told me I'd love him are correct.

I think it was Brad Nelson who recommended Rachel Cusk's "Outline" trilogy here and prompted me to check out the first part. I'm now partway through the third (Kudos) and I've found them fascinatingly observant and wryly funny.

I got over my Bolaño block with Jim Thompson's The Getaway. I thought I must have read this before but I think I would have remembered the grisly realism of it and the batshit ending, which takes some, uh, hallucinatory liberties with the notion of a 'getaway'.

I started Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford. It's a great title for a novel and that drew me in, but a comedy on the social morés and personal dysfunctions of the English upper crust, set in an era when they had far more wealth and power, is rather tepid fun. I read Highland Fling last winter and not one bit of it remains in my memory. Not sure I'll finish this one.

I got over my Bolaño block with Jim Thompson's The Getaway. I thought I must have read this before but I think I would have remembered the grisly realism of it and the batshit ending, which takes some, uh, hallucinatory liberties with the notion of a 'getaway'.

― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski), Friday, June 3, 2022 7:45 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

oddly enough neither of the film versions uses the end that Thompson had on the novel.

Eustace Chisholm is truly balls-to-the-wall insane, highly recommended, highly readable if you can stomach it

I read James Purdy’s Malcolm a long time ago and remember it being impressively overwrought, so am interested in reading Eustace Chisholm

There’s a notorious scene that I arrived at today, and I immediately understood why he’s equally beloved and reviled. It was horrifying.

still want to read Bolaño's 2666

Me too./pvmic

read 2666's 'the part about the critics', found myself not caring at all, stopped

2666 would be on the shortlist for my favorite novel.