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

Oh yeah, Jill LePore's freewheeling New Yorker my-life-as-a-bicyclist-from-the-age-of-two memoir (which I'm tempted to retitle "Always Crashing On The Same Bike," but techically there have been different bikes), spins around some references to xpost ilx grad Jody Rosen's Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of The Bicycle, which she tags as "quirky, kaleidoscopic stories"( we should prob give that first adjective a vacation; I'd miss the second one too much)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/30/bicycles-have-evolved-have-we-jody-rosen-two-wheels-good

I despise Sherwood Anderson, adore the lushness of Fitzgerald and Faulkner (in their different ways), and believe that Hemingway wrote two good books and the rest is utter dreck.

Cather is miles above them, even just "Paul's Case" is better than anything Fitzgerald ever set to paper afaic.

Yay! We love Cather!

I didn't know Anderson had enough of a profile in this century to be despised, which I write without snark.

well yknow the table is the table (high, tables!) Speaking of western US lit, an ilx search on Wallace Stegner mainly turned up a couple of favorable passing mentions by James Morrison---anybody else got an opinion---?

The couple of Wallace Stegner novels I've read were OKish, but nothing from them has stuck with me. I enjoyed his non-fic book on the Powell expeditions, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian more than the two novels.

I loved Angle of Repose. As a child of the West, I found him to be one of the writers who understand it best.

went through a phase a while back during which i was never certain if it was 'angle of repose' or 'angel of repose'

That's the one I keep hearing about.

I love Big Rock Candy Mountain— it’s a real epic family tragedy of the West, in both Canada and the US. Great book.

i also read a long story, more like a novella, of his when I was 16, and it had some effect on me at the time, but i cannot for the life of me remember what it was. I keep thinking about Faulkner’s “The Bear” instead, which I also read around the same time.

remember really liking Stegner's Angle of Repose, and also Cather's My Antonia, but those reads were decades ago

We Have Always Live in the Castle is by far best Shirley Jackson novel imo, but I love them all -- I would recommend The Sundial and The Haunting of Hill House next.

I have Hill House which also has some pretty delicious prose to start it. Haven't managed to get much further cos I've been reading other stuff.
I have a biography of her too.

I did manage to finish Love in a Cold Climate, by splitting my time between it and another book, Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler. The Mitford book was fitfully amusing, but the main draw was that its characters had almost no social or financial constraints upon them and therefore were free to grow into a variety of outlandish shapes. A bit sadly, those shapes were the predictable ones, like pure selfishness, greed, hedonism, whimsicality and the like. No one in the book rose above their privilege to achieve any great stature.

I'll finish the Chandler book next. I suppose I could say similar things about its characters, except in it their lack of social or financial constraints is expressed in criminality and corruption rather than whimsy.

Chandler is such a delight to read. He could craft a phrase like no one else.

“From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”

Currently reading Purdy's 63: Dream Palace, a collection of his stories. He's like a less suburban, more midwestern, and infinitely more gay version of Carver. Bleak but absolutely spellbinding prose.

Agreed. One of the last coherent essays Gore Vidal wrote was a reappraisal.

Finished James Kaplan's The Voice, which takes you up to Sinatra's Oscar win for From Here To Eternity. He's washed up for most of the book and self-pitying for all of it. lols at Sinatra lobbying for the juvenile delinquent role in Knock On Any Door.

Now I've started Rachel Pollack's Unquenchable Fire. A perhaps post-apocalyptic society that worships the Founders; magic and spirits are commonplace. Society worships a group called The Founders and there's big holidays around Tellers reciting Pieces that the Founders wrote, with transcendental results. This may all sound like yer average fantasy nonsense (written in 1988 tho) but what sets it aside is the protagonist lives in Poughkeepsie and much of the book so far is a satire of suburban America, just with all this mystical mumbo jumbo integrated into the social politics. Also very unabashedly queer.

I am 180 pages into Murakami's "The Wind Up Bird Chronicle" and I am still not sure where this is leading to. I am enjoying it so far though!

Re: Cather, she was intensely critical of American capitalism...from the right. She wanted feudalism; thought it would yield better art.

She was an anti-Semite and anti-Black as well. I love My Antonia, but there's a really disgusting paragraph in it describing a Black pianist that makes pretty clear what kind of person she was.

I love her writing!

Fred Moten said something a few years ago about Eliot, that he can't get rid of Eliot's influence. That he wishes he could "disavow that racist motherfucker," but that he can't totally.

I agree with Fred— I can't disavow Cather insomuch as her writing has changed me, and to deny that would be to deny myself. Goes for a lot of authors, artists, musicians, etc. whose beliefs are diametrically opposite to mine.

xpost the Blind Tom passage was striking enough to get me looking up the real-life Thomas Wiggins, who may have been an autistic savant---by all accounts, she seems to have been right about his powers of mimicry (which some found reassuring: he wasn't a black genius, so much as a freak)as well as his being a prodigious pianist and composer, exploited as hell. Striking subject of at least one novel and many shorter works, also book-length nonfiction and a documentary.
Some details are disputed, but think most of this is right:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Tom_Wiggins

I reached the end of Trust last night -- I'll not say "finished" because I don't feel I will be done with the book (pondering, discussing, rereading) anytime soon. An absolute wonder.

I'm currently reading The Children of Men, P.D. James.

Bob Spitz - Led Zeppelin

Stayed up way late last night watching The Natural on TCM, wish I hadn't, but kept thinking more Malamudian qualities might come through. ("There must be a pony in there somewhere!") Any of yall read the novel??

I see where a new thread for discussing our summer reading is almost due!

Finished David Thomson: HOW TO WATCH A MOVIE (2015). We've discussed already here how this isn't his greatest work, but in a sense DT spinning the wheels is still enough for me.

An oddity though is that the book really isn't about ... how to watch a movie. He declares on p.226: "You came into this book under deceptive promises (mine) and false hopes (yours). You believed we might make decisive progress in the matter of how to watch a movie. So be it, but this was a ruse to make you look at life".

He can almost uniquely get away with sudden, sweeping statements from nowhere, which are like whims or gambits. The last lines (p.228): "If you really want to watch a film, you must be ready to recognize your own life slipping away. That takes a good deal of education. But you have to be stupid, too".

I've been reading George Moore's ESTHER WATERS (1894). Moore was very important in Irish letters, including eg: in the formation of the Abbey around 1900. He comes up all the time if you read about Yeats et al. I needed to read him. This famous novel seemed a good bet. It has nothing to do with Ireland, though.

I'm about 1/3 through and on balance it's disappointing: not very well written or narrated, though it has improved and picked up momentum. Much of the first quarter describes a great house, where our heroine works as kitchenmaid, and it's nigh impossible to tell characters apart. Much of their talk is about horse racing and is impenetrable. As storytelling I find this all quite cackhanded. But once Esther goes to London and has a baby, it seems to gain focus, though it still has little evident special literary quality.

Moore gets credited for things like free indirect discourse, maybe even internal monologue, but I'm not so far detecting narrative innovation here; nor fine writing. If anything it seems stronger as a 'social problem novel', a work of naturalism detailing the struggles of the poor, in which righteous content is more important than fine form.

"You came into this book under deceptive promises (mine) and false hopes (yours). You believed we might make decisive progress in the matter of how to watch a movie. So be it, but this was a ruse to make you look at life".

I find myself very resistant to this sort of writing, the whole "tipsy man who thinks he's charming" vibe

(Still love the BDoF though)

Finished Purdy's book of short stories, reading Josef Kaplan's 'Democracy is Not for the People,' and looking forward to seeing a friend tomorrow who just bought a huge collection from a prominent older poet...I get some first dibs :-)

ESTHER WATERS, by halfway, has included some better passages describing London. Here I can see the hints of, say, the descriptive style of parts of Joyce's DUBLINERS - or for that matter Ford, Conrad or whoever. It's not outstanding writing but suggests more ambition than the first quarter.

i read jordan castro's 'the novelist' - very short novel from the post alt-lit miasma. i don't really know how i feel about it, partly because it and castro seem to be caught up in a broader discussion about art, politics, new york, catholicism, transgression that i guess must interest me because i read about it and read this novel but which is also confusing and offputting.

anyway, he can write, though his prose style is heavily reminiscent of tao lin. certain of the expressions of disgust in the novel are entertaining and feel identifiable in the moment, even as i recognise that identifying with them - everyone on twitter is terrible, everyone in publishing is an embarrassing sham - is a trap. certain set pieces, whether banal or grotesque, work in the sense of a writer feeling pleased with himself for being able to do them and take them to an extreme (there is a long passage about shitting and wiping yourself), push something as far as it can go. the ending is supremely trite in a way that some american books are

also breton/soupault - the magnetic fields, barbara pym - excellent women and been making my way through '4 dada suicides' from atlas press

Just finished reading and copying the biography to the Ibram X Kendi edited book 400 Souls which was pretty good and quick reading 0nce I took it off the backburner. A load of authors writing chapeters on the black experience over the last 400 years since the first enslaved were traded with an early colony.
Got some good writers on it. Shjouldn't have taken me as long to get hold of it and read it once i did so but am reading a stack of other things at teh same time. Will look out for further work from the writers and try to work through a number of these books i transcribed. been doing that with teh books I've read since ta least the start of the year. So do have a pretty large to read list.

Have the book of the 1619 Project to get to as one of teh next books. As well as a number of others.

JUst got the Gerry Johnstone edited A Restorative Justice Reader which i hope gives me more of a grounding in a field I think I have some understanding of.
Also got Howard Zinn's A People's History of The United States to get through which I hope to dfo over the next couple of months.

JU7st about 2/3s of teh way through Ge9orge Yancy's book of interviews On Race which is pretty good and again I seem to be racing through now that I've actually got into it.

About 30 pages away from the end of Angela Davis An Autbiography and just heard a recent talk from teh City Arts& Lectures series from her
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1S2q1UQStGcOSbTUxW7g8h?si=a301b8ff893441da

I may move onto Jorge Luis Borges the Total Library after that since its the other book I've had around for years and somehow not read. Was very excited to get it but somehow just never got to it. Love his short stories.
May get further into Games For Actors and Non-Actors by Augusto Boal though it does remind me of teh group I thought were whitesashing his work.
Also possibly 25 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism or thinking Fast & Slow or Haunting Of Hill HOuse or something else entirely

two more aubrey-maturin books. absolute bangers.

the return of the soldier - rebecca west

the turn of the screw - henry james. am i in the minority if i say this guy is an indescribably bad prose stylist?

sea of tranquility - emily st john mandel. you will like this if you like her other books?

the age of revolution - eric hobsbawm. from a different era in the sense that it assumes a lot of knowledge about what happened in the 18th/19th century that i simply don't have. very good that nowithstanding.

clade - james bradley. climate change/pandemic thing. jumps around the 21st century so kind of scifi i guess. mostly set in australia. not great imo.

The idea of James being a bad, not good, prose writer is interesting to me.

i have yet to make it through a single james novel, including the incredibly short turn of the screw, assumed the problem was me

guys. no. James rules. Turn of the Screw is really not like anything else he wrote (I really like it, though; it’s nuts.)

I think it depends on the era, for me. I love Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady, but could not figure out The Wings of the Dove.

Looking back at earlier message I thought I had typed bibliography and it's come out as biography. So I copy the book lists for further reading . Come away from something like 400 Souls with a stack of pointers which I will eventually find and read.

love so much that horseshoe is thoroughly here for this

henry james > mark ruffalo (although perhaps only slightly)

I was the only person who loved The Aspern Papers when we had to read it for a class in tenth grade

so, agreed with horseshoe

I’m not saying he’s bad in general. I’m saying that his prose style in particular is bad. Does he have a reputation as a stylist?

Bbc loved him.for some reason and made a load of tv interpretations of his ghost/ supernatural work.
I thought that was because of his ability to maintain suspense and that had to do with his writing style.
But haven't read what I have by him.

i think you might be thinking of M R James there

Yeah was just going to correct that.

BBC still seems to have made a number of interpretations of Henry's stuff. Assume that is because he's a respected writer or is it just what is presented as a great one to aspire to. Cultural icon better than he he's worth or something.

'Turn of the Screw' is one of the first pieces of prose that James dictated to a typist, rather than wrote out by hand himself (he was literally suffering from writer's cramp). This late style is notoriously difficult, but that may or may not be the same thing as a 'bad prose style'. It certainly has a kind of poetry when read aloud, although I concede it's the poetry of evasion and interiority. I think the style is doing exactly what James wants it to do, for better or worse, and that human thought and feeling still lies at the heart of his subject matter, however obscurely rendered.

But just as a wordsmith, a composer of sentences, the James of Portrait of a Lady or The Aspen Papers or etc etc is pretty unimpeachable imho, and not radically different from similar writers of the era. Just better.

Washington Square is gorgeous, although I never finished it. I had to read Roderick Hudson as a student and was bored, but I suppose I might find it more bearable now.

I am probably in the minority but I absolutely despised Turn of the Screw. Interesting experiment to tell a ghost story by removing all the exciting bits, but it’s a prissy slog, and once you understand what James is trying to do, utterly monotonous.