Novelists No One Reads Anymore

In a secondhand bookshop yesterday (South London readers: the tiny cheap and chaotic BOOKS on Oglander Rd in SE15) I was inspired by this thread to take a look at a Len Deighton book, “Horse Under Water”.

On the back it had a quote, no context, apparently from LIFE Magazine:

“Next, big soft girls will read Len Deighton aloud in jazz workshops”.

I don’t know what that was supposed to mean or what readers it was meant to attract but it sure as hell worked on me, I bought it for £2.

I like this story and quotation a lot.

I also quite like that shop. We may have discussed it before.

We may well have.

Truth told, the appealing front cover of the book also had a part to play in my decision to purchase:

https://astrofella.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/fab6d-deighton20horse20under20water.jpg

LIFE magazine: “Next, big soft girls will read Len Deighton aloud in jazz workshops”.
narrator's voice:

Deighton After Dark.

I love the context-free "Next"

It's an amazing blurb.

Friend informs me that particular Deighton is set in Portugal, and at one point the main character mentions the German's uncanny ability to emulate the local language accent-free. This, I regret to say, is not true.

http://clothesinbooks.blogspot.com/2017/11/big-soft-girls-and-jazz-workshops.html?m=1

The thriller is borrowing the props of the conventional “literary” novel…
No wonder a newspaper reviewer breathlessly declared that “the vitality of the modern thriller flows directly from the bloody realities of our embattled day”. Next, big soft girls will read Len Deighton aloud in jazz workshops. The real question is not whether the new thrillers are literature (the answer is no) but whether they really do tell anything about the latest symptom of fiction’s increasing inability to get to the terrifying matters of our time.

context of the context: conrad knickerbocker (for it is he) is supplying his own implied narrator's voice (viz that this is not in fact going to happen, bcz newspaper reviewers are making too much of "the modern thriller", which knockerbocker boldly offsets against "fiction" (despites its current, viz 1964, failures)

He liked In Cold Blood though.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/28/home/capote-blood2.html

He was working on a Malcolm Lowry bio but committed suicide, some say as the result of a Lowry curse.

comically enough given the context of this thread what the full blurry knickerbocker review is pleading for is the arrival of the pynchonesque spy thriller (viz a form that also reflects desk-bound faceless bureaucracies at scale)

adding: george plimpton klaxon

Great cover too: Len halfway under what over here (US) signifies "watered down" to some and "Lifesaver!" to others---not the candy but the striped Cliff's Notes you read just before the big test. There are or were (when I worked in a mid-90s bookstore) even Notes for short stories, and I sold some; God forbid you risk getting lost in the five-page original when you can (well probably) cruise right through Cliff's ten. But I'd still like to look at the Notes for Finnegan's Wake before I finally try to read the whole original (which will happen, if at all, with Campbell's A Skeleton Key To).
Meant to say that Daniel's misgivings about lack of canon feel right re further fragmentation (of secular, pluralistic, in my take) social-and-even-individual cohesion.

My mother taught English, American and World Lit (in a university geared toward STEM and other non-Liberal Arts majors), and I maybe spent too much time in school, so I tend to think of canons as academic: What should be taught now, to all students, to those with certain majors, on what grade levels, secondary and college?

Just read Conrad Knickebocker's obit and feel a little unclean. Somebody posted his interview with William S. Burroughs here if you want to read: https://bluewatsons.tumblr.com/post/122329932364/conrad-knickerbocker-interview-william-s

@Daniel_Rf - Good thoughts. My feelings on monoculture are complicated, I guess I'd say. I grew up I guess with an adverserial relationship to monoculture - I guess what you could call "hipsterism", with the caveat that I was in no way anything resembling "hip". As I've gotten older, some of the stuff I liked _because_ it was opposed to the monoculture has been absorbed into the monoculture. Geeky shit, a lot of times. Comic books and so forth. There's a shared cultural context that gets lost when something gets mainstreamed.

With books I guess that doesn't matter so much - time to "canon" is longer than that. The original cultural context of Olaf Stapledon, say, doesn't play into it so much.

There's this rift, I think, between liberal and radical approaches to... life, really, just life. And I've been on both sides of that divide. The liberal approach is look, can't we just expand the divide? Let's read more Octavia Butler. (I really need to read some Octavia Butler.) The radical approach on the other hand is... the monoculture isn't just _impoverished_, it's fucking insane and is killing all of us. I like the idea of _a_ monoculture, one where we don't have this fundamentally adversarial relationship with the "other". At the same time to defend _this particular version_ of the monoculture is an exercise in defending the indefensible.

He was working on a Malcolm Lowry bio but committed suicide, some say as the result of a Lowry curse.

― Misirlou Sunset (James Redd and the Blecchs)

Always wondered what Lou Reed meant when he sang "Malcolm's curse haunts our family"

Kate otm (incl. that last scary quote)
(Despite well-earned news coverage about book bans as grassroots prairie fire in US, and this being the Deep-ass South, my sister reports that, meeting the cast of a "beautiful mumblecore" local high school production of The Glass Menagerie, she was told that they're now reading The Handmaid's Tale.)(Have also read that Banned Books lists can be good for sales.)

Now reading it as assignment, that is. Wonder if anybody's sticking to Cliff's Notes---I'm guessing some might go from those to the original, once given an indication of the details.

Those nice Vintage International early-90s paperbacks probably led to more readers of Rilke and Camus in the U.S., or at least more people getting them as birthday gifts.

and their covers made them ideal beach reading..

Anyway---first thought not nec best thought---I wanna say "The Waste Land" should be required, while pointing out that it's Ezra Pound's remix---tell 'em/maybe have 'em read some Pound, maybe have to tell what a remix is by now, show/play examples of process (demonstrating value of revision and editing), also Eliot as St. Louis->London remix, and how that affected his writing maybe (allowing them to speculate at all times). Also about shittier side of him personally, ditto Pound ("Now, class, how does this affect your reading?") Also is any of his other writing as good as "TWL," to the extent that you can appreciate why it is-was considered good, whether you enjoy it or not.

moving away from academia - how about VC Andrews?

Should I read Flowers in the Attic? I found an extremely tattered free paperback, which seems somehow appropriate.

Been meaning to type all morning that there is an implicit slipdrift in the thread title itself. Does No One mean
No one at all
No one I know
No one I care about
No one I respect

Your day breaks, your mind aches.

xpost Somebody who I think first read it in middle school presented a very readable reconsid in The New Yorker not too long ago.

xxpost Not saying it would *have* to be taught this way

some of the stuff I liked _because_ it was opposed to the monoculture has been absorbed into the monoculture

I was an English major circa 1989, and I recall that critiquing the monoculture was a pretty central part of the monoculture even then.

In White Noise there's a coterie of PhDs who only read comic books, gum wrappers, cereal boxes, etc. 1984.

In like 1968 or so Ishmael Reed writes "No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o'clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons."

Pictures from an Institution has a line about a soap bubble being equivalent to a pyramid.

Culture has a ways to go toward full inclusion, but it has almost always had inbuilt self-criticism, if only of a halfhearted sort.

Pictures from an Institution has a line about a soap bubble being equivalent to a pyramid.

― the floor is guava (Ye Mad Puffin)

randall jarrell!

maybe contrarian of me but i'd put soap bubbles over pyramids. this idea of the Enduring Edifice, the megalith. what can you say about Giza? Wow, that's big? Who builds skyscrapers? North Korea. Saudi Arabia. I should _admire_ them? Admire their _great work_?

Not huge on "banned books" lists. Oh, everybody makes a big deal about Huck Finn being a banned book and I mean. I read it in, I don't know, sixth grade. It's a 19th century novel by a racist white guy and this is the novel we use to teach children that racism is bad? I don't think I benefited from reading that book. I think there are better ways of teaching kids about racism. I don't think reading it made me less racist, though it did _eventually_ help me figure out that America is, and always was, a white supremacist ethnostate.

I've never seen a celebrity on an "I Read Banned Books" poster holding a copy of The Turner Diaries. I guess it's only a matter of time, though.

Like, how do I feel personally? Burn every copy of Myra Breckinridge. Bury it wherever they buried the Gore Vidal biopic starring Kevin Spacey. Heine saying "Where they burn books, they will one day burn people" - I don't think it's _true_. Where they burn books, they are _already_ burning people, and people care more about the books than the people. Those famous pictures of the Nazi book burnings - Magnus Hirschfeld's _Institut Fur Sexual Wissenschaft_. A great loss to history, to _science_? Sure. How about Dora Richter, though? Where's her fucking obituary? She was "presumed dead" when the Nazis destroyed it. Presumed. Nobody _bothered_ to make note of her murder. It's only by chance that we know she ever existed.

Happy Nobel Prize week to all who observe. This is your reminder that, in October 1922, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Rilke were all alive and publishing major work. The prize that year went to Jacinto Benavente.

— Ryan Ruby (@_ryanruby_) October 3, 2022

https://www.nobelprize.org/images/benavente-12925-portrait-medium.jpg

Not huge on "banned books" lists. Oh, everybody makes a big deal about Huck Finn being a banned book and I mean. I read it in, I don't know, sixth grade. It's a 19th century novel by a racist white guy and this is the novel we use to teach children that racism is bad? I don't think I benefited from reading that book. I think there are better ways of teaching kids about racism. I don't think reading it made me less racist, though it did _eventually_ help me figure out that America is, and always was, a white supremacist ethnostate.

I think this is part of why I liked Huck Finn (apart from being a good to excellent yarn): besides showing the origins of the white ethnostate, it shows an America full of grifters and (nyuk nyuk) huckers.

There's this rift, I think, between liberal and radical approaches to... life, really, just life. And I've been on both sides of that divide. The liberal approach is look, can't we just expand the divide? Let's read more Octavia Butler. (I really need to read some Octavia Butler.) The radical approach on the other hand is... the monoculture isn't just _impoverished_, it's fucking insane and is killing all of us. I like the idea of _a_ monoculture, one where we don't have this fundamentally adversarial relationship with the "other". At the same time to defend _this particular version_ of the monoculture is an exercise in defending the indefensible.

I would certainly throw my lot in with the radicals when it comes to life - hierarchies are to be abolished, not tokenized, and sure canons qualify. The problem I guess with any kind of less horrible monoculture we could dream up is it's always going to be based on exclusion to some extent, because what's in it will always be less than what's not.

On the other hand, deciding then that monoculture is a lost cause and canons to be entirely abolished is that it cedes cultural ground to capitalist forces who do not share the hand wringing - so the shared culture becomes, at best, the front page of Netflix and, at worst, the youtube front page before you log in.

I'd say capitalism is killing us all, and, yeah, capitalism opposes monocultures of any kind, i.e. "You will no longer stream Von Sternberg on Netflix, suckers."

On the other hand, deciding then that monoculture is a lost cause and canons to be entirely abolished is that it cedes cultural ground to capitalist forces

Yes there's that. But for me the problem is that _I_ can curate my cultural intake just fine (for me). But so can everyone else, and "everyone else" will inevitably include horrible people.

So yeah, I'm curating for me. Kate is curating for Kate. And so on. There's a part of me that is glad that a few dudes on one specific island no longer decide who gets published and who doesn't.

But Matt Gaetz and Josh Hawley and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Eric Trump and Lauren Boebert are curating for Matt Gaetz and Josh Hawley and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Eric Trump and Lauren Boebert. I am not suggesting things were better when there was an alleged "consensus" about the world and reality - because I am old enough to remember that consensus sucked too.

This is your reminder that, in October 1922, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Rilke were all alive and publishing major work.

I'm not sure if this proves very much. Recherche was unfinished, Ulysses wasn't published until that year, Woolf's best-known novels are later. Rilke, sure.

That's well argued!

Yeats, winning in 1923 I think, is a more encouraging case.

the photo proves the nobel was correctly assigned in 1922

Yeah the Nobel is (by design) meant to be for your whole canon, and therefore tends to indicate that you're "done" (whatever that means). Which is why at least some writers have drily regarded the Nobel as a death sentence and sought to avoid it.

(At the same time, that's a pretty good problem to have, just sayin)

Woolf should've gotten the Nobel in 1882 imo.

Sick burn on toddler, damn

Her stuff up to age 6 was quite experimental. Lots of alternative spellings.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo....

I'd say capitalism is killing us all, and, yeah, capitalism opposes monocultures of any kind, i.e. "You will no longer stream Von Sternberg on Netflix, suckers."

Not sure I agree with this! Personalised choice is what streaming services claim to peddle, sure, but I'm not sure it actually pans out that way. You won't stream Von Sternberg, but you sure as hell will stream Squid Game! Which is not the greatest example of the evil of this model, being as it is a non-anglo show that from all I've heard is very well made and ideologically right on, but it's when I became aware of a certain disconnect - all these breathless articles going "wow a Korean show is the most watched thing on netflix, how could this be??". And, well, it can be because Netflix fucking put it on their main page for everyone. Which those of us accostumed to curating our culture might ignore, but there's still a huge amount of people who will click on that. And having that sort of mass audience will always be better for capital than tailoring a thousand different things to different niche audiences.

I'm not sure if this proves very much. Recherche was unfinished, Ulysses wasn't published until that year, Woolf's best-known novels are later. Rilke, sure.

― jmm, Monday, 3 October 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Ulysses was published in February. Fine. I doubt they could've give it to him the same year.

They could've easily given this to Proust. Even if it was for Swann's Way I'm sure by then many could see the ambition for the entire project.

"Yeah the Nobel is (by design) meant to be for your whole canon"

Beckett also had a whole period of work ahead of him!

Not sure I agree with this! Personalised choice is what streaming services claim to peddle, sure, but I'm not sure it actually pans out that way. You won't stream Von Sternberg, but you sure as hell will stream Squid Game! Which is not the greatest example of the evil of this model, being as it is a non-anglo show that from all I've heard is very well made and ideologically right on, but it's when I became aware of a certain disconnect - all these breathless articles going "wow a Korean show is the most watched thing on netflix, how could this be??". And, well, it can be because Netflix fucking put it on their main page for everyone

This is what I meant to say -- merely that "I can't watch what I want on Netflix because Netflix has decided for me; the rest goes into the memory hole."