Everything is Whirling and Twirling! What Are You Reading this Summer 2023?

Which reminds me once again of Henry Kuttner telling a young Ray Bradbury: “You give away all your steam. No wonder you never finish your stories. You talk them all out. Shut up.”

"Try taking the fucking horn out of your mouth".

Was that for the Wes Anderson thread?

what's wrong with aiming books at boys?

Alfred, please point out to me where I said there was anything wrong with aiming books at boys, because fuck me if I can see where that comment came from. What I thought I was saying was that I (as in me, this reader) couldn't find a toehold in the first several chapters capable of holding my interest, in part because I was far from the intended or ideal audience, which was children, mainly boys, entering their adolescence. We both know that any book can be a good book for the right audience.

Exploring the dark and twisted mind of Garth Marengi via his Terrortome; also started Joyce's Ulysses for some light relief.

xp accuracy of aim
power of throw
trying to quieten down the rest of the class in the aftermath
possibly parents suing?

Alfred, please point out to me where I said there was anything wrong with aiming books at boys, because fuck me if I can see where that comment came from. What I thought I was saying was that I (as in me, this reader) couldn't find a toehold in the first several chapters capable of holding my interest, in part because I was far from the intended or ideal audience, which was children, mainly boys, entering their adolescence. We both know that any book can be a good book for the right audience.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless),

I wasn't attacking you. Thanks!

Listening to the audioboook of Papillon. Even if it's largely fictionalized (or borrowed), it's immensely entertaining. Of course, I can't not think of Steve McQueen as the narrator.

The Managed Heart Arlie Russell Hochschild
The book that introduced the idea of emotional labour. The idea that if one is doing a public facing job as well as physical work one is working with management of emotions e.g. keeping a fixed smile directed outwards regardless of the way one is feeling inside.
She is looking at reasons why and how so the various schools of the humanities are coming to play philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history etc which all have heavy venn overlap anyway. I'm finding it a ery interesting read. I may have read it a couple of decades ago so glad to be rereading it. I think if I'm remembering when right it would have been the summer f 2003 when I was reading a massive stream of different books while I still had access to the University library. Anyway recommended read.

Robert Conquest The Dragons of Expectation
Found this while walking around the library and it looked interesting.
He is virulently anti communist, but I am finding it to be a somewhat interesting read. Has me wanting to read James Burnham for probably closely related reasons. It's not very long so I'm reading it pretty fast.

Martin Bulmer (ed) Racism
A great selection of short pieces on teh subject of Racism in various forms . Has selections from a load of writers I really want to read more by . & has a great bibliography of further work that I need to look further into.
I let this slip onto teh backburner when I should have been reading it faster. I've read a load of other stuff in the time I've had it out from the library.
BUt now I'm back on it I really want to get it read.
Or more ingest the contents in a meaningful way. Maybe get a copy for further revisiting.

finished Joe Nigg's Fabulous Creatures last week and thought it was a very interesting read I'm glad i have read since it coversa lot of historical descriptions of imaginary and semi imaginary animals that inhabited the unmapped regions of the world.
It has introduced me to a couple of animals I hadn't been aware of previously . hadn't realised a Yale was an animal before.
It has me wanting to look further into the lore about unicorns and dragons now since there is a wealth of stuff I'm not fully familiar with.
IT was also interesting to read about the adoption of more classical animals in the medieval era as symbolic of Christian teaching. Deeply syncretic.

For the last week I've been reading Sean O'Casey's AUTOBIOGRAPHIES.

This work comprises 6 columes. From the library I have a book with the last 3. I've been reading that. I've read all of volume 4: INISHFALLEN, FARE THEE WELL, and a fair amounrt of volume 5: ROSE & CROWN.

The book can be repetitive and self-indulgent. It mostly flows along. You confront the many pages thinking this would take a long time to read: then start reading and soon you're 30 pages further on. Thus it's often marvellously readable.

The volume I've read is about Ireland 1922-1926. Now I'm on England, c.late 1920s.

On the whole my respect for O'Casey has grown greatly in recent times. You can point to flows: as a writer he wasn't the most precise or beautiful; he perhaps didn't leave a large number of major literary works; he was quick to anger and self-defence, and might hold a grudge. Worst, his politics made him naive about Stalinism - arguably for longer than he should have been. And yet he was so open-hearted, generous, honest. He had a commitment to socialism and emancipation from inequality and poverty that was deeper than most writers'. He was sceptical about religious authority and dogma, while maintaining a sense of the wonder of nature and the world. An essay I've just read on his letters concludes by citing a number of letters he wrote to obscure people who'd written to him, including for instance an American housewife who was dismayed by the state of her life and the world. He took the time to reply at length, offering comfort and fellowship to these unknown people he would never meet. Few major writers have acted quite this way. O'Casey reminds me a little of Alasdair Gray: the eccentric ingenuousness, the instinctive kindness, the disarming directness.

After finishing Human Voices I'm well into another Ross MacDonald novel, The Barbarous Coast.

Self Help by Lorrie Moore
The last book I read was an endless cast of characters and made me wonder how a reader or writer keeps track of them all without being able to search the text.

Finished 'Gods Without Men' by Hari Kunzru, eh it was ok. An earlier work that's both longer and not as good as his more recent ones ('Red Pill' etc).

Also closing in on the end of 'His Master's Voice' by Stanislaw Lem, it's bone dry compared to his fun sci-fi stuff but there's always just enough of interest to keep me in. I appreciate the super realistic approach to a scientific project deciphering a potential extraterrestrial message (reminds me of the "competence porn" being discussed in one of the other tv or Star Trek threads).

Got some fun ones lined up, which I'll need for some medical treatment visits. New David Grann and Patrick DeWitt books, can't wait.

Finally getting around to The Well of Loneliness, about a third of the way through. I like it more than I thought I was going to - I figured it would be an interesting artefact of the time but not necessarily a great book. But the prose is nicely melodic in places and I'm finding it fairly compelling. The interaction between sexuality and gender in historic lesbianism is fascinating, as well.

Still reading the William James bio by Richardson, on chapter 80 of 90. Seems a pretty solid and well-researched book. Aims to be an "intellectual" bio, focusing a lot on intellectual influences on James, starting from his father, Henry Sr., an eccentric thinker and writer (nowadays perhaps would be called a crank) who was self-funded from his inheritance (his father was one of the richest men in the country at the time and though he tried to cut Henry Sr out of the will, Henry successfully challenged the will after his death) which enabled him to self-publish a voluminous output of religious-philosophical works, on the nature of evil and such, apparently influenced by writers such as Swedenborg, and take his large family (though not for the time) around Europe for a good chunk of their childhoods, often moving cities on a whim. The children's education was haphazard, but Henry Sr made a special effort with William, even to the point of sometimes changing cities because he'd heard of some school or instructor that he thought would benefit William's education. If nothing else, and despite the fact that William later expressed the view that he would have preferred staying put in America and having a more conventionally grounded childhood, William did become fluent in German and French, which served him well when, after a troubled young adulthood, he finally landed on the newly forming field of psychology and his life's work. There's plenty of interesting material in the book, although even despite its length, its treatment of certain lines of James's though can feel cursory.

Impressive study from o.nate here. (I'm not certain but have an idea that he lighted on this book after I cited a very old LRB review of it -- this makes me glad to hear of his reading.)

Yes, that's correct! That's how I heard about it.

The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

I read an excellent recent bio of the James family a couple months ago.

Got confused for a second and thought this was part of the Eagles/Steely Dan discussion.

I've started on Botchan, by Natsume Soseki, published in 1908. It's much loved in Japan and I can see why. The main character, who is also the narrator, is somewhat naive, but unusually straightforward and irreverant, never mincing his words. From what I've read about traditional Japanese culture, everyone was (and still is) expected to be self-effacing and deferential, at least as their public, socially-adjusted face, so, the idea of a naive truth-speaker is delightful.

I read *A Book of Silence* by Sara Maitland. Maitland is from a noisy, large family; she is Roman Catholic; she has a family of her own, and lived in a vicarage for many years in East London. Post-children, she finds her marriage breaking down and, over several years, decides to move gradually further and further into the wilderness, in search of silence. This book tracks those years: her research into the desert fathers and occluded female eremites; her experiences in an isolated cottage on Skye; and a retreat in the Sinai desert. Finally, we're with her as she moves into a remote area of western Scotland, looking across the yawning expanse of heather to the hills beyond. I've read some other interviews with her and she's still there and is now basically described as a hermit.

I did enjoy the book, though it never quite catches fire. It's got rather too much on its mind and some of the explicatory sections - about psychoanalysis, astronomy - are a bit thin. The autobiographical sections were the richest and I admire her drive and fortitude.

william empson - seven types of ambiguity

minimum 1 laugh to be had on every single page of this wonderful book

Suddenly bothered by the question of whether Nick Carraway gets too much in the way, I re-read The Great Gatsby and ended up believing that he seals the deal, inextricably part of the total effect: insecure yet avidly curious and observant, even while being dismayed, put off by juicy Big Apple's downside ov hordes swarming Gatsby's wide-open fanstasy castle (becoming unadjusted as he sees them again through Daisy's eyes, they are more than ever "Broadway, from nothing to nothing"( provincially supercilious, from an insular, proper family (Daisy of Louisville's second cousin once removed!), revolted and picking up on waves and trickles of gossip, popular delusions and the madness of crowds, rubberneck gawker taste for fuckery----also initially cautious as hell, monitoring Gatsby---he comes all wrapped up and almost unraveled in spectacle, in the events and his fever dream of Gatsby's dream, of his life and death and still can't shake it, becomes a ghost of all that, at least in his reverie---somewhat like Proust's narrator's vision and narrative of Swann In Love, this is also something of a novel-within-a-novel, that can be read and read around the edges of, as Nick reads the room and writes it, replays it who knows how many times in his head, seeking perfection, out of his depth like everybody else in there, like everybody, he thinks, and says

'compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired'

A few short books to start the summer:

Marie Darrieussecq - Pig Tales
Jean Paul - Prefaces
Halldor Laxness - The Atom Station
Gerald Murnane - Last Letter to a Reader

Loved the Murnane - its a great idea (writer reflects back on each of his books -- including the one you are reading -- as a 'final' work). Its full of ego, in that he is very precious about what he does, but I can't help but really enjoy what he does so its not that off-putting. They are different from Prefaces, such as the ones collated in the Jean Paul book (which have some very good writing (if you like the Baroque) in it but as I haven't read any of the works its all a partial view) (Sublunary Editions are an interesting publisher and I might do a thread on them).

also reading short books:

what tech calls thinking by adrian daub. pretty accessible (normie?) theory/literary/historical perspective on silicon valley.

annihilation by jeff vandermeer. reread. not as good as i remember it.

no country for old men. interesting to see what got cut for the movie, but otherwise minor mccarthy.

three o'clock in the morning by Gianrico Carofiglio. if you like before sunrise you might like this.

foster by claire keegan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster_(short_story), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/02/15/foster. short and very plain, so you can see why it's apparently taught in schools. but very good. even better than small things like these (which was good).

and then i read "it" by stephen king which was ridiculous and not a good use of time in hindsight.

"It was an immediate fail for me. Too directly aimed at kids (mainly boys) of roughly 11 to 15. And the writing style was a romanticized to within an inch of its life."

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Monday, June 26, 2023

I'm an audiobooks person and started listening to Something Wicked This Way Comes, but I diverted to a John Le Carré novel because the beginning of Wicked just seemed just too delicious not to read in October

The Libertine Louis Aragon
Surrealist vignettes that frequently touch on misogyny though possibly misanthropy.
I've had this out of a library I visited in a nearby town a few months ago and have had on the backburner. Just on final unread piece.
Some of it is quite interesting.
But consciously experimental stuff is not going to be totally easy reading.
I'm now conscious that this is a translation too.
Have hit some bits where I was wondering if a cut up technique had been used. Though it also did seem to be semi coherent about as much as the rest of the text.

Withdraw Anne Llewellyn Barstow
A book on the witch trials and mistreatment of women in a wider historical context. I think it was in the bibliography of Caliban and the Witch.
Looks Good, mid 90s feminist fare.

400 Years of Fashion Nathalie Rothstein
Text tied in to a V&A museum exhibition .
Tracing history of Fashion for a few centuries and describing how garments wound up in the museum and what state they were in when they did. Also what the cleaning and repair process revealed about the garments and fabric they were made from.

Racism (ed) Martin Bulmer
Great selection of essays and extracts from a bunch of writers I want to read further.

I finished and loved Lorrie Moore's I AM HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME. A kind of zombie screwball collaboration between Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Parker, Stevie Smith and Edward Grey. I think of it a secret sequel to 'What You Want To Do Fine' from BIRDS... - her best story I think, and itself a riff on the roadtrip from LOLITA.

Picked up Meghan O'Gieblyn's GOD, HUMAN, ANIMAL, MACHINE - an essay about AI from a lapsed Calvinist, taking in Aibos and Hannah Arendt, which I found quite refreshing.

Have been rereading Kay Ryan's selected poems - love them more every time I read them.

Should be Edward Gorey not Grey :/

I hope "AI" is another typo there---

I finished volume 5 of O'Casey's AUTOBIOGRAPHIES: ROSE & CROWN. Most of it takes place in England; the latter part in the US. It features dialogues with Stanley Baldwin and with ageing W.B. Yeats who asks O'Casey what Communism is and what is its spiritual value.

I am now reading more strategically chapters of volume 6, SUNSET & EVENING STAR. Highlights so far: a typical score-settling attack on a newspaper profile from 15 years before the book was published (O'Casey sure held grudges and took revenge cold), and a lengthy description of the University of Cambridge where he tells a Don that Dons mean nothing to most people and they don't deserve to have Parliamentary representation.

I continue to enjoy O'Casey's anti-clericalism and constant attacks on religious customs that he thinks are dead relics. He seems somewhat like one who believes in a god but not in religion, which may be a paradox.

O'Casey, vol 6, ch 5, enters uncomfortable territory.

At his home in Totnes, Devon, he's suddenly visited by three women, one of whom wants to impress on him the evils of 'your Soviet Union', which she says has kidnapped her husband.

O'Casey is dismissive and changes his own position no whit.

True, these women turning up out of the blue to lecture him may be impertinent, but history seems to have vindicated them. It's odd that with his general openness to thought he doesn't even reflect on the possibility that she might be partly correct about the direction of Stalinism.

His next chapter is a sustained frontal attack on George Orwell! Frankly, it's mostly unjust.

Looks like I finally read more than a hundred pages of a Patrick White novel, in this case The Vivisector.

I'll bite: thoughts?

Only on pg. 136!

Reading The Wager, by David Grann. It's a bit plodding, but gives a very good sense of just how grim ordinary life at sea in the 18th century could be, let alone for sailors who got stranded in Patagonia (after nearly dying of scurvy--a fascinatingly horrible disease).

advanced scurvy is a real horror show. among other things your teeth fall out and all your old scar tissue dissolves so your old wounds open back up.

Finished Roots, hugely impressive. A fairly simple (appalling and harrowing, of course) story, fairly simply told but with a real subtlety of character, and variety of characters. Towards the end you do get the impression he's just galloping through the genealogy though. I'm not really bothered by the controversy about his research, that it's a good and believable story is enough. The plagiarism is perhaps more unfortunate, maybe one day I'll read The African.

Country music originals : the legends and the lost Tony Russell,
short biographies and career overviews of a load of early country performers of the 20s and 30s, I'm not as familiar with the genre as I'd really like to be. Have a number of titles from artists from this era but would like to know more. I think I'm a bit more familiar with the blues contemporary to this.
very interesting anyway. THis comes with suggested listening listed.

Linda Nochlin Women Artists
anthology of her writing over several decades.
I enjoyed her Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists which is included here and thsi would have probably been a better first choice for interlibrary loan request really.
She was a feminist art historian and her work is pretty readable.
Nice thick oversized book that I will try to make sure I read through.

Racism (ed) Martin Bulmer, John Solomon.
Great anthology of writing on Race by a lot of great writers I want to read more by. GOt backburnered way too much cos it is a really good selection.

Warrant for genocide : the myth of the Jewish world conspiracy and the Protocols of the elders of Zion Norman Cohn,
reprint of a 1967 work on the history of teh famous hoax document and much more of teh history of anti semitism.
I've read the introduction so far which looks pretty promising. I picked this up this afternoon after coming across it in a bibliography, I think of Dragons of Expefctation which seemed to be good for a number of books i need to look into further

Darker than blue : on the moral economies of Black Atlantic culture Paul Gilroy,
a collection of 3 texts based on speeches that Gilroy had given 10 yeas before publication.
Based on Gilroy's research into W.E.B. du Bois's thought.

The Managed Heart Arlie Russell Hochschild
her look into what she termed emotional labor . The interface a public facing worker has to have with teh public they are facing. In terms of faked smiles and other NVB. Also the consequences to the worker having to do this in terms of how faking things effects the authenticity of being able to access those emotions.
Pretty interesting read.

I've meant to read Roots since seeing both tv adaptations. I think also seeing it turn up in a few bibliographies.

I also want to read Paaul Crooks who has managed to trace his family history back from London, through teh West Indies and back through the middle passage to find out where his ancestors came from in Africa. & has written books on how other people can do it too.
I've been to a few webinars he's put on which have been interesting.

Had just been trying to remember something about Haley that was on the tip of my tongue. Thought it was something to do with the publication of Roots but I think it was probably more that it was him that edited the Autobiography of Malcolm X.

I think the original tv version was being released around the time i was in NYC for the first time visiting my dad for the summer.

I know I've had copies of the book for years but don't think I've read it still unless I did way way back at the turn of my teens in the wake of the tv show. I think the 2nd tv version is a lot more reflective of Africa having had civilisation including a visit to the University in Timbuktu. The original version has a far more minimalist take on life in Africa.

he was more than the editor of rhe autobiography of malcolm x - Wikipedia calls him the co-author and goes into more detail on his contribution.

I'd be interested to see one of the TV versions. I learned today that in the original, young kunta kinte was played by levar burton in his first TV role.

I read an excellent recent bio of the James family a couple months ago.

Sounds intriguing. The one I read sticks pretty closely to William, but since he and Henry were fairly close, despite living in separate countries for much of the time, there ended up being a fair bit about Henry in it, and the other James siblings as well. The book did inspire me to pick up a slim paperback of Henry James stories, as a gentle introduction to his work. I'm finding them enjoyable enough, especially "The Real Thing" which was fantastic, but there is something about his style (verbosity, perhaps?) that tempers my enthusiasm a bit.

> I learned today that in the original, young kunta kinte was played by levar burton

hence my hilarious joke:

> it's an amazing story of how a slave ended up as chief engineer on the Enterprise D.
> koogs, Wednesday, 28 June 2023 16:52

Americans know him from a thing called Reading Rainbow, like our Playschool i think, or Jackanory maybe, features heavily in an episode of Community

i get it now!

probably the biggest rags to riches story apart from that indian squaw ending up as president of the entire human race...

Dances with Wolves, Battlestar Galactica

Burton reappears in the 2016 version too.
I was thinking he was only in the original tv version for a short time and it was more John Amos who got to play the character as an older man. But haven't seen the series since around the time the later adaptation came out when I rewatched it.

Robert Browning - Men and Women, Vol II
Hilda Hilst - Fluxo-Floema

The Hilst is really good. She was a Brazilian writer (read a couple by her before), and fully into the modernist project (Woolf, but also De Sade, the whole shebang). This was a set of short stories written in an almost incantory way.

So! A hundred pages from the end of The Vivisector and White's losing me with his gender politics. This awful painter-egoist is fussing over his relationship with...a 13-year-old child savant.