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

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.

The Horse's Mouth did this sort of thing in fewer pages.

That was a good one. But I never read the others or saw the movie for that matter.

The movie's fun!

Guinness should've played more hellions.

i read the Vivisector (muffled) years ago when i was in uni

the gender stuff i remember being very uncomfortable/ offputting but also i think i passed it off as being in context. oof. i think the parallels of my having read a lot of true crime & serial killer novels that that outlook was just acceptable or went unchallenged by me?
like his sociopathy is ok because there’s an end to it (art?)

i dunno if i could read it now

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.

Ohh, I read With My Dog Eyes and it was wild. Amazing writing, so full of bitter rage. I got The Obscene Madame D recently, it's in my to-read pile and I'm hoping to get to it reasonably soon but I've got so many unread things I don't know when that will be.

I recently finished The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Super intense! Love his writing. Level of detail is amazing, so much research & foreknowledge obviously went into it — it becomes a whole other thing when you then layer his specific perspective. In some ways it feels like it’s own category of historical fiction .. so much more immediate. it’s pretty incredible. And I really liked how angry his tone is, it feels quite, revolutionary. or something. maybe that’s the wrong word.

Last few chapters are wild, very disorienting (with good reason) it definitely stayed with me for a long time afterwards

Am also now halfway through The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers
Another one that has really grabbed me right away. Beautifully written, captures the immediacy of a historical time & place. It’s very tactile/sensory, you can see & feel everything so clearly, it’s like you’re astral projecting into the wild 18th century Yorkshire moors. Loving it.

I loved, loved, loved The Sympathizer. He hit just the right combination of humor, cynicism and horror.

I haven't read The Committed yet, but it's on the list.

Ohh, I read With My Dog Eyes and it was wild. Amazing writing, so full of bitter rage. I got The Obscene Madame D recently, it's in my to-read pile and I'm hoping to get to it reasonably soon but I've got so many unread things I don't know when that will be.

― emil.y, Thursday, 13 July 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Yeah those are the two others from her I've read. She was a poet too. Would really like a translation of it.

Still moving through two longer books, but just finished Ed Steck’s A Place Beyond Shame, which is a meditation on horror movies, childhood sexual and physical trauma, addiction, horror movies, and the rust belt. It is harrowing and brilliant, best new book I’ve read this year.

I've skipped some of Sean O'Casey's chapters on WWII, but will finish with his AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 4-6 for now. 600+ pages of O'Casey on O'Casey are enough for a while.

I commence his play PURPLE DUST, which is engaging. It depicts an old house in Ireland being refurbished on the orders of new English owners. To a degree the scenario, so far, is "wily Irish locals outfox the naive English incomers". I'm slightly reminded of CASTLE RACKRENT and of the first chapter of Ulysses. The language is much closer to Synge than any other O'Casey I've read. Which may emphasise how relatively unlike Synge O'Casey usually is.

A friend who used to be in the Irish army just passed on to me an introductory illustrated book on IRISH HISTORY. I feel like I should read it as it's a gift. On the earlier periods I have much to learn. So far Newgrange has been built.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

this has been on my list for ages and this post was the nudge i needed. thanks!

yay :)

It's good!

I finally finished Leena Krohn's Collected Fiction, Vol. 1: The Novels. I say "finally" because it was a long and challenging read, which I picked up originally on Jeff VanDerMeer's recommendation. The collection started with the weakest of the lot, Doña Quixote, but got considerably better as it went on. The last three in particular were quite strong. Her style isn't really like anyone else's, although Borges may be an obvious comparison; Lovecraft too, in some of the more dreamlike aspects. Very much worth the read.

I've been reading early novels and stories of Forster and Henry Green. What Firbank should I try, if any? Library loan has Five Novels, Valmouth and Other Stories, Complete Plays, but I might could track down some others.

Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg. I know it's not a novel but loads of the reviews call it a novel - so far it doesn't read at all like one, her dad sounds like a real piece of work and i'm not tickled by any of her hilarious family anecdotes. But I'll stick with it.

Is this your first experience? She was my big 2021 discovery (thanks, NYRB!).

Yeah - I was torn between this one and an actual novel.

re Firbank, there aren't many novels - I think that FIVE NOVELS will have the lot. THE FLOWER BENEATH THE FOOT is one to try I'd say.