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

I started writing this on a bus leaving Dublin airport. At time of posting this message I am still in Dublin, I bet they don’t have traffic in Yankee Stadium but I still wouldn’t want to live there. 😎

This Cleary novel is charming in that the stakes are so low and so little goes wrong.

Almost the worst thing so far was when the new bf came to drive the protagonist to their date in a truck from work, rather than a car.

It's refreshing to read a story where problems are tiny.

The prose is clear, ingenuous. It all seems less cunning and cheeky than the Cleary I remember in the Ramona books.

Started A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White yesterday. Primarily reading it for dissertation background, but I'm surprised I'd never gotten to this one before.

It's um stiff in places.

I finish Cleary's TEENAGER. It's quite conservative at the end, literally concluding 'She was Stan's girl. That was all that mattered'. I had an idea that Cleary was more liberal and sceptical than that (from my reading of RAMONA et al? - very long ago). Stan gives Jane his 'identification bracelet' as a major token of 'going steady', a new concept to me. I had never heard of such bracelets.

In terms of life lessons the book is not bad, though. It implicitly tells you to be patient, not to wait for the telephone to ring but to get on with your life, not to overreact to incidents, and above all to be yourself - then people will like and respect you.

The novel reads like a pastiche of 1950s or early 1960s teen life - 'Mom, can I go to the dance with Stan on Friday?' 'I don't know, Jane, I'd rather you just went to the malt shop' - etc - which is all familiar, from GREASE, BACK TO THE FUTURE and beyond. The crazy thing is, this book is from 1956 so all that stuff is ... real. It's not a pastiche, it's actually how someone wrote about teenagers in the 1950s. Unless Cleary was already, in some way, pasticheing an emergent understanding of such life?

I commence reading Sally Rooney's CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS (2017).

I've given up on Family Lexicon. After 100 pages there's zero narrative drive, there's scarcely anything even rising to the level of anecdote and certainly nothing amusing or moving. This feels a bit harsh, like a review of her life and her family rather than just a book, but I'm just not interested in these people at all.

It's kind of what I like about that book, it's cool and off about family and event.

Anagrams by Lorrie Moore - each generation responds in a way that is characteristic (through a range of forms and cultural and critical trends) and pays tribute to an ongoing struggle to make sense of being alive (which may take the form of jazz pianists in hotel bars for business travelers)

Family Lexicon is on my checkout list. You can't give up!

I won't give up on her - I'll try a novel at some point.

She wrote a lot of good novels. Try another one!

I had heard one or two negative reports on Sally Rooney's writing. In that context, I find her book slightly better than I'd hoped.

I have heard that the writing is plain and undistinguished. Yes, in a way. But this is a first-person novel. So the voice is that of a character. What matters is not whether it's elaborate or plain, but whether it coheres as this character's narrating voice - as with any other first-person narrative. I'd like to think that this voice is one that Rooney has fashioned, as such, rather than it just being what she has written because she can't write any other way.

I don't mind plainness. Slackness is worse. The voice has some of that. It rises very occasionally to higher formulations and figurative language. More notably, it holds shrewdness in enumerating and describing feelings:

'I could heard that Bobbi said this with an ironic smile, because she was aware that she was showing off. I was jealous, but I also felt that because I had seen the play I was party to something Bobbi didn't know about. She still saw Nick as a background figure, with no significance other than as Melissa's husband. If I told her that I had just sent him an email thanking him for the tickets, she wouldn't understand that I was showing off too, because to her Nick was just a function of Melissa's unhappiness, and uninteresting in his own right' (32).

The awareness about feelings and the readiness to elaborate them reminds me slightly of Éric Rohmer's characters, who do this to an absurd extent. I sense that the greatest distinction of this novel may turn out to be the detail with which it describes and explains such tesselations and shifts of feeling. I quite like the way that, so far, it isn't boringly saying 'I didn't know how I felt' or 'I wasn't sure of anything', but rather is content to name feelings and their causes exactly.

The funniest line in the book thus far is: 'I concluded that some kinds of reality have an unrealistic effect, which made me think of the theorist Jean Baudrillard, though I had never read his books and these were probably not the issues his writing addressed' (28-9).

For a while I didn't think this line was going well. I thought it was going to overreach and say something pretentious that would put me off. But it does the opposite. The admission of not having read Baudrillard is one thing. The ready statement that the perception was probably unrelated to his thought is something else. It makes the whole proposition marvellously collapse.

A point that I distrust about Rooney is that she posits some characters (the narrator here and the fellow in NORMAL PEOPLE) as 'very talented writers'. I am not convinced that they are. Or, I think Rooney believes that they are, but I don't think I would agree with her assessment, if we could actually assess them. I think this is one respect in which she may be naive. I note that the narrator here mostly does not narrate the novel in a stylistic impressive way (see above). This is OK (see above), but doesn't help with the proposition that she is a great writer. Not does this sentence:

'I sat in bed in the morning writing poetry, hitting the return key whenever I wanted' (11).

200pp through the 321 of CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS. It feels as though the book may be too long; longer than what Rooney had to say.

The protagonist has an on-off affair. The novel drifts through much inconsequential banality. The stakes seem quite trivial. The dialogue is banal. Characters don't offer interesting ideas or insights.

All the characters decamp to France. You might think that intelligent or sensitive people would then respond to this environment and have thoughts and perceptions about France. The characters don't. It's as if they haven't gone anywhere.

The novel does contain some other elements that surface occasionally, such as an interest in physical pain and a family back story that indicates another social world from the main story. I don't yet know how far these will be integrated into that story.

Most of the characters are supposed to have artistic talents and strong political views. They don't talk about these issues much. These things do appear sketchily, as part of a conversation that will go on for a few lines then stop. But the 'conversations with friends' may have had the potential to be much more diverse and substantial than the inconsequential conversations that actually dominate the novel.

Thought this piece tackled the often opaque politics of Rooney works pretty well

Political flimsiness is not, for one, unique to Rooney’s sharp millennial protagonists. Frances’s mother is “a kind of social democrat.” Connell’s is vague about who she’ll vote for, but is “interested in Cuba and the cause of Palestinian liberation.” Nick doesn’t really talk politics but at one point concedes he is “‘basically’ a Marxist.” The Republic of Ireland is almost unique as a Western European country in that it has a small and fractured organized left that has never held major power. In the last decade, the Republic has seen a sea-change of social progress, from episodic referendums on abortion rights and equal marriage, to issue-based movements around water charges and housing and a surge in votes for Sinn Féin, a left-wing party whose central project is opposing the border which splits Ireland into two.

But it remains a place in which left-wing sentiments do not find easy institutional expression. It’s a place where, as Rooney put it in 2017, “the deterioration of the power of the Catholic Church was replaced pretty much wholesale with the power of the free market,” a chronology leaving scant space for the development of strong left-wing institutions. These characters aren’t (only) sanctimonious millennials: they are people of all ages searching for political answers, trying to place their progressive values in an historically conservative country. Simon’s half-formed answer is to work as a parliamentary adviser for a small leftist grouping in the Dáil, perhaps as much an article of faith as his deep Catholicism.

In Anagrams, I don't think I completely understood what was fabrication but think I got the gist or sense of each story, but possibly not.

I read the first page or so of Last Resort by Andrew Lipstein. Sometimes, with newer books, I read the Acknowledgments and the first page to get to know the author's writing style. It was nice when Acknowledgments did not exist (and I did not cheat in this way); they only seem to now for English language publishers or authors.

The book tour and personality seem to have started with the influence of other media types and have intensified with streaming and the pandemic. Salinger, Rooney, Mandel, ... (Television, basketball, and pop music in Crooklyn ...)

I returned the Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard yesterday, and The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth MacKenzie. I thought those were worth noting if not previously acknowledged by anyone (for the unique space of Australia and New Zealand in cultures shared by people where English is the primary language and the particular anxiety related to parents or mothers).

Transit of Venus is a strange book: lush but spare?

I finished a few books:
- Split, by Jeremy Boyd: sent by the author to me as a trade, this appears to be a masters thesis manuscript. In that regard, it’s quite good, and I can see Boyd’s poems going somewhere eventually. Like many younger writers, tho, there is a lack of discipline or consistency in the daring elements of the work, so that their concepts seem slightly flimsy. A decent book overall.

- The Maximus Poems, by Charles Olson: I had never read this weighty tome, only a few poems from it, before diving in. Upon completion, I found myself feeling much more “educated” on the modernist project and its inheritors, as well as quite taken aback by the breadth of Olson’s poetic capabilities. The poems range from historical accounts and lists to elegiac lyrics about seafaring to damning visual poems about contemporary capitalism and so on. There’s so much in the 634 pages that it is impossible to encapsulate the book’s subjects in a way that does them justice. Glad I made the effort!

I'm on holiday reading some dialogues by Giacomo Leopardi. Elegant and depressing. Better not to have been born etc, great beach reading.

^recently read a short leopardi extract in an anthology which got me interested in reading more. had only been aware of him before that from the title of an early birtwistle piece.

finished john wain's hurry on down. went in more or less expecting some kind of kitchen sink realism, but turned out to be pretty much a picaresque in episodic form (with a lot of very non-realistic coincidences driving the narrative) following the idealistically callow protagonist down and eventually back up the social ladder to a plateau of resigned acceptance (i think). favourite section and probably the most comedic was his withdrawl into country house chauffeurdom. one of those novels i'd half been meaning to read since my teens, so happy to have finally done so!

then read stan barstow's ask me tomorrow. this was most definitely kitchen sink realism. centred on an aspiring writer moving from his small coalmining village to a nearby provincial centre as part of his plan to ultimately conquer literary london, holed up in a boarding house writing his first novel and navigating his changing relationships with his family, landlady and co-boarders all with pasts that are coming home to roost, so to speak.

now reading some edna o'brien and liking it.

No Lime Tangier, my experience with Wain is similar. Not that I expected realism in quite that way, but I also did not realise how picaresque, episodic, even allegorical it would be. I found the book very stimulating, comic, enjoyable. I, like you, had meant to read the book for many years, and needed to make myself get round to it.

Only Barstow I have read is A KIND OF LOVING, which I found quite shrewd about (the protagonist's) emotions.

re hurry on down, should also have mentioned his time living with his writer acquaintance & girlfriend during his window cleaning career as a highlight of the novel for me. whole thing is a strange mix of grimness and comedy.

it's been so long since i read a kind of loving (or saw the film) that i now only remember the general outline. what i didn't know was that he wrote a couple of sequels to it, one of which features a cameo from the main character from ask me tomorrow.

I finish CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS. Ultimately it's not for me. Yet oddly I quite like the ending.

I've been camping and doing much strenuous hiking for the past couple of weeks. Easy reading was the best I could manage at the end of those tiring days. To wit:

Maigret Bides His Time, Georges Simenon. A thoroughly typical Maigret novel.

The Comforters, Muriel Spark. A somewhat atypical Spark novel, but quite nicely done and entertaining.

Rose Gold, Walter Mosley. A late entry into his series of detective novels featuring Easy Rawlins. Mosley seems at his best and most comfortable with the cast of characters he's assembled in this series. Again, a typical effort, which also means a good story well told.

Finished a strange book of poems by Thomas Delahaye, and then made my thrice-weekly bike ride a rare trip to the university where i sometimes teach to pick up a copy of TJ Clark’s The Sight of Death. It is excellent.

Finished The Wager. It's a workmanlike effort. Oddly, my estimation of it went down just a little when I saw the author interviewed on "60 Minutes" this past Sunday.

I finally started The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. LeGuin, which has been in my library for years. My dad and I watched a PBS adaptation way back in the late 70s-early 80s. Prophetically, she imagines a future impacted by climate change. I admire her vision and her economy of language.

Yeah, I saw some of that, def incl. the sweet ending, when it ran back then, and parts of it on YouTube, which may have the whole thing now or sometimes. She said it was homage to Philip K. Dick, her "invisible classmate" (as quoted in an openculture.com post:
https://www.openculture.com/2016/12/when-ursula-k-le-guin-philip-k-dick-went-to-high-school-together.html

*Bartleby & Co* by Enrique Vila-Matas. Really, this is another book about writer's block and does the world need another book about that topic? When it's this funny and deftly constructed the answer is a defiant yes.

I commence reading Alasdair Gray's MCGROTTY & LUDMILLA (1990), a slim political satire. It seems one of Gray's least serious books.

It's curious how many books Gray published, when everyone just cites a few lan[dm]arks and short stories.

Territory Of Light, Yuko Tsushima - Short novel, originally published as a newspaper column in the late 70's, about a young woman dealing with divorce and raising a young daughter in a new apartment. The very down to earth everyday passages are punctuated by highly lyrical dream sequences. Its origins means there's some redundancy from chapter to chapter but not much. Main character is very likeable and relatable, not at all a martyr or a supermom. It feels like this might be autobiographical or as we now call it autofiction, but there's no big intro; the author blurb does mention her father, also a famous author, killed himself when she was one, and that is the case for the protagonist too. Strikes me how autofiction is only really a useful term for writers, as something to espouse or rail against; for me as a reader it really makes no difference if that is what this is or not.

Treacle Walker, Alan Garner - A slightly bizarre case I feel, Garner having neither changed his writing to graduate from children's fiction to adult fiction nor made an effort to update his style for today's kids. So this reads exactly like a 70's children's novel, the more difficult aspects of it for me at least mostly down to old fashioned vocabulary. Anyway it delivers the goods as far as the folk horror vibes everyone loves. The UK comic Knockout plays a major role, must track an anthology down.

Newcomer, Keigo Higashino - Murder mystery set in a traditional Tokyo neighbourhood. Interesting structure: each chapter follows a suspect. At some point this starts to feel a bit diminishing returns, as obviously none of these will turn out to be the killer or they'd be the last chapter, and there's also a repetitive nature to the petty family secrets the investigator uncovers instead. But as the network of characters expands and overlaps things get more interesting, and gradually emotional stakes get higher as well. Higashino is a very kind hearted writer, firm in his belief that most people are trying their best ("Japan's Stieg Larsson" says one of the blurbs on the cover, and I've rarely seen a comparison more misleading); the inspector as invested in helping people find closure and healing rifts as he is in the murder per se. Lovely stuff.

I just finished Sergio Pitol's The Love Parade. I liked this very much. He creates an engrossing interpersonal and cultural setting of 1940s Mexico City. The end is weirdly abrupt and a little unsatisfying, as if he didn't know how to end it, which I just learned is because this is the first of a trilogy. The others haven't been translated yet, but definitely would read them when they are.

Just started Van Halen Rising.

The next vol of that trilogy will be released later this year.

Excellent.

I loved how the narrator always seemed to be circling the mystery, making very little progress, which was why the last few pages was so strange to me. Now I realize they were setting up the next book.

THe Commissar Vanishesthe falsification of photographs and art in Stalin's Russia
David King,
Late 90s coffee table sized book documenting Soviet photo retouching. I think the process is pretty well known where individuals are airbrushed out of history and disappear from photos they had been in. This gives some very good examples.

Great kingdoms of Africa / edited by John Parker
new book published a couple of months ago on the historic Kingdoms of Africa. Need to get this read over the next 10 days since it has a number of people behind me in the interlibrary loan queue.

The view from the cheap seats : selected nonfiction Neil Gaiman,
I think I found this when looking for books by Samuel Delany and it has an essay/intro to the Einstein INtersection in it . as well as a load of other short pieces on things. Finding it pretty interesting anyway.

I've been reading Rain: A Natural and Cultural History, a non-fic by Cynthia Barnett. It's belongs to that genre which has proliferated in the past couple of decades where an author selects a very broad topic like 'clothing' or 'horses', does a shit ton of research and gathers a mountain of index cards with various facts they think will capture people's interest, then weave them all into something that resembles a cross between a set of encyclopedia articles and a book of bathroom trivia.

I don't mind reading these books from time to time. They're a nice break from the novels, history or better-focused popular science type things I generally read. In the midst of reading one I feel like I'm learning all kinds of interesting things, but they are such a jumble that a week later I'm lucky to remember more than three of the facts I read. That's OK. But I don't kid myself that they are anything but middlebrow entertainment.

As for Rain specifically, it's a fine example, better written than most, but still a hash concocted of tidbits of knowledge and entertaining trivia.

I recently finished "Ragtime" by E.L. Doctorow. I'd always been curious about it, mainly because I've seen it compared to Pynchon, but I'd never gotten around to reading it until recently, when I found a cheap used copy. I guess there are some similarities. Both writers get the "pomo" label thrown at them, but if I ever knew what that term meant in terms of literature, I must've forgotten. To me it seemed more similar to something like "100 Years of Solitude" (so I guess "magic realism"?). Although famously set in turn-of-the-century America, the themes of race relations and urban violence also link it to other 1970s New York novels like "Mr. Sammler's Planet" and "Speedboat".

Malicroix by Henri Bosco (recent NYRB translation) -- very reassuring to have a fire, honey, bread, basin, bitter soap, pitcher of water, rain, whitewashed walls, solid roof -- nature threatens but does not seem threatening -- death is near but one has ancestors

Finished the Le Guin, highly recommended. It's so succinct, and profound.

Started something completely different (and yet somehow not), The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. Written in 1999 by a theoretical physicist, it's an accessible introduction to string theory. It's been in my library for probably 15 years. Probably a little out of date, but I'm excited to read it. I guess that's a good outcome of seeing Oppenheimer this week: it made me more interested to understand, at least at some level, the science involved.

i was into Greene in the early 00’s and remember liking Elegant Universe a lot!
made me feel like i actually ~got~ it
but of course it all immediately fell out of my head & i went back to being dumb as a post lol

LOL

I will never be able to retain the names, let alone the weights and charges, of the various particles.

travelling people by bs johnson

here we are with the travelling people
don't ask why, B.S. says go

I finished MCGROTTY & LUDMILLA, which I was reminded is a novelisation of a TV / radio / stage play. I don't care for the "sexual politics" of the novel, but in other kinds of politics it's perceptive, especially on the idea of Con / Lab sustaining a two-party status quo that serves both. I didn't use to see politics that way (as Gray seemingly did decades ago) but I do now in the KS era.

I then read Alasdair Gray's THE ENDS OF OUR TETHERS: short stories, and one report on the anti-Iraq War march. The book is easy to read and mostly agreeable.

I read some of Edwin Morgan's poems and am impressed. His concrete poems are unusually witty and intelligent.

I began J. Meade Falkner's MOONFLEET (1898), am a quarter in. It's a historical novel set in the 1850s, so though writing in 1898 already looks old to us, I think that the writing and speech in this novel deliberately sounds even older. It's a thrilling tale of smugglers in a tiny coastal village. One thing that strikes me about the life described is the lack of entertainment or things to do. No film, TV, internet, radio, records. But also no theatre, no novels, hardly any books. The narrator does read THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. That's his only entertainment media. So he is driven to spend time gazing out to sea, or walking around the country. And in a Robert MacFarlane way, he has knowledge and words (that we no longer have) - of nature, land, sea, crafts, ships.

I think PKD was right about the heat and the threat that it poses given that the problem is caused by an industry that is not easily regulated and that involves changes that are more interwoven in everyday life. Other threats seem to have been more specific and readily controlled (but this may be appearance and popular understanding only).

I've been reading Rain: A Natural and Cultural History, a non-fic by Cynthia Barnett. It's belongs to that genre which has proliferated in the past couple of decades where an author selects a very broad topic like 'clothing' or 'horses', does a shit ton of research and gathers a mountain of index cards with various facts they think will capture people's interest, then weave them all into something that resembles a cross between a set of encyclopedia articles and a book of bathroom trivia.

RAIN: THE BIOGRAPHY

we had a copy of moonfleet on the shelf at home when i was a kid. can't say i ever read it though.

Incidentally, I was thinking of acid rain in the eighties as an example and wondering if for marketing purposes the targeting should be more specific (e.g., methane leaks, meat eating).

But the targeting may be incorrect hence the usefulness of accurate informative popular scientific writing.

I have read Moonfleet twice and still have no memory of it.

There's another Falkner book I remember slightly better where there's a church or cathedral or something that's been added onto over the centuries until the arch that supports it can no longer hold all its weight, and every time the main character walks past it he has this refrain running through his head of "The arch never sleeps...They have bound on us a weight too heavy to be borne; we are shifting it. The arch never sleeps." That stuck in my head, though I can't actually remember the name of the book.