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

Speaking of the Irish: I've read about half of John McGahern's short fiction after reading Amongst Women years ago and am entranced.

By coincidence, after Bread and Wine I read Cause for Alarm, a zippy little thriller by Eric Ambler, also set in Italy under Mussolini and published two years later in 1938. The two books both portray the brutality of the fascists, but could hardly have been more different in their tone.

Silone's book was intended to reach a pan-european, socialist-leaning, intellectual and politically sophisticated audience. Ambler's audience was British, middle-class, much more insular, reflexively suspicious of socialism and foreigners in general. Putting them side-by-side they say a hell of a lot about the vast differences between prewar England/Britain and the rest of Europe.

Conversation: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/books/naoise-dolan-megan-nolan-nicole-flattery.html🕸🕸 We've talked about Flattery, are the other two good?

About to start collected short stories, will report. Also intrigued by mentions of the novel.

Start with the last story, "The Country Funeral."

Eh? The last story in Show Them A Good Time is "Not The End Yet."

I finish Angus Wilson, THE WRONG SET (1949).

Here are further stories that appear in it.

'Realpolitik' is a brief highlight. It depicts a meeting at an old museum which has been taken over by a new executive who wants things to be businesslike, streamlined and popular. It feels like a 1980s scenario, it even feels very relevant now. But this was written in the 1940s! The way the executive beats everyone else in the conversation is deftly written by Wilson.

'A Story of Historical Interest' is about a woman whose old philandering father becomes very ill and eventually dies. Moving back and forth in time, it shows her talking to his nurse (who is Irish and whom she distrusts*) and travelling with him in an ambulance. She has turbulent feelings about him which go back and forth. At the end he is set to die and she says, no, she doesn't need to go and see him, she has her life to get on with. I am reminded of the old widow at the end of THE CORRECTIONS who is happy to restart her life.

* a few Irish people appear in the book and they are treated as having a charming brogue which is unconvincingly rendered. I'm surprised that Wilson couldn't do better than this.

In 'The Wrong Set', a young lad called Norman has moved to London as a student. His aunt, nightclub piano player Vi, goes to visit him. We see the seedy nightclub world: here lesbians are glimpsed and Jewish people are also talked about, with a predictable undertow of anti-semitism. When she finds Norman's place, he has gone out to a rally with Communists. The landlady remarks that they're rallying 'to make trouble for the Government they put into power' - Attlee's. This is one of the book's interesting elements, the occasional remarks about the Attlee government, usually not especially positive. When Norman returns, Vi complains that he is 'mixing up with a lot of Reds and Jews'. The snti-semitism becomes explicit and Vi regrets this. But she complains to Norman's mother that he is in 'the wrong set'.

This title phrase does correspond to something about the book. Much of it is about class, cliques, manners, people's distaste for others. It's an accurate sort of title but not one that indicates anything pleasant or encouraging.

'Crazy Crowd' shows young couple Peter and Jennie going to visit Jennie's family in the Cambridgeshire countryside. The family is very eccentric (including reactionary brother Hamish), in a way that is difficult for Peter to handle. The reader sympathises. Eventually he snaps and Jennie makes an effort to stop him leaving. The eccentricity is quite vividly drawn; it's one of the most effective stories.

In 'A Visit in Bad Taste', a couple is visited by the wife's brother, who has just been released from prison after a charge of 'offences against children'. The couple tell him that he must move on; the wife even says that perhaps he should commit suicide. Nothing else happens; basically it's a tale of distaste and distanciation.

'Raspberry Jam' is about a boy who is taken up by two very eccentric sisters, who eventually get drunk and kill a bird. The boy won't go to see them again. As I write down the content of these stories I notice how minimal it is. It would be good to say that this is compensated by fine writing and thought, but it isn't really. Once again a clear recurring pattern can be seen of distaste and separation.

'Significant Experience' tells of one Jeremy, remembering how in 1936 he had an affair in France with an English (and partially Irish - leading to the same slack idea of Irishness) woman 13 years his senior, and how this was perhaps a romantic education for him. The woman is unpleasant, they quarrel, the relationship isn't nice to read about. The odd thing is that the story is prefaced by a brief scene among firewatchers - thus presumably early 1940s - but then ended with a scene among young men at an Oxbridge college. This doesn't seem a good piece of composition. It doesn't work to interesting effect.

'Mother's Sense of Fun' shows one Donald experiencing the oppressiveness of his mother's personality, until, or even after, she dies. The sense is of a negative feeling about family.

'Et Dona Ferentes' shows a family in the countryside who have a vistor, an 18-year-old Swede called Sven who is proud of his good looks and wants to seduce someone - possibly the father, Edwin. (Sven's thoughts and speech are again treated quite crudely, a poor pastiche of foreignness.) The mother, Monica, thinks with panic of Edwin's past of gay liaisons. These are only alluded to without quite naming them, in a way that must have been period-specific. But the panic about gay desire is plain. It's the one place in the book of this gay author where the theme becomes central. In the end Sven is sent away and Edwin and Monica try to restart their marriage as if nothing has happened.

The story's title is in some other language - I don't know what it means. Google Translate says it means 'and bearing gifts'. Titles like this usually remind me of my view that (while knowing as many languages as possible is excellent in lots of ways, good for the mind and for thought) writing in one language shouldn't and needn't borrow phrases from others, in this particular way - it's evasive and pretentious. I think Orwell said this long ago and I tend to agree. If the title means 'and bearing gifts', then why not say that? It would be unimpressive? So why does it look better in another language? I think this kind of thing is a case of the fake prestige of the unfamiliar because you can't make up something that works better in your own language.

I can see thematic coherence across THE WRONG SET, but not in a way that's appealing. The coherent themes are class, division, distaste, disdain or even disgust, detachment, separation. The people are mostly bitter, unkind, snobbish, occasionally bigoted. The book presents quite an unpleasant view of the world. It doesn't really redeem this with great writing. I can't very much see why this first book should have been acclaimed. However, I think there is more to Wilson than this and maybe his later books are better.

That title is part of a famous Latin expression, originally from the Aeneid; it has been Englished as “beware Greeks bearing gifts” but I don’t think the title “bearing gifts” would point the reader as directly to the particular expression. It’s really the opposite of evasive though it does expect you to know a thing

there's an element with this type of move (which orwell in fact may have been getting at) of establishing (bcz also limiting) the readership wilson felt he wanted, who will also be a "set" (i guess the "right set") among whom the this exploration of wrong-setness is taking place. middle-class education in the first half of the 20th century included some years of latin, and imperial myth-making included the aeneid: the voyages and settling of aeneas are a foundation tale for the roman empire and the british empire was openly and loudly following the roman model -- shared knowledge of latin, as well as marking out people who were likely good with languages (handy in the colonial civil service), functioned as a kind of intellectual (or better say memetic) ligature for that class and that world. this particular motto was easy for clubbable types to recall bcz it contained a little pellet of bigotry-as-advice.

(adding: as wins says it's from the aeneid but it was also no longer i think quite "of" the aeneid: ppl could roll it out as an easyread shared joke w/o necessarily recalling where it came from… )

i haven't read these stories and my memory of reading angus wilson in the past is "why i am doing this again?", but i think i recall enough about his being seen as a sardonic commentator to believe that the concept-reveal is that the "right set" is also pretty awful (you the reader, perspicacious and in on the joke, naturally excepted)

Good analysis, Mark S. Thanks.

I'd say I'd like to see your take on the actual story / stories but then I've already indicated that they're not great, and you've already said you didn't get much out of Wilson, so not much rationale for inflicting that on you.

I have a friend who’s always pushing the old man (men?) at the zoo so I’ll probably get around to that one at least

Peter Stanfield A band with built-in hate : The Who from pop art to punk
pretty decent Who biography that takes them up to the late 70s.
Think I'll be reading some more of him if I can get hold of some. This was his only title in the Irish library system .
I had came accross him being interviewed on Ugly THings podcast.

The hidden treasures of Timbuktu : historic city of Islamic Africa John O. Hunwick,
coffee table sized photobook talking about the manuscripts etc held at the ancient University town.
Quite gorgeous.

19th-century fashion in detail Lucy Johnson
garment porn. Book on details in garment items in the Victoria and Albert museum in London.
a book I'd love a copy of. Another one from Irish library system.

Witchcraze Anne Llewellyn Barstow,
Book on the craze of Witchunting in the 16th & 17t6h centuries. Particularly fixated on the perseccution of women.
I noticed the author is writing as though whatever wicthcraft the witches were accused of has a factual basis which I wasn't sure how to take. I was thinking more that I would say allegedly or something similar since I would be thinking this was pretty exaggerated at the very least. & a ruse for persecution.
I'm just reading a chapter on how women were pushed out of the workforce in teh 16th century after having been more closely involved traditionally. Oh well up the patriarchy burn the witch like.
I think this is a decent book but I am having some problems with that , since I would think a lot of what women were accused of were male projections. & the lore and methodology of what was thought of as witchcraft were outside of the experience of thsoe doing the accusing. Certainly all the satanic orgies sound pretty fictive.
Oh well, bibliography has turned me onto some titles I'm looking forward to reading.

Darker than blue : on the moral economies of Black Atlantic culture Paul Gilroy
transcripts of 3 lectures done for W.E.b. du Bois conference.
one on car culture, one on Bob Marley and other musical artists and one on citizenship and consumption. Prett interesting.
Bibliography has pointed me at some books on the history and practise of Human Rights that I will have comingto me next week I think.

I ordered a number of books through the interlibrary loan system thinking that in the past they have taken an age to come through and now it seems 8 titles have already been sent out to my library. Seems the efficiency of teh system has improved also, I think, how long it takes for a book to reach me once sent out. So just about to be inundated with decent reading on top of the stack of decent reading I already have out. Hope I am going to get through everything.

I conclude Jonathan Coe, BOURNVILLE (2022).

The novel is a family saga that tells a version of the story of England 1945-2020 through several key historical moments. The moments are VE Day, the Coronation, the World Cup Final, the Investiture of the Prince of Wales, his 1981 wedding, Diana's funeral. The frame, either end of the novel, is 2020, the first 3 months or so of the pandemic.

To a degree Coe renders these historical events. But he extensively does so by quoting radio and TV commentary on them, presumably from actual recordings and transcripts. So the voice of Dimbleby et al is intercut with characters commenting on what they see on screen. In a way this is lazy, an easy writing job for Coe. In a way maybe it's an authentic way of writing about how people experience big events. The most intellectually interesting thing about the novel might involve media, and the fact that history is experienced as media events, though still by specific people in their own places and groups.

Coe's writing is mostly plain, orderly; you could say flat or bland. He is not a Nabokovian writer. Except, in a way, when he writes pastiches of other styles and genres - that is when he can come to life as a writer. He has most verve when he is copying someone or something else. He doesn't do that so much in this novel, except in a pastiche of a report of an EU committee. The EU is presented, by this very anti-Brexit writer, as well-meaning, broadly a good thing, but bureaucratic, slow and obstructive.

The novel features characters who have appeared in other novels, including THE ROTTERS' CLUB / THE CLOSED CIRCLE / MIDDLE ENGLAND. But Coe's final note states that it belongs to a different sequence, called 'Unrest', which includes EXPO '58, THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS, MR WILDER AND ME, and he hopes to write a 5th. So a trilogy and a quintet are linked. Whether WHAT A CARVE UP! and NUMBER 11 are also linked to these, I don't quite recall.

The novel seeks to espouse progressive values and open-mindedness. One white character Geoffrey Lamb, is viewed as a closed-minded racist. A black character, Bridget, condemns him after his death, and states that others are also guilty for not standing up to him. Coe seeks to write the issue of 'race' in a particular way by not openly signalling it, and not highlighting the ethnicity of non-white characters. (As I recall, his novel NUMBER 11 partially centred on black characters.) Non-white characters, eg from India and Iran, gradually appear during the novel and the implied sense is of England changing for the better as it becomes more open. Meanwhile, a character very predictably turns out to be gay - this point is telegraphed from early on.

Perhaps some of the characters are not very vividly drawn. In fact Coe doesn't really provide much visual description of characters. It's as if he just wants us to go by personality. But the personalities are sketchy too. I think this is somewhat deliberate; we're meant to have an impression of character traits, without a direct lengthy account of them. The character Bridget is meant to be from Glasgow, but this aspect of her (eg in her voice) is surprisingly little demonstrated. The novel is somewhat more interested in Wales, where certain scenes are set (as they were in the ROTTERS' CLUB trilogy).

In a way the novel is ambitious. And in developing characters over a long period of time and 350pp, it builds some poignancy, especially around mother Mary Lamb who turns out to be, ultimately, the central figure. On the other hand, you could feel that Coe is coasting here. At least, it often feels as though the novel wasn't very hard to write.

I think in Family Sayings what may require patience is the idea of getting to know a family by what it says. The sayings acquire force and weight through repetition; everything outside of what is said is not completely known but only gradually sketched in, and it takes time to figure out what is said means what it does.

(That is where I am hoping the book will take me. Right now it seems like the echo chamber of a loud family.)

lol the ep of morse i just watched is called "greeks bearing gifts" (in english not latin) and morse ponderously morseplains virgil and the reference to the ever-patient lewis at the end

I haven't had much time for Coe outside of What A Carve Up and The House of Sleep. The earlier stuff is juvenile. The later stuff (pretty much from The Rotters Club onwards) seems to be, like you say, coasting. I think at some point Coe decided his metier was The Great English Politics Novel, but I don't think that's his strength - his dialogue is too cornily on-the-nose, and his politics are as middle of the road as mine are, and therefore not particularly interesting to me.

Where he Ceo excel, IMO, is in writing excessively byzantine and sellf-referential thriller plots (as in the House of Sleep). But it seems like he exhausted himself early on and stoped writing those sort of books, which is a shame.

A PS on Coe:

c.2001, when he was becoming quite famous or notorious, James Wood reviewed THE CORRECTIONS and complained that Franzen's critique was "telling the culture what it already knows" (or similar phrase).

I have never been totally convinced by that critique of that particular novel. But it is much more evidently true of this Coe novel.

When Coe writes about the death of Diana, he literally writes a passage like "The public wondered where the Queen was. The national mood of grief was turning restive". When he writes about Covid-19, he writes things like "With lockdown, people were trapped in their houses. They could only communicate on screens. It was as though human connection was cruelly taken away".

In other words, he repeats things that were immediately said about these events in the most mainstream media; ideas about the events that almost literally everyone heard as soon as they happened. This doesn't seem a great vocation for an imaginative fiction.

Maybe Coe could say that what he's doing is creating an archive of living history, in fiction, for posterity. Maybe one day his novels will be useful in this way as Victorian novels might be now. His record of eg lockdown *is* quite accurate.

But even if this is useful for posterity, it's not very enlightening to read now.

So I do think that his novel falls heavily under Wood's old stricture. He tells us things we already know all too well.

I commence Jonathan Lethem, BROOKLYN CRIME NOVEL (2023).

I also start on Cordwainer Smith, THE INSTRUMENTALITY OF MANKIND, ed. Frederik Pohl (1979), stories 1958-1963.

Conversation: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/books/naoise-dolan-megan-nolan-nicole-flattery.html🕸🕸 We've talked about Flattery, are the other two good?

I like Dolan. Haven’t read Megan Nolan’s prose. Did you like Flattery?
― ydkb (gyac), Friday, 11 August 2023 bookmarkflaglink

About to start collected short stories, will report. Also intrigued by mentions of the novel.

― dow, Saturday, 12 August 2023 bookmarkflaglin

Been reading a bit about this:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/08/a-smorgasbord-of-unlikability-the-authors-helping-sad-girl-lit-grow-up

William J. Mann - Katie: The Woman Who Was Hepburn
John le Carré - The Mission Song
Charles Olson - Collected Poems

finished Eric Sneathen’s Don’t Leave Me This Way, a book of cut-up poems about Gaëtan Dugas, the AIDS crisis, and the voices of those lost. References to The Odyssey abound. Great book.

also read a bunch of William Bronk poems, as well as new shorter collection of poems by Ed Roberson about his time working in an aquarium.

The only Coe I've read is the Rotters Club trilogy.

Absolutely love The Rotters Club, think it fits this odd template I often fall for - ridiculously ambitious completely failed comedy. The comic sections are awful and should have been left out entirely, especially the "hilariously" naff 70s dinner party, unfortunately the shit TV version leaned heavily on this aspect. News events do not at this point seem shoehorned in, but are important to the plot. The wonder and delusion of being a precocious arty sixth former, framed within this unmanageable series of plot devices, shifting perspectives and styles, with that closing internal monologue (I guess inspired by Joyce), that's where the gold is here, and I can forgive all of the flaws, including the larger framing device which also should have been left out.

The Closed Circle was less good. It has interesting(ish) new characters and some strong sections, but the overall effect is essentially wheel-spinning, until we get to the shock twist. The political satire of New Labour seemed to be dull and ineffective. Not a bad book, just a very average one.

Middle England was quite a different book, but in the end would rate it about the same as The Closed Circle. The story follows the same characters across the coalition / Brexit years and unfortunately resorts to increasingly simplistic characterisation with the new characters introduced. There's one - a rich teenage girl who becomes a Corbynite and is implied heavily to be antisemitic - who nearly ruined the whole thing for me, though she doesn't feature much. Overall it seemed like a failed experiment, if he wanted news impacting real lives then austerity would have been a much better place to go. The novel ends quite well, but think I'm done with the series at this point.

Camaraderie: I found THE CLOSED CIRCLE disappointing. I found MIDDLE ENGLAND much more effective overall. Aspects of it remain memorable for me.

It's entirely true that he introduces the one socialist character and implies that she's bigoted, and I was naturally troubled by this also, but fortunately it's only one line in about 400pp. But it's also symptomatic that he can't take the socialist revival of these years seriously, says nothing at all about, for instance, the 2017 election result.

He does write extensively about austerity in another novel, NUMBER ELEVEN.

Another problem I had with Middle England's politics was the nice moderate Tory MP girlfriend, of course there is no such thing IRL, she would have voted for every benefit cut, and not even acknowledging that seemed like a huge error.

I'd forgotten her! and still don't remember her clearly, whose gf she was, or anything.

I think you're right to imply that this looks like 'centrism', and it's slightly puzzling that Coe got here after having once been politically sharper.

Coe is my age and my cohort: just over a year younger than me and was actually for a while in the late 80s a fellow reviewer at the wire, stopping at the time I became editor lol (tho not by my command). A thing I have glumly and grimly noticed a lot of is a *lot* of ppl from the same cohort swerving from a sharper 80s politics to a crappy 00s centrism. I suppose we could just handwave it as "getting older, kids and mortgages blah blah", but it seems to manifest in quite a particular way. So instead I'm going to blame the abolition of the GLC and the vanishing of the alt-terrain of e.g. City Limits.

it may be the cosy champagne-socialist hummus-eating latte-drinking guardian-reader cultural elite to blame. or else he just hasn't encountered any young working class people outside of a service setting in the last few decades. or those might just be the same thing.

in 1984 he played keyboards for a "short-lived feminist cabaret group, wanda and the willy warmers"

orwell was right

I think it's been pointed out before that one group of bad 'centrists' is middle-aged UK rock critics.

Another is UK stand-up / TV comedians. The odd thing here is that in NUMBER ELEVEN, Coe specifically attacks / satirises that particular group.

Now I want to read this Number Eleven.

What I want from Coe (or somebody else) is a UK 20th/21st century Les Rougon-Macquart (which if anything gets more radical as it progresses, Germinal is book 13 or 16 depending on how you count and ends with a demand for Communist revolution) but I'm never going to get it.

Antonio Lobo Antunes - Fado Alexandrino.

- Modernist novel pub. in 1983, trying to draw up a picture of Portugal's Carnation revolution in the 70s. Five soldiers tell their stories in a bar to the 'Captain' (who is there to only listen). All have fought in the colonial wars in Mozambique. They look back and talk about the years after, during one night.

(The wiki on the novel has a good summary of the structure.)

- The long, coiling sentences have a long tradition by the time Antunes got going. They come from the likes of Proust and the last chapter of Ulysses, with further refinements by many authors down the decades (anything from Hermann Broch's Death of Virgil, Bernhard, Faulkner, late Woolf, to obscure writers such as Juan Benet when talking about the Spanish civil war etc.) This kind of writing often has a flattening effect on character (though you learn enough to distinguish their stories), it can obscure much as the ocean of thought-flights pile on. This is often exhilarating to me, as an experience.

- I like that it can amplify the painful history but also take these events down a peg or two. For these soldiers, it was a period in their lives. But they live on...

- Another key reference is Celine (the back of the book mentions Dos Passos but that didn't feel right to me). As the subject implies the content is grim, it can also be grotesque to look from outside in. It's specifically remarkable when dealing with their various relationships the soldiers have with the women in their lives. The heat of what they've been through weighing heavily on these relationships and yet a sense that war and Portugal's politics didn't have a say in the ups and downs (mostly down) they experience. These are lives that are shaped by events, but they also make choices.

Mothers keep up a constant, initially one-sided, conversation with their young children and then later seem to repeat stories, deliberately or having forgotten, to fill the silence when their children come to visit.

Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries (also, like Fado Alexandrino, finished in 1983) has some unusually two sided conversations between mother and daughter..

I am halfway through The Elegant Universe, and we are on superstring theory. He really does try to keep things understandable, but I am struggling. This stuff is so far outside the realm of my experience, I have a hard time visualizing it, even with the helpful diagrams.

Conversation: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/books/naoise-dolan-megan-nolan-nicole-flattery.html🕸🕸 We've talked about Flattery, are the other two good?

re: nolan, i liked acts of desperation but have not read the new one.

Counselor Ayres' Memorial, Machado de Assis - His last work, written as a diary by a character who is also advanced in age. He meets this young widow and makes a bet with his sister that she will remarry. It seems pretty clear from the beginning he's attracted to her, and there is a line of unreliable narration running through the novel as he consistently underplays this, but it doesn't end up going anywhere extreme...a more age-appropriate romance blooms between the widow and a young man instead. Felt kind of trivial in the end. The abolition of slavery happens during the novel but characters take it mostly as an almost neutral event, some have to go back to their farms and take care of the paperwork of employing the former slaves as workers but that's pretty much it. That being said the ending I found pretty affecting. Def still more in the romantic than realist school. Also a book where the narrator says stuff "I heard much news, none of which I will write down right now", as per the pinefox's experiences with Moonfleet - the diary conceit used to mask this somewhat.

Good Pop, Bad Pop, Jarvis Cocker - The pitch for this being Jarvis sorting out his attic and deciding what to keep, I thought this would basically amount to music criticism, some sort of guide through his record collection doubling as a manifesto for his aesthetics. It is not that. There are few records in the attic, and he uses this conceit more as something to hang an autobio on and to provide some advice to ppl looking to become artists. What he has to say about music is mostly quite boring and basic - Beatles, Velvets, Punk. It was interesting to see him talk about Barry White as a vocal influence tho, which in retrospect makes tons of sense. The autobio stuff is mostly very charming, unless you hate the guy I guess - his grandad making him a makeshift dalek, young Jarvis going to a Stranglers show and naively wondering at the area next to the stage being near empty only to be caught in a mosh pit when the concert started, an early song based on having sold a bunch of rancid crabs at his day job.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Voung - Book club pick. Both a second generation immigrant and queer coming of age novel. Voung writes poetry, and you can really tell this is a poet's novel, to effects both good (loved the violent, lyrical ode to Hartford) and less good (a lot of highly abstract, very assertive sentences about life, love, nationality that I think would work in poems but in prose make me go "hmmm IS that right tho?"). Overall very strong, dark, heartbreaking stuff.

Vuong’s poetry is awful, fwiw.

Warrant for genocide : the myth of the Jewish world conspiracy and the Protocols of the elders of Zion
Norman Cohn,
traces the history of a famous hoax that had a great deal of consequence in its wake. Arguments by an imagined Machiavelli copied from a satire on the despotism of Napoleon III. IN th eoriginal it had the liberalism of Montesquieu argued against the cynicismn and manipulation of Machiavelli. The plagiarist simply copied out whole chunks of the dialogue from Machiavelli and attributed it to a jewish leader. They even kept most of the original structure except they dropped one chapter from the original.
& it took until the wake of the first world war for the book to become popular. Apparently one book containing it was among the books taht the Tsaritsa took with her into her pre assassination captivity.
So, interesting book, thought I'd read it after it appeared in the bibliography of something else I read recently. Now I'm having to rush through it because i have a pile of books arriving thanks to the library system suddenly becoming efficient.

David King The Commissar Vanishes
author's book detailing the research into the photo manipulation of the early soviet years in Russia.
Coffee table sized book that details a lot of the images both in doctored and undoctored forms.
Interesting to see how this was done after having heard about it for years. I think I probably read reviews of this book being released at the time it was and related Guardian/Observer magazine articles.

Handbook of English costume in the nineteenth century C. Willett Cunnington,
NIce book of images of clothing from teh era. I think I need to get a copy of this and a couple of other centuries as standing reference style guides for future garment construction/design. I think he goes back a few more centuries back to medieval times at least.
Bloomin love the clothing of this era, even if it was a bit restricting.

Women artists : the Linda Nochlin reader
a set of essays by feminist art historian. It includes her Why have there been no great women artists? as well as a number of others.

The philosophy of modern song Bob Dylan,
short pieces by the great lyricist/dj on a number of songs he feels significant.
Quite interesting. I grabbed this on seeing it was in the local library despite knowing I had a pile of books about to appear. But t does seem to be a pretty quick read. I just need to get through it.
Also saw that the local library has Ted Gioia's History of Jazz in but managed to restrain myself from grabbing that too.

Dancing in the street : Motown and the cultural politics of Detroit Suzanne E. Smith,
have read the introduction so far but this does look very interesting.

The evolution of international human rights : visions seen Paul Gordon Lauren,
One of a couple of books I ordered to try to learn the history of Human Rights. How they developed what they really mean.
Felt it a bit weird that somebody was trying to present them as tangible things when I think they are more a question of leverage.
Not wanting to seem overly cynical or right wing or something and wanting to see them as in some way significant and recognised but it seems a little unrealistic to think that one can bash somebody around the head with the existence of a right. THough free speech does require some level of responsibility not to intentionally misrepresent and so on.

haha table, I did think of you as the ILXor most likely to have an opinion on this guy

still unsure on how I feel about his novel, in the end. the nods to Barthes and Simone Weil feel a bit out of nowhere. I will say the book club I'm in tends a bit mor and unlikely to feature anything with as much explicit passages about gay sex as this had, so it's interesting it got chosen.

I like a lot of different types of poetry— my favorite poets include Hopkins, Dambudzo Marechera, Jean Day, Prynne, Niedecker, etc— but one thing that I loathe in poems is when they engage in what has been called the ‘dilatory epiphanic,’ closed to anything except a certain interpretation and affect that the poet intends. It makes for boring work, and Vuong engages in it across much of his work.

Finished The Country Girls trilogy a few days ago, wonderful stuff but tough going, especially the third one. Would love to read more by her but maybe something featuring someone with a bit more grit - not to victim shame or blame! But Cait's helplessness and Baba's millstone grinding cynicism were hard to stick with for 600 pages.

Try her short fiction.

Will do! Forgot to mention how mad I am at Baba for fucking up Cait's life by getting her expelled.

I've been reading some Tove Jansson short stories from the selection that NYRB published as The Woman Who Borrowed Memories.

Charles Rosen - The Frontier of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music
Marguerite Duras - L'Amour

The Rosen is fantastic. NYRB should 110% collate his literary criticism, it's as good as Hardwick's. This volume are a bunch of 'informal' lectures. I suppose that could imply a conversational, chatty tone...and while they can have that dimension there is no mistaking that these pieces have as much argument as a classical piece articulates argument.

The Duras is just wonderful. She is one of the 20th century's greatest artists and you'd point to books like this when asked for evidence. Her later books are like scripts for experimental pieces of cinema (they are like her films, which are kinda unclassifiable). The fusion of cinema and literature are like nothing you'll ever read.

I recently read "Fleshmarket Close" by Ian Rankin. This is apparently one of a long-running series about a detective based in Edinburgh, Scotland. I had never read any of them - this one falls somewhere in the middle of the series, I believe, but it seems that the books are written so that no prior knowledge of the series is required. It was interesting to me to see the contrast between how the main recurring characters are handled vs everyone else. The minor characters are generally involved in some way in the crimes being investigated, ie. they are experiencing major life events and personal crises. The major characters on the other hand, the detectives, are just doing their jobs, perhaps daydreaming about retirement. Very little of consequence happens to them. Readers know and presumably like them, and their job is basically just to be themselves, to demonstrate the stable aspects of their personalities: a certain blunt irascibility, perhaps too much fondness for drink, etc.. The book ambles along at a fairly moderate pace, until near the end, when the plot strands begin to come together quickly, which gives the book some momentum into the finish. Now I'm reading "Those Who Walk Away" by Patricia Highsmith, but more on that later.

xp it's funny, I was looking for what to read next coming off the stack of detective/crime stuff I've been reading, and I have some super cool 70s hardback editions of Duras stuff I found in the Hudson Valley last year, and I reached for one and then thought...no my dude it's still summer try to keep it light, not stuff you're gonna have to get into a whole analytical mode of reading to follow. but then I grabbed an Egyptian 70s feminist novella lol

Was it Woman at Point Zero?