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

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?

no, same author though -- The Circling Song

Good post o.nate.

I have had the impression that THOSE WHO WALK AWAY might be one of Highsmith's best.

I am finding Cordwainer Smith hard to focus on so back to new Lethem in the insomniac watches of the night.

Slavoj Zizek has mentioned "Those Who Walk Away" as one of his favorites, which is how I was led to it.

for the central female minds working overtime(often, but not always, those of unnamed first-person narrators)in xpost Natalie Flattery's Show Them A Good Time, Hell isn't other people, it's (often, but not always) closer to the self, rattling hot and cold like erratic plumbing in there, is she gonna blowy Other people are greatly needed, as as objects of concern, defiance, reassurance, desire, love, seeming indifference, impression, hopefully favorable---for sure, for all of these central characters, an audience is required, but they (from one to unspecified several) can be a tough crowd---dangerous, even (some of the ones, exes), but even these last are necessary focal points, seized on, closely observed, graphically recalled in the hairline fractured innerverse, which can implode, at least temporarily?
Well, these gals are never "crushed, like matchboxes" (maybe like other things), not like one of them's friends (there are often groups of female friends), sadcore girls who "dress like widows" and who are on a certain occasion supposedly displeased with the narrator, for "not being tragic enough" and thus "detracting from their beauty" by showing up with a bunch of men, including older ones (who themselves are not properly appreciative of "my death jokes, my single girl jokes," and of her laughing at the rong time during sexual encounters)
What the hell: stability is always found, at least for a while: flags are planted. Someone recalls being almost 14 and in love with a rando who might also be the or a local serial killer, out in the bare boondocks. As per rountine, He comes to pick her up from the regular babysitting gig, as he's agreed with her father, his semi-employer to do, and asks, "Are you scared?" She's prevailed on him to watch The Exorcist with her, and (with a conviction that you shouldn't lie to the one you love), she answers indirectly, instructing him that the hellpuke all over the screen is really pea soup, that she's no dummy.

This is one of the first stories---in the last, "Not Yet The End," a grown-ass woman travels purposefully in her hoadery car(which she scored from the divorce!), that she knows people assume she lives in, but she doesn't she's also got a crappy house, by cracky, and a cool-looking cat companion named Screechy, whom she rescued from the schoolyard, when her principal threatened to eat him, feeling liberated by the end of the world---date announced, although (see title). She tells her latest unsatisfactory date (it's date night! As maybe every night is now) that she will not put up with this. He's another good audience/responder, in his crappy way, and he and we see she's got principles, dammit.

In the middle, another older woman disappoints her friends by no longer presenting her life "as a production," but going off to Paris with her long-time boyfriend-to-new-husband and his son, both of them damaged by his first wife, who has finally succeeded in self-destruction (though not before the narrator, too much the student of family documents, including photographs, is sure they've once been in silent proximity while windowshopping). She's trying to do right by the man and the boy.

There are some partially unsatisfying endings (and other bits, where Writing can make for distracting billboards or potholes, in passing), but the only one that's really a problem is actually a good one that further drains the life-as-afterlife of a successful writer and her source-material sister: in context, the ending seems to me like a set piece, gimmick maybe, climax-as anticlimax at least: which is maybe part of the point, along with, maybe, no such thing as a lowest point? Dunno, will read some more, but literature shouldn't be too easy to judge---and if I've made any of this look on-the-nose, be assured it can make for uneasy reading and re-reading, or at least not breezy.

is she gonna blow?, I meant, not "blowy" jeez sorry

What's the best critical edition of Tristram Shandy? Is Norton good? Seems to be most commonly available in library loan, but I'm willing to dig further.

and Nicole Flattery, not Natalie.

FLATTERY My feeling when I reread the stories recently was a lot of sympathy for my younger self, like, “Oh, it’s not so bad.” I feel like with your first book, you’re very conscious that you have to be impressive. I’m not as interested in impressing anyone, which I think just comes with age.

i read an old penguin english library edition of shandy which has copious (& very handy) notes and intro. also have one by some american univeristy imprint which was much less comprehensive in that regard. no idea how the norton compares.

currently reading new worlds 3. some good stories, also some not so good stories.

not sure about dilatory epiphanic (which i just googled in quotes and the only result was this thread) but i'm also an ocean vuong hater

Dow I liked your review! I think we have some overlap though for obvious reasons I felt more kinship with the characters.

Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022

I should read some of these again. That’s the beauty of short stories.

Thanks! o hell yes check this yall:

Show Them A Good Time - Nicole Flattery

These stories - eight in all, dark and complex, were easy to read but not so easy to grasp. Is that a compliment? Maybe. I liked this collection very much though. Like me, Flattery is from the Irish midlands and the landscapes she draws on in some of the stories - flat land, dead light, still suffocating air - are familiar to me, as is the mood of depression saturating everything. There’s a lot of dark humour in this collection, almost always unsettling, like hearing someone laugh behind you on a dark path. Her prose is precise in execution, with short sharp sentences, but the stories themselves are almost the opposite. They are woven in almost dreamlike ways. The title story, Show Them A Good Time, is about an almost-revealed service station that seems like purgatory and the atmosphere is very much like that of a nightmare you experience on the edge of waking up. I read it once but I want to read it again.

The main characters in these stories are all women - varying ages and backgrounds. Sometimes they are brutal, sometimes they are adrift, but they are always strangely compelling. Track, I thought, was very interesting, about a directionless woman in a relationship with a famous comedian. There are nightmarish details sprinkled casually throughout the stories, the horror of modern life is mundane and fades with time except to those who experience it directly. “The missing women of the midlands,” the 13 year old’s miscarriage, the slipping ladder - these are all details that haunted the corners of their various stories and hooked into me. She has a very strong sense of who she is and where she’s from and it’s a real pleasure to read that in a young woman’s work.

I would need to read this again, I think, but overall I enjoyed it. It’s not for everyone, but then most things aren’t.

― mardheamac (gyac), Sunday, March 27, 2022 2:54 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

Looks like it is for me, thanks!

― dow, Sunday, March 27, 2022 3:23 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

You don’t live over here, do you? I’d lend it to you if you came to an ILB FAP.

― mardheamac (gyac), Sunday, March 27, 2022 3:24 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'll look around over here, thanks for offer.

― dow, Sunday, March 27, 2022

FLATTERY My life throughout the period of writing this novel was a lot more stable than it was in my 20s, when I was writing the stories, which just felt chaotic. The move for me was just being like: I have to do this every single day. It felt way more like a job to me than the stories did.

Recently read:

Pat Long - The History of the NME (Pretty basic biography of the magazine, not really anything particularly illuminating in here)
John Rogers - This Other London (Sinclair-lite written by a guy who does really enjoyable YT videos about...walking around London. Think ley-lines only get mentioned once or twice which is impressive for A Book About Walking London)
Susannah Dickey - Common Decency (Fairly enjoyable novel about two neighbours in a Belfast block of flats - one gets obsessed with the other)
Claire Keegan - Small Things Like These (Loved this novella about an Irish coal seller's Christmas in the mid-80s, would love to read more Keegan now).

Currently rotating between:

Michael McGee - Close to Home
Megan Nolan - Ordinary Human Failings
Gerald Murnane - Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

I finished Norman Cohn's Warrant for Genocide and had realised it had been around all my life since it was first published the year I was born.
It's an interesting pretty quick read. Odd to see how much damage a pretty obvious hoax can do. But it needed to find a receptive audience which it did in the wake of the First World War. It was already having books refuting it and pointing the flaws in argument etc being printed in the 1920s. But it does seem that some people do still believe in the Protocols. There have even been supposedly supporting arguments using tnh idea that Maurice Joly who wrote Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, ou la Politique au XIXe siècle par un contemporain, was Jewish and therefore intended his work to further the conspiracy which is just absurd.

Geza Csath - Opium and Other Stories

Don't read many short stories but this is a keeper. Early 20th century Hungarian fiction has a particular vibe, a fluidity in storytelling with incredible concision, all of its own. The story of the orchestra goes through so much disappointment and a screaming sadness tinged with humour in less than 10 pages.

Elsewhere there is something akin to Poe; some very nasty, macabre tales, and as the title implies a hallucinatory quality.

The Tale Of The Fat Woodworker, Antonio Manetti - A novelized account of a supposedly true story, in which a group of friends (including Donatello and leader of the pack Brunelleschi) get angry that the titular woodworker failed to show up to one of their dinners and, as punishment, decide to gaslight him into believing that he's been Freaky Fridayed into some other bloke. This is achieved with the collaboration of many a member of Venice's upper class, including a judge who sentences him to prison for debts accrued by the other guy. Real Bullingdon Club stuff, a big part of the animus clearly being that the lowly woodworker failed to show up at a dinner featuring so many of his social Betters. The poor guy ends up moving to Hungary in shame once he finds out the truth. Manetti was a biographer of Brunelleschi; the translator's introduction suggests this was Brunelleschi's attempt to show himself a master of perspective in human as well as artistic terms and also points out the similarities to Kafka.

There's a strong sense of cruelty in a lot of Italian comedy, I've seen enough spaghetti westerns to know this, but here it's really difficult to laugh along with the poshos torturing this poor dude. Still, an interesting experience to read a 15th century Italian text that often feels like a 90's magic realist comedy (Groundhog's Day, Liar Liar, etc.)

William Shakespeare - Macbeth
Marguerite Duras - Hiroshima Mon Amour (the script for this was published as a book)

Good Lord Bird by James McBride (looking forward to the other novels based on this one)
before that, Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser (rich, promising start but enough -- contrast -- The Electric Hotel by Dominic Smith)

The Writing In The Stone Irving Finkel
Story about an Assyrian official looking for a treasure source in Ancient Mesopotamia.an attempt by a historian of the era to portray how people of the time viewed their world. A touch of the Jim Thompson in the narrator or protagonist's viewpoint on the disposabili6y of other people's human life possibly.
& trying to think if the depth of field of the narrative is similar to that in The Graduate the original novel cos it reminds me of that. Found that book to have a distinctive one like scenes seen in a snowglobe or something.
Quite a nice read I guess and a fast one.
I was a little thrown off by The complete absence of page numbers so unable to tell how far into the book I was.
I was trying to think what had directed me to this and was surprised to find out it was only a few years old cos I had thought it was from earlier before I started reading it.

Neil Gaiman View From The Cheap Seats
A set of shorter previously published pieces by the fantasy author. Several reviews and introductions to other people's works and things.
Very readable and makes me want to check out the material referenced.

Frederick Douglass is not a hero. Is changing number of verbs indiscriminately to indicate the South vs. the North rather than black vs. white a tactic or a tic? Or is it West vs. East? Or are there no vs. but just a family (un)happy in its own way?

I don’t understand your post, youn.

I finished a re-read of Guy Hocquenghem’s Homosexual Desire. Astonishing how prescient and present its analysis remains.

As told in The Good Lord Bird, the Civil War and the abolitionist movement were complicated ... North vs. South (culture), East vs. West (property), Black vs. White (slavery, history, ethnicity). The novel is a fictional account of John Brown's rebellion at Harper's Ferry.

All the verb numbers are switched, and I don't know if that is an accurate representation of how people spoke much less the pattern for different dialects.

Frederick Douglass has big hair and does not come off too well.

oh i see— yeah that’s strange about the verb conjugations!

The family (un)happy in its own way was my attempt to characterize the unique legacy of slavery in the United States; it seems to have a powerful grip even for those who want to claim a fresh start and to forget.

A couple of Hatha yoga texts:

Anon - The Shiva Samhita, tr. by James Mallinson
Shandor Remete - Shadow Yoga

i don't know if this is a relevant point abt verb numbers but someone (lol i forget who)* argued that the civil war is when "the united states are ___" became "the united states is ___"

*(i think i encountered it in garry wills's book on the gettysburg address but i don't think he came up with it and anyway it's currently in a box so i can't check)

And if slavery and racism (which I hesitate to name on account of lack of verifiability of human races as fundamentally different but is real otherwise) have carried over on a global scale exacerbated by finance and climate disasters, then is the American Dream as an extension of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the Protestant Reformation untenable?

Think you're unlikely to get any defenses of the viability of the American dream in this particular forum (thankfully).

But what I meant was trying to give up a certain notion of progress. I am not certain everyone on ILX would be willing to do so unless prepared to offer or to accept or to have confidence in a cogent alternative.

I'm reading The Bachelors, Muriel Spark. It's one of her early novels. It has many of the elements that characterize her complete body of work, such as main characters engaged in fraudulent or criminal behavior, excellent pacing and deft use of dialogue, but it doesn't quite feel like she'd hit her full stride, yet. She's still assembling her materials. Which isn't to say it's not a good novel. I don't think she was capable of writing a bad novel.

Isn’t that her very first novel? I never bothered with it since I heard she wasn’t fully formed yet as you said.

But now I am intrigued

I love reading embryonic fiction and poetry.

I finished John MacGahern's The Barracks and am about to begin Kate Masur's Until Justice Be Done.

According to Wikipedia, The Bachelors was published in 1960 as her fourth novel. As for where it stands in order of when it was originally written or at least existed in an advanced draft, I can't say. Order of publishing isn't always accurate in that way.

Oh sorry I was getting confused with The Comforters. She had already written a few good books before that one so maybe I should (re)read it. Don’t you mean her fifth novel?

Right. Fifth novel.

xxxxxxxpost youn, I would not like to give up on the ideal or idea of progress re better vaccines, for instance. Also if it means better anti-fascism, whatever that might consist of.