I'm in Love With Books and I Feel Fine! What Are You Reading in Autumn 2023?

Oh yeah, Stephen King held the spotlight on The Doll... in the Ramsey Campbell section of Danse Macabre. He said he thought The Parasite was "better," but---also good comments by Campbell in reply to King's letter (also memorable responses of Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Peter Straub, James Herbert, and Harlan Ellison. Shirley Jackson was already gone, but King brings cogent quotes re writing of The Haunting of Hill House from her "Experience and Fiction.")

Re-read Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets, a book which I lost in the move from west to east coast and which I found myself wanting to take a look at this fall. Since her passing last year, it has become enormously expensive, but I bought a copy as a birthday gift to myself.

Really an astonishing book, so full of radical enjambments and fervid utopic thinking that it really feels sui generis, truly one of a kind.

Ilan Pappe Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Horror story of the destruction of Arabic Palestine with tolerance of multiple faiths to make way for the state of Israel. Told by expat Israeli academic.
I wasn't very familiar with the story of the Nakba prior to this. Am now a bit more so but want to read more.

Elizabeth Badinter The Myth of Motherhood.
French feminist looks at history of attitude to what constituted motherhood in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Pretty scathing. Glad that Rousseau cropped up at the right time if this is to be believed.
Thinks well written and translated.
Think it dates from around 1980.

Richard Morton Jack Nick Drake
Great in depth history of the introvert singer. I've got as far as the summer before him going to Cambridge.
He's spent time in Southern France and got notably good on guitar

Myth Of Motherhood is v good but be aware Badinter took a sharp islamophobic turn later on.

nice try, sly dow, but you can't tempt me to read any more stephen king, not after i've already read howevermany dozen of his books and

jfc his tics

gotten wise to his

seriously this is so obnoxious

writerly affectations (tho he does generally seem to be a solid dude, and the responses by the other authors do sound intriguing... dagnabbit fine maybe i will finally check out danse macabre)

yeah but anyway for reasons obscure to me i'm now on The Ceremonies by T.E.D. Klein even though i think i hate it

in particular there's a bit where a mennonite-ish guy thinks lustily of his wife "naked as old mother Eve" and i fear it may be some time before i can wipe that blotch from the carpet of my mind palace

I finished that book about the Holy Roman Empire and Ottoman Empire in the early part of the sixteenth century. Because the author limited himself for the most part to relating facts it didn't at all support the idea of some grand wrestling match between Christianity and Islam. One galling detail was that in his afterword the author confidently writes as if the book I had just read actually did support the 'clash of civilization" bromides. Nope.

Basically it told an old story of a bunch of autocratic rulers seeking incremental gains of power, cleverly lying to each other, waging stupid little wars that kept trading the same territories back and forth, or grandiose wars of conquest that failed to conquer much. On the fringes of all this idiocy was Martin Luther, a shameless egoist, stirring up trouble to no good end. Whatever religious faith or civilization mean, they don't mean the hot mess that this book described.

xxxpost yeah cat, as said on Rolling Speculative, I had to get used to King's writing all over again, especially his big frisky Cujo-breath romps of enthusiasm, but he does know his genre, with digressions and joekyness to minimum in the section about works ov Campbell et al, and authors' comments are noteworthy, esp. Bradbury's.

I'm reading The Gendered Brain by Gina Rippon. I wouldn't say it's required reading, she spends at least as much time going over territory I'm already familiar with from other neuroscience books, as she does in deconstructing gender myths. The main message seems to be that studies that show gender differences in the brain are often low quality, highly selective, or unreplicated; studies that confirm the null hypothesis (no differences) are, as usual, less likely to be published; any genuine differences are population level, often with 90% or more overlap between populations; and finally and most importantly the brain is highly plastic and it's impossible to disentangle the influence of our highly gendered/sexist society.

Cordelia Fine's Delusions Of Gender does something similar with regards to the idea of "biological" early childhood differences

good title!

I attempted to give The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen a go, but had to ditch it at the 1/4 point. Tbh I was wrestling with the urge to give up on it practically since the first pages. Ostensibly a comic novel, I just didn't find it very funny. And minus humor there wasn't much other reason to keep reading about basically uninteresting characters doing uninteresting things.

Next up is Henderson The Rain King, a Bellow which I haven't read before. Not to beat a dead horse, but I've had more genuine laughs in the first 10 pages than in the 160 pages of The Corrections.

Fascinating. I found Henderson as funny as a truck, but this might be my problem with late Bellow.

1959 is late Bellow? But yes, maybe my least favourite of his and probably reads as a p racist text now (I slogged my way through it 30 plus years ago, so can't actually remember much about it now, other than that it was a chore rather than a pleasure).

No noticeable racism as of yet, except when the narrator remarks that a hotel he stayed at was so fancy that it didn't admit Jews, although clearly this is meant ironically.

I'm currently reading another Ross MacDonald, The Far Side of the Dollar. It moves swiftly.

I wish I'd read *Red Harvest* in one or two sittings because, in the end, I lost my way with the plot (sort of the point, I guess) and just held on for the ride. The body count in the book is kind of astonishing, almost approaching farce.

The emptiness of the subjectivity in the novel is interesting to me. Right there at the birth of a genre the sense of a character who is pure action, pure verb, driven by an urge to finish the job, to *solve* (to loosen), and whose motivation remains forever clouded - it's right there, fully (un)formed. I'm sure there are hundreds of PhDs about it but I'd love to read more about its genesis.

This of course doesn't nearly explain what he did with the material, but as wiki points out:

The story is narrated by the Continental Op, a frequent character in Hammett's fiction, much of which is drawn from his own experiences as an operative of the Pinkerton Detective Agency (fictionalized as the Continental Detective Agency).[2] The plot follows the Op's investigation of several murders amid a labor dispute in a corrupt Montana mining town. Some of the novel was inspired by the Anaconda Road massacre, a 1920 labor dispute in the mining town of Butte, Montana.[3]

...One Man, Two Guvnors (a play featuring James Corden) is an adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s 1745 comedy Servant of Two Masters (orig: Arlecchino servitore di due padrone, or Harlequin Servant of Two Masters), relocated to 1960s Brighton.
When Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars was a smash in Italy in the fall of 1964, Leone’s work came to the attention of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Leone had used Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai movie Yojimbo (The Bodyguard) as the entire basis for his plot, with some (very) minor differences. Leone received a letter from Kurosawa, pointing out that ‘I have just seen your film. It is a very fine film, but it is my film’. Kurosawa claimed copyright infringement and demanded payment. Leone, clutching at straws, discovered that both Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars bore a passing resemblance to Goldoni’s play. After some negotiation, Kurosawa and co. were allowed exclusive distribution rights to A Fistful of Dollars in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, plus 15% of the worldwide box office. It’s now been established that both Yojimbo and Fistful were influenced by numerous sources, including Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (titled Piombo e sangue, or ‘Lead and blood’ in Italy) and the western-set Corkscrew.

Judge for yourself who borrowed what from where:

A Fistful of Dollars

Yojimbo

Servant of Two Masters

Red Harvest

Corkscrew

: Once Upon a Time in the Italian West: The Filmgoers’ Guide to Spaghetti Westerns and Cinema Italiano: The Complete Guide from Classics to Cult published by I.B. Tauris

Oscar and Lucinda again, finally. I first thought about rereading about a year ago. So much prose from this lives in my mind but none more so than this:

“Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier. We bet–it is all in Pascal and very wise it is too…we bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it. We calculate the odds, the return, that we shall sit with the saints in paradise. Our anxiety about our bet will wake us before dawn in a cold sweat. We are out of bed and on our knees, even in the midst of winter. And God sees us, and sees us suffer. And how can this God, a God who sees us at prayer beside our bed…I cannot see,” he said, “that such a God, whose fundamental requirement of us is that we gamble our mortal souls, every second of our temporal existence…It is true! We must gamble every instant of our allotted span. We must stake everything on the unprovable fact of His existence.”

…”That such a God,” said Oscar, “knowing the anguish and the trembling hope with which we wager…That such a God can look unkindly on a chap wagering a few quid on the likelihood of a dumb animal crossing the line first, unless…unless–and no one has ever suggested such a thing to me–it might be considered blasphemy to apply to common pleasure that which is by its very nature divine.”

And this, too, about Oscar’s father, a fierce Plymouth Brethren minister who is also a naturalist:

Wardley-Fish had an impression of a killjoy, love-nothing, a man you could not send a birthday present to in case he smelt the racetrack on it, a man who would snatch a little Christmas pudding from a young boy's mouth. But where he might have expected to find a stern and lifedenying spirit, he found such a trembling and tender appreciation of hedgerow, moss, robin, and the tiniest of sea creatures that even Wardley-Fish (it was he who thought the "even") was impressed and moved.

Leaning against the counter at Martindale's with all the heavy physical awkwardness of a fellow waiting for his wife at the milliner's, he read this passage: "the pretty green Ploycera ocellata was numerous; but the most abundant, and at the same time most lovely species was the exquisite Eolis coronata, with tentacles surrounded by membranous coronets, and with crowded clusters of papillae, of crimson and blue that reflect the most gemlike radiance."

Now Wardley-Fish thought himself a man's man, steeped in brandy and good cigars, and if expediently-he had renounced the racecourse, he had no intention of abandoning the hunt, which he still rode to at Amersham whenever it was possible. Further, he imagined himself stupid. He had been told so long enough, and had this not been his father's opinion also, he would never have been pushed into a life as a clergyman. His early wish had been to study law, but he was told he had not the brain for it. He had not questioned this assessment and had therefore decided, whilst still at Oriel, that he could only hope to advance himself through connections, the most effective of which would be made through marriage.

He claimed to have no ear for poetry or music and yet he was moved-it nearly winded him-by the elder Hopkins's prose. Where he had expected hellfire and mustard poultice, he found maidenhair and a ribbon of spawn. "I found the young were perfectly formed, each enclosed by a globular egg, perfectly transparent and colourless."

To be able to feel these things, to celebrate God's work in such a lovely hymn, Wardley-Fish would have given everything and anything. He felt, in these simple, naturalist’s descriptions, what he had never felt—what he should have felt—in the psalm beginning “I will extol thee, my God, O King; and I will bless Thy name for ever and ever.”

Thanks for giving me the necessary nudge.

I'm reading The Jokers, by Albert Cossery, who was born in Cairo in 1913 to a Greek Orthodox family and wrote his novels in French. This one is set in an unnamed middle eastern city by the Mediterranean. It's short, cynical and dances on the edge of nihilism. My copy is an NYRB edition, translated by Anna Moschovakis. This one is not in my wheelhouse, as the saying goes, but It's good to get out my wheelhouse from time to time.

Gotta keep your shoulder to the wheel.

finishing up Chateaubriand's memoirs after having read "the adventures of sherlock holmes" last month for the first time

unsure what i'll read in december but have a list a mile long as usual

Oh I did read xxxxxpost At Swim-Two-Birds, thanks yall for the rec (re place to start w Flann/Myles). The only parts that properly amazed me, given this book's acclaim, were the mad lost king Sweeney's succinct laments, checking in to sing updates on his suffering, having spent last night perched on a high branch in the deep woods, for instance. The way he balances imagery on meter, resigned and yet not---or he wouldn't keep showing up: he's sad, not depressed---seems classical in the best sense. Not knowing a better Irish reference, I think of it as Yeatsian, in the best sense, though seems to draw on whatever Yeats drew on.
And there's some echo of this in the suffering of the author of the book within the book (etc.), whose characters have risen against the oppression of his shit writing: not because he expresses it like Sweeney, but because he's not learning the error of his ways, because the violence against him seems (and is) futile.

Also, got a chuckle about cowboy hack characters getting hassled by rustlers from another book---all in Ireland, of course---otherwise, as the narrator's pal replies whenever the narrator goes on in an un-Sweeney-like way, the rest of these crowded, very talky halls-within-walls are "all my bum."

But I wouldn't mind reading some more if I come across it, and may make The Third Policeman my next library system loan request.

Definitely read The Third Policeman. I need to reread that too.

A pint of plain is your only man.

Yu Miri - The End of August. A 700 page book around the Korean experience in Japan/parts of East Asia, roughy from the '20s through to World War, touching onto the present day. Centers around the author's family, and her marathon-running grandfather, who pretty much ran through life though the peak of the book is a train journey in the last third of the book, undertaken by one of the women in it. Lots of striking writing around food, and the way prayer is incorporated in the language of the book.

And the many deaths, as well as many births!

I'm reading Zadie Smith's The Fraud at my wife's request, she was finding it quite oblique and wanted my opinion. Well, here's how we find out - with so far very little other supporting evidence or confirmation - that the lead character and her cousin's wife have become lovers (the two things referred to at the start are, as far as i can make out, 'a home of women and girls at ease with one another' and the husband's continued absence):

One thing permitted and made possible the other, even if the logic was too shrouded, too mysterious to penetrate. Like a finger. Like two penetrating fingers. Like two fingers penetrating a flower. In complete, candleless darkness. As if the fingers and the flower were not separate but one, and so incapable of meaning the one against the other. Two fingers entering a bloom not unlike the wild ones in the hedgerow – layered like those, with the same overlapping folds – yet miraculously warm and wet, pulsing, made of flesh. Like a tongue. Like the bud of a mouth. Like another bud, apparently made for a tongue, lower down.

Doesn’t seem that oblique to me

Goodbye Columbus

Always meant to read this! So enjoyable. Roth writing in his early 20s - the voice is already so developed and confident - frightening.

That's just Zadie trying to avoid the normal pitfalls around writing a sex scene and instead getting more of a faux Victorian orientalism mashup.

Thomas Bernhard - Gargoyles. Not one to start with, though it's really interesting to see the great man developing his technique as this book culminates in a thirty page paragraph of bile.

William Shakespeare - Julius Caesar

hi gyac, your presentation of Oscar and Lucinda (which I think local library still has, will check tomorrow) has me wondering if you've read Marilynne Robison's Gilead? If you like that, check the follow-ups---Alfred didn't approve the last/latest, Jack, but is sadly rong.

Marilynne *Robinson*, that is.

Racing through Bernhard's Woodcutters - every other attempt I've made at Bernhard (Extinction, The Loser, Old Masters) has fallen by the wayside about 20 pages in, but Woodcutters is really doing it for me.

Footnotes in Gaza Joe Sacco
Collection of comics from early 00ieswhere American cartoonist depicts his trip to Palestine. This time he's an accredited journalist and he's looking for information for a story on a massacre in 1956.

Fair Future Wolfgang Sachs
Book on resources distribution and ethics.
Gets a little technical but only a little.& isn't overly dry.
Based on information gathered in Germany so that's where the statistics come from.
Decent translation.

Nick Drake Richard Morton Jack.
Very good detailed biography of introvert acoustic artist. I've got as far as him getting to University in Cambridge.
I should be concentrating on it more but am reading a stack of things at the same time.
Well will get through rest of it over couple of weeks after I get back to Galway.

I am almost straight in the middle of Jed Rasula’s American Poetry Wax Museum, and I wish the pinefox were here so that we could talk about this passage regarding Robert Lowell:


“Lowell's work is compulsively fascinating precisely because it takes on the waxwork character of the freak show, the exhibit of a human life assuming monstrous pro-portions. What is "monstrous," I should clarify, comes from the root monstrum and monere, portent and warning: Lowell warns us, by self-exhibition, of the pitfalls of life lived on a pedestal, in the show-case; life as continual self-dramatization; poetry as public monument. His celebrated jawbreaker lines have an integrity that detaches them from the very poems they inhabit, bringing to mind Albert Speer's penchant for designing Third Reich buildings for the elegance of the rubble that would eventually be left of them.”

Rasula, via other critics as well as his own incisive wit, gets down what I dislike so much about Lowell’s poems— they often feel as if brokered between an image of what a poem should be and what the poem actually is, flattened and unyielding in their flatness.

In any case, any who are interested in post-war poetic culture and politics in the US should read this book— it is fascinating and quite funny at moments, too.

He had me until the Speer comparison.

Lowell inspired so many better poets that I gotta wonder how they didn't peck out letters to each other with "Cal sucks, doesn't he lol" at the top.

They did!

I'm intrigued -- who and what else is covered in American Poetry Wax Museum?

Alfred-

“Oscillating between documentary and polemic, The American Poetry Wax Museum is a study of the canonizing assumptions and obsessions that animate postwar American poetry. Highly public literary controversies, such as the Pound affair of 1949, or the anthology wars of the early 1960s, are chronicled in a precise, detailed, and theoretically inflected account redefines the project of literary history. Rasula's analysis moves from the of New Criticism, through the ascendancy of Robert Lowell and confessional poetics, into the current period of multiculturalism and the avant-garde provocations of the language poets. Drawing upon an impressive array of sources—ranging from the history of museum display to the institutional and cultural processes by which American poets have been canonized—Rasula combines literary criticism, cultural studies, and social history in an analysis that works to disrupt prevailing myths about poets and poetry in the public sphere and in the academy. This innovative and irreverent book…will be an important resource not only for scholars of the period but for writers and teachers of poetry as well.
It stands as an invitation for all of us to consider what it means to assemble and police a national canon of poetry.”

A friend recommended it because we were talking about poets no one reads anymore and the false economy of “visibility “— he brought up Peter Viereck, whom no one except a very few have ever heard of, but who won the Pulitzer in 1949 and a Guggenheim a while after that. Rasula’s book helps explain who and what has been canonized and why… and some of the details are pretty damning.

Sold! My uni library doesn't carry it, alas.

I think of people like Muriel Rukeyser and Karl Shapiro.

Shapiro is especially prominent

I finally finished The Jokers, Albert Cossery, but it was (for me) rather a dud, which is unusual for an NYRB edition; they're normally pretty reliable for me. This novel felt didactic in intent and sadly sophomoric, displaying the laziness in thought and execution that often springs from overconfidence in one's innate brilliance. Too bad. It did have the virtue of a setting in a culture that is underrepresented in English translation.

Now I'm reading A Gambler's Anatomy, a Jonathan Lethem novel from 2016.

^, ^^ Have you read any of the "bake-off" books of Robert Peters?

(xxxxpost--re: Lowell and other waxed p.s)
When I finally got the nerve to show Gert my poetry, she stood up, clapped me on the shoulders, and said, "Pablo, go home and paint!" So I did, and boy was I glad. See, that was constructive criticism, guys.

The Fraud was not that good. Full of research, you could go down all sorts of rabbit holes if you wanted - the once popular and now forgotten William Ainsworth Harrison (I thought at first he was a fictional version of a typical 19th century author) plus Dickens, Thackeray, Cruickshank and others; slavery, the abolition movement and slave revolts; the Tichborne claimant; the corn laws, the Cato Street Conspiracy, land reform, the rights of women... but it was all very slight and unengaging. At least it was a quick read, most chapters were only 3-4 pages so you couldn't get bogged down.

Another one from the bottom of the library stack: Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Classs, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. Recommended by the same deceased relative who recommended The Elegant Universe. Maybe a little out of date now, but I think still worth reading, as an examination of how, starting in the 70s, the U.S. political system was turned so completely to the service of the very wealthiest.