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

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.

November is female month, when i look back and realise I've just read men for the first 10 months and try and make amends... (it's not that bad this year)

Anne Tyler - celestial navigation
Issy Sutie - jane is trying
Ali Smith - companion piece
Shirley Jackson - haunting of hill house

Ali Smith was an extension to her Seasons quadrology and is fun and insightful and angry

Hill House is a reread and I'm 25% through and it's a classic, obv.

the first two were a bit light tbh.

(dug out my copy of Danse Macabre as well so reading the relevant bits of that alongside the Jackson)

Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives
J.L. Carr - A Mouth in the Country
Robert Glück - About Ed
Robert C. Rosbottom - When Paris went dark : the City of Light under German occupation, 1940-1944

journeys end in lovers meeting. the thing that always pops into my head in railway stations etc, it's from Hill House, which I'd forgotten.

(originally from twelfth night)

forgot one - Ariadne by Jennifer Saint. another Greek myth retold

What did you make of the Carr, Alfred? I am going to dig into Bob’s new one when the semester ends, too

let's fucking go you miserable bastards

https://i.imgur.com/9CwsYmO.jpg

What Iris Murdoch should I start with??

What did you make of the Carr, Alfred? I am going to dig into Bob’s new one when the semester ends, too

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table)

The Carr? Mildly dull. I liked most of About Ed.

Oh man. Love A Month in the Country, sorry you found it dull!

A Month in the Country is perfect!

I read Héctor Tobar's *Deep Down Dark* about the Chilean mining disaster. I've started Richard Holmes' monster biography of Shelley but not sure I have the stamina.

v belated answer to fizzles (long after he needs it; long after others have decoded it accurately) re "the road is up"

i: yes, i have encountered this now and then -- very possibly in early 20th century crime fiction (wimsey etc)
ii: i had half-reasoned (i.e. w/o applying much genuine thought and no research) that somehow it derived from the era of e.g. plank roads and such, where the surface would be something you could lift up and lean at the side when digging holes was necessary? (not that plank roads were ever much of a phenomenon in the uk as far as i know)
iii: … at the unreasoning edge of my mind i also had the notion that a safety barrier in front of a roadworks was somehow like the drawbridge being up
iv: "it's been dug up" makes much more sense but i don't think i ever got that far

Oh man. Love A Month in the Country, sorry you found it dull!

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Friday, December 1, 2023 9:21 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

A Month in the Country is perfect!

I usually love mid-century UK/Irish fiction (Pym, Bowen, Taylor, etc.) or the same fiction set in the early to mid-century.

I’m almost done with Henderson the Rain King. I would rate it as lesser Bellow. This may be a terrible thing to say but I think Bellow is more fun to read in his cranky, misanthropic mode. I’m not really sure what he was trying to accomplish with this sort of Joseph Campbell slash The Golden Bough type of exploration of myth, ritual and archetype; lots of it is less compelling to me than he seems to find it. And after Henderson arrives in Africa, the laughs get fewer and further between as Henderson becomes less of a satirical antihero and more of a straightforward hero.

I finished A Gambler's Anatomy, Lethem. I can't say I loved it, but it was weirdly compelling because he writes so vividly, creates an unfamiliar but convincingly detailed world, and he kept driving the story and characters ahead at a hard pace in unpredictable directions. Those were its virtues.

My eventual difficulties with it were fairly central. Lethem seemed to know exactly what he wanted to write about but his main interest in the book wasn't the story or the characters. Those existed as throwaways, just contrivances that allowed him to write about his real interest, which was stitching together two extremely specialized worlds: high stakes backroom gambling on backgammon and a particularly exotic branch of neurosurgery. Once he'd accomplished this virtuoso feat in the first half of the book, he just sort of winged it for the remainder and let the characters collide rather aimlessly until they reached a dead end.

Front Lines, Juliet Jacques - Compilation of her journalism. Was expecting it to be much more of a chronicling of the UK's descent into terf island, but it doesn't really get too granular on that, good for my blood pressure. The early pieces really drive home how much has changed, both in terms of vocabulary but also of things that now seem obvious still needing so much explaining at the time. It also gets a bit repetitive - Jacques herself in the foreword makes a joke about there being a potential drinking game here where you take a swig every time Sandy Stone's "The 'Empire' Strikes Back" gets namedropped. I really enjoyed an essay on being stuck in a train with some fellow footie supporters and having to negotiate all the conflicting impulses - did they clock she's trans, will it code too male if she gets deep into the trivia, will she be reinforcing sexism if she pretends she just knows a few names. Also, lots of good stuff about queer groups in Eastern Europe and sundry trans and queer artists.

Mystery Of The Yellow Room, Gaston Leroux - Book club pick. Fine as far as this kind of thing goes - gotta admit that if you start including maps of the building in order to further detail your mystery you've lost me, I just don't care enough about the whodunnit - but fascinating to me due to an unfortunate purchase: local bookstore said it was only available in hardcover, and when I went to pick it up...it turned out to be one of those shoddy jobs ILX's own James Morrison sometimes details, with the cover clearly a GIS result for yellow + room. Anyway as someone who's used to a Criterion/NYRB/Fantagraphics mode of cultural consumption I actually found it quite novel to read something where the original text has NOT been lovingly treated. Turned out to not be too bad, though the translation was clearly done by someone better at French than English - thus the detective asking that nothing in the room "be deranged", for example. Aside from that, only one other note of the bizarre - an observation that was clearly supposed to be a translator's note just showing up in the middle of the text, letting the reader that "in the original translation" the word was translated into killed but you can safely use murdered. Ok!

I have a nice hardcover reprint of Mystery of the Yellow Room, part of a facsimile series from 'the Collins Crime Club'. Appears to be the original 1909 (uncredited) English language translation. An introduction notes that Hercule Poirot enthuses about Yellow Room in the 1963 mystery The Clocks, so I'm guessing it was a formative favourite of Christie's too. Talking of whom, I'm also a sucker for secondhand copies of those Christie first edition hardcover facsimiles that Collins issued in the last decade or so - some great covers, Christie p much always had good covers on her bks, h/c and s/c - an underestimated part of her appeal imho.

Maps are p much as fundamental to the whodunnit as they are to the fantasy epic.