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

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.

I finally finished Dostoyevsky's The Idiot which took me a long time to read. I was enthralled at times and completely lost at others. The ending was great though.

I've now picked up Little Dorrit again after putting it down for a year and I've started War & Peace. I'm hoping to make good progress over Winter.

I've also read a bunch of Simenon's Maigrets recently - quite fun!

I’ve started reading book 5 of Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Jon Fosse, of recent Nobel fame, makes an early appearance as one of his writing instructors.

I've bought Jon Fosse's The Other Name: Septology I-II as an audiobook but haven't listened to it yet.

As part of my book club (now in its 29th year!) I read Tan Twang Eng's Book of Doors, a fictional account of W. Somerset Maugham's year in Penang on the Malay Peninsula in 1920-1921.

It was fine. My 10 book club compatriots overall voted it as the third best of the 8 books we read together and discussed in 2023 (following Tom Crewe's The New Life and Aleksandar Hemon's The World and All That It Holds. My favorite was Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

I'm currently splitting my reading each evening. First I read some of the recent new translation of Homer's Iliad from Emily Watson. After which I read some poems from Wsilawa Szymborska's Poems New and Collected: 1957-1997 for some lighter fare before trying to sleep.

Emily Wilson! serves me right for relying on my memory

And while you are it, make sure you also fix in your mind that her father is A.N. Wilson and not, say, Angus Wilson.

Though I did take a months-long break because it was depressing me too much, I finally finished a re-read of Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Here is one of the final pieces in the book, which is particularly pertinent given the current world situation.

Come off it. – The critique of the tendencies of contemporary society is automatically countered, before it is fully expressed, by saying that things have ever been so. The excitement thereby so promptly abjured, testifies merely to the lack of insight into the invariance of history – to an unreason, which proudly diagnoses everyone as hysterical. Moreover, the critic’s attacks are said to be merely hamming it up for the gallery, a means of claiming special privileges, while whatever they are nonetheless upset about is well known and trivial, so that no-one can be expected to waste their attention on such. The evidence of the calamity comes to benefit its apologists: because everyone knows everything, no-one is supposed to say anything, and it may then continue unchallenged, hidden by silence. What is affirmed is what philosophies of all political stripes have trumpeted into the heads of human beings: that whatever has the persistent gravity of existence on its side, is thereby right. One need only be dissatisfied to be already suspected of being a global dreamer (Weltverbesserer). The consensus employs the trick of ascribing to opponents a reactionary thesis of decay, which is untenable – for is not horror in fact perennial? – by discrediting the concrete insight into the negative through its alleged failure of thought, and those who rise up against the shadow, are maligned as agents of the shadow. But even if things were ever so, although nonetheless neither Timur nor Genghis Khan nor the British colonial administration of India deliberately burst the lungs of millions of human beings with poison gas, then the eternity of horror is revealed by the fact that each of its new forms outbids the older ones. What endures is no invariant quantum of suffering, but of its progress towards hell: that is the meaning of the talk about the growth of antagonisms. Any other kind would be innocuous and would pass over into mediating phrases, the renunciation of the qualitative leap. Those who register the death-camps as a minor accident in the victory procession of civilization, the martyrdom of the Jews as world-historically insignificant, do not merely fall behind the dialectical insight, but invert the meaning of one’s own politics: of stopping the extremity. Quantity recoils into quality, not only in the development of the productive forces, but also in the increase of the pressure of domination. If the Jews are exterminated as a group, while the society continues to reproduce the life of workers, then the comment that these former are bourgeois and their destiny unimportant to the larger dynamic, turns into economic spleen, even insofar as mass murder is in fact explicable by the decline of the profit-rate. The horror consists of the fact that it always remains the same – the continuation of “prehistory” – but unremittingly realizes itself as something different, something unforeseen, overwhelming all expectations, the faithful shadow of the developing productive forces. The same duality applies to violence, which the critique of political economy pointed out in material production: “There are determinations common to all stages of production, which are generally fixed by thought, but the so-called universal conditions of all production are nothing but... abstract moments, by which no real stage of production can be understood.” (Marx, Grundrisse, page 88) In other words, to abstract out what is historically unchanged is not neutral towards the matter , by virtue of its scientific objectivity, but serves, even where it is on target, as a fog in which what is tangible and assailable disappear. This latter is precisely what the apologists do not wish to concede. On the one hand they are obsessed by the dernière nouveauté (French: latest novelty) and on the other hand they deny the infernal machine, which is history. One cannot bring Auschwitz into analogy with the destruction of the Greek city-states in terms of a mere gradual increase of horror, regarding which one preserves one’s peace of mind. Certainly, the martyrdom and degradation suffered by those in the cattle-cars, completely without precedent, casts a harsh, deathly light on the most distant past, in whose obtuse and unplanned violence the scientifically organized kind was already teleologically at work. The identity lies in the non-identity, in what has not yet been, which denounces what has been. The statement that it’s always been the same, is untrue in its immediacy, true only through the dynamic of the totality. Whoever allows the cognition of the increase of horror to escape them, does not merely fall prey to cold-hearted contemplation, but fails to recognize, along with the specific difference of what is newest from what has gone before, simultaneously the true identity of the whole, of horror without end