Nothing Doting Living Loving: What Are You Reading In The Winter of 2023-24?

I have to confess to enjoying A Feast of Snakes. It definitely sits in the guilty pleasures bin.

I don't like to dismiss Major Novelists out of hand, so I'm picking that one up on Sunday.

It's my turn to host book club, and I have picked a book recommended by my brother: _Chain-Gang All-Stars_, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. It looks to be a near-future dystopia in which inmates of the private prison system fight to the death for a chance at release. Very solid reviews.

I barely get time to read but just finished Babel by RF Kuang - anyone read it? Think I was expecting more from it and it began to seriously annoy me. But, guess it kept me reading.

I barely get time to read but just finished Babel by RF Kuang - anyone read it? Think I was expecting more from it and it began to seriously annoy me. But, guess it kept me reading.

I was really disappointed by it (it had been highly recommended to me), for roughly the reasons here: https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2023/07/02/the-fall-of-the-tower/

i quit it after like 100 pages

It was like someone has tried to crowbar 2020s online discourse into the mouths of 1800s Oxford students and it felt so off even though I appreciate the actual positions of the characters. (The most minor, yet most jarring to me in some ways, was one of them declaring a dessert was supposed to be "sticky toffee pudding" which might sound like a jolly old traditional English pudding but is far more recent! like if they'd talked about Cheesecake Factory!). For a book about language, the way they spoke was bizarre.

I really loved the idea of how the magic 'works' but it had hardly changed the world apart from making existing things more efficient.

I should say a friend of mine who is not white found it really nailed some of his experiences of talking about nations of "Brown" people with white people.

I finished *The Age of Innocence*. Obviously the word 'perfect' is overused but well, sometimes it's the only thing that will do. It left me sobbing my poor ragged heart out.

Oh that sounds exactly my thing. Will see if we have it

It's quite well done

A model of decorum there, Alfred.

There's that feeling that you only really get with novels that you're in the presence of an intelligence so vast and refined that it's like being known.

It's 'how many 'thats' can you fit into a sentence', Saturday.

Wharton's one of my favorite novelists.

1) What should I read next? and 2) do I dare watch the Scorcese film?

The House of Mirth. You'll feel the noose tightening around your neck.

The Scorsese film is one of his best.

I haven't tried any xxxp Harry Crews novels yet, but his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place is amazingly good. Tough-minded teacher Mary Karr, in The Art of Memoir, says she's partial to it, while noting how it breaks some of her rules, and greatly prefers it to his fiction, likewise Casey Cep, in an astute New Yorker presentation. Those who do like the novels usually mention A Feast of Snakes first.

xp I thought the film version of The House of Mirth was quite good as well. Gillian Anderson is underappreciated as an actor.

Yeah, I thought it was good when first released, haven't seen it since, would like to.
Here's what I said about xp AC on a WAYR? thread last year:

In A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, the earliest memory of Harry Crews is of waking up under a tree with his excellent dog Sam, both of them in early morning sunlight: he's a sleepwalker who's hit it lucky, in and out of place. The place, into which he now centered by tobacco farming, is late 30s Bacon County, Georgia, sometimes extending across the St. Mary's River into Jacksonville, Florida's Springfield Section of tiny shotgun row houses and cigar factories, with the youngest children, like himself, left to their own devices.
In Bacon and the Section, he's the mostly the audience, including that of the glossy people in the Sears Roebuck catalog, so fantastically intact, unlike almost every one else he sees, that they must have wounds under their clothes: he and his friend Willalee and Willalee's grandmother, Auntie.a self-proclaimed conjure woman and ex-slave, tell each other stories about the Sears people: the audience continuing through the creative process.
Little Crews also responds and is responded and susceptible to an increasing number of people, becoming "a parade" of vistors to his bedroom, when he's confined with "infantile paralysis" (nice work, Dr. Colombo). Many of these are people he knows or recognizes---though not the faith healer from the next county---in a new context, with him more an audience than ever, but for their attentions. Scary, especially when Auntie
s dropping knowledge, though things were already disturbing enough, hence the sleepwalking, and now he feels in place (for one thing, he can't wake up in a dark field, because he can't get there).
The second session is even better: almost boiled alive, he now qualifies for actual treatment, by drying light and soothing spray (which becomes a protective coating) while he's under a protective shell, which he compares to the top of a carriage, with his Sears Roebuck Catalog and a tablet for his detective novel, about a boy detective who carries fireworks for protection. He's also allowed to keep an attentive baby goat in there---all things for the twice-struck child---
Before, in between, and after these confinements, he can disappear like a tiny Ishmael, one whose reappearances become more self-revealing, traced in and out of place, for keeps---spoiler of sorts: a mind-fuck evangelist appears, an alibi of sorts for very bad child Crews deed, but a plausible one, as far as he goes, which is pretty far, in a professional way. Even I, Boomer suburbanite, was singed by one during a brief primary school encounter, while preschool Crews and his crew get the extended treatment, as isolation's captive audience.
There are what I take to be fictional outcroppings, but not much to stumble over. He learns from the stories of men (character-driven, funny) and women (action, cutting the surface)--the former told while taking a break, the latter not so much.

“the house of mirth” is extraordinary

“the leopard”, which I finished today, was also extraordinary

^^ otm

I'm about halfway into A Lost Lady, Willa Cather. There's still time for a change of direction, but so far it tilts toward romantic sentimentality in a way that is uncharacteristic of Cather.

My suspicion is that this is partly due to a technical issue, where she fails to adequately disentangle and distinguish between her own omniscient/objective narrative voice and a narrative perspective strongly tethered to one of her central character's point of view. Cather is usually very intentional about such technical nuances, so this apparent leakage of romance into the 'omniscient voice' passages is puzzling to me.

The Leopard is amazing. Whole scenes whirl in dusty corridors of my mind.

I read (or, rather, listened to) Steven Price's novel about Lampedusa's writing of The Leopard, called (not surprisingly) Lampedusa. Now I have to read the source material.

I'm about halfway into A Lost Lady, Willa Cather. There's still time for a change of direction, but so far it tilts toward romantic sentimentality in a way that is uncharacteristic of Cather.

My suspicion is that this is partly due to a technical issue, where she fails to adequately disentangle and distinguish between her own omniscient/objective narrative voice and a narrative perspective strongly tethered to one of her central character's point of view. Cather is usually very intentional about such technical nuances, so this apparent leakage of romance into the 'omniscient voice' passages is puzzling to me.

Oh, wow, interesting. The narrative framing reminded me of The Great Gatsby's, where the distance b/w us and Gatsby works in the novel's favor; it deepens his mystery.

Here's a recent piece on Crews: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/04/a-childhood-is-one-of-the-finest-memoirs-ever-written

I should note that Penguin Classics has reissued some of those hard-to-find novels.

Yeah, that's the Cep coverage I xxxposted, glad to see it's not paywalled, thanks!
Late last night, wanting to be done it with it, I finished my first Portis, The Dog of the South. I can see how his deadpan, constantly active, funky panoramas suited the Coens, who declared their True Grit straight from the book, w/o bothering to watch the John Wayne version. And this might be a good movie too, though on the page it gets monotonous to me, with the same affects, especially via the motormouth monologues of self-justifying seekers, finders, who just keep a-goin', frequently on the shady side---I admit it's also a tad close to home, coming from several directions, but mainly drone-y, despite all the bumps, breakdowns and more turns ahead. Good choice of narrator,though: a determined driver and straight man for others, also naive, relatively innocent, conservative, if a bit crazed/compulsive, and can see maybe why his wife took off, somewhut starved,
I will read True Grit at some point, but how does A Dog... compare to his others? Should I keep-a goin' with any of them?

Yes, "affects," not "effects": in this case, the way I read it and feel about it: downtempo, despite the pace of the predictably colorful, crinkled road reports.

The poem "To Elsie" by Wm. Carlos Williams is my touchstone for understanding the characters and stories Portis wanted to get down on paper. It's online here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46485/to-elsie

totally ripped off beethoven imo

doesn't everyone sooner or later?

Water Closet Williams shoulda stopped after the first line, which is classick quote-bait, but after all who among us is that pure, and I don't think peasant traditions would help Portis characters, who are more decent (at least in the sense that a meal or an overcoat can be decent) than the rest of that, as are some Williams (he wrote better fiction than poetry, I now think). Portis seems closer to Sherwood Anderson (on the road, not in Winesburg, as far as they'd care to know).

they=Portis/Dog of the Southpeople. (I shouldn't generalize too freely, having only read the one book.)

Wharton musings this morning. I sometimes think of a thing Wallace Stevens said (particularly around Christmas, when I want to run and keep running), that 'life is an affair of people not of places. But for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble'. Wharton said of her move to Hyères in Provence in 1922 (two years after *The Age of Innocence* was published) 'I feel as if I were going to get married – to the right man at last'.

Prepping for a new class and reworking some older syllabi, I have been flipping around a lot in Keats, Mary Ruefle’s book of lectures, Adorno, Prynne’s long book on Wordsworth, and a few other things. Amidst all that, I am in the middle of The Palestine Laboratory, which I believe I wrote about in the old thread, and am slowly moving through EDEN EDEN EDEN by Guyotat, a small section at a time.

Mornings now taken up with a book by my favorite French poet currently working, Anne Portugal, whose Flirt Formula is beautiful, uncanny, and consistent in its surprises. She is truly a great, highly recommend her works.

Ooh. I'm quite interested in Field Notes, but, alas, neither my uni library nor the statewide catalog carries it.

Alfred, I have a digital copy— it is a strange copy because some British guy took literal photographs of every page, so you get his awful thumbs and bits of garden in the corners, but otherwise, it is a crisp and clear PDF of the thing in its entirety. Webmail me, I will forward it along.

I see now I spoke too soon about A Lost Lady. It did indeed change direction almost immediately, so that the apparent romanticism of the first half now looks like a set up for a more nuanced perspective. Because I haven't finished it yet I'll reserve further comment until then.

The Art of Memory by Frances Yates, about classical memory techniques and in particular their application in the middle ages. Way more academic than the kind of thing I usually read, I got it because it focuses on (among others) Giordano Bruno, who kept on popping up various novels.

Also decided that alongside this it would be good to start on Ulysses, wtf, make it easy on yourself why don't you.

OK, I finished A Lost Lady last night. Honestly, I had hoped for Cather to cast some serious side-eye on the seductive aura of beauty and refinement that the wealthy aristocracy weaves around themselves, which is constructed entirely upon the labor of the poor. Instead, Cather seemed to be endorsing the idea that the first generation who brought industrial commerce into the raw plains of North America were honorable visionaries and idealists.

The 'lost lady' at the center of the book was lost in the sense that as the book begins she embodies the highest and most ideal American version of what makes a woman "a lady" and by the end she has lost that ease of perfection. Her subsequent downfall comes not through her personal failings, but because the generation of Great Men of the West, as embodied by her husband, has been overtaken by men who do not uphold the ideals and manners of those giants. Their wealth has been appropriated and their days of greatness are over.

Her fate in the book is just a reflection of theirs. Her ideal figure of 'a perfect lady' could only be sustained through her connection to the great and good Captain Forrester. When his wealth disappeared, she fell out of grace. As the book ends and she has regained wealth through a second marriage, her grace is marred because the Captain's heroic virtues were irreplaceable and she can never be the same 'perfect lady' again. Cather's wistful, even elegiac, tone over this romanticized version of western history seems undeniable to me.

Alfred will probably want to quarrel some with my conclusions, but I don't see how the text supports an alternative interpretation.

In that same Capote trade pb w xxxxpost novella The Grass Harp(1951) is The Tree of Night and Other Stories(1949). Considering the era, he's been doing good to get the ones set in NYC published respectably, since they mostly feature protagonists who are (psst) double-gaited, as some said back then---also considering the era, they are bad serial boyfriends, equal opportunity destroyers, who learn the hard way that Crime Does Not Pay, via encounters with Thee Unknown (yet strangely familiar), cracking the shell of identity as effectively as Robbie Coltrane or an unexpected dose of acid.
Here he mostly lays off the Gothicky special effects gravy that overloaded some of Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), until near the end of the urban stories that get it, by which time their tawdry momentum just slams on through, leaving me with a satisfying stir of speculations about the characters.
An exception to the bad lover is the nice old widow who is just set in her ways, her own shell of normalcy, and has forgotten that she's in New York and should keep her distance, so nice that she introduces herself to a little girl who is all alone at the movies, a little girl who looks like one of the twins in Kubrick's version of The Shining--but who may not be supernatural at all. Whether and however she exists or not, she's needy and determined.
Likewise the androgynous girl in another story, an evocative outsider artist, possible (and possibly abused) paranoid schizophrenic, possibly a stalker: "the follower and the followed," at least according to the bad man whose mind she's still blowing,into psychedelic clutter, but not too terribly much.
(The most effective one in this vein might be the most restrained, where the love rat starts getting those calls, wherever he is, from a dry voice, never extant otherwise, just "You know who I am.")
The stories set way down South are rambunctious tales, mostly "Mayberry Southern Gothic," as I said of The Grass Harp, although one is more violent, and the finale, "A Tree of Night" itself, is a dark carnival ov three (Something on this night train is happening, and you don't know what it is, or do you, Miss Jones?)

As a side quest, I started The Grifter's Daughter, by Duane Lindsay, which has been sitting in my Kindle Unlimited checkouts for some time. It's good, light fare, a quick read that I'm hoping will take some turns I'm not expecting.

now reading: “poor things”

I read Cather as part of my American Literature degree and can't remember much except being bored! We had so much boring stuff on the syllabus (boring to a 19-year-old English person anyway): Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne, Sherwood Anderson, Roderick Hudson (I've grown to enjoy James but Roderick Hudson, ugh) so perhaps it was hard to see the wood for the trees. Will try Cather again.

her short stories are my favorite part of her work tbh!

is Roderick Hudson Rock Hudson's dad

between a Rock and a Rod Hudson

What Anderson?

Aimless, your interpretation strikes me as right on (I haven't read the novel since 1995). However, why should she cast a side-eye on the seductive aura of beauty and refinement? I didn't/don't expect her to. The novel as I remember it is a brief sustained reverie. What appealed to me about it as a writer was its structure (Cather's good about architecture) and the tints and tonalities.

I _am_ gonna reread it this semester though.

Xpost Winesburg Ohio, which I’m happy to reassess. I’ll stick to my guns about Fenimore Cooper though

I'm reading Vila-Matas, Montano's Malady, my third of his. I'm also writing stuff, and his writing really makes me feel incredibly mid while I'm working, he's so good, so capable of keeping multiple plates spinning while making it look like there's no real effort involved. Kinda wanna read all of him just like I kinda want to read all of Pitól, though Vila-Matas is the more entertaining writer by far.

a very French sort of abstraction that is deeply boring.

I gone done and made a new one: I have coveted everything and enjoyed nothing: what are you reading in Spring 2024?

I wonder if some of the French reputation for abstraction may have to do with translation difficulties. Just guessing it would be easier to make a long sentence with many abstract terms cohere in a language like French, with its wealth of inflections. I think many English translations try to keep the long sentences but without the inflections as hints they become rather frustrating to parse.

Thanks, Chinaski!

I mean that he utilizes a lot of abstract rather than concrete images, and this lends his poems a sort of French theoretical quality mixed with a strange messianism that I think of as rooted in “the mythic.” Part of my disinterest might be that this style is deeply dated; the other part of me believes that the poems are so hermetic that it takes a certain mindset to find a way into them. I enjoy a lot of “difficult” poetry, though— Palmer’s work simply feels like one sheer surface, whereas many of his compatriots write in multiple modes and in ways that betray surfaces of language and signification rubbing against one another. That kind of friction is ultimately absent from Palmer’s work after the mid 80s, to my mind.