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

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.

why should she cast a side-eye on the seductive aura of beauty and refinement?

As an example, in the very first chapter Cather establishes how gracious and thoughtful Mrs. Forrester is by describing how, when she spots some boys from the town visiting the stream below her house she goes to the kitchen and tells the cook who is working at the the baking that "while she is at it" to make a batch of cookies. Later she brings the warm cookies in a basket down the hill and acts pleasantly with the boys. Then she walks back to the house.

(shrugs) Cather wants us to be charmed by her actions. But what did she really do here? All she must do to be thoughtful and gracious is to generate one simple idea: cookies. All the work required to manifest that thought is done for her by a servant. That's what I meant by the aristocracy weaving an aura of grace and beauty about them. Their accomplishment is to have 'good taste'. They make it seem effortless because their refinements of 'taste' manifest as beauty entirely by interposing the labor of servants.

I would have expected Cather to have at least acknowledged how this kind of ladylike 'accomplishment' is at heart an empty one and is confining enough to make any spirited young woman restive and wanting to break out of that box.

Maybe she's employing Show Not Tell?

xp Chuck, have you seen this:
Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses
Mark Twain

There are nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction -- some say twenty-two. In "Deerslayer," Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:

...2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the "Deerslayer" tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.

3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the "Deerslayer" tale.

Maybe she's employing Show Not Tell?

You could read it and decide.

you figured out the score

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/17/Rush_Show_Don%27t_Tell.jpg/220px-Rush_Show_Don%27t_Tell.jpg

I wouldn’t look to Cather for a materialist/ Marxist critique. Wasn’t her thing.

I'm reading a book of early Pinter plays. It's funny how all his plays are basically the same - couple sitting down for breakfast, there's an intruder who they may or may not know, sinister vibe throughout, then abrupt violent ending

xxxpost yeah, I'll ask Library Loan for A Lost Lady, also Death Comes For The Archbishop, which seems to be generally regarded as her best.

Bummer title though!

The Professor's House!

I wouldn’t look to Cather for a materialist/ Marxist critique. Wasn’t her thing.

― o. nate, Thursday, January 11, 2024 11:51 AM (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

From a queer POV she's fascinating

I could teach Paul’s Case to every fiction class I instruct until I die— it is an incredible piece of writing.

yup!

persuaded! just bought a cheap paperback of the collected short stories online

And I finished Harry Crewe's memoir; it earns the plaudits. An evocation of a time and place, it taught me about scaling (not skinning!) a hog, caring for a rooster with a stuck craw, how to cook possum, and other rural Georgia delights circa 1935. Unexpected too is Daddy, who breaks the stereotypes I've read in Faulkner and elsewhere by adoring his boy, showing physical affection, etc. This is of course a memoir, so, as Emily Dickinson once wrote, tell the truth but tell it slant.

Currently reading "The Ancient City" by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, about religion in classical Greece and Rome. As a person who thinks about Ancient Rome on a regular basis I couldn't pass it up after this Marc Andreessen shout out:

1. The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges -- the single best book I have found on who we are and how we got here.

— Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 (@pmarca) October 4, 2022

I've started reading the second volume of Taylor Branch's history of the civil rights movement, Pillar of Fire, covering 1963 to 1965. About a hundred pages in and he's still pacing over ground that was covered in the first volume with five hundred pages yet to go. I may intersperse a less heavy book (literally - this thing is a doorstop), just as I did recently with the Iliad.

The greatest value I've derived from this and the first volume is a much stronger sense of just how many thousands of people threw their lives and livelihoods into the struggle and how vast the obstacles in front of them were. The level of violence consistently used by the whites never loses its ability to shock and horrify, which of course was its purpose all along - control via terror.

It's magisterial stuff.

persuaded! just bought a cheap paperback of the collected short stories online

_The Rebel Angels, The Fifth Business, The Manticore_ by Robertson Davies

Extremely enjoyable novels. The main enjoyment is to be had in the overall description of an area where theology and psychology, probably more properly psychoanalysis, play together, with a large amount of more or less obscure erudition, and how that might applied to personal and generational histories. The Rebel Angels, although a lot of fun, is probably less successful, more

I enjoyed these. Take an area where theology and psychology, or psychoanalysis meet, throw some more or less obscure erudition - classical, neo-platonist, apocryphal, magical - at it, play it out across personal and generational histories in the contemporary world. The Rebel Angels has most fun with this, in particular with the character John Parlabane - "a real bad man" - a mixture of self-serving victimhood, caprice, and spiritual compulsion towards malice. The tone and language is consistently witty and amusing, and a little frenetic. The Big Themes that it plays with - character, destination, virtue - have the status of baubles or toys. Big Serious Novels tend to allow the 'giant homeric wheels' (to use a Mark E Smith phrase) to move at a slower pace, less visible on the surface. As a reader you feel the weight of their undertow on Matters. That's purely illusion of course, and I'm not saying one is better than the other - it's in the nature of comic novels to juggle and conjure with celestial bodies - but in The Rebel Angels it does leave you at the end wondering what all the froth was about. In a way that, say, Twelfth Night, to pick something more or less at random, somehow does not.

I must read 12th Night again, it's a wonderful play.

The first two novels of the Deptford Trilogy (The Fifth Business, The Manticore) dial down the knockabout considerably. This doesn't necessarily add anything, but the more muted approach means more of a balance between the comic (which is still definitely present) and the serious.

Robertson Davies can handle language, ideas, description and drama - in other words a very good writer, not at all dull. I should read some criticism as well as final book of the Deptford Trilogy, and the rest of The Rebel Angels trilogy.

The big thing for me in last year's reading was that I got sick and tired of... well it has a number of names, not strictly cognate - stream of consciousness, interior monologue, language as sensory time, the solipsistic narrative, or to use phrases from Wyndham Lewis' critique in Time and Western Man narrative as the 'self-conscious time sense' creating an 'unending prose song'.

I wouldn't want to steelman the full philosophical implications Lewis does - his conclusions are fundamentally illiberal and unprogressive, even if some areas of the critique, like the mode tending towards infantalisation, do hold for me. My main annoyance is that it leads to poor writing.

I'd imagine this is because it allows such enormous latitude to a writer. The free indirect third person, both invented and perfected by Jane Austen (well and Flaubert I guess), as well as creating an extra dimension in prose writing, also creates tension, especially with its ability to tweak matters of dramatic irony. Writing as *insinuation* as Henry Green had it. The management of it requires skill and concentration.

This is not the case for the interior sensory time narrative. And it *can* be more or less well done. I recognise that it is appropriate to Jon Fosse's Septology for instance - matters of perception in the winter landscape, memory on either side of death, the self in others - the mode is helpful to depicting these matters. In fact it almost compels these sorts of subjects, memory and interiority being so baked into the mode. Similarly Murnane, who *is* dull, but is also very good, painstaking in fact, at managing the nests of memory and perception and their interrelation - landscapes exterior and interior. In fact that is one of the chief pleasures of reading him. (and tbf to Murnane I'd tend to interiority in the Australia as well - i yes ok i mean that partly sarcastically, but partly genuinely, the interiors of Australia seem magnificent in concept and in reality, an expansive but intense imaginative space, whether the deserts or the Plains).

In the end, in fact, I'm not sure that you need anyone other than Beckett in this mode. Like Austen and the free indirect, he perfected the solipsistic, circling prose, both capturing the existential absurd, and a comic essence to our social and ambulatory beings.

But in general it's a mode that's extremely tolerant of slackness in the writing, and what is worse it can take you a while to realise - the words just fly by.

There are what I would call pure five-finger exercises (take it in both ways) like Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Spadework for a Palace (it's *fine* I guess), which has the virtue that it's short, and Cărtărescu's Solenoid, which does not. I should put an asterisk by Solenoid, because I read half of it last spring, before deciding it wasn't really a spring book, and that i'd save it to winter. I then picked up a very weak book - Garden of the Seven Twilights - and it's possible that this coloured me on that whole period of reading. Not that I don't think a very good and interesting book on international banking and the large scale movement of money couldn't be written btw. But this isn't it.

I thought Solenoid had a number of things going for it - a world where the tenebrae activae* is composed of the arthropod, the chitinous and skeletal, the fragments of industrial desuetude in the communist Bucharest hinterlands, a sort of electro-industrial mysticism. Enough to make me think I'll finish it at some point. Still, what Solenoid reminded me of most was The Great Fire of London. Not in style, but because they are both books about failures of writing and creativity. In fact it's the central theme of both as well as being the driving force. They both circle endlessly repeating themselves in an attempt to find some central matter. Again, five finger exercises. They're the things you do when you're not engaged in the thing itself. It's the easiest thing in the world to write in circles, endlessly around a topic, in this way.

It's lazy and it's rude to the reader and was enough to put me off reading for a long while. It was only picking up Muriel Spark that made me - warily - enjoy reading again - books where each sentence is a pinprick, that makes you attend, that adds something new to the perception and progress of the novel.

I realise the above is all rather captious, but i'm irritable about it, so am scratching that itch.

*tenebrae activae - Thomas Vaughan, 17th Century Welsh alchemist &c. and brother of poet Henry Vaughan: "beneath all degrees of sense there is a certain horrible, inexpressible darkness. The magicians call it tenebrae activae"

I still love the old Jesuit who knew the secrets of the saints.

In Fifth Business, I think.

Warlock because 22 mentions in the NYRB Publishing thread cannot be wrong

"In the end, in fact, I'm not sure that you need anyone other than Beckett in this mode. Like Austen and the free indirect, he perfected the solipsistic, circling prose, both capturing the existential absurd, and a comic essence to our social and ambulatory beings."

Feels like a mode with an interesting history (starting from Proust with ppl like Blanchot) where Beckett is an end point (only refreshed by a few others, like Bernhard).

"But in general it's a mode that's extremely tolerant of slackness in the writing, and what is worse it can take you a while to realise - the words just fly by."

I am currently reading Platonov's Chevengur slowly (mostly because life reasons otherwise I would have finished it fast), it's a different mode (a satire) where it feels like words are made to matter and never fly by. If they do, the characters who utter them could be killed in 20s Russia. Here they are allowed to say it, sometimes.

I still love the old Jesuit who knew the secrets of the saints.

― Pictish in the Woods (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 15 January 2024 00:25 bookmarkflaglink

In Fifth Business, I think.

― Pictish in the Woods (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 15 January 2024 00:26 bookmarkflaglink

Yes, The Fifth Business. This character - Padre Igancio Blazon - is great. 'Oho, you nice Protestant boy! Joseph is history's most celebrated cuckold ... Padre Blazon was almost shouting by this time, and I had to hush him. People in the restaurant were staring...'. RD writes some really good one-off characters who understand or can interpret the underlying cruces of his main players.

And writing that quote makes me realise that John Parlabane - an avatar of evil in The Rebel Angels - is very similar to Padre Blazon - a guide to the Devil in The Fifth Business.

Feels like a mode with an interesting history (starting from Proust with ppl like Blanchot) where Beckett is an end point (only refreshed by a few others, like Bernhard).

Yes, this seems right to a degree. Though i would say like any mode it's a tool in the toolkit of a writer. it comes with a set of strengths and some subjects and treatments to which it's particularly suited... though as so often you'd more often like to see the mode applied to subjects to which it's completely *unsuited* or rarely used. tho when i start to come up with examples - a crime and detection story, a spy thriller, a comic novel, i feel that this must already have been done a few times!

but yes, certainly proust is the great inventor and progenitor of it all - would be my rather casual view anyway.

I think of that Padre pretty much every time I learn about the dark side or personal failings of some artist I like, as part of a way to get a handle on whatever it may bring up. Maybe once in a great while it will be so bad I can’t stand them anymore but usually it just humanizes them and I have to take most of it in stride, ultimately there’s no way to avoid knowing it sooner or later if one is a fan.

yes, i mean i think one of the main morals in RD is that it's better to be a sinner than a Laodicean. In that language it sounds fine, but of course it means 'it's better to run the risk of doing something that might be considered evil than it is to sit on the sidelines.' put like that it's less clear cut of course. still, 'adults are messy and agency, especially moral agency, is not a simple matter, so be try not to judge other people's errors, even bad ones' seems a reasonable message, especially in a highly amplified social media age that runs very quick and noisily to judgment. (communities have ofc always run to this judgment - see Mrs Dempster at the beginning of the trilogy - it's the amplification and the encouragement to mimetic sorting inherent to social media that is the problem imv, though this ofc is me editorialising and not inherent to the books).

Speaking of Beckett in this (innerverse streaming etc.) context: although it's been a long time since I've read any of his fiction, I remember liking Mercier et Camier especially because it actively acknowledges the existence of the outside and even/especially? outdoors world, seeming closest in that respect to his plays, which are never closest drama, are always written for the audiences of stage/radio/TV/ the silver screen even, though the reviews of Film that I've seen (close as I've come to viewing it) aren't so enthusiastic---still, he recruited Buster Keaton and came to NYC and directed the damn thing---he could do things like that, and the Resistance and so on, not always the professionally depresso hermit etc.---
Also, Fizzles, was wondering what you currently think of Joyce and V. Woolf (and Leonard, for that matter; I've heard he's good)?

never *closet* drama I meant, damn!

Murphy's one of the century's funniest novels and it's got characters and an urban setting.

Yeah! Thanks for the reminder.
Good concise piece on Beckett and running buddy Giacometti, an influence and colleague, who contributed design ideas to early Godot production:

Giacometti died in 1966, while Beckett lived until 1989. Throughout their careers, both artists drew freely from a broad range of mediums including design, architecture, cinema and literature. This experimental approach to working has inspired many artists, such as Gerard Byrne, Bruce Nauman, Miroslaw Balka and Doris Salcedo, to name a few.

Murphy's great. first read it as a teenager, and it's always been a favourite with lines that have just stuck - the qauntum of wantum does not vary, the great buzzing confusion (of gas molecules iirc), the rocking chair being one of the few things that keeps getting faster until it stops.

leonard... woolf? no idea i'm afraid.

ulysses is a great book, human, garrulous even, of the city (the true meaning of Aristotle's politikon zōion - that is to say a being 'of the polis', a social being) and a complete joy to read, mostly. though when i was dipping back into Time and Western Man for the post above, I'm reminded that Lewis felt Joyce-as-schoolmaster was evident in the 'general knowledge paper' aspect of reading Ulysses, not totally unfounded - Joyce iirc said that chapter was the best adverse criticism Ulysses received. Time and Western Man is worth reading sections of, because it covers this moment, in its skewed a rebarbative way, very well - the moment when people were fighting over time, in particular the appearance of Bergsonian time as a philosophy that might underpin artistic representation. Now so much in the past that we forget it was ever a battle in the first place or that there are different options here. (very much, i should stress in opposition to Lewis, *a battle that does not matter*, and like many things that simply didn't matter, Lewis constructed an entire intractable edifice of a book out of it.)

Digression to quote, as I'm flipping through TaWM here:

Almost all Tories are simpletons – the simpletons of what passes with them for 'tradition,' we could say (as is proved conclusively by the way in which they have defended themselves - how they hastily close all the stable doors long after the horses have all disappeared; also by their rare instinct for closing all the wrong doors, behind which there were never any horses).

Virgina Woolf - and I feel bad about this - I've never really warmed that much to. I should probably revisit though, as it's been over twenty years.