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

Finished Mockingbird and yeah I see what Flannery O'Connor might have meant in calling it a children's book, despite the ugly truths inside, and some thriller filler: all of it leading to attempted reassurance---somewhat labored at times, required at so many times----as readers and moviegoers of all ages might have responded to in 1960,looking at a story set in the mid-30s: reassurance about race-craziness resurfacing among fellow white people, incl. friends, neighbors, relatives---becoming less predictable among the ones that you knew/were being taught were bad.

(And so I see why it still gets banned.)

Andrei Platonov - Chevengur.

This is a translation of a book I have been waiting for about ten years. It finally arrived late last year and I picked it up as soon as I could, and the high expectations were met, if you like. In the introduction the translator (Robert, with Elisabeth Chadler) talks about how they have been working it at this book for decades, and anyone who has read the numerous books by Platonov over the years can get a sense of the utterly strange way he puts things. In Chevengur (named after the town where communism has been 'achieved') there is an example or several on almost every page of its near five hundred or so. It is about the way in which Platonov writes (as distinctive as any writer like Proust or Musil, whom I would easily compare him to), but also about the way he has come up with a language that has been transformed beyond recognition as the politics of the time has transformed humanity -- whether for the worse or better -- and communism has enlarged humanity's capacity to see, feel, relate to one another as well nature, whether animals or plants (he writes about grass as if it was a cathedral), and of course, to think, whether well or badly (there is no novel which follows to te nth degree what it is to think along collective lines of thought laid down by a theory of some sort).

In his works of the 20s and 30s -- in his many books and stories -- Platonov is fully embedded into the Soviet project, he writes about its results. As we know some of these are violent, they lead to famine, death, sufferin (it all comes with multiple, dense allusions to Russia literature (esp Gogol and Dostoevsky) and the bible). Platonov doesn't shy away from that, but there is also a sense that if humanity is to survive that something fundamental must change, in our souls and our thoughts (Musil similarly wrote about our souls, but at the end of the Hapsburg empire). Mistakes made? Hopefully we can work on making less of them, maybe we have fucked up, but everything put down here is how these lives are now being lived, how we have arrived at this, what roads we can take, or not. The bread and butter of literature is ambiguity about what has occured, there is no place for the final judgment that you or I could easily make about the blood spilled and millions dead.

There are many wonderful passages translated in the notes sections, too. In one of them Platonov writes how the sun's power must be harnessed to do our work. This is someone thinking about 'Communism', what it could do and didn't. Can we feel it? What is it anyway? It is a Science Fiction book like no other at points, an utopia written by someone who has nearly tasted it before melting away in violence (what else?). I can only think of Victor Serge or maybe a few pages of Trotsky's Literature and Revolution (where there is a similar sense that we are near something transformative for us all, and yet...) that get to similar matter.

Ultimately, it all comes back to the inner workings of Platonov's writing (and I cannot do justice to how he writes), which is really like no one else, and cannot be replicated. In Chevengur, more than his other books (but you must read them all) you can see the reasons why that is the case.

Picked that one up from a secret NYRB discount code I had, very excited to dig into it later in the spring, when I will have a little more time.

Finally a really good review of Chevengur.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-real-unrealists-on-andrey-platonovs-chevengur/

I'm about 3/4 of the way through Chain-Gang All-Stars and can highly recommend it. It's a pretty great examination of the carceral state, the overrepresentation of African-Americans in it, and its tendency to brutalize the entire culture, which adapts cruelty as a business model. I'll definitely check out his short story collection afterwards.

Tokyo Express, Seicho Matsumoto - Postwar Japanese mystery novel. Def a fun read, heavy on the procedural as I like it. Mind you the protagonist's hunches always seem very forced, and the suspect's innocence so obvious, that it gets eyebrow raising how long he gets to keep working at it. Case is part of a larger puzzle involving govt corruption - like so much media of its era, postwar Japan in this is a country without honour or humanity.

I finished Isaac Butler's addictive The Method and started Denis Johnson's Resuscitation of a Hanged Man.

I tried reading Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, loved the first couple of chapters, but found it maddeningly whimsical thereafter. So I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson instead. I think I still slightly prefer The Haunting of Hill House but it was a lovely and creepy read.

have an entire pile of books i'm working through but this is the current one.

The Underworld -- Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean, by Susan Casey

i heard about her via a very incisive and appropriately fuming piece she wrote for Vanity Fair about the Titan submerisible disaster (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/08/titan-submersible-implosion-warnings), and this book covers the world of undersea exploration, via private adventurers. What's notable to me is these people are all well-aware of the dangers and just incredibly cautious, they get all the certifications and make sure their submersibles are completely safe (i.e. they're made of titanium and not carbon fiber.) It's a good read. The most illuminating part is the chapter devoted to focusing on companies which would like to dredge the bottom of the ocean for minerals and metals, which would likely be catastrophic for the ocean environment and therefore the world, considering it's the one area of the planet which has remained largely pure and untouched.

I finished Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-1965. As with the first volume, Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch gets much deeper into the weeds of the civil rights movement than you'll ever learn about by watching the many documentaries and 'based on a true story' films on that era, and consequently paints a picture that contains far more truth. Even then, he's forced to merely hint at a tremendous amount of that history which was less directly connected to MLK, Jr. If you can stand the emotional punishment of reading 1200+ pages of detailed and often brutally horrific history, I can't recommend these two volumes highly enough.

Now I'm reading a novella, The Nonexistent Knight, Italo Calvino.

I'm reading *Doppelganger* by Naomi Klein (and yes, I very nearly typed the other name). It's terrifying.

I'm taking a break to re-read *The Handmaid's Tale* for a work thing. It might as well be a first-time read, in honesty. I get ghost-glimpses of the version of me that read this 25 years ago and worry at what I would have missed, what I might have sneered at. God, Atwood. The dizzying helical structure of it; the dread, the dread; the precision of each rendered detail screaming 'there is no time, there is no time'.

danielle evans - the office for historical corrections. short story collection a couple of which were v good indeed.

Read Christie's The Big Four during a delayed flight last night. Imho the most ambitious and least successful of the Poirot books.

Miguel Angel Asturias - Mr.President. A somewhat-based-on-fact fiction around a Latin American dictatorship. This was written in the late 20s and, though I'd have to recheck I found quite different from some of the Lat Am 'dictator' novels from the 60s where the focus is on the personality of the leader, whereas here its on the people around him whom he has to remove so he can gain power.

There is a real pleasure in the scenes where it feels like the world is falling to pieces, or just setting very dark moods, with the nod to that being a window into a perhaps better world, before this is all shut down violently.

I'm halfway through that Mavis Gallant doorstop - she writes exclusively about expats and immigrants but it's amazing what range she manages to display within that in terms of class, nationality, background. Latest one I read was about a couple of German immigrants in Paris, one Jewish one gentile, who make a living as extras and bit players in films and tv shows about the occupation - the gentile one as a German officer, the Jewish one as the guy who gets killed in the first episode to show the evil of the nazis. at the story's end it's the late 70's and they start to worry that by 1982 the French general public might be sick of hearing about the occupation. good stuff.

The Nonexistent Knight feels like Calvino had no clue what he was going to write when he started on the first chapter. He just plunged in and improvised everything as he went like a parent telling a bedtime story. The resulting story is a pleasant diversion, somewhat whimsical, mildly philosophical and more than a little slapdash. What saves it is his innate ability to improvise in interesting directions.

Will have to check that---I enjoyed Mr Palomar in something of the same way last year, although I thought he did have a clue to start with, one I won't spoil, but anybody who gets to the end will get what I mean---some dizzy moments on the high wire and the patio w Mr. P. (His little daughter knows when to yank him through the crowd, "C'mon.")

the auctioneer by joan samson! it good 🧡 70s small town new england suspense novel where the monster is neoliberalism. less gonzo batshit trash than is my usual preference, but the creeping dread/powerlessness really hits the spot, leavened by the sour lols of the old new england matriarch moaning about her family getting chased off their own land as if they was no more than a bunch of indians & the titular auctioneer selling off a baby who turns out, gasp! to have been his own progeny! in the time-honored american tradition (<- slavery reference, sorry)

Turns out I remembered how to read again!

Grown Ups - Marian Keyes

I had the hardback of this since it came out but never read it until this week. I went on an MK reread the past fortnight - Last Chance Saloon, Rachel’s Holiday, The Other Side of the Story, Sushi for Beginners. Grown Ups is about a big messy entangled family, centred around three brothers:

Johnny - the charming, handsome gobshite
Ed - kind botanist
Liam - a class-A prick

and their lives, wives and work and relationship dramas. The wives get as much time. I was very taken by insecure, slightly overwhelmed Jessie. Nell I didn’t really like that much - too gen Z in the worst ways, but Cara…

Oh, Cara. Cara is a bulimic and there is no detail spared on the humiliations, the rituals, the pain, the secrecy. I felt incredibly seen by this character. Keyes is a former alcoholic with a history of disordered eating and she gets it. It hurts to read some of these scenes. This, of course, is what made Rachel’s Holiday such compelling reading too.

Anyway the book starts with a big dramatic dinner scene where everyone’s dark secrets get spilled in front of everyone else, and then rewinds back to the previous year where everything unspools. It’s a pretty long book (600~ pages?) and there’s slow build on some of the threads but like someone managing multiple pans on a cooker, she keeps it all going.

Is it classic? It’s not quite up there with Last Chance Saloon or The Mystery of Mercy Close for me, but it’s very good. I found most of the characters, even the pricks, to be compelling and nuanced. There are many lives and there are threads of tragedy, births, celebrations and betrayals binding them all together.

There’s a minor character who is an asylum seeker and to be honest, I didn’t really expect direct provision* to be covered in a book like this. But then again, why wouldn’t it? Previous Keyes books have covered such cheery topics as drug addiction and overdoses, bereavement and denial, rape and nervous breakdowns. Her books have always engaged with the world we live in.

So. Very very solid, probably my favourite of hers since The Mystery of Mercy Close.

From the authors notes:

You’ll have seen the term ‘Direct Provision’ mentioned in the book. This refers to how the Irish state treats people who are seeking asylum in Ireland, having escaped war or trauma in their country of origin. While they wait for their application for asylum to be processed, they are provided for ‘directly’, as in their food and shelter is provided for, in one of thirty-six centres around the country. Their lives are subject to a variety of restrictions and indignities, from being ineligible to work, being unable to cook their own food, sharing sleeping space with people from many different countries and cultures and not being permitted to have visitors.

Many asylum seekers live like this for several years. It’s a terrible way to treat people who are already traumatized and I suspect that one day Ireland will feel great shame that we let this happen.

Finished Laura Henriksen’s Laura’s Desires, a two-part, rather long essay-poem that dwells within the poet’s sexual, political, and aesthetic commitments. Much of this is done via a reading and poetic analysis of Bette Gordon’s Variety, a film I haven’t seen in many years but remember rather well. A transformative and generous read, to be honest— very much in the tradition of Bernadette Mayer, which is an excellent thing.

gyac - I haven't read 'mystery of mercy close' but I will now if you regard it as top tier keyes.

have to finish patricia highsmith - 'deep water' first. halfway thru and I get the feeling that the husband isn't going to get away with it and I kinda want him to.

Omg I would love your thoughts on it, it’s up there with her very best!

Andrei Platonov - Chevengur.

This is a translation of a book I have been waiting for about ten years(...)

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, January 24, 2024 1:40 PM (two weeks ago)

Holy shit, thank you for the heads-up - have been out of the loop and had no idea they'd finally completed this (the NYRB Soul has haunted me for the past fifteen years or so). Let's see if anywhere in NZ is stocking it.

I've started a short semi-autobiographical novel by Barbara Comyns, Mr. Fox. One of the jacket blurbs tries hard to sell its comedic qualities, but I can't see it. The poverty of the narrator has pushed her life into a sad state of squalor. However, she just muddles ahead, skating along like a waterbug, rather than sinking into desperation or despair.

That last sentence sounds promising, also that the whole thing's short, and semi-autobio, so still some room to skate. Let us know how it goes.

I'm reading "Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons" by Jeremy Denk, about learning to play the piano.

Jeremy Taylor - Four Sermons. English language at it's most beautifully expressed. Good luck to today's writers.

I first read Crime and Punishment when I was 14 and the only reaction to it that I can recall is that it seemed to have come from another planet, one so unfamiliar that I was continually lost and bewildered. Since then I've read at least five other Dostoevsky novels and I'd describe my relationship with him as queasy and contentious.

For no reason I can articulate I recently bought two different (cheap, used) translations of C&P. Last night I did a brief side-by-side comparison and chose the Peavar & Volokhonsky as the easier one to assimilate. I will take a run at reading it for the second time, but it won't surprise me if I lay it aside. I guess I'll find out.

The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth: Curiosities from the History of Medicine, by Thomas Morris. I bought this years ago from Kobo for about .99, and it's a good, light read. Very funny at times, but I cannot tell you how many times already the descriptions have made my butt pucker.

I finished a re-read of Edward Saïd’s Orientalism, which was as astonishing as I remembered, and particularly clarifying in our current epoch.

Reading Don Carlenter’s Hard Rain Falling and a Prynne chap at the bedside, and Olúfémi Táíwò’s Elite Capture in the mornings with coffee.

Hard Rain Falling impressed the hell outta me five years ago. A strong queer novel.

Yeah I am only a few chapters in— I am loving it so far!

Hard Times by Dickens

Almost started reading that but we went with Dombey and Son instead, despite ledge’s deep disapproval.

Finished Táíwò’s Elite Capture. A little too slim for me, and perhaps a little too “positive”— but made some truly salient points about creating change.

One element of his argument that I found particularly compelling was the way he discussed “common ground.” Essentially, he argues that changing the epistemic regimes of how current systems operate is necessary to making them anew; that is, he argues against working within systems that tends toward elite capture, and instead trying to change their foundational bases. It is a quietly radical argument for losing the fealty to current systems and starting fresh.

I agree with him in this regard, and think that part of what is sometimes missed in my arguments on ILX and elsewhere is that I want to consider that another reality is possible within my lifetime, and I don’t think that this better world will come about via working within currently extant systems.

This is where I think the book fails a little bit, because it mentions positive programming such as revolutionary schools and embracing community models for change— which are great!— but sort of glosses over the fact that the sort of change that is necessary also comes about through the negative element of violence. From the examples he gives (Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau), it is apparent that it will take a lot of different strategies and disciplines to get what is needed for liberation.

Now my morning reading is Bevins’ recent book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution . Guess I’m on a jag about this subject!

positive programming such as revolutionary schools and embracing community models for change...the sort of change that is necessary also comes about through the negative element of violence.

The Jakarta Method, read at your rec, impressed me, table. And it looks like my public library has Elite Capture on the shelf.

Great subject, but what are these?

some truly salient points about creating change.

dow, he says that changing the terms of engagement— that is, moving the "common ground" away from institutional capture— is one of the ways to go about creating change. This means rejecting the simplicity of deference politics and epistemic knowledge and virtue, among other things. Elite capture is all about recuperation— and our willingness to go along with corporate and governmental cooptation and defanging of radical social policy is one of the reasons why things aren't getting better.

He doesn't necessarily give many examples, but does give some insight into contructive change, a la the revolutionary movements in Cape Verde which focused on building coalitions via different communities, schools, and talents.

I'm outsider-curious about: Diggers (original and 1960s), Levellers, peasant revolts, slaves uprisings, communities of maroons(fugitive slaves) and other ex-slaves, Oceania and landlubber confabs, Pre-Columbian/other Western arrivals, and later for that matter; Wobbilies (still active), Left libertarians, anarcho-syndicalists---this last got me going again, via WSJ war correspondent's dispatches re: Syria's Rojava Kurdish democratic confederalism, in part inspired by the writings of Murray Bookchin, with a gathering of the tribes for certain projects, such as fighting, capturing, and keeping Isis, in---a carceral state? Until enough American troops left the background that the Turks moved in, the Kurds ran away, and Isis got loose, until rounded up again by the Kurds, who had come to an understanding with Assad's people----democratic confederalism ain't very easy---much more here (pretty dense, grab a coffee before going in):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rojava_conflict
But this is a reading thread after all.

I wonder what publisher approved an Anthony Hecht bio in the 2020s. Does anyone read his generation's (and a previous one's) chiseled formalist verse -- poets like Richards Howard and Wilbur, Louise Bogan, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, etc.? I like a bit of Hecht but I don't read him like I do James Merrill or Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O'Hara, James Wright, etc.; this bio, as fastidiously composed as a Hecht poem, takes us through his Italian sojourns, his poems based on myths and Biblical stories, and I'm revolted by this midcentury postwar American privilege.

xp
From an ILE thread about HBO's The Anarchists:

sarahell, do you know anyone who was in the Diggers? I mostly know about them from Emmett Grogan's Ringolevio: A Life Played For Keeps. They gave food away in the Haight etc.:got donations from food places, dumpster dove, stole it. One of Grogan's colleagues in there is the actor Peter Coyote (also maybe the basis of Joni Mitchell's song "Coyote").

― dow, Friday, July 29, 2022 1:29 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

I have met at least one former Digger ... they were influential on a lot of counterculture stuff in the Bay Area in the following decades, so I am somewhat familiar with their history.

― sarahell, Friday, July 29, 2022 1:45 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

Good Diggers interview here:
https://diggersdocs.home.blog/2022/03/05/we-had-a-far-more-profound-effect/

― Andy the Grasshopper, Friday, July 29, 2022 1:45 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down is a great read on the original (17th century) Diggers (and Levellers and Ranters and etc.)

― papal hotwife (milo z), Friday, July 29, 2022

Alfred, lol @ Anthony Hecht bio. I think I have read a few poems and then promptly moved on, because...they're not good.

I'm about halfway through Crime and Punishment now. It's not hard to see what discombobulated my 14-year old self. The melodramatic elements run at a constant fever pitch. Every character at every moment is in the throes of wildly fluctuating emotions.

It didn't help at all that I knew literally nothing at all about Czarist Russia either. Or that Dostoevsky sets new sub-plots spinning with lavish abandon. It's hard to keep up. Since age 14 I've learned that most 19th century novels tend that way because most of them appeared as serials in periodicals and a successful one kept circulation numbers high for as long as it appeared, so that extending it on the fly with new characters and complications was standard practice everywhere.

The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation feels like a good one to me in terms of fitting the diction into adequately modern and colloquial terms without resorting to distracting anachronisms.

I like a bit of Hecht

His methods work in "More Light, More Light". But how could anyone write something like "The Seven Deadly Sins"? And there's a lot more where that came from, and it's just as not good.

I'd add "A Hill" and a few others.

Nur Masalha Palestine a Four Thousand Year History
Very good read looking into the history of an area that has been recognised since antiquity. & kept the same name or linguistic variations on that for most of that time. I think I semi forget that Philistine was one of the variations partially because I know that modern usage tied in to a German university population and I think hazing rituals.
Anyway book is a pretty compelling read when I get back to it since I'm also reading a stack of other stuff at the same time. But I would recommend it as the website Decolonize Palestine does too.
I think I learnt quite a bit. I'm now on the last 40 pages so looking forward to reading other things the bibliography has turned me onto.

Albert Hoffman LSD My Problem Child
Hoffman the discoverer of LSDor at least it's main pioneer looks back at its development. Apparently Sandoz weren't the only firm looking into synthesizing forgot and it's derivatives so there were similar substances being discovered and researched. LSD itself was created and shelved for 5 years before Hoffman went back to further research it.
Anyway interesting book, can get a bit technical. & do wish he'd give more background to some things he seems to see as totally abstract. Toxic effect on elephants etc stuck with either how you happen to have a spare elephant or alternatively his involvement in a later experiment which he gives no further detail on at least at that point. Hoping there is further explanation later.
This is a 2019 pairing with his memoir Insights/Outlooks and I'm not seeing when things were actually written.

A Disability History of the United States Kim E Neilsen
A book that is in the Penguin Revisioning History series though this edition appears not to be. I thought books were commissioned to be in that series so have been surprised by that. They are looking back at US and pre history from several marginalised perspectives. I'd like to read them all cos the ones I have done have been good.
So book looking at how disability is viewed or at least what constitutes disability from the setting up of the colony and also in native American culture before that. Native American culture largely attempted to include anybody who had physical injury or corporal diversity as an active member of the community where they could. This does talk about the wendigo where a person has been taken over by a malevolent spirit and can't be trusted may be cannibalistic too. & what the protocols for dealing with them are.
The section on rejection of would be immigrants at Ellis Island who are deemed to probably need state assistance is very interesting too. This included several deaf craftsmen who had previously settled family members saying they would help them find their feet or potential employers turning up to support the fact that a job had been offered. & the individual still being sent back to point of origin. 'Kin ablism.
That section also goes into abbreviations related to disability being chalked on the backs of individuals trying to get through the immigration process. Which were going to be assessed by the actual decision makers as to whether they would be landed.
Interesting book. But I think I haven't given it the attention I intended when I ordered it.

Political Theory an Introduction Andrew Heywood
Interesting overview of political theory like. I wanted a bit more grounding . As to why and wherefore. Still not sure about the ins and outs of liberalism totally. Why it goes hand in hand with hypocrisy and fascism and things. Hopefully this will explain, seems pretty good so far.