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

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.

Does anyone read his generation's (and a previous one's) chiseled formalist verse -- poets like Richards Howard and Wilbur, Louise Bogan…

This reminds me I’ve been meaning to read Bogan. Nicholson Baker quotes some of her poems in one of his novels.

I want someone to talk to about Birnam Wood, which I just finished and enjoyed but can’t recommend. It’s fun but doesn’t really fulfil its potential.

Otherwise I’m splitting time between Call for the Dead and Jane & Prudence, both comfortably within their authors’ safety zones but very enjoyable. Le Carre’s voice is creepily fully-formed for a debut, although that voice seems amusingly precocious coming from a 20something rather than a middle aged man.

I'm reading James Leo Herlihy's first novel *All Fall Down* from 1960. Made into a movie by John Frankenheimer in 1962 way before all the Midnight Cowboy hullabaloo. His mentors were Tennessee Williams and Anais Nin! His Broadway play Blue Denim was made into a movie in the late 50s. I've never seen that one. And I've never read *Midnight Cowboy* or *The Season of the Witch* his other two novels but I am really enjoying *All Fall Down* so I might seek them out now. I guess I was expecting what I usually get when I pick up a cool-looking 60s paperback that looks vaguely "groovy": something dated, overwritten, melodramatic, and with some sort of proto-hippie "social" message. It is not that. It's very enjoyable and compelling. He had quite a bit of success for a gay man writing about gay themes in the 50s and 60s. He killed himself in the early 90s. I would definitely read a biography of his life.

Will look for that, thanks. You long ago posted about Fat City, right? Has always had a critical and popular following, for those who could find it, and now I see it's an NYRB Classic, will look for it as well (liked the movie).

speaking of crit faves, *All Fall Down* definitely reminding me a bit of Portis/Norwood without as much funny. but still funny at times. (and to be accurate, my paperback is a 70s copy with a 70s cool dude cover. not 60s "groovy" really but obviously vying for the youth vote. the kind of book i would pick up as a kid because i thought it would be about sex and drugs and then stop reading 10 pages in.)

I finished the Denk book "Every Good Boy Does Fine". It was an enjoyable memoir and inside look at some aspects of the classical music establishment: music schools, contests, summer institutes, job hunting, etc. Denk seems very down to earth and unafraid to embarrass himself or others he has come across in his education and career. And he also writes insightfully about classical music in an unpretentious and nontechnical way.

Now I'm reading "I Hate the Internet" by Jarrett Kobek.

great book (the Kobek)

It was pretty funny and prescient. Or at least I wasn't thinking about many of these issues in quite this way in 2016. I didn't even start using Twitter until a few years later. I had a moment of trepidation towards the beginning when it became apparent that the whole book would be written in that kind of faux-naive, "out of the mouths of babes", poker-faced style of narration. Reminds me of Vonnegut in his later period, when the somewhat didactic authorial voice started to overshadow the characters and plot. At least Kobek understands the remit. Your statements can be true, partly true or even wildly exaggerated, but they must be inflammatory and surprising.

I finished Crime and Punishment last night. I'm not sorry I read it, but it feels a bit like I've been spending time in a madhouse, so it will be a relief to move on to something less overwrought.

After closing the book and reflecting on it a while what struck me the most is how utterly conventional most of the plot, characters and ideas were, if the conventions in view were those of the melodramatic stage plays of the era, right down to featuring a prostitute with a heart of gold and a roué who corrupts young innocent girls.

Raskolnikov is the only innovative character and he is so wildly inconsistent, shifting character from one page to the next, that Dostoevsky doesn't even try to reconcile his character to reality and simply describes him as "delirious" whenever he does something inexplicable. Only a 19th century Russian novelist could get away with all this, if only because late stage Czarist Russia is the only nation where all this febrile insanity seems remotely believable.

"Greetings," Kuptsov said. "Here, make sense out of this one, Chief. It's written in this book -- a fellow killed an old woman for her money. Tormented himself so much about it that he gave himself up for hard labor. While I, if you can imagine, knew one client in Turkistan who had about thirty wet jobs behind him and not a single conviction. He lived to about seventy. Children, grandchildren, taught music in his old age... And history shows you can get away with much more. Like putting ten million in their graves, or however much it was, and then smoking a Herzegovina Flor."

-- Dovlatov, The Zone

"You're no better than Raskolnikov -"
"Who?"
"- yes, Raskolnikov, who -"
"Raskolnikov!"
"- who - I mean it - who felt he could justify killing an old woman -"
"No better than?"
"- yes, justify, that's right - with an ax! And I can prove it to you!" Gasping furiously for air, Clevinger enumerated Yossarian's symptoms: an unreasonable belief that everybody around him was crazy, a homicidal impulse to machine-gun strangers, retrospective falsification, an unfounded suspicion that people hated him and were conspiring to kill him.

Currently on Bonjour Tristesse / A Certain Smile. Undeniably impressive for a 17 year old and fairly psychologically acute but not profound, I hope it's not kneejerk old man reactionism but I did get a bit tired of the
superficiality and of both protagonists changing their minds every other paragraph.

You had to be there, I guess. I like it though, despite not being in the target audience. Maybe the movie is actually better.

I'm now reading A View of the Harbor, Elizabeth Taylor. It is very sedate, coming after Dostoevsky. That was deliberate. The novel does have a plot and characters, but at heart it is all about perfectly constructed, gently evocative sentences.

marian keyes - mystery of mercy close
as recommended by gyac. main character helen walsh has appeared in other keyes novels I've enjoyed that were centred around her sisters. in those she came across as acerbic, sarcastic, unsentimental, v funny and v don't give a fuck. I liked her but wasn't sure how that would translate into a whole novel.

her character is still all those things but also fragile, despairing, ominously accepting of depression and yet trying so hard to keep her head above water.

I'm fortunate not to have any personal first hand knowledge of depression yet keyes writing still rings true to me and makes complete sense especially the ocd nature of Helens illness. for instance helen is a p.i looking for a missing person and during her investigation spends a lot of time at the empty home of the person she's looking for. she feels bad for drinking a diet coke left behind in the fridge so replaces it and buys some more in case she gets thirsty again but then frets that she's stealing by using the fridge to keep her drinks cold etc

Helens suicide ideation was tough to read about but so it should be and I don't feel keyes ever took any easy or obvious choices when writing about the psychiatric hospital, medication or therapy. during the course of the book you get hints of back story about helens now absent best friend bronagh and helens back in the picture ex boyfriend jay. I thought I knew where keyes was going with this and guessed a betrayal from jay and a death for bronagh. I was wrong on both counts but the absence and the break up made complete sense and gave more layers to the characters than my more obvious conclusions would have.

oh and the whole book is v funny as well obviously. I wasn't that convinced that helen was that good at private investigation although maybe determination is mostly what you need.
probably my favourite keyes so far.

A View of the Harbor was my first Elizabeth Taylor novel, Aimless, and I hope the taste is agreeable enough for you to keep going. She's become one of my favorite 20th century novelists.