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

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.

This is my second Elizabeth Taylor. I read Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont in 2019 and enjoyed it, but only now am I getting back to her. Too many good books yet unread and I read 'em at a much slower pace than you do!

Also unexpectedly good at English surburban horror, re: "The Flypaper"

probably my favourite keyes so far.

Btw that part near the beginning where Helen returns to her parents empty nest and finds them having cake and tea for dinner cos they can’t be bothered is something I have quoted to my own parents - grazers! - more than once.

I recently finished Nadja by André Breton. A strange, slight, but also dense, book, not sure it’s really a novel. The central narrative part is sketched very quickly. Characters are barely described. There are recurring digressions about apparently random coincidences or juxtapositions of everyday objects or events that the author takes much care in describing precisely, presumably these are the parts that relate to Surrealism as a unifying aesthetic and way of life. And yet there is a real emotional resonance to the story, the character of Nadja and her relationship to the narrator. Odd but memorable.

Thanks to a fabulous college professor who became one of my mentors Nadja was my first experience with flâneur lit.

it warms my heart that you guys read elizabeth taylor. i love her so. i feel like i raved about her on here more than once over the years.

i went to a retired english professor's house to buy records and he had a huge shelf of books and i couldn't help myself i said "Where are the women?". he kinda stammered and said there are women there and i said not many oh there is one barbara pym...it was like a sad where's waldo. and then he said oh when i was teaching of course it was all dead white males....and i wanted to say yeah they didn't have women back then...
he was 70 so he would have been teaching in the 80s and beyond...

I treasure those midcentury Anglo-Irish miniaturists: Pym, Taylor, Bowen maybe, Penelope Fitzgerald, even those two Philip Larkin novels.

i'm currently reading city of quartz by mike davis and having a rough go at it. i feel guilty because in terms of subject matter, style and orientation it ought to be up my alley (and it's beloved by many writers i like), but i'm finding it pretty charmless and feel like i'm not learning much from it

for a work of marxist political economy davis strikes me as oddly incurious about the actual nuts-and-bolts workings of urban political economy. he's extremely well-read, but reading it often feels like the recital of an endless list of poorly-contextualized proper nouns in a prose style that's at times way too purple and at others painfully dry and academic. for example, the second chapter, which documents the shifting elite power structures that shaped the city over the course of its history, is little more than a who's-who, going through the sequences of industries that boomed and busted and listing the names of the capitalists whose power waxed and waned. davis subsumes most of the (imo more interesting) story of how these elites ruled and wrested power over one another in the many violent metaphors and adverbs that glue his narrative together. for example, a central player in davis' account is harrison gray otis, publisher of the la times and real estate investor who sat on most of the city's business organizations. davis imbues otis with a near-dictatorial power, turning LA into "the most centralized ... militarized municipal power-structures in the united states", but never gives me anything on how he came to amass such power, how he used the various tools at his disposal to exert it. and when otis' political dynasty (then lead by his son-in-law harry chandler) finally loses its monopoly of power, davis' story is basically that new industries (automobiles and aerospace in particular) emerged and along with them new capitalists. did the otis-chandler empire put up a fight? if so, why did they lose when they'd previously held uncontested power for half a century? despite a conspiratorial tone, nothing is ever spelled out in enough detail to get a feel for how the conflicts and transitions played out at anything approaching a "micro" level. i wasn't expecting caro, but there's something really satisfying about the way a book like the power broker follows the money and traces the operation of power through the web of byzantine local regulations, and there's just nothing like that here

the first chapter--on the various waves of artist and intellectuals who shaped the country--had a similar problem, where it just felt like a long annotated bibliography. i added some cool books to my reading list, but other than that, not easy to say what i got out of reading it :/

gonna keep on with it for a while but i'm really hoping the first two chapters are the worst

I kind of felt the way you did… it’s impressive but there’s an assumed familiarity with decades’ worth of California politicians and developers.

I don't think Davis cares about the minutia of the history of the powers that be and their struggles (beyond the shift from Downtown to the Westside that gets brought up many times). He's way more interested in their effect on the city itself. Also, it's more a polemic than a biography of a person/city.

I was hooked by the book right away, but I will say one similarity to The Power Broker is that City of Quartz builds momentum as later chapters benefit from those that came before.

Funny, I think Davis is great, but then again I grew up reading dry leftist rags so my standards for a lot of that kind of writing are pretty low.

My February reading:

My February 2024 reading:

Denis Johnson – Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki – In Praise of Shadows
Lisa Tuttle – My Death
* William Shakespeare – Measure for Measure
John McGahern – Amongst Women
Peter William Evans – BFI: Written on the Wind
Teju Cole – Black paper: Writing in a Dark Time
Stephen Davis – Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story
Joshua Green – The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and The Struggle for a New American Politics
Edward J. Larson – American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795
William Maxwell – They Came Like Swallows
Harry Crews – A Feast of Snakes
David Yazzi – Late Romance: Anthony Hecht, A Poet’s Life
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò – Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)

Thanks, table, for the Táíwò recommendation -- a genuine education.

Paul Lynch - Prophet Song.

For once I am reading a booker winner. In this novel, Ireland has become a police state. What I am liking so far is the description of various stresses, griefs, despairs being passed "through the body" of one of the characters.

About halfway through If We Burn, Bevins’ new book on the missing revolution, and while I was a bit skeptical at first, I can see him pull threads together— the cooptation of leftist protest by libertarian/right forces; recuperation and manglingof leftist ideas to fit neoliberal ideologies; the detrimental effects of social media preventing coherent movements to take shape; state and corporate actors seizing on unrest to shoehorn in their own fascist plans; etc. I am reading about a chapter per day with my coffee, so should be finished soon.

Currently reading "Good Morning, Midnight" by Jean Rhys, always an inimitable bracing voice.

Euphoria, by Lily King. A more or less fictionalized account of the love triangle among Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson. It's well-written, and while it of course can't be taken as biography, it's already sent me down numerous Mead-related rabbit holes, as this is someone I knew of mostly by reputation.

I've started another Ross MacDonald 'Lew Archer' novel, The Chill. As with the others of his I've read, he keeps the action moving along at a breakneck pace. When Lew Archer meets an incidental character who supplies Archer with a single piece of useful information, MacDonald tends to dispose of the conversation in as few words as possible and speed Archer on to the next plot development. He's not like Chandler, who had a delightful habit of inserting brief conversations between Philip Marlowe and incidental characters that barely moved the plot forward, but were rich with humor and always gratifying. I kind of miss those moments idling on the side tracks.

Would love to mention something about The Chill (when you've finished it).

You're right that the Archer books are missing a little humour, and perhaps even boring at times, but I also kind of enjoy their seriousness: at the very least, they're never pompous or unintentionally camp. Plus - he's an optimist about people and empathetic about life's compromises, it's not just easy noir fatalism. I always find myself quite invested in solving the mystery - not the case with Chandler. I suppose you could say - Macdonald wrote many better books than The Big Sleep, but I couldn't imagine him ever writing a better book than The Long Goodbye.

Would love to mention something about The Chill (when you've finished it).

I finished it last night.

The many twists and turns of the plot eventually arriveded at a denouement that was pretty far toward the furthest reaches of believability. Yes, each of the many constituent elements were only somewhat 'out there', but within belief if considered in isolation. It was the concurrence of all of them in a single tight constellation of characters that pushed the odds too far for me. But ofc that's what happens when your audience demands plots so intricate they're left guessing the outcome wrongly until the final page or two. MacDonald was just doing what his fans expected and doing it remarkably well considering.

Now I'm reading How to Live -or- A Life of Montaigne, Sarah Bakewell.

pretty far toward the furthest reaches of believability

otm