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

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

I finished How to Live, Sarah Bakewell, the full subtitle of which is A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. It was a bit repetitive, as so many non-fic books seem to be these days, but on the whole I found it engaging. The gimmick of 'one question & twenty attempts' wasn't very helpful, but didn't actively detract either. The author succeeded in making Montaigne's life, work, and character consistently interesting. I'll chalk it up in the 'Win' column.

I had an extra hour, so I raced through a very slender book Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, which takes a brief four line poem by the T'ang poet, showing it in Chinese characters, then as a phonetic transcription, and then a literal translation of each character's possible meanings. It then gives sixteen modern translations of the poem into English, French and Spanish, with commentary on each translation. It quickly convinces you that translating T'ang poetry into modern european languages is fiendishly difficult to do well.

I've moved on to reading Grand Hotel, Vicki Baum, first published in 1929 and an instant best seller. I can see why. She handles her large cast of characters with marvelous assurance.

I am getting toward the later sections of the Thorpe biography I started about a year ago. It's actually quite a good book, if long. There is a lot to consider in this book and the life it examines, including the history of the hegemonic culture in relation to the indigenous, the shameful legacy of the same, our relationship with sport and its idols, the nature of fame. It's also an almost embarrassingly intimate view of one man's life. I kind of squirmed through the chapter quoting at length his love letters courting his (very young) second wife while still married to, if separated from, his first.

Ann Powers - Good Booty
David Yaffe - Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown
Henrik Pontoppidan - Lucky Per
Heinrich Böll - The Silent Angel

i'm experimenting with a new method of reading while at the gym. audiobook playing in my earphones, tablet placed across the screen with ebook of same book. for the latter i use an app called BookFusion that has an "autoscroll" feature which i calibrate to match the speed of the reader. i am aware it sounds insane but it actually works. i'm too adhd to listen to audiobooks, and pure reading while running doesn't work. i also zone out super hard and find i can run for much longer, do a few extra laps to finish a chapter, etc. i find exercise insanely boring but cardio helps me with stress/anxiety so i'm hoping it sticks. finished "say nothing" by patrick radden keefe (which was excellent) in a little over a week

Jones, Loaded

Getting some non fiction in - an immense world by ed yong (life is bonkers, evolution is insane) and fermat's last theorem by simon singh.

Jones, Loaded

― alimosina, Saturday, March 16, 2024 7:44 PM

I leafed through it at the bookshop yesterday.

Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood - Difficult to talk about because, here and elsewhere, fawning over Lockwood is a) an obvious move and b) already somewhat passé; also difficult because reviewing, even in this informal setting, is about finding a way to pinpoint exactly what a writer's deal is, and her deal to a large extent is pinpointing exactly what lots of other things in life's deals are, so my insight looks pale. Suffice to say I totally loved this and laughed out loud many times.

One I've actually read! It's great, isn't it? I was googling to remember the name of the other book, and found this about her meeting the Pope, which I will now sit down to read
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/patricia-lockwood/diary

Thanks, I was meaning to look that up!

Ted Gioia History of Jazz
pretty in depth history of jazz over 400 pages. Goes into the 21st century a bit.
I'm still on Modern Jazz, thought I'd be through this faster. But it is pretty good.

What is Modern Israel? Yakov Rabkin
History of the creation and results of setting up Israel. Looking at Zionism, its ties to the Nazi Party, the drive to secularism in Zionism. I've come across a lot of this before in Pappe, Masalha , Sand and elsewhere. So it's not as shocking as coming across the information contained absolutely freshly. But there is some dodgy behaviour looked at here. & it has confirmed the links between Zionism and the extreme right wing including the Nazi Party.
Interesting book and quite short,

Strangest genius : the stained glass of Harry Clarke Lucy Costigan
picture book on the stained glass artwork of Harry Clarke the Irish artist. I need to get into this. Still kicking myself for missing a cheap personal copy at the start of the first lockdown by not ringing a bookshop that had a few.
Great artist anyway. Seemed to have some influence from Aubrey Beardsley.

Sonic Life Thurston Moore
Sonic Youth ,mainstay's memoir. So far I'm still in the late 70s with him driving to events with his friend Harold. They're getting to a lot of gigs at CBGBs and Max's and discovering a lot of music.
Pretty great book but I'm reading a lot of other stuff at the same time so its being backburnered.

Andrew Heywood Political Theory
good primer on the subject. My current bathroom book,

fermat's last theorem by simon singh.

apparently this is called fermat's enigma, in large letters on the cover.

I started Morning and Evening, my first Jon Fosse.

"Good Morning, Midnight" was great. Haven't read a bad Rhys yet, so will definitely keep going. Currently reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt focusing on his youth: "Mornings on Horseback" by David McCullough. Covers a similar time period and American upper class social stratum as the William James bio I read last year.

fermat's last theorem by simon singh.

apparently this is called fermat's enigma, in large letters on the cover.

no, my copy is indeed called fermat's last theorem. enigma is the american edition. is "theorem" too scary a word for americans, like "philosopher's"?

Enigma I associate with Turing, maybe that’s why?

Oh wait

Finished a re-read of Lyn Hejinian's Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, which is, of course, none of those things. It consists of 270 free sonnets that interweave elements of Hejinian's visits to the USSR during perestroika alongside the plot of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. It's a great book, much more funny and joyous than I remember it being. That said, I first read it more than a decade ago, so my memory of it might have been a little blurry.

Hejinian is well worth reading, for anyone interested in contemporary poetry. She will be missed.

Today I need to finish my fifth or sixth re-reading of Etel Adnan's The Arab Apocalypse to prep for my poetry workshop students tomorrow, but I also am spending stray moments with a short Michael Palmer book, First Figures, which I picked up over the weekend. Palmer is an interesting poet, for while his first five or six books are quite mesmerizing in their focus on how and why we read and place signification the way the we do, his later works veer into a very French sort of abstraction that is deeply boring. This is one of his final "interesting" books.

It's officially Spring! Things have been a bit slack in the WAYR thread compared to days of yore, but maybe the pace will pick up a bit in a new thread. Either way, it's time for a new beginning.

Any takers for starting a Spring 2024 thread?

a very French sort of abstraction that is deeply boring.

My grad school experience in the early 90s in a nutshell.

lol— did you get hit with too much Lacan and Derrida?

As filtered through professors like Perry Meisel, yes.

a very French sort of abstraction that is deeply boring.

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

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

Thanks, Chinaski!

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