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

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.