'In a somer seson, whan softe was þe sonne': What are You Reading in Summer 2024?

The thread title quote is from the opening line of Piers Plowman. Because of leap year, solstice come on June 20th, so here's a new thread for all our summertime ruminations, commentaries and appreciations.

It replaces the springtime 2024 thread: I have coveted everything and enjoyed nothing: what are you reading in Spring 2024?

I am about to finish Eric Ambler's Background to Danger, as mentioned in the prior thread.

Soon I'll be out solo camping/hiking for more than a week. I need to choose a few books to bring with me. I'll opt for nothing too heavy - both literally & figuratively - both because I'll be fatigued in the evenings and I'll have to carry at least one of my choices upwards of 3000 ft of elevation gain along with about 28 or 30 more pounds of stuff.

I finished Robert Plunket's long out-of-print 1983 My Search for Warren Harding, which the likes of Frank Rich and Ann Beattie declared one of the funniest novels ever written. It takes about 50 pages to get going, and more than half the nyuk-nyuks are fat and gay jokes.

Just finishing Alice Munro's "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage". Unlike many short story collections I can still remember the individual stories long after I've read them - there's something remarkable in every single one. The theme seems to be "everything in my life I didn't tell my therapist".

Next up, Oliver Harris's "The Shame Archive". Highly recommend anything by Harris if you like well-written cut-above-the-average British spy and detective thrillers. His plots are quite hectic, sometimes enjoyably so - a bit like what Max Read calls a "systems thriller" - but he's a far better sentence writer than some of the big sellers like Herron, Rankin etc

"Floating Bridge" is one of my favorite stories by anybody.

i'm reading The Lost Ones by Ace Atkins which i highly recommend if you like average American crime novels written by someone who is not a far better sentence writer than Burke, Leonard, etc.

the plot is not that hectic. but the southern slowness does fit how my brain feels when i go outside this week.

still, even saying that about the sentences, there are little touches that a decent local color artist brings to the table that i appreciate. the dialogue is fun. Ace has an ear.

Is there a good entry novel for Burke? I remember his paperbacks used to be everywhere, not so much recently.

Reading Phil Hall’s ‘Killdeer,’ which is more than a decade old but remains classic Hall— meditative and autobiographical poetry and poetics. Kind of an astonishing book.

on Spring WAYR, Aimless mentioned one of the Library of America Jack London collections which I read maybe 20 yrs ago, still struck by The Road, esp. his focus on consecutive details of moving along train train w/o being mesmerized by its steady rhythm--also what happens on the ground, and I think that's the one where he talks about strings of jobs, such as working in a laubdry---winding up in hospital for a while, rough but vacation from the gig: he's often at his best in this kind of personal journalism, can see how he encouraged Orwell's (Burma Days etc.). As far as Beliefs, The Valley pf the Moon might be a gppd pne to avoid, judging by Joan Didion's pathology report on Where I Was From (where she probes fucked-up California hype->belief systems, incl. in her own life & works).

dammit The Valley of the Moon might be a good one to avoid, that is--sorry.

laundry!

"pathology report" on TVOTM is in Where I Was From.

By "personal journalism," I mean accounts of experiences, tending toward the practical x how I got that way. like not falling off train or into the wheels, working in laundry, shooting an elephant, in pieces where London and Orwell are doing it (Didion at her best with personal experience and how that informs her views pf others in Where I Was From and other late work).

Of course Orwell had that personal experience and how that informs her views pf others to some extent, like when he said that Gandhi found fasting to be easy pr personally natural, visceral response/tactic/condition: I've always had the impression of Orwell as having an ascetic/self-punishing side, like going way up to that cold-ass island to chain-smoke his way through 1984, but no time for self-analysis then, far as I know---in his case, empathy w Gandhi etc. seems mpre intuitive than Didion's life/lives project, though she has some of that.

i need to read more because I've enjoyed the 5 or so I've already read. the Iron Heal is very prescient.

they are all out of copyright so are easy to find / cheap
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/120

Just read Paul Tremblay’s Horror Movie, which is pretty good but doesn’t entirely stick the landing. Now I’m rereading Tony Judt’s Postwar and will probably try to finish Enrique Krauze’s Mexico: Biography of Power next.

Plymell, Benzedrine Highway

Allen Ginsberg once wrote a poem called "Wichita Vortex Sutra." The Wichita Vortex part was invented by Charles Plymell, a Kansan whose early work is collected in this book. Ginsberg wrote a supportive introduction to a 1966 collection of Plymell's poetry, and it is included here along with the poetry. One assumes that Plymell's poetry got better. The rest of the book, originally published in 1971, is prose.

-Do you remember that time we were working on the Dalles Dam in Oregon? Betty and I went over on the Washington side to see a whorehouse she had known about. We drove up this little winding road and came to a hilltop where an old burned out foundation was. (There were little lines of rubble indicating the space of rectangular rooms where burned up emotion sped away on the charred remains of cots into which the wind played as it raced over the hill touching the wildflowers and down the valley to where the wile rapids roared into Portland to the calm Pacific. A lamb played in the chilly breeze the grass was yellow and huge clouds puffed in the sky. It's as if we were somewhere we'd been before, or not been; or will be again, or never. While it lasted maybe it's the pleasure of life itself. And only life is remembered. Life is pure joy. A release. Freedom from all gravity and time. While it lasted each event seemed like the complete emotion. A long story unwinding without beginning or end. No more emotion. The memory is not easily felt. The conflicts were trivial crises of unaccountable billions that make up a routine day. And then the years speed by. It was only yesterday when. It is hardly worth the trouble to think about it. The days screeched by like the broken record of time. What is happening? I am here now. Someday I won't be here. Where will I be? Me. I'm hiding behind everything in the world. The real me is hiding. Knowing that someday I won't be here. Where will I be? Is that the whole history of me? The sum total. Driving from town to town. WHat is this whole thing? Anyway? The years passing. Wrinkles and pot bellies. What to do? Where to go? Where can I wait out the Reality Nausea? The Young Flowers, they have a choice. Be cut down and take their chances being planted in someone else's suburban rose garden every summer, or roll around, blow around with the wind, planting their seeds where the wildflowers bloom. Drifting around in raw emotion before it becomes a story, fantasy's companion, where pure fiction reigns, and desire is spent like hot billionaire come, golden time is thrown away, forever spent for pure drama, more time spent than graft will ever accomplish, more freedom than any government could buy with all its tonnage of murdered flesh, the life force being beautifully alive with no thought of recompense, where dreamers go and novelists are not allowed.)
-Remember Little TOOT?
-The little boat I lived in on the Columbia River? I didn't have a place to live until payday, so I went out on this boat and camped. I got up every morning and went to work on those big air drills drilling all day into rock. Wagon drills they called them. They were mounted on wheels and pounded and drilled holes in the side of the mountain either to put re-enforcing steel in or to put dynamite in. They were developed from the steam drill, I guess. The one that replaced the hammer of John Henry.

As with Kerouac, this evokes both nostalgia at second hand and a sense of belatedness. We are hearing about the party after it is over. The unasked question is whether it had any significance in the long run. There is a sense of loss, which is shared by the writer.

History is visible in the background. As the title sums up, two aspects of those early postwar years come through: the availability of amphetamines in various forms (including a powerful inhaled substance called Oxy-Biotic, claimed to be as strong as crystal meth), and the affordability of cars by the seasonal-job-having teenage Plymell. Jobs were so easy to get that even a high school diploma was a waste of time. Kerouac didn't start any trends with On The Road; he was just the first to record what was already going on. (Plymell clearly intended to make that point.)

We don't hear enough about Plymell's Odysseus-like father, who lived everywhere, did everything, and went from being a railroad brakeman during the Depression to making and losing millions of mid-20th-century dollars on impulsive land speculation.

The two geographic poles of this book are a sepia-toned Wichita and the San Francisco of the early 1960s (or metaphorically amphetamines and LSD). Plymell was drawn in by San Francisco, where the culture is moving fast, but also wary, being no fool. Those who had moved there seven or eight years earlier were effectively of an older generation.

Plymell's values were working class, and he admired his fellow union longshoremen more than the poets and painters he hung out with. He was a friend of the artist Bruce Conner, but also helped S. Clay Wilson relocate from Wichita and publish his repulsive cartoons in Zap magazine.

Plymell surely passed away several years ago, after Ginsberg but before Ferlinghetti (who died recently at 101). Wrong! Plymell is alive right now, in 2024, the year of the debt at 130% of GDP, the collapse of the Ukraine front, the Huawei P70, and analogues of black hole ringdown modes in superfluid vortices. His youth coincided with the apex of American power and prosperity, and he's still with us as we watch the empire's death thrashings. He has the last living memories of a lot of things. And it may be that he is being written out of his own history.

Thanks. Ginsberg mentioned in Plymell in some interviews---he may be the poet credited, in No Direction Home, with giving Gins, just back from India, his first exposure to a Dylan track (think it was "Hard Rain"): "I knew the torch had passed."
The hobo as boho, an educated, freewheeling migrant worker and player, goes back at least as far in literature as young and younger xxxpost Jack London, in late 19th and early 20th Century, then he even went back, for People of the Abyss, though there were other youngsters who found themselves caught in such a way of life for who knows how many reasons and seasons---Marilynne Robinson's novel Lila builds around some of this, in an engrossing way (when the Depression comes, it registers on Lila and her colleagues as competition, from the Oakies-come-lately and such).
One of my favorite parts of On The Road is when the narrator realizes how much company he's got out there, and my favorite part of that is the driver in the homegrown vehicle, like a telephone booth on wheels, or something equally vertical.
]

lol i thought 'maybe i should try and finish Pascal Quignard's The Tears'. Picked it up

Not only did Richarius lay hands on them and remove their pain, but the water from his spring, which was dedicated to Saint Marcoul, was magically curative.

Not only did those who lived along the Somme come on foot in their droves, but the North Sea fishermen came too in their boats.

Not just Saxon monks, but Celtic druids.

And the princesses of the islands of Ireland came, their vessels in full sail, the prows carved with monsters

and just went 'nope, i can't do this faux chronicles thing any more, for i see not the purpose'.

i've still got his Abysses to get through (in theory - I may just return it to the library unread), as well as Lord Chandos' Answer - a far more interesting title at least (I only ordered it for the title tbh and it's taking ages to arrive. let's hope it takes a little longer eh).

just finished Penance by Eliza Clarke which sounded great from the blurb, but instead of being "about" true crime/podcasts/Tumblr fandom etc. it "is" those things, i.e. it has nothing to say about the genre it supposedly critiques.

also recently read

chip war by chris miller. non-fiction about history and current geopolitics of computer chips. pretty good if you are disposed to be interested in that sort of thing.

the only one left by Riley sager. gothic novel set in Maine. didn't love this. some truly awful prose at times.

the phoenix project by Gene Kim et al. very strange business novel in which completely normal business things happen and there is very little drama.kind of soothing like I imagine playing the sims or something is soothing. fiction is used as a vehicle to present certain theories of busines (Toyota theory of constraints, just in time, devops, etc.).

by force of arms by James nelson. spiritual successor to the Aubrey-maturin novels, but set in the revolutionary wars. this was the first one. has a much more conventional adventure story structure than an Aubrey-maturin novel, does not (yet?) have the benefit of the interesting relationship between two lead characters (there's only one). I will probably give the next one a shot to see if they improve.

now reading

the passage of power by Robert Caro. don't care what anyone says, he is a good writer on the subject of power.

^^

That was definitely Plymell, who writes about the encounter. More generally Plymell was a sort of interface between the Beats, whom he knew and sometimes let live with him (Neal Cassady and wife), and "the 60s" as it was taking form. Later, of all people, Herbert Huncke (like the undead Dracula) shows up and Plymell drives him around.

Plymell's moments were the 1950s driving all night on the highway and San Francisco from the early 1960s until the deluge of 1967. Plymell had a low opinion of the hippies, although he and his friends didn't mind all the young girls. Unlike the hippies, Plymell was willing to work. What he had was a horror of doing one thing for very long.

One talks about transitional figures, but Plymell during this time was so literally transitional, and liminal (poetry-Zap magazine-blue collar work), that he may have made less of a mark than he would have otherwise. I want to read Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association, but according to Google Books Plymell isn't mentioned there at all, though Conner was a close friend.

I see there's a recent collection of Plymell's letters, and that he started a teaching career after this memoir and became more rooted.

A later figure you could mention is Chris McCandless. I wonder if the tradition (if it is one) is fading out.

Unlike the hippies, Plymell was willing to work. What he had was a horror of doing one thing for very long.

“Tramps and hobos are commonly lumped together, but see themselves as sharply differentiated. A hobo or bo is simply a migratory laborer; he may take some longish holidays, but sooner or later he returns to work. A tramp never works if it can be avoided; he simply travels.”

"serial enforcement": that is, you get busted for being unemployed, released in the custody of someone who has paid your bail, you work that off, maybe make a little more (minus more expenses), get laid off, busted again etc.

And you might have to work off interest as well.

I'm reading Pride and Prejudice again. It gets better each time. I'm tempted to just marathon all of the Austen novels.

reading what an awful lot of reviews called 'the best spy thriller of the year' etc as my 'don't start me thinking *now*' just before bedtime / in bed reading. also David Petraeus' ZOMG BEST THILLER EVER book as well apparently.

and what do you know it's a sort of US omnicompetence / bro fantasy with a lot of probably quite frighteningly well researched process detail. i see absolutely nothing to distinguish it, though as of still quite early in the book it seems competently enough put together and written.

what _is_ quite good though is reading it at the same time as the petrochemical lovecraftian qabbalistic found text faux crit theory iranian/middle eastern ludibrium (or bagatelle or whatever your preferred word is for fiction as game / pastiche / caprice) Cryptonomium: complicity with anonymous materials by Reza Negarestani.

The problem with this sort of thing is that the pastiche needs to exist in tension with another message otherwise you're reading a lot of words to no end other than a sort of loose mimicry. Swift was exceptionally good at this, often managing three levels of reference and irony simultaneously, Helen deWitt also very good, most noticeably in Lightning Rods). The other narratives being sustained here are a very attenuated 'plot' managed in the footnotes, and a possibly geniunely held view of power politics in the GWoT and US/Middle eastern relations. But there's a *lot* of faux kabbalism and other stuff to get through. Fun enough if you're happy skimming. I strongly recommend Howie Lee's At The Drolma Wesel-Ling Monastery as recommended by Tim F in his AOTY2024 post for keeping things moving and providing the requisite mystical-modernist vibe going, and also for other ilx links, Death from Above 1979 are also mentioned briefly.

Essentail view of oil as a sort of universal lubricant or alkahest for religion, politics and narrative is a similar theme to Tom McCarthy's really not very good Satin Island iirc.

However, as a subtext for a mediocre spy thriller it works really well, roiling middle-eastern desert religion gnosticism invisibly driving US spy fantasy motivations and descriptions.

It's called Cyclonopedia not Cryptonomium. I don't know why i wrote that (eldritch beings reaching out from alternative dimension controlling my thoughts or Monday morning? YOU decide.)

I found Cyclonopedia similarly interesting but skim-worthy— many moments of real insight sort of smashed between incomprehensible mathematical/logic jargon and the faint wisp of a plot. I still enjoyed myself reading it, tho, as it is quite singular— can’t really think of another book quite like it.

On my current quest to read many books about mountaineering, I finished James Salter’s ‘Solo Faces’ last week and thought it pretty remarkable in a lot of ways, tho I hated the ending. Much better descriptions of what it feels like to actually climb than in Harrison’s ‘Climbers.’ However, the latter introduced me in a roundabout way to an interesting figure, John Menlove Edwards, a pioneering Liverpudlian interwar climber who was also a Marxist conscientious objector and a homosexual. Reading Perrin’s biography of him at the moment, which includes some of Edwards’ own writings in the apoendix. It is a fascinating bit of history.

I've been out hiking, during which time I read a couple of books.

One was a John Buchan novel from the early part of the 20th century, The Island of Sheep. It preserves in amber a time when the elite of the British empire still cherished its ideals of noble amateurism and fair play rising victorious over all opposition. It was an attractive fantasy and remains so, but only when imbibed in its pure form, as a fiction from which all the sludge of ugly reality has been excluded.

The other was a rereading of a Walter Mosley novel, A Red Death. As a novel of crime and detection it is mediocre, but what always made Mosley's books worthwhile is their presentation of Black American culture as a distinct and very human response to daily oppression and exclusion. Putting it into a titillating package of crime fiction and male sexual fantasies was a kind of trojan horse for trying to educate white America about that culture.

I finished both Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey in preparation for it, but I can't imagine how James Joyce's Ulysses could really be related to them. I am committed, though. If I can read War and Peace I can read Ulysses.

I am going to first get through Zadie Smith's The Fraud, a book club selection

I started Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood. As one of the blurbs said, it is "unflaggingly ironic" and I found myself wishing her tone would vary into something more ordinary for a paragraph or three, but there's plenty of book left for me to find out and she's clearly a master of her chosen comedic voice.

Today I'm reading Enrique Krauze's Mexico: Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico, 1810–1996. I started it a while ago, put it aside, and picked it up again last night.

I'm reading Jacqueline Rose's *The Haunting of Sylvia Plath*. It's the kind of hard theory stuff I've not read for a while (rooted in post-structuralism and psychoanalysis) and I'm struggling with it and finding it exhilarating in equal measure.

xp I think there are some very effective moments in Priestdaddy that look more soberly at the environment and community that she grew up in.

Herbert, Destination: Void
Mezrich, Breaking Twitter
Malzberg, The Destruction of the Temple. A good book to read on Independence Day, and almost beautiful in parts.

This country is going to blow up. Something opens in my mind like curtains parting, I see the fires, hear the sounds of shooting, the still, doomed sense of panic rising and in this vision I see not only the death of my country but my own as well, the two intermingled; it must have always been this way because driving the interstate I am the country, the country is me, linked together forever. The country is going to die, for too long things have been too close together: misdirected energy, waste, ambiguity, loss, rage. Now at last a knife is going to be drawn limb by limb, north through south, east by west through the corpus and in the bed the patient is going to erupt in clouds of blood and steam. Thrashing, clutching, groaning on the bed this patient, the country is going to die; it has been willed for a long time, now at last it is going to happen. I am going to help it die. I could not be more culpable if I had willed the destruction myself. I am bringing the Lincoln Town Sedan to Dallas.

The tippler's ginger ale and cold pizza brunch with Collete, via My Mother's House/Sido, the slim Modern Library twofer, 1995 ed. w added biographical note: charging through the garden and other (always related) thickets of imagery to the latest moment's point of further access, revelation re a figure and/or ground which has come to seem familiar---and we're off, for another whirl-jump through space-time---to the point, the point, for she really is the force that drives the green fuse through the flower and vice-versa (ginger ale, wow).

always love a bit of malzberg, and that sounds good alimosina xpost.

Two remarkable vignettes:

Hugo von Hofmannsthal – Letter from Lord Chandos and a description of Emily Brontë's time in a Brussels educational Pensionnat/school from Katherine Frank's biography of Emily A Chainless Soul.

As a schoolboy Hugo von Hofmannsthal astonished contemporaries such as Alfred Stieglitz, Richard Strauss (for whom he wrote the libretto for der Rosenkavalier), Rilke and Arthur Schnitzler and Viennese cafe society generally with lyrical poetry published under the name Loris. He then had a spiritual and creative – you might say almost epistemic and linguistic – crisis. He addressed this crisis in a letter written by a fictional Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon at some point during the reign of Elizabeth I.

After a preamble, where he writes about an inability to comprehend or connect with the works and self of his youth, he is explicit:

My case, in short, is this: I have lost completely the ability to think or to speak of anything coherently

He is driven to an 'inexplicable anger' by straightforward moral judgments (that such and such is doing well, or someone has suffered a reverse), and reading the Classics, from which he had previously derived pleasure and instruction, he feels 'like someone locked in a garden surrounded by eyeless statues.'

He is overwhelmed by isolated minutiæ of the world, such as a beetle in a bucket of water, a distant shepherd's fire, and in one vivid section, the death of rats in a cellar where he has instructed poison to be laid down. He does not feel able to connect the world with grand abstractions and language is incapable of capturing them. The rest of the time he is filled with 'a barely believable vacuity, and have difficulties concealing from my wife my inner stagnation.'

Why has he picked this moment in history, and this figure, Francis Bacon? Hofmannsthal said that the word that best described the heart of his own work was Verwandlung: transformation. Perhaps Bacon heralds the moment where what is mysterious is converted into the legible, expressible, scientific. Does Chandos' stifling surfeit of transcendence get converted along with it, or is something left behind? Hofmannstahl is himself writing at a point, well captured by Joseph Roth and Robert Musil, at the decadent end of Empire, and his letter also seems to express the collapse of High Romanticism, and its transformation and mutation into the modern age.

As I say, a psychological crisis of Self and an epistemic, spiritual, mystical and creative - even an historical - crisis come together in this short letter.

Katherine Frank's portrait of Emily Brontë is of a wild, self-denying person in a strange prison with multiple walls - the hated flat lands of Belgium, and the carefully cultivated gardens, stone walls and educational system of Constantin Héger's Pensionnat. She responds to this situation with extreme and grotesque abnegation and silence, responding to all friendly comments or jokes with a terse 'I wish to be as God made me' driving off even well-wishers with the direness of her company. She cuts a strange figure, tall and lean next to trim and petite Charlotte, over whom she exerted a malignant controlling influence, so that Charlotte, who was very much enjoying the time there, felt unable to socialise, turning her head to profile or completely away from any people she was in conversation with. Emily in the meantime kept complete silence, and for her essay exercises in French wrote black misanthropic screeds and of all Nature being an engine to produce evil, that took Constantin Héger's breath away with their brilliance and originality, even though they existed in complete opposition to each other throughout. She sounds f'ing awful tbh, with a powerful ability to create intense suffering for herself, and an equally strong ability to endure it.

I was driven to both these texts by finally getting my copy of The Answer to Lord Chandos by Pascal Quignard, which it turns out is a response to Hofmannsthal's letter, and not anything to do with the Chandos Ammendment which was the only Chandos I'd been aware off before from A-level history, along with the Lord Chandos pub just off Trafalgar Sqaure. One of the things I took away from The Tears by Quignard was that I didn't really trust him with historical detail. I didn't have _reason_ to exactly, as I simply didn't know enough about that period of French history during the reign of Charlemagne. It was a suspicion, something about the way he worked historical detail.

Anway, first para of Lord Chandos:

In 1842, on Rue Isabelle, In Brussels, when she was teaching at the Heger boarding school, Emily Brontë never raised her eyes toward the other professors. She went only once into the room reserved for them; the panic attack that seized her then was such that she never set foot in it again. If someone watched her closely while she was eating at the refectory table, she would look away, confused, filled with a dizzying fear, although she was never fearful of anything in England, *in the Yorkshire*, when she was out on her own and roamed the moor in the company of her dog and her goshawk, when she encountered vagabonds and crossed paths with madmen there. She never had the courage to address her colleagues when she bumped into them in the hallways and they took her to task in a discussion; she rapidly bowed her head. Even the students to whom she taught English, literature and music...

I had two thoughts reading this. One, *did Hercule Poirot translate this*? Two, errrrr I don't think Emily taught English and literature, that was Charlotte? Hence me going to the biographies - and yes, as far as I can tell from those, Emily only taught music, partly because she was such an inflexible tyrant in how she did this, they didn't want her teaching anything else.

And in answer to my question, it was not translated by Hercule Poirot, en fait, but Stéphanie Boulard and Timothy Lavenz (US, I think).

So, my suspicion and intense wariness of Quignard remains and is intensified, but the book is very short and i'm grateful to him for causing me to read Hoffmansthal and the Emily Brontë biog.

also reading a selection of pieces by Anne Carson - Wrong Norma. Trying to collect my thoughts on it - it's extremely elusive.

oh, and Practice by Rosalind Brown. v undergraduate novel about a day in the life of a young oxford student trying to write an essay on shakespeare's sonnets. ikr. it fills the time with an obsessive iteration of miniscule sensory experiences, and hauling over nascent sexual awakening. it is a v undergraduate novel, and you kind of think Brown should have been left to complete and finish this as a worthwhile writing exercise, rather than having it published. because brown *can* write, no question, and the feel they have for the sonnets is well expressed. it's just the dramatic context of oxford undergraduate is so stale and not really retrieved by the throwing together of undergraduate experience, a dubious sounding sexual relationship, and the sonnets.

i've said it's a v undergraduate novel twice i see, which is entirely justified.

I am continuing with the book on John Menlove Edwards, the interwar British climber and adventurer who was also a homosexual rights activist and conscientious objector. It is a little sloggy but the good parts are quite astonishing— the author just included an entire sermon that Menlove gave in 1934 and it was quite moving.

Also began and finished Dennis Cooper’s new book of stories this week. All but one were new to me, and are typical for Cooper— teenage boys reflecting and projecting the nihilistic violence of society in increasingly perverse ways. I enjoyed it, particularly the way Cooper has really gotten the cadence of mindless sex worker chatter down to a ‘t’ (and I say this as a former SWer). Anyway, I am a fan and will continue to be, tho I know he’s not for everyone.

Thanks for all that, Fizzles---might be good to take a look at Lucasta Miller's The Bronte Myth and this thread: Bronte Siblings: FITE!

Thanks for all that, Fizzles---might be good to take a look at Lucasta Miller's _The Bronte Myth_ and this thread: Bronte Siblings: FITE!🕸🕸

Been a long time since I read The Bronte Myth, but liked the way it traced some stories etc. back to family members )maybe mostly Emily?), also looked at takes down through the ages, Victorian, Freudian etc, and in some cases, beyond doctrinaire lols, gave a sense of pieces of the truth therein, also non-reductive re the artistic adventures, challenges of, for authors and their readers (I think that Miller also expressed frustration w Bronte homeplace etc as part of the cuet British tourist industry).

I recently finished “Tarka the Otter” by Henry Williamson and am now re-reading it. The unfamiliar vocabulary made it slow going the first time but the second read is flowing much better. I’m not much of a naturalist so all the names of animals and plants and terms for waterways and geological formations send me scurrying for the dictionary or the helpful glossary he provides for the more obscure local terms that are peculiar to early 20th century Devon.

In something of a step down from many of the previous posts, I've just finished Me Talk Pretty One Day, which wasn't on my list but I had to read for reasons too embarrassing and long winded to go into. I wasn't totally against the idea but in the end I just didn't find it at all funny.

Now on to Second Class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta.

What's a good translation of The Red and the Black?

I started Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood. As one of the blurbs said, it is "unflaggingly ironic" and I found myself wishing her tone would vary into something more ordinary for a paragraph or three, but there's plenty of book left for me to find out and she's clearly a master of her chosen comedic voice.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless),

I started it yesterday night at your recommendation.

I've been enjoying it.

Finished Second Class Citizen. It reminded me of Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (as much as I can remember it) - largely autobiographical poverty and misogyny in mid (ish) 20th century London told in a fairly plain / straightforward way, with added racism. Adah/Buchi goes through hell for sure but she is so full of grit and self belief that the reading experience is almost uplifting.

Sly Stone Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)
Funk bandleader and ex-dj's memoir . Quite a quick read I got through it in 3 days while doing other things. Thought itpretty interesting though maybe not as in depth as the George Clinton one I read a few months back and does have overlap here.
I love the Family Stone music anyway.

Arthur Koestler The 13th Tribe
History of the Khazars an Eastern European population that appears to have converted to Judaism in the 8th or 9th century.
I saw this in the bibliography of a book I read a few months ago Nur Marsalla or Shlomo Sand or something. Ties in with a theory that a lot of Jewish population across Europe dates back to this conversion and not the alleged one where Israel is an ancestral homeland for every Jew. The latter not tying in with Palestine having existed for a much longer time than that history would allow.
Anyway interesting book by an author I've read and enjoyed before.

Before European hegemony : the world system A. D. 1250-1350 Janet Abu-Lughod,
Historian that I found out to be Palestinian writing about set up of geographical/political/economocal set up in the 13th-14th century and how there were non-European trade systems that had as much if not more weight before that. So the West was not visibly predestined to be dominant beforehand which counters a Eurocentric viewpoint that has been prevalent for a couple of hundred years.
I remember having read about a book looking into this in a Guardian or Observer book review at roughly the time this book came out so have wanted to read whatever book that was since, subsequently am wondering if this was the same book. Seems well written and argued anyway.
So looking forward to getting through this. But again probably too many library books going on at the same time cos there are a few others I haven't really looked at yet plus one I had on order came through this morning. & one I'm still backburnering has a hold on it so need to rush through that.

Just finished Ducks, Newburyport after a year or so on and off. It really gets going in the last 150 pages, so I started to skip passages looking out for the plot points. Can't see myself ever rereading, tbh.

i made it halfway through Ducks during the pandemic. my bookmark is still there in case there is ever another pandemic.

have a lot of gay sex, get monkey pox, start where you left off

will do!

my review for Ducks still stands. "What if Erma Bombeck wrote Finnegans Wake."

have a lot of gay sex, get monkey pox, start where you left off

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 20 August 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Just got finished reading a new book here’s my review pic.twitter.com/5N0glNGz1S

— Liv (@Liv_Agar) August 20, 2024

I finished A Childhood, Harry Crews, and it really delivered all the way through.

I immediately left for a backpacking trip the next day. For reading material I took with me The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler. I'm about halfway through and it's OK. If it were my first Philip Marlowe novel I'd probably say it was superb stuff, but it's not my first. It's the fifth one Chandler wrote and there is a rote quality creeping in, where he does all his signature moves, but they're getting a bit shopworn from frequent handing. otoh, Chandler was a good enough writer that he couldn't write a bad book, only one that's subpar for him.

‘cigarettes’ by harry matthews

second novel i’ve read by matthews, first was ‘the journalist.’ so far ‘cigarettes’ is more conventional in form (though who knows what mischief lies in store) despite being similar in content (people caught in a web of infidelity). feels like an influence on whit stillman ‘metropolitan’ at times (young idle rich new yorkers). matthews’ impish dark humour just cracks me up. there’s a delightful momentum to it, lots of the early chapters capturing the brisk acceleration into infatuation of young love so well; there’s an early scene where two characters have sex in a mudbath that’s hilarious but also very romantic and cute

have a lot of gay sex, get monkey pox, start where you left off

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 20 August 2024 10:37 AM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

will do!

― scott seward, Tuesday, 20 August 2024 11:02 AM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

lmao

Reading a fair amount to prep for the semester but my night reading is ‘Summer’ by Edith Wharton, my second Wharton. i had forgotten how good she is.

I'm so glad you think so, tabes. Even now when I recommend her in person I get scowls like she writes this corseted fiction when she understood sex and power and geography more than any novelist/short story writer of her time

reading Real life by Adeline Dieudonne. i love it. scary. sad. magical. about two kids with a horrible father. something completely insane happens to them and the book is about what happens after that. its not a horror novel but it feels like one. i actually might like those best when it comes to horror. translated from the French. the author is from Belgium.

https://bunnyspause.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/86766520_561552091105524_7449956001404420096_n.jpg

lots of different covers for this book.

https://bookaroundthecorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/dieudonne3.png

I've begun to read Abigail, Magda Szabo.

I read it a couple years ago. Keep us posted!

I finished Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Mad and the Bad a few minutes ago. I'll reread The Silent Woman now.

I re-read *The Silent Woman* after finishing the Heather Clark biography. It's terrific - arch, funny, acerbic, all those things you want from Malcolm. She's kinder to Anne Stevenson than I remembered; Malcolm is rarely starstruck but carries vestigial respect for Stevenson from their shared background in the 50s. She's very human toward Olwyn too. As for Jacqueline Rose: she had Malcolm's number (and I don't imagine many did).

Malcolm's anything but kind about England, though. It functions almost as a character and it's clear she sees England and English attitudes as a fundamental part of Plath's story.

It's also a brilliant book about writing I think? Malcolm allegorises each 'character' as part of the writing process: the resistances, the strength a writer needs to conquer demons (real, imagined), what a writer must learn to *leave out*. I could quote whole passages!

nb, here's one of Malcolm being human about Olwyn. Human, but still, ouch.

We all move through the world surrounded by an atmosphere that is unique to us and which we may be recognized as clearly as by our faces... Some of us, however, have thicker atmospheres than others, and a few of us have an atmosphere of such opacity that it hides us entirely from view - we seem to be nothing but our atmosphere. Olwyn Hughes is like this.

I needed an epic in my life. Reading The Prophets of Eternal Fjord by Kim Leine. Part One of his Greenlandic trilogy. Translated from Danish.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91cAeWtPqdL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg

Finished Euclides Da Cunha - Backlands. Described about half of it here.

'Novels' by Journalists

finished Barchester Towers, almost a second 2/3rds to The Warden. found it a real slog though, half the page rate of other reading.

and the next one is about 50% longer than those two together.

i guess he's trying to out-Dickens Dickens with the character names, but misses. Proudie, Harding, Bold, Handy, just adjectives. Sir Abraham Haphazard, Omicron Pie, ridiculous. the bloke with 14 kids is called Quiverful, suggesting, i don't know, potency? (psalm 127 apparantly)

Heh -- that's the only major Trollope I haven't read. Sorr.

Sorry.

In the way we live now there is a baker called crumb. And other such things I don’t recall

The Way We Live Now pulled me right through its mass, and sometimes tours my head w/o warning (well, the news can trigger), to this day.
Only other AT at local library: first Lily Dale, The Small House at Allington---good?

Jenny Erpenbeck, The End of Days. Starts with the death of a child and, over half way through, it hasn't lightened up yet. I mean it's got the first and second world wars and stalinism so it doesn't have a lot to be cheery about. The writing is just incredible, I think it's kind of a masterpiece, but I don't know if I can fully love a book that only shows the worst of us.

The Small House at Allington---good?

good!

Jazz on Record a Critical Guide Charles Fox Peter Gammond Alexis Korner
1960 book from the Grey Arrow series of handy guides. Very interesting reading now since it features a number of significant artists in very formative stages and is dismissive of electricity in blues. Also no mention of Delta Blues or Robert Johnson, though the first lp compiling his work was 1961 so that is probably not that surprising. Just odd from a current perspective.
Chance find from a charity shop yesterday. Not sure it's going to turn me on to anything new but interesting to see what was thought at the time.

I guess one could argue that Delta blues was not as influential on jazz as the more urbane varieties.

I finished Cutting for Stone, which was great, highly recommended. A bildungsroman, family saga, exotic adventure, medical thriller and many other things.

I finished Abigail, Magda Szabo, about a week ago, but left at once to go camping so my impressions aren't as fresh as I'd like them to be.

The protagonist was a 14 year old girl as were many of the supporting characters, who were her schoolmates. Because the book concentrates its attention upon their thoughts and feelings, while portraying the adults exclusively through such words and actions as were visible to the girls, it felt like an exceptionally good 'young adult' novel, but one that only made a few concessions to younger readers. Its main concession was that the plot twist at the end was telegraphed rather frequently and transparently. Otherwise, it was very deft at suggesting the many moral ambiguities that are imposed upon adults, in spite of all their efforts to impose moral clarity upon existence, and how one's recognition of these moral complications is a major step into adulthood.

While camping I read a collection of early Dashiell Hammett short stories, The Continental Op. The prose was clean and precise. The pulpy elements were there, but only to satisfy the requirements of the audience, so that his stories could be sold, published and read. It was evident that Hammett had other interests as a writer that he was pursuing, often tangled up with how corruption is everywhere hiding behind endless facades, emerging into the open to protect itself with violence when challenged.

Any Thackeray fans? I want to read Vanity Fair? How does he compare with my beloved Trollope?

i want to be a fan. i will read some. he wrote a lot! one of these days...

this always looked fun to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Snobs

Thackeray initially adopted several pen names to remain anonymous, including the pseudonyms: Théophole Wagstaff, Charles Yelowplush, Major George Fitz-Boodle, Michael Angelo Titmarsh, and Ikey Solomons, Miss Tickletoby, Manager of the Performance, Arthur Pendennis, Timothy Titcomb, and Solomon Pacifico.

Finished the sixth Jackson Brodie book by Kate Atkinson, a very fun three-star book, which is kind of the same as four.

I've never really seen anyone talking about Atkinson on ILX, either here or on the ILE thriller thread - her Brodie books are all different degrees of excellent. If you liked Alan Plater's Beiderbecke books/TV shows, you're probably on safe ground here. They are grim without being grindark and fun without ever becoming "FUN!!!". It's almost a Doctor Who model - Jackson is always at the center but the tone of the novel depends on whatever the mess he's got into this time is.

i liked Case Histories a lot. it was very unique! but i never read any of the other ones.

Scott, you'll be pleased to know my next book is another Elizabeth Taylor novel, The Soul of Kindness.

she is such a pleasure to read.

Working and living in CT this summer with one day off/week. Hitting NYC bookstores once weekly and making a point of buying and reading a book each time. So far read The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras, Groove, Bang, and Jive Around by Steve Cannon, All Fours by Miranda July, Tremor by Teju Cole, Waterfront Journals by David Wojnarovic, and Scratches by Michel Leiris. All excellent and thank god I can still finish actual paper books!

Love Thackeray - well, Vanity Fair, anyway. Becky is an amazing character, a very modern anti-heroine, and Thackeray gives her her due.

I finished Music & Silence, Rose Tremain. Some raunchiness and vague hints at magic realism to distract from the fact that this is a very conventional story, featuring innocent star crossed lovers, a kindly but weak king, an evil stepmother, etc. Not angry I read it or anything but nothing special.

I’m almost done with House of Splendid Isolation by Edna O’Brien. This is my first by her. It reminds me a bit of Leonardo Sciascia in the way it combines something like a political thriller with keen social and psychological observation.

I just finished The Soul of Kindness last night. I was a bit disappointed in it, but that is largely due to the high expectations I have of Elizabeth Taylor's novels, not any grave flaws in the book. I simply found the characters and their actions to be less compelling than in the other Taylor novels I've read.

Finished a chap by John Coletti and a collaborative book of New Yorker cut-ups by Clark Coolidge and Larry Fagin.

New morning reading is Carl Sauer's selected essays from 1963-1975. having never read Sauer before but knowing his influence on the last generation of the modernist poets— Olson, Dorn, Prynne— I am actually enjoying myself.

Now reading Rick Moody's debut novel "Garden State". It reads like typical early work, something a mature writer might want to disown, but in his preface to the reissue, added later, Moody seems ok with letting it out into the world, warts and all. It seems like the writer is not sure exactly what effect he is trying to achieve a lot of the time. There is the sense that just getting down the truth of what happened (in some sense of "truth" and some sense of "what happened") is sufficient. Lots of references to local northern NJ suburban lore that probably tickled those in the know, but are guaranteed to fly over the heads of most. There is also apparently no connection to the Zach Braff movie, despite the similarity in theme and setting. This book is a lot tawdrier and druggier though.

In the meantime, read a book by young Canadian poet Hamish Ballantyne that was among the best I have read all year— surprising images, really deft line-work, and the sort of “learned dropout” sensibility that seems to spring eternal from the Vancouver area’s poetry scene. Good stuff.

hamish was my roommate in vancouver. funny worlds-crossing moment to see his name itt. great guy :)

(Aimless morphs into a giant white rabbit and looks at his pocket watch)

Dear, dear me! It's time already? I'm late. Oh dear, I'm late for a very important date. Time for a new WAYR thread.

As We Seek Moderation!!! In All Things!!!!!! What are Your Reading in Autumn of 2024?

With apologies to dow, he started a Fall 2024 WAYR thread a couple of hours before I launched mine. It takes precedence.

Caught, Back, Party Going: What Are You Reading In The Fall of 2024?

awesome, close thread, mods!

> It takes precedence.

i'd disagree. you linked to the new one from the old one, people started posting here. the other one was just created and left for people to find, and had no posts.

also, we don't do 'fall'.

To quote the man-god dying on a tree: "It is done."