September 2006 - What are you reading?

reading:
picture of dorian gray

(this is my first post here, yay!)

finished 'vineland', have gone back to 'bouvard and pecuchet', a bit of 'schnitzler's century', and am rereading 'the claim of reason'. also, auditing a schopenhauer seminar that starts this week so i'll be reading 'the world as will and representation'.

Also yesterday, Jean-Philippe Toussaint's short Autoportrait (à l'étranger). Just little article like stories of time spent in different cities - Tokyo / Hongkong / Berlin / Prague / etc. Pretty insignificant.

Today, just started Haruki Murakami's Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. New collection of twenty-four short stories written from the beginning of his career to just last year.

Huh? It's this chap here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James

I didn't even realize he was the brother of Henry!

I already have a sense that I'll need to plough through this book. :-)

I am still reading 1599, and it is still very good, but my concentration is low, so it seems like it's going on for ever. But some really solid historical research and interesting anecdotes. I want to go and watch a whole load of Shakespeare now.

Ah damn it, I should have bought that book!

Also read the Kite Runner [Khaled Hosseini] and The Accidental [Ali Smith]. Both good.

Also: 'I know where I'm going' by Michael Bracewell and Linder: a guide to the delights of Morecambe Bay, where me and Mrs the Nipper will be spending some time in a couple of weeks. It's a pretty book but extremely insubstantial. I bet MB wrote it in half an hour just before his final deadline.

I read this as well. Due to my VU obsession, I guess. I'm not interested in the upcoming movie though.

Is that the Plimpton oral biography?

heh. well, it's big jimmy. the erected version. ;-)

I somehow got the impression that young Huxley stitched together a jumble of his university papers and some ideas tossed around in his late-night bull sessions, into a loose, rather plotless, framework and dropped the result on his publisher, who was demanding a new MS at once, in order to take advantage of the success of Huxley's first book as swiftly as he could. In spite of all that, it succeeds in overcoming its many weaknesses and being quite amusing and enjoyable.

Last book I read was Turgenev's Fathers & Sons. I'm pretty sure the old Norwegian translations of 19th Century Russian novels are generally the most readable books I know of - at least when there aren't too many names to keep track of. I love how he shot in a quick glance at how the poor viewed Bazarov.
Slowly reading "The Selfish Gene" now. Dawkins is frustrating when he gets on his pedestal in the media (which frankly is every time he is in the media), but his pop science writing is excellent.

I can assure you, the MB I know would never do such a thing.

Finished re/reading Downriver the other day. So dense; the English GR, I think, with good and bad connotations of that thought. Sinclair is awfully stagey when he tries to fictionalize. But he remains, or already was, terrific when simply writing about ... reality: places, objects, journeys.

Started Lanark; still not much over 100pp in; not quite sure whether to continue, really.

I have read surprisingly a lot in the last couple of months, but the post I wrote about it last week wouldn't send, so you don't know about it.

Jaq, now we know the source of those many distractions... good luck in your move back to Seattle and the possibly fantastic new job there.

Pinefox, could you be the one to buck the ILB trend on Lanark?

I am reading The Year of Magical Thinking by Hey Joni Didion.

I could not get on with Titus Groan. Is this normal?

I have read The Road to Los Angeles by John Fante. It was good, but not as good as Ask the Dust or the last part of the quartet whose title I have forgotten. There was a lot of cruelty to animals.

The former is interesting because it features a teacher of literature who is neither inspired nor inspirational, thank goodness for that.

I didn't know there was an ILB trend re. Lanark - ie: I thought everyone liked it!

'Lacquered dandy'. I have to admit, JtN is keeping the faith with RB, admirably.

Too often he'll be doing his regular Greil Marcus thing, getting into close analysis of some passage (mostly of film, in this book) and just when you're waiting for him to slam a point home, he seems to run out of steam. The example that springs to mind is where he talks at some length about the opening sequence of "Blue Velvet", and all this build up leads to (my paraphrase from memory, apols) "it's not making the familiar strange, it's getting at how familiar the familiar is." Which seems either facile or not thought-through, or maybe a bit of both.

I should add that I know a sum total of NOWT about film, don't watch many films, very very rarely read film criticism, so maybe I'm missing something obvious and valuable. (There are many other reasons I might miss something obvious, of course, mostly brain-related.)

Towards the end of the book I felt myself willing him on: "make your point MAKE YOUR POINT" and when no great big slam-dunk of a point was made I was a little frustrated. It was the right thing, though: the book's equation goes "here's America's founding mythos" + "here's how America conducts itself" = ____________________ make your own mind up about right and wrong.

A week tomorrow I'll be in Tennessee, so this counts as homework, by the way.

Finished the Edie Sedgwick biography this morning. If the word 'fabulous' had been omitted, it would have been half the size. Many of the people interviewed appeared more keen to talk about themselves, "so Edie asked me what Andy Warhol should do next - I said, well what about silk screen printing? Well, look what happened!"

Edie took astounding amounts of drugs.

Tom, Egil is the one who avenges his uncle's mistreatment by King Harald of Norway. At least, I'm pretty sure that's where it going.

Oh, da Peej, you so funny. Mister Monkey would not like to hear you talk of Suetonius in that way.

Kia ora, Justine. Or something.

I'm a Chch expat in Canada, btw.

When I am rich, I will move to Christchurch and stay there forever, with a little holiday home way up north in Pahia, to give me the excuse to go on the ferry and stop off in Picton periodically. Sigh.

Anyway, I've just finished reading a book of short stories by Irish authors called These Are Our Lives. It is a super book, covering all the bases of actual modern Irish writing, including post-apocalyptic holidays in Spain, romantic oldy-Irelandy dreams about horses, legging around Europe on the doss, and casual sex in soulless apartment buildings. Top quality stuff. Naturally, as with all books of short stories, there was one long, boring one, but for the most part this book zips along. I recommend it.

I don't know what JAFAs are. But I didn't see any of those things when I was in Christchurch. I'm willing to believe it has its problems, and certainly the area my cousin lived in seemed, er, euphemistically colourful. But it's still a nice place. I like small cities. I liked Wellington too, especially the bookshops.

How was away, Tim?

accentmonkey: JAFA = just another fucking aucklander :)

have just picked up Catch-22, am about 100pages in but finding it difficult and slightly confusing, although it is quite funny. since its a "classic" im trying to persist.

just had a skim read of the thread "summarise a novel in 25 words" - i haven't laughed so hard in a looong time... book-geeks have the best sense of humour...

Some of the story cycles referenced in the trickster book regarding the way that the human body came to be as it is, particularly the intestines and penis, are hilarious.

Saragossa isn't as convoluted as I thought it would be. Cracking book, regardless.

Lanark

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

The White Album

For Esme With Love & Squalor

and I didn't like any of them as much as I would have liked, might have hoped. I liked the idea of them, but the actualities didn't always match that.

Lanark I thought deeply impressive at the end - but it took ablkut 400 pages to reach that stage. For a long time it dragged, and didn't do much to drag me along. I liked it most at its most metafictional, and when it was most explicit about its political ideas, its desire for and interrogation of utopia. It *did* feel important and worthwhile, but did it have to be so long?

Joan Didion disappoints me - because she seems to offer so much, and is acclaimed in such encouraging quarters. I have read more of her than I have of most writers. But all four volumes I've finished haven't altogether convinced. Leaving aside the fiction, these two essay collections both strike me as immature, brittle, underachieved to a surprising degree. I like them too, in a way, like them a lot. But maybe I like the idea of them and of her, more than I like the actuality of what she has to say. She can be such a reactionary: never mind her essay on feminism, and her enduring fascination with military graveyards, the piece on LA traffic management seems to me just a slice of right-wing anti-statist satire. Maybe the title essay 'StB' is better; I read it with Dylan Live 1966 and a bottle of red wine, which went down pretty well. But even here, I think I was troubled by her relation to the people she wrote about. She wants to appear so wise, and for others to appear so foolish, as they bob amid her cool simple sentences. But after a while this technique doesn't seem so wise - it seems evasive, egotistical, snide. I am trying to think of pieces I liked. 'On The Morning After the Sixties' - in theory; but even that is rather reactionary. 'The White Album' itself: maybe that's as good as she gets? And the last piece in StB, on NYC - that moved me some.

She has been fortunate in her admirers.

The Salinger I started many years ago, have read in bits, thought I had better finish - so at least I've now read all the published fiction. The last two stories, again, disappointed. 'Teddy', I think that's the last one - the boy who has Hindu cosmic awareness; jeez, surely this is JDS at his worst. I am torn. I like this book, I like to like it, like to have it on my shelves. But what's actually good about it?

this is appealing! but i'm not entirely sure it's fitting.

didion's detachment is maybe a result of attempting to write her depression, not eliminate it from the written account of her experiences. whether that's right or not i dunno. her isolation is troubling but sorta compelling. her isolation from haight-ashbury kids, the suggestion that there is no 'movement', is convincing to me. but then her isolation from/dismissal of the feminist movement i find slightly repugnant, hard to process.

i'm not entirely sure who those people-who-matter are meant to be, seeing as how they don't seem to include any of the artistic figures or politicians she's written about. (that i've read her writing about.)

(maybe i think i'd prefer your metaphor if you worked aliens into it. she sometimes seems to be looking upon the human species like a zoological observer from mars.)

This is not how I read her. i think she's hyper-aware of the "problem" of a journalist's detachment from her subjects and she's really worried about the condescension inherent in romanticizing them (compare her to Capote on this, for example). She often strikes me as really sympathetic to those she writes about, especially when they're women, for example in "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" (I love that essay) and the one about Joan Baez. But it's an intellectualized, detached sympathy for sure: I think that that's in part a function of her personality (she's often talked about her shyness and how hard calling up people for interviews is for her) and in part an ethical decision. again, compare "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" to In Cold Blood on this.

well, because it's honest!! right?

The claim that her style of presenting other people might be caused by shyness or depression / mental problems seems to me probably true - mainly because she virtually says as much early in both collections/ But the fact that we might be able to *explain* the style doesn't *justify* it, does it? If reader A says 'I don't like William Burroughs' incoherent, babbling writing', and reader B says: 'you have to understand that this is because he took lots of drugs' - then reader B is correct, but the claim doesn't necessarily make Burroughs any better.

I agree that it's hard to say who does 'matter' in her world, except perhaps soldiers.

re. her relation to the 1960s counter-culture: I don't think she says 'there was no movement' - if anything she says it's more political and more dangerous than the media understand? But she does make it seem ... weak, foolish, immature, half-baked. She seems sceptical about it. I don't think there's anything wrong with that: I think it must be an important truth about that culture - and perhaps her judgement thus endures better than more excitable ones.

BUT - she also writes about the period in apocalyptic terms. Here's the first paragraph of that essay:

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together.

And there's more of this in the intro the book, I think; so, she is prone to sensationalism herself?

Horseshoe says that JD is 'ethical' compared to Capote because he romanticizes violent criminals and she remains detached. In that kind of case, this surely makes sense. But -- not all of the people she writes about are violent criminals! There's no need to remain so detached from them - and there must be a middle ground between romanticization and the way she deals with them, which too often seems contemptuous to me.

And she *does* romanticize John Wayne (and co? I think) - in an essay which might have seemed original and distinctive before David Thomson wrote, but now seems somewhat second-hand and limited.

I don't think we should get fixated on this particular problem with Didion, when I think there are others. But I guess a lot of it does come to down to a) banality; a failure to tell us anything really incisive or thought-provoking: as though 'blank' reportage is always enough; b) a sense of superiority, a much too frequent implicit sneer; c) the reactionary attitudes mentioned above. In truth, I still think Amis on Didion is a more compelling piece than any piece I've read by Didion. Gosh, do I really think that? I fear that I do.

Fair enough: she does romanticize Wayne, but she doesn't really have a choice; he sort of comes pre-romanticized for her and for her readers, which is pretty much what that essay's about. I've never read Thomson, though, so I can't speak to that essay being derivative. I find it insightful.

I wasn't trying to suggest that Didion isn't romantic in some larger sense; it's completely true that the passage you quoted is apocalyptic-sounding, as is a lot of StB. I don't find that "sensationalistic" (I'm sure they felt like pretty apocalyptic times!) and I don't think it changes the fact that she is committed to registering the isolation of the reporter vis-a-vis the subject. To me, this keeps the people she writes about real and protects them somehow.

I can't help feeling that you and I are characterizing her writing in an entirely opposite way, Pinefox, so maybe there's nothing more to say. I will admit that the new journalism of that period makes me really uncomfortable, even when it's written beautifully, as Capote's work usually is, and I view Didion as an antidote because she's so scrupulous. And she writes beautifully.

I'm really glad this came up; it's making me want to reread her. Maybe I'll have more to say once I do.

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/103/didion-per-harrison.html

I really don't get the "cold, cold heart" school of criticism. (I heard a professor once complain about Jane Austen for similar reasons. which seems to be entirely missing the point.) does it get applied to male writers, too?

Distant but at least topical comparison: Borat - taking c.2 hours of footage and showing 30 seconds to make passer-by / real person look sillier than they really did.

I was not saying that Didion was derivative of Thomson - he comes after her and reveres her. Just that once you've read him, her take on movies doesn't seem so great. Though I don't mean 'In Hollywood', which is kind of interesting - though also sneering and nasty.

Once again: I quite agree that Amis *in general* is annoying - the point is about this particular essay, and the valid or at least interesting things he has to say in it.

PS / I have to countenance the possibility that LATE Didion - much admired, Indian summer, crowning moments of career etc - might be better than early.

Thomson adores Democracy.

I have Where I Was From on a shelf at home. I have heard good things about it, which may be better than reading it. I have found it difficult to bring myself to read about Didion's ancestors. I like the cover, though. It is nicely designed and she looks good on it.

This is her appeal in a nutshell.