2012 and the northern days advance, the southern recede: what are you reading?

It is now Aprille with his shoures sote. Time for a new 'What are you reading?' thread.

I have been reading The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, about the last Scott expedition to the South Pole, where Scott got to the pole, discovered Amundsen had got there first, then died on the return trip, along with the group that accompanied him.

musil - 'the man without qualities'
von rezzori - 'an ermine in czernopol'
fitzgerald - 'great gatsby', 'tender is the night'
austin - 'mansfield park'

i always get about twenty pages further in 'mansfield park' and fall asleep but i really enjoyed everything else

further interpretations of real life events - kevin moffett

^v excellent short stories, cant recommend more highly

also reading a sorta pulpy thing called 'sharon tate and the manson murders'

I finished Roth's Letting Go. It was really good, though heavy going at times which is unusual for him. It may have been me I suppose, I got to feeling reader's blocky latterly, yet there were certainly plenty of things happening to bowl the story along. One definite flaw in it is that it shifts perspective a bit, again unusually for him, but lands mostly on the least interesting of the major characters - and as he becomes increasingly distant towards the end, I found myself knowing not as much as I'd've liked to. Leave the reader wanting less, in this instance.

Now DeLillo's The Angel Esmerelda. No reader's block here, I've devoured five of the nine stories already. The title story is quite amazing - such a jolt to see it stand alone, with the metaphors and backstories shorn of the wider resonance they gain from Underworld. They work regardless; it speaks to the power of the long novel though, that the appearance of terror, discarded syringes, or a parade of death instantly brings that book back in vivid flashes.

Mansfield Park is Austen's gothic novel, right?

finished Elsa Morante's Aracoeli - amazing, great book with a flawed last few pages.

Harlot's Ghost, a real treasure.

this time, i am actually going to finish the power broker.

"finished Elsa Morante's Aracoeli - amazing, great book with a flawed last few pages."

did you read La Storia? - it's her masterpiece, subjectively and objectively:)

currently reading Delillo's Angel Esmeralda which is very very good.
and Tristran Shandy - an on going project i startet 2 weeks ago.

i keep hoping nyrb or someone will put out a collection of morantes short stories in english

On Photography by Susan Sontag.
V for Vendetta - Alan Moore / David Lloyd
And I'm about to start on Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos too.

did you read La Storia? - it's her masterpiece

no but I bought it (at a completely awesome used book store in Denton which not that most people ever get the chance to go to Denton but Jesus if you do, right downtown there's a place called Recycled Books that's completely make-a-point-of-coming-back-to-this-town-to-buy-more-books great) once I was about 1/3 of the way through Aracoeli - what a great writer

i keep hoping nyrb or someone will put out a collection of morantes short stories in english

dude if you dropped a note to Open Letter saying this it might actually have an effect, those guys are doing great work in bringing stuff into print. A little uneven, not every volume's a gem but I have them to thank for getting me into Merce Rodoreda who's now one of my favorite writers ever

anti-oedipus which i am really loving.
power / michel foucault so far so good.
aaand the return - roberto bolaño which i haven't really started yet

Please describe the writing of Morantes.

finished going through the viriconium books.

reading tolkien's 'the notion club papers' which is this weird proto-borgesian thing about the inklings collected in those horrid 'the history of middle-earth' volumes.

should probably read some proper books.

Wdn't bother - walked past Daunt's bookshop just now and they all look rubbish.

Geoffrey Kabaservice - Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party

just finished, best book on politics I've read since Nixonland. really insightful into the 60s struggle for republican party's 'soul' if you will. Mitt Romney's relationship to his father George (governor, CEO, failed presidential candidate) reminds of the Bushes. well written, not too wonky.

Saul Bellow - The Dean's December and More Die of Heartbreak

hey I'm a middle-aged guy who married into a family of smart talkative jews. late Bellow speaks to me (though I don't agree with the dean's politics).

Vladimir Nabakov - Bend Sinister

occasionally OTT prose but mostly compelling and complex evocation of life under dictatorship. lots of breathtaking prose too and LOLs of course.

taking on vacation next week: Saul Bellow - Collected Stories and John Julius Norwich - Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy

Morante is great! Its been a while but History is a must, kinda the equivalent to Germany: Year Zero

Barthes - Camera Lucida

is that germany year zero as in batman year zero

i started reading a charles williams book on the bus, as of 20 pages it is fantastic and i want to read all his novels. this feeling will not last

*googles* if there was a Batman type vigilante who was walking around a ruined Berlin in '45 saving German boys from paedo Nazis who escaped from the Red Army into the new post-war society then sign me up.

Wetherspoon News. Editorial. First sentence:

As we all know, a strong current of tribalism flows through the veins of humanity

haha

Geoffrey Kabaservice - Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party

just finished, best book on politics I've read since Nixonland. really insightful into the 60s struggle for republican party's 'soul' if you will. Mitt Romney's relationship to his father George (governor, CEO, failed presidential candidate) reminds of the Bushes. well written, not too wonky.

damn. have to read this.

picking up wodehouse's 'joy in the morning' before bed each night and getting through about 40 pages a day. it's swell.

Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind, which I just ordered, covers some of that terrain but begins with...Burke.

Been reading the Optical sound zines I got last week since getting them, discovering a load of new current psychedelic bands i hadn't been aware of before.

also I Need More the Iggy Pop autobio in the 2:13:61 version which is itself from 96 and reissued a book from about 14 years earlier. Wondering if there's any chance of an update or new autobio by him. Stress by him since I'm really enjoying his versions of things. Probably several tall tales and egocentric views in there but entertaining.

Just finishing Greil Marcus's book on the Doors which has been very interesting. Need to sit down and listen through the live recordings he talks about, those I've got anyway.

Simon Reynolds Retromania
Have enjoyed most of his books that I've read.

The Beatles The Anthology book

Journal Of the Dead
book about a couple of young guys getting in trouble in a desert region of Colorado or somewhere. Should be way too close to civilisation for what ensues but disaster or something still strikes. Cost me 50c in a library sale anyway.

also need to read more of the books I have out of the library Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, No Go The Bogeyman and a couple of others.

i read marcus's book on the doors a few weeks ago. it's really refreshing reading him on a band he's barely talked about; i'm a fan, but i'm pretty tired of reading him on his 8 or 9 pet subjects. would love to track down some of those live recordings he rhapsodizes about.

Lots of them have turned up on torrent sites over the last few years and others are on the Boot the Butts box set. Not sure if you can still get that though.

Some of the '70 live sets were appearing in FOPP for £5 a pop, so may be cheap elsewhere too.

Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind, which I just ordered, covers some of that terrain but begins with...Burke.

All I know of that book is that the author has this to say:

I treat the right as a unity, as a coherent body of theory and practice that transcends the divisions so often emphasized by scholars and pundits. I use the words conservative, reactionary, and counterrevolutionary interchangeably: not all counterrevolutionaries are conservative -- Walt Rostow immediately comes to mind -- but all conservatives are, in one way or another, counterrevolutionary. I seat philosophers, statesmen, slaveholders, scribblers, Catholics, fascists, evangelicals, businessmen, racists and hacks at the same table: Hobbes next to Hayek, Burke across from Palin, Nietzsche in between Ayn Rand and Antonin Scalia, with Adams, Calhoun, Oakeshott, Ronald Reagan, Tocqueville, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, Ernst Junger, Carl Schmitt, Winston Churchill, Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Nixon, Irving Kristol, Francis Fukuyama, and George W. Bush interspersed throughout.

He doesn't mention his parents?

tbh that makes it sound a bit like the mirror image of jonah goldberg's 'liberal fascism.'

Just reading Browning & about Browning for a while. Sort of an experiment, see what happens if I focus on something for a couple of months, rather than just flitting from topic to topic. Finished the Ring and the Book last night. Starting The Inn Album.

I have also acknowledged that there is a problem with books in my flat, and I am Building Billys.

shouldn't have been a capital on 'Building' in that final sentence. Makes no sense.

W/e, we all know you are Building Billys, can't take it back now

finished blue nights, book 1 of dune, and mishima's the mask. not sure what to tackle next--the man without qualities has been on my list for a while, and the recent discussion here prompted me to get it from the library--but it's so big to lug around.

i am still struggling with mansfield park but i bought a bunch of 99 cent fantasy books at the thrift store yesterday (and lol 'underworld') so i think i may just give up on it

did u give up on musil already

no i finished reading that

already? god that's depressing

tbrr reading musil at 18 was probably the most influential reading experience since aa milne some 14 yrs earlier

they were both born in 80-82, that fecund era that begot joyce, stravinsky picasso, bartok &c

In a pleasing bit of life/art unity, I finished The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James on the same day that I went to Snowshill Manor, a National Trust property devoted to one man's collection of wonderful objects...

Also read The Battle for Bond by Robert Sellers, a fascinating account of the legal wrangles surrounding the novel/script/movie of Thunderball, which made me want to read some Fleming. But first, Pat Long's History of the NME bk (mainly for the early chapters, rather than the Britpop years)

shirley jackson - we have always lived in the castle. kinda trying too hard southern gothic imo.

connie willis - the doomsday book. apparently in oxford in 2054 people still make trunk calls and use pound notes - (book was written in 1992, pound notes went out of circulation in the late 80s and not sure anyone has used the term "trunk call" since like 1950). Is it forgivable to not have seen the rise of mobile phones in 1992?

oh and an intro to heidegger. kinda hard to see his work as an ontology and not just a phenomenology tbh but i guess that's one for the philosophy thread.

xp alright northern gothic. american gothic.

Vide the Great English Reversion of 2036

There is a late 20th or early 21st century pandemic mentioned but this is no dystopia. They have video phones, just not personal ones, and a countrywide underground train network. There's just a quaint 1950s feel to her future, woollen goods and handbell ringing and overprotective provincial mothers straight out of enid blyton.

already? god that's depressing

idk i was really impressed/fascinated with it and just plowed through? haha i probably dont take my time enough i guess :/

Finally finished Midnight's Children, loved it. Then I read the challop-y Rushdie thread.

I have this advance of Tom B1ssell's new book of essays because a friend is reviewing it, but I don't know. I mostly know him from those video game pieces on Grantland that are alternately enjoyable and punchable.

The Unborn: The Life and Teachings of Zen Master Bankei, 1622-1693, trans. Norman Wandell

A priest of the esoteric Shingon sect visited the master and said: "The principle of the Unborn in our school's meditation on the letter A contains the two gates of eliminating delusion and of actualizing fundamental reality. Wouldn't the teaching you expound fall into the latter category?"

"Come closer," Bankei said.

The priest moved forward.

Raising his voice, Bankei shouted, "What aspect is that!"

The priest was struck dumb.

A monk in the audience stuck out his tongue.

It's mostly plainspoken and quite funny, but that passage is kind of puzzling.

Makes great sense to me.

Here comes this Shingon priest lauding his school for its mumbo-jumbo "meditation on the letter A" as being superior and he lays down some jargon he doesn't actually understand, so Bankei throws him a corker of an impromptu koan that he fails miserably to 'solve'. The monk in the audience then 'solves' it.

david foster wallace and bulgakov. i feel like i can't be seen in public.

So it is, James: "The Crime Wave at Blandings". Just reread parts, looking for a choice quote, but i ended up wanting to type out sections the length of a couple of pages, so nevermind. (Tbh, I censored myself in that post. I first wrote "bimbos", but slid in ninnyhammers when I realized it could be taken the wrong way by those who hasn't read Plum. What a rube)
Read _84 Charing Cross Road_ last night, which was quite charming, even affecting. Went straight on to the sequel _The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street_, which is thankfully quite different, and rather enjoyable as ewll.

Now reading Balzac's A Harlot High and Low

so much fun!

weirdest poem i read today:

THE CUSSED DAMOZEL

The Cussed Damozel cut loose
About half-past seven
Prepared to do as wild a deed
As any under heaven.
Oil-soaked rags were in her hands,
And the bombs in her grip were seven.

She cried, "We'll blow this mansion up
Where Lloyd and George do dwell!"
"Wow!" cried her fellow-suffs, whose names
Were sweet as caramel-
Millicent, Pansy, Rosalys,
Phyllis and Christabel.

Sounds Edwardian to me. Belloc?

a totally famous person who is almost completely forgotten:

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

thomas hobbes - leviathan
george herbert - poems

and truly and honestly a tip of the hat to wikipedia in this case cuz its rare to see such a well-written and comprehensive post on someone like this.

you just don't get inside baseball roycrofter parodies like this anymore:

The Bilioustine: A Periodical of Knock; published by William S. Lord under the name “the Boy Grafters, at East Aurora, Illinois.” (1901) – The work parodied Elbert Green Hubbard’s Philistine: A Periodical of Protest independently published by his Roycrofters press of East Aurora, New York. Hubbard’s magazine was itself a collection of political satire and whimsy, and sold bound in brown butcher paper because the “meat” was inside." As editor, Taylor referred to himself as Fra McGinnis, a parody on another Hubbard publication, The Fra. The material from Taylor’s Bilioustine originally appeared in the “Line,” and was later published in booklet form. The booklets were also bound in bound in brown paper and twine after Hubbard’s Philistine, and they sold at various stores and markets throughout Chicago, Denver, and Buffalo.

I've started Freeman Dyson's memoir Disturbing the Universe. Pretty interesting so far. He writes very well for a scientist.

At least I was right about the Edwardian part. T'was written in 1913.

btw, last night I began my first-ever PK Dick novel: The Man in the High Castle. It is embedded within a Library of America volume with three other novels of his, so I can forge on if I like this one. So far, it has a sort of a plot, and some almost-lifelike characters doing a few conceptually interesting things in a counter-factual setting. It's not setting my mind on fire or anything like that, but 'twill do for now.

David 's Partisan, a thin but entertaining account of the Partisan Review intellectuals (Mary McCarthy, Lowell, Rahv, the Trillings) from their postwar peak to how the sixties and neocons treated them.

― taking tiger mountain (up the butt) (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, September 24, 2012 5:35 PM (Yesterday)

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/l/laskin-partisans.html

stumbled on this while googling for the book you mentioned

yep!

'taking tiger mountain (up the butt)'? charming.

you're welcome!

here come the warm jets

of urine

Ambient 4: On Hands and Knees

Bums Between the Bells

Read _84 Charing Cross Road_ last night, which was quite charming, even affecting

I remember enjoying this, even though hanff goes on about how she doesn't like fiction. And then she reads some Austen and is all 'Wow, fiction is really good!', and I'm all 'Duh!'

no pussyfooting

xp

David 's Partisan, a thin but entertaining account of the Partisan Review intellectuals (Mary McCarthy, Lowell, Rahv, the Trillings) from their postwar peak to how the sixties and neocons treated them.

They're the American Bloomsbury.

that's one of those 'wagner is the puccini of music' recommendations

Yeah. To be fair, maybe the book's OK.

i think i've read 84 charing cross road at least ten or twelve times (not that it takes long to read). and seen the movie ten times. i'm an old lady like that. i like that book the way the japanese love anne of green gables.

new batch of books -
Morton Feldman - Give My Regards to Eighth Street
Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness
J.G. Ballard - The Complete Stories

probably will start with good ol' morty mort!

love feldman's essays — he writes mostly about art and poetry and almost nothing about music

The Left Hand of Darkness is an eerie, wondrous novel.

They're the American Bloomsbury.

no Forster or Woolf though. It's funny how only Stafford's The Mountain Goat has experienced anything like a revival. Despite their considerable collective intelligence their novels and poetry are ehhhh. They remain useful, undervalued critics though. When I finished my graduate thesis a few years ago my director tried to steer me away from citing Trilling and McCarthy ("They're not academics, they're belle lettrists" or something, to which I said, "Thank god!").

Mountain Lion?

Still reading that Richard Brautigan biography, which is wonderful but so long. Interrupted by library requests coming in (I have already polished those off) - A Wilderness of Error by Errol Morris and a pretty decent memoir of pre-gentrification Williamsburg, the Last Bohemia. Any interest in crime: read Morris. It really was swell. And now I have money. Amisæs Money that is. Sorry but my apostrophe turned into an æ Canæt fix it. Oh, now I see that I was using the Norwegian keyboard.

Mountain Lion?

blame me for listening to the new Mountain Goats at the same time.

no Forster or Woolf though.

Nobody like that. Maybe The Group was their true literary legacy.

"They're not academics, they're belle lettrists" or something, to which I said, "Thank god!"

Amen to that. NYRB has published some Trilling this year, and I've seen a recent book, Why Trilling Matters.

To think Trilling's designated heir was Norman "World War IV" Podhoretz.

No Forster or Woolf, but beyond the spotlight of that chapter, PR did publish Bellow, Lowell, Schwartz, othera whose best work far surpassed The Group. The often pathetic-even-then Pod was Trilling's designated heir? Trilling's prefaces often make me wish I could have taken one of his course although Cynthnia Ozick remembered his classroom presence as grey. All grey (can't say "very", it was too grey for such an extreme word). I like his fiction:
The Middle of the Journey (1947)One of the main characters is based on Whittaker Chambers, whom Trilling knew way before the Golden Age of McCarthy, and this was published at the dawn of that era. Trilling was always struck by Chambers' consecrated immersion in his own drama, and the other main character, who seems like the viewpoint guy in all T.'s stories, is--well, let's say they're not polar opposites.
Of This Time, of That Place and Other Stories (1979, published posthumously). Title story based on having Allen Ginsberg and another guy, whose name I forget, in the same Columbia class (the other guy was just as spacey but oh so "normal") Other good stores too.
The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel (2008) (published posthumously, edited by Geraldine Murphy)Haven't read this, but read favorable reviews.

Non

Sorry about the typos, too much caffeine as usual.

I've twice tried to finish The Middle of the Journey.

What would you say is the main problem? The suggestion of a Man From Mars POV at times?

Energy? Narrative drive?

I have a similar problem with Jarrell's poetry.

I wouldn't have thought of those two writers as having anything in common, good or bad. H'-m-m...

Only that they're magnificent as critics and just okay in fiction and poetry.

(suddenly realizes doesn't know shit about Jarrett's criticism, unless "Read at whim!" counts). Where should I begin?

I finished P.K. Dick's Man in the High Castle last night. The lack of a truly coherent plot didn't hurt it, but actually helped, since any attempt to wrap up all those subplots and corral all those startled hares could only have ended in tears.

So, having enjoyed the first of the four novels in the anthology, I moved directly to The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which starts right away parading around a naked young lady with nipples "like pink pearls", and a main character comically named Leo Bulero (which proves Dick had read Tristam Shandy, but otherwise serves no further discernable purpose). This was not a good way to catch my interest and allegience. This story had better pick itself up and stand upright pretty quickly or I will find a pretty little ditch to dump it in.

it's one of the good ones

Okay, re xpost Jarrell's criticism, think I'll try Poetry and The Age and No Other Book: Collected Essays (from poetry to sports cars).

I need to read Three Stigmata again; I had a major fundamental question about what went on

i think it's pretty much self-contradictory

'eldritch' is a really severely broken novel i think? might be worth noting that it's a weird and counter-intuitive expansion of a short story. anyway i am enjoying aimless-reads-philip-dick and wish it to continue

OK that strikes a chord. I'm planning after Harlot to go on a PKD binge & read the last ten novels he ever wrote (except for Nick and the Glimmung, which was a kid's novel set in the Galactic Pot Healer universe, I think?)

Finished Portrait of a Lady this morning. Absolutely loved the arc of Isabel's journey - glad I read it from Washington Square, as it provides some pay-off to see how James builds on many of his character types established then. The themes of innocence lost and the unbearable weight of money on relationships provides so much tragedy and loneliness on all of his cast -- but James writes with such a forensic eye and calculated cool that you feel it is simply there and everyday, inescapable.

We, the book-bedizzened members of ILB, have lived half a year with this thread as our Polaris. It has now surpassed its 900th-post birthday and is neck and neck with Methuselah. It seems to be time for a new ILB WAYR thread. Ergo... (waves hand)... Behold! We start afresh.