I have coveted everything and enjoyed nothing: what are you reading in Spring 2024?

just finished “things fall apart” by chinua achebe. 10/10 masterpiece

currently reading “the rebel angels” by robertson davies. my dad gave it to me years ago when i first started grad school, saying something like “this book will make you want to do a phd.” it’s since sat on my shelf unread, but i’m now reading it in the last few months of my phd. finding it loads of fun so far

I have always wanted to read that. Maybe I'll pause my current read--A Master of Djinn, by P. Djeli Clark, a Kindle Unlimited book--just to tackle it.

(Never come across the book or stage version, but Grand Hotel is a grand film, with peak turns by Garbo at her wittiest as a hardcore diva spinning just past her commercial peak, John Barrymore as the well-born English cat burglar, a black sheep and desperate gambling addict, also Lionel Barrymore, of course shamelessy chewing all the grand scenery, wised-up low-expectations yet still young Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery[as mogul on the brink of Depression, not tugboat captain etc. this time] and an international cavalcade of character actors.)

Recently finished my first Iris Murdoch, The Red and the Green(1965)---study of an Anglo-Irish and Irish extended family, during "the seven or eight days leading up to the doomed Easter Rising in Dublin,1916," as jacket flap says, and I think I hit it lucky: jacket thinks this is "warmer" than previous, though also it's not too effusive/loose/garrulous, as I've seen complaints about re several later novels. This 'un moves adroitly between all the characters, checking in on latest seismic movements and dithering of male interiors, while the women are mostly known by what they say and do, incl. in male gaze.
Sex and money figure, ditto environment---weather, picturesque to appalling cityscapes, incl. poverty--but so what,"You can see a hundred scenes like that all over town every day"--news of the War and British promises for the peace, many points made in arguments and gossip and oratory re: Ireland, with even the mystical terrorist proving capable of second thoughts, for a while.
It's a well-tracked whirl, and I'm reminded of Ta-Nehisi Coates on the US Civil War: "Don't say you know what you would have done. You don't know."

Also curious about Under The Net, and what else should I read by her, incl. later ones?

Under The Net is, against all expectations, a fun romp of a novel, I had a great time.

The other Murdoch I read was The Sandcastle - more of a conventional literary novel, main detail I remember is the couple mourning a dead dog who managed to bring them together "the way their own children never had".

Agreed on Grand Hotel.

i'm rather sure audiobooking is forbidden here, but i happened to fall across maugham's _the moon and sixpence_ and it is... not how i figured maugham really. i'd not recommend other than for how odd the characters come across, it's almost interesting how weird and unlikely they seem.

Audiobooking counts, unless you aren't really listening.

a nice thing with audiobooking is that my absorption is deeper than much of my reading because i will relisten to sections simply to re-experience or reparse, it feels pretty weightless to do.

Rereading an anthology of Akutagawa short stories. Had forgotten the Kurosawa film is a) based on two different short stories and that b) the one called Rashomon ISN'T the one with the multiple perspectives.

currently reading “the rebel angels” by robertson davies.

Thanks for the tip! I saw I have a combined edition of the whole Cornish Trilogy sitting on my shelf and your post encouraged me to try out The Rebel Angels as my next book. I've enjoyed several of Davies' novels in the past, but I tend to space them out at multi-year intervals. Luckily his trilogies aren't so conjoined that later entries require a knowledge the prior ones.

Have finished Justin Torres' Blackouts and Fuminori Nakamura's The Thief, and both were excellent. Am now almost through the second of the 5 parts of Roberto Bolaño's 2666

I read the first chapter of Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine, which was very heavy on the lingo but I'm already enjoying it.
I read a short collection of short stories by Clarice Lispector, it was good to very good, clearly I should have gone for an anthology (now that I'm done with Lydia Davis' complete stories). I guess it worked as a taster to compare to her novellas.
Before that I read The House on the Borderland. It was certainly much more digestible, but ultimately with similar strengths and weaknesses as The Night Land. Interesting as a curiosity, but no masterpiece.

Finished Total Doing That, a book of poems from Thomas Delahaye, a heteronym of a friend of mine. More accessible and dare I say obviously humorous than the other books of his I have read, it retains some undercurrents of sexual trauma that is evident in his other work.

Today it’s been pissing rain mostly, so I started in on So Much for Life, the selected poems of deceased British cult poet Mark Hyatt. Hyatt was a half-Romani queer who didn’t learn to write until he was in his twenties— by 31, he was dead, leaving behind hundreds of pages of poems, most of which were preserved by Barry MacSweeney and Jeremy Prynne on the eve of Hyatt’s suicide.

This interesting and tragic life is reflected in the poems, which crackle with rage and beauty and also with sex and a very unorthodox, nearly Californian approach to language— there are times when one could be convinced that they were reading a lost poem from the Spicer/Blaser/Duncan circle.

Ted Gioia History of Jazz
Pretty thorough history by writer I had recommended and found in a couple of bibliographies. Interesting. Taken me longer to read than I meant to. May need to revisit.
But I think I can recommend it.

Eddie Piller Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances.
Memoir of mod/Acid Jazz label head I met several times in my teens and early 20s.
He came from an area I lived in as a child and was about 5 miles away from where we moved to shortly before most of what I read so far took place. So I'm hearing talk about areas I knew and mentions of people I met and half knew.
So quite interesting to me anyway. I van see a couple of details he got wrong and thought he'd know better about. Calling a Regal shirt a poloneck when those are quite different (and something I've meant to make for ages) and I thought the term for this side of neck and top of shoulder buttoning style was Dr. Or Dr Kildare. Also Regal didn't move from Kensington market it opened a 2nd branch that coexisted with it for a couple of years.
One was a small premises like a walk in stall the other was a standalone shop.
Otherwise finding this fascinating. Him finding his way through being a mod in the revival's earlyish days when I was too young to know about it. I'm about 3 or 4 years younger.
So yeah very interesting to me cos it's local history. Not sure if it would remain immediate to anybody more distanced from it.

Those are the main 2 right now. Going to get back into another load as soon as I'm through.
David Greener Debt
A couple of anthropological/historic books on African tribes.
An anthropological book on Guayaki Indians by Pierre Clastres.
& a few others.

Gioia reached its maximum renewals I can do online so needed to be finished. Had been backburnered.

currently reading “the rebel angels” by robertson davies. my dad gave it to me years ago when i first started grad school, saying something like “this book will make you want to do a phd.” it’s since sat on my shelf unread, but i’m now reading it in the last few months of my phd. finding it loads of fun so far

― flopson, Tuesday, 19 March 2024 18:07 bookmarkflaglink

oh i enjoyed this v much. lot of fun like you say. every page has something that you want to read twice. maybe slightly exhausting? in the end i prob preferred the deptford trilogy (I say that, i still haven't read the last). rebel angels more clearly a comedy, a farce even. rd was my main find last year and was surprised I hadn't previously stumbled across him.

my long run of not really being arsed with fiction continues:
some poetry: dipping into michael hofmann and tom gunn selecteds, and a late-ish RS Thomas - Counterpoint. the hofmann is fine, highly competent, and the thom gunn contains some striking stuff. to the extent i'm competent to judge (on grounds both of theology and poetry) the rs thomas is only intermittently successful, and somewhat arid - it feels v dated (mysteriously this slender volume of theological poetry was the only physical book i took with me for the 24hr flight to australia and back), but does have moments where you are aware of a profound poetic intelligence grappling with faith, evil and creation.

more generally re-engaging with poetry, the poetic act, feels like electricity coursing through the body and mind.

a history of fake things on the internet - walter j scheirer. good this, apart from an ill-advised foray into structuralism in the second section. the book starts from a place that questions how much fake stuff there is - sophisticated 'deepfakle' attempts to deceive us in terms of audio/visual media - very little. synthesized and selective creative acts, cobbled together images and text memes etc - 'participatory fakery', designed to make a point - a lot. and also questions the term 'fake' as it's generally thrown around:

Do all falsehoods necessarily mislead us? Are those who produce false content always malicious? What would happen if media that facilitate the widespread dissemination of fictions were strictly regulated or even banned? Who even has a good grasp of what those media are and how they work?

the author is sensible to then go into use cases to look at the mechanics and history of misleading content on teh internet. early hacker communities and 'culture jamming' ('the news is, in practice, is a system that can be hacked'), photoshop ('What was not initially appreciated by creators and observers of visual disinformation was that a fake image could be more effective in a democracy if it were obviously fake'), 'cheat codes' as a line into the passing about of information designed to provide special insight or knowledge, media forensics, shock content sites, and a couple of others that look more general on AI, and the internet (and social media) as creative spaces.

this all files under 'epistemic health' for me, and how we need to update it practically as the internet changes, and the book does good work identifying the mechanics of manipulations of cultural information on the internet.

Descartes' Error - António Damásio. Updating my very out of date understanding of neuroscience - especially the generally somatic view and approach. Hate reading about the brain - its complexity is so great and the impact of damage is so profound, it makes me feel very queasy, an enormous sense of fragility and dependency on it for everything. ugh. anyway, once it gets over some slightly irritating literary flourishes at the beginning and gets clearly into the topics about which Damasio knows and is interested in, it's very good.

Cybernetics and the Origin of Information – Raymond Ruyer. An old (now) book of engaged critical theory writings on information theory. interesting to see what needs updating because of recent developments. Reminds me I should pick up On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects by Simondon again - it was dense, but possible to engage with, and probably would be a good counterpart to this.

Monsieur (or 'The Prince of Darkness') - the first of Lawrence Durrell's Avignon Quintet, whose main subject matter appears to be gnosticism. I don't know whether i can stick it. It's laughably precious:

Sabine was older than the rest of us – not in years, to be sure: but in judgment and insight. Her voyagers and adventures had forged her mind already while we were still upon the threshold of our emotional maturity. The word I was looking for, I suppose, was "sphingine"

This produced an actual yelp of laughter from me. Yes, I suppose it was now I come to think of it. Sure. aiui the quintet or 'quincunx' (¬_¬) is meta-textual, so i'll continue into the second volume, Livia, to see if the nauseating polycule at the centre of Monsieur is undermined and made a justifiable laughing stock. Title isn't promising though is it.

I admit to a sneaking enjoyment of the flummery around the gnosticism. it's what's kept me reading.

also, also, he has a habit of putting *all* foreign words in italics. This gets extremely funny and irritating:

the scarlet bedsocks he always wore to match his vivid Egyptian babouches
at each corbner of the court rises a quaint and crusty little tourelle [sounds like a euphemism for penis]
I lit my candles and quickly put on the traditional black velvet coat which Piers had given me, with its scarlet lining; also the narrow stove-pipe pantaloons, dark sash and pointed black shoes – tenue de rigueur for Christmas dinner at Verfeuille. [also incidentally how i dress to put the rubbish out]
He will become the régisseur of Verfeuille while I am absent en mission [gone to the corner shop for milk]
I was seized by a singular sort of constraint, almost a pudeur [*almost*. not quite]
with always the danger of a fugue staring me in the face
at any rate she wore a red velvet carnival cagoule through the slits of which her eyes looked at us [£5.99 from M&S]
he had gone out to the Café Durance for a croissant and a cup of coffee [moi aussi, mon vieux, moi aussi, have u seen the price these days tho]
all but united in this central despair about the metaphysical status quo. Slowly, in his quiet voice, with its flavours of an ever mounting disenchantment he sketched in the terrible fresco of the present world, often in the form of a long quotation which attested as always to the formidable memory of this stage man. "The praying Mantis which devours its male even while it is fecundating her, the spider trapping the fly, and the pompile which stabs the spider to death, the ceceris which with a triple stroke of its sword scientifically destroys the three centres of the bupreste's nervous s ystem: and carries it off so that its larvae will be able to eat it still living, choosing their mouthfuls with skill, preserving the vital parts with a terrible science, unto the very last mouthful of the victim's flesh. Then the leucospis, the anthrax, the worm of which simply applies itself to the flank of the chalcidone, and sucks it dry through the skin, ingests, pumps out this living broth which is the young larvae, and then dries it cunningly, in order to keep it also fresh, living, until the last mouthful... The philante, the bee-killer, before even carrying off its victim presses out the crop to make it disgorge its honey, and sucks the tongue of the wretched dying insect as it sticks out of its mouth..."

[sorry sir this is a wendys etc]

why isn't fresco in italics why.

just to prove that i am indeed possessed by the ghost of a 50-something british woman who choked to death on turkish delight at a church jumble sale in the cotswalds in 1976 i am really enjoying Joanna Trollope's The Rector's Wife. she is a very good writer!

Last night I finished The Rebel Angels, Robertson Davies. It was a tour de force, a descriptor that aptly fits any of his novels I've read. This one displays the usual erudition, wit, mastery of form and strong sense of playful mischief. It's entertainment with an intellectual flair.

It also reminded me why I tend not to avidly seek out another Davies novel soon after finishing my most recent excursion into his work. There's a quality in him I find off-putting, but hard to pin down. He strikes me as having a depth of understanding of human nature, but one that is artificially induced via intellect. There is a cruelty in him, hidden beneath a mask of flamboyance and theatricality. He tries hard to seduce you into this attitude and does a good job of it, too, but he leaves me feeling uneasy about what's at the core of his art. YMMV.

Holly George-Warren's A Man Called Destruction. Itinerate commenter Edd Hurt dismissed it several weeks for not delving into the sources of Alex Chilton's guitar playing, but as someone who owns the Big Star albums and nothing else K found the bio was well-sourced and literate.

About to start The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World.

March was:

Zola - Germinal
Henri Alain Fournier - The Lost Estate
Dumas - Black Tulip
Balzac - An Episode Under the Terror
Balzac - At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
(the last two were very short, less than 100 pages total)

i'm not sure what i was expecting the lost estate to be like but it wasn't that.

germinal and black tulip a lot more readable than you'd think.

i'm not sure what i was expecting the lost estate to be like but it wasn't that.

in a good way or a bad way? (I love it.)

I picked up that book (The Lost Estate) about 15 years ago on the recommendation of a friend. I have yet to read it. I'm not sure why, other than this friend is a bit of a misanthrope. More than a bit, actually.

it's definitely not a misanthropic book.

it was probably a bit more modern than i was expecting. and i guess the cover suggested flouncy 20-something female and i got mostly scruffy teenage boys.

i liked the mystery of it. it was a bit tom's midnight garden. but i was expecting Thomasina.

(i guess it's not so modern that places even 20 miles away are practically unknown to people, because 20 miles is a day's travel)

There's a quality in him I find off-putting, but hard to pin down.

same tho i don’t think i agree with your point about cruelty. as i feel similarly about how it’s hard to pin down i’m not sure i have a reason for why i don’t agree.

whatever that quantity is, it’s less visible (but still disconcertingly present) in the deptford trilogy than the cornish stuff.

Yeah, cruelty isn't the right word for that quality. I was reaching and overreached. Whatever it is, it is submerged and cumulative in effect.

picked up after you were, i am by camille ralphs, which i’ve seen some fuss about.

this is - or at least the first section is - religious poetry, or rather religious poetry/texts from various periods (George Herbert, John Baillie, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Rumi) brought into contact with modernity.

Ralphs’ stylistic markers are so visible - word play, antithesis, dense clusters of alliteration and assonance (there must be a term for this) - that it’s a little difficult to work through the thicket as it were and find what else is there.

the project seems to be to divine something of the just future by applying mystic texts to the syllabic cacophony of the present.

i think there’s enough of interest on a first reading to go back and work through it some more.

from veni sancte spiritus:

Give to those who, doggèd, wait
on your fingers’ click and bait
the worried bone of friendliness

i suppose dogged needed the grave. but yes it gives a good general sense of it: the imv successful play of “your fingers’ click and bait” and something about in an age of social media captured well by the phrase “the worried bone of friendliness”.

when ralphs cuts loose a bit from their acrobatics they get some punch:

Like that last phrase, you run, like blinding colours through the eyeless world
and when the mind forgets itself, you’re there — where what is left to know is left to live.
Fine, hold me in your Holocene: give me a kicking; and the goods,
the martyrs with their hopscotch blood and nails as fragrant in their palms as cloves

(from Wessobrunn Prayer)

i’m looking forward to digging in, even if periodically i wish they’d let up a bit.

oh i think there must be something of the Pound here. interpreting the prosody of these old texts and modes to create unusual modern poetic forms (the alliteration, obv a form in old english/german etc)

periodically i wish they’d let up a bit

based on the fragments you quoted, understandable. sonically, it invites you to move right along, but semantically it's a slow, dense obstacle course, which tends to fight itself

I've started in on Kokoro, Natsume Soseki. The translator is Edwin McClellan. Too soon for comments.

S. Yizhar - Preliminaries.

Review here that is fine with giving the synopsis of the book:

https://wordswithoutborders.org/book-reviews/preliminaries-by-s-yizhar/

The writing is wonderful, if you like that kind of thing. This will do it for you, no question. If it is a well I will walk for miles everyday to drink from it, for sure. And so on.

Except: what is it to read this now? Arabs have been displaced and we see the images of what that means on our screens. Every day for the last few months. The politics of that situation isn't discussed much in that review.

What saves it (if you like) is a measure of acknowledgement, some guilt, some awareness of what it is to have moved to a place so alien.

Above all the writing on nature, friendship, people. This guy can extract every ounce of feeling for the sky in his writing. If we were all truly able to have those feelings as expressed here maybe things would not have turned out as they have. I am no doubt wrong about this.

really enjoying the ralphs. it's actually caused me to get my bible down this easter sunday to check the story of job against the prose poem Job 42:10-17 (the final verses covering god's double restitution to job of that which he had lost), which has the epigraph:

Yesterday P. asked: 'Do you think the children from Job's second chance could actually be happy?' Anna Kamieńska, A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook

His Children (whom he'd seen the fired pyres stripping of their nakedness and every woolly talisman) came back: came bringing groceries: and they said, this is what a bad trip feels like, we were never dead, you only thought we were: and though he had mislaid his face in tumuli of boils, had dropped his Eyes in lozenge-bottles crouched behind the ziggurats of shipping boxes at the docks, screamed at Life's fair unfairness, they beatified him

potent. i particularly like the mislaid face in the tumuli of boils, the brutality of those woolly talismans going up in flames, 'ziggurats of shipping boxes' does the job of the architecture of the ancient world in the modern well. and later, "And he blessed the World in turn because he feared to curse it" speaks plainly of what's been done to Job.

After This is That, he said, and if this were a bad trip I would know it. And did not escape the Feeling, angry as a tennis racquet, of his being made to serve.

And then Ralphs goes and does this! The actual metaphor, the maximal tautness of the strings in the tensile frame, the thwock of the tennis ball - no question, brings something to the quality of Job's anger. but 'of his being made to serve' can only be a joke. it's hard to see it as anything else. the immediate suspicion is that Ralphs couldn't find another way of putting it, was reluctant to relinquish this form of words, liked it too much maybe. on the other hand this could be depicting a nasty rhyming cruelty of the universe, indifferent to bathos. either way it's extremely disconcerting, and pulls you up short.

the final lines though, reassert the general tone of the poem, of Job alone retaining the memory of that which has been done to him:

You're dead, you're dead, he said, watching his children reproduce; and soon they too grew to believe it.

ralphs is willing to untether words from their moorings and use them for their abstract quantities, but this has the effect sometimes of causing you to wonder what a word is doing there - is there any constraint of meaning hanging off it at all? it can have the feeling of an LLM set to high temperature. but as i say, i'm really enjoying getting my teeth into it. it's fecund, energetic, smart etc.

Yeahm was already thinking that some of the word choices seem more willful than anything else, on first reading--but

And did not escape the Feeling, angry as a tennis racquet, of his being made to serve.

And I suppose that capitalizing "Feeling" could be sarcastic/counter-Serious, making your own damn book/Book, twisting the other side of the story around to the front.

oh i agree the psychology is apt - it’s partly the point, but the serve-as-in-tennis-serve is, well it’s just silly. introducing an image that does nothing for the poem.

germinal ... a lot more readable than you'd think.
i did germinal in january & this was my takeaway too. definitely piqued my interest for more zola.

recent reads have included ivan turgenev's virgin soil, austen's persuasion, and anna kornbluh's immediacy. hoping to get to sand's the devil's pool soon.

Fludd by Hilary Mantel. A strange little book, the kind where I feel like I'm on a completely different wavelength from the author, despite her easy cynicism concerning religion. (Though in an afterword she says she wishes that everyone could be brought up catholic, or something like it, because of the sense it gives that everything is not as it seems. Hmm.) You wouldn't think it was by the same author as Wolf Hall.

because of the sense it gives that everything is not as it seems

most religions and a fair number of drugs provide this sense, but catholicism will do in a pinch

a few children's books and an average imagination will do it.

Thurston Moore Sonic Life
Avant garde guitarist's memoir. He's just got to having Lee Ranaldo in Sonic Youth who have Richard Edson back in the band after playing as a drummerless 3 piece.
Been pretty good so far.
I needed some lighter reading. Feeling fluey or something.

So not getting as heavily into a number of other non-fiction books as I wanted.

Rashid Khalidi the Iron Cage
Book looking at why Palestine is not doing better in its struggle by a Palestinian academic and historian. Looking at 20th century history of the place.

Enzo Traverso
Book on Marxist explanations of the holocaust.
I really dug the author's name when it turned up in a bibliography. So grabbed the book when I saw it was in the local library.

Peter Fryer Staying Power
Book on black presence in the British isles. Pretty scathing on widespread racism.
I'm having the same problem trying to work out how you read a text peppered with endnote reference numbers. Which this has several per paragraph frequently. How frequently you turn to the end of the book to read the notes thereby messing up flow reading the text.
Had this with Federici and Theodore Allen too. Maybe shows level of research but doesn't help flow.

And several other books I'm part way into.

I've stuck with the Clark book, it's vastly entertaining. Steampunk without being annoying, that's a feat in and of itself.

javier marías - a heart so white

very good. i thought the modernist long stream of consciousness sentences would tire me out (tbh they do, a bit) but he keeps it moving and mixes in enough dark humour to keep me afloat. the weirdness of spain is underrated

A Heart So White has stayed with me. Great novel.

I'm reading *Night Soldiers* by Alan Furst. It's a spy novel, set in the 30s, and the central character (Bulgarian, but Russian by allegiance) is first trained in Moscow, then sent to Spain to infiltrate the Republican army. He's now on the run in Paris. I'm not at the stage where I can intuit a grand plan, so am sustained by Furst's moment-to-moment world-building. Furst clearly knows his subject but the sweep is so grand it can fall into national cliche pretty easily. Everything is buoyed by bawdy humour; weirdly, it makes me think of Jeffrey Eugenides in places.

Also reading *Empire of Normality: Capitalism and Neurodiversity* by Robert Chapman. He's using Marxist theory to show how capitalism both creates and exploits neurodiversity but how neurodiversity may provide a new mode of organisation against capitalism's worst excesses.

I'm in the middle of writing some essays for my MA, so I've had to take my first break from reading books in a few years.

That said I'm puttering through Jane and Prudence (great) and Pet Shop Boys vs America (complete classic, just page after page of prime Lowe/Tennant one-liners and mischievous glibness)

I finished Alan Furst's *Night Soldiers*. I come to espionage fiction for the tight plotting and this had an odd mix of almost picaresque and what I came to think of as ambient passages of detail. I liked the latter quite a bit in the end. Weird comparison but some sections come on like Poker Face (the Natasha Lyonne series), wherein, to set up a new location, Furst introduces peripheral characters 'at work' in their particular milieu (Paris, New York, Bessarabia), as a stage-setting for the central characters to arrive into. He's great at. Plot? Maybe not so much.

It's 100% made me want to take a trip down the Danube though.

Alejo Carpentier - Explosion in the Cathedral. Set during that period between post-American and French revolutions, this novel draws on the life of Victor Hughes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Hughes), where Carpentier basically uses him to sketch revolutionary undercurrents and alliances between members of the ruling class and the peasantry. The novel explores this episode of Caribbean history through the eyes of three characters as viewpoints. As a writer working in Castro's Cuba, Carpentier gets to write about revolutionary history, pre-communism (Peter Weiss does similar things with a Peasant revolt in the Aesthetics of Resistance (the 2nd part), drawing on peasant revolts in Sweden). All done in a Baroque framework (it is a new translation, released late last year). Can't recommend this enough.

Carpentier's wonderful. The Kingdom of This World is one of my favorite novels.

Great - need to read that and The Lost Steps (the other novel recently re-translated)

table! I checked out Try, my first Dennis Cooper in 20 years from the library.

nice!

What a handsome man
https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1578101999i/28707898.jpg

Read the Oxford eleven stories paperback. Ranged from alright to pretty bloody fantastic! On the latter end was "The Duel." Charming, cutting and affecting. The relentless tear down and following redemption of a pathetic wannabe bohemian was just a pleasure to read. Loved "Terror:My Friends Story" too. Proper shivers at the end.

I think this return to 19th century Russia was what I needed to kick-start the book-reading engine again. Had a lot of fun with Chekhov

I turn to Chekhov every few years and he's a water fountain after a marathon.

penguin has a 52 stories book

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/565772/fifty-two-stories-by-anton-chekhov-translated-by-richard-pevear-and-larissa-volokhonsky/9780525562382

i've been working through the 13 volumes on project gutenberg but people reckon the translations aren't up to much (the formatting isn't consistent either, which bugs me)

since Alred has brought it up, here is a google summary of Dennis Cooper's Try:

"Simultaneously deadpan and queasily raw, Try is the story of Ziggy, the adopted teenaged son of two sexually abusive fathers whose failed experiment at nuclear-family domesticity has left him stranded with one and increasingly present in the fantasies of the other. He turns from both of these men to his uncle, who sells pornographic videos on the black market, and to his best friend, a junkie whose own vulnerability inspires in Ziggy a fierce and awkward devotion"

Ok, I admit there is some sense of redemption there in the retelling - but it didn't feel like that at all to me when I was reading the book or when the book was over. It just felt debasing. I don't need that in my life

I bought all of these books when they came out but gave them all away, and am not interested in reading them again to see if I was wrong, they were just too painful

I'm 60 pages from the end and I'll have a few things to say tomorrow.

The New Yorker's Jennifer Wilson has a very appealing take on Claire Messud's This Strange Eventful History---have any of you read the book itself? Local library's only The Burning Girl" Good? What else of hers should I read, if any?

here's the review, not paywalled for now:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/13/this-strange-eventful-history-claire-messud-book-review

Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu (abridged Penguin version) - Very hard to speak intelligently of something written in 11th century Japan; the world is just entirely alien to me in a way that even, say, 19th century Paris is not. So yeah, most of this is about how Genji, the Emperor's illegitimate son, is just the most awesome dude, better at poetry and dance and scholarship than anyone else, and everyone loves him and those that don't it's just because they're jealous. Of course this guy also fucks, a lot, including some occasions that a modern reader will view as rape and grooming. Can't say I was getting much out of it aside from ethnographic interest and the occasional beautifully lyrical passage...but then, quite long into it, Genji falls out of favour with the court, takes up residence in a desolate fishing village and, even though he's only in his late 20's, turns to talking a lot about the sadness of days gone by and the approach of death. Now this I can get with! We live and we die, there's yer human condition for ya, in 21st century London or 11th century Japan.

Lovely post on Genji. Makes me want to read it.

Shakespeare's Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays, A Selection

The NYRB paperback is a great endeavour in the first place. A re-print of a translation from the period that produces some of the greatest stylists the English language has seen.

The problem is that its only a partial selection, that's an issue at times as "An Apology for Raymond Sebond" gets cut (its a book by itself) and the oversell on Shakespeare which leads to (every now and then) annoying speculation.

This should've been like their reprint of Burton's Anatomy. Do it fully, without the overreach. I hope Penguin or someone else can reprint the full translation one day.

I want to get back to Genji this summer. I had to take a break about halfway through. It got to the point where I was writing in the names of every character in the margins to keep track of them (the Tyler translation frequently uses their titles or certain identifying descriptions, e.g. "the lady in the east wing", which change frequently.)

I also have this on the shelf, Seidensticker's memoir during his time translating Genji, which to be honest I bought because it's one of the prettiest looking books I've ever seen.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1438819207i/194631.jpg

the penguin deluxe edition (tyler) of Genji is relatively cheap as an ebook at the moment i noticed but i don't know how much of the deluxity translates to digital i don't know. 2k+ pages though. nevermind the quality, feel the width.

Finished two small things by cult figure Frank Kuenstler , thought long-lost but found in some archive by audio archivist and writer Michael Klausman. Typical 70s experimentalism but some nice weird moments in the poems.

Also finished another by Thomas Delahaye, who is among the more interesting experimental poets working today, I think, as well as Catriona Strang’s Unfuckable Lardass, an excellent book of poems that sprung from a hideous comment made about Angela Merkel. It’s an odd and refreshing book that gets into misogyny, particularly against menopausal and post-menopausal people.

Now onto nightly reading of Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, which I am reading for a big group art project thing, and then morning reading of Marc Masters’ book on the history of the cassette tape

the deluxity of Genji means it's 8MB rather than the usual 1. lots of spot illos and the odd map and diagram (which are never great, either stupidly low resolution and about an inch square, or so large that they don't fit onto a page). copious notes. terrible penguin boilerplate cover.

I should've been grossed out by the un-consensual underage sex in Try, but instead I reacted as if I'd watched a Gregg Araki flick.

I'm now listening to the audiobook of Homer's The Iliad (with a very good translation by Emily Wilson and narration by Audra McDonald). I read it in high school, but forgot that the death of Patroclus and Achilles' subsequent wrath was the culmination.

Next I'm going for Homer's The Odyssey by the same team, and then I'm going to tackle James Joyce's Ulysses

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o - Devil on the Cross

Never read a novel that centred the struggle against imperialism in quite this way. Set in post-Indepedence Kenya, its subject is really how the struggle against colonialism goes on. How that mindset poisons everything. A really unique kinda book.

i started reading The Dog of Tithwal by Saadat Hasan Manto, the renowned Indian short story writer who migrated to Pakistan after the partition of India. he is considered one of the greatest modern Indian fiction writers, and i am a fan of great modern fiction, so, its nice to have this translation of stories. He wrote 22 collections of short stories and died in 1955. A lot of stories about Bombay and the partition. Lots of darkness and lots of humor too. the style is my kinda style.

I finally finished The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus. The Introduction to the Penguin edition tried hard to sell this as cri de coeur against the brutality of the Thirty Years War, but the book didn't match that description at all. Instead it struck me as 'a book of tales and wonders', designed to entertain more than anything else, full of ribaldry, trickery and greed. And it was entertaining, if a bit repetitious.

From time to time the author made it a point to tut-tut and say how sinful and un-Christian all those activities were, but I got the distinct feeling that the intermittent sermonizing was just a sop that allowed the book to escape censorship. Mostly it was a book to feed one's imagination on tales of derring-do, easy wealth and unlimited license to ignore ordinary morality.

Sindbad and Other Stories from the Arabian Nights (tr. Husain Haddaway).

It comes with an intro by the translator, which reveals the project to be a hit back on the 'orientalism' with which affected both the reception of these stories - - both in their authenticity and their past translations - - which means that (past translator) Burton's language is toned down, but also the lewdness of some of the episodes are fully rendered.

I've returned to Katherine Anne Porter, a favorite.

i haven't read her in decades. those stories blew my mind. i'd like to go back and re-read them sometime. they had a big effect on me. they also made me realize how much great stuff was out there that nobody had really told me about or that i hadn't read about. despite her once-upon-a-time fame, it wasn't like everyone was raving about KAP in the 80s. outside of a short story class or american lit history class probably.

"Flowering Judas" and "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" used to appear in high school lit anthologies, dunno now.

yeah, she was anthologized a lot.

I reread "Old Mortality," one of the cutting fictions I've read about what family does in memory and in the flesh.

She's never been fashionable but she's one of our best imo

i agree. i never finished Ship Of Fools though. its all about those stories for me. they are quite an achievement.

Yeah, I've got a big collection of her stories, been thinking I'll dive in soon---seems like she has a better rep for those than the novels?
Speaking of Indian short stories, I've come across an intriguing in-depth take on R.K. Narayan's Malgudi Days: "No one disputes his charm and compassion," but some people---well,Naipul--while calling Narayan "a born writer," thinks he's too accepting of conditions of poverty---others say that the protest is implicit---descriptions can incl. some pretty tough stuff, also the comic twists can be pretty sharp, also judging by descriptions, which tend to get more detailed, like "Betcha can't eat just one": a good sign, when even nonpartisan reviewers get pulled in that direction.

Drive your plow over the bones of the dead - Olga Tokarczuk. funniest book I've read in a long time. An extremely sympathetic portrayal of a type of person familiar to me. Horoscopes, ecology, murder, the solipsism of an old lady. It's a good melting pot, loved it.

Reading Dostoevsky's poor folk at the moment and struck by the genius of allowing your first work to be the letters of two people who are meant to be poor writers haha. All criticism can be deferred to that fact! So far, it doesn't reach the heights of his more famous works. It's subtlety won't let it. But you can see the seed in it.

Reading a Pushkin collection at the same time (as poor folks character are). A forceful measure, I'm entirely ignorant and inexperienced with poetry, but I'm enjoying it and you have to start somewhere.

I'm taking another stab at Eula Bliss - Having and Being Had, prompted by moving in with my gf and it being one of the books we own two copies of between us. I've never read anything else of hers that I know of (maybe magazine articles? She seems New Yorkerish) but I like her writing, and her concerns accord with mine in this season of life.

Also a big brick of a book, The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón by Claudio Lomnitz, which rose to the surface during unpacking and called out to me after collecting dust on my shelves for years. It is clearly a labor of love for the author to resurrect the doomed international community of anarchists that surrounded Magón, and his passion is infectious.

And I just started listening to Serge Tankian's memoir on audiobook. Trying to decide whether it's rude to fast-forward through the Armenian genocide, which I admittedly know very little about (feel free to recommend books on the subject)

re: Olga Tokarczuk, I've really enjoyed but also been a little frustrated by her Flights, a 'novel' with 100 or so small chapters of musings about transit and in-between spaces as a diarist, and maybe 10 larger chapters which advance the story forward, but even those not in an obvious linear or connected way

I think I've posted this before

Masters’ book on cassettes, ‘High Bias,’ is much more fluffy than I thought it would be, though I am still enjoying myself reading details of taper culture and etc.

And here’s where I admit that re: the Odyssey, I just don’t care about this stuff. I never really did when I was younger, either, and since one can easily absorb the epic’s themes, symbolism, and signifiers easily enough without ever reading it, I think I am going to stop reading the Wilson translation. I don’t really know how I am going to work on this project with friends— it involves me writing a piece about a multimedia performance concert composed by twelve people or so, put on at a new music fest in Canada— but I will do the supplemental reading and think I should be fine. I just find myself bored bored bored with the book!

Not the most articulate post, I am pre-coffee, apologies

IMO the best part of The Odyssey is the second half, after Odysseus returns to find his house full of moochers with designs on his wife. I read the Fagles translation. I've recently been reading a bit of this and that. Finished Hume's "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding". Read Descartes's "Meditations on First Philosophy". Finished "Cawdor", a long narrative poem by Robinson Jeffers (spoiler alert: taking a much younger wife causes trouble). Been reading some spooky 19th-century tales by Wilkie Collins ("A Terribly Strange Bed" is a highlight). And now starting "Matter and Memory" by Henri Bergson.

Yeah, I've got a big collection of her stories, been thinking I'll dive in soon---seems like she has a better rep for those than the novels?

Just one novel whose reputation preceded it, so when it became a huge hit on release (and inspired a fucking terrible movie) it was pretty much forgotten afterward.

pascal quignard - the tears. bought his new one - Lord Chandos' Answer on whim, but it's blown past its publishing date, and I'm on holiday, so i got this out from the library instead.

tl;dr review: I don't know, I have no idea.

I don't know what to make of it! It's a collection of more or less fabulistic fragments that collect around the lives of two notional twin grandsons of Charlemagne, Harthnid and Nithard.

The style is a particularly gallic form imv; I don't mean the typical and exuberant 'gallic' essay style of Paul Hazard in The Crisis of the European Mind, for instance, but the opposite: a compressed, economic style to relate a history, which you also see in Pierre Michon and Eric Vuillard, I guess you might even see it as a feature of Camus. In this form, it takes on the quality of a child's story, a fable, as I've said, and denudes the text of explanatory force. This means as histories these texts have a sort of gnostic sententiousness, or a phatic opacity. If you accept the link with Camus, there it would be the opacity of purpose of an absurd universe. In Quignard it is to construct a method of history that takes the often fantastic stories recorded in chronicles, annals and histories – genesis of peoples, lineages, topographical features and local histories, cultural behaviour – on their own terms, and in the matter-of-fact economy style that characterises old chronicles:

In stories dating back to ancient times, there is often mention of great wonders. It isn't that there are fewer such wonders these days intervening – quite as unexpectedly as before – in the course of our lives. But their ocurrence doesn't register in the mind as it did in days of old, when, in the repetition of the tasks of ordinary life, nothing new really made calls upon it.

The memory of their surprising nature also fades because we are wary of noting them in family records, in res gestae, in chronicles, in private diaries, in history books, in engagement books.

So miracles seem less frequent to us, when in fact the world abounds with them

That conveys something of the method or spirit.

There is a line that starts a Michon book – is it Vies Minisculesp? – that says something like 'Let us describe a genesis for our pretensions'. Part of Quignard's purpose is to describe a genesis for Europe and for French letters, not just a historical genesis, but a spiritual genesis. I should give a flavour of it:

It was then that the defeated Franks told them of Sar's prophecy. They remembered now that everything she had predicted in the most minute detail three years before had come about: the rain, the river bursting its banks, the knees getting soaked, the surprise attack, etc. Then the Norsemen asked where Sar lived. Under torture, one of the Franks who had been taken prisoner pointed out to the young Icelandic sailors where the shaman had chosen her cave in the cliffs. The Norsemen climbed the slop, drove away the gulls, entered the cave, drove out the bats, took her by the arm and put her eyes out. Her blue pupils flowed and flowed without end. This is how the Somme was created, which now sends its endless flow out into the North Sea, reaching as far as the port of London.

So, that captures quite nicely the blend of compressed history and fable.

By the way, everything I'm writing needs *"I think"* in very heavy emphasis around it, because as I say I'm really not sure what to make of it. The chapters are extremely short, and I've been taking notes on many of them to try and keep track of how it all correlates. A lot - a *lot* - of my notes say 'I have no idea what this chapter is about' 'I really don't know what this means'. I feel a bit illiterate when I'm reading it – is this history or something that he's made up? is this a real myth? what is the symbolism here? I have no idea. why? to what end? i have no idea &c &c.

Harthnid fucks and fights a lot - there's quite a lot of women taking his 'member' (that's not me being prudish, it's the word in the translation) in their hands, mouths, loins etc. Nithard (see what he did there) is history recorder, a bookworm, a copyist and linguist.

The subject is love and loss all treated in immensely cryptic way – 'The Tears' are formed many times, but to take one example they are formed out of a shadow on a bar-room wall, left by a cheating bell-ringing husband who, seeing his wife, fled the bar so quickly he left his shadow. A renowned artist then comes along and creates an artwork *around* the shadow that tells the story of a dark lake 'of Origin' into which a goddess weeps...

For it seems that this mysterious water that runs down the faces of men goes back there sometimes, while it is possible that in the depts of every living being it merely dries out. I have known many men in whose depths that water had evaporated

I actually found this all quite moving, by by god it's all so abstruse. Maybe necessarily so, maybe this is how we need to approach love, grief and solitutde.

So, very much *unlike* Michon (it all shares some similarities with his incredible Winter Mythologies/Abbots etc - one of the best things ever *read it*), I'm finding it a real slog. I am also finding it fascinating, and it's super-dense. Trying to find details in its tiny chapters is so hard, because it's all so rich. So I ended up wondering if it was me not him. I am feeling more and more illiterate as I get older, and less and less capable of approaching fiction with any sort of seriousness. I think the great value of the book is that it does approach difficult subjects in a way that is very far from simplistic and which requires of the reader a sort of negative capbility to fill in the uncertainty.

oh, the relationship between the animal world, in particular horses, and people is important. no i don't know why. also it's all taking place within the great 'pincer' movement on the Franks between the Norsemen and the Arab world.

in short: I don't know. I have no idea. which may be the point. I don't know.

also I read The Honjin Murders – Seishi Yokomizo. A classic Japanese locked-room mystery. Kind of fascinating - the whole picturesque apparatus of the mystery is part of the solution to the deadly deed - kind of bootstrapped out of its environment. And although a lot of post-golden age development of the. detective story is to improve the quality of psychological motivations and character, this is the only one I've read that actually makes the psychological factor the key element - as in it dictates the necessity of the killing *and* its method - it's an ingenious piece of writing I think. Roger Ackroyd is a named influence I think (no, not in that way), as is John Dickson Carr and, interestingly AA Milne, a novel called the The Red House Mystery – I didn't realise he wrote detective fiction.

The style is a little plain (which may be the translation)

in short: I don't know. I have no idea. which may be the point. I don't know.

i find myself puffing my cheeks a lot and thinking 'wait, why am i reading this?'

intellectual and critical decay.

lol goodreads review of Quignard's Hatred of Music

The Hatred of Music has an irresistible back story. The author, Pascal Quignard, was renowned in the field of baroque music when "in 1994 he abruptly resigned from all of his professional administrative activities, both musical and literary." He proceeded to write Hatred "in the wake of this resignation."

...

When I gave up reading Hatred, I was satisfied that Quignard quit a good job less because he had had some dreadful epiphany about music and more because he is a supercilious, strange, French man.

i mean, i'm not saying the reviewer is *right*, but also, are they really RONG? this is the question with which i'm grappling as i read the tears.

> Seishi Yokomizo

there are over 70 of these, about 6 or 7 of which have been recently translated and published by Pushkin. of the 5 I've read only 1 has been a bit duff.

(and one of them is in the Kindle deals for this month)

> Seishi Yokomizo

there are over 70 of these, about 6 or 7 of which have been recently translated and published by Pushkin. of the 5 I've read only 1 has been a bit duff.

they aren't quite doing them in order afaict (and i skipped one, but have just bought a copy) and some of them do briefly mention previous tales

at this rate i will be dead before they get anywhere near the end

I'm reading Elizabeth Taylor's first published novel, At Mrs Lippincote's.

why does it give me so much joy that you guys read elizabeth taylor!! it just does. it does my heart good. she's so good and so entertaining.

I'd be fine if the only novelist whose books I was stuck with were Taylor.

*Taylor's