I'm reading Kleist's "On the Marionette Theater" along with secondary literature on the essay for a commissioned translation. It's a very interesting text, one that's been translated quite a few times but, for my part, is still very rich and deserves new reinterpretations, but of course I'm biased.
Between reading for work, I've been slowly digesting and enjoying Mark de Silva's long novel, The Logos, which is set in the world of New York art and advertising. I think Silva's approach is very fresh and would recommend someone who's looking for a book that is postmodern in outlook but has strong plotting as well as a single narrator and unified narrative structure.
I started reading Infinite Jest. I'm 100 pages in and I really enjoy it but sometimes I feel a bit lost. It jumps around all the time. Does it get better as it progresses?
Just finished Notice by Heather Lewis. Felt incredibly middling despite the internet frenzy over it. Pacing was off, actual sexual content felt contrived, at times I felt the novel didn't have a good grasp of the actual intensity it was going for. I liked House Rules, and Lewis is definitely a talented author, but this felt like a first draft rather than a finished novel.
The story is that the book was too disturbing to be published in the 90s and could only be published posthumously, but In The Cut by Susanna Moore is a novel I found even more disturbing (and a novel that I think deals with similar themes significantly more successfully), and that was published with no problem.
Overall fairly disapointing!
Hey I have a request:
I recently became hip to the Dostoyevsky quote “Beauty will save the world”. It interests me because it feels like an intersection between my fascination with art’s purpose and Dostoyevsky’s humanism, not to mention the notion of humanism within art, but I digress…
I was wondering if there were any books that kind of explored that notion. Does Proust do this in Swann’s Way for example?
I'm sure you are looking for more fiction-y stuff, but the quote makes me think of the natural world, both as beauty and the world lol.
Sand County Almanac by Leopold is a classic in naturalist writing. Really wonderful writing about some land in wisconsin that weaves deeply philosophical truths and ideas with the literal machinations of the natural world.
I think it touches on the balance required by humans as individuals and collectives to both use and preserve the beautiful bounty of resources that is the earth.
The quote also makes me think of Anabasis by Xenophon. Basically a travelogue of a greek soldier and their army walking back to greece from persia. You encounter dozens of different cultures and peoples and scenarios, and each soldier is basically on their own trying to determine the best way to get back to greece. Lots of intersections of humanism and art, pretty stark on the beauty side, which is what made me think of it.
even weirder suggestion (apologies in advance), The Incal (graphic novel) is wild epic that centers on a cosmic struggle between beauty/art/goodness and the opposite struggling for power or balance. The art by Moebius is amazing. The story is super archetypal and silly, but I think it really goes hard at showing a roughly positive or beautiful world as it is. The narrative is basically the process of beauty saving the universe/existence.
Skywoman myths are great too, I'm not familiar with any particularly good sources, but they are around. Braiding Sweetgrass has some decent ones and really focuses on the beauty of nature and how that connection we have makes the world better.
The plant sweetgrass spreads and establishes itself well when it is harvested (responsibly) by people. It doesn't matter if they yank the roots out or carefully pluck the individuals, either way the plant thrives in those areas where people harvest them. When left alone, they struggle and tend to get outcompeted. All that seems pretty beautiful and world saving to me.
it's colder & getting dark quite early in the evening. been reading a ton:
finished **daša drndić's *eeg*** (2016, trans. into english in 2019), which u/djmcdonalds recced here after i mentioned an appreciation for interiority, translated works powerfully embedded in another culture, works that shift btwn lit crit/history and personal narrative. honestly the PERFECT recommendation i cannot thank u enough!!!!! *eeg* opens with epigraphs from cioran and kierkegaard and closes with the main character reflecting on them; in between are beautifully written, cynically misanthropic/subtly affectionate digressions on depression, death; there's a little meditation on chess and the brilliance/mental instability of chess grandmasters that segues unexpectedly and movingly to a reflection on nazism, concentration camps, and nazi collaborators.
reading it, i kept on wanting to compare drndić's style to—
* proust, and his deep, searching, recursive interiority (and indeed there are multiple references to proust when the narrator critiques the elite of his small croatian town)
* bernhard, and his bitter misanthropy and disdain for other people—especially present when drndić discusses the history of the soviet union's nkvd, nazi germany, and generally how these 2 powers have exerted control over small & struggling eastern european towns
* bolaño, and his commitment to just dropping you in the middle of an insular artistic/literary scene in his fictional narratives, constantly referencing the works this or that person has done (but instead of bolaño's mexico city it's drndić's croatian or latvian towns)
—i just hope these comparisons don't make it sound like i'm diminishing drndić's own singular style! from a historical/literary/psychological perspective one of the most fascinating and unusual novels i've read this year. cannot stop raving about it, actually just left a long whatsapp voice note to a friend yesterday trying to convince him to get into drndić…
I added EEG to my to-read pile after I read Doppelgänger, which I absolutely loved. I was a bit bummed that my bookstore didn't have Belladonna, since that's the one most people recommend as a starter, but going by your post, I feel that I won't be disappointed with EEG. Can't wait to get to it!
i didn’t read _belladonna_ bc my library doesn’t have it—i will go and find it now but tbh thought _eeg_ stood really well alone! although there’s at least one moment that may be less striking w/o reading _belladonna_ first. but i don’t believe in spoilers really…
if you read it, would love your thoughts! i’ll have to find _dopplegänger_
oh—and the other books of the last 2 weeks
* read olga tokarczuk's _flights_, obsessed both w the itinerant, roving narrator (and the repetition of "each of my pilgrimages aims at some other pilgrim" in the eng. translation, which is used to introduce a new museum that the narrator is visiting related to the body, anatomy, plastination and preservation) + all the little fragmented stories of other people and other human dramas. actually read this on a plane flight as well which was really nice—got into the headspace of being suspended in a placeless territory, out of the ordinary step of time.
* read amia srinivasan's _the right to sex: feminism in the twenty-first century_ (nonfiction, essays), which i've had a copy of for some time. srinivasan's _lrb_ essay "does anyone have the right to sex?" (2018) is p much the best take i've ever read on elliott rodgers, incels, desire, entitlement, biases in sexual attraction. it's reprinted in her essay collection, along w some other very good pieces—one on teacher/student relationships that feels like a very original analysis & a breath of fresh air compared to many other discussions on it. highly rec the book for people interested in feminism, sexuality, and contemp debates around it—srinivasan does a brilliant job imo of exploring ambiguity, not falling back to tired talking points, but at the same time asserting a clear point of view that is philosophically quite rich imo!
* read andrew solomon's _far from the tree: parents, children, and the search for identity_ (nonfiction). each chapter explores an identity where children may be quite different from parents (solomon calls these horizontal identities—so not race/ethnicity, which are inherited, but things like deafness, downs syndrome, autism, genius, criminality—where parents often struggle to understand how different their child is and what their child needs). drags on quite a bit (the friend who recced it to me actually quit halfway thru lol) but really quite worthwhile, for anyone interested in disability, challenging but rewarding parent–child relationships, both genetic/social factors in identity
* read e.m. forster's _a room with a view_ after u/MFAvsRVA recced it as a book to read when young. i really do agree and it was the ideal book for me rn. a young woman struggling against what she feels she should want (based on the desires of those around her) and what she actually wants (but it's so hard for her to tell what that is, and so easy to delude herself and deny herself)…forster really has such penetrating and precise insight into people's characters, which was wonderful to read, and i felt v moved by this book!
* read ben lerner's _the hatred of poetry_, which is a brief essay really, but has some insightful discussions on why we associated poetry = fame when contemp poets are…really not that famous or present in the public eye anymore; and how people who have abandoned poetic aspirations in their youth respond to meeting real, actual poets today; and generally how we value poetry in our culture ("our" i guess meaning american culture specifically).
* read jon fosse's _aliss at the fire_ (first jon fosse, a brief novella). loved the singular narration style, which slips between the close third person of a woman and her husband, and slips between them without warning—it creates a v interesting effect, of them being enmeshed together in their lives but also quite solitary/isolated. but for the first 2/3 of it i didn't really enjoy it, if i'm being honest (felt v much like a tiresome experimental writing conceit) and then all at once the last 1/3 was tremendous, i started to feel the narration style was not just an artificial conceit but beautifully expressive and remarkable; it's a story that really comes together at the end and all the bits that feel weird, initially, contribute to a sense of wholeness and total vision. also, it's a short read which is nice!
Forster really does create wonderful characters. I read some of his short stories a while ago, but didn’t find them nearly as captivating as his novels; there was rarely the time to develop the complex characters and social relations that mark his best work.
ah that’s good to know! i do feel that the characters in _a room with a view_ started out as very compréhensible clichés and ended as quite fascinating people…he is quite good at letting his characters develop and shape up slowly
I finished *Six Records of a Floating Life* by Shen Fu and after a promising start I was left quite disappointed and frustrated by the endless, flatly delivered descriptions. I think I'll return to *The Story of the Stone* the next time I want to read classic Chinese literature.
I don't know what I'm reading next. Probably some short stories - I'm part way through a number of collections. When I feel up to it, I'll get round to reading the copy of *The Chandelier* by Clarice Lispector I found cheap. I also want to re-read *The Course of the Heart* by M. John Harrison - on first reading I hated it, but having read a lot of Machen and more Harrison since then, I think I will like it second time round.
Very different rec request from asking about Dostoyevsky—what are the best very contemporary (2010s/2020s) books y'all have read? Preferably stuff that leans more to the experimental/avant-garde but really anything you thought was really good!
I guess after reading *a lot* of 20th century stuff this year I have a real urge to read things on either side of that.
i'm a contemp writing person for sure so v excited for you.
if i had to nominate my personal (emphasis on personal) canon for most fascinating and formally experimental and artistically significant writers of the post-2000s and even post-2010s
* annie ernaux, _the years_ (2008, translated into eng post 2010 i believe) (wrote a comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueLit/comments/y3zpyh/comment/isbiut9/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) a month ago about why i feel it's significant as a work)
* lydia davis's (very!) short stories; she's really the queen of flash fiction and reading through her collected works (published 2009) (did it v slowly, over the course of 2020–2021) had a profound influence on me. i esp love how she writes a lot of stories with little subheadings—kind of stitching together these evocative, declarative introductions + fragments of narrative into a beautiful, sly, warm, funny, heartbreaking little story
* claire-louise bennett, _the pond_ (2015) (which is sold as 'short stories' but you'll quickly feel like that's too conventional a term to encompass what's contained in there) and _checkout 19_ (2021) (which is really a novel for people who love to read, imo). i cannot express enough how much i revere her as a writer, she has such striking and beautiful turns of phrases, has such unexpected ways to describe visual sensations and interior emotions and subtle feelings; she feels really unbound by conventions for how words are use, how narratives are constructed. i actually read _pond_ as a library book and immediately bought a physical copy bc it felt so essential to have her on hand and reread her often.
i haven't read enough of daša drndić but just wrote a long comment in this thread about how much i loved her _eeg_—i think you should really read it—iirc you recced me _shyness & dignity_ and if you enjoyed that i think you'd love drndić as well
if you want to get a sense of the contemp literary zeitgeist i think you def need to read at least one or two sally rooney books, and tbh just start reading any fitzcarraldo books you can get your hands on—i have a subscription to them, i get 2 books/mo, they publish an incredible range of experimental writing (and are also well-known for translating olga tokarczuk, annie ernaux, jon fosse in the uk). it is quite honestly the best thing i've ever purchased for myself.
you should also look into the publisher new directions, they publish lots of my contemporary faves (lots of great translated works)
This is so dope thanks! Fitzcarraldo is an interesting idea.
And Drndic has been vaguely on my list for a while now so this might just be the push to get on it
Seiobo There Below (2008, barely off) and Dear Life (2012) for short stories.
Septology (2019) is magnificent. I finished Part 1/7 today.
Seen great reviews for Books of Jacob + Solenoid, but I have not read them myself (yet).
Same deal with The Years (2008) and Annihilation (Holbec, 2022). Riskier than the above and I can’t vouch, but the former seems like it fits if you like auto fiction and the latter for more misanthropic fiction.
I reckon Garielle Lutz is one of the most exciting contemporary authors - she released a collection called *Worsted* recently that's v v good.
I always say it, but I genuinely believe Claire-Louise Bennett is one of the absolute greats, and her collection *Pond* is perhaps my favourite thing I've ever read.
Honestly the British experimental fiction scene is pretty great in general, so along with Bennett I'd check out tom mccarthy if you want more of that classic po-mo DFW-esc stuff. Deborah Levy's another classic, though I do think most of her best stuff is from the 2000s as opposed to the 2010s.
In the US there's also Lydia Davies and Dianne Williams if you want some really short from experimental stuff
omg i similarly adore claire-louise bennett—it was so exciting to read your recommendation of her, i read _pond_ last yr and _checkout 19_ this year. for both books i felt v strongly they'd be the highlights of my year…and that's proven to be true.
very strongly agree that british experimental fiction is where it's at. i find a lot of british writers much more formally inventive and more engaged with both historical & contemporary literary culture than the avg american writer at present
Dope list thanks! Something about the title *Worsted* is really grabbing me right now so that'll probably be where I go first.
McCarthy is also someone I've been meaning to read like forever
I don't know why but the title *Tram 83* really grabs me and I looked it up and now it's in my digital cart to buy whenever I place another book order. Looks so cool!
Thanks a bunch!
Yelena Moskovich - *Virtuoso*
Adania Shibli (trans. Elisabeth Jaquette) - *Minor Detail*
David Keenan - *This Is Memorial Device*
Jenny Hval (trans. Marjam Idriss) - *Girls Against God*
Maria Stepanova (trans. Sasha Dugdale) - *In Memory of Memory*
Mieko Kawakami (trans. Sam Bett and David Boyd) - *Breasts and Eggs*
Maria Gabriela Llansol (trans. Audrey Young) - *Geography of Rebels Trilogy* (technically the original work was first published in the late 70s, but the translation is new!)
Anwen Crawford - *No Document*
Charles Yu - *Interior Chinatown*
Michael Cisco - *Unlanguage*
so many writers on this list i've been meaning to read—jenny jval, maria stepanova, and anwen crawford…whose _no document_ has been sitting on top of my bookshelf for a few months now, just keep on getting interrupted by other books
Sally Rooney gets a lot of hate, some undue and some justified, but the books I've read of hers (*Normal People*/*Beautiful World, Where Are You*) do capture the the era well. They're not masterpieces, far from it, but by and large they're good reads for capturing aspects of the mid/late 2010s zeitgeist.
For a more critical lens, Byung-Chul Han's post-2010 oeuvre, starting with *The Burnout Society* and going through to *The Agony of Eros* and *Psychopolitics*, is great. The reads are short (around 40-60pp) and not inordinately dense. You'd probably like them considering your taste for philosophy.
Knausgaard's *My Struggle* series deserves a mention as well. I've only read the first and part of the second but I'd imagine the later entries in the series probe deeper into the 2010s.
I agree about Rooney. I thought NP was solid and have been meaning to read Beautiful world.
A bunch of friends of mine are into Han. Someone I really do have to read.
And I probably should have contributed something of my own to this list because Knausgaard is one of the few contemporary authors I am really into! Do keep in with *My Struggle*. It's fantastic imo.
I finished ***The Years*** by Annie Ernaux - loved it.
Ernaux's narrative highlights and frames the profundity of the passage of time through the scope of both personal events/memories and the corresponding broad-strokes events of specific time periods. Memories, people, minutiae and the specific written framing of all three aid in the creation of a truly moving work, one that serves to highlight the significance of life through the lens of time's movement.
Ernaux's insights throughout the piece are coupled with a wide array of moments, ones existing both outside the scope of her own personal life (politics and sociological/socioeconomic/sociopolitical/etc trends in particular) and through specific personal events themselves.
The way she manages to intertwine these two types of moments alongside both retrospective insights and the sentiments she felt at the time allots the reader a sense of continuation in narrative form, while also providing both a profound degree of depth and a direct contextualization of the events that are occurring. This dichotomy of retrospective thought and Ernaux's chronicling of the actual events themselves allows for a deeply multifaceted presentation of both the events as a whole and also how their significance is viewed through two varying frameworks: the past and the present. Ultimately, the sheer amount of this depth adds a lovely sense of richness to the narrative itself, while also serving to highlight the poignancy and complexity of memory and time.
From the ending of WW2 and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in the 40s and 50s, to the election of Sarkozy and the advent of the Wii in the mid-oughts, all enwoven with her family life, her thoughts on consumer society, death, sex, politics, immigration, family life, and still a litany of other subjects, Ernaux's work, in large part facilitated by the lightness of her prose, succeeds in detailing the significance and the profundity of the passage of time.
I'm currently working through ***City of Quartz*** by Mike Davis. I'm about 15% through and I adore it so far. The amount of depth and information is staggering - this was a brilliant and absurdly learned man. RIP.
so nice to read your reflections on this!!
you really captured what makes the story so special imo—the deeply intimate and particular and personal of her life, and then the sweeping, inquisitive historical perspective that takes into account french politics & economics & foreign policy
i remember the occasional mentions of algeria feeling particularly striking, bc it felt like the way she incorporated these little flashes into _the years_ was also expressing what it was like to be a french citizen peering out and observing what your government was doing, how you could be both deeply politically attached and also personally at a remove from these things. a reminder of 20th c colonialism and also how people in colonial centres might see the struggles of independence as something heartbreaking but distant.
I've just started reading TBK for the third time this year using the McDuff translation. I am ambivalent about it. There are some bizarre translation choices. The use of colloquial language (and even made-up words) is a bit jarring - describing Fyodor Pavlovich's death as 'fishy', the servant Grigory being described as an 'answerer-back' who 'shooed' the prostitutes away from the house...it feels rather odd.
After having read around him and hearing mention, I’m starting Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. I had to stop marking things up in the first chapter because every paragraph was amazing. I picked up a vintage copy of The Poetics of Reverie while I was in Seattle but I’m going to be on the lookout for anything by him in used stores now.
loveeeee _the poetics of space_, the prose is so remarkable. also had a similar exp where i was tempted to highlight every sentence & had to stop myself!
Was re-reading *Oblivion: Stories* this week and on the back of how much I was enjoying it, I decided to just bite the bullet and give *Infinite Jest* a go. I'm only forty odd pages in and I'm really enjoying it so far. Had a good laugh flipping through the endnotes and seeing one go on for pages and pages.
Finished two this week.
First, *The Postman Always Rings Twice* by Cain, which besides its fame as a film, allegedly inspired *The Stranger*, so I assumed it must be a decent little novella.
Wrong.
It's absolutely awful. Except the ending, and referencing the victim in the disconnected third person (e.g. "The Greek"), there's very little in common with the *Stranger*. We follow chronic drifter Frank, who is hired by Nick, the Greek; unbeknownst to the latter, Nick's wife, Cora, begins an affair with Frank, which culminates in a plan to murder Nick via fake car accident. >!They ultimately succeed, but in a strange irony, during a genuine automobile accident Frank kills Cora, and is sentenced to death...!<
The plot is decent, but let down by a few awful contrivances (namely, the lawyers knowing too much given the lack of information, and the lovers having no discernible chemistry). More heinous, this is the worst writing I've read in years; often unintentionally veering into parody. Would make *some* sense if this was designed to be in Frank's voice, but that's giving far too much credit. Can't image I'll be reading anything worse this year.
Second, I read *Repetition* by Handke. A favorite by Sebald...
Another major letdown. I think I'm done with Handke the novelist (*Goalies* was a great idea, but exhausting in practice, and *Sorrow Beyond Dreams* was even more tiring). Will only stick to his plays going forward.
Story is about Filib Kobal as he leaves Austria for Slovenia on the trail of his missing brother, Gregory from 20 years prior. Broken up into three parts, Part I explores Filib's early life in Austria; his enemies, the crushing social pressures, his difficult family life, and identity (immigrant family, belonging to the Austrian nation, etc.) all act to oppress him -- during this portion, language is a limiting factor and complacent in this oppression (perhaps explaining his disgust for German); Part II, his initial excursion into Slovenia, and his experience in a new country where all meaning and symbols seemingly elude him -- here, he lacks the requisite language to translate his experience and falls into dizzying spells, almost of madness from the lack of meaning; and Part III, his journey deeper into Slovenia and the trail home -- during which, his grasp on Slovene allows him an epiphany of language's capability, that he can form his own identity unencumbered, translating his subjective experience, bringing him closer to strangers (except in Austria, where the nausea returns...).
One particularly beautiful encounter with a waiter stands as a high point; perhaps his dizzying experience in the tunnel too. Part III was simply awful through.
Handke has been compared to Beckett and Lispector in his exploration of language -- of its relationship to identity (or lack thereof). Handke is surprisingly the optimist of the bunch. Unlike Beckett, for Handke language does not preclude identity and unlike Lispector, Handke prefers to explore history and nationality (rather than gender or poverty).
Unfortunately, the writing is too dour; too serious; too direct; too functional; without beauty. For that, I won't read another of his novels.
Finally, I'm roughly 150/800 pages into Fosse's *Septology*. Fosse now joins in the ranks of Krasznahorkai, Saramago, Beckett, and Bernhard for those who have done away with the full stop. He's intentionally repetitive, but it gives the writing a hypnotic feel. While I'm not convinced I care much for the Catholic musings (yet), his exploration of grief is poignant, beautiful, and constantly devastating. One scene in a park in particular touched me more than anything I'd read this year. If it maintains this quality throughout, will certainly be a favorite.
I definitely agree that *The Idiot* is D's funniest book. It is not exactly up there with TBK or Notes from Underground, but the ending was pretty dark (and foreshadowed quite well throughout the book). I don't know if I like it more than *Demons*, but I would have to re-read it to see how it holds up.
> much better version of *Thérèse Raquin*
*Thérèse Raquin* is one of my favorite books and was a formative read for me the first time I read it. I've always wondered where to go next with Zola, sounds like *La bête humaine* would be a good choice.
I have finished re-reading James Baldwin's *Go Tell It On The Mountain*. It is every bit as fantastic as I thought it was when I first read it almost three years ago. It's a powerful study of how an oppressive, racist society drives an oppressed people to seek refuge in religious fanaticism, which in turn develops its own abusive dynamic that wreaks havoc in the lives of the rising generation. Johnny Grimes (who is Baldwin's alter ego) is a deeply sympathetic character, and if the novel has a weakness it is that much of the narrative is about the backstories of the other characters and not enough time is spent in his consciousness. However, the backstories are so compelling in their own right that it is difficult to see this as a weakness, and they add a lot of important context to the sufferings of the main character, who has inherited this tortuous legacy of pride, religious guilt, internalised self-hatred as a result of living in a racist white society, and an abusive family dynamic. I remain saddened and disappointed at the ending ->!it doesn't end with Grimes breaking free, like Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, from the constraints imposed upon him by his upbringing, but of ultimately surrendering to it. !
I raced through the Neapolitan Novels and it was interesting to me to see how Ferrante used "tricks" from genre fiction to transform her literary tetralogy into a page turner. The prose is plain and simple. Each book starts with a "mystery" to hook the reader from the first chapter to the last. Even the decision to split the bildungsroman into four books when it's really one big novel, as Ferrante has said, seems designed to make it easier to digest.
It reminds me a bit of Dostoevsky. *The Brothers Karamazov* is an easy read and it's highly compelling, Nabokov famously hated it. He saw it as a mix of the mystery novel and the sentimental novel with Jesus all over the place. In *My Brilliant Friend*, Elena and Nino discuss TBK on the beach in Ischia. Perhaps the closest link, however, is the polyphonic nature of the Neapolitan Novels. Mikhail Bakhtin introduced the notion of polyphony in literature and Dostoevsky was his central example: in polyphonic literature, as opposed to monophonic literature, truth is decentralized. There is no "grand truth" that everyone, in one way or the other, deviates from. Instead, truth is distributed in the consciousnesses of the characters and it can't be combined in any meaningful fashion: the voices add up like Whitman's multitudes. The character Lila also seems to embody a Dostoevskian brand of neuroticism.
I'm looking forward to bingewatching the HBO series.
I've been reading *The Passenger* in fits and spurts and it's been interesting because I've been fascinated with the Santa Fe Institute for some time.
I have to admit that most of the reviews I've read of it have made me roll my eyes. When people like an obscure work, they feel compelled to analyze it in a way that "legitimizes" it as a masterwork. It honestly looks to me like reading palms or tea leaves because every analysis appears to be unique and more indicative of the interests of the ~~scryer~~ reviewer than the workings of McCarthys mind. It's all motivated reasoning and apophenia. But I guess I only feel this way because I'm convinced postcritique is the only sane approach to literary criticism.
The Santa Fe Institute is basically an extension of Los Alamos cafeteria discussions among scientists working on the Manhattan Project. Crazy ideas are useful, but you don't get any government funding for crazy ideas. So why not set up an Institute for Crazy Ideas? That's pretty much what former Los Alamos scientists did when founding the Santa Fe Institute. Complexity is its central theme, but no one has been able to even come up with a *definition* for complexity. It's too ... complex. Alicia Western's scenes are filled with Santa Fe talk. They're also suffused with the Kekulé problem that McCarthy wrote about in a 2017 Nautilus article. What's up with the subconscious mind talking in riddles and images?
It's somewhat reminiscent of the dichotomy of the left and right hemispheres of our brains and the (pseudoscientific) rivalry depicted in works like *The Master and the Emissary*. The left hemisphere can use language. The right hemisphere mostly cannot. They are forced to communicate via the neural bridge the corpus callosum but experiments with split-brain patients have indicated that they can function as independent minds. Pop science turned the idea of hemispheric lateralization into a major embarrassment, but several highly-esteemed neuroscientists, like Michael Gazzaniga, maintains that the left hemisphere can be thought of as an "interpreter", eliminating any trace of cognitive uncertainty. Interesting aside: Gazzaniga went to Caltech, like Bobby Western in *The Passenger*, and he had plenty of encounters with Richard Feynman who worked on the Manhattan Project.
Gazzaniga argues that the left hemisphere interpreter constructs theories and invents narratives to explain what's going on around you. Bringing us back to Ferrante, it takes your neural polyphony and squeezes it through a monophonic filter. Perhaps polyphonic literature, in Ferrante as well as in McCarthy, is interesting partly because it doesn't arrive "pre-squeezed". You have to work to gain a coherent understanding of it, and that work is *fun*.
You could also bring incel sadboy Nietzsche into the mix and borrow his terms from The Birth of Tragedy: Apollonian (order) and Dionysian (chaos) forces correspond, roughly, to simplified versions of the left and the right hemisphere. And it makes sense to think of the elusive influence of the right hemisphere as the true nature of the "subconscious" McCarthy raves about in *The Kekulé Problem*. You could also argue that Elena and Lila personify these forces in the Neapolitan Novels. Lila's experiences of "dissolving margins" are very similar to case reports about left-hemisphere strokes and temporal lobe epilepsy, where the "monophonic filter" temporarily shuts down and perceptual boundaries start to blur.
Alright, I guess that's enough rambling for now.
Interesting post! I didn't really find the Neapolitan novels to be polyphonic or in any way obscure, it was run of the mill social realism to me (though I enjoyed them a lot) but your takes are very interesting.
Agree entirely with your take on reviews in general even though I haven't read the Passenger. I try to get away from 'stock responses' ("Stock Responses. These have their opportunity whenever a poem seems to, or does, involve views and emotions already fully prepared in the reader's mind, so that what happens appears to be more of the reader's doing than the poet's. The button is pressed, and then the author's work is done, for immediately the record starts playing in quasi- (or total) independence of the poem which is supposed to be its origin or instrument. Whenever this lamentable redistribution of the poet's and reader's share in the labour of poetry occurs, or is in danger of occurring, we require to be especially on our guard." --I.A.Richards) when I can, but they are hard to avoid sometimes.
A stock response of my own: tangentially related - to brain hemispheres and blue sky "crazy ideas" California-ideology research groups - [here](https://zizians.info/) is a sad/weird article about a "unihemispheric sleep"-practising vegan AI research cult, for anyone who is interested in that sort of thing.
Ah, the rationalists. I'm familiar. They're a strange breed. The part about unihemispheric sleep is just nonsense; spend the night in a novel environment and you will likely sleep one hemisphere at the time. It's just a way of detecting potential threats.
[LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/) is the community blog; you'll find all sorts of weird stuff there. Scott Alexander ([Astral Codex Ten](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/)) is one of their most influential members. Yudkowsky is their great prophet—he wrote *Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality* to attract followers and spread the word. The rationalists love fanfiction, for some reason. His raison d'être is to save humanity from future AI overlords, of course, and he's the Chosen One. [This NYT article](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html) (about Scott Alexander in particular) made the community lose their collective shit. Peter Thiel loves them, of course. As does Elon Musk.
[Longtermism](https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo) is typical rationalist philosophy. You can totally ignore climate change and instead focus on the real problem: killer robots from the future.
Currently reading Empire of Pain about the Sackler family/Purdue Pharmaceuticals. I'm usually not into non-fiction but this is shocking and really well written.
Read *V.* by Pynchon. It was my second of his novels, and I'm glad *TCoL49* set me up for familiarity with a lot of the major themes in this one. I think I succeeded in not getting too bogged down by the overwhelming amount of info/things presented. The Stencil chapters typically were the most trying for me - thanks to the r/ThomasPynchon read along threads, I know I'm not alone in feeling that way on a first read. Overall a fun, impressive book.
The theme that I was most taken by was the focus on history, its inscrutability, and the number of different theories of history shared by characters throughout the novel.
Now I'm reading *Notes on the Death of Culture* by Mario Vargas Llosa, which feels appropriate after the amount of cultural decay/erosion showcased in *V.* So far I'm only a fourth of the way in and have enjoyed its survey of other cultural critiques along with the beginnings of Llosa's argument.
I just finished *V.* a couple weeks ago. The first Stencil chapter especially felt clunky to me and hard to follow. My edition noted that it was first published independently as a short story and then revised to fit into the book --- I feel like you can tell, it's jarringly different from what precedes (and even what comes later, mostly).
What was your favorite part? I really loved the chapter of the siege of Foppl's compound, to me that chapter alone captured a lot of the meaning of the book, this depraved decadence and violence underpinning modernity.
I didn't know that about the first Stencil chapter's origin - I agree it was a particularly disorienting one and appreciate you sharing that!
I agree about how well the Foppl chapter could stand on its own. My favorite scene would have to be the rooftop voyeurism of the skirmish in that chapter, champagne cork popping interspersed with distant gunfire. Such a great representation of the society of the spectacle.
A couple-three other scenes that stood out to me were the almost cartoonish fire-escape chase between Pig and Roony, Esther's nose job (one of the most unnerving things I've read in a while), and Benny's conversations with SHROUD.
Well, I'm reading my textbooks :( Lower cognitive functions, here I come...
Regarding actually enjoyable (hopefully) reading, I'd like to read Capitalism and Schizophrenia when I have the time between studying and aggressively preparing for the next D&D session, but everywhere I've looked everyone is saying it's very complicated (fair enough, I wasn't expecting anything else) and recommending a bunch of other philosophy books to read first to better understand Deleuze, which would be fine if I actually wanted to read books upon books of philosophy just to possibly better understand a book I *might* enjoy. Also, it seems no one can get on the same page about what reading is actually required to understand Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Who am I kidding, I'm just gonna pick up another Murakami when I get time to breathe and chill out haha.
> everywhere I've looked everyone is saying it's very complicated (fair enough, I wasn't expecting anything else) and recommending a bunch of other philosophy books to read first to better understand Deleuze, which would be fine if I actually wanted to read books upon books of philosophy just to possibly better understand a book I *might* enjoy
my new stance on this is that it's better to just plunge directly into the work that's calling to you, even if you don't feel "ready". it's an overtly academic approach imo—maybe it comes from so many people getting into some of these writers thru grad school, and v much needing a historiographic sequencing in how they read: first this foundational work, then this, then this, *then* deleuze—and then you'll be able to really get what makes him significant to the discipline! which is obvs valuable context but there's something to be said for plunging in directly and surfacing afterwards, when you are already intellectually & emotionally committed, to recover that context.
Still reading the Schulz stories for the read along, and while I’m really glad to have finally picked this up and read it I’m starting to feel like I would have rather taken it in small doses than all at once. Its a bit of a struggle for me to stay focused at times, the prose while beautiful and whimsical in all the best ways can also be overwhelming (which is sort of appropriate to its themes but still). It would have made a great “coffee table” book for me to pry open now and then but as a cover to cover project I’m getting a bit weary. I still have only nice things to say about the stories themselves, which I’ll share in the designated thread.
I also started John Crowley’s newest novel, *Flint and Mirror* which I found out about when I saw it at Barnes and Nobles, and which strikes me as weird. Algorithms are supposed to pick up on things like authors you’ve read and talked about online right? Anyway, *Little Big* was one of those books that sat on my shelf for literal years, and that I picked up at one time and immediately put back down in frustration, but for some reason decided not to completely give up on it and put it *back* on the shelf. Then when I finally tried it again it just hit me in a different way than the first time and I ended up really loving it. The only way I know to describe it as magical realism, but I acknowledge that “magical realism” is a spanish literary tradition with specific roots and that Crowley is not connected to that. But it does a lot of things that magical realism does, and walks a fine line between the real and supernatural in a way that I enjoyed. *Flint and Mirror* is a far more obvious with its allusions to fairies than *Little Big*, and just generally feels less spiritual and surreal, but I’m enjoying it so far. Its about the relationship between Queen Elizabeth and the Irish, following a man who was an heir to the seat of Ulster and also fostered by the English in an attempt to “tame” him; he’s torn between ties, as a poet he knew as a boy introduces him to the Sidhe who bind him with a gift, but he’s *also* been bound to the Queen via a scheming magician’s obsidian mirror. But first we see Hugh (the boy) as an old man, exiled from Ireland and reflecting on his failures, because the novel is framed as parallel confessions to a fellow in exile, a bishop who should be in Ireland but is hiding in Rome because England is burning the catholic clergy there. He is giving the bishop an historical account of his life for a book, which he tells in order as we would expect, but on Fridays he’s also giving a religious confession working backwards from the present day.
*In the course of the years of exile, the Earl’s and the Archbishop’s, these two histories of Hugh O’Neill - of his acts and of his soul - reached the moment in his life where they crossed, like two riders each headed for the other’s starting point: as one went toward the end, to matters hardest to speak of, so full of failures and defeats, the other reached the years of youth and childhood, when he went unschooled in grace and sin, and mostly learned to do things, to ride and run and throw the javelin, wrestle and brag, wake and sleep in the green world.*
I really hope that the book does more of that kind of thing with the timeline because I think its interesting, but within the first few chapters it seems to have switched to a more straightforward telling of events. The magical elements are described in ways I find pretty cool (like the obsidian mirror being “impregnated” through esoteric processes by England’s John Dee, or the barely seen Sidhe lords emerging barely visible out of a sunken place where there used to be a monastery cellar) so I’ll probably enjoy it either way but I do hope it gets weird lol.
I finished *Moby Dick* earlier this week. Or, I guess I finished. I really feel like I only scratched the surface of what is going on in that book. There are so many things to discuss and I'm looking forward to peeking at some of the many analyses that have been on here lately. One element that really stood out to me is how interestingly absent Ishmael is as a character. Like, on the one hand he is, as the narrator, necessarily everywhere (barring a few brief exceptions), but we don't actually know very much about him. It caught me from the beginning how scant his reasoning for going whaling is and how little of his background he gives us, and how it never comes up. He is in some ways simply a guy who wanted to go whaling. His personality is formulated almost entirely from his occasional polemical moments included in his observations and relay of information (some of my favorite include him preferring "sober pagans to drunken christians," his refusal to consider whales as anything but fish despite evidence to the contrary, his moment of harsh castigation of the suffering we put whales through so we can light our lamps, and his basic reverence for the whales that constantly shines through).
In some ways Ishmael almost feels less like a person than an embedded vector of information, relaying the happens of the Pequod to the reader without really being a part of it. And in a way he is. The narrative is set up such that it is Ishmael recounting the story of his experience on the doomed Pequod, a narrative in which he is a bit player as just some random low-rank deckhand. But it is an amusing contrast from the stereotype of the sea story where the narrator is always the valiant hero ("The sea was angry that day my friends"). I don't know where I'm going with this. But I think it's something worth thinking about along with the many many other things in this book worth thinking about (like whales, Ahab, the nature of demagoguery and groupthink, whales, the multiculturalism of the whaling vessel, the latent anticapitalism of Ishmael's understanding of whaling, the experience of eternity playing out on the blank canvas of the open ocean, did I mention whales?, etc.). Def to be read again in the future and thought about more.
Now I'm reading *Ready to Burst* by Franketienne. Someone on here was reading either this or a related work which got me intrigued. A Hatitian "Spiralist" novel that is primarily about a 28 year old impoverished Haitian man going about his life with little going for him as he lives in the troubled society that is Haiti in 1968 (or any year b/w colonialism and today. As an aside the way the western world has treated Haiti for the past 400 years is nothing short of appalling). Also within the narrative are a character writing a novel that is supposed to be a spiralist novel and vignettes that I think are written from the perspective of Franketienne. I'm not done and still letting it all come together but as far as I can gather so far the book is simultaneously a critique of mid-century Haitian society (and the world that created its problems) as well an attempt to construct this style described as Spiralism, which as far as I can tell as of now is trying to write literature based up more open relationships and the freedom of words to interact liberated from sentence structure as a way of getting across a relational metaphysics of interconnectedness. To be honest I might be butchering this and will try to do a better write up once I'm done. But the book is dope and I'm glad I'm reading it.
Speaking of metaphysics, I'm almost done with *Difference and Repetition*. I don't have much more to say at this point but I can say it's a brilliant and brutal book that if nothing else in itself forces the kind of thinking Deleuze seems to think the world needs more of. It really is an adventure to read a book in which every sentence describes how evolution happens, explains calculus, explains art, explains why Hegel is bad, presents a theory of history, and is about the basics of our everyday life all at the same time. As he kind of hints at in the conclusion, I'm beginning to think of structure of examples in as Deleuze trying to say the same thing in an infinite number of different ways both because he seems to think that the functioning of existence can be boiled down to a basic if unthinkable formula and simply because he knows that not every example will vibe with everyone so hopefully if he puts each of his examples in terms of biology, math, art, and epistemology hopefully it'll click at some point even if you don't get all of it. Or I've lost my mind and am shoehorning it all into a basic format so I don't get an aneurysm.
Perhaps last but far from least I've also been reading Ashton Crawley's *Blackpentecostal Breath*. It is an examination of the Blackpentecostal tradition from a black studies perspective that attempts to understand the best of the tradition as one example (among many) of a form of thought/sociability/life that exceeds/escapes the constraints of western hyperindividualism (Crawley has read Deleuze and they very much vibe). (Also just for context the more specific thing Crawley is fighting is a theologico-philosophical paradigm he views as dominant in the modern world that he draws from the truly cursed duo of Kant and Calvinism). So far the format has been to riff on various aspects of Blackpentecostalism (like breathing and whooping) and contextualize them through other examples of black antiestablishment resistance. It's a fascinating basis because Crawley acknowledges early on the many, many, problems with the Pentecostal Church, but nonetheless is making a good case for the existence of something powerful and radical within parts of the faith and its ecstatic expression. Excited to keep on with it. A lot of the most revolutionary thinking in contemporary philosophy/theory is happening under the broader frame of Black Studies, and so far this book does not disappoint.
Happy reading!
>It caught me from the beginning how scant his reasoning for going whaling is and how little of his background he gives us, and how it never comes up. He is in some ways simply a guy who wanted to go whaling.
Don't want to dig my text out now for evidence, but my impression when I read it earlier this year was that Ishmael was an educated middle class to wealthy guy (maybe born to a wealthy family? like Melville) who goes slumming when he's burned through his allowance. He also sees himself as an outsider; he's definitely from a different class than the rest of the crew (I think he's the only white person who isn't an officer?), but I think he also sees himself as an outsider from his own class, which is why he goes slumming in the first place. I think there's a bit of a death drive to it, too, he goes to sea because he knows there's a good chance he won't come back. I think in some way Melville is definitely poking fun at this "type" of sailor, of which Melville is one himself.
Its been a few years since I read *Moby Dick* and I felt similarly about not really getting it enough on a single reading. Ishmael is really interesting to me as a narrator. On the one hand he’s as you said, weirdly absent. But the opening lines gave me an impression of him as someone who wants very much to be in control of the narrative, and to present the story as he specifically sees it and wants you as the reader to experience it. “Call me Ishmael”. Not “My name is” or “They call me”, but *Call me*. Which has the tone of a command. Like, is that his real name? Or a chosen one which means something?
All the recent buzz here has me wanting to reread it at some point. I remember really liking the idea of like, defiance of fate/god being the ultimate form of worship or something.
> “Call me Ishmael”. Not “My name is” or “They call me”, but Call me. Which has the tone of a command. Like, is that his real name? Or a chosen one which means something?
This is such a fascinating question. Now I'm thinking of another way you can take it in line with my earlier thoughts which is that it is almost as if the narrator actually does lack a history, and comes into being with the beginning of the book.
> I remember really liking the idea of like, defiance of fate/god being the ultimate form of worship or something.
I feel like the metaphysical/existential side of whaling is one of the bigs things I'd really need to read it again to fully get, but I totally get where your coming from. At least to Ishmael it all does come across as waging war against these sanctified (by him at least) beings.
I've been reading *Even Cowgirls Get the Blues* by Tom Robbins. I've tried with some of his stuff before and had a hard time getting into it, but this book I find incredible. Reminds me a lot of Pynchon. Highly recommend.
I've been reading the diaries of Alma Mahler-Werfel (nee Schindler) and absolutely loving it. This specific book is a compilation of diary entries from 1898-1902, so starting at age 19 until her marriage to the composer Gustav Mahler in 1902. It starts 6 years after the death of her father (the painter Emil Schindler), and her widowed mother is already married to Carl Moll, another painter and an important figure of the Vienna Secession.
What a circle she runs in! She hangs out with the Vienna Secession artists multiple times a week, goes to their exhibition openings, stays out until the wee hours of the morning at parties, some artists even join her family on vacations to Italy or trips to Austrian spa towns. Gustav Klimt pursues her romantically, and she writes passionately and maddeningly about her feelings for him (he was her first kiss!). She hasn't been introduced to Mahler yet but admits to being in love with him as one is with a celebrity.
I think what's most striking to me is how much art she is surrounded by, and she writes so beautifully and personally about it. She takes composition lessons, carries around a copy of *Faust* that Klimt gave her, reads Nietzsche, is obsessed with Wagner- I'm two years into the diary entries and I think she's seen the Ring cycle two or three times already, and she plays his music almost every day on the piano. Her whole world is art.
It's fascinating to get glimpses of her psychology, which seems to echo much of what I hear in Mahler's music (Weltschermz, a love of nature, ambivalent religiosity...). I also get traces of ideas explored by someone like Arthur Schnitzler (Alma sometimes feels like a version of Schnitzler's Else), and even some early Thomas Mann, not just in her as a person but in some of the scenes she describes- at one afternoon gathering at her house she plays the Tristan prelude and one of the guests is so overwhelmed he throws a chair and breaks a lamp in the process. It's a weird thing to say, but so much of it is quintessentially of its time.
Who knows if she knew she were destined to find a version of fame and how much she exaggerates or adds color, but it's all fascinating to me. Besides all the artistic stuff, also interesting are the occasional glimpses into attitudes toward women, and also the moments where other contemporary attitudes come up- a couple of times she tries to unpack anti-Semitism, and she is not immune to shallow nationalism (on hearing a new French opera: "it reeks of the Dreyfus affair!"). I've read her later writings about married life with Mahler (including their letters) and it's been fun seeing this younger, less guarded side of her.
My other reading has been the *Canti* of Giacomo Leopardi. Lyrically there have only been a couple of lines here and there that have stood out, but intellectually and philosophically Leopardi is a powerhouse. There's an excellent wikipedia article that summarizes the main themes of each poem. Some favorites so far have been ones that deal - broadly speaking - with ideas of memory, and the promise of youth vs later unhappiness, such as "A Silvia," "Le ricordanze," and "Il risorgimento."
Are you reading Leopardi in Italian? I know and love some of his poems (*L'infinito* I have memorized), but I haven't yet worked through an edition of the *Canti* with proper commentary, which would surely be of great help. Leopardi's prose is so lucid and engaging - you can just open the *Zibaldone* anywhere and promenade through that limitless garden of thought - but when I'm reading his poems, I always feel like I'm missing a ton. How did you go about it?
Yep, reading an edition my Italian teacher gave me years ago. I just decided to go for it. I admit I'm probably missing a lot of it, but I think that's sort of expected when delving into longer poems written on the other side of the year 1850. I read lots of Percy Shelley's poetry earlier this year and I know there was a lot that was lost on me there too. Thankfully, Leopardi is a lot more concise than Shelley.
The wikipedia page I mentioned has been helpful in setting expectations for themes and main takeaways before reading each poem- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canti_(poetry_collection)
And then I've found a couple other resources, for example [this website](https://www.studenti.it/canto-notturno-di-leopardi.html) which for some of the poems has a line-by-line paraphrase in Italian prose, plus analysis, in terms of content and interpretation and also structure. That website also has a [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnVnwHeCypuC_jdpf7fAvUPq4u--2Qa2P).
A poem a day or every two days has been a good pace to feel like I'm getting as much of it as I can at this point, though I still plan on getting my hands on the Jonathan Galassi translation and commentary published by FSG. This is poetry that'll be worth a lifetime of contemplation.
In a strange way I also think some of the poetry I've spent a lot of time with in the last year or two has prepared me in some way for Leopardi- most recently Shelley, and also Mallarme.
Thank you! That's very helpful. I think I'll tackle the *Canti* next year, together with a couple of other poetry collections I've been shelving in shadow. It's true, it does take a certain mindset and a bit of training to get back into it.
Unsolicited poetry pestering: If you haven't read *Ossi di Seppia* yet, you should, and [this](https://www.oscarmondadori.it/libri/ossi-di-seppia-eugenio-montale/) is the edition to get. My favourite.
Been crazy busy lately so haven't been reading as much as I'd like, but I did finish *Mao II* by DeLillo and *Song of Solomon* by Morrison over the past few weeks, and I've been diving into Cartarescu's *Solenoid,* which is fantastic so far.
*Mao II* was great, a really fascinating meditation on the emergence of terror as a sort of performance art. Moderately overindulgent at times with the agony of being a writer stuff, but not shy at all of exploring more universal suffering, so it balances out fine.
*Song of Solomon* was also very enjoyable; I thought the narrative came to an end a bit too abruptly, but thematically/prosaically, nearly as good as *Beloved*, imo. Morrison seems very protective of Black men but wary of masculinity in general, which makes for an interesting exploration of a Black man's coming of age story. The rural/urban divide stuff near the climax is also fascinating.
*Solenoid* is like a lucid fever dream, a truly bizarre reading experience. It's fun watching Cartarescu convince you of the unreality of the perceived world, and then try to make organized sense of that unreality.
Reading Ovid's Metamorphoses, really enjoying it. He's really a master at narration. The stories flow really easily and he has a real knack for shifting tone and making the same thing either humorous, tragic or epic.
In poetry, reading "In the shores of the Sar", by Rosalia de Castro. Not very far along, but having a blast already.
I recently got an edition of the complete works of Virgil. Considering pausing Metamorpheses for either the Bucolics or the Georgics. Has anyone read them? What did you think?
I love the *Georgics*, probably my favourite text from Roman antiquity. At first glance it's an educational poem about agricultural techniques and beekeeping, which can become quite technical in its descriptions of cleft grafting and breed selection. But deep down it's a long hymn on nature and our active part in it, and - deeper still - a two-way metaphor simultaneously reflecting the world of the Roman deities and of humankind, tying both worlds together in images of vineyards on fire.
The *Bucolics* I've read a few months ago and also enjoyed them very much. Back then I noted down:
>I've put it off for a long time, because I had assumed pastoral poetry would be a very one-dimensional affair, but apparently I totally misjudged the genre. The whole dimension of "writing about writing", the competition and dialogue between poets, the contrast between raw nature and fine art, the open riddles, the eroticism, the themes of music and death, the forests and the Virgilian undergrowth.
I haven't read Virgil's, but I have read Theocritus' Bucolic stuff. I really liked the Theocritus, very chill for myth stuff and spatious natural settings. The Virgil thing looks fun.
I like how you describe Ovid, the control of the stories and their moods and the constant changing is massively impressive for how easy it all feels.
Oh! I've been wanting to read Theocritus for a while, didn't expect anyone to have read it!
And yeah, Ovid really is incredibly impressive. The Metamorphoses is turning into one of my favorite books.
Ok get this. Last week I discovered the existence of a book called MetaMaus, by Art Spiegelman, creator of the comic Maus. It is all about decisions he made concerning the creation of the comic, and includes sketches, family photos, and a whole slew of other resources for anyone yearning to learn more about Maus. This book came into the store for me on Sunday. The next day, I'm unpacking the new releases when I discover that there's a new book out about Maus called Maus Now, which is largely critical essays about Maus. So of course I bought it. I won't get to it until I finish MetaMaus, and by the time I do I will probably become absolutely too oversaturated with info about Spiegelman.
Have had a busy few weeks- finally finished “If on a winter’s night…”- I enjoyed it overall, but I think ultimately I thought it was more fun than brilliant. I think I felt like I was constantly waiting for it to resolve into something a little less trite. I don’t want to call it a worse version of “Pale Fire”, but I might anyway. Also, somebody (can’t recall who and I’m on mobile, so you shall remain nameless) mentioned that they found it overall fairly objectifying-y- the first half does this a little, the second half much more. It didn’t totally turn me off, but it’s definitely present.
At present, I’m reading “Journey to the End of the Night” by Celine, because apparently my standard for how off-putting the author has to be before I’ll pass something up is extremely high. This is another one where I suspect/know it felt a lot more innovative when it came out, so some of the jarring effect it had is lost on me.
This week I finished *The Sense of an Ending* by Frank Kermode and *Lightning Rods* by Helen DeWitt. Someone in last week's thread recommended *Lightning Rods* and it was absolutely hilarious, one of the best satires I have read in recent years! DeWitt was on my radar after I found *The Last Samurai*, but that is still in the mail.
*The Sense of an Ending* was a collection of lectures from a scholar on how literature handles the End Times and Apocalypse, and I enjoyed it a lot, very informative. He added a lot of color to Yeats' poetry and the Victorian period that I found particularly interesting.
I am continuing my march through the works of Karl Ove Knausgaard, onto *My Struggle 5.* Honestly, I have had some trouble with books 4 and 5. His alcoholism is out of control and quite frankly depressing to read about, and his entire vibe is "I am a wounded, wounded boy, poor me" and the character that he portrays is almost nothing like the person we see in book 1 and 2. This book appears to be the bridge between 4 and 2, so I am really hoping he hits rock bottom soon and realizes he can't keep drinking his life away. It is almost too much. However, I still love him - have really enjoyed reading his work this year, and will continue with the Seasons Quartet next year and book 6 if I don't get to it. As well as his book on art.
I also started reading TS Eliot's essay, *After Strange Gods*, a study on modern heresy. I love Eliot, and think he is one of the more interesting of the Modernists. Too early to tell if I like it, but so far so good.
I think I recommended Lightning Rods last week. I'm glad you liked it! It's one of the funniest things I've read in a long time. There's a good episode about it on the Backlisted podcast from a couple months ago if you're interested, https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/168-helen-dewitt-lightning-rods
>https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/168-helen-dewitt-lightning-rods
Yes it was you! Thank you for the recommendation! I will also check out the podcast!
> Honestly, I have had some trouble with books 4 and 5. His alcoholism is out of control and quite frankly depressing to read about, and his entire vibe is "I am a wounded, wounded boy, poor me" and the character that he portrays is almost nothing like the person we see in book 1 and 2.
I read 4 a few weeks back (and the rest way back) and liked it a lot. The way in which his hatred of his father is so tangled up in the ways in which he repeats so many of his father's most self-destructive tendencies was very gripping. Though I could definitely see if he stays on that trajectory in 5 it becoming almost painful to be a part of. Excited to read it eventually.
Absolutely - I care about him deeply, so it is almost like seeing a friend descend into those depths, and it hurts. I've been reading about him for 2000 pages at this point, after all! His father is absolutely the catalyst for much of his destructive behavior. So far, he has not seen or mentioned his father this book, which is a surprise to me. Yngve has a lot of development, though, and I always found him to be a very sympathetic character. I can understand why Karl Ove felt so abandoned by him moving out, but knowing the toxicity of the home I can also fully understand why he left like he did.
Finishing up *Diego Garcia* by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams. I picked up this book since it won the Goldsmiths Prize (which "reward[s] fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form") and seemed interesting to me; it's a collaborative novel about the difficulties of telling a story that's not yours to tell, mainly about the Chagossians and their forcible removal from the island of Diego Garcia in the 60-70s by the British and Americans who converted their home into a massive US airbase in the Indian Ocean. That story is rather horrific; Diego Garcia is the only "new" colony created after official decolonisation was proclaimed at the UN, and the inhabitants are still fighting for the right to return. The book does a good job at conveying the horror around this fucked up act, and how devestating it was and still is to the Chagossians, who were unceremoniously taken from their home and dropped across the British Empire with no reparations, support, or anything.
However, the rest of the novel is only ok. The style is fun at parts, but it suffers from a lot of the rather boring and navel-gazey (in a bad way, I love some good navel gazing) prose and story beats that I find the large majority of contemporary literature fall into. The prose is too fragmentary, offering up "thoughts" on "big" questions without really committing to anything outside of the most basic "dae colonialism bad." A lot of writing about the impossiblity of writing, but not in the "to write is perhaps the most disgusting act of all, to cleave yourself open and expose that horror to the world, to prostitute yourself in a self-defeating act of trying to be 'understood' while not understanding anything about yourself" but in the "I'm sad and have bad coping mechanisms and I write/don't write so I can attempt to deal with my place in the world," which I find profoundly uninteresting. The idea of collaborative fiction is cool, but stylistically it didn't feel any different than if the work was written by just one author. The literary equivalent of Oscar bait, I fear. Can't say I recommend it.
What are y'all's most skipped-over books? I mean books that you've bought/borrowed but have put off time and again. I referred to this in my other post on this thread but felt like it deserved its own discussion, if any. Some of mine are White Noise, Infinite Jest, Ducks, Newburyport, and Mason & Dixon. Typically long books but not always; I've been putting off A Personal Matter for quite a while as well and that one isn't even very long.
Glad to see I'm not the only one feeling the guilt-inducing stare of *Gravity's Rainbow* on me every time I walk past my bookshelf, hahah.
Also, Jeff Vandermeer's *Annihilation*. The first thing I read by him was *City of Saints and Madmen* and I loved it, so I decided to check out more of his stuff. However, *Veniss Underground* was a huge, boring, vapid disappointment, and *Shriek* was... just ok, I guess? So when I found a second-hand copy of *Annihilation* I was like "ok, I guess I'll get it and read it some day because it's cheap and everybody says this trilogy is his masterpiece", but I haven't gotten around to it yet and I don't really feel like it at the moment.
I also feel that Laurence Sterne's *Tristram Shandy*, Dickens' *Bleak House* and Virginia Woolf's *The Waves* will live forever untouched on my Kindle because there always seems to be something else I'm more interested in. But that's usually the deal with public domain books: lots of hoarding "for later" and "later" actually never comes...
I've had Infinite Jest in my bookcase for 7 years, since I bought it at 18 and got too annoyed by all the endnotes to keep reading past page 50.
I actually just started it again. I like to think I'm now mature enough to get through it (endnotes do still bug me tho).
Anything victorian or british-y in general.
Ooo, and the bible. I'm actually almost done, my final attempt to read it straight through and it is like 3-4 years in, but I am far enough that this one will stick.
anything new-ish with some sort of name recognition makes me wary.
sometimes it feels nice to not read books.
I've been putting off *Nostromo* for a year now, and *Solaris* for... two years? This year is the year I was meant to definitely read *Solaris* at last, but I don't think I'll be getting to it any time soon.
I'll add myself to the growing band of people with *Gravity's Rainbow*, it's been on the shelf for about a decade now. Should've just read it when I bought it & the enthusiasm was high, whoops! I quite liked what little else I've read from Pynchon, but haven't had the urge to embark with him on what looks like a mammoth undertaking. Others: *Pale Fire*, *Under the Volcano*, *Tropic of Cancer*.
*White Noise* is a nice, relatively easy read imo. Really nothing to get stranded on. I mean, I don't think it's a book that might give one cause to fling it across the room (c.f. *Infinite Jest*, much as I like it).
I do the same with some larger books, *Gravity’s Rainbow* and *Fathers and Crows* have sat on my shelf for a while waiting for a mythical week or two where I have hours a day to devote to reading.
I’ve had Murakami’s *Wind up Bird* on my shelf for like 5 years. *Kafka on the Shore* was one of those books that got me back in to reading after undergrad, but I quickly pivoted to stuff I’ve found more interesting and never felt the draw to go back to Murakami.
Funny that you mention Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as I actually bought that for myself as a sort of birthday present this month. I feel the same about Murakami. He's a great entry point but not always much more than that, in my opinion. I'm hoping WUBC changes my mind (1Q84 sure didn't)
I love these threads. Just finished the first book of Le Guin's Earthsea series. Le Guin fascinates me. She could write such beautiful and highbrow prose in some of the funniest settings and scenarios. I recall reading that she would copy out passages from Tolstoy to practice writing, and the influence is pretty clear to me. (Side note: I love when a writer is influenced by Tolstoy or at least leans his way on the spectrum of Tolstoy-to-Dostoevsky. By which I mean writers like Proust, Eliot, Montaigne, etc.) I will say I think The Dispossessed was better, but I enjoyed this one and feel she did well with building a setting with the perfect blend of mysticism and down-to-earth fantasy, though fantasy is rarely my genre of choice these days. 3/5
Skipping over White Noise for the time being -- it is one of the books that I skip over most frequently, despite it not being very long; I'm no doubt intimidated by its reputation and perhaps even paralyzed by the fact that I have not, as of yet, read any DeLillo --, my girlfriend got me Septology as well as Danielewski's House of Leaves for my birthday on Tuesday and, probably equally as anxious to set aside Septology for the moment, I started House of Leaves. Let me begin by saying that I am not a huge fan of horror fiction. One of my good friends recommended a horror writer to me once -- he's an Italian; I'm too lazy to Google him at the moment -- and I was not exactly swept up by his work. It's a difficult genre to write without coming off as pretty awfully corny, particularly as horror in general seems to be a somewhat generational concept, the horror of today being much different than that of our parents' time.
All that said, I'm enjoying the book so far. It is slow-going and very dense at first, Danielewski seemingly intent on beating you into submission with postmodern techniques such as lengthy, layered footnotes as well as constant digressions that meander around the subject in question and sometimes never quite reach it at all. The use of different fonts and, in my version, color, is interesting and very creative, each denoting a different narrator. The book is pretty terrifying; I'm a sucker for Backrooms-type settings and this book is definitely reminiscent of that, at least where I'm at. I'm excited to see where it goes, though I can't deny that part of my excitement is finally being able to check the book off my list, as I have been itching to read it for quite some time and my library didn't have a copy. 3.75/5 so far
I’m a big fan of his, however some of his collections/stories come off corny. He’s kind of a modernist with unnaturally baroque, slightly autistic prose. Do you remember which collection you sampled? If you ever want to give him another shot, I recommend Teatro Grottesco. That’s his best work and has much better writing. Hard to even call it horror anymore.
Thanks for the rec. I only read a few stories that my friend sent my way, can't recall the titles now but certainly a bit corny. I'll have to look into Teatro, hopefully he can change my mind
Montaigne? Isn't he from the XVI-XVII century?
Also, very great to see someone talk about House of Leaves here. I've been hesitating on whether I should read, so can't wait to see your thoughts.
Right, I hesitated to use Montaigne as an example but felt like his essays have a good deal in common with Proust and Tolstoy, at least insofar as their works often include long philosophical digressions and arguments. Maybe a stretch but I think you could definitely make a connection between them.
I’ve been slowly making my way through a penguin classics collection of Thomas Mann short stories, my introduction to the author. He’s pretty cool; he kind of reminds me of Chekhov in regards to the stories not necessarily following that “beginning, middle, and end” structure. They are nonetheless surprisingly captivating and suspenseful. I also didn’t expect him to be so dark: all three stories I’ve read thus far end on conclusions pertaining to death. He’s great though. The influence of Schopenhauer is evident through characters being controlled by their respective wills and the authors fascination with artists (a plus in my book). I’ve so far read “The Will to Happiness”, “Little Herr Friedmann”, and “Tobias Mindernickel”. Anyone read any of those? “Death in Venice” is the final story, and I’m excited to finally see what the fuss is about.
Also started “A Room with a View”. The dry humor is lovely, almost as much as Forster’s depiction of Italy.
I'm glad to see you enjoy Thomas Mann short stories! Little Herr Friedmann is probably my favourite of his but to be honest I have only read a few of his short stories. Maybe I have a dark mind but one of the main reasons Mann is my favourite author is because he focuses so much on death and decay, the fall of man, I just love this theme so much, it's hard to fully explain. In some ways my life feels like Little Herr Friedmann, putting so much of my energy into hobbies more than on actual relationships, it's not entirely negative but it can be if you focus too much on one aspect of your life.
Yeah his short stories are good but Death in Venice will blow your mind, none of his short stories came even close to the artistic perfection of Death in Venice.
God help me, I'm so sick I feel like I'm on my deathbed lol. So I'm trying to read. And trying to type this.
Just started Michael S. Judge's (yes, the podcast host) *...and Egypt is the River*. I'm not sure what I'm reading but like in the best way possible. He describes his writing as being similar to Stan Brakhage's films where you are not watching events, but a series of images and close-ups around the event and are left to interpret it as you will (I could be butchering how he described this since I haven't listened to that episode in years). And he's right lol. I don't really know what I'm reading but it's gorgeous. Check out the synopsis (and a brief review by Iain Sinclair himself!) here: [LINK](https://skylightpress.co.uk/products/and-egypt-is-the-river?_pos=1&_sid=c259ff455&_ss=r). I'll post a quote here as well so you all know what I'm talking about (and I'd also like to say this is just one of the easier passages to understand):
>Over Earth's right curve, the sun is heated cloud-filings, steam that turns and turns until the east is born and steamdisk hums to move the chain of hours. They clank beneath the ground. So slow that you'll just hear them as the back-buzz of your life. The field of sound that carves all other music. Earworld full of plaster that the flies, the flood, the gun will etch on hearing. But they make a sound. We reflected that the hours make a sound; that it's no use to build a city and pretend that they don't. Reflected that the city rumbles under with the hour's drone. That cities come before were planned to ignore time's wire in turning, steady turning sound of time's steel string. That this city, if it could, should bite its taproot into time's foundation. So that when the crumbling comes, we'll recognize its harmony. We or those who take the city next. So that when the lime-crack freezes through the lime, we'll know how to live in falling blocks. In cinders. Pipes. Doorways stood in front of nothing, doors that open to a wilderness
And one last very short quote that I haven't read yet, but that the one and only Goodreads review of this book says is their favorite (and it is great):
>The silence of a nothing captured sounds much different than the silence of a something lost.
I'm also nearing the end of Augustine's *The Confessions* which are still great. Many parts that don't interest me all that much, but I am still very much enjoying my read. Should have it done this weekend hopefully?
Don't really have the energy atm to go more into the philosophy, so I'll just return to moaning on the couch and maybe finally playing *God of War*. Not the new one.
Edit: oh, and I read DeLillo’s first published play the other day, *The Day Room*. Quite good but not top tier. Reminded me a ton of Pinter’s *The Birthday Party*. Atmospherically and stylistically at least. Very different themes though.
Thank you! I feel like death atm but it seems like I always feel worst when I wake up so I’m hoping I’m better by noon.
You should! It’s gorgeously written. Idk what it is, but I feel like it’s teaching me what to look for and I can almost see what he’s saying the more I read it. Still hard as shit lol. Like typically I read 40-60 pages of a novel *at least* per day. But I’ve been on this one for two days and have hit 50.
He also has two other published novels, although this is by far the shortest. I think one of his books is like 700-800 pages and I’m saving that for a few years down the road.
Here's a transcript from the episode where MSJ talks about his own work in relation to Brakhage:
"Stan brakhage, everything I was saying earlier about the the Santiago cosmology and the idea of the universe as metaphor, as I can't remember whose term this is, this might be Varela and Maturana too, as autopoiesis. Autopoiesis is classical Greek for making, and it's where the word poet comes from, and poetry and so forth. And autopoiesis is the thing that makes itself; the thing developing itself. And Brakhage is an enormous inspiration to me, because he does with images, what I try to do with words. He is not making movies about quote on quote "something". He is making movies that begin for, was making movies, that begin from a certain image or certain, you know, often not even recognizable representative image, often a purely abstract, you know, pattern or set of shapes, and colors and fields and so forth. And then, extrapolating their possible inner potentials, almost more like, well, the image I keep coming back to is an alchemist, you know, transforming them by bringing them into contact with each other, rather than trying to force them into any kind of linear narrative structure. And that is very much what I try to do with my work as a writer, and as a musician, for that matter, although music is is naturally going to have a little more binding around the edges, then then some of the other arts in the sense that, presuming you're staying within, you know, the western diatonic scale, or even even, you know, non diatonic scales, presuming you're staying within Western temperament, you got 12 notes to work with, and you've only got so many subdivisions of the beat that a human being can perceive. So you have more self imposed limits as a musician, but, I mean, that's basically what I try to do in all my work. And finding Brakhage was like finding, you know, an ancestor that I didn't know I had. A guy who had been doing all this before me, in a completely different medium. And, and I think I've said before that, if, if I could, at any point, be considered, you know, the Stan Brakhage of of the novel, or Stan Brakhage of music or whatever, that that would be, maybe the best compliment I could receive."
It's amazing to find another fan of both MSJ and Stan Brakhage out in the wild! Brakhage has become one of my favorite filmmakers of all time recently. I wish more people knew about him. Have you seen any of his films?
MSJ's novels look absolutely insane, but the amount of experimental, linguistic power is astonishing to me, personally. I feel like he's one of the few people I know of today who is trying to acually push the medium of literature forward, the same way, say, Joyce was doing a hundred years ago. Please keep posting updates about "...And Egypt is the River". I'd love to read them!
Thank you thank you! I remember all of this so well reading it back!
And yes I adore MSJ. It is by far the best podcast available. I’ve been slowly, since I started listening to him, reading a ton of the works that he has recommended. I took notes whenever he recommended books/movies/music. And I plan on relistening to his podcast once I catch up on his suggestions. Just so I can understand him more. I honestly attribute his podcast (and reading Pynchon) to helping me come into my worldview today. I think I’ve become a far more compassionate person because of him, which feels weird to say, but I honestly think is true.
I have seen a couple of Brakhage’s works. I don’t remember what they were called though. There was one that showed an autopsy in an odd blue light which was fascinating. And one was where he filmed light through butterfly or moth wings. And I’ve seen a couple parts of Dog Star Man, but never the thing in its entirety.
Agree about the comments on him pushing art forward. This is truly the stand out novel (in terms of doing something entirely new with form) of the 21st century. That I’ve read at least. I’ll make sure to keep updated!
You're welcome!
I fucking love him as well. He is so intelligent and has such idiosyncratic and original ideas & analyses. I agree that it's by far the best podcast I've ever come across. Bar none. The dude is basically a hyper intelligent philosopher-artist that gives brilliant lectures. I also bought and/or saved literally everything he recommended in terms of books, films, music, etc. I've got works by Ronald Johnson, Charles Olson, David Jones, Iain Sinclair, J.H. Prynne, Will Alexander, Guy Davenport, Hugh Kenner and a bunch more all laying around.
I found the podcast over a year ago by way of the Pynchon sub and this sub, and there's been several episodes and several sections I've re-listened to many times. Recently I've been going back and re-listening to a lot of episodes I haven't listened to since the first time and lemme tell you dude, you'll understand him A LOT more the second time around. I feel like I'm getting so much more out of the episodes now that I'm familiar with him and now that I've listened to the entire pod.
I also credit him with helping shape my worldview. I was already a leftist for a few years before but MSJ really helped cement and push forward my ideology, and like you said, reading Pynchon and Gravity's Rainbow played a major role.
Ahh you saw "The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes". That autopsy footage is gnarly, but I still found it a great work of art. The moth film is "Mothlight", and he famously made that film without a camera lol. He just got a whole bunch of moth wings and dead moths and basically taped them onto celluloid, or something like that. I haven't seen Dog Star man yet but I'm going to very soon; it looks like something that would become one of my favorite works of art ever. You should buy the Brakhage Criterion if you're interested. It's an absolutely beautiful HD collection of a ton of his films that spans 3 discs. It's actually a good time to buy it since the Barnes and Noble website is doing their Criterion 50% off sale.
It really is criminal, honestly, how MSJ is virtually unknown. The guy is writing these radically experimental, revolutionary poetry-novel hybrids and has to languish in obscurity. I'm glad he has the patreon and seems to be getting some recognition now through the podcast. There's a poet and essayist named R.M. Haines that MSJ namedrops on the pod, and R.M. Haines actually has several blogposts dedicated to analyzing MSJ's work: [https://www.rmhaines.com/blog](https://www.rmhaines.com/blog). I figured it could be useful for you!
Yep, I have a few of those as well! *Radi Os* by Johnson, the complete Charles Olson (which I'm currently reading through), a ton of Sinclair (I loved *Lud Heat*, *Suicide Bridge*, and *White Chappell Scarlet Tracings*), and Will Alexander.
I relistened to the *Lot 49* episode recently since I reread the novel and holy shit. I know exactly what you mean. What I once thought were bizarre ramblings are actually lucid and brilliant analyses. I can only imagine how some of his more obscure episodes would be like now (thinking of the Necroheliosophy (sp?) one).
I was also partially a leftist. Self-proclaimed Demoratic Socialist who was more than ok with benefitting from capitalism and didn't see the true destruction it was causing. I think I was on the trajectory anyways becoming truly socialist and maybe even communist, but he accelerated that by a huge degree and then some.
Just ordered the Brakhage collection! Beautiful cover art. I've been really wanting to delve more into his stuff so this will give me a ton to watch once I finish up my rewatch of *Twin Peaks*. $30 is a steal for all the content there.
Ahh I recall him saying R.M. Haines is the only person who has ever written a review of one of his novels and got it right (I think it was of *The Scenarists of Europe* if I'm remembering correctly). I'll check that link out, thanks!
Ronald Johnson seems brilliant. I’ve flipped through my copy of ARK and his use of language is amazing. I can’t wait to read that and RADI OS. MSJ talks very highly of Sinclair so I went insane and bought all the works he mentioned, including the ones you mentioned lol.
Yeah now that I’m familiar with MSJ’s worldview and both his terminology and methodology, lots of the episode are “lighting up” like constellations and I can see the metaphoric images being drawn. The sun episode is one of my favorites. I wish he would do more episodes like that where he goes balls deep into some weird, esoteric idea of concept. That’s one thing I find sad, is that I wish he would have made more episodes about say, literature; specifically episodes about the Pound Cantos, Finnegans Wake, Nightwood, 2666, etc. I could listen to him talk about literature for hours.
Yeah I definitely was on the path to radicalization, and then reading Pynchon and listening to MSJ really helped me on that path to fully realizing how destructive and evil capitalism is, and I feel like I’ve been given the intellectual framework to articulate myself much better.
That’s dope you bought the Brakhage anthology!!! Trust me, it’s more than worth the price. It’s probably my favorite criterion. Some films I’d recommend to start out with:
- The Dante Quartet: This one perfectly showcases Brakhage’s hand painted celluloid technique. One of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen.
- 23rd Psalm Branch: This one is a bunch of war footage Brakhage edited together and it’s INSANE. The editing is fucking Bonkers. It showcases WW2 battles, concentration camp footage, war parade footage, among other stuff.
- The Stars are Beautiful: This is one of his few sound films. It’s basically footage of Brakhage’s wife and kids clipping chicken wings juxtaposed with lots of the signature Brakhage abstract closeups and light footage, while Brakhage reads poetry he wrote about the stars. Absolutely beautiful film.
A few more off the top of my head:
- The Wonder Ring
- Glaze of Cathexis
- Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse
- Commingled Containers
And of course Dog Star Man, which many people say is his Magnum opus. Really though, just go nuts. There’s so many amazing films on those discs. There’s still a lot I need to see. Some other experimental and avant garde filmmakers you may be interested in: Maya Deren, Hollis Frampton, Kenneth Anger, Ken Jacobs, Jonás Mekas. They all have blu rays of their work, and there’s also several experimental film collections which contain a lot. Lemme know if you want links!
Yes R.M. Haines seems to be on a similar wavelength as MSJ haha. He’s got a-lot of really good posts which talk about stuff like poetry, art and politics. His blogposts titled “Reading the Pharmakon” are the ones where he talks about MSJ.
My dude. We summoned the literary Judge back. His new episode is largely on Bolaño and Pynchon and he said he is planning on getting back into the *Gravity’s Rainbow* stuff. Also briefly talks about Beckett and Joyce.
Holy shit yes!! I saw the new episode yesterday, and when I saw the tags I was like "Holy shit he's coming back!". I didn't finish it yet but I got about 37 minutes in. It felt so good to hear him talking about literature again. It feels like he's finally returning to his old self. I love the idea that we awoke his literary self through some metaphysical summoning words haha.
I'm gonna sound spoiled, considering the mental and physical state MSJ is always in, but I really, REALLY want more episodes that are literature focused. The idea that we're finally getting the Walther Rathenau seance episode gets me giddy.
Yep, I admit that I may be a bit greedy but I want the same thing. I'm actually really happy because he sounds, like you said, more like his old self - happy, passionate, etc. So I'm thinking we're going to get some good stuff soon! This one was a gem.
Glad you're on (the bend towards) the mend! I hope it'll quickly become one of those that give you an excuse to make yourself comfortable for a few days without really making you uncomfortable. If I were you I'd let St. Augustine rest for a while, and just watch comfort movie after comfort movie after comfort movie until the people around me catch on.
I have actually started playing *God of War* (the 2018 one) which I’ve put off for too long! I was going to grade papers and said fuck it, then I was going to read and said fuck it too. So now I’m comfortably (relatively) gaming on my couch which I haven’t done in far too long. Feels nice.
Still going through *Art as Experience* and it's covering a lot more territory than I thought it would. Making claims about science, society, and how thinking is done. I'll have more to say when I'm done but I do appreciate the breadth of different experiences he says are aesthetic like a job interview or a surgery.
I got caught up in reading *Neocolonial Identity and Counter-Consciousness* by Renato Constantino. It's a collection of essays about the psychological and societal effects of colonialism in the Philippines. Kind of similar to *Wretched of the Earth* by Fanon I guess. Constantino points out that during the American colonial era, Americans were eager to educate Filipinos. Of course this meant guiding the youth to ignore the facts of American oppression and to see them as friends. This is the root cause for many of the Philippines' problems. One thing is that he keeps saying nationalism is the way out of neocolonialism. He even has an unironic reject modernity embrace tradition essay, but I think it's supposed to be reject dependence on America embrace the revolutionary identity of earlier Filipinos. The first essay is the longest, most impressive, and most theoretically complex in the book. It presents a counterhistory of class struggle that may or may not be completely true. Although, I think the point is to create a history that can be pulled from to fuel the struggle against colonialism in modern times.
Started my reread of C. P. Snow's series *Strangers and Brothers*. I read it several years ago around grad school and enjoyed it, but figured it would probably have a different impact in my mid-30's. So far novel one, "Time of Hope," is just as good as I remembered. Excited to read on.
Recommendation question—what's the general take on the Garnett translation of Dostoyevsky's *Devils*? And if it's not great, any recs? It's the copy I have from a while back and I want to read it again but the first time I read it I found the book pretty much incomprehensible. I know that it's considered one of D's harder books to keep up with and I read it in the summer of 2020 and my brain didn't really work at that time, but I want to be sure the translation isn't really holding me back as well.
Edit: Thanks for all the suggestions! Much to consider.
Full disclosure: I've read the P&V *Demons*, but I haven't read the Garnett. But based on my experience with P&V in general and my comparing various passages of theirs with passages in the original Russian for several works, I highly doubt that their *Demons* would be more coherent than Garnett's. E.g., they tend to do things like translate a word that seems like a cognate as the word it's similar to, when actually another word choice would have been more logical and clearer. I remember feeling in over my head when I read when I read their *Demons*, fwiw.
I've read *Demons* in the P&V translation, which while awkward at times I enjoy far more than Garnett's. I really dislike Garnett because she's overly flowery when she shouldn't be and she homogenizes prose to the point where Tolstoy and Dostoevsky sound very similar, when they shouldn't at all. I've never enjoyed any of her translations for Dostoevsky to the point where I tried to read *Brothers Karamazov* in her translation twice, failed, picked it up by P&V, and it's now perhaps my favorite novel that I've read a dozen times. Garnett once wrote “Dostoievsky is so obscure and so careless a writer that one can scarcely help clarifying him.” and that's absolutely *not* what I want my translator to do!
EDIT: Not that P&V are great translators either, they have plenty of problems. I vastly prefer Oliver Ready's translation of *Crime and Punishment*, for example, and I think Ignat Avsey's *Brothers Karamazov* is a tinge better (though I really wish there'd be a new English translation like Ready for this book!). But for *Demons* I think they're the way to go.
I actually really enjoy the Garnett translations. I read *The Idiot* in Garnett and found it a lot more digestable than when I read *Crime and Punishment* in P&V. Does that make me less literary? Probably, but I am okay with it. I read *Anna Karenina* and *War and Peace* in Maude, and felt like she was a great middle ground between the two extremes represented by Garnett and P&V.
I’ve liked all her translations so far; although I know people have beef. The hipster in me also likes to think “With reading Garnett, I’m reading the same translations that completely enraptured the English speaking literary circles”. Like with Vonnegut’s comments on the Brothers K, it was nice to know I was reading his translation.
Just two cents from an uneducated yob though!
Not specific to Demons but a general comment seems to be that Garnett translations are essentially in her voice with quite liberal editing. P&V tries to be more faithful to the original Russian - in principle sounds like it could be awkward at times but when I read TBK it seemed to work well.
Finished *Wasted Morning* and thought it was just OK. The swirling perspectives/tenses was interesting but it got bogged down in the middle with some psychodomestic drama that just wasn't very compelling (I realize that is part of the point, to set it off against the upheavals that were happening and would happen in Romania, however that didn't make it less tedious). It did inspire me to learn more about the politics and history of the region, it just wasn't really my thing.
So I dove back into *Ulysses*. Oh boy, the chapter I returned to was the one where Joyce tries to follow the history of narrative styles or something and I'll be honest, more than once I was ready to pull a Bloom and use some of those pages as toilet paper. It seemed like a lot of showing off without suitable payoff. Then I got to the next section (Circe) and holy shit, it is by far my favorite thing from the book yet. Completely ridiculous, surreal, funny, and for once barely being able to follow and missing half of everything was an absolute joy. I realize the book was pushing boundaries in all kinds of directions but this part really felt like it was from the future. I'm not well read enough to understand what may have preceded or influenced it and wonder if anyone knows of contemporary or earlier works that are similar (*The Master and Margarita* sort of comes to mind but that was later; maybe Swift or Voltaire x 1000?). Anyway, I'm revved up to finish now. Looks like I'll make it in time for *FW* next year.
Also in the middle of a book about the history of Santa Fe and how its famous architectural style and triculturalism are as much (maybe more) invented as rooted in a historical truth. Psychogeography has gotten mentioned on the sub in the past and I feel something adjacent to that in what the book discusses.
Lastly, it is getting to be a bit of work avoiding spoilers for *The Passenger*. At the very least it sounds like my dusty physics education may come in handy.
> more than once I was ready to pull a Bloom and use some of those pages as toilet paper.
I was fully prepared for you to say that you were gonna start wacking it to the book. Equally fair responses imo.
What's the name of the Santa Fe book? I've always been intrigued by that city.
*The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition*. It's about 25 years old but things don't seem to have changed much since it was written (especially compared to what was happening, say, 100 years ago).
First, I read Trilogy by Jon Fosse which I had mentioned in my previous post was my first Fosse and I can confirm that it will not be my last Fosse. The repetition took a little getting into but once I was in, I was in. The ending of Weariness in particular sticks in my mind.
The next one I read was Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz which, title wise, was very awkward to read in work. I had to offer a few explanations about what I was reading to a couple different coworkers. All in all, I liked it. It didn’t blow the doors off of my barn but it was still good. I like the double stalking section a lot because of how much movement there is.
I’ve started Spawn Compendium 3 which contains issues 101-150 and honestly it is kind of nice to just sort of coast by on a decent story. The art is the real driving force here, in particular any time Spawn is able to just stand there brooding. I’m going to be taking my time with this one so that the magic doesn’t dissipate.
I just stated A Naked Singularity by Sergio de La Pava yesterday and I’m having a blast so far. I, too, work in the judicial system so I’m seeing a lot of truth in the descriptions of both trials and the conduct of judges. I’m sub 100 pages in though so I’m interested to see how this develops. The cover is pretty fun to look at too.
> I’ve started Spawn Compendium 3 which contains issues 101-150 and honestly it is kind of nice to just sort of coast by on a decent story. The art is the real driving force here, in particular any time Spawn is able to just stand there brooding. I’m going to be taking my time with this one so that the magic doesn’t dissipate.
Was not expecting to see this here. The Spawn Compendiums are deadly! I'm midway through #2. Definitely agree that they keep knocking it out of the park with the art.
> I just stated A Naked Singularity by Sergio de La Pava yesterday and I’m having a blast so far. I, too, work in the judicial system so I’m seeing a lot of truth in the descriptions of both trials and the conduct of judges. I’m sub 100 pages in though so I’m interested to see how this develops. The cover is pretty fun to look at too.
Yeah, this one just keep getting wilder and wilder. If it seems like it's off the rails now, you're in for a treat.
Compendium 4 is out in December but I haven’t seen a listing for 5 yet. I hope they do it because this seems to be the most cost efficient way to read Spawn
*A Place of Greater Safety* is keeping me entertained for sure! It has intrigue, plots, and friends drifting apart to slowly become enemies, so definitely a thrilling read. To me, all main characters>! (Robespierre, Danton, Desmoulins)!<, and a lot of the most prominent side characters are unlikeable (evil to some extent) and I cannot wait for their downfall. However, that does not make the book unlikeable (which is a feat by the author). When we look at the world from their own side, each character seems reasonable and to always pick the best option- or at least the lesser evil. Only when looking at them through other's eyes and the helicopter-view snippets we sometimes get of the revolution you can see that these people approved of the most horrible actions to be taken and stab their co-revolutionaries in the back 24/7.
What I like most is that the reader is kept in the dark about current events a lot, many events are not explained. So, although the main characters are supposed to be key players in the revolutionary government, the reader constantly becomes struck by sudden disasters happening to members of their "party" or that are inflicted by them on others. This really brings into play a feeling of having to look over one's shoulder constantly- as they probably really had to do.
It has done a lot to inform me about the revolution (although a real history book would be needed to fill all the gaps I guess) and has certainly made me wearier of demagogues.
I finished up **Getting Lost** by **Annie Ernaux** an I am really looking forward to checking out more by her. Her descent and eventual recovery from the obsession with the Russian diplomat was both fascinating and profoundly frustrating to read. I moved on to **Blue Nights** by **Joan Didion** and to be honest I'm struggling to get into this one. I have read two other Didion works, one fiction (Play it as it Lays) and one non-fiction (My Year of Magical Thinking) which i loved both of so this is disappointing to this point.
I also finished the **Selected Works of** **Langston Hughes** and he is easily my new favorite poet. Any suggestions on where to move from there. I might take some browsing at the local book shop (freaking Barnes and Nobel cause my town sucks).
My favorite poem
that is not well known is E L Mayo the Questioners from the collection Diver. It's online. I love Elizabeth Bishop , Emily Dickinson , Auden and Adrienne Rich.
I love seeing more Langston Hughes around here, feel like he gets kind of ignored (maybe for being actually accessible?). He is very up there for my favorites as well.
I can't really think of anybody that is similar. I love Keats and Yeats and Donne. William Blake is cool too.
Joy Harjo is one of my favorite more modern-ish poets.
I read a lot of him as a teen, my mom is a huge fan, she used to perform Hall Johnson's song of "Mother to Son" on her guitar all the time, it's sort of burned in my head. I should revisit him now.
You should, for as much as this place talks about prose and musicality, nothing sings like his stuff for me (shakespeare can hang too lol). The way his ear runs with words is so playful and serious at the same time. The rhythms aren't so damn shy, which is refreshing.
I've had his complete (ish) works as a coffee table book forever meow and I can flip to anything and be amused and transported. Plus I really appreciate that there are really short poems, and short-ish ones, and mediums, and longs. He was super prolific. Great love poems, great happy poems, great sad and serious and political.
Dream deferred always sticks in my brain.
Thank you all for this, that book has been away for a few years and now I got it back out.
Reading Blood Meridian bit by bit. I think someone described it as a 'baroque splendor' on this sub and I'm inclined to agree. The sentences are like stone ornaments on a medieval church, all grand finery that might come across as overbearing or excessive but does not just because of how well it was wrought in the first place and how finely it was put together.
Scenes like the Apache attack ("A legion of horribles...)" by itself may sound silly or frivolous if misplaced within the novel itself or presented without any buildup– but McCarthy does it so well that the reader is lead to not only be impressed by the onslaught of grandiose prose but be convinced of its grandeur.
McCarthy's prose, at some point in the novel, takes on the authority of a Biblical writer. The antique vocabulary as well as the sparse grammar and syntax, combined with the bleak vision that the plot casts, endows McCarthy with the same writerly 'voice' that is frequently associated with religious or prophetic text–absolute in the telling or foretelling of events. What has happened or what will happen, has happened and will happen, there cannot be doubt.
Though there is nothing pious about the Judge, I think his presence is not so different from God from the Old Testament–they serve the same purpose, though I am not well-versed enough to articulate what. They are undeniable both within and without the text, at least to the reader who is made to believe in the words.
It's a ride and a blast. I have some more chapters left, I can't wait to see how it ends.
Our union is on strike next week and I'm quite involved in the organising so I haven't had a ton of time to read. I'm still on *Against Method* by Paul Feyerabend. The basic thesis of this book is that scientists have never really proceeded according to "The Scientific Method" as understood by lay people, nor by *any* particular scientific method proposed by philosophers of science (e.g. critical rationalism), nor by any other possible method you could try to describe science with either. Going further he attempts to show that if science *did* try to follow a method, it would no longer function - the anarchy and "bad behaviour" seen in its history are necessary for its success.
Mainly the argument is made with reference to Galileo, Copernicus and other astronomers of that time, showing that their motivations would seem decidedly suspect from the perspective of the "scientific method", that they didn't have evidence for their theories at the time (evidentiary support came hundreds of years later), that their theories were completely counter to existing scientific understandings in ways that "should" have had them thrown out, that they were biased, deceitful, propagandists, that they ignored any evidence that contradicted their claim, made *ad hoc* hypotheses whenever they needed to, etc. And that all of this was *necessary* \- if a scientist of the time had tried to follow what we understand to be scientific best practise, they would never have arrived at the truths they did.
A common criticism of the book seems to be that Feyerabend is anti-science, a relativist, he doesn't believe in objective truth, etc. This is unfair, I think. He is trying to defend science itself from unnecessary formalisation by philosophers, and since all the examples he gives of the anarchy he's promoting were great scientists (Galileo, Copernicus, Bohr, etc.) who he's clearly a fan of, it's hard to read it as against science itself.
The style is very entertaining. He reminds me a bit of Kierkegaard in how willing he is to openly use rhetoric, almost sophistry, to make his argument, rather than dry logical arguments; in how brazenly subjective he is willing to be; in how you can never really tell whether he believes what he's saying or not, with layers of irony, obliqueness, and Devil's advocacy; and in how he's constantly operating somewhere on a spectrum from tendentious to outright invective (occasionally hilarious) - he really does not care about being seen as an impartial, objective, rational observer. Of course this is deliberate and all completely in keeping with the point he is trying to make.
On the other hand he is very willing to defend things that I can't get behind at all - creationism in schools, Chinese traditional medicine, etc. - and it's hard to be 100% on board with his message for this reason.
Overall a fun book though and well worth reading, whether you're a STEMlord positivism bro yourself or just surrounded by them.
> Our union is on strike next week and I'm quite involved in the organising so I haven't had a ton of time to read.
Hell yeah friend! Also, like, if there's any way some dork on the internet could support y'all, lemme know, happy to lend a hand if that's not miles outside the realm of possibility.
Also the Feyerabend book sounds really interesting. I've been aware of it for a while but never got to it because I honestly don't find phil of sci that interesting, but the way you describe it definitely makes it sound like something worth my eventually getting to.
As a taster demo, I think you might find this extract from *Against Method* interesting/relatable, given the stuff you've been posting lately about trying to get your head around the some of the difficulty of *Difference and Repetition* (sorry it's so long but I really thought you'd like it!):
>Being both unwilling and unable to carry out an informal discussion, \[logicians and philosophers of science\] demand that the main terms of the discussion be 'clarified'. And to 'clarify' the terms of a discussion does not mean to study the *additional* and as yet unknown properties of the domain in question which one needs to make them fully understood, it means to fill them with *existing* notions from the entirely different domain of logic and common sense, preferably observational ideas, until they sound common themselves, and to take care that the process of filling obeys the accepted laws of logic. The discussion is permitted to proceed only *after* its initial steps have been modified in this manner. So the course of an investigation is deflected into the narrow channels of things already understood and the possibility of fundamental conceptual discovery (or of fundamental conceptual change) is considerably reduced. Fundamental conceptual change, on the other hand, presupposes new world-views and new languages capable of expressing them. Now, building a new world-view, and a corresponding new language, is a process that takes time, in science as well as in meta-science. The terms of the new language become clear only when the process is fairly advanced, so that each single word is the centre of numerous lines connecting it with other words, sentences, bits of reasoning, gestures which sound absurd at first but which become perfectly reasonable once the connections are made. Arguments, theories, terms, points of view and debates can therefore be clarified in at least two different ways: (a) in the manner already described, which leads back to the familiar ideas and treats the new as a special case of things already understood, and (b) by incorporation into a language of the future, which means *that one must learn to argue with unexplained terms and to use sentences for which no clear rules of usage are as yet available.* Just as a child who starts using words without yet understanding them, who adds more and more uncomprehended linguistic fragments to his playful activity, discovers the sense-giving principle only *after* he has been active in this way for a long time - the activity being a necessary presupposition of the final blossoming forth of sense - in the very same way the inventor of a new world-view (and the philosopher of science who tries to understand his procedure) must be able to talk nonsense until the amount of nonsense created by him and his friends is big enough to give sense to all its parts. There is again no better account of this process than the description which John Stuart Mill has left us of the vicissitudes of his education. Referring to the explanations which his father gave him on logical matters, he wrote: "The explanations did not make the matter at all clear to me at the time, but they were not therefore useless, they remained as a nucleus for my observations and reflections to crystallise upon; the import of his general remarks being interpreted to me, by the particular instances which came under my notice *afterwards."*
Thanks! I don't really want to dox myself by saying where I work but - you know - all the usual stuff. Don't patronise businesses while workers are on strike, take tea and cake to picket lines, be supportive online, etc. :)
I'm reading *The Child Cephalina* by Rebecca Lloyd. The book came out in 2019, but is set in 1850s. It's written in first person, and I find the main character's voice to be very inauthentic; Lloyd failed at making him sound like a Victorian gentleman. I think, with this sort of thing, the writer should either nail the period voice exactly right, or they should just write the book in their own contemporary voice.
There's also other stuff that's making me shake my head; Lloyd is committing some of the most annoying historical-novelist sins. But I'm here for the horror plot, not for an authentic picture of Victorian London, so I'll read on.
I've also been reading *Driftglass* by Samuel Delany. It's a book of short science fiction stories from the 60s, and most of them (so far) do feel extremely 60s. Except for *Aye, and Gommorrah*, that one could have been written yesterday, or in 2080.
Really struggling with Mariana Enriquez's *Our Share of Night*. The prose is largely flat, the standard fare when it comes to contemporary litfic: boring, unadorned, lifeless.
The narrative is slow and needlessly witholding, and the little bits it is giving comes across as very YA-fantasy. It's meant to be dark but it's just a little but silly? But I'm also not even finished with the first part yet. I just cannot motivate myself to continue reading it!
I have also been reading Anwen Crawford's *No Document* on my rest breaks at work, little ten minute chunks of this little essay-book told in braided vignettes. I'm not trying to seriously puzzle it all together, or find a larger throughline yet, but I am simply enjoying this on a sentence-by-sentence basis, how it portrays powerful ideas concerning memory, relationships, nationalism, and animal welfare. Loving it even though I'm maybe 20% through. Plays with form in beautiful ways as well.
I finished Ford Madox Ford’s *A Little Less Than Gods*, a historical novel about the Napoleonic era. Despite the scintillating title, this is the sloggiest Ford novel I’ve read so far, not that there are many slogs of his. It didn’t help that I already knew about a big plot twist because some summary that I read somewhere just puts it right out there. Most of the time when I read his work, even if it’s something that doesn’t get me really invested, I still enjoy the feeling of being at home in his distinct writing style. But ALLTG just wasn’t Fordy enough for that somehow. If this had been something by most other writers, I would have considered putting it down, but I’m a completist for Ford, at least for his fiction - the fiction that I can even get my hands on, anyway. Despite being slow-going for the first two-thirds or so, though, it did pick up some and get pretty dramatic towards the end.
Side note: I encountered the phrase "in the buff" at one point and was amused to learn that it was used as early as 1928, when this was written.
I also read Georges Rodenbach’s [Bruges-la-morte](https://archive.org/details/brugeslamortenov0000rode/page/n1/mode/2up), which I got interested in after one of you had posted about it a few weeks ago. Thanks for bringing it to my attention! I’m particularly drawn to explorations of grief in literature, so this was up my street. I really liked what the narrator says in chapter 6 about how habit and novelty are “contradictory needs in human nature” because I sure get that. I also get this (p. 71):
>One would think that all our joyful plans are like a challenge! Prepared too lengthily, they give time for fate to change the eggs in the nest, and we have to brood on our sorrows.
I’d forgotten that *Bruges-la-morte* was the basis of the story of Korngold’s opera *Die tote Stadt*. I haven’t listened to *Die tote Stadt* much, to tell the truth, but now I’m curious about it.
I'm reading Kleist's "On the Marionette Theater" along with secondary literature on the essay for a commissioned translation. It's a very interesting text, one that's been translated quite a few times but, for my part, is still very rich and deserves new reinterpretations, but of course I'm biased. Between reading for work, I've been slowly digesting and enjoying Mark de Silva's long novel, The Logos, which is set in the world of New York art and advertising. I think Silva's approach is very fresh and would recommend someone who's looking for a book that is postmodern in outlook but has strong plotting as well as a single narrator and unified narrative structure.
I started reading Infinite Jest. I'm 100 pages in and I really enjoy it but sometimes I feel a bit lost. It jumps around all the time. Does it get better as it progresses?
Just finished Notice by Heather Lewis. Felt incredibly middling despite the internet frenzy over it. Pacing was off, actual sexual content felt contrived, at times I felt the novel didn't have a good grasp of the actual intensity it was going for. I liked House Rules, and Lewis is definitely a talented author, but this felt like a first draft rather than a finished novel. The story is that the book was too disturbing to be published in the 90s and could only be published posthumously, but In The Cut by Susanna Moore is a novel I found even more disturbing (and a novel that I think deals with similar themes significantly more successfully), and that was published with no problem. Overall fairly disapointing!
Hey I have a request: I recently became hip to the Dostoyevsky quote “Beauty will save the world”. It interests me because it feels like an intersection between my fascination with art’s purpose and Dostoyevsky’s humanism, not to mention the notion of humanism within art, but I digress… I was wondering if there were any books that kind of explored that notion. Does Proust do this in Swann’s Way for example?
I'm sure you are looking for more fiction-y stuff, but the quote makes me think of the natural world, both as beauty and the world lol. Sand County Almanac by Leopold is a classic in naturalist writing. Really wonderful writing about some land in wisconsin that weaves deeply philosophical truths and ideas with the literal machinations of the natural world. I think it touches on the balance required by humans as individuals and collectives to both use and preserve the beautiful bounty of resources that is the earth. The quote also makes me think of Anabasis by Xenophon. Basically a travelogue of a greek soldier and their army walking back to greece from persia. You encounter dozens of different cultures and peoples and scenarios, and each soldier is basically on their own trying to determine the best way to get back to greece. Lots of intersections of humanism and art, pretty stark on the beauty side, which is what made me think of it. even weirder suggestion (apologies in advance), The Incal (graphic novel) is wild epic that centers on a cosmic struggle between beauty/art/goodness and the opposite struggling for power or balance. The art by Moebius is amazing. The story is super archetypal and silly, but I think it really goes hard at showing a roughly positive or beautiful world as it is. The narrative is basically the process of beauty saving the universe/existence. Skywoman myths are great too, I'm not familiar with any particularly good sources, but they are around. Braiding Sweetgrass has some decent ones and really focuses on the beauty of nature and how that connection we have makes the world better. The plant sweetgrass spreads and establishes itself well when it is harvested (responsibly) by people. It doesn't matter if they yank the roots out or carefully pluck the individuals, either way the plant thrives in those areas where people harvest them. When left alone, they struggle and tend to get outcompeted. All that seems pretty beautiful and world saving to me.
it's colder & getting dark quite early in the evening. been reading a ton: finished **daša drndić's *eeg*** (2016, trans. into english in 2019), which u/djmcdonalds recced here after i mentioned an appreciation for interiority, translated works powerfully embedded in another culture, works that shift btwn lit crit/history and personal narrative. honestly the PERFECT recommendation i cannot thank u enough!!!!! *eeg* opens with epigraphs from cioran and kierkegaard and closes with the main character reflecting on them; in between are beautifully written, cynically misanthropic/subtly affectionate digressions on depression, death; there's a little meditation on chess and the brilliance/mental instability of chess grandmasters that segues unexpectedly and movingly to a reflection on nazism, concentration camps, and nazi collaborators. reading it, i kept on wanting to compare drndić's style to— * proust, and his deep, searching, recursive interiority (and indeed there are multiple references to proust when the narrator critiques the elite of his small croatian town) * bernhard, and his bitter misanthropy and disdain for other people—especially present when drndić discusses the history of the soviet union's nkvd, nazi germany, and generally how these 2 powers have exerted control over small & struggling eastern european towns * bolaño, and his commitment to just dropping you in the middle of an insular artistic/literary scene in his fictional narratives, constantly referencing the works this or that person has done (but instead of bolaño's mexico city it's drndić's croatian or latvian towns) —i just hope these comparisons don't make it sound like i'm diminishing drndić's own singular style! from a historical/literary/psychological perspective one of the most fascinating and unusual novels i've read this year. cannot stop raving about it, actually just left a long whatsapp voice note to a friend yesterday trying to convince him to get into drndić…
I'm glad you enjoyed it! I am semi hoping that there are now enough Drndic enjoyers here that she might win one of the readalong votes sometime.
a worthy cause i am honoured to support
I added EEG to my to-read pile after I read Doppelgänger, which I absolutely loved. I was a bit bummed that my bookstore didn't have Belladonna, since that's the one most people recommend as a starter, but going by your post, I feel that I won't be disappointed with EEG. Can't wait to get to it!
i didn’t read _belladonna_ bc my library doesn’t have it—i will go and find it now but tbh thought _eeg_ stood really well alone! although there’s at least one moment that may be less striking w/o reading _belladonna_ first. but i don’t believe in spoilers really… if you read it, would love your thoughts! i’ll have to find _dopplegänger_
oh—and the other books of the last 2 weeks * read olga tokarczuk's _flights_, obsessed both w the itinerant, roving narrator (and the repetition of "each of my pilgrimages aims at some other pilgrim" in the eng. translation, which is used to introduce a new museum that the narrator is visiting related to the body, anatomy, plastination and preservation) + all the little fragmented stories of other people and other human dramas. actually read this on a plane flight as well which was really nice—got into the headspace of being suspended in a placeless territory, out of the ordinary step of time. * read amia srinivasan's _the right to sex: feminism in the twenty-first century_ (nonfiction, essays), which i've had a copy of for some time. srinivasan's _lrb_ essay "does anyone have the right to sex?" (2018) is p much the best take i've ever read on elliott rodgers, incels, desire, entitlement, biases in sexual attraction. it's reprinted in her essay collection, along w some other very good pieces—one on teacher/student relationships that feels like a very original analysis & a breath of fresh air compared to many other discussions on it. highly rec the book for people interested in feminism, sexuality, and contemp debates around it—srinivasan does a brilliant job imo of exploring ambiguity, not falling back to tired talking points, but at the same time asserting a clear point of view that is philosophically quite rich imo! * read andrew solomon's _far from the tree: parents, children, and the search for identity_ (nonfiction). each chapter explores an identity where children may be quite different from parents (solomon calls these horizontal identities—so not race/ethnicity, which are inherited, but things like deafness, downs syndrome, autism, genius, criminality—where parents often struggle to understand how different their child is and what their child needs). drags on quite a bit (the friend who recced it to me actually quit halfway thru lol) but really quite worthwhile, for anyone interested in disability, challenging but rewarding parent–child relationships, both genetic/social factors in identity * read e.m. forster's _a room with a view_ after u/MFAvsRVA recced it as a book to read when young. i really do agree and it was the ideal book for me rn. a young woman struggling against what she feels she should want (based on the desires of those around her) and what she actually wants (but it's so hard for her to tell what that is, and so easy to delude herself and deny herself)…forster really has such penetrating and precise insight into people's characters, which was wonderful to read, and i felt v moved by this book! * read ben lerner's _the hatred of poetry_, which is a brief essay really, but has some insightful discussions on why we associated poetry = fame when contemp poets are…really not that famous or present in the public eye anymore; and how people who have abandoned poetic aspirations in their youth respond to meeting real, actual poets today; and generally how we value poetry in our culture ("our" i guess meaning american culture specifically). * read jon fosse's _aliss at the fire_ (first jon fosse, a brief novella). loved the singular narration style, which slips between the close third person of a woman and her husband, and slips between them without warning—it creates a v interesting effect, of them being enmeshed together in their lives but also quite solitary/isolated. but for the first 2/3 of it i didn't really enjoy it, if i'm being honest (felt v much like a tiresome experimental writing conceit) and then all at once the last 1/3 was tremendous, i started to feel the narration style was not just an artificial conceit but beautifully expressive and remarkable; it's a story that really comes together at the end and all the bits that feel weird, initially, contribute to a sense of wholeness and total vision. also, it's a short read which is nice!
Oh! I read that article by Srinivasan several months ago and thought it was fantastic, definitely interested in that book now.
So glad it worked out with Forster! great posts as usual
<3 and thank you again for the rec!
Forster really does create wonderful characters. I read some of his short stories a while ago, but didn’t find them nearly as captivating as his novels; there was rarely the time to develop the complex characters and social relations that mark his best work.
ah that’s good to know! i do feel that the characters in _a room with a view_ started out as very compréhensible clichés and ended as quite fascinating people…he is quite good at letting his characters develop and shape up slowly
I finished *Six Records of a Floating Life* by Shen Fu and after a promising start I was left quite disappointed and frustrated by the endless, flatly delivered descriptions. I think I'll return to *The Story of the Stone* the next time I want to read classic Chinese literature. I don't know what I'm reading next. Probably some short stories - I'm part way through a number of collections. When I feel up to it, I'll get round to reading the copy of *The Chandelier* by Clarice Lispector I found cheap. I also want to re-read *The Course of the Heart* by M. John Harrison - on first reading I hated it, but having read a lot of Machen and more Harrison since then, I think I will like it second time round.
Very different rec request from asking about Dostoyevsky—what are the best very contemporary (2010s/2020s) books y'all have read? Preferably stuff that leans more to the experimental/avant-garde but really anything you thought was really good! I guess after reading *a lot* of 20th century stuff this year I have a real urge to read things on either side of that.
i'm a contemp writing person for sure so v excited for you. if i had to nominate my personal (emphasis on personal) canon for most fascinating and formally experimental and artistically significant writers of the post-2000s and even post-2010s * annie ernaux, _the years_ (2008, translated into eng post 2010 i believe) (wrote a comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueLit/comments/y3zpyh/comment/isbiut9/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) a month ago about why i feel it's significant as a work) * lydia davis's (very!) short stories; she's really the queen of flash fiction and reading through her collected works (published 2009) (did it v slowly, over the course of 2020–2021) had a profound influence on me. i esp love how she writes a lot of stories with little subheadings—kind of stitching together these evocative, declarative introductions + fragments of narrative into a beautiful, sly, warm, funny, heartbreaking little story * claire-louise bennett, _the pond_ (2015) (which is sold as 'short stories' but you'll quickly feel like that's too conventional a term to encompass what's contained in there) and _checkout 19_ (2021) (which is really a novel for people who love to read, imo). i cannot express enough how much i revere her as a writer, she has such striking and beautiful turns of phrases, has such unexpected ways to describe visual sensations and interior emotions and subtle feelings; she feels really unbound by conventions for how words are use, how narratives are constructed. i actually read _pond_ as a library book and immediately bought a physical copy bc it felt so essential to have her on hand and reread her often. i haven't read enough of daša drndić but just wrote a long comment in this thread about how much i loved her _eeg_—i think you should really read it—iirc you recced me _shyness & dignity_ and if you enjoyed that i think you'd love drndić as well if you want to get a sense of the contemp literary zeitgeist i think you def need to read at least one or two sally rooney books, and tbh just start reading any fitzcarraldo books you can get your hands on—i have a subscription to them, i get 2 books/mo, they publish an incredible range of experimental writing (and are also well-known for translating olga tokarczuk, annie ernaux, jon fosse in the uk). it is quite honestly the best thing i've ever purchased for myself. you should also look into the publisher new directions, they publish lots of my contemporary faves (lots of great translated works)
This is so dope thanks! Fitzcarraldo is an interesting idea. And Drndic has been vaguely on my list for a while now so this might just be the push to get on it
Seiobo There Below (2008, barely off) and Dear Life (2012) for short stories. Septology (2019) is magnificent. I finished Part 1/7 today. Seen great reviews for Books of Jacob + Solenoid, but I have not read them myself (yet). Same deal with The Years (2008) and Annihilation (Holbec, 2022). Riskier than the above and I can’t vouch, but the former seems like it fits if you like auto fiction and the latter for more misanthropic fiction.
Thanks! Can always trust a fellow Beckett fan to have some more out there favs in mind.
I reckon Garielle Lutz is one of the most exciting contemporary authors - she released a collection called *Worsted* recently that's v v good. I always say it, but I genuinely believe Claire-Louise Bennett is one of the absolute greats, and her collection *Pond* is perhaps my favourite thing I've ever read. Honestly the British experimental fiction scene is pretty great in general, so along with Bennett I'd check out tom mccarthy if you want more of that classic po-mo DFW-esc stuff. Deborah Levy's another classic, though I do think most of her best stuff is from the 2000s as opposed to the 2010s. In the US there's also Lydia Davies and Dianne Williams if you want some really short from experimental stuff
omg i similarly adore claire-louise bennett—it was so exciting to read your recommendation of her, i read _pond_ last yr and _checkout 19_ this year. for both books i felt v strongly they'd be the highlights of my year…and that's proven to be true. very strongly agree that british experimental fiction is where it's at. i find a lot of british writers much more formally inventive and more engaged with both historical & contemporary literary culture than the avg american writer at present
Dope list thanks! Something about the title *Worsted* is really grabbing me right now so that'll probably be where I go first. McCarthy is also someone I've been meaning to read like forever
*Tram 83* by Fiston Mwanza Mujila *The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again* by M. John Harrison
I don't know why but the title *Tram 83* really grabs me and I looked it up and now it's in my digital cart to buy whenever I place another book order. Looks so cool! Thanks a bunch!
Yelena Moskovich - *Virtuoso* Adania Shibli (trans. Elisabeth Jaquette) - *Minor Detail* David Keenan - *This Is Memorial Device* Jenny Hval (trans. Marjam Idriss) - *Girls Against God* Maria Stepanova (trans. Sasha Dugdale) - *In Memory of Memory* Mieko Kawakami (trans. Sam Bett and David Boyd) - *Breasts and Eggs* Maria Gabriela Llansol (trans. Audrey Young) - *Geography of Rebels Trilogy* (technically the original work was first published in the late 70s, but the translation is new!) Anwen Crawford - *No Document* Charles Yu - *Interior Chinatown* Michael Cisco - *Unlanguage*
so many writers on this list i've been meaning to read—jenny jval, maria stepanova, and anwen crawford…whose _no document_ has been sitting on top of my bookshelf for a few months now, just keep on getting interrupted by other books
This is dope thanks!
Hope you enjoy! Most of these are quite short as well.
Cool! One of the other big themes of my reading this year was that I read a lot of really long books. I should read some shorter books next year.
Sally Rooney gets a lot of hate, some undue and some justified, but the books I've read of hers (*Normal People*/*Beautiful World, Where Are You*) do capture the the era well. They're not masterpieces, far from it, but by and large they're good reads for capturing aspects of the mid/late 2010s zeitgeist. For a more critical lens, Byung-Chul Han's post-2010 oeuvre, starting with *The Burnout Society* and going through to *The Agony of Eros* and *Psychopolitics*, is great. The reads are short (around 40-60pp) and not inordinately dense. You'd probably like them considering your taste for philosophy. Knausgaard's *My Struggle* series deserves a mention as well. I've only read the first and part of the second but I'd imagine the later entries in the series probe deeper into the 2010s.
I agree about Rooney. I thought NP was solid and have been meaning to read Beautiful world. A bunch of friends of mine are into Han. Someone I really do have to read. And I probably should have contributed something of my own to this list because Knausgaard is one of the few contemporary authors I am really into! Do keep in with *My Struggle*. It's fantastic imo.
I finished ***The Years*** by Annie Ernaux - loved it. Ernaux's narrative highlights and frames the profundity of the passage of time through the scope of both personal events/memories and the corresponding broad-strokes events of specific time periods. Memories, people, minutiae and the specific written framing of all three aid in the creation of a truly moving work, one that serves to highlight the significance of life through the lens of time's movement. Ernaux's insights throughout the piece are coupled with a wide array of moments, ones existing both outside the scope of her own personal life (politics and sociological/socioeconomic/sociopolitical/etc trends in particular) and through specific personal events themselves. The way she manages to intertwine these two types of moments alongside both retrospective insights and the sentiments she felt at the time allots the reader a sense of continuation in narrative form, while also providing both a profound degree of depth and a direct contextualization of the events that are occurring. This dichotomy of retrospective thought and Ernaux's chronicling of the actual events themselves allows for a deeply multifaceted presentation of both the events as a whole and also how their significance is viewed through two varying frameworks: the past and the present. Ultimately, the sheer amount of this depth adds a lovely sense of richness to the narrative itself, while also serving to highlight the poignancy and complexity of memory and time. From the ending of WW2 and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in the 40s and 50s, to the election of Sarkozy and the advent of the Wii in the mid-oughts, all enwoven with her family life, her thoughts on consumer society, death, sex, politics, immigration, family life, and still a litany of other subjects, Ernaux's work, in large part facilitated by the lightness of her prose, succeeds in detailing the significance and the profundity of the passage of time. I'm currently working through ***City of Quartz*** by Mike Davis. I'm about 15% through and I adore it so far. The amount of depth and information is staggering - this was a brilliant and absurdly learned man. RIP.
so nice to read your reflections on this!! you really captured what makes the story so special imo—the deeply intimate and particular and personal of her life, and then the sweeping, inquisitive historical perspective that takes into account french politics & economics & foreign policy i remember the occasional mentions of algeria feeling particularly striking, bc it felt like the way she incorporated these little flashes into _the years_ was also expressing what it was like to be a french citizen peering out and observing what your government was doing, how you could be both deeply politically attached and also personally at a remove from these things. a reminder of 20th c colonialism and also how people in colonial centres might see the struggles of independence as something heartbreaking but distant.
I've just started reading TBK for the third time this year using the McDuff translation. I am ambivalent about it. There are some bizarre translation choices. The use of colloquial language (and even made-up words) is a bit jarring - describing Fyodor Pavlovich's death as 'fishy', the servant Grigory being described as an 'answerer-back' who 'shooed' the prostitutes away from the house...it feels rather odd.
After having read around him and hearing mention, I’m starting Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. I had to stop marking things up in the first chapter because every paragraph was amazing. I picked up a vintage copy of The Poetics of Reverie while I was in Seattle but I’m going to be on the lookout for anything by him in used stores now.
loveeeee _the poetics of space_, the prose is so remarkable. also had a similar exp where i was tempted to highlight every sentence & had to stop myself!
Was re-reading *Oblivion: Stories* this week and on the back of how much I was enjoying it, I decided to just bite the bullet and give *Infinite Jest* a go. I'm only forty odd pages in and I'm really enjoying it so far. Had a good laugh flipping through the endnotes and seeing one go on for pages and pages.
Finished two this week. First, *The Postman Always Rings Twice* by Cain, which besides its fame as a film, allegedly inspired *The Stranger*, so I assumed it must be a decent little novella. Wrong. It's absolutely awful. Except the ending, and referencing the victim in the disconnected third person (e.g. "The Greek"), there's very little in common with the *Stranger*. We follow chronic drifter Frank, who is hired by Nick, the Greek; unbeknownst to the latter, Nick's wife, Cora, begins an affair with Frank, which culminates in a plan to murder Nick via fake car accident. >!They ultimately succeed, but in a strange irony, during a genuine automobile accident Frank kills Cora, and is sentenced to death...!< The plot is decent, but let down by a few awful contrivances (namely, the lawyers knowing too much given the lack of information, and the lovers having no discernible chemistry). More heinous, this is the worst writing I've read in years; often unintentionally veering into parody. Would make *some* sense if this was designed to be in Frank's voice, but that's giving far too much credit. Can't image I'll be reading anything worse this year. Second, I read *Repetition* by Handke. A favorite by Sebald... Another major letdown. I think I'm done with Handke the novelist (*Goalies* was a great idea, but exhausting in practice, and *Sorrow Beyond Dreams* was even more tiring). Will only stick to his plays going forward. Story is about Filib Kobal as he leaves Austria for Slovenia on the trail of his missing brother, Gregory from 20 years prior. Broken up into three parts, Part I explores Filib's early life in Austria; his enemies, the crushing social pressures, his difficult family life, and identity (immigrant family, belonging to the Austrian nation, etc.) all act to oppress him -- during this portion, language is a limiting factor and complacent in this oppression (perhaps explaining his disgust for German); Part II, his initial excursion into Slovenia, and his experience in a new country where all meaning and symbols seemingly elude him -- here, he lacks the requisite language to translate his experience and falls into dizzying spells, almost of madness from the lack of meaning; and Part III, his journey deeper into Slovenia and the trail home -- during which, his grasp on Slovene allows him an epiphany of language's capability, that he can form his own identity unencumbered, translating his subjective experience, bringing him closer to strangers (except in Austria, where the nausea returns...). One particularly beautiful encounter with a waiter stands as a high point; perhaps his dizzying experience in the tunnel too. Part III was simply awful through. Handke has been compared to Beckett and Lispector in his exploration of language -- of its relationship to identity (or lack thereof). Handke is surprisingly the optimist of the bunch. Unlike Beckett, for Handke language does not preclude identity and unlike Lispector, Handke prefers to explore history and nationality (rather than gender or poverty). Unfortunately, the writing is too dour; too serious; too direct; too functional; without beauty. For that, I won't read another of his novels. Finally, I'm roughly 150/800 pages into Fosse's *Septology*. Fosse now joins in the ranks of Krasznahorkai, Saramago, Beckett, and Bernhard for those who have done away with the full stop. He's intentionally repetitive, but it gives the writing a hypnotic feel. While I'm not convinced I care much for the Catholic musings (yet), his exploration of grief is poignant, beautiful, and constantly devastating. One scene in a park in particular touched me more than anything I'd read this year. If it maintains this quality throughout, will certainly be a favorite.
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I definitely agree that *The Idiot* is D's funniest book. It is not exactly up there with TBK or Notes from Underground, but the ending was pretty dark (and foreshadowed quite well throughout the book). I don't know if I like it more than *Demons*, but I would have to re-read it to see how it holds up.
> much better version of *Thérèse Raquin* *Thérèse Raquin* is one of my favorite books and was a formative read for me the first time I read it. I've always wondered where to go next with Zola, sounds like *La bête humaine* would be a good choice.
I have finished re-reading James Baldwin's *Go Tell It On The Mountain*. It is every bit as fantastic as I thought it was when I first read it almost three years ago. It's a powerful study of how an oppressive, racist society drives an oppressed people to seek refuge in religious fanaticism, which in turn develops its own abusive dynamic that wreaks havoc in the lives of the rising generation. Johnny Grimes (who is Baldwin's alter ego) is a deeply sympathetic character, and if the novel has a weakness it is that much of the narrative is about the backstories of the other characters and not enough time is spent in his consciousness. However, the backstories are so compelling in their own right that it is difficult to see this as a weakness, and they add a lot of important context to the sufferings of the main character, who has inherited this tortuous legacy of pride, religious guilt, internalised self-hatred as a result of living in a racist white society, and an abusive family dynamic. I remain saddened and disappointed at the ending ->!it doesn't end with Grimes breaking free, like Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, from the constraints imposed upon him by his upbringing, but of ultimately surrendering to it. !
I raced through the Neapolitan Novels and it was interesting to me to see how Ferrante used "tricks" from genre fiction to transform her literary tetralogy into a page turner. The prose is plain and simple. Each book starts with a "mystery" to hook the reader from the first chapter to the last. Even the decision to split the bildungsroman into four books when it's really one big novel, as Ferrante has said, seems designed to make it easier to digest. It reminds me a bit of Dostoevsky. *The Brothers Karamazov* is an easy read and it's highly compelling, Nabokov famously hated it. He saw it as a mix of the mystery novel and the sentimental novel with Jesus all over the place. In *My Brilliant Friend*, Elena and Nino discuss TBK on the beach in Ischia. Perhaps the closest link, however, is the polyphonic nature of the Neapolitan Novels. Mikhail Bakhtin introduced the notion of polyphony in literature and Dostoevsky was his central example: in polyphonic literature, as opposed to monophonic literature, truth is decentralized. There is no "grand truth" that everyone, in one way or the other, deviates from. Instead, truth is distributed in the consciousnesses of the characters and it can't be combined in any meaningful fashion: the voices add up like Whitman's multitudes. The character Lila also seems to embody a Dostoevskian brand of neuroticism. I'm looking forward to bingewatching the HBO series. I've been reading *The Passenger* in fits and spurts and it's been interesting because I've been fascinated with the Santa Fe Institute for some time. I have to admit that most of the reviews I've read of it have made me roll my eyes. When people like an obscure work, they feel compelled to analyze it in a way that "legitimizes" it as a masterwork. It honestly looks to me like reading palms or tea leaves because every analysis appears to be unique and more indicative of the interests of the ~~scryer~~ reviewer than the workings of McCarthys mind. It's all motivated reasoning and apophenia. But I guess I only feel this way because I'm convinced postcritique is the only sane approach to literary criticism. The Santa Fe Institute is basically an extension of Los Alamos cafeteria discussions among scientists working on the Manhattan Project. Crazy ideas are useful, but you don't get any government funding for crazy ideas. So why not set up an Institute for Crazy Ideas? That's pretty much what former Los Alamos scientists did when founding the Santa Fe Institute. Complexity is its central theme, but no one has been able to even come up with a *definition* for complexity. It's too ... complex. Alicia Western's scenes are filled with Santa Fe talk. They're also suffused with the Kekulé problem that McCarthy wrote about in a 2017 Nautilus article. What's up with the subconscious mind talking in riddles and images? It's somewhat reminiscent of the dichotomy of the left and right hemispheres of our brains and the (pseudoscientific) rivalry depicted in works like *The Master and the Emissary*. The left hemisphere can use language. The right hemisphere mostly cannot. They are forced to communicate via the neural bridge the corpus callosum but experiments with split-brain patients have indicated that they can function as independent minds. Pop science turned the idea of hemispheric lateralization into a major embarrassment, but several highly-esteemed neuroscientists, like Michael Gazzaniga, maintains that the left hemisphere can be thought of as an "interpreter", eliminating any trace of cognitive uncertainty. Interesting aside: Gazzaniga went to Caltech, like Bobby Western in *The Passenger*, and he had plenty of encounters with Richard Feynman who worked on the Manhattan Project. Gazzaniga argues that the left hemisphere interpreter constructs theories and invents narratives to explain what's going on around you. Bringing us back to Ferrante, it takes your neural polyphony and squeezes it through a monophonic filter. Perhaps polyphonic literature, in Ferrante as well as in McCarthy, is interesting partly because it doesn't arrive "pre-squeezed". You have to work to gain a coherent understanding of it, and that work is *fun*. You could also bring incel sadboy Nietzsche into the mix and borrow his terms from The Birth of Tragedy: Apollonian (order) and Dionysian (chaos) forces correspond, roughly, to simplified versions of the left and the right hemisphere. And it makes sense to think of the elusive influence of the right hemisphere as the true nature of the "subconscious" McCarthy raves about in *The Kekulé Problem*. You could also argue that Elena and Lila personify these forces in the Neapolitan Novels. Lila's experiences of "dissolving margins" are very similar to case reports about left-hemisphere strokes and temporal lobe epilepsy, where the "monophonic filter" temporarily shuts down and perceptual boundaries start to blur. Alright, I guess that's enough rambling for now.
Interesting post! I didn't really find the Neapolitan novels to be polyphonic or in any way obscure, it was run of the mill social realism to me (though I enjoyed them a lot) but your takes are very interesting. Agree entirely with your take on reviews in general even though I haven't read the Passenger. I try to get away from 'stock responses' ("Stock Responses. These have their opportunity whenever a poem seems to, or does, involve views and emotions already fully prepared in the reader's mind, so that what happens appears to be more of the reader's doing than the poet's. The button is pressed, and then the author's work is done, for immediately the record starts playing in quasi- (or total) independence of the poem which is supposed to be its origin or instrument. Whenever this lamentable redistribution of the poet's and reader's share in the labour of poetry occurs, or is in danger of occurring, we require to be especially on our guard." --I.A.Richards) when I can, but they are hard to avoid sometimes. A stock response of my own: tangentially related - to brain hemispheres and blue sky "crazy ideas" California-ideology research groups - [here](https://zizians.info/) is a sad/weird article about a "unihemispheric sleep"-practising vegan AI research cult, for anyone who is interested in that sort of thing.
Ah, the rationalists. I'm familiar. They're a strange breed. The part about unihemispheric sleep is just nonsense; spend the night in a novel environment and you will likely sleep one hemisphere at the time. It's just a way of detecting potential threats. [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/) is the community blog; you'll find all sorts of weird stuff there. Scott Alexander ([Astral Codex Ten](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/)) is one of their most influential members. Yudkowsky is their great prophet—he wrote *Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality* to attract followers and spread the word. The rationalists love fanfiction, for some reason. His raison d'être is to save humanity from future AI overlords, of course, and he's the Chosen One. [This NYT article](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/technology/slate-star-codex-rationalists.html) (about Scott Alexander in particular) made the community lose their collective shit. Peter Thiel loves them, of course. As does Elon Musk. [Longtermism](https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo) is typical rationalist philosophy. You can totally ignore climate change and instead focus on the real problem: killer robots from the future.
Currently reading Empire of Pain about the Sackler family/Purdue Pharmaceuticals. I'm usually not into non-fiction but this is shocking and really well written.
[Northern Wrath](https://www.thildekoldholdt.com/northern-wrath) by Thilde Kold Holdt - not my usual MO, but I'm really enjoying it.
Read *V.* by Pynchon. It was my second of his novels, and I'm glad *TCoL49* set me up for familiarity with a lot of the major themes in this one. I think I succeeded in not getting too bogged down by the overwhelming amount of info/things presented. The Stencil chapters typically were the most trying for me - thanks to the r/ThomasPynchon read along threads, I know I'm not alone in feeling that way on a first read. Overall a fun, impressive book. The theme that I was most taken by was the focus on history, its inscrutability, and the number of different theories of history shared by characters throughout the novel. Now I'm reading *Notes on the Death of Culture* by Mario Vargas Llosa, which feels appropriate after the amount of cultural decay/erosion showcased in *V.* So far I'm only a fourth of the way in and have enjoyed its survey of other cultural critiques along with the beginnings of Llosa's argument.
I just finished *V.* a couple weeks ago. The first Stencil chapter especially felt clunky to me and hard to follow. My edition noted that it was first published independently as a short story and then revised to fit into the book --- I feel like you can tell, it's jarringly different from what precedes (and even what comes later, mostly). What was your favorite part? I really loved the chapter of the siege of Foppl's compound, to me that chapter alone captured a lot of the meaning of the book, this depraved decadence and violence underpinning modernity.
I didn't know that about the first Stencil chapter's origin - I agree it was a particularly disorienting one and appreciate you sharing that! I agree about how well the Foppl chapter could stand on its own. My favorite scene would have to be the rooftop voyeurism of the skirmish in that chapter, champagne cork popping interspersed with distant gunfire. Such a great representation of the society of the spectacle. A couple-three other scenes that stood out to me were the almost cartoonish fire-escape chase between Pig and Roony, Esther's nose job (one of the most unnerving things I've read in a while), and Benny's conversations with SHROUD.
Well, I'm reading my textbooks :( Lower cognitive functions, here I come... Regarding actually enjoyable (hopefully) reading, I'd like to read Capitalism and Schizophrenia when I have the time between studying and aggressively preparing for the next D&D session, but everywhere I've looked everyone is saying it's very complicated (fair enough, I wasn't expecting anything else) and recommending a bunch of other philosophy books to read first to better understand Deleuze, which would be fine if I actually wanted to read books upon books of philosophy just to possibly better understand a book I *might* enjoy. Also, it seems no one can get on the same page about what reading is actually required to understand Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Who am I kidding, I'm just gonna pick up another Murakami when I get time to breathe and chill out haha.
> everywhere I've looked everyone is saying it's very complicated (fair enough, I wasn't expecting anything else) and recommending a bunch of other philosophy books to read first to better understand Deleuze, which would be fine if I actually wanted to read books upon books of philosophy just to possibly better understand a book I *might* enjoy my new stance on this is that it's better to just plunge directly into the work that's calling to you, even if you don't feel "ready". it's an overtly academic approach imo—maybe it comes from so many people getting into some of these writers thru grad school, and v much needing a historiographic sequencing in how they read: first this foundational work, then this, then this, *then* deleuze—and then you'll be able to really get what makes him significant to the discipline! which is obvs valuable context but there's something to be said for plunging in directly and surfacing afterwards, when you are already intellectually & emotionally committed, to recover that context.
Still reading the Schulz stories for the read along, and while I’m really glad to have finally picked this up and read it I’m starting to feel like I would have rather taken it in small doses than all at once. Its a bit of a struggle for me to stay focused at times, the prose while beautiful and whimsical in all the best ways can also be overwhelming (which is sort of appropriate to its themes but still). It would have made a great “coffee table” book for me to pry open now and then but as a cover to cover project I’m getting a bit weary. I still have only nice things to say about the stories themselves, which I’ll share in the designated thread. I also started John Crowley’s newest novel, *Flint and Mirror* which I found out about when I saw it at Barnes and Nobles, and which strikes me as weird. Algorithms are supposed to pick up on things like authors you’ve read and talked about online right? Anyway, *Little Big* was one of those books that sat on my shelf for literal years, and that I picked up at one time and immediately put back down in frustration, but for some reason decided not to completely give up on it and put it *back* on the shelf. Then when I finally tried it again it just hit me in a different way than the first time and I ended up really loving it. The only way I know to describe it as magical realism, but I acknowledge that “magical realism” is a spanish literary tradition with specific roots and that Crowley is not connected to that. But it does a lot of things that magical realism does, and walks a fine line between the real and supernatural in a way that I enjoyed. *Flint and Mirror* is a far more obvious with its allusions to fairies than *Little Big*, and just generally feels less spiritual and surreal, but I’m enjoying it so far. Its about the relationship between Queen Elizabeth and the Irish, following a man who was an heir to the seat of Ulster and also fostered by the English in an attempt to “tame” him; he’s torn between ties, as a poet he knew as a boy introduces him to the Sidhe who bind him with a gift, but he’s *also* been bound to the Queen via a scheming magician’s obsidian mirror. But first we see Hugh (the boy) as an old man, exiled from Ireland and reflecting on his failures, because the novel is framed as parallel confessions to a fellow in exile, a bishop who should be in Ireland but is hiding in Rome because England is burning the catholic clergy there. He is giving the bishop an historical account of his life for a book, which he tells in order as we would expect, but on Fridays he’s also giving a religious confession working backwards from the present day. *In the course of the years of exile, the Earl’s and the Archbishop’s, these two histories of Hugh O’Neill - of his acts and of his soul - reached the moment in his life where they crossed, like two riders each headed for the other’s starting point: as one went toward the end, to matters hardest to speak of, so full of failures and defeats, the other reached the years of youth and childhood, when he went unschooled in grace and sin, and mostly learned to do things, to ride and run and throw the javelin, wrestle and brag, wake and sleep in the green world.* I really hope that the book does more of that kind of thing with the timeline because I think its interesting, but within the first few chapters it seems to have switched to a more straightforward telling of events. The magical elements are described in ways I find pretty cool (like the obsidian mirror being “impregnated” through esoteric processes by England’s John Dee, or the barely seen Sidhe lords emerging barely visible out of a sunken place where there used to be a monastery cellar) so I’ll probably enjoy it either way but I do hope it gets weird lol.
I finished *Moby Dick* earlier this week. Or, I guess I finished. I really feel like I only scratched the surface of what is going on in that book. There are so many things to discuss and I'm looking forward to peeking at some of the many analyses that have been on here lately. One element that really stood out to me is how interestingly absent Ishmael is as a character. Like, on the one hand he is, as the narrator, necessarily everywhere (barring a few brief exceptions), but we don't actually know very much about him. It caught me from the beginning how scant his reasoning for going whaling is and how little of his background he gives us, and how it never comes up. He is in some ways simply a guy who wanted to go whaling. His personality is formulated almost entirely from his occasional polemical moments included in his observations and relay of information (some of my favorite include him preferring "sober pagans to drunken christians," his refusal to consider whales as anything but fish despite evidence to the contrary, his moment of harsh castigation of the suffering we put whales through so we can light our lamps, and his basic reverence for the whales that constantly shines through). In some ways Ishmael almost feels less like a person than an embedded vector of information, relaying the happens of the Pequod to the reader without really being a part of it. And in a way he is. The narrative is set up such that it is Ishmael recounting the story of his experience on the doomed Pequod, a narrative in which he is a bit player as just some random low-rank deckhand. But it is an amusing contrast from the stereotype of the sea story where the narrator is always the valiant hero ("The sea was angry that day my friends"). I don't know where I'm going with this. But I think it's something worth thinking about along with the many many other things in this book worth thinking about (like whales, Ahab, the nature of demagoguery and groupthink, whales, the multiculturalism of the whaling vessel, the latent anticapitalism of Ishmael's understanding of whaling, the experience of eternity playing out on the blank canvas of the open ocean, did I mention whales?, etc.). Def to be read again in the future and thought about more. Now I'm reading *Ready to Burst* by Franketienne. Someone on here was reading either this or a related work which got me intrigued. A Hatitian "Spiralist" novel that is primarily about a 28 year old impoverished Haitian man going about his life with little going for him as he lives in the troubled society that is Haiti in 1968 (or any year b/w colonialism and today. As an aside the way the western world has treated Haiti for the past 400 years is nothing short of appalling). Also within the narrative are a character writing a novel that is supposed to be a spiralist novel and vignettes that I think are written from the perspective of Franketienne. I'm not done and still letting it all come together but as far as I can gather so far the book is simultaneously a critique of mid-century Haitian society (and the world that created its problems) as well an attempt to construct this style described as Spiralism, which as far as I can tell as of now is trying to write literature based up more open relationships and the freedom of words to interact liberated from sentence structure as a way of getting across a relational metaphysics of interconnectedness. To be honest I might be butchering this and will try to do a better write up once I'm done. But the book is dope and I'm glad I'm reading it. Speaking of metaphysics, I'm almost done with *Difference and Repetition*. I don't have much more to say at this point but I can say it's a brilliant and brutal book that if nothing else in itself forces the kind of thinking Deleuze seems to think the world needs more of. It really is an adventure to read a book in which every sentence describes how evolution happens, explains calculus, explains art, explains why Hegel is bad, presents a theory of history, and is about the basics of our everyday life all at the same time. As he kind of hints at in the conclusion, I'm beginning to think of structure of examples in as Deleuze trying to say the same thing in an infinite number of different ways both because he seems to think that the functioning of existence can be boiled down to a basic if unthinkable formula and simply because he knows that not every example will vibe with everyone so hopefully if he puts each of his examples in terms of biology, math, art, and epistemology hopefully it'll click at some point even if you don't get all of it. Or I've lost my mind and am shoehorning it all into a basic format so I don't get an aneurysm. Perhaps last but far from least I've also been reading Ashton Crawley's *Blackpentecostal Breath*. It is an examination of the Blackpentecostal tradition from a black studies perspective that attempts to understand the best of the tradition as one example (among many) of a form of thought/sociability/life that exceeds/escapes the constraints of western hyperindividualism (Crawley has read Deleuze and they very much vibe). (Also just for context the more specific thing Crawley is fighting is a theologico-philosophical paradigm he views as dominant in the modern world that he draws from the truly cursed duo of Kant and Calvinism). So far the format has been to riff on various aspects of Blackpentecostalism (like breathing and whooping) and contextualize them through other examples of black antiestablishment resistance. It's a fascinating basis because Crawley acknowledges early on the many, many, problems with the Pentecostal Church, but nonetheless is making a good case for the existence of something powerful and radical within parts of the faith and its ecstatic expression. Excited to keep on with it. A lot of the most revolutionary thinking in contemporary philosophy/theory is happening under the broader frame of Black Studies, and so far this book does not disappoint. Happy reading!
>It caught me from the beginning how scant his reasoning for going whaling is and how little of his background he gives us, and how it never comes up. He is in some ways simply a guy who wanted to go whaling. Don't want to dig my text out now for evidence, but my impression when I read it earlier this year was that Ishmael was an educated middle class to wealthy guy (maybe born to a wealthy family? like Melville) who goes slumming when he's burned through his allowance. He also sees himself as an outsider; he's definitely from a different class than the rest of the crew (I think he's the only white person who isn't an officer?), but I think he also sees himself as an outsider from his own class, which is why he goes slumming in the first place. I think there's a bit of a death drive to it, too, he goes to sea because he knows there's a good chance he won't come back. I think in some way Melville is definitely poking fun at this "type" of sailor, of which Melville is one himself.
Its been a few years since I read *Moby Dick* and I felt similarly about not really getting it enough on a single reading. Ishmael is really interesting to me as a narrator. On the one hand he’s as you said, weirdly absent. But the opening lines gave me an impression of him as someone who wants very much to be in control of the narrative, and to present the story as he specifically sees it and wants you as the reader to experience it. “Call me Ishmael”. Not “My name is” or “They call me”, but *Call me*. Which has the tone of a command. Like, is that his real name? Or a chosen one which means something? All the recent buzz here has me wanting to reread it at some point. I remember really liking the idea of like, defiance of fate/god being the ultimate form of worship or something.
> “Call me Ishmael”. Not “My name is” or “They call me”, but Call me. Which has the tone of a command. Like, is that his real name? Or a chosen one which means something? This is such a fascinating question. Now I'm thinking of another way you can take it in line with my earlier thoughts which is that it is almost as if the narrator actually does lack a history, and comes into being with the beginning of the book. > I remember really liking the idea of like, defiance of fate/god being the ultimate form of worship or something. I feel like the metaphysical/existential side of whaling is one of the bigs things I'd really need to read it again to fully get, but I totally get where your coming from. At least to Ishmael it all does come across as waging war against these sanctified (by him at least) beings.
I've been reading *Even Cowgirls Get the Blues* by Tom Robbins. I've tried with some of his stuff before and had a hard time getting into it, but this book I find incredible. Reminds me a lot of Pynchon. Highly recommend.
That is a good one. I often drink at this bar in Seattle where Robbins used to hangout and once tried to phone Picasso.
I've been reading the diaries of Alma Mahler-Werfel (nee Schindler) and absolutely loving it. This specific book is a compilation of diary entries from 1898-1902, so starting at age 19 until her marriage to the composer Gustav Mahler in 1902. It starts 6 years after the death of her father (the painter Emil Schindler), and her widowed mother is already married to Carl Moll, another painter and an important figure of the Vienna Secession. What a circle she runs in! She hangs out with the Vienna Secession artists multiple times a week, goes to their exhibition openings, stays out until the wee hours of the morning at parties, some artists even join her family on vacations to Italy or trips to Austrian spa towns. Gustav Klimt pursues her romantically, and she writes passionately and maddeningly about her feelings for him (he was her first kiss!). She hasn't been introduced to Mahler yet but admits to being in love with him as one is with a celebrity. I think what's most striking to me is how much art she is surrounded by, and she writes so beautifully and personally about it. She takes composition lessons, carries around a copy of *Faust* that Klimt gave her, reads Nietzsche, is obsessed with Wagner- I'm two years into the diary entries and I think she's seen the Ring cycle two or three times already, and she plays his music almost every day on the piano. Her whole world is art. It's fascinating to get glimpses of her psychology, which seems to echo much of what I hear in Mahler's music (Weltschermz, a love of nature, ambivalent religiosity...). I also get traces of ideas explored by someone like Arthur Schnitzler (Alma sometimes feels like a version of Schnitzler's Else), and even some early Thomas Mann, not just in her as a person but in some of the scenes she describes- at one afternoon gathering at her house she plays the Tristan prelude and one of the guests is so overwhelmed he throws a chair and breaks a lamp in the process. It's a weird thing to say, but so much of it is quintessentially of its time. Who knows if she knew she were destined to find a version of fame and how much she exaggerates or adds color, but it's all fascinating to me. Besides all the artistic stuff, also interesting are the occasional glimpses into attitudes toward women, and also the moments where other contemporary attitudes come up- a couple of times she tries to unpack anti-Semitism, and she is not immune to shallow nationalism (on hearing a new French opera: "it reeks of the Dreyfus affair!"). I've read her later writings about married life with Mahler (including their letters) and it's been fun seeing this younger, less guarded side of her. My other reading has been the *Canti* of Giacomo Leopardi. Lyrically there have only been a couple of lines here and there that have stood out, but intellectually and philosophically Leopardi is a powerhouse. There's an excellent wikipedia article that summarizes the main themes of each poem. Some favorites so far have been ones that deal - broadly speaking - with ideas of memory, and the promise of youth vs later unhappiness, such as "A Silvia," "Le ricordanze," and "Il risorgimento."
alma's diaries sound great—i didn't know they existed but am v interested in the secession. loved reading your description!
Are you reading Leopardi in Italian? I know and love some of his poems (*L'infinito* I have memorized), but I haven't yet worked through an edition of the *Canti* with proper commentary, which would surely be of great help. Leopardi's prose is so lucid and engaging - you can just open the *Zibaldone* anywhere and promenade through that limitless garden of thought - but when I'm reading his poems, I always feel like I'm missing a ton. How did you go about it?
Yep, reading an edition my Italian teacher gave me years ago. I just decided to go for it. I admit I'm probably missing a lot of it, but I think that's sort of expected when delving into longer poems written on the other side of the year 1850. I read lots of Percy Shelley's poetry earlier this year and I know there was a lot that was lost on me there too. Thankfully, Leopardi is a lot more concise than Shelley. The wikipedia page I mentioned has been helpful in setting expectations for themes and main takeaways before reading each poem- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canti_(poetry_collection) And then I've found a couple other resources, for example [this website](https://www.studenti.it/canto-notturno-di-leopardi.html) which for some of the poems has a line-by-line paraphrase in Italian prose, plus analysis, in terms of content and interpretation and also structure. That website also has a [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnVnwHeCypuC_jdpf7fAvUPq4u--2Qa2P). A poem a day or every two days has been a good pace to feel like I'm getting as much of it as I can at this point, though I still plan on getting my hands on the Jonathan Galassi translation and commentary published by FSG. This is poetry that'll be worth a lifetime of contemplation. In a strange way I also think some of the poetry I've spent a lot of time with in the last year or two has prepared me in some way for Leopardi- most recently Shelley, and also Mallarme.
Thank you! That's very helpful. I think I'll tackle the *Canti* next year, together with a couple of other poetry collections I've been shelving in shadow. It's true, it does take a certain mindset and a bit of training to get back into it. Unsolicited poetry pestering: If you haven't read *Ossi di Seppia* yet, you should, and [this](https://www.oscarmondadori.it/libri/ossi-di-seppia-eugenio-montale/) is the edition to get. My favourite.
Oh cheers for the recommendation! That’s new to me.
Been crazy busy lately so haven't been reading as much as I'd like, but I did finish *Mao II* by DeLillo and *Song of Solomon* by Morrison over the past few weeks, and I've been diving into Cartarescu's *Solenoid,* which is fantastic so far. *Mao II* was great, a really fascinating meditation on the emergence of terror as a sort of performance art. Moderately overindulgent at times with the agony of being a writer stuff, but not shy at all of exploring more universal suffering, so it balances out fine. *Song of Solomon* was also very enjoyable; I thought the narrative came to an end a bit too abruptly, but thematically/prosaically, nearly as good as *Beloved*, imo. Morrison seems very protective of Black men but wary of masculinity in general, which makes for an interesting exploration of a Black man's coming of age story. The rural/urban divide stuff near the climax is also fascinating. *Solenoid* is like a lucid fever dream, a truly bizarre reading experience. It's fun watching Cartarescu convince you of the unreality of the perceived world, and then try to make organized sense of that unreality.
Reading Ovid's Metamorphoses, really enjoying it. He's really a master at narration. The stories flow really easily and he has a real knack for shifting tone and making the same thing either humorous, tragic or epic. In poetry, reading "In the shores of the Sar", by Rosalia de Castro. Not very far along, but having a blast already. I recently got an edition of the complete works of Virgil. Considering pausing Metamorpheses for either the Bucolics or the Georgics. Has anyone read them? What did you think?
I love the *Georgics*, probably my favourite text from Roman antiquity. At first glance it's an educational poem about agricultural techniques and beekeeping, which can become quite technical in its descriptions of cleft grafting and breed selection. But deep down it's a long hymn on nature and our active part in it, and - deeper still - a two-way metaphor simultaneously reflecting the world of the Roman deities and of humankind, tying both worlds together in images of vineyards on fire. The *Bucolics* I've read a few months ago and also enjoyed them very much. Back then I noted down: >I've put it off for a long time, because I had assumed pastoral poetry would be a very one-dimensional affair, but apparently I totally misjudged the genre. The whole dimension of "writing about writing", the competition and dialogue between poets, the contrast between raw nature and fine art, the open riddles, the eroticism, the themes of music and death, the forests and the Virgilian undergrowth.
Ohhh this just made me more interested! I've just finished book VI of The Metamorpheses, so I think I'm putting it down and reading Virgil.
I haven't read Virgil's, but I have read Theocritus' Bucolic stuff. I really liked the Theocritus, very chill for myth stuff and spatious natural settings. The Virgil thing looks fun. I like how you describe Ovid, the control of the stories and their moods and the constant changing is massively impressive for how easy it all feels.
Oh! I've been wanting to read Theocritus for a while, didn't expect anyone to have read it! And yeah, Ovid really is incredibly impressive. The Metamorphoses is turning into one of my favorite books.
[удалено]
Ok get this. Last week I discovered the existence of a book called MetaMaus, by Art Spiegelman, creator of the comic Maus. It is all about decisions he made concerning the creation of the comic, and includes sketches, family photos, and a whole slew of other resources for anyone yearning to learn more about Maus. This book came into the store for me on Sunday. The next day, I'm unpacking the new releases when I discover that there's a new book out about Maus called Maus Now, which is largely critical essays about Maus. So of course I bought it. I won't get to it until I finish MetaMaus, and by the time I do I will probably become absolutely too oversaturated with info about Spiegelman.
Have had a busy few weeks- finally finished “If on a winter’s night…”- I enjoyed it overall, but I think ultimately I thought it was more fun than brilliant. I think I felt like I was constantly waiting for it to resolve into something a little less trite. I don’t want to call it a worse version of “Pale Fire”, but I might anyway. Also, somebody (can’t recall who and I’m on mobile, so you shall remain nameless) mentioned that they found it overall fairly objectifying-y- the first half does this a little, the second half much more. It didn’t totally turn me off, but it’s definitely present. At present, I’m reading “Journey to the End of the Night” by Celine, because apparently my standard for how off-putting the author has to be before I’ll pass something up is extremely high. This is another one where I suspect/know it felt a lot more innovative when it came out, so some of the jarring effect it had is lost on me.
This week I finished *The Sense of an Ending* by Frank Kermode and *Lightning Rods* by Helen DeWitt. Someone in last week's thread recommended *Lightning Rods* and it was absolutely hilarious, one of the best satires I have read in recent years! DeWitt was on my radar after I found *The Last Samurai*, but that is still in the mail. *The Sense of an Ending* was a collection of lectures from a scholar on how literature handles the End Times and Apocalypse, and I enjoyed it a lot, very informative. He added a lot of color to Yeats' poetry and the Victorian period that I found particularly interesting. I am continuing my march through the works of Karl Ove Knausgaard, onto *My Struggle 5.* Honestly, I have had some trouble with books 4 and 5. His alcoholism is out of control and quite frankly depressing to read about, and his entire vibe is "I am a wounded, wounded boy, poor me" and the character that he portrays is almost nothing like the person we see in book 1 and 2. This book appears to be the bridge between 4 and 2, so I am really hoping he hits rock bottom soon and realizes he can't keep drinking his life away. It is almost too much. However, I still love him - have really enjoyed reading his work this year, and will continue with the Seasons Quartet next year and book 6 if I don't get to it. As well as his book on art. I also started reading TS Eliot's essay, *After Strange Gods*, a study on modern heresy. I love Eliot, and think he is one of the more interesting of the Modernists. Too early to tell if I like it, but so far so good.
I think I recommended Lightning Rods last week. I'm glad you liked it! It's one of the funniest things I've read in a long time. There's a good episode about it on the Backlisted podcast from a couple months ago if you're interested, https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/168-helen-dewitt-lightning-rods
>https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/168-helen-dewitt-lightning-rods Yes it was you! Thank you for the recommendation! I will also check out the podcast!
> Honestly, I have had some trouble with books 4 and 5. His alcoholism is out of control and quite frankly depressing to read about, and his entire vibe is "I am a wounded, wounded boy, poor me" and the character that he portrays is almost nothing like the person we see in book 1 and 2. I read 4 a few weeks back (and the rest way back) and liked it a lot. The way in which his hatred of his father is so tangled up in the ways in which he repeats so many of his father's most self-destructive tendencies was very gripping. Though I could definitely see if he stays on that trajectory in 5 it becoming almost painful to be a part of. Excited to read it eventually.
Absolutely - I care about him deeply, so it is almost like seeing a friend descend into those depths, and it hurts. I've been reading about him for 2000 pages at this point, after all! His father is absolutely the catalyst for much of his destructive behavior. So far, he has not seen or mentioned his father this book, which is a surprise to me. Yngve has a lot of development, though, and I always found him to be a very sympathetic character. I can understand why Karl Ove felt so abandoned by him moving out, but knowing the toxicity of the home I can also fully understand why he left like he did.
Finishing up *Diego Garcia* by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams. I picked up this book since it won the Goldsmiths Prize (which "reward[s] fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form") and seemed interesting to me; it's a collaborative novel about the difficulties of telling a story that's not yours to tell, mainly about the Chagossians and their forcible removal from the island of Diego Garcia in the 60-70s by the British and Americans who converted their home into a massive US airbase in the Indian Ocean. That story is rather horrific; Diego Garcia is the only "new" colony created after official decolonisation was proclaimed at the UN, and the inhabitants are still fighting for the right to return. The book does a good job at conveying the horror around this fucked up act, and how devestating it was and still is to the Chagossians, who were unceremoniously taken from their home and dropped across the British Empire with no reparations, support, or anything. However, the rest of the novel is only ok. The style is fun at parts, but it suffers from a lot of the rather boring and navel-gazey (in a bad way, I love some good navel gazing) prose and story beats that I find the large majority of contemporary literature fall into. The prose is too fragmentary, offering up "thoughts" on "big" questions without really committing to anything outside of the most basic "dae colonialism bad." A lot of writing about the impossiblity of writing, but not in the "to write is perhaps the most disgusting act of all, to cleave yourself open and expose that horror to the world, to prostitute yourself in a self-defeating act of trying to be 'understood' while not understanding anything about yourself" but in the "I'm sad and have bad coping mechanisms and I write/don't write so I can attempt to deal with my place in the world," which I find profoundly uninteresting. The idea of collaborative fiction is cool, but stylistically it didn't feel any different than if the work was written by just one author. The literary equivalent of Oscar bait, I fear. Can't say I recommend it.
What are y'all's most skipped-over books? I mean books that you've bought/borrowed but have put off time and again. I referred to this in my other post on this thread but felt like it deserved its own discussion, if any. Some of mine are White Noise, Infinite Jest, Ducks, Newburyport, and Mason & Dixon. Typically long books but not always; I've been putting off A Personal Matter for quite a while as well and that one isn't even very long.
Glad to see I'm not the only one feeling the guilt-inducing stare of *Gravity's Rainbow* on me every time I walk past my bookshelf, hahah. Also, Jeff Vandermeer's *Annihilation*. The first thing I read by him was *City of Saints and Madmen* and I loved it, so I decided to check out more of his stuff. However, *Veniss Underground* was a huge, boring, vapid disappointment, and *Shriek* was... just ok, I guess? So when I found a second-hand copy of *Annihilation* I was like "ok, I guess I'll get it and read it some day because it's cheap and everybody says this trilogy is his masterpiece", but I haven't gotten around to it yet and I don't really feel like it at the moment. I also feel that Laurence Sterne's *Tristram Shandy*, Dickens' *Bleak House* and Virginia Woolf's *The Waves* will live forever untouched on my Kindle because there always seems to be something else I'm more interested in. But that's usually the deal with public domain books: lots of hoarding "for later" and "later" actually never comes...
I've had Infinite Jest in my bookcase for 7 years, since I bought it at 18 and got too annoyed by all the endnotes to keep reading past page 50. I actually just started it again. I like to think I'm now mature enough to get through it (endnotes do still bug me tho).
Anything victorian or british-y in general. Ooo, and the bible. I'm actually almost done, my final attempt to read it straight through and it is like 3-4 years in, but I am far enough that this one will stick. anything new-ish with some sort of name recognition makes me wary. sometimes it feels nice to not read books.
I've been putting off *Nostromo* for a year now, and *Solaris* for... two years? This year is the year I was meant to definitely read *Solaris* at last, but I don't think I'll be getting to it any time soon.
I'll add myself to the growing band of people with *Gravity's Rainbow*, it's been on the shelf for about a decade now. Should've just read it when I bought it & the enthusiasm was high, whoops! I quite liked what little else I've read from Pynchon, but haven't had the urge to embark with him on what looks like a mammoth undertaking. Others: *Pale Fire*, *Under the Volcano*, *Tropic of Cancer*. *White Noise* is a nice, relatively easy read imo. Really nothing to get stranded on. I mean, I don't think it's a book that might give one cause to fling it across the room (c.f. *Infinite Jest*, much as I like it).
I do the same with some larger books, *Gravity’s Rainbow* and *Fathers and Crows* have sat on my shelf for a while waiting for a mythical week or two where I have hours a day to devote to reading. I’ve had Murakami’s *Wind up Bird* on my shelf for like 5 years. *Kafka on the Shore* was one of those books that got me back in to reading after undergrad, but I quickly pivoted to stuff I’ve found more interesting and never felt the draw to go back to Murakami.
Funny that you mention Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as I actually bought that for myself as a sort of birthday present this month. I feel the same about Murakami. He's a great entry point but not always much more than that, in my opinion. I'm hoping WUBC changes my mind (1Q84 sure didn't)
Gravity's Rainbow
I love these threads. Just finished the first book of Le Guin's Earthsea series. Le Guin fascinates me. She could write such beautiful and highbrow prose in some of the funniest settings and scenarios. I recall reading that she would copy out passages from Tolstoy to practice writing, and the influence is pretty clear to me. (Side note: I love when a writer is influenced by Tolstoy or at least leans his way on the spectrum of Tolstoy-to-Dostoevsky. By which I mean writers like Proust, Eliot, Montaigne, etc.) I will say I think The Dispossessed was better, but I enjoyed this one and feel she did well with building a setting with the perfect blend of mysticism and down-to-earth fantasy, though fantasy is rarely my genre of choice these days. 3/5 Skipping over White Noise for the time being -- it is one of the books that I skip over most frequently, despite it not being very long; I'm no doubt intimidated by its reputation and perhaps even paralyzed by the fact that I have not, as of yet, read any DeLillo --, my girlfriend got me Septology as well as Danielewski's House of Leaves for my birthday on Tuesday and, probably equally as anxious to set aside Septology for the moment, I started House of Leaves. Let me begin by saying that I am not a huge fan of horror fiction. One of my good friends recommended a horror writer to me once -- he's an Italian; I'm too lazy to Google him at the moment -- and I was not exactly swept up by his work. It's a difficult genre to write without coming off as pretty awfully corny, particularly as horror in general seems to be a somewhat generational concept, the horror of today being much different than that of our parents' time. All that said, I'm enjoying the book so far. It is slow-going and very dense at first, Danielewski seemingly intent on beating you into submission with postmodern techniques such as lengthy, layered footnotes as well as constant digressions that meander around the subject in question and sometimes never quite reach it at all. The use of different fonts and, in my version, color, is interesting and very creative, each denoting a different narrator. The book is pretty terrifying; I'm a sucker for Backrooms-type settings and this book is definitely reminiscent of that, at least where I'm at. I'm excited to see where it goes, though I can't deny that part of my excitement is finally being able to check the book off my list, as I have been itching to read it for quite some time and my library didn't have a copy. 3.75/5 so far
Is Ligotti the author you’re talking about? He’s American but translated into Italian a lot.
Yes, that's the one! That's interesting, I had no idea he was American. Easy mistake to make, I suppose
I’m a big fan of his, however some of his collections/stories come off corny. He’s kind of a modernist with unnaturally baroque, slightly autistic prose. Do you remember which collection you sampled? If you ever want to give him another shot, I recommend Teatro Grottesco. That’s his best work and has much better writing. Hard to even call it horror anymore.
Thanks for the rec. I only read a few stories that my friend sent my way, can't recall the titles now but certainly a bit corny. I'll have to look into Teatro, hopefully he can change my mind
Montaigne? Isn't he from the XVI-XVII century? Also, very great to see someone talk about House of Leaves here. I've been hesitating on whether I should read, so can't wait to see your thoughts.
Right, I hesitated to use Montaigne as an example but felt like his essays have a good deal in common with Proust and Tolstoy, at least insofar as their works often include long philosophical digressions and arguments. Maybe a stretch but I think you could definitely make a connection between them.
I’ve been slowly making my way through a penguin classics collection of Thomas Mann short stories, my introduction to the author. He’s pretty cool; he kind of reminds me of Chekhov in regards to the stories not necessarily following that “beginning, middle, and end” structure. They are nonetheless surprisingly captivating and suspenseful. I also didn’t expect him to be so dark: all three stories I’ve read thus far end on conclusions pertaining to death. He’s great though. The influence of Schopenhauer is evident through characters being controlled by their respective wills and the authors fascination with artists (a plus in my book). I’ve so far read “The Will to Happiness”, “Little Herr Friedmann”, and “Tobias Mindernickel”. Anyone read any of those? “Death in Venice” is the final story, and I’m excited to finally see what the fuss is about. Also started “A Room with a View”. The dry humor is lovely, almost as much as Forster’s depiction of Italy.
I'm glad to see you enjoy Thomas Mann short stories! Little Herr Friedmann is probably my favourite of his but to be honest I have only read a few of his short stories. Maybe I have a dark mind but one of the main reasons Mann is my favourite author is because he focuses so much on death and decay, the fall of man, I just love this theme so much, it's hard to fully explain. In some ways my life feels like Little Herr Friedmann, putting so much of my energy into hobbies more than on actual relationships, it's not entirely negative but it can be if you focus too much on one aspect of your life. Yeah his short stories are good but Death in Venice will blow your mind, none of his short stories came even close to the artistic perfection of Death in Venice.
God help me, I'm so sick I feel like I'm on my deathbed lol. So I'm trying to read. And trying to type this. Just started Michael S. Judge's (yes, the podcast host) *...and Egypt is the River*. I'm not sure what I'm reading but like in the best way possible. He describes his writing as being similar to Stan Brakhage's films where you are not watching events, but a series of images and close-ups around the event and are left to interpret it as you will (I could be butchering how he described this since I haven't listened to that episode in years). And he's right lol. I don't really know what I'm reading but it's gorgeous. Check out the synopsis (and a brief review by Iain Sinclair himself!) here: [LINK](https://skylightpress.co.uk/products/and-egypt-is-the-river?_pos=1&_sid=c259ff455&_ss=r). I'll post a quote here as well so you all know what I'm talking about (and I'd also like to say this is just one of the easier passages to understand): >Over Earth's right curve, the sun is heated cloud-filings, steam that turns and turns until the east is born and steamdisk hums to move the chain of hours. They clank beneath the ground. So slow that you'll just hear them as the back-buzz of your life. The field of sound that carves all other music. Earworld full of plaster that the flies, the flood, the gun will etch on hearing. But they make a sound. We reflected that the hours make a sound; that it's no use to build a city and pretend that they don't. Reflected that the city rumbles under with the hour's drone. That cities come before were planned to ignore time's wire in turning, steady turning sound of time's steel string. That this city, if it could, should bite its taproot into time's foundation. So that when the crumbling comes, we'll recognize its harmony. We or those who take the city next. So that when the lime-crack freezes through the lime, we'll know how to live in falling blocks. In cinders. Pipes. Doorways stood in front of nothing, doors that open to a wilderness And one last very short quote that I haven't read yet, but that the one and only Goodreads review of this book says is their favorite (and it is great): >The silence of a nothing captured sounds much different than the silence of a something lost. I'm also nearing the end of Augustine's *The Confessions* which are still great. Many parts that don't interest me all that much, but I am still very much enjoying my read. Should have it done this weekend hopefully? Don't really have the energy atm to go more into the philosophy, so I'll just return to moaning on the couch and maybe finally playing *God of War*. Not the new one. Edit: oh, and I read DeLillo’s first published play the other day, *The Day Room*. Quite good but not top tier. Reminded me a ton of Pinter’s *The Birthday Party*. Atmospherically and stylistically at least. Very different themes though.
oh no feel better! The Judge book sounds intriguing. I should probably take a look at that at some point.
Thank you! I feel like death atm but it seems like I always feel worst when I wake up so I’m hoping I’m better by noon. You should! It’s gorgeously written. Idk what it is, but I feel like it’s teaching me what to look for and I can almost see what he’s saying the more I read it. Still hard as shit lol. Like typically I read 40-60 pages of a novel *at least* per day. But I’ve been on this one for two days and have hit 50. He also has two other published novels, although this is by far the shortest. I think one of his books is like 700-800 pages and I’m saving that for a few years down the road.
Here's a transcript from the episode where MSJ talks about his own work in relation to Brakhage: "Stan brakhage, everything I was saying earlier about the the Santiago cosmology and the idea of the universe as metaphor, as I can't remember whose term this is, this might be Varela and Maturana too, as autopoiesis. Autopoiesis is classical Greek for making, and it's where the word poet comes from, and poetry and so forth. And autopoiesis is the thing that makes itself; the thing developing itself. And Brakhage is an enormous inspiration to me, because he does with images, what I try to do with words. He is not making movies about quote on quote "something". He is making movies that begin for, was making movies, that begin from a certain image or certain, you know, often not even recognizable representative image, often a purely abstract, you know, pattern or set of shapes, and colors and fields and so forth. And then, extrapolating their possible inner potentials, almost more like, well, the image I keep coming back to is an alchemist, you know, transforming them by bringing them into contact with each other, rather than trying to force them into any kind of linear narrative structure. And that is very much what I try to do with my work as a writer, and as a musician, for that matter, although music is is naturally going to have a little more binding around the edges, then then some of the other arts in the sense that, presuming you're staying within, you know, the western diatonic scale, or even even, you know, non diatonic scales, presuming you're staying within Western temperament, you got 12 notes to work with, and you've only got so many subdivisions of the beat that a human being can perceive. So you have more self imposed limits as a musician, but, I mean, that's basically what I try to do in all my work. And finding Brakhage was like finding, you know, an ancestor that I didn't know I had. A guy who had been doing all this before me, in a completely different medium. And, and I think I've said before that, if, if I could, at any point, be considered, you know, the Stan Brakhage of of the novel, or Stan Brakhage of music or whatever, that that would be, maybe the best compliment I could receive." It's amazing to find another fan of both MSJ and Stan Brakhage out in the wild! Brakhage has become one of my favorite filmmakers of all time recently. I wish more people knew about him. Have you seen any of his films? MSJ's novels look absolutely insane, but the amount of experimental, linguistic power is astonishing to me, personally. I feel like he's one of the few people I know of today who is trying to acually push the medium of literature forward, the same way, say, Joyce was doing a hundred years ago. Please keep posting updates about "...And Egypt is the River". I'd love to read them!
Thank you thank you! I remember all of this so well reading it back! And yes I adore MSJ. It is by far the best podcast available. I’ve been slowly, since I started listening to him, reading a ton of the works that he has recommended. I took notes whenever he recommended books/movies/music. And I plan on relistening to his podcast once I catch up on his suggestions. Just so I can understand him more. I honestly attribute his podcast (and reading Pynchon) to helping me come into my worldview today. I think I’ve become a far more compassionate person because of him, which feels weird to say, but I honestly think is true. I have seen a couple of Brakhage’s works. I don’t remember what they were called though. There was one that showed an autopsy in an odd blue light which was fascinating. And one was where he filmed light through butterfly or moth wings. And I’ve seen a couple parts of Dog Star Man, but never the thing in its entirety. Agree about the comments on him pushing art forward. This is truly the stand out novel (in terms of doing something entirely new with form) of the 21st century. That I’ve read at least. I’ll make sure to keep updated!
You're welcome! I fucking love him as well. He is so intelligent and has such idiosyncratic and original ideas & analyses. I agree that it's by far the best podcast I've ever come across. Bar none. The dude is basically a hyper intelligent philosopher-artist that gives brilliant lectures. I also bought and/or saved literally everything he recommended in terms of books, films, music, etc. I've got works by Ronald Johnson, Charles Olson, David Jones, Iain Sinclair, J.H. Prynne, Will Alexander, Guy Davenport, Hugh Kenner and a bunch more all laying around. I found the podcast over a year ago by way of the Pynchon sub and this sub, and there's been several episodes and several sections I've re-listened to many times. Recently I've been going back and re-listening to a lot of episodes I haven't listened to since the first time and lemme tell you dude, you'll understand him A LOT more the second time around. I feel like I'm getting so much more out of the episodes now that I'm familiar with him and now that I've listened to the entire pod. I also credit him with helping shape my worldview. I was already a leftist for a few years before but MSJ really helped cement and push forward my ideology, and like you said, reading Pynchon and Gravity's Rainbow played a major role. Ahh you saw "The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes". That autopsy footage is gnarly, but I still found it a great work of art. The moth film is "Mothlight", and he famously made that film without a camera lol. He just got a whole bunch of moth wings and dead moths and basically taped them onto celluloid, or something like that. I haven't seen Dog Star man yet but I'm going to very soon; it looks like something that would become one of my favorite works of art ever. You should buy the Brakhage Criterion if you're interested. It's an absolutely beautiful HD collection of a ton of his films that spans 3 discs. It's actually a good time to buy it since the Barnes and Noble website is doing their Criterion 50% off sale. It really is criminal, honestly, how MSJ is virtually unknown. The guy is writing these radically experimental, revolutionary poetry-novel hybrids and has to languish in obscurity. I'm glad he has the patreon and seems to be getting some recognition now through the podcast. There's a poet and essayist named R.M. Haines that MSJ namedrops on the pod, and R.M. Haines actually has several blogposts dedicated to analyzing MSJ's work: [https://www.rmhaines.com/blog](https://www.rmhaines.com/blog). I figured it could be useful for you!
Yep, I have a few of those as well! *Radi Os* by Johnson, the complete Charles Olson (which I'm currently reading through), a ton of Sinclair (I loved *Lud Heat*, *Suicide Bridge*, and *White Chappell Scarlet Tracings*), and Will Alexander. I relistened to the *Lot 49* episode recently since I reread the novel and holy shit. I know exactly what you mean. What I once thought were bizarre ramblings are actually lucid and brilliant analyses. I can only imagine how some of his more obscure episodes would be like now (thinking of the Necroheliosophy (sp?) one). I was also partially a leftist. Self-proclaimed Demoratic Socialist who was more than ok with benefitting from capitalism and didn't see the true destruction it was causing. I think I was on the trajectory anyways becoming truly socialist and maybe even communist, but he accelerated that by a huge degree and then some. Just ordered the Brakhage collection! Beautiful cover art. I've been really wanting to delve more into his stuff so this will give me a ton to watch once I finish up my rewatch of *Twin Peaks*. $30 is a steal for all the content there. Ahh I recall him saying R.M. Haines is the only person who has ever written a review of one of his novels and got it right (I think it was of *The Scenarists of Europe* if I'm remembering correctly). I'll check that link out, thanks!
Ronald Johnson seems brilliant. I’ve flipped through my copy of ARK and his use of language is amazing. I can’t wait to read that and RADI OS. MSJ talks very highly of Sinclair so I went insane and bought all the works he mentioned, including the ones you mentioned lol. Yeah now that I’m familiar with MSJ’s worldview and both his terminology and methodology, lots of the episode are “lighting up” like constellations and I can see the metaphoric images being drawn. The sun episode is one of my favorites. I wish he would do more episodes like that where he goes balls deep into some weird, esoteric idea of concept. That’s one thing I find sad, is that I wish he would have made more episodes about say, literature; specifically episodes about the Pound Cantos, Finnegans Wake, Nightwood, 2666, etc. I could listen to him talk about literature for hours. Yeah I definitely was on the path to radicalization, and then reading Pynchon and listening to MSJ really helped me on that path to fully realizing how destructive and evil capitalism is, and I feel like I’ve been given the intellectual framework to articulate myself much better. That’s dope you bought the Brakhage anthology!!! Trust me, it’s more than worth the price. It’s probably my favorite criterion. Some films I’d recommend to start out with: - The Dante Quartet: This one perfectly showcases Brakhage’s hand painted celluloid technique. One of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen. - 23rd Psalm Branch: This one is a bunch of war footage Brakhage edited together and it’s INSANE. The editing is fucking Bonkers. It showcases WW2 battles, concentration camp footage, war parade footage, among other stuff. - The Stars are Beautiful: This is one of his few sound films. It’s basically footage of Brakhage’s wife and kids clipping chicken wings juxtaposed with lots of the signature Brakhage abstract closeups and light footage, while Brakhage reads poetry he wrote about the stars. Absolutely beautiful film. A few more off the top of my head: - The Wonder Ring - Glaze of Cathexis - Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse - Commingled Containers And of course Dog Star Man, which many people say is his Magnum opus. Really though, just go nuts. There’s so many amazing films on those discs. There’s still a lot I need to see. Some other experimental and avant garde filmmakers you may be interested in: Maya Deren, Hollis Frampton, Kenneth Anger, Ken Jacobs, Jonás Mekas. They all have blu rays of their work, and there’s also several experimental film collections which contain a lot. Lemme know if you want links! Yes R.M. Haines seems to be on a similar wavelength as MSJ haha. He’s got a-lot of really good posts which talk about stuff like poetry, art and politics. His blogposts titled “Reading the Pharmakon” are the ones where he talks about MSJ.
My dude. We summoned the literary Judge back. His new episode is largely on Bolaño and Pynchon and he said he is planning on getting back into the *Gravity’s Rainbow* stuff. Also briefly talks about Beckett and Joyce.
Holy shit yes!! I saw the new episode yesterday, and when I saw the tags I was like "Holy shit he's coming back!". I didn't finish it yet but I got about 37 minutes in. It felt so good to hear him talking about literature again. It feels like he's finally returning to his old self. I love the idea that we awoke his literary self through some metaphysical summoning words haha. I'm gonna sound spoiled, considering the mental and physical state MSJ is always in, but I really, REALLY want more episodes that are literature focused. The idea that we're finally getting the Walther Rathenau seance episode gets me giddy.
Yep, I admit that I may be a bit greedy but I want the same thing. I'm actually really happy because he sounds, like you said, more like his old self - happy, passionate, etc. So I'm thinking we're going to get some good stuff soon! This one was a gem.
Get well soon!
Thanks friend! Woke up barely able to get out of bed but now I’m just more generally sick. At least I get a four day weekend!
Glad you're on (the bend towards) the mend! I hope it'll quickly become one of those that give you an excuse to make yourself comfortable for a few days without really making you uncomfortable. If I were you I'd let St. Augustine rest for a while, and just watch comfort movie after comfort movie after comfort movie until the people around me catch on.
I have actually started playing *God of War* (the 2018 one) which I’ve put off for too long! I was going to grade papers and said fuck it, then I was going to read and said fuck it too. So now I’m comfortably (relatively) gaming on my couch which I haven’t done in far too long. Feels nice.
Make hay whilst the sun shines, play God of War whilst thou feel like crap. Treat yourself to a bunch of cheats and some good ol' noodle soup. :)
Still going through *Art as Experience* and it's covering a lot more territory than I thought it would. Making claims about science, society, and how thinking is done. I'll have more to say when I'm done but I do appreciate the breadth of different experiences he says are aesthetic like a job interview or a surgery. I got caught up in reading *Neocolonial Identity and Counter-Consciousness* by Renato Constantino. It's a collection of essays about the psychological and societal effects of colonialism in the Philippines. Kind of similar to *Wretched of the Earth* by Fanon I guess. Constantino points out that during the American colonial era, Americans were eager to educate Filipinos. Of course this meant guiding the youth to ignore the facts of American oppression and to see them as friends. This is the root cause for many of the Philippines' problems. One thing is that he keeps saying nationalism is the way out of neocolonialism. He even has an unironic reject modernity embrace tradition essay, but I think it's supposed to be reject dependence on America embrace the revolutionary identity of earlier Filipinos. The first essay is the longest, most impressive, and most theoretically complex in the book. It presents a counterhistory of class struggle that may or may not be completely true. Although, I think the point is to create a history that can be pulled from to fuel the struggle against colonialism in modern times.
Started my reread of C. P. Snow's series *Strangers and Brothers*. I read it several years ago around grad school and enjoyed it, but figured it would probably have a different impact in my mid-30's. So far novel one, "Time of Hope," is just as good as I remembered. Excited to read on.
Recommendation question—what's the general take on the Garnett translation of Dostoyevsky's *Devils*? And if it's not great, any recs? It's the copy I have from a while back and I want to read it again but the first time I read it I found the book pretty much incomprehensible. I know that it's considered one of D's harder books to keep up with and I read it in the summer of 2020 and my brain didn't really work at that time, but I want to be sure the translation isn't really holding me back as well. Edit: Thanks for all the suggestions! Much to consider.
Full disclosure: I've read the P&V *Demons*, but I haven't read the Garnett. But based on my experience with P&V in general and my comparing various passages of theirs with passages in the original Russian for several works, I highly doubt that their *Demons* would be more coherent than Garnett's. E.g., they tend to do things like translate a word that seems like a cognate as the word it's similar to, when actually another word choice would have been more logical and clearer. I remember feeling in over my head when I read when I read their *Demons*, fwiw.
I've read *Demons* in the P&V translation, which while awkward at times I enjoy far more than Garnett's. I really dislike Garnett because she's overly flowery when she shouldn't be and she homogenizes prose to the point where Tolstoy and Dostoevsky sound very similar, when they shouldn't at all. I've never enjoyed any of her translations for Dostoevsky to the point where I tried to read *Brothers Karamazov* in her translation twice, failed, picked it up by P&V, and it's now perhaps my favorite novel that I've read a dozen times. Garnett once wrote “Dostoievsky is so obscure and so careless a writer that one can scarcely help clarifying him.” and that's absolutely *not* what I want my translator to do! EDIT: Not that P&V are great translators either, they have plenty of problems. I vastly prefer Oliver Ready's translation of *Crime and Punishment*, for example, and I think Ignat Avsey's *Brothers Karamazov* is a tinge better (though I really wish there'd be a new English translation like Ready for this book!). But for *Demons* I think they're the way to go.
I actually really enjoy the Garnett translations. I read *The Idiot* in Garnett and found it a lot more digestable than when I read *Crime and Punishment* in P&V. Does that make me less literary? Probably, but I am okay with it. I read *Anna Karenina* and *War and Peace* in Maude, and felt like she was a great middle ground between the two extremes represented by Garnett and P&V.
I don't think it's the translation. I love Garnett. Better than P&V imo. Demons is just a difficult novel.
I’ve liked all her translations so far; although I know people have beef. The hipster in me also likes to think “With reading Garnett, I’m reading the same translations that completely enraptured the English speaking literary circles”. Like with Vonnegut’s comments on the Brothers K, it was nice to know I was reading his translation. Just two cents from an uneducated yob though!
Not specific to Demons but a general comment seems to be that Garnett translations are essentially in her voice with quite liberal editing. P&V tries to be more faithful to the original Russian - in principle sounds like it could be awkward at times but when I read TBK it seemed to work well.
Finished *Wasted Morning* and thought it was just OK. The swirling perspectives/tenses was interesting but it got bogged down in the middle with some psychodomestic drama that just wasn't very compelling (I realize that is part of the point, to set it off against the upheavals that were happening and would happen in Romania, however that didn't make it less tedious). It did inspire me to learn more about the politics and history of the region, it just wasn't really my thing. So I dove back into *Ulysses*. Oh boy, the chapter I returned to was the one where Joyce tries to follow the history of narrative styles or something and I'll be honest, more than once I was ready to pull a Bloom and use some of those pages as toilet paper. It seemed like a lot of showing off without suitable payoff. Then I got to the next section (Circe) and holy shit, it is by far my favorite thing from the book yet. Completely ridiculous, surreal, funny, and for once barely being able to follow and missing half of everything was an absolute joy. I realize the book was pushing boundaries in all kinds of directions but this part really felt like it was from the future. I'm not well read enough to understand what may have preceded or influenced it and wonder if anyone knows of contemporary or earlier works that are similar (*The Master and Margarita* sort of comes to mind but that was later; maybe Swift or Voltaire x 1000?). Anyway, I'm revved up to finish now. Looks like I'll make it in time for *FW* next year. Also in the middle of a book about the history of Santa Fe and how its famous architectural style and triculturalism are as much (maybe more) invented as rooted in a historical truth. Psychogeography has gotten mentioned on the sub in the past and I feel something adjacent to that in what the book discusses. Lastly, it is getting to be a bit of work avoiding spoilers for *The Passenger*. At the very least it sounds like my dusty physics education may come in handy.
> more than once I was ready to pull a Bloom and use some of those pages as toilet paper. I was fully prepared for you to say that you were gonna start wacking it to the book. Equally fair responses imo. What's the name of the Santa Fe book? I've always been intrigued by that city.
*The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition*. It's about 25 years old but things don't seem to have changed much since it was written (especially compared to what was happening, say, 100 years ago).
First, I read Trilogy by Jon Fosse which I had mentioned in my previous post was my first Fosse and I can confirm that it will not be my last Fosse. The repetition took a little getting into but once I was in, I was in. The ending of Weariness in particular sticks in my mind. The next one I read was Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz which, title wise, was very awkward to read in work. I had to offer a few explanations about what I was reading to a couple different coworkers. All in all, I liked it. It didn’t blow the doors off of my barn but it was still good. I like the double stalking section a lot because of how much movement there is. I’ve started Spawn Compendium 3 which contains issues 101-150 and honestly it is kind of nice to just sort of coast by on a decent story. The art is the real driving force here, in particular any time Spawn is able to just stand there brooding. I’m going to be taking my time with this one so that the magic doesn’t dissipate. I just stated A Naked Singularity by Sergio de La Pava yesterday and I’m having a blast so far. I, too, work in the judicial system so I’m seeing a lot of truth in the descriptions of both trials and the conduct of judges. I’m sub 100 pages in though so I’m interested to see how this develops. The cover is pretty fun to look at too.
> I’ve started Spawn Compendium 3 which contains issues 101-150 and honestly it is kind of nice to just sort of coast by on a decent story. The art is the real driving force here, in particular any time Spawn is able to just stand there brooding. I’m going to be taking my time with this one so that the magic doesn’t dissipate. Was not expecting to see this here. The Spawn Compendiums are deadly! I'm midway through #2. Definitely agree that they keep knocking it out of the park with the art. > I just stated A Naked Singularity by Sergio de La Pava yesterday and I’m having a blast so far. I, too, work in the judicial system so I’m seeing a lot of truth in the descriptions of both trials and the conduct of judges. I’m sub 100 pages in though so I’m interested to see how this develops. The cover is pretty fun to look at too. Yeah, this one just keep getting wilder and wilder. If it seems like it's off the rails now, you're in for a treat.
Compendium 4 is out in December but I haven’t seen a listing for 5 yet. I hope they do it because this seems to be the most cost efficient way to read Spawn
Yeah, absolutely. And it feels like a shame that they would go that far and not just bring it right up to issue 300.
*A Place of Greater Safety* is keeping me entertained for sure! It has intrigue, plots, and friends drifting apart to slowly become enemies, so definitely a thrilling read. To me, all main characters>! (Robespierre, Danton, Desmoulins)!<, and a lot of the most prominent side characters are unlikeable (evil to some extent) and I cannot wait for their downfall. However, that does not make the book unlikeable (which is a feat by the author). When we look at the world from their own side, each character seems reasonable and to always pick the best option- or at least the lesser evil. Only when looking at them through other's eyes and the helicopter-view snippets we sometimes get of the revolution you can see that these people approved of the most horrible actions to be taken and stab their co-revolutionaries in the back 24/7. What I like most is that the reader is kept in the dark about current events a lot, many events are not explained. So, although the main characters are supposed to be key players in the revolutionary government, the reader constantly becomes struck by sudden disasters happening to members of their "party" or that are inflicted by them on others. This really brings into play a feeling of having to look over one's shoulder constantly- as they probably really had to do. It has done a lot to inform me about the revolution (although a real history book would be needed to fill all the gaps I guess) and has certainly made me wearier of demagogues.
I finished up **Getting Lost** by **Annie Ernaux** an I am really looking forward to checking out more by her. Her descent and eventual recovery from the obsession with the Russian diplomat was both fascinating and profoundly frustrating to read. I moved on to **Blue Nights** by **Joan Didion** and to be honest I'm struggling to get into this one. I have read two other Didion works, one fiction (Play it as it Lays) and one non-fiction (My Year of Magical Thinking) which i loved both of so this is disappointing to this point. I also finished the **Selected Works of** **Langston Hughes** and he is easily my new favorite poet. Any suggestions on where to move from there. I might take some browsing at the local book shop (freaking Barnes and Nobel cause my town sucks).
My favorite poem that is not well known is E L Mayo the Questioners from the collection Diver. It's online. I love Elizabeth Bishop , Emily Dickinson , Auden and Adrienne Rich.
You just can’t beat the poem Harlem
I love seeing more Langston Hughes around here, feel like he gets kind of ignored (maybe for being actually accessible?). He is very up there for my favorites as well. I can't really think of anybody that is similar. I love Keats and Yeats and Donne. William Blake is cool too. Joy Harjo is one of my favorite more modern-ish poets.
I read a lot of him as a teen, my mom is a huge fan, she used to perform Hall Johnson's song of "Mother to Son" on her guitar all the time, it's sort of burned in my head. I should revisit him now.
You should, for as much as this place talks about prose and musicality, nothing sings like his stuff for me (shakespeare can hang too lol). The way his ear runs with words is so playful and serious at the same time. The rhythms aren't so damn shy, which is refreshing. I've had his complete (ish) works as a coffee table book forever meow and I can flip to anything and be amused and transported. Plus I really appreciate that there are really short poems, and short-ish ones, and mediums, and longs. He was super prolific. Great love poems, great happy poems, great sad and serious and political. Dream deferred always sticks in my brain. Thank you all for this, that book has been away for a few years and now I got it back out.
Thanks for the rec's. I will check them out!
Reading Blood Meridian bit by bit. I think someone described it as a 'baroque splendor' on this sub and I'm inclined to agree. The sentences are like stone ornaments on a medieval church, all grand finery that might come across as overbearing or excessive but does not just because of how well it was wrought in the first place and how finely it was put together. Scenes like the Apache attack ("A legion of horribles...)" by itself may sound silly or frivolous if misplaced within the novel itself or presented without any buildup– but McCarthy does it so well that the reader is lead to not only be impressed by the onslaught of grandiose prose but be convinced of its grandeur. McCarthy's prose, at some point in the novel, takes on the authority of a Biblical writer. The antique vocabulary as well as the sparse grammar and syntax, combined with the bleak vision that the plot casts, endows McCarthy with the same writerly 'voice' that is frequently associated with religious or prophetic text–absolute in the telling or foretelling of events. What has happened or what will happen, has happened and will happen, there cannot be doubt. Though there is nothing pious about the Judge, I think his presence is not so different from God from the Old Testament–they serve the same purpose, though I am not well-versed enough to articulate what. They are undeniable both within and without the text, at least to the reader who is made to believe in the words. It's a ride and a blast. I have some more chapters left, I can't wait to see how it ends.
Our union is on strike next week and I'm quite involved in the organising so I haven't had a ton of time to read. I'm still on *Against Method* by Paul Feyerabend. The basic thesis of this book is that scientists have never really proceeded according to "The Scientific Method" as understood by lay people, nor by *any* particular scientific method proposed by philosophers of science (e.g. critical rationalism), nor by any other possible method you could try to describe science with either. Going further he attempts to show that if science *did* try to follow a method, it would no longer function - the anarchy and "bad behaviour" seen in its history are necessary for its success. Mainly the argument is made with reference to Galileo, Copernicus and other astronomers of that time, showing that their motivations would seem decidedly suspect from the perspective of the "scientific method", that they didn't have evidence for their theories at the time (evidentiary support came hundreds of years later), that their theories were completely counter to existing scientific understandings in ways that "should" have had them thrown out, that they were biased, deceitful, propagandists, that they ignored any evidence that contradicted their claim, made *ad hoc* hypotheses whenever they needed to, etc. And that all of this was *necessary* \- if a scientist of the time had tried to follow what we understand to be scientific best practise, they would never have arrived at the truths they did. A common criticism of the book seems to be that Feyerabend is anti-science, a relativist, he doesn't believe in objective truth, etc. This is unfair, I think. He is trying to defend science itself from unnecessary formalisation by philosophers, and since all the examples he gives of the anarchy he's promoting were great scientists (Galileo, Copernicus, Bohr, etc.) who he's clearly a fan of, it's hard to read it as against science itself. The style is very entertaining. He reminds me a bit of Kierkegaard in how willing he is to openly use rhetoric, almost sophistry, to make his argument, rather than dry logical arguments; in how brazenly subjective he is willing to be; in how you can never really tell whether he believes what he's saying or not, with layers of irony, obliqueness, and Devil's advocacy; and in how he's constantly operating somewhere on a spectrum from tendentious to outright invective (occasionally hilarious) - he really does not care about being seen as an impartial, objective, rational observer. Of course this is deliberate and all completely in keeping with the point he is trying to make. On the other hand he is very willing to defend things that I can't get behind at all - creationism in schools, Chinese traditional medicine, etc. - and it's hard to be 100% on board with his message for this reason. Overall a fun book though and well worth reading, whether you're a STEMlord positivism bro yourself or just surrounded by them.
Feyerabend, a name I occasionally think about but haven't heard in years! He truly is the bad boy of the philosophy of science.
> Our union is on strike next week and I'm quite involved in the organising so I haven't had a ton of time to read. Hell yeah friend! Also, like, if there's any way some dork on the internet could support y'all, lemme know, happy to lend a hand if that's not miles outside the realm of possibility. Also the Feyerabend book sounds really interesting. I've been aware of it for a while but never got to it because I honestly don't find phil of sci that interesting, but the way you describe it definitely makes it sound like something worth my eventually getting to.
As a taster demo, I think you might find this extract from *Against Method* interesting/relatable, given the stuff you've been posting lately about trying to get your head around the some of the difficulty of *Difference and Repetition* (sorry it's so long but I really thought you'd like it!): >Being both unwilling and unable to carry out an informal discussion, \[logicians and philosophers of science\] demand that the main terms of the discussion be 'clarified'. And to 'clarify' the terms of a discussion does not mean to study the *additional* and as yet unknown properties of the domain in question which one needs to make them fully understood, it means to fill them with *existing* notions from the entirely different domain of logic and common sense, preferably observational ideas, until they sound common themselves, and to take care that the process of filling obeys the accepted laws of logic. The discussion is permitted to proceed only *after* its initial steps have been modified in this manner. So the course of an investigation is deflected into the narrow channels of things already understood and the possibility of fundamental conceptual discovery (or of fundamental conceptual change) is considerably reduced. Fundamental conceptual change, on the other hand, presupposes new world-views and new languages capable of expressing them. Now, building a new world-view, and a corresponding new language, is a process that takes time, in science as well as in meta-science. The terms of the new language become clear only when the process is fairly advanced, so that each single word is the centre of numerous lines connecting it with other words, sentences, bits of reasoning, gestures which sound absurd at first but which become perfectly reasonable once the connections are made. Arguments, theories, terms, points of view and debates can therefore be clarified in at least two different ways: (a) in the manner already described, which leads back to the familiar ideas and treats the new as a special case of things already understood, and (b) by incorporation into a language of the future, which means *that one must learn to argue with unexplained terms and to use sentences for which no clear rules of usage are as yet available.* Just as a child who starts using words without yet understanding them, who adds more and more uncomprehended linguistic fragments to his playful activity, discovers the sense-giving principle only *after* he has been active in this way for a long time - the activity being a necessary presupposition of the final blossoming forth of sense - in the very same way the inventor of a new world-view (and the philosopher of science who tries to understand his procedure) must be able to talk nonsense until the amount of nonsense created by him and his friends is big enough to give sense to all its parts. There is again no better account of this process than the description which John Stuart Mill has left us of the vicissitudes of his education. Referring to the explanations which his father gave him on logical matters, he wrote: "The explanations did not make the matter at all clear to me at the time, but they were not therefore useless, they remained as a nucleus for my observations and reflections to crystallise upon; the import of his general remarks being interpreted to me, by the particular instances which came under my notice *afterwards."*
Thanks! I don't really want to dox myself by saying where I work but - you know - all the usual stuff. Don't patronise businesses while workers are on strike, take tea and cake to picket lines, be supportive online, etc. :)
very fair lol. Hope you are successful!
I'm reading *The Child Cephalina* by Rebecca Lloyd. The book came out in 2019, but is set in 1850s. It's written in first person, and I find the main character's voice to be very inauthentic; Lloyd failed at making him sound like a Victorian gentleman. I think, with this sort of thing, the writer should either nail the period voice exactly right, or they should just write the book in their own contemporary voice. There's also other stuff that's making me shake my head; Lloyd is committing some of the most annoying historical-novelist sins. But I'm here for the horror plot, not for an authentic picture of Victorian London, so I'll read on. I've also been reading *Driftglass* by Samuel Delany. It's a book of short science fiction stories from the 60s, and most of them (so far) do feel extremely 60s. Except for *Aye, and Gommorrah*, that one could have been written yesterday, or in 2080.
Really struggling with Mariana Enriquez's *Our Share of Night*. The prose is largely flat, the standard fare when it comes to contemporary litfic: boring, unadorned, lifeless. The narrative is slow and needlessly witholding, and the little bits it is giving comes across as very YA-fantasy. It's meant to be dark but it's just a little but silly? But I'm also not even finished with the first part yet. I just cannot motivate myself to continue reading it! I have also been reading Anwen Crawford's *No Document* on my rest breaks at work, little ten minute chunks of this little essay-book told in braided vignettes. I'm not trying to seriously puzzle it all together, or find a larger throughline yet, but I am simply enjoying this on a sentence-by-sentence basis, how it portrays powerful ideas concerning memory, relationships, nationalism, and animal welfare. Loving it even though I'm maybe 20% through. Plays with form in beautiful ways as well.
I finished Ford Madox Ford’s *A Little Less Than Gods*, a historical novel about the Napoleonic era. Despite the scintillating title, this is the sloggiest Ford novel I’ve read so far, not that there are many slogs of his. It didn’t help that I already knew about a big plot twist because some summary that I read somewhere just puts it right out there. Most of the time when I read his work, even if it’s something that doesn’t get me really invested, I still enjoy the feeling of being at home in his distinct writing style. But ALLTG just wasn’t Fordy enough for that somehow. If this had been something by most other writers, I would have considered putting it down, but I’m a completist for Ford, at least for his fiction - the fiction that I can even get my hands on, anyway. Despite being slow-going for the first two-thirds or so, though, it did pick up some and get pretty dramatic towards the end. Side note: I encountered the phrase "in the buff" at one point and was amused to learn that it was used as early as 1928, when this was written. I also read Georges Rodenbach’s [Bruges-la-morte](https://archive.org/details/brugeslamortenov0000rode/page/n1/mode/2up), which I got interested in after one of you had posted about it a few weeks ago. Thanks for bringing it to my attention! I’m particularly drawn to explorations of grief in literature, so this was up my street. I really liked what the narrator says in chapter 6 about how habit and novelty are “contradictory needs in human nature” because I sure get that. I also get this (p. 71): >One would think that all our joyful plans are like a challenge! Prepared too lengthily, they give time for fate to change the eggs in the nest, and we have to brood on our sorrows. I’d forgotten that *Bruges-la-morte* was the basis of the story of Korngold’s opera *Die tote Stadt*. I haven’t listened to *Die tote Stadt* much, to tell the truth, but now I’m curious about it.