what I'm reading

amor fati

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'
....
My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants to have nothing different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear the necessary, still less to conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness before the necessary—but to love it.

- Nietzsche (epigraph to Atkinson's Life after Life)

Readsday

Readsday! Been forgetting about this for a while now apparently, holy shit WHOOPS. Got distracted by xposting GR reviews, I think.


What did you just finish reading?
Life after Life, Kate Atkinson, which was pretty amazing, even if she let the whole Hitler thread just kinda.....fizzle out. (Can threads fizzle?) A dud. A little reminiscent of Night Watch by Sarah Waters, and even Woolfian -- I don't think this is at all a coincidence, given the (terrific) character actually named "Miss Woolf." The characters were great and the pre-War, WWII and post-War settings were beautifully done. There is the problem of where to end a story of eternal recurrence, which she doesn't quite fix, but it was very good. It reminded me a bit of the pageant of English history at the end of Between the Acts, too. The breathless "What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?" blurb is really quite misleading, it's not Groundhog Day. More like a kaleidoscope - same material, unending patterns - or something like the Mandelbrot.

What are you reading now?
Not quite sure yet - I might go back to Anne Carson, whose work I am carefully rationing out to myself so I won't gobble it all and then be immediately bereft. I can't say much about her except "gorgeous" and "holy shit WOW" and "brain being rewired," especially by "The Glass Essay" and "Gender of Sound."  So far I have Nox, Plainwater, Red Doc, Eros the Bittersweet, Grief Lessons, Decreation, If Not, Winter, and Economy of the Unlost. Hoarding.

What do you expect to read next?
See above (why am I always writing these when I am between books? arrrgh). Maybe another Ian Rankin, for fun.


ETA: I wound up reading Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids, by Maia Szalavitz, no real idea why, except I needed to read it at some point for research and it bobbed to the top of my Kindle. It's really fucking depressing. Just came across this gem, tho: "She and her best friend found identical black pleather vests at the mall. Lulu also bought black pleather pants to match, her friend purchased a skirt of the same material, and they planned to wear Capezio shoes, skinny ties, and white shirts to complete their look." Insta-flashback to 1984. However, Lulu Corter wound up being "held in a New Jersey program called KIDS for thirteen years: from age thirteen to age twenty-six." That is going to be horrifying reading.

ETA 2: Finished that (a shattering but quick read) and am now on to The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England's Most Notorious Queen by Susan Bordo, the gift of a friend, which is very well-written and witty and completely enjoyable.

"I like, I need, to shape things"

Once I understood how much I admired novels, the layered, complex truths novels offer, I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do. The conflicting perspectives that a novel requires are precisely what fundamentalism forbids.

- Anouk Markovits interviewed by David Green, Haaretz-International Herald Tribune

I Am Forbidden by Anouk Markovits (GoodReads xpost)

I Am Forbidden by Anouk Markovits


And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother.


Well shit, I was totally not expecting that twist at the end. KAPOW.

I gobbled this up in one evening and -- I don't think it's a novel per se? (yeah I know that is such a useless categorization when you have books like the Odyssey and David Markson) -- it was more like a very long tale by a storyteller, or a collection of them. It had a real fairytale atmosphere, even though it was about horribly modern events....it's a real hybrid. These aren't even criticisms. Obviously the book knocked me on my ass and parts of it are beautiful and nearly all the characters are amazing. It reminded me a little bit of Briar Rose by Jane Yolen except the focus was all on the women.

I do think there was one big structural problem with the book -- up to A's leaving the family it's pretty much a day-by-day chronologically intact novel with minute psychological observations, and after that, BOOM, major time skips, and the chapters are much shorter -- the wedding, then five years! then ten years! then R's birth! then ten years! then R getting married! then J's birth! and so on. I can see why; I mean, if the entire story was written in the style of that first half, it would fill about four volumes. WWII and the Holocaust are pretty much giant lacunae (which fits the general theme) because those would completely drown out the other story.

I think this narration -- X begat Y begat Z -- is also deliberately Biblical, and totally in keeping with the idea of survival at any cost, the survival of generations, of Jews -- how do you survive as a Jew? How does Judaism survive? At what point do you stop being Jewish because of the terrible things you have to do to live? Is it even possible to make a bargain with God? -- it's easy to imagine the Rebbe or Josef thinking Just this once, and I'll confess what I did later....later....later.... and "later" never comes because confessing what you did would destroy the result, the reason why you did it.

Anyway, it's beautifully written and mesmerizing and gripping and even if the structure's wonky and there's some first novel-itis there, I'd buy anything else this author wrote unseen in a heartbeat. HEAR THAT AMAZON

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Resurrection Men (Inspector Rebus, #13) by Ian Rankin (GoodReads xpost)

Resurrection Men by Ian Rankin


Sadly disappointing....somehow, this book never lived up to its brilliant premise: Rebus, a walking nightmare of an employee, throws a mug of tea at his female boss and ex-lover and gets sent to a combination boot camp for recruits/rehab center for cops on their last chance. But really he's there undercover, trying to secretly investigate a ring of dirty cops....without revealing his own secrets about a cold case they've been assigned by surprise. Or is his boss trying to get rid of Rebus once and for all? Is he setting up innocent men or being set up himself? (It can't be a coincidence that a book whose plot depends so much on modern art is all about being framed....) One cop is known as "the Glasgow Rebus" which is what inspires our antihero to get set up in the first place. Does he want to smash the mirror and bring his double to justice, or join him in finally going all the way over the line? Like I said, brilliant.

But the story somehow just dies, unlike Rebus's beloved Saab, less than halfway through and I had to struggle to finish it, like chewing a bite of meat that in your mouth suddenly turns out to be all gristle. There's one sparking moment when Rebus and his double/nemesis Cafferty face each other in a tiny interview room, but the will-he nill-he ambiguity that should suffuse the pages is just....absent. Often these books read like novelizations of screenplays to me (yes I realize it's the other way round): good actors could bring the implicit tensions to life with eloquent voices and faces, but flat prose can't do it.

I did like Siobhan very much, and her prickliness caused by the way she constantly has to keep charming and soothing the men in her workplace in order to get them to just do their jobs and work with her, but also turn them down when they keep trying to bag her, and the cautious empathy she and her female boss have for each other. A subtheme of this book is women working with men, working for men, being seen as men's possessions, and there's one terrifying moment when the sexualized violence threatens Siobhan herself. But a few moments aren't enough to redeem the whole book.

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"He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein"

I went off to Elliott Bay YET AGAIN and this time they had one copy on the shelves of Autobiography of Red, not displayed anywhere near the hardback face-out copies of Red Doc. I snatched it up.

Bespectacled Bookstore Clerk Guy: "You were in here looking for Anne Carson before...."
Moi: "Yes, you have one copy!"

 He then praised Beauty of the Husband as his favourite Carson, which I hadn't read. I in turn told him about Antigonick, which he hadn't read. Amazon got no money. A good exchange.

(I also got a copy of Plainwater.)

Standing in Another Man's Grave (Inspector Rebus, #18) by Ian Rankin (GoodReads xpost)

Here we go, my very first crossposted GoodReads review. TAKE THAT, AMAZON!....haaaaah yeah. Well, I wanted a place to archive these anyway, and since nobody at LibraryThing answered my (plaintively repeated) question about whether or not I could export just reviews over there, here you go, lucky reader (or maybe this blog has two).

Standing in Another Man's Grave by Ian Rankin


Well, maybe if I say "fuck" a lot in this review Amazon won't seize it and lead it to an evil digital dungeon. ....wait, I say "fuck" all the time anyway.


A very enjoyable way to kill an afternoon. Not a good entry point for anyone not familiar with the series, but hell, it's the eighteenth book. For the rest of us, it's a nice installment.

Rankin, never very good with female characters, serves us up a weepy stalker in this one. I was hoping Rebus would drown her in a bucket of her own tears, but I hoped in vain. The book earns a major DING and DING again from me for making Siobhan and a high-ranking female colleague have a bad case of the Stupids, i.e. they're Not Rebus. (This is why people call me a bitch feminist.) (Then again, to be fair to Rankin, everyone in a series like this is Stupid because they're Not Rebus, so.) Major bonus points for Rebus just being Rebus. The murder and indeed the motive are really glossed over, and the romanticization of the Scottish Thugs 4 Lyf continues, but it's awesome to see Rebus just being Rebus again, which is sometimes all you want in a series.

Some dude named Fox whom I also wanted to drown in a bucket apparently visits from a less successful series Rankin is trying to launch, but fortunately only for four-five chapters total. Remember the Bond movie where Judi Dench dressed down -- which one was it then, Timothy Dalton? -- at the beginning and then he went on Bonding his way all over the movie anyway? It's like that. Fox is foiled, of course, not just by being a berk but by Not Being Rebus. The supposed theme of the book is dinosaurs of the past dying off and a newer generation moving up and moving on, except, well, Rebus. He half-heartedly cuts back on Silk Cuts and trades his IPA for Irn-Bru, but his poor physical shape is emphasized throughout the novel, his heart banging alarmingly at times. It doesn't matter, though: the most unkillable character in modern literature, after the immortal vampire, is the murder dick. I think when Christie died, at the end of his series Poirot was something like eighty-five and yet still looked forty. Twitter and cell phone snaps enter the picture, but what solves it is good old-fashioned flatfoot footwork by Rebus, because, well, what else are you reading the series for?*

The musical selection is, as always, pretty great and the title mondegreen is woven in very well. If the publishers could wrest rights away from the music industry to include a CD or soundtrack link in each book they'd make a mint. (I seem to remember Rankin had a book playlist on last.fm a while ago? but I doubt it still works.) I predict this book will be amazing to American readers because Rebus damnear puts a girdle round Scotland in forty minutes, and here that wouldn't get you halfway through Montana. Rebus' enduring, dangerous, manipulative-on-both-sides relationship with Cafferty is very good. It'd be great to see another book where they really clash.

Nobody would call Rankin a great writer (well, I wouldn't take them seriously if they did) but certain images are haunting: the rained-on full grave at the beginning, a pale hand barely visible at night reaching out of a shallow grave deep in a forest, ghosts of missing and dead girls haunting CCTV footage and cell phones....Despite the indefatigable nature of Rebus, whatever immortality he has depends on his fictional status: his unreality. Whereas for the rest of us, whatever's making us stand in or just above the open grave, death sooner or later shoves us all down into it. And that's not even a crime.


*Colin Dexter cemented his curmudgeonly status once and for all by killing off Morse, which I applaud intellectually but I've only been able to read that book and see that series (in which John Thaw was phenomenal) just the once.

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books read in April 2013

Fiction is in red.

56. Standing in Another Man's Grave, Ian Rankin
57. Resurrection Men, Ian Rankin
58. Symptoms of Withdrawal: A Memoir of Snapshots and Redemption, Christopher Kennedy Lawford
59. The Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
60. I Am Forbidden, Anouk Markovits
61. Glass, Irony & God, Anne Carson
62. Life after Life, Kate Atkinson
63. Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids, Maia Szalavitz
64. The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England's Most Notorious Queen, Susan Bordo
65. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-Earth, John Garth
66. Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal, Melanie Warner
67. The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
68. Scotch Verdict: The Real-Life Story That Inspired "The Children's Hour", Lillian Faderman (WONDERFUL)
69. So Much Pretty, Cara Hoffman (basically R-rated Jodi Picoult)
70. Tiger, Tiger, Margaux Fragoso
71. Food Rules, Michael Pollan
72. Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953, Elizabeth Winder
73. Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety, Daniel B. Smith
74. Dead in the Scrub, B.J. Oliphant
75. Deservedly Dead, B.J. Oliphant
76. Death and the Delinquent, B.J. Oliphant
77. Rage Against the Dying, Becky Masterman
78. Music: What Happened?, Scott Miller
79. The Other Child, Charlotte Link
80. A Certain Slant of Light, Laura Whitcomb
81. Plainwater, Anne Carson
82. Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation, Dan Fagin

2013 booklist 

"Now that you own publishing, what are you going to do with it?"

We're facing a new digital Dark Age. One where every bit of human knowledge is owned and locked down in DRM protected silos and only released when its corporate owners are paid. One where the profit motive governs every human transaction, where knowledge is power and power is money and knowledge only goes to those who can pay and we spiral in to a cycle of human ignorance that drags us back down in to the intellectual squalor of the dark ages.

- "An Open Letter to Jeff Bezos"

if there's a way out it will be / step by step through the black

Transcendental musical experiences that are not wearing out: the last verse of "Riding with the Ghost" ("I put my foot to the floor to make up for the miles I've been losing / I've been running out of things I didn't even know I was using") and the last thundering two minutes of "Farewell Transmission" with the wailing guitars and crooning chorus and drums all dying out to the final repeated commands: "Listen!.....Listen!.....Listen!" and then the music stops.

(Dammit, Jason.)

"mine mine mine"

I was looking through my reviews on GoodReads to see which ones I wanted to xpost here after the Amazon debacle, and this amused me:

Easter

On this day, in 2002, I quit drinking. One of the hardest things I ever did (see also: quitting smoking). And every time I wake up, I'm still grateful I was able to do it.

no longer on the map

Once her critical descent started, Maud's (L.M. Montgomery's) loss of status would continue steadily until her death. Not until near the end of the twentieth century, long after she was dead, would literary critics dismantle and discredit the norms that the entire generation of academic critics had worked so hard to establish in the 1930s, norms that pushed popular fiction -- and almost all women's writing -- completely out of the canon and off the map of literary culture.

 -- Mary Henley Rubio, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings

Ursula K. Le Guin on "accidental discovery"

My “research method” was to go to the largest library accessible to me, get into the stack where some books about whatever it was were, and blunder around in those shelves pulling off books until I found the ones I needed. I mean, how much can you know from the title? One book on Ancient Roman Sewers will be useless and the one next to it will be a revelation. But riffling through to establish such judgments seems immensely easier to do with an actual bound book than with the page-by-page limitation of a reading device.

From her blog (how much does it delight me that Ursula K. Le Guin has a blog? Almost as much as it does that Margaret Atwood has a Twitter.) (And, of course, Chaucer....) (Someone should really do a series of blogs by famous authors. Think of Juvenal's. Or worse, Martial's.)

Peter Dickinson: two Pibble novels

I was reading back through some of these entries and thought, "Shit, it's been a long time since I said anything about a book I liked." It's that old conundrum about how it's always easier to write about times you were upset or movies you hated, e.g. why Milton's Satan has all the best lines: there's something about being happy or uplifted that's hard to put into words. At any rate, I disliked the very negative emphasis here so far, so I'm crossposting some quick'n dirty reviews from that site I used to love.

Sleep and His Brother was the first Dickinson I've ever read, after a friend reviewed it -- I like procedurals and detective series, and other bookish friends had mentioned they liked Dickinson's prose style, so I was in. (I managed to snatch up a grand pile -- ten battered paperbacks! cheap! -- of Dickinson from a local used bookstore, only to get home and gnash my teeth on finding none of them were Pibbles.) I found this book (not the first in the series, but you can read them out of sequence, or at least I have) very oddly compelling. I can't think of very many good procedurals which also have supernatural setups -- Kate Wilhelm's Death Qualified is another (I'm sure there are more, that's just one of the few I can think of right now). Very satisfying in that first-five-minutes-of-Prime-Suspect way in which everything's happening and you can't figure it out and it all isn't neatly explained, so the plot stretches your brain a bit. The book was originally published in 1971 and some of the gender issues are very dated -- a scientist will "never" marry a young heiress because of her genetic background (can't they....just not have kids? adopt?), many nurses are pinched, women are automatically and bluntly rated on an attractiveness scale when they first enter the narrative, and so on. But the female characters themselves were quite good -- I liked the spoiled Doll, the comically gruesome Lady Sospice, and "poor Posey" all very much.

The book really isn't about genetics or telepathy or corruption or crime at all, although Dickinson weaves all these themes into his central, real one: obsession. The Dormice-children are like little fleshy rings of Gyges: what they are matters less than what other people do with them. And the book itself is almost hypnotically gripping....like the sleepy children themselves, eerily alluring. Dickinson makes even the tremendously stale copper-confronts-the-sympathetic-bad-guy endpiece (which actually happens twice) interesting -- it's a dangerous skill, like a knife: bright but with an edge.


The Old English Peep Show (a better, earlier title was Pride of Heroes) doesn't have any supernatural elements, but it was just as weirdly mesmerizing as Sleep and His Brother. Dickinson has the real, odd gift of making me read straight through in a day about almost entirely unsympathetic people in very puzzling environments. He doesn't coddle his reader at all, but he won't lie or trick you, either; he plainly, coolly plants two ENORMOUS clues near the beginning, and when they're recalled nearly a hundred pages later, I swore out loud and flipped back, sure I hadn't missed them -- but I had. He reminds me a little of Christie, except he's deliberately iconoclastic where she's more conservative. Parts of this book must have seemed much more daring in the late sixties, barely two decades after WWII, with its debunking of a mythical Naval operation and references to "Winnie." The people are nearly all cardboard but somehow vivid, and Pibble is a complete schlub but somehow it's a pleasure watching him doggedly tease everything out.

Dickinson's prose style is amazing -- poetic but concise, stripped bare but never ostentatiously simple. I've heard friends say they find Dickinson off-putting, and I think part of it is in how nearly everyone is lying and trying to conceal their motives, which of course fits well into the typical mystery plot. But there's a sort of cold rock-bottom callousness about human nature -- as Ginsberg wrote of Junky, "the stoic cold-humor'd eye on crime." I suppose you could call him an uncozy mystery writer.


(Side note: .....I first read Junky when I was about fourteen ((yes)) in an edition that had Ginsberg's introduction, and his phrase was so striking I've remembered it ever since -- but Google wouldn't cough it up so I had to check my 50th anniversary copy to be sure, and realized only then my lifelong tic of spelling "humour" and "favour" (probably too much Dickens as a kid) was what had gotten in the way.

(Yeah.)

LibraryThing vs GoodReads

LibraryThing is now offering free accounts through Sunday.

There is no such thing as a free web 2.0 service. We are the product. If a "free" service built LARGELY on entirely volunteer reviewing, cataloguing, ranking and commenting can be sold for over a billion, with no profit or consideration given to the people who provided all the content, that demonstrates it like nothing else.

For all the (justified) worrying about data mining and reviews, the target of Amazon's buying GoodReads was probably Bookish, and definitely Barnes and Noble. The Nook is doing terribly. Since GR is now basically Amazon's book social network, and since more people than ever are now reading digital books on phones and tablets, this is going to pump steroids into the sales of the Kindle Fire, with its extreme DRM.

A bad day for booklovers.

Readsday

Readsday! Man, this just never gets old. Maybe now we'll see a resurgence in bookblogging since Amazon and GoodReads joined up in unholy matrimony? Can we get Anton Scalia to be unhappy about that? No? Right, right.

What did you just finish reading?
Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, Therese Anne Fowler. Flat-out terrible. Full of anachronisms and totally wrong speech patterns, and even worse, Scott and Zelda don't sound like themselves at all. (SAMPLE DIALOGUE: "I went to the window. 'I never woulda thought it. Not like this.' I turned back toward him. 'You're sorta impressive.'") There's really no excuse for this, since so many letters and stories and novels by both Fitzgeralds have been published, as well as an infinitude of biographies. As near as I can tell most of the good parts are pretty much straight out of Sally Cline's Zelda biography, anyway. Too much of it reads like a bad movie script: flat dialogue, lots of summary instead of action, and barely any description.

More seriously, Fowler also has the main acrimony between Hemingway and Zelda start after he makes a pass and she turns him down -- which is really off, Hemingway wouldn't have made a pass at her when Fitzgerald was cultivating him, AND he tended to let women make passes at him, which they frequently did. This is more important than it sounds because in the book, Hemingway is the reason the marriage fails, and Scott denies his homoerotic attraction, and expects Zelda to be more "wifely," and then she goes off to the asylum.

How much better would it have been if Fowler had stuck to the facts -- from the first, Zelda thought Hemingway was overly macho and "phony" (anticipating feminist 20th century criticism by how many decades?) and this shocked everyone. (She told Gerald Murphy -- another male artist in denial about his sexuality who was in thrall to Ernest -- that Hemingway was "bogus.") Hemingway's "proof" in his memoir of Zelda's insanity is when she asks him if Al Jolson isn't greater than Christ; the Murphys, who knew her much better, also heard her say that and never thought she was crazy. It was the era of the shocking wisecrack, and both she and Scott delighted in showing off how much they didn't give a damn. Zelda never took any shit from anyone and said exactly what was on her mind. Sometimes, the mentally unstable have a weird kind of absolute radar for lying and bullshit -- they're very sensitive to it. All that meant she and EH were trouble from the start. I think it does injustice to both of them to blame it all on EH making a pass at her.

Worse, Fowler omits a lot of Zelda's actual bad behaviour -- some of which was high spirits, some of which was bad behaviour on purpose (she and Scott putting purses and wallets into sauce, &c) especially when drunk, and some of which was clearly erratic. Zelda was self-destructive and talented and frustrated and ambitious and more than a bit nuts, and she deserves so much more than either the stereotype of "mad bitch of a wife" or "victimized genius." She loved daring fearless pranks, but this author makes them into hollow performances Scott forced her into. There's just so little of Zelda's actual vitality and amazing boldness in this book. It's sad.  

What are you reading now?
For ONCE, this neatly segues into: Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise, by Sally Cline. This is only the second full-length biography of Zelda since Nancy Milford's 1970 book, which was groundbreaking but frequently sentimental, and of necessity partial. Cline has access to far more unpublished writing of Zelda's, especially letters, and fascinatingly parallels Zelda and Scott partisans with "Plath and Hughes camps" -- if, as Beauvoir reportedly said, "marriage is a dangerous thing for a woman," it seems perilous indeed for a creative woman to marry a creative man (as Anne Sexton wrote about her own affair with another poet: "There is too much food and no one left over / to eat up all the weird abundance"). This book has all the advantages of new scholarship plus the social impact of feminism since 1970, and while there are odd errors here and there, Cline is certainly more rigorous than Milford.

However, if Milford's writing was often florid, Cline is dry, dry, dry. It is just about as hard to get a sense of Zelda's boldness and bright spirit from this biography as from Z, which is a real shame. I'm chewing through it, but it's going very slowly. It's one of those books you only read for the information in it, which is sort of like chewing through raw asparagus to make sure you get enough fiber in your diet.

What do you expect to read next?
This always stumps me (as indeed, it stumps most of my friends). Probably something lighter?.....I do have Red Doc, and Custom of the Country, and The Illness Narratives, and Holograms of Fear, and and and....


-- Damn, I forgot to write up Peter Dickinson, who is really something. And I'm sparing you all the RADICAL changes in diet I have made since being terrified by Salt Sugar Fat: BE GRATEFUL. Fruit! Vegetables! No cheese! Perhaps no more cheese ever again! .....God, I miss cheese.

well, holy shit

Amazon looked back to its roots in bookselling and forward to its future as the global overlord of all reading and writing by announcing its plan today to purchase social reading site Goodreads.

Readsday, shambling back into the light like a zombie

Better late than never at all....still not in that great a mood, and the death of Jason Molina was fucking shattering (organ failure from alcoholism at thirty-nine), but I don't want to get completely out of the habit. Baby steps. Baby steps on the bus.


What did you just finish reading?
Uhh, some truly awful trashy true crime books, both nonfiction and novels. A little more seriously, Constance: The Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde, which was very sluggish at first and all about Constance and Oscar's external doings to a maddening extent (she appeared dressed like this! he went off on a lecture tour dressed like that!), but then picked up the terrible tragic weight that the downhill slope of Oscar's story always does. (You have to wonder if Oscar's apparent suicidality in bringing the original libel case, and then later going back to Bosie and abandoning Constance after prison, didn't derive from a deep wish for his life to seem a perfect Greek tragedy.) We don't really get a better picture of Constance -- that might be impossible now -- but at least she doesn't come off as a simpering ignorant stereotypical Victorian female dupe. (Interestingly, she might have written or at least collaborated on the fairy tale "The Selfish Giant," which was used as a framing device in the visually lush but psychologically unconvincing 1997 Wilde -- that presented the very odd spectacle of Jude Law and Stephen Fry being perfectly cast with pretty much nothing to act.)

What are you reading now?
Salt Sugar Fat, which is threatening to do for processed "food" what Fast Food Nation did for Mickey D's. The real evil of a lot of corporate executives, and the bizarre moral neutrality of a lot of "food science" researchers (who are just like the tobacco industry researchers -- the book makes the point, over and over again, that the giant tobacco companies own the giant food companies, and often use the same advertising tactics) is horrifying. You can read along with my bogglement here. The really unsettling thing is how deeply corruption, greed and exploitation is woven into corporate culture: they're the butchers, and we're the cattle. Like most people I first heard of this book after reading the author's New York Times article, which is a pretty good summary, but lacks the building horror that comes from his piling detail upon detail, page after page.

What do you expect to read next?
A dear friend just showered me with a lot of NYRB books, so I'm utterly spoiled for choice here. Fermor! Zweig! Bernhard! Blackwood! I'm having fun just looking through the titles. It cheered me up quite a bit.

I want you to get together

Why yes I AM VERY excited for this thank you (the fake Shakespeare snobs* are already dissing this to high heaven, just like they did the Tennant/Tate Much Ado. Idiots).

Also, new favourite band - hello!


*How you can tell a true fake Shakespeare snob -- they will go on and on about the 1964 Russian version of Hamlet when they speak no Russian. Trust me on this. It is an infalliable litmus test.

and in case you thought I was kidding....

.....about that book on Plath, part of it went:

Steven Gould Axelrod reads 'The Colossus' as an allegory of patriarchal domination of female creativity where the metaphors of destruction and incomprehension exemplified by the incoherent animal voices of stanza one lament the oppressed, silenced voice of the woman poet. Crucially, though, Axelrod finds that the poem demonstrates the....

and I don't know what comes after that, because I had fallen asleep in my chair, and when I woke up I decided to try something else.

Linkses!

The Infinite Jest liveblog
(Ah, the end of IJ. "I threw the book across the room!" "It was like waiting for your friend to give you a dead arm and instead taking a brick to the face." Or simply, "AAAAAARRRRRGGGHHHH.")

(You wanna know what the end of IJ means? I studied conic geometry and calculus a little at SJC, so I can actually tell you. IT'S A TANGENT. No, that's not a joke. Go look it up.)

Salinger's early Holden Caufield stories. Hmm, the book is a buck-ninety-nine? I might get this.

Interview with Anne Carson! sort of. Her emails sound brilliant.

Fuck yeah Tin House and Granta. They will be getting some of my money.

Readsday!

A friend of mine came up with that title, which I find delightful, since if you miss Wednesday that's okay, and another friend switched the order of the first and second questions so they're actually easier to answer.....other people were talking about basically making this recurring post a snapshot of the books you're reading right now, as opposed to feeling obligated to write up capsule reviews of everything you've read during the week (with me, this is usually three to five books) or even full-length reviews of two or more books every week -- which, no. (Altho a lot of people doing this -- me included -- were hoping this would push them into more regular book-reviewing again, which, also no.)

So: Readsday.


What did you just finish reading?
I just came off being sick, and then the migraine moved in for a Surprise Flank Attack (apparently triggered by a BPAL perfume called, wait for it.....Our Lady of Pain ((NO LAUGHING)) ((okay, go ahead, it's funny)) ) which meant yesterday was lost to head pain and severe nausea, and today might very well be too. Migraines: you go with the riptide. A friend who suffers much worse migraines (and also had to be weaned off Perks by her doctor, FUN) has tried out every chronic pain clinic in the country, just about, and I admit it's still hard for me to think of migraines that way: they're "just" oh yeah those crippling headaches that make it impossible to go to school or work or write or even read much that happen a couple of times a month. Thank you, Christian Science upbringing. Vitamin I(buprofen), you are my favourite.

All of which is a very long-winded way of saying I did nothing much but comfort-reread Terry Pratchett. Witches Abroad, Thud, Hogfather, Lords and Ladies, Wyrd Sisters, Going Postal, all old favourites that never let me down. I even reread Witches Abroad twice. I tried some not-new-to-me Pratchetts I haven't reread in some years, too: Feet of Clay, Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, and one I had apparently just skipped over entirely, The Fifth Elephant. They were.....okay. I'm now at the point where I'm starting to notice not just repeated plot points and characterizations but actual phrases (for some reason he's fond of a "perfect chrysanthemum" of soot appearing on walls after a small explosion), so I better find something else. ....hmmm, maybe Hound of the Baskervilles or The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, those are old sickbed friends. I've been eyeing The Italian Secretary, but....I d'know.

What are you reading now?
Not exactly reading it, but looking at The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, which just arrived and is mainly reminding me how awkward I find High Academese to just read. The disappearing of middlebrow lit journals and little magazines has also meant that there's now nothing much in between the desperate-to-be-hip slanginess of book blogs and academia (which is itself endangered) (I can't be too broken up about that). Just once I would like to read a book of critical theory without names like Derrida and Irigaray and Cixous and Foucault (Foucault! can't he just be taken down by a pack of feral neopragmatists like the Stephens Island Wren? Or maybe that happened already, and his spectre is doomed to haunt the powers of Old Europe, forever) being tossed into the mix like so much post-structuralist flavouring.  Just once. "Remember, fledgling critics, you can always add more salt Lévi-Strauss, but you can't ever take him out."

What do you expect to read next?
.....I really have no idea, it's hard to focus (no, I can't take heavy-duty painkillers, thanks for asking). I might go back to bed. I might read The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland, which just arrived, except something that unrelentingly twee might stun me in my weakened state, or kill even more brain cells than a migraine. Maybe after a nap.

-- Wow, migraines seem to encourage profusions of parentheses.

xposted from (God help us) Tumblr

Hey all you naifs who reblogged this snippet! I “hearted” it (O modern nomenclature) and scrolled on, only to wonder later, Why the hell would Louis-Ferdinand Celine, genius and psycho, say something as soppy as that? Turns out he didn’t mean it to be that soppy.

Context is a wonderful thing:
 
Woman is very troubled, because clearly she has every kind of known weakness. She needs … she wants to stay young. She has her menopause, her periods, the whole genital business, which is very delicate, it makes a martyr out of her, doesn’t it, so this martyr lives anyway, she bleeds, she doesn’t bleed, she goes and gets the doctor, she has operations, she doesn’t have operations, she gets re-operated, then in between she gives birth, she loses her shape, all that’s important. She wants to stay young, keep her figure, well. She doesn’t want to do a thing and she can’t do a thing. She hasn’t any muscle. It’s an immense problem … hardly recognized. It supports the beauty parlors, the quacks, and the druggists. But it doesn’t present an interesting medical situation, woman’s decline. It’s obviously a fading rose, you can’t say it’s a medical problem, or an agricultural problem. In a garden, when you see a rose fade, you accept it. Another one will bloom. Whereas in woman, she doesn’t want to die. That’s the hard part.
 
…..that doesn’t sound quite so Hallmarky, now does it?

(I unhearted it. The modern form of protest. I guess.) 


-- I mean for Chrissakes, it was Celine! Certified wingnut! It would be like Genet saying "A pretty girl is like a melody"! You wouldn't just reblog that and move on, would you?....well....well obviously people would. They're probably all the same people who reblogged that fake Virginia Woolf quote. sigh.

reading Wednesday

Feeling too ill and depressed to try a reading Wednesday post this week. Maybe next time.

"without faith and without hope"

In the meantime she continued to dictate, sometimes supine on the floor. The necessity to speak her prose was tremendously discouraging, but as she would tell Marianne Moore a few years later, "It also taught me a lesson. When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, without faith and without hope....suddenly the work will find itself."

 -- Isak Dinesen: Life of a Storyteller, Judith Thurman

books read in March 2013

Fiction is in red.

39. With or Without You, Domenica Ruta (well, that was fucking heartbreaking)
40. Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape, Jenna Miscavige Hill (ditto)
41. Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles, Jeanette Winterson
42. Sane: Mental Illness, Addiction, and the 12 Steps, Marya Hornbacher
43. Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power, Marya Hornbacher
44. Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill
45. Cocaine's Son, Dave Itzkoff
46. The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett
47. The Folklore of Discworld, Terry Pratchett
48. A Blink of the Screen, Terry Pratchett
49. Constance: The Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde, Franny Moyle
50. The Real Holden Caufield, Michael Moats
51. Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, Michael Moss
52. Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, Therese Anne Fowler (one of the worst books I've read in a good long while)
53. The Old English Peep Show, Peter Dickinson
54. Sleep and His Brother, Peter Dickinson
55. Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise, Sally Cline

2013 booklist

winter's tale

One year, a century ago, spring was late in Denmark. During the last days of March, the Sound was ice-bound, and blind, from the Danish to the Swedish coast. The snow in the fields and on the roads thawed a little in the day, only to freeze again at night; the earth and the air were equally without hope or mercy.

Then one night, after a week of raw and clammy fog, it began to rain. The hard, inexorable sky over the dead landscape broke, dissolved into streaming life and became one with the ground. On all sides the incessant whisper of falling water re-echoed; it increased and grew into a song. The world stirred beneath it; things drew breath in the dark. Once more it was announced to the hills and valleys, to the woods and the chained brooks: “You are to live.”

— Isak Dinesen, opening of “Peter and Rosa,” from Winter’s Tales

reading Wednesday

I have my period, T has the flu, and I am probably getting the flu, so this will be short. I wanted to write something about Janet Reitman's Inside Scientology, but that will have to wait. Ain't nothin' goin' on but the rent around here.

What are you reading now?
Rebel Angels, Libba Bray -- yeah yeah as always with the popular books I'm years behind everyone else. I started A Great and Terrible Beauty before I felt like shit but these books are perfect sickbed reading: light, fluffy, silly and not requiring that terribly much concentration. So far the middle book is unpromising, filled with if-you-didn't-read-the-first-book exposition dump, and you can see the Plot Gears grinding grudgingly into motion.....fifty pages in.  The GoodReads reviews (I know, I know) universally lament the third book as terrible, so I'm guessing this trilogy follows the Hunger Games plan: good first book, sequel squeezed out under contract, third book a piping hot mess. I am so tired of genre authors apparently submitting one good first novel and then having trilogy contracts pressed upon them. DON'T SIGN! DON'T SIGN! (In case you think I am exaggerating: "Do you remember when you broke the [spoiler] and freed your [spoiler]?" WHY NO, MY FAITHFUL YET MYSERIOUS COMPANION, THANK YOU FOR REMINDING ME. Gahhh.)

What did you just finish reading?
See above. I did comfort-reread some Pratchett, which is almost de rigeur when I'm getting sick (favourites: Wyrd Sisters, Witches Abroad, Going Postal, Night Watch). When I grow old, fuck wearing purple, I want to be Granny Weatherwax. I also reread "Peter and Rosa" from Winter's Tales a couple of times, because it's gorgeous. ("Peter and Rosa," "The Sailor-Boy's Tale," The Pearls" and "The Dreaming Child" are my favourites from that book.)

What do you expect to read next?
Probably The Sweet Far Thing, altho it does sound just terrible. 

-- Well, not a terribly thrilling update here, but I do want to keep in the habit of writing this every week, even if I'm sick.