ovid's heroines

Very excited about this.

Readsday

Reading Wednesday! On time and even early for once! (No I did NOT stay up all night, thank you very much, I woke up about 2 hours ago, after maybe 12 hours of sleep. Hi-ho. Morning looks rather strange, all fresh-washed and sparkling, when you're a permanent citizen of the nightside.)

What did you just finish reading?
A whole bunch of modern urban fantasy -- late Russell Hoban, Ben Aaronovitch (rather disappointing), Paul Cornell ('these characters were originally written for a TV series,' and boy does it show -- still enjoyable tho).  Fun, but sort of like that moment sitting in the movie theatre when you realize you've eaten nearly all the popcorn in the jumbo-size box you're holding.  I love Hoban to bits and pieces, always have, and I'm so delighted we got something like TEN new novels from him after the silence of the nineties, but the later books just aren't up to the earlier ones. It's like Peter S. Beagle's post-2000 second renaissance of so many short stories -- delightful, but not quite like it was. But nothing is ever quite like it was at first, and more Hoban, or more Beagle, is only something to treasure. Angelica's Grotto was surprisingly OK (given its awful premise, and even more awful cover) until the terribly botched ending, Amaryllis Night and Day was very charming and had a good twist (even if he didn't seem to know quite what to do with it), and Angelica Lost and Found was like a beautiful little finial on his whole career. There was a great quote from a Grauniad review of it:

.....he's asking, very entertainingly, deeper questions about belief and reality, about storytelling and the nature of life. "Two kinds of reality," a character shrugs. "It happens." Yes, it does happen, every time you read a book, every time you tell a story, every time a character like Volatore or Angelica yearns for more than just the narrative that traps them. Much as we often do in life.


Broken Homes was very well-written, as always, full of great characters and set pieces, ditto, and has the narrative pace of a hot-air balloon and ends on a GIANT, completely unresolved cliffhanger. I special-ordered this book from the UK because I didn't want to have to wait for the US Kindle edition in FEBRUARY, and now I feel like a patsy. I hate and despise cliffhangers (you should have heard the wails of despair when my parents took me to see The Empire Strikes Back in the theatre), and I'm beginning to get really fed up with fantasy series that have Grand Overarching Plots to keep the sales going but which also don't really ever resolve said Grand Overarching Plots, to keep the sales going. Which makes it sound like I hated the book, or personally resent its author, and I really don't. I just hate cliffhangers. Which is a personal preference, but when the publishing industry seems to be using cliffhangers as a desperate move to keep sales going, that's what makes me actually angry. (See also: the dreadfully edited/marketed Blackout/All Clear, and the way a lot of first books in fantasy series don't have "series" anywhere on the cover or even in the back pages.)

London Falling was nowhere near as well-written (at first I couldn't tell the characters apart, the prose style is so pedestrian you want it to catch a bus, and the author keeps resorting to constant ! and even ?! in reported speech and thoughts), but damn, that was a fast-paced narrative, and surprisingly moving by the end. The last scene is obviously sequelbait, but not in an annoying way, and I was very pleased at how a female character who seemed offstage was brought naturally into the foreground. (Aaronovitch tries to do that in his novel, and fails pretty completely.) However, the female villain is an express trip to Misogyny Land, and there's a long, terribly ill-judged, anachronistic and baffling interlude sort of from her POV which neither really explains her character or makes us feel sympathy of any kind for her. Broken Homes really fails its main female character right at the end, but in a way that's maybe fixable (SPOILERS). But I fear that isn't the author's intent. -- That said, Broken Homes has a mixed-race narrator and two major characters in London Falling are black (one is also gay), and that was really nice.

What are you reading now?
Just started Chuck Klosterman's I Wear the Black Hat, a gift from a very generous friend -- again: I was looking at it but then saw the first pages of Falling London, and fell down that rabbit hole instead. I have to be a little careful with Klosterman -- I enjoy his stuff, but I have to be in just the right mood for it, otherwise he sounds like some deranged suburban Midwest version of Woody Allen.

What do you expect to read next?
The Zauberberg group read loooooms out of the mist ahead of me, like Everest first seen from Base Camp. Oy vey. I just hope I don't wind up like Joe Simpson.

editing is dead

You mean whitED sepulchure. WHITED. Not white. 'White sepulchure' makes no fucking sense.

- me on reading London Falling

considering Hoban

Lessee, how much Hoban have I got left -

The Mouse and His Child 
The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz 
Kleinzeit 
Turtle Diary 
Riddley Walker 
Pilgermann 
The Medusa Frequency 
The Moment under The Moment 
A Russell Hoban Omnibus 
Fremder 
Mr. Rinyo-Clacton's Offer 
Angelica's Grotto 
Angelica Lost and Found

Amaryllis Night and Day
The Bat Tattoo
Her Name Was Lola
Come Dance with Me
Linger Awhile
My Tango with Barbara Strozzi

Linger Awhile and Tango don't look that great, but I'm looking forward to Amaryllis and Bat. I thought I knew where Lola and Dance are, but maybe not, ARGH. (In the UK ALL of his books are available for Kindle! BUT NOT HERE.)

Hmmm, I don't have The Carrier Frequency, The Second Mrs Kong, the Riddley Walker play, or Soonchild and The Trokeville Way, altho those don't look that interesting. Also 'One Less Octopus at Paxos' in Granta and his last short story. I wonder if his publisher'll do a new posthumous collection....they should, he was the one who said death would be good for his career, after all.

my tolerance for reading about young well-off white men is at an all-time low

With “& Sons,” David Gilbert....has set out to write a big, ambitious book about fathers and sons, Oedipal envy and sibling rivalry, and the dynamics between art and life, talent and virtue....The novel also contains some razor-edge glimpses of literary life in Manhattan, and the rarefied latitudes inhabited by old Upper East Side money. - nytimes.com

PASS.


(Also featured on that website today: the story of a man who lost a $150K job as 'vice president of a student loan company' ((below advertising executive, in my book)) and "reinvented himself" two years and one $188,000 severance package later by accepting a $75K job at Merrill Lynch. Then he quit and had another full-time job offer teaching abroad. PS He took it.)

un dia

into the spin

over the wall

Reading is not as insignificant as we claim. First we must steal the key to the library. Reading is a provocation, a rebellion: we open the book’s door, pretending it is a simple paperback cover, and in broad daylight escape! We are no longer there: this is what real reading is. If we haven’t left the room, if we haven’t gone over the wall, we’re not reading.

- Hélène Cixous

Magic Mann* reading schedule

From here, written by Kalliope:


Week 1: August 12 - 18. 
Read from Chapter 1, “Arrival” (Ankunft) p. 3, until the beginning of Chapter 3 “One Word too Many” (Ein Wort zu viel) p. 81.

Week 2: August 19 - 25. 
Read from “One Word too Many” p. 81, until the beginning of Chapter 4 “Table Talk” (Tischgespräche) p. 158.

Week 3: August 26 – September 1. 
Read from “Table Talk” p. 158, until the beginning of Chapter 5 “My God, I see it!” (Mein Gott, ich sehe!) p 242.

Week 4: September 2 - 8. 
Read from “My God, I see it!” p. 242, until the beginning of Chapter 5 “Research” (Forschungen) p. 318

Week 5: September 9 - 15. 
Read from “Research” p. 318, until the beginning of Chapter 5 “Walpurgis Night” (Walpurgisnacht) p. 382.

Week 6: September 16 - 22. 
Read from “Walpurgis Night” p. 382 until the beginning of Chapter 6 “The City of God an Evil Deliverance” (Von Gottesstaat und von übler Erlösung) p. 458.

Week 7: September 23 – 29. 
Read from “The City of God an Evil Deliverance” p. 458, until Chapter 6 “Operationes Spirituales” p. 521.

Week 8: September 30 – October 6. 
Read from “Operationes Spirituales” (Latin title) p. 521, until the beginning of Chapter 6 “A Good Soldier” p. 590.

Week 9: October 7 – 13. 
Read from “A Good Soldier” (Als Soldat und brav) p. 590, until the beginning of Chapter 7 “Vingt et un” p. 659.

Week 10: October 14 – 20. 
Read from “Vingt et un”(French title) p. 659, until the beginning of “Mynheer Peeperkorn – Conclusion” (Mynheer Peeperkorn – Schluss) p. 729.

Week 11: October 21 – 27. 
Read from “Mynheer Peeperkorn – Conclusion” p. 729, until the beginning of “The Great Petulance” (Die grosse Gereiztheit) p. 813

Week 12: October 28 – November 3. 
Read from “The Great Petulance” p. 813, until the end of the novel in p. 854.



*eternal Heart fan, no apologies

Reading Wednesday

Readsday returns! On a proper Wednesday even! The stunning shock!

What did you just finish reading?
Summer, by Edith Wharton. I'm trying to get back into reading fiction, and baby-stepping myself with short novels and collections of short stories.  This book was short all right, but pretty damn haunting. It's not written in absolutely stunning prose, I didn't even like reading it sometimes (life in a small rural town is all too well-portrayed), but the heroine is amazing and there was something really compelling about it -- about her.  I wound up carrying the book around the apartment with me because I kept picking it up when I was supposed to be doing something else. It gets paired a lot with good old Ethan Frome, apparently, but it reminded me more of Chopin's Awakening, except (SPOILER) the girl doesn't die at the end.  The top-rated reviewer on GoodReads apparently thought it was about as sexy as a bathtub full of ice cubes, which tells you all you need to know about GoodReads (and its reviewer ranking system) right there. Marilyn French, in an exquisite introduction, argues that Ethan Frome remained in print and on school curricula because in it illicit sexual love is punished (it's also the story of a man. Narrated by another man). Summer was criticized because the lovers seem to "get away with it" -- only it's Wharton, so nobody gets away with anything. She reminds me of that supposed Spanish proverb: "Take what you want, God said, and pay for it." Wharton's stories are a full accounting of the price paid.

What are you reading now?
 I was rereading Lords and Ladies, but I might have worn that one out. My period's over (it routinely flattens me for at least a week, EVERY damn month) and I still feel crappy, so I might go back to bed with another Wilkie Collins (recently read The Law and the Lady, and it was fabulous, and simultaneously deeply, cringingly problematic about the mentally ill and the disabled for about the last third. That was some combo). Collins is really ideal sickbed reading, for me. But that's more about

What do you expect to read next?
This always fucking stumps me. I might read Collins, I might try Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales which I haven't reread in over a decade, I might FINALLY pick up Russell Hoban's last book, Angelica Lost and Found. -- But I feel a little sad, and odd, about reading his last book, but also paranoid that even though I have agoraphobia and almost never leave my house, I'll get hit by a bus or something before I can get to it. -- Speedboat, The Dream of Perpetual Motion, Hav, Shaggy Muses....just a few in the Kindle queue.  So many books! Only two eyeballs!

.....of course, I might get an early start on the brand-new translation of The Magic Mountain, in preparation for the GoodReads group read. AAAAAAAAAAHAHAHA. I last read that sucker....God, probably in my late adolescence, when I relentlessly chewed my way through everything I could lay my muddy little paws on. I think I reread most of it in my very late twenties, but not all the way through. My Vintage paperback edition has NO NOTES, too, which will make those long philosophical conversations just fly by, I'm sure. Oh, Mynheer Peeperkorn, how I am not at all looking forward to making your acquaintance again.

(....oooh.)

all's well

'surprise'

I was surprised, when my body no longer made sense to me, and it seemed foreign, somehow, ungainly, full of complicated wrongness. 

I was surprised when I cheated on myself with other girls, telling myself they were so much better than me, so much prettier in every way. 

I was surprised when I had to be smart because I wasn’t anything else anymore, instead of being smart because of everything I was. 

I was surprised when I felt relieved to be called pretty by even the least interesting guys. 

I was surprised when I sometimes dated them. 

I was surprised when I found myself having sex I didn’t want to have. 

I was surprised that I’d been doing it for a long time by then. 

I was surprised by the reshaping of my desire, which became contorted so that I sometimes couldn’t locate it, and sometimes I seemed to be coming at it through a confusing loop, a rift in a the space-time continuum, so that I could only feel lust as a pretend man, because it was only men who seemed to actively lust, and women were always just moaning along, splayed, obliging. 

I was surprised that this was supposed to be liberation. That being a free woman meant being a woman who didn’t flinch, didn’t blink, didn’t bother to be hurt by anything. Being a free woman meant, somehow, doing the things to guys that guys already wanted you to do, but doing them because you thought this was fun anyway, because you just felt like it. It was all in the nonchalance, the unaffectedness, the laughing-it-off. 

I was surprised to look at myself, finally, and find that I could no longer see myself through my own eyes. Instead, my image had been filtered through all of the other eyes in the world. Through the eyes of every man. 

 I was surprised by my surprise, which after a while seemed misplaced. Why be surprised at all? This is just life. It just goes like this. 

The truly surprising thing, really, I began to think, was that I’d learned somehow to be surprised in the first place. 

- "Eat the Damn Cake"

can't spend what you ain't got / and you can't lose what you ain't never had

jealous guy

Mikhail Bulgakov

Set Yourself On Fire

he says you ain't no Buddha

'Trayvon Martin and the Irony of American Justice' - Ta-Nehisi Coates

In trying to assess the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, two seemingly conflicting truths emerge for me. The first is that based on the case presented by the state, and based on Florida law, George Zimmerman should not have been convicted of second degree murder or manslaughter. The second is that the killing of Trayvon Martin is a profound injustice. 

....The injustice inherent in the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman was not authored by a jury given a weak case. The jury's performance may be the least disturbing aspect of this entire affair. The injustice was authored by a country which has taken as its policy, for the lion's share of its history, to erect a pariah class. The killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman is not an error in programming. It is the correct result of forces we set in motion years ago and have done very little to arrest. 

You should not be troubled that George Zimmerman "got away" with the killing of Trayvon Martin, you should be troubled that you live in a country that ensures that Trayvon Martin will happen. Trayvon Martin is happening again in Florida. Right now.... 

It is painful to say this: Trayvon Martin is not a miscarriage of American justice, but American justice itself. This is not our system malfunctioning. It is our system working as intended.

via

gotta believe Big Mama

Big Mama Thornton - "Everything Gonna Be All Right"

by and by

XTC - 'Melt The Guns'

'the very presence of a gun -- like all forms of power -- alters its bearer'

I grew up in a situation where violence was a fact of everyday life. Violence waited for you when you walked to school. Violence waited for you in class. Violence waited for you on the way. Violence waited for you on the way to football practice. Beatdowns at the bowling alleys. Shootings at the roller skating rinks. You could not go and see your girlfriend if she lived in some other neighborhood without bringing five other dudes with you -- one of them possibly strapped. I was not a violent kid. I was, and am, a softie. But after about a year of living in that environment, I basically became acculturated. When I became a professional and an adult, I basically spent years trying to deculturate and act like I was civilized. This isn't a matter of punching people because they looked at you wrong. (Thought it kind of is.) It's a matter of understanding that what you once considered vital has no meaning in the wider -- much less violent -- world. I am the furthest thing you will meet from a street dude. And yet I still find myself in conversation with myself over how to comport myself like a civilized person. Add on to that thinking about how to comport yourself when you are a big black dude, and you see what kind of weight might be there. It's not so much that I am uninterested in defending myself. It's that I spent a good part of my younger life doing exactly that. My takeaway was that defensive violence often isn't, and even when it is, even when all your dreams of triumph come true, it still takes a toll on you.

- Ta-Nahesi Coates

dear EVERYONE, please stop fucking reblogging this crap

Stay healthy; sickness is a waste of time and money. Smoking or overeating will eventually make you sick. Drinking and drugs interfere with clear perception, which you will need in order to make good work. It may be worth paying for psychotherapy sessions now instead of paying for inpatient treatment next year; see someone in-network.

- Sarah Manguso, "How to Have a Career: Advice to Young Writers"

-- MY GOD, talk about fucking privilege. I FORGOT, AND WENT AND BECAME ALCOHOLIC AND AGORAPHOBIC AND BIPOLAR AND HAVE DEBILITATING RSI! Silly silly me! And I have about three-four other chronic health conditions besides, which, like chronic pancreatitis caused by the alcoholism, are just going to get worse as I get older! And I don't have insurance, so I can't even afford to see a sliding-scale therapist in my neighbourhood, let alone someone in-network. Jesus. What is she, a fucking Republican? "If you want to have a career, don't get sick!"


(also who the fuck even goes to psychotherapy anymore, I don't think that's really covered by any insurance. But hey, "don't get sick, that just wastes your time," great advice, right?)

a jealous heart did retaliate

After twenty years together it's still a shared favourite dorky habit to suddenly drop into Rock Star Face around the house and mock-shout some lyric totally unrelated to any ongoing activity, and this week "The laws of men -- THEY DON'T APPLY -- when BLOOD gets in a woman's eye" is that lyric.

one of my friends is taking her in and giving her codeine

Readsday!

YES, IT'S STILL READSDAY, SHUT UP. Every day is Readsday! Every single day!

.....in my personal timezone, anyway.

What did you just finish reading?
Just reread Hangsaman from start to finish in its spiffy new Penguin Classics edition, which I bought to treat myself -- the paperback I bought used when I was twenty or so has this horrible cover. It was as chilling and beautiful and unsettling as ever, like nearly every damn thing Shirley Jackson ever wrote. She must have revised like a motherfucker.  It's so wonderful to see her getting just a little of the acclaim and worship she deserves -- more than thirty years after her death. Hi ho. -- I think what awes me most is how precise her writing is: not just that no single word is wasted, but she picks exactly the right word, or combinations of words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, so that it's not so much like reading a book or even hearing a story but being entirely caught up in someone else's waking dream. Her narrative voice, her descriptive style, her characterizations, everything about her writing is as if she never had a doubt about it in her life -- which can't really be true, she was after all human, but damn, she's just amazing. Even though it's been mumblemumble years since I read it through, I found there were whole passages I knew almost by heart, as if they were music.

(Apparently a big problem people have with this novel, to judge from the whining, is that it's not clear enough whether or not the Imaginary Friend is real. This makes me wonder if they've ever read anything else by Jackson -- espeecially Hill House. The point is not whether or not Tony is real, or Eleanor is "doing this all by herself," or if the apocalypse really is outside the door, but that the perspective shifts equally and dizzyingly from yes to no; that is the point, that our perceptions are subjective and we can never be as sure about what is real, and what is imagined, as we think we can be. That this is expressed in the clearest possible language, and the most confident manner, is fittingly almost just like another twist for the reader.)

What are you reading now?
Digital Vertigo (which I keep perpetually mistyping as Digital Vortex), in a probably vain attempt to disentangle myself from the parts of the Web I regularly participate in - mainly Tumblr, GoodReads, and too often, Twitter. I never got into Facebook (frankly, the interface is too ugly and confusing), successfully divorced myself from IM (in the process grievously offending three or four former friends: WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON'T WANT ME TO BE ABLE TO GET HOLD OF YOU ALL THE TIME), and I tend to just upload-and-run on Flickr, but I need to unplug. All that liking and reblogging and retweeting is making me stupid. Focusing so much on other peoples' content is preventing me from, in the horrible phrasing of the day, generating my own, and that makes me unhappy.  The author is far too full of himself and name-drops nearly every other paragraph and his thoughts aren't half as profound as he thinks they are, but it's amusing enough to thumb through. I am taking perverse satisfaction in reading this on the Kindle.

What do you expect to read next?
As always it's hard to say -- I'd like to get out of the nonfiction rut I feel I've been in this year, and read interesting novels -- something challenging. I used to almost never read nonfiction, and then I got really fucking sick of the late stages of Mailer and Updike and Roth (oh my) and the critical sucking-up to them, and then there was horrible Literary Minimalism, and then there was utter crap like The Corrections, and I just couldn't stand it anymore. But now people are praising Shirley Jackson and Angela Carter again! and there's Aimee Bender and Kelly Link and other neat new writers! so I don't have to just hide with Woolf and Murdoch anymore. You young people who can read zombie novels without being laughed at* today** don't know how good you have it.


*Much.

**Altho I knew a Classicist who claimed one of the Roman histories -- Suetonius, I think? -- basically was a post-apocalyptic zombie tale.

'The advertisers are the ones buying, Facebook is the one selling, and we’re just the goods.'

It’s in the interest of services like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to protect you from the very real possibility that your “friends” are out there and they can see what you’re doing, but they just don’t care. Or, alternatively, that you’re less interesting than you think you are.

- The Number Facebook Doesn't Want You To See

"untitled"

I am cycling through several titles a day. Titling a book has never been this excruciating before. Usually I pick a title - and then I am home with the book - can see through this book - can inhabit it - a title has to allow me to love it and inhabit it -  I guess it's like naming a child. Once Heroines became Heroines I knew what it was (and some have interpreted the title to be about the women I worship, admire, that's not what the book is about, it's about women who were characters, who see themselves as characters, it's also taken from a series of monologues by Claude Cahun.) I wanted a one-word title that was an abstract concept, kind of mirroring Bernhard (am rereading Concrete now, what permission Bernhard gives to the bilious a friend of mine just noted) - and mimicking Franzen's Freedom.

- Frances Farmer Is My Sister

c&p'd from GoodReads

My bedside books, currently, in a stack that I then rest my glasses on whilst I sleep....hey why don't y'all list your bedside stacks and glasses resters??

I don't have a bedside table and I rest my glasses on the windowsill, altho sometimes my Kindle is on the bureau by the bed. I'll tell you what's piled on my desk right now tho:

FIRST PILE
Seattle Architecture, Maureen R. Elenga (research)
Make Good Art, Neil Gaiman
The Glass of Time, Michael Cox
The Meaning of Night, Michael Cox
Wolf Solent, John Cowper Powys
Charles Dickens in Love
Iris Murdoch: A Life (duplicate copy, can't find first one)
Dopehead, Tim Elhajj (research)
Cemeteries of Seattle (research)
Heroin: Its History, Pharmacolgy, and Treatment, Second Edition Revised and Updated (research)

SECOND PILE
Postcards from the Province of Hyphens, Sonya Taaffe
The Corpus in the Library, Alf mac Lochlainn
Bough Down, Karen Green
One Foot in the Grave, Peter Dickinson
Collected Poems, Sylvia Plath
Red Doc, Anne Carson
The Real Jane Austen, Paula Byrne
With Chatwin, Susannah Clapp  
Magic Mountain (Woods translation, bought for GR group read)
Doctor Faustus (Woods translation, bought for GR group read)
The Raw Shark Texts

Husband's pile on floor, his side of the bed:

Salt Sugar Fat (my rec)
The Ghost Map (my rec)
Viruses, Plagues and History
A Planet of Viruses
The Surprising Design of Market Economies
Merchants of Doubt
The Signal and the Noise
The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution

&c &c &c

'Claudio, in the pool, with the snorkel'

In a key scene when the film’s villains trick Claudio (Fran Kranz) into believing something that is untrue, Claudio appears in a manner wholly unexpected for a Shakespeare play but that makes sense for a modern guy who has just spent the night partying. So why did Whedon decide to put Claudio in a swimming pool, martini in hand, donning a snorkel for the scene? The answer is quite simple: The director, who shot the film at his own Santa Monica, Calif. home, told EW, “For the love of God, if you have a pool overlooking beautiful mountains and trees and you are doing a party scene in a modern-day Shakespeare, and you don’t have someone in a snorkel and martini, then you should be fired.” 

Actually, there was a little more to it than that. Even before Whedon knew that the photo of Claudio in a swimming pool would become a promotional image for the film, he knew that it would set the right tone for his adaptation and for that scene in particular. “It encapsulates so much of the spirit of the thing,” he said. “Ridiculousness with just a hit of darkness.” That carefully measured dose of darkness comes into this scene as a night of partying ends and the morning dawns with the first of multiple times poor Claudio is cruelly tricked by the movie’s antagonists. Whedon sees Claudio in this moment as “a guy who has been partying too much, and there’s that feeling of decadence that’s about to go from charming to damaging in that image.”

- via