Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

 

Wilt on High by Tom Sharpe

 

Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story by Rick Bragg

 

The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz

 

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

 

Very readable novel about some very ugly characters.

In the end though it was quite long and compounded by the large type edition from the library, i really enjoyed it. 

It seemed like a revelation to them, but really the revelation was only that someone took the time to sit and listen to them and appear to absorb their human condition instead of ignoring it. [120]

The last thing Carl saw on this Earth before he closed his eyes were the anguished faces of the people who had loved him most in the world - the people who fretted over him and live symbiotically with him and existed with him inside the unique syzygy that is a family.  the whole universe lines itself up to make a family, and the family takes it from there. [650]

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

 

Mystifying novel. There is power in Kang's prose - the story follows a young woman who gives up eating meat and ends up losing her mind - but the three part structure diffuses that power somehwat.

In the first part, she gives up meat and is denounced and abused by her husband and family.

In the second part, her brother in law features her in a video series after painting her body (and his own) with flower parts and having sex with her.

In the third part, her sister (whose husband seduced her in part two) visits her in a mental hospital where she is deteriorating.

Bear by Julia Phillips

 

More than halfway through and still puzzling over my lack of feeling for the story she tells.

Couldn't make it, didn't care.

Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story by Nick Tosches

 

Hardly lives up to the hype. Tosches' Old Testament doggerel prose style and wandering biographical outline are underwhelming. 

JLL was an astounding performer and musician - and at the same a deeply disturbed addict with many mental health issues, exacerbated by his profound musical genius that had him barely finishing the eighth grade and cutting his first sides for Sun Records at age 15.

It did drive me back into Lewis's music, which I was obsessed with for awhile in my 20s, and which is an incredibly deep pool. Not that rock and roll as such - the original Sun sides were never really improved upon in multiple re-recordings and reissues -- but JLL released an ungodly amount of first-rate country music after his heyday and fall from grace in the 1960s. He was a great singer and showman. 

Will now see out "Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story" by Rick Bragg which seems a much more complete, scholarly and un-rabid version of the life.

The Quantity Theory of Insanity: Stories by Will Self

 

My Idea of Fun by Will Self

Brilliantly written but a bore to read, like much of Self's work. Still he appeals to me as a thinker and a philosopher, much like JG Ballard (whom Self admires). THE BOOK OF DAVE and GREAT APES were unqualified masterpieces. The rest of it I've struggled with.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

 

Long involved (if beautifully written) novel about boy born speechless growing up on a dog breeding farm in Wisconsin. How did I hear about it? I don't know. Oprah selection from 2008. It's good but don't know if I can stick with it.

10/30/24 - I cannot stick with it. Halfway through and gave up.

Both Flesh and Not: Essays by David Foster Wallce

 

Great funny essay on prose poems.

sex is never "bad," but it's also never casual. (from "Back in New Fire," his strange essay on sex in the aftermath of AIDS.)

He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations in religious or ideological certainty - a mind turned thus wholly in on itself. His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything. (from "Borges on the Couch."

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

 

Made the mistake of watching the delight THE THIN MAN 1934 film when I was halfway through reading this. It's been said that the film improves upon the novel, and I must agree. The book is good - the film is sublime.

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

 

A little hard to follow the plotting and action sometimes, because of Hammett's heavy gangster 1920s vernacular, and the level of deviance and betrayal by the  criminals and police. But still a primal source for much of the crime fiction I love.

The phrase "blood simple" originated here apparently. 

“It's an expression he used to describe what happens to somebody psychologically once they've committed murder,” Joel Coen told Time Out. “They go 'blood simple' in the slang sense of 'simple,' meaning crazy."

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

 

Good to finally (?) read this - my printed last name across the width of the pages makes me think I've had this book since high school, but never attempted it. (notes on the fly leaf below indicate it was after h.s., as i’m paying rent, or trying to calculate if i CAN pay rent.)

 Hardy attacks marriage and love and the sexes in his brilliant way - not much of a plot besides people seeing and judging people in English village society and attacking reputations, which the main characters take with deadly serious. 

I particular like Jude's son, also sort of named Jude, but known colloquially as Father Time and Time, because he seems to wise and old and disinterested in his life as a child, from his rough life being raised in Australia by his mother (for awhile), then abandoned by her there when she returns to England, and the boy is then sent by relatives for Jude to raise.

Finally finished it - quite compelling, if dense and relatively action-free. Well, Jude and Susan's children hang themselves, so that was exciting (a little too exciting). But moving in the end, by incrementedly building up the anguish and despair of Jude and Susan as they do immoral things for moral reasons (return to loveless marriages).

Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union; that of having a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable. [73]

The utter death of every tender sentiment in his wife [77]

"Save his own soul he hath no star" - Swinburne [79]

Some women's love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can't give it continuously. [203]

And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened. [203]

He might go on believing as before, but he professed nothing. [216]

But sometimes a woman's love of being love gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. [239]

A contented mind is a continual feast. [313]

Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer? [346]

Ah, dear Jude, that's because you are like a totally dead man observing people listening to music. You say, 'What are they regarding? Nothing is there.' But something is. [346]

When I first knew you I merely wanted you to love me... [348]

Or is it that you're humbugging yourself, as so many women do about these things; and don't actually believe what you pretend to, and are only indulging in the luxury of the emotion raised by an affected belief? [383-384]

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Short Stories by Stephen Crane

 

I read the stories "A Girl of the Streets" and "The Open Boat" - both astonishing.

The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard

 

Turgid, boring, another failed attempt to read Ballard's fiction.

Beeswing by Richard Thomspon

 

Good if perfunctory. It stays on relative high impersonal ground, although I liked RT's insights on the folk songs and styles that inspired him. You do get a good sense of the "folk music circuity" in Britain in the 1960s.

Chronopolis: The Science Fiction of J.G. Ballard

 

Miracles of Life by J.G. Ballard

 

A fascinating memoir. Ballard beautifully and deeply engages with his vivid memories of his childhood in Shanghai - first idyllic and strange, then blinkered and strange in a Japanese internment camp during WWII. Reading this with pleasure at the same time I'm struggling to finish his 1975 novel HIGH-RISE (and as I have struggled over the years with his science fiction.)

As a young boy Ballard writes he constructed a large plywood frame screen with a peephole and put it at the center of the table so he would not have to look at his younger sister the whole time.

All in all, a remarkably sane, measured account of a happy life, ending with Ballard announcing he has metastized prostate cancer but is in the care of a good doctor, awaiting his death.

I suspect that it's no longer possible to stir or outrage spectators by aesthetic means alone... A psychological challenge is needed that threatens one of our dearer delusions... a bisected cow forced to endure a second death in order to remind us of the illusions to which we cling about the first.

As every parent knows, infancy and childhood seem to last for ever. Then adolescence arrives and promptly leaves on the next bus, and one is sharing the family home with likeable young adults who are more intelligent, better company and in many ways wiser than oneself. But childhood has gone, and in the silence one stares at the empty whisky bottles in the pantry and wonders if any number of drinks will fill the void. (220)

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

 

Struggling with this. Wolfe's style is sweeping and brilliant, but I'm finding it difficult to engage with any of the characters - or the narrator. Is that what his style of journlism was all about?  A favorite of mine, BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME by Dennis Farina, has much more gravity for me: I identify with, marvel at, pull for, and end up loving the doomed narrator.

Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - The Definitive Life by Tim Riley

 

Liking this so far - great writing and namedropping on music from the Beatles era that influenced/was influenced by them. The later biographical material itself is mostly familiar to me from my other recent readings. The early biographical material about Lennon's childhood is vivid and dramatic.

Enter the Aardvark by Jessica Anthony

 

Promising premise falls off in second half.

More aardvark! Less Republican yuppie 2nd person address!

Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation by Philip Norman

 

okay. filling in the gaps from my previous Beatles' readings.

Up Against It by Joe Orton

 

Familiar Orton ground - the unusual nature of this treatment is that it was (allegedly) considered by Brian Epstein and the Beatles for their follow-up film to HARD DAY'S NIGHT. Would have been amazing to see - although Orton cut the main characters from four to two. The action is predicatable - damaged, violent, crime-focused young men attack - and are attacked by - a damaged, violent, criminal society.

The Likeness by Tana French

 

I love Tana French's work, find it addictive, and this one eventually worked its way under my skin. But it was way too long. The premise was cunning if farfetched - an undercover detective has her (undercover and abandoned) identity stolen by a young woman who looks exactly like her, and ends up murdered. The detective infiltrates the group home the victim lived in (with four close friends) to try to find out clues toward the identity of her murderer.

High-Rise by J.G. Ballard

 

Struggling to get through this. Ballard has an odd, clinical, detached narrative style that fits his futurism - but is none too pleasurable. 

A gigantic modern high-rise in Britain in an unnamed future begins to distintergrate as its 2000 inhabitants begin violently attacking each other, first by sector (bottom, middle, top) and then by floor.

Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, with Barry Miles

 

Pretty good, lots on insights, a little annoying in Miles insistence on his own place in the Beatles history, but that's a small point. The chapter on the London cultural and arts scene - when McCartney had bought a house in town, while the other three Beatles had retired to the suburban countryside - is interesting, although McCartney (as always) sound a little glib and fey when discuss art that's not pop and rock songs.

Good source of McCartney's assigning "percentages" of authorship credit to himself and Lennon. Who knows what actually went on? Their whole career was magical and creative and, I'm sure, chaotic. But they wrote 180 songs the likes of which had never been seen before - and won't be seen again.

Confidence by Denise Mina

 

Really underwhelming. A disappointment. Two podcasters on a wild goose chase. Phoned in plot, insubstantial characters. 

Three Hundred Paces: The Journal of Corporal Otis Truitt, CSA by William Cannon

 

Innocent by Scott Turow

 

Good, page turning, hard to put down, even though I haven't read PRESUMED INNOCENT, unlike everyone else in the world. The inner working of the judicial world - as a judge and a prosecutor who've worked together for 20 years face off in a murder trial that eerily echoes the same crime 20 years earlier.

Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life by Michael Nott

 

Deeply immersed. Very important poet to me, my first extended deep dive, met him at Northwestern, been reading him and thinking about his work ever since then.

The 1980s section devastating, where Gunn loses dozens of loved ones in the space of a year or so. Unimaginable until now when I read of how he took it full on, trying to survive it and gain some meaning from the carnage. 

And his "old age" as it were, is tragic as presented, although he is never really self-pitying. In his late 60s, he vigorously renewed his passion for drugs and picking up young men as sexual tricks, often homeless and troubled, although he cared for them as he could toward his purpose. He certainly died as he lived, with a fierceness and a care for the person he was with, and did not put on much of the dress of one ageing slowly and gracefully. He did not want that.

Yvor Winters definition of a poem: a statement in words about the human experience (p. 130)

The Sense of Movement was about a "specifically contemporary" kind of "malaise," the attempt "to understand one's deliberate aimlessness, having the courage of one's convictions, reaching a purpose only by making the right rejections." (147)

Gunn's love of Camus, particularly THE PLAGUE. (162)

Gunn on Lowell, and his aims for a personal autobiographical essay (209)

Gunn on Robert Creeley (218)

from TG piece about TOUCH: There remains open the possibility that one can deliberately and consciously attempt to create in oneself a field which will be spontaneously fertile for the tests of sympathy[.]... I do not mean that one can simply love everybody because one wants to, but that one can try to avoid all the situations in which love is impossible. (229)

Gertrude Stein: "She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting."

"Only Tony White, among my close friends, became an exception. He dropped out, coolly and deliberately, from the life of applause, having coming to see how the need for it complicates one's existence quite unnecessarily." 

... loss is loss, and time often only helps to show how deep and wide it is. (296)

Mike Kitay: "Tony Tanner was a good example of a smart friend Thom had, but he didn't like Tony's problems." (303)

"'The proverb is: A cat in gloves catches no mice. [...] I mentioned my proverb to a San Francisco poet, and he capped it with one of his own: And mice in high heels have a terrible time getting away from cats.'" (335)

TG on Duncan's definition of the Romantic movement: "the intellectual adventure of not knowing." (409)

"a poem is a record of activity" (422)

Thom saw these poems [in limited edition Unsought Intimacies] as "distinct from confessional poetry, which is a form of indirect boasting about pain, not so indirect maybe. When there is pain in these poems, it is a cause for deep regret." (431)

The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns

 

Fascinating, dark, neglected novel from 1959. A violent, tormented English veterarian and his withdrawn, abused wife and their ignored, well-meaning 15 year old daughter. The daughter suffers through the death of her mother and her father's new rakish mistress, and beginnings experiencing acute psychological distress, including the (imagined?) ability to levitate. 

Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties by Ian MacDonald

 

Stunning, track-by-track dissection of the Beatles' recordings.

MacDonald's forewords to his several editions are piercing sociological essays on British (and American) culture.

He has strong negative opinions about many of the later Beatles' tracks, the ones where he feels (with good reasoning) that the drugs had taken over and the spontaneous and unplanned ideas almost completely took over the painstaking craftsmanship of the earlier songs.

The Hunter by Tana French

 

Liked this one, a "sequel" of sorts to her recent novel "The Hunter." 

But it's a slow burner, and her Irish idiomatic dialogue gets a little wearying. 

More secrets and betrays and bad parenting in a remote Irish town, centered on the transplanted American retired detective and the somewhat-abandoned, previously-feral 15 year old girl he cares for and attempts to instruct.

I do long for the earlier Dublin murder squad novels though.

Sheila arranges the shirt on a hanger and hooks it onto the back of a chair. She says, "I shoulda picked ye a better father."

"Then we wouldn't exist," Trey points out.

Sheila's mouth twists in amusement. "No woman believes that," she says. "No mother, anyhow. We don't say it to the men, so as not to hurt their feelings -- they're awful sensitive. But you'd be the same no matter who I got to sire you. Different hair, maybe, or different eyes, if I'd went with a dark fella. Wee little things like that. But you'd be the same same."

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

 

Great luxurious read. Rather than being shot, a Russian nobleman is confined for the rest of his life to a tiny attic room, 10 feet square, in a grand hotel in the heart of Moscow across from the Kremlin. The novel covers the next thirty years of his life, as he struggles to maintain his outstanding character and morals through the birth of the modern Soviet Union.

Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings 1988-2018 by Peter Schjeldal

 

It is becoming evident to me that I'd read read about something than experience it. Take painting for instance. I have little patience with an art gallery -- my legs grow as bored as my eyes walking room to room, dodging the poseurs and tourists -- I find it completely uncomfortable to stare at paintings on a wall for hours, all that standing, all that taking of little steps to move in closer and move from one side of a canvas to the other.

But I like very much to read great writers talking about paintings. And Schjeldahl is one of them (seems to be in the Ashbery school of art criticism, which I'm also a fan of.) Such close, imaginative, lively, informed thinking makes an artist and his work and his life a thousand times more interesting to me.

The show was conceived on the Planet of the Scholars, where every question is considered except "So what?" [178]

I began to imagine the artist's [Picasso's] pictures as a steamrolled sculpture. [190]

Cartier-Bresson: [Photography] is a marvelous profession while it remains a modest one. [320]

James by Percival Everett

 

Another classic from Everett, this time longer and "more conventional" than his other novels, a resonant and deeply felt re-telling of the brunt of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, who in this version is far from the ignorant version Mark Twain gives us.

Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson

 

Have had this on the shelf for literally 35 years - but have I ever read this? No sign of markings, no memory. And it's a lot to take in: none of the colorful and hallucinatory characters and action of LAS VEGAS, which I remember well (well, mostly for the drugs). And the 1972 McGovern presidential candidacy is not something I know a thing about.

Thompson's political writing style (if one can call it that) is absurd - he reports a ton about what other reporters are reporting, and he reports on his own personality.

After suffering through the first 2/3rds of the book, I finally got to August 1972 (chapters run chronologically by month for the year) and it's finally paying off - after an especially dull long section about the McGovern campaign leadership's machinations at the convention to delay declaring victory until the Humphrey and Muskie forces were completely confused and demoralized (can you tell I didn't even understand the section? or quite finish it?).

Thompson barely touches on policy or governmental action: he dwells on the political as personal, on polling and popularity, on the athleticism of devoted journalits. V. odd book. 

And HST pops in this quote late in the book for no apparent reason (good quote though):

Behold, my brothers, the spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love! Every seed has awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land. Yet hear me, my people, we have now to deal with another race—small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possessions is a disease with them … They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own, and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They threaten to take [the land] away from us. My brothers, shall we submit, or shall we say to them: “First kill me before you take possession of my Fatherland.” Excerpt from Sioux chief Sitting Bull’s speech at the Powder River Council in 1877.

In Memoriam by Alice Winn

 

Stunning WWI novel about two English schoolboys who fall in love, enlist, and then meet again in the trenches at the battle of the Somme.  Terribly sad, quite beautiful - and even ends well! Well, not for most, that is. It's apparently Winn's first novel, but seems a much accomplished and polished and thoughtful work. Her close writing about men on the battlefield is exquisite.

Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir by Jann S. Wenner

 

Had to put it down not even halfway through. Though the dude knew everybody from the 1960s, his sly and immodest style of claiming to influence almost any important work that took place during his tenure as publisher of Rolling Stone became too annoying for me to take.

Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro

Munro's first published book, and a fitting way to kick off my retrospective of her important body of work. She hasn't yet unleashed the "time torquing" technique of her later work, but the stories are wonderfully detailed and the characters deeply engraved.

The story “A Trip to the Coast” ends in a decidedly Flannery Oconnor manner.