Coffee and Books (reading post)

[radiantfracture]

I accidentally cracked my coffee press while washing it (moral: never wash your dishes), so before yesterday's accidental omnibus meeting, I walked down to the second-nearest local coffee shop and bought a pourover apparatus. Hipsterdom circa 2011 here I come. I also bought a cup of coffee to tide me over.

I am not wholly convinced by the results of my first pourover, but I'm committed now.

Reading

I just re-read The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden, a comfort read for its luminous intensity. Although I usually read it as a sort of sensory reverie, this time I was much more attuned to the movements of the plot and the geometries of desire, which were crueller than I had remembered.

I haven't read any other Rumer Godden books -- should I? I tend to look for books of the same flavour rather than books by the same author.

On the family visit, I collected a copy of Grace Paley's Enormous Changes at the Last Minute my mother kindly ordered for me. I haven't finished all the stories, but I devoured several. These are a little grimmer than I expected from her other collections. I expected -- because it's what I love in her -- that politicized slapstick domestic surrealism she does so well, but these were -- well, also crueller. Perhaps better for that? I'm not sure yet, because I was surprised.

In theory and in practice (wa ha ha) I've been reading through Cruising Utopia of course, and have read a few of the short essays in Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie, which I think I'll discuss here next, unless there's hard lobbying for The Ghosts of My Life. There is some talk of taking up a further theory reading project with the copper bracelet crew, which would please me.

I'm re-reading This is How You Lose the Time War preparatory to teaching it. My brother also read it, and I think I have coerced him into making a video about the math and science therein. (He's the family mathematician, and also the family gamer, and he pointed out a possible connection to Halo, for which I am infinitely grateful.)

Oh yeah, and I'm almost finished The Starless Sea, which is propped up in a book stand on my kitchen counter so I can read a few pages each morning with my now-pourover coffee, like the newspaper from fairyland.

{rf}

Comments

[cmcmck]

I like: 'An Episode of Sparrows'

[radiantfracture]

Thank you! That's three comments and recommendations for three different novels, so I think I had better pursue this matter further.

[cmcmck]

Oh! And I forgot!

'Kingfishers catch fire'

[yhlee]

I've only read one Rumer Godden book, which was given to me by Jo Walton the one time I visited her, In This House of Brede. You would not think that a novel about life at an...I'm sorry, I can't remember the word. Like a monastery, but for nuns? A nunnery? Anyway, life at a nunnery, and the inner lives of the nuns all braided together. I would not have picked it out for myself, but somehow it was perfect. It was luminous and wonderful - I gave my copy away to a friend I thought would also enjoy it, but I still remember what a perfect read it was.

[radiantfracture]

I would also say nunnery, or convent.

Do you know Sylvia Townsend Warner's /The Corner that Held Them/, also an excellent book about a nunnery (or convent)? I like it very much.

I think I've neglected Rumer Godden. Thank you!

[yhlee]

Ah! "Convent" was the word used in the book. Thank you.

I don't think I've read Sylvia Townsend Warner, but someday I should rectify this!

[oursin]

I was just digging into my posts on works of convent-fiction because I remembered 'there was that book that really had the same feel as The Corner that Held Them' and then I realised it was actually Susan Stinson's Spider in a Tree, which is about Rev Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, MA in the early C18th, in a similar small inward-looking religious community.

[sovay]

I don't think I've read Sylvia Townsend Warner, but someday I should rectify this!

Seconding Sylvia Townsend Warner in general, but also The Corner That Held Them. It is not my favorite book of hers, but that is because I really love some others. [edit] Kingdoms of Elfin (1977) and The Flint Anchor (1954), specifically.

[sovay]

I haven't read any other Rumer Godden books -- should I? I tend to look for books of the same flavour rather than books by the same author.

I haven't read The Greengage Summer, but the one other adult novel of hers that I have read, Black Narcissus (1939), has that supersaturated quality we were discussing with J. L. Carr. I read it years after seeing the 1947 film and was stunned by how naturally it read in charged and slightly unreal Technicolor. I keep meaning to read The River (1946) because I also love the 1951 film. This is not my normal relationship with writers.

[edit] Is the flavor of similar book you are looking for the luminousness, or some emotional tone, or what?

and have read a few of the short essays in Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie, which I think I'll discuss here next, unless there's hard lobbying for The Ghosts of My Life.

I recommend Ghosts of My Life at some point, but I think The Weird and the Eerie is a great place to start. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

[radiantfracture]

Is the flavor of similar book you are looking for the luminousness, or some emotional tone, or what?

Exactly this:

that supersaturated quality we were discussing with J. L. Carr

I've also found it in Denton Welch, and that's all I can think of for the moment.

[sovay]

I've also found it in Denton Welch, and that's all I can think of for the moment.

I've never read Denton Welch!

I have definitely encountered it in other writers, since it tends to be one of the modes of prose and mood that attracts me. I associate it with intensity of place as well as emotion. In terms of novels that suggest themselves, in no particular order: Barbara Comyns' Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954), Henry Green's Caught (1943) and Back (1946), Helen Dunmore's The Greatcoat (2012), Millen Brand's The Outward Room (1937), Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop (1967). Almost certainly other people who aren't occurring to me because they are too close or too important. Tanith Lee's The Book of the Damned (1988) and The Book of the Mad (1993), but I might have to think about the two intervening books in that quartet. Forrest Reid's Uncle Stephen (1931), which I have desperately failed to write about for two years even though it is a queerness-of-time novel par excellence. Penelope Fitzgerald has something close but not identical, ditto Jane Gardam, sometimes A. S. Byatt, who is really hit or miss for me. Susanna Clarke's Piranesi (2020). M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart (1992). [edit] Oh! The nonfiction of Iain Sinclair and Derek Jarman.

[radiantfracture]

That's a magnificent list, thank you. Some I have read and some I have not.

I've never read Denton Welch!

May I strongly suggest *In Youth is Pleasure* as a book I imagine your liking a great deal.

I think I will add that for this precise feeling there also has to be a sort of trancelike quality often associated with summer, although as we discuss it I remember that Alain-Fournier's *Le Grand Meaulnes* is set in the dog-end of winter, but has it.

[sovay]

That's a magnificent list, thank you. Some I have read and some I have not.

I hope you enjoy the ones you have not!

May I strongly suggest *In Youth is Pleasure* as a book I imagine your liking a great deal.

I will look for it.

I think I will add that for this precise feeling there also has to be a sort of trancelike quality often associated with summer, although as we discuss it I remember that Alain-Fournier's *Le Grand Meaulnes* is set in the dog-end of winter, but has it.

I don't know if summer is a requirement for me; I might agree on a strong seasonal component, which is part of the intensity of place; my personal numinous season is autumn; so does Tove Jansson's The Summer Book (1972) fall into this category for you?

[radiantfracture]

Yeah, I think your point about intensity of place is more salient than summer -- summer might signify only because many people seem to find it easiest to invoke this intoxication of the senses in recollection of childhood and of summer, together.

What I think /The Greengage Summer/ has is this quality of heightened sensory perception so intense that it becomes eerie, although nothing supernatural (or weird) (necessarily) occurs -- it's just the uncanniness of perception itself.

For me, quite mundanely, that time is the very end of summer and the very beginning of fall, when the light is changing, and just starting to darken at the edges, but there are still long evenings to be lived out by the fire.

[sovay]

Yeah, I think your point about intensity of place is more salient than summer -- summer might signify only because many people seem to find it easiest to invoke this intoxication of the senses in recollection of childhood and of summer, together.

I mean, it's a trope for a reason, it's just not my trope.

What I think /The Greengage Summer/ has is this quality of heightened sensory perception so intense that it becomes eerie, although nothing supernatural (or weird) (necessarily) occurs -- it's just the uncanniness of perception itself.

That makes sense to me. It tends to create in me the sense that the supernatural could occur at any moment, even if it never does, and accounts for the weird or fantastic feeling of many theoretically mimetic books or movies.

For me, quite mundanely, that time is the very end of summer and the very beginning of fall, when the light is changing, and just starting to darken at the edges, but there are still long evenings to be lived out by the fire.

I pick up a lot of ghosts at that time of year. (Also, the High Holidays.)

[radiantfracture]

I keep thinking about this list and wanting to reply more deeply, in the spirit of refining our lexicon of the many flavours of literary intoxication available.

I am tired, though, so may not add much to the *clarity* of this discussion.

(Note: Forgive me for over-using the word "affect.")

So, for this particular experience I'm looking for, you've identified place as key, and we combine with place the sensory response to place (or other overwhelming/immersive stimuli) -- and I think pleasure specifically is part of what I'm looking for, and maybe desire, though that need not be the foreground.

And all this brings about a sense of suspension, of losing the strict propulsion of time and being subsumed by the senses.

Okay, so I love Barbara Comyns, and /Who Was Changed/ absolutely has halluncinatory intensity, though I would say for me the affect of Comyns is more often dread/disgust than beauty, wonder, desire. Maybe the awe end of the terror spectrum.

(There's disgust mixed into /In Youth is Pleasure/, too -- that horrified fascination that becomes a kind of pleasure. Is that Mark Fisher? It must be. The Weird?)

I think my favorite Comyns is /Our Spoons Came From Woolworth's/, but only as part of a set with the others, read *with* them, for its lighter touch.

I've read /Loving/ and /Party Going/, but not the Henry Greens you mention.

I see what you mean about Fitzgerald and Gardham; Fitzgerald (whom I love in some ways best of all) is a little too -- matter-of-fact, maybe? Too matter-of-fact to get at this particular emotion I'm searching for, I mean, not too much qua matter-of-factness. I love her immoderately.

Oh god, the proposal in /At Freddie's/. The final storm in /Offshore/. Those are pretty transcendent.

So the absurd is related to this somehow -- maybe because the absurd also takes us outside of ordinary time. I really have to have that sense that time has temporarily evaporated.

I think Gardham almost does it, or something equally glorious but more delirious, in /Queen of the Tambourine/ but doesn't stick the landing. Which reminds me of /Kilbrak/ by Jamie O'Neill -- same problem -- 2/3 lunatic genius, 1/3 letdown.

Oh -- /The Third Policeman/, infinite lunacy erupting into intoxicating lyricism.

In a not dissimilar way to these, I liked /Piranesi/ a great deal, and like Susanna Clarke's work in general -- /Piranesi/ is almost too -- in focus? -- to quite be what I meant in the first instance. That is, he is carefully measuring the immeasurable.

/Piranesi/ does have the lostness, the disorientation, that is part of it too -- but reduced down to a small set of experiences rather than diffused into a sense of infinite sensory extension.

(Okay, well, that's all very self-indulgent, but I couldn't leave the list lying there like that. It was gnawing at me. Tiny white mice ideas.)

[oursin]

I find Rumer Godden - uneven in whether she rings the bell for me or not. Some of her books seem to me to descend into gratuitous emotional character torture (The Battle of the Via Fiorita really icked me) and some just miss the target, but In This House of Brede... A Candle for St Jude... parts at least of The Peacock Spring -

[isis]

I broke so many glass (and ceramic!) coffee presses I eventually bought a stainless-steel thermal press, and that sucker has outlasted two houses and three cats.

[radiantfracture]

I didn't even know such a thing as a stainless steel press existed, and now I'm a bit sad that I don't have one.

The pourover filter is metal, so I hope it will outlast the glass jug that comes with it.

[cosmolinguist]

I also broke my coffee press when I went to wash it a few weeks ago! But I just bought another one. :)

[sabotabby]

Please tell me everything you think of The Starless Sea. (I loved it and almost no one I know did.)

[radiantfracture]

I will! I'd love to! I have Thoughts. I'm just waiting to finish it and then I thought I'd write about the whole thing at once.

The short version is that I think I found the ideal way to read it -- a few pages a day -- and so while most of the criticisms of it seem accurate, I didn't really mind its flaws for the most part, because I sort of drifted along on the current of the book, enjoying the mise-en-scene rather than wishing for more event.

[yarrowkat]

"the newspaper from faeryland" is a lovely way to see that book.

[starshipfox]

I always pick up Rumer Godden books when I find them second-hand. I knew her initially as a children's author, who wrote books about dolls or animals: she seemed to have an interest in writing from the point of view of someone or something powerless, and how a narrative can be arranged around powerlessness. Some of them were good, and some bad. I feel that way about her adult books too: she wrote a LOT, with varied success. Her family lived in India when she was a child, and her writing about British colonialism varies: sometimes it seems insightful, and sometimes it seems completely without self-reflection. She can be mannered or condescending, but sometimes she can reach the luminous depth of "The Greengage Summer". I would second most of the recommendations you've had here, and tentatively recommend "The Didakoi", her children's novel about a Romany girl.