July Reading Post
Aug. 3rd, 2017 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radiantfractureIn progress / housekeeping
Early in July, I was most of a week at my parents' house, ostensibly to help out my mom post-surgery. Ultimately, the visit became more of a family party.
During the visit, I read half of Zarqa Nawaz’s Laughing all the Way to the Mosque, but I left the book there. I'll probably finish it when I visit in August for the Writer's Festival. Nawaz spoke (hilariously) at last year's festival.
Conversely, I forgot Christopher Milne's The Enchanted Places at home, so although I listed it as a June book, I really finished it in July.
Unsurprisingly, I did not make as much progress with work- and review-related reading in July as I'd hoped. I am reading two books for review, one of which is also useful for prep. So far, that one is fantastic: Learn, Teach, Challenge: Approaching Indigenous Literatures, edited by Deanna Reader and Linda M. Morra.
Part 1: Alphabetical Listing
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, Book Two. I'm still really enjoying this series. It's like an essay on power in the form of a comic book. My favorite character is probably the conflicted academic radical of a previous generation (natch). He has a smaller role in this volume, but an interesting confrontation with the anti-monarchists and himself.
Coates is setting up a stimulating resistance between the story he's telling and the story-world as it existed before his own series. The central character as originally conceived is defined (narratively, archetypally) by being a king. The story's sympathies (while complex) are clearly on the side of rebellion. Will T'Challa be destroyed by the paradox? We shall see.
Like the first trade paperback, this collection included reprints of earlier Black Panther stories – I am not well-'versed enough to identify authors, artists, and styles, but I enjoyed the slightly scraggly 70s/80s art.
Han Kang. The Vegetarian. Now, this was a book. A book book. A work of strange and agonizing quiet. In three acts, a woman's transformation, seen three different ways, by three different external viewers, all who know her well and also not at all.
The first act is perhaps the one you're expecting. Yeong-hye becomes a vegetarian. Her husband is frustrated and bewildered -- and so is everyone else around her. They treat her with contempt, then violence, but this is really only an intensification of the violence that is already a part of her marriage, her family, her social interactions, her life. Yeong-hye's renunciation seems to be an inward-turned response to these oppressive relationships. It seems like a declaration of autonomy, but also a form of self-harm.
I think the middle act is my favorite, this strange interlude of the flowers. A middle act that isn't just a bridge between the beginning and the ending is wonderful and unusual in itself. Something blossoms from Yeong-hye's self-denial -- something almost generative arises -- but this is undercut in the bleak pragmatism of the third act.
In the third act, desolation. It is interesting that trees are terrible rather than nurturing in this book. Nature is not a salve for culture in The Vegetarian, and compassion is inadequate or tainted.
I could call this novel the opposite of the Loos-Ephron nexus (below). If those books are about suffering told glancingly and lightly, this is suffering told with precise and terrible attention. Beautiful, though.
Hanff, Helene. 84, Charing Cross Road. I re-read this little book of letters between book-buyer and bookseller, and then I listened to various audiobook incarnations as I washed the dishes, and it was all just lovely. This is another comfort read, of course. I can't read this book without thinking furiously at Hanff's younger self: Go to England! Just go! JUST GO. Every time.
Hayes, Bill. Insomniac City. I'd been waiting for this to come in at the library for some time. As I've noted elsewhere, this is a memoir by Bill Hayes, Oliver Sacks' partner. Hayes is an attentive diarist, attuned to small details and interactions. He seems like a remarkable person in himself – profoundly giving to his partners. Nothing really happens in the memoir, except lots of dinners, walks, talks with strangers in New York, drinking red wine right from the bottle, and smoking pot. The picture of Sacks -- brilliant, infinitely curious, delighted by every discovery, from kissing to chemistry -- is endearing. Though Insomniac City is not all about Sacks. A reader who had never heard of him could read this book as a gentle memoir of New York. I am a latent fan of Sacks' books (that is, I loved them once but haven't picked them up in a few years), and I mourned his death in 2015, so this visit with him was sweet.
Lerner, Ben. The Hatred of Poetry. This was an enjoyable essay that made a fair point — we expect poetry to live up to the abstract ideal of itself as a kind of trigger for ecstatic/transcendent aesthetic experience, and we resent the inevitable failure of any actual poem to become The Poem. Readers of Leaving the Atocha Station will find this a familiar theme.
I would have liked this essay better as part of a collection. As a standalone monograph, it was enjoyable but not quite substantial enough.
Also – maybe I'm projecting plenitude into the past, as (I think) Lacan would insist, but I'm pretty sure I've had many at least momentarily transcendent experiences of poetry (and other art, and music, and ritual, and nature, and sex, and so forth). Lerner seems to regard this as a myth (or at least he likes to take that pose).
This kind of romantic expectation/analysis obviously does not really include poetry like L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. poetry, which aims to disrupt/resist the ideal of the lyric and beautiful and expressive poem. However, I am always reading that poetry all wrong anyway, since disruption can also create ecstasy/catharsis. I, too, pretty much read all poetry for ecstatic experience, and maybe – as Helene Hanff's friend said of London – if you look for it, you find it.
Taylor, Elizabeth. A Wreath of Roses. I liked this for its accuracy about the transformations of friendship that happen over time and changed circumstances, and for the simple domestic tyrannies and complicities, and for the atmosphere. The ending I almost liked. It is certainly unnerving. It reminded me of a Muriel Spark, but not quite as ruthless and therefore not quite as successful.
My favourite Taylors are probably still Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont and A View of the Harbour, but she’s just so reliable. Her prose and her attention are like no one else's – unflashy, yet devastating.
Part 2: Women Suffering Hilariously
Ephron, Nora. Heartburn.
Loos, Anita. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes.
I'm going to put these three books together. I read them in succession – Loos first (Blonde, then Brunette), then Ephron. The first two made me laugh out loud in public places. Heartburn did not. I found its flat, joky affect claustrophobic – for example, a robbery and a murder are both played primarily for cheap laughs.
Well, okay, an attempted murder is played for laughs in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but the humour there is in being aware of the heroine's own cognitive dissonance about it, and in observing the way she can spread that dissonance to the people around her through her beauty. There's commentary, is what I'm saying.
Yes, there's commentary in Heartburn, too, about craving attention as a witness, but the protagonist doesn't have the same excuse (or stylistic helium) to treat the murder -- and her own trauma -- so callously.
However, at the end of Heartburn, Ephron comments directly on this exact problem. The narrator worries about having failed to do justice to her material because of the reflex to "tell stories" and crack jokes when her suffering is too painful to experience otherwise.
It’s a nice self-aware moment. It didn't save the book for me, but it opened up a bigger question about the purpose of style.
It occurred to me belatedly that Ephron might have been influenced by the Zany Antics in Loos' novels. Putting Heartburn together with Loos' books made me re-think my response to all three. (The discussion of Blondes on Backlisted also prompted this.)
Maybe there's something here about women using a particular kind of arch, farcical humour to talk about what otherwise would be terribly sad or painful or frightening, this baked-in violence within even a cheerful story told under conditions of oppression. Something like that. I'm not sure.
I think Loos would say that her aim was to be hilarious, but she, too, was self-aware. The guest on Backlisted quoted Loos' own preface to her novel, in which the author reports (or confabulates) that Soviet Russia regarded Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as an indictment of women's plight within patriarchal capitalism: “her relentless pursuit by predatory males ... her nauseous connection to a male that is repulsive to her physically, mentally, and emotionally”. Loos writes this as though it's funny, but surely she must also be saying it because it's true.
There was TV in there, too, and I also watched the Monroe / Russell film of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which was disappointing, though I'm sure someone has written a clever article about the differences between the tightly regulated sexuality of the film (Monroe's Lorelai never really strays from her fiancé) and the anarchic self-interest of the novel.
{rf}
Early in July, I was most of a week at my parents' house, ostensibly to help out my mom post-surgery. Ultimately, the visit became more of a family party.
During the visit, I read half of Zarqa Nawaz’s Laughing all the Way to the Mosque, but I left the book there. I'll probably finish it when I visit in August for the Writer's Festival. Nawaz spoke (hilariously) at last year's festival.
Conversely, I forgot Christopher Milne's The Enchanted Places at home, so although I listed it as a June book, I really finished it in July.
Unsurprisingly, I did not make as much progress with work- and review-related reading in July as I'd hoped. I am reading two books for review, one of which is also useful for prep. So far, that one is fantastic: Learn, Teach, Challenge: Approaching Indigenous Literatures, edited by Deanna Reader and Linda M. Morra.
Part 1: Alphabetical Listing
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, Book Two. I'm still really enjoying this series. It's like an essay on power in the form of a comic book. My favorite character is probably the conflicted academic radical of a previous generation (natch). He has a smaller role in this volume, but an interesting confrontation with the anti-monarchists and himself.
Coates is setting up a stimulating resistance between the story he's telling and the story-world as it existed before his own series. The central character as originally conceived is defined (narratively, archetypally) by being a king. The story's sympathies (while complex) are clearly on the side of rebellion. Will T'Challa be destroyed by the paradox? We shall see.
Like the first trade paperback, this collection included reprints of earlier Black Panther stories – I am not well-'versed enough to identify authors, artists, and styles, but I enjoyed the slightly scraggly 70s/80s art.
Han Kang. The Vegetarian. Now, this was a book. A book book. A work of strange and agonizing quiet. In three acts, a woman's transformation, seen three different ways, by three different external viewers, all who know her well and also not at all.
The first act is perhaps the one you're expecting. Yeong-hye becomes a vegetarian. Her husband is frustrated and bewildered -- and so is everyone else around her. They treat her with contempt, then violence, but this is really only an intensification of the violence that is already a part of her marriage, her family, her social interactions, her life. Yeong-hye's renunciation seems to be an inward-turned response to these oppressive relationships. It seems like a declaration of autonomy, but also a form of self-harm.
I think the middle act is my favorite, this strange interlude of the flowers. A middle act that isn't just a bridge between the beginning and the ending is wonderful and unusual in itself. Something blossoms from Yeong-hye's self-denial -- something almost generative arises -- but this is undercut in the bleak pragmatism of the third act.
In the third act, desolation. It is interesting that trees are terrible rather than nurturing in this book. Nature is not a salve for culture in The Vegetarian, and compassion is inadequate or tainted.
I could call this novel the opposite of the Loos-Ephron nexus (below). If those books are about suffering told glancingly and lightly, this is suffering told with precise and terrible attention. Beautiful, though.
Hanff, Helene. 84, Charing Cross Road. I re-read this little book of letters between book-buyer and bookseller, and then I listened to various audiobook incarnations as I washed the dishes, and it was all just lovely. This is another comfort read, of course. I can't read this book without thinking furiously at Hanff's younger self: Go to England! Just go! JUST GO. Every time.
Hayes, Bill. Insomniac City. I'd been waiting for this to come in at the library for some time. As I've noted elsewhere, this is a memoir by Bill Hayes, Oliver Sacks' partner. Hayes is an attentive diarist, attuned to small details and interactions. He seems like a remarkable person in himself – profoundly giving to his partners. Nothing really happens in the memoir, except lots of dinners, walks, talks with strangers in New York, drinking red wine right from the bottle, and smoking pot. The picture of Sacks -- brilliant, infinitely curious, delighted by every discovery, from kissing to chemistry -- is endearing. Though Insomniac City is not all about Sacks. A reader who had never heard of him could read this book as a gentle memoir of New York. I am a latent fan of Sacks' books (that is, I loved them once but haven't picked them up in a few years), and I mourned his death in 2015, so this visit with him was sweet.
Lerner, Ben. The Hatred of Poetry. This was an enjoyable essay that made a fair point — we expect poetry to live up to the abstract ideal of itself as a kind of trigger for ecstatic/transcendent aesthetic experience, and we resent the inevitable failure of any actual poem to become The Poem. Readers of Leaving the Atocha Station will find this a familiar theme.
I would have liked this essay better as part of a collection. As a standalone monograph, it was enjoyable but not quite substantial enough.
Also – maybe I'm projecting plenitude into the past, as (I think) Lacan would insist, but I'm pretty sure I've had many at least momentarily transcendent experiences of poetry (and other art, and music, and ritual, and nature, and sex, and so forth). Lerner seems to regard this as a myth (or at least he likes to take that pose).
This kind of romantic expectation/analysis obviously does not really include poetry like L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. poetry, which aims to disrupt/resist the ideal of the lyric and beautiful and expressive poem. However, I am always reading that poetry all wrong anyway, since disruption can also create ecstasy/catharsis. I, too, pretty much read all poetry for ecstatic experience, and maybe – as Helene Hanff's friend said of London – if you look for it, you find it.
Taylor, Elizabeth. A Wreath of Roses. I liked this for its accuracy about the transformations of friendship that happen over time and changed circumstances, and for the simple domestic tyrannies and complicities, and for the atmosphere. The ending I almost liked. It is certainly unnerving. It reminded me of a Muriel Spark, but not quite as ruthless and therefore not quite as successful.
My favourite Taylors are probably still Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont and A View of the Harbour, but she’s just so reliable. Her prose and her attention are like no one else's – unflashy, yet devastating.
Part 2: Women Suffering Hilariously
Ephron, Nora. Heartburn.
Loos, Anita. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes.
I'm going to put these three books together. I read them in succession – Loos first (Blonde, then Brunette), then Ephron. The first two made me laugh out loud in public places. Heartburn did not. I found its flat, joky affect claustrophobic – for example, a robbery and a murder are both played primarily for cheap laughs.
Well, okay, an attempted murder is played for laughs in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but the humour there is in being aware of the heroine's own cognitive dissonance about it, and in observing the way she can spread that dissonance to the people around her through her beauty. There's commentary, is what I'm saying.
Yes, there's commentary in Heartburn, too, about craving attention as a witness, but the protagonist doesn't have the same excuse (or stylistic helium) to treat the murder -- and her own trauma -- so callously.
However, at the end of Heartburn, Ephron comments directly on this exact problem. The narrator worries about having failed to do justice to her material because of the reflex to "tell stories" and crack jokes when her suffering is too painful to experience otherwise.
It’s a nice self-aware moment. It didn't save the book for me, but it opened up a bigger question about the purpose of style.
It occurred to me belatedly that Ephron might have been influenced by the Zany Antics in Loos' novels. Putting Heartburn together with Loos' books made me re-think my response to all three. (The discussion of Blondes on Backlisted also prompted this.)
Maybe there's something here about women using a particular kind of arch, farcical humour to talk about what otherwise would be terribly sad or painful or frightening, this baked-in violence within even a cheerful story told under conditions of oppression. Something like that. I'm not sure.
I think Loos would say that her aim was to be hilarious, but she, too, was self-aware. The guest on Backlisted quoted Loos' own preface to her novel, in which the author reports (or confabulates) that Soviet Russia regarded Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as an indictment of women's plight within patriarchal capitalism: “her relentless pursuit by predatory males ... her nauseous connection to a male that is repulsive to her physically, mentally, and emotionally”. Loos writes this as though it's funny, but surely she must also be saying it because it's true.
There was TV in there, too, and I also watched the Monroe / Russell film of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which was disappointing, though I'm sure someone has written a clever article about the differences between the tightly regulated sexuality of the film (Monroe's Lorelai never really strays from her fiancé) and the anarchic self-interest of the novel.
{rf}
no subject
Date: 2017-08-04 06:31 am (UTC)This is so much not my relationship with poetry, I can't tell if it means I'm doing poetry wrong or this guy is.
though I'm sure someone has written a clever article about the differences between the tightly regulated sexuality of the film (Monroe's Lorelai never really strays from her fiancé) and the anarchic self-interest of the novel.
There's the intermediary stage of the 1949 musical, best known for introducing Carol Channing and the one true definitive version of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend." I am not sure how closely its plot resembles either the book or the movie, although it does involve Lorelei taking up with another man than her button-king fiancé (though they make up at the end). There was also a 1928 silent version co-written by Loos herself, which might have been fascinating, but it's lost and therefore I have less than no idea how that worked.
I have weirdly positive memories of the romantic B-plot between Jane Russell and the private detective, but have not otherwise seen the 1953 movie in years and kind of worry about it.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-04 07:19 am (UTC)I might, if I were you, choose to leave the memory of the film unsullied by watching it again, but that's only my opinion. Do you know anything about The Seven-Year Itch?
no subject
Date: 2017-08-04 07:31 am (UTC)I grew up on the original Broadway cast recording. Part of my problem with the movie is that it doesn't star Channing.
I might, if I were you, choose to leave the memory of the film unsullied by watching it again, but that's only my opinion.
Well, it unfortunately matches my fears. [edit] Does the number with Russell and the Olympic team hold up? It looks fairly amazing in memory, being composed mostly of Russell's roving eye and a lot of men's butts.
Do you know anything about The Seven-Year Itch?
I remember enjoying it—and while I can remember few of the details of the plot, the ones that have stuck with me suggest that it's less about Monroe as irresistible homewrecker than Tom Ewell's inability to stop fantasizing about her as such—but I'm also not sure how it would stand up to a rewatch. It's an American sex comedy from 1955, so there isn't actually any sex in it. Billy Wilder had a lot of trouble with that.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-04 02:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-04 07:29 pm (UTC)Interesting. Can I ask for more details?
(And the men's swim team number is fantastic.)
That's good to know!
no subject
Date: 2017-08-05 01:55 am (UTC)You are so right about the swim team number.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-04 07:20 am (UTC)If you were going to write a monograph about your experience of poetry (not to presume that you haven't already done that), how would (or did) you tackle it?
no subject
Date: 2017-08-04 08:40 am (UTC)Yikes. I never have and I don't know where I would start: I suppose I would talk about poems that were important to me, when I noticed they were, when I figured out why they were, what I read poetry for and what makes it work or not work for me, insofar as I can answer any of these questions without sounding like a blithering idiot. I know that I dodged several of the bullets that seem to have caught friends of mine—I never believed that it took a particular kind of person to enjoy poetry, or that it was a rarefied discipline rather than a form of thinking about the world; I don't have a lot of mysticism associated with being a writer and I never know how to respond when people expect me to. That doesn't mean that I haven't read poems that raised the hair on my neck or transfixed or haunted me. The idea of being disappointed in a poem because it failed to live up to some Romantic standard of transcendence, though, is just bewildering to me. I am not usually disappointed in poems. Any number of them don't do much for me, but that's different.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-04 07:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-05 01:56 am (UTC)