October 2020

A List: Hemingway--The Sun Also Rises......................................................168/247

B List: Between books

C List: Carlyle--The French Revolution..........................................................59/727

I had never read The Sun Also Rises, which is usually considered to be Hemingway's best novel, until now. It is on the B list, but not for a long time, so I'm happy to have the opportunity to take it up now. I do like it. It doesn't seem like a lot actually happens, in terms of action, compared with traditional novels, yet more than in other books, especially of this brevity, one does get the sense of a cohort of people occupying the world quite entirely for a certain period of years which the reader a century on at least knows and feels to have passed on. I guess this means the characters are not especially timeless or universal, though maybe they will come to seem so in the future. For me the world and mentality described in this is real enough while not being quite reproducible that the passing of this particular era and generation carries some influence in my life. The characters in this spend almost all of their time doing exactly the things I most like doing, or would have liked doing--wandering around Paris having nightlife adventures, drinking, reading novels, going on train excursions, having love affairs, bantering with their friends--but that never quite comes off with the same appeal in our age. One reason is that the people in this time had educations, particularly literary educations, that are more similar to what I have than that of contemporary educated people. Not better, perhaps--I don't really know, our truly educated people now are certainly very very smart in some ways--but more in line with my own mind...(would go on but I have run out of time)

I didn't get very far in Carlyle last month. Reading him and Henry James at the same time would have been ridiculous so I put Carlyle off. With having to write the Henry James report and a couple of shorter works upcoming, I should be able to put a little bit of a dent in him this month. There is a fair amount of gold to be found in his book, I think, but there is a lot of overgrowth to hack your way through to get to it...

I don't take very many pictures. I should take more perhaps, but my children usually won't hold still long enough to get the picture I want, and when I go somewhere I find I am not usually at inner rest enough to take the time to calmly size up and get a good picture. And then often my children take my phone and take hundreds of pictures by themselves, a few of which come out interesting. 

(Vermont)

(Vermont)

(Vermont)

(Concord--soccer field)

Our little squirrel died just a few days after this. I'm assuming it was one of those rodent diseases that takes them off suddenly. We probably should have let him go, though I don't think he would have survived long anyway. 

We've gone back to Maine a couple of times. I was in Portland last weekend, but I wasn't moved to take any photos on that occasion.

 (Vermont again)

(R)October 2018

A List--Nathaniel West--A Cool Million...................25/119
B List--Between books
C List--Between books


This month's check-in catches me on an off day. I am working on the report for B, and the book due up for C was a novel by Philip Pullman that was highly rated but I didn't realize it was a Harry Potteresque fantasy/young adult type book. I read about 20 pages of it and wasn't interested, so I'm waiting to get to the library to get the next title for that list.


Nathaniel West is, by some people anyway, a celebrated American satirist of the 1930s. I did read his most famous book, Miss Lonelyhearts, a few years back. It didn't make much of an impression on me. This one is supposed to be a spoof on the Horatio Alger genre. The first few pages were funny, then an orphan girl character got introduced who has already been the victim of two rapes, the first when she was twelve years old, and who works in the employ of a local lawyer and town who takes down her pants and spanks her twice a week. I get that this is supposed to be part of the dark skewering of banal conventions, and it does give the story some bite, or at least a sense of controversy, and I am attracted to that, but at the same time it is difficult in the current environment to react to its being presented in this rather light way in the spirit which is probably conducive to the way this episode is supposed to be understood. In general I am almost always ultimately disappointed by these kinds of books, even by their better practitioners such as Waugh. I am just not thoroughly (wickedly?) cynical enough by nature to derive the full enjoyment from them. Besides the likelihood that they don't seem to age very well, for them to work the humor and thrust have to be quite sophisticated, I find, and this is where Waugh is strong. One of the oddities of our time is that Donald Trump would seem to be such an obvious target for a devastating satire, and truly millions of people are offering would-be witty and devastating commentary on his entire persona on a daily basis, yet I cannot remember anything of the sort that I thought was particularly funny or clarifying about the absurd situation we find ourselves in, not that I have read everything, of course. Trump is a slippery target I suppose because he genuinely seems (along with his supporters) to regard his detestable qualities as in fact great strengths, and this detail seems to be beyond the comprehension of his critics, which dulls their ability to mock him. Instead, the most delicious targets for satire in the current environment are the Resistance and the virtue signalers who regard themselves with hilarious self-seriousness as moral paragons, at least compared to their cultural and political enemies, and the guardians of the true Republic. Not that the Trumpists are not delusional too I suppose but the attacks on them are so obvious and predictable, I guess, they don't have any sophisticated force beyond brute rage....


This is the time of year when I start to count down the days I have left to read on the porch before I have to close that up for the winter. Most years I feel like I can get out there most days up to October 20th or so, but this year even the second half of September has been chilly. I've only gotten out there a couple of days each week the past fortnight, as there have been a lot of days where the high temperature was 57 degrees (and raining). It looks like there are two or three days coming this week which will be warm enough to go outside, but that might be it...

 

October Update

A List: Between books currently

B List: Between books currently

C List: Karl Ove Knausgaard--My Struggle: Book 1........196/441

For the A-List I have just finished a trio of Shakespeare plays--Measure For Measure, Cymbeline, and Henry V--that I had not managed to read before. I decided to tally up the overall number of Shakespeare plays I have read through via these lists, and to my surprise this recent batch just put me over the halfway point, at 20 out of 37. I thought I must have read more by this point. But it is legitimate, I have missed thus far most of the early comedies and histories, as well as the five or so plays that are generally obscure, Pericles, King John, Henry VIII and so on. Measure for Measure and Cymbeline were better than I was anticipating. Henry V was mildly disappointing in that I was expecting it might join the ranks of my all-time favorites, and parts of it certainly have that quality, but I was not positively enthralled by it all the way through on this first reading anyway as I thought it possible I might be. At this point of my life, expectation plays an outsize part in my response to literature and other works of art encountered for the first time after having only read about them, in some instances over the course of decades.

I am working on an essay for a book I have just finished for the B-list. I have made a rule that I cannot move on to the next book on this list until the posting for the previous book is published, otherwise I would never complete them, Hopefully that will be up in the next day or two.

The Knausgaard is also a deviation from my usual strict system. An old classmate had a copy mailed to me because he wanted me to read it, the first volume anyway, and the series has received effusive praise among the intelligentsia here so I decided to take it up. To this point it is largely a record of memories of ordinary life as experienced by a Norwegian teenager--and a heterosexual male at that--in the 1980s. Knausgaard is only about a year older than I am and I also went to high school in a cold northern place that was not unpleasantly a couple of decades behind the times in certain aspects. So his experiences are very similar to mine, with the exception that he was, if not a full-blown stud, a little less hopeless with the ladies during his high school years. There was at least some mild kissing and breast touching going on, and this with Scandinavian girls too, it must be borne in mind. I have to admit, the enthusiasm for this writer among many normally jaded and scornful critics and intellectuals, the kind of people who understand everything new and move with it and are bored by anything that is at all informed by the past we have left behind, is puzzling to me. I do not yet see the genius and brilliance that these other very exacting people are evidently seeing. I am not persuaded that it is not coming, because I am quite fascinated by the attraction it has for this self-consciously smart and superior class of readers, and I really want to know what they are finding in it. I don't dislike it, and I am curious to finish the first volume at least--maybe I will continue on to the other books down the line, one a year or something like that--but it does not strike me as being particularly funny (maybe this is because, as the argument was made against Bob Hope, Knausgaard is not Jewish, and Americans are conditioned now to understand humor as existing in the form in which it has been presented by Jewish comedians for the last 80 years). I also do not think the writing itself is that special. He constantly records very plain and seemingly unimportant exchanges of conversation verbatim, but then when a brash and confident boy comes into a room at school where the author is sitting with a girl he is in love with and the intruder proceeds to cast a spell over her and prompts her to (unconsciously?) open her legs when he takes a step near her (this was a good observation) he does not actually transcribe what this rival said that was so mesmerizing and effective, which I was dying to know. But perhaps this is consistent with the overall plan of the book...

No pictures this month. Too late in the evening.  

October Update

A List: Thomas Hardy--Far From the Madding Crowd........136/353
B List: Burton--Anatomy of Melancholy.............................758/1,132
C List: Gillian Flynn--Gone Girl...........................................418/419

This is the last of the three Hardy books on the A-List, and the only one that I had heard of previously. I suspect it is going to end up as the best of the three. The characters seem to more vitally represent the ideas they are meant to represent, and the depiction of the rural life also seems more intense and detailed, in the character of his most celebrated books. I say seemed because I know I am influenced by prevailing opinion and find it difficult to trust my own judgment in these matters anymore, though I hope I have read enough that if something strikes me as better than it is supposed to be that I can recognize the sense in myself--indeed I believe I did something of this sort with Dreiser, which played against the expectations I had going into it. These Hardy books are generally playing to form in that regard.

One of Hardy's great themes in this and other of his books is the way that the rhythms of rural life remain largely the same as they had been for centuries, though in London and other cities thirty years past is ancient history. Masterful shepherds and others skilled in the timeless knowledge of the village, malting, cider-making, and so on, are indispensable men, and the books (Far From the Madding Crowd was published in 1874) are written as if they always will be, though Hardy himself would live well past the time when this was true.

The sheep in this book are constantly at threat of dying from disease or bloating or stampeding off cliffs or otherwise being killed by one means or another, and it is no minor skill in itself to keep them alive long enough to even be able to exploit or slaughter them. I  always like to be cognizant of the reasons why our forefathers were so much less romantic about animals than we seem to be.

The Anatomy has grown by one page since last month. That is because my copy of the book is divided into 3 volumes, each of which begins on page 1, and I made an error in adding them the last time. While there are parts of it that I do like, on the whole I have to admit it really is a slog, and it could be considerably shortened. I pride myself on being able to still concentrate on blocks of dense 17th century prose with sentences that go on for half a page when I need to, but this book I find does test me. When Burton is making a list of the twenty-seven different varieties of lust, with accompanying examples and quotations from ancient and medieval authors, most of which are in Latin, there are times where I am overcome by the sense that, all right, the point has been made. But people--granted, mostly unmarried or at least childless men well into middle age--love this book. This is my second time reading it, and it is obvious that I am never going to be able to appreciate it at any very high or satisfying level.

I am almost done Gone Girl, obviously. Didn't care for the ending. Certainly didn't care for the main character, who was awful. There was a lot of emphasis on how brilliant she was, and how superior mentally to her husband and basically all of the men of her generation, but she certainly did not put this genius to any productive or admirable means. It was not clear to me how much the author sympathized with her plight, and the neurotic, endlessly dissatisfied type of intelligent woman whose ranks in our society seem to be ever growing, at least in the most socially competitive areas of it. People mistake male revulsion against this type of character as a revulsion against, or fear of feminine intelligence. I think it is more a revulsion against neuroticism, which in many instances seems to be a product of....

The update posts are subject to a strict time limit and I must stop now. Hence the (even more than usually) rough nature of the thoughts.

I did manage to read out on the porch today (66 degrees!). However it is getting cooler by the day, and I doubt I will make it to the end of the month, though that remains my goal.