August, 2015--Readings & critiques

Starting off August with REAGAN: THE LIFE, a biography by H.W. Brands.

No surprises yet: Ronnie Reagan, corporate shill, is in the process of transforming himself into Ronnie Reagan, politician.

All in an effort, according to Jacobs, to be perceived a likeable, a good, solid guy. Unlike his drunk of a father.

Not getting any deep, underlying psychological insights here. Was R.R. really as uncomplicated (and uninteresting) as that?

>1 CliffBurns: - didn't Reagan start as a Liberal Democrat and then change his political allegiance? Surely that journey gives some focus to the early political career. I do remember reading years ago that while Reagan was always on camera as an actor and politician his real character remained strangely out-of-focus. Naturally that raises an interesting question - was this due to him putting up walls or was there just a lack of real substance?

Lack of substance AND walls. Reagan didn't like people getting too close (drunk, unreliable father?) and even Nancy said sometimes she didn't understand him.

Yup, he was at one time a big supporter of FDR but once he realized he wasn't going to make it as a movie actor, he devolved to TV and became a corporate drone for the likes of GE. It was his speech at the 1964 Republican convention (Goldwater won) that drew the Republican elite and money men to Reagan. Ronnie and Barry had the same message really, it's just that Goldwater came across more like a vicious thug. Ronnie's thuggery was more subtle and salable.

But in terms of a well-formed ideology or political sophistication, Reagan was a featherweight. Yet there was talk of making room on Rushmore for him.

America is deeply, deeply fucked.

>3 CliffBurns: - just down to popularity. Policies were less important for Reagan's wins than his like-ability. Mind you, the next two Republicans were Bush and Bush who make Reagan look like a colossus.

Gave up on A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. Couldn't get on with the prose. Now reading Ghost Country instead.

Just read a collection of Orwell essays published by Penguin as Why I Write, which includes "Politics and the English Language." Didn't bother reading that one again. The centerpiece of the whole thing was a long wartime essay, "The Lion and the Unicorn," which is full of Orwell's thoughts on Englishness. Also includes "A Hanging," which reminds us that the New Journalism wasn't really New at all.

Just started Graham Joyce's Smoking Poppy, which isn't even billed as fantasy, or magic realism, or whatever category Graham was supposed to fall into... But I suspect we might end up in such territory by the time I've finished.

I told myself I'd just read the first chapter before I turned in for the night, only to find myself seemingly minutes later looking at the beginning of chapter four...

I'm almost done with a fantasy I've been reading to Chris, The Last Light of the Sun, which was surprisingly good. Also almost done with The Pale King, which was very depressing. I feel like I have gotten too much inside the head of a very unhappy person who was also a talented writer, and it is starting to get to me; I'll be glad when it's finished. On to a history book about North Africa which I picked up at Powell's yesterday.

Continuing with Pelevin's Sacred Book of the Werewolf. A selection his prose was made by Derek Offord in Using Russian to represent modern Russian belles lettres. I thought I would try him. The book begins with a parody of John Ray, JR. On Turing the page, we find "Who is your hero Delores Haze, Still one of those blue- caped starmen?
V's influence on modern Russian literature is extensive.( I recommend the video 'Russia's Open Book as a general intro to modern Russian Lit. They are familiar with pop culture,too. They know who Steven Kink is and what a Hobbit is.

Finished The Tin Drum. A lot of good moments in the book. By the end though I was growing tired of the grandiloquence. I wonder what the book would sound like read by Stewie Griffin.

I also finished a charming little collection Poems from the Greek Anthology by Dudley Fitts. The final section includes a sequence of epitaphs that I found very moving. There are several poems attributed to Plato. There also was this Meleagros guy that was consistently interesting.

Just wrapped up Kim Stanley's Robinson's latest science fiction effort, AURORA.

Not sure what our pal Ian Sales thought about this book (I know he's a fan of Robinson's) but, personally, I found it a bore. Lots of info dumping and cutting edge science but the characters were unintertesting and the novel's pacing downright glacial.

Finished Ghost Country. A book guaranteed to make you angry, although the right people got their happy endings. Now reading The Sense of an Ending.

Cliff, I didn't think Aurora was as good as 2312, despite what a lot of people had said. The science was mostly interesting, the framing commentary on narratology worked quite well, but I wasn't convinced by the way people behaved - all those different cultural groups and everyone thought like 21st century Californians.

Just back from a camping trip on which I finished The Killer Inside Me and Platform.

Ian: I liked 2312 but even in that one there were long sections where NOTHING happened--Robinson needs a good editor, someone with the courage to cross out big swathes of text and scribble, in bright red ink: "EXPOSITION".

Gimme Alastair Reynolds' stuff over Robinson's any day.

#14 Further re: Robinson, the problem of exposition is not exclusive to sci fi writers but it is endemic to them.

Robinson has said he considers exposition just another narrative tool. He does it deliberately.

Um...

No comment.

Giving My Struggle: Book One by this Knausgard fellow a chance. So far feels like heavy sauce. Good though.

Spent the last week in a tent with T.S. Eliot's Selected Poems, which makes me feel especially lit-snobby. Now I can read Mack Bolan novels for a year....

Just started All That Heaven Allows, the novel from which my favourite film was adapted. Took me bloody ages to track down a copy.

mejix: My Struggle is about the most inexplicably delicious thing I've read in a while. Hope to start on vol. 3 soon.

>21 KatrinkaV: You mean the Hitler one? (Touchstones would help).

KatrinkaV: I'm halfway through the first book. Very very enjoyable. It's easy to see why it got rave reviews.

A copy of Pastures of Heaven landed in my hands and nothing else I was reading had me by the throat, so I slunk in ... Wow. May be my favorite Steinbeck yet.

justifiedsinner: No, the Knausgaard.

>1 CliffBurns:

Republicans who worsip RR probably do so because it is so easy to project oneself into his shoes. It takes a real characterless bland and somewhat stupid personality to invite so much mindless adulation. Incisive people with well defined values fight for them and make enemies. Usually, we may not like them but we secretly or openly admire them. Think Hillary Clinton.

Another ultra-uniteresting (IMO) president is Harry Truman. He seems to have arrived on earth a self-satified mid-westerner with conventional values and conservative habits. But what makes him uninteresting is different from what makes RR ditto in a subtle way.

Truman never experienced an epiphany of any sort, either as a person or as a politician. He was always competent in his political career, seemingly one of those figures whom history made. And he had a quality lacking in RR -- common sense combined with common decency -- that allowed him to come down on the right side of an issue much more than not and to create effective policies in the face of extraordinary crises (i.e., the Marshall Plan).

In sum, to me, RR was a walking sack of ego lacking empathy and political imagination. He had no more than a digital brain. His world was one in which good guys wore white hats, bad guys wore black ones. And that's how he told 'em apart. HST was a common man totally lacking in ego but filled with ambition to do right and good. His gift was a capability for nuance that characterizes true autodidacts, which he was.

Even David McCullough couldn't make Truman interesting. RR and HST both remain dull, dull, dull to me.

I appreciate your insights. Americans frequently baffle me and I need all the help I can get in terms of understanding their weird, weird ways.

I've just been reading the weekly bulletin at the company I work for. It's produced by the marketing who seem to pride themselves on their lack of knowledge, including their inability to construct a meaningful sentence. This is the second sentence from today's masterpiece -

If you’ve had your holiday and feeling refreshed, it’s time to start diarising to catch up with your key contacts/referrers of business.

>28 Jargoneer: And doubtless time to start punching the low-hanging fruit.

>28 Jargoneer: That sentence is so atrocious that what it meant was almost hidden by the way it was worded: So if I've not had my holiday, I take it that I'm free to unprioritise diarising? Sorry, boss, I'm going nowhere near my referrers until I've expended my reinvigatory holiday?

I've absolutely no interest in American politics but at least at the time I found Plain Speaking interesting enough.

Bit of a departure for me--finished Nick Tosches' TRINITIES.

A gruesome crime novel, makes "The Godfather" look like "Bambi".

I think Tosches, a pretty decent writer, really enjoyed splashing buckets of blood about, interspersed with graphic sex scenes.

Entertaining, but I also got the sense of an author slumming about in pulp.

28, that is really funny. I work for a local government and we overuse words like "collaborative" and one of my colleagues made up the word "advocrat" (shudder) but marketing jargon is even worse than governmental jargon.

I am now dithering over which to read first of the two books I picked up today: Martin John by Anakana Schofield and Debris, a debut story collection from Kevin Hardcastle. (Debris is blurbed by none other than John Irving, which is a pretty impressive blurb for a Canadian debut!)

I propose Schofield as a genuinely snobworthy writer. Her first novel, Malarky, is a truly impressive feat, a sustained virtuoso verbal performance. She can write most contemporary authors into the ground and use their remains to blot her inkspots.

Started The Bone Clocks.

Finished My Struggle: Book One. Very very very good. His description of seeing a painting by Constable is very moving. That final paragraph is sublime. Looking forward to Book Two.

Just finished The Gospel of Loki by Joanne Harris, a retelling of various Norse myths from the viewpoint of Loki. Unfortunately the characterisation is non-existent, the 'insight' banal, and Loki has all the charm of your average pout-y teenager. It's hard to see what the point of this book is.

ps...this wasn't my choice, it was a book group pick.
ps2...Harris allegedly got the best deal of her career for this novel. It is marketed as an adult fantasy but it's not, it's a YA book with a fake ID.

36: Wow, that sounds pretty awful! A good concept that didn't exactly work.

I just finished The Heart has its Reasons and decided that although it was a nice, memorable novel, I would have really enjoyed reading it better if I had managed to get it in Spanish. It would also have taken a lot longer and I would have gotten more out of it, since I have an unstoppable tendency to speed-read fiction in English.

Now starting Osiris, a sci-fi dystopia about a world after the seas rise due to climate change. Interesting so far.

Also keeping on with my history of North Africa, but need fiction in the summer. As for the Pale King, I'm taking another break. It's just so awfully depressing.

Just finished Charles Eisenstein's latest, THE MORE BEAUTIFUL WORLD OUR HEARTS KNOW IS POSSIBLE.

The kind of title that would normally provoke jeers on my part.

But I've read quite a bit of Eisenstein now, watched a number of his YouTube presentations, and I think the lad's got something. He's not a guru; I believe, like Krishnamurti, he's a student of life, a voyager, offering to take us along for the ride. Some of what he says strikes me as fanciful (""whoo-whoo", Sherron and I call it, something too weird or far-fetched for us to have much truck with it) but there are other aspects that seem bang-on.

Anyone else familiar with the dude?

A re-read: Jerome K.Jerome's THREE MEN ON A BOAT.

Still makes me laugh.

And as I'm reading, I can hear the Richard Briers-ish tone of the narrator. Really, a triumph of voice and just about pitch perfect.

Martin John was all it was cracked up to be, so now I'm turning to the Hardcastle story collection, Debris.

Also just picked up a complete collection of Elizabeth Bishop (Poems/Prose) with a $75 pricetag, for $10. So that's coming.

Finished Osiris. I am not a sci-fi expert, but I really enjoyed it and thought it was above usual genre fare. Have you read it, Ian?

>41 anna_in_pdx: No, but I've heard good things about it.

Dan Fante's 86'd.

A semi-autobiographical novel featuring an immature arsehole for a narrator.

Dimestore Bukowski, wallowing in the offal like the worst of Selby.

Not a patch on his father--ASK THE DUST is one of those Great American Novels you often hear about (except this one lives up to its reputation).