Books

• Colin Dickey, Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy
• Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry
• Safia Jama, Crowded House
• William Shakespeare, Othello
• Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis
• Djuna, Counterweight, translated by Anton Hur
• William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

I re-read Charles Portia’s Masters of Atlantis to see if there was anything new there in the light of Colin Dickey’s exploration of the American perception of secret societies – and, it’s true, because it’s comfort reading. MOA is an exploration of the secret society in comic form; but it’s also a novel about profound stasis, not dissimilar to Oblomov. The secret knowledge at the center of the Gnomon society manifestly fails to change anything in the world, or changes things infinitesimally slowly; seeking it lets the characters ultimately do nothing.

The plot threatening in the background – a thwarted novice turned FBI agent comes to wreak revenge – ends in a slow motion fizzle: arriving late to provide evidence in a hearing, Pharris White tells his story to a clerk on leave from a Christmas party; he gives her the evidence he’s spent the book collecting, and she throws it away. Everything eventually dissolves; the same has happened to the Gnomons’ abandoned temple. Does it matter? The characters have accomplished nothing, really, but they are happy, or as happy as they can be, at the end. It’s perhaps Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” played as a comedy.

Books

• The Penguin Anthology of the Prose Poem, edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod
• Evelyn Waugh, Decline & Fall
• Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies
• Alan Garner, Red Shift
• Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art
• Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma
• Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

Films

• Museo, directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios
• Hail Satan?, dir. Penny Lane
• The Last of Sheila, dir. Herbert Ross

The Penguin Anthology of the Prose Poem is a decent idea: a good general anthology of the history of the prose poem. There’s an interesting structural arrangement: it’s arranged in order by date, reverse chronologically, starting with the present and working its way back to the French 19th century. Predictably there’s a bit of jiggery-pokery over what a prose poem might consist of. Aside from arranging the poems in date of publication, however, there’s no historicizing whatsoever; one looks in vain for author bios or real contextualization. Instead, the prose poems are allowed to breathe free; unless you flip forward to the end of a poem, you might not know who it’s by when you start it. These aren’t terrible ideas in and of itself; however, the anthology sags under its persistent attempts to make an argument for the history of the British prose poem, almost all of which could be cut without great loss. I can imagine that it’s tempting to avoid the “first the French, then the New York School, then everybody” narrative! But the obvious highlights that everyone knows shine much brighter than the filler around them. 

Claire Dederer’s Monsters is a useful way of thinking about art and the people who made it; it worked especially well after re-reading Evelyn Waugh’s first two books, inspired by the LRB piece. I don’t think I’d actually read Decline & Fall since being assigned it in college (!); now the two books struck me as splitting the difference between Ronald Firbank and Henry Green without being as serious as either. There’s gratuitous racism in Decline & Fall: a punchline at the end of the chapter is that a main character’s boyfriend is . . . Black, which is clearly meant to be hilarious. A chapter or so of received minstrel jokes follows. Homophobia is used in the same way in Vile Bodies: a gay secondary character is meant to be a funny distraction. It’s hard to imagine any reader getting around this now – it struck me as odd that this wasn’t mentioned in Seamus Perry’s piece – read with Remote People, Waugh’s account of a trip to Ethiopia, written between these two, it’s hard not to see Waugh as repellent. 

I came to Erik Davis’s High Weirdness looking for contextualization of Carlos Castaneda, and an understanding of how people came to take him seriously. There’s a bit of that in this book, a very thorough investigation of Terrence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick’s visionary experiences during the 1970s; I think I liked it most as a compendium of pointers to interesting things. I’m not quite convinced of the importance of McKenna and Dick’s attempts to think through what happened to them – the novels that came out of Dick’s experiences are interesting, though I’m not sure that context makes them deeper. Wilson’s work mostly passed me by, except through secondary adaptations – I can’t tell if reading through that would be worthwhile or not. 

Books

• Djuna Barnes, The Lydia Steptoe Stories
• Robert A. Kaster, The Appian Way: Ghost Road, Queen of Roads
• Anne Garréta, Not One Day, translated by Emma Ramadan & Anne Garréta
• Nona Fernández, Voyager: Constellations of Memory, trans. Natasha Wimmer
• H. G. Wells, The Croquet Player
• John Ashbery, Something Close to Music: Late Art Writings, Poems, and Playlists, edited by Jeffrey Lependorf
• Henry James, In the Cage
• Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
• Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
• Henri Charrière, Papillon, trans. Patrick O’Brian
• Christian Kracht, The Dead, trans. Daniel Bowles
• Kenneth Koch, Sun Out: Selected Poems 1952–54
• Robyn Schiff, A Woman of Property
• John Berger, Bento’s Sketchbook

Films

• Three Ages, directed by Edward F. Kline
• Asteroid City, dir. Wes Anderson
• 千禧曼波 (Millennium Mambo), dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien

Exhibits

• “Martha Alf, Opposites and Contradictions,” Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles
• “Salomon Emquies: Complex Systems,” Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles

A bunch of scattered reading – part of this was due to travel and being on a plane and picking things at random as distraction from whatever was going on. My criterion for this is often things that are short and seem less imposing. More (re-)reading of Henry James’s novellas; I’m a little surprised that In the Cage, his novella about a telegraph operator, isn’t more widely known as an example of technological mediation. (It does turn up in Deleuze & Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus, though they’re doing something else with it.) The H. G. Wells book is an odd little book which isn’t really well-known for good reason; I always feel curious about how the books he’s still known for are all in the first decade of a fifty-year career. A couple of years ago I was interested by his The Wonderful Visit, which is maybe not forgotten in the French world; I can’t quite convince myself that he’s worth a thorough reading, though I would like someone to do that for me.

Papillon is maybe interesting as an example of an unverifiable narrative: it feels basically like a novel, though it is ostensibly a memoir; most of what happens is fundamentally unverifiable because there wasn’t anyone else to see or to comment on the truth of what Charrière says happened. A lot of it seems wildly unlikely. This seems more interesting read now, when it’s hard to imagine anything being that unverifiable, when everything exists in databases.

Books

• Andrés Caicedo, Liveforever, translated by Frank Wynne
• Lisa Hsiao Chen, Activities of Daily Living
• Carlos Castenada, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
• Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Reputations, trans. Anne McLean

Exhibits

• Casa Museo Otraparte, Medellín, Colombia
• Cathedral Labyrinth of Thorns, Curaçao
• Landhuis Bloemhof, Curaçao

A bunch of random things in here, mostly because I was traveling. The Caicedo novel comes from reading about the figure of Caceido in interviews with Colombian artists from the 1970s; it seems like something that would have been revelatory at the time, though it feels impossibly dated now in its vision of the emancipatory power of music and the 1960s. (Perhaps it’s interesting as a precursor to Bolaño’s writing, which might flow from the ruins of that world?) 

I’d never read Carlos Castaneda; when I met an older man who talked about how revelatory those books had been, I read the first one. I found myself wishing for something like a Norton Critical Edition of this: taken as face value – or as anthropology – this seemed ridiculous, read as a creative fiction project, it might be more interesting. I am not the ideal audience for this book! Though I would like to know why this was as influential as it was; and it seems like the sort of text that would lend itself to many wildly different readings by audiences at cross purposes with each other. I’m not sure who could put that together.

Chen’s novel on Tehching Hsieh and the problem of projects deserved more attention than I remember it receiving; it falls into the slim category of contemporary novels that I can imagine wanting to re-read.

Books

• Henry James, Daisy Miller
• Henry James, Washington Square
• Yukito Ayatsuji, The Decagon House Murders, translated by Ho-Ling Wong
• Emmanuel Carrère, Yoga, trans. John Lambert
• Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
• Yukito Ayatsuji, The Mill House Murders, trans. Ho-Ling Wong
• Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères, trans. David Le Vay
• Ursula Le Guin, Dangerous People

Films

• Eating Raoul, directed by Paul Bartel
• Washington Square, dir. Agnieszka Holland

Exhibits

• “Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing,” LACMA
• “Women Defining Women in Contemporary Art of the Middle East and Beyond,” LACMA
• “Afro-Atlantic Histories,” LACMA
• “Light, Space, Surface: Selections from LACMA’s Collection,” LACMA
• “Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa. Cantándole a las plantas,” Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín
• “Luisebastián Sanabria. Temporada de eclipses,” Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín
• “Nicolas Collins. Alcance largo,” Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín
• “Débora Arango. República, 1948–1958,” Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín
• “Versión libre. Sucesos en la Colección MAMM,” Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín
• “Fragmentos del mundo,” Museo de Antioquia, Medellín

A lot of disconnected reading because of travel. I’d intended to re-read more Henry James, though I ended up distracted and things are a bit all over the place. I do think I’d last read Daisy Miller when I was a teenager: the idea of a teenager reading Henry James feels ludicrous, as so much of his work is clearly literature for the middle-aged. Predictably I felt antipathy for him when I was young; I can’t say that I love him now, or that I’m ever likely to love him, but I do appreciate him more now, and I think I’ll keep going on with the novellas, still procrastinating away from reading the late books.

I last read Northanger Abbey an astonishingly long time ago; on re-reading, it turned out that I remember very little accurate about it. I’d remembered it as a comedy on the perils of reading, a parody of the Mysteries of Udolpho; that’s in there, though that’s a small part of the book, and the rest was entirely unfamiliar to me, to the point where I wondered if I’d actually read it. The peril of re-reading is to realize how block-headed you were in the past.

In a similar spirit of rectification, I finally read Carrère’s Yoga, which I’d been putting off – his previous collection published in English hadn’t done very much for me, and this didn’t do much either. I did like his previous books, which always felt like they were going to drive off the rails, then straightened themselves out at the last possible moment. With the latest two, I feel like I’ve had too much of Carrère – perhaps it’s that so much of the autofiction is meta-autofiction, where the repercussions of publishing books in his life becomes the narrative (and, in the latest one, much is pointedly excluded from the book, which the reader is expected to know because Carrère is a celebrity. It feels like Carrère has exhausted his subject.

The Sam Francis show at LACMA isn’t particularly kind to him: the contemporary Japanese work that it presents as an influence on him (Gutai and otherwise) is more interesting that Francis’s work, and makes the viewer wish there were a whole show of that. 

Books

• Leonardo Sciascia, To Each His Own, translated by Adrienne Foulke
• Robert Plunket, My Search for Warren Harding
• Patrick Modiano, Scene of the Crime, trans. Mark Polizzotti
• Henry James, The Aspern Papers
• Thea Lenarduzzi, Dandelions
• Nick Pinkerton, Goodbye, Dragon Inn
• Rex Stout, Over My Dead Body
• Dino Buzzati, The Stronghold, trans. Lawrence Venuti
• Mitch Sisskind, Do Not Be a Gentleman When You Say Goodnight

Films

• Aprile, directed by Nanni Moretti
• Il deserto rosso (Red Desert), dir. Michelangelo Antonioni
• 不散 (Goodbye, Dragon Inn), dir. Tsai Ming-liang
• They All Laughed, dir. Peter Bogdanovich
• Daisy Miller, dir. Peter Bogdanovich

I made my way through most of Henry James’s novels a few years ago, leaving off after The Wings of the Dove, with The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl still outstanding. I keep meaning to go back, though it’s taken a while; rewatching Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating a few months ago, I found myself searching out the short stories behind that, and now I find myself going b

ack to James in general – his depictions of hapless Americans bumbling through Europe seem like they might be of consideration when so much of my life is spent around hapless Americans and Europeans bumbling through Asia – though how long I can keep up that enthusiasm is not clear to me; reading the New York Edition introduction to The Ambassadors might put anyone off of reading entirely. Lately I’ve been re-reading the shorter novels; the impetus for The Aspern Papers was Robert Plunket’s My Search for Warren Harding, a Charles Portis-y transposition of the plot of that book into Los Angeles in the early 1980s. Peter Bogdanovich’s filmed version of Daisy Miller – I hadn’t seen most of his work after Paper Moon – is almost slavishly faithful to the original, and loses something by that fidelity. They All Laughed is an odd mess, a picture of 1981 New York where everyone is listening to country music and rollerskating when they are not falling into bed with each other.

I’m glad there’s a new translation of Buzzati’s Il deserto dei Tartari; I can’t say that I care for the title – “The Tartar Steppe” is much more evocative – and I’m not sure that the translation seems to me like a marked improvement over the old one, though more versions are always better. NYRB has also reprinted Joseph Green’s translation of A Love Affair, which I don’t think I’ve read, though I might be forgetting things.

Fireflies Press’s short books on films are fantastic and beautifully produced; it took me a while to get around to reading Nick Pinkerton’s book on Goodbye, Dragon Inn, though it was worth the wait, a thoughtful consideration on the place of the theater in watching films. I should get a copy of Dennis Lim’s Tale of Cinema, which came out when I wasn’t paying attention.

Books

• Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks
• Sabrina Orah Mark, Happily: A Personal History – with Fairy Tales
• Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar, translated by William Weaver
• “Lord” George Sanger, Seventy Years a Showman
• Movements of Thought: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Diary, 1930–1932 and 1936–1937, edited by James C. Klagge & Alfred Nordmann
• Jaroslav Hašek, The Man Without a Transit Pass and Other Tales, trans. Dustin Stalnaker
• Julien Gracq, Great Liberty, trans. George MacLennan
• Dorothy Tse, Owlish, trans. Natascha Bruce
• Louisa Lim, Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong
• Roberto Bolaño, The Unknown University, trans. Laura Healy
• Roberto Bolaño, The Romantic Dogs, trans. Laura Healy
• Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, trans. William Weaver
• Rex Stout, Some Buried Caesar
• Leonardo Sciascia, Candido, or A Dream Dreamed in Sicily, trans. Adrienne Foulke

Films

• A New Leaf, directed by Elaine May
• Jackals & Fireflies, dir. Charlie Kaufman
• 青少年哪吒 (Rebels of the Neon God), dir. Tsai Ming-liang
• Portrait of Jason, dir. Shirley Clarke
• Il colibri (The Hummingbird), dir. Francesca Archibugi
• L’immensità, dir. Emanuele Crialese
• バトル・ロワイアル (Battle Royale), dir. Kinji Fukasaku
• Bianca, dir. Nanni Morretti
• La messa è finita, dir. Nanni Moretti

Books

• Rex Stout, Fer-de-lance
• Rex Stout, The League of Frightened Men
• Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
• Natalia Ginzburg, Happiness, as Such, translated by Minna Zallman Proctor
• Pierre Albert-Birot, The First Book of Grabinoulor, trans. Barbara Wright
• Natalia Ginzburg, Voices in the Evening, trans. D. M. Low
• William Shakespeare, Macbeth
• Xi Chuan, Bloom, and Other Poems, trans. Lucas Klein
• Rex Stout, The Rubber Band
• Rex Stout, The Red Box
• Giacomo Leopardi, Selected Poems, trans. Anne Paolucci & Thomas G. Bergin

Films

• …طعم گيلاس (Taste of Cherry), directed by Abbas Kiarostami
• The Wrong Guy, dir. David Steinberg
• Porte aperte (Open Doors), dir. Gianni Amelio
• The Tragedy of Macbeth, dir. Joel Coen
• Ecce bombo, dir. Nanni Moretti
• Sogni d’oro (Sweet Dreams), dir. Nanni Moretti

Books

• Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy
• David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
• George Schuyler, Black Empire
• Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper, edited by Giovanni Marchini Camia & Annabel Brady-Brown
• Pier Paolo Pasolini, Poet of Ashes, translated by Stephen Sartarelli
• Natalia Ginzburg, The Road to the City, trans. Frances Frenaye
• Natalia Ginzburg, The Dry Heart, trans. Frances Frenaye
• Leonardo Sciascia, Open Doors, trans. Marie Evans
• Leonardo Sciascia, Death and the Knight, trans. Joseph Farrell
• Natalia Ginzburg, Valentino and Sagittarius, trans. Avril Bardoni
• Natalia Ginzburg, Family and Borghesia, trans. Beryl Stockman
• Leonard Sciascia, A Straightforward Tale, trans. Joseph Farrell
• Leonardo Sciascia, 1912 + 1, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch
• Aldous Huxley, Mortal Coils
• Kirmen Uribe, Bilbao–New York–Bilbao, trans. Elizabeth Macklin

Films

• Judex, directed by Louis Feuillade
• Judex, dir. Georges Franju
• Whoever Says the Truth Shall Die, dir. Philo Bregstein
• Retour à Séoul (Return to Seoul), dir. Davy Chou
• Two Weeks in Another Town, dir. Vincente Minnelli
• Pickup on South Street, dir. Samuel Fuller

Books

• Michalis Pichler, Publishing Publishing Manifestos
• Amr Ezzat, How to Remember Your Dreams, translated by Jennifer Peterson
• Marius Kociejowski, The Serpent Coiled in Naples
• Matt Ruff, The Destroyer of Worlds
• Emilio Fantin, Luigi Negro, Giancarlo Norese, Cesare Pietroiusti & Luigi Presicce, Besides, It’s Always The Others Who Die, trans. Steve Piccolo

Films

• Les Vampires, directed by Louis Feuillade
• Tár, dir. Todd Field

Exhibits

• “Rirkrit Tiravanija: We Don’t Recognise What We Don’t See,” STPI