Wild Brink of My Wednesday
Nov. 28th, 2018 04:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bWhat I've Finished Reading
Not a lot! Guilty Pleasures: Popular Novels and American Audiences in the Long Nineteenth Century was a lot of fun. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London was very poststructuralist, which reminded me that I want to try to actually understand poststructuralism before I reach the end of my life. I'm sure it's not actually very complicated! But poststructuralists have a particular writing style that is mostly fine for talking about Victorian sensation novels in, but whenever it turns toward explaining itself I get suddenly very tired. I tried looking for "Poststructuralism for Dummies" at the library yesterday while I was grabbing up Graftons, but they didn't have it.
What I'm Reading Now
Titus Alone! which I found conveniently in the used bookstore in a matching Ballantine paperback edition, so I didn't even have to check the library! (I know I should check the library, but that's a different question). Guys, it's weird. That's not to say Titus Groan and Gormenghast aren't weird, but the weirdness here is in a new and jarring key. It's weird in its own right but also weird within the set of weird books by noted weirdo Mervyn Peake. The chapters are so short that they're stressing me out a little, as if I were the one out of breath, and the world outside Gormenghast is so alien to the son of Gormenghast - with its new non-crumbling glass buildings and motor-cars and house parties - that the combination of new imagery with Peake prose and Peake-typical grotesque precision is both unnerving and a little flattening, at least here at the start.
Since I keep saying non-specific things about Peake's prose, here are the first four paragraphs of Titus Alone for your empirical observation.
In all honesty I don't know if I'm going to like it as much as the other two. But seriously, check out that echoing drumbeat-hoofbeat nonsense and the ridiculous slant-rhyme punning action on "marrow and bane" come ON PEAKE rein it in a little; I ALREADY LOVE YOU TOO MUCH.
Speaking of things I love too much, KINSEY MILLHONE IS BACK and better than ever. I finally got to the other library, and all of the Sue Graftons were there, or close enough, so I brought home menaces L through N. L is for Lawless opens with Kinsey grumbling that she'll never again take on a case as a favor to a friend, since this one left her with a nasty knock on the head and she didn't even get paid. Oh, Kins. Never change, never learn. The friend is Kinsey's inexplicably sexy octogenarian landlord, of course (whose entire family of cantankerous Midwestern eightysomethings is visiting, much to my delight), and the case is a dead neighbor's missing service records, which his son thinks are missing as part of a vast government conspiracy. Are they? Is it actually a much pettier conspiracy? I don't know, but in about a hundred pages, I will! Also there's a subplot where Kinsey's long-lost cousins keep trying to get to know her and can't understand why she thinks human ties are for chumps.
What I Plan to Read Next
This is the sixth or seventh time this year that I've run into that Henry James anecdote about going to see Uncle Tom's Cabin in order not to be beguiled. My conclusion is that I should go ahead and read Uncle Tom's Cabin - but I probably won't read it next. What I'll probably read next: M is for Malice by Sue Grafton.
Not a lot! Guilty Pleasures: Popular Novels and American Audiences in the Long Nineteenth Century was a lot of fun. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London was very poststructuralist, which reminded me that I want to try to actually understand poststructuralism before I reach the end of my life. I'm sure it's not actually very complicated! But poststructuralists have a particular writing style that is mostly fine for talking about Victorian sensation novels in, but whenever it turns toward explaining itself I get suddenly very tired. I tried looking for "Poststructuralism for Dummies" at the library yesterday while I was grabbing up Graftons, but they didn't have it.
What I'm Reading Now
Titus Alone! which I found conveniently in the used bookstore in a matching Ballantine paperback edition, so I didn't even have to check the library! (I know I should check the library, but that's a different question). Guys, it's weird. That's not to say Titus Groan and Gormenghast aren't weird, but the weirdness here is in a new and jarring key. It's weird in its own right but also weird within the set of weird books by noted weirdo Mervyn Peake. The chapters are so short that they're stressing me out a little, as if I were the one out of breath, and the world outside Gormenghast is so alien to the son of Gormenghast - with its new non-crumbling glass buildings and motor-cars and house parties - that the combination of new imagery with Peake prose and Peake-typical grotesque precision is both unnerving and a little flattening, at least here at the start.
Since I keep saying non-specific things about Peake's prose, here are the first four paragraphs of Titus Alone for your empirical observation.
"To north, south, east, west, turning at will, it was not long before his landmarks fled him. Gone was the outline of his mountainous home. Gone that torn world of towers. Gone the gray lichen; gone the black ivy. Gone was the labyrinth that fed his dreams. Gone ritual, his marrow and his bane. Gone boyhood. Gone.
It was no more than a memory now; a slur of the tide; a reverie, or the sound of a key, turning.
From the gold shores to the cold shores: through regions thighbone-deep in sumptuous dust: through lands as harsh as metal, he made his way. Sometimes his footsteps were inaudible. Sometimes they clanged on stone. Sometimes an eagle watched him from a rock. Sometimes a lamb.
Where is he now? Titus the Abdicator? Come out of the shadows, traitor, and stand upon the wild brink of my brain!
In all honesty I don't know if I'm going to like it as much as the other two. But seriously, check out that echoing drumbeat-hoofbeat nonsense and the ridiculous slant-rhyme punning action on "marrow and bane" come ON PEAKE rein it in a little; I ALREADY LOVE YOU TOO MUCH.
Speaking of things I love too much, KINSEY MILLHONE IS BACK and better than ever. I finally got to the other library, and all of the Sue Graftons were there, or close enough, so I brought home menaces L through N. L is for Lawless opens with Kinsey grumbling that she'll never again take on a case as a favor to a friend, since this one left her with a nasty knock on the head and she didn't even get paid. Oh, Kins. Never change, never learn. The friend is Kinsey's inexplicably sexy octogenarian landlord, of course (whose entire family of cantankerous Midwestern eightysomethings is visiting, much to my delight), and the case is a dead neighbor's missing service records, which his son thinks are missing as part of a vast government conspiracy. Are they? Is it actually a much pettier conspiracy? I don't know, but in about a hundred pages, I will! Also there's a subplot where Kinsey's long-lost cousins keep trying to get to know her and can't understand why she thinks human ties are for chumps.
What I Plan to Read Next
This is the sixth or seventh time this year that I've run into that Henry James anecdote about going to see Uncle Tom's Cabin in order not to be beguiled. My conclusion is that I should go ahead and read Uncle Tom's Cabin - but I probably won't read it next. What I'll probably read next: M is for Malice by Sue Grafton.
no subject
Date: 2018-11-29 02:53 am (UTC)What's the Henry James anecdote about going to see Uncle Tom's Cabin? How is it going to help him escape beguiling?
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Date: 2018-11-29 03:49 pm (UTC)I am also super curious! It's one of those things that I technically sort of "read" when I was ten, but remember absolutely nothing about.
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Date: 2018-11-29 10:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-11-29 03:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-11-29 02:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-11-29 03:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-11-29 03:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-11-29 03:49 pm (UTC)