The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024, pt. 23: Christopher Brown

 

 

Reading and Viewing in 2024

by Christopher Brown

 

I dragged my wife this summer to see a post-apocalyptic prequel to the third sequel of a 1979 movie about Australian men trying to kill each other with their cars, promising her this was the one that would finally deliver the feminist utopia made from the ruins of petrochemical capitalism we had been teased with in 2015. And we did get a glimpse of The Green Place of Many Mothers—for about three minutes at the beginning until the bikers showed up, proving the filmmakers’ inability to unmoor their story from its (and their) roots in those '70s exploitation films where the bikers always showed up, and their (or maybe Hollywood’s) inability or unwillingness to show us an authentically different version of how life could be.

 When it came time to watch the actors pretending to be space opera jihadis rising up under the leadership of the tween prince, while we averted our eyes from the events unfolding in the real Arab world, I went alone.

 I took a long lunch to catch a weekday matinee of the movie about a Second American Civil War, but as anticipated it had no politics.

 

Maybe that is why most of my movie viewing this year was of the Criterion Channel’s new feed of their own non-stop selections from their library, Criterion 24/7, which lets you experience fragments of great movies as ambient backgrounds to domestic life. Among my favorite discoveries were An Angel at My Table, Jane Campion’s 1990 adaptation of the autobiographies of New Zealand author Janet Frame; Ornette: Made in America, Shirley Cole’s 1985 documentary following the improvisational music pioneer back to his hometown of Fort Worth; and Radio On, Christopher Petit’s beautiful black and white English road trip at the dawn of the Eighties.

 

 The most illuminating book I read this year was written in 1849 about events that took place in 1810-13. Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River is classic Americana, the account by Scots-Canadian entrepreneur Alexander Ross of his years helping launch John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company in the Pacific Northwest. A tale of frontier exploration and colonization, it begins with the dramatic arrival in downtown Manhattan of a group of Canadian management recruits escorted in a giant canoe by singing Voyageurs, takes a harrowing journey by ship around Cape Horn under the captaincy of an Ahab-like tyrant, has a decadent and utopian sojourn in pre-colonial Hawaii, and then details for hundreds of pages all the mishaps, fears, and failures of the group as they try to build their outposts and interact with the diverse Native American groups that surround them. You realize you are reading a business book, written not by adventurers, but by traders, whose skill was not trapping wild animals, but making deals. Reading their story, you get a vivid tour of the Pacific Northwest as it was before Anglo-American settlement and a fresh appreciation of how entrepreneurial finance was the real virus that paved the way for what would follow. 

 

Exploring similar territory from a radically different vantage was Boyce Upholt’s excellent 2024 book The Great River: The Making & Unmaking of the Mississippi, a wonderfully written work of Anthropocene ecology about what we have done to the bountiful riparian world we found between the Appalachians and the Rockies and the futility of our efforts to engineer the forces of nature into submission.

 

In a year extra busy with my own book launch and work and familial responsibilities, much of my reading was in the margins of the day, on the tiny screen of my phone after putting our daughter to bed. I deeply connected with Camille Dungy’s Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, which made a diary of a suburban yard into an incisive exploration of race, family, and American identity. I liked some aspects of Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger but found his efforts to write the other fell short, exposing the exhaustion of the burned-out masculine archetype at the center of the story. I was fascinated by my discovery of W. G. Sebald’s book-length poem After Nature, and enchanted by the dark spell of Nathan Ballingrud’s Crypt of the Moon Spider, a work of wonderfully weird fabulist melancholy that gets into your head and starts poking around like an alien dentist. I ended the year enjoying Joanna Pocock’s Surrender, which had been on my TBR pile since I picked up the print edition from Fitzcarraldo upon its publication in 2019. It’s a beautifully written and deeply insightful account of the author’s two-year stay in Montana in the company of her husband and daughter, witnessing the damage of both human and natural ecology at the frontier that is the edge of every American town, while navigating her own crises and life changes.

 

I devoured the nihilistic noir of David Goodis’ Dark Passage, enjoyed the brief retelling of the story of Viking matriarch Aud the Deep-Minded in Keneva Kunz’s new (to me) translation of Eirik the Red's Saga, and went into the bunker with Volker Ullrich for Eight Days in May, his fresh 2022 reconstruction of the last gasps of the Nazi regime. After our own incoming regime won the evident support of the American Volk, I found myself retreating into the labyrinth with Borges, rereading my favorites of his stories in the original Spanish (as collected in the Cuentos Completos, which I also enjoyed in the audio edition narrated by Gerardo Prat). Reading Borges untranslated takes some work for me, but made me realize how much more feeling and magic those stories had than one gets from the logic-drunk translations by American professors—and how much more strongly I could feel the specters of colonial horror and emergent autocracy echoing through the walls of the library in which those micro-narratives take sanctuary.

 The single thing I read this year that resonated with me the most was an essay by Patricia Lockwood in the December 4 issue of the London Review of Books, “Encounters With Aliens,” about watching X-Files reruns with her husband after he has major surgery, seeing how the whole show is about control of Scully’s body (and of that of the actress who plays her), and all the visitations of ghosts and disparate connections a nugget of aging popular culture can conjure. A reminder that our diverting escapes from the news of the day can also serve as left-handed strategies of engagement, and maybe even the laboratory to germinate the seeds of real change.

 

 

Christopher Brown’s latest book, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys and Other Wild Places, is now available from Timber Press.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024, pt. 22: Som Paris

 

Tending our micorrhizal networks

by Som Paris

 Many gardeners who have learned how soil works lay down their deep-dig tools, stop feeding plants with fertilizers, and make a subtle but important shift: they begin to feed the soil itself. This allows undisturbed soil to keep its delicate structures and the gardener can actually tend the micorrhizal networks of funghi within the soil that move nutrients around and network all the rooted in plants. 

 As writer-readers, we can do the same, and this year that is precisely what I have done. If we stop reading just to write that one next book and instead read to feed, heal and transform the deepest parts of our selves, then our books will bloom out of us organically. They will make more authentic sense, bursting into the world with stronger truths.

Colonial capitalism has separated us all from our original cultures, from our ancestors, from everything that used to be understood as vital, essential. This year, in my reading, I have turned back to feed that soil and let those magical micorrhizal connections grow. 

Many of the books that I have read this year will be of limited interest to others, which is precisely what feeding the inner soil makes so interesting: eschewing homogenizing capitalist culture, we become beautifully different from one another once again. Together we create a pluriversal wealth that breeds more creativity. This is not a superficial diversity within an homogenized universality, this is a rich, lavish pluriversality.

 

Books such as the Popol Vuh; A Lo Sucu Sumucu (Raízes Mayas del habla Jíbaro); Decolonial Psychology; or The Myth of Indigenous Carribean Extinction; Cannibal Recipes; might be of limited interest to many. But Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, by Gloria Anzaldua, is a text that I would fully recommend to anyone placed on the margins of society who wants to turn the wounds of colonialism and cisheteronormativity into magic in a way that connects us to all other marginalized souls, just like micorrhizal networks. 

 

I would also recommend I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World to just about every human with a pumping heart. In these political times it can indeed feel like the end of the world for many, especially racialized trans people like the author Kai Cheng Thom. Somehow she holds onto the thin thread of what really matters. How do we continue to choose love, when we are all so scared and wounded? How can our communities be ones of care and strength rather than fear and virtue-signaling?

 

A work of fantasy that fits in perfectly with my decolonial path is the finale to Rebecca Roanhorse’s Between Earth and Sky trilogy, Mirrored Heavens. Rebecca’s work finds an esteemed place within the growing body of literature that roots fantasy into the non- European culture of the writer. Africa is exploding with fantasy steeped in its own mythological roots, like Black, Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James or The Binti books by Nnedi Okorafor, just to pick a couple (that I have actually read) out of hundreds (that I have not yet had the pleasure to read!) 

 

For me, though, Rebecca Roanhorse’s work, drawing from Mesoamerican and Caribbean indigenous cultures, feels like coming home to fantasy for the first time. The politics and conniving intrigues are crunchy and satisfying, and the themes of generational trauma, though imagined in a world without European colonialism, speak to our own generational wounds. The characters are wonderfully diverse in the ways that life has set them in motion with vastly different needs and desires, pushed together to make a truly epic story. Rebecca does well in the way that she simply and without fuss dropped in a trans woman, much in the way that N.K. Jemisin does in the Broken Earth trilogy; she lets you know that our existences are real without turning us into a morbid plot point. I think it’s a great way for cis women to ensure that we (trans people and in this case, trans women) do not get swept quickly up into invisibility by the heavy, persistent domination of cisnormativity that narrates the world as if we never existed. And it does this without fetishizing us or using us as spectacle or plot device. She also manages well to depict cultures with more than two genders, as well as other cultures ignorant of those gender forms, all within the same mesoamerican universe: a realistic and well crafted touch.

 

These are some glimpses into my world of books this year. It has changed who I am, connected me to my own ancestral lines, and transformed how I am in the world. All of that will shine through the books I am writing. I can’t wait to see what next year brings. 

 

Som Paris is the author of Raven Nothing, which Aqueduct Press published in 2020. She was born in Oklahoma to a pair of traveling preachers who carried her on their missions around the world, inadver­tently making her an ardent internationalist. She ran away to Australia after high school and ran out of money studying tropical ecology, eventually surviving by living in a tree. She then moved to England, where she dove into studying history, literature, and philosophy for a BA and MA. More recently, she moved to the wilds of Galiza, in north Iberia. When she came out as transgender, she turned her wild patch of land into a nature retreat for trans and queer people; she can still be found there now.

 

 

The Pleasurs of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024, part Twenty-one: Mark Rich

 

Readings 2024

by Mark Rich

 

         

   Now that many of my friends and peers are retired, retiring, or worrying the thought of it as do dogs their stuffed toys, I have taken a job. Being paid to work for anyone besides myself makes me itch. This job, though, pays nothing, except indirectly. I am clerking in an antique shop where Martha and I have things for sale.

 Yet I have retired in one sense—from working in silence. For decades I have gone without listening to music. At the shop now once or twice a week, my day starts with early-Baroque consort music, moves on into the Baroque, and around three p.m. sometimes leaps centuries to Bebop and Swing. My selections started out scant, since some of my old CDs play only the graphic tune, "Disk Error." Lately, some thrift-shop finds have let me stay in the Baroque until closing time, if I so choose.

 My frustration at having little time to read has become worse, now that I have found a new way to work for nothing. So far, anyway. I chose a midweek day to be at the shop, thinking business might be slow enough to slip in some idle reading. I even placed a copy of Frost's poems among our books for sale, in case I wanted to do some memory-refreshing work with them, in odd moments. Some miscreant bought the book before I was back the next week.

The job may turn out to be only suited for random re-reading. Of the books I did read this year, three are already candidates for this treatment. Two I respect for their clarity and directness: Maria Lydig Daly's Diary of a Union Lady, 1861-65, and Henry Adams's Democracy, subtitled "An American Novel," written in 1880. Adams's portrayal of Madeleine Lee might well have been written expressly for our own time when so many, who presumably started into adulthood with bedrock intellectual, moral, or emotional verities beneath them, now live in straw-built piggy-houses sold to them by their friendly neighborhood wolf. In the novel, the call to social power that threatens Madeleine's principles takes the form of a corrupt Senator who hopes to marry her.

I had already longed to re-read The Education of Henry Adams, the narrative of which falls, in part, over the same years as Daly's diary. Maria Daly is cogent, insightful, and catty ("I had quite a pleasant time, having heard some ill-natured things and said some myself"). She was married to a judge whose opinions influenced and aided the government of the North; and if her personal nature and social situation led her to favor the Union while feeling some distaste for Lincoln and the notion of racial equality, her heart seemed genuine and her capacity to learn ample. If they exist, her journals from the years of Senator Blaine and President Grant would tempt me. Those years gave rise to Adams's novel. I suspect the real Maria Daly and the fictional Madeleine Lee might have shared many attitudes.

           

Not only concision and sharp perception prompt my desire for re-reading time, apparently. For I wish I could re-read Richard Holmes's Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage. Months ago on social media, Eleanor Arnason posted her observation that the use of adverbs was declining. "And quickly!" I responded, facetiously. Soon thereafter, in Holmes, I found a passage so weighted with modifiers I was tempted to post it to her page. The passage conclusively made it ringingly clear that the elusive reason for my having been paging doggedly but dazedly through the book, while woefully sensing that desirable facts had wiggled eel-ishly from my usually eel-snatchy hands, was that its author, with slippery intent, slap-dashedly dulled the murderous steel of Mr. Savage's notorious sword by coyly coating even so pointed a fact with emotional slanting, guesswork, and, to my mind, unreliable logic. I did sometimes see the statement, "Now, what I think was happened was this." I gained the impression that more often he slipped his opinions to the reader concealed in modifiers; and I learned, at the end, that I had learned little. Far from having obscured it in a London fog of pedantry from which one emerges misted and mystified, Holmes put his scholarship in plain view, but all too often prettified, uglified, or dramatized it in a way that made me start distrusting even the facts.

All the same, I may revisit Johnson's London and its characters as Holmes presents them — if, after bracing myself first with a splash of Henry Adams, I can just dash through the book.

 For hours each day I pretend to re-read things — by which I mean I pursue memory-work in Bach's preludes and fugues. Last year I memorized the odd-numbered preludes of Book II of The Well-Tempered Clavier — one per month. By each month's end I could falteringly make it through one prelude completely — only to forget it completely in working up the next. The exercise mainly clarified for me aspects of Bach's phrasing. At some point late last year, finding my memory of all these pieces more or less gone, I retackled prelude No. 17, then its fugue — wondering if I could put the whole into more permanent storage, in the way that I seem to have, for instance, Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality."

Around January or February of this year I learned that a villain had snuck into my life: Maria Sofianska, who in her time was, no doubt, a delightfully skilled pianist. I had followed some of her fingerings in my early work on No. 17. Yet in two passages in the fugue, I found that with Sofianska's fingerings my hands had no option but to present Bach's writing as textural music. Individual voices contributed to the texture, but with their contours — essentially their meanings — made indistinct and confused. Of these two passages, one falls mid-fugue; the other, more disastrously, at the end. As a monumental concluding texture, musically that ending does work for the ear. Yet the monumental texture makes the main voice disappear. The primary melody is not in the soprano. It also makes the supporting voices lose their reasons for moving in the way that they do.

It took me some three months to fully dispense with the hand-memory of one fingering and replace it with a new one that let the different voices play their parts. To this day, in trying to get these passages right, I not uncommonly stop midway, to re-start them.

When asked about how his works were to be played, Bach said, "As they are written." To read such writing can be daunting. Yet if one has time to work through all the impatient, inattentive, and inaccurate ways to read Bach's writing, one has at least a chance at rising to the measure of the measures.

This ending evidently occurs to me because I am presently reading Sidney Poitier's The Measure of a Man.

 

 

 

 

In 2024 poems by Mark Rich appeared in Poem, The Lyric, Blue Unicorn, Quiet Diamonds, and Penumbric.com — which seems remarkable to him, since although he writes poems regularly he almost never sends them out into the world. He lives in western Wisconsin with antiquing-and-life partner Martha Borchardt, the Scotties Callie and Hutton, and the constant thought of getting back to both prose-writing and guitar.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024, pt. 20: Lesley Hall

 

 

Pleasures of Reading, 2024

by Lesley Hall

 

 

 

I did a re-read of Middlemarch very early in the year, as part of a group reading project, and that set the bar rather high. Not sure how many times that makes it since the first I time I read it aged 16-going-on-17. It still offers more, new lights, and fresh insights. And in the noise and fume and fret of the modern world, that conclusion still resonates:

the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

However, there were other reading pleasures during the year if not quite on the same elevated pinnacle, but we cannot always live in that atmosphere.

A very different writer I discovered – in fact one currently in a general process of rediscovery – was Eve Babitz, whose work leant heavily on her own experiences, even if fictionalized, as an artist and writer hanging out with rock musicians in California in those days when it was all happening there. I read Sex and Rage and L. A. Woman as well as the biography by Lili Anolik, Hollywood’s Eve, and look forward to reading more. I wonder if there is a certain nostalgia involved, not so much for my actual own youth, but the sort of things I was reading in the 1970s and 80s about lifestyles and places very different from the way and places in which I was living myself.

A similar trip down memory lane was Lee Tulloch’s Fabulous Nobodies (1989), which I put in somewhat the same category except it is about clubbing in the East Village in New York when that was a happening scene. I must have read it around the time it came out, and it stuck in my mind, though I never heard it mentioned by anyone else at all until somebody namechecked it recently in a ‘Books in My Life’ article. So I got hold of a copy and re-read it and it was still really, really enjoyable even if it is one of those books that it is really hard to describe exactly why that is so and even what it resembles.

Another trip down the corridors of remembrance of reading past, and the recovery of writers apparently lost was the very welcome reissue of the idiosyncratic novels of Rosemary Tonks.

There was a small cluster of books published this year which, though quite different in themselves, all had resonating elements about the power of narrative. One of them, The Watermark by Sam Mills, I was alerted to by a rather snotty review – sometimes an adverse review can be a better pointer than a kind one in directing the reader to something to their taste, at least I have found it so. I can see that it’s the sort of conceit that might not work – the two main characters find themselves plunged into having to navigate the action of a series of very different novels – but Mills entirely pulls it off.

Sally Smith’s A Case of Mice and Murder is predominantly a brilliant historical murder mystery, set in the legal precincts of the Inner Temple, London, in 1901, as the Victorian era has just turned Edwardian. However, an important subplot deals with the disputed authorship of the sensationally best-selling children’s book Millie the Temple Church Mouse and this apparently twee tale turns out to have deeper resonance.

Furrowed Middlebrow, an imprint of Dean Street Press, has been doing sterling service bringing back into print works by ‘middlebrow’ women writers of the early to mid-twentieth century. Their latest, Eleanor Farjeon’s Miss Granby’s Secret, or the Bastard of Pinsk (first published in 1941), is an absolute delight. The prolific author of many successful melodramatic romances, Adelaide Granby, has died: her niece discovers in her papers the unpublished manuscript of her first novel, the eponymous Bastard of Pinsk, as well as her contemporaneous diaries. The various strands – the novel, and the events in Addie’s life it reflected, accounts by various other characters whose evidence is sought, the ‘modern’ niece rather aghast at the Victorian limitations on her aunt’s knowledge and her youthful misapprehensions – are all woven together to make a very satisfying and entertaining read.

So, while I felt sometimes during the year I was in a bit of a reading slump, looking back, there were some considerable high spots.

 

 

Lesley Hall was born in the seaside resort and channel port of Folkestone, Kent, and now lives in north London. She has retired from a career as an archivist of over 40 years, though she's still active in her field of specialization. Her recent essay "Send in the Clones?: Naomi Mitchison and the Politics of Reproduction and Motherhood," was published in Naomi Mitchison: A Writer in Time Edited by James Purdon, Edinburgh University Press https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-naomi-mitchison.html. She has published several books and numerous articles on issues of gender and sexuality in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain, and is currently researching British interwar progressive movements and individuals. She has also published a volume in the Aqueduct Press Conversation Pieces series, Naomi Mitchison: A Profile of her Life and Work (2007). She has been reading science fiction and fantasy since childhood and cannot remember a time when she was not a feminist. Her reviews have appeared in Strange Horizons, Vector, and Foundation, and she has been a judge for the Tiptree and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. She has had short stories published in The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women (1996) and The Penguin Book of Erotic Stories by Women (1995) and, most recently, is the author of the series The Comfortable Courtesan: being memoirs by Clorinda Cathcart and Clorinda Cathcart's Circle: https://www.clorinda.org. Visit Lesley's website.