Stuart Arnot

A paperback book, published by Bloodaxe Books, B.S. Johnson, House Mother Normal: A Geriatric Comedy. There's a Lucien Freud painting on the cover. The forefinger of my left hand covers the breasts of one of two figures.

Funny/nasty/preposterous. Finger included to escape the nipple censor.

Book, 'The White Boy Shuffle' by Paul Beatty. 'Beatty is an original and irreverent talent', The Times. Winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Picaresque and witty till it's not, but still is.

Paperback book, Cane, by Jean Toomer. With a new afterword by Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, jr. With quote from Alice Walker, "[Cane] has been reverberating in me to an astonishing degree. I love it passionately; could not possibly exist without it."

Perplexing and incredible, structurally, thematically, and totally.

Quicksand, Nella Larsen, paperback. Penguin English Library.

Charming, sad, and serious.

Paperback book, The Spider's Web by Joseph Roth. 'Roth, above all, is a consistently magnificent writer of prose', says Guardian on the cover. It is not that above ALL.

Picked up a cache of Roth that I hadn't read from Keel Row in Whitley Bay on Saturday. His contempt for the stupidity, cowardliness and self-serving perfidy of these people leeches through the pleasantries a bit more than in later works, I think.

Yeah, a lot of Yiddish guessed at from context, and its hurriedness was slightly knackering, but thrilling

Book: Fran Ross, 'Oreo', with an introduction by Marlon James.

Really funny and smart, 1974 precursor to post-soul brigade, but more Oulipan?

I was going to say, but forgot, that it was the passing resemblance between Nettel's book below and Lispector's 'Family Ties' that led me to read his, but it's a great distance away from those forms.

Penguin Modern Classic: 'One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century' Colm Tóibin. Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. My hand is covering the nipples of an abstract nude on the cover. The painting is a detail of 'The Silent Statue (Ariadne)' 1913 by Giorgio de Chirico.

Re-photographed for the algorithm.

Adult Content!

Penguin Modern Classic: 'One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century' Colm Tóibin. Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

Brutal and hypnotic. I feel sure a reference to Ellison's invisible man is of some significance. Like Sartre's tree root scene extrapolated wildly, inverted and played alongside itself.

Book: The Accidentals, Guadalupe Nettel, Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Read these short stories.

Paperback book, Four Novels by Marguerite Duras: The Square; Moderato Cantabile; 10:30 on a Summer Night; The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas. Introduction by Germaine Brée.

Read the fourth of these Novels, 'The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas'. Such a characteristic pacing, pointing toward her later work, but still very separate, as are the others in this collection, from the point she'd eventually get to.

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Paperback book, The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid, a novel. The cover is dominated by a sepia photograph of a woman, presumably Kincaid's actual mother.

Finished this. Multi-faceted - I devoured it pretty quickly - but one facet that sticks is the dessicate-dry wit with which it is coloured.

Book, The Guyana Quartet by Wilson Harris. With a foreword by Ishion Hutchinson. "An Exhilarating Experience... Genius", Jamaica Kincaid.

Read the second of these novels, 'The Far Journey of Oudin'. Remarkable time-play, a chronology like risset tones.

Book. Richard Wright, White Man, Listen! Lectures in Europe, 1950 - 1956. 90s edition, with an introduction by Cedric Robinson.

Compelling but knotty and complicated in its position. Cedric Robinson's introduction helped tease that out a bit. I wish John A. Williams' introduction from the 60s edition had been included too.

Paperback book. J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians. 'A remarkable and original book', says Graham Greene.

I had never before read Coetzee, and was convinced to do so by GC Spivak.

Book, 'Migrant Brothers: A Poet's Declaration of Human Dignity' by Patrick Chamoiseau. Cover contains quote from Junot Diaz, "If justice had a Jericho trumpet, Chamoiseau would be it."

More optimistic complement to recent Mbembe reading.

A paperback book, 'Brutalism' by Achille Mbembe

Mbembe is overwhelming. Insightful, prescient, gutting.

...narrator compared a fictionalised version of PE to Ornette Coleman! That works too, I guess.

Picador paperback of 'I Am Not Sidney Poitier' by Percival Everett

I was thinking, recently, about how Percival Everett is like Anthony Braxton. How the works of both are like millefeuille of serious/funny/ironic/earnest pastry, and, more prosaically, they've just got similar vibes/looks, etc. So imagine my surpriseb when, in this novel *SPOILER ALERT*, the...

Paperback, Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe

A real thriller/killer

Paperback book, 'On the Postcolony' by Achille Mbembe.

Finished this one just now

Paperback book, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons by Igor Stravinsky. The cover has a portrait of IS by Picasso.

Speaking of pomposity... quite revelatory, though, as old IS is more candid about the politics of music than many would have allowed themselves to be.

Yeah, I thought that might be the case. I'll do my best!

Thanks C. I saw one in a charity shop recently (Dogma, I think) and realised that I no longer have a conflict of interest in reading it. Will pick them up when next I spot.

Ha! For me it's the sneering pomposity, but all reasons are valid!

Are Lars' novels good? He was a supervisor on my PhD and I didn't want to read them in case I hated them.

Paperback book, The Other City by Michael Ajvaz

Finished reading this. Complicated thoughts about it. Reads sort of like a midpoint between Bruno Schulz and Robbe-Grillet, which I dig, but there's also a sort of dialectics of semiotics running through that leans a bit too close to a Debord/Baudrillard position for my liking.