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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 1h

Finally decided to read the only Denis Johnson still unread on my shelves (five years after buying it.) A wonderfully inventive and imaginative take on the "post-apocalypse" novel set in the ruins of what were once the Florida Keys . More in the alt text, Johnson at his best.
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$Fiskadoro, by Denis Johnson. The nuclear holocaust has been and gone, and now everything is different. In Twicetown, once Key West, two missiles sit unexploded, objects of awe and indifference. Mr Cheung teaches the boy Fiskadoro to play the clarinet; Grandmother Wright, the oldest person in the world, endlessly relives the fall of Saigon; Cassius Clay Sugar Ray trades in radioactive artefacts. Boats go out to comb the sea for fish, and the sea keeps some of the men. Tossing fitfully in nightmares of forgotten wars, lazing in the tropical heat, the flotsam and jetsam of a lost civilization pursue their lives through a world of fractured memories. And they wait - for the Cubans to come, for the Quarantine to be lifted, for the god Quetzalcoatl, the god Bob Marley, the god Jesus to return and build their kingdoms.$

Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 8h

2019 #73
A confession here, I spent six years chipping away at this massive book having bought it shortly after release in 2013 but it was well worth persisting with. A guide to political thought from Ancient Greece up to the early 21st Century and a very good one at that.
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On Politics, by Alan Ryan.

A massive one-volume history of political thought from Herodotus to the present, Ancient Athens to modern democracy - from author and professor Alan Ryan.
This is a book about the answers that historians, philosophers, theologians, practising politicians and would-be revolutionaries have given to one question: how should human beings govern themselves? That question raises innumerable others: can we manage our own affairs at all? Should we even try? Many people in the past have thought that only some individuals were either able or entitled to practise self-government: Greeks, but not Persians; men, but not women; the better-off minority, but not the poor majority. Others have thought that few of us have any desire to govern ourselves, and that government is inevitably a matter of a competent elite managing an acquiescent mass.
Then what do we mean by 'freedom' today, and is it the same freedom that people enjoyed, or strove for, in the past? Almost every modern government claims to be democratic; but is democracy really the best way of organising our political life? For almost two thousand years, educated opinion said not. Today, educated opinion says yes. In the modern west, do we actually live in democracies? They certainly do not resemble what the Athenians fought and died to preserve. It seems that there may be less agreement than we might think about how human beings can best govern themselves.
In this extraordinary book, more than thirty years in the making, Alan Ryan engages with the great thinkers of the past to explain their ideas with a lucidity which makes the book compelling reading. While acknowledging how much separates us from our intellectual forebears, he reminds us how often the ideas of long-dead or distant thinkers are more alive, and speak to us more vividly and immediately than those of our contemporaries.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 1d

2019 #72
Another excellent set of short stories, this time following the Paris Metro starting from Gare du Nord with tales from some of the leading lights of French writing plus one lesser knowns. All these collections from Oxford Uni Press have been very good.
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Paris Metro Tales, translated by Helen Constantine.

Following on from Helen Constantine's hugely successful Paris Tales, the twenty-two short stories included in More Metro Tales take the reader on a fascinating journey around Paris by metro. The journey begins at the Gare du Nord, stops at twenty underground stations along the way, and ends at Lamarck-Caulaincourt. Some of these stories actually take place in the metro itself, but most are to be found when you emerge above ground. They range from the 15th-century account of the miraculous Saint Genevieve, patron saint of Paris, through tales by favourite writers such as Zola, Simenon, and Maupassant, to Martine Delerm's evocation of the last hours of Modigliani's mistress, Jeanne Hebuterne. Gerard de Nerval evokes the thriving, bustling market in Les Halles in the 1850s; Colette recounts her involvement in a traffic accident near the Opera; Boulanger describes a blackly funny experience in Pere Lachaise.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 1d

Spent the evening with this haunting and very strange novella about a man who finds a videotape of an obscure French film and sets out to find more about its elusive director. Definitely prime weird fiction and as always with Joel Lane, very well written.
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The Witnesses Are Gone, by Joel Lane

Moving into an old and decaying house, Martin Swann discovers a box of video cassettes in the garden shed. One of them is a bootleg copy of a morbid and disturbing film by obscure French director, Jean Rien.
The discovery leads Martin on a search for the director's other films, and for a way to understand Rien's filmography, drawing him away from his home and his lover into a shadowy realm of secrets, rituals and creeping decay. An encounter with a crazed film journalist in Gravesend leads to drug-fuelled visions in Paris - and finally to the Mexican desert where a grim revelation awaits.
The Witnesses Are Gone is a first-hand account of a journey into the darkest parts of the underworld - a look behind the screen on which our collective nightmares play.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 2d

2019 #71
Another really good collection of short stories from an immensely promising young writer, these all set in the great Texan melting pot that is Houston.
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Lot, Stories, by Bryan Washington.

The Millions In the city of Houston - a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America - the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys. Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston's myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra. Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 2d

Good grief, we've had our first snake in the garden this spring as well now -just one of the regular Tiger Snakes we get here. No pictures as I was too busy getting the cat to leave it alone and shepherding (or should that be snake-herding) it off the block. Another day in Australia 🙄
#snake

Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 2d

New resident in the kitchen. She was eyeing up my breakfast for some reason...
#spider

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 3d

Ordered these from the publisher in the UK just 7 days ago and they've already turned up down here. Nice! More Recovered Books from Boilerhouse Press and @neglectedbooks.com and they haven't let me down with anything in this series yet.
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And So Did I, by Malachi Whitaker.
Solitary Confinement, by Christopher Burney.
Trance by Appointment, by Gertrude Trevelyan.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 3d

2019 #69 & #70
Two fascinating lectures delivered in the form of two slender volumes. Esi Edugyan muses on ideas of home while Michael Crummey explores the relationship between fact and fiction in writing. Both are great little reads full of interesting thoughts and ideas.
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Dreaming of Elsewhere, Observations on Home, by Esi Edugyan.

Home, for me, was not a birthright, but an invention. It seems to me when we speak of home we are speaking of several things, often at once, muddled together into an uneasy stew. We say home and mean origins, we say home and mean belonging. These are two different things: where we come from, and where we are. Writing about belonging is not a simple task. Esi Edugyan chooses to intertwine fact and fiction, objective and subjective in an effort to find out if one can belong to more than one place, if home is just a place or if it can be an idea, a person, a memory, or a dream. How "home" changes, how it changes us, and how every farewell carries the promise of a return. Readers of Canadian literature, armchair travellers, and all citizens of the global village will enjoy her explorations and reflections, as we follow her from Ghana to Germany, from Toronto to Budapest, from Paris to New York.

Most of What Follows is True, Places Imagined and Real, by Michael Crummey.

Most of What Follows Is True is an examination of the complex relationship between fact and fiction, between the "real world" and the stories we tell to explain the world to ourselves. Drawing on his own experience appropriating historical characters to fictional ends, Michael Crummey brings forward important questions about how writers use history and real-life figures to animate fictional stories. Is there a limit to the liberties a writer can take with the real world? Is there a point at which a fictionalization of history becomes a falsification of history? What responsibilities do writers have to their readers, and to the historical and cultural materials they exploit as sources? Crummey offers thoughtful, witty views on the deep and timely conversation around appropriation.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 4d

2019 #68
A fine novel about life in the Thai capital as it is overwhelmed by water in a time of massive rainfall and rising sea levels. Blurb is in the alt text but I remember this as a very creative and original take on the "climate change" novel.
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Bangkok Wakes to Rain, Pitchaya Sudbanthad.

In the restless city of Bangkok, there is a house.
Over the last two centuries, it has played host to longings and losses past, present, and future, and has witnessed lives shaped by upheaval, memory and the lure of home.
A nineteenth-century missionary pines for the comforts of New England, even as he finds the vibrant foreign chaos of Siam increasingly difficult to resist. A jazz pianist is summoned in the 1970s to conjure music that will pacify resident spirits, even as he's haunted by ghosts of his former life. A young woman in a time much like our own gives swimming lessons in the luxury condos that have eclipsed the old house, trying to outpace the long shadow of her political past. And in the submerged Bangkok of the future, a band of savvy teenagers guides tourists and former residents past waterlogged landmarks, selling them tissues to wipe their tears for places they themselves do not remember.
Time collapses as their stories collide and converge, linked by blood, memory, yearning, chance, and the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibian, ever-morphing city itself.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 5d

2019 #67
The last book from Denis Johnson, another wonderful collection of short stories albeit very different from his previous short fiction collection. Showed he was still at the top of his game, another little gem.

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The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, by Denis Johnson.

The final story collection from Denis Johnson, author of the groundbreaking, highly acclaimed Jesus’ Son . Written in the same luminous prose, this collection finds Johnson in new territory, contemplating mortality, the ghosts of the past, and the elusive and unexpected ways the mysteries of the universe assert themselves.
Finished shortly before Johnson’s death, this collection is the last word from a writer whose work will live on for many years to come.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 5d

Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
20/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting

Palaeolithic cave paintings, Altamira, Spain. Artists unknown.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 5d

A novel gripping enough to keep me reading through to the end in one day. Natsuo Kirino is quite possibly my favourite Japanese writer and this did nothing to change my mind. Four teenage girls in suburban Tokyo become entangled in the aftermath of a violent murder. Dark.
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Real World, by Natsuo Kirino, tr by Philip Gabriel.

In a suburb on the outskirts of Tokyo, four teenage girls drift through a hot smoggy August and tedious summer school classes. There's dependable Toshi; brainy Terauchi; Yuzan, grief-stricken and confused; and Kirarin, whose late nights and reckless behaviour remain a secret from those around her. Then Toshi's next-door neighbour is found brutally murdered and the girls suspect Worm, the neighbour's son and a high school misfit. But when he disappears (taking Toshi's bike and cell phone with him) the four girls become irresistibly drawn into a treacherous vortex of brutality and seduction which rises from within themselves as well as the world around them.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 6d

2019 #66
This odd tale of obsession, corruption and revenge is probably the weakest of the Bolano novels I've read so far but it's still ok. There's a bit more info in the alt text but it's definitely one more for the completist.
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The Skating Rink, by Roberto Bolano, tr by

Dropped from the Olympic figure skating team, Nuria Martì's fate pivots her into a world of corruption, jealousy - and revenge.
Cushioning her fall from grace, a besotted admirer builds a secret ice rink for her in the ruins of an old mansion on the outskirts of their seaside town. What he doesn't tell her is he paid for it using public funds. Such deceit is not without repercussions, and the skating rink soon becomes a crime scene.
Narrated by a corrupt and pompous civil servant, a beleaguered romantic poet, and a duplicitous civil servant, The Skating Rink is a darkly atmospheric tale of murder and its motives.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 6d

Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
19/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting

The company of Frans Banning Cock preparing to march out, known as the Nightwatch , by Rembrandt van Rijn.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 6d

Continuing a productive start to the month, another gem of a book in the Recovered Books series from Boilerhouse Press. This time, the tale of a psychiatrist in 1930s Germany and then WW2 trying to be "a good man in an evil system." Blurb is in the alt text, a terrific read.
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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 7d

2019 #65
A thoroughly enjoyable book that recounts the myriad ways our planet has shaped us as a species, from plate tectonics to ocean currents to changing climate. For more detail there's a long publisher's blurb in the alt text. Excellent.
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Origins, How the Earth Made Us, by Lewis Dartnell.

From Sunday Times bestselling author of The Knowledge, a book that takes us far back in time to the point where history becomes science, and that unpeels the layers of this history to reveal not how we made the earth, but how the earth made us.
When we talk about human history, we focus on great leaders, mass migration and decisive wars. But how has the Earth itself determined our destiny? How has our planet made us?
As a species we are shaped by our environment. Geological forces drove our evolution in East Africa; mountainous terrain led to the development of democracy in Greece; and today voting behaviour in the United States follows the bed of an ancient sea. The human story is the story of these forces, from plate tectonics and climate change, to atmospheric circulation and ocean currents.
How are the Himalayas linked to the orbit of the Earth, and to the formation of the British Isles? By taking us billions of years into our planet’s past, Professor Lewis Dartnell tells us the ultimate origin story. When we reach the point where history becomes science we see a vast web of connections that underwrites our modern world and helps us face the challenges of the future.
From the cultivation of the first crops to the founding of modern states, Origins reveals the Earth’s awesome impact on the shape of human civilizations.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 7d

Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
18/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting