Reading in April

I just wrapped up Edmund White's short story collection Skinned Alive.  I'd say there is a distinct disadvantage in being a bit of a pioneer in that he spent so much time explaining the gay milieu to straights that I wasn't sure if I was reading fiction or essays by Margaret Mead.  I kid...  But there is definitely something very sad about the fact that the relatively few (privileged) homosexuals who made it to New York or SF (or possibly France) in the late 70s or early 80s and could live relatively open lives had their special society crushed by AIDS.  White almost never uses the term AIDS but uses other terms, mostly just indicating his characters had tested positive or negative.  While he is clear about the unfairness of it all (though still acknowledging some people continued having risky sex), he is much less angry (and political) than gay writers of  the next generation, such as Tony Kushner and certainly Larry Kramer. 

I have about 200 pages to go in Arlt's The Flamethrowers. I'm still annoyed that it got water-damaged but it is still readable.  I'm also a bit surprised that the two separate translators that tackled The Seven Madmen passed on The Flamethrowers!  So strange.  I should wrap this up in a few more days, esp. as I'll probably be taking the train a couple more times this week. 

I did reread Lamming's The Emigrants.  I had forgotten that over a third of the book was set on the voyage from the West Indies to England, and indeed the structure has some similarities with Ondaatje's The Cat's Table.  I didn't really understand why there was an unnamed first-person narrator who vanished for huge stretches of the book and seems to be absent from the 2nd and 3rd parts of the novel.  I generally found the characters pretty interchangeable, though maybe that was sort of the point to have a Greek chorus of sorts.  Anyway, I would say Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin is the stronger of the two.  I also managed to read Selvon's The Housing Lark, mostly on my phone!  I'll pause my reading of both for a while, but maybe over the summer I'll read Moses Migrating and Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile.

And I reread Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman.  There were certainly several sections that made me laugh, especially the bit about the policeman warning the narrator about people becoming more like bicycles the more they ride them.  There was actually a Fringe comedy act called The Bicycle Men that must have been partially inspired by this, as they have a character who becomes part bicycle.  Incidentally, the best song from that show is on-line here.

I generally am pretty open to new poets, but I didn't care for Mary Jo Salter's Zoom Rooms, probably because so many of the poems rhymed, and specifically she seemed to be trying to channel Lord Byron's Don Juan over-the-top rhymes.  I really do need to work my way through a huge stack of new publications from Brick Books but that will have to wait.

My new reading list is shaping up, and after Arlt I think I'll read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (a classic I've never cracked), Celine's Journey to the End of Night, Fallis's Best Laid Plans (to lighten the mood), Beckett's Three Novels, David Lodge's Therapy (though apparently I should read Kierkegaard first, which I've been meaning to do but would be a really significant diversion).  Things get a little blurry after that but probably All About Hatterr, rereading Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy, Ford's Canada and Welty's The Robber Bridegroom (which is fairly short, which is a real selling point these days!).