Lola Reads

A continuation of my reading thread, begun in a different place.

So where's the book?

First, I must read THE book.

HUGS to you, Dr. Urania Newton-Freud! I've been thinking how I need to plop down on your couch (as soon as I collect the greenbacks for the hour) and ask you to explain to me Why Do I ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS Fall For People I Can't Have?

Is it incurable?

If Love's a Sweet Passion,
why does it torment?
If a Bitter, oh tell me
whence comes my content?
Since I suffer with pleasure,
why should I complain,
Or grieve at my Fate,
when I know 'tis in vain?
Yet so pleasing the Pain is,
so soft is the Dart,
That at once it both wounds me
and tickles my Heart.

I press her Hand gently,
look Languishing down,
And by Passionate Silence
I make my Love known.
But oh! how I'm Blest
when so kind she does prove,
By some willing mistake
to discover her Love.
When in striving to hide,
she reveals all her Flame,
And our Eyes tell each other
what neither dares Name.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLsMwIOwaYc&feature=related

“The mosque is all awareness. Mind you never go that way.
“The tavern is all ecstasy. So be aware and come!”

Ghalib

“They offer paradise to make up for our life below
“It needs a stronger wine than this
“To cure our hangover.”

Ghalib

Thanks for the poetry, Murr and Rick.

I still haven't read A book.

>7 LolaWalser: Lola,

That was then. This is now. Read a book.

The reason for the forum's season is sorely lacking.
Can we perhaps goad you into review stacking?

Where am I? Who are you? What's this thread about? I heard noises, there was a crash, and a sound like a Zeppelin leaking gas, then a purple flash... and then I don't remember anything...

Won't work, sorry.

Shhhh....Lola's reading!!

I READ A BOOK!

Alert the press...

Believing that the best thing for inflated expectations bubble is a quick, firm needleprick of hope-dashing reality, I hereby announce my successful completion of Gerard Jones' (whoever he is) Men Of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, a book about. The business. Of comics. Start redexing this thread, its hellish descent has just begun...



It is mostly about Superman, his hapless creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and their hair-raising incompetence at making a buck off a product that made millionaires of hundreds of others, but the background is nicely padded with an overview of the rambunctiously seedy pulp industry, and other superheroes as they zoom in on the trail of Superman's cape, mostly ridiculous, some sublime. I mention with admiration that I never knew so many Jews made the comics (along with Hollywood, this clearly makes them US and world entertainers supreme). I didn't even know Jack Kirby was once Jake Kurtzberg, for instance. Outside art to the outsiders, marginal culture to the marginals.

I also discovered--echoing Peter's (copyedit's) experience of the Marvel gang in another thread --that anyone writing or drawing comics is most likely an extraordinarily boring person with a dreary life to whom nothing ever happens. One notable exception would be Dr. William Moulton Marston, psychologist, lawyer, lie detector inventor, happy polygamist, househusband and creator of The Wonder Woman--all those bondage scenes in her comics, it turns out, were inserted for the good of young men's mental health. Thank you, Doc!

In sum, a good book for an older, unsentimental comics geek.

The reading, it continues apace!

I am still pursuing my "Read it or Lose it or THEN lose it" campaign, where I grab a book more or less at random. The more or less random recent reads:



Contes et nouvelles en vers by Jean de La Fontaine--not the La Fontaine we read in school! A good proportion are versified tales from Boccaccio and all feature sexual shenanigans and humour of the broadest kind--the kind that would get you censored on TV to this day. Example--and don't say I didn't warn you--an old husband with a frisky young wife suffering jealous torments dreams one night that the Devil is putting a ring on his finger and tells him that as long as he keeps it on, his wife will be faithful. He awakes to find his finger up hers you-know-what. (L'anneau de Hans Carvel)

And so forth with froth.

Les amants de Byzance by Mika Waltari (1952)

A tale of the fall of Constantinople, covering about six months up to Doomsday, the waiting, the raids, the siege. A mysterious stranger, Johannes Angelos, half Greek, half Latin, erstwhile slave to the Sultan, arrives "to die defending the city" and falls in love with a high born lady once meant for the Emperor. Everyone dies. Recommended for the younger teen by my inner chile.

L'ancre de miséricorde by Pierre Mac Orlan (1941)

A pirate adventure story with all the ships anchored in the port! That's my main peeve. It is not more boring than Treasure Island, though.

La guerre des boutons by Louis Pergaud (1913)

Two bands of boys from hostile neighbouring villages, the feud dating centuries back to the case of One Sick Cow, are engaged in total war, meeting regularly for skirmishes where rocks and stick fly, and the captives are stripped and their clothes de-buttoned, forcing victims to return home shamed and sometimes naked. Wonderful language, sparking with dialect and juvenile argot, wholly Rabelaisian (Pergaud warns in his preface no concessions are made to "decency" in illustrating the kids' lingo and mores), reminiscent of the (much later) Lord of the flies, but funnier and somewhat less vicious. Pergaud was killed in WWI, at age 33.

#15 Lola

I hadn't realised the War of the Buttons was a French novel. An Irish version of the story was made into a very funny film starring Colm Meaney. The first few minutes are available to view here. In fact, now that I look at the lists of captions on YouTube it looks like the whole film is there.

Having just watched the opening scenes I note the Irish film credits state it was based on a French film called La guerre des boutons.

Interesting. Looks like there are at least two earlier French adaptations too (the photo on my book's cover is from the later one, I guess). Haven't seen any of the above.

Treasure Island boring? My inner chile protests most vehemently at this appellation.

18
You have an inner chile? Green or red?

;)

Almost as boring as Hugo. Or Dickens. Or Tolstoy. Or...

Maki's right. I should have said; Not nearly as boring as...

#18

What can I tell you, cat, me 'n Stevenson aren't exactly well-matched. Not that I hate him! Gosh no, and there's plenty of him (Arabian night stories esp.) I've quite enjoyed. The Suicide Club! Excellent. Treasure Island--not so much. To be fair, it's been decades.

It was only in the past couple of days that I read somewhere (on LT perhaps?) the lament that Stevenson is now regarded as primarily a children's author. That's rather a pity. There's a lot of decent Stevenson that goes way beyond Treasure Island.

It's hard to imagine the existence of The Picture of Dorian Grey without The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

I loved The black arrow. Read it many times. I have a copy of Kidnapped knocking about too, although I fear its time in my life is long past.

Also reads:

***

Un Noël de Maigret (Maigret's Christmas) by Georges Simenon. Three early-ish stories happening on Christmas (for evil knows no religion!), only the first one, about a Santa Claus' mysterious and likely sinister visit to a sick child's room, featuring Maigret. The second one was quite exciting, with policemen stationed in their headquarters following helplessly on the city map the trail of a child following a killer--or maybe the trail of a killer following a child. The third one was funny (in the dour way Simenon is sometimes funny). In a bistro about to close, filled with loners (who else would be there on Christmas?), one of the lonely men suddenly commits suicide. The event shakes up one of the whores present who decides to continue her evening in the human throng, instead of going home. In a cafe she observes a couple of sleazebags putting the make on an obvious novice, fresh off the bus, and stages an incident that ends up in general police arrest. The women are jailed together and the veteran whore gives a piece of her experienced mind to the young one. It's the sweetest Simenon ever gets. I read him rarely, almost grudgingly. I don't like him very much--I don't want to like him either. But damn, there's quality in him.

The spoke by Friedrich Glauser.

I've no trouble liking Glauser, a druggie and a crazy who spent lots of time in sanatoriums, although he's probably less deserving than Simenon. However, he also suffers from being read in translation, his juicy Bernese Swiss simply can't work its effect in English dress. But something gets through: the variety and the plastic form of people, usually small towners and rustics, peasants, rural no-goodniks, young delinquents, girls who strive, matrons content or disappointed... In this book, someone is murdered using a filed bicycle spoke, and Sergeant Studer (once upon a time humiliated and demoted from inspectorship, but going about his business of being a policeman coolly and unswervingly) puts together the picture of what happened through lots of talk and a few casual observations.

(I'm the world's worst mystery reader, forgetting "clues" as they hit me between the eyes, and hardly ever caring for whodunnit. So, it is not from nor for that angle that I read these--just a warning to possible follow-uppers.)

forgetting "clues" as they hit me between the eyes, and hardly ever caring for whodunnit

lol
me too.

Mystery twins!

For you, Murr, I`d recommend Glauser`s In Matto`s realm (should you chance upon it, rather than expressly getting it). It distills Glauser`s madhouse experiences; in some ways it`s like The cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in words.

The mention of the French books and films reminds me that I'm off to France on Friday for ten days. Just thought I'd say! :)

Enjoy.

#26

Oh, I hate you!

NO, no, I mean, "enjoy"! :)

For the Stevenson deprived, an interesting collection of his lesser known tales.

R. L. Stevenson
The Fabulous Raconteur

Forgotten Classics of Mystery Volume 4

http://www.librarything.com/work/258806/summary/19555435

The Suicide Club
The Young Man with Cream Tarts
The Physician and the Saratoga Trunk
The Adventure of the Hansom Cab

Thrawn Janet

The Pavilion on the links

The Sire de Maletroit's Door

The Wrecker

#27 Thank you!

#28 Thank you! I hate myself sometimes too; but I'm still going to France on Friday. ;)

Have a lovely Easter. Hopefully I will have had a chance to do some reading and will have something worth contributing.

Bon chance, mes amis!

#29 Thrawn Janet

"Thrawn". That's a word I haven't heard in years. It is common enough in Northern Ireland where I grew up, but I moved to Dublin in 1982 and it doesn't seem to be used here at all.

***

Looking backward by Edward Bellamy (1887)

I'm startled by how pleasant it was to read this literarily unprepossessing "novel" in the beautiful LEC edition. This does not bode well for my ability and willingness to consume electronic "books". I was looking forward (and backward) to chapter headings with illustrations in always different colour, admiring the letterpress type (so black, so thick, so deep), weighing the book in my hand (solid, yet light), noting the modernist square shape... all of these are signs and messages in themselves, unnecessary, to be sure, in receiving Bellamy's communication, but somehow enhancing it and helping it along. Call me a sybarite, but I'd rather have that than not.

Bellamy's communication is his solution for the ills of his society, set 113 years after his day. And it's communism. The most astonishing feature of his utopia is the basic one--complete abolition of the market and trade.
The State--that is, the collective of citizens--is the sole owner and overseer of industry. All citizens are members of the "Industrial Army" until the age of 45, when they retire (and as Bellamy describes in a disarming vision, their life, far from ending, actually begins). All citizens receive the same fixed amount of credit (not "pay"), whatever their function and profession. Private inheritance is done away with, on death all possessions revert to the state. Work hours are light for difficult jobs, longer for the pleasant ones, and vacations abound past what Europe ever dreamed of. Many other innovations are mentioned, regarding environment, housing, religion, shopping, women, the sick etc.

Knowing nothing about Bellamy himself, it becomes clear that he was deeply affected by the poverty, misery and social upheavals he witnessed, labour unrest, strikes and terrorist anarchism especially. The latter is discussed as "the red flag party", which, it turns out, was subsidised by capitalists to obstruct reform.

All in all, a very interesting read on a perennial theme--what makes a just society?--and a nicer, more humane utopia than any other from that period I've read.

Le chant d'Orphée selon Monteverdi (The song of Orpheus according to Monteverdi) by Philippe Beaussant

Monteverdi, the man who married music and drama, is my greatest musical hero, a creator of astonishing, unique imagination and innovator who convinces me that everything is discovered only once, the first time, the followers only develop. All 400 years of opera are in his Orpheus, like a tree in a seed. I was finally able to squeeze in two consecutive hours for a joint listening-reading session of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo and Beaussant's culturological analysis of it, and the experience of having another consciousness guide my ear was wonderful. Monteverdi's patrons, the lords of Mantua, Vincenzo Gonzaga and his intellectual wife Isabelle d'Este, were discussed, the art that embellished their palace (lots of Mantegna), the academies of scholars and amateurs flourishing at the time throughout Italy, the example of Florence, where the first something-like-opera was performed in 1600, Jacopo Peri's Euridice (the myth of Orpheus again), and the neoplatonism that suffused the words of Alessandro Striggio, Monteverdi's librettist, and cast the old myth in new philosophical clothes. Last and least, there is some musicological analysis, just enough to draw attention to Monteverdi's new devices, his amazing emotional expressivity, the colouring of Orpheus with A minor, say, and the brutal contrast to it of Charon's F major, in the dank and oppressive underworld, the frank subjection of words to music, the cross-over employment of Italian dances and Dutch polyphony, the super-fine dynamics...

Loved the last sentence: "In Orpheus Monteverdi midwives Renaissance and the newborn is Baroque." (Hey, it's not my fault English doesn't have the perfect translation for "faire accoucher"!)

Rare fun was had by me.

that sounds divine. Monteverdi is also one of my heroes. I'm listening to the Vespers right now.

Loooove them. Which version? That was the first Monteverdi I heard live, and in a church too, as our Lord ordains. Check out Handel's Marian cantatas too. The Virgin could be a Muse...

John Elliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir. Philip Langridge. RIP.

Have that!

Me too!! -- believe it or not, its been in my CD changer for the last few months!!

Monteverdi >>> Beatles

In homage I dug out my copy of Monteverdi's Vespro della beata vergine performed by McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort, and listened to it yesterday.



And today I found this:



Yum. The music that is - of course...

(You can click the pictures to go to the label's album pages and listen to samples.)

Yeeeeees, Emmanuelle Haim and her ensemble did a jazzed-up Monteverdi too... being Monteverdi's bitch I of course bought it, but old-timey is the best for me.

Have the McCreesh too. Solid, less sparky than Gardiner.

I can't believe Silent isn't picking up on the Beatles diss. I'm losing my touch...

Maybe if I bold it?

Monteverdi>>>Beatles

That was a diss? I thought you were speculating on the schizophrenic juxtapositions within my CD changer (where >>> is the sound of changing disks):

Monteverdi >>> Beatles >>> Morton Feldman >>> Gonzalo Rubalcaba >>> Allman Brothers >>> Pierre de la Rue >>> Fritz Wunderlich >>> Les Claypool >>> Peter Gabriel >>> Eliot Carter >>> Jethro Tull >>> The Dead Weather >>> Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan >>> Heinrich Schütz >>> Morten Lauridsen >>> Florence Foster Jenkins >>> Toshiko Akiyoshi >>> Meshell Ndegeocello >>> Miles >>> Mingus >>> Monk >>> Mahler >>> Booker T & the MGs >>> Wayne Krantz >>> Mike Keneally >>> Mitsuko Uchida >>> Dead Kennedys >>> Gerald Finley >>> Toru Takemitsu

Florence Foster Jenkins

lol

I was wondering how quickly you'd catch that.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of hearing The Glory of the Human Voice

Oooh, which Finley and Akiyoshi disks? Wondering about the Takemitsu too.

FFJ is a standard party recording for geeky opera buffs. Nothing is guaranteed to lead to heavy drinking and raucous fun sooner. Either that or the party clears out immediately.

Back in my carefree younger days, we used Florence Foster Jenkins to clear out the record store at closing time....

Mockers! The woman was a genius! GENIUS! The vibrato, the control! The frocks!

When we've all had a bit more to drink, I shall treat you all to my FFJ impersonation.

45> Finley::Akiyoshi::Takemitsu:: here are the ones currently in my CD changer ::

Gerald Finley w/ Julius Drake (piano) :: Schumann :: Dichterliebe & other Heine Settings :: Hyperion

Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra Featuring Lew Tabackin :: Desert Lady-Fantasy :: Columbia

Takemitsu (1) :: Chamber Music :: Aiken (flute) / Toronto New Music Ensemble :: Naxos

Takemitsu (2) :: Riverrun, Water-Ways, etc. :: Crossley (piano) / London Sinfonietta / Knussen :: Virgin Classics

A Confession: FFJ is not really in my CD changer right now. In fact, she can't be -- I only own Glory in a vinyl copy of late 70s vintage. I just threw her into the mix to see what happens.

Also, the schizo-positioning of the disks is really meaningless -- I rarely play disks in the changer in sequence. I'll either listen to the one I just loaded, or I'll set it up so something I'm currently interested in repeats ad nauseum. So mood-swings from, say, Uchida's Schubert to the Dead Kennedys are highly unlikely.

All Florence needed was a great voice coach.

>I shall treat you all to my FFJ impersonation.

Only if you dress the part!

>my CD changer

We use iPods for that now. ;)

Seriously, I miss having a really good CD changer; I looked around for a used one but gave up, partly because I couldn't find the kind I wanted at a reasonable price, partly because I couldn't really fit it into my cramped apartment anyway. Except for one or two Yamaha warhorses and the like, they're not even manufactured anymore - it's easier to buy a turntable.

oh of course! Dressing up is half the fun!

Murr, as our most prominent Russophile, are you acquainted with the tradition of Russian song?

#48

I knew you wuz cheatin'! No one can listen to such a mess without their head exploding.

Jenkins Flo vs. Sumi Jo... ah, I feel a ditty coming on.

50>

My iPod is, if anything, more eclectic than my changer. It pretty much stays in my car, though, except when I travel (my commute to work is about an hour each day, so it sees pretty heavy usage). I've put somewhere between 600 and 700 CDs on it, yet still often find myself in the mood for something I have at home...

52>

Ooh, thanks for that, E. --- I love Anna Russell, but know her almost entirely from audio recordings (again, originally vinyl). I never thought of looking her up on YouTube -- she's as amusing to watch as she is to listen to.

Silent, that clip is from VAI Music, which has released a couple of DVDs of Anna Russell - their site is linked under the videos, if you didn't already notice.

Re: iPods (you know I was ribbing) I find that my ripped or downloaded tracks, even when heard through high-end headphones, sometimes carry static and other glitches not on the CD; and nothing quite replaces listening through a pair of speakers that have plenty of detail.

>52 Existanai:

Ahhh...whot a lovely RATION song!

** ** **

Vor Bildern by Robert Walser is a small, appetising selection of Walser's sketches on specific paintings, in prose and poetry, where the paintings are often only framing other topics--a tiff with a landlady, a walk in the forest--or serve as departure points for drama (as the fantasy of a conversation with Manet's Olympia)--or undergo that strange Walserian analysis in which everything except the primary object seems to be discussed, and then a sudden connection or insight clicks into life, like a revelation. The liveliness of the text is owed to his mildly zany mannerisms, the shifting of pace, the digressions, and the irruptions of the personal--such as the last sentence in the otherwise well-behaved sketch on Brueghel the Older--"Beautiful women are ornamenting the Promenade by their presence, and I'm sitting here and writing?", which is like someone jumping away from the table just as they brought in the dessert, and declaring he must live, live, LIVE!

Il dolore by Giuseppe Ungaretti leaves me cold as poetry, and chills as testament to his suffering. The collection is very short, and most of the pieces in it are short (one a single broken line, a desperate shout: "And I love you, I love you, and it is a constant tearing!") as if the voice were being strangled. Two tragic premature deaths, of his brother and son, dominate the first part, and continue to echo in the grieving war pieces, and the hope for god (Jesus' return), and renewal of innocence.

Le centaure dans le jardin (The centaur in the garden) by Moacyr Scliar didn't fulfill by the end all the hopes it raised in the beginning. A centaur, called Guedali, is born in an otherwise unremarkable Jewish-Brazilian family eking a farming life out in the sparse countryside. The problems of a human with the lower body of the horse are presented quite realistically--the dietary and hygienic concerns, the complications of horse-sized sexuality, the question of whether a centaur can be a good Jew (one hopes circumcision is the step in right direction). After a move to the city (preceded by my favourite sentence in the whole book, something about how in a city no one will notice how unusual Guedali is) and escalating family tensions, Guedali runs away, joins a circus, falls in love with a mysterious stranger he secretly spies on, and eventually meets a girl-centaur, Tita, who becomes his mate. For a while they enjoy a pastoral idyll, among friendly old ladies, galloping and having hot horsey sex all the time, but then Tita grows dissatisfied, yearns to be normal, live in the city... and they start exploring the possibility of species-change, which takes them to a plastic surgeon in Morocco. I'd rather not retell the whole plot--there's quite a bit of it, no one need worry about philosophical longueurs in this book--and say only that the transformations of the characters and their surroundings took up too much in descriptive detail and not enough in motivation. I was especially intrigued by the conflict between the emerging yuppie class and the leftists and the question where our centaurs placed, as well as by the position of Jews in Brazil--was it a promised land, where even Jews could ride (one of Scliar's epigraphs remind us that "There never were Jews on horses"--(i.e. noble), or was it a painful trap, where a Jewish boy better fantasise himself out of reality?

Would love to hear opinions from whoever read this.

After nature was Sebald's first published book, and sounds just like his other, except the sentences are broken up into patterns signifying "poetry". No metaphors, no fancy epithets, no bells and whistles, just his serious, poised cadences informing us about Matthias Grünewald, a mysterious Renaissance painter with a talent for grotesque and visual representations of pain; Georg Steller, a scientist and one of many Germans in intellectual professions who emigrated to Russia--Steller because he wanted to take part in the Bering expedition sponsored by Catherine the Great; and Sebald's family.

I also read two borrowed Reginald Hills, Dialogues of the Dead, a feast for any word puzzle nerd, brimming with excellently used literary references and allusions, and Midnight fugue, which I've already almost entirely forgotten... except there's Bach in it. I really like this Reginald Hill person, I like his detectives, and I like the nowts and owts and many colourful expressions people apparently use in Yorkshire ("getting up at sparrowfart"--I hope I remember that).

Speaking of detectives, I watched the three episodes of the first season of BBC's 2010 "Sherlock" series, with Bernard Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Sherlock and Watson and I give it all four thumbs up. Unevenly good writing, some doubtful casting (come on--THAT's Moriarty?!) but overall a successful concoction based on an idea (bringing Sherlock into 21st century) that at first sounds terrifying to any fan. So very glad 221B Baker Street is open for business again. And this time all the gay may come out to play!

Sadly, I can't speak to your reading choices, but I can agree with your take on the new Sherlock series. Classy and smart, with a great update of the Watson character. My family and I loved them and can't wait until the new episodes begin in August.

Oh, so cool to meet another fan! Yeah, I love this Watson (I've seen Martin in The office and The black books too)--he is such a fine person, solid, good, brave, but I like best his unassuming-ness and shyness--how he conveys them, like when he shifts from one foot to another, or pulls his head between his shoulders, or looks away, from side to side--there is something touchingly vulnerable about him.

I've never seen Cumberbatch before, but his presence and acting make you think he was born to play this. Excellent, excellent casting both of them.

*** *** ***

A time to keep silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor caught my attention because of his mention of Huysmans (he was reading him a lot at the time, Fermor notes), whose En route I recently read. Both Huysmans and Fermor write about their stays as guests in Trappist monasteries; Fermor also visited Solesmes (as did Huysmans), and observed the remnants of Byzantine monasteries and churches in Cappadocia. Well--whatever Fermor thought about or carried away from Huysmans is completely invisible in this tepid account, as is any personal engagement or disengagement with religion. I rarely had such a strong feeling of themes and opinions being actively AVOIDED, although, considering that Fermor might have been a Protestant or atheist seeking hospitality (repeatedly) among Catholics expressly withdrawn from the world in order to practise complete devotion, perhaps that is not so difficult to excuse. He does wonder briefly about the monkish life in regard to Freudianism (aren't they all horribly repressed, sexual bombs ticking away?), but in general, the monks seem to him out-of-this-world calm, benevolent, happy. Fermor himself, while keeping mum on what these retreats may be doing for his immortal soul, expands somewhat on the benefices of silence and quiet for a stressed-out 20th century body: first the discouraging onslaught of fatigue and boredom, the escape into drugged-like sleep, then the restoration of balance, lucidity, vitality. I believe this process has since been widely commercialised, with many a spa offering "the monastery experience".

There's one thing I want to remember from this book. Fermor asks a monk if he can sum up his way of life. The monk thinks for a bit, then asks Fermor if he had ever been in love. Yes, says Fermor. The monk smiles widely. It's exactly like that, he says.

(Associations--ecstatic life, agape, pre-capitalist society, discipline, routine, bare essentials--and in the Trappist tradition, dolorism.)

La Bavolette by Paul de Musset, three stories/romances, first published in 1856. In the first one, set at Sun King's dawn, a poor peasant girl of great beauty and fine character gets to hobnob with aristocrats, defend her (often threatened) honour, and best them all; in the end, possibly, even carrying off the prize of a very special lover--nice of de Musset to keep it ambiguous, Claudine is upright but no prude. In the second story, mistaken identity and a series of drolly vicious incidents eventually lands a young man with a very desirable bride; in the third one, two would-be lovers spend two months separation endangering their relationship through uncalled-for epistolary gyrations--it is never smart to be too witty.

Paul, by the way, was Alfred's elder but much less popular brother, who doted on his cadet, kept his literary flame burning, and even married Alfred's last mistress.

Ferdinand by Louis Zukofsky. This is the first time I read Zukofsky, who was, it seems, above all a poet. Ferdinand is a story, not particularly "poetic" at all, tracing the main course of a life from boyhood to middle age, from pre-WWI Europe to WWII United States. The boy is privileged, growing up on the Riviera, but his parents, busy with statesmanlike affairs, handed him over to a loving aunt and uncle. This may or may not pose some kind of problem for the boy--on the whole, not much. (Until he witnesses his mother's death and manages a smile.) For some annoying reason Zukofsky never identifies Ferdinand's country by name, writing instead "Ferdinand's country", "the capital of his country", which is nothing but silly. The country in question is France, the capital Paris etc. and no, I don't see that this circumlocution matters in any way. In due course, as expected and projected, Ferdinand entered diplomatic service, like his parents and elder brother, and the invasion of France found him in Washington, D.C. This break in his routine life shakes him out of his routine biography, he takes a leave of absence, drives off to meet his aunt and uncle, now old and on the run from Europe, and sets with them on a cross-country jaunt, reaching, by my guess, New Mexico. Maybe Arizona. There he has a dream in which he kills the old people, based on a Native American myth, but is glad to find it was just a dream. The end.

What's in this story? For one thing, a strong sense that none of us knows why we are who we are, where we are, and how we got there.

Bibliographie des fous. De quelques livres excentriques by Charles Nodier is an essay on a handful of more or less certifiably crazy (per Nodier) people who wrote books, or "literary lunatics". They are, in order Nodier mentions them, Francesco Colonna, the author of the macaronic galimatias Hypnerotomachia Poliphili; Guillaume Postel, astronomer, philosopher, and Christian kabbalist who claimed to have discovered a "new Eve", the female Messiah, in an old Venetian nun; Simon Morin, "a poor devil" who figured out that HE was Christ come again, burnt on the stake with his "Pensées" in front of the Notre Dame, while some easy women were being whipped around it, for good measure--this undoubtedly threw yet another pail of cold water on free thinkers, fanatical or not; one Sieur de Mons, from the times of Henry IV, whose Quintessence du quart de rien (The quintessence of a quarter of nothing) and Sextessence diallacticque sound utterly tantalising, but are apparently unfindable. Nodier describes them as the fifth and sixth essence of the absurd, and notes that likely their import is lessened in the times when the absurd runs in the streets (Nodier, let it be noted, is squarely of the mid-19th century). Last but not least, Bluet d'Arbères, self-styled comte de Permission, at various times shepherd, gunner, prophet, hermit, buffoon, and always, by his own account, illiterate, somehow yet managed to publish books, which, in OUR day and age, is really nothing remarkable. Besides, Mohammad did it first. One site I managed to find talks of Bluet's "luxuriant visions, etymological games, and parables of religious character", and then of the interest his hallucinations have for neurobiology.

So now to the question of lunacy in art. In short, how does one tell? It isn't enough or even essential, that something "makes no sense", because nonsense exists as a playful genre on its own. Seems to me that mad art is whatever is produced by mad people, and nothing else. (As for the question of how one can tell mad people from the non-mad, always... hell if I know.)

In searching for sources given in Nodier, I came across this site, dedicated to "lunatics in literature" and others of the kind: I.I.R.E.F.L. (full title: : Institut International de Recherches et d’Explorations sur les Fous Littéraires, hétéroclites, excentriques, irréguliers, outsiders, tapés, assimilés, sans oublier tous les autres…)

This post shows some graphic and plastic "sick art", but noted mainly for further reference:

Marcel Réja, "L'art malade : dessins de fous" (1901)

And a ref to an American "expert on kooks":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Kossy

60
Wonderful post. It is regrettable that so little of Nodier is available to the monoglot English-speaker (i.e., me).

yes, ditto. I would love to read that Nodier. I love those kind of crazy mad artists, and the whole question of where do you draw the line. Isn't it crazy to write a whole novel with no letter 'e' for example? Crazy, or just a technical challenge? Or a crazy technical challenge.

Coudln't we get existanai to write a spurious De Mons work? For the Hellfire Press?

Or maybe it's crazy to write a novel that earnestly aims to capture the pangs and pains of first love, the humiliations and pleasures of aging, or the feeling one gets watching the sun, in winter, set behind a stand of barren trees—even if those novels are employing all the vowels the language hasn to offer.

#61

You know, that is a pity and a surprise too, because Nodier is really good. I don't understand how come someone didn't jump to translate him already. Especially for your tastes, Mak, not only did he write quite a bit of supernatural horror (he introduced Slavic tales of vampirism to the West, as well as Slavic folklore etc. he encountered working as a librarian in Ljubljana), but he was also a fanatical bibliophile, bookshop-crawler and collector, and wrote lots about these passions. Somewhere in the essay on the literary crazies he notes that every scribomane, no matter how crazy, can count on eventual interest and championship of a no less crazy bibliomane. :)

He also held a literary salon (in a library), entertaining Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, de Vigny, Alfred de Musset, Dumas dad--every single name warranting an entry in the Who's Who of Romanticism.

#62

Cat, your people should talk to my people. So what if the bookworld is in crisis. So what if The Book is dead. So what if the publishers are scrambling for survival. I say we buy a printing press and get down to business.

Coudln't we get existanai to write a spurious De Mons work?

He's nimble and fast, but if I aim well, I could probably fell him with a well-chosen tome, tie in front of a computer, and threaten with starvation and/or "damnation without relief", as Rowan Atkinson says. I have a feeling he works best confronted with deathlines. :)

#63

Like in that Poe story, everyone is mad--except the writer.

Wow, check this out Maki--French, but you get the idea (didn't look at the English page, often they ditch data)-scroll down to Oeuvres--says Nodier was one of the "most prolific French writers" and that the list is only a small part of his bibliography:

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Nodier

Maybe the translators don't know where to start.

I'm feeling veritable hunger pangs here: Description raisonnée d'une jolie collection de livres (Annotated description of a PRETTY collection of books!); Dictionnaire des onomatopées françaises (Dictionary of French onomatopoiea! How can I live without it!); Apothéoses et imprécations de Pythagore (Apotheoses and imprecations of Pythagoras!!!--that is, other people apotheosing or imprecating Pythagoras); Du langage factice appelé macaronique (On the artificial language called "macaronic") and on and on...

Dedalus translated Smarra and Trilby in a single edition, but beyond that, there is precious little.

http://www.librarything.com/work/1063560/workdetails/19131867

Available on Gutenberg:

Smarra ou les démons de la nuit Songes romantiques
Infernaliana - Anecdotes, petits romans, nouvelles et contes sur les revenans, les spectres, les démons et les vampires
(group read, anyone?)

Available on gallica.bnf.fr:

Apothéoses et imprécations / de Pythagore
Du langage factice appelé macaronique
Dictionnaire raisonné des onomatopées françaises

(and probably more, but the gallica site went down after a while)

I read Infernaliana recently, off the computer, and it was very enjoyable. I hope Gallica comes up again, I wanted to copy Jean Sbogar, it's damn difficult to find in print! (I'm not considering those newfangled POD things...)

#68 I know what you mean. We had enough of the POD-People in the 1950s.

According to abebooks, the Librairie à la bonne occasion in Quebec is offering a copy of Jean Sbogar that was printed in 1980 for Éditions France Empire.

#69

You may laugh, but it's clear they WERE among us! Nothing else explains modernity!

#70

Yes, saw that: a paperback from the eighties, Couverture frottée et souillée. Bah! For twenty two dollars I can buy twenty two one-dollar books!

I'm looking at the edition from 1938, though. However, i just placed some orders I shouldn't have so it will all have to wait.

******

Man in the Holocene, Max Frisch

An old man retired to a Swiss village begins a descent into death and oblivion as incessant rains and thunderstorms seem to herald a general transformation of the landscape. In Geiser's last days the human is miniaturised until it practically disappears, as his mind increasingly falters and leaves the personal behind, and his attention becomes wholly consumed by the gigantic geological past of the planet and his canton. Very good.

Time's arrow, time's cycle, Stephen Jay Gould

S. J., how we miss thee! Frisch's book made me yearn for more thinking on the grand scale, in millions of years, so I grabbed this exploration of the most famous metaphors for progress and change in science--one imposing the idea of linear irrevocable directionality, the other an eternal cycle. As it turns out, neither "model" fits the facts, and Gould explains--brilliantly, as usual--how the worldview clashes of their champions (Thomas Burnet, James Hutton, Charles Lyell) shaped inquiry into the age and nature of the world, geology and biology. Gould's starting point is the frontispiece to Burnet's "Telluris Theoria Sacra", showing Jesus straddling the phases of Earth's transformation, history beginning at his left foot, proceeding clockwise, ending at the right. Time's arrow is bent into a cycle, or, as Mark Twain said it best: "History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes."

Un philosophe sous les toits, Emile Souvestre.

Souvestre's futuristic The world as it shall be was infinitely more fun that this moralistic collection. Twelve sketches of poor and humble folk inspire lofty thoughts in the writer, along the lines of "theirs will be the reward of Heaven". Pie in the sky. Skip the philosopher and go for the prophet, say I.

For love of the Dark One: Songs of Mirabai, Mirabai

Sometime in the sixteenth century a high born Hindu lady fell in love with a god, Krishna, dropped everything, family, friends, widow's weeds, and went through the land singing about it. The ecstasy is similar to the Sufi effusions, but--at least according to this translation--rather more starkly sexual. This truly is "body & soul" devotion. The singing was apparently literal, and although I suppose Mirabai's own melodies are lost or transformed after all this time, her texts are still sung and recorded. To look up: Lakshmi Shankar Sings Mira Bhajans; Les heures et les saisons: Lakshmi Shankar (HM); Chants of devotion. Lakshmi Shankar (Astree Auvidis); Mira Bhajans Sung by S. M. S. Subhalakshmi (EMI); Meera Bhajans. Kishori Amonkar (EMC); Anthologie de la musique de l'Inde vol. 2 (GREM)

Frisch is great. I read Andorra in German in high school about 400 years ago, and Stiller. I didn't know about this one, so thanks for alerting me.

I think that is my favourite Frisch. Of course, it may also be the first Frisch I read and the erste liebe thing may be colouring my recollection.

I, too, miss Stephen Jay Gould. He had a truly broad mind and an insatiable thirst for knowledge. He was an inspiring thinker. There are too few like him left.

There you go, that was my first Frisch too. And Gould was golden, faults and baseball and all.

Precious little German books! One produced in 1917 in Dachau, when Dachau was just the name of a pleasant little town. What would one give to have it had remain so?

****

Der Löwe Alois und andere Geschichten (Lion Alois and other stories) by Gustav Meyrink

In the first of these delicious comic stories, a little orphaned lion cub is raised by sheep and thinks he's one too. I totally LOL'd at his encounter with an older lion who couldn't believe his eyes when grass-grazing Alois started baa-ing at him. The animals speak Viennese, which is all the more hilarious. Another story expands on a tale of a murderer (from The Golem) who ends up as a mild-mannered gardener in a nunnery; there's a report from the Otherworld, run just as burocratically as This World; and another modern fable, of a high-thinking Oriental sage (a camel), eventually coming to a dire end when his Western pals lose ideals to hunger.

Die chinesische Mauer (The Chinese Wall) by Karl Kraus

This essay, which Kraus often read in public, was inspired by the anti-Chinese hysteria following the 1909 murder of Elsie Sigel. A young Christian woman was killed by a Chinese man she loved (but maybe not loved exclusively). The sensational topic finds matching lurid expression in Kraus' shrill, biting tones, resulting in a book that seems to hop and boil in one's hands. (My edition reproduces Oskar Kokoschka's graphics from the original--this was the only book by Kraus ever originally published illustrated.) Rarely are anti-racist and anti-clerical sentiments married to misogyny with such éclat.

Brevier by Wilhelm Busch

The terrors Max and Moritz, the raven Hans Huckebein, a piano virtuoso wildly music-making and other versified comic strips. What can I do, Busch makes me laugh.

Hans eyeing the booze:



Hans dancing after imbibing booze:

Hans Huckebein - text with illustrations and a translation.

>that was my first Frisch too.

It's been a while since I read it, but Homo Faber is worth checking out, though I recall having some reservations. I believe you already have a copy, so I'd be interested in your opinion.

A couple months, and I'm already hopelessly behind both the reading and the remembering!

**

Eustace Chisholm and the works, and Malcolm, both by James Purdy

I mark the encounter with James Purdy with a white stone. Eustace Chisholm... is rather tragic; Malcolm rather comic; the former's humour grotesque, the latter's farcical and fantastical, but in both books the centre of everyone's action and reflection, is a beautiful teenage boy. He is the love and his is the love that cannot be had. Purdy's language is anti-realist, poetry potent, casting the shadow of another world and heightened moods over the grubby lives of his bohemian, dirt-poor characters.

** **

Le diable amoureux (The devil in love) begins sweet, ends pear-shaped. Foolish young man invokes Beelzebub, demands service, gets it--and far more than he bargained, as the devil's female incarnation falls in love with him. Young man at first fears his unusual maid, then is persuaded that she's an ordinary human being and agrees to marry her, at which point for unclear reasons the devil reappears and terrifies the pants off the hapless dupe. Maybe the devil-maid can't take the church ceremony, or maybe Cazotte ran out of steam. I wished for more adventures, but had lots of drawings to look at instead (see samples in the Praising Real Books thread #2).

Imaginación y Fantasía: Cuentos de las Américas, Various

Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte (Stories of love, madness and death), Horacio Quiroga

The first is a short anthology with bite-size stories by Borges, Amado Nervo, Clemente Palma et al.; the Quiroga story inspired me to read the other book, with some of his best known tales. Lots of fantasy, some detective tales, some fancy levity (in one, a man becomes as light as a balloon, begins to bounce off surfaces, eventually floats off into the skies). Except for a few lighter stories he wrote for children (with animal protagonists, in one a giant anaconda, in another a riverful of rays and a forestful of tigers--both stories feature conflict and death, though), Quiroga is reliably depressed, grim and terrifying.

Which story in the anthology was it that inspired you to read the Quiroga collection?

El hombre muerto, linked for you acá!

Although no doubt you already read it, analysed it, published a paper or four...

I love Quiroga! It must be that grim and depressing thing that makes me enjoy his work so very much (plus, it's just so incredibly vivid, visceral). I tried translating some Quiroga as a teen-it was a humiliating exercise. Absolute, abject failure. It did result in me realizing how remarkably difficult the translator's art is though (and that I wasn't the least suited to it).

Oh yes, vivid, visceral... Words like torn from the flesh, no? I imagine him grinding his teeth all the time.

**

Two great books by Leo Perutz. In From nine to nine we follow a furious young man with alarmingly peculiar behaviour dashing through Vienna on some mysterious errand. One accidental meeting after another illustrates that he is in a strange predicament, panic rising as some deadline looms. It is comic, it is absurd and then terrifying. I'm loath to spoil the delight of any detail, so just a little hint meant to bait bibliomaniacs--as in The Master of the Day of Judgment, there is a fatal book...

St. Peter's snow is a "bigger" book (though hardly longer). There is a Borgesian timelessness to most of Perutz I've read (or vice versa?), a universal, alchemical point of view which aligns different periods like so many pieces of lamb on a skewer. Here it acquires a blatant political dimension (the year is 1933...) Amberg, an aimless young doctor, pressed into the profession out of economic pragmatism, and half-absent from himself due to a unrequited, never confessed passion for another student, gets a job with a baron von Malchin in the latter's mist-enveloped domain. Even before he reaches the post there are portents which begin to wind his psyche--he sees the girl he's in love with in the small town closest to the village, and when it turns out that she is von Malchin's scientific collaborator, he almost expects it. The dream logic begins to overtake him--or maybe the reality IS this nightmarish? The baron's project is, first, to bring back religious faith to people--through a drug distilled from a wheat mould, or fungus, known as "St. Peter's snow". In the next step, the Holy Roman Empire is to be restored, complete with a legitimate Kaiser, a descendant of the Staufers (or Hohenstaufens) the baron tracked down in a poor Italian family. And then... Something goes wrong. COMPLETELY wrong.

Let's just say the Nazis didn't care one bit for Perutz's prognosis for their imperial dreams.

Thanks for this!

I HAVE to get more Perutz! He is a neglected genius, at least in the English speaking world. He ought to be as well known as Borges...

He is. ;-)
All of Preutz is required reading. ;-)
The Swedish Cavalier is interesting.

Yes--I just did a quick search (what's the point when I only have the time for a "quick search" but not to read?)--Borges KNEW Perutz's stuff (and apparently Hitchcock mined Perutz for some of his twists, is that a spoiler?)



I bought The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters "because it was there" for a buck. I have no special interest in the sisters or their milieu; the only books BY them I've read so far are Nancy Mitford's charming, highly enjoyable The Sun King and Madame de Pompadour. Other than that, the merest fact of their existence, and the notorious information that politically they ran the gamut from Nazism to Communism, all I know about them was gleaned from this book. I don't know whether I'd feel more or less charitable if I had deeper insight. So, based on this edition by Charlotte Mosley (daughter-in-law of Diana, wife to Oswald, head of British Union of Fascists), my one dominant feeling is deepest loathing for the English upper classes, the dungheap that bred and breeds these specimens. Jessica Mitford (the "Communist") strikes me as the only decent person of the bunch, that is, the only one who wouldn't look down upon one not of her set, or kill one like a cockroach. The only one who doesn't in SOME FORM deny the humanity and dignity of other classes of people, which her sisters do constantly.

Unsurprisingly perhaps but still shockingly so, they are casually antisemitic, xenophobic and deeply racist. The letters concerning Jessica's daughter's "black" baby are disgusting, gloating and offended (serve her right and how could she do this to us) and the only unguarded moments in the book, although Nancy Mitford, the one with the loudest arrogance, lets loose with "wretched little yellow people" on the subject of the Vietnamese etc. I don't know how much is due to the editing, but the overall impression is of disingenuousness, insincerity and constant affectation--I realise that lots of it is congenital, but some is no doubt deliberate, especially as it begins to be clear that the correspondence won't remain private forever.

Ironically, it would be easier to forgive them if the example of Jessica didn't point out that one needn't be a slave to one's upbringing, that we have the capability to change, develop and become better. (In this connexion, I don't give a damn about judging people by the standards of their time. As long as ONE person transcended these standards, they are NOT inexorable.)

The reason this infuriates me so is that it is precisely in those attitudes that I see the germ of fascism and all warfare, be it military or social. Aristocracy is based on believing the ruled are vermin, essentially different from the elite, and adherence to wars springs from conviction that the enemy is vermin, essentially different from us.

Vive la guillotine.

Perutz's The Marquis of Bolibar ranks in my personal top ten best books ever.

Lola, I just scanned the reviews already posted for The Mitfords: Letters... and think you should copy your message 85 there as a counterweight.

Robert

I also enjoyed Mitford's book on Pompadour, a felicitous match of biographer and subject, I thought. Beyond that, I never saw much point in the Mitfords. Or the Sitwells, for that matter.

I must try to get hold of some Perutz.

#86

I love it too!

#87

It could be a matter of emphasis... I don't think anyone can miss the ugliness, it's just that they prefer to like, or at least admire, these remarkable, smart, stylish women. I should add that the letters weren't nearly as interesting as I expected, in historical or literary terms (this edition at least).

#89

The Sun King is even better. Nancy Mitford seems to have fancied herself as a French aristocrat, pre-1789 (the sisters refer to her as "the French lady"). Total immersion.

On, on and awwwaaaayy...



Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy

Continuing with the Mitfords currently in my library. In 1956 or thereabouts Nancy Mitford published an article on English aristocracy and for SOME reason it created quite a brouhaha, eliciting responses from, among others, Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Sykes, John Betjeman (a silly poem)--the lot was published together in a book, along with one Mr. Ross' article on the defining traits of the U and non-U speech: "U" standing in for "upper class".

It's almost sixty years later, I am not English, never suffered class discrimination, and possibly "therefore" I can't see what was so inflammatory about Mitford's article. In the letters, the sisters are annoyed by it; the odious Evelyn Waugh smacks her down as a "Socialist" (funny that)--my one guess is that merely saying out loud what everyone knew, i.e. that the "U"s say and do things differently from the "non-U"s was scandalous. Nancy DID have a penchant for saying all kinds of things out loud, as I noted before.

**

Alexander Theroux isn't well known and judging by the evidence presented by these two books, the obscurity is amply deserved. Calling these compositions "essays" degrades the term; they are vapid collections of facts or capricious notions about colours (blue, red, yellow, purple, orange and green), reading slightly worse than the collected Ripley's Believe It Or Not, and much worse than the OED, straight up. I thought Paul was the designated vacuous snob of the House of Theroux, but he's got competition. I'm sorry I can't quote from the books (ditched them already), but a typical fragment would run like this: "Orange are cows, plutonium, grapes of Brittany under the harvest moon; ice boxes from 1950s, tramcars in Singapore; frictitious hangamajigs mate in orange nests--ebulliently--and I knew a girl with orange hair (not Debussy's): of all the women who loved me, she in her orange halo remains apodictically the shadeous truxome in my memory's root."

William Gass, linguist, philosopher, excellent writer, wrote one of my favourite books of all time, about the colour blue, On being blue. I picked up these hoping for a similar experience, and the disappointment is acute.



The difficulty of being a dog would make a great gift for the literate dog lover in your life. Two weeks later that's all I remember about it. Oh well--it's little anecdotes and vignettes and references to dogs in literature, written by a highly cultured Frenchman, so it's elegant and pretty even if it doesn't amount to much of anything. Except a great gift for the literate dog lover in your life.

**

In both Out of Romania by Dan Antal and Herztier (Land of green plums) by Herta Mueller, people are harassed by the secret police, dragged into pointless interrogations, intimidated and blackmailed. Antal's account is a memoir, but Mueller's seems hardly more fictional; I preferred the former, because Antal is an amiable, warm human being whose travails engage our sympathies. He wrote this book in England, where he escaped shortly after the fall of Ceausescu, in his mid-forties, forced from the status of an intellectual, however badly paid, into that of a dogsbody for hire. I was most interested in the account of his growing up in the sixties and seventies Romania, the glimmers of life-as-it-was, the tastes and preoccupations of youth (the usual: foreign literature, rock 'n' roll, blue jeans, making out).



Ein Winter-Idyll by Karl Stieler--a bourgeois super-seller of several centuries, literary dreck, all the worst one could imagine in the line of proverbial German sentimentality and thick-headedness. Poems to father, mother, wife, children, fatherland, neighbours, the village and Time. Oh--lovely edition, though, I might praise its body yet, if not its soul.



"Are women human?", asked Dorothy Sayers some seventy years ago, and seventy years later, the answer is still "no, not really".



Tintin and the secrets of literature by Tom McCarthy is a postmodern deconstruction of Tintin, from the strip's politics to sexuality. I grew up with the comic and never knew there was sex in it. The magic of pomo strikes again. I shall never look at Captain Haddock's nose with the same eyes again.



Die Kindermörderin : ein Trauerspiel (Child-killer: a tragedy) (1776) by Heinrich Leopold Wagner rocked my socks--the first version that is, opening with a seduction-rape of an innocent bourgeois girl by an officer (therefore, a noble) and ending with her stabbing the eventual unfortunate fruit of their fleeting intercourse. Wagner had written the play for reading only, but actual stagings of it (the second in a changed version by Karl Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim's less famous brother) prompted him to create a second version of his own--the one, alas, with a happy end. This second cleaned-up version is titled Evchen Humbrecht, or, Mothers Take Care! and is interesting chiefly in that it shows the same man can create something almost-genius and something doltish. Poor Wagner didn't profit greatly either way, dying in 1779 at mere 32.

When I say the play is almost-genius, I mean in the context, the great novelty of it was-- remembering Shakespeare. The salty naturalistic language and action, the comedic vignettes (most critics of the time hated them, saying they broke up the play) none of that was new in the world, only new on German Romantic stage.

What a shame about Theroux. I had hopes for him, someone I've not yet read. But the Gass is now on my wishlist. Lola, have you read/come across Derek Jarman's book on colour: Chroma, written as he went blind from AIDS? An amazing work.

Tintin and sex? YES! my fantasy! Isn't every gay Frenchman modelled on tintin?

I'm disappointed too hearing about The Primary Colors. I hope you'll still give his novels a shot, if you haven't already.

I love that On Being Blue is one of your favorite books. Mine too. I reviewed it just last month here. Gass is in love with language and ideas like few other writers I've ever read.

#93

Primary AND Secondary. I think I have one of his novels. Not sure I'll rush to get to it. There's too much of a brownnosing schoolboy about his voice. No evidence of thought. I can't remembered how his book on Gorey impressed me, years ago, but then, being a fan of Gorey's, I was probably most interested just in hearing about the man.

#92

No, no, it's fun to make up your own mind!

Isn't every gay Frenchman modelled on tintin?

Gaaah! Only if your idea of sex is gently slapping each other with soggy toast.

Don't know the Jarman book. Love his cinema.

I enjoyed Darconville's Cat, even if it is one of the most mysogynistic books I've ever read. One wonders if it flirts with self-parody, although it seems sincere enough in a hyperblown (is that a word?) way. It was most certainly unique.

(ditched them already)

Your comments about the Colors books are interesting. I remember buying the first one when it came out, probably after having read a positive review. For some reason I don't specifically recall, it really got under my skin (in an unpleasant way), and I discarded it. Now, I hardly ever discard a book, so, I must have found it as irritating as you did.

Years later, after having read Darconville's Cat, it clicked for me that the Colors books were by the same author, so I picked up a cheap copy when one came my way. It's on my shelf near my chair, and I pick it up every so often and read a page or two. It is an irritating book to try to read straight through, but it is tolerable, interesting even, in small doses. I suppose one could make the argument that all of Theroux is best in small doses, but he doesn't usually come marketed that way.

I reiterate that I greatly enjoyed DC, but when I read the first pages of An Adultery, I had the impression that, although the writing was fine enough, we were going to soon be treading the same thematic ground as DC. I decided to put the novel down until a later date.

Tomcat, read Darconville: you'll love it.

I'll add that it's no shame for an author to have only one really good book in him/her. A lot of them don't even have that. As a reader, you just have to hope that that one is the one you pick up first.

I'd start a list of authors who only wrote one good book, but I wouldn't want to put existanai (or myself) through it. ;)

I'd start a list of authors who only wrote one good book, but I wouldn't want to put existanai (or myself) through it. ;)

Do it, man, do it!

One wonders if it flirts with self-parody, although it seems sincere enough in a hyperblown

I'm willing to bet "hyperblown" is fitting enough for A. T.'s head. Now, I can forgive any amount of swooning over oneself, if it's a bit justified. But the inane blather that intersperses the colour-"facts" in the guise of commentary--granted, very sparsely, he really had nothing original to say about them--is really beneath contempt, e.g. "Aren't consonants great? Want more?"--I swear this is verbatim.

Now I wish I had noted the spots, you'll have to take my word for it (or not)--in at least one case what he writes is wrong, in another he repeats the same notion/reference twice. I hated those lapses. To be not only unoriginal, but also wrong and careless--too much.

I agree that reading a few sentences here and there could be stimulating. Like reading lists of associations or something. Of course, a list of ingredients in Jaffa cakes in parallel Georgian, Azeri, Russian and Ukrainian can fascinate me for hours too.

Yeah, it was probably the preciousness that turned me off those books. To be uncharacteristically generous, I'll assume Theroux took on the color books as hackwork. (The vast majority of authors are not rolling in dough, and a little hackwork can help pay the bills.) This doesn't excuse sloppiness, but I know based on enough reading of author's diaries, letters, etc, that hackwork tends to be approached differently from what the author may consider his more artistic endeavors.

Of course, a list of ingredients in Jaffa cakes in parallel Georgian, Azeri, Russian and Ukrainian can fascinate me for hours too.

Ha. You and I have a lot in common, Lola-Lola, at least as far as our reading habits are concerned. Except that you can probably read those languages, and I can only ponder the pretty shapes of the letters...

It's probably churlish to mention it, but, with regard to The Primary colors, there's also the plagiarism thing.

Whoa.

Theroux told the Times the copied passages resulted from "stupidity and bad note taking."

Amen on stupidity.

#98

I picked up Georgian alphabet off a bottle of shampoo. The trick is finding something with long enough text for all the letters to recur in identifiable words, then it's easy-peasy. Of course, that's nothing compared to Lord Greystoke's tour de force of learning English out of a book, as a lone child in the jungle raised by apes. Me no Tarzan.

Of course, that's nothing compared to Lord Greystoke's tour de force of learning English out of a book, as a lone child in the jungle raised by apes.

With apologies to Mom and Dad, that's pretty much how I learned it.

But you had ears and lived among people, no? You probably spoke some of the language to begin with. We're talking total linguistic isolation!

As a kid (it bothered me endlessly, could barely continue the series until I mulled it out) I worked out a way Tarzan could've chanced on some sounds correctly (although the text, as far as I recall, didn't support my theory--it was a "regular" book, not an illustrated ABC Tarzan had). But there is simply no way he could have known how to pronounce--correctly--whole words, intone the sentences etc.

102> Ee ay gree

#98 "To be uncharacteristically generous, I'll assume Theroux took on the color books as hackwork. "

Everything Theroux does is hackwork. I have yet to read anything by him that isn't hackwork. Of course, that's probably because he is a hack.

Seriously, those colour books are some of the worst writing I have ever read (and I've read Spartan Planet, people. I know shitty writing!). Lola, the Gorey book, recently reissued and read by me just in the last couple of months, is crap. Pure, unadulterated crap. One learns virtually nothing (at least nothing interesting) about Gorey and all too much about Alexander Theroux. The book reeks of a sickly and markedly juvenile narcissism. Bleh. Just thinking about it gives me the creeps.

If you are looking for some interesting, poetic but not excessively serious books on colour, I highly recommend the various books by Michel Pastoreau. Pastoreau writes primarily from an art history perspective and thus his books are always well-illustrated. They are also relatively brief and always quite sprightly, charming and not too deep-just enough to draw the reader in without drowning her in excessive detail. They inspire further, deeper forays into the subjects they cover. On a subject like colour, what more could one ask for?

Re: learning languages from books: I half-remember a story about Lenin teaching himself French (or was it German?) from a book, and then being amazed when the natives in Switzerland, I guess it would have been, couldn't understand him.

#103

eemm gledudu

#104

sickly and markedly juvenile narcissism.

Perfect. Fits my own impression of the author to a tee.

Thanks for the Pastoreau reference. I wasn't looking for books on colour as such, simply seduced by the Gassian overtones. Must look at that book on Gorey again.

#105

Better test-drive my Albanian-to-Zulu soon! Well, but nowadays we have the interwebs. We can hear anything we like.

**

L'homme de pourpre (The crimson man) by Pierre Louÿs is a selection of some of his languid, wicked tales, strongly Parnassian in flavour, especially the title story, set in ancient Greece, in which a famous sculptor reaches the apex of his art at the cost of two lives, that of his model for Prometheus, who had to be chained to a rock and tortured to achieve the desired effect of authenticity, and his own (but by gum he made a great sculpture!) There's one about a woman whose life is ruined when she realises she is indistinguishable from one of Balzac's heroines--except that the fiction is more vital than her reality; in another a woman witnesses a rape at inches distance, hidden behind a window shutter, and is turned off sex and love forever; in another a little girl discovers the inexorable misery of life in her father's rich library, books playing the role of the forbidden fruit etc. I'm always slightly amazed to think that Louÿs was Gide's closest childhood friend (in Si le grain ne meurt--gosh I hate that English translation, If it die--Gide gives a wonderful description of their clandestine explorations of masturbation), they seem to belong to different centuries. They both engaged in what today would be called sex tourism and pedophile sex, Louÿs with girls, Gide with boys, but that's the sum of their similarity. Gide was profoundly moral, religious, even politically engaged by virtue of his courageous public defense of homosexuality; Louÿs... was rather a decadent rat, frozen in late 19th century and pseudo-classicism, technically perfect. Also, he was a mad bibliophile.

À l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie (To the friend who didn't save my life) by Hervé Guibert

Picked this up accidentally and read through in one sitting. This book made a splash on appearance in France, won the Goncourt, was one of the first (or the first) AIDS memoirs there. Guibert died in 1991, had been diagnosed as seropositive in 1988, and since the diagnosis wrote frantically to record his life. The first half of the book is dominated by the story of Michel Foucault's last years (in the book he's called Muzil), who befriended Guibert, a gorgeous youth, in the late seventies, and whose neighbour he'd be until his death. After Foucault's death, Guibert turns to his own fate and that of his several lovers, primarily Jules, a married man, whose wife and then children were unwittingly infected as well. The focus of the second part is an American friend employed by a pharmaceutical company who offers tantalising hope for a cure (at the time people were madly scrambling for a vaccine), which is linked to the threshold number of T cells the patient still has (below a certain level the vaccine is withdrawn as futile). Guibert swings from hope to frustration until the very last pages, when it is clear that he's doomed. It's impossible to remain unperturbed in the face of such a story, which is like watching someone die in front of you. Guibert doesn't philosophise, his chapters are short, a page or two or even just a paragraph, and move fast, giving a sensation of days and hours melting away, of a flame flickering, flaring and then dying. At one point he expresses almost gratitude that it is AIDS he's dying of, which (paraphrasing) gives one TIME to die--and also time to live out whatever is left. Putting his affairs in order, giving away presents to friends himself, instead of bequeathing them in a testament. He reads--the only atypical piece of writing in the book is a lengthy discussion of Thomas Bernhard, whom he admires and envies, but feels that he has somehow reached and surpassed, in living if not in art.

they seem to belong to different centuries

Indeed. It's rather astonishing to realize that they were contemporaries.

You're a braver woman than I am for reading Guibert. I actually cannot read AIDS memoirs. It's too painful and close to my own experience of losing friends and loved ones.

Pierre Louys sounds fun, though.

a woman whose life is ruined when she realises she is indistinguishable from one of Balzac's heroines--except that the fiction is more vital than her reality

This I can relate to lol.

Guibert seems to have been one of those people whose person leaves a deeper mark than their work, a beauty so many desired, born to be an entry in someone's Exotic Flowers I Knew. I've read everything of Edmund White's, who spent several years in France and crossed paths with many in Guibert's milieu (including Foucault, whom he first met in the US). This was like hearing another voice in the same play.

So, so behind. But I want to note before I forget--I read The grand design, co-authored by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, and indeed, I must confirm that the very second paragraph of the introduction begins with a blunt assertion that philosophy is dead, a point of view that's never elaborated nor touched upon again in the book, closing the door on that discussion. Then again, the language is unpleasantly simple, sentences short and tight; there's a touch of "Impossibly Brilliant Stuff for Idiots" irony about the whole thing.

I had a similar reaction when I read Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. Feynman had an interesting life, but the point of each of the anecdotes that constitute this book seemed to be that Richard Feynman was the smartest person in the room.

Okay, he probably was the smartest person in the room, but it got a bit tiresome.

111
Philosophy is dead? how daft. Philosophy will last as long as thinking human beings do (unless the idiocy known as theology kills it first). Perhaps what Hawking means is that he knows nothing about it.

#35 Lola Call me a sybarite,

Hey, you're a sybarite! (Just doing what I was told.)

Thank you for the new word. I think I may be one of those too. (A sybarite, that is.)

#114

I'd wave at a fellow syb, but it's too much work on such a hot day...

#112

That one (and I think the sequel, or prequel) is very much ABOUT Feynman, so there's no escaping the personality. The problem with popularisations is different, it's that they have this in-built paradox of obscuring what they wish to clarify, by dint of dumbing down precisely what makes the concepts challenging--their difficulty and complexity, especially if it's best (or only) expressible in mathematics.

Anyway, I just noticed that Hawking's co-author on The Grand Design, Mlodinow, also rewrote The Brief History of Time as A Briefer History of Time, described on the front cover as "the science classic made more accessible--More concise--etc. Ominous words, and a pointer to the stultifier of the new book too, I think. Is there an assumption that people are getting dumber and more ignorant (may be true for all I know)? You can make the tone in which you talk of quantum mechanics stupid, but there's no way of making the topic stupid, so what's the point?

#113

I suppose there is a sense in which philosophy is dead, supplanted as it is in many aspects by the sciences, physical and social. Then again, taking a historical perspective it may seem transformed rather than "dead". At any rate, I'm not sure I now what Hawking thinks about it, as this book isn't at all meant to illustrate his attitude to philosophy. The remark is actually utterly gratuitous.

re your comments on 112:

it's all part of the general movement towards anti-elitism. Nothing should be beyond the ability of the average person to grasp, otherwise it's elitist and undemocratic, so even very difficult subjects get dumbed down. In the end, we will have no knowledge at all, just dumb information, all something that Professor Faraway found in his researches into the Age of Stupidity.

The outloook is grim.

#116 Could you explain that to me in words of one syllable, please? :-)

This reminds me of a discussion I heard on British radio some time in the 1990s. It was on BBC Radio 4 (somewhat intellectual radio channel) and the panelists included representatives of BBC 1 (the main UK channel, funded by TV licence fees and no advertising broadcast), BBC 2 (somewhat arty wing of BBC 1) and Channel 4 (relatively new independent channel).

The topic of high versus low quality programming on television was ths topic of discussion.

For the sake of discussion, high quality television programming was typified by the type of period drama BBC used to produce - full costume; elaborate sets; good acting; quality scripts.

Low quality television programming was typified by quiz shows; the type often aired by ITV (Independent Television, funded by advertising revenue.) These were the good old days, when "reality TV" hadn't been invented.

It was asked "Why do we see fewer and fewer quality programmes and more and more quiz shows?"

The man from Channel 4 hit the nail on the head. The main points of his answer were:
- BBC, the channel that has been known for producing high quality programmes has limited funding as it has only licence fees.
- ITV has advertising revenue which means it has the type of money it needs to make quality shows.
- ITV has lots of advertising revenue because it has high viewing figures and can ask higher and higher advertising rates.
- ITV has high viewer number because it attracts a mass audience who want to watch the quiz programmes it shows.
- Conclusion, ITV dumbed down its programming to attract more people; now it has those people and the ensuing advertising revenue, it doesn't want to reduce its appeal to the masses by producing high quality programmes which the masses won't want to watch, which would reduce the viewing numbers and hence the advertising revenue.

Now we have Reality TV.

As stated in #116 The outloook is grim.

Grrrim..

And on that cue...

...

I had a fairy evening yesterday, finally finishing off Folio's edition of Brothers Grimm and Afanasiev's Myths and legends of Russia. It was disappointing to read Grimm in this translation, it sounded very flat without the strange archaic words of the original, but this time the pictures were the point, copious illustrations by Arthur Rackham. The reproduction leaves a lot to be desired and I can't recommend this edition--the colour illustrations look muddy (Rackham's frequently drab palette doesn't help), and even some of the black and white ones are smudged.

The Russian tome has wonderful illustrations by Niroot Puttapippat. Many of the stories are variants and the long ones especially would benefit from improvisational viva voce telling as much as they lose in sober-eyed reading. But there they are. Two fat books of unbelievable stories. With pictures.

Ojos de perro azul (the English has "Eyes of the blue dog", with unfortunate overtones of that Cajun painter's damned Blue Dog shtick), was a bit surprising, to me, not having encountered (or maybe I forgot. I should tag everything with: "unless I forget...") this flavour of García Márquez: ghostly, horrific, un-magical, almost Borgesian fantasy. For example, a man dies, but dammit, the death is a doubling, instead of sinking into nothingness, he is still conscious--of not existing, and at the same time, of the existence of his cadaverous double, the dead body. In all its horrid sensuous detail--skin, bone, embalming fluids etc. The title story is actually rather mawkish, two people meeting in dreams, using a password to recognise each other, but even that one has a certain un-Marquezian heaviness and gloom.

Innnnteresting.

And now for something completely different.



Le livre des amours galantes by Ryutei Tanehiko (1830s) is one of those proverbial books for a single hand, essentially the same incident, copulation, repeating in different couplings, and helpfully illustrated in jolly detail. The characters are the small people of Edo, inn owners, servants and guests. Apparently these were madly popular, the author managing to produce hundreds of titles before an untimely death. If I'd known him, I'd want to buy him a drink.

Disenchantment by C. E. Montague, mix of polemic, memoir, exhortation, informed by the devastating discoveries the author made in WWI about his society, his country and people. Gripping and moving while eschewing melodrama. I shall quote something he observed about Australians and Canadians--the "Dominion forces"--compared to the English. {quote here} Because that touched me



Moment in Peking by Lin Yutang took me almost as long as the action takes place--some thirty years. It's a type of story I almost never read, a multi-family saga spanning decades, but the setting made it irresistible--China, from the Boxer rebellion to Japanese occupation, changing ways of life vertiginously fast, sparks flying in clashes of modernity in all its guises, from philosophy to foreign military rearing at the shores, and the millennial traditions. While I enjoyed reading about the daily and emotional peripatetics of the characters, I wished the political complexities had been presented more deeply than through mere action--I wished for more opinion. The central character's (girl Mulan's) family is attached to a middle way, they suffer and endure, they are, we are given to understand, China at its best: industrious, wise, enlightened, and tremendously resilient.

Concerning some remarks a friend made about the (unrealised) romance of Mulan and Lifu, who married her sister, yes, I too think it was Lin's way of explicating a basic difference between Chinese and Western conventions, philosophical approach to life (and therefore character? Culture?) In a Western romance, the final romantic calculus would result in two ecstatically happy people, Mulan and Lifu, and two unhappy ones, Sunya and Moochow, whereas the Chinese Wahlverwandtschaftenerei produces four--equally, apparently--contented individuals. Contentedness vs. happiness. Contentedness as, perhaps, the only REAL happiness. I didn't find the matching of characters theory very convincing, but I suppose the point is the culture believes it i.e. Moochow will be better at "pulling" Lifu back to earth, whereas it is necessary for Mulan's "pushing" nature to work on a properly inert object, Sunya.

Btw, I think it is refreshing to encounter such casual recognition of a basic fact that Western conventions stupidly deny (or have denied)--that it is perfectly possible to have a satisfying sexual life with the person one ISN'T in love with. But then again. One DOES want to have ALL the cake.

I'm marking The Penguin book of new Russian writing for the translation of never-before-published Духовка (translated as "The Oven") by Evgeny Kharitonov (dead at forty, what a shame), a story of a gay man's hopeless yet hoping infatuation with a teenager. It is always a dilemma, what to emphasise in such cases, the fact that it is a story of a gay man by a gay man, or the fact that the emotional truth of it is sex- and sexual orientation-blind.

Also (re)read/skimmed and ditched a bunch of Jacob Bronowski's writings, once a popular sciencey pundit working the trough plowed by C. P. Snow's Two cultures.

More ecstasy by Mirabai. More better ecstasy by Rimbaud (Illuminations). How that boy did write.

it's nice to see you back, Lola, stimulating reading and comments as always (no pun intended...) I want that Tanehiko.

Have you read Comrade Loves of the Samurai?

Halloa! The ca'!

Yes, I did read Saikaku's gay samurai stories, BUT a different edition of them, The great mirror of male love. I recently got the older Tuttle edition and will read that with as great a pleasure (I trust) too! Will inform on differences etc. The former title is a larger format, for one thing, and has pictures.

...

The insatiable Spider Man and El Rey de La Habana (The King of Havana) by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez

Gutiérrez is a pornographer of poverty, and I wonder what that makes me, his reader. As in the first book of his that I read, Dirty Havana trilogy, the place is Havana, the times the nineties of the last century, covering the horrible years of famine after the collapse of the USSR, through the end of the decade, when increased tourist trade alleviated the economic woes some, and the characters are his usual assortment of the lowest of the low riffraff imaginable: total down-and-outs, whores, pimps, idiot children of idiot parents, petty gangsters, drifters, muertosdehambre (the famished), the dregs of humanity. Occasionally a member of the middle class floats through, but never as more than a cameo; much more frequently we're presented with someone who fell through the ranks from a loftier position to the usual occupation of Gutiérrez's characters, rummaging through garbage and stealing food. When they aren't stealing or starving, they are screwing, with a zest that seems to be their only mark of vitality.

The King of Havana ("rey/king" is wordplay on the main character's name, Reynaldo, Rey for short) is different in that it is told in the third person, and that it is more disgusting than the other two, in my subjective assessment. For one thing, the leading couple relish the dirt, of the environment and their bodies, in a way that makes it unwise to eat or drink while reading. Gutiérrez's language is completely unadorned, but starkly evocative nevertheless--the man wouldn't know a euphemism if it bit him. Cunts, cocks, assholes, fucking, shitting etc. are referred to directly and constantly, in fact the genitals (and race) are main, and often the only, points of characters' description.

Rey is thirteen at the beginning of his story, jacking off along his brother, watching the pretty whore living next to them on a building roof, among chicken coops. The boys' retarded mother shouts them out, the older boy pushes her away and she falls on a piece of metal, dying in front of them; Rey's brother is horrified by what he did and hurls himself off the roof, smashing on the street; the paralysed grandma suffers a heart attack and dies on the spot; Rey goes off into shock and refuses to tell the police what really happened, so that they pack him off to a correctional facility.

The horror that strikes the poor is even comical, in its monstrous proportions. There's no limit to it.

At the end of his story, Rey has only just turned seventeen. He's been starving for days, he's injured his leg in getting away with his lover from the collapse of the building they squatted in, he's killed his lover and had sex with her corpse, he's tried to bury her in a garbage fill while being attacked by rats who also fed on her, and he spends his last six days thirsting, in fever, in terrible pain, in the rusting carcass of a bus in which he'd built a little "house" for them some weeks before.

Jesus. Victor Hugo would have a heart attack reading about these miserables.

I've often looked at Gutierrez in the bookstore and put it down again.
Lola, are you recommending him or not?

#126

I'd recommend him, with caution. First, there are those who wouldn't stomach that language and themes. I'm not into misery and gore as a genre, I don't go out of my way to be disgusted and horrified. But, I can take some types of disgusting things easier than others--a description of a Sadeian orgy, say, over a GOP convention.

Second, I wouldn't recommend him as a source on things Cuban to those who know nothing about Cuba. Here it becomes complicated--I simply don't know whether Gutiérrez is political, cynically exploitative, or innocent as a lamb, or at least "a camera". Is he pathologically honest or a cunning shock-jockey? Although the plot I've given above is horrible, it is actually impossible to state that Gutiérrez thinks life in Cuba is irredeemably horrible--yes, even the short savage life of his character Rey, against whom the writer stacked the deck from the start.

Be it also noted that he chooses to continue to live there, although he could easily have left... but then what would happen to his subject and career?

Cuba is extremely complicated and confusing. Only fools can have unambivalent feelings about its situation. I'm concerned that a diet of Gutiérrez alone can't help but elicit revulsion--fair enough when it comes to the world of his books, but unfair when it comes to Cuba the real, total place.

And to go back to why I read him--maybe as penance for my (abiding) sympathy for the Cuban revolution. I can't have one without the other.

Every time I read a borrowed book I feel like Solomon slinking off to a singles bar for a "change", couple-thousand-timing couple thousand spouses... I was seduced by the cover, dammit! But I can't afford to marry for keeps again!

Francine Prose still hasn't surpassed (or even reached again, I fear) the heights of the Blue Angel. But My new American life is as clever and funny as one can expect from her, which is a good deal cleverer and funnier than almost anyone you can think of. The story concerns Lula, a young Albanian woman freshly legal as a minder of a teenage boy in New Jersey after a stint of illegal waitressing existence in NYC. Because she's Albanian, Americans assume all kinds of things about her, some vaguely in the cosmic neighbourhood of truth, most pure bosh. This doesn't faze Lula, who philosophically accepts and even abets Americans' worst ideas about her home country and the past. The plot is set in motion by the appearance of some shady Albanian men who, Balkan-fashion, claim instant kinship based on national feeling and leave a gun with her for safekeeping. One of them is sort of cute. Lula begins to feel lonely in New Jersey.

Prose's needle-sharp characterisations are pure joy, and she has a great ear for dialogue. I especially love her young people. But the best part of this book was her understanding of Lula, a foreigner and immigrant, the only intelligent look at such a figure I've ever come across from someone who wasn't an immigrant herself. Choosing Albanian nationality for the character made it all the more impressive. That said, the constant wisecracking, especially comparisons to Albania, got a bit tedious, and the resolution fell flat. But I'm sorry Prose isn't the type of writer to produce "Further adventures of Lula in the land of the free", because I'd SO be there.

sounds fun! a seductive cover indeed!

consider me seduced...

That's funny - on Monday, Borders was at 90% off, and I held this book in my hand for consideration.

(I didn't buy it, because my TBR pallet is just too big; but now you've piqued my interest.)

Another one that got away...

Silent, I'd bet my last buck you'd love this book. Would love to hear your comments.

Bob, I'm pretty sure you'll run into sooner or later again, and for even less, aless. As a father of two angelic girls, you might be interested in what an insufferable teenage daughter is like! (One of the secondary characters, pure comic relief, but TRUE.)

Headbirths, or the Germans are dying out by Günter Grass

I've been mulling a million thoughts about this short book (an essay, a pamphlet?) for weeks now, and I'll probably go back to it and them in the future, because I can't come up with a satisfactory digest of the problems raised. First let me note that I have never read Grass before and have no "handle" on his character, as a writer or a man. I could be miles off in interpretation of his opinions--which he doesn't make easy anyway, this English translation I read actually specifies his political affiliation (leftist), because clearly it isn't clear from the text!

It begins seemingly simply enough. In the late seventies Grass and his wife visited China and he came away with a playful question: what if instead of a billion Chinese (and counting) the world had to face a billion Germans? I find this question very bizarre (and so bad that it's unanswerable, at least as Grass states it.) But the bizarre gets bizarrer. This triggers considerations on overpopulation, interwoven with questions of German unification, and German then-current affairs and politics (a looming federal election with a showdown between the Nazisoid Christian Democrats and Social Democrats) and birth statistics which have the native German population in steady decline. As Grass puts it, "the only umbilical cords being cut here... are Turkish ones".

In order to render the problematic plastic, Grass proposes a storyline (which he considered filming with Volker Schlöndorff), inventing a thirty-something couple of German teachers, leftist, profoundly socially conscious, voting Green, and intensely blond (Grass underlines the blondness) who can't make up their mind about having a baby. This couple Grass sends off to Asia on vacation, apparently to see a) just how many non-white, non-German people there are in this world (covered by China) and b) the previous, plus how these non-white people are having tons of babies without a second, or actually any thought at all (covered by India and Indonesia). The Germans are duly astonished and appalled by Asian human masses, and the squalor of India. Chinese dictatorship has done better by its people than the world's largest democracy. The Chinese are many and many are poor, but they are not destitute, nor are they living in filth like the shit-encrusted slum dwellers of India. It is the sight of Indian disease-ridden children which makes them almost decide against having a child of their own--doesn't it serve justice better to adopt? But the husband asks, adopt which one, out of the hundreds they see? And wouldn't that be like the choice in the concentration camps, between the one who gets to live and the rest who are left to die?

Now that's a terrible dilemma to place Germans in, of all people. There is only one answer--there will be no choosing for adoption. Which is, I must think, why Grass poses it. He wants his blond German couple to procreate genetically, blondly Germanically. The wife tries to emulate Indians, follow her heart and whatnot, do what comes naturally--let's have a baby then, right now. But now the husband resists. No, he wants none of the irrational Indian shit, things need to be thought out to the end. A great calamity awaits--all this Asian ocean will hit European shores soon. Lets die out before that happens. But can you picture slant-eyes and dark skins crowding the beer halls, the forest glades, the lovely cities, with only a token blond German here and there waiting on them?

I think I've said enough to illustrate the strange difficulty of this text. In short, it seems to me Grass was arguing for a SD vote (away from the Greens) with the most enlightened, most decent German public, using right-wing arguments. He is coy and muddled about it, but I can't put any other interpretation on his vision of Asians invading Germany and the horror it induces in the lethargic natives.

Must cut away now--I want to say more about the 30-year difference (if any) in the demographic problems he mentions.

Tangentially, there's this recent article in The Economist on marriage in Asia:

Women are rejecting marriage in Asia. The social implications are serious

and Amartya Sen's comparison of India and China in NYRB: Quality of Life: India vs. China

German birth rate? At record low, 8.3/1000; higher only that Hong Kong, Japan and Monaco.

Global birth rates

Barring problems this creates for German economy (and others down the line), I can't see any reason for Grass-like upsets. The world is connected vessels. When Italians leave Southern villages, Albanians and Kurds move in. If Germans die out, someone else will fill their place. The problem isn't whether they are Germans genetically, but whether they are Germans culturally. Which brings me to one answer to Grass' starting point. No, the world could hardly stand a billion of Germans. The world is having trouble dealing with the Chinese, as they turn "German"--living on ever higher standards, consuming and producing waste. Ironically, those filthy Indian children, terrible burden as they are to consciences (but not to enough, or those that count), are light as ants to earth itself.

I can't recommend The story of French highly enough, to lovers of ANY language. It informs, teaches, entertains (the description of l'Académie française alone is worth the admission) and dispels not a few myths and urban legends about, yes, French, but also English--and this being an English site on which I already discussed some of the ridiculous things Anglos often believe about English (uniquely expressive, has most words, uniquely suited to doing business, science etc.), I want to underline this.

The most important thing I learned is the role Quebec has played (is playing) in bringing modernity to French, shaping it up and exercising in the global arena, in which, we are told, English is the uncontested champion. (Personally, I despise the view that there is a competition between languages, and the authors don't endorse it either.) In fact, this book has made me see Canada with brand new eyes, and I am hippity-hoppity happy about the vision it has given me, this wonderfully interesting brand new thing, or a hundred new things actually, because the ramifications are so many--the importance of language diversity, the reasons and ways to preserve it, the interaction of politics and culture, the imposition of cultural norms by political power etc.

I picked up La Disparition de la langue française by Assia Djebar following the previous, in which there was much discussion about the fate of French in France's old colonies. In Djebar's novel, set around 1991, at the cusp of Algeria's fall to the Islamists, a fiftyish Algerian man living in Paris gets dumped by his French girlfriend and returns to Algiers, seeking the place he left. (But you can't go home back again.) Berkane begins writing, in French, his memories of the fifties and sixties, when Algerians were fighting for independence; meets with an Arab woman, also an expat, who tells him of her family's story, complementary to his in some way. Her businessman grandfather was killed by the Front of National Liberation, because he wasn't giving them enough money fast enough; Berkane was a teenage fighter, swept into the insurrection and the famous battle of Algiers as if going to a football match. They are both disappointed by the state of the country which has steadily declined since the departure of the French, and both fear the future. Nadja returns to Europe, Berkane disappears, probably a victim of one of the systematic assassinations after the Islamist victory. The book reads like a sad postscript to Gillo Pontecorvo's famous movie; although it's not referred to directly, Djebar repeatedly introduces the scenes and characters known from it, such as Ali la Pointe, the petty street thug-turned-revolutionary, the Casbah steps and warrens, the flight over the rooftops, the torture cell in the prison with water on the floor and electrical cables etc. Moderately interesting--if you're interested in Algeria, or the postcolonial fate of the Maghreb.

133> some of the ridiculous things Anglos often believe about English

I notice that you qualify "things" (with "some") and "believe" (with "often"), but offer not a single escape hatch for "Anglos"

I would like to believe that a reasonable number of us Angloglots have managed to avoid the delusions of linguistic superiority that plague our kind--enough of us, at least, to warrant a little wiggle room in any future jeremiads.

Besides, some of us even sympathize with you poor, lonely polyglots (it must be so hard for you to find books in French, German and all those other exotic languages), even though our friends and colleagues would most certainly relegate you to your own pretentious circle of hell.

Don't oppress me! You're oppressing me! Stop oppressing me! "Often" means "often", not "always", and yes, that's exactly what I experienced.

By the way, in case you're serious: so knowledge is now "pretentious"? I think I prefer my friends and colleagues.

135> Don't oppress me! You're oppressing me! Stop oppressing me!

Hush!! We're in hell, remember? (Besides, you know you like it!!)

"Often" means "often", not "always"

I do not disagree. My point is that "often" does not mean "some":

Dogs often chase cats is not the same as Some dogs chase cats,
Anglos often talk shit is not the same as Some anglos talk shit

Moreover, "often" means neither "most" nor "many":

Dogs often chase cats is not the same as Most dogs chase cats.
Anglos often talk shit is not the same as Many anglos talk shit.

I'm just pointing out that you chose a line of argument that (intentionally or not) propagates the claim that "You damn English-speakers are all the same!"

136> in case you're serious

What?? You mean that my calling French and German exotic languages wasn't a big enough clue?? Am I not even allowed the opportunity to distance myself from my Angloglot peers through satirical self-ridicule. Am I not allowed to be serious and satirical within the scope of a single message? Jeez, talk about imperious!!

To be completely clear...

My final paragraph in 134 was intended to be a parody of precisely those attitudes that you criticize. As an aerospace engineer in Southern California, I am surrounded by cultural morons and the best way to mock them is pretending to be one of them. I was hoping the absurdities of that paragraph were enough to signal sarcasm, but apparently they weren't. My apologies. It was certainly not intended to be read as an actual attack (or even a half-attack). Besides, as you know, any attack along these lines would be an attack upon myself as well...

I stand by my grammatical criticism, however. I do not accept that "Dogs often chase cats" is the same as "Most/Some/Many dogs chase cats." The first sentence says something about the frequent behavior of the group of all dogs. The latter sentence(s) indicate that this group is not homogenous. (This, incidentally, is pretty much the same practice that "some" women have criticized as being insidiously sexist: when a man makes a statement that women are like this, or women are like that, he effectively objectifies all women by denying heterogeneity to the group of women as a whole).

That said, I of course know what you meant and do not disagree with you in substance.

>132 LolaWalser:, Lola, Grass's recent pronouncements are puzzling to lots of people. check this out:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,784611,00.html

This pamphlet sounds bizarre to say the least. One wonders if Grass is perhaps going cuckoo? It always amazes me that population control and immigration are not discussed together. Population control is one of the areas where globalisation seems not to have reached, in that politicians seem unable to think beyond the confines of the nation. Taiwan has the lowest birth rate in the world, and the government here is anxiously coming up with programs to encourage breeders to reproduce, instead of congratulating the population for their restraint and encouraging immigration.

Those people who wonder about what tax base is going to provide for the growing number of elderly, should consider immigration as the answer to the problem. As you say, the world is connected vessels. I know here in this part of the world there are plenty of Pinoys and Indonesians who would be happy to come to Taiwan and work for a better lifestyle.

Moreover, "often" means neither "most" nor "many":

Exactly. Why do you think I MEANT "most" or "many"? I didn't, and therefore DID NOT say so.

My point is that "often" does not mean "some":

My original statement (or JEREMIAD, to you) is perfectly clear in NOT implying that ALL Anglos believe etc. I could have phrased it with "some"; I chose a different phrasing, amounting to the same meaning, whatever your impression. Any logic manual will demonstrate the different ways of denoting subsets of categories; "some" isn't the only modifier in town. The Portuguese are often descendants of fishermen. The Icelanders, I just heard, often believe in elves. Does any of these statements throw you off like the Anglo one? Do they carry the implications you imagined about how frequently X happens, or that it implies EVERY single Portuguese or Icelander? Probably not.

I'm very sorry you misunderstood, but then I find it odd that after all this time you could misread me so badly. If you don't know me by now... ;)

Murr

When it comes to political judgment, Grass has demonstrated with amazing regularity that he doesn't have any. Over the years, he has begotten the most outrageous nonsense.

WHEW! That's a relief to hear, because that pamphlet (and I should udnerline, published some 30 years ago), really stumped me! Being written by a somewhat crazy person explains so much...

I'm with you on the population/immigration issue, but we're probably in a tiny minority.

Okay, now this:

"Grass cited the Holocaust as a reason why Germany had to remain divided in two states, saying: "The scene of the horror rules out having a future unified state."'

Goes completely CONTRARY to the opinions expressed in Headbirths, where he WANTED unification, and talked of the efforts that writers from both Germanies had been making for years to meet as often as possible. Odd.

Maybe he's just a leg-puller supreme:

"all of Europe's Gypsies should be summoned to Berlin because Gypsies are generally known for making any border porous.""

Then again, it seems they are coming rather hard on him. That six million thing must be just a slip of the tongue, he is old.

...

Still in francophone North Africa: La civilisation, ma mère!... : roman by Driss Chraibi and Gide's Amyntas. Chraibi's book is almost a fairy tale of female and national emancipation, with touches of burlesque. The very first few pages contain a beautiful portrait of his mother, physically tiny, an orphan from birth who was married at thirteen to a man she had never seen before, and not only illiterate, but completely ignorant of the outer world--she lives sequestered in the house, doing the household chores. Her two grown sons decide to help her (her, "the maker of our days"--"la créatrice de nos jours") to come into being as an independent person--to grow up, finally.

Gide owes a huge debt to Maghreb, which gave him his first poetical, romantic masterpieces. Maghreb was Gide's Roman campagna, where purity of nature harmonised with purity of men, where modernity didn't exist, and handsome young boys blew tunes on rustic pipes while tending fluffy sheep. At least, it was until he could sustain the illusion no longer. In the earliest of his travel notes this hunger for being somewhere entirely different from his origin dominates everything--he is only as happy as the circumstances seem foreign, only where other tourists are not, seeing sights they miss, like the cheap puppetry show, and not the staged dances. He is constantly reassuring himself that he is experiencing something authentic, spontaneous. He wants to become invisible to the locals, to meld with them, in fact, he writes in one place, he would give everything to BE this particular Arab, here, now. It's easy to conclude that the 19th century mal du siècle lasted all 100 years of it, that the Western man was already gripped by anxiety, angst, nausea and the lot, in 1896. By the end of the notes in Amyntas, dating from 1904/5, Gide has definitely lost this second paradise, he will never return. Morocco and Algeria aren't Arcadia, the Arabs are troubled, sick and apathetic, not wisely contemplative; even the boys aren't good-looking anymore, barely two out of a hundred. Maybe that's the moment where Gide begins to see the world, for real this time.

I love both early and late Gide, for many reasons, one being his language, beautiful, and it's beautiful in this book too, even in translation. He got the colours of North Africa just right.

The selected letters of William Faulkner is the dullest letter collection I've ever read--the bulk of them are to his agent and publishers, it's William bloody Faulkner, and even after The Sound and the Fury etc. all he does is grovel grovel grovel and beg beg beg some more for money, left and right. Now that I think of it, this WOULD make a good gift for a youngster setting his/her sights on a literary career, if you wanted to scare them away from it. If there were any wine, women and song in Faulkner's life, you'd never tell from this (even Scotch is barely mentioned); the man must have read, but there are few mentions of books, and what discussions of literature there are, are all of his--fair enough and interesting enough for his readers, but. All sunk beneath dollars numbers. And then by the end, when I was thoroughly anesthetized, up popped several letters concerning the burning NEGRO question (late fifties, early sixties, civil rights movement in the swing) and my neuralgic point, (Southern) racism, was brutally poked. I absolutely don't want to bash Faulkner or sermonise over his dead body, I would just like to understand--years later, and the phenomenon and its enigmas persist--that makeup of personalities, that set of circumstances, that makes one capable of deepest compassion, affection and devotion to a single person (or several persons) while at the same time entertaining all the usual racist antagonisms and prejudices against the larger class to which those people belong.

For instance, Faulkner loved his black "mammy", who, he says, raised him. He delivered a touching eulogy at her funeral, he was profoundly shaken, struck by her death. He obviously felt compassion for the blacks (I don't want to drag his books in, literary "evidence" is so ambiguous). And yet he's capable of writing to someone, "(...) and so twice in a hundred years we Southerners shall have destroyed our native land just because of niggers". So these "niggers" aren't on THEIR native land, THEY aren't Southerners, and anyway, their fate is something so unimportant, negligible that it's "just because of..."?

Then there is the repeated occurrence of the idea that blacks need to prove that they are "capable" of equality, and obvious belief that they are not, in fact, "capable of equality", not then and possibly ever.

Some time by the end of the decade Faulkner changed his view on segregation, to being "against" it, but not, apparently, because of his feelings, but because of the zeitgeist. He comments fatalistically that in fact it would be better for "us" whites to abolish it willingly, rather than have it "crammed down our throats by the Federal Government", because then "the Negroes will owe us gratitude". And I must say here I began to question Faulkner's reputation as a genius psychologist, plumber of the depths of the human nature. You have people enslaved, humiliated and martyrised for centuries, then you stop--and you think they'll be GRATEFUL, and TO YOU?

And then there's the extraordinary answer he directed to a black man who used to serve Faulkner's family, and who wrote to Faulkner asking him to pay for his subscription to the NAACP. Faulkner refused to do so, because he thought NAACP was dangerous, wrong-headed, etc.--and he goes on to tell this man that they, the blacks, ought to become "MORE responsible, more educated" (and a further string of epithets I'd forgotten) than the whites, so that the white people will WANT the blacks to be "equal with them", and "ask" the blacks to "join" them etc.

to be cont'd

great stuff on Gide. I was especially excited by the phrase 'shepherd boys blew'... then I saw 'tunes on pipes' and my excitement shrank. Perhaps that's simply what happened to Gide.

Faulkner? really?

Oh, it still blew and blew in Gide's life for decades... Interestingly, the first thing he wrote after the final North African adieu was Corydon (although it wasn't published until years later), where the question of homosexuality and its acceptance in the society was displayed frankly, polemically, in contrast to his previous North African fictional megahits, Les nourritures terrestres and Les nouvelles nourritures, where it's hinted at but never named or discussed.

Faulkner, really, had tons of money problems.

Ah yes, just one final remark about the racism (Toni Morrison in Playing in the dark talks of white literary "Africanism")--after Richard Wright published Black Boy, Faulkner wrote to him and chided him for not writing about the experiences of "the everyman", for not representing the everyman (I'll post actual quotes later, forgot my notes)... Well, there's the obvious--who's Faulkner's "everyman", if a black boy isn't--can't be? An Asian woman? A Turkish eunuch? A Bedouin? A Tierra-del-Fuegan? A Mexican mestizo? A Basque grandma?

So I thought of Faulkner's "everyman", and universals, and how we are always looking for and admiring this and that for its "universal" value and I've come to the conclusion that all literature that finds its "universal" in one particular--and is blind to everyone else--is morally and ethically bollocks.

Faulkner wrote to him and chided him for not writing about the experiences of "the everyman...

That would sort of defeat the purpose of what Wright was doing, wouldn't it? As I recall, the book drew on Wright's own experiences. To suggest, if that's what Faulkner was doing, that the experience of one black American male in the mid-20th century was a template for the lives of all black American males is a rather simplistic approach.

The one bio I've read of Faulkner, by Stephen B. Oates, gives great detail on the poverty in which Faulkner toiled. He does seem to have made some money by the end of his career, as evidenced by his lovely Oxford estate nicely photographed in Writers' Houses. Then again, Faulker's aversion to physical labor and his late entry into the gentry supposedly earned him the sobriquet "Count No 'count".

The question, for me, is why the experiences of a black boy (or presumably any of the imaginary examples I added) aren't universal, to Faulkner. Even if they extend to a category--and Wright's experiences certainly weren't unique--according to Faulkner they still aren't talking about "the everyman". And my reply is that there IS no universal, there are only particulars. The experiences of a a white patriarch or Hemingway's he-man are no more (or less) universal than those of a crippled Finnish lesbian.

The question, for me, is why the experiences of a black boy (or presumably any of the imaginary examples I added) aren't universal, to Faulkner.

And my reply is that there IS no universal, there are only particulars.

It seems as if these statements are contradictory. I would certainly agree with the latter. I'm assuming, perhaps erroneously, that what Faulker was suggesting was that Wright ought to be illustrating the life of the Black American "everyman", and that he felt that the value of Wright's as some sort of polemic on the burden of being black in America was somehow diminished.

Am I missing your point?

The centre of the world is everywhere and everyone is "universal", I think, but needless to say, Faulkner wouldn't agree with me. That's his loss--literally his LOSS. You read what he wrote and you wonder at things he was missing (there are psychological/social/historical explanations for this, of course, that I'm not equipped to go into).

But I'm reminded of a couple things that letter to Wright reminded me of, comments I've been avoiding because I don't know what's the use of touching superficially on such a huge complex topic--briefly, some impressions left after reading the conversations between Margaret Mead and James Baldwin collected in A Rap on race; and the Paris Review interview with Derek Walcott.

Note that all these three examples fall into the boiling years of civil rights fight in the States, fifties/sixties.

After reading all three I was struck (and amazed, perplexed, frustrated etc.) by the whites' (then?) inability or unwillingness to assume the black POV. By their resistance, overwhelmingly resistance, to understanding the issues the way the blacks understood them, sometimes even to HEAR them. By the misreadings and misunderstandings (like watching someone miss one bus after another). Most of those people are now dead and you can't imagine how they'd regard their opinions 50 or 60 years later. But I wouldn't have been so deeply upset and moved if I hadn't heard, seen, experienced such things relatively recently.

Mead, for instance, can barely let Baldwin say anything about the problems the blacks face, however generally, without declaring her and her family's (rare) righteousness. There is a strong need to justify and exempt oneself from the racist "bloc". She is also a teacher, and has something of that "you marvellous people need to be more marvellous than us" attitude, which insults blacks' humanity almost as much as antagonistic racism.

Walcott had published a play in which a black man (bit of a simpleton) kills a white woman who had personified Godhead to him. The white interviewers just can't get over the fact that a black had killed a white person on stage. They are deaf to the play and everything Walcott tells them about it, they want him to apologise (not using that word), to retract.

I can't remember much more without going back to the books and my notes, I'll just add that Faulkner, who writes of it explicitly, made me realise another element was very much in the air at the time (in the US)--fear, whites' pure fear of black anger and revenge.

#149

Faulkner just wrote "the everyman", absolutely no mention of a "black everyman", nor is there any indication he meant any such thing.

It seems as if these statements are contradictory.

Not really, I'm implying the same thing from different sides.

As I said x-postingly, in my opinion particulars have to be understood as possibly universal, because they are all that there is. But all particulars are equal in this ability to shed light on the "universal". A black boy is as valid an example of a human existence as a white man. But not to Faulkner.

I'll just add that Faulkner, who writes of it explicitly, made me realise another element was very much in the air at the time (in the US)--fear, whites' pure fear of black anger and revenge.

My tamales are getting cold, but, yeah, this is an attitude that goes back at least to Jefferson's metaphor of the Negro as a wolf being held by the ears.

Oh, and your comments also put me in mind of Philip Roth's recent novel Everyman which deals with thoughts of mortality and death as they affect an aging Jewish author. While some fear of mortality may be universal to the human condition, Roth's protagonist is quite obviously responding as an aging Jewish author, which to a great extent subverts the implications of the title.

responding as an aging Jewish author, which to a great extent subverts the implications of the title.

Haven't read that and don't know where Roth's coming from (I last witnessed Roth coming in Portnoy's Complaint, which I still resolutely love), but that's exactly what I'm talking about--the universal doesn't exist apart from the particular, so if the ageing Jewish author or the young Swedish vedette want to write about a "universal" experience, unless they are blathering philosophically in abstract, they have to choose anchor in some particular--any particular, but SOME definable, describable person, POV...

I mentioned Portnoy's Complaint, not many women (I learnt much later) supposedly find themselves in it, but the hero resonated with me, I felt almost conspiratorially (I can admit so much later) with his doggishness, his infidelity, his hysterical self-analysis, his mother love-and-repulsion. Something in Portnoy was like me (and vice versa), I took a ride in that character--some other reader may not have been able to do so, but surely knew somebody like Portnoy, or could even only just imagine someone like Portnoy, because that character lives.

But there's no call in pretending Portnoy, the white male, is "universal", whereas that black boy of Wright's--or any other example of a human--isn't.

Thinking of the Roth Everyman, I can't help but recall the aphorism of Nietzsche which says (as far as I remember) that an individual's pain is the one thing that you cannot pry away from them - we have a possessiveness about our pain. It is OURS, and we will be damned if you can take it from us. There is this possessiveness about pain in Everyman that one sees in oldsters (and other afflicted ones) everywhere. At some point we have to realize, our pain is like our dreams - it is of paramount importance to us, but rather a bore to everyone else.

...

Violette Leduc is seen by some as Genet's female counterpart--an oddity, an outsider of devastating frankness with a fantastic command of language, and unusual life story. She was a bastard, hypersensitive, ravenously hungry for affection, bisexual, ugly (yet charming, even charismatic, according to witnesses), difficult. I had started La bâtarde many years ago, but didn't like the tone it had in translation, that almost comical stiltedness the French assumes when English'd, that comes from different use of tenses. Leduc also employs ellipses and symbolism a lot, some of her sentences almost read as short code, and she wasn't afraid of high-strung melodrama (witness her titles: Asphyxia, The ravening one, Ravages...) But, as I still haven't come across the original, and books are closing in on me, I finally dispatched both parts of her memoir, with less attention than they deserve. She was born in 1907, so the first book covers WWII, the second the postwar years, and both are chock full of Parisian cultural life (Leduc mostly worked in publishing) and pretty much everyone in French letters through mid-century. However, La bâtarde is probably better known for its two major love stories between schoolgirls--the first ever homosexual--or actually any-sexual--coming of age tale depicted in utterly frank erotic language. Leduc fictionalised this experience in Therese and Isabelle, which was filmed by Radley Metzger--recommended!

The second memoir is structured around her obsession with Simone de Beauvoir (there were other women Leduc was obsessed with, but this was the pivot of her emotional life), and, partly, Genet, who she cared for a lot, but who never returned her friendship, probably repelled by the very similarity that drew her to him.

#155

Hmm, I don't know, seems to me you hit on one of the great "universalisers".

Feeling lazy. So lazy. So very, very lazy.

Lessee...

The Nephew (less attractive than Malcolm), much-loved, lost in Korea and finally laid to rest in the minds of his bachelor uncle and spinster aunt after various discoveries sparingly contributed by other mostly broken small-town characters.

One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is a feel-good story about the Gulag; everything goes well for Ivan Denisovich during this one day!

Das Halsband der Königin (The queen's necklace) was meant to accompany the bio of Marie-Antoinette by Zweig, but was too thrilling and fast a read: strange people doing strange things for strange reasons, one of which is love--or vanity--or cupidity...

Joseph Cornell's Dreams are less boring to read about than other people's dreams because you can picture them boxed

Was Ding Dong Bell the inspiration for Masters' Spoon River Anthology or is this simply what anyone sneaking about graveyards wants to do?

Die Lebensbeschreibung der Erzbetrügerin und Landstörzerin Courasche has a great female character in Courasche (Courage), a lusty Amazon and survivor, and offers a great object-lesson in what happens to uppity women, now as in 17th century

Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments surpasses its genre in greatness and interest although the years covered (1940s) weren't bursting with gems, especially during the war

>146 LolaWalser: - 155 Awesome discussion, which I arrived late to (for some reason the Hellfire Club doesn't show up on my list of groups on my profile page when I log in. I have to go to all sorts of complicated rituals to get here.)

all literature that finds its "universal" in one particular--and is blind to everyone else--is morally and ethically bollocks.

bravo. But. Can you give some examples?

I'm surprised you need them! So-Faulkner? Tolstoy? Dickens? How about pretty much ALL LITERATURE EVER WRITTEN???

Partly what I'm driving at, is that we should stop advertising great literature (of the past for sure, and probably any, ever) for its moral lessons. If there are any, they are suspect.

To turn the question otherways, can you name any non-contemporary writer holding a truly "universal" POV, a point of view that would treat any human being's existence as equal in significance to any other?

SHAKESPEARE DOESN'T COUNT!

Perhaps I have misunderstood. It seems to me that all literature worth its salt is particular. The great writers create particulars only. It's the strength and power of these particulars which makes them universals.

I can only think of one writer who deliberately set out to make universals: Bunion, sorry Bunyan, and we all know how incredibly boring and fatuous he is.

I don't agree that the moral lessons of great literature are suspect. Surely the moral lesson of great lit is simply to value every other human being by presenting the (inner life) of an individual in detail.

thanks for introducing me to Leduc. and I love the comment on Ivan Denisovitch. You should write cover blurbs. lol

...we should stop advertising great literature (of the past for sure, and probably any, ever) for its moral lessons. If there are any, they are suspect.

I agree. I can smell a moral lesson coming a mile away.

Surely the moral lesson of great lit is simply to value every other human being by presenting the (inner life) of an individual in detail.

I agree with what (I think) you're getting at, but I would hesitate to describe this as a moral lesson. In some way, I would describe this as a realization that the value of life is to be found beyond provincial moralities.

Of course, there are some, perhaps even lurking on LT itself, who believe that the purpose of literature is to inculcate morality.

We can safely dismiss this perspective.

Well, don't know how it is today, but I was brought up with the idea that Great Literature Will Make You A Better Person--this could be true or false in different ways--and that Great Literature Holds Eternal Truths--this, I have found, is bunk.

On the universal/particular--my train of thought started off with that remark of Faulkner's to Wright, about Wright's Black Boy not being about "the everyman", and what this implied about Faulkner's view of the purpose of literature, "the everyman", and likely his own contribution to the literature about "the everyman" (on the background of indications of Faulkner's racism too).

The great writers create particulars only. It's the strength and power of these particulars which makes them universals.

I'd absolutely agree, but that's just one part of it. In brief, Faulkner's remark reminded me of the idea that what happens to white men, or what white men think, is "universally" interesting, whereas what happens to any other kind of human, or what they think, is interesting only to those sub-categories, if that.

There's another angle. Perhaps the only "universality" of view is possible in--the reader. All the books are parochial compared to the cosmos encompassed in a sufficiently widely--and well--read mind.

Everybody should know what's discussed in this book: The Shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains and then something should be done!--what, I am not entirely sure--but will someone, please, THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

The most important first: do not buy into computing metaphors for the human mind and if you ever use them, stop. The brain isn't like a computer, the memory isn't like a hard drive, or any inert mechanical storage unit, from a disc to a silo. The way we read, off a hyperlinked screen or off paper, matters, not only for the resulting memory, but for long-term effects on our thinking.

I've read quite a bit neurobiology, various aspects of, but this is the first lengthier take on the brain in the age of the Internet, and the effects of Internet use on it. No one expects to roll back the tide, nor would it be advisable to do so even if we could. But the arguments are strong for preserving and enforcing part-time use of "old-fashioned" technologies (such as physical books) and educational methods that strengthen memory (also mostly "old-fashioned").

And finally someone comes out and criticises bullshit concepts like multimedia and "multitasking"! Yeah!

But we are dooomed, we are doooooomed...

Unusually distracted over the weekend, I managed only one mystery, set in the Victorian era, The face of a stranger. Since learning about the copy-editing habits of some publishing houses (Americanising British English and vice versa), it annoys me no end to see American spelling and modern usage where I think--I can't be sure anymore, can I?!--they shouldn't exist. For instance, there appeared the word "homosexual", in direct speech, while the action is set in 1857 or so. I don't know what term would be used by the English police in 1857, but I bet it wouldn't be "homosexual" (not in general medical use until the end of 19th century). And so on regarding some other turns of phrase and vocabulary... I'm not familiar with this author, who I think is British--does anyone know how scrupulous or not she is about linguistic verisimilitude? I like my rare historical fiction fix as clean as possible...

Wasn't "invert" the preferred term back in the bad old days?

Mary Anne, Uranian,
pederast, Urning, etc.

noice to see someone coming out attacking multitasking, whcih has always seemed to me a crafty way for the capitalist scum who own us to get more work out of us. No wonder no one can concentrate anymore.

another internet-age word I hate is 'interactive'. Fuck that. CLick.

Yes, "invert" and Murr's examples would've worked better, I suppose... Curse the mood-breakers!



In the pursuit of the English is the first book by Lessing I ever read, and it is a reader-winner: count me a fan. All right, maybe I should wait until I check out her fiction (all said and done, non-fiction seems to attract my interest sooner and hold it better), but one can tell this is a writer of QUALITY. The book is autobiographical, and yet the narrating voice manages to erase itself, while bringing everyone else in relief. In 1949 Lessing and her three year old son left South Africa for England, arriving in grim and bombed-out London (whose ugliness astonished her) with no money or contacts. She found lodgings through the expedient of entering a shop and asking the salesgirl whether she knew of any flats for rent; the salesgirl (Rose) did, in the house she herself lived in, and the year (or so) Lessing spent there is the entire content of the book. The landlords were a working class couple on the make, Dan and Flo, with a teenage son from Flo's previous marriage, and a toddler whose upbringing cried out for Dr. Spock (Flo apparently believed every kiss should be followed by a slap and vice versa). Other lodgers included another couple with a small and equally abused child, father being always on the road, mother a neurotic mess; a call girl, and an invisible old couple, barricaded in their rooms, which Dan and Flo fought to get out of the house (the court process ends the book).

From the start Lessing notes that the famed English with their famed "English" characteristics seem to be as rare as unicorns. Nobody she meets fits the bill. She certainly doesn't, as is made clear by landladies asking her--being from Africa--might she not be coloured in fact, or a Jew. The working class doesn't behave "English". Dan and the stepson parade around the house in wifebeaters (I think that's what "singlet" means), flexing muscles and ogling the girls like any of the Med machos. Flo had an Italian grandmother, who taught her to cook--a lot is made of terrific meals, communal on Sundays, accompanied by low jokes and sexual innuendo. Rose the salesgirl isn't so much "English" as a Londoner, a city mouse who spent her entire life within a few blocks. Brent the con man, ex-commando, "a sadist and a psychopath" (as Lessing tells him, conversationally, at one point) could be any flavour of Foreign Legion cannon meat.

I've rarely come across the England emerging from Lessing's pages (possibly entirely due to the sort of books I read), such a very convincingly real place, gritty (but the war practically just ended), grimy, the populace desperately fighting still, not the Germans, but poverty, disappointment, bleakness, and something stifling in the air.

Went well with the movies I saw recently--Basil Dearden, and Carol Reed's Fallen idol, and a couple based on John Osborne's plays, Look back in anger and The entertainer. But Lessing is less emotional, and funnier.

Lessing is also a gap in my reading, Lola, but this sounds very good.

poverty, disappointment, bleakness, and something stifling in the air...

Yup. That's England alright.

Well no wonder the English make such willing immigrants.

Two serious ladies by Jane Bowles reads eccentrically, as happens not infrequently when the characters are women not defined by wifehood and/or motherhood (what the hell are they here FOR, then, the world seems to demand). The two ladies of the title aren't any of the female couples in the book, but the two most scrutinised, a rich Miss Goering with a gift for religion (and a female companion), and the small and lost Mrs. Copperfield, a stand-in for Jane Bowles herself. At least, the Copperfield marriage seems based on that of Jane and Paul Bowles, a less than happy or fitting union, he having been quite gay. Why people do that--get married to people they have no business marrying--is beyond me, but then why does one do anything.

What happens in the book, for example, is that the ladies travel to exotic places, like Panama, meet whores and unhappy strangers, have drinks in seedy bars, start households and end up with strange housemates sleeping on their couch. There isn't much "story" but the telling is nevertheless gripping because there's lots between the lines, or so you can imagine.

Those who like Leonora Carrington (The hearing trumpet, say) have a good chance of liking this one too, although it's rather more subdued.

Le bal du comte d'Orgel is fine and precious like a piece of jewellery. A young man falls in love with a married woman (the wife of the count d'Orgel) and she is troubled by him too, but not to the point of adultery. Lots of thinking about feelings. Radiguet was inspired by Mme de Lafayette's La princesse de Cleves and in addition the book bears Cocteau's imprint (he edited the final version, and advised Radiguet from the start), but its subtle spirit, gentle and knowing, is all this marvellous boy.

René Crevel--cute, no? He was dadaist, surrealist, communist, gay, and a suicide, aged 35. Also consumptive--he actually underwent therapy in Davos, right there in the setting of Mann's Der Zauberberg. Êtes-vous fous? (Are you mad?), some say, is the first surrealist novel, if a novel can be permitted to... have no boundaries and sort of splash all around. It's a notably strange text from an epoch brimming with strange texts and damn hard to hang onto, like a live fish. The main character is the narrator, who is Crevel, who is called Vagualâme (wonderfully evocative of half a dozen things: vagabondage?, the sea?, an uncertain soul?, a wavy soul?, waves like blades? etc.) who receives a prophecy from a fortuneteller about a redheaded woman who'll bear him a blue child, and an encounter with a Mata Harish, femme fataleish woman-city, who turns out to be some kind of zombie, kept alive by a fakir, whose niece turns out to be the readhead of the blue child, who dies as soon as it is born etc. This is underpinned by Crevel's real-life reminiscences and introspection, revolving around his sanatorium stay in Davos, when he had a (first?) homosexual affair with an American, and faced his own death, one supposes, because it seems that his suicide, years later, was triggered by the discovery that he wasn't completely cured, that the TB had returned.

This is a book that will take multiple readings well. Don't add milk!

Als ich ein kleiner Junge war (When I was a little boy) tells autobiographically of Erich Kästner's parents and childhood in Dresden, just before WWI. The parents were of humble origins and recently come from the country into the city, the resources were limited, but a proper petit bourgeois lifestyle maintained, and Erich, the only child, doted on. In his books for children there is always a marvellous bond between the mother and the child, especially that of an independent boy who helps and takes care of his mom; so it was in life. Although I like Kästner (as a kid I loved him), I wouldn't have read this for his life alone. It is the mystery of that magical period that attracts me, the lull before Europe went to hell for good.



In my brother's shadow begins some thirty years after Kästner's book ends, with another little boy--this one barely three or four-- remembering his older brother, a volunteer in the SS, dead at nineteen somewhere in the Ukraine. After his death the family received a box with his belongings, including a small notebook with sparse diaristic entries. Uwe Timm pores over these entries, and his brother's letters home, trying to piece together not only what had been happening to his brother, but also what his brother was like, what he had felt and thought about it all. And what isn't there becomes as important and heavy as whatever little is there. For instance, there is never any mention of prisoners, although there had been combat, and the soldier took part in at least one major conquest, that of Kharkov. Timm mulls over this repeatedly: were the prisoners and their fate of no account to the soldier, or was he too horrified to write about such things? Timm notes, with relief, that there is no propaganda-speak, no slogans, no politics. In one letter the soldier enclosed pressed flowers, some pinks. The year was 1943. He was dead by November. The boy's father, who had also served in the army, returned home from the POW camp and started a business with a sewing machine he found in the rubble of the city. Denazification couldn't really touch him. Thousands of men like him never felt truly guilty about what had happened, even if they sometimes had bad dreams.

This is a painful and hopeless business, this groping for understanding in the past. One understands why a person does it, but how depressing it is, seeing how little it matters.

I loved Kastner too when I was a kid (how do you get the umlaut?) I never heard of Crevel, but his book looks interesting.

On the laptop I have a Notepad file with non-, un-, and anti-English characters, which I copy & paste, when I can be bothered to. On the desktop you can use those alt& codes too--pull them down from the Help menu.

Are you familiar with Kästner's adult stuff? Fabian is an attractive example of satirical expressionism from the Weimar era, all sentimental disillusionment and economic hardship, on the backdrop of a wretched, hysterically steaming city and night clubs--now Kästner knew a LOT about night clubs, providing extraordinarily catchy verses for the cabaret of all descriptions; even playing the piano and singing himself, occasionally. I can't say he produced immortal poetry, but if immortal songs rate anything, he's pretty much the tops. One of my faves: Das Eisenbahngleichnis (1931), and a trivium about it: the wife of Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Zeus the Thunderer of postwar German literary criticism), Teofila, wrote out and illustrated this poem in the Warsaw ghetto, as a gift to Marcel. Its opening lines, the now ambiguously resonant "Wir sitzen alle im gleichen Zug"--"We are all sitting on the same train", were chosen as the title of a recent edition of those wartime manuscripts.

I have somewhere another volume of Crevel's writing, the letters. I thought I'd get a taste of his fiction first, but what is really necessary is an introduction, explanations etc. (the book I read was nothing but the bare text). There's almost nothing online either. I got to Crevel via a mention by Apollinaire, who only knew him for three minutes before dying. I read somewhere that Crevel aligned with a handful of other mystical communists (none of which could remain communists formally for long)--Daumal, Breton--meaning that reading him with profit requires knowing which mystical tradition he was pottering with, tuning in on that symbolism, and that sort of thing generally bores me silly. Having to know what tarot card signifies what etc. Always reminds me of that horrible exam in general botany and plant taxonomy in the first year...

The train was on time was published in Germany in 1949, when it and Europe in general was one stinking, smoking wound. It was Böll's first novel, and perhaps he's not at his best here. He was 32 at the publication, presumably a mature adult if not writer.

The novel is short, the plot simple--it's 1944, and a young German soldier, Andreas, after a short leave is expected to return to the front in the East, having already spent three years fighting in France and elsewhere. Already on the first or second page he becomes absolutely convinced that he would die--"soon"--that he won't return. The train takes him and other soldiers similar to him (none are Nazi, apparently) into Poland. They kill time playing cards, drinking, eating. An episode in a brothel in Lvov ends the novel, with the German soldiers who spent the night with the whores being attacked by Polish resistance. Following the action through Andreas, we register the deaths of some of the other characters, but as to Andreas' own, it's implied only, by narration cutting off at that point.

Böll is completely preoccupied with making us feel sorry for Andreas, and by extension, for all such German boys, innocent victims of their times. Andreas is 23, a sensitive soul who thinks of life beyond the war as "music--poetry--flowers" (this phrase occurs multiple times), a virgin (he's only interested in discussing music with the Polish whore assigned to him, makes her play the piano, and plays in return--a Beethoven sonatine which he performs delicately, "carefully, perhaps too carefully--as if afraid of his own strength"), and a Catholic (not spelled out, but obvious), who, amazingly, prays for the Jews. And not just once. He prays on page 27, then a few pages later; it's true he prays a lot, constantly maybe, but the first time the praying is mentioned, it's for the Jews. It's not completely clear why, as the prayer in question is one for "non-believers"--that's why it's effective for Jews too--so presumably if Andreas were simply praying for all the unsaved souls out there, he wouldn't need to single out Jews for special mention, as he does--and twice at least.

Trying to be charitable, one might think Böll was being ironic here, making Andreas into a naive fool, but my reading simply doesn't support that; if someone else detects irony in this book (intentional, I mean), please point it out.

So, Andreas is utterly innocent (what he did for three years in combat, whether he killed anyone etc. is never mentioned), sweet, and human--he actually exclaims to the Polish girl "I'm a human being!"--and the only anguish that fills him is the dread of his own death. As we're not given any other clue to Andreas' thoughts about what his army has wrought, one must wonder whether this dread itself is a symptom of guilt. Then again, who knows? He might simply figure that surviving three years already has worsened his chances for the finale (bad statistical thinking, but typical for us all).

I've lots of problems with this book. For one thing, it isn't well written, clumsiness abounds. Andreas' voice is unconvincing, stilted, artificial; the pleading for understanding was too obvious and strident, and the devices Böll used, such as repetition, diluted the emotional effect (Andreas thinks he'll die "soon"--"soon" is then repeated a dozen times; the reader understands perfectly well that Andreas feels he'll die soon, but the reader doesn't feel it. Finally, this is the most sickeningly sentimental 20th century novel of my acquaintance. "At that moment he felt a ballad by Schubert could save his life..." The Polish girl, who's also an informant to the resistance and should mark Andreas for killing, comments on how "sentimental" Germans are, how... emotional. Oh, and she falls for him and wishes to spare his life. But of course, he's such a dear.

And the thinking behind this book, as far as I discern it, only nauseates me. I don't resent Böll's choice of the protagonist as such--let a thousand "good Germans" bloom!--but in the context of the times (1949!), and given the weaknesses of the novel (adolescent-like wrapping up into oneself), I have to wonder whether this is the anti-war novel to read, when one is in the mood for anti-war novels.

music--poetry--flowers ?????

sounds like Fotherington-Thomas.

I kid you not.

Champavert: contes immoraux (Champavert, immoral stories) by Petrus Borel are highly recommended to all who like their Romanticism super-mad, bad and dangerous. In fact, that probably gives a too static idea of what Borel sounds like--I just discovered there's a literary genre called "freneticism" (frénétisme), of which he's (people say) the pinnacle. Never has a style been so happily named.

The stories are in form Gothic-Romantic dreadful tales set in Paris, Madrid, Cuba, Jamaica, Provence: virgins are raped and killed, men stab each other out of mad jealousy, unfaithful lovers are horribly disposed of, graves are desecrated, betrayals of worst sorts strike the righteous, nobody is spared. But this is no Mrs. Radcliffe. Borel comments with rageful bitterness and in a startlingly modern voice on conditions that bring on the disasters: poverty, antisemitism, racism, bourgeois laws, sheer stupidity.

Borel died in Algeria in 1859, of sunstroke (some say deliberately--suicide: by sun), which is in itself stunning.

Before I forget--he was a friend of Nerval's and Édouard Ourliac (yay, touchstone!), the minor Romantic I wrote about somewhere before.

Champavert (in French)

Andreas Vesalius the Anatomist (in English, pdf)

"You are less than a faithful Jew is, doctor! Think about it: aren't we all heathens or baptised Jews, Jews-Huguenots from the sect of Jesus of Nazareth; infidels, fugitives, renegades of Moses' laws, because of the sabaism, sadduceism, polytheism and protestantism of a peasant from Bethlehem! What monsters we are! to wish to raze the rock from which our torrent springs! Bastards! We'd like to slaughter our ancestors. We burn Jews, and we kiss their books; stupidity! we burn them because they are faithful to their law, their god, and we sing around the pyres the psalms of their king David, shouting Hosanna in excelsis! unto the sky! What a bloody masquerade!"

From Dina, la belle Juive

By coincidence (or not, perhaps something I read here or in the Chapel got me thinking of it) I just began reading Starkie's bio entitled Petrus Borel, the Lycanthrope last night. I also downloaded "Andreas Vesalius".

I like the idea of suicide by sunlight.

Ha, it does raise the stakes on inventiveness in self-destruction, doesn't it!

I'd like to get Starkie's book. I think I looked but everything was expensive.

There are several (one for sure, but it looked like several) French bios of Borel with the same title, free, on Internet Archive and elsewhere.

I think I'll read Madame Putiphar first, and the poems if I can find them. So there's really no complete English translation of Champavert? Bizarre.

I'd do it, for money. Or love. No, money.

If only we could get someone to publish a translation of Champavert. It's insane that there isn't one available. There is a free French edition for Kindle, but my High School French is nothing more than a sweet memory of the sweet and lovely Ms. Nalda.

You know what's funny, the only marginally affordable copy I found on Abe was a Serbian translation from 1962. But, hardcover, great shape for a 50 year old book. Infinitely better than POD abominations, or reading off screen.

Oh, sorry--should not blaspheme to a Kindler! :)

...

It turns out that these two titles bookend Bernanos' career, Sous le soleil de Satan being his first, and La France contre les robots his last publication. The former is a novel and the latter a polemic, but they are united in worldview, which evidently didn't change at all from 1926 to 1945.

And the view is this: the world is lost in sin (under Satan's black sun), evil reigns, god is (apparently) silent. In the novel we are given the example of spiritual combat for salvation (and sainthood) such as presumably all should engage in, in the figure of the priest Donissan, who wrestles with "despair" all his life, right until death. In the polemic, Bernanos acknowledges that he doesn't have any solutions for the catastrophe in which the world has sunk (the Mechanical Civilisation), only a hope, for "a new explosion of Christianity upon the scene".

The enemies (Satan's tools and avatars) are realism, optimism, rationalism, humour, curiosity, capitalism, technology, technical civilisation, technocrats...

I find I want to escape thinking about the airless oppressiveness of the novel, with its absurdly self-flagellating (in every sense) central character and mercilessly hopeless "sinners", and rather concentrate on the unruly, impassioned, wartime call to sense. And when I say "sense", I mean morality, health. Oddly enough, while I feel like a living photo-negative of Bernanos in every possible way, seventy years later there are strains in this old Catholic antisemitic monarchist I can respond to.

"What makes me despair of the future is exactly that the slaughtering, skinning, quartering of thousands of innocents has become a task a gentleman can accomplish without soiling his cuffs, or his imagination. A companion of Pizarro's, even if he had disemboweled only one pregnant woman in his entire life, even a mere Indian, would sometimes no doubt suffer from her disagreeable return in his dreams. The gentleman, in contrast, has seen nothing, heard nothing, touched nothing--the Machine did it all; the gentleman's conscience is clear, his memory is only enriched with a few sportive moments... {...} Do you understand now, imbeciles? Do you understand that it's not the massacre of thousands of innocents that make us despair of the future, it's that horrors like that invite us to despair of YOU, it's that abominations like that have already disposed of the questions of individual conscience."

"One understands nothing about the modern civilisation if one doesn't first recognise that it is a universal conspiracy against every sort of inner life."

This is a necessary book. Everyone ought to know what's in it, and that's the story of the construction and dissemination of the most noxious piece of plagiarism in history, The protocols of the elders of Zion.

Most of the characters in the book really existed, and their actions and utterances are such as have been recorded. Eco's great labour consisted in creating one main character to weave all the threads in a linear story, a composite of probable actors who carried the plot in history, and in doing so he took pleasure in attaching this character, Simone Simonini, to some of the greatest historical events of the period, beginning with Italian Risorgimento, through Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune, and ending with the Dreyfus affair.

Simone is a vessel of all corruptions: a forger, spy and murderer, a loveless, friendless glutton, passionate only about food and antisemitism.

Eco imagines him as the grandson of a person who actually existed, Gian-Battista Simonini, and whose maniacal antisemitism culminated in a fan letter he wrote, one Jew-hater to another, to the Jesuit Augustin Barruel, in which he reported hearing about a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity. The historical Simonini lied and exaggerated, and it's not clear (nor can ever be) what exactly was at root of his obsession. Eco imagines a meeting in the Jewish ghetto (where Simonini hid for a while to save his life) with a crazed Jewish refugee from Syria, whose ravings Simonini takes absolutely seriously, and embellishes and amplifies for Barruel's sake.

This is the first important thing: how little it takes for the obsession to take root, how ready and eager Simonini and innumerable people after him were to hate, against evidence, even against their own reason. The historical Simonini dropped out of sight after the letter to Barruel, but Eco makes of his early influence the fictional grandson's main motivation. (Also, the boy is just bad--vile.) Barruel himself kept the letter and used it years later as "evidence" of the Jewish conspiracy.

The snowball starts rolling. The narrative gradually amplifies the strands of the story, growing in size and complexity, involving a huge boiling anthill of political events. Eco navigates this roiling sea with elegant ease. There's no question that much is omitted, and don't expect deep characterisation, this is not a psychological novel (none of Eco's are). Nor is there any over-pretty painting of scenes. Too much is happening, and the numerous characters and events were so colourful in themselves, it would be superfluous. No fictionalist could come up with someone stranger than Abbe Boullan the Satanist, or Leo Taxil the anti-freemason crusader; more romantic than Ippolito Nievo (or Garibaldi himself); with something more terrible than the story of the Paris Commune; or more disgusting than the plot to scapegoat Dreyfus and forever destroy the idea that Jews can be good Frenchmen.

The book feels like a talk with a intensely engaging, erudite stranger on a train, a long ride, but unflagging in urgent interest. Eco doesn't have a great talent for explaining people, but sometimes, when we balk before the hopeless complexity of history, it feels enough to understand simply only what happened.

I'm not a great review writer (or any sort of review writer, come to think of it), but the poor rating of this book on LT seriously pisses me off. So, I'll post the above as a review, and imbeciles!, as Bernanos would snarl, be damned.

(Touchstone: Il cimitero di Praga)

your reviews, or whatever you think of them as, are excellent, what are you talking about?

One understands nothing about the modern civilisation if one doesn't first recognise that it is a universal conspiracy against every sort of inner life."

Ain't that the truth!! Let's post it on the YA lit thread, for the pap eaters. I"m going to get the Eco. I had given up on him after the dreadful fiasco of Baudelino, but it looks like he is back on form here.

Huh, thanks, kind sir! I have problems deciding what to say and what to leave out, and it always feels like I decided badly.

Oops, Baudolino--I liked it plenty, not sure what that portends for your enjoyment of The Cemetery...

I'm one of those people (not many from what I gather) who find Eco as entertaining as a basket of monkeys on speed, and the more encyclopedic detail he puts in, the more entertaining he seems. I hope this won't sound like a slur... the way to read him, imo, is like superb journalism, and not as "regular" made-up stories, high literature, or experimental or pomo lit. Eco is enthralled by insane things that actually happened, by history. I don't think he has much imagination at all. And why would he need it, when he spent a lifetime reading chronicles of medieval insanity and generally unbelievable human history? Fact trumps fiction. But so few know the facts...

Only one of his novels was a complete flop for me, The island of the day before. But that is such an aberration I really ought to revisit it. I don't remember it well at all; two things only stuck in my mind as possible problems--one, the agony of that poor dog whose wound served as some sort of living compass or sensor, two, what I remember as relative paucity of characters and events. (Stark contrast to all his other novels, except maybe Queen Loana, but which had the abundant richness of a catalogue instead.)

I've only ever read The Name of the Rose and a couple collections of Eco's essays. I've enjoyed all of it, and am now eager to move on to The Prague Cemetery.

And please keep the non-reviews coming. We need them to balance out stuff like (there are all real LibraryThing reviews):

The first thing you ought to know about Brideshead Revisited is that its author, Evelyn Waugh, is a man. I forget how I found that out, but it’s a tricky little thing for English majors who might accidentally talk about the man as if he were a woman, and thus expose their ignorance. Instead, now you can feel smug that you won't be fooled by the first name.



Pride and Prejudice is a Classic. Of that there is no doubt, as it has stood the test of time for nearly 200 years, and been commented on and reviewed a great many times. I seriously doubt that there is anything I can say that is unique, original, or even all that helpful to anyone. I shall try, nonetheless... goes on for another 600 words



This version of Les Miserables is abridged, and I'm glad of that. I think they did a good job of keeping the plot lines in tact, while removing Hugo's out-dated ramblings about .. architecture, or whatever.



I actually liked Ulysses (despite the fact that it really isn't well-written, at least in my opinion).



There were probably many other ancient Greek epics that have been lost and are no longer known to us today. I think The Iliad was preserved because it was so uninteresting that later authors weren't tempted to rewrite it with later versions. That explains why the myths of the Trojan horse and Achilles' heel are based on later writings. They are more interesting plot ideas and may have preempted earlier myths that are now lost. (This is my idea and I may be the only person who believes it.)



The Merchant of Venice is about a man named Antonio who is sad at the beginning of the play for no reason.



Jane Eyre, was a exceptional book. Charlotte Brontë, was an extremely talented author, who brought to life vibrant characters throughout her books. Jane Eyre in particular was a very memorable character, whose personality was intriguing and at times appears above her time, where you can see glimpses of a Victorian feminist. I was familiar with Jane Eyre from a “Women’s Writers" literature course I took in college, where we watched the movie version instead...

LOL
omg, how embarrassing. my favourite was this, from the ineptly named 'wisewoman' :

"I think I finally understand the fuss about Shakespeare. "

from a review of hamlet.

oh dear, we are such terrible snobs.....

Ahahahaha!! You and Murr... you just can't live quietly. :)

See, I'm shallow enough that I forgive things like those for making me laugh. Thanks, David, peerless gems one and all!

#191

Aw, if it's the same LTer I'm thinking of, she IS a smart young lady. Maybe it's written in "dry humour" mode.

I doubt she is capable of dry humour. She is an American Christian. The two are incompatible.

and to add spice to the proceedings, I've decided to write my own dictionary, so that I too can quote egregious nonsense in debates about definitions:

http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2012/04/new-all-meruhcan-dictionary.html

Murr, they're going to come after with you with torches and pitchforks on the YA thread for this.

No one torch, I mean, touch the cat!

It's already started (and no prize for guessing who started it). Don't worry, Murr. We'll hide you.

I have nine lives, and no fear.

Quick, the Great Dane disguise!

Lola, your message/review brought sweet tears to my eyes. Your enthusiasm and passion for this book, coming from someone I respect so highly, are leading me back to Eco. Sounds like a worthy successor to Rose and Foucault, two very entertaining works in themselves.

Oh, dear! I'm terribly flattered, Makif (and, garrrsh, sure hope you like it now!)

Maybe I should explain a bit... I've seen the Protocols on sale in regular bookstores in Europe and Near East, I've heard people refer to them with utter conviction; not to mention their poison, which has seeped into the air we breathe. There have been quarrels and incidents of various kinds because of this.

Now, this is not a question of god's existence, or how many dancing angels etc. The protocols were unmasked as forgery and plagiarism in the 1920s and (as Eco? writes somewhere) every year since then--to no avail. That is, apparently they can never be killed--only unmasked, again and again.

As I don't have an academic or dedicated interest that would lead me to collect references etc., I don't know what other literature on the Protocols there may be, and in this I am probably the representative average. No doubt there exist academic studies of the forgery (forgeries), but those aren't going to be widely read. Information in reputable encyclopedias and histories would be sufficient--to people who care about reputable encyclopedias and histories.

But how do you make "everyone" take notice?

A few years ago I got Will Eisner's The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Eco wrote the introduction), and that was the first systematic debunking, in a literary form, that I read. It's good. But not many people know Eisner and not many would be aware of or turn to a graphic novel on such a topic. (It's really not much more of a "graphic novel" than those "Introduction to..." series in comic strip form.)

So, the appearance of a literary book about the Protocols, by an author as respected and well known as Eco, yes, I think it is extremely important. Even if most never read him, just knowing that this famous writer wrote a book about the lie, explaining how and who lied it out, is important. That everyone in Italy is aware of this, whatever they continue to think and believe, is important. I don't have much hope for Eastern Europe and farther, but it is still important, it's something you can tell them to read, something that's not a Wikipedia link.

There's more. In the post-Auschwitz world, seeing the caricatures of the Jews, verbal and graphic, caricatures which saturated European culture for centuries and became ubiquitous in the 19th century (the book is illustrated), is gut-wrenchingly sad and shaming. And that's the thing I wish those people could feel above all: sadness and shame. Maybe you'll say they can't; well then we who can shall feel it for them.

So with that in mind, I must admit I'm even less concerned with the literary merits of this book than with Eco's other novels. But I hope you won't be very disappointed.

I should add that the period and events covered include some of my liveliest historical interests, so that was another factor in making this a speedy read for me.

I might open a thread about it--I thought it would be nice to add footnotes to many things Eco notes in passing, the details he used to make the atmosphere authentic.

I wish there was a "like" button I could click.

Lola, despite my enthusiasm for Eco, it was your post that induced me to get it sooner rather than later. In fact, it was on the doorstep when I got home this evening!

I first read the Protocols 25 years ago. I had borrowed them from an older co-worker, who told me that he got them as a freebie for filling up with gas in a small Texas town. The Protocols will be around forever, no matter how bogus they've proven to be, because they support a worldview that too many share. Unfortunately, I doubt that there is much commonality between Protocol True Believers and Eco readers, so we can't imagine that too many of them will be picking up this book.

Mm, yes--unfortunately... it pains me to say this, but it's not just the "true believers" who are the problem--or the worst part of the problem. In Europe at least, there's lots of casual antisemitism, of matter-of-fact, "everybody knows" type of prejudice... and I'm afraid Eco's readers aren't exempt, as a group. I rarely get in trouble with utter trash because, for one thing, where would I find them? (Don't say: the interwebs. :))

No, it was the nice, upstanding, educated citizenry that provided me with the worst shocks. Fine people, kind people, even good people...

The Protocols are important as a touchstone and fulcrum of antisemitic attitudes, a condensation of rumours into something tangible. And, while antisemitism can't be defeated, the Protocols can. Only, one needs to keep doing it.

It's less important that people read Eco than that they know he had written a book like that.

I readily defer to your experience. I suspect there are subtle differences - which others can delineate better than I - between European and American anti-semitism.

I work one day a week at a university in Tokyo. One of the teachers with whom I share the staff room on my day there has, over the last year or two, transformed himself into a more or less unabashed anti-semite. His antisemitism is not, as far as I can tell, a prejudice he inherited, or an ugliness that, without reflection, became part of who he is. Rather, it's through careful study of the nether reaches of the Internet, and of faux-scholarly work like Kevin B. MacDonald's, that he's arrived at his position.

He's the sort of guy who craves a total explanation of how the world works. In the time I've known him I've seen him embrace different explanations. First Chomsky's explications of world affairs were his key, and then when he was tired of Chomsky, the Matrix movies did the trick (I'm not making this up). Neither of those, however, seemed to satisfy him as much as the one he's latched onto now: the Jews did it.

(Included in that "it" you won't be surprised to hear, is 9/11.)

The odd thing is, the guy is quite intelligent, reasonably well-read, and in his day-to-day dealings with people, including, I am sure, Jewish people, he is good natured and kind. We were, for a while, developing a friendship. Then he started sharing his new enthusiasm with me.

For an individual, especially an individual who really does have many good qualities, to go off the rails like this is sad, but one can see it as an individual tragedy.

What I find appalling is that of the five or six of us well-traveled, advanced-degree-holding cosmopolitans who sit around before class sipping our coffee and listening to his "analysis," I'm the only one who's ever called him on it. Everyone else listens with the same respect they might pay to any social or political opinion batted around among co-workers.

I don't think this would be the same if he launched into a tirade against black people, or Asian people, or Buddhists.

Apparently, however, among a table full of people who should know better, antisemitism is still an acceptable prejudice.

One really does despair.

#204

Oh, obviously everything I say is strictly subjective. The next person may have a different impression. Very hard to pin those things down... Will you let me know when you start reading? Anytime. I think I will open a "footnote" thread.

#205

What I find appalling is that of the five or six of us well-traveled, advanced-degree-holding cosmopolitans who sit around before class sipping our coffee and listening to his "analysis," I'm the only one who's ever called him on it. Everyone else listens with the same respect they might pay to any social or political opinion batted around among co-workers.

This. This is the crux of the matter. This is how it survives. This is how every vileness survives. You have one system-building nutcase (functional enough to go about his life like everybody else), and everybody else nodding and thinking "no way am I gonna brawl with a nutcase". Or--the more depressing thought--they think he might be sort of right...

Why are Jews different from blacks or Asians--because they are not immediately recognisable. The phantom menace. Could be anywhere. Could be ANYBODY. So the crazy logic easily puts them behind every curtain pulling all the levers, and if you start proving otherwise, well then, the beady eye begins to look at you speculatively...