Haydninvienna (Richard) listens in on the great conversations

I said I’d start a new thread when I had a title for it. This is it. Conversation is the best part of the Pub (although the cheese and PGGBs are pretty good too), but of course all literature and music are conversation. The “literature” one has lasted for something like 3,000 years now, starting with whoever wrote the Epic of Gilgamesh. Probably the other arts too but I don’t know enough about them. So it’s Saturday 1 January 2022, we have some blue sky for a change, and I’m hoping that 2022 will be better than the year just finished, whose name now escapes me.
The title came about partly because I picked up Sarah Bakewell’s book on Montaigne, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer. She is discussing the conversation over 400 years between Montaigne and Virginia Woolf.

ETA and in the space of half an hour it’s clouded over and started to rain. Oh dear.

>2 hfglen: Year of the Dead Fish? Year of the Fruitbat?

>1 haydninvienna: Still sunny here but I daresay the rain is on the way... Boo...

>1 haydninvienna: Gray and wet this side of the pond as well. But warm! (So I won't complain.)

I love the concept of 3,000+ year long conversation. Happy New Year and Happy New Thread, my friend.

Happy New Year and happy new thread. It is grey and gloomy here with snow expected later.

>1 haydninvienna: Grey and gloomy here too. Though the sun shines briefly in the early morning.

Here's to a brightening sky in the days ahead and lots of good contributions to the long conversations between readers and other denizens of the Pub. Someone might check to see whether the AI in the Roombas has allowed them to work out how to communicate with humans.

>7 jillmwo: Don't care about the AI - I just wish they can manage staircases and steps.

Sleer lives in the office on the charger where she's mostly out of the way. Being a converted link garage, the office is down a step from the ground floor. I have to carry her to where I want her to work on next - ground floor or upstairs.

The other thing is the Flotex on the stairs - I have to hand sweep with the small Dyson instead with Paul holding the Dyson a step or two above the one I'm working on. There was a reason I wanted laminate but the flooring company wouldn't install it on the stairs - for safety reasons they claimed.

Thanks for the good wishes, all. Hugh, I don’t even want to think of it as the Year of the Fetid Dingoes’ Kidneys, let alone the Year of the Fruitbat. (The latter would be an insult to those noble, if smelly, noisy and destructive, animals, flying foxes.)

Reading-wise, I’m definitely starting on a high note. Having essentially had a DNBR day except for going for lunch with Mrs H, I’m about two-thirds of the way through How to Live…, and it’s terrific. Peter, I remember you expressed an interest—I’m recommending it. Ms Bakewell quotes Leonard Woolf (Virginia’s husband) as saying that Montaigne was the first modern man. I believe him. Montaigne comes across as a sane, civilised man, and much more like a 20th century person than any of the strutting peacocks that fill the literature of his time. And he really was part of a Great Conversation—other authors who engaged with him, just from the names mentioned so far that I can remember: Shakespeare (probably), Blaise Pascal, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Hazlitt, Virginia Woolf, Stefan Zweig—and one that won’t be mentioned, my mate F L Lucas.

Now finished the Montaigne book. An absolute delight. If the rest of 2022’s reading is as good as this, I’ll be a happy camper.

The twenty-first century has everything to gain from a Montaignean sense of life, and, in its most troubled moments so far, it has been sorely in need of a Montaignean politics. It could use his sense of moderation, his love of sociability and courtesy, his suspension of judgement, and his subtle understanding of the psychological mechanisms involved in confrontation and conflict. It needs his conviction that no vision of heaven, no imagined Apocalypse, and no perfectionist fantasy can ever outweigh the tiniest of selves in the real world. It is unthinkable to Montaigne that one could ever ‘gratify heaven and nature by committing massacre and homicide, a belief universally embraced in all religions’. To believe that life could demand any such thing is to forget what day-to-day existence actually is. It entails forgetting that when you look at a puppy held over a bucket of water, or even a cat in the mood for play, you are looking at a creature who looks back at you.

A Life of Montaigne: in one question and twenty attempts at an answer, p 327.

Happy new year! I hope that the rest of your reading matches up to the great start!

>10 haydninvienna: I am not admitting to having been hit by that one, but I certainly felt the breeze as is flew past me. It might yet ricochet and hit its target.

As Claire said, I hope the rest of your 2022 reads match up.

I saw a comment somewhere on LT recently to the effect of "who wants to read about old white men contemplating their navels?". Montaigne might well be the archetypal old white man contemplating his navel, but the book was a best seller when first published and has continued to be read ever since. Maybe people do want to read old white men contemplating their navels, if they are interesting old white men?

>13 haydninvienna: …or if they have a particularly fascinating navel.

>14 pgmcc: I have the Penguin Montaigne, but it's 1269 pages long and 70 mm thick. That would be awkward to read, as I discovered when I read Spenser's Faerie Queene a couple of years ago. I wonder if the Everyman version (the one Sarah Bakewell quotes from) comes in 2 volumes?

Taking a sharp jerk to the left (or somewhere): went into Bicester for a haircut and stepped into the British Heart Foundation shop, where I seldom fail to find something. This time it was My Drunk Kitchen, by one Hannah Hart. Ms Hart is apparently a professional YouTube personality, which probably explains why I’ve never heard of her. But I think she’d fit right in in the GD: “… we won’t always have a pantry full of whatever we like best (for me that would be a pantry where every shelf contained cheese, the bottom shelf bearing the most soft and subtle, then each level above graduating to firmer and … stinkier, frankly) …”.

Incidentally, it’s the only cookbook I’ve ever seen with a blurb by Neil Gaiman.

>16 haydninvienna: Shameless shooting! I might have to at least check out her YouTube videos.

>17 MrsLee: Do that by all means, but you probably won’t learn much about cooking. Most of the book is life advice from a young gay woman’s point of view. It was amusing for a while, and my buying it helped the charity shop a little.

>18 haydninvienna: Hmmm, not sure I need life advice from a younger person (how's that for curmudgeonly?) but it's always good to see new perspectives. :) Still, I would be more interested if she was a fabulous cook/chef.

>19 MrsLee: I’m betting that she isn’t a fab cook. She does seem like a decent sort of person, but the cooking is decidedly minimal in every sense. Don’t let me talk you out of looking her out on YouTube though.

>20 haydninvienna: I did look it up, and was not impressed. It really isn't very amusing to watch drunk people unless you are drunk, and I'm not. To be fair, I only watched for about 30 seconds before I decided life is too short.

I don't drink when I'm cooking because I'm very fond of my fingers and not dropping knives on my feet. Not to mention burning things, or getting so sleepy I forget to add an ingredient.

>21 MrsLee: Agreed on all points in your second para. I still haven’t looked her up on YouTube—I don’t YouTube except for music.

Coldest morning so far this winter. Ice on everything. The hen blackbird has definitely figured the system out—this morning she just fussed around under the table while I was putting the food out.

>16 haydninvienna: In addition to YouTube fame, she was briefly popular on Food Network, but since that only lasted about 6 months, her fame must have faded quickly.

>23 Karlstar: Well, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes ...

My news of the month: I just booked a quick trip back to Doha. Aim is to pick up a new work laptop, hopefully to persuade somebody to buy me lunch, and to clean out a bank account that has a significant sum of money in it, which I can’t do by internet (long story). Negotiating the test requirements was a bit of a chore but I think I’ve got it straight.

>25 haydninvienna: Good luck! I hope it all goes smoothly. Friends who've recently returned from Europe have found that their 2-day PCR test results have not been delivered on time, but hopefully the labs will be back up to speed by the time of your trip.

>25 haydninvienna: Safe journey.

>26 Sakerfalcon: >27 pgmcc: Thanks. I’ve bought some PCR tests online before and had no problems.

>25 haydninvienna: Best of luck! Safe travels.

Latest read is a bit odd. Some GDers will know about Oliver Onions, particularly for what is said to be one of the great ghost stories, “The Beckoning Fair One”. (I’ve never read it—I don’t generally do horror.) Well, I was diving down an internet rabbit hole and came upon his Wikipedia article, and found that he had written about 40 novels, a couple of which Wikipedia calls “detective novels”. One of them is A Case in Camera, which is available from Project Gutenberg. So I downloaded it and read it fairly quickly, skipping quite a bit. I’ll have to go back and read it properly now.

Overall, I found it good, but I wouldn’t quite call it a detective novel. There is a murder, under rather spectacular circumstances, but we know from the outset who did it—the novel is about why, and the effect of the knowledge on the lives of the people who have it. The novel was published in 1920, when the First World War was still very fresh in the public mind, and there’s a lot of discussion about aviation and its future. Onions writes much better than Freeman Wills Crofts, but Crofts certainly has the edge with tightly constructed plots. Given that this is not a traditional mystery, I wouldn’t see Onions as a likely member of the Detection Club.

I think I’ll read the other “detective” novel by Onions as well. It’s called In Accordance with the Evidence, which sounds rather more like your traditional whodunit.

>30 haydninvienna:
I have not read any of his non-ghost stories but I do have a number if his novels on my shelves, including In Accordance with the Evidence. This will get an early read now that you have mentiined it.

>30 haydninvienna: I am intrigued by A Case in Camera (as I have just gone quickly over to Gutenberg to scan it quickly.

>31 pgmcc: I'll keep an eye out for what you think of In Accordance with the Evidence.

I’m in Doha. Getting here was pretty interesting. I wanted to go on British Airways because they do premium economy and Qatar Airways doesn't. There are 5 flights a day between the 2 major London airports and Doha, but all the ones out of Heathrow are actually Qatar Airways flights with BA codeshare flight numbers, so Gatwick. Not my favourite airport and it's an hour and a half drive from Bicester, but you pays your money and takes your choice. After a normal drive to Gatwick Airport, the check-in was only a little bit weird because "every destination has different rules now", but fortunately I had everything and got checked in without any problems. Then it turned out that I had the entire premium economy cabin on a British Airways 777 to myself, so three flight attendants with nobody else to serve, and I am a very low maintenance passenger.

Things started getting really weird when we got to Doha. The cabin crew had to call row numbers for de-planing, apparently to reduce the bulk of people all going along the jetway. I had a printed copy of my approval to enter Qatar (did I say I had to set up an account on a Qatari government system, make and upload a booking for my mandatory 2-day isolation package plus my vax certificate, and undertake to abide by the quarantine rules?) and it said to go to the "Hotel quarantine" entry queue? There were actually 4 queues, seriatim. First we got our permit to enter and hotel booking checked. Next was immigration, which was the same as usual. Then the big queue, which got us a transport voucher. Then the queue for transport, which turned out to be an ordinary Doha taxi. I had picked the Hilton for my isolation, so got driven to the Hilton. But on the way! The cabin manager on the flight, having noted that I was by myself, and because I am a British Airways gold frequent flier, came to chat and I said I'd lived in Doha, so she asked me for suggestions about fun stuff during their short stay (I'm guessing that aircrew don't have to do quarantine). Doha isn't really a tourist city, but I suggested the souk, which everyone ought to see, plus taking a walk along the Doha Corniche early in the morning. The ride into the city goes along the Corniche, and I find that it's all concrete walls and construction! This is evidently all part of the build-up to the World Cup later this year. So I'm afraid my friendly cabin crew won't be able to see what really was a pretty nice place two years ago. To the crew of flight 2033, on the very remote chance you read this: I'm ever so sorry.

At the Hilton, the taxi driver (who had obviously done this before) directed me to a small side door, which led into a small room isolated from the main lobby. Another short wait and I received a card key, as Hilton-normal, and finally got into my room. On the 23rd floor, overlooking the Hilton marina and looking out towards the Gulf. The room is pretty nice, but I'm unable to leave it for 2 days. Meals get delivered outside your door in a paper shopping bag. More on the meals later, maybe.

My reading for the flight was The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix. This is another ancient-powers-of-the-land story, but with booksellers (and lots of books), several mentions of Foyles bookshop, and lots and lots of modern firearms. A bit reminiscent of a line from The Matrix: “Guns. Lots of guns.” It's set in a slight variation of the London of 1983. It has a heroine who is of course partly descended from one of the Old Ones, a ridiculously over-the-top but actually competent hero, a bent copper who turns out to be even nastier than that, and even a bent bookseller (horror!). I thought it was a fun romp and would read a sequel if there is one, and I think there might be one or two loose ends to make a sequel possible. But I think I’ve got the author on one point: his heroine mentions a flight from somewhere in England to Dublin, supposedly on a VC10. I’m pretty sure that no airline ever operated a VC10 to Dublin.

Garth Nix turns out to be a former Canberra boy like me. In the acknowledgements he mentions the Daltons, who used to have a bookshop in Canberra. I remember Daltons Bookshop in Garema Place well. Gone now of course—I think there’s a pharmacy there now.

I wonder if Garth Nix ever crossed paths with Daniel O'Malley? O'Malley used to work at the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is based in Canberra. O'Malley's The Rook and Stiletto share a premise with The Left-Handed Booksellers of London—secret organisation that has existed for centuries and has ties with the government to protect us against supernatural threats—but they take the basic idea in somewhat different directions.

>33 haydninvienna:
Your Doha trip sounds very interesting. It must be weird seeing the place change so much in the two years since you were there.

I have The Left-Handed Booksellers of London and hope to get to it soon. Your comments have pushed it up the pile. I did not look behind the spoiler mask. Thank you for using the spoiler mask.

In October 2018 I was fortunate enough to meet Garth Nix at the annual OctoCon SF convention while my son and I were manning the Swan River Press stand* in the dealers' room.

**

He was very pleasant and posed for a picture at the stand. When I told him my daughter loved his work he was pleased, but I did get the feeling he would have preferred my telling him that I loved his work. It reminds me of the time I told the MD of the Waterford-Wedgwood group that my parents loved the Eternal Beau tableware produced by Wedgwood. He said, "I would prefer you said you loved it." (Actually, I do.)

*Mr. Swan River Press had a clash and was manning his stand at a convention in England on the same weekend and asked if we would do him the favour of staffing the stand at Octocon.

**My youngest on the left.

>33 haydninvienna: I really enjoyed The left handed booksellers too. Nix managed the British tone very well. I hadn't thought of the comparison with The rook but it's spot on.

>34 pgmcc: Great photo! It's always nice when someone famous whom you admire turns out to be a nice person.

>33 haydninvienna: Wow, that sounds awful, I'm not sure I'm ever going to fly again, between covid and the ever increasing security requirements.

That Nix book also sounds interesting, I have some catching up to do on his novels.

>36 Karlstar: Mrs H and I are hoping to go to Australia later this year. Wish us luck.

>34 pgmcc: I should have added that although there was obviously a lot going on at Doha airport, it all seemed pretty orderly and the queues moved at a reasonable rate. Of course the queues I saw were only for hotel quarantine. Citizens and residents would not have had to deal with all of this.

I said there were lots of books. Nix mentions quite a few of the books that use the "ancient powers of the British landscape" trope, such as The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, which I have not read but probably should do.

>33 haydninvienna: Yikes! Well, at least you made it in one piece. Enjoy your solitary confinement.

>34 pgmcc: What a great photo. (And memory.)

>36 Karlstar: Agreed. I'm supposed to be flying to New Orleans for a wedding in two month, and I have to admit I am getting a bit squirrelly about it.

>37 haydninvienna: Good luck, both now and for that future trip!

>40 Karlstar: Thanks Jim. The way today has gone, I'll need it.

I got released from quarantine at about 1 pm yesterday, after a negative rapid antigen test. So I thought "you beauty" and went out and about, ending at one of my favourite restaurants anywhere, and had a good dinner. With, incidentally, a very nice South African shiraz. It's possible to eat as well in Doha as anywhere else in the world as long as you don't insist on eating pork. (You can get roast camel, if you're prepared to pay about $300 and give 24 hours' notice. I've never tried it but apparently it's pretty good.)

That was when stuff started getting weird. Back in the hotel and I find that my Ehteraz tracking app, which had shown me as "good health", now showed me as "in quarantine". It still showed that first thing this morning. I rang the support line 3 times, put in a service ticket, and waited. The hotel staff and a colleague that I had intended to visit told me that the problem is pretty frequent: the colleague suggests that with the surge in cases, and more clinics doing rapid antigen tests, the system has simply collapsed under the load. Best anyone could suggest was to wait, and it would fix itself eventually. Anyway, it cleared about 2 o'clock this afternoon (by which time I had changed my flight booking and extended my hotel stay) and I was able to visit my colleague and pick up my new work laptop. But by the time I'd done that the bank was closed—the main purpose of my visit was to close a bank account. So I'll go to the bank first thing tomorrow. Hopefully I can get that done in time to catch my once-more-rebooked flight.

Oh, and the colleague was the general manager who farewelled Manuel and me in October 2020 (see https://www.librarything.com/topic/322035#7281983 for details). She still had 2 of the books listed in the scroll: The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs and Lyrical and Critical Essays by Albert Camus. So now I have all of them. The first at least seems quite appropriate to the times.

>42 haydninvienna: Best of luck with the bank. Hope all goes smoothly and you catch that flight. Keeping my fingers crossed for you.

>43 clamairy: Thanks Clam.It's been an interesting few days.

In the interval between #42 and this post I've read The Pleasures of Reading ..., and I thought it was terrific. Not entirely surprisingly, Jacobs is big on reading for pleasure, but he also sees reading in terms of a conversation, at least between book and reader. I could pick out quite a few gems, for example is his distaste for reading lists: if he puts a book on a reading list "it becomes as broccoli to me". He has some withering scorn for lists of Books you Must Read before you die and any other "must-read" lists, and among his sources he notes C S Lewis's short book An Experiment in Criticism.

It's also a dangerous source of BBs among the sources. I've already put in a library reserve for The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes by Jonathan Rose.

Got the banking done this morning, after solving a last-minute problem: the customer service officer asked me to empty the account (which meant transferring a sum of money to my UK bank account) but the teller could not do it without seeing evidence that my Qatar ID had been cancelled. That happened in September 2020 but I had no actual evidence. We went round and the question for a few minutes and then I said, "Hey, would my former employer have it?" They were right across the street. I nipped over there and a very nice young bloke in a brown dishdasha (which means he probably wasn't Qatari--theirs are usually white) greeted me by name although I don't think I've ever met him before, and gave me copies not only of the cancellation certificate but the actual ID card itself. The bank were quite happy which that and duly transferred my money to my UK bank account. So that's done, back to the hotel for a wash and brush-up and then off to the airport.

Going through the immigration exit, the automatic scanner rejected my passport and I had to go to the desk. The woman there went and got a uniformed police officer and I started to wonder. But he just asked me if I'd ever lived in Qatar, and I said yes but my ID had been cancelled months ago. He shrugged and stamped my passport. I think somewhere the system must have picked up the name.

I'm not making any predictions about being home free until I'm safe in my own bed tonight.

>45 haydninvienna: Safe journey!

>46 pgmcc: Thanks Peter. I'm safely in the lounge at Doha airport as I write.

Your past few days sound like quite the adventure. Safe travels home!

Let us know when you make it!

What an adventurous life you've been having! Safe travels. And yes, the Alan Jacobs book you reference in #42 above is the best of the three in that trilogy (at least, in my view.) I'm not familiar with the Jonathan Rose title.

>48 Storeetllr: >49 clamairy: >50 jillmwo: Thanks all. I walked safely through our front door at just on 9 pm last night. As I thought to myself while walking down an escalator at Heathrow, it hadn’t really been my ideal weekend away, but everything got done. And I had a couple of good meals along the way, despite the rather ordinary quarantine food.

>50 jillmwo: The Jacobs book wasn’t at all what I expected. I thought it would be more in the line of Howards End is on the Landing—books praising the delights of particular books. It does a little of that, certainly, but Jacobs has much more to say than that. I was delighted to find that he spends a page and a half on R A Lafferty’s short story “The Primary Education of the Camiroi”, and lamenting that most of Lafferty’s output is out of print. It may have been at the time Jacobs wrote, but it’s coming back now. Jacobs described Lafferty as “one of the great American weirdos”. I’m not going to disagree.

>51 haydninvienna: Glad to hear you are safely home! That sounds like a real planes, trains and automobiles story.

In #44 I mentioned The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, by Jonathan Rose. I picked it up today, and started to read. Already it’s clear that this book will be a real eye-opener. He has already spoken favourably of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, putting a somewhat different spin on the book than most late 20th century writers would. Rose so far has quite convincingly shown that reading “good” literature is good not because it makes you “good” but because it challenges your “frame”. After reading the Iliad or Paradise Lost, you see the world differently. This explains, in Rose’s view, why the elite were so against the idea of allowing the lower orders to be educated: it was all too likely to lead them to question the supposed divine order of things.

Rose has given many examples already of lower-class people who became educated by their own efforts. My favourite so far: Catherine McMullen, a washerwoman in a workhouse, who read Elinor Glyn and was prompted to begin reading Lord Chesterfield’s Letters. That led her on to much, much more, including Erasmus, John Donne and even Finnegan’s Wake. Who was this washerwoman? She became a best-selling novelist, under the name Catherine Cookson.

And I have for the first time encountered one Rudolf Rocker, a German gentile who edited a Yiddish newspaper in London’s East End in the early 20th century, and turned Marx on his head by arguing that economic systems were determined by culture rather than the reverse.

ETA the copy I’m reading is of the second edition. I see that a third edition was published last year.

Sounds like you had quite an adventure - glad to hear you made it back safe and well.

Little footnote to the story of my trouble with the quarantine: just now I'm sitting here staring into space and my Qatari mobile phone rang. It was a woman calling about the ticket I raised (see #41). I assured her that there was no need to keep the ticket open and wished her good day. thinking that I was very glad not to be still in quarantine all the time while waiting for the issue to be resolved.

>55 haydninvienna:
Phew!

Just starting to catch up. Hope you have now revovered from your travel adventures.

>53 haydninvienna: Sounds like a great book.

Still plugging on with The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. I mean it no disrespect when I say it’s hard work—it’s a big book (and awkward to hold), and very dense. But there’s a lot in it. I’m now reading Rose’s views on why Marxism never became a major political force in England. He also has an explanation (related) about how and why William Morris combined his socialism and his aesthetic opinions. In Morris’s “frame”, socialism, craft and aesthetics went together.

One blast from the past: references to the sociologist Richard Hoggart, who came from a distinctly working-class background. I remember reading The Uses of Literacy in high school, but nothing else about it. I might have to buy a copy and re-read it.

I found my copy of Arcadia last night. Not promising to join the group read, but it’s there if I do.

And sitting on the night-table I have Kleinzeit by Russell Hoban. I read one or two of Hoban’s other novels many years ago, but nothing recently. Also, I picked up one of Charles Stross’s “Laundry” books (The Labyrinth Index) and By the Pricking of Her Thumb, by Adam Roberts, at the library today.

>59 haydninvienna: You do realise The Labyrinth Index is book 9 in the series? Which reminds me, must read it - I got so behind last year...

>60 Maddz: I knew it was nowhere near the first. I’m usually not bothered reading a series out of order.

>61 haydninvienna: Um, there's a lot of backstory in the earlier volumes. I'd say this is one series that really ought to be read in order as there are consequences from earlier actions. Plus Bob changes as he 'ages' and gets promoted.

>62 Maddz: Fair enough, but have you ever noticed that libraries never seem to have volume 1 of anything? I’m prepared to take a fair bit on trust, and since I’ve never read any of the others I basically have to start somewhere. Plus the idea of an Elder God as prime minister has a certain current appeal.

>63 haydninvienna: I don't think I've used the local libraries since c. 2005. The Cambridge Central Library was reasonable back when they had the budget to actually buy books, but the branch libraries are poor unless you want YA or chick-lit. That's why our house is full of books. We're slowly replacing paper with electrons.

>64 Maddz: Much the same in Oxfordshire. Oxford central library used to be pretty good in 2007 or so, but now they have fewer books and a really awkward (to me anyway) “topic” based arrangement for the non-fiction. Like a proper DDC but without the numbers. The branch libraries are slowly wasting away—Bicester library is in a nice new building in the town centre, but the collection is pretty thin. Our house has a good few books in it too, and I have no plans to move away from paper. In fact, I took a serious BB from dustydigger in Science Fiction Fans, and I’m seriously contemplating springing £28 for a paper copy rather than £3 for the kindle version of The Exploits of Engelbrecht.

>61 haydninvienna: I would second Maddz's warning re jumping in this late in the series. There are a lot estaisged relationships and "rules" of how the setting works that are probably not going to be re-capped at this point.

As I mentioned above, I took a serious BB hit from dustydigger with The Exploits of Engelbrecht, by Maurice Richardson (see here). The book has just arrived, and flipping through it I saw that some of the illustrations looked like the result of a cross between "Alice in Wonderland" and Molesworth. And of course one of the illustrators turns out to have been Ronald Searle.

Finally finished The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Not by any means an easy read, but in the end I thought it was brilliant. It’s in some sense an expansion of John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses and its thesis that the advanced writing, music and art of the early 20th century (and subsequently) came about because the intellectuals needed to separate their culture from that of the autodidacts. There’s also a strain from C S Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism. But there’s a lot more than that, as I noted above.

ETA I note that there are only 2 reviews on LT, but both reviewers gave it five stars.

Next up, maybe:The Exploits of Engelbrecht.

I did read The Exploits of Engelbrecht, and it was fully as loony as dustydigger suggested. It’s quite self-consistent though—there is never any suggestion that anything unusual is going on, and all the weirdness just passes for normal.

Next was By the Pricking of Her Thumb, by Adam Roberts. A private detective, while investigating a murder in a future London, is retained by one of the four richest people in Europe who is convinced that one of the four has been murdered but doesn’t know which one. Alma’s brief is to find out which one. Along the way we get a very odd man with a devotion to the films of Stanley Kubrick, and the detective’s lover, who has to receive high-tech medical treatment every four hours or she will die from a whole suite of infinitely varied bio-engineered infections. Efficiently told, and kept me reading, but I’m not sure that I buy the underlying idea. Which I’m not going to tell you even inside spoiler tags.

Then a DNF: Kleinzeit, by Russell Hoban. This one kind of reminded me of Engelbrecht, for reasons that I’ll come to. It’s about a man who gets fired from his job and goes to hospital, and falls for the nursing sister, and that’s where I stopped. I’m not that fond of novels about middle-aged white men pondering their lives (unless they’re interesting middle-aged white men) and this one is decidedly stream of consciousness (or something) and full of puns and malapropisms. Kleinzeit the man isn’t interesting enough. The book was interesting for a few pages but got old rather quickly after that.

ETA: I notice that I never explained the likeness to Engelbrecht, and now I can't remember. Shows how much of an impression Kleinzeit left. Too bad.

>69 haydninvienna: *takes cover from hail of BBs*

>70 -pilgrim-: You might want to take cover again.

It's my Thingaversary in a fortnight—my 14th, so 15 books to buy. (Not having any truck with pgmcc's hyperreal numbers.) I've started cleaning out my wishlist and ordering things from it, and the first one just arrived: The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron. It's the diary of Byron's journey from Venice to Afghanistan. Maybe I'll see if I have a recording of "In the Steppes of Central Asia" by Borodin to go with it (although the steppes were a bit further north, I think). I won't start reading just yet, but on flipping it open, how's this for a third sentence (he is writing of Venice in August 1933):

The bathing, on a calm day, must be the worst in Europe: water like hot saliva, cigar-ends floating into one's mouth, and shoals of jelly-fish.

I haven't filled out the list completely yet, but so far I have:
A Reader's Delight by Noel Perrin (the same Noel Perrin, I find, who wrote Dr. Bowdler's Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America, which I wrote about a while back)
The Year of Reading Dangerously: by Andy Miller
The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
Saving Mozart by Raphaël Jérusalmy
100 Acts of Minor Dissent by Mark Thomas.
Possibilites include:
Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli
Crossings by Alex Landragin
Palimpsest by Catherynne M Valente
Hav by Jan Morris
The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice by Irmtraud Morgner
Dead Mountaineer's Inn by the Strugatsky brothers
A Wild Ride through the Night by Walter Moers.

ETA Emil und die Detektive by Erich Kästner (for the same purpose as I bought Le Petit Prince)—and maybe Der kleine Prinz as well.

Congrats, and what a great book pile!

>72 clamairy: Thanks Clam, and more good stuff to come!

>71 haydninvienna: Which translator were you thinking of for the Strugatskys? My experience with The Snail on the Slope demonstrated how crucial that is with them.

>74 -pilgrim-: There appears to be only one translation available: by Josh Billings, with an introduction by Jeff Vandermeer. There is a book presented as another one, translated by one "Maria K", but as the only Amazon reviewer says, while the cover says "The Dead Mountaineer Hotel", the text inside appears to be that of Roadside Picnic.

I highly recommend Hav!

Emil and the Detectives was one of my favorite Scholastic Book Services books in grade school.

>77 Jim53: That was probably around the same age as I first met it - being read in class when I was around eight.

>76 Sakerfalcon: Just ordered Hav.

>79 haydninvienna: I hope you love it as much as I do!

Currently reading Space Opera by Catherynne M Valente. I said I’d been editing my wishlist, and this was on it. I have read comments by some LTers about wish lists that run to hundreds of titles: I think that’s ridiculous. Mine has never gone over about 60, and from time to time I’ve bought some items and if one was available from the library I’ve borrowed it. (I have Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts, and Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho waiting for me.) Borrowing an item wouldn’t of course prevent me buying a copy if I liked it enough.

But back to Ms Valente. The idea is a good one: a kind of Eurovision Song Contest in spaaaace, but with the prize not national prestige but the survival of your species. There’s an awful lot of backstory about the has-been pop group that’s picked to represent humanity, and an awful lot of rapid-fire monologue about Life, the Universe and Everything, and sometimes I swear that Ms V is channeling the spirit of the late Douglas Adams, in the throes of a bout of severe logorrhoea. All of which means that the actual story (and I’m not even sure there is one) moves astonishingly slowly. I’m about 40% through and the group are still being picked up from Earth.

>81 haydninvienna: Definitely laughing out loud at the discussion of Valente. However, in an effort to further plump out your TBR list, I will say that I enjoyed Sorcerer to the Crown more than I'd expected to do. I remember I did it with one of my book discussion groups.

>82 jillmwo: I'm honoured.

I've just ordered a few more from the list:
Joy: 100 Poems edited by Christian Wiman
The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner
Traffic: Why we drive the way we do by Tom Vanderbilt
The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice by Irmgard Morgner
The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart.

I also bought The Dead Mountaineer's Inn by the Strugatsky brothers on Kindle, since paper copies seem to be selling for outrageous prices.

As I mentioned in #59, I first encountered The Uses of Literacy in high school. I'm planning a re-read in the light of Jonathan Rose's book and mumble-mumble years of life experience.

I think that's 14 so far (number keeps coming out different every time I count). But all being well I'm going into London tomorrow and hope to be able to hit Foyles up for a couple.

Having now finished Space Opera, yes, she was channeling Douglas Adams. And David Bowie, but that doesn’t show in the writing so much. Despite some dirty tricks, including some illicit time travel, they win, and the Earth is saved.

Overall, I liked it, although it gets worrying in places given the current state of things.

>84 haydninvienna: I read it for the Dublin Hugos, and gave it no vote. I thought it very bad; as a piece of short fiction, it would have worked far better. As it was, it went on for far too long (the adage about odiferous guests and fish sprang to my mind), and it was overly padded.

I posted up there a couple of lists of books I thought of buying on account of my Thingaversary. One of them was A Reader’s Delight, by Noel Perrin. It arrived today. I forget where I picked up the BB for this, but I’m a bit of a sucker for books about books. This is one, but a slightly unusual one—it’s not about “the adventures of the soul amongst masterpieces”, but a collection of essays about books that Perrin thinks of as unrecognised minor masterpieces. It was a qualification for the inclusion of a book that no more than two of his colleagues had ever heard of it. The book was published in 1988, so some works that were almost unknown then might have become familiar by now, even though another condition was that books discussed had to be at least 15 years old then.

Since he is writing in the US of 1988, he gives a list at the back of what was in print and where to find it. That list seems to be the only author-title list. I was surprised to find on it The Silver Stallion, by James Branch Cabell; A Fine and Private Place, by Peter S Beagle; Watch the North Wind Rise, by Robert Graves; They Asked for a Paper, by C S Lewis; Far Rainbow, by the Strugatsky brothers; and All Hallows Eve, by Charles Williams. All of those (except the Strugatsky one, and that may just be a matter of a title) strike me as reasonably familiar now, so times and places obviously have changed.

So far I’ve read only the first essay, on Indian Summer by William Dean Howells, which Perrin describes as “a realistic romantic comedy”, and credits it with “some of the best dialog ever written in an American novel”. I’m looking forward to reading more little essays like this.

ETA: Now finished it. Beware. It’s a great wishlist-fattener (as the LT reviews warn you).

EATA: now started The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn.

Incidentally, Perrin has a little essay on Seven Days in New Crete/Watch the North Wind Rise By Robert Graves, which happens to have been published in the year of my birth. As for its being unrecognised or obscure, there are at least 2 editions of it in print in the UK at present, one of them in Penguin Modern Classics. Carcanet Books has a fancy hardback including another of Graves’s novels and an introduction by Patrick Quinn.

As a result of a drive around with Mrs H this morning:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

More than obvious, but still lovely.

And I’ve now finished The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn. Given the Strugatsky brothers’ well-rehearsed problems with translations, I have no idea whether the kindle version i read was even complete, but I still thought it was pretty interesting. Up till about 20 pages from the end, it’s almost a comedy—an inn in a snowbound countryside, far off the beaten track, isolated by an avalanche, with a very strange group of guests, and a crime. So far, so much a classic locked-room mystery. I won’t say what the crime is beyond that the apparent crime is not the real one. One of the guests is a policeman, whose speciality in investigation is forgery and fraud, which the crime is certainly not. Inspector Glebsky investigates in what seems to be a pretty bumbling, haphazard fashion, nothing makes sense, and then about 20 pages from the end the brothers pull the rug out from under us and we find out what the crime really was. After that perhaps we think rather better of Inspector Glebsky and the difficult choice he had to make.

-pilgrim-: if you’re there, does “Glebsky” mean anything interesting in Russian, or look like it might?

Life events: as you may remember, I do drafting for a financial regulator in Qatar. Up till now I’ve been using a laptop supplied by them to do the work, because they wanted to maintain tight control over everything that had access to their network. Now they have a new setup that allows the use of any hardware anywhere, and they would like their laptop back please.
Pro: I get to ditch the laptop (I dislike everything about them). I can work on my own machine and in fact on a Mac rather than a Windows box. I can claim a tax deduction on anything I have to buy for that purpose. Major pro: less clutter on the desk—I can probably get rid of at least one power board and a number of cables.
Con: I have to kit out my ageing Mac with a virtualisation program and run Windows and Microsoft Office/365/whatever on it—quite doable, I think, even with my present Mac, but I can still get a fully kitted out Intel-based iMac, on which it would be easy. I might be a total Mac fanboi but I also dislike the user interface for the Mac version of Microsoft Office, so want to go with the Windows version of Office. On balance, positive, I think.

>88 haydninvienna: Hmm. You may be able to use a browser interface depending on how the Qatari end is set up. When I started working from home at LBI, we were issued a dongle, and we'd log into the LBI network via a browser interface utilising a one-time passcode generated by the dongle. That got upgraded to a newer system.

I can still use my MacBook to log in, but the interface is limited and I need some specialist software. We've now got work laptops which log in using the same Global Protect and a couple of apps on my phone (In Tune Company Portal and Authenticator). This means I have my MacBook in the sitting room (12" screen) and the work laptop (17") and the 27" screen lives on my Mum's old kitchen table in the 'library' (actually a former garage).

It helps having separate rooms - it makes a demarcation between work and personal space, and the work machine doesn't need breaking down when I pack up in the evening.

>89 Maddz: I’ve actually logged in to their SharePoint site on the Mac, so it should work. They say it will work on any device and I’ve no reason to doubt it. I think I could have edited one of my documents on the SharePoint site on the old Word for Mac that I already have (2016 so no longer supported), but I didn’t actually try it because there was real work to be done.

>88 haydninvienna: Gleb is a Russian forename. Its most famous bearer is Prince Gleb, son of Vladimir the Wise, who brought Christianity to Rus'. He and his brother, Boris, were murdered by their other brother, Sviatopolk the Accursed.

The murdered brothers were canonised. The brothers became known as "Strastoterptsy" (Passion-Bearers), since they did not resist evil with violence.

So as a type for non-violence, perhaps?

(In crude terms, -ov surnames derive from a "son of" structure, while -sky surnames derive from "from (place)".Very anciently, of course.)

ETA: Or maybe a type for inaction generally?

>90 haydninvienna: I don't have any MS Office on my MacBook and i could happily edit documents within the interface. As I remember it, it uses something like Office 365 (spit!) which is hosted on the LBI system and works in the browser, no download required. I occasionally use Office, but my primary use was to log into Internet Explorer via the interface (IE for the Mac went 10 years ago?) and log into Business Objects and work on those reports.

So no need to run Parallels or similar, or own a copy of MS Office (I do - Office 2009 on the old iMac - stuck on 10.4). I refuse to buy a subscription when my main usage is Excel, so I use Google Sheets instead.

>91 -pilgrim-: Thanks for that. I didn’t find Inspector Glebsky to be inactive—he was quite active but didn’t achieve much (for reasons that turn out to be quite plausible, within the story).

>92 Maddz: Microsoft Word at least is non-negotiable for me. Our documents are created in it and use a good deal of document automation which depends on VBA. I could use Word for Mac, but as I said, the interface is different (the underlying data format is the same), but some things that I use a lot are either unavailable or hard to find in the Mac interface. So either Windows or frequent fits of minor cursing. The link with Microsoft is inescapable anyway, since the whole shebang runs under Microsoft Azure.

The Brightfount Diaries by Brian W Aldiss. This was Aldiss’s first book, a short novel in the form of diary entries, about the life of a young man who works in a bookshop. Short and amusing, with some interesting characters, both in his family and in the shop. Given that BWA lived in Oxford for most of his working life, and that he really did work in a bookshop, I assume we are talking about Blackwell’s (“Brightfount” ≠ “Blackwell”). It appears that the fabled conversations in bookshops where the customer doesn’t know the author or title but knows that it’s blue really did happen.

The copy I read came from the Oxfordshire library system, and still had the old date-due slip in the front. First loan was due on 21 November 1963. Just to be clear, this was a copy I borrowed from the library, not a discarded copy that I bought.

>95 haydninvienna:
That sounds like a treat to read.

>96 pgmcc: It was. Certainly not great literature, and not really much of a prefiguring of what was to come from BWA, but worth the time all the same. Actually, the diarist rather reminded me of a rather less self-absorbed Adrian Mole, crossed with the first-person character from Three Men in a Boat.

A book I picked up (literally) on a whim the other day: Perkin: A Story of Deception, by Ann Wroe (the touchstone goes to a different title but apparently it's the same book). I spotted this in the bookswap at our local Tesco superstore while we were shopping, and picked it up simply because Ann Wroe writes the obituaries for the Economist. When I was a subscriber, the obituary was always what I read first. "Perkin" is Perkin Warbeck, who was a pretender to the throne during the reign of King Henry VII, and of whom I had heard of only by the references to him in 1066 and All That. It's a pretty solid chunk, and I am unlikely to read it any time soon, but hey, free book.

Pity the Economist won't let you read a full article without paying. The latest obituary is that of Shane Warne (for non-cricket-lovers: he was a cricketer). I must see if I can get a look at a library copy or something.

Up in #88 I mentioned that I was proposing to run Windows on a Mac. It's now all installed, I have the Windows version of Microsoft Office, and it all seems to be running smoothly. Word inside Parallels on this Mac seems to be about as fast as Word in "real" Windows on the Dell desktops we had in Doha. I still have one major hurdle, which I can probably regard as optional--we have a set of rules called IBANK (available here, if you're curious) which is big enough, and complex enough, to slow Word down quite noticeably. The hurdle is to see how well I can edit it on this setup.

UPDATE: Well, it opened. Seemed to take about the same time as on the Dell machines.

I posted in the "stabbity" thread about the dramas with our flight bookings. Well, guess what? We both got positive Covid tests, so we won't be going anywhere tomorrow. All the bookings have to be done again. I've just spent a good while in Finnair's call queue rebooking our flights, and the earliest I could get was on 3 May. And I had to stump up some extra cash because the original booking class is no longer available on some of the flights.

>99 haydninvienna:
I am very sorry to hear that for several reasons. 1. The disappointment you must both feel at having to delay your long anticipated trip. 2. The annoyance at having to do all that rebooking, including dealing with customer service bots and agents. 3. The fact that you and Mrs. You have the bug. I hope you get rid of it quickly and that it does not cause either of you too much discomfort.

Get well soon.

>99 haydninvienna: Get well soon.

Well poo. That's bad news, but I hope you don't get hit with it too hard. Covid varies so much between people.

Thanks all. Finnair was actually very helpful and patient, trying numerous combinations of dates until we found one that worked, and very apologetic about the extra cost. So far Mrs H and I are just dopey like a dose of the flu.

>99 haydninvienna: Very sorry to hear that! I hope you are well soon. Glad to hear the trip can be rescheduled.

>99 haydninvienna: Oh no! One disaster after another. I'm glad Finnair were helpful, and will keep my fingers crossed that nothing interferes with your revised plans.

I said to Mrs H last night that it was almost like the whole deal had been cursed, but maybe that's how travel is at present.

>100 pgmcc: The most irritating phone queue so far, oddly, is M and S's (travel insurance). Apart from the usual irritation of being told frequently how hard they are working, their "music on hold" consists of just 2 tracks--Bobby Darin's rendition of "Somewhere Beyond the Sea" and "Midnight Train to Georgia" by Gladys Knight and the Pips, neither of which works well over a phone line. Over and over again, just those 2 tracks. Seriously, do call centre managers ever call themselves?

>104 haydninvienna: A I can say is that you have a great deal of tenacity! I applaud you for your stick-to-it-iveness. Also, may you heal quickly.

>108 MrsLee: Thank you! You could also have said that sometimes I just get bloody stubborn. The fact is, we really do want to go, so it had to be done sometime.

Incidentally, after a couple of nights feeling like I was trying to swallow a handful of rusty barbed wire, I don’t feel too bad this morning. Mrs H had the same thing a few days earlier. Not much chance of me avoiding it—we really can’t self-isolate from each other under the same roof.

So sorry to hear you and your wife got Covid, but glad you are feeling better. Bummer about the trip. Hope it works out for you in May.

>110 Storeetllr: Thanks. I'm more or less back on deck this morning, but not sure how long I'll stay there.

Sigh. My listening in on the great conversations seems to have hit a snag. I've got a few books started but nothing that counts as part of a "great conversation", except possibly the Richard Hoggart book that I mentioned in #59 (The Uses of Literacy, to save you looking). Then I had a serendipitous moment. I've mentioned the Five Books website before. I was looking at their page on Fairness and Inequality books, which includes a description of a book by the Victorian political economist J A Hobson, and by devious ways that led me to remember that pgmcc once mentioned an essay, "Traffic", by Ruskin, about why he couldn't advise the good burghers of Bradford on their new Wool Exchange building. (They went ahead and built it anyway, without the benefit of his advice.) But the essay is pretty startling stuff. I might have to read some more of Ruskin's social and economic writing. And of course that leads on to William Morris and some of his mates. So now I have a conversation going between these writers and Jonathan Rose, who I mentioned above, and possibly with some earlier English writers. Come to think of it, one of those mates was T J Cobden-Sanderson, who was one of the parties in the weird story of the Doves Press and its typeface, which I've mentioned a couple of times before.

Also, I've been looking for any half-baked excuse to post a mention of another book, and a specific edition of a book—namely, the Oxford Lectern Bible published by the Oxford University Press in 1935, designed by the American typographer Bruce Rogers. I first heard of this maybe 40 years ago when I read a book about book design, which I can't even remember the title of. There are only (if I'm understanding correctly) 1201 copies, one of which is in the Library of Congress. Rogers designed a new typeface, Centaur, for the edition. Bonhams the auctioneers sold a copy in June 2019 for £1275, which seems ridiculously cheap. There's an image at that link of the first page of the book of Genesis. I think this is one of the most beautiful manufactured objects I've ever seen.

Connection between the first paragraph and the second: craft. That's a conversation in itself.

I’m now about 100 pages into The Uses of Literacy, and I’m wondering why on earth the educational authorities of the great state of Queensland, in the year of grace 1965, thought it sensible to put it on the Senior Public Examination reading list. Not that it’s a bad book: quite the contrary. But I think expecting 15-year-old me to read and understand it was really shooting for the moon. The life of working-class Leeds in the 1950s didn’t much resemble that of working-class Brisbane 10 years later, even though I can now recognise aspects of my own mother in Hoggart’s description of the life of a wife and mother. I recall reading it, but that I found it hard to make sense of. No context to put it into—perhaps because Hoggart seems to have invented the academic study of the sociology of the English working class. Perhaps if I could have discussed it with a teacher? I had an excellent English teacher, who I remember with affection, but I doubt very much that she had read everything on that list. (There was several pages of it, as I recall. But hey, one of the items was The Lord of the Rings).

>113 haydninvienna: How did the reading list function? Were you supposed to read all of it, or select some?

>114 -pilgrim-: My recollection was that it was suggestions. There was a much shorter set list (I remember that A Passage to India was on the set list; still haven’t read it nearly 60 years later). I don’t think I was an unusually stupid student, but Hoggart was just so far outside my world at the time that I could make little of the book.

Of what was on the suggested list, I know I read LOTR, and I still have the 3-volume hardback copy I got for Christmas that year. But nothing beside remains.

>115 haydninvienna:
But nothing beside remains.

Even I, a poetry Philistine, got that allusion. :-)

>116 pgmcc: Ha! You set my mind free-associating, Peter. There might be more than one allusion here. There’s one to Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias”, but I have a nagging feeling that there’s a very similar line in a pop song somewhere. Paul Simon, perhaps? Which of those did I intend? The first, if either, but there isn’t any particular point in either one, just that those words occurred to me while I was writing the post. Of course I first encountered “Ozymandias” at about the time I failed to read A Passage to India, but I know of no particular meaning to that.

Imagine that I’m a famous author and you’re a critic. What fun you could have with that coincidence! I wonder how much detailed analysis of my motives and so on you could get from this? C S Lewis has written about this, I know. And there’s a short story by Isaac Asimov about a physics professor and a lit professor chatting one day, and the physics professor, who is a bit tipsy, starts bragging about his time machine and how he has brought William Shakespeare to a 20th century university and enrolled him in an English class—and the lit professor starts remembering a strangely dressed bald man with an ugly moustache, muttering things like “what wonder to make so much from few words; could one wring a flood from a damp clout”.It really was Shakespeare, and the lit professor flunked him.

>117 haydninvienna:
"Ozymandias" was the one I was thinking of. While I would be a fan, with a small "f", of Paul Simon, I did not recall his using those words in a song. That is why I use a small "f".

As I have said, I was never a great follower of poems, but "Ozymandias" was one poem that stayed with me from school. I thought the use of those words provided a wonderful statement on the power of man. Their position at the end of the words of "Ozymandias" was genius. They just catch you in the midst of your awe at the bombastic statement of Ozymandias's invincibility.

Here is the poem:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Here’s another random thought. I wrote this message after reading C S Lewis’s essay An Experiment in Criticism, and clearly the poem is about what, in terms that Lewis uses in the essay, a myth—that even the most powerful and arrogant are brought low by Time. But I see from Wikipedia that

Scholars such as professors Nora Crook and Newman White have viewed the work as critical of Shelley's contemporaries George IV, with the statue's legs a coded reference to the then Prince Regent's gout and possible sexually-transmitted diseases, and Napoleon Bonaparte. That the poem is connected to Napoleon is indeed the 21st century accepted reading.

To which I can only reply “Who cares?” Maybe Shelley did have the Prince Regent in mind, but that consideration adds precisely nothing to the poem.

Seriously, read that essay of Lewis’s. It’s available from Faded Page Canada.

>117 haydninvienna: Could you be thinking of Mad About You from Sting's Soul Cages album? At least, I think of Ozymandius when I hear that song (which I love and think I'll listen to later today).

>120 Storeetllr: I doubt it, given that I know little of Sting’s output. But thanks for trying.

>119 haydninvienna:
I wrote quite a long response to your post and somehow lost it. In summary, thank you for posting the poem. I really love it.

Also, I agree that making the poem refer to a specific ruler is of no value. Its power is in its general application to all meglamaniacs.

Thank you for the essay. I have downloaded it for my Kindle.

I began my last thread with a post about a book called Intelligent Life in the Universe. I happen to have just had a birthday, and my younger daughter Laura gave me an Amazon gift card. I've just blown the card on a secondhand hardback copy of that book. I have a copy of the UK paperback reissue, but the paperback is a nasty one--tight binding, narrow margins and generally hard to read. The one I've just bought is the original Holden-Day one from 1966, which I used to have a copy of, and remember as being pretty nice.

Actually, this has been a big book-buying week, although I'm buying secondhand ones only, with one exception. At the moment my Amazon queue has in it the following:
The Populist Temptation by Barry Eichengreen
Political Sciences by Hugh Stretton
An Experiment in Criticism by C S Lewis, noted above
The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch
How to Stay Smart in a Smart World by Gerd Gigerenzer
Intelligent Life in the Universe, as noted
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is the new copy mentioned.

All of those are reasonably familiar except possibly for the one by Hugh Stretton. I came across a quotation from this somewhere recently and the quotation was interesting enough that I was hooked--it's about what counts as explanation in history. Stretton was an interesting guy--he was a professor of history at Adelaide University and became a visiting research fellow at the Australian National University, in which capacity he wrote about urban planning and development. That writing led to his appointment as head of the Department of Urban and Regional Development by the Whitlam government in 1972. I'd heard of him to that extent, having watched the Whitlam government rise and fall, but I discover that his grandfather William Stretton was a brewer who liked a bet, unsuccessfully, whose luck changed spectacularly when he backed the winner of the Melbourne Cup in 1902 and collected a fortune. He invested his winnings shrewdly and made sure all of his children had good educations. Grandson Hugh became a Rhodes Scholar (Balliol College), a sailor in the Royal Australian Navy during World War 2, and then a professor at Adelaide.

>124 haydninvienna: Happy birthday! Hope it was a memorable celebration. What a nice book haul!

Belated birthday wishes! There's little better than a book haul for one's celebratory gift. Enjoy!

>125 clamairy: >126 Storeetllr: Thanks guys. Actually I didn’t celebrate at all—leaving that till we get to Oz. I would have been in Sydney on The Day, but for the enforced change of plans.

Belated happy birthday! I hope you enjoy your books!

Been a bit quiet lately, haven't I?

Missed creating another weekend thread for this. I want to a performance of the St Matthew Passion at the Royal Festival Hall yesterday and to my dismay didn't enjoy it much. First, it was sung in English, which I found off-putting for reasons I find hard to articulate—perhaps I'm just too used to references to the "dreizehn Silberlinge" and so on, which Mark Padmore as the Evangelist gets so much juice out of. But now I really know where the "authentic performances" movement is coming from. It was just too loud! Bach would have had, I guess, a choir about half the size, if that, and players in about the same proportion. Just too many people on stage. Some soloists seemed to find it hard to be heard over the orchestra. Also, the text matters. You have to be able to hear the words! Bach had to set the text of Matthew 26 and 27 (in Luther's translation, of course) exactly, without omission or alteration. The arias are interpolated, and are comments on the Evangelist's text. However wonderful the music is (and it really is wonderful), the text is what we are really there for. I don't think it's just my ageing ears: I didn't have any trouble with the Evangelist's words, sung by a tenor with only the continuo for accompaniment. But even the great shout from the choir for Barabbas came across all blurry.

After writing that I looked at Wikipedia, which suggests that Bach might have had no more than 20 choristers. If I can find my copy of Sir John Eliot Gardiner's book on Bach, he might have something to say about it.

But the bit that really got to me was the ending. This is the most desolate moment in all of music: it's all over, evil has triumphed and the Saviour is in the grave. At that point, the choir and orchestra should not be going flat out! I doubt if there's anything in Bach's score to say so*, but I've seen performances where the last number is sung very quietly and diminishes almost to a whisper. That's how to do it.

*Ah ha! Wikipedia again: "The work is closed by a grand scale chorus in da capo form, choir I and II mostly in unison for the first part (Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder (We sit down in tears)), but in dialog in the middle section, choir II repeating "Ruhe sanfte, sanfte ruh!" ("Rest gently, gently rest!"), choir I reflecting: "Your grave and headstone shall, for the anxious conscience, be a comfortable pillow and the resting place for the soul. Highly contented, there the eyes fall asleep." These are the last words (before the recapitulation), marked by Bach himself: p pp ppp (soft, very soft, extremely soft)." (emphasis by me)

Sorry to keep banging on about the St Matthew Passion, especially since I'm not a musician, but I know what I like. And I think the St Matthew Passion is the greatest single piece of Western art music. I want it done right.

The program got at least one thing right though: it said how, at the performance in St Thomas's in Leipzig in 1736 on which today's standard performing edition is based, the congregation would have been sitting uncomfortably on hard wooden benches. I've been to a performance there, and the benches really are hard and wooden. No applause is allowed at all (which I think is right—in St Thomas's it's a church service, and that also is right).

I recall going to a performance of the Fauré requiem at the Bristol RC cathedral back when I was a student there, and recall the audience being requested not to applaud.

Back to reading. My Easter reading has been The Ladies of Grace Adieu and other stories by Susanna Clarke, and Jurgen by James Branch Cabell. I’ve read both of these before, but a good while ago.

I really enjoyed The Ladies of Grace Adieu. Susanna Clarke has a certain sly wit, as in the case of the clergyman Mr Hawkins:

Mr Hawkins said nothing; the Hawkins' domestic affairs were arranged upon the principle that Fanny supplied the talk and he the silence.

Or:

It contained a spell for turning Members of Parliament into useful members of society and now, just when Uncle Auberon thought he had a use for it, he could not find it.

Incidentally, I’ve previously mentioned one hint of a connection between The Ladies… and Piranesi, and there’s another: the bridge that Tom Brightwind magically built at Thoresby was copied from a design by the architect Piranesi.

I have to admit I still haven’t managed to finish Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but we’ll see.

I doubt that there’s much to say about Jurgen that’s new. If you haven’t read it, you should, as one of the ur-texts of modern fantasy. Also, it’s very much part of the Great Conversation—referred to by Arthur C Clarke and Robert Heinlein. I don’t recall it ever being mentioned by Borges, but if he didn’t he should have done, if only because of Cabell’s facility in inventing the names of ancient books and authors.

I enjoyed Ladies of Grace Adieu and have read and reread Jonathan Strange, but I couldn't seem to get into Piranesi for some reason. Could have just been my mood; I mean to try again. Did you watch the BBC adaptation of Strange? It was pretty good, though it left some stuff out and changed a couple of things. It would have to, really, or the series would be at least 128 episodes long.

Haven't heard of Jurgen before. I'll have to check it out.

>132 Storeetllr: I found Jurgen curiously unsatisfying. The writing is stylish and often gorgeous, but it didn't strike me as a book I could fall in love with (some people do, though — there's a group on LT devoted to the author, James Branch Cabell). Your mileage may, as they say, differ.

Another "great conversation": has anyone here read a short story by C M Kornbluth called "Ms. Found in a Chinese fortune Cookie", about a science fiction writer called Corwin (a joke —"Corwin" was one of Kornbluth's pseudonyms) who discovers something that he refers to as "the answer", attempts to publish it, and is silenced by a group of previous discoverers who would rather it not become generally known so that they can continue profiting from their knowledge?

I thought a bit. "I'm doing a Civil War thing about Burnside's Bomb," I said, "and I realized that Grant could have sent in fresh troops but didn't because Halleck used to drive him crazy by telegraphic masterminding of his campaigns. That's a special case of The Answer—as I call it. Then I got some data on medieval attitudes toward personal astrology out of a book on ancient China I'm reading. Another special case. And there's a joke the monks used to write at the end of a long manuscript-copying job. Liddell Hart's theory of strategy is about half of the general military case of The Answer. The merchandising special case shows clearly in a catalog I have from a Chicago store that specializes in selling strange clothes to bop-crazed Negroes*. They all add up to the general expression, and that's that."

He was nodding. "Many, many combinations add up to The Diagonal Relationship," he said. "But only a writer cuts across sufficient fields, exposes himself to sufficient apparently unrelated facts. Only a writer has wide-open associational channels capable of bridging the gap between astrology and, ah, 'bop.' We write in our different idioms"—he smiled at the T-shirted man—"but we are writers all. Wide-ranging, omnivorous for data, equipped with superior powers of association which we constantly exercise."

Yesterday I was reading a book called Obliquity, by John Kay. Kay's argument is that our goals are best approached indirectly; for example, the most profitable businesses over the long term tend to be those whose main objective is something other than profit. Which is where I hat-tip to The Living Company, by Arie de Geus, and Finite and Infinite Games, by James P Carse, both of which I've posted about before. Kay refers to a "superb" book called Seeing Like a State, and I thought, I have that but have never read it. So I dug out my copy and found it leading me down a rabbit hole about Stalin's collectivisation scheme and other schemes for re-making society from scratch. None of them ever work. One of Scott's discussions is of Brasilia, the artificial city founded as a capital for Brazil, and how it doesn't work. Of course Washington DC and Canberra are both artificial planned cities, at least in origin, and both work now, but were never as rigidly planned as Brasilia. I suspect that Brasilia was really intended to re-make the idea of a capital city, whereas Canberra at least was originally intended simply to get the capital out of the orbit of Sydney and Melbourne. (Some social remaking followed — Canberra was dry till about 1940.)

But "Corwin"'s nemesis calls it "the diagonal relationship". Kay's title is "Obliquity". I wonder if John Kay had ever read the Kornbluth story? But it kind of makes the point that objectives may be best approached indirectly. And it seems that people keep rediscovering the diagonal relationship without being silenced — Kay's book has several pages of references and further reading. One reference is to a paper by Charles Goodhart, who is a respected economist and Emeritus Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and seems to be still functioning.

*Spoiler tag is for an expression that Kornbluth could get away with, but isn't appropriate now.

Weekend reading: The Man with the Silver Saab by Alexander McCall Smith. The novels about Detective Inspector Varg of the Malmö police Department of Sensitive Crimes are the only books by the incredibly prolific McCall Smith that I've been able to read—I bounced off both Precious Ramotswe and Isabel Dalhousie, and haven't visited 44 Scotland Street. The Varg novels (I think there are 3 so far, of which this is the second) have been referred to as "Scandi blanc", to emphasise how different they are to the girls who kicked the hornets' nest and suchlike. I unkindly reflected that reading about Varg is a bit like eating a whole box of chocolates at once: Varg is impressively kind, gentle and nice, and no-one ever gets seriously hurt. Instead of torture and mayhem we get page after page of Varg's ruminations about life, the universe and everything. You can either read it and find wisdom, or just let it wash over you, or skip it altogether. If you do, the book will be a lot shorter. On the other hand, there are sentences like "Of course, cucumbers were capable of being threatening in a way in which peaches and nectarines, for instance, were not". Here, a cucumber might not have just been a cucumber, but we never actually find out. Instead, the actual "sensitive crime" that the book is about is a sort of art fraud, and it's reminding me of "Michael Innes'" novel A Family Affair, which features a vaguely similar incident (|IIRC) as part of a series of practical jokes.

Last time I looked at the great world outside, it was 6 pm on Tuesday. Now, after the night, it’s 9 am on Thursday, far away in another country. Yes, Mrs H and I are in Sydney, having finally made it to Australia. All my paranoia over the last few weeks about missing connections and other possible dramas were for nothing, thankfully—we made both our connections (in Helsinki and Singapore) easily, but without any unnecessary hanging about. Between Helsinki and Singapore we had Finnair’s A350 business class, which now has a seat that doesn’t recline at all. The bit you sit in is a kind of half cone with an upholstered surface, and on the open side there’s space into which you can slide if you want to lie down. The only moving parts are a couple of small panels that fill in the opening where your feet go when you’re sitting. It’s hard to describe but the result is surprisingly comfortable for sleeping—to my mind, more so than the much more luxurious-looking “Q-suites” in Qatar Airways’ business class. (More description, and some pictures, here: https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/finnair-reveals-new-gorgeous-long-haul-cabins... —scroll down a bit.) Mrs H with her back issues didn’t like it so much.

I have to mention one item of the Finnair dinner—the dessert was a blackcurrant mousse, served in a very small Iittala glass dish. I like blackcurrant and was at first a trifle disappointed that there wasn’t more, but what a wallop of blackcurrant flavour! Perhaps as well that there wasn’t more of it.

After dinner, put the headphones on and listened to Danielle de Niese’s recording of Handel opera arias, with Les Arts Florissants conducted by William Christie. There’s some stunningly gorgeous music in Handel’s operas, and my goodness what a voice! I’m imagining Handel looking down from heaven (where he is at long last partying with Johann Sebastian Bach) and going “Wow!”

Anyway, we’re here. Both tired, of course—Mrs H is sleeping and I’m trying to muster up the energy to take a Covid test—can’t leave the hotel until we get a negative test result.

ETA just done the test and got a firm negative. Phew!

>135 haydninvienna: I am glad all your careful and diligent planning paid off. May you have a lovely adventure.

>135 haydninvienna: I am delighted you have arrived in Australia. I hope you and Mrs. H. have a lovely time.

>136 MrsLee: >137 pgmcc: Thanks, both of you. Just had a pretty good dinner at a grill bar on Circular Quay and feeling reasonably pleased with life.

I'm so glad you've arrived at last after all your travails! I hope you both have a wonderful visit.

>135 haydninvienna: Sounds like a great flight, enjoy your trip!

>135 haydninvienna: I'm glad it all worked out for you. Travel really has gotten to be horribly complex and frequently so uncomfortable. Hope you enjoy Australia!

>141 jillmwo: Thanks Jill. We always enjoy Down Under—as I said to Mrs H in the cab coming into the city, you come back here after years away and you can hear Peter Allen in your head (singer, ex-husband of Liza Minnelli, born in Tenterfield, NSW, who had a major hit in Oz with a song called “I Still Call Australia Home”).

And first book purchase of the trip: Helgoland, by Carlo Rovelli. I think it’s the only one of his popular books that I don’t already have.

Enjoy! We expect plenty of photos when you finally get home.

(I must now google for recipes for blackcurrant mousse!)

The story so far: Mrs H and I in Sydney for a few days; some fine meals, a bit of shopping (including another book purchase, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings, which I found on the sale table at Abbey’s in York Street), and then a couple of days in Port Macquarie, a pleasant resort town a few hours drive north, with my stepdaughter Alexandra and her new family. Mrs H is still in Port Macquarie with Alexandra and I’m now in Canberra. I have already caught up with Son Who Cooks, but my goodness you’ve got to laugh: my elder son David has Covid. He got his positive test result this morning, and his isolation period exactly covers the period during which I’ll be in Canberra. If the Almighty has a sense of humour, I’m not sure I like it.

Alexandra’s relationship with her partner Ant (who is quite a bit older and has two sons) started rocky but seems pretty settled now. She and Ant and the two boys look and behave like a family and she seems very happy, which of course makes Mrs H and me happy. Mrs H hasn’t seen her daughter for more than three years so Mrs H can stay in Port and hang out while I hang out with the boys in Canberra. That was the plan anyway. I’ve spoken to David briefly on the phone and he doesn’t sound entirely his normal self, understandably.

I’m about two-thirds through The Fellowship … and I’ll post about it when I’m done.

>145 haydninvienna:
That must be a very emotional trip, and a bit of frustration thrown in there too. I hope your son gets over his illness quickly and without too many of the symptoms.

I hope you and Mrs. H enjoy the trip as much as you can. Mrs. H must be delighted to see your stepdaughter after three years.

Of course, you have not included any detail of any food involved in your catching up with Son Who Cooks. The last time we had detailed descriptions of some lovely dishes, and if my memory serves me correctly, including a dessert.

Glad to see you got a book. That book has popped up before on one or two threads. It was the mention of The Inklings in a thread that had me think the Saturday morning pub meeting group in Arcadia might have been a hat-tip to The Inklings.

ETA: Following your mention of The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings and your further remarks in >148 haydninvienna:, I had a peek at "The Fellowship" on Amazon and read the early parts of the prologue. Apparently Pears was well aware of the Inklings; the prologue mentions the places where the Inklings met, which included a pub, and describes the nature of their discussions. It could be used as a description for the conversations held at the Saturday morning pub meetings in Arcadia.

I nearly pressed the buy button, and may do yet. Let's just say you have locked on your target. I will let you know if/when your bullet hits me with procurement effect.

>145 haydninvienna: I have had the book about the Inklings sitting on my shelf for awhile. I have dipped into it once or twice for reference purposes, but haven't really sat down to read it through. I will will be very interested in your assessment.

>147 jillmwo: I finished a first quick read this morning. It’s about all 4 principal Inklings (Lewis, Tolkien, Barfield and Williams) in roughly equal proportions by bulk, with a considerable measure given to Warnie Lewis and some of the minor figures like Dyson, Lord David Cecil and Havard, plus hangers-on (not in a bad sense) like John Wain and Dorothy Sayers. I learned a lot about Barfield and perhaps more than I wanted to about Charles Williams. Barfield was an anthrosophist, who spent a good part of his life propagating the views of Rudolf Steiner—that I knew. But I didn’t know that late in life he garnered considerable recognition for writings on the esoteric philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Williams’s early interest in esoterica we knew about, but the Zaleskis discuss it in some detail, along with Williams’s continuing interest in ritual magic. Bluntly, Williams was far weirder than I thought, and he might have been a very unsafe spiritual directeur. It also suggested that there was a lot about Williams that Lewis, who called him “my friend of friends”, never realised.

Best little surprise of the book: a quotation from a review by John Wain of Lewis’s volume in the Oxford History of English Literature, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama): “Mr Lewis, now as always, writes as if inviting us to a feast.”. That is exactly right. But I think the Zaleskis are unfair in saying of that book “Who, in an age of instantly available digitized data, troubles to read seven-hundred-page works on literature five centuries old?”. Er, me. I have two copies and have read it at least twice.

The Zaleskis are good, I think, on the turbulence between Lewis (and those who shared his views) and the school of Leavis, pointing out that despite the surface disputation they would actually have agreed on quite a few issues. Also good on the decline of Leavis’s school, pointing out that Lewis’s book An Experiment in Criticism, which was aimed at Leavis, was flogging a dead (or moribund) horse—the parody The Pooh Perplex, published two years after Lewis’s book, killed the Leavis school dead. “No intellectual movement that has made itself so easy to parody can long survive.”. With respect, this goes a bit too far: you probably know better than I how influential Leavis is today, but I think he is still a bit more than just a historical footnote.

They seem to get inside Lewis and Tolkien much better than some other biographers—it would be interesting to compare their account with Humphrey Carpenter’s books on Tolkien and the Inklings, and of course there must by now be a dozen biographies of Lewis, of varying degrees of rose-tintedness. From my other reading by and about Lewis, the Zaleskis seem to have got the balance about right.

All in all, I thought it was pretty good, particularly in bringing Warnie Lewis into the light a bit more. I’ll certainly have to read it again.

ETA that I didn’t read the LT reviews before writing the above. I stand by what I said about “roughly equal proportions”, and I think the reviewers who thought it was about Lewis and Tolkien, with the others as afterthoughts, were projecting their own interest in Lewis and Tolkien onto the book. Barfield and Williams are less significant figures in literature generally, of course, and it’s also fair to add that however much Lewis valued the friendship of Barfield and Williams, they were both mostly outside Oxford, hence less central to Lewis’s life than Tolkien was. Also, Williams died in 1945: Lewis outlived him by 17 years.

I also have to add that I thought the Zaleskis were a bit harsh about Barfield’s life as a solicitor. I’ve done that kind of work, and so have many others I know, and I didn’t find it so grindingly dull as they suggest. I suppose Barfield may have, of course—no accounting for taste.

>146 pgmcc: No descriptions of food this time, not yet anyway. I’ve just had dinner with Manuel and our former colleague and mentor Jeremy Wainwright at Philip’s current place of employment. It’s basically an upmarket pizza joint, but the pizzas are accompanied by various other things such as salads and charcuterie platters which P is responsible for. It’s good stuff, and we three enjoyed it hugely with Philip acting as waiter and gofer. Philip seems to have marked out a schedule of dinners for me: his mate X wants to meet me and can I come to dinner on such a night, and so on. In short I apparently have a fan club, which is kind of nice.

>149 haydninvienna: I apparently have a fan club,

I can understand that.

>150 pgmcc: Yes, we are legion.

>151 ScoLgo: :-)

>150 pgmcc: Thanks Peter. And >151 ScoLgo: : perhaps rashly, I’m going to assume that you are agreeing with Peter, in which case thanks also.

>153 haydninvienna: It's a good assumption. I am not a frequent commenter, but I do enjoy reading your thread.

>155 haydninvienna: Thank you, that’s reassuring.

>155 haydninvienna: Another follower here!

>156 Karlstar: Thanks, Jim. Hoping that you won’t change your mind if I dilate a bit about Canberra. I lived here for 36 years, and there’s a part of me that still does.

Canberra was originally put where it is explicitly to get it out of the orbit of Sydney and Melbourne. The Australian Constitution expressly says that the national capital is to be within the borders of the state of New South Wales, on territory surrendered to the Federal government by the State, and more than 100 miles from Sydney. The foundation stone of the city was laid in 1913, but nothing much was done for about 20 years. There was an international competition for a city plan, won by the American Walter Burley Griffin. Griffin’s design fitted into a natural shallow valley among 4 hills. The valley had a small stream running through it, and the design has an artificial lake in the valley, with the site of Parliament on the lakeshore. On the map of the present city you can just about see Griffin’s design—the lake is there all right, but the Houses of Parliament are actually built on and into the hill on the southern side of the lake. As the city grew, the governing principle was a number of urban centres connected by main roads. This led to a very low density city, and much of the recent development has been residential tower blocks in the urban centres. I wrote a few posts ago about Brasilia, another planned capital, which seems to have been far less successful. Canberra is still a city built to a human scale, not a series of monuments like Brasilia seems to be. Canberra has grand buildings all right, but only one grand formal avenue—Anzac Parade, running down to Lake Burley Griffin from the Australian War Memorial.

I first saw Canberra in 1970. The population then was about 150,000. It’s now more than double that. The fast growth between 1960 and 1970 was due to the government policy of moving all Federal government departments to Canberra, with subsidised housing provided, and that was complete by about 1973. After that the city had to live or die on its own resources. Granted that having the government here is a powerful draw, I’d say that Canberra has done pretty well.

Spent an hour or so on the phone with my isolated elder son David. He seems pretty cheerful and they are coping with the isolation pretty well—his wife Caitlin still hasn’t had a positive test. The worst family member at coping is their dog, who doesn’t understand why David and Caitlin aren’t together. David is now seeing the end of his law degree and is actually working in law, as a clerk doing probate filing and such. Sigh. I now have 2 children working for law firms, despite all my attempts to dissuade them—I thought one lawyer in the family was enough.

And a question to which I already know the answer. Where are all the bookshops? I went on a bus ride this morning partly just to have a look at the city, but also visited 2 bookshops. Didn’t buy from either one. When I lived here, I could have visited at least a dozen used bookstores of some quality. Now there seems to be about 4. I visited one yesterday and bought The Black Cloud, by Fred Hoyle, and A Maggot by John Fowles.

The answer is partly e-readers, but more the economics of the used-book business, which have become more marginal as real estate and other prices rise.

>157 haydninvienna: It is always good to hear such good information about a city I'm unfamiliar with!

>157 haydninvienna:
I found your post very interesting. You have added to my bank of knowledge.

Sad to hear the decline in secondhand bookshops is universal.

>158 Karlstar: You missed a bit, Jim. I think it went something like “oh gosh, he’s on the soapbox again…”.

>157 haydninvienna: I liked Canberra a lot when I visited back in the 2000s. The National Gallery is great, and I loved the grass-covered Parliament House which people were walking all over and rolling down the sides. The city felt like a place where people actually lived, rather than just somewhere built for government business.

>161 Sakerfalcon: The city felt like a place where people actually lived, rather than just somewhere built for government business: I’ll take that as a compliment for Canberra.

>157 haydninvienna: The discussion of Canberra and how the city was planned is very interesting and not something I'd ever been aware of. However, I'm taken aback by your discussion of bookstores being missing. For a long time, Australia had trouble getting books published in other parts of the world; the shipping and other distribution costs were just too high. As a result, Australia had its own publishing environment which (the last I knew) had been thriving. Have you talked to any of the locals about the lack of bookstores? Could anyone say for sure what the situation was?

>157 haydninvienna: >159 pgmcc: Unfortunately I think the pandemic took a heavy toll on the used bookstores that have a physical store. Even in these days of internet purchasing, those stores rely a lot on foot traffic and impulse buying by folks such as ourselves. With either being forced to close or limit hours, much fewer customers and low margins to start with, it was really tough.

Good reminder to go back and buy something from the used bookstore that is bravely trying to survive in my town.

I loved the tale of Canberra. It felt like a tour to a place I will most likely not be able to see in my lifetime.

>163 jillmwo: Looking back at my original post, I see I didn’t explain myself properly. When I asked where all the bookshops were, I mostly meant secondhand bookshops, although new bookshops seem to have declined as well. But that’s happening everywhere, not just here. In Canberra the big used bookshops used to be mostly in the industrial area of Fyshwick, where there were three or four good ones. Now, from what I can tell from Google Maps, there’s one, and Fyshwick is a pain to get to by bus. (Another consequence of the decades of low-density development: Canberra is very car-dependent. This is changing somewhat, with the spiffy new tram line and the much improved bus system.)
I don’t think local publishing has disappeared by any means. There are still local publishing houses and I regularly see authors who I know to be Australian (such as Garry Disher and Liane Moriarty) mentioned on LT.

>161 Sakerfalcon: Unfortunately they don’t allow you to walk over the Parliament building now. Terrorism and all that. Thinks: I wonder whether some of the politicians got irked at the symbolism of having their constituents walking all over them.

For those who need an explanation of all that, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_House,_Canberra#/media/File:Parliament_.... The building is a low dome (sort of), part of which is underground. The roof is grassed over, and as Claire said, you used to be able to walk over it and roll down the slope.

I’ve been inside it a few times back in the day. Best of everything, understandably.

>167 haydninvienna: That's a pity, but not surprising I suppose (fear of terrorism). The Australian friend who was with us said the symbolism was the whole point of the design!

Well, we are back from Australia. It all worked, nothing got lost, and we didn't get Covid. I finally got to have a face to face with David on my last morning in Canberra, which was the first day out of isolation for him. He drove me to the airport, and we had time for some talk. Better than nothing.

Some photos:

Sydney Harbour. No explanation necessary.


Two stuffed wombats on the sofa in a sitting room in our Sydney hotel:


Went for a walk with Son Who Cooks and his mate's dogs and saw quite a few of these (no, did not try to cook them):


View south over Canberra from my hotel room window in early morning--Parliament House is at the right of the picture:


Some autumn colour in Canberra (but noting how many of the European trees have suffered severely from dry, hot summers):


Seen on the portico of a building on London Circuit, Canberra (I have no idea either):


The building formerly known as Robert Garran Offices--when I was a branch head at Attorney-General's, my office was on the top floor at the corner:


Looking towards Mount Ainslie from Canberra Centre (which is a shopping mall):


Bearded dragon at Sails Resort at Port Macquarie (according to a waitress there, they think they own the place):


And a surprise: never seen one of these close up (Royal Australian Air Force KC-30 tanker-transport--it was parked at the next gate to ours at Sydney Airport):

>169 haydninvienna:
Super pictures from what appears to have been a great trip. I am delighted you got to meet David face-to-face.

>170 pgmcc: Thanks Peter. A footnote to the pic of Robert Garran Offices (as it used to be) is that the building is now occupied by the Office of National Intelligence. So you can see that times have changed.

>171 haydninvienna:
So you are a spy after all.

>169 haydninvienna: Wonderful photos, and I'm glad you both stayed healthy. So sorry that you didn't get to spend more time with your son.

(Thanks for the bullet with the Inklings book!)

>172 pgmcc: I admit nothing. (The point of my throwaway line was more to the effect that the "intelligence" has replaced whatever was there before.) In the afternoons in autumn, the western side of RGO (what you see in the picture) would be flooded with golden light from the low sun filtering through the autumn leaves. Beautiful. I miss that office.

Thank you for sharing the photos. I'm glad you are happy at the end of your travels.

I love the bearded dragon (at a safe distance!) and I WANT one of those stuffed wombats! I'm glad you had a great trip after all the obstacles you experienced getting there.

>169 haydninvienna: Thoroughly enjoyed your photos. And I'm glad you had a chance to connect with the people you care about.

I'm curious about bearded dragons. Clearly it's a lizard and it does look intimidating, but are they more dangerous than your average gecko? Are they apt to take a chunk out of you if you irritate them? Should the waitress have been more concerned about their presence than it sounds as if she actually was?

>176 Sakerfalcon: >177 jillmwo: Bearded dragons (or eastern water dragons, which this may have been) are approximately as dangerous as the average gecko. They have strong jaws and would undoubtedly give you a nasty nip if you tried to get too familiar, but I understand that people keep them as pets. You can judge the size of the one in the picture by the slice of a lemon--I didn't put the lemon there, it had been dropped by someone previously. I'd guess that this particular dragon was about 18 inches long, and the biggest might get a bit longer. We've been at this resort before (see https://www.librarything.com/topic/309227#6891800) and there were dragons all over the place then too. In short, quite harmless unless you try to handle them, and you could even get away with that if you did it correctly (think David Attenborough). And they usefully deal with cockroaches and even small mice!

>176 Sakerfalcon: You obviously need to go back to Australia.

Couple of recent reads.

Helgoland, by Carlo Rovelli. The jacket copy of this is somewhat misleading, in that the book is presented as being about Werner Heisenberg's short sojourn on the island in 1924, where in the space of three weeks or so he developed one of the alternative mathematical bases of quantum physics. But in fact only the first part is about Heisenberg and the other mathematical physicists involved in the development of quantum theory. The rest is about what quantum theory means--in fact it's about what "reality" is. This is where I lose touch, partly because I don't really understand it and partly because I don't see why it matters. There's a school of thought that says "don't worry what it means, the maths gives the right answers". Then there's the school that holds that every instant, when an "event is observed", a new universe is created. Then there's Rovelli's view, that nothing exists except as relationships (I think). But of course we all have a fixed opinion that the things we see and touch and eat and drink "really exist". Now i'm not going to sit down to my dinner in a few hours' time and think of a chicken and ham pie or a glass of wine as being just relationships, am I?

Basically, I'm stuck with this book, which is a pity since Rovelli has, up to now, been an insta-buy for me.

Word Play, by Gyles Brandreth. What it says on the tin.

Underground, Overground by Andrew Martin. This is about the surprisingly chaotic history of the London Underground (more than half of which is actually overground, hence Martin's title). Not a formal history, but a lot of good information, and an introduction to a few surprising characters, such as Charles Yerkes, who had made money out of streetcars in Chicago and then went to London and played a big part in developing the Tube, in its early history--in particular, being responsible for the electrification of the system as it then was--and Frank Pick, which was the Underground's chief executive (although not called that) for many years. It makes entertaining reading. There's some reflection on the part that the Tube has played in making the modern city, by making it possible for people to commute into the centre from the suburbs, and the extent to which the development of the Tube system was driven by real estate. Little sidelight: the man who was a graphic designer in World War One, and was faced with a plea by the Government for scrap metal for the war effort. He responded by throwing out 200 cases of old Victorian style type, keeping only the Caslon type. He then sent a bill for something to a client, who was outraged by the use of Caslon type and cancelled his account.

ETA Thanks for the kind words about the photos.

I’ve just topped up the food on the bird-table (and of course my little friend the hen blackbird showed up as soon as I stepped outside). Now I’ve got a wood pigeon out there stuffing its face and fighting off any other pigeons that try to cut in. Greedy blighter.

Another lightbulb—that alphabetical order had to be invented: A Place for Everything:The Curious History of Alphabetical Order by Judith Flanders. This is a history of how things have been sorted, with “alphabetical order” becoming the norm surprisingly recently. Some discussion also of how cultures that don’t have an alphabet (most obviously, Chinese) approach the problem. One story among many: apparently, in the 1960s a new chief was appointed to the department of the British Post Office that prepared the phone books. The new appointee was unusually aware of the issues with alphabetical order* and left a message with the head librarian at the British Museum seeking a list of works that he might consult. The reply gave only a single phone number, supposedly that of the foremost expert in the field.

It was his own phone number.

I picked the book up in the book swap at our local Tesco supermarket. It overlaps with Index, The, which I mentioned above.

Unfortunately, Ms Flanders offers no support for the assertion that Baron Gottfried van Swieten, director of the imperial library in Vienna and friend and patron of, and sometime librettist for, Haydn and Mozart, invented the library card catalogue (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_van_Swieten#As_librarian). I’m disappointed by that, since van Swieten is somewhat of a hero of mine.

*Commonplace example: how do you deal with ordering surnames beginning with “Mac”, “Mc” and M’”, given that people aren’t always sure how Mr MacTavish spells his name? The Australian solution, IIRC, was to alphabetise all of them as if spelled “Mac”.

And now for something completely different: Seance for a Vampire by Fred Saberhagen, yet another bit of the ever-growing pile of Sherlock Holmes pastiche. Sherlock (and Mycroft) Holmes, Watson, Scotland Yard, murder, vampires (including Dracula himself), stolen pirate treasure, Russian revolutionaries, spiritualists and even Rasputin in a walk-on part: what’s not to like? No jarring details (no saddle horses in London, for example) and only minor hiccups in the language. It’s narrated alternately by Watson and the Count, but I didn’t find any problem in keeping track. As far as I can remember, all the plot details worked, but from a writer of Saberhagen’s experience you would expect that.

>181 haydninvienna:
My Saturday was a day you would have loved. I browsed Hodges Figgis, Books Upstairs, The Secret Record and Book Shop, and Chapters.

I was thinking of you on my bookshop-crawl.

>182 pgmcc: you sweet thing, Peter. I must admit I would have loved to have joined you.

>181 haydninvienna: Ah, you realise that is #8 in The Dracula Sequence series? They are all pretty good - they are on my re-read pile. I re-read the first one - The Dracula Tape - fairly recently, and I need to re-read the rest of the series.

Some are set modern day, some are set in the Victorian era, and there's one partly in Renaissance Italy and another in Revolutionary France.

>184 Maddz: I realised that it wasn’t the first but I didn’t have any trouble following it. Looking at the series descriptions, I think there’s one earlier one with Holmes. I might look out for that one. I remember Saberhagen as the author of the Berserker stories, although I think I only ever found one of them.

>185 haydninvienna: oh boy, direct hit! I love Saberhagen's Books Of Swords and hadn't realize he had other books too. Off to add them to my Thriftbooks wishlist :)

>185 haydninvienna: Yes, The Holmes-Dracula File. I think most of mine were Forbidden Planet purchases back in the day, although some may have been from second-hand stores. (I still miss the Fantasy Centre - funnily enough I now work for Islington.)

Have you tried the Solar Pons pastiches?

>187 Maddz: I’ve heard of the Solar Pons stories but never encountered any of them.

My acquaintance with the Holmes industry isn’t large. I remember reading the additional Holmes stories by Adrian Conan Doyle while I was in my teens. Then there was The Seven Percent Solution, which brought together Holmes and Sigmund Freud, and I’ve read a couple of the “Mary Russell” stories. Plus I was a bit unkind about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Mycroft Holmes a while ago. That’s about it. But I will keep an eye open for The Holmes-Dracula File.

Catching up on some recent reading.

The Killer in the Choir and The Liar in the Library both by Simon Brett. Couple of cosy mysteries—although I really don’t understand why “cosy” when violent death is involved. From Brett’s “Fethering” series. Competently done and the characters are well sketched out, and there’s a decent portrait of an English seaside town. Both from the Oxfordshire library system. I also have one of his Charles Paris mysteries, involving an alcoholic and mostly “resting” actor, whcich I haven’t started, and one of his “Blotto and Twinks” stories, which I bailed on.

The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz. This one is written in first person, by Horowitz in his own persona, about a supposed investigation by a private detective who persuades “Horowitz” to make a deal where the detective will investigate (with “Horowitz”’s dubious assistance) and “Horowitz” will write the novel, and they share the profits equally. Horowitz has written Sherlock Holmes pastiche (The House of Silk and at least one other), and it shows. Hawthorne, the detective, reminds me strongly of a lower-middle-class Holmes, and the relationship between Hawthorn and “Horowitz” is a good deal like that between Holmes and Watson. The frame story begins with a woman efficiently arranging her own funeral, and then being murdered the same night. Ingenious and well done. I have Horowitz’s The Magpie Murders on the go at the moment. That one has a complete mystery novel inside it.

Then The Little Library Cookbook for a bit of relief from all the murder. There’s a thread in the Cookbookers group about this book (https://www.librarything.com/topic/300008#n7863458) so I will say no more about it here.

Finally some classic SF: The Black Cloud by Sir Fred Hoyle. The Penguin Modern Classics edition that I read has an afterword by Richard Dawkins, in which Dawkins compares the book to the best of Asimov or Arthur C Clarke. I’d say the comparison is fair—Hoyle shares their clunky dialogue and lack of characterisation. But it’s still a genuinely gripping read.

More murder.

First and best was The City & the City by China Miéville. This must be one of the weirdest settings ever for a whodunnit—a young American archaeologist is murdered in a city which is apparently somewhere in the Balkans. But the city is actually two cities which interpenetrate, and the citizens of each are conditioned not to see the other. Seeing the other city, or entering it, is called Breach and is a major crime. There is a shadowy body also called Breach to enforce the separation. Sometimes the interpenetration is down to the level of inches, and that fact almost becomes a character in its own right. Cities split into two are not unknown—pre-1989 Berlin, or present Nicosia, for example—but those always have a fairly clear line. Besźel and Ul Quoma have no such clear line. The book won a sackful of awards including tying for a Hugo, and I can see why.

Then Richard Osman’s two Thursday Murder Club books, The Thursday Murder Club and The Man Who Died Twice. These have already been given lots of love on LT, and again I can see why. In the first one, four people living in a luxurious retirement community somewhere in Kent go from poring over police files of cold cases (which they have because another dweller in the community, who is now in a coma after a stroke, was a former police inspector on the cold-case beat) to solving a real murder, with a certain amount of discreet police assistance. After I finished reading this, I worked out how many murders there are, either on or off stage, and I think the body count was something like 7 or 8. The second one also has a surprisingly high body count and a good deal of actual violence, plus a staggering amount of exceedingly dodgy stuff from MI6.

For something different, this morning I was reading the Wikipedia article on the Föhn wind, and at the end I found this:

"Foehn" is the last word in A Nest of Ninnies, a 1969 novel by John Ashbery and James Schuyler. Ashbery claimed that he and Schuyler chose this particular word because "people, if they bothered to, would have to open the dictionary to find out what the last word in the novel meant.”

Well, I’ve heard of Ashbery but not of Schuyler, so I did some digging. On Goodreads, one Josh Friedlander says:

Short comic novel written on a lark (alternating one sentence at a time) by two major American poets. Among its many eccentricities is the fact that its huge dramatis personae - old, young, male, female, French, American, Italian - are all basically the same person, that is, Ashberry (and presumably Schuyler, though he led a more private life). Meaning: arch, sophisticated, vastly knowledgeable about food and antiques and Italian literature, insatiably keen on old movies - references to Akim Tamiroff or Irène Bordoni abound. In the same vein the narration and dialogue is exquisitely, ludicrously mannered and archaic. There is a vague gesture at a plot - a cellist and her brother live in a shabby house in suburban New York where the heating is always on the blink. Through trips to Manhattan, Florida, Sicily, the Loire Valley and Duluth, we gradually meet old and new friends. But the "point" of this book is the ironic asides, the mock-seriousness, the gimmicks (no chapter 13!), the choice of an exotic word when "plain American which cats and dogs can read" (in Marianne Moore's phrase) would do. In a piece on Lord Berners, Michael Dirda praises the "camp modernism" of E.F. Benson, Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett as "the cocktail hour of literature - witty, languorous, enticing" in contrast to the "totalitarian" and joyless doorstoppers of High Modernism and its descendants. But Ashberry and Schuyler are poets doing something simpler: the bone-dry one-liner, the mellifluous detritus of high culture, the gratuitous reference to the Haugtussa cycle.

What else can I say? I’m rather surprised to find that the Oxfordshire library service has a copy, and I’ve put in a reservation.

>190 haydninvienna: Well that Miéville certainly sounds intriguing!

>191 clamairy: I have read a number of Miéville books and The City & The City is one of the better ones, IMHO.

There is also a 4-episode miniseries adaptation on Amazon (freevee w/ads).

>192 ScoLgo: Maybe I'll give that a shot first. I have Prime, so...

>191 clamairy: it’s a noirish crime novel, but the setting really makes it. Recommended.

>191 clamairy: I thought so too, but I'm afraid I would get a headache trying to keep up with it.

>190 haydninvienna: I'm not a big fan of crime or noir but The city and the city blew me away.

Yet more murder (I think):Sherlock Holmes and the Unholy Trinity by Paul D Gilbert. “I think” because I never actually got to the murder—I bailed on page 26–he writes like a management consultant. (Sorry, Peter, not you, you’re a noble exception.) I remember having had, many years ago, a friendly argument as to whether Arthur Conan Doyle could write. I defended him as a writer of clean, efficient prose; my friend disagreed. At least this example of the “Holmes industry” shows that there’s more to writing a Holmes story than the characters’ names. As with writing P G Wodehouse pastiche, you need to learn the tune as well as the words.

And now another cookbook! This Could Get Messy (no touchstone, not surprisingly) by James Wirth, an Australian who has run a string of pubs in Sydney. “A Guide to Eating. To Drinking. To Doing Both at the Same Time.” It’s pub food, with a mixture of Mexican, Korean, US-Deep-South, Caribbean and California influences plus possibly other things. Could be very good or abominable but authentic it ain’t. Fun it might be, and there are some interesting drink recipes, including one called Satan’s Breakfast, which is cherry-flavoured bourbon (apparently you can buy this), Kahlúa, cold espresso and sugar syrup. Definitely makes me go “Hmm”. This is not the weirdest drink recipe in the book!* It is still in print in Oz and I have a small desire to send a copy to Son Who Cooks just to see what he thinks of it.

*Actually, “weirdest” would probably be the Swinging Tit:

Before we took over the Oxford Tavern, it was a working-man’s bar with strip shows and jelly wrestling. The locals nicknamed it the Swinging Tit. How could we not name a drink after such a salubrious history?
PER SHOT
1x85 gm packet of jelly crystals (”Jell-O” to US-ians)
30 ml (1 fl. oz.) rye whiskey
Prepare the jelly as instructed on the packet.
Once the jelly has set, empty the jelly into a soda syphon and charge the syphon with 2 bulbs, shaking vigorously after each charge.
Pour the rye into a shot glass. Squirt the jelly foam into another shot glass (or over your other hand).
Shoot the rye and swallow the jelly chaser.

I accept no responsibility for the consequences if anybody is mad enough to actually try this.

>197 haydninvienna: I would be more inclined to shoot the rye and toss the jello chaser down the sink.