RussellinVT’s Comments (group member since Apr 11, 2024)

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

I finished La Rôtisserie de la reine Pedauque, and it continued entertaining, or at least stimulating, to the end - except for some passages where Anatole France went on too long with the fabulations of the lunatic alchemist who says there are ethereal creatures he calls Salamanders and Sylphs in the air all around us who couple with humans to produce promising young persons like Jacques the turn-spit. Those passages dragged. What AF’s idea was I just couldn’t make out. Equally obscure is why he makes an old Kabbalist such a malevolent figure.

But, to give an idea of the entertaining side, one central scene is a comical debate over the dinner table. A devil-may-care military gentleman is due to fight a duel with Jacques in the morning over the attentions of the coquettish Cathérine but in the meantime has invited Jacques and his mentor, the urbane and learned abbé, to sit down to a fine dinner with himself and Cathérine, who for her part listens to it all unconcernedly. The military man shocks the abbé by professing to be an atheist, while the pious abbé, who is also an admirer of the female form, argues for the absolute unimportance of virtue in attractive young women - Virtue, like a crow, inhabits only ruins, it lives in the hollows and wrinkles of the flesh, look at this delightful young lady, where in her person, I ask you, could there be any room for virtue, she is full of sap, and meaty, and well-rounded, no one could sensibly expect her to be virtuous. And so on for several pages.

Interesting obits of Frederick Forsyth, who has died at 86. I read The Day of the Jackal only recently and was quite taken with it as a thriller, very involving. I particularly liked it for the authentic feel of 1960s France, where he lived for a time as a young man. But I’m not really tempted to read any of his others.

P.S. And I’ve just remembered that in those early days the “memory” was not something digital but a set of cards with little rectangular holes punched in them.

I’ve finished Bomber by Len Deighton. This brick of a book was a good read, the first half all scene-setting, the second half the massive raid, up in the air with the Lancaster crews trying to locate the target in the darkness and confusion while evading the deadly flak, the searchlights and the skilful German night-fighters, and on the ground under the bombs, all destruction and death. There was a lot of convincing technical detail. The story felt both realistic and grim.

Footnote: This was the first ever work of fiction written on a word-processor, in 1969. LD describes in an endpiece how this came about. His secretary retyped the early chapters 20+ times. Then he was able to do it 20+ times himself. Today it’s hard to imagine not being able to amend with ease. When I started work in an office in 1971, word-processing was just starting. It was done by a specialist group, and was for long documents only. Lowly people like me barely ever got access. But that taught you to get it right, as best you could, first time.

Tam wrote: "I have very much enjoyed 'Innocence' by Penelope Fitzgerald, Pub. 1986 (Collins) ..."

Interesting thought, Tam, that her style depends on some sleight of hand – not that this much of a problem for me, as her style is so winning. I agree on Offshore, which left me wondering what the fuss was about. Contrast The Blue Flower, which I thought close to perfection. I haven’t read Innocence, so that will be a good opportunity to look out for tropes. Anything that can be mentioned alongside Elizabeth von Arnim is a hot recommendation.

AB76 wrote: "the break will have made you anticipate it more i'm sure....! is it the university of columbia version?"

Yes indeed. I can't imagine anyone doing it better.

...

Meanwhile, on page 248 of Len Deighton's Bomber, just over half way through, the Lancasters have finally taken off. Good scene-setting, good characterizations, now for the action. It's clearly going to be appalling.

A very nice copy the Ernst Junger war journals arrived yesterday from Thrift Books in Texas, so I shall be resuming that highly impressive slow read.

giveusaclue wrote: "I'm back to the history genre with
..."

I always find the Beaufort story impossibly complicated (are they in? are they out?), so a book specifically on them might help. Nathen Amin is a new name to me.

Continuing with The Age of Wonder. I’ve finished with the main section on Banks, though the index suggests he is omni-present through the rest of the book, because, while he made only one more voyage himself, to Iceland, he was President of the Royal Society (strolling Kew with the King and planning what we see today) for 41 years and as such was an indefatigable encourager and promoter of other expeditions. Also, I hadn’t made the connection between him and Omai, the splendid, astute and charming man portrayed by Reynolds who was brought to England by Cook from his second visit to Tahiti. Banks was his principal friend and sponsor, introducing him to everyone. Omai’s first words to the George III, after making a balletic bow: “How do, King Tosh.”

Now Holmes is moving on to the extraordinary William Herschel, who was making a living as a musician in Bath but developed a self-taught passion for astronomy and built with his own hands the most advanced and powerful telescopes then known. And his equally extraordinary young sister Caroline, who had a passion for comments. Herschel’s opinions could be heterodox. One early paper, based on his close observations of our nearest neighbour, argued that the Moon was the planet and Earth the satellite.

AB76 wrote: ...theories and ideas, that the englishman disdains, but not Greene."

A way of looking at him that I hadn't thought of - a good touchstone for the next time I read him.

AB76 wrote: "are you reading that in french Russ?"

Yes. It's not that difficult. What I do need the notes for is the slew of names that AF throws out - medieval and renaissance writers I'd never heard of.

In To the Finland Station Edmund Wilson devotes a chapter to showing that Anatole France was terminally unserious, the final representative of a disintegrating bourgeois tradition, addicted to history as an entertaining picture instead of history with determination and purpose.

Speaking for myself, I have rather enjoyed the ones of AF that I have read, and currently I’m some way into one set in the Paris of about 1700, La Rôtisserie de la reine Pédauque, which translates roughly as “The Roast-meat Shop at the sign of the Web-Footed Queen” (pédauque being derived from the term in langue d’oc for having webbed feet like a goose). A young man, the son of the rôtisseur, recounts how he left his job as spit-turner and got his education in life and letters, e.g. listening to a learned abbé, a disreputable capuchin monk and a mysterious natural philosopher as they debate, over dishes of succulent goose pâté, and with much reference to alchemical authorities, whether Salamanders are creatures of the Adversary and whether they can truly survive in a fire. It’s all done in a comical mock-serious tone and so far it’s very enjoyable.

Normally I never look at an introduction until afterwards. This time I checked the Preface to see if the period really was 1700 and not, in view of the language and the Rabelaisian/Faustian overtones, the late 1500s. From the little I read it seems the editor, very solemn, thinks it is not a jest at all.

Welcome to the new thread, and thank you to gpfr for the guidance on lists.

Just to continue on the weather theme, we too are experiencing shorter springs. In no time at all, ten days or so, you seem to move from glacial winter to summer heat. The fall is also getting warmer and moving later. Fifty years ago the height of the fall colour was the last weekend of September. Now it is more like the third weekend of October. It’s still glorious when it arrives. Native Vermonters like to say Vermont has three seasons – July, August, and winter. The old joke doesn’t apply any more.

I keep hearing new words that I can’t ever imagine myself using. Two that came up in the last couple of weeks are aprioristically (sic, used to mean approaching an issue a priori) and the verb to exponentiate (an expression in mathematics used by the speaker to mean get a lot larger). I’m happy to leave them to a younger generation. No doubt they will one day seem normal.

AB76 wrote: "I'm in the final 80 pages or so of the majestic Vossby Patrick White(1957), a novel i decided to read as a challenge after negative White reads in my late teen..."

I remember the negativity about White, and probably as a result I've never read anything by him. But he did get the Nobel Prize. So, given your strong reviews I may pick him up at some point.
...

I'll close this thread in about an hour.

AB76 wrote: "how hot does Vermont get, is it a slog of 30c days by July and August, like in Canada?"

We used to get maybe a week of 90-94 degrees F (32-34 C) at around the start of August, and it was so short we didn’t bother with any air-conditioning. The rest of the summer you could rely on a steady 80-85 degrees F (26-29 C), which is why people from the city would reckon to escape here for July & August. In about the last 10-15 years that one week has extended to two-three weeks and sometimes longer. So it's kind of a mini-slog and we have put in some A/C – not whole house which many Americans would expect wherever they go, just one of those window units in one room, which is perfectly fine for us.

AB76 wrote: "i wanted to check the latest frosts recorded in the UK..."

We’re certainly seeing the effects of climate change here – milder and shorter winters, and more violent summer storms, the change very evident since we started coming here 30 years ago. But it still gets ferociously cold for periods, and – something I never experienced in England – the ground freezes iron-hard for 2-3 months. Late snow is actually not a problem. If the ground below has thawed, the snow insulates it from any sub-zero air above. So it is possible to start early with plants that don’t mind a degree of cold – peas, parsley,etc.

All of which leads me smoothly to botany, and Joseph Banks, the enthusiastic and very wealthy Linnaean, who at age 23 proposed himself as Chief Botanist for Cook’s first trip to the South Seas to observe the transit of Venus and (under secret instructions from the Admiralty) to explore and chart what came to be New Zealand, Australia and Tasmania. The story of their three-month stay in Tahiti is told beautifully by Richard Holmes in The Age of Wonder (which I’ve started properly from the beginning, instead of just dipping in). There’s as much attention to anthropology and the lives of the natives (diet, customs, language, sexual practices, the utterly bizarre sport of surfing in the ocean) as to the science of plants and wild life. The determined and charming Banks was the mediator when sharp issues arose over the contrasting attitudes to property – the Europeans ready to shoot and kill whenever there was thieving (especially of anything metal, nails by the bagful, since there was no ore of any description on the island), the islanders themselves thinking only in terms of communal ownership. Banks, who out of his own pocket funded a team of six to assist him on the voyage, recorded it all in his journal and returned home with specimens by the thousand, though sadly not many drawings, as the artist he brought along died in Sumatra, along with about half the ship’s complement. In short order he was famous and elected a member of the Royal Society. But he was a changed man and could no longer contemplate marriage and domesticity with the lovely young woman he left behind nearly three years before and who had waited for him all this time. That story ended happily – Banks gave her £500 (getting on for a hundred thousand today) to serve as a dowry, and she married well soon after.

Years ago I began Patrick O’Brian’s biography of Banks and had to give up it was so boring. How could the consummate novelist make such a mess of it? Holmes, using the same material, is a delight.

Somewhat the same here - finished with several books and just starting on others. Plus a lot of time now planting the kitchen garden. The oldsters here say never plant before Memorial Day (last Monday in May) which sounds very late by English standards, but the risk of a frost is definitely there.

Tam wrote: "I miss the lists that used to be somewhere on the right hand side, as to what books had been discussed. Perhaps gpfr could be persuaded back..."

I miss scarlet too. He's still a very regular contributor on WWR.

Not sure about the lists. I'm still seeing Group Home, Bookshelf, Photos etc at the top right. Was there some other list I'm not remembering?

After a final session under the spell of Junger’s war journals the book had to go back to the library. I was less than a third of the way through. I’m getting my own copy.

Tam wrote: "Ahh! The Peregrine at Play. This was inspired by J A Baker's book, 'The Peregrine' a somewhat sad but strangely illuminating book, which was a favourite of Werner Herzog, apparently!..."

Nice piece, Tam. I didn’t know any of that about the "lazy killers." We see quite a few raptors round here, from kestrels to eagles, always on their own.

Leaving Brutalism on one side as a horrible mistake, I think Modernism and where it came from is incredibly interesting. In particular I’d like to read a study on the influence of 20th century science on modern literature, along the lines of what CH Waddington did in Behind Appearance on the influence of modern science on painting. There doesn’t seem to be anything at all on the subject. Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder on the pre-modern era shows it can be done.