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

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

Well, I re-typed it all and it still messed up.

The missing words are:



If they don't show up this time, I'm defeated.

Robert - Here is what GPFR posted some time ago when I needed help.
…

Copy and paste
into your post.

Paste your postimage link between the first pair of inverted commas thus:



Then adjust the width and height and check if it’s OK in preview

Click on (some html is ok).

As I mentioned before, GP added that if you are posting your own photo already on postimage you post that link as above; and if you are posting a photo from elsewhere on the web, you just post the link [between those same two inverted commas] and you don’t need to go through postimage.

Doing Yeats in school we learned about Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World as a controversial play that Yeats helped put on at the Abbey Theatre - there were street riots led by nationalist protestors - but I never read it till now, and what an excellent drama it is – full of personality and movement, and dialogue that feels authentically rustic and yet also, in the mouths of Pegeen Mike and Christy Mahon, beautifully lyrical. The nationalists thought the play insulting to Irish peasantry, and to the honour of Irish women. To me it seems a respectful evocation of their spirit. I’m impressed that such a story should even have occurred to him, a member of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. I shall have to learn more about his life and work.

The Dover edition includes an interesting introduction by Synge himself, who clearly knew what he was aiming for in this play. It’s worth quoting what he says about using the language of rural working people:

“This matter, I think, is of importance, for in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words, and at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form. In the modern literature of towns, however, richness is found only in sonnets, or prose poems, or in one or two elaborate books that are far away from the profound and common interests of life. One has, on one side, Mallarmé and Huysmans producing this literature; on the other, Ibsen and Zola dealing with the reality of life in joyless and pallid words. On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy…”

Riders to the Sea, a one-act accompaniment in this edition, is written in the same style. Even In a short space he conjures a dense tragedy from the hard lives of fishermen. I know a little of that life, having grown up in a fishing town. It was a regular occurrence to hear of men lost overboard in the icy northern seas.

AB76 wrote: "...Catholics formed 30% of the colony of NSW, far higher than in the UK, which is probably due to convict populations rather than imigrants...."

That is very high, isn't it? They must have been largely Irish, and since this pre-dates the Famine my guess is that transportation was a standard sentence for Irish criminals.

The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton, a professor at Johns Hopkins, which came out in 2023, explores how three very different people – an idealist, a fabulist and a physicist – held converging views on the perception of reality. His argument is that Kant, Borges and Heisenberg each thought that the assumption on which we all base our daily lives, our belief in an ascertainable objective reality, is an illusion. The closer we think we get to an ultimate tangible truth the more elusive it becomes. We’re probably most familiar with this in the realm of quantum physics, where the foundational proposition is that we cannot know simultaneously both the position and the momentum of a particle, because to measure one is to lose the other. I don’t pretend to understand these mysteries in any depth. Egginton does an excellent job on the biographies of the three men. In the analysis of their thought he did seem to me to engage in a good deal of elaborate refinement that didn’t add to the substance. The best chapter was the one at the end, which I actually read first, on Heisenberg’s interrogation by his American captors in 1945. And it is one pithy statement of Heisenberg, to which Egginton comes back again and again, that I found most graspable and indeed memorable: “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

AB76 wrote: "before i forget, i just watched ep2 of the netflix doc on the vietnam war..."

That definitely sounds like one to watch. It's the sort of thing that you used to expect from one of the mainstream channels, and now it's coming from Netflix, who not so long ago were competing with the video store by sending you CDs of old movies in the mail, in red envelopes.

AB76 wrote: "its so odd how some books can be "difficult" and others not...."

I’ve already had some great reads in 2025 but I’ve also had a more than usual number of the not-so-great – which leaves me in the position of having to decide whether to give a negative review, something on the whole I prefer to avoid. I waver – some people may have enjoyed it, so why do they need to hear from me; on the other hand, some may prefer to be warned.

Tam wrote: "I have read a couple of her novels along time ago. I remember nothing of them, except a slight remembrance of the taste of something sour being left in the experience... ..."

I also had the general impression of her being an unhappy person, leading a life that was cloistered and almost secretive, and I think you put a sympathetic case for her outlook. Whether her novels can provide the enjoyment, or at least the satisfaction, we mainly look for, is more doubtful. I wonder if they will remain in print. I did see that NYRB had a couple of hers in their list, including this one, so that is a kind of imprimatur.

In the last thread AB wrote about the different varieties of “difficult”.

How about difficult in the sense of "not enjoying it at all"? I've never read anything Ivy Compton-Burnett as far as I remember, so I picked one up at random, A House and its Head, and the first 35 pages involve five adults in one family speaking spikey thoughts to each other over breakfast on Christmas morning, 1885, followed by a cold lecture from the vicar, in place of a cheering sermon, and spikey words to the other congregants. The dominant adjectives are fierce, grim, awkward and sullen. I will give it a bit longer, but it will have to show some charm or wit or stylishness pretty soon or I won't make it to New Year.

... Yet it did have a certain momentum, and I kept reading. The story turns eventful, and the dry, in-turned, unsmiling, undeserving head of the house eventually arrives at a place of satisfaction. But with all the deaths and marriages along the way the plot slides close to melodrama, the wit and charm never appear, and the spikeyness never lets up. So even though I finished it I won't be rushing to read another by ICB.

giveusaclue wrote: "I am in Llangollen for a week's holiday. I stopped at a restaurant for lunch on Sunday to find it had a huge 2nd hand bookshop above. I had a look round but found it a bit overwhelming to be honest..."

We spent a book-hunting holiday in North Wales years ago. We passed through Llangollen and were impressed by the deep, dark greenness of the valley - without realizing we should have stopped..

"...As for the Cally,, compared to Tottenham High Road it is a lot more affluent but also afflicted with the London plague of jumbled, bittiness, where a row of tatty, dirty shops and small independent mosques and backpack hostels, merges into a classic victorian terrace..."

Which sounds like a good setting for a multi-family state-of-England novel, which is what I understand Andrew O'Hagan's Caledonian Road to be. It's certainly very thick, as, surprisingly, I was able to look at it in our village library, who have bought it for the collection. I don't think that anyone on GR has read it. Perhaps someone on WWR, but I don't remember.

On the posting of images, it might take me a bit to put up GP’s detailed guidance as it looks as though I’ll have to re-type it.

...

AB - But perhaps you were there to support Palace? They were excellent, carving through Spurs’ defence at will.

Welcome to the new thread. Warm and sunny spring weather has finally arrived in our corner of Vermont, after a couple of weeks of more or less constant rain. I’m looking forward to planting season in the garden while still maintaining a varied reading agenda. Currently I’m on:
A German Officer in Paris (much to go, outstanding)
The Rigor of Angels (almost finished, comment in due course)
Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649-60 (about half-way through)
A novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett (on which I’ll report separately).
A couple of plays by JM Synge

AB76 wrote: "Spent yesterday at the football in Tottenham with my 6yo nephew, he was a delight ,..."

Glad he enjoyed it despite Spurs' less than impressive performance. I watched it on TV and thought this has to be the end for Ange, even if they do win the Europa League.

The Cally Road must have changed a bit since I lived there 50+ years ago, as I don't remember any bookshops at all!

...

It’s three weeks since we started this cycle, so I will open a new thread in an hour or so.

Robert wrote: "RussellinVT wrote: "...I'd be interested to see the illustration...."

I'd appreciate the help.

A while ago GPFR posted some detailed advice, which I kept, but at this moment it is refusing to copy over to this post. I think the short answer is to go via www.postimage.com. You post an image there, either from elsewhere on the web or your own photo, and then copy the link from that site into the post you want to make here.

I'll try later to reproduce GP's detailed advice here.

I should say that even going through postimage I only ever managed to post a link to a photo, rather than the actual photo. (I did once succeed in getting an image into our Photos section but that was by accident and I never managed it again.)

Robert wrote: "I've found an illustration-- Apuleius Metamorphoses Bartolomeo di Bartoli. I'm trying to upload it!"

I'd be interested to see the illustration. Need a bit of help uploading? Not that I'm very adept at it myself.

AB76 wrote: "....Is yours the columbia university edition, if so i think its a brilliant work all round, a good introduction, index etc..."

Yes, the Columbia edition, and this is the one I'll get. One or two typos, but otherwise exemplary.

Back to the war diaries of Ernst Junger. Out in the country he seemed to enjoy his time with the French people on whom he was billeted, and they seemed genuinely to regret it when he left. Now he has been transferred to headquarters in Paris. Is it that he chooses to write chiefly of the cultured, non-martial side of his life, or did he really have only the lightest of military duties, which are mentioned, if at all, in the margins? (One exception: the minutely observed execution of a deserter.) Either way, every page records the response of a civilized man to the most civilized of cities. So far, early 1942, he keeps company with like-minded officers, and those in the Parisian artistic community who are hospitable to the Germans. He seems to have little to do with actual collaborators. But increasingly he shows caution in what he says.

Though a year in, I have acres to go. I find myself so seduced by the sensitivity of his writing (on the classics, authors, antiquarian books, etchings, flowers, entomology, language, life) that I am reading more and more slowly. I shall never finish it before the book has to be returned, and I have no wish to. I shall have to get my own copy.

Robert wrote: "He heeded the voice of a dog?..."

We don't actually hear much about those conversations with the dog, or what the dog thought. When he killed his parents he killed their dog as well. Unclear whether that was the dog he talked to.

AB76 wrote: "RussellinVT wrote: "...If I have time, I might have a go at translating what the sketch artist said and post it here, just to give a taste."

that would be interesting to see..."

OK, here goes (free translation).

To recap, the killer is asked a question about his dog by the avocat for the defence, and the man collapses. You hear his head hit the floor, and see his legs waving in the air over the dock. He makes a wild groaning noise that freezes the blood. In the courtroom there is a glacial silence. The Présidente calls an adjournment. Carrère and the sketch artist, an old guy in a cardigan with a white beard, stand outside having a smoke, which normally Carrère wouldn’t do but now he needs one.

The artist then says, referring to the avocat: “You understand what he was trying to do.” Carrère admits that he doesn’t. The artist: “He wants to make him crack. He’s thinking that it is all lacking life, guts, that the people in court are finding him cold, so he wants them to see the flaw in the armour. But what he doesn’t realise is that it’s horribly dangerous to do that. I’m telling you, I’ve been trailing my design box round every court in France for forty years, I have the eye. This guy is very seriously ill, the psychiatrists are mad to let him stand trial. He controls himself, he controls everything, that’s how he can hold himself upright, but if you start provoking him [titiller] in places where he can’t control things any more, he’s going to fall to pieces [fissurer] in front of everyone, and I assure you, it’s going to be horrific. People think we have a man in front of us, but in fact it is no longer a man, for a long time now it has not been a man. It’s like a black hole, and you’ll see, it will hit us in the face. People don’t know what it is, madness. It’s terrible. It’s the most terrible thing in the world.”