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

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

I finished The Call of the Tribe by Mario Vargas Llosa, an account of his journey from the earnest Communism and Existentialism of his youth, studying from cover to cover each issue of Les Temps Modernes as it came out, to the democratic liberalism of his maturity through seven affectionate assessments of philosophers and writers who particularly influenced him, starting with Adam Smith and ending with Jean-François Revel. A good read, and informative without getting too deep into the weeds.

AB76 wrote: "how did that post get into our forum?"

Search me. Maybe he sent it to every Goodreads page he could find.

I finished Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson. There’s far more detail on the tactics of soccer than any non-specialist could absorb. But there were some good stories. For example, I enjoyed reading about César Luis Menotti, the coach of Barcelona, Atletico Madrid and Argentina in the 1970s and 80s, who is said to have been an ineffably romantic figure, the embodiment of Argentinian bohemianism, a left-wing intellectual, philosopher and artist. This is one of his quotes, a bit unusual for a manager:

“There is a right-wing football and a left-wing football…Right-wing football wants to suggest that life is a struggle. It demands sacrifices. We have to become of steel and win by any method…obey and function, that’s what those with power want from players. That’s how they create retards, useful idiots that go with the system.”

RussellinVT wrote: "AB76 wrote: "My grandparents had bookcases galore...So i'm delighted to have picked up by chance Paris in Ruins Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism by Sebastian Smee Paris in Ruins by Sebastian Smee..."

P.S. As an illustration of what I was saying about the difference between the two new bookstores, this book wasn't on the shelves at middle-of-the-road Parnassus, but it was right there at The Bookshop.

Tam wrote: "I have read a fair amount of SF in my life. This one attracted me as it was shortlisted for the international Booker prize, and just plain curiosity, and I have perhaps an odd impression of Japan...."

The International Booker - I should have twigged. Look forward to hearing what you think.

Those stories of Japanese friends are singular in one way, but in another perhaps representative of actual Japanese norms.

AB76 wrote: "My grandparents had bookcases galore...So i'm delighted to have picked up by chance Paris in Ruins Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism by Sebastian Smee Paris in Ruins by Sebastian Smee, a book about the commune, Paris and the impressionist movement...."

How funny - I just picked up exactly that book as well, in Nashville, with the same eager anticipation. In my case I didn't learn about the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune until I did A-Level History (and French - Daudet's Contes du Lundi was a set book), but those conflicts I found riveting then and ever since (Michael Howard, Emile Zola, etc.)

Tam wrote: "I have set off reading 'Under the Eye of Big Bird' which turns out to be a novel about the hazards of cloning, rather than surviving a dystopian future catastrophe...."

Out of curiosity, Tam, what was it that led you to this book? I didn't recollect you being interested in futuristic sci-fi. The idea of babies being brought up by AI mothers is alarming but no longer dismissable as fantasy. Indeed, it's rather far-sighted for a 2016 novel.

Justine – Lawrence Durrell. I finished my latest, always enjoyable, re-read, and will soon move on to Balthazar. As I remember, only there do things begin to fall into place. For the moment it is an impressionistic examination of movements of the heart, and of the melancholy that afflicts the leading characters, with the ancient city as a dreamscape background. The richness of the prose, culminating in the great set-piece of the Mareotis duck hunt, does at times feel overdone. If there were a law against sumptuary in the writing of novels, Durrell would be a repeat offender. But really it’s a very classy performance, with just as many moments that are not overdone, and are instead wonderful, for example: when Melissa tells Nessim in terms that Justine is no longer faithful to him, that phrase “stood quivering in his mind, like a thrown knife.”

AB76 wrote: "Iron Cross is a UK magazine that covers stories from the German military in WW1 and WW2...The latest find is the Siebel Ferry, a kind of floating landing craft cum anti aircraft battery originally created for Operation Sealion."

Also very interesting. That photo does make them look quite imposing. I'm not familiar with Iron Cross magazine, but found there is quite a long piece about Siebel ferries on wikipedia. This mentions that after a few prototypes they developed a model that could cope with the waves of a Force 6 gale. So if they could have built enough of them - and achieved air superiority - a cross-Channel invasion might in fact have been feasible.

AB76 wrote: "The Victorian Crisis of Faith is really making me think, this slim volume of lectures published by the Church of England publishing house, the SPCK, has been a great find...."

Interesting, AB. Years ago I tried reading Newman's Apologia but didn't get far either.

AB76 wrote: "rumour is that Shaw wrote that section about the Indianapolis"

Never knew that either. Think I'll have to explore his work.

...

Apropos living Vermonters - "and your good self of course!"

A nice compliment, tks. I actually I hardly count - I think of myself more as a goodwill ambassador for the UK, and for this purpose maintain a strong British accent!

I've finished La délicatesse by David Foenkinos. It’s the story of how a beautiful woman slowly recovers from a horrible event and against her inclination finds love with an unprepossessing and modest man, who is himself all hesitation and yet poetic in his simplicity. It’s related in the drollest manner imaginable, and the sweetest. What a terrific find.

It turns out that the author has written many other works of fiction, including a play and stories for children, and has been translated into thirty languages. This is his most popular work. I look forward to reading various of his other novels.

The book was one of a large number of used books in one Nashville store each with a sticker giving the name and address of a certain lady. A bit of searching around showed that she died a couple of years ago, in her nineties. There were some lovely appreciations. She had been very active in the local community, including establishing a branch of the Alliance Française, and a French conversation group. The family presumably had no use for a stack of paperbacks in French and disposed of them en bloc to a dealer. I call myself the happy and fortunate inheritor of her enthusiasm, and in due course I will continue her legacy by passing them on in turn to another transatlantic Francophile.

AB76 wrote: "I dont think many are aware that Robert Shaw, celebrated Bond villain, Jaws star and top stage actor, was an author too..."

I did indeed never know that (but I read the Leonard Cohens). As it happens, we just re-watched Jaws for the umpteenth time a couple of nights ago. My favorite scene, among many great moments, is the one in the cabin when first they compare scars ("She broke my heart!") and then Robert Shaw holds you fascinated with the story of the USS Indianapolis.

AB76 wrote: "Bill Mckibben writes of Vermont in the TLS Russ, extolling the benefits of the state he lives in and its community spirit, good to read, i thought of you as i read it!..."

He is probably Vermont’s third most famous living person – after Bernie and Ben’n’Jerry.

(Among famous dead Vermonters we have of course a powerful claim to Rudyard Kipling.)

Tam wrote: "I have had one of my worst months for a very long time, with a brief but very welcome break to go on a days pilgrimage to Wells..."

Sorry you’re having a bad time, Tam. I don’t know any of the books you’ve borrowed, but I hope they help. I liked the account of your trip to Wells, and all the music.

I looked up the Lucian Freud portraits of Caroline Blackwood. One when she was younger has her looking rather innocent and at peace. The one of her older, as you say, is full of tension: https://artlyst.com/news/lucian-freud...

Maybe I got a bit carried away with “some”! Having said that, any worthwhile editor should really have helped her out.

Surprisingly, the used bookstores in Nashville had quite impressive collections of books in French. I picked up on spec quite a few modern novels by authors I don’t know (but all from Folio/Gallimard, which gives a reasonable assurance of merit). I’ve started on one called La délicatesse by David Foenkinos, which is very droll, except now tragedy has just struck, so I'm looking forward to see how it develops. It was made into a movie with Audrey Tautou.

Another book picked up in the same place was Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, a Brazilian writer of Ukrainian origin who was a new name to me. This slim volume came with an endorsement from Colm Tóibín. Though appearing to be fiction it had no story and was more a strange meditation, made up of short passages of a few sentences, on how to capture each instant of “the pure present”. It seems to have a cult fame. One for reading slowly.

One book I picked up (at The Bookshop) was a new edition of a 90-page 1976 story called The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood, the well-born bohemian who had a successful writing career later in life, after successive marriages to famous men (inc. Lucian Freud and Robert Lowell).

This was, I thought, a moderately interesting psychological drama, cleverly constructed as a series of letters to an imaginary correspondent, up to the point half-way through when she opens a trap-door under what we assume to be the facts of the situation. It then becomes very intriguing. I don’t know her other writings. This novella is worth a look.

It did have one real stylistic failing, a drastic overuse of the word “some”. Quite apart from the constant “someone”, “something”, “somewhere”, and “somehow”, we regularly get phrass such as “like some prisoner”, “like some nurse”, “in some complicated way”, “in some forlorn way”, and a repeated ”like some kind of”. In my book this is a sign of laziness on the part of the author, and of culpable negligence on the part of the editor.

We were in Nashville for a few days, to visit a son who has recently moved there. The downtown music scene is lively and raucous. The centre of it all is a stretch of Broadway where virtually every building is a bar with a live band, the music blasting out into the street, and they don’t wait till the evening to get started - several were pounding it out by 10.30 on Sunday morning. We’ll take in more of the music on a future visit, and fortunately there is plenty of it going on outside the centre – we listened to an outstanding jazz trio one night in a bar in a quiet neighbourhood. More than one regular Nashville resident told us they never go downtown.

What occupied us more this time was the very good range of bookstores. One of the used bookstores was a huge converted warehouse, with a mezzanine for a vast selection of CDs and LPs. Many of the books were so cheap (quality paperbacks for $0.50) the customers were walking round with shopping carts.

Among new bookstores, the most famous is Parnassus, the store co-founded by Ann Patchett with Reece Witherspoon (who, we were told, has since moved on). This was a perfectly good general store, with an emphasis on contemporary authors, and good sections for children and young adults. To be honest, we found it a bit unexciting. The one we liked much better was about one sixth the size, if that, a one-room place called The Bookshop that was just stuffed with stimulating new books, including many we hadn’t come across before. As an indication of the difference in level, The Bookshop had a lot of NYRB titles (e.g. all three of their John Williams books) and Parnassus, as far as I could see, none at all.

I finished A Woman of Substance. I doubt I’ll ever read anything else by Barbara Taylor Bradford but am glad to have learned something of her work and style. A book doesn’t have to be high literature to be enjoyable. She has the skill to move your emotions.
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Gold and Iron arrived today and I’ve been dipping in. Looks good.
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We’re travelling for a few days, so I’m unlikely to be posting until later next week.