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

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

AB76 wrote: "its a sad day when good journalism gets paywalled"

Yes, indeed. I wonder if anyone else remembers when The Observer was an essential purchase in the 1970s – to read Clive James’ laugh-out-loud TV reviews if nothing else. A bunch are collected in The Crystal Bucket.

AB76 wrote: "... i'm sure the Observer content was basically Guardian branded on a Sunday on the website?"

That's always what I thought, and I never saw anything to suggest otherwise - never an Observer masthead, for example.

Gpfr wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "... The Memoirs are a brilliant read...."

It was me 😉

Ah - a big smiley thank you.

scarletnoir wrote: "... I bought a version of Anna D.'s Memoirs about a year ago, but it's still on the TBR pile. It won't stay there forever, though.."

The Memoirs are a brilliant read. I think it was Berkley who first recommended them here.

“I wonder if Wilson is going to make the Bakunin/Stavrogin link.”

No, he doesn’t. Instead he picks up an idea of GB Shaw that Bakunin was the model for … Siegfried. Wagner met him in the street in Dresden at the time of the uprising in 1849, when Wagner was the conductor of the Dresden Opera. Bakunin had rushed to the city, and in the days following took a leading part in the defence against Prussian troops. Siegfried? Wilson says nothing further, moving on to tell the story of the terrible Nechaev, who when it comes to merciless revolutionary action makes Bakunin himself look anaemic.

scarletnoir wrote: "Aaargh!

Well, unwisely I continued to dig the subject as I was sure I'd seen a link from 'The Demons' to Bakunin before..."

Fantastic, scarlet, thanks for all that. I’d been thinking it was time to re-read Demons (The Devils in my old Penguin/David Magarshack) and this is all the prompt I need. Also, I thought the name of Leonid Grossman was familiar, and the reference to the Memoirs of Anna Dostoevsky in the French Wikipedia entry explained it. I wonder if Wilson is going to make the Bakunin/Stavrogin link.

The book I’ve been reading fitfully, when not diverted by great novels, is To the Finland Station. I’d forgotten how far it is a succession of biographies, which Wilson retells with zest. Currently it’s Bakunin, and it’s not far short of incredible. The eldest of ten children, growing up idyllically on a country estate, all tender feelings and intellectual excitement, as if prefiguring Turgenev or Chekhov, he incited each of them to revolt against their father/their husband/their lover, while he himself was passionately in love with one of his sisters. Though eventually he married, he remained impotent all his life (incest taboo, says Wilson). He turned his volcanic energy first into immersive Hegelianism - his literary group’s idea of fun was to toast the Hegelian categories, each in turn, from Pure Existence to the Divine Idea - and then to acts of absolute destruction, for which he blamed, who else, his despotic mother. I’m agog for the next bit.

Tam wrote: "I think that the journalists are on strike today..."

Thanks, Tam. That certainly explains it.

November reads on WWR closed for comments on Dec 4???

Virgin Soil – Ivan Turgenev (1877)

The last, longest, and darkest of his novels. He brings two worlds into collision. One has the familiar landscape of a country estate – the head of the house, a government official, who is “a liberal, and therefore superior to all prejudices”; his lady wife, who is in love with her own loveliness; the poor relations living on charity, one of them a strong-willed young woman; and the neighbours who visit for dinner and cards, including a self-satisfied gent given to throwing out provocatively reactionary remarks, e.g. that he esteems two things only – Roederer champagne, and the knout.

Then there’s a second grouping, of discontented radicals on the fringes of society who look forward to “the event” and are always planning “to act”. Their intense conversations are edgy and ineffectual, and the cause they believe in is largely left vague. We learn that part of the plan is to become “simplified”, that is, to become one with the peasants – who remain uncomprehending.

The two worlds meet when one of the radicals, a brooding student who secretly writes poetry, is taken to the estate for the summer, to be a tutor for the couple’s young son.

Turgenev’s message, and the meaning of the metaphorical title, is that Russia will never be cured of its ills by a single dramatic act. The better course for those who wish to change society is to plough deep, as one would with untilled land. If, as it seemed to me, his usual urbane and ironical style works less well with this material, and the story does rather wander in the middle section, it is still thoughtful on contemporary conditions; and as ever there is the masterly interplay of human relations, especially once the student and the young woman move into the same orbit.

The introduction to the NYRB edition (trans. Constance Garnett) gives a good picture of the social context, and suggests that the expatriate Turgenev understood the outlook of younger Russians much better than his critics allowed. For once it is an introduction that does not give away the plot.

giveusaclue wrote: "Absolutely nothing to do with books but I hope you enjoy these:

https://news.sky.com/story/wildlife-p..."

I'd be stumped for picking the best.

Gpfr wrote: "...I've also read Elizabeth Strout's, Tell Me Everything. I like her books so much...

Thanks for the new thread, GP.

I’ve read a few by Elizabeth Strout and was impressed each time (Olive Kitteridge, Olive Again, Lucy Barton), but The Burgess Boys failed to hold my interest. There was one difference: it was an audio version. I think I’d better try it in print.

giveusaclue wrote: "...Of course, the phrase "going to the wall" comes from the fact that cathedrals had no seating in those times..."

Good one, giveus. I’d forgotten it. The old editions of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable used to be full of excellent origin stories like that. Then an efficient editor got hold of it and removed every explanation that was plausible but to a degree speculative, and destroyed all its charm at a stroke.

AB76 wrote: "Some further light on the Germans in the San Antonio area..."

All very interesting, thanks, AB. I'm going to watch out for any evidence of a German culture surviving in today's Texas.

Gpfr wrote: " I'm enjoying Dino Buzzati's Contes de Noël et autres textes which I've posted about on WWR...."

Following in your tracks. Got it on Kindle.

Gpfr wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "Fortunately, we are allowed to go off topic here. Even as a non-religious person, I find this news delightful:

https://archive.ph/UkLA6"

More pictures here:
https://www.thegua..."

Those are all lovely pictures. The restored interior reminds me of a movie which came out in maybe the 1960s/70s. It might have been The Lion in Winter. It was in colour and there was a scene in a cathedral. I remember being completely surprised at how the stone was clean and bright, which of course it would be 8-9 centuries ago - and how empty it was, with no pews.

AB76 wrote: "Texas and its envelopment into the USA in 1850 has always fascinated me, likewise the California situation a few decades later

In Olmsted's Slave States he travels into West Texas along the New Mexican border.."

Interesting about all the German immigrants. You wouldn’t expect them to opt for such a hot and humid region.

scarletnoir wrote: "Not sure that this belongs here, exactly - but you may remember that I have often praised the 1960s BBC adaptations of the 'Maigret' novels, and further - that I have singled out the set design ..."

That is some career, and I enjoyed reading about it, even though I don’t think I ever saw anything beyond the Maigret, and the Billy Bunter with sets which I remember as looking like cardboard cut-outs. What a talent, to be able to create a believable world with “one bloke and a hammer”.

AB76 wrote: "... I remember i think an article or it may have been the excellent book Confederate Cities that i read, where it suggested the small intelligentsia was actually pro-union and quite at odds with the masses, questioning and curious"

Tks, AB. I remember the book but hadn’t remembered that detail. The Revue belongs to an age when comfortably off people had the leisure to read periodicals where every article was a dense 20 pages. Today it seems to take quite a long time to read one 3 page article in the NYRB!

Apropos slave states, I was visiting relations on the coast of Georgia some years ago and found in a most unlikely place, a small antique store on the sea front of a resort village, a few original copies of Revue des Deux Mondes dating from 1861-62. I bought a couple, just to see what it was like, this periodical that is referred to everywhere. Each was a mix of culture and travel/geography, with articles, for example. On:
- Affairs in Syria
- The Waterloo campaign, in the light of some new documents
- Travels in Italy
- The colonial policy of France
- Picturesque literature
- The navies of Britain and France compared
- The novel in France, from Astrée to René
- A royal marriage project (this article by Guizot) from the time of Henri IV, who shortly after the accession of James VI/I sent an ambassador to London to propose the double marriage of (1) the Dauphin, later Louis XIII, with James’ daughter Princess Elisabeth, then aged 5, and (2) the Prince of Wales (Henry, not Charles), then aged 7, with Elisabeth de France, eldest daughter of Henri IV.

On the assumption that the antique store bought its stock locally, it seems there was at least one person in the slave states who liked to stay informed of current European thinking, and thought it worth paying for these 200-page volumes to be brought through the blockade.

GP/giveus - Thanks for those articles. I wasn’t aware of the pending sale. It looks like something cooked up by K Viner and the CEO of Guardian Media Group, Anna Bateson. The CFO of GMG had better have some convincing figures ready. If I were the Chair of the Scott Trust I wouldn’t leave it at a presentation from them. I would have the now-resigned editor of The Observer attend and make a presentation too.