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

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

Berkley wrote: "I've read Marx's 18 Brumaire but it was quite a few years ago and mostly I just remember finding it an impressive piece of rhetoric. Many people will be familiar with the following quote..."

Remarkable. I had no idea 18 Brumaire, or Marx even, was the source of that quote. I shall definitely ask the library to see if they can find a copy.

I thought I would see what Christopher Clark says about this in Revolutionary Spring (just received). He paraphrases the idea without quoting the quote itself. Bit of a pity not to give Marx the credit for his acid formulation.

AB76 wrote: "Robert wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "Has anyone here read the writings of Karl Marx on contemporary French history - The Class Struggle in France (of 1848-50), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte..."

In reality he was a dangerous, shifty character who wheeler dealed his way back and forth and totally deserved the defeat of 1870-71 that ended his time in the sun. Marx is almost pathological in his hatred of Boney the Lesser...but i also think we wouldnt have Paris as it is now...

Sounds about right. I think you do have to allow that he showed a marked degree of determination and organization and ruthlessness when he had to, achieving his coup d’état - unless that all came from his brother-in-law Morny, the Minister of the Interior.

As for Marx - did you find it an interesting read, Robert? - you wonder if the hatred was due in large part to resentment, that a conspiracy on the right managed to bring off in 1851 what all the forces on the left so manifestly failed to bring off in 1848. I’m acquiring a copy of Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring, so look forward to being educated on that subject.

AB76 wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "Has anyone here read the writings of Karl Marx on contemporary French history ..."

i have read some Marx but none of those...i want to read the Bonaparte one, Marx was scathing about him in the collection of journalism i read a few months ago

I'm thinking of the Bonaparte one too, if only because it ties in with the start of the Rougon-Macquart cycle.

I’ve finished a rewarding re-read of A Sportsman’s Notebook by Ivan Turgenev (Everyman edition, translators Charles and Natasha Hepburn – he at one time our man in Canberra, she born a Bagration). The narrator has us understand that his main business is hunting, which he does, not in a lordly way, on horseback, but on foot with a gun and a dog, tramping through fields and marshes in search of blackcock, in all kinds of weather. Along the way he encounters people of every degree of fortune, from landowners who are hard and proud to serfs who are wretched and fatalistic. His mild-mannered questions encourage each of them to tell their history. Most wretched of all is the woman in The Live Relic, once again the outstanding piece, pure pathos. Even without the magnetic stories, some two dozen of them, Turgenev would excel as a nature writer. It is all set, incidentally, in the region of Kursk, today again a battlefield.

Gpfr wrote: "[bookcover:Notes from the Henhouse: From the author of O CALEDONIA, a delightful springtime read full of pigs, ponds and fresh air|..."

I read your comment on Elspeth Barker over on WWR and failed to make the connection with the wonderfully witty-sad O Caledonia. Now that I'm tuned in, the that set of essays does look interesting.

... taught to think for myself!

P.S. In Siracusa there is a basilica, very bare inside, with a late Caravaggio, The Burial of Saint Lucia, which looks nothing much in the dimness of normal light but is quite wonderful when you insert one euro into a box which provides illumination for two minutes. The saint herself, though central to the story, is not really central to the composition. The really striking figures are the two gravediggers in the foreground.

Has anyone here read the writings of Karl Marx on contemporary French history - The Class Struggle in France (of 1848-50), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (of 1852) and The Civil War in France (of 1871)? Edmund Wilson in To the Finland Station calls them ”one of the cardinal productions of the modern art-science of history…electrical…Marx is here at his most vivid and his most vigorous.”

Tam wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "Tam wrote: "I have lost my automatic updating system, on Goodreads ..."

Sicily was great, thanks, and still a pleasure to think about every day. If on your travels you ever find yourself in the direction of Catania, there is a wonderful hotel that I can recommend with bedrooms overlooking an arcaded square with lots of cafés and activity and people strolling, a converted palazzo full of beautiful antique furniture and vibrant, mostly figurative, modern art. You almost wish for a rainy day, so that you can stay in and absorb it all.

Guildford, I am afraid, is a place that is not so great in my memory – I had a deadly six months there studying for Solicitors’ Finals. Having spent three years at university being talk to think for myself, I now went to three or four lectures a day where you were required to take down every word dictated by the lecturer and then go back to your digs and learn those notes by heart, and be tested on how well you knew them with an exam every two weeks. I never went to the Watts Gallery. Clearly I should have, as I have since learned to love GF Watts. The Lever Gallery in Port Sunlight, with the fabulous Leightons and other great Victorians, is another place I should like to visit one day.

Tam wrote: "I have lost my automatic updating system, on Goodreads. Does anyone know why this might have happened? I have to scroll back to September in order to access it. Pretty soon it will be quite a lot o..."

Tam - Very aggravating. I wouldn't bother trying a technical fix, unless it is really easy. I would just cancel your existing account and start a new one (which I had to do once) with a new name. How about Not Tam? Though this might mean that your reviews would also have to be the mirror image of what you actually think.

Passion simple – Annie Ernaux. Exactly that, an account of a passionate affair, in which every aspect of the passion itself is more central than the personalities and backgrounds of the man and the woman. After seeming at first negligible it did acquire a degree of depth – but not a lot: a tale of 25 pages set with wide margins and long gaps to fill 75. This was my first by her, and my main thought was, this can’t be an example of her strongest work, can it?

Thankfully not, because I went on to read Mémoire de fille, another slim volume, which proved absorbing, and at times gripping, a scrupulous, unsparing, cool-eyed examination of her much younger self, a girl of 18, leaving home in 1958 for a summer job at a sort of sanatorium for children, the very first time she, an only child, has done anything not in the company of her parents, in particular her severely watchful mother, this girl who is the star student at her convent school in small-town Normandy but who knows nothing of the world beyond what she reads in books, a girl who has spent every previous summer alone in her room above the small family grocery, who has never been anywhere except once to Lourdes when she was 12, and who, leaving off her bottle-thick glasses, is now intent on finding romance and losing her virginity.

Every shade of this vivid experience causes her to reflect on her sense of self, even as, shortly after, we follow her to London to be an au pair. In N12 the future laureate gorges herself on trifle, lemon curd, and Dairy Milk. She also becomes an expert shoplifter. Nothing is glossed over. All this against the background of the movies, the songs and the books of that time.

So now I am interested and will be searching out her larger works.

Years ago I wrote not to the author himself but to the London office of Yale Publishing regarding John Wilkes,, then just out, by Arthur Cash (the late professor of history at SUNY New Paltz). After saying I had found it a marvellous read (which it was - I had ripped through it), I drew their attention to several errors which I thought the copy editor might have picked up and which they might want to correct in the next edition. I had a charming letter back from the chief editor, expressing regret that economies obliged everyone nowadays to cut back on copy editing, and by way of acknowledgment offering me a free pick from their recent titles!!

Great summary, thanks AB. “Ectomic nationalism” may have meant the Czechs wanting to disembarrass themselves of the Slovaks, but my recollection is that the Slovaks also were very willing to separate and, as you say, have a stronger voice.

Interesting that the Czech Rep today is quite heavily populated - a bigger pop. than Sweden or Portugal or Greece. Even Slovakia is up there with Denmark and Finland, all of them above Ireland.

Footnote: My father used to be able to hand-draw a map of Europe starting from the diamond of the Czech lands.

AB76 wrote: " The End of Czechoslovakia (1993) is a brilliant collection of essays about the Czech Rep and Slovakia, their history, unification and then seperation..."

AB - Any thoughts in the book on how these two countries preserved their identity over the centuries? I was once briefly in Prague but have no knowledge of Slovakia. I imagine the protective Habsburg suzerainty had a lot to do with it.

scarletnoir wrote: "To @AB... you wrote in the last thread about John Fowles... I read three of his novels in the 60s and early 70s (in other words, fairly soon after publication). I found 'The Collector' effective but creepy..."

That pretty much sums up my feelings on those three too. I did like the first half of The Magus, before it turned supernatural.

I can add that Mantissa was a nothing of a book, and Daniel Martin was a dreadful, endless bore. On the other hand, The Ebony Tower was a good read, and The FLW continues to be very satisfying. I’ve been thinking of reading it yet again.

Thanks for the new thread, gp, and thanks also for the recommendation of Chemins intimes. It’s interesting how differently the writers in the collection interpreted the brief – from recollections of village schools straight out of Daudet and Alain-Fournier; to the trace of a path created by animals in a deep valley which for them would be as if lit up at night, by all the scents they leave, while human life is still very present, only it’s a hundred metres up in the air, on the viaduct of an autoroute; the private road that does not take us into summer days in the countryside – “je me fous des paysages” – and leads instead through Rabelais and Don Quixote; the Dunkirk convention on romance novels, despised by the literary classes yet essential for those like the grandmother who reads them in secret at night, to escape her family burdens (and was I so different, reading armfuls of Mary Wesley and Patrick O’Brian for relief from daytime office pressures?); and the story of F-H Désérable, who goes to spend two weeks in the house of Julien Gracq on the banks of the Loire, now donated as a writer’s retreat, and ends up confined there for the whole of covid, going nowhere and unable to write a word – but, against all expectations – and how charming this was - finds himself on the road to love.

I know you know all this. I just wanted to share my enjoyment!

I must read FHD's Danton book, much liked here.

scarletnoir wrote: "Berkley wrote: "I like your method and have followed a similar plan with French..."

I think the best approach very much depends on what you plan to do with the language.

I’m sure you’re right. I’m looking only to read books in the original, with some ability to cope as a tourist. Different story if you’re living there. When I was in Paris decades ago I too liked to watch the news readers, and watch the football (the Euros – “Aah, Linnekaire – qu’il est vite!”), and also a particular slinkily attractive weather lady who pouted her lips with vigour and articulated every syllable – couldn’t take your eyes off her.

Berkley wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "Sicily, Italian reading - Thanks for all the comments and the guidance. I've started and stopped a few times learning Italian, but I aim to have a real go this winter."

Which book or other material are you using?..."

The book I’ve used before and aim to use again, even though it’s now pretty old, is Living Italian by Maria Valgimigli. I like it because of its grammatical approach. Once I can see how e.g. the basic verbs are conjugated, and how simple pronouns and plurals work, I’m content to learn by reading a story, very slowly, with a dictionary (Langenscheidt) in hand, making notes of new words and phrases as I go along. This worked for me with French (30 minutes a day without fail), and it’s what Tim Parks did as well, according to his foreword in A Literary Tour. I don’t care for learning from audio lessons, as they leave me very foggy on the syntax.

Orlando Furioso – I’d be interested to know which translation you read. One of our sons knows all the Italian romances, in translation, and he thinks the relatively recent version by A.S. Kline is the best one of O.F.

Sicily, Italian reading - Thanks for all the comments and the guidance. I've started and stopped a few times learning Italian, but I aim to have a real go this winter.

Gpfr wrote: "Any Leonard Cohen fans?

In The G, maybe last year, there was an article about a show by Ballets Jazz Montréal to the music of Cohen. I thought I'd really like to see that..."

Very envious. I was a big fan in student days, and still put on a greatest hits CD every now and then to stir up those memories and the delicious melancholy. I read one of the novels, don’t remember which, and found it rather light. I liked the poetry better and have Poems 1956-1968 in front of me. They read a bit like lyrics, so it’s not a surprise to find here the glorious “Suzanne takes you down”. I saw somewhere that the real-life Suzanne objected strongly to his use of a private and intimate moment.