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

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

Bill wrote: "As promised, here is a Gift Link to the NY Times “100 Best Books of the 21st Century”..."

Thanks, Bill, for a diverting read. I clocked up a semi-respectable 18, but I’d probably put fewer than half of them (*) in a list of the 100 best books I’ve read in the 21st century. Both the Hilary Mantels would make my top ten. It’s mainly the classics that do it for me. If I sat down to work it out, Balzac on his own might fill up a couple of percentiles.

Bring Up the Bodies*
Station Eleven*
The Human Stain
Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
The Emperor of All Maladies
The Story of the Lost Child
Olive Kitteridge*
10.04
Tenth of December
Life After Life*
H is for Hawk
White Teeth*
Sing Unburied Sing
Atonement
Austerlitz*
The Corrections
Wolf Hall*
My Brilliant Friend

Tam – Zadie Smith - The exuberance of White Teeth makes it a great one to start with. The Fraud is not bad either. I’m reading her short story collection Grand Union, which I would have to say is middling.

Tam wrote: "I very much would like to read it. Can you send me the link, so that we are on the same page!... ..."

The link’s a bit funny, but here is what worked for me -

:/wiki/neuroesthetics

Tam wrote: "...What I am not sure of is that there are that many neuroscientists that are very interested in how the brain perceives art..."

Tam – Checking Zeki on the net I came across a massive wiki page about “Neuroeshetics” which you might be interested to look at.

CCCubbon wrote: "My ongoing eye condition has made me most aware of visual acuity and different areas of the brain...."

That is a grim situation, CCC. I echo the comments of giveus and AB. How dangerous and distressing life can be without dependable sight.

Tam wrote: "... He doesn't directly state a particular theory but the assumption seems to be that it is tied into the separate areas of the brain that record different factors from the image. .."

Ah, that does explain things. If the assumption is correct, we have a part of the brain which stores what we each think conforms to “couch” or “jug”, and another part (or parts) where we store anything “non-couch” or “non-jug”. Must be quite a clutter in there!

I’m guessing his diagonal lines will extend out from the image to embrace feelings, emotions and intuitions, and beliefs, since we will all have complex thoughts, beyond the visual, about a couch – I certainly do – and objects that are more prosaic like a jug.

I think I will ask the library to find a copy of Zeki’s book. I don’t at all expect to read the whole book but it would be interesting to dip into.

Time to watch Endless Sunshine again, sad as it is. Jim Carrey shows he can play a part other than comical goofs.

Tam wrote: "My review of Semir Zeki's book ‘Inner Vision - An exploration of Art and the Brain’ at last ..."

Very interesting, Tam, thank you – amusing too. Based on your discussion, I think Robert Delaunay deserves to be better known. On the Zeki theory of visual memory, does he say anything about what happens to the images that are sifted out? If his idea is that they get permanently deleted, I doubt that this fits with the common experience of most of us. More plausible would be the notion that there is another area of the brain where sensations go for eventual retrieval. This happens all the time with, say, sounds and tastes and smells which you can’t immediately place but later do. Even in the particular field of visual memory I wonder how he accounts for what happens a million times over in painting – the unseen, subconscious influence of images drawn by earlier artists.

giveusaclue wrote: "More amazing Labour only got about 34% of the vote."

Yes, very, very low, the lowest share of the vote for the winning party since 1850s (if we ignore MacDonald’s minority government of 1923).

I get this info from wikipedia’s page on UK general elections, a good tabular presentation.

One other observation, which is not facetious: Labour win big when led by lawyers.

With a non-lawyer as leader they have not won since 1974.

The lawyers seem to do a better job of quelling the nutcases on the far left, and as a result Labour look a serious viable alternative to the long-standing Conservative governments.

giveusaclue wrote: "I think the exit polls have been pretty accurate at recent elections."

And broadly right again this time, by the looks of it. So far, out by two on the total number of Labour seats. Off a bit on the Tories: somewhat fewer seats lost to Reform. Very good night for the Lib Dems.

Rather astonishing that increasing your total vote by 1.6% can bring you 211 extra seats.

More understandable when your main opponents lose 19.9% of their vote.

Labour on track for the largest majority since 1832, says The Times (of London). Could the polls be right??

That would outclass the ground shaking elections of 1906, 1945, 1997 and several others.


One advantage of living in the US is that you don't have to stay up late to get the UK election results.

scarletnoir wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "The Lunar Men..."

This sounds really interesting - I don't often read non-fiction..."

Some day I should like to visit the Potteries. I didn’t realise you could still see the old kilns.

The book is written for the general reader but even so there were a few passages where I wished I had a stronger grip on things scientific. I’m sure a proper scientist like yourself would enjoy it.

I’ll share one more story from the book, this one about Erasmus Darwin.

It was from the late 1790s that some of the lasting legends about him come, recorded by his grandson Charles. George III sent for him to be his personal physician, it was said, but he refused. A mysterious gentleman arrived from London to consult him as "the greatest physician in the world, to hear from you if there is any hope in my case." Darwin examined him and declared the issue hopeless, then asked him why, if he came from London, had he not seen the famous Richard Warren, the senior royal physician? "Alas! doctor," came the reply, "I am Dr Warren."

The Lunar Men – Jenny Uglow (2002)

When the influential groups we are familiar with are so often on the artistic side (the Romantics, the Impressionists, Bloomsbury) it is different to meet a society of practical men who gather to discuss their experiments and instruments. Different also for receiving their education, some of them, from the dissenting academies.

Josiah Wedgwood, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin and a half dozen others lived in the Midlands, not far from each other, and met once a month, on a night when the moon was full, so that they could get back safely to their houses. “Their enquiries covered the whole spectrum, from astronomy and optics to fossils and ferns. One person’s passion - be it carriages, steam, minerals, chemistry, clocks - fired all the others.” From start to finish, this long, instructive and wide-ranging account of their mutual enthusiasms, and their often irregular family lives, was immensely readable.

The origin of the Industrial Revolution in Britain can be traced almost to a single evening in 1765 when Watt, at that moment out walking in Glasgow, had the sudden idea that the inefficient steam engines of the day could be vastly improved by having a separate condenser to cool the steam. If he could work out how mechanically to integrate that extra apparatus, there would be no need to wait for the main chamber to cool down before being re-heated to generate a new vacuum.

The Lunar Men were also heavily involved in promoting schemes for the new canal waterways, which were monumentally expensive for the day. One forgets how vital they were, from the 1760s on, for inland businesses. Not only did the price of transport plummet, the barges themselves were far more satisfactory. Before, when Wedgwood’s wares were delivered by cart over deeply rutted roads, a third might arrive broken.

Wedgwood, one learns, had a wooden leg. In his thirties he developed crippling osteomyelitis. Darwin, a full-time practising doctor as well as leading poet and botanist, advised that, despite the risks of shock and haemorrhage and gangrene, the limb had better come off. This operation was too interesting to miss. Wedgwood sat upright in a chair and watched while they did it.

All the while we have Priestley at work in his lab, or vigorously preaching his radical Unitarianism. Once he is at a dinner in Paris, where perhaps unwisely he describes to a young chemist, Antoine Lavoisier, his ideas on dephlogisticated air.

The later chapters are dark. In 1791, a determined mob burns Priestley’s house and books and smashes every piece of his scientific equipment, an appalling story told in fiery detail. The houses of other known dissenters are visited in the same way. Priestley with his family escape and then move well away. He becomes a minister in Hackney, where his friends supply a new lab. The temper of the times had changed. It was now dangerous to be identified as a philosopher. Soon even Hackney became too hot, and Priestley followed his sons to America. Back in the Midlands, the lunar meetings became sporadic.

The epigraph is memorable. Boswell was visiting the Soho Works in Birmingham, where Boulton was building Watt’s new engines. Boulton made a remark that Boswell himself said he would never forget: “I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have – Power.”

…
Some time soon I will tackle The Revolutionary Temper, Paris 1748-1789 by Robert Darnton, which I think will be an interesting companion volume.

scarletnoir wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "I feel very out of touch with French politics. Whatever happened to the centre-right bloc of voters who sustained Chirac and Sarkozy? Has Macron really been that terrible?.."

GP has already given you an answer... in addition, I'll just emphasise that whether or not his policies have been terrible, he's a terrible politician. He comes across as so sure of himself, smug, complacent, that he won't listen to anyone. As you can imagine, after a while this starts to go down like a lead balloon with the electorate.

(Chirac was a consummate and charming politician, if a crook; Sarkozy was like Macron but a crook to boot - he was sentenced to a period of imprisonment - or house arrest, anyway..."

I like your descriptions. It seems we could plot French political leaders on a graph, one axis 0-100% charm, the other 0-100% crookedness.

Gpfr wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "Will someone help me by telling me what the various parties stand for in the French elections and their comparison, if possible, with UK parties. please...."

I find it hard tokeep up with their names!
Here is what seems to me on a quick look a pretty good breakdown. Below the first yellow sections, you've got the different parties:
https://about-france.com/political-pa...."

Thanks for the link, GP. A succinct and clear summary. Para 5 seems plausible to me, i.e. Macron calculated that in the event RN did get most seats and he did have to appoint an RN PM, three years would be plenty long enough for them to fail as a governing party, with him blocking them at every turn.

I feel very out of touch with French politics. Whatever happened to the centre-right bloc of voters who sustained Chirac and Sarkozy? Has Macron really been that terrible? From the headlines it looks as though he’s been done in by just two factors – immigration, and the (rational) raising of the pension age. You have to say the Brits managed the latter much better, doing it gradually in stages. (No one in the US dares touch it.)

AB76 wrote: "...Churchill easily wrote the most but suprised he never tried a novel or two"

Churchill did in fact write one novel, in his twenties – Savrola. I haven’t read it, or even seen a copy. Roy Jenkins gives a couple of pages to it in his biography. He calls it a roman-à-clef. The heroine Lucile is clearly modelled on his mother Lady Randolph. She is married to Morala (Lord Randolph?), the ruler-dictator of a Balkan Ruritania. Lucile is more ethereal and more chaste than the real Lady Randolph but even so she forsakes Morala for the young love interest, Savrola, who weirdly is modelled on Churchill himself, “vehement, high, and daring.” It sold respectably, initially in serial form.

Among 19th century PMs, Aberdeen, Derby and Gladstone all published studies or translations of the classics, but no novels.

Francis - Good spot with Havel.

I’ve been reading the Diary of Anaïs Nin, the first volume, where she and her American banker husband have arrived in Paris in the winter of 1930-31. She has already published her first book, a study of DH Lawrence, and she is now at the start of an affair with Henry Miller and his mesmerising huntress-beauty wife June. I’m enjoying it. For a diary, not much happens. It’s more an intimate meditation on personalities, her own and the Millers’. The writing has an easy, sensuous flow.

I’ve never read any Nin before. I assumed she was French and that the English editions you see around were translations. So I was interested to pick up this battered Livre de Poche – only to discover she was indeed French but wrote in English. No matter. The French is stylish, and fits the locale.

AB76 wrote: "A good reading year continues in the shires with the following:... Something Of Myself by Rudyard Kipling is a short unfinished sort of auto-biog which he was writing in the 1930s before his death. Its a wonderful read,..."

Very tempting, AB, thanks.

Berkley wrote: "I came across a short, positive review of this book tonight: Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955. The review was of the French translation..."

I read it a while back (the English translation) and it was excellent. He manages to show how in a shattered society the human spirit can rise from the depths, while also showing how those with a Nazi past quietly slid back into comfortable positions. The reviewer was right to draw attention to the wide range of materials. The many photos were also telling.

There were afterwords to a couple of historical novels I ready recently.

Zadie Smith in The Fraud does a decent job of explaining what the record does and does not show. Her principal female figure, she reveals, is made to live much longer in the book than she did in real life. This bending of historical truth didn’t bother me, as Mrs Touchet is, you feel, largely a fictional character anyway.

On the other hand, CJ Sansom, in quite a long afterword to Winter in Madrid detailing all his sources, reveals that he changed one significant date in Franco’s campaign, and did it to make the facts fit his plot. I found myself more than a bit aggravated. I know it shouldn’t matter but I felt he was tampering with history.

Bill wrote: "...Yes, the theory of color discussions were pretty tedious, though I found it interesting how extremely thin-skinned Goethe seemed when criticized on that particular topic."

Armstrong describes how the much younger and far less famous Schiller, wanting to introduce himself to the great man, wondered how to do it. He decided to apply himself to a diligent study of Goethe’s theory of colour and then wrote a lengthy and sympathetic appreciation of it with tentative ideas of his own which he submitted for Goethe’s consideration. This subtle flattery worked like a charm. He received an invitation to visit, which was all he needed to begin a long and close connection.