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

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

Berkley wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "Fille!"

It's all right, I just created a text file and named it 'aux yeux d'or' in order that your post would make sense. Except that in French they use the word fichier (I think?) so not really."

I think you have an excellent filling system there!

Fille!

In a Cardboard Belt!, the collection of essays by Joseph Epstein, arrived, and I immediately turned to the one on Harold Bloom, a 10-page take-down of the critic’s pomposity and pretentiousness, and indeed his frequent incomprehensibility. It was very comical and entertaining. But I felt he entirely missed what made Bloom appeal to people outside the literary-academic world, which is to say, his ability to bring excitement to the business of reading, and an intense enthusiasm for even the most familiar of names. I shall always be grateful to him for giving me an urgent wish to read Balzac. I started with La File aux yeux d’or, first of the eight he picked for the Western Canon, and I didn’t stop until I had read everything there was in Folio Classique.

He’s just as unkind, and just as amusing, on George Steiner, another of my heroes among critics. While allowing that Steiner might be thought (by others, not him) to be a brilliant dramatizer of ideas, and as a lecturer mesmerizing, he doubts Steiner can know as much as he pretends over such a vast range of subjects and languages. Then he drifts away to talk about his own experience of 30 years as a teacher at college level. (“And I should like to add that I don’t think I learned a thing from my students…”). Some admiring references to the philosopher-teacher Alain show that he doesn’t play it all for laughs.

scarletnoir wrote: "Berkley wrote: "How is Eden seen these days, from the perspective of so many decades?"

I am just about old enough to remember Suez - as you say, that is what Eden is remembered for. His policy onSpain's civil war I didn't know about. Another black mark against him."

Yes, the blundering failure of Suez - I think that’s exactly how he’s remembered by virtually everyone who remembers him at all. The policy on Spain will, I think, be known only to specialists. His being an early anti-appeaser might be a bit better known. He resigned in early 1938 over Chamberlain’s dealings with Mussolini, and alongside Churchill he was one of the very few bitterly opposed to Munich. He was a brave man. He won an MC on the Western Front. Two brothers were killed in WWI, and a son in WWII. Like many in his generation, his life was dominated by war. Perhaps in time he will be viewed more sympathetically.

scarletnoir wrote: "... One of my favourite discoveries of recent years is Juan Marsé... he was fairly young during the civil war, but essentially writes about the aftermath..."

Thanks for the prompt. I think Juan Marsé has been mentioned here before, and I will follow up.

Bill wrote: "I just read a 7 page article in The New Yorker by Parul Sehgal about Judith Butler, and at the end I had no idea what Butler's supposedly controversial ideas about gender and Zionism were, though the "hullabaloo" they stir up is mentioned throughout the article. ..."

I didn’t know who Judith Butler was, so followed your link, which in two short paragraphs says pretty much all I needed to know about "them". I did explore a bit further. They are a professor at UC Berkeley specializing in gender studies. They have developed what is called performative theory. In this theory, gender, like race, is a social construct. You and I are born without gender. We learn our gender roles as we go along. We are regarded as men because we act like men, not because we are men. By the same token, feminists have gone down the wrong track in pursuing rights for women, which is to fall into the binary trap. But I’m still in the dark about the hullabaloo. Interesting, isn’t it, that readers of The New Yorker are now expected to be up-to-the-minute with these things and not require explanation.

Winter in Madrid – CJ Sansom

A good picture of what life might have been like in Madrid in late 1940, the year after the victory of the Nationalists, if predominantly from the perspective of those in more comfortable situations - Embassy officials, government ministers, crooked businessmen, Church figures in the ascendant again, etc. Still, we also see the pitiful lives of the impoverished, hungry, oppressed Spanish lower classes, and there are believable retrospectives of the fighting and the International Brigades. While I found this general depiction more engaging than the central love story, it was overall a decent read.

My interest was caught by some words put in the mouth of a British journalist, that the Republic would not have touched Russian aid with a barge pole if the French had supplied arms, which they didn’t do because of pressure from Baldwin on the French government – so that everything was the fault of the British. Hugh Thomas’s book says nothing about this. While there were high-level communications, the Baldwin and Blum Cabinets, as he tells it, held the same view independently, that their country’s interests would be best served by the prevention of military aid to Spain. Anthony Beevor’s book, on the other hand, does indicate that Blum’s six-week-old government was guided by the British. He quotes Eden: “The French government acted most loyally by us.” The policy of non-intervention was in fact all Eden’s work, as Baldwin was at first ill and then preoccupied with the Abdication crisis and didn’t want to be bothered. But neither book gives colour to the idea that the leaders of the Republic had wanted to keep their distance from the Russians. Sansom is firm on the issue in his Historical Note, so perhaps he got it from Spanish or French sources.

Very warm here, and our lovely hummingbirds are back. Other recent sightings: a turtle crossing a busy road, lots of wild turkey (reintroduced in Vermont 50+ years ago), carpenter bees (a menace, drilling into the eaves), a red-crested woodpecker (hammering as I sit here), and a black bear exploring round the house.

Thanks for that graphic summary, AB, and for your previous comments. Calais is so often treated as a foot-note to Dunkirk. Airey Neave clearly does justice to those brave men.

Rather topically, I just finished:

Seneca: Six Tragedies – trans. Emily Wilson

In school we learned that Seneca was a model for Shakespeare and Jonson, but he sounded deeply dour and I stayed away. Then Emily Wilson did such a wonderful job on The Odyssey that I thought an up-to-date translation by her of his plays might be appealing.

I found them impressive and, while hardly a light read, rather magnificent. The style is mostly one long speech after another, so they seem more like staged recitations than plays as we would think of them. The weight of emotion is immediate, the language is splendidly vigorous and expressive, and the force of the drama is never for a moment lightened by diversion or levity. It is all very black, the atmosphere thick with menace.

Greek myth supplies the subject matter of all these short, dense pieces (each 30-35 pages). It is interesting that Seneca could assume his Roman audience were intimately familiar with even the secondary myths. I had to refer often to the notes.

The motivations are jealousy, hatred, remorse and revenge. Always there are the three unities of time, place and action. I would add a fourth, the sense of fatality and death that runs throughout. The stoicism I was expecting was barely present, except in the very general sense that there was no avoiding one’s fate. When in The Trojan Women Agamemnon urges moderation in victory, the advice is dismissed out of hand by the murderous Pyrrhus, son of Achilles. Passion and gore are dominant.

The form EW uses is mainly blank verse, though varying anywhere from three to seven feet to a line. The iambic metre comes and goes, providing more cohesion than you might think. EW explains that Latin verse, as well as having a longer line, has a quantitative metre which is impossible to render in translation - meaning the poetry comes from a balance in the length of syllables - rather than the stressed metre we are accustomed to in English.

If there can be a favorite when each is excellent, I would pick Phaedra, for the elegance of its internal movement.

Paul wrote: "Logger24 wrote: The Emperor of All Maladies – Siddartha Mukherjee ... "

Unfortunately, cancer biology is not really much better understood now than 10 years ago for precisely the same reason that CRISPR genome editing is likely to play very little role in cancer therapy: because the underlying causes of cancer are not strictly genetic or epigenetic...."

Very interesting, thanks, and how depressing. Mukherjee definitely leaves you thinking that genetics is the way forward, even though any one cancer may apparently involve forty to eighty mutated genes – or now, it seems, none.

Berkley wrote: "...Also, is it still true that Latin is taught in some schools in the UK and continental Europe? ..."

I believe Latin, and Ancient Greek, are still offered as options in some schools in the UK, though I would guess more in the private sector than in state schools. I learned from a quick look at the internet that there are circa 5,000 students studying Classics at the eight British universities that have courses in the subject, so they must have learned it somewhere. Government statistics show that fewer than 2% of A Level entries in 2023 were for Ancient Languages, but surprisingly this was an increase of 20% over 2022.

I wonder if the misuse of “transpontine” for “transatlantic” is due to a vague idea that it’s derived from “the pond”.

scarletnoir wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "The walls of her house in Lewes were lined top to bottom with bending bookshelves..."

I'm intrigued - were these shelves sagging under the weight, or are 'bending bookshelves' a cunning design to fit more books into a give area?"

Sagging, to an alarming degree! No central supports.

The Emperor of All Maladies – Siddartha Mukherjee (2010)

A long and interesting book, balancing human stories of awful suffering (and the occasional heartening success) against centuries of scientific research, which left me more knowledgeable on novel retroviruses and mutated oncogenes and molecular pathways. One theme was the successive failure of possible cures that were strongly favoured for a time by the medical profession - radical surgery, extreme chemotherapy, intense radiation, all of them macabrely distant from concern for the individual patient. Another theme was the disconnect between the laboratory work on causes and the hospital work on cures. As SM leaves the story in 2010 the biology appears, finally, to be to a fair degree understood, and there are signs of collaboration on cures. I shall be interested to find a text that brings the story completely up to date. For example, the whole book is pre-CRISPR. Fourteen years seems to be an eternity in this world.

AB76 wrote: "...my first slowdance at a party was to La Isla Bonita with a girl called Giselle in 1988, wonder where she is now?..."

I'm sure Giselle, wherever she is, is still thinking about you too, AB!!

Berkley wrote: "...A more general question, what are some other good novels in which movies are important, whether as part of the action and setting..."

I haven’t checked, but doesn’t part of the chase in Brighton Rock take place in a cinema?

Also, the Lumière brothers feature prominently in a not bad graphic novel called The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick.

My Week with Marilyn by Colin Clark about the making of The Prince and The Showgirl is delightful, and qualifies as a novel rather than a memoir if, as many think, it’s a bit of a fairy tale.

Bill wrote: "...I read one book of essays by Epstein, In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage, which I enjoyed very much,..."

I've bought a copy on ABE.

Gpfr wrote: "AB76 wrote: "i just found a collection of english essays i found in oxfam before xmas..."

"Those Penguin collections are great..."

In Photos, I've just posted a shot of a top shelf with Pelicans from my school and university days

Nice pic, GP. I suspect a lot of us still have a stack of those blue covers – overlapping too.

What a debt we all owe to Penguin, for the fantastic range and quality of their titles. I feel I owe a large part of my general education as a student and after to their list - the classic and modern fiction as well as the immense non-fiction catalogue.

Once, in the mid-70s, I was taken to visit a lady who had been part of the management team at Penguin since its founding. The walls of her house in Lewes were lined top to bottom with bending bookshelves, because she had her own copy of every single book they published.

AB76 wrote: "i just found a collection of english essays i found in oxfam before xmas...

Those Penguin collections are great. I’m working through their collection of 20th century essays. What a trove of pleasure.