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

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

AB76 wrote: "exactly what i think about that Judt book and many that were written in very different times,..."

That's a relief.

The Morselli novel sounds interesting.

AB76 wrote: "Really enjoyed Comrades and Christians: Religion and Political Struggle in Communist Italy, that title belies the specific Bolognese focus of the book mind you..."

Thanks for that summary, AB.

“…but the Eurocommunism of the 1970s is long gone”

In a similar vein I’ve thought from time to time of reading Tony Judt’s Post War, which I never got round to. Twenty years ago it seemed to have a strong contemporary relevance. But now I tend to think that, as with the vanished age of Eurocommunism, he will have been writing about a world that no longer exists. Should I be reading it anyway?

giveusaclue wrote: "See my edit to the earlier post. 🙄."

Happens to me too!

I think my post on the Bannalec gives the impression I didn't enjoy it much, but I did - ripped right through it (and then couldn't sleep).

I finished Jean-Luc Bannalec’s Death in Brittany. I thought it was an amiable, middle of the road murder mystery, with some pleasant descriptions of Breton fishing villages. I correctly worked out who the villain was but not how it was all done. I’ll quite likely read another when needing some light diversion.

I learned a couple of small facts: the coast of Brittany, washed by the Gulf Stream, apparently never has a frost; and the name Finistère, so familiar from the shipping forecast, comes from the Latin finis terra, and is therefore just like saying Land’s End.

I'd never read any Commissaire Dupin before. Yesterday the library put Death in Brittany in my hand and already I'm a third of the way through. Not bad so far. All mystery and investigation, no gruesomeness. Apparently Jean-Luc Bannalec has a big following in this quiet corner of Vermont.

giveusaclue wrote: "Having read the previous Slow Horses books I started Clown Town with high hopes, only to be disappointed. I think the author has become intoxicated with his own verbosity. After several pages of long winded meandering I gave up on it."

Just so long as they turn it into a TV version with Gary Oldman that's all right. The script writers will bag all the useless stuff.
...

Death at Castle Cove has finally arrived at the library. I'm picking it up today.

Charles?? Geoff.

Robert wrote: "I've renewed my acquaintance with the Wolff brothers, Geoffrey and Tobias, both writers of memoirs..."

I’ve read a few of Tobias Wolff – the two you mention plus Old School - without ever realizing he had an older brother. It was years ago, so I may have misremembered. Charles definitely sounds like one to explore. What I do chiefly recall of Tobias is the clarity of his style, as you say, and the feat of lying his way into an upper crust prep school, which from his background sounded so improbable I thought the story itself must have been invented.

AB76 wrote: "I;'m fascinated by the Titanic disaster but have never seen the film and havent actually read any accounts of the disaster..."

A Night to Remember is a brilliant read. You might be interested to see a street map of Southampton with a red dot on the house of every crew member who died. A friend who lives in Southampton sent me the picture he took on a visit to the Titanic museum there. I will try and load it in Photos.

Was someone here wondering about the use of “transpontine”? Here’s a bit from page 50 of Justine, the night when Durrell's narrator meets Melissa for the first time, very ill:

I had remembered the existence of an old doctor, a Greek, who lived down the street, and it was not long before I managed to fetch him up the dark staircase, stumbling and swearing in a transpontine demotic, dropping catheters and stethoscopes all the way.

In this context across-the-sea (Greek derivation) makes more sense than across-the-bridge (Latin derivation).

The Call of the Tribe by Mario Vargas Llosa turns out to be really rather good. He discusses To The Finland Station as a history of the idea of socialism. Here, in the form of a sequential account of seven writers who have most influenced his own thinking, he presents his take on the history of the idea of liberalism, starting with Adam Smith and ending with Jean-François Revel (a new name to me), via Ortega y Gasset, Hayek, Popper, Aron and Isaiah Berlin, which is where I’ve started. MVL makes the very interesting point that Berlin in philosophy wrote in the same way as Flaubert did as a novelist, by effacing himself. Also, I never seem to tire of accounts of Berlin’s intense meeting with Akhmatova in 1945.

Tam wrote: "...Does anyone here remember 'The Borrowers', by Mary Norton? Does anyone here reread the books that they loved as a young child? It struck me that she took some inspiration, perhaps, from 'The Secret Garden' by Francis Hodgson Burnett, another book that I loved as a child ..."

I never read The Borrowers but, like you, loved The Secret Garden. I do re-read the books I loved in childhood. The Just William books which I thought were a scream were now a bit disappointing. The Eagle of the Ninth, on the other hand, had not lost its power, even after a couple of readings as an adult. Treasure Island likewise.

Perhaps unusually, Dickon was for me the most powerful figure. The book gave me the ambition, perhaps more a dream, of living in a house with a private walled garden. Eventually we were lucky enough to have one for a time.

Robert wrote: "RussellinVT Glad you're enjoying Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics. It was interesting to learn years ago that in the 1970s those rural counties had the highest rate of diagnosed schizophrenia in Europe."

Yes, and so prevalent it accounted for half of all mental hospital admissions in Ireland, an amazing statistic. I warmed to the author’s view that given the strongly differing opinions among specialists as to whether the cause of the illness was genetic or social – of course, still a wholly unresolved debate - the probable explanation in light of her own observations as an anthropologist was that it was a mix of both. Thank goodness for modern antipsychotics, which make the debate essentially redundant. (We have a family member who has the illness and is able to live a fairly normal life, once a brilliant young psychiatrist had identified the correct medication and dosage.)

Also, for an academic study, the many personal stories and the literary quotations made it very readable, as you said.

Thank you to Robert for recommending Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics. I’m nearing the end, and the picture it gives of the depressed state of the west of Ireland in the 1970s is every bit as bad as that drawn by Edna O’Brien.

Finished Robe de Mariée by Pierre Lemaitre (transl. as Blood Wedding), the tale of a disoriented young woman and a stalker with a fiendish obsession. There are several deaths along the way. Even though it’s often gruesome, and all a bit ludicrous, Lemaitre is such a capable story teller you have to keep reading to see what happens. Not bad if you’re looking for diversion.

RussellinVT wrote: "Tam wrote: "I am so glad to hear that you don't have problems with PFA's, and PFOA's. ..."

P.S. The oil painting - Once it's framed I'll ask if it's OK for me to post a copy of the photo. In the meantime he has a website which you might like to look at: www.paganostudios.com. I think there must be more work in preparation. What he had on his phone was very colorful and inventive.

AB76 wrote: "Robert wrote: "This group fallen silent? Horrors. Readings on 1941 have me thinking about FDR's style of presidential leadership..."

It does get very quiet in here now, still a very interesting group of regular posters of course and less regulated and filleted than the Guardian."

It does sometimes fall quiet, but I like it all the same - as you say, a very interesting group, and we have enough of an overlap in tastes to make it congenial.

I'm glad you liked the story of the young couple. They are the age of our younger son, who has just moved to Nashville, and they're going to look him up when they are next there. I can also see us buying more of the young man's pieces. What a lovely connection to stumble on all of a sudden.

Tam wrote: "I am so glad to hear that you don't have problems with PFA's, and PFOA's. It must have been very worrying whilst waiting for the results. I do wonder how the polluted water is rising uphill though?..."

Yes, it was worrying for a while, though we were fairly sure we were OK, as I had been told as much by the chairman of another water authority (in the course of long discussions - over a half dozen breakfasts at a diner, the way business gets done in VT - about them buying a piece of forest land we owned up the mountain, the very last bit of the watershed supplying their reservoir that they didn't own).

The reason our well water might have been contaminated, despite being as you correctly say a long way uphill from the old factory, is that they didn't just pour the waste chemical down the drains out back, polluting the ground water all around, they also spread it in the form of vapor from their smoke stack, and the prevailing westerly winds blow in our direction. So, these toxic chemicals appear to have been carried at least some distance uphill by the wind and then fallen (when it rained, or snowed, or even just from gravity) onto the ground, and from there permeated down into the streams and aquifers.

Having said that, there's another area of the town that has PFAS pollution which no one can explain - a long way from the factory, three or four miles, so outside the likely area of ground contamination, and not in the direction of the wind. You can bet that St Gobain, the new owners of the business, will be saying that that pollution is not down to them.

One interesting quirk of the regulation of it all is that, while the State "safe" level is 20 parts per trillion, the federal EPA "safe" level is 3 parts per trillion. Why would the famously ecological VT have a higher level? The explanation seems to be that the present federal level is a short-term Biden-era hangover, and the reason the State is not proposing to drop its own level to align with the federal level - aside from not wanting to accept responsibility for installing a whole lot more super-expensive filters - is that everyone supposes the Trump-era EPA will soon be raising the federal figure to 20 - if not a lot higher!

Thanks for the reminder of your lovely piece on Hecate and thresholds and Frost. We do expect to be in touch with the young couple - for one thing, they've asked if we could send a photo of the frame I'll be taking - and I will point them to it.

I think the Dan Van Der Vat book on the scuttling at Scapa Flow would be well worth reading. I remember him as a writer of visceral pieces in The Times.

Wells Cathedral - that is pretty impressive as an example of emergency engineering. I have a fondness for Wells, as it is close to where my grandparents retired, decades ago, to a cottage in the Polden Hills, with a direct view of eerie Glastonbury Tor. There's a lovely passage about the Cathedral grounds in HV Morton's In Search of England (the epitome of nostalgia for an expat).

Tam wrote: "What happened about your water testing?"

Yes, that was me, and I'm happy to say that we had a call just the other day from a lady in State environmental office to tell us that our results for PFAS had come in and were not just below the "safe" level (20 parts per trillion, which apparently one should think of as one tiny drop in an Olympic-sized swimming pool) but actually zero. So we seem to be in the clear. But a few of the people living downhill from us and less than a mile away were found to be above 20. We're waiting for the written confirmation. In the meantime there has been a public meeting with local officials, when there were a lot of anxious questions from worried residents, because they've been drinking their well water for decades and anything over 20 might be a cause of all sorts of cancers. As things stand, the State will pay for anyone registering over 20 to have an extremely expensive but effective filter system installed. Between 0 and 20 you're on your own. The long term solution is probably to extend the piped system from the nearby town. That will never happen for us, way out in the woods. So we will have to continue periodically testing the water from our well. Thanks for asking.

I love that Blue Horse on the Mary Oliver book. Very clever design work. It would make anyone want to pick it up. How wonderful to have them enter your dream world!

We bought an original oil painting today, I think for the first time ever. It's semi-figurative, semi-abstract, and might even be described as dreamy. A lovely young couple stopped into the bookshop at the end of the day yesterday, the guy from NYC and the girl originally from Nashville. We stood talking with them for an age and discovered all sorts of surprising personal connections. They have given up their jobs in the city (in finance and sales) to go on a free-wheeling tour, in their camper-van. They were en route to Acadia National Park in Maine, and then to Canada, and then probably out West. It turned out the guy was also a musician (recording on vinyl) and an artist, and looking at the scores and scores of images on his phone you would have say he had a strong talent, everything fresh and vibrant. He had a few of his small canvases in the van, and when they were in again today, in the course of another long chat, my wife chose one, which I am to frame. They are in the area to explore the Robert Frost connections. The young man for years has carried in his wallet a copy of The Road Not Taken given to him by his father, with a personal message from his dad written on the back. (This led to me showing them the Yeats poem I carry in my wallet, Brown Penny.) The reason for mentioning all this is that, after the appalling murder of Charlie Kirk this week - whatever one thinks of his views, and I hadn't heard of him either till now, he did not deserve to be gunned down for expressing his very Christian/conservative but mostly not outrageous opinions, a right that is supposed to be constitutionally protected here - it was encouraging and restorative to meet a smiling and thoughtful young couple who gave out such a powerful sense of happiness.

AB76 wrote: "have you read his graphic novel A Comic Strip, its worth googling the illustrations he drew.."

Just judging from the NYRB cover he obviously had talent as an artist. I haven't read Poem Strip yet but will look out for it (assuming I've got the right one).