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

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

Enjoying Claudius The God, just a chapter or two a day. We are about to invade the Druid-ridden island of the Britons.

AB76 wrote: "Most of my interest in post-war Greece has been focused on the 1960s as the "regime of the colonels", well covered in literature and film...."

Those statistics are terrible.

Not reading much at the moment. We have family visitors three weekends in a row, and we're racing to finish various projects before Labor Day weekend when there will be 19 or 20 of us around the house. I'm finding the short travel essays of Aldous Huxley a pleasant way to drop off to sleep. As he moves through Italy he discusses previous visitors - Goethe, Stendhal, etc. Just the ticket.

AB76 wrote: "Superb images of Northern Ireland in 1969 by a Japanese photographer, rich in colour and quality, makes me feel old to say, nothing beats film!..."

Yes, very fine. In color too. In a strange way, from all the press photos at the time, one tends to think of the Troubles as happening in black and white.

AB76 wrote: "Summer in Algiers(1936) is a short essay by Albert Camus and another piece of literature capturing French Algeria and pieds-noirs culture...."

I didn't know the pieds-noirs were such a mix. I always assumed they were essentially French.

We saw some friends the other day who had recently been visiting Southern Africa. They hated the atmosphere in Cape Province - not a mixed society at all - but loved Botswana and, surprisingly, Zimbabwe, which I had supposed was still in the grip of the racial tensions even post-Mugabe.

RussellinVT wrote: "Tam wrote: "...Filippo Marinetti, the main protagonist in the Futurist movement, declared in his manifesto “we wish to glorify War - the only health giver of the world” and he extolled “militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the Beautiful Ideas that kill”. ..."

Not something I remember seeing in art books. I will look at his pieces with a new eye!"

I take that back. Herbert Read quotes exactly those words in A Concise History of Modern Sculpture, which was a school prize (you were allowed to choose the book yourself), so I’m surprised not to remember it. He quotes quite a bit more from the manifesto, describing it as “breathless and incoherent” and you have to agree. The examples of Futurism chosen by Read are mainly by Boccioni, and seem to me rather good, particularly the bronze called Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.

Tam wrote: "...Filippo Marinetti, the main protagonist in the Futurist movement, declared in his manifesto “we wish to glorify War - the only health giver of the world” and he extolled “militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the Beautiful Ideas that kill”. ..."

Not something I remember seeing in art books. I will look at his pieces with a new eye!

AB76 wrote: "i'm always wary of historical studies that cover 3-4 centuries,..."

I tend to agree about the value of shortness in historical studies. I think of the brilliance of Michael Howard’s The Franco-Prussian War and the micro-studies of Lytton Strachey, the epitome of elegance and wit (almost out-Stracheyfied by Aldous Huxley in The Author of Eminent Victorians). But then there are the long-view studies of people like Paul Kennedy, and Robert Tombs (The English and their History), and Christopher Clark himself, covering a couple of centuries centuries of Prussian history in Iron Kingdom, which I found riveting. Like you I’ve got his Revolutionary Spring sitting there – a bit intimidated by the size – so maybe I’ll wait till you pronounce!

Hot and dry here too, and yet, somehow, very humid as well. We're using our A/C units much more than I remember in previous years. It used to be that you needed A/C for a week at most.

AB76 wrote: "RussellinVT wrote: "AB76 wrote: "RussellinVT wrote: "i have Clea, still to read of the Alexandria Quartet....."

I haven’t read any Paul Bowles. Thanks for the recommendations.

I don’t think I will persevere with Brendan Simms’ Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy. Its great length is not in itself a problem. Rather it is that the effort to be comprehensive leads him far away from his theme of the centrality of Germany. I looked ahead from the 17th century to try passages on the 1870s-80s, the 1910s and the 1930s, and each time the diffuseness overtook the argument. On top of which the banality of his prose is depressing. Oh for an elegant essay by Robert Tombs on the same subject.

AB76 wrote: "RussellinVT wrote: "i have Clea, still to read of the Alexandria Quartet. ..."

I remember liking Clea the best of the four. The look-back-in-time structure gave the whole enterprise depth and resonance.

While waiting for a book from the library I’ve been re-reading Lawrence Durrell’s Justine which, in my twenties, I thought wonderful, for its sensuous, atmospheric rendering of cosmopolitan pre-war Alexandria. I see why many people find it overwrought. Justine herself – unfaithful, self-absorbed, searching - is described as a child of the city “which decrees that its women shall be voluptuaries of pain…” But I still find the prose enticing and will keep reading for the moment.

Durrell himself was portrayed as a rather exploitative figure in the TV adaptation a few years ago of Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals – a definite gap in my reading which I should make up for soon.

Reading Justine is also taking me back to Cavafy, who might be described as the sphinx of the city. He is currently receiving a lot of attention with the new biography by Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis. This seems to be an impressionistic work, in the almost total absence of hard information, or even writings, beyond the poems themselves, which were never published in his lifetime. One of the reviews says that none of the translations captures the melody of the original Greek. Another, in The G, describes the poems as prosaic, “without metaphor, simile, rhyme or rich vocabulary.” Fifty years ago the only available translation was by John Mavrogordato, and it was good enough to enthrall me. Now any number of people have had a crack at it, so I will be trying some of them as well.

I have finally got to the end of Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder. It is a very fine study of science and culture in the Romantic age. No specialist scientific knowledge is needed, just an interest in the progress of scientific thought, and the vindication of the inductive method. It is difficult to imagine anyone other than RH having the depth of knowledge to illustrate at every turn the two-way traffic between the advances of the “scientist” (a term first proposed in 1832, to replace the inapt “philosopher”, and rapidly gaining currency) and the leading poets and writers of the time.

AB76 wrote: "i love Matsumoto Russ, i read both novels you mentioned and they are superb..."

Thanks, AB. I'll definitely get to these before too long.

giveusaclue wrote: "...If you are looking for my crime/mysteries there are plenty on My Books list you may find interesting!..."

Thanks - I'll check that out. Off to the library in a moment.

AB76 wrote: "Whenever i look at the 1918-1933 period, it is striking how much the etablished military lost in that 15 years...."

Good summary, AB, tks. I remember reading once a quote of FDR, towards the end of WWII, that he was determined to wipe out every last trace of Prussian military junkerdom, which – even under the Nazi regime - he still saw as the source of Europe’s misfortunes for the previous hundred years. Though he wasn’t there to see it, that class and culture was indeed extirpated. I’ve hunted all over for that quote and not found it.

giveusaclue wrote: "For RussellinVT

I know you enjoyed Emylia Hall's The Rockpool Murder so here is another one you may like:

"

Thanks - well remembered, and timely too, as I’ve just been thinking I need something a bit lighter and diverting in our summer heat. I’ll ask the library tomorrow if they can get the Mary Grand (fine name!).

I only ever went to the Isle of Wight once, to Cowes, to speak with a witness in a copyright dispute over the design of the hull of a racing yacht. He gave me less than half his attention, up there in his cavernous sail loft, as he was busy laying out a new main sail. A good sort of setting for a crime novel…

Do you have an opinion on Seichi Matsumoto? He’s been getting a lot of love over on WWR, currently Inspector Imanishi Investigates (the one someone found lying on a café table and couldn’t stop reading). Another of his I’ve seen mentioned more than once is The Tokyo Express.

AB76 wrote: "i always try and balance out WW2 reading, so i dont read too much but there is just so much to read out there...."

Likewise - but one WWII book I have been meaning to read for decades and must eventually is The Nemesis of Power by JW Wheeler-Bennett (very old now, 1964, but revised and updated by Richard Overy in 2005) about how from its peak of power in WWI the Army high command fell into total subservience to the Nazis. I believe it will fit neatly with Robert's comment:

"Upper-class and professional German Nationalists who joined the Nazi Party found that they did not have the weight that they expected to wield in the Party movement. Instead, they were expected to serve as transmission belts of Party doctrine to their old circles. The book ends with an appeal to the German Army to act.

AB76 wrote: "Thanks Russ, just back from a funeral, a humanist event without black, for somebody i used to volunteer with...."

Apart from the times when someone dies far too young (we’ve known two young men recently killed in horrendous car crashes), funerals can be fine events, the dignified and sober marking of a life well lived, followed generally by the hubbub of a very good party.

After the interesting exchanges this morning, welcome to the new thread

I don’t myself have much in the way of new books to discuss. My reading for the moment is largely limited to the same non-fiction books I’ve mentioned in previous posts.

Suzanne Massie’s The Land of the Firebird is principally a study of the culture but it is good on the general history as well. I didn’t realise what a wasteland most of Russia was for centuries after the second Mongol invasion of 1236. The Golden Horde massacred entire populations or abducted them, by the hundred thousand, to sell into slavery. The Medicis were among the buyers.

Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder has reached the absorbing story of Davy’s invention of the safety lamp, truly a wonder, the product of six months of intense experimentation closeted with his assistant Michael Faraday, following three dreadful explosions in the northeastern coalfield. Crucially he examined first the chemical properties of fire-damp before turning to the design of the lamp itself. What he discovered was that if the flame were enclosed in a metal column pierced with extra-fine holes, the flame would burn brightly in the presence of the methane gas but never leap through the gauze.

This work came after a wedding trip of 18 months through France, Italy, the Balkans and southern Germany - perfectly safe for an Englishman in 1813-14, provided you were also a distinguished scientist. The couple were accompanied by a young and very gauche Faraday. Lady Davy, a wealthy Scottish widow, resented his presence. She made him ride on the outside of the comfortably appointed coach, and treated him as a valet. Davy and Faraday were enthralled by the aqueduct bringing fresh water 50 kilometres from Uzès to Nîmes. The Roman engineers achieved average falls of 10 to 20 centimetres per kilometre, a miracle of measurement and construction, and this water supply worked for 300 years. How many of our engineering feats from 1725 are still working?

Brendan Simms’ Europe: The Struggle For Supremacy, instead of showing how mastery of Germany confers actual mastery of Europe, seems to me so far to be demonstrating a rather different point, that fear of (Habsburg) mastery of Germany caused princes inside and outside the HRE to act so as to keep the German lands disunited. Also, is it true that “the Great Rebellion against Charles [Stuart] was in its essence a revolt against Stuart foreign policy”, i.e. failing to intervene to aid co-religionists in the Netherlands and the Palatinate? A factor, yes, but the essence?

Ernst Jünger’s Paris Journals continue to impress with every page, and sometimes to appall. He observes that executioners who work with an axe take pleasure in their craft, compared with those who work with a guillotine.

Prompted by Robert, I’ve started a re-read of Claudius the God . I wonder how far these books derive from an amazing knowledge of the sources and how far from a deep imaginative reconstruction.

One other pleasure has been some old CDs I have from Classic FM in which well-known actors and poets read the top 100 Poems as chosen by listeners. How fresh and invigorating it is to hear great poetry read out loud. The readers are all excellent, in particular the late lamented Richard Griffiths.

I'll start a new thread in about an hour.