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

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

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.

AB76 wrote: "The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain is simply wonderful ..."

Well outside my normal range, but I think I shall have to try it.

AB76 wrote: "I decided to not continue with my reading of Tony Benns diaries from 1963-67...."

Interesting, AB. I was never much in sympathy with Benn's views and so would very probably not read the diaries for that reason. The best book I've read for getting the temper of the Wilson years is actually a popular history (which I know you don't go for) - Our Times by AN Wilson - and I can vouch for its accuracy, because he correctly relates, at length, the course of one of the property scandals in which (as a lawyer defending the newspaper) I had direct involvement.

Robert wrote: "Junger had a similar idea about Germany; it will always have importance because of its central position. Different civilizations contact and influence each other through Germany.."

Good point. On a facetious note, when I was practicing, we merged with a German firm which had several outposts in Eastern Europe through associations with local firms and was looking to open more. When I asked how we were going to supervise all these offices and make sure they were up to standard, the German partner organizing it all said to me, "Don't worry about Eastern Europe - we've taken care of it for a thousand years."

AB76 wrote: "Sales by publishers, what a con!..."

And US university presses are the worst!

AB76 wrote: "Nossack in The End, writes with real passion about the events of late July 1943, the aftermath of the allied bombing of Hamburg..."

Thanks for all that info on the raid. My knowledge of it was only superficial.

Tam wrote: "Commiserations to Scarlet whose mum has died, at 103. What an age!..."

Condolences, Scarlet.

A recent WSJ book review in by Brendan Simms – author of the relentlessly depressing Unfinest Hour (2001) dissecting British policy during the Bosnia-Serbia War – led me to dip into his Europe: The Struggle For Supremacy, From 1453 To The Present, the theme of which, clunkily outlined in the opening chapters, is that no one achieves supremacy in Europe without first achieving mastery of Germany, even disjointed, dysfunctional, disunited Holy Roman Empire Germany, a theme I didn’t realise needed much demonstrating, but still I never tire of geo-historico-strategic essays, so I will keep reading.

The book he was reviewing was No More Napoleons by Andrew Lambert, the sub-title of which is the presumptuous How Britain Managed Europe From Waterloo To World War One, which he says we did with a large navy and a small army and a defensive system of forts and alliances, a system which might have deterred France for a century but the Kaiser decided was not enough to deter him. I’m simplifying of course, and will probably end up reading this one as well.

AB - Something to ponder on. The US Constitution does not say in so many words that a person may serve as President for two terms only. The 22nd Amendment says, "No person shall be elected to the office of President more than twice..." So it seems to me - a person with no relevant legal knowledge at all, but just reading those words - that there might be a mechanism by which a person might serve a third term without being elected to it.

Re-reading I, Claudius was enjoyable but after a hundred pages that was enough. I turned to something else, a debut collection of short stories called Music for Wartime by Rebecca Makkai (fairly recent, Penguin 2015). They were very good. Different settings and styles, different voices, no reaching for effect, just simple, attractive language, all of them carrying some weight without forcing out a meaning. Most had a lovely humour that seemed to come to her with no effort at all, the sort of stories you want to read one after another, straight through. My favourites were one about deeply rural 1940s America and what a young Reverend has to deal with when the circus comes to town; and the final, brilliant one about love and survival in grim circumstances. Now I’m interested to explore her later stories and novels.

Looking for something a bit lighter I picked up I, Claudius, first read 50+ years ago, and am enjoying it.

AB76 wrote: "i totally missed you including that article Russ,..."

It was actually Tam who found it. I’ve now read the piece myself. It is most impressive in laying out everything that is attractive and repulsive in the life of this “warrior-aesthete”. Ross says enough about Junger’s other published works to make me think that once I have finished the Paris Diaries I will leave it at that.

L’exil et le royaume – Albert Camus

One hardly thinks of Camus as a short story writer, and indeed several of these six nouvelles read more like descriptions of personal crisis than actual stories: a central figure feels that his/her inner self is coming apart. If they fit into an existentialist thought-scheme, it’s a struggle to work out exactly how.

But one of the six – Le hôte / The Guest – is outstanding, a perfect 20-page tale involving a teacher, a police officer and an Arab prisoner, set in the empty terrain on the southern slopes of the Atlas Mountains. This one is well worth looking out.

Tam wrote: "I cant remember if I put up this article on Earnst Jünger's fictional imaginations, so here it is for those interested as I was quite taken by the similarities of him imagining something that pre-figured, somewhat, the much more recent development of AI. 'Ernst Jünger’s Narratives of Complicity' by Alex Ross https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...."

This looks interesting, thanks. Initially the link would allow me to read only the opening paragraph, but now I seem to have the whole piece.

Tam wrote: "...I did enjoy a lot of the characterisation but I think that gothic novels are not really for me.

The only one that I can think of, that I did enjoy, was Mary Shelly's 'Frankenstein'. ,..."

I just read the story of Frankenstein in a section of Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder. He places it in the context of a heated argument over Vitalism, in which two leading medical authorities of the time, one an established professor, the other his upstart young collaborator, disputed in public whether there was in our physiology some additional (God-given) vital fluid or whether there was nothing beyond our (evolved) organs. The Romantic poets followed it all, and Mary Shelley may have attended one of the lectures. When the Creature is laid out on Frankenstein’s operating table and is galvanized and opens one eye, it recalls what happened in a lugubrious experiment by the sinister Italian Aldini trying to revive an English murderer’s corpse with an electrical charge, shortly after his hanging. Holmes makes the point that a similar major issue, the origin of consciousness, remains wholly unresolved today. Victor Frankenstein from Ingolstadt seems to have been a composite portrait based largely on a physiologist named Ritter who was one of the circle around Novalis in Jena, another group I’ve enjoyed exploring. The Creature of course is entirely her own invention. I found him pitiable and rather tragic, not at all the monster of the movies.

Of the eleven stories in The Distracted Preacher and Other Tales by Thomas Hardy only two ended happily, the rest in misery or death. The best were the lead story (about smugglers), The Son’s Veto (about a vicar with no charity in his heart) and On The Western Circuit (about a London barrister and a country girl). One or two of the others were rather weak. But on the whole it was a worthwhile read.

I read Jude The Obscure recently and was surprised to find how sometimes Hardy’s style fell into preciousness. The editor of this book has a spot-on comment:

“Those aspects of Hardy’s writing which most often irritate or repel – the syntactical mannerisms and convolutions, the archaisms and insensitively placed abstract or learned references – are largely absent from the stories.”

AB76 wrote: "Robert wrote: "RussellinVT wrote: "Robert wrote: "Junger in the Caucasus on a tour of inspection...."

Just finished that section myself. One curious thing is that we never learn the reason for his visit ..."

good point about the blue max and Jungers politics, as for the uniform shortages, i wonder if anyone has explored this in depth?..."

The role of logistics in WWII has to be the subject of many studies in staff colleges. I’m not sure I’ve seen much on it in the popular histories that I mostly go for. Even in Richard Overy’s Why The Allies Won it receives only intermittent attention. He is excellent on the disastrous decline of German tank superiority on the eastern front, but even here the focus is more on manpower and production rather than deployment. No mention at all that I can find of winter uniforms.

Robert wrote: "Junger in the Caucasus on a tour of inspection...."

Just finished that section myself. One curious thing is that we never learn the reason for his visit. It was not to fight – he visits positions near the front line, makes observations on the grim state of equipment and morale, and then moves on. A relatively junior officer, he meets with generals and commanders, who show him their maps. There is no mention of any report he must make, whether written or oral, just this journal, which could not be shown to anyone, so close does it come to criticism of the conduct of the war at the highest level, and a condemnation of atrocities. As the front collapses, after the capitulation at Stalingrad, he learns to confine his views to platitudes when speaking with an officer of “the other party”.

As you say, he does have an ear for a good epigram. I keep trying to identify what it is that makes his writing so special. It seems inadequate to say it’s apt and cultured and expressive. His paragraphs somehow possess a rhythmic balance. To put it in a sub-Jungerian way, it’s as if there were no such thing as poetry, and all poets were obliged to express themselves in prose.

Greenfairy wrote: "Hello everyone, I've not been here for a while, I've been trying not to have anything to do with Amazon or Besos, but hey, I've missed you all!
I'm currently reading The Woodcutter by Reginald Hill."

It looks good - will ask the library to find it for me.