Larry’s Comments (group member since Nov 23, 2020)

Larry’s comments from the Nonfiction Reading - Only the Best group.

It's not nearly the same thing, Cynda, but my wife spent a lot of time with her Sicilian grandmother, who would pass on certain recipes to her ... and tell her she could share the recipe but she would have to leave out one ingredient if she passed it one to someone she was sharing that recipe with.

Nominated by Cynda ... A glorious book about the glory of books:

The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance - "Ross King’s latest popular history, The Bookseller of Florence, is more than a biography of a single man. He uses Vespasiano’s life as an anchor point from which to expand his history of books, bookmakers, booksellers, and readers, and while the narrative roves from ancient Greek philosophers to the 1453 conquest of Constantinople by the Sultan Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empire, it always finds a line back to Vespasiano and his bookshop in Florence. Still, the scope of bookmaking is vast, and King doesn’t hesitate to go into detail about the history of bookmaking and the materials used, taking the reader back to Egypt and Rome to explain the origins of the materials and detail the process that took us from papyrus to vellum to paper, and from scrolls to the books we know today."

SOURCE: https://travelinggladly.com/2021/04/0...

Just a wonderful story, Cynda.

The pricing of Substack subs is just strange. I paid for one (ECONOMIC PRINCIPALS) and dropped the paid subscription and then discovered that for that one, you get nothing more if you paid than if you don’t pay.

I read his STILL LIFE WITH WOODPECKERS many years ago ad enjoyed it. But I haven’t read his subsequent books. I did, however, buy this latest book as a bargain book recently. If you like it, let me know and I will read it.

Ron wrote: "Discovered this book so I figured I would give it a try too:

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture"

Ron, I think we have only begun to understand how algorithms are affecting us and our world for good and bad. The direct effects of algorithms are often easy to understand, but even that understanding may be pretty superficial. It's all those indirect effects that we need to explore widely and deeply.

John,

A Few other Substacks I recommend:

The Bulwark https://plus.thebulwark.com/
Front Row & Backstage https://bradkyle.substack.com/
My Five Things https://myfivethings.substack.com/
Rick Wilson's Substack. https://therickwilson.substack.com/
TechTalks. https://bdtechtalks.substack.com/
Today in Books https://todayinbooks.substack.com/

There are now thousands of Substacks. Finding the ones that most appeal to you can be a problem. But I think that the platform/app and the journalists and writers who have migrated to it have shown that it is one future for journalism. I wish that there was a monthly fee you could pay so that you could add as many paid subscriptions without paying each one ... it can get expensive. I once had six paid subscriptions ... I'm down to five, but that's still $25/month.

John, I posted the following yesterday on FaceBook from Tom Moon's lastest Substack:

Tom Moon on why the re-release of some of Joni Mitchell’s albums is problematic …

“Ah, but alas, not every detail on those titles is quite so crisp: The percussion heavy “The Jungle Line,” one of the highlights from The Hissing of Summer Lawns, has always suffered from a strangely blurry instrumental mix, possibly from an early approach to looping. The latest upgrade retains the blur, but because the other instruments and the vocals are intensely sharp, the mix feels more diffuse, less knit-together than it was on the initial release.”

SOURCE: https://open.substack.com/pub/echoloc...

Tom Moon is the author of 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, perhaps my favorite guide of what to listen to next when I'm searching for music to listen to.

John, I pay $5.00 each for five Substacks. One is economics-related and four deal with music. I subscribe without paying (sometimes you get the same whether you pay or not … sometimes you get a small fraction of what a paying subscriber gets) to about 30 others. I’ll post in another message which ones I thinks are really good. But tow that come to mind immediately are the Substacks of Heather Cox Richardson and Kareem Abdul Jabbar. My favorite (I pay for this one) is the one written by the music and cultural critic Ted Gioia. This one is named The Honest Broker.

Just great, John. And I like your description of him as an "idiosyncratic A.E. Stallings."

Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? captures some of the course material in one of the most popular courses at Harvard University ... a course taught by the author, Michael Sandel. The following is from a review in the New York Times:

"What “Justice” does, and does very well, is teach. Sandel explains theories of justice based on utilitarianism (minimize social harm), libertarianism (maximize personal freedom) and communitarianism (cultivate civic virtue) with clarity and immediacy honed by years of classroom presentation; the ideas of Aristotle, Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Robert Nozick and John Rawls have rarely, if ever, been set out as accessibly. Sandel’s virtuosic untangling of Kant’s notorious knots, in under 40 pages, is worth the price of admission by itself. If “Justice” breaks no new philosophical ground, it succeeds at something perhaps no less important: in terms we can all understand, it confronts us with the concepts that lurk, so often unacknowledged, beneath our conflicts. "

SOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/bo...

Carol,

I also am hoping for a rapid recovery for your husband.

Larry

Great choices, Ron.

I also want to share this ... but say I do not use it as an argument against discussing poems here ... so much as an explanation for my sometimes silence about the wonderful poems that are posted.

"A poem should not mean but be" is the final line of the poem "Ars Poetica" by Archibald MacLeish. The line has been described as a "classic statement of the modernist aesthetic"1. The poet is supposed to show, not explain what’s occurring in a poem, but allow the reader to experience the feelings and emotions of the poem for themselves. The worth of a poem does not lie in its paraphrasable content, but in its structure with its interlocking words, metaphors, associations, rhythm, rhyme (if used), its line lengths."

Pronko's comments about it can be found here:

He leads into it by saying this: https://thefontjournal.com/before-i-t...

Before I Taught a Poem, I'd Ask to Know

In addition to writing, I also teach American Literature. That’s a wonderful day gig, but it can be frustrating as well. I wrote about one poem that I often teach in an introductory course. And the fine folks at The Font, a journal dedicated to the creative, literary and human side of teaching, published it. You can read it here.

Before I Taught a Poem, I'd Ask to Know

After a lot of good comments, Pronko gets to this:

"I look forward to the wall-accepters now, though my heart remains with the wall-rejecters. They both teach me. I learn.

As a teacher, I always try to “ask to know what I was walling in, or walling out,” and try to get students to do that, too. Misunderstandings leave “our fingers rough with handling them,” but also lead us to a clearer understanding of what we’re doing, or not doing. The more we think we know what we’re teaching, the more we’re shown our misconceptions and prejudices. That is how our teaching souls are revealed. Some walls come down and better ones go up and we see ourselves on both sides."

I'll begin by posting this often cited poem by Robert Frost. And then in the next message, some comments about it from a Professor of American Literature in Japan. This is Michael Pronko, who has the three most perceptive books about life in Tokyo that I've ever encountered.

First Frost's poem:

Mending Wall
By Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

SOURCE: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...

I don't remember it either, John. Thanks for posting.

Carol wrote: "Have been watching the Wagner method, a crime mystery set in Strasbourg. Not too gruesome, a touch of humour, and a police detective who is a hypochondriac. ..."

We enjoyed the first season of The Wagner Method a lot. We also recently finished watching Sherwood. Great social commentary which didn't get in the way of some great story telling.

Another point, John. It used to be that the only easy way to use ProQuest in reading newspapers online was at my computer. It has become very easy to do it now with my large iPad. This digital world keeps changing ... faster and faster.

This is crazy, John, but one reason I dropped my NYT was because I found it easier to read theNYT Book Review with ProQuest (I access it through my library online) than with the digital version of the NYT. this wouldn’t be true if the NYT offered a digital image of the actual paper the way that The Washington Post or the Financial Times does.