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

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

John, I have a similar book, Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, in my library. Really good, but I really don't whether it is better--or even as good--than the one you shared with us.

Sher wrote: "I'm a fan John. I've read _The Road_ and _All the Pretty Horses_. All the Pretty Horses. The Road. The road has scenes I'll never forget as long as I live! Very intense.. ..."

I have put off reading him, but I think I need to start. Which one first, Sher?

Sher, I feel for you. I know that most homes in your part of the country don't have central air conditioning ... for very good reasons.

On the subject of the next short story, THE NOSE, I perhaps should say that really dislike works in the genre of the absurd. I saw Ionescu's play Rhinocéros IN 1974 or 1975 and still think it was the worst play I have ever seen. (I didn't understand it at all and perhaps would have appreciated it more if I had know what it was actually about. That probably wouldn't have mad eme like it, however.) I'm sure that THE NOSE won't be the worst short story I've ever read ... perhaps just the worst short story in this book.

In terms of my own personal preferences, although I don't like the works in the category of the absurd, I do enjoy those in the genre of magical realism, e.g. A HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. I'm currently reading another work in this genre, The Murmur of Bees and find it wonderful. Some critics note the presence of absurd happenings in this genre of magical realism, but I don't hink that is quite right.

Carol, I'm reading Hinton's commentary book Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetrybecause of how he explains the poetry, but he is very well informed about the current science of cosmology also, as is witnessed by this passage:

"It is the heartbeat of the Cosmos, this steady pulse of stellar birth and death, gravity’s long swell and rhythm of absence and presence, presence and absence. And in the third star-generation, our planet was formed, rich in those heavy elements. It cooled and evolved until eventually water appeared: hydrogen, created during the original cosmic expansion, combining with oxygen, one of those heavier elements created in the cauldrons of dying stars."

Hinton, David. Awakened Cosmos (p. xi). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.

I bet most people don't know that our sun is a third-generation star, and that is not because of its age (~4.55 billion years) in a universe that is ~13.8 billion years old ... but because of the heavier elements present in our sun itself and in our solar system. I once asked the British physicist/author John Gribbin whether our sun was a second or third-generation star. It's actually a bit more complicated than just saying one or the other ... and he told me "Probably a third-generation star."

Element creation is pretty complicated. I wear a titanium wedding ring for a few reasons. The most basic one is I've gained enough weight so that my original gold wedding ring is too tight. The other reason appeals to my love of physics. The two isotopes of titanium we have on Earth originated through two different kinds of novas/supernovas ... I like knowing that my ring came from two different stars.

I want to add here that Carol and I don't mean to take over this thread just for Tu Fu's poetry, but I still want to keep it here ... along with any other Poems for the Day.

Carol, I'm going to cheat on this first poem. I bought Hinton's book Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry in which he explains in detail 19 of these poems and he starts with this one:

"This is among the earliest surviving poems by Tu Fu. He was around thirty when he wrote it ... Exalt was one of China’s five sacred peaks, and in its popular sense, Exalt-Mountain Ancestor refers to the mountain as a deity. But given the cosmological ways Tu Fu describes Exalt Mountain, it’s clear he sees something quite different. That mountain cosmology begins here in this poem with Changemaker, which also sounds like some kind of deity. But it is in fact Tao, that generative existence-tissue that is the maker of change. In gazing at the mountain, Tu Fu is gazing at a dramatic manifestation of the wild Taoist Cosmos: he sees Exalt as a kind of cosmological center-point where space stretches endlessly away north and south (literally, the ancient kingdoms of Ch’i and Lu from Lao Tzu’s time), where the divine beauty of all existence is condensed into a single dramatic site by Changemaker Tao."


So, I don't think I would gotten that without the explanation by Hinton ... but I still would have enjoyed the poem ... and I will enjoy it more after I think about Hinton's explanation. All of this really makes me think a slow read through the book one poem at a time is great.


Hinton, David. Awakened Cosmos (p. 4). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.

Carol wrote: "Here is Gazing at the Sacred Peak, the first poem in the book of Tu Fu's poems, translated by David Hinton. I know we were going to read them in groups of 6, but it might be nice to read them indiv..."

Carol,

So happy to get back to this. More comments tomorrow!

Larry

Master and Man is easily my favorite story so far as well.

Money--or the love of it--is obviously the driving factor for the Master. It starts with him commingling his personal and church funds. And we are told how he doesn't pay Nikita what he's worth but justifies to himself.

One thing that I didn't pick up on until Saunders mentions it later was the foreshadowing provided by four views of clothing on the clothesline. I totally missed that.

I was totally surprised by the Master doing what he did to save Nikita.

Sher posted this: "Olenka reminds me of an animal's love -- in that =- when an owner dies, that animal can devote itself to another --owner-- very quickly. I realize this is not universally so, but generally. It's interesting that love for Olenka wasn't personal - I mean it wasn't about her and her individuality, it was more about devotion and having an object of attention to grasp and subsume into."

She does fascinate me ... in that her love moves from person to person ... and she takes on the opinions of the one she loves. She's opinion-empty in herself, and then adamantly adopts the opinion of the one whom she imprints herself on. It's sort of a commentary on our times where almost everyone is both opinionated and opinion-ful. (The philosopher Robert Nozick distinguishes between having strong opinions (being opinionated) and having many opinions (Being opinion-ful).

I wondered about the matter of estates ... what did she own after the deaths of the two husbands?

"The autonomous, solar-powered ship, the Mayflower" ... amazing, Carol. I'll Google this in a moment!

Finished with the third story ... without saying anything else, it feels like a fairy tale in some ways.

There is another reason to like the slowness of a story like the Singers and that is that it serves as a respite from the immediacy of our digital world. I love the digital world but it comes with many real costs, and one of those is how it affects our attention spans. It pushes us toward changing our attention every time something isn't giving us what we want ... RIGHT NOW. Turgenev is going to gives us what he wants us to know in one slow reveal after another.

Sher wrote: "I finished Saunders' interpretive material about "The Singers." I enjoy reading his insights and I really loved the Henry James quote. Strange- Saunders calls this story a masterpiece but he seems to have no problem dissing the author.

After reading Saunders , do you feel any differently about the story?

For me the answer is no. His arguments did not move me at all. ..."

I do feel differently about the story after reading Saunders explanation ... particularly of how an imperfectly written story may help explain how imperfect singing may still carry the day. That said, I think that the story is just very good and certainly don't relate to it the way that Saunders does.

Steven, I think your comments about the way we look for differences are brilliant.

John, I don't listen to late Coltrane ... but give these two COLTRANE albums a try: BLUE TRAIN and JOHN COLTRANE AND JOHNNY HARTMANN. Just fabulous music.

John wrote: "Alas, I did review it here. I gave it relatively good marks, mainly as I recall, because anything that promoted a love for jazz is a good thing. I always imagined Larkin sitting at home, putting a record on the turntable, and pouring the first of several gins. ..."

Larkin is akin to to the great British film reviewer, David Thomson Both are lovers of old traditional jazz ... and both disliked and even were offended by the evolution of jazz into new forms. I like 1950s and 1960s jazz the best myself, but see no reason to denigrate the recent music.

Carol wrote: "He is extremely famous (and I know that there are many very different views on him) but I don't think I have ever read his poetry, so intend to do so...."

He has certainly earned all of those opinions ... from the laudatory to the despicable. And he is worth reading ... his poetry, at least. John's comments are spot on. I've dipped into his letters (1940-1985), which do serve as a form of memoir. They are interesting, and a real illustration of his meanness, ... and find his published commentary on jazz (All what jazz - a record diary 1961-1971) a study in ignorance albeit with some very good analysis of earlier jazz.

John wrote: "And here is another Crow poem by A.E. Stallings.

Pacing to and fro
Along the autumn shore
Among the wrack and reek

With your arms clasped behind your back
And sporting your grey frock-coat
Trimme..."

John, I am ever so grateful for you turning me on to the poetry of Stallings ... I buy so few books in paper these days, but I was excited when my copies of her Like: Poems and Hapax: Poems arrived in recent weeks.

Nabokov was, of course, very brilliant, ... a wonderfully creative writer and but rude doesn't even begin to describe him. Here's another paragraph about the value of Garnett's translations:

"Without Garnett, the nineteenth-century “Rooshians,” as Ezra Pound called them, would not have exerted such a rapid influence on the American literature of the early twentieth. In “A Moveable Feast,” Hemingway recounts scouring Sylvia Beach’s shelves for the Russians and finding in them a depth and accomplishment he had never known. Before that, he writes, he was told that Katherine Mansfield was “a good short-story writer, even a great short-story writer,” but now, after reading Chekhov, she seemed to him like “near-beer.” To read the Russians, he said, “was like having a great treasure given to you”:"

I think that the whole Remnick article may be available here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

Steven wrote: "That is a big difference for sure - I read both versions, and overall, prefer the former, which was translated by David Magarshack though I am not sure which is the more accurate. Larry, you may a better idea of this...."

My guess, and not knowing Russian it is only a guess, is that the Magarshack translation is more accurate. I do know that Nabokov excoriated Constance Garnett for her poor translations. Given how much she translated, she must have had a lot going for her. But I also have a feeling that Nabokov was right about this.

This is from a 2005 article (The Translation Wars) by David Remnick in the New Yorker:

"As a literary achievement, Garnett’s may have been of the second order, but it was vast. With her pale, watery eyes, her gray hair in a chignon, she was the genteel face of tireless industry. She translated seventy volumes of Russian prose for commercial publication, including all of Dostoyevsky’s novels; hundreds of Chekhov’s stories and two volumes of his plays; all of Turgenev’s principal works and nearly all of Tolstoy’s; and selected texts by Herzen, Goncharov, and Ostrovsky. A friend of Garnett’s, D. H. Lawrence, was in awe of her matter-of-fact endurance, recalling her “sitting out in the garden turning out reams of her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. That pile would be this high—really, almost up to her knees, and all magical.”

And ...

"Garnett’s flaws were not the figment of a native speaker’s snobbery. She worked with such speed, with such an eye toward the finish line, that when she came across a word or a phrase that she couldn’t make sense of she would skip it and move on. Life is short, “The Idiot” long. Garnett is often wooden in her renderings, sometimes unequal to certain verbal motifs and particularly long and complicated sentences. The typescripts of Nabokov’s lectures, which he delivered while teaching undergraduates at Wellesley and Cornell, are full of anti-Garnett vitriol; his margins are a congeries of pencilled exclamations and crabby demurrals on where she had “messed up.” For example, where a passage in the Garnett of “Anna” reads, “Holding his head bent down before him,” Nabokov triumphantly notes, “Mark that Mrs. Garnett has decapitated the man.” When Nabokov was working on a study of Gogol, he complained, “I have lost a week already translating passages I need in ‘The Inspector General’ as I can do nothing with Constance Garnett’s dry shit.”"

But the truth is that Constance Garnett opened up the Russian writers to English readers in a way that had never been done before her, and she deserves mor ethan a little credit for that.

I've read THE SINGERS in the Constance Garnett translation, but haven't worked through Saunders' chapter yet. But get the differences in the two translations for just the first sentence of this short story!

Saunders’ chosen translation (David Magarshack)…
“The small village of Kolotovka, which once belonged to a lady nicknamed in the neighborhood “Mistress Trouncer, because of her vicious and uncontrollable temper.”

Constance Garnett trans.
“The small village of Kolotovka once belonged to a lady known in the neighborhood by the name of Skin-flint, in allusion to her keen business habits…”