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What are we reading? 21 November 2022
Irish literature is a rich treasure of styles and expression, i have been interested in the nationalist authors who came of age at the time of the Easter Rising and the Civil War, especially Liam O'Flaherty and Sean O'Faoalin.Both have a good catalogue of works which challenge and question orthodoxy, nominally from catholic nationalist backgrounds, neither slotted easily into the Catholic Irish consensus that grew from the 1920s into the 1950s. They had been angry young men, seeking an Ireland for the Irish but like all good thinkers and writers, questioned conformity when it became cloying and restrictive.
O' Flaherty was a Dublin writer, using his skill with the pen to document urban strife, its outcasts and its losers, many novels set in the 1920s and 1930s. There is the dark tragicomedy of Mr Gilhooley, the even darker, unsettling The Informer and the novel i read and enjoyed this year The Puritan, a kind of Celto-noir but soaked in the best of Irish styles and humour.
O' Faolain was a Cork writer, his works set in the south, far from the big city, instead Irelands second city that was losing people from 1841 to 1911, a rare city to have more inhabitants in 1831, than 1911. His short stories are wordy and intelligent, while the novel i am reading now Bird Alone(1936), is more direct and subtle. Cork is conjured up, warts and all, the sea, Shandon, the churchs and Parnell situation all feature next to the story of an old man recalling his youth.
Hopefully this may steer some souls towards these two great Irish writers
Chief of Station: Congoby Larry Devlin, is the story of how Devlin worked to undermine the Lumumba regime in the Congo, making sure that the USSR wou;d not gain a foothold in the newly independent ex- African colony, rich in minerals and metals with a cheap exploited labour forceWhile its a good read, well composed, i am aware that i am reading the account of man who was part of the group that facilitated the brutal murder of Lumumba. he makes clear he did not approve of assassination of Lumumba but is working all along with Mbotu and his cronies.
The internet has many books like this, where an old cold warrior from the victorious side, slowly recalls the comedy and tragedy of world events they experienced, while skirting around the dirty deeds the CIA are always up to, with some kind of wooly mission statement
Am half way through and Lumumba has just been captured...
Get well soon gp
Hope you feel better soon g. Early night, hot lemon and honey drink for you.I read with interested the discussions towards the end of the last thread but will not comment as it is finished.
It did remind me about the poet Shelley. He wrote some beautiful poems but when I came to look and learn about his life after a recent Poem of the Week found that I recoiled against his treatment of women. This is an issue that I feel strongly about so there is something of a quandary - can I ignore the man and praise the poet?
CCCubbon wrote: "Hope you feel better soon g. Early night, hot lemon and honey drink for you.I read with interested the discussions towards the end of the last thread but will not comment as it is finished.
It d..."
Good point and a difficult one CC.
Mod
I'm sorry, but it's a very brief introduction today. I'm rather 'under the weather' with a full-blown cough and cold as I haven't had since before covid started. I was afrai..."
I've had a cold for a week or so, too. Funny how it seems so much more dire, post(?)-covid.
Mod
https://themorningnews.org/article/th...
Almost scary how few titles I recognize.
CCCubbon wrote: "It did remind me about the poet Shelley. He wrote some beautiful poems but when I came to look and learn about his life after a recent Poem of the Week found that I recoiled against his treatment of women. This is an issue that I feel strongly about so there is something of a quandary - can I ignore the man and praise the poet?"Though I’m pretty unforgiving when it comes to living authors, under the assumption that patronizing them only underwrites their bad behavior, I generally consider that death cancels any failings in their personal lives.
The question then becomes: Is the behavior you object to in the person somehow present in the work? This is a question I’ve looked into in some depth in the case of Wagner. I’ve read two book-length studies making the claim that his operas are infested with an encoded antisemitism, but the authors failed to convince me.
I’ve read Shelley’s two teenage Gothic novels, but don’t remember them very well – I see I gave them two stars, so evidently they didn’t impress me much at the time. Neither was a patch on the teenage Mary’s later masterpiece. The only poem by him I know is “Ozymandias”, and that because it was featured in a comic book I read at an impressionable age. I’m not aware of any musical settings of his poems.
Lljones wrote: "Gpfr wrote: "Good afternoon to all.I'm sorry, but it's a very brief introduction today. I'm rather 'under the weather' with a full-blown cough and cold as I haven't had since before covid started..."
i usually only get one cold a year but since covid began in early 2020, i havent had a cold. i put it down to more mask wearing in public places but its a suprise with two small child infested christmases that i ended up cold free! as i wasnt wearing a mask with them
Mod
"I've had a cold for a week or so, too. Funny how it seems so much more dire, post(?)-covid."
I know just what you mean!
@BillI am not a great lover of Shelley’s work as I find it rather too flowery for me. I thought you would like these two lines
Music, when soft voices die
Vibrates in the memory
He was a radical in many ways, often in trouble for his political views, family arguments and financial worries. He had a liking for young girls aged about sixteen and was a believer in ‘free love’.
Mod
Bill wrote: "CCCubbon wrote: "It did remind me about the poet Shelley. He wrote some beautiful poems but when I came to look and learn about his life after a recent Poem of the Week found that I recoiled agains..."Ozymandias - I could (mis)quote it from after it’s appearance in the Python anteater sketch.
(https://vimeo.com/617430369)
These days it’s in my mind frequently as we have two (vast and trunkless) Iron Age standing stones on the hill close by.
Thanks to Python also, I instantly recognise the novel that begins..
A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching..
Lljones wrote: "I haven't even finished The Hero of This Book, but I'm ready to rave about it...it's brilliant! If you haven't read Elizabeth McCracken, start with this one. Then go back and read e..."Wow, that's a heck of a recommendation. i had planned on reading The Giant's House pretty soon, but I'll keep an eye out for this one as well
With all the Qatar controversy, by chance i came accross mention of the late Hilary Mantels Eight Months on Ghazzah Street a novel influenced by her time in mid 80s Saudi.Right away, what could be a distant world is re-inforced by every day visions of Qatar and its intolerant closed society. Mantel describes the Jeddah of the mid 80s as a kind of sanitised nowheresville, the sponsoring system is in place and a kind of tired hostility from the Saudis.
So far it reads a little like Ballards late sci-fi, of smooth, sanitised, not quite right worlds of western decadence, though with Mantel the westerners are the prisoners of the desert heat and the culture.
In the last couple of days I’ve read what will no doubt be one of my novels of the year, Strega by Johanne Lykke Holm translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel.
Strega is a fictional unidentified Alpine village, at whose train station passengers disembark from, for the once chic winter resort Hotel Olympic, reachable by cable car from the town, and overlooking a black lake in an isolated valley. These days the hotel has a faded red facade and proportions that seem all wrong, ‘like a doll’s house’. Here Rafaela and eight other teenage girls arrive in late summer to train as maids for the coming season.
Their training begins, finishes, and they start work, but as Rafa observes in a haunting and repetitive strain, ‘no guests arrived’.
Their days of bed-making, room tidying, meal service take on a murky monotony - nothing may be happening, but there is an increasing sense of dread, and feeling that something is seriously amiss.
During a festival to celebrate a local holiday, one of the maids goes missing. Rafa investigates, but the deeper she delves, the more that it seems it is womanhood as a whole that is threatened.
Both the era and the country are unspecified, which heightens the atmosphere of mystery and invites guesswork from the outset.
Lykke Holm’s prose is illusory, richly descriptive and gives the book a nightmarish quality. Very little that is horrific happens, but the atmosphere is laden with unease and trepidation.
It is a superbly written deliberation on the resilience of female friendship when faced with the menace of violence, and slave-like working conditions.
Most certainly, one of the stand-out books of the year.
Some clips..
I usually sat on windowsills, because there was always a chance one might fall out.
Postcards of mountains stretching to the sky, colorised a sunny hue, because the true light of the sky had a brutality to it that had no place on a postcard.
I had tried to write a letter to my mother more than once, but had to give up. I wrote: Mum. The ink flowed out and made my handwriting illegible.perhaps I could no longer speak the language of daughters.
And, Rafa and a friend on a night out in the town..
I said, in a murderer’s voice: One could lure away the barmaid. Do things to her. Tie her to a tree or put her in a metal box.
We spent all our money on sweet drinks. We toasted like men. We said many terrible things. I heard myself say meaningless lines, which I borrowed from the sleeping parts of my brain. Lines from hospital novels and films.
Lljones wrote: "Happy Birthday, Mom. I miss you."
lovely photo LL!
Lljones wrote: "I haven't even finished The Hero of This Book, but I'm ready to rave about it...it's brilliant! If you haven't read Elizabeth McCracken, start with this one. Then go back and read e..."I note that it isn't included in the 2023 Tournament of Books longlist you posted earlier ...
Since a bout of Covid in early October I have been unable to concentrate on reading.I have been looking at books but with the fatigue and some brain fuzz they were just words on a pageAll better now thankfully. I have just finished Edinburgh Twilight by Caroline Lawrence. Oh dear. The elements of a detective story/ police procedural are all there and it isn't a bad story but it suffers from Americanisms .
It is set in Edinburgh in 1899 and is obviously inspired by the Rebus novels, and possibly Morse and Lewis.
The hero is a maverick detective who patronises his sergeant and they are after a serial killer, so far so good but the attempts at writing dialect are all over he place, almost as laughable a Hardy writing about Farfrae.
Now the Americanism- Did Robert Burns really spell the word "armour" sans the "u"? and we're there Longshoremen working at Leith docks in 1899? did anyone "take a powder"?
In one scene our hero gave a street urchin who had appointed himself as an assistant (artful dodger?)
four sovereigns which is equivalent to £400 in today's money.
So I am sorry Caroline,I won't be reading the rest of the series.
Rant over.
Mod
Published in October; missed the cut-off, or at least the list compilers' cut-off, I expect.
CCCubbon wrote: "Hope you feel better soon g. Early night, hot lemon and honey drink for you.I read with interested the discussions towards the end of the last thread but will not comment as it is finished.
It d..."
I've had a similar problem with Dickens.
How could I reconcile the writer I loved with the behaviour of the man he was.
I found my solution, quite unexpectedly, with the help of Carl Friedrich Gauss. Where would Dickens, the man - as opposed to Dickens, the writer - sit on the bell shaped curve?
Far away from people like Handke, Hamsun, Céline eg.
Bill wrote: "CCCubbon wrote: "It did remind me about the poet Shelley. He wrote some beautiful poems but when I came to look and learn about his life after a recent Poem of the Week found that I recoiled agains..."Bill wrote: "
https://www.cbr.com/avengers-ultron-o..."
Bill, you are a music buff.
What links the following composers:
Theodor Berger (1905–1992)
Johann Nepomuk David (1895–1977)
Werner Egk (1901–1983)
Gerhard Frommel (1906–1984)
Harald Genzmer (1909–2007)
Ottmar Gerster (1897–1969)[54]
Kurt Hessenberg (1908–1994)
Paul Höffer (1895–1949)
Karl Höller (1907–1987)
Mark Lothar (1902–1985)
Josef Marx (1882–1964)
Gottfried Müller (1914–1993)
Carl Orff (1895–1982)[55]
Ernst Pepping (1901–1981)[56]
Max Trapp (1887–1971)
Fried Walter (1907–1996)
Hermann Zilcher (1881–1948)
And/or the following conductors:
Hermann Abendroth (1883–1956)
Karl Böhm (1894–1981)
Karl Elmendorff (1891–1962)
Robert Heger (1886–1978)
Eugen Jochum (1902–1987)
Oswald Kabasta (1896–1946)
Herbert von Karajan (1908–1989)
Hans Knappertsbusch (1888–1965)
Joseph Keilberth (1908–1968)
Rudolf Krasselt (1879–1954)
Clemens Krauss (1893–1954)
Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt (1900–1973)[57]
Paul Schmitz (1898–1992)
Johannes Schüler (1894–1966)
Carl Schuricht (1880–1967)
Not really a quiz question (though I would not discount the possibility could answer it) ;-)
Orff is famous, so are Böhm and Karajan, but have you heard of any of the others before (I am a complete ignoramus in that field)? If so: how would you (roughly) rate them?
Just finished a bedtime book of short stories that I’ve had on the go for the last few days… Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories by Robert Aickman
There are two outstanding stories in this collection.
The Swords
Absolutely tremendous. Very Harry Crews in its incorporation of carnivals and 'freak-shows'.
A young traveling salesman, perhaps 16, is bored when working away from home and goes looking for adventure. He stumbles upon a decrepit town carnival that has long seen better days. Hidden away, he finds a side-show that becomes an infatuation: men paying to stab a woman with swords.
There was a burly chap standing on the low platform, giving the spiel, in a pretty rough delivery. He had tight yellow curls, the colour of cheap lemonade but turning grey, and a big red face, with a splay nose, and very dark red lips. The ears didn’t seem exactly opposite one another.
On the chap’s left a girl lay spread out facing us in an upright canvas chair, as faded and battered as everything else in the outfit. She was dressed up like a French chorus, in a tight and shiny black thing, cut low, and black fishnet stockings, and those shiny black shoes with super high heels that many men go for in such a big way. But the effect was not particularly sexy, all the same. The different bits of costume had all seen better days, like everything else, and the girl herself looked more sick than spicy.
As peculiar as it is, it does have meaning - a boy coming of age and experiencing something like sex for the first time, but dreading it, and indulging in it because its what everyone else does, rather than any drive from within.
The woman is as inexpressive and impassive as the boy.
Aickman is making a statement here, whether it is about the act of prostitution, or the blindly copying the behaviour of others / elders without querying it.
And, The Hospice which is a genuinely scary horror tale.
Another travelling salesman (this time much older) called Maybury takes the wrong turn on a road somewhere in the west Midlands and finds himself lost, and low on fuel. Amidst solitary Victorian detached houses separated by a forest he stumbles upon ‘The Hospice’, which offers ‘good food, some accommodation’. He decides to try it out, hoping to stay the night.
There are vast portions of everything, and the residents are tucking in with what seems unending appetites. Maybury finds the food stodgy and overcooked, and struggles to get through a fraction of what the rest are.
Looking around he notices..
something most curious. A central rail ran the length of the long table a few inches above the floor. To this rail, one of the male guests was attached by a fetter round his left ankle.
It’s all twin rooms at the Hospice as the residents cannot stand to be alone. When Maybury gets to his room he finds the heating turned up full, he tries to open a window, but behind the curtains is only a bricked wall. His roommate steps outside for a few minutes. When he returns Maybury thinks it may ne a different person.
This is classic horror; a tremendous author at the height of his powers. There’s no gruesome murders, no monsters, no sudden shock moments, the terror is achieved by misdirection.
At its heart it is about paranoia, people who see threat all around them, and who are so terrified of what could happen to them they will do anything to avoid it.
Georg wrote: "What links the following composers:...
And/or the following conductors:"
I knew more conductors than composers - from the names I recognize, I think that the common element is that they all spent some of their careers under the Nazis.
Of composers, in addition to Orff, I've heard pieces by Egk (an opera Peer Gynt), Pepping (symphonies, piano concerto), and Marx (string quartets). None really bowled me over as I recall, but the music was competent enough that I would give them another hearing, certainly Marx and Pepping.
Conductors, in addition to those two you named: Abendroth (know the name, but can't recall having heard a recording), Elmendorff (only know him from 3rd Reich radio recordings), Heger (post-war recorded a number of operas on EMI), Jochum (a fairly prolific post-war career - I recently listened to a very good Berlin Brahms cycle from the mid-1950s), Knappertsbusch (frequent post-war conductor at Bayreuth - a great Wagnerian IMO), Keilberth (also a post-war Bayreuth regular, not in the Knapp class for my money), Clemens Krauss (friend of Richard Strauss, librettist of Capriccio, led a well-received Bayreuth Ring from 1953), Schmidt-Isserstedt (again a name I've heard, but don't recall hearing him conduct), Schuricht (pretty sure I've heard a few recordings, probably as accompanist, but can't recall specifics).
CCCubbon wrote: "Music, when soft voices dieVibrates in the memory"
Thanks for the Shelley lines; like my reading, much of my experience of music comes from its life in my memory, when am not actively listening, but recalling my experience of listening. This is probably one reason I am so critical of books I don’t find memorable: they don’t participate in that post-reading experience.
Recently in following classical music fans on Twitter and, now, Mastodon, I am surprised that so many seem to have music going on all the time, while engaging in other activities like walking and reading. Except when driving, which I do a lot less of recently, I pretty much only play music when I can give it my full attention. I recently read this from Cate Blanchett:
When I was in High School, I had a friend whose uncle was an opera critic, and whenever I’d go to his house, it would be silent. And I said to him ‘it’s interesting, your world is music and you don’t have music on’. And he said ‘I listen to music, it’s not background. I sit, and I listen to it’. And it was quite a new concept to me because that wasn’t the case in my household. Obviously if you go to a concert you attend to the music in a very different way, which is why I find it such a profound experience hearing music live. But I can no longer have music in the background. My world now falls into two zones – it falls into the times when I’m listening to music, and the times when I’m not. It’s quite a different shift to me.
https://www.gramophone.co.uk/features...
Bill wrote: "Georg wrote: "What links the following composers:...
And/or the following conductors:"
I knew more conductors than composers - from the names I recognize, I think that the common element is that ..."
Your knowledge is impressive.
And your hunch goes in the right direction. They are all on the "Gottbegnadeten" list compiled by Goebbels and Hitler in 1944. Albeit only class B.
I had never heard of this list until I stumbled upon it today. Not many names I recognized in other categories either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottbeg...
Btw: if you're interested: there is the whole "Ring" (Berlin State Opera/Thielemann) on arte atm (had a peek only, quite "modern")
https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/RC-0230...
Georg wrote: "And your hunch goes in the right direction. They are all on the "Gottbegnadeten" list compiled by Goebbels and Hitler in 1944. Albeit only class B."I hadn't heard of this list either. I have to admit, ideology aside, the purely musical judgement of putting Strauss, Pfitzner, and Furtwängler on the 'A' list ahead of those you mentioned seems pretty solid to my ears.
Finished one of the two I got for my birthday : Sosuke Natsukawa, the cat who saved books. Coming of age story about grief, responsibility and books.
Bill wrote: "CCCubbon wrote: "Music, when soft voices dieVibrates in the memory"
Thanks for the Shelley lines; like my reading, much of my experience of music comes from its life in my memory, when am not act..."
That’s really interesting, Bill.
I am not very musical and do not listen often nor have music as a background noise but you made me think about poetry. I do skim read poems often and they slide out of mind but then there are those which make me stop and think and lines get fixed as the music does for you when you concentrate.
Mod
I borrowed La Madone de Notre-Dame by Alexis Ragougneau from the library. I remembered having seen it mentioned here and on looking it up I found it was Andy, who thought it "so-so".
I got about a third of the way through and have given up on it. The tone of the book really bothers me. The commissaire leading the investigation is macho, laddish, crude ... and there's a general crudity and prurience over all.
It was the 1st book by this writer but I won't be looking for any more.
To cleanse my palate (!), I read 2 of Margery Allingham's Albert Campion short stories in Mr Campion and Others.Now I've started the latest Freyja and Huldar: The Fallout byYrsa Sigurðardóttir.
Mod
Bill, I like your comment about how we feel about great artists, and we are more inclined to be lenient with dead ones. It is interesting that some of the most gifted writers, painters, musicians have been complete b*stards in their personal lives. Picasso is one that immediately springs to mind. Maybe we are at fault for expecting talent to equal a perfect outlook on everything. What I am sure we have all noted is how people in the orbit of such talent are often treated so badly by the genius or feed and enable their bad behaviour as if somehow talent excuses every fault.
But I am dubious, personally, about cancelling anyone.
Bill wrote: "Georg wrote: "And your hunch goes in the right direction. They are all on the "Gottbegnadeten" list compiled by Goebbels and Hitler in 1944. Albeit only class B."I hadn't heard of this list eithe..."
In 1932 the villa next to Max Liebermann in Berlin was requisitioned by the Nazis for training SA leaders.
One day a SA man watched Lieberman painting. Eventually he offered:
"Considering you are a Jew you paint quite well, Professor."
Liebermann (known for being quick-witted):
"Considering you are an SA man your artistic sense is half-decent."
Storm wrote: "What I am sure we have all noted is how people in the orbit of such talent are often treated so badly by the genius or feed and enable their bad behaviour as if somehow talent excuses every fault.But I am dubious, personally, about cancelling anyone."
I think there are some artists whose art possesses them like a daemon in the ancient Greek sense, and under its power they are willing to sacrifice family, friends, and social responsibility to serve it – of course such dedication also partakes of a certain amount of egotism and ambition and the proportions vary by individual cases. For me, liking a placid life, I’m willing to admire from a distance, but would eschew personal involvement with such driven individuals.
I was really pissed off with ‘cellist Yo-Yo Ma when he played a duet with George W. Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in 2002 during the ceremony where he received a National Medal of the Arts (I note that Leonard Bernstein declined a similar award offered by Bush’s father). He compounded that by performing with her again in 2017 at the Kennedy Center, by which time it was obvious to anybody with a sense of decency that Rice, Bush, and the rest of his foreign policy team should have been tried at The Hague.
I’m no fan of artists “palling around” with politicians or lending their talent to political events. I voted for Obama twice, but am dismayed when I see artists like Marilynne Robinson fawning over him.
The White Horse Inn by Georges Simenon translated from the French by Norman Denny (1980 translation).
This is one of Simenon's earliest stand-alone novels. To my reckoning it was the eighth out of 106.
I am actively trying to track down some of his littlest known and most difficult to get hold of novels, in an attempt to get to know him better.
Though this touches on several familar themes, marital tension leading to lust for extra-marital affair, the misery of the working class, and the day to day life of a country inn, the characters are less well developed and there is only just enough in the story to keep the attention.
Its fascinating to compare this to ssomething written ten years later, for example the wonderful Monsieur Monde Vanishes, and something ten years after that (1958) the excellent Sunday.
In this, the Arbelet family, father, mother, and two very young sons, stop in at the White Horse Inn on one of their tiresome Sunday hikes. They discover, to their horror, that Madame Arbelet's Uncle Felix is night porter there. Felix is a war veteran, but now an alcoholic and bitter man, old before his time, riddled with guilt for a fellow soldier's suicide. Monsieur Arbelet seeks to find Felix sanctuary in a home to end the family's 'embarassment', while eyeing up a young maid. Elsewhere in the Inn scandal is rife with inappropriate behaviour pretty much in plain sight: the proprietor ogles his helpless female staff while his wife looks on with indifference.
This is Simenon at his most pessimistic. Barely evident is his dry and very dark humour, and notably, the twist in the tail, which often is brutal and shocking. There is subtlety here, but I suspect the most well know of his stand-alones, those that continue to sell well, include both.
Do you believe (prompted by Bill’s comment) that genius can only be served by being selfish? Is there an autistic/spectrum quality to genius?
To create something truly memorable or different, do you need to have arrogance? Or is it simply confidence?
Bill wrote: I’m no fan of artists “palling around” with politicians or lending their talent to political events.Politicians and events are one thing. They come and go. What are your views on artists lending their voice to political parties?
I am thinking of Günther Grass, who has, for years, supported the German SPD.
Moving on from the slightly chilling tale ofCIA meddling in the Congo, my non-fiction now moves to a detailed study of the Argentine military junta and their invasion of the Falkland Islands, 40 years ago.Land That Lost Its Heroes: How Argentina Lost the Falklands War is based on the argentine side of the conflict and the political and military decisions that led to the invasion and the subsequent collapse of the junta after the defeat of the Argentinian forces
I am amazed i have never seen this book before as i have read so much on the Falklands, which was a key part of my early childhood and saw many friends family members serving in the British forces during April to July 1982.
Galtieri and the dirty war are familiar to me but am looking foward to re-visiting the Argentine decisions for invasion and the implications that had for the nation. My South American reading continues in 2022
AB76 wrote: "...Land That Lost Its Heroes: How Argentina Lost the Falklands War..."
I’d be interested to know if it includes material on the views of the Argentinian leaders as to the strength of their conscript forces on the Islands. I asked a work colleague in London what he thought of the chances of the Paras, just then about to land, against a large entrenched force with plenty of time to prepare. He had been one of the founding members of the SAS, and he knew all about professional soldiering. Even so I was amazed when he confidently said “No contest”. Did the Argentine generals have private doubts about their army?
GP – Glad to hear you’re improving.
I’d be interested to know if it includes material on the views of the Argentinian leaders as to the strength of their conscript forces on the Islands. I asked a work colleague in London what he thought of the chances of the Paras, just then about to land, against a large entrenched force with plenty of time to prepare. He had been one of the founding members of the SAS, and he knew all about professional soldiering. Even so I was amazed when he confidently said “No contest”. Did the Argentine generals have private doubts about their army?
GP – Glad to hear you’re improving.
Georg wrote: "Politicians and events are one thing. They come and go. What are your views on artists lending their voice to political parties?I am thinking of Günther Grass, who has, for years, supported the German SPD."
Some not-quite-connected thoughts.
I’ve long held up the American novelist Thomas Pynchon as approximating my ideal of the artist’s relationship to his public and the wider society. Although he’ll occasionally write an introduction or liner notes or “appear” on The Simpsons, he pretty much limits his public communications to his relatively infrequent novels. No authenticated pictures of him have been published, to my knowledge, for over 50 years; when he won the National Book Award in 1974 for Gravity's Rainbow, he sent double-talk comedian Professor Irwin Corey to accept the award for him. To the extent a creative artist, particularly an author, goes beyond that limited amount of self-revelation, I feel their art becomes compromised.
I suppose something similar to Pynchon’s situation can be achieved by writing under a pseudonym, though maintaining strict privacy in such a case probably requires a similar level of caution and care on the part of writer, agent, editors, and publishers.
As someone who can get passionate about politics, I can understand the temptation for a writer to use their perceived fame and influence to weigh in on party politics, but it’s a temptation I think even Oscar Wilde would advise resisting. Commitment to a party always involves, to some extent, compromising with bullshit and bullshit is an absolute corrupter of art.
I think that this is why the Franzen/Oprah controversy of 2001 continues to fascinate me. It was like a keynote controversy for art in the public forum in the 21st century: How can artists continue to stand against bullshit when the bullshitters become the gatekeepers?
To the extent an artist becomes involved in politics, which is inevitable in many cases given the weight and urgency of some issues, I think it should be as a critic and trouble-maker rather than a cheerleader and enabler. Speak Truth to Power, but not if your truth amounts to, “Hey, Power, you’re doing great!”
Bob Dylan Gets Tangled Up in Book Autograph ControversyJustin Steffman, a professional authenticator who runs a Facebook group for collectors, said the autograph was most likely created by an autopen. The machine, which recreates signatures, is used by universities, celebrities and, most notably, the White House."Fans" are sure more trusting than I would be.
Handwritten penmanship normally has a flow, Steffman said. But “with a pen machine, it goes from point to point,” he said, adding that the beginning and the end points of each stroke apply more pressure to the page. Dylan’s autograph in the new books also appears to have a “slight shakiness throughout the signature,” he said. ...
While questions remain about the decision to use an automated autograph in the Dylan book, fans are confident that Dylan had nothing to do with it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/ar...
Note: the above is a link to a "gift" article - you should be able to read it without running into the Times' paywall.
Mod
I've should have asked you this long ago, Bill: What did Dylan ever do to you? 😉
Mod
--No new yarn or craft supplies: Almost. I had to buy a few skeins of yarn to finish a project, pictured below.
--Quit smoking (again): Done, as of April.
--No new books: Done, so far. My wish-list is only a few hundred titles long.
Next year's resolution: make no resolutions.
/
Lljones wrote: "Bill wrote: ""Fans" are sure more trusting than I would be...."I've should have asked you this long ago, Bill: What did Dylan ever do to you? 😉"
I do find it interesting that the fans quoted in the article absolve Dylan of responsibility.
“I was surprised by the sheer number they were saying they had — 1,000 copies in and of itself seems like a red flag to me,” said Laura Tenschert, who hosts a podcast called “Definitely Dylan.” “I would assume he has better things to do with his time.”Do they really think that the publisher would go rogue and carry out this scheme without a go-ahead from the author and copyright holder? It's not like we're talking about Harper Lee. It seems like an emotional version of the "sunk cost fallacy".
Tenschert described the situation as “messy” but said, “I, personally, would assume Bob Dylan was not involved in this.” She pointed to his history of keeping ticket sales “affordable and accessible” to fans, which, she said, “suggests it’s more important for him to reach his fans.”
(Nice project, by the way. What do you call the technique you used: is it needlepoint or something else?)
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Well done with your resolutions! Especially, congratulations on the smoking. I like the pussy.
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Ersatz TLS
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Authors mentioned in this topic
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I'm sorry, but it's a very brief introduction today. I'm rather 'under the weather' with a full-blown cough and cold as I haven't had since before covid started. I was afraid it was covid, but tested negative.
Anyway, good reading, everybody, and let's make sure we keep this a space where people can express different viewpoints politely and amicably!