Batgrl (Book Data Kept Elsewhere) > Recent Status Updates

H. P. Lovecraft alert: BBC Radio 4 will start a 5 episode version of Shadow Over Innsmouth sometime today. Keep an eye on expiration dates though, episodes are only posted for 7 days and then go offline again. Reading the work: Richard Coyle.

Had to add this quote from M. R. James especially for the part about the guest re-shelving upside down books in his host's home. Because yes, I have to oogle other people's books, can not help myself. And I would want to turn books right way up, but would worry about that being too nosey.

Am getting very addicted to BBC 4 Extra - this week you can hear a series of M.R.James ghost stories, only about 15min each. But they expire after so many days, so check them out quickly.

There's a BBC radio program online written by Peter Ackroyd: The Mystery of Charles Dickens. They're usually only accessible for 3 days or so, so be quick if you want to listen.

Currently when I search GR for: Burger's Daughter (1979 book) - typed just like that - the only book that comes up: Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer Summary & Study Guide by BookRags - check if you get the same via search, or maybe it's because this is the link my search gives me: http://www.goodreads.com/search?utf8=...+
This is REALLY odd, because Nadine Gordimer is well known.

It's always terribly sad (to me) to get excited about a book, then learn that because it's academic (university press, small number printed, used as textbook, etc) the price is upwards of $50. Sometimes even the ebooks are between $30 to $60. Ouch. And of course these are also texts that are hard to track down, even at university libraries. I'm not a researcher, just want to read others' research.

Trying to imagine growing up with the name Thomas Love Peacock...

During Liberation: "In the mornings, toward 11 o'clock, the Nazis sallied forth from the Luxembourg with their tanks and went down the Boulevard Saint Michel, shooting here and there. Rather disagreeable for those of us who were lined up at the bakery at the bread hour."

The Germans shut down her shop, and eventually came for her: "After six months in an internment camp, I was back in Paris but with a paper stating that I could be taken again by the German military authorities at any time they saw fit. My friends agreed that, instead of waiting to be sent back, I should "disappear.""

"When the United States came into the war, my nationality, added to my Jewish affiliations, finished Shakespeare and Company in Nazi eyes. We Americans had to declare ourselves at the Kommandatur and register once a week at the Commissary in the section of Paris where we lived. (Jews had to sign every day.) There were so few Americans that our names were in a sort of scrapbook that was always getting mislaid."

During the Occupation: "I had a volunteer helper, a young Jewish friend, Francoise Bernheim. A student of Sanscrit, but now excluded from the Sorbonne by the Nazi laws, she was encouraged by her professor to copy notes taken by her non-Jewish friends, and, with his help and theirs, she was persevering in her studies."

Finding various histories online about Sophia Duleep Singh, and thinking how odd no one's written a book about her. Apparently Bloomsbury has one, though maybe it's still in the works?

"People imagined, perhaps, that I was making a lot of money from Ulysses. Well, Joyce must have kept a magnet in his pocket that attracted all the cash Joycewards. ...All that was available from his work, and I managed to keep it available, was his. But it was all I could do to prevent my bookshop from getting sucked under."

"Actually, I think the banning of Ulysses was a fortunate thing. So great a writer might otherwise have waited several hundred years to become famous except in the comparatively small group that will go in for a Ulysses. But Joyce always considered himself a victim of persecution. I wondered if he was ever that."

p 179-182 - great info on piracy of Joyce's works. It's almost funny to read that pirates then were saying the same things as today - that they're really fans of the artist, that the artist and publisher already have enough money and this couldn't hurt them, etc.

"If the food is nice, no other thoughts should intrude; if there is a conversation, whether on business or on art, one listens attentively, and how can one do that and at the same time enjoy nice food? I always noticed that the French at table wouldn't discuss anything, except perhaps the food, till after the second helping, when one could begin to think of something else."

"In 1924, I went to the office of His Master's Voice in Paris to ask them if they would record a reading by James Joyce from Ulysses. ...His Master's Voice would agree to record the Joyce reading only if it were done at my expense. The record would not have their label on it, nor would it be listed in their catalogue."

Ben W. Huebsch: "To present a crisis of souls for an evening's entertainment... is a very hard task and particularly so in such a play as Exiles which does not act itself but requires actors. I should think that the real actor would love Joyce's parts just because they are so severe a test. You cannot walk through these parts - you have to act or fail."

"Eugene Jolas, with his three mother tongues, English, French, and German (he was from Lorraine), and James Joyce, the multilinguist, set out to revolutionize the English language. They had plenty of words at their disposal and they didn't see what could prevent them from getting all the fun in the world out of them."

"Poor Scott [Fitzgerald] was earning so much money from his books that he and Zelda had to drink a great deal of champagne in Montmartre in an effort to get rid of it. He spent an entire publisher's check on a pearl necklace for her."

"...the Shakespeare and Company cat, a black-as-ink cat named Lucky. Joyce never wore gloves, so Lucky's appetite for the fingers of them didn't annoy him as it did people who had laid down a good pair on one of the tables and found them with the fingers devoured. You couldn't make Lucky see how wrong this was. All I could do was to put up a sign warning the customers of the danger to gloves."

"There's a great deal to do in a bookshop. As in the "Rhyme of the Nancy Bell," I was both "the cook and the captain bold." - to get the full joke (hint, cannibalism!), read the poem by Sir William Schwenck Gilbert.

"The principal event of this trip [to the US] for Bryher, aside from meeting Marianne Moore and other poets for the first time, was her marriage to the young writer from Minnesota, Robert McAlmon. They were married the day after they met. Bryher did not tell the man she married who she was. ...she intended to keep her marriage secret from her parents until she could take her husband to England and introduce them..."

Bryher: "She was practically soundless, a not uncommon thing in England; no small talk whatsoever - the French call it "letting the others pay the expenses of the conversation." ...This was so different from the way most people blew in and out, wrapped up in themselves like parcels for the post."

"It was distressing trying to explain my reasons for not undertaking other publications than Ulysses; lack of capital - but you couldn't persuade anyone that Shakespeare and Company hadn't made a fortune - and that we lacked space, personnel, and time. It was difficult to tell him [D. H. Lawrence] that I didn't want to get a name as a publisher of erotica ...what could anybody offer after Ulysses?"

"Though the question who has influenced such and such a writer has never bothered me, and the adult writer doesn't stay awake at night to wonder who has influenced him, I do think Hemingway readers should know who taught him to write; it was Ernest Hemingway. And like all authentic writers, he knew that to make it "good," as he called it, you had to work."

"An eye operation must be a dreadful ordeal, particularly for someone as sensitive as Joyce. Conscious, he watched it going on, and, as he told me, the instrument looming up in front of his eye appeared like a great ax."

"Joyce told me that he had written a third of Ulysses on the proofs. Up to the last minute, the long-suffering printers in Dijon were getting back these proofs, with new things to be inserted somehow, whole paragraphs even, dislocating pages. M. Darantiere warned me that I was going to have a lot of extra expense with these proofs. He suggested that I call Joyce's attention to the danger of going beyond my depth..."

Writer Valery Larbaud: "Larbaud, curiously enough for such a peace lover, possessed an enormous army, and a growing one, of toy soldiers. He complained bitterly that they were beginning to crowd him out of his rooms, but he made no effort to control them."