Lola Reads, vol. 2

...

In a stroke of serendipity, I chanced on Athanasius Kircher : a Renaissance man and the quest for lost knowledge just as I ordered Juan Eusebio Nieremberg's Oculta filosofía de la simpatía y antipatía de las cosas, artificio de la naturaleza, y noticia natural del mundo : razones de la música en el hombre y la naturaleza.

Kircher and Nieremberg were contemporaries (1602-1680; 1595-1658), and Jesuit scholars both, writing on many same topics and, it seems, from a similar position, one of incipient modern scientific inquiry, against fancy-free alchemy and superstition. Joscelyn Godwin's introduction to Kircher is so obviously doting I must take his assertions of Kircher's intellectual brilliance with some salt, especially as he's forced to admit that Kircher was eventually proven wrong on every major point he put forth.

Still, his encyclopedic interests, expressed in a huge output of marvellously illustrated books, make him an attractive and curious figure, one I wouldn't mind getting to know better.

Nieremberg seems, if anything, even more interesting, perhaps because I had a taste of his own writing, a direct expression of the man. He too published tons, more than seventy books, most being proper theological fare, e.g. on the beauty of God and the lovableness of Mary, but some, like The occult philosophy, venturing boldly where few have ventured since the Greeks--into rational science. It should be noted Kircher and Nieremberg both relied on classical sources for "first" information; Nieremberg quotes constantly from them, adding occasional later corroborations or, in some places, refutations. The topic of this selection from The occult philosophy is music: its effects on man, animals, plants and inanimate matter, such as water (Interestingly, Godwin reports that Kircher's most-reprinted work is also musical, Musurgia universalis).

What is striking is Nieremberg's cool rejection of any supernatural solutions to observed phenomena--everything must be explained in terms of naturaleza. For instance, he considers the question of whether music has an effect on demons on the example of the Biblical story of David soothing the evil spirits that possessed Saul. Nieremberg doesn't question the veracity of the story (heaven forfend!), or the existence of "evil spirits" (demonios); he references a bunch of authorities on that. The question, for him, is this: by what "virtue" (how) did David's harp-playing work on these spirits? Procopius, he mentions, thought the answer must be supernatural; himself he believes the natural causes suffice--it was the "ordering" effect of music which erased the (demonic) disorder and confusion in Saul. Besides, he adds in what I can't help reading as tongue-in-cheek humour, the fact that they sent for a musician to cure Saul proves that "they weren't expecting a miracle, but a natural remedy".

He takes the same rational view in discussing whether animals and plants respond to music, how and why, weighing the reports from classical authors in light of logic and, always, naturaleza. That a fountain of still water was found to move when music was played nearby, he explains by physical means, displacements of air; it is, he says, a strictly natural effect. "To assign another effect to music as music and sound harmony over inanimate objects is false and superstitious."

He doesn't always come to the right conclusions (what we today have the luxury of knowing to be right or wrong), as in, for instance, the widely reported phenomenon of tarantula venom causing madness and "dancing illness", but the manner in which he approaches the problems is definitely something new in his times and foreshadowing the future.

...especially as he's forced to admit that Kircher was eventually proven wrong on every major point he put forth.

Yeah, well, there is that.

Yes, always, but the poetry of occult lore is nonetheless potent. By another chance, I had started reading Meyrink's Der Engel vom Westlichen Fenster (The angel of the West window) a while ago, and I wish I had read it in a proper book instead off the computer because it turned out to be much longer and more complicated than expected, and reading in snatches between other work didn't help in maintaining the atmosphere. But, it was too exciting to leave off once I started.

Baron Muller, a Viennese dealer in antiquities, discovers he's a descendant of John Dee, who was Queen Elizabeth's astronomer and adviser and, most famously, a seeker of occult truths. The significance of this link becomes both more evident and changes, as Muller reads through Dee's diaries. The world becomes double, with the hitherto occult one gradually emerging from beyond the shallow appearance of reality. The story (or history) becomes double too, as contemporary events mirror events in the past, and the figures from John Dee's time reappear in Muller's life as modern counterparts. Some of these people are Dee's (and Muller's) mortal enemies; some are friends, but he struggles to recognise their identities and aims. There is an overarching occult theme to the plot too, the alchemical rite which was foiled in Dee's time, a mystical wedding, to which Muller now blindly grapples in a very literal sense--but has he identified his "bride" correctly? Does he understand what the rite is supposed to mean, and which elements need to unite to bring it through?

Meyrink's a master at making the stitches between dreams and reality shimmer uncannily, at projection of mysteries that point to the deepest being.

As a fan of Meyrink, and a John Dee enthusiast, I'm surprised I've not heard of this book. It sounds terrific. I'll have to see if it's been "englished".

Dedalus - The Angel of the West Window; they translated quite a bit of Meyrink. Peter Ackroyd's The House of Doctor Dee is on topic as well.

Nice, I figured Dedalus was the most likely place to check.

"The Black Mirror", a short story by Jean Ray, explores the effect of Dee's scrying mirror on a down-at-heels physician who comes into its possession through craft and violence.

#5 - yeah, the description at #3 put me in mind of Ackroyd's The House of Doctor Dee as well.

Which makes me think that there must be an entire shelf of books featuring Dr. Dee...
...and sure enough, LT's "character"cross-reference is overly-broad, but it turns up 60+ books:

http://www.librarything.com/character/John+Dee

I think you'd love it, Mak, and be much better at spotting the alchemical references. I didn't have the time for supplementary reading and one could certainly do with some with this book.

#8

I'm just looking at John Dee on Wikipedia and they don't list this novel in fiction about him--a strange omission. If anyone knows how to add it...

#5

Thanks, I've never read Ackroyd, I'll remember to look that one up.

A mirror, diaries, a lance tip, the colour green and the westerly direction are some of the mystical objects/motifs recurring in the book. It's interesting that green is occult in the West and holy (sacred-mystical) in the East. Could there be a connection, and if so, what and how?

Also read: Wohin rollst du... (Little Apple) by Leo Perutz (Meyrink and Perutz, by the way, often cross thematically in the occult range--and King Rudolph, an adept of the mystick arts, makes an appearance in The angel of the west window as he did in Perutz's Nights under the stone bridge.) A seemingly simple story that just won't leave my head; mostly because I don't understand the main character.

The Great War is nearing its end and five officers of the Austro-Hungarian army are released from two years Siberian captivity. Four of them begin recovering their civilian selves and aspirations already on the train taking them home, but Georg Vittorin thinks of one thing only: of returning to Russia and avenging himself on the supercilious commander of the prisoners' camp, one Michail Michailowitsch Seljukow. Seljukow was, apparently, an arrogant s.o.b. none liked, but his BIG crime, to Vittorin, consists entirely in the incident when Vittorin went to him to plead for rescindement of a disciplinary punishment (couple weeks withholding of post), and Seljukow nonchalantly refused and had him shown to the door.

As this detail recurs in Vittorin's memory throughout the book, it's worth describing: Seljukow dismissed his plea at once and had him leave by saying to his orderly, with a careless wave of a hand, "Poshal", meaning, in Russian, "he is to leave".

That's all it took to damn a man, or two, when one considers what happens next with Vittorin's life. He returns to Vienna but hardly notices his father, sisters and young brother, who are direly in need of help--all his energies go into plotting the return to Russia. He takes on a job, not to help out his family, but to get the money for the trip, and as soon as opportunity arises, he sets off back to the East. Once inside Russia, he faces a hundred obstacles and near-death experiences as the civil war is raging and Vittorin clings now to the Whites and now to the Reds, all in his mad chase after Seljukow, who resembles more and more some legendary demon, a phantom. Vittorin's hunt inadvertently brings several bystanders down, as bad luck would have it, people who have helped him out, but he doesn't even notice. Years go by; Seljukow's trail leads him to Turkey, then Europe; Vittorin follows from one miserable situation to the next, living off gambling and whores, playing the violin for small change like a Gypsy, rolling any which way like the "little apple" from the Russian song which gives the book its title.

When he finally meets with his mortal enemy… things go off as one would expect.

I am most intrigued by the origin of Vittorin's revenge trauma. One of Vittorin's co-captives calls his obsession a war neurosis, but what does that mean? Why is Vittorin affected and they are not? And what is the nature of Vittorin's hurt, of the "narcissistic injury" he suffered? (If only Vittorin had stayed home and talked it all out with Dr. Freud…)

One could argue that Vittorin's obsession has an erotic component. In the fatal incident and Vittorin's sick relivings of it, Seljukow constantly appears as an elegant, superior man, with "fine, narrow, lightly tanned hands", and fingers that hold cigarettes in some special, inimitable way (Vittorin actually tries to imitate it); he is sexually attractive and has a fine mistress to prove it, a mysterious noble married lady; he is valiant, with high decorations, including the St. George's cross; he reads French novels and speaks fluent French, which is how he communicates with the Austrians, except when he cuts Vittorin with that Russian word, addressed not even to him, but to the peasant orderly, the brute who will dare push Vittorin physically out of the room, should he not leave on his own.

Or is it that extreme passions resemble each other? At any rate, there is stuff in this odd story for at least one other one, preferably by Dostoevsky.

...

More accidentally fitting-together reads were Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin and Irvin Schick's The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alterist Discourse; the former actually getting mentioned in the latter, by way of its "happy savages" portrayal of the islanders. Gauguin abandoned Europe for a couple of years just before the break of the XX century, deeply disgusted by modern civilisation, and set off for Paradise--and by golly, he found it. What were the odds? The climate, he says, was mild, the simple food plentiful, the people naked and gentle, and the girls naively, generously loving. But there hangs a cloud of unease over this narrative, and not, I think, mainly the reader's (embarrassing as it is to read of this cultivated adult European taking to wife in a sham marriage a thirteen year old illiterate)--Gauguin's idealisations of the Pacific are frequently frustrated, although all the blame is turned, seemingly perfectly un-self-consciously, against the invading European rot. At any rate, eventually, he… left.

Schick's book is recommended not only for its concise exposition of the curious mechanics of "othering", distancing and strange-making via sexuality, and showing what role "exotic" sexuality had and has in colonialist and supremacist discourse, but also for its extensive bibliography of orientalist erotic literature. I don't expect enriching bizarro wishlists was his aim, but it certainly fulfills it most excellently, and I hope to add soon some choice titles to my stupendous loot.

He also wrote one of my favourite sentences, something like: "Home is where we dream of other places." On that cue, I'd say that home is also the only place where these "other places" exist. Travel is deadly to the explorer.

...

Unica Zürn was an artist and writer of surrealist lineage, and Hans Bellmer's longtime companion, too often overlooked for his sake. She suffered from schizophrenia and committed suicide during one of her hospitalisations. Sombre printemps (Dark Spring) is a novella with autobiographical flavour, at least its depiction of a young girl's developing sexuality and first love rings shatteringly true. The child is first passionately in love with the first man in her life, her dashing and too distant, philandering father, contemptuous of her mother, hating her abusive brother, crushing on a boy her own age, who doesn't respond to her amorphous fiery need as she'd like him to (the poor kid is a kid!), and at ten falls in love with a beautiful man she sees at the public swimming pool--a deep, hopeless, physical passion such as adults rarely dare conceive of in children. The girl knows her love is impossible and satisfies herself with watching him at the pool, keeping to the sidelines (he has other, more mature admirers too, who take every opportunity to swarm around him), until he stops appearing and she, panic overwhelming her shyness, learns he is ill. The compulsion to see him is so great that she sets off on an adventure tremendous for a child, a real quest--she finds out his address, buys a bag of peaches, and walks through the city to him. The landlady and the sick man are astonished by the visit, he is stunned when he understands what brought her. In his confusion, he lets her feed him a peach; she collects the pit, as a keepsake, and becomes so bold as to ask, first for a hair, then for a photograph. He gives her both, but then tells her she must leave, go directly home, without stopping anywhere. She is elated and feels strong enough not to see him again. Her love is impossible. She has climbed to the top of her love, and there's only one direction from there, exactly the same the author will take some years later.

Next... I confess I have a soft spot for Medea; in fact, she is my favourite mythological heroine. Medea the childkiller. Her own children. What Sophie's choice, what earth-mothering, what holy self-sacrifice, what tears for the crucified son, what gut and womb-love--fuck this show, I hear Medea saying, fuck your archetypes, struggle for survival, societal imperatives, gender roles and tender babes. Medea refuses to be a mother. Medea deletes that dimension of her self; Medea opts for monsterhood. We all sort of expect men to be lousy parents, as they are lousy partners and lovers--but whither humanity and the entire Greatest Show On Earth without mother-love? Medea is the greatest criminal in the universe. Medea is worse than Satan.

Well, not Christa Wolf's Medea, who is an intelligent, loving, courageous woman, tragically scapegoated, damned if she does and damned if she doesn't--the type and fate depressingly too frequently encountered in reality. It's a necessary counter-weighing retelling of the myth, but not very interesting in execution, to me at least, with it's undifferentiated chorus of first-person voices each bringing a tile of the too-flat mosaic.

...

Jacques Chessex was a prolific Swiss writer and painter who died recently; Le Dernier Crâne de M. de Sade (M. de Sade's last skull) is his last book and tenth recipient of the Prix Sade. That can't be a very serious prize, if something as slight as this novella commands it, but I'm sure it's good fun (the money isn't much, but the winner receives a little whip too). The impetus for the novella came from an exhibition on Sade, specifically from the exhibit of one of the six skull moulds that were made when Sade's remains were exhumed several years after his death. On visitors' approach to the obscured cabinet, eerie green lights would slowly outline the skull hanging in darkness--the closest one could come nowadays to the singular corporeality of the most corporeal of philosophers, with Hammer Studio effects thrown in.

The novella presents an imaginary but factually possible account of Sade's last days, his relationship with one of the staff's young daughter, his theatrical projects, and his indomitable seeking after sexual pleasure to the last. Sade's testament, which prohibited any interference with his cadaver, was initially respected in this regard, but when several years later borders of the graveyard needed to be moved, the grave was exhumed and the opportunity taken by a phrenology-happy medic, Dr. Ramon, to study this most notorious of heads. Famously, he concluded that Sade's skull "was in all points similar to that of a Father of the Church". Other phrenologists show up on his doorstep, one of them, Spurzheim, begs to borrow the skull, promises to make moulds and return the original--manages to fulfill half the promise, Ramon never sees the original skull again, and it's difficult to tell who does. Odd things happen on the trail of Sade's skulls, as they disappear one after another, strange kind of sexual madness seems to possess those who handle them, the marquis is still enjoying his devilish games from beyond the grave.

A tidbit for Sadeians only; I'll be getting more Chessex.

On n'enchaîne pas les volcans (You cannot shackle volcanoes) collects four short essays on Sade by my favourite Sadeian expert, Annie Le Brun, loosely connected by the notion of theatricality, in Sade's atheism, literary work, and life. In plain words, fit for hellfire, the central idea is that Sade not merely philosophised with his dick, but had discovered that there is no other way to philosophise, that no one philosophises otherwise. Philosophy is lighted at the fire of passions, he wrote. Desire is primary. With Sade philosophy enters the boudoir and is tested directly on our bodies, to the extreme of our abilities, to the breaking point of our ideologies, and every last intellectual self-deception, every last reservation, barrier and restraint made on freedom. In this annihilation of ideology, refusal of the straitjackets of any intellectual system, in his total liberty, Sade is an enemy of party politics no less than of religion.

Two essays discuss Juliette, Sade's paragon of criminal immorality, created to show Vice Triumphant, as her sister Justine represented Virtue Abashed. I disagree with Le Brun's optic concerning Juliette's sex; I don't think it's in any way remarkable, within Sade's universe, that one of his greatest libertines (or the greatest, going by sheer mass of text expended on her) was a woman.

The juxtaposition of Bataille and Sade is too personal and therefore opaque; I don't read Bataille as she does, and perhaps (probably) I don't understand him half as well. Hoping I don't muddy the waters further, I'll just say Le Brun opposes Bataille and Sade utterly, but finds a mirror-like point of connection in their (differently but equally) "tormented erotic functioning", which in both conditions their thought absolutely.

As an introduction to Le Brun's thinking on Sade, I'd much sooner recommend the longer, more cohesive and detailed Sade: a sudden abyss and Les Chateaux de la subversion. However, I loved the illustrations that accompany this edition, especially the selection of drawings by Georges François Marie Gabriel of some of the inmates of Charenton, some of whom took part in Sade's theatre there. (Link to a contemporary publication on Gallica: Recueil. Têtes d'aliénés dessinées à Charenton, vers 1823)

>10 LolaWalser: I hope to add soon some choice titles to my stupendous loot.

chortle. Can't you post a list for us?

talk about coincidences (I know we weren't, but....) I just came across Gaugin's book while looking for illustrations to my piece on Melville's Mardi on The Lectern. I included some of them. They are wondrously strange and beautiful. Lola, have you read Segalen's essay on the exotic?

What, give away precious info so rivals can raid Abe? Some of that stuff is as rare as feather of newt! Especially if you avoid the abominable Print-On-Demands... But okay. I'll post a selection within the next few days.

have you read Segalen's essay on the exotic?

I did (I think--it's really a long list of jottings, no--unfinished?), but rather long ago, and not much survives, except that it irritated me like a circus of fleas in my underwear. I know I started making notes, about how calling Segalen's concept "exoticism" is misleading (in the historical context), that I prefer to label it "Otherism", because he widened the notion to every perception of strangeness, spatial, temporal, individual, racial etc. Which, by the way, I thought was a great idea (his broadening of the term), but if memory serves that was the last thing I thought was great about it.

Assuming I'm not completely misremembering: Segalen fetishised otherness, diversity, difference and it seemed to me he did so primarily out of egotism, of his experience of HIS own individuality as the ineluctable axis around which the world displays its quaint diversity like so many insects in a museum. He said something about only "strong" personalities perceiving differences, or that the stronger one's personality, the more defined one's individuality is, the more one is able to perceive differences--which, in his view, it is CORRECT to perceive. He slagged everyone who, again according to him, dared find commonalities between the stuff he resolutely separated.

I suppose one could see a reflection of his fundamentally analytical nature in this. I don't know. (It reminds me of going to zoo with a creationist friend and his kids; said he to me, "I really can't credit evolution when I see how different the animals are from each other", said I to him, "huh, you first see the differences, and I first think of the underlying unity".)

I see in it, apart from a dated worldview which didn't have the resources (knowledge) that we do, a pernicious Romantic tendency to give the world the shape of our dreams. For some reason, it was absolutely necessary to him that the "races" (and mutatis mutandi, sexes, languages, cultures etc.) remain "impenetrable" to each other. I have a feeling Segalen would have liked nothing better than to transport every one of his exotic objects on non-communicating planets, there to evolve ever more "differently". (To tell the truth, as a scientist I can appreciate such thought experiments. Meaning I might feel a shade of that longing myself.) But, back to real life!--the life in which the world is a system of communicating vessels, in which money, words, news, merchandise and genes circulate through any kind of obstacle. In the end, maybe the essential mistake is to imagine we can describe anything "objectively", whether the result is a perception of difference or similarity. Maybe we can only have repertoires, palettes of "objectivity".

See, I barely remember what the man wrote, but the fleas bite anew.

However, I couldn't have asked for a better cue to the next installment of "what I read":



La Boîte en os (The bone casket) by Antoinette Peské. When Peské was eight years old (in 1918), she was about to have Apollinaire publish a collection of her verses, but he died. She was so struck by his death that she didn't write again (certainly didn't publish) for decades, then in 1941 this novel came out. Cocteau praised it fulsomely, but clearly that didn't result in any great fame for the author, who only published one other novel together with her husband.

It would stand a revival and fit nicely into the NYRB Classics or any other "obscure foreign lit" imprint, although it misses greatness because, while it has a wild and wildly driven idea at its centre, the plotting is inept.

Harking back to Segalen's general exoticism ("otherism"), which includes the exoticism of other people, never felt so acutely as in love, it's a story of a man gone mad with the desire to "see" inside his beloved, to grasp her soul (mind, essence) as he only grasped her body. So, to make a short story shorter, he tries to open her skull (the "box made of bone") and almost kills her, is institutionalised, eventually recovers and gets released, haunts the woman again, and it all ends in tragedy, or multiple tragedies, as a new generation plays out the old (same) obsession. The setting for the story is the gloomy Scotland of lakes and castles, there are ghosts, burial of the living, curses, reincarnation--these elements of the classic Gothic strangely at odds with Peské's occasional flight into pure expressionism and sexually explicit language.

A literary curiosity more than a masterpiece, and genuinely creepy.

>13 LolaWalser: Re abominable print-on-demands. They really are abominable. I just got one by accident from Amazon. Wavy print of various sizes and what should have been colorful cover art had mutated into the indistinct color of mud. How does one avoid them?

#14

Good question. On Abe, I select "NOT print on demand", although I've noticed some filter through. Any rare, old or out of print title available in quantities from a single seller is POD--check the dates of printing too. Some POD imprints are LLC Group (they will also sell you Wikipedia), Nabu Press, Kessinger... Have you noticed the covers with generic nature, clock, pen and/or seaside scenes? The same cover for a zillion different titles? POD.

Some POD covers:

.........

.........

16
A hideous lot, covering generally hideous printings. These have all the sex appeal of the obsolete telephone books that someone deposits on my doorstep with depressing regularity.

On the brighter side, an investment in a Kindle (and, I suppose, a prime membership) obviates the need for these monstrosities. Most of the public domain stuff in these editions can be downloaded gratis, as I just did the Dowson up there.

I still need the feel of the material book in my hand. But I agree that those POD covers are hard to admit to shelves.

WHEN will someone decent reprint Octave Uzanne? I'm afraid it's hopeless.

19
I know the feeling. Never thought I'd get into it, but I got a nice leather cover, and I can read in the dark by the pool.

(For the time being, at least. It's almost the time of year that the HIDEOUS GIANT FLYING COCKROACHES begin to make their nocturnal appearances in these here parts.)

>13 LolaWalser: thanks for expounding at such length on Segalen. I have not read it yet, but I will come to back to your post when I do.

I should reread it, I really remember my irritation more than the thrust of Segalen's argument; although, given the nature of the text, I'm not sure there is a completely worked-out argument. Maybe it would be necessary to compare what he says in the essay with what he does in his other writing. Assuming the essay was a recapitulation rather than a discovery. I've read only René Leys and Peintures, a bit too long ago.

I looked at those notes I made back when, the last one: 'Tahiti--où la femme est un animal exotique', with "la" viciously circled, "la femme" and "animal" and "exotique" separately underlined three times, and five sarcastic exclamation marks. Har.

One thing that occurred to me, I was puzzled by Segalen's contempt for Loti and his ilk, because Segalen's attitudes didn't strike me as being all that different, or any less "orientalising" than Loti's. But the more I think about it, the more I feel that in this opposition lies a key to understanding Segalen. To him, Loti was an "impressionist", a cosmopolitan tourist, donning native garb and striking "native" poses--stuff absolutely abhorrent to the "scientific" observer. Loti found Frenchmen in Turks, Greeks, Arabs etc. because he found a common humanity wherever he went. To him, differences were so much stage costume. Dress up like a Japanese and you could be Japanese. To Segalen this is anathema. Differences are essential. "Impenetrable". (Except they are perfectly penetrable in this world--something that he, IIRC, explicitly regretted.)

I suppose one could say Segalen took "others" with more seriousness than Loti, that his analysis goes incomparably deeper than Loti's impressions--but is it really more significant? Is what Segalen comes up with more true? I think it's merely more interesting, perhaps, because he is SO conscious of his self, of his subjectivity.

well, honestly, I find myself quite in sympathy with Segalan, if your memory/reading of the essay is correct - and like I said, I haven't read the essay yet, so I'm basing my remarks on your remembered reading.

Differences are essential. "Impenetrable".

The longer I live in Asia, the more I begin to think this is correct. Of course there are aspects which are penetrable as you say - we are all human beings and we all share many of the same attributes and drives, - but I think these are superficial. Deep deep down, there are fundamental differences in the very structure and nature of consciousness, differences that are so subtle, and yet so all pervasive, that they are indeed impenetrable.

It's easy for westerners to project their theory of mind onto an asian - Rene Leys is all about this- because westerners might not even be very aware of what it is exactly that constitutes their theory of mind. prolonged exposure to the 'Other' not only reveals the make up of one's own consciousness but the scary realisation that the consciousness of the Other might be completely different.

If Segalen is only hinting at all this, at the possibility that the Other is indeed impenetrable and different deep deep down, then, as you say, it is very interesting. Consciousness of the real nature of the other can only come with increased consciousness of the nature of one's own subjectivity.

I would agree that the "other" is impenetrable (to some degree or at some level, in final reckoning) if we are talking about individuals. Who ever knows the soul of another etc. But I would vehemently disagree when it comes to supra-individual categories, and in my case too first of all because of my personal experience, which bears out the opposite.

Looking at that remark about "THE" Tahitian woman, I'd say there's the germ of my problem with Segalen's optic (assuming he's consistent)--seeing "THE" Tahitian woman (or THE Asian man or whatever--even THE European) when there are, in reality, multitudes infinitely varied. Who's to say every Asian has a "theory of mind" impenetrable to a European? What does it even mean, impenetrable? If it's something communicable in language, then it can be communicated to anyone who speaks the language. If it's genetic, it can be passed on like any genetic trait, to any kind of human hybrid we can imagine.

Btw, in the suicide thread Ben linked to an article (but I couldn't see it whole) on Segalen's death which talks of his love of "mystery", or mysteriousness or something like that. People with that affinity will find mystery where others may not, that's what I fear.

Furthermore, bear in mind that he never mastered any of the languages of the cultures he was in thrall with, and dying at thirty or so also means that he didn't get to live anywhere very long. Scoffing at Loti as a "tourist" is all very well, but frankly, while I deeply admire Segalen's talent, and think he's a million times more interesting than Loti, I don't see that he was anything more.

If it's something communicable in language,

aha, but maybe it's not, and which language? Is it possible to really penetrate the consciousness of another culture in a language foreign to that culture? according to Heidegger, it's not. that's my point. Anyway. VS died at the age of 41, far too early, as you say.

What I enjoyed most about Segalen's Essay on Exoticism was its form. An unfinished collection of fragments, journal entries, letters, and outlines, it's the very definition of an open text, and much richer, I think, for its ragged, unfinished nature.

Much of it is intriguing, and some, as Lola notes, infuriating.

The essentialism to which Lola objects, quite common and little questioned at the time Segalen was writing, is, I think, somewhat mitigated by Segalen's repugnance at the facile "understanding" of other cultures people believe they have or can get without doing the necessary work. Think, for example, how confident some Americans and some Soviets have been that they know or knew what Afghan Muslims want. In those cases it seemed or seems to be quite impossible for those Americans and Soviets to imagine that people from very different cultures might not want the same things they do.

Just as Iraq was not Iowa, neither was Afghanistan Arizona—though of course that's not to deny the common humanity of Iraqis, Afghans, Iowans or even Arizonans.

Has anybody read Stèles / 古今碑錄? I enjoyed it, and René Leys remains a favorite novel.

From Stèles:

They are, in the twenty-eight houses of Heaven:
the starry Shuttle that has never woven
silk;

The instarred Bull, rope about his neck, that
cannot pull his cart;

The myriadfold Net made perfectly for snatch-
ing hares, & that never gets one;

The Winnowing Basket that does not winnow;
the Dipper useless even for measuring oil!

And the throng of earthly craftsmen accuse the
celestial ones of imposture & nullity.

The poet says: They beam.

Just popping back in to add that I remember Harry Harootunian's introduction to the English edition of Essay on Exoticism as being more than usually obtuse.

#25, etc.

Oops, didn't mean to shave off ten years from an already short lifetime... According to Gérard Cogez (in Les écrivains voyageurs au XXe siècle, which I think you'd find interesting, Murr--possibly you too, David--it covers Segalen, Gide, Levi-Strauss, Henri Michaux, Nicolas Bouvier, Michel Leiris), Segalen arrived in Beijing on June 12 1909, spent two months there, and then proceeded on a cross-country trip (an official French archaeological mission) which ended in February 1910. There was another shorter mission in 1914. We are left to speculate about how (and if) his views would have changed with a different kind of encounter, even, say, with a faux-transplantation such as Gauguin effected to the Marquesas.

Segalen was always a visitor, a traveller in motion. And it sounds like he sought out and wanted to live in a state of perpetual "first contact"--striving to understand the other, as he asserts, but in some way that would preserve the experience of the other's essential strangeness.

Is it possible to really penetrate the consciousness of another culture in a language foreign to that culture?

Even assuming that Heidegger was right, languages can be learned, and although they are systems of signs never wholly equivalent, I'm not sure there is ever something essential, vitally important, outlandishly different, that can be conveyed in one language and not in another. I'd sooner argue that it's the (missing) extra-linguistic factors that contribute to the opacity of communication (which raises the question of what it even means to speak a language and so forth.)

Anyway, this particular body of work is incredibly rich, opening dozens of questions and raising new problems with every observation, the nature and the purpose of the mediation between the real and the imaginary, the boundaries of the self, how they weaken and strengthen (could the insistence on "impenetrability" and a rock-solid self reflect a fear of penetrability, of being changed, of becoming other?), what it means to imagine the other, is it even possible and so on endlessly.

What's especially tantalising to me is that Segalen seems to say--says it!--that "others" need to be imagined/understood as those who see "us" as others, that is, others are subjects--and then he still somehow ends up objectifying them, like THE Tahitian woman. But maybe "she" is an exception, because as a woman she's just cattle anyway.

Ha, from vivacious interest to rage in five paragraphs! Breakfast to the rescue!

Fosca by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti (1869)

A young Milanese officer recalls the stormy year of love and hate for two women; one, Clara (light) passionately loved in a happy though troublesome because adulterous affair, and Fosca (dark), sick and monstrously ugly, who entangles him in a morbid net of dependence despite his profound physical and spiritual repugnance of her.

It's far from perfect, but it works. There is a mighty strain of psychological horror and morbidity typical of the Milanese "dishevelleds" (Scapigliati) to which Tarchetti belonged. Fosca is an amazing creation, unexplained and inexplicable, an emotional vampire and a physical threat, who poisons Giorgio's weakened soul and body. And yet she is far more than a witch and a monster, she has intelligence and exquisite sensitivity, and enormous strength, like those unkillable bugs who seem to revive after every crush of the heel. She is just as repellent, but changing moods and registers with unfailing cunning, she gets Giorgio to pity her, to forgive her, to accommodate her, to the point of agreeing to pretend to love her (she is expected to die any minute, so where's the harm in that). He tries to run away, she follows like a haunting nightmare, and finally gives away her passion in public, precipitating Giorgio's duel with her cousin. The night before the duel Giorgio, who has been abandoned by Clara, goes to Fosca, who forces him to make love to her. Tarchetti died before writing out the sketched "night of passion", the book was completed by his friend Salvatore Farina. I believe Tarchetti would have given it more zest, more madness; it still reads like a sketch. Nevertheless, because of Fosca, sufficient and whole in her desperate yearning, the story itself feels complete.

......

Mikhail Prishvin lived in interesting times (1873-1954) and spanned interesting fields and styles in his professional and literary life--did some soldiering, some revolutioning, studied chemistry and agronomy, and published works ranging from Decadent through lyrical nature writing to sober-minded studies of the common potato. Ginseng (The Root of life in English translation) is a blend of fact and fiction, and I wish I knew where the lines lie, but in the short time I had to explore, I couldn't figure it out. (I hope to get hold of Prishvin's diaries one of these days.) A Russian soldier in Manchuria (1904-5) drops out of the war game with the Japanese and ends up living in a valley close to the sea, in close quarters with a Chinese ginseng-hunter, Lu Wen. Lu Wen isn't necessarily a sage, but he's wise, and imbued with a sense of kinship for everything living. It even makes him reluctant to kill, but not to the point of forgoing sustenance on animals--so, happily, there's this big Russian "captain" to take care of that. The Russian gradually awakes to Lu Wen's vision (or state), although he never fully gets there. He is too much of a go-getting Westerner, and he can plot, for instance, a deer antler-harvesting operation even as he practically falls in love with the animals. The utterly unsentimental, unapologetic contrast in lyrical feeling for nature and the urge, or need, and skill in exploiting it, deeply affected me. The Russian wonders at the trace of an old bullet wound in the ear of a beautiful hind he names and tames, he admires the regal beauty of her mate, and yet he cuts off the latter's crown, precipitating his decline in the herd and eventual death. Deer antlers are prized as "medicine" in Asia, they bring in a lot of money.

So does ginseng. Ginseng is rare. The Russian manages to see a grown root only once in ten years, in the hands of a band of hunters. But Lu Wen identifies a growing root for him, his ginseng, something that will ripen only in time and which the Russian consciously connects to the zest, the living current in his life. The spot is marked and almost forgotten about. It is something growing underground, like the meaning of life, something never on the surface of things.

Kabloona means "white man" in some Inuit language, and it's what the fabulously named Gontran de Poncins was during the fifteen months he spent in the Canadian Arctic, in the late thirties. Poncins went to the Great North consciously seeking to taste the life of the Eskimo--not just to see it, but to live it. Like Gauguin in the Pacific (Poncins too had travelled to Tahiti), he sought expressly the primitive life (I employ his words), the society of the primitive man. This meant long trips on dog-pulled sleds in deep freeze temperatures, living on raw meat and fish, sleeping in stinking igloos, and never ever washing. Not to spoil anything, he grows to love it, so much so he feels bereft when the time comes to go home.

Curiously, Poncins seems to confirm both Loti's and Segalen's takes on "the Other". "Dressing up" as an Eskimo will eventually turn you into an Eskimo, simply as a function of the lifestyle (in itself a function of physical conditions). I suppose that's at the root of great colonialist fear of "going native". But, like Segalen, Poncins runs into some final barrier. He's not as good an Eskimo as the Eskimos, and they, in turn, make bad white men.

This is a single-sitting read, lively and bursting with quotable insight. But forgive me if I skip all those for the moment which made me LOL, because I heard this effervescent Frenchman's voice in it. Also because it illustrates the dreary monotony and boredom of outpost life:

But my ingratitude was boundless. Here was a man {Paddy Gibson, the lone white man and manager of the one general Store and Post that far north} who had taken me in, had permitted me to share his precious solitude, had guided me in my first fumbling acquaintance with a people strange to me. When I tried to buy a kulaktik, an outer coat, he insisted upon making me a gift of one. When I started off without glasses against the blinding snow of spring, he ran after me to press a pair upon me. When I came in from a long trek frost-bitten and hardly able to brew myself a pot of tea, he looked after me. And I, instead of thanking him for the tea I was drinking, would think of those pies he baked, and sit inwardly fuming.

I hate prunes. They always give you prunes in hospital. As a child, when I had to be punished, prunes were my punishment. Now that I was forty years old, I saw no reason why I should go on being punished. I was not in hospital: why should I go on eating prunes? Gibson never baked any pies but prune pies. As delicately as I could, and then as firmly as I could, I let him know there was nothing I loved so much in the world as an apple pie. Do you think that could change him? Each time that he came back from the Store with materials for his pie, I would ask casually:

"What's it going to be?"

"Prunes", he would say; and then, fearful of an outburst, he would mumble his little joke in a low voice, as if to himself: "The humble prune."

I could have murdered him! When for the third time he had pronounced those words, "The humble prune!" with that smile which said the Arctic might sink into the sea and still it would be prunes, my eyes went straight to the axe that stood in a corner of the room. "I'll crack his skull with that axe," I said to myself grinding my teeth. "And if he is still alive when I bend over him, I'll look him in the eye and say to him, 'The humble prune!'"

E. O. Wilson's Biophilia explores human attachment to everything living, the natural inclination we have to the living world, to life. We anthropomorphise because everything alive is "people". St. Francis preached to bird-people and fish-people (can't help remembering someone remarked, "if he loved birds so much, why didn't he preach to cats?!"), even the Sun, which, waxing and waning, seems very much alive, even capriciously so. We are attuned to life and turned on to life. Life of other species is necessary to our life, and the need broadens much past the physical, into our aesthetics and ethics. Prishvin's Lu Wen and Poncins' Eskimo illustrate the attachment in a natural setting, and its range. Humans couldn't exist without biophilia, wouldn't be human without it. It doesn't mean not hunting, it means loving and cherishing what you hunt (or grow) because it gives you life.

I don't have the reference at hand, but there's a classic anthropology paper in which a researcher goes to live among the Inuit, and records her experiences, but what she doesn't seem to realize is that, in her field notes, she's also recording her own disintegration among the very difficult conditions--both culturally and physically--in which she is living. She takes, for example, to hoarding tinier and tinier scraps of the food she had brought with her (granted, the blocks of fat the Inuit ate are not to everyone's taste). Although it was published in a reputable journal, it seems to have much in common with unreliably narrated fiction.

I'll try to dig up the reference later (or does anyone know the paper I'm talking about?).

...

Bulgakov's Diaboliad was written before The master and Margarita, and in some ways reads like a preview of the novel. From the beginning, when the inoffensive, timid Korotkov, employed as a clerk--he hopes "for life"--in the Central Depot for Matches makes one small blunder, to the bitter end, when he jumps to his death and "a sun the colour of blood explodes in his head", surreal events unfold with the increasing frenzy similar to that in the novel, where the Devil and his retinue cause havoc. The devil as such doesn't appear in the Diaboliad, it's the entire web of rules, people and events that entraps and ruins Korotkov, that is devilish. But some avatars of the Devil may be seen in the infernal dwarf twins, perhaps even in Korotkov himself, in the brief moment of rebellion near the end, when he's lost his official identity and laughs that nobody can force him to do anything anymore--he doesn't exist. A troublesome cat is there too (Behemoth as kitten?) Bulgakov's comic brio is as vibrant here as in the novel, and there's more than a touch of the theatre of the absurd. (At the start of the story, lack of cash leads to the workers being paid in kind--Korotkov takes home boxes of matches; his neighbour who works in a wine factory brings back dozens of bottles of the Mass wine. They do some desultory trading; the matches mostly don't work, Korotkov gets unsatisfactorily drunk on substandard church booze).

Pessoa wrote La hora del diablo (The hour of the devil) some time between the age fourteen and seventeen. Unless later changes were made, one can here already glimpse his philosophy in broad terms:

"...the truth is that I don't exist; not I, not anything. This whole universe, and other universes, with their creators and their different Satans (more or less complete and perfect) are vacuums inside a vacuum, nothings that rotate, like satelites, in the futile orbit of nothing."

Satan is talking to Maria, his Maria, a married woman in an indifferent marriage who will bear a son, a rare and strange genius "under the sign of Saturn" (plucky young writer!) He's basically the romantic Satan of the nineteenth century, a brooding magus and seducer, but Pessoa--and this makes him very much Pessoa's--describes him as essentially complementary to god, and opposite out of cosmic necessity.

"Music, moonlight and dreams are my magical weapons."

"In dreams we are our natural free selves."

"I corrupt, certainly, because I cause them to imagine things. But God is worse, at least in one sense, because he created the corruptible body, which is much less aesthetic. Dreams, at least, do not rot. They vane. It is better that way, isn't it?"

"I am the oblivion of all duty, the uncertainty of all decisions. The sorrowful and those tired of life raise their gaze to me through the ruin of illusions, because I too, in my way, am the bright Morning Star."

"I corrupt, but I enlighten."

"I confess I am tired of the Universe. Both God and I would gladly take to sleep that would free us from the transcendental burdens we carry; if only we knew how. Everything is much more mysterious than is generally believed, and all of this (God, the universe and I) are no more than fake shelters of the unattainable truth."

#31

No, never heard of it! But then I'm not well or even badly read in Inuit culture. Sounds bizarre, tho'. Poncins describes in detail the importance of the hunt and the meaning of Eskimo binges--you eat when you catch it, lug the rest around and hope it lasts until the next catch.

She takes, for example, to hoarding tinier and tinier scraps of the food she had brought with her (granted, the blocks of fat the Inuit ate are not to everyone's taste).

I'd ditch her first thing, for her own good. What nonsense. You goes with the Eskimo, you eats with the Eskimo. Poncins grew to love both raw food and appreciate various rare delicacies, such as caribou lice, actually worms popped out of fresh caribou meat (it's a wonder how many parasites bedevil the ungulates...), and rotten fish. We eat rotten milk and grapes, don't we? All a question of habit.

What's also interesting is that Poncins found the meat and fat diet completely, and notably, satisfying. He doesn't mention ANY vegs or fruit, although I read that some plant-y things might be available here and there, perhaps some berries and nuts.

He also drank seal blood.

Oh, and. It is AMAZING how much tea and what sort of tea these people consume. (Who and when introduced tea in the Arctic?) They keep boiling tea adding fresh leaves to the pot. Must be thick and strong like naphta.

Great stuff on Bulgakov and Pessoa. P has been on my list of things to read for ever, but I keep putting him off.

YOU HAVEN'T LIVED UNTIL YOU READ PESSOA! (Having read Proust improves the stats, tho'.)

I have told of this before--in 1997, when I discovered him, I the ardent lover of toasty deep sleep was getting up at the crack of dawn with military discipline just so I could get 2-3 hours of reading Pessoa before work.

Hasn't happened since for anyone.

ok, it's next. I'm big on military discipline for reading.

I hope you get the bug! It is a magical scarabee!

Recently I spent a couple of nights in a hospital, staying with a friend. Oddly enough, I couldn't concentrate on my own book, but I did manage to read through, if not very attentively, two "genre" books I picked off the hospital book carrel.

The long dark tea-time of the soul is my first Douglas Adams, although I'm aware of his reputation and most famous work. As with Terry Pratchett, I am sorry I missed reading them much earlier because I'm sure I would have earlier adored them both --let's say at original issue. It must be my loss, but there simply isn't much of THAT kind of laughter and wonder in me anymore. The story isn't especially original--the twilight of the gods--but then I rarely find stories original, at this age. (Read it all in Kindergarten!) Nevertheless, Adams' gentle humanity is winning and immensely reassuring. Unless I'm ridiculously wrong, this was a soul without an atom of meanness in him.

I recognised The vampire tapestry because of praise I noticed on LT. My one literary vampire reference point is Stoker's Dracula (can that be right?!), but thanks to other media and interwebs buzz I think I know the most popular versions of the beast. And, Dr. Weyland, as per LT chatter, does seem a creation out of the usual. He is primarily a creature-that-hunts, human in form and endowed with reason, but devoid of human values, probably because he lacks human emotions. He is centuries old, travelling between eras thanks to a sleep that overtakes him. In contrast to most vampires in popular lore, his need for humans is desexualised, and he doesn't bond in any way with anyone, or even get attached to places or things. One uncharacteristically probing relationship, with a psychoanalyst, is quickly aborted. Weyland eats to live and lives to eat and that is all. What is curious for such a concept is that he's endowed with exceptional intelligence and he even gains education and professional expertise.

The writing is competent and the idea of the character interesting, but ultimately our interest gets exhausted, because Weyland is so starkly limited. He mimics human behaviour in order to survive in human society, but he doesn't have any real interest in it, not even in his work. (In one story, he operates a sleep lab, but only so because it gives him easy access to people to feed on.) And here I must wonder, ludicrous as that is, about the plausibility of his mentality. Is it possible to be highly intelligent and yet completely uninterested in the objects that intelligence surveys? Isn't there a contradiction almost in terms? Without interest, how does one focus the intelligence?

I think Charnas wanted to experiment with ablating sex from the vampire mythos, and ditching the emotional "module" of behaviour is an obvious way of doing that. The problem is that emotions aren't merely a prod to bonding and mating. Emotions are absolutely necessary for understanding the environment and orientating ourselves in it, for learning, for knowing the world. Autistic humans have problems processing emotions, but they have them. Animals, as close to pure predators as possible, have emotions. Turtles and birds show individual preferences for individuals, special bonds. It is very difficult to imagine a mimic of humans without this component, who could survive in a human environment. And without any long-term plan or project, without any chosen meaning for his existence, such a creature simply isn't interesting for long.

I've never been much of a vampire enthusiast, either, but on a Virgin flight I took, one of the hundreds of movies on offer was a Swedish vampire flick called "Let the Right One In." A Swedish vampire flick? I had to check it out, and found it quite remarkable. It's worth a look if you come across it somewhere:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1139797/

And aren't psychopaths, by definition, devoid of empathy for others? And don't intelligent psychopaths mimic the emotional reactions of others--usually in order to manipulate them? If I'm right about that, isn't Weyland just a supercharged and supernatural psychopath?

"Psychopath" is getting to be a buzzword on LT!

I saw that movie, I liked it. I thought the ending may have been a bit too cozy, but I can't grudge that kid his vampire bud.

Well, yes, I suppose Weyland is a natural supernatural psychopath. But, speaking of human psychopaths, devoid of empathy doesn't mean one is devoid of emotion.

The Inuit anthropology I was hazily remembering is actually a book, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family by Jean L. Briggs from which I read excerpts. Looking at something I wrote about those excerpts at the time, I realize that Briggs probably was aware—at least once she'd escaped from the village where she doing her field work, and had a full belly and a warm and comfortable place to read her over her notes—that she had been suffering a sort of breakdown brought on by the various pressures. She does see that carefully wrapping seven sesame seeds in a tinfoil was not the act of a normally happy camper.

I'd say not. What makes Kabloona so charming is that Poncins wasn't any sort of scientist. He speculates here and there about what makes the Eskimo different from him, but it's a struggle to understand them in order to get along, not to fit them in some theoretical scheme. And included in that effort is that of understanding how they see him--that's perhaps the most entertaining and valuable thing in the book.

One thing to note is that Poncins didn't stay in any long-term Eskimo settlement. Could be that a harsh life is easier to take on the move. His m.o. was this: he'd hitch a ride with a willing Eskimo to wherever this one was going; once there, he'd look for the opportunity to hitch with another, either back to Gibson's, or elsewhere. The only static periods were those at the Post. On the trail, there is simply no time for boredom. The hunt is always on, for anything that moves. Once they stop, they build an igloo, make tea, fress, sleep. The next day one starts on the move again. The length of time is counted in the number of temporary igloos built. When enough furs are collected, they head to the store to trade them, then take off again.

It takes enormous energy to live like that, but living in the moment is also refreshing, invigorating. Sitting in some abject village watching the natives drink themselves to death can't possibly compare.

......

Tigers are better-looking by Jean Rhys is a collection of stories from the end and the beginning of her career. Dealing with women's lives, the eternal outsider, underdog, the colonial immigrant, the impoverished hopeful, the disappointed alcoholic, the starving model and the semi-prostitute, they are all depressing, although the protagonists of the early stories are relatively young and attractive, still at the centre of male attention, still groping toward materialisation of dreams. Thirty years later all that's left is accumulated bitterness and rage. Women are stranded alone, in poverty, dying of unnamed illnesses, brutally ridiculed because they are old, and old and poor, and old and poor and odd. Their tragedy (for Rhys at least) lies precisely in their gender. On top of ordinary human tragedy everyone gets to partake in--existing, hoping, decaying and dying--the women get punished extra, in the form of scant regard by society, lifelong humiliations, reduced opportunities.

The late stories are brilliant; the early ones (which Rhys herself didn't think were worth reprinting) a bit derivative and self-conscious, but interesting for allowing to trace the trajectory between two periods.

Twenty-four eyes by Sakae Tsuboi was darling, there's no other word for it. In 1920s Japan, a girl barely out of college becomes a village teacher to twelve children in a poor fisherman community--so poor the kids must work along their parents, can only afford straw sandals, which they make themselves, daily, the food is scarce, and a seven year old girl is "sway-backed" because she's been carrying baby siblings on her back since she was three. The material sparseness of these lives is underlined by their precariousness--any typhoon can leave a house "squashed like a crab", sweeping away people into the sea, obliterating vegetable patches, subtracting from what already looks like zero. None of this is dwelt on centrally, the tone is humorous, even riotously so, and to me, used mostly to impersonal iciness and experiments of Japanese modernists, strangely warm. Tsuboi was married to a Communist and at least a sympathiser herself. As the children grow, the story progresses and expands to depict Japan's society, increasingly militaristic. China is invaded, Communists persecuted, education polluted with propaganda. The ageing teacher witnesses one after another of "her children" falling victim to life's and history's vicissitudes; girls sold into prostitution, boys killed for nothing. But at the end, as an old woman (of forty), she still teaches, and some of her pupils are the children of her first generation.

The Shadow of the sun collects some of Ryszard Kapuscinski's journalism from Africa, which he visited and explored over some forty years. Somehow, to call it journalism seems demeaning--in its style and effect it compares to best of fiction. Isherwood called himself a camera, that was bullshit; Kapuscinski, now, is one: framing subjectively but infallibly putting the reader on the spot. The stories range widely in time and space, all contributing to a general sense of a deep predicament, of an entire continent in crisis, but composed of vastly disparate and contradictory situations. There isn't one solution for Africa's problems unless there are ten thousand or a million solutions. The chapter on Idi Amin especially struck my fancy. In Amin's Uganda the living nightmare was something played out by Sade and Ionesco, horrific and absurd. The civil war in, say, Rwanda appears in contrast as the most logical of processes.

Is it fair to ask why is Africa so susceptible to the monstrous strongman? Who isn't, given the right circumstances? And most of the time, who cares?

Is it fair to ask why is Africa so susceptible to the monstrous strongman?

Only if one could first establish that Africa would be more susceptible to that than the rest of the world. In that case it just possibly might be an interesting titbit of fact. (Not counting on it. My theory: it's just like in other primates, the strongest, biggest, whatever, ape throwing his weight around. Nothing special.)

P.s.: Might just be me of course. But as I see it: except that some of us can now read and write, we're not that far beyond the baboon.

Keisuke Kinshita made an excellent (and long!) film of Twenty-four Eyes: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047281/

#44

I saw it! Do you know, the book still moved me, more than the movie. Which is odd also because I saw the movie first, and that generally ruins the book for me.

#43

I suppose the non-rhetorical question would be, why is Africa's post-colonial history what it is. The true answer must be at least as complex as our endlessly enriched scenarios of the beginning of WWII, for instance.

......

Trilby by George du Maurier is that rare thing, a modern source myth. In mid-19th century bohemian Paris, in the garrets of the rowdy and poetic Latin Quarter, three British painters befriend a young model, Trilby, also of British origin. Trilby isn't a whore, but with such an occupation neither is she a proper young lady, although there's the excuse of the orphaned younger brother to account for it, and although she poses mainly for--feet. But she has posed in the nude too, for one or two respectable painters, and this fatal fact dooms her romance with the horribly named Little Billee in the very thought of it. The three British prigs are somehow agreed on this without any discussion, so when Little Billee's (ugh!) mother appears to size up the hussy her boy's been raving about, it's unsurprising that Trilby melts out of the picture contritely, without a peep. Little Billee (blech) returns to England after a bout of "brain fever" and becomes famous; five years later the three pals are reunited, go to a concert, and discover that Trilby has become a vocal diva, a singer of unearthly gift.

This is odd because when they knew her she was utterly tone deaf, although possessing an exceptionally beautiful speaking voice. The secret must be in her teacher, whom they also knew of old--the repellent toad Svengali, a musician as brilliant as everything else about him is slimy and dark.

We've grown used to stories about powerful men building up and exploiting stars, but this was the first one, a huge hit, and in some ways unlike any of the others. For one thing, there is the literally hypnotic power Svengali exercises over his medium and victim, Trilby. Du Maurier had a rare, and to my mind, insufficiently exploited knack for the supernatural. In his other bestseller (nowadays as forgotten as Trilby), Peter Ibbetson, a couple of thwarted lovers meet in dreams, annihilating physical constraints which, as we learn in the end, are of rather more severe nature than we're first told. Frustratingly, this aspect is diminished by du Maurier's tone, alternately frivolous and weepy--never was a writer less ashamed to pull at heartstrings, verbally pet puppies, and heap on the sugar.

Another way in which Trilby has become unusual is its blistering antisemitism. If it were a matter of some offhand remark or two I wouldn't bother mentioning it, considering its vintage, but this goes much deeper. Svengali the dirty evil cowardly etc. Jew is described in detail and his many disgusting features dwelt on repeatedly--and all of them are due to his ethnicity. The caricature is so unpleasant, so embarrassing, as to render the book practically unreadable. I can't help wondering about the minds of du Maurier's contemporary public, or believing ever more that it was pure chance it was Germans who ended up burning Jews--it could have been the British, just add Hitler.

I'm also curious about how du Maurier came to write the story, how and why he chose a German Jew for his model of evil--who was Svengali? I knew from before that du Maurier was friendly with Felix Moscheles, the son of virtuoso pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles (Felix published a book In Bohemia with Du Maurier, illustrated by du Maurier, based on their joint travels). Of course, the end of nineteenth century saw an explosion of virtuoso pianism, with many famous pianists who were Jewish--Anton Rubinstein, who founded the Russian school of pianism, the greatest in the world, Godowsky, de Pachmann, Gabrilowitsch etc.

Fact remains that, whoever may have been the model for Svengali, du Maurier had at least one close Jewish friend. So how could he write a character like this, and how could he think about Jews like that?

Trilby suffers then, in content, style, and structure--far too much space is given to the three boring Brits and their incomparable superiority to all the other "races", and not enough to Trilby and Svengali, but, in addition to being a valuable curiosity in a time-capsule sort of way, it strikes at least one precious note of pure horror and one of real tragedy, unfortunately unexpanded. Svengali is a great conception, but undeveloped, unrealised in du Maurier's book.

Fantomas is the first entry in the series about a master criminal pitted against the equally ingenious Inspector Juve. It is melodramatic pulp at its finest--the murders are gory, the thefts stupendous, the twists dizzying, and everyone is a suspect (including, at one point, Juve), because of the genius touch at the heart of the mystery--we never hear nor see Fantomas directly. He is a true phantom, feared, abhorred, whispered about, suspected, but never seen, never touched, never caught.

I came across The skull of the Marquis de Sade by pure chance, searching for completely unrelated stuff, and as I recently read that other book about Sade and his skull, by Jacques Chessex, I was most interested in the relationship between the two. Then I learned that a movie had been made, in 1964, based on Robert Bloch's story, with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. I had to have it pronto; I watched it, it is delicious shlock, you who would enjoy this know who you are. In the previous post I actually wrote that Chessex's story had "Hammer Studio" effects--this movie was produced by Amicus, not at all far off. Unless there's a whole cottage industry of stories about "the skull of de Sade" I'm unaware of, it seems evident that Chessex had seen the movie or read Bloch's story. All I can say is that he doesn't mention them. Bloch's greatest claim to fame, it seems, is having written the story on which Hitchcock based Psycho.

"melodramatic pulp at its finest--the murders are gory, the thefts stupendous, the twists dizzying, and everyone is a suspect": Time to pull the edition of Fantomas I've had forever down form the shelf. As I recall John Ashberry and lots of his set were big fans.

Bloch's greatest claim to fame, it seems, is having written the story on which Hitchcock based Psycho.

Ironically, for some people he is best known for the fact that Lovecraft based his character "Robert Blake" in "The Haunter of the Dark" on him.

Huh, I keep forgetting how relatively contemporary Lovecraft is--for some reason, he impresses me as a total early 19th century throwback.

#47

Edward Gorey too! Via Feuillade. That's what brought me to the olden Fantomas, as a kid I had watched the 1960s movies with Louis de Funes and Jean Marais.

> 49: Lovecraft in his later years, Bloch an aspiring sapling. But Lovecraft was something of a mentor to Bloch.

Fun fact: Edward Gorey and Frank O'Hara were roommates at Harvard, and both were buddies of John Ashberry's.

It seems that the only way I'll review a book is when I deeply dislike what other people are saying about it... Yes, I committed a review, for Dino Buzzati's Poema a fumetti, or, as it's apparently named in English, Poem Strip.

(What I hope is the link to my review and not, say, to Rabba's Thursday special)

It's very cool of NYRB to have published a translation (the original dates from 1969 and has been reprinted a zillion times until 1979), but I tremble at the thought of utter incomprehension it's likely to run into. Not because it's difficult to get!--except, maybe, it IS difficult to get, considering how much it relies on visual stimuli and signals, the wealth of associations in a sixty year old Italian writer and painter's head, in the 1960s...

Still, even young Italians are likely to find completely familiar the layout of the page and even the dominant visual style, the simple line of the comic Diabolik. Young or old Anglos, I wouldn't bet.

It's as sixties as The Avengers, the miniskirts, the mods and the Beatles (the intro in my copy went at length about the cover to Sgt. Pepper's...). It is the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, with some changes. Yes, there are naked girls in it, but this is Hades we're wandering through--and the dead are always, always naked.

My favourite image, almost from the very end, pity it's so small:



The last fairy tale kings were heading into exile.

Buzzati with his dog:



and the dog in the book:



When the eyes of the old sick dog are sending us a message.

Had read that Buzzati painted as well as writing, was intrigued when I saw NYRB had done this.

And "as sixties as The Avengers", eh? Really must pick this one up!

Fascinating. Will have to find myself a copy - preferably in Italian, but that might get tricky here in Holland.

Bubba's Thursday Special just might be good too though. ;-)

#54

Ha, yes, although not quite in the same way...

If you're interested in his art, especially illustration, you should check out La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia (The bears' famous invasion of Sicily), a book more or less for children, but enjoyable to adults without needing to dumb down.

I keep mulling about how the experiences of format might affect the reception of the work. The comic Diabolik, which I take as an example because Buzzati was a fan, and other popular comics in the same format would be very familiar to the Italian reader. They were small, thickish booklets with one, or two panels of equal size on each page. The line was clear, the drawing realistic but simplified--like those commercial comics Roy Lichtenstein used in his paintings. The stories were pure pulp. Hugely popular.

Poema a fumetti was originally published in a proportionally similar, but larger format. It's appearance would have been doubly shocking, to those with traditional expectations from a (very) great, established writer, and to those used to receiving a specific kind of entertainment from books that looked like that. One segment was asked to look at sequential pictures seriously, another to consider serious content in what they were used to chug down like lemonade.

Clearly, a reader today, especially one from a different popular tradition, isn't at all likely to react in the same way. New readers are comparing this to the current "graphic novels" as if Buzzati had published it yesterday. That's obviously a valid and necessary comparison, but one can't ignore the original context of the story without missing its impact.

#55

Matt, I got it from Deastore.com, they have free shipping like BookDepository.

I've always felt a new beginning in autumn, not mid-winter. My autumnal resolution is to at least mention books I've read within a week of reading them. The problem is that I like to group titles, or X will remind me of Y, or I'll wait for Z to complete thinking about A and obviously there's no end to it.

Meanwhile, I forget.

The backlog stretches to June now.

I was reserving the wicked, terminally disenchanted Walter Serner for when I finally finished translating one of his stories (didn't even start, but I will). As far as I could find out, he's never been translated into English, which is TRULY bizarre. I speculate that his corrosively cynical worldview simply didn't mesh with anything in Anglo-dom; at least, I can't think of a comparable Anglo of the times (1920s-1930s). He might be likened to Brecht, but only superficially, specifically to Brecht of the Kurt Weill collaborations, and their universe of seedy characters in the underworld. In his frequent choice of criminals as subjects and occasionally "hardboiled" style he's a little like (later) American writers of crime and noir, but his language is frank, uncensored and his philosophy pure Sade. I suppose the basic thing that makes him different is the absence of any moralising, and the frequent sardonic humour.

Serner died or was killed with his wife in Theresienstadt, at an unknown date.

Ramon del Valle-Inclan's Autumn sonata and Winter sonata, two back ends to the saga of the wise, debauched, ugly but irresistible Marquess Bradomin (Spring and Summer are the middle), delighted me greatly. Elegies to love and life without sentimentality, even if the ladies tend to swoon and die of unspecified languors. Without much regard for conventional morals either: in Winter the Marquess discovers that a young novice nun, still a child, who clearly developed a crush on him, is his bastard daughter. Feeling sorry for her ugliness and clumsiness, he patiently, with pity forbears her attentions, because no man will ever love her. The only thrill of romance she'll ever feel is during the unwitting flirtation with her own father--so he flirts. A bad man with a heart.

I loved A portrait of the artist as a young man, for its language, and for its indictment of Catholicism.

For some colour within the post:



Osman Lins's L'isola nello spazio (An island in space, 1964) was wonderful and made me want to read more by this Brazilian fantast (a word I'm forcing into English--a writer of fantastic fiction in Borgesian vein). In a supermodern condominium the tenants begin inexplicably dying, without any pattern or sense. Panic spreads, one after another the survivors leave the building, until only one person is left, Claudio Arantes Marinho, in his forties, disaffected husband and father, a man recently aware of the emptiness in his life, of a lack of affection and human contact. His wife and daughters don't seem to love or need him. He stays on in the empty skyscraper, going urban-feral, noting and living with the slow decay of the building, but increasingly hungry for human company. His pathetic attempts at friendship, with the news vendor, with a cat, fail. Finally he panics. Will the building claim his life too? He begins to plot his escape...

You must sacrifice the past before you can begin your future.

Serner sounds fascinating. If you're willing to share, I look forward to reading your translation.

I'm entirely willing, only lazy. Well--undecided maybe. The one I'm set on is in some ways untypical, because it's more or less a monologue, but as it is an exposition of the character's (Serner's?) philosophy and so reminiscent of Sade, it draws me irresistibly. But I'm thinking a more ordinary tale with a scorpion's sting in the tail might be more representative? So I remain idle. (Of course I could have translated at least two since I began wanting to translate any, but then what justification would I have for this post?)

It does seem strange that he could have escaped Anglo attention... Not that he seems to have been much on the radar in Teutonia, since WWII and until the seventies. And yet there's a two page bibliography of his pre-WWII publications in the book I read. He also translated Baudelaire and Tzara. Maybe I should suggest him to NYRB...

There used to be a thread around here somewhere, monitored by NYRB people, where one could suggest authors. And I think you can also do so at their website.

They ignored my request to bring some out-of-print Guy Davenport back, but of course Davenport was on record as a non-fan of the New York Review. Here's Davenport's response to a review of Tatlin!, the only book of his they ever deigned to notice: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1975/feb/20/the-life-of-the-mind/?pagin....

Well, now I'm dying to find out who was/is Mrs. Mortimer (never heard of Davenport either).

Ages and ages ago I pitched a pre-WWII, tragically-died-young (of tuberculosis or some similar wasting disease) Romanian writer, Max Blecher, to NYRB, but they didn't bite. But if they ever do... I'll remind them where they first heard of 'im.

Lola, please give Davenport a go. His essays and his stories (he said he worked all his ideas out twice, once in each form) are sui generis, and all kinds of fun. Tatlin!, his first collection, is a good place to start with the fiction (though all the collections are equally good). For the essays most people recommend The Geography of the Imagination, and it's excellent, but I have a special place in my heart for Every Force Evolves a Form. Again all the collections, and the monograph on Balthus, are superb.

Here's his Paris Review interview: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/355/the-art-of-fiction-no-174-guy-daven...

And just to give you a taste, here's a short piece he wrote on Wittgenstein: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lady/ramblings/wittgen.html

Penelope Mortimer was an English journalist and author who I don't know much about, but doubt her work belonged in a review that also considered Davenport's.

I note the rec monkeybrite.

http://www.monkeybrite.com/?

Davenport's essays are wonderful. As for NYRB, I hope to one day getting around to pitching The Resurrection of Maltravers to them: an old Eridanos Library edition that out to be brought back to life.

#65

I'mafraidtoclickthat.

That was a most interesting interview, thanks. So many little comments I made in my head while reading! I am now awake and aware.

#66

There's no day like today!

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Blast, we* should've copyrighted the expression twelve years ago...

*(A defunct forum wherein the language monkeybrite she was spoke.)

On with the ruins of readings!



Two cultures?: The significance of C.P. Snow F. R. Leavis

Famous critic and man of letters F. R. Leavis eviscerates C. P. Snow's literary output by way of proving that a man who writes so badly, such a literary nullity, cannot possibly be taken seriously on any topic. That's an interesting idea, similar to the argument from aesthetics: an ugly theory cannot be right, or an ugly thing good. I'm not wholly hostile to it. Still, while Leavis is probably right about the quality of Snow's novels, he harps on them at such length that at the end the polemic has been bypassed and Snow's main argument (that to be complete an education must encompass natural sciences) has barely been addressed. Leavis, in fact, merely scoffs at it, at Snow's example of knowing the second law of thermodynamics as being as important or fundamental as knowing Shakespeare. Nothing of the kind, never on your life, not of the same order, thing, planet etc. sez Leavis. The invective is funny and colourful, for those who like such things, but disappointing in not fueling a real debate at all. Leavis wasn't necessarily anti-science (I don't think anyone was allowed to be, in those hectic tech-triumphant days), he just doesn't seem to understand what science IS, at all, nor does he seem to have stopped and thought about any of the amazing discoveries made in his lifetime. For him it's just a tool doing tooly things in the toolshed. He doesn't understand what the second law of thermodynamics means, how it describes the universe, how it relates to the way things are, to what we are, or life. So he throws it back at Snow as if he'd been asked to kowtow to a wrench, exemplifying exactly the misunderstanding and ignorance that sparked Snow's pamphlet in the first place.

Lively reading and a classic piece of cultural history, more interesting in the context of the fifty years that followed (especially now with the hind view of the Sokal hoax).



Bella-vista, four stories by Colette

I absolutely must stop reading in bed. There I was, all mellow and ready for a dive and a swim in Colette's beautiful rich French, a story no doubt filled with marvellous descriptions of animals, landscapes, plants, and it started well--the narrator, very like Colette, goes out of season to a small inn on the Provençal coast, run by two women (one of whom appears somewhat odd, and for good reason), and only one other guest, a fussy, dapper high-ranking civil servant... with a peculiarly unsettling interest in... birds. And garsh darnit the whole thing turned so unexpectedly horrific it unsettled me into nightmares! Unfortunately it's very rare that my readings transfer into dreams (otherwise I'd be self-prescribing all the time)--just my luck that this took. Colette's stories usually have a little sting of darkness, sadness, despair somewhere in them, it is that mix of love of life and bitter knowledge of how much it hurts, the meshing of pleasure and pain, that I like so much in her... but this one is pretty unique in the centre place it gives to insane sadism.

I read two books by Michail Kuzmin:

...

Wings (1906), they say, was the first Russian novel about homosexuality--that date looks early enough to me to make it one of the global pioneers, maybe even THE first "gay" novel, period (if we discount clandestine press). Beautiful Vanya, a poor orphan teen, moves to the relatives' house in a big city and begins a formal and a sentimental education, described through series of conversations. I liked how Kuzmin presents Vanya (and us) with ideas indirectly. The more sophisticated reader knows that a given character is gay, but Vanya is puzzling over their behaviour, lacking words, gradually meeting concepts that explain why Stroop remains unmarried although he is attractive to women, why the presence of Stroop's male servant upsets his female friend etc. Just think, this tentative, slow exploration was how most people ever learned anything about themselves and others. You had to figure everything out for yourself out of this mysterious signage of oblique things people did and said...

The book is quiet, filled with erudition and classical allusions, expanding in reach as does Vanya's mind. At the end the young man makes a decision, discovers and opens his wings.

The adventures of Ayme Leboeuf is an unfinished but satisfying pastiche of the 18th century French gallant novels, with the usual mix of amorous intrigue and travel adventure. Fun for anyone who enjoyed Casanova's memoirs. Beautiful youth of eighteen wins favours of one noble lady after another and yet for some reason or other keeps bunking with his ever-lovin' pal. Like Vanya, the hero of this story doesn't understand the significance of his friend's moping after another friend "betrayed" him, it would've been fun to see the truth dawn on him. Or maybe he's a tease...

I have always found Leavis totally overrated as a crtitic: I have learnt nothing from reading him.

Now Kuzmin looks interesting....

>69 LolaWalser:: I remember Timothy Birdsall saying, "If all the novels of C. P Snow were laid end to end, I would ride a bicycle over them".

That's probably the most passionate response to them I ever heard of.

I started on something by him once and abandoned it within a page. Can't reconstruct exact event--I suspect total uninterest.

Haven't read Leavis either, although I've come across mentions of his opinions, influence etc. Champion of D. H. Lawrence, shook up musty old Anglo criticism etc.

Murr, I think you'd like Kuzmin's Wings. I hope I can find his diaries; am very curious about what his life was like, the reception of this book etc.

"If all the novels of C. P Snow were laid end to end, I would ride a bicycle over them".

Now that's literary criticism ;-)

>73 Nicole_VanK:: In the early sixties it was what passed as satire.

Modernist playwright and novelist Max Aub (1903-1972), leftist who knocked about French and Spanish prisons and found refuge in Mexico, is another writer not much translated into English, and yet better and more interesting than many who are. It is to wonder. Probably too Communist or something...

Crimenes ejemplares (Selected crimes) is a short collection of first-person utterances by perpetrators on their crimes, which are almost always murder. Unlike, say, Félix Fénéon's collage of newspaper items on crime (Novels in three lines), Aub's is fictional, but ultra-realistic, although with an absurdist shade. Oddly, while Fénéon's technique ends up bestowing a surreal quality to things that actually happened, Aub's invented crimes and the chorus of deadpan, apologetic, defiant, furious, indifferent, jeering, repentant, despairing, insane etc. voices have the immediacy and authenticity of a on-the-spot documentary.

The edition I have is set to resemble a newspaper's columns, two per page, one containing text and the adjacent newspaper cuttings and photos. Each perpetrator's remarks are given in single paragraphs and not otherwise marked or attributed, we understand the shift from one to another from the text and the type of voice. From the whole there arises a sense of hopeless bleakness about the violence of human nature and the fragility of our sanities and lives. Most crimes are murders and most have been committed on a trifle, whether for trifling motives ("I just had to have that ticket...") or an impulse of rage ("How many times have I begged him not to scrape the chair on the floor like that?! How many?!") Juxtaposed, they show that anything and its opposite may serve as a reason to destroy (one murderer's "I killed her because she had a stomachache." followed by another's "I killed her because I had a stomachache.")

> 73: Sorry, slightly too young to remember much about the early sixties. After that there's plenty I don't remember that well either, but for those later years I can't use the "too young" excuse anymore.

Lola, thanks again for the jump-start - your review was marvelous, suggesting just what I need at the moment (I love the novel of erudition - and this one is much shorter than most). You might also want to track down the Ardis press edition of Selected Prose & Poetry, which includes Wings among much else(400+ pages).

Thanks, I would definitely want that. A novel of erudition, you say--I must use that as a tag, I like them too.

If only Pater wrote like Kuzmin, I might finish Marius the Epicurean some day... All the Hellenistic/Renaissance talk reminded me very much of Pater and his circle and epigones.

Some of my Mithrasmas/new year's gifts: the entire Dark Shadows collection on DVD, and a damned bloody flu. I'm taking off the rest of the week and propose to do nothing but hack, spit, drink tea, and watch a 1960s soap opera about vampires, witches etc.

I've never seen any part of any soap opera. A couple minutes of a telenovela here, a glimpse of "Dynasty" there... Not sure I can deal with the endless dialogue. I managed to read two books--heavy on pictures, it must be said-- with the first 70-odd installments of the show in the background. Very soothing, the wail of the theremin, the creaking and the screaming, while my temperature gently rises.

...

Sang pour sang : Le réveil des vampires by Jean Marigny reads like an encyclopedia entry on vampires, but with many more pictures. I think Abrams republishes these Gallimard booklets--or maybe it's the other way around. Nice little things for fact-magpies.

In search of Dracula; a true history of Dracula and vampire legends by McNally and Florescu looks in greater depth at the historic Dracula, Vlad Tepes (the Impaler), a 15th century Wallachian warlord and scourge of, primarily, Turks, but then everybody else too, down to and including small animals. That he had a lot of people killed, and horribly so, seems incontestable. How much intimate pleasure he took in it is a bit less certain, but on the whole it would seem political expediency and personal taste for cruelty made a happy marriage in his savage, yet undoubtedly religious breast. It is interesting how thickly he surrounded himself all his life by monks, priests, preachers--he even endowed five monasteries. Well, the greater the sinner, the more spiritual laundering necessary, I suppose.

With all that, it bears remembering that he wasn't considered a "vampire" or some such by any means, in his time or later (the term itself is of 18th century origin, although the concept is much older). Bram Stoker ingeniously hit upon the perfect combo of real setting, remarkable historic character, and legend which melded the two in popular consciousness, but hardly anyone can complain that it does severe injustice to Vlad the Impaler.

There's a fine bibliography and filmography (only up to 1972) in this book, including a reference to a hefty pre-WWII tome on Romania by Robert Seton-Watson I already have--about four pounds more knowledge on Romania than I could conceivably need and that, yet, perversely tempts me now.

oh gosh you poor thing. I hope your flu goes away quickly.

Speaking of vampires, have you read Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles? Perfect thing for a sickbed.

Hugs

Ha, thanks, but it looks like the damned thing has made up its mind to stay, it's been DAYS!

No, haven't read Rice.

I skipped in my Dark Shadows viewing to the arrival of Barnabas Collins. I'm in love, or maybe just feverish.

In the times of the feathered butt-cut, I loved getting home from the forced labor of school and watching Dark Shadows (followed by Sir Graves Ghastly's show on "Money Movie Seven"). The The Charles Randolph Grean Sounde score was great- something like "Back at the Blue Whale" - a fuzztone instrumental. And what of the character Quentin! A ghost who becomes a werewolf. Best of luck with your plague up there in the industrial tundra. I can send you a pint of "fatto-in-casa" limoncello (or arancello - come si desidera) - cures all and leaves a lustre,

Ben! Limoncello! How did you guess, I adore it. Not sure it's safe to send across border though? The defenders of your fair land & freedom have sequestered some chocolate I sent a while ago (maybe because I stupidly marked it "chocolate"?) And I keep hearing about thousands of Kinder Eggs being stopped in their migration southward. If only you could BRING it...

My gifter tells of a similar after-school ritual! I'd never heard of the show before. Yes, the score is really good. There's a hallucinatory snakes-writhing-on-the-bottom-of-a-well quality to the agoraphobic scenes. (I love the interminable conversations taking place in the anteroom, or hallway, or whatever it is.)

Actors having to wing it so often is a novelty too. Did it really broadcast live? Amazing.

Bring it? I'd have to leave the house for that, vero? I'll wad it up soundly and mark it "prayer cloths" or "reading material on the rationality of US statehood". Should throw them off the scent. This is assuming I won't have swilled it all by the time I can make it to the drop off. Odd laws around here (all laws bonds and all kings cruel, etc., etc.), I nod to them, but bowing is out of the question.

I can't remember if the series was broadcast live or not - but do seem to recall it had that same misty - if gothic - ambience my mother's soaps had (As the World Turns... One Life to Live...).

Public sidebar: it does amuse me that the business I propose is as incendiary as napalm - if much, much tastier :).

I'd have to leave the house for that, vero?

Make up your mind now, start slowly, and I'll see you cca May 2015? You oyster-covered hermit, you.

I started reading up on Dark Shadows online but the damn bug makes the screen dance. Yes, apparently it did go live.

I only just learned the actor who played Barnabas was practically a neighbour (living in Hamilton, Ontario), and died recently... Argh! It's like how I lived basically next door to Conrad Veidt's daughter in New Orleans and learned of that only after she died!

You're making me hungry. But I'd love to make it to the birthplace of The Kids in the Hall... speaking of - see Dream Crushers, episode 1:

http://www.hamfatter.com/?p=2002

AAAAUGH!! I saw all five! AAAUGHHH!!

Now as you're sick and bed and as I suppose I can't in all good conscience (yours) send you any hootch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2Ka2nkIi2I

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuOOy3qlV9Q

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phIUwHXwSes

I'M HEALTHY!

*burning offering to Comedy Gods*

90: mabrouk!

91: Either Beckett or Democritus: "Nothing is more amusing than unhappiness."

huzzah!

Glad you're back up again, Lola-lola!

I saw the Broadview edition of Dracula this afternoon, but decided that I should resist buying yet another copy, although I love their edition of Vathek. (The theme for this year is downsizing the books.) I met Raymond McNally many years ago at a lecture, where he signed my copy of A Clutch of Vampires.

I'll have to confess to enjoying the Francis Ford Coppola version of "Dracula", a baroque treatment which pays due attention to the Vladic origins in the prologue.

I had to recover, Ben's Dream Crushers scared the wits out of me. Who knows what other entertainment for invalids he's got up his sleeve. ***shudddderrrrr***



The Symbolism of the Tarot, P. D. Ouspensky

It's not so much that I'm a skeptic, as that I can't. For the life of me. Remember all those interpretations, codes, secret alphabets etc. Of all my sad failures, actualised and latent, I'd probably be the saddest as an occultist.

Ouspensky (a friend and follower of Gurdjieff's) says symbolism dies if understood statically. That is, the moment a symbol is defined, it is falsified, the meaning betrayed. The kaleidoscope of Tarot cards must be viewed with one's own interpretation of symbols at hand, merely gently guided by the suggestions of the initiates.

This is the first time I read through a description of the Greater Arcana so I can't compare it to any other. I would point out Breton's extended meditation on The Star, Arcane 17, for an example of a very individualistic, applied reading--in the midst of war Breton invoked hope, symbolised by a young woman (girlish innocence), the idea that only by submitting to the feminine, the world, ruined by destructive masculine forces, stood a chance of regenerating and improving itself.

Ouspensky sees in it "the Soul of Nature" and a bunch of other things I'm at a loss to summarise, but little womanly and nothing feminist to be sure. Going by these two, "free composition" is the rule here.

And, just to make it scientific, I took first three "Which Tarot Card Are You" online quizzes that came up and can report I'm EMPEROR, MAGICIAN, HIEROPHANT... or maybe none of the above.

Ouspensky on those cards, choice excerpts:

CARD I: THE MAGICIAN... "With his hands he unites heaven and earth, and the four elements that form the world are controlled by him."

CARD IV: THE EMPEROR... "I am the great Pentacle!"

CARD VII: THE HIEROPHANT... "Aspire only after the impossible and inaccessible. Expect only that which shall not be."

Clearly, this shall take a deeper study.

#94

I'll have to confess to enjoying the Francis Ford Coppola version of "Dracula", a baroque treatment which pays due attention to the Vladic origins in the prologue.

I've never seen that! But I will.

And I have to confess that just the other day I shamelessly enjoyed the 1979 Dracula with Frank Langella. I'm a GREAT fan of Kate Nelligan's!

I bought that Clutch of vampires for a friend recently! It had a Gorey cover!

The scene is changed was published pseudonymously in 1933 or 1934 to no acclaim whatsoever--if I may judge so by the book's terminal scarcity, in fact and memory. Verily, it is a terrible book. So bad that one is amazed that the author went on to publish other fiction--under a different pseudonym, though.

Eric Partridge was a fairly well known expert on slang, etymology and other things lexicographical. I do not know what possessed him to write this fantasy; I wonder if he mentions it in his autobiography.

The setting is contemporary (1933). A global epidemic wiped out most of the men and many of the women. Strangely enough, of the mere hundreds of men remaining in the British Isles, no fewer than thirty are found in Oxford. Splendid chaps all. Immediately they regroup in a military fashion, collecting arms, organising the defense of Oxford against outsider males and, most importantly, against "advanced feminists" (ugly dykes to the last one). The "sensible" women, being sensible, cooperate with the men, until the danger of feminist gynocracy is ousted--the feminists are deported en masse to France--and life in Britain assumes the new normalcy with families composed of one male and eighteen women.

One wonders how fared poor France...

Oddly enough, it's not the theme but the style, shape, structure of the book that are so awful. The prose is so wooden you wouldn't be surprised to see deer peeping between the pages; the plot, such as it is, forgets itself repeatedly; author's hobbyhorses take up huge chunks of space and his obviously loving effort--the military stratagems are meticulously detailed, almost diagrammed, there are even pages on military slang, and a whole inexplicable chapter on... education, publishing and book reviewing.

There's lots of sexual intercourse (the dearth of men apparently causes nymphomania), but described so coyly and ineptly the effect is one of utmost goofiness.

A sigh and breath of eroticism soughed through the great hall, men's eyes became bright, their bodies hot, while women's eyes shone liquidly, their bodies softening into languorous curves and tell-tale relaxings: an effluvium of animality weighted in the air, a wave of lust swept magnetically over all, the unspoken and perhaps unthought wish of the men winged itself quiveringly across the short distance separating them from the dancers, and the dancers themselves, realising that their colleague-spectators would like them, by casting aside the last meagre veil, to cast aside what was felt by some to be mere lickerish inadequacy, by others to be a needless irritant, by others again to be the rankest of hypocritical pretences, were moved, with a gesture that hinted at a force beyond themselves, to discard those glossing gauzes.

Professors should never ever try to write novels, that's all!

I have Partridge's Shakespeare's bawdy as well. Must say I'm dubious about it now.

The Scene is Changed is unknown to both Amazon and AbeBooks. That is obscure.

Yes, it is amazingly unknown. Or maybe unamazingly, considering.

It was in a batch of olden sci-fi and fantasy I got last year. (I think I mentioned the sale to you?) I've started another one that looks to be similarly fruity but I seriously don't expect this one can be worsted.

Not that I begrudge it the time spent, it's a curiosity because of the authorship if nothing else.

And possibly of interest to someone collecting dystopias, or anti-feminist dystopias etc.

Is there a name for these "what if one entire (or almost) sex disappeared" things?

And possibly of interest to someone collecting dystopias, or anti-feminist dystopias etc.

Yeah, that would be me - which is why your review sent me off on a quest for it....

Is there a name for these "what if one entire (or almost) sex disappeared" things?

I wish I had a handy term for it, but I haven't come up with one. I've tagged stuff men-without women sf and the significantly more common women-without-men sf , because it is a real sub-genre. The scene is changed certainly fits right in; it's even an early exemplar.

Are you kidding me! I thought the 19th century was all about that sort of thing.

Dear me, dear me, it sounds like a book you really ought to have... When's your birthday, Bob?

the significantly more common women-without-men sf , because it is a real sub-genre.

Interesting, why the disparity? Is it mostly wishful thinking from women or "this is why you can't rule" from men?

(Well, if you're done with it, I'd love to see it....)

Interesting, why the disparity? Is it mostly wishful thinking from women or "this is why you can't rule" from men?

Well, 'neither', I'd say.
The feminist wishful "world-without-men" is largely a recent development; but SF as a genre is nothing without wish-fulfillment for adolescent boys: I think fantasies about 'worlds with a surplus of women' fit this market to a 'T'.

(Fantasies about 'worlds without women'? Probably less so.... They certainly exist in greater numbers than my holdings, but I simply have not run across as many of them.)

Philip Wylie's The Disappearance is probably the most interesting of this sub-genre - imaging a world in which men and women become invisible to each other. Much like an exaggerated version of the real world....

"the significantly more common women-without-men sf , because it is a real sub-genre.

Interesting, why the disparity? Is it mostly wishful thinking from women or "this is why you can't rule" from men"

I wonder if its because the only way writers could imagine a world with women in charge is to imagine a world without men.

And if that is the case, it could be for various reasons: because the writers see men as aggressive bullies (where would they get that idea?) who would seize power in any world where they live, or because they see men as natural leaders who will, of course, rise to the top in any world where they live.

...

Berggasse 19 : Sigmund Freud's home and offices, Vienna, 1938 : the photographs of Edmund Engelman

In March 1938, the same month that Germany annexed Austria, Sigmund Freud's home was twice invaded by the S.S., on one occasion confiscating passports and robbing the family safe, on another arresting Anna Freud, who was detained at the Gestapo headquarters but managed to work out a release.

After paying some ransom money and with the help of international friends (and probably only because of that), Freud's family was allowed to leave, taking along the contents of the apartment where they had lived and worked for 41 years. Before their departure on June 3, Viennese photographer Edmund Engelman was contacted by their friend August Aichhorn and asked whether he'd undertake the risky project of photographing the premises, in order to document the site of the birth of psychoanalysis.

The apartment was under constant surveillance by the Nazis, so Engelman had to arrive and work as inconspicuously as possible. Only natural light was used. Initially the idea was to photograph only the rooms, but after running into Freud accidentally during one session, he also took some portraits and even supplied the new passport photos.

The photos are moving for many reasons. I can do no better than urge everyone to pick up Sebald's Emigrants to understand what sort of thoughts and feelings possessed me.

According to the commentary, octogenarian Freud didn't evince any sentimentality over losing his beloved surroundings after living there nearly half a century (and 66 years in Vienna). After the Nazis forced him to sign a paper claiming he had been treated well and allowed to work "in full freedom" until departure, he asked whether he could add a post scriptum: "I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone."

Engelman too managed to escape, and visited Vienna and Freud's old apartment after the war. The rooms were completely empty, on one occasion he saw the traces of the famous couch still on the ground; on the subsequent visit they were scrubbed out.

A plaque commemorating Freud's residence there was placed in 1953. The Sigmund Freud Society was founded in 1969 and began planning the current museum at the site. Some of the furniture returned.

Freud's four sisters died in the Holocaust.



Spring snow, Yukio Mishima

Youth is stupid! Beautiful, but oh so stupid!

Can't be helped.

I liked this very much.

I'm late to every single party, Lola. But I just read this. entire. fucking. thread, and am leaving this note before I flit away to God only knows what depths of 6AM debauchery I can find in this town...

Mostly the note is so I can find this again, admittedly. I miss hearing what's new/old/ripe/rotten/etc in book land.

I should have made this one of those private comment things. I haven't slept in days. Been listening to The Virgin Prunes on repeat and reading Shakespeare really, really drunk.

But again, I don't know why I'm cluttering your reading thing.

Come say hi! In comment land!

-(what's left of-) Jourdain

Cluttering my thread, that's impossible, J, you rare ornament, cloud of confetti!

I keep oscillating between "what's the point of saying a few words" and "better a few words, than nothing!"

The argument about providing at least an aide-mémoire used to be more convincing when there was some "mémoire" to evoke, but it is increasingly true that in most cases the snapshot is all that remains. Oh, WELL.



Les Désenchantées: Roman des harems Turcs contemporains (1906) by Pierre Loti

Some twenty-five years before the publication of Les Désenchantées (Disenchanted women), Loti had achieved fame with another Turkish-themed semi-autobiographical novel, Aziyadé, also about an unhappy secret romance between a Western man and a green-eyed Turkish woman, told in letters and diary entries. Aziyadé is something of a cultural landmark, having favourably influenced French opinion on Turkey at the time, as well as making Loti famous in Turkey. The latter point is much expanded on in Les Désenchantées where both Loti and his first novel appear barely disguised, as the hero "André Lhéry" and his bestseller "Medjé". It is probable that Loti drew on his own fan mail and circumstantial acquaintances rather than on an actual affair.

The plot is minimal: a young upper class Turkish woman he's never met strikes up a correspondence with novelist André Lhéry just before her arranged marriage, expressing her admiration for his books and unhappiness with her lot as a Muslim woman. Coincidentally, Lhéry soon returns to a diplomatic post in Istanbul, which enables him to meet up with Djenane, but never alone--she is always accompanied by two friends, Zeyneb and Melek, who also add postscriptums and independent notes to Djenane's letters. All four meet in strictest secret in deserted spots, and during the entire time Lhéry is allowed only a single glimpse of their three faces. The adventure ends as Melek dies from some mysterious illness (but could be just melancholy!), Djenane kills herself after the husband she had divorced managed to get the divorce annulled, and Lhéry's service is over.

The three women relish this "friendship of the souls" with a man, an impossible occurrence in the gender-segregated Turkish society. In relationship to him they become persons. And that's something I wasn't expecting, just as I was surprised by the sensitivity and sympathy Loti exhibits in his attitude toward these characters. And the story of Djenane's marriage, to a man she doesn't love and who doesn't love her (they meet for the first time on the day of the wedding), but which nevertheless becomes sexually very passionate, is told in such normal, unprejudiced tone it would be remarkable today, let alone then.

It's entirely thanks to this unusual aspect that I finished the book which, I'm sorry to say, began to bore me rather quickly.



Die Abtei (1977) by Alois Brandstetter

How I ended up reading before bed a snark-filled Catholic rant about the apocalyptic decay of the modern world and Austria especially, as seen from the vantage point of St. Benedict's rule, told entirely in monologue without paragraphs or chapters by a classically educated police inspector come to investigate the theft of a precious chalice from the abbey to which it had been gifted in the eighth century (the last time anything good happened in the world)--is anyone's guess.

Morphine (1927) by Mikhail Bulgakov

Bulgakov got hooked on morphine for a year, but his wife marshalled him successfully through withdrawal and recovery. No such luck for the hero of his novella, also a doctor, also deployed in a tiny provincial town, and also getting addicted following medical treatment.

Other autobiographical touches include a suicide letter similar to the one left by a friend of Bulgakov's, and the hero's love of opera. The authenticity of the account gets a quirky further recognition in the fact of Soviet censorship of the dosages used, at original publication.



The burnt orange heresy (1971) by Charles Ray Willeford

An art critic might go very far to establish a personal reputation, but possibly even farther to protect the reputation of an entire school of art. For those who like capital-S Surrealism and don't mind hilarious violence.

The Pierre Loti sounds very interesting. I wish more Loti was available in English. Why doesn't NYRB or someone like that publish him? He's no worse than Stephan Zweig, say.

Are you still living in the fridge dear?

Oh no, we reached zero degree, and it's sweltering! Everything is melting!

Hm, not sure poor old Loti trumps Zweig, but it's been a while since I read any fiction by the latter (his non-fiction didn't age well). I remember being very impressed by Amok and the chess story, ages ago.

You've given me the urge to go read Zweig's "gay" book, it's probably something I could "let go" (I am now constantly looking to reduce, reduce, reduce).

Speaking of gay, I wonder whether Loti's ambiguous sexuality had something to do with how he saw and treated women... To begin simplistically, there seems to be lots of Platonic love in his books and a complementary lack of the usual leering hetero machismo.

I heard that Roland Barthes himself opined that Loti's Aziyadé had been a man, must find where was that.

I don't think Zweig is really bad, he's just not as good as he thinks he is.

I'll try Amok and give him another chance. What 'gay' book are you referring to?

This one:



La confusion des sentiments (orig. tit. Verwirrung der Gefühle) (1927) by Stefan Zweig

A distinguished sixty year old professor of philology reminisces about his youth and the man who had crucially affected his entire life--the essential history that is missing from the official history.

His student days began unpromisingly when as a teenage rebel from the provinces he came to Berlin and began to party hard with easy women and pals. A visit from his father having shamed him out of that life, he transferred to a smaller town, determined to prove himself academically.

There he falls in thrall to a charismatic lecturer, and also finds lodging in his house. Roland's first weeks are an ecstatic immersion in the study of the Elizabethans (the professor is an expert on Shakespeare) and idolisation of the man whose passion has lighted his. Roland is romantic and naive. (Actually, far too naive for someone who reads Marlowe and Shakespeare...)

But, the more he loves and observes his teacher, the more disturbed he becomes by the inexplicable features of his life: the strangely icy relationship between the professor and his tomboyish wife, the disappointing public lectures nothing like the enchanting improvisations amidst a handful of adoring students, the surprisingly slim academic output for someone so talented, the terrifying isolation of the man who seems to have no friends and whom colleagues and even students treat with ironic coldness, and the intermittent fugues, days of cancelled lessons and disappearances in unknown direction that people comment on with nasty rumours.

Roland's tantalised, adoring fascination with the man cannot be separated from his fascination with study, they feed on each other. He is determined to excel in scholarship but also yearns to win the approval and love from his teacher. He discovers that the professor had abandoned an ambitious history of the Globe Theatre, a project that would have secured a great reputation, and coaxes him back to it, offering unlimited help and encouragement.

The work proceeds well, but Roland is made increasingly wretched by the professor's capricious treatment, his reserve and seeming lack of gratitude--of affection. At reaching an important milestone in the work, the atmosphere relaxes into a mini-celebration--the professor goes so far as to address him with the familiar form and hints at some explanations to come. But on venturing out of the room to get a corkscrew, Roland discovers professor's wife eavesdropping on them and--this is what shocks him--she does so without a trace of embarrassment or guilt, in fact she looks positively menacing. Roland excuses himself to the bemused professor and goes to bed in utmost turmoil and confusion, made worse when a little later he hears steps in front of his door and finds the professor there, terrifying because so oddly changed, hissing at Roland with an ugly expression that perhaps it is better that they "observe distances".

It's a good thing the novel is really a novella; the buildup is excellent but one does get slightly impatient with poor Roland's lack of comprehension.

The professor disappears again and Roland's interesting relationship with the professor's wife culminates in a sexual encounter after an outing. In bed she tells him everything she refused to explain previously, but Roland's disgust at himself for betraying the man prevents him from fully understanding the situation.

As he prepares to leave the house for good, the professor returns and begs him for a last, frank conversation. He understands from Roland's attitude what has happened; to Roland's astonishment (still!), he shows no anger about the adultery, his wife is free to do as she pleases and besides, it was to be expected and besides, he--the professor--also... loves him.

Then he tells Roland the story of his life and at the end begs for a goodbye kiss, which is an ironic delivery of everything Roland wanted: love, the highest affection, the most special, unique regard... but Roland's body wouldn't follow where his loving soul beckoned.

And who knows? Maybe that's why the opposite happened too. As the enigmatic last paragraph has it (translation from the French):

I never saw him again. I never heard from him again. His book was never published, his name is forgotten; nobody remembers him, except me. And yet even today, just like back then when I was an ignorant boy, I feel that I owe nobody as much as I do to this man, not to my father and mother, before him, not to my wife and children, after him... and that I have loved nobody more than him.

Seems NYRB Classics has published it; if you ever get it, Murr, looking forward to your comments.

Le grand jeu (1927) by Benjamin Péret

Surrealist fireworks of all colours, shapes, and sounds. A poem calculating on the strength of maths, so reassuring if only it were true:



A poem diving deep through solitude, until we lose sight of it (and still it dives):

Voyage de découverte

Il était seul
dans le bas du seul-seul
Un seul à la seule
il seulait
Ca fait deux seuls
deux seuls dans un bas–seul


Un bas-seul ne dure pas longtemps
mais c’est assez quand on est seul
dans le bas du seul-seul

And lots of dancing poems with musical structure intact and images cut up any which way, some ribaldry, some cheek and irreverence. Loved it.

Memorie del capo della polizia di San Pietroburgo (1889) (Reminiscences of the chief of police in St. Petersburg) by Ivan Putilin

Ivan (Dmitrievich) Putilin (1830-1893) was the head of the investigative branch of St. Petersburg's police force from 1866 until 1889 and the writer of a memoir, Forty years among thieves and murderers, chronicling about two dozen of his crime cases. There's a strong suggestion that Putilin was the model for the inspector Porfiry Petrovich in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment; at any rate, Dostoevsky the avid reader of crime columns must have been aware of "the Russian Sherlock Holmes".

Nor was Dostoevsky the only one, at least two other later writers used Putilin (and his memoir) as the model and basis for their detective fiction.

The three cases in my book concern a murder in a love hotel, a con man, and a horrific quadruple murder in a private house, where a couple, their teenage son and a maid had been found with their heads bashed in with a clothes pressing iron.

The style is concise and vigorous, the descriptions precise and vivid, and the abundance of dialogue makes these stories feel as if they happened yesterday. The "plots" aren't polished or neat; real life detection involves lots of pavement pounding, waiting, patient digging and not a little sheer luck. Putilin doesn't bother with moralising, but his deep interest in people and their doings is evident and evidently humane. There's a tone here familiar from Russian literature, the knowledge of how wretched and weirdly complex people can be.

Any of the three cases here could be an outline for a "Russian" novel and the characters. In the first case, a husband is bent on revenge on his wife's rapist, finding no peace until he schemes the murder, and then finding no peace afterwards.

In the second case, there are a colourful con man and his female partner, defrauded priests (perhaps with something on their conscience as well), and a clever police spy, the wife of a prison guard, who outfoxes the baddies.

The third story, the most sensationally gory, practically cries out for Dostoevsky. Who could have committed such a massacre, expending such cruelty and strength?

A very pretty young woman, it turned out, a girl who used to be a servant in the household and remained on good enough terms with the family that she asked to stay over one night when she missed the train to her village. And only some time in the middle of the night, being unable to sleep, did it occur to her that she could, well, rob the house. But they'd know it was her, so--obviously--she'd have to kill them. Nobody knew she had stayed over with them, nobody had seen her...

So she gets up, checks that everyone is sleeping, and looks around for a weapon... the knives won't do, can't guarantee she'd kill them with the first blow, then she notices the "good, heavy" iron... and then she crosses herself and sets to the butchery.

She was found only because her husband bragged about the goods she had fetched from the city.

Re: #114 xkcd #55:



http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/useless.jpg

I love the 2 poems in 114, and the Putilin looks fantastic. How grand guignol.

#116

Ha, exactly so! Why can't maths be REALLY useful... If I can find the relevant notebook, I'll post some mathematical expressions of proverbs I did in high school. I was mad about functions a good long year.

#117

Grand guignol is right. But that crossing herself before killing... For the manual of the perfect murderer: "DO always recommend your soul to Jesus before blowing someone's brains out."

It's not very far away from "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition", though.



Pushkin: A Biography by T. J. Binyon

Binyon says upfront that his dominant concern was with giving a picture of Pushkin as a man, and his life as it was lived in the moment. A biography of this kind must be a prime necessity when the subject has become a legend and a monument, but for my purposes I'd have preferred something different, with emphasis on the works, not private life. This is not a criticism, it's an interesting book in its own right, only I don't feel I have much to say except make notes of a few points that struck me especially.

To begin with, there's Pushkin's extraordinary African ancestor, maternal great-grandfather Abram Gannibal (Hannibal in Russian transliteration), sold to Peter the Great by a Serbian trader who procured the boy and his older brother from the Turks. The older boy's traces lose themselves after his entering military service, but the younger one, Peter the Great's favourite, ascended to a long and brilliant career. Peter the Great had him educated in military arts in France, and when the tsar died two years later, Peter's wife Catherine employed him as teacher to the tsar's grandson. On her death Abram (having acquired/taken the surname Gannibal in the meantime) at first had some trouble at the court, but the new empress, Peter's daughter Elizabeth, continued to show favour and promote him. He was granted lands and eventually set in charge of military engineering in all Russia, with the rank of a general.

It was with his second, Swedish wife, that he had the son who would become Pushkin's grandfather.

Pushkin started versifying in childhood, writing plays in French and performing them for his sister. The following incident is too cute: after one play was hissed off the stage, ten year old Pushkin wrote a self-critical epigram about the event:

"Tell me, why was The Filcher
Hissed by the pit?"
"Alas! it's because the poor author
Filched it from Molière."

He read a lot all his life, was influenced especially by the French and later, Lord Byron; spent more on books than he could afford.

He was constantly in love. For someone of unprepossessing physical appearance--short, ungainly, and (ugh, something rather repulsive, I'd think) nurturing for some reason astonishingly long fingernails--he seems to have had a lot of success with women. At any rate, he pursued them relentlessly, often in parallel (hedging the bets, one might say) and with a certain aggression and cynicism that sometimes make it difficult to rejoice in his conquests. "Conquering" and sleeping with other men's wives (and/or their mothers, sisters, friends and underlings) was a general occupation in his society.

For all the sex he was having, and maintaining a constant state of flirtation with dozens of women, Pushkin seems to have had few significant romantic attachments, or maybe it appears that way because he claimed to be in love with so many. The impression one gets is that he was basically ever-ready for a dalliance, whatever his declared emotional status--all it took was opportunity.

He had a very good friend who was homosexual--modern Russia could stand to take cue from its beloved Pushkin's attitude to homosexuality.

He was atheist.

He loved bawdiness and obscenity--another reason, along with his premature death and lyrical genius, that I kept thinking of Mozart.

In fact, Binyon tells a funny story when Adam Mickiewicz, great Polish poet and apparently far more of a gentleman than Pushkin, upbraided him for saying things in company that a decent man wouldn't even tell to himself.

Fucking Tolstoy might have caused Pushkin to duel at 21, and mayhap die at 21!! I love it when people I hate turn out to be bastards.

Finally, the circumstances around Pushkin's fatal duel are analysed in detail and received wisdom on several points questioned. It is clear that Natalya Pushkin, of all involved, had least guilt to bear for the affair. The main "problem" with her was that she was a beautiful society woman who had attracted the attention of a vain, enormously silly man. After this initial event, nothing that happened was fully in her power, if at all. The complications grew (over a couple YEARS!), with other people and interests getting involved. Once before a duel had been avoided, then peace seemed to be at hand with Natalya's "suitor" unexpectedly marrying a sister of hers (the marriage engineered by baron Heeckeren, the young man's protector, and--possibly--lover, of all things).

But Pushkin was still seething. The annoyance had lasted too long, cost too much in self-regard and, beset as he was by serious financial troubles, it aggravated his shaken confidence and mood in general. People now gossiped about Natalya's sister's marriage--still, in effect, gossiping about Natalya and Pushkin. It got on his nerves.

And then came the straw and landed on the camel's back: jeering anonymous letters sent to Pushkin's friends and acquaintances, mockingly inducting him in the pantheon of cuckolds. Binyon makes what to me seems a very reasonable case that it wasn't van Heeckeren who sent the letters (the most widely accepted theory; Akhmatova believed it), but rather a circle of rascally ne'er-do-wells headed by Prince Dolgoruky, renowned for such pranks.

Some of his friends sent the letters unopened to Pushkin or destroyed them, but he couldn't or wouldn't ignore this.

For the second time since the affair began he issued a challenge, and this time it wasn't avoided. Pushkin's wound was fatal and he died after a night of agony, aged thirty-seven. The man who killed Pushkin died of old age in 1895.

interesting notes.I really enjoyed this biography, but for something more focussed on the works you might want to try Pushkin on Literature by Tatiana Wolff mmmmm no touchstone.

Oh, look, it's been a while. Part of it is that I feel chronically incapable of making a decent effort to talk about reading (for various technical and internal reasons), but also an ever-intensifying feeling that I'm reading the wrong books. Or, rather, that I increasingly wonder why I'm reading what I'm reading, when everything is changing as I breathe and speak and post.

I've read recently Lancelot by Walker Percy, and The collector by John Fowles, both yesterday's snows and damn if I can think of any good reason for anyone to read them.

So let's forget about the good reasons and concentrate on the bad.



Percy's The moviegoer, a much praised book, struck all the right chords with me back in horrible lonesome and bitter 1993 New Orleans. His character--looking like William Holden--didn't know why he was alive and whether it was even okay for him to be alive and neither did I. We fit very well and had the same thoughts about the hideousness of it all, local colour and custom especially. So I've been partial to Percy since, and enjoyed also his Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, although I haven't re-read either in all these years and I'm not sure I ought to.

Therefore, when a fine signed first edition of Lancelot crossed my path--a rare event for this half-forgotten author--I leafed through it, letting a paragraph where the hero rails at the betrayal of Catholicism hook me in.

It was a quick read, but unfortunately it falls quite a way below my memory of the quality of The moviegoer.

Lancelot Andrewes Lamar, lefty lawyer fond of the bottle, looking like Sterling Hayden gone to seed (the Holden/Hayden model fits remarkably well Percy's own looks, as it happens), heir to a beautiful Louisiana mansion restored thanks to his second wife's Texan money, discovers one afternoon that his young daughter must be another man's child. Blood type science indicates that much, but he decides he wants proof, he wants to catch his wife in flagrante delicto. He goes a bit bonkers in fact, as shown by increasingly foul rants about sin, evil, the modern age, the failure of the Catholic Church (a familiar motif: the RCC just ain't what it was in the Middle Ages--and this is a BAD thing), and women.

With the help of a black servant he secures such proof but also more than he bargained for, for instance the information that his other, sixteen year old daughter from the first marriage is sleeping with a creepy couple of Hollywood stars, and that his wife is on (at least) the second lover, the presumed father of the little girl in the meantime becoming impotent (ageing is a bitch...)

A storm is brewing, though, that trusty deus ex machina of Southern literature: a purifying hurricane, right on cue to sweep Sodom away. Lancelot helps it out by setting his beautiful mansion and everybody in it on fire, for which he gets incarcerated in an asylum. He tells his story to a visiting childhood friend, now a priest, who, like God, remains silent throughout.

Percy (his heroes) is still interesting to me, what troubled him is interesting to me. His (his heroes') lust and zest, his William Holdenish-Sterling Haydenish big-boned square-jawed Scotch-soaked sexy body is enticing and exciting.

It's unfortunate that behind that one runs fairly quickly into a sort of tight-lipped prissiness and doldrums, a panic at the revolution of the eras, fuddy-duddy vapours about oral sex and feminism. Like a bon vivant uncle from the 1910s incapable of getting a grip on the 1960s.

Dostoevsky knew what is crime (or, as the believers say, sin): murder, the murder of body and the murder of soul. Not a soft porno called "The 69ers". Not adultery, not the birth of an illegitimate child, not leaving your drunk of a husband for a prospect of life with greater vitality, even if that's just a dream.

I doubt Percy intended to make Lancelot ridiculous, but I can't help finding him such--a little like Jake Barnes' brave-smiling agony over being unable to penetrate his lady love. Sex just isn't THAT important!

On the topic of race, Percy manages to see something Faulkner did not: that blacks did not owe whites gratitude. But, somehow, he still conveys resentment at not having it. In servant Elgin he creates a super-black who is yet completely and irredeemably underclass: a brilliant scientific genius getting a degree at MIT, with an equally brilliant (Jewish!) fiancée, who can't pronounce "ask" correctly and retains all the instincts of a devoted servant. But if the former is a fact, why even notice the latter, if not to compensate for one's own inadequacy, or justify the servitude?

There is an ongoing conflict between white Southern pride and white Southern shame, which I have never seen happily resolved, in literature or life. And, as far as I'm concerned, THAT's where a cosmic debate about sin and evil is well placed, not around people's genitalia.

What? What about the women?
Women? How will it be for women?
In order to understand that, you must first understand the strange thing that happened to the human race. It is an event which you people had an inkling of but then turned upside down and inside out for your own purposes.
It is the secret of life, the most astounding and best-kept secret of the ages, yet it is as plain as the nose on your face for all to see.
You were onto it with your doctrine of the Original Sin. But you got it exactly backwards. Original Sin is not something man did to God but something God did to man, so monstrously that to this day man cannot understand what happened to him. He shakes his head groggily and rubs his eyes in disbelief.
The great secret of the ages is that man has evolved, is born, lives, and dies for one end and one end only: to commit a sexual assault on another human or to submit to such an assault.
Everything else man does is so much bushwa and you know it and I know it and everybody knows it.
Women have only just discovered the secret, or part of it, the monstrous absurdity of it. Can you blame them for being outraged? Yet even more absurd are their pathetic attempts, once having made the discovery which men are too dumb to make, to pretend it isn't so, to cover it up, to blame it on men.
What the poor dears discovered is the monstrous truth lying at the very center of life: that their happiness and the meaning of life itself is to be assaulted by a man.
Ah, sweet mystery of life indeed, indeed yes, exactly, yes indeed that is what it is: to be rammed, jammed, stuck, stabbed, pinned, impaled, run through, in a word:
Raped.

I haven't read Fowles before, so it's neat that I started with his first book. The title was on my radar due entirely to my mad love for Terence Stamp, who was cast as the lead in the movie made after the book. (I have not seen it yet.) But, having read the book, it is obvious Hollywood or whoever chose to completely ignore what the book is about in favour of OMG BONDAGE SLAVE GIRL SEXY TIMES! based on, well, a pure technicality--there is in fact a beautiful girl imprisoned in a maniac's cellar, and this has something to do with his fucked-up sexuality, but it is as far removed from a story about sex as is gorgeous divine baby doll Terence Stamp from the hideous Fred "Ferdinand" Clegg, Collector.

Obviously the cover on the edition I had went for the same shameless subversion of actual meaning. See, this kind of thing is what Lancelot (see post above) was railing about! I'm beginning to feel him!

Clegg is a twenty-five year old Englishman from a lesser class, shaped by it as if he'd been dough poured into a mould. He has some intelligence, technically speaking, but no taste, no "real" (humanistic) education, and very little human feeling. An inveterate butterfly collector, he grows obsessed with a beautiful middle class girl, allowing himself to dream (chastely) of her, and then of being with her. Also chastely. With no romantic or sexual experience, and apparently incapable of getting some, his desire for Miranda's proximity is from the beginning circumscribed by what he cannot do: cannot approach her, cannot know her, cannot seduce her, or love her--not in a normal fashion.

So he kidnaps her and imprisons in the cellar of an isolated cottage, with the apparent aim of keeping her there indefinitely.

Miranda is a prize-winning art student, a warm, sympathetic character without class snobbery, an artless young girl sexually seemingly as inexperienced as Clegg, but with a normal emotional past involving attractions to a beautiful but uninspiring young fellow student, and the ugly but fascinating mentor twenty years her senior.

The contrasts between Clegg and Miranda are many and insoluble, but oddly, the broadest, the one from which everything else seems to spring--at least to Fowles' thinking--seems to be, of all things, class.

Clegg is "scientific", inhibited, dead; Miranda is artistic, vital, life-loving. Clegg collects and catalogues; Miranda creates. Clegg has a rudimentary, mechanistic understanding of beauty as symmetry of shape; Miranda understands beauty as a matter of active feeling, perceiving as aesthetic even what is superficially ugly, unpleasant and formless. Clegg is a puritan with petty bourgeois notions of conventional morals and propriety; Miranda understands sex as a mode of communication, a bestowing of love, that cannot be dirty in itself. Clegg is closed upon himself and his obsessions; Miranda thinks about social injustice and the threat of nuclear war. Etc.

The question is what makes Clegg the way he is, and Miranda the way she is? Fifty years later (book was published in 1963), it's difficult not to "diagnose" Clegg with some form of autism or mental deficiency, and yet it seems clear that for Fowles he is the exponent of some wider problem, and not just a random unfortunate victim of genetic lottery. Clegg embodies a deadly technological principle which destroys beautiful creative life and as such he cannot be unique--anyone belonging to Clegg's class--the class that ruins beautiful ancient cottages with horrible kitsch, orange wall-to-wall carpeting, bad imitation paintings, china ducks and gaudy plates, the class that teeters between its native lowborn accent and fake RP, that cannot hear the difference between Mozart and Bach, that doesn't read--is liable to ignore the human being to the point of destroying that human being. Just like it ignores humanity and humanity's best, not just achievements, but gifts.

There is quite a bit of horrible in this book, but the worst for me--worse than any physical torture could have been--was the complete impossibility of communication, although both characters try, in their desperately different ways. Miranda tries to awaken Clegg's conscience, his feelings, a reason greater than rationality, and even (disastrously) his body.

Clegg struggles to get words out and never truly explains himself because there is nothing to explain. She is a butterfly and that is all. He doesn't have the equipment, emotional or physical, to give any other form and meaning to the relationship he wants with her. He really doesn't want anything else but to collect her, to "have" her in a completely sterile, useless, deathly way.

Still a riveting read although obviously dated in the sophomoric depiction of the "great questions" in modern art and the intuition that a woman defines herself primarily through men. Certainly an unexpected treatment of the "two cultures" motif!

well, that sounds better than Lancelot at least. The only Fowles I've read is The French Lieutenant's Woman - brilliant - and The Magus, which was less than brilliant. I've heard so many mixed things regarding The Collector that I'm really quite put off. Great review though, and I also hate the things that Fowles hates about Clegg and his class. But then I'm a terrible snob. :)

You're a cat, that goes without saying!

Yes, Lancelot is junk; Fowles, I don't know, it's dated, I'd bet you wouldn't find anything fresh in it. The themes are very much of their time, it reminded me of Losey's movies ("The damned" especially) and several other books with artsy characters, down to the exact same details of reading reverently The Catcher in the rye (poor Miranda makes Clegg read it in vain hopes it might rouse his soul), Ravi Shankar, and Bartók's Music for strings, percussion and celesta.

I think this is the fourth or fifth time I've read a book where this piece figures, twice (or thrice) specifying Fritz Reiner's recording with the Chicago Symphony. Everybody was talking about Pollock and bebop and listening to Bartók's celesta! And writing about it!

I have The French lieutenant's woman, I bought it because the first page intrigued me, contrary to the dark expectations raised by the title (hate love stories).

The class conflict in The collector, the frequency of the theme in British lit and movies and television puzzles me. I've seen it so many times, it's a thing.

The Clegg-like character is a young lower class man of scientific/technical bent, on a rising social trajectory, the face of new technocracy. He is logical and unimaginative, ambitious but cold, with an increasing purchasing power but wretchedly tasteless, unrefined etc. Morloks swarming to the surface.

He is the plebs, allowed entrance to the universities by science and technology, not fine arts, humanities or politics (reserved strictly for the upper classes, who govern and enjoy).

So class hatred meshes with the antipathy to science and the fear of technology and "modern progress"--industry, mass production, speed, exploitation...

Fowles is a writer I forget about, and then from time to time one of his books comes my way and I end up enjoying it. The last one of those was A Maggot. If you're in the mood for more Fowles, that might be the one to look for. It's a sort of Rashoman-like historical novel (for some reason Fowles says it is not a historical novel) that is less a who-done-it than a what-happened where we try to compose an answer to that question from various scraps, fragments, letters, and so on that comprise most of the novel.

He doesn't register as a particularly interesting idea-author to me (if somebody had distilled the ideas from The Collector into bullet points I'd been bored in a minute), but I'll keep it in mind.

Le capital au XXIe siècle (Capital in the 21st century) by Thomas Piketty



Therefore, Marx was right.

Therefore, Lenin too was right.

But who shall be Lenin in the 21st century?

No Lenin needed. Natural disasters or war can do the job just as well. And otherwise there is hyper-inflation,

that machine-gun of the Commissariat of Finance which poured fire into the rear of the bourgeois system

as the president of the Finance Committee under Lenin Yevgeni Alekseyevich Preobrazhensky used to describe it. He was executed under Stalin, but not for saying this.

Call me insanely optimistic, but I'm hoping some solution can be found other than a--or, rather, even more--natural disaster or war. Including revolutionary wars.

Piketty doesn't seem convinced by any of his own timidly suggested measures, does he? Really disappointing in the end.

Is there really nothing to look forward to but sinking deeper into this atavistic feudal barbarity?

I skipped the last part of Piketty's book, since I do not believe in a global tax. One area where tax havens seem to be disappearing is for "ordinary millionaires" and other citizens, who stashed away some money from the claws of the local tax men. It is now increasingly difficult to open a bank account in places like Switzerland or Singapore, at least for Westerners. Multi national corporations and billionaires still have plenty of choice, and the stakes are bigger for the havens that facilitate them.

We are not sinking into atavistic barbarity. Every year millions of people are elevated out of poverty if you think on a global scale. It's the "working classes" in rich countries (that consists of immigrants from poor countries for a significant part) that pay the price. Barbary is worst where the economy is hardly growing, think the Middle East, Pakistan and parts of Africa.

>129 mercure:

That millions are "elevated out of poverty" on a global scale means little to nothing--or, it means no more than, say, some countries' vertiginous development after WWII--"improvement" always seems fantastic when you are starting from zero. Being poor is a different condition in different places. There's the poverty of the scrounger on garbage in some Indian slum, and there's the poverty of the American with three backbreaking jobs, a used car and a TV set and other appliances at home, who still needs food donations to survive.

And, crucially, while millions might be elevated out of poverty (momentarily) in China and India, we could say that globally the effect cancels out with increasing pauperisations in the West.

I take your point about the Middle East etc., but the thing is, the person NOT in the Middle East etc. still gotta live. Relative to the MIddle East etc. it would be obscene to complain, but I can still complain for being worse off than my parents at my age. (Actually, an Afghan my age and class could make exactly the same complaint, judging by reports of that society in the sixties.) And the worst is that I can't even hope for the younger generation what my parents hoped for mine.

I call the transformations of the Western society, due to neoliberal destructions of public property, privatisations, and outsourcing of jobs, plainly barbarous.

And I do see the increasing domination of ephemeral, badly paid, uninsured "service industry" jobs as ushering a new form of feudalism, even slavery.

P.S. Aside from those half-hearted suggestions at the end, do you find Piketty's analysis correct overall?

I disagree wit you that the millions lifted out of poverty in the Third World are cancelled out by the increased pauperisation in the West. It is simply a matter of numbers. And not only has people's financial situation improved, it has also improved their health, increased their social security and it has created a more liberal culture. China is a prime example. The current age gives far more opportunities to Chinese women than ever before. India is a bit of a laggard, but most of the incidents you read in the paper are in traditional areas, not in Bangalore or any of the other tech cities exposed to global culture. The Muslim world is a different matter altogether, but you cannot say that globalisation has made much inroads beyond Kalashnikovs, Facebook, and Wahhabism.

America's culture wars look pretty alien from the other side of the Atlantic or the Pacific. Where I live badly paid service jobs do of course exist, but temping is often a choice to pay less taxes in return for less social security and higher net income. It depends on the sector of the economy. Almost nobody goes uninsured, and those who do so do it at the burden of their tax paying compatriots. If Americans organise their society differently, it is largely that society's choice.

The fact that younger generations might feel worse off than their parents may also have to do with other interest groups that defend their privileges as well as multi-national corporations or billionaires. E.g. the elderly used to be poor, but are now often the richest generation. Baby boomers not only expanded the welfare state, but they are also cannibalising it, through early retirement, tax deductions, generous pensions and extensive health care at the cost of the government, rather than their own savings.

In some ways being worse off than an earlier generation may also be the simple effect of markets. E.g. my grandfather had limited education, but he could support a wife and two children and live in a pretty nice flat in a good area. Currently, households will often need two incomes to afford that same flat in that still comfortable neighbourhood. It is all the consequence of women entering the labour market and adding to couple's income. The income has risen more than the number of nice urban areas.

I thoroughly enjoyed Mr. Piketty's overview of the history of capital formation, economic growth and income distribution. It was nice that he made the link to icons of popular culture. I do not agree that the growth level of assets is always higher than economic growth. It is simply impossible that a small group of people would own absolutely everything, which would be the consequence of r > g. He does not seem to grab much about accounting of financial assets.

Which does not mean that Mr. Piketty does not have a point about the current state of income distribution. I enjoyed the comparison to the Belle Époque for example. And income differences are currently a bit overrated for those who do not consume their riches. The billionaire Steve Cohen explained this concernquite clearly recently:

Check out London, Manhattan, Aspen and East Hampton real estate prices, as well as high-end art prices, to see what the leading edge of hyperinflation could look like.

>131 mercure:

I think China is an example only of China. And, certainly, good for China and the Chinese if more of them are getting to taste the intangible benefits of a liberalised society--I'm not in a position to judge how far reaching the changes there may be.

But I know that if I look at Greece, I'm not seeing lifting out of poverty and increased prosperity etc. Nor is it only countries like Greece. In recent years I've been astonished by the numbers of educated, "middle class" Italians, Germans, Spanish and French who have immigrated here looking for opportunity (the British immigration here has been pretty lively traditionally). The problem is that a lot of those people are finding opportunity, if any, that's notches below what the reasonable expectations for their status would have been just a decade or two ago.

Which does not mean that Mr. Piketty does not have a point about the current state of income distribution. I enjoyed the comparison to the Belle Époque for example. And income differences are currently a bit overrated for those who do not consume their riches.

I thought the point was that the current state of income distribution leads to increased inequality, i.e. ever more poverty for ever more people. That it's a "dynamic" point, so to speak.

As for the problems of those who are too rich to consume their riches, or whose problems concern the hyperinflation in the Hamptons or the art market, well, I must admit I'm not in the least inclined to sympathise with their POV. But I have one sure cure for their headaches! ;)))

China is not the only example. Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia are other countries with increasing numbers of middle class people. Brazil and Chili are examples in the Western hemisphere. Note that I mainly speak about Third World countries.

Greece is of course a victim of one element of globalisation: the euro. But primarily the Greeks are the victim of the mismanagement by their own political class. More of Greece's debt should have been cancelled, but that had gone at the expense of mainly French and German banks. Other Europeans are suffering for that as well; they are the victim of unequal power distribution in the European Union. Particularly Italians and French are the victim of vested interests in their countries and again these are not solely the multi-national corporations, but just as much unionised workers - often petite bourgeoisie or bobos. Germans I find more difficult to judge. Dutch farmers emigrate to Canada to find better business opportunities, but others go to Sweden for a simpler life (at lower wealth) or to Australia for the Lucky Country lifestyle. Most live in neighbouring countries where houses are cheaper or in Spain where the weather is nicer. Unemployment figures differ a lot from one country to another.

You are right about the dynamic point in Mr. Piketty's book and that is that gives me most trouble. The concentration of riches cannot continue forever. At some stage in the future the government (think the New Deal or post-war "financial repression"), war or other disasters will get them. What Mr. Cohen tried to explain so colourfully is that the purchasing power of all his riches vis-à-vis his peers is not at all improving so much. He blames it on the FED. If the FED would run a different course he could be equally rich vis-à-vis his peers (the one thing important at the top, I am told), but the difference with you and me would be much smaller. Partly the current income disparity is an accounting phenomenon.

This however does not reduce my appreciation for all the data that Mr. Piketty collected and the historical overview that he gave. He is sometimes a bit repetitive, but I did not mind this.

>133 mercure:

Regarding the Third World Piketty doesn't say much; as you mention, the novelty and strength of his book is the unprecedented wealth and quality of--historical--data, and that doesn't exist except for the handful of countries in the West--I think he expresses doubts somewhere on how reliable the information coming from China really is (or he comments on its paucity--either way it's a tightly-controlled "substance").

But I wonder again--is the currently registered increase in prosperity in those countries a real permanent gain, or is it just an expression of theirs "catching up" with the phase the West was in decades ago--and will end in foreseeable future due to the same factors the West's "Trente Glorieuses" ended?

If the mechanism that Piketty describes is accurate, then it's accurate wherever the conditions of neoliberal capitalism causing extreme point accumulation of wealth exist--which is, I guess, pretty much everywhere today.

Okay, the Chinese state shows every willingness to intervene in the market as necessary. Russia, I think, is getting there again.

But to hell with them, I want to know whether life will get better in Europe, so I can go home finally! Instead all I'm hearing is that fascism is rising again...

Unfortunately, economic history is not such a popular subject among practitioners of the Dismal Science. Still, economic historians are increasingly able to patch together an idea of economic development in other eras, and I would not be surprised if they can do this also for relatively stable places like Japan, South America, China or certain areas in India. I have no idea how these calculations are made (e.g. for the Roman Empire), but I suppose you prefer records on paper or at least extensive archaeological research. However, as Piketty makes quite clear, before industrialisation there was almost no economic growth, so for many countries doing such research would probably not add much to our knowledge.

Surely, the catching up phase that large parts of the “Third World” go through are real progress. I cannot think of better proof than comparing my own trips around the world to those 20 years ago. You may rather consider increasing life expectancies (except for areas in AIDS-stricken Africa), falling birth rates, or more indirectly from the large numbers of people that perform the Haj or the popularity of smart phones. Obviously, a price is paid for this in the form of boring factory work and migratory labour. But how boring is it to work a small plot of land at an extremely low productivity level?

You are right that the people who prosper most are those in charge of the distribution of assets, i.e. the managers in large corporations and their cronies in many corrupt governments. Luckily, sometimes they bring us interesting gossip . Hong Kong is an interesting example. As an anti-communist colonial outpost, 50% of its population worked in manufacturing. In 25 years, that percentage has fallen to 5%, while Shenzhen, the city next door, grew from 300 thousand inhabitants to over 10 million. Luckily, cross border tourism brought a lot of simple new jobs to Hong Kong. On the down side, it also increased costs of living which only help the oligarchs that run the place with the full support of the communist central government. Still, everybody has access to first-world health care and schools. The middle classes have done quite well; only the young ones now feel the pain, because they were not able to invest in real estate in the good times. Europeans will think that the benefits were extremely unevenly distributed, but they were not absent. In countries that stood at a lower level of economic development 25 years ago, progress is often more tangible.

Fascism rising in Europe? I suppose you talk about the Balkan and primarily about Greece. But Greece is going through a 1930’s style depression. Otherwise the Balkan is not really on my radar screen, but I got the idea that fascism has not risen much in the last half decade or even the Yugoslav wars. In Western Europe, the French Front National is gaining acceptance only since Marine le Pen took over from her father. Marine is relatively moderate, although the party’s contacts still include some rather treife figures. I would consider the party now primarily as a populist party, as you can find almost everywhere in Europe.

Populism is Europe’s answer to the Tea Party, or indeed the Republican Party in the United States. Overall, it appeals to people with a lower education who have not profited from globalisation. They lack the religious orientation of the Americans and are certainly not anti-government. Rather, they want to protect the welfare state as it is, without usually caring too much about its financing. The parties who advocate this range from the former communists in the eastern part of Germany to the Freedom Party in the Netherlands that is as pro-welfare state as it is against Islam. It also includes movements that are against subsidies for poorer areas in their own country (Italy and Belgium) and maverick Nigel Farage’s UKIP, who wants Britain out of the EU. None of these parties support a truly fascist ideology, but rather a return to the institutions as they were during the various Trentes Glorieuses in Old Europe. Belgium’s N-VA is probably an exception. Apart from being anti-subsidies, it is mostly a normal liberal party in the European definition of the word (e.g. something like the Democrats in the Land of the Free). Its rise wiped away the rather more sleazy Vlaams Belang.

>135 mercure:

Nice to see you back!

Fascism rising in Europe? I suppose you talk about the Balkan and primarily about Greece.

I was thinking primarily of Western Europe, Britain and France in particular (Italy has never not been fascist/ic, except in small enclaves), but overall, yes, it certainly seems to be affecting anew all of Europe.

Surely, the catching up phase that large parts of the “Third World” go through are real progress.

I'm not completely disagreeing, but it seems we are thinking about different things when we talk about "real progress". Noting that I'd use the term only very cautiously in any case, I'd apply it only to changes that seem permanent, not something possibly dependent on the next oil crisis, a decade of bad crops or political upheaval. For example, the dissolution of serfdom in Russia was what I'd call "real progress"--it is unimaginable that serfdom could ever be re-instated.

But twenty years of higher GDP, more intense tourism and such, with concomitant rise in the standard of living, real estate development etc.--that's here today but possibly gone tomorrow, like a dream.

And of course it's so much more complicated. What are the chances of "real progress"--achieving it and maintaining it--on the background of ecological catastrophe and resource depletion? So, again, I'm not at all questioning whether we can say that on average, life in, say, China, has become better--only that I don't know that that can last. And, seeing what happened and is happening elsewhere, where life had been "better" for even longer than in China, it seems logical to wonder. Which is not to say that Asia couldn't be in for a relatively long (in human-life terms) period of (relative, average) "prosperity"--say a century.

But even then there's the factor of climate change, changing circumstances as we're trying to get a hang on their effect.

Obviously, a price is paid for this in the form of boring factory work and migratory labour. But how boring is it to work a small plot of land at an extremely low productivity level?

It's probably worse than boring, but, assuming that going back to scratching the soil is not really what most of urbanised people are facing, however badly affected by un- and underemployment, I wonder just what would be wrong with, well, lower productivity levels?

I think we are beginning to understand that the traditional rhetoric of "growth and development" that dominates economic discourse of the past (across the political spectrum) is in itself a problem, a way of looking that biases how we think about "progress". Why are we aiming for "high" productivity and not "sufficient" productivity? And what damage are we causing led by this habit of thinking--always more, bigger, "better"?

>136 LolaWalser:

Fascism rising in Europe?
I was thinking primarily of Western Europe, Britain and France in particular

Lola, I would agree with you on this. The increasing support for UKIP (UK Independence Party) is worrying and the ground roots people I speak to in France are moving towards the right.

The policies being advanced in my own country, Ireland, are those of the dominant coalition party, Fine Gael, which was formed by the coming together of organisations which included the National Guard, or Blueshirts. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueshirts)

I think we are also talking about different definitions of fascism. Parties with an outspoken fascist ideology are unpopular in Western Europe. Parties that want to reduce the numbers of foreigners (or Muslims) are another matter. Such parties are indeed on the rise, but are still contained. They are also the result of integration issues with previous waves of immigrants, notably those during the various Trentes Glorieuses. And I doubt the UKIP is any worse than the skinheads of the 1980's.

In general modern technology can be more energy efficient than the aged technologies often embraced by developing countries. If a country tends towards energy efficiency may be partly a matter of taxation. I wish multinationals would use the cash they hoard to develop more resource efficient products. Most of the economic growth of the last century led to increasing income levels and optimism in society. It is a personal belief I hold that a rising middle class is necessary to create a form of democracy and greater individual freedom. On my last visit to Asia I was surprised by the equal and "European" treatment of children by parents. What causes this? Rising wealth, access to modern ideas via television or the internet, the fact that families are smaller to afford children better education, changes in school curriculae, the education of the parents themselves? Probably a bit of all.

>137 pgmcc:

Blue shirts too! Is no colour safe?! :)

>138 mercure:

The skinheads and similar hooligans don't typically organise in viable political parties, though. I think the shift to the right in Europe is worrying whatever the overlap with historical fascist ideologies.

Speaking of history and fascism, I read an entertaining (and short) book starring an old fascist:

The death of the author by Gilbert Adair

 

I've known Adair only for his tour de force translation of Perec's La disparition--written without employing the letter "e"--into English, with the same constraint. It seems his love of literary games extended to original work too, because this novella makes fun of itself through making fun (of a serious kind) of some beloved postmodern literary theories--and theorists.

Professor Léopold Sfax, postwar immigrant to the US, harbours nasty secrets from his past, such as that he was a prolific and enthusiastic contributor to a collaborationist paper in occupied France, using the pseudonym "Hermes". Seventeen years later, his quiet and unexceptional academic life in the US is rocked by sudden fame, thanks to a Theory of his that unexpectedly and rather to his horror becomes a popular sensation. He can't escape the limelight, and it's only a question of time when someone will connect him to "Hermes" the Nazi fan.

Can he use his Theory to protect himself from the inevitable charges and opprobrium?

With the ruthless dazzling irrefutable logic of which I had become the master I would deny not only the primacy but the very existence of the Author--and therefore deny the very existence of Hermes. I would argue that authorial presence had to be redefined as an absence-- and therefore that Hermes' authorial presence had to be redefined as an absence. That, far from there being a single privileged interpretation for every text, there existed no text that permitted interpretation on any level whatsoever--and therefore no text of Hermes that permitted interpretation on any level whatsoever. That, since all texts were self-referential entities, and that only ever connected with other words, could never be made to reflect a 'real' world outside of those texts--and therefore that none of Hermes' words could ever be made to reflect a real world outside of his texts. That, from a theoretical viewpoint, considerations of the actual and historical existence of a writer were an utter waste of time--and therefore that considerations of Hermes' actual and historical existence were an utter waste of time. That, when subject to the closest analysis, to the most rigorous exercise of decipherment, every text could be shown infallibly to unmask and undermine the ideology it appeared to be endorsing--and therefore that Hermes' texts could be shown infallibly to unmask and undermine the Nazi ideology that they appeared to be endorsing. That, finally, at the most profound level of such analysis, all meaning, all intelligibility, all possibility of interpretation, would dissolve into a rattle of disconnected voices, an infinite regression of empty linguistic signs-- this would be, of every text, and therefore of every text of Hermes, the terminus, the last stop before the abyss, what I elected to call, in an inspiration that delighted me, its aporia.

I really enjoyed this fine little satire.

        

The details of Charles Williams' "Aspects of Power" cycle are fading fast from my mind, as I lost time deciding whether it would be worthwhile to jot down a few words about it--but apparently I do want to do some jotting after all. In all probability thoroughly useless to anyone else.

When I picked up "Descent into Hell" from a dollar box (how could I not, a title like that, and with a copyright date of 1937) fortunately I didn't know Williams had belonged to the circle of C. S. Lewis and Tolkien, because I can't stand them. By the time I collected all seven books I vaguely knew of the connection and would have postponed reading them indefinitely, if someone else on LT (Poquette) hadn't read and talked about one. I started with Descent into Hell concurrently with the first in the cycle, War in heaven (only the first two books have some connection between them, a shared character), then read in what is, I think, more or less the chronological order of publication.

They proved to be surprisingly engaging and, to me, entertaining. Williams was devout and had a deep, basically scholarly interest in theology (he actually worked in publishing), and that is very much in evidence in these books. Every one of them describes a battle between Good and Evil and in every one of them Good, specifically Christian belief, triumphs. However, because Williams assumes the truth of Christian faith, there is very little preaching. The accent here isn't on conversion, but on the battle, and that is made tremendously exciting.

This is due first to Williams' real talent in creating not just loathsome characters (generally far more vivid than his pure heroes), but in conveying affect, psychological moods, from anguish to horror. In this he is, to my mind, more effective than, say, Chesterton or Lovecraft, whose themes and elements of style he combines. (War in heaven is almost imitative of Chesterton--recommendation for Father Brown fans; anyone appreciative of Lovecraft's mood conjuring and less so of his purple streak, would do well to look at Williams).

Moreover, the plots hinge on occult traditions, a different one dominating each book: the search for the Graal, tarot, necromancy etc., and that always jazzes up things. The excellent reviews by paradoxosalpha throw light on this background. I found the tarot book, The Greater Trumps, of breathtakingly beautiful imagery. Descent into Hell, The place of the lion, All Hallows' Eve, all contain moments of authentic horror. Sir Giles Tumulty, the character who appears in War in heaven and Many dimensions, deserves to be a legend of vileness. (He gets to represent the spirit of scientific materialism, alas.)

Last I want to note that--silly as it may sound, not to mention be utterly wrong--I have a sense of Williams as a profoundly GOOD man. I feel I like HIM, the person who wrote these books.

>140 LolaWalser: Thanks to you I now have another author to investigate. I don't know whether to thank you or to cry.

Drop me a note when you figure it out! :)

I'm surprised Williams doesn't seem to be better known. I suspect he suffered from falling into some oubliette between weird fiction and whatever appeals to hardcore god-botherers. Probably too Christian for one, too demonic for the others.

>142 LolaWalser:
too Christian for one, too demonic for the others.

The ultimate gap between the stools.

I had never heard of him until I read your post. Of course, now that you have mentioned him there are books about him crawling out of every crack in the woodwork.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Inklings-Lewis-Tolkien-Their-Friends/dp/0007748698/ref=s...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Charles-Williams-Inkling-Grevel-Lindop/dp/0199284156/ref...

By the way, I think I will cry and thank you. One can never bemoan the opportunity to learn something new...for too long.

Yes, I'm looking forward to that Grevel Lindop bio--I have his of De Quincey. He's one of Charles Williams' fan club, check it out:

http://www.charleswilliamssociety.org.uk/

I've only read War in Heaven, and that was because it cropped up in an Auden biography. Didn't grab me for the same reason that C.S. Lewis (beyond the Narnia books which I loved as a child) doesn't grab me. Interesting to get your perspective on him.

I was completely surprised by how much I enjoyed this--it's notable relative to having expectations of "nil". But I genuinely can't tell whether anyone else, or what type of person, would.

I suppose one attraction to me is that it's so exotic. It amazes me people believe the stuff they believe and I get engrossed in their systems if they're not too dull. But I don't mean to patronise--Williams' worldview is very much a firm, worked-out thing, within which damnation and salvation and chasing lost souls around an English village make perfect sense.

Also, I think I tolerate the religiosity of writers like Williams and Chesterton--or, rather, find stuff to admire in them despite it--because they are so very different from the horrible, terminally morose Catholics I'm used to--Claudel, Bernanos, Mauriac etc.

It's all David's fault that I'm resurrecting this thread--omg, the dust tornado! ;)

Should start a fresh one but, cripes, there are not enough posts in here yet, so...

Beginning from a random cut-off point, and in no way guaranteeing to record everything, I have read:



Pulp by Charles Bukowski (amazingly, touchstone shows up for Pride and prejudice; heavens how droll).

Bukowski's last novel about a fifty-something loser private eye strikes some of his usual satirico-cynical notes but seems softer and more innocently, straightforwardly comic--furry purple snakelike aliens with a single eye will do that for a book. It's not a bad ending for someone who, I think, was gentler than one might suppose.

Nick Whatsisname goes in a day from no clients and imminent eviction to several clients and all expenses paid. One is a mysterious Lady Death with a killer figure who seeks confirmation that a man who uncannily looks like Céline is indeed Céline (or Celine as Bukowski prefers--none of that pretentious French accent malarkey), the other a jealous husband who wants proof that his wife is cheating on him. Nick promises, as soon as he sees her photo, to "nail her ass"--"I'll nail her ass!" resonating on every page thereafter; in hoc signo you'll nail her ass. That was really funny.

Nick, poor devil, like the author seems to be at the ebb end of life... He still sparks at the babes, but he can't catch them any more, it's much more likely he'll get random zaps and beatings. In the end, it was all a joke, wasn't it, isn't it.

And then



Apocalypse by D. H. Lawrence (touchstone: Heart of Darkness! my word)

I picked this up for the commute because it is slim and I dislike Lawrence plentifully, so I was hoping it would make me angry and thus keep me awake, vigilant and battle-ready. It worked, sort of. Well, intermittently. It's about a book from the Bible, Revelation (or the Apocalypse), which Lawrence believed was mostly inherited from pagan myth and overlaid by Jewish and Christian interpretations--ruined, that is. He explains this belief chapter by chapter and really, you'd do much better to read him than my summaries. (If you're interested.)

Angry-making bits aside, I was feeling sorry for Lawrence by the end, because the positive in his philosophy is very beautiful and he was much persecuted in life. While I abhor a lot of his opinions (maybe all), I cannot deny that in sensuous feeling and adherence to life we are the same. Whatever may be criticised in Lawrence, in this there is beauty:

For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

yep. there is.

There YOU are! :)

yes, I am in lurking mode these days, but that quote was soooooo apt I had to miaow.

Miaow bello!

I'm willing to accept the blame for bringing Lola out of retirement, and I'll even take some of the credit for getting a Miaow out of Murr.

Bukowski, discovered on the bookshelf of a Bohemian aunt—could two women be more unlike than her and my mother?—was tremendously important to me as a young teen. He seemed at the time the most radical and exciting author I had ever encountered, and at the time that may have been the case.

He lived, at the end of his life, up the hill from my parents' last house, in San Pedro, California, and died down the hall from a good friend's mother, who was in the same hospital at the same time (but didn't die).

He was occasionally seen around town (though not by me). One did not, I assume, approach him for autographs and literary chit-chat.

>153 dcozy:

That's funny, he actually published a poem with his phone number for a title. Strangers called him all the time.

I have read more books but they put me in a bad, "don't want to talk about it" mood. Vargas Llosa, La civilización del espectáculo--what a stupid waste of time... and now I'm thinking of ditching all his fiction unread. L'anima della donna by Aldo Carotenuto--imbecillic crap of Jungian gender essentialism and mythological fundamentalism and just plain NOT LOOKING AROUND YOU AND NOTICING--I'm thinking of ditching everything Jung and Freud. Life is short and my temper shorter.

Today I intend to spend recovering with Wittgenstein... and Pogo.

The Latin American boom was in full-swing when I was in university, and I was swinging with the best of them. I read and loved Garcia Marquez, Borges, Cortázar and most of the rest of the gang. The one I could never get with—I don't think I've finished any of his books—was Vargas Llosa.

Aaargh, I'll start complaining! And it's not worth it! It's a collection of bottom-drawer journalistic offal, not really something worth engaging with. Bullet points (endlessly repeated with no gain in depth):

--the end is upon us, Culture is dead. "Culture", mind you, means exclusively "high culture", as in how T. S. Eliot (V. L.'s touchstone thinker) understood the term. Why, how come? Well, for one thing, V.L. is weirdly stuck on how we now talk about all kinds of culture, pop culture, video game culture, sports fan culture etc. This bothers him inordinately. Part of this is due (say I, not he) to that "culture" is used somewhat differently in English to some other languages, and it is mainly English that generates global concepts these days. One doesn't encounter the notion of a "person of culture" in English so much. But that's semantics, not a reflection of absence of such people.

Nevertheless, V.L. harps on this endlessly, as if rave culture, say, or "lowbrow", has somehow literally done away with "highbrow".

His problem is--and again, say I, not he--that he resents the LOSS OF PRESTIGE of so-called high culture, the loss of social impact. It hasn't disappeared. "Persons of culture" haven't disappeared. I don't even think it is "endangered". There are still people who find wrestling with Broch or Joyce genuinely a more fulfilling and enriching experience than a Shakira concert or comics. These people can't help themselves, they can't help existing. They will continue to be born, and not necessarily within the "privileged" classes (same as they ever did). But, we have just stopped pretending that such people are necessarily superior in organising and leading a polis (among other things).

None of this is new. V. L. mentions that George Steiner (and HE wasn't first either) pointed out again and again that "high culture" didn't prevent super-cultured Europe from becoming a shithole of worst barbarity humanity has ever experienced. He doesn't follow the idea anywhere new, or even to a logical conclusion. He avoids it. His horizons, he says, were "expanded" by reading Tolstoy, Proust, Kafka--but in the next breath he tells how he refused to read stuff by postmodernists and feminists. Apparently, if you've read your War & Peace there's absolutely nothing new under the sun to learn.

The man has his head so far up his own ass he fails basic logic... and decency. Another thing he laments is the "death of eroticism". People nowadays know too much about sex, there is no more "mystery" to it, and this, according to V.L., is worse than whatever infinite numbers of people suffered because of ignorance, obscurantism, prohibition and persecution.

He dedicated a whole article to a complete lie, that in 2009 some socialist group in Spain wanted to "teach children to masturbate". They didn't; they were proposing a sex ed programme. But exactly as happened in the US to Joycelyn Elders who got hung and quartered in effigy when she championed better, rational and honest sex education, so where these people falsely accused and ridiculed... and V.L. has the gall to do it in the name of preserving the "mystery of sex". Did this guy ever stop to think for a moment in his life what "mystery of sex" meant to women? He's from bloody Peru. How many abortions did his girlfriends go through? Does he bloody care?

What about the gays? Well, no, he don't speak about such things too much--or at all--barely he mentions the "increased liberties" in our day and age, but that's all happening on the "margins" (yes, he says that--"marginal" groups have gained liberty), and obviously the only people who count are gentlemen like himself, and they are feeling the pinch in the very centre.

Jorge Volpi, the Mexican author, and not necessarily my favourite (he's too much into e-books and tech shit) rightly observed that the only thing that's endangered and "dead" is the dubious role of "intellectuals" like Vargas Llosa. And that's why they are crying, blind to the immense riches of the present, to everything that doesn't fit their incredibly narrow-minded, blinkered standards and doesn't resonate with musty, 19th century prejudice.

Hear hear!

Publisher snobbery alert--I picked up The normal personality by Steven Reiss mainly because it was published by the Cambridge University Press, and not the usual pop psychology outlets. Even so, the language is dumbed down (Reiss calls it "plain language") and there are several sections brimming with those "Jane G., a 35-year old accountant with a major firm..." case-stories I can't stand, I never come to the same conclusions about them that the writer does, I can imagine dozens of different interpretations etc. That, I skimmed.

What I liked: Reiss chucks all "psychodynamic" schools of psychology out of the window--Freud, Jung, the lot. He admits we don't know how genetics and history create personality and motivation and says immediately that is not his focus. Reiss totally rejects Freud's "psychopathology of everyday life", which links personality to mental illness and is a large part of why people (especially in the United States) are getting overdiagnosed as mentally ill.

Reiss's approach saves individuality from abnormality by recognising that different people have their axis of normality in different places. Instead of thinking of people as created by murky and unknowable childhood experiences and motivated by the mysterious (and equally unknowable) "subconscious" or "the unconscious", Reiss proposes to take people's motivations and desires as indexes to personality and resolve their problems practically in view of what they now value most--not the supposed unresolved traumas of their childhood.

The model Reiss developed includes sixteen "basic desires" that different people feel with different intensities, giving rise to what we see as different characters. People who value "Power" or "Status" strongly may appear as more ambitious than those who don't. Some people value sex intensely, others don't. The important point is that neither is less "normal" than the other--once we quit imagining there is an absolute "normal" baseline and one standard "normal" personality.

Rather, the question is what is normal for you. If you're happy, or not more unhappy than the average, that is a good indicator that you are leading a normal life.

This is potentially a very liberating approach because, clearly, instead of interpreting ourselves in terms of conforming to some general ideal personality, we can concentrate on discovering what we really need and how to live in terms of those basic needs.

A loner who lacks social skills would be seen by most traditional psychotherapists as having a problem of "lacking social skills" and therefore being a loner, but in Reiss's model he lacks social skills because he is a loner (i.e. values solitude, independence etc. over social contact etc.)

What this means practically is that, instead of trying to "teach" such a person social skills so they could stop being a loner, they ought to be helped into situations where they can be alone and thus achieve their maximum potential (for happiness, productivity, contentment etc.)

It seems weird that something as simple as the idea that different people have different needs and that this variety is NORMAL, still needs defending, but; we do still suffer from various forms of totalitarian and absolutist thinking.

Very interesting. As someone whose always not felt quite normal, I've wondered what 'normal' is supposed to be. Everyone else seems to be totally mad. I think Riess's approach is right, but of course, it will never become mainstream, as too much is invested in diagnosing and 'treating' the mentally ill, as you say.

>159 tomcatMurr:

Everyone else seems to be totally mad.

They ARE! :)

I'm not sure what's mainstream or not in the world of psychotherapy--seems to be a buyer's market, really--but I guess it's true prospects look bad for getting the DSM lingo out of general public's usage. I wish I could have a dollar every time some twit warbles about how "OCD" they are because they like their socks arranged just so etc. A dollar, or to get to kick them in the shins.

Academically, Reiss's approach fits well enough with older models of personality testing, compatibility etc.

I'm not a huge fan of psychological taxonomies of any sort, but I can see where they may be useful in problem-solving, to say nothing of turning a buck for the creators.

156:

Fukken hell: I've returned to librarything in earnestness because I miss a good, nuanced discussion and man oh man how you've warmed the cockles of my fermenting heart with this post...should've come back here sooner...

Preach it, sister.

I'm acutely aware that I'm like six months late to the party on this one, but as far as my usual precedent goes, that's actually pretty prompt... :p

xoxo
j

J!! You pop up in most unlikely places! :)

I have perhaps four threads I have any interest in peeking at when I make these returns to LibraryThing (I'm like Cher: this is like the fourth time I've come out of internet retirement, guys, if you've been following along...), and this is one of them! I love your selections and comments! Truly, truly. (Although I suppose I won't be able to read The Greater Trumps without driving myself to distraction, despite being a tarot nut, because the VERY WORD IS SULLIED FOREVER AND EVER AMEN).

Oh well.

(On that line, though, incidentally...have you ever dipped into Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom? It's just fantastic, whether it's approached in earnestness or merely out of curiosity. Lovely stuff.)

>163 veilofisis:

I am honoured and mortified! Seeing how disappointing it must be. Good thing you space the visits! :)

the VERY WORD IS SULLIED FOREVER AND EVER AMEN

ha, indeed. ooargh, the words curdle in my throat. Every morning there's a little pause in which I've forgotten it all--then I remember.

have you ever dipped into Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom

No, basically I'm your classic scientific-materialist villain who drops into the pits of hell in the last act. Resistant to wisdom all the way. :)

Also lazy and ungifted. The amount of invention and ingenuity necessary to weave those tapestries is well beyond my powers.

TRUMPO KILLED THIS THREAD